The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - April 21, 2025


My Chat with Dennis Kneale, Author of "The Leadership Genius of Elon Musk" (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_823)


Episode Stats

Length

55 minutes

Words per Minute

186.0764

Word Count

10,277

Sentence Count

687

Misogynist Sentences

5

Hate Speech Sentences

11


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Dennis Neal is an award-winning journalist, media strategist, and advisor to senior executives. After serving as a senior editor at the Wall Street Journal and Forbes, he helped write Wealth Management, a Wall Street insider on the dirty secrets of financial advisors, and How to Protect Your Portfolio by Ed Butowski. Neal lives in New York City.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.420 Hi everybody, this is Ghat Saad. It's never not the right time to have wonderful conversation
00:00:06.560 with the folks, even if it's Easter weekend. Dennis Neal, I'm going to introduce you formally,
00:00:12.700 but first I want to extend the welcome. Thank you for being on the show.
00:00:16.640 It's so great to see you and I appreciate this opportunity.
00:00:19.540 Thank you. Okay, let me just read the official media kit that I received in terms of who you
00:00:24.600 are. Dennis Neal is an award-winning journalist, media strategist, advisor to senior executives,
00:00:30.000 and the host of the What's Bugging Me podcast, which I've not been invited to yet, but I won't
00:00:35.600 hold that against you. Hosted by the Ricochet Network, he was an anchor of CNBC and at Fox
00:00:42.440 Business Network after serving as a senior editor at the Wall Street Journal and managing editor of
00:00:47.300 Forbes. He helped write Wealth Management, a Wall Street insider on the dirty secrets of financial
00:00:53.180 advisors and how to protect your portfolio by Ed Butowski. Neal lives in New York City. Am I
00:01:00.680 missing anything before we drill down? No, my gosh, we probably run out of time for the interview.
00:01:05.400 Thanks so much. And by the way, I record my interview for my podcast every Wednesday and I'd be honored
00:01:12.040 to have you on. Guys out there who are listening to this, I want you to know, I've followed this guy,
00:01:17.480 okay, for two or three years. I've just been in all of his tweets. He's so brave and courageous at a time
00:01:23.800 when polls show that 40% of Americans, the boldest people in the world, 40% are afraid to post on
00:01:31.040 social media because they might get canceled. And this man, he talks the talk and he walks the walk.
00:01:36.980 And I've always tried to do that. And this man has 1.1 million followers and I have about 66,000.
00:01:42.660 So I am in awe of him and I'm so honored to be here. And man, if I can get you any Wednesday just
00:01:48.300 to come on and talk about what's bugging you, that's a standing invitation. And then one day
00:01:52.060 I shall owe you a favor. Thank you so much. Well, today what we want to talk about is this beauty
00:01:58.160 right here, the leadership genius of Elon Musk with a beautiful sort of background. It's a gorgeous
00:02:04.300 cover shot. Didn't HarperCollins do a great job, that kind of dark figure, especially now? You know,
00:02:09.920 at first I thought, oh my gosh, this is great timing. He's controversial, controversy sells
00:02:17.420 books. And yet I've been told that the sales are disappointing. And I suddenly thought, is
00:02:24.680 this because half the population has been brainwashed into hating a man that is probably the best thing
00:02:31.040 to happen to America, one of them in a hundred years? It's so bad. Absolutely. And I mean, I want
00:02:36.600 to drill down in terms of how you decide when, when did you first say, this is a book that I need
00:02:43.220 to write. So let's start there. Yeah. What was the process by which I think the book is broken up
00:02:48.120 into sort of 11 leaders? Lessons. Lessons. 11 Lessons of Elon. I love alliteration. Let's start with
00:02:56.660 inspiration. Yeah, go ahead. So, all right. So when I was an anchor a decade ago at Fox Business,
00:03:03.920 I remember hearing these couple of young gals outside my office talking about this guy, because
00:03:09.760 one, I'm a producer there, and now she's a very senior executive at another network, said, oh,
00:03:14.560 my girlfriend is on a yacht with this billionaire guy, this PayPal billionaire, Elon Musk. And I thought
00:03:21.000 that sounds like a cologne. And that was my first time ever hearing about him. And I was just so
00:03:25.620 fascinated that one degree of separation removed from me through this producer was a woman who's kind
00:03:30.580 of partying with this guy. Started watching him then. Then cut to years later, a very talented
00:03:37.780 editor in charge of the Broadside Books imprint at HarperCollins. I worked with him on Lou Dobbs,
00:03:43.360 the late Lou Dobbs' book. And he ends up sending an email one day simply saying, do you know of a
00:03:49.100 business writer somewhere who could do a management book, lessons from Elon Musk? And I kind of thought,
00:03:54.920 well, yeah. And within a weekend, I came up with a proposal. And that's for anyone out there who
00:04:00.300 wants to write a book thinking about it. I once had a guy tell me, he said, you take a weekend to
00:04:04.860 write a 10,000 word proposal, laying out the book, the ideas, the chapters, the flow. If you can finish
00:04:10.500 the weekend doing that, that means that you really want to write this book. If you never get around to
00:04:15.000 it, it's because you really don't want to write it. Well, this proposal was ready like that.
00:04:19.520 Those 11 lessons with some help from the editor, Eric Nelson, came into vision. And I just had a
00:04:26.820 criticism from a friend of a friend. He read it and he told my friend, frankly, I don't see what's
00:04:32.600 so special. All of these 11 lessons are lessons that every executive should follow. And I just
00:04:38.520 thought, thank you. Thank you very much. That would be good. And they are good lessons. But what I think
00:04:44.380 is that I could double sales of this book. And that is why we are here, to get this book on the
00:04:50.060 New York Times bestseller list in defense of Elon, in the New York Times, which hates Elon. And we
00:04:55.460 could double sales if I can tell enemies out there, if you want to work against this guy, this book will
00:05:01.100 show you how he operates. He's got, for example, two lessons going on, three lessons of the 11 that are
00:05:06.880 involved in Doge. Lesson two is reduce, reduce, reduce, cut back everywhere on everything. I have,
00:05:13.780 we have a $40 billion a year storage industry in this business, where we store stuff five miles
00:05:19.100 from our home that if we really needed it, it would be here. But instead, we're paying to not
00:05:23.740 throw it out, throw it out. He does that with Teslas, which have 10,000 parts compared with 40,000 in a
00:05:29.900 Ford. He did it with SpaceX, reduced it down to stainless steel and fuel. Another lesson, the highest
00:05:37.740 nail gets pounded down first, so strap on a helmet. Elon doesn't shrink from controversy.
00:05:43.760 He says, bring it. And lesson four, tease your critics and torture your enemies. And man,
00:05:52.080 Elon does that with alacrity, doesn't he?
00:05:54.420 Indeed. Well, you may or may not know, I've gotten to know Elon personally. And, you know,
00:06:01.760 we've communicated many times. We've met in person.
00:06:04.080 He, you know, we haven't.
00:06:05.720 I have one response to an email, just one. And I feel like Wayne's world, where he looks at that
00:06:11.300 guitar in the window and says, yes, one day I will have him. He will be mine.
00:06:15.460 Hey, you know what I'm hoping for, Dennis? That I might actually be able to finish a sentence
00:06:20.400 without you interrupting me. You think that's going to be possible?
00:06:23.400 So sorry.
00:06:24.500 I'm kidding. Don't worry. Listen.
00:06:26.060 I'm over-revving.
00:06:26.840 I'm Lebanese. So you've got to be able to ride with the jabbing. Don't worry about it.
00:06:32.520 No, but what I was going to say is, I've gotten to know him personally. And knowing him personally,
00:06:38.060 it frustrates me to see all of the nonsense that is spewed about him. Because once you know someone
00:06:44.220 personally, you feel as though, you know, he's owed, not that he needs my protection, but for
00:06:49.880 somebody to stand up. I was going to say, as someone who, okay, you don't know him personally,
00:06:54.520 but you wrote this book about him. Do you get offended to see that here we've got this,
00:06:59.540 you know, treasure? He's not an American treasure. He's a world treasure who is trying
00:07:04.180 to always do the good thing, the right thing. And yet he is so maligned. Does that piss you off?
00:07:09.320 It really does. It offends me for a couple of reasons. And number one is it's that old cliche,
00:07:15.300 that old saying, no good deed goes unpunished. And I'm so sorry to see that come true. But more than
00:07:21.280 that, because I was with CNBC and Fox and Wall Street Journal and Forbes, you know, I love journalists.
00:07:29.060 And I respect journalists. And I did for a long time. And today, many of them, I don't recognize
00:07:34.420 at all. And what they've done to this man and how they've made him the enemy simply because he allied
00:07:40.260 with Trump because he was truly worried about our nation. And it's just appalls me that the media
00:07:46.000 could side against him like that. They've turned from watchdogs who we at least try to hide what our
00:07:51.140 bias was into liberal lapdogs who just ply the Democrat agenda, most of them. And I'm so sorry to
00:07:59.040 see it because Trump broke them. Do you think that you're having written this book is going to
00:08:05.600 ensure that you're not invited to the cool kids party anymore? It may, but I never have been. So
00:08:11.520 that's okay. I've been on the B list. Why? Why? I don't know because I am anyone who sees me,
00:08:20.300 they would know this guy's dying to be on the A list. He's desperate for the approval of strangers.
00:08:24.720 Anyone who takes a full job, time job in television is desperate for the approval of
00:08:29.780 strangers. But I don't know what, you know what it is, the differences? Because when I went to the
00:08:34.040 Wall Street Journal at the start of my career, and I was from the University of Florida, and everyone
00:08:39.860 around me in the New York office, the home office was from Princeton and Yale and Harvard.
00:08:45.160 I didn't hear you mentioned Cornell, which is my alma mater.
00:08:48.200 There you go. Okay. And they were from Cornell as well. All these Ivy Leaguers. And they have
00:08:52.600 a sense of entitlement that things just come to them because they deserve them. And a guy like me
00:08:58.980 who came from a lower middle class upbringing, and just my mom raising me for most of that time,
00:09:05.460 we don't ever feel like we deserve or are entitled. And we have to fight and scrap for every little
00:09:13.200 step ahead that we get. And I think those of the Ivy League, they spell that desperation in me.
00:09:19.800 And so I've never been quite invited into their circle.
00:09:23.440 You know, it's actually very refreshing that you're very open about some of these things,
00:09:28.560 right? Because most people would have the reflex to not share that, you know, out loud. And the fact
00:09:35.620 that you do actually speaks to the fact that you're probably ultimately quite confident about your
00:09:40.700 abilities, right? Because it takes a lot of confidence to be self-deprecating. And so
00:09:45.420 screw those Ivy Leaguers. You're doing well. You're writing a book on Elon Musk. Let's put it back. Go
00:09:50.700 out there and buy this book. Tell us, how did you decide on why 11 lessons? Why not 10? Why not 12?
00:09:57.360 Yeah. So 10 is cliche, and it's two lettermen, right? Seven would be a better number. Seven is a
00:10:04.220 wonderful prime number. It's a lucky number. It's in dice games. So seven would be good,
00:10:09.360 but it's not quite long enough. But then the one great writing technique I have, and this is my
00:10:14.260 fourth book. It's the first one I've done on my own. The one great writing technique I have is
00:10:18.380 alliteration. So 11 works so well with lessons and Elon, 11 lessons of Elon. And they work so well
00:10:27.400 together. For example, lesson one is the most bizarre one, because it says that Elon may really,
00:10:34.020 truly believe that we could be living inside a vast simulation right now that's so advanced that
00:10:41.860 we just have no idea that it's real. And you think that's ridiculous. But then you realize,
00:10:46.840 well, 10,000 years from now, actually, that's not impossible to perceive, to imagine. But then we
00:10:53.380 realize the universe is almost 14 billion years old. And that means that there would be 1.4 million
00:11:00.040 10,000 year stretches. So to Elon, the thought we've gone almost 1.4 million stretches without
00:11:07.000 achieving that yet somewhere in the universe seems impossible. So it could be very true. And that means
00:11:11.940 how do we, how do we know? Well, then what comes along? Lesson two, reduce, reduce, reduce. There's a
00:11:17.540 physicist I interviewed in that lesson who has created a new law. He's a fascinating interview. You would love
00:11:24.100 him. The second law of infodynamics. And it says that while the rest of the universe is given to
00:11:30.680 entropy and complexity and more and more trash, information in our universe is constantly reducing
00:11:37.640 itself. And he noticed this in nature, COVID, the original version versus 20 generations later,
00:11:44.440 it kept shedding DNA characters. And scientists used to think that this shedding was mathematical error.
00:11:51.320 And along comes the physicist who says, no, no, this is nature's efficiency. They're doing this on
00:11:57.880 purpose. The organism does the same old stuff with far fewer letters and characters. And he says,
00:12:03.640 and all through nature, they're constantly reducing information required. Why? And then he suddenly
00:12:08.560 thought, if this were a simulation, they have figured out it would take 45 planet Earths of computing power
00:12:16.200 to do a perfect simulation. Okay. And if this were a simulation, you'd want to cut down on information
00:12:23.100 and storage as much as possible everywhere. So the lesson works. And then lesson 11, Elon says,
00:12:30.460 I'm looking at the lessons. Go on. I'm listening. Elon says the most likely outcome in life
00:12:34.680 is the most ironic one, the most opposite of what you tried to make happen or what you thought would
00:12:40.280 happen, or it's the most entertaining one. Well, that hooks into the simulation because think about it.
00:12:45.380 A physicist who first came up, Bostrom, in 2001, came up with seminal paper on the simulation.
00:12:51.340 And he said, if there is a simulation, the guys who are running it, they wouldn't do it to come up
00:12:57.340 with boring outcomes. They're doing it for entertaining outcomes. And so that kind of teaches
00:13:02.720 you to live your life bigger, louder, fuller. It all might be a game anyway.
00:13:08.320 Right. Well, I mean, there are so many things I want to jump off from what you just said.
00:13:12.600 But number one, speaking of physicists, one of the... By the way, what's the name of the
00:13:16.440 physicist that you're mentioning?
00:13:18.460 I've now forgot it because you asked. Hang on.
00:13:20.560 Okay. Just so that we can...
00:13:22.020 But I just love the guy. And I spent an hour and two hours on Zoom with him. He was so wonderful.
00:13:30.400 I'm thinking...
00:13:31.560 I just remembered it. Vobson. V-O-P-S-O-N.
00:13:34.260 Okay. I'll check him out. Here's another guy you might want to check out. I'm giving
00:13:37.960 him some free publicity. Do you know David Deutsch?
00:13:40.860 I do not. But I love physicists.
00:13:43.080 Yeah. Well, David Deutsch is a gentleman who recently came on my show twice. He came back
00:13:48.120 to back for... We had such a great first conversation that we ended up having a second conversation.
00:13:52.960 And to me, he epitomizes what a real intellectual should be like. Because one of the great disappointments
00:14:01.000 in my long academic career, and I've been a professor for 31 years, very difficult for
00:14:05.560 me to imagine that that's true, is that many professors are actually not intellectuals,
00:14:11.640 right? They're hyper-specialists. They know their small, restrained field, but ask them
00:14:17.120 to talk about art history or to talk about, you know, whatever, geopolitics. If they only
00:14:22.420 know physics or chemistry, that's all they're comfortable talking about.
00:14:25.260 Right. David Deutsch was certainly not that, albeit he is a quantum computing
00:14:30.840 and quantum mechanics guy. So he certainly has the scientific imprimatur. So, but what
00:14:35.560 I was going to go back to one of your earlier lessons where you say, you know, kind of tease
00:14:40.000 or, or, you know, go after...
00:14:41.980 Orchure your enemies. Yeah.
00:14:43.000 Orchure your enemies. So I think I would put that lesson as part of a greater mindset.
00:14:48.720 So in The Parasitic Mind, my 2020 book...
00:14:53.340 An incredible book.
00:14:54.360 Thank you so much. In the last chapter, I talk about activate your inner honey badger.
00:14:59.100 And the honey badger, of course, is a ferocious, fierce animal. And I recently released a clip
00:15:05.180 on my channel where I said, here's what's the greatest commonality across Donald Trump,
00:15:11.400 Elon Musk, and Joe Rogan, is that they are true honey badgers in their own domains. They
00:15:17.020 all don't give an F. So would it be fair to say that encapsulated in one or more of your
00:15:24.160 lessons is the honey badger? Exactly. Yeah. That, that lesson three, right before lesson
00:15:30.220 four, which says, hey, highest nail gets pounded down, strap on a helmet. And, you know, instead
00:15:35.280 of our fleeing controversy, instead of our fleeing reprisal, maybe we should say, I don't give
00:15:40.700 an F, like you say. And that's what Elon does. And maybe it turns out greatness requires being
00:15:48.200 willing to not give an F. Well, and I think, so I often mention this maybe once a month, I'll put
00:15:54.160 out a tweet on this and I'll say, look, the great people of history, whether they be negative forces,
00:16:00.720 Hitler, or they be positive forces, are not equivocators. They're not fence sitters. They see a vision
00:16:07.400 and they go full throttle in, right? So your very kind words at the start of our show, when you were
00:16:13.100 talking about sort of my public engagement, I can't be anything other than exactly what I am,
00:16:18.960 which is if I were to modulate a millimeter of what I want to say, I would feel fraudulent.
00:16:25.200 And therefore I just go full throttle and I don't give an F. Right. And, and that's really worked for
00:16:31.140 you. Whereas for me in 2014, when I left Fox with 15 minutes notice, and they had a security guard
00:16:38.920 escort me out of the building, literally, I, I, I almost fainted. I had to hold up a wall.
00:16:44.380 You know, I waited for those offers to pour in because by golly, I got, and this guy, he says
00:16:49.920 what he really feels. None came. I mean, nothing, nothing. Why did you get, if, I don't know if
00:16:55.320 you're allowed to speak about it or not, but what, what led to your very ceremonious departure?
00:17:01.020 Because my, because my friend, someone I just adore and admire so much, Maria Bartiromo.
00:17:05.880 Right. A huge career risk. She was so hurt at CNBC because they were going to try to, you
00:17:11.700 know, uh, kind of start to phase her out perhaps, or cut her salary. So boom, she risks everything.
00:17:17.180 And she leaves that network that she was part of for 20 years and goes to Fox business, which
00:17:22.940 was the second also ran and wasn't yet big. And the very day she shows up for work and she
00:17:28.820 comes through the turnstile. She says, Dennis, I'm so sorry. You know, you don't blame me.
00:17:33.340 Do you, she knew already I was being fired that day. And I didn't know. And because I
00:17:39.060 knew I was losing my anchor chair and they're shaking up the schedule to make room for Maria,
00:17:42.320 but it turns out they had to make room in the budget. She's coming in costing 6 million
00:17:46.200 a year reportedly, and they needed to cut a million. So cut me and two other producers.
00:17:50.680 And the three of us six months earlier had been in the office of one of the senior executives,
00:17:55.340 bitterly having an argument, you know, the two of them against me. And then we all three
00:17:59.300 were taken out together on the same day, six months later. And suddenly I'm thinking,
00:18:04.280 I like those two guys more than I knew. They had to cut the budget.
00:18:09.720 Have you maintained a working relationship with Fox? Did you ever appear on any of their
00:18:14.160 shows? Well, you know what? It's interesting because why is it that my two alma maters,
00:18:20.040 Fox Business and CNBC, have yet to have me on air to talk about this book? At CNBC,
00:18:26.060 it would be because we're liberal and Elon's a bad man. At Fox, I have heard the PR department,
00:18:32.540 the most feared corporate PR department in the land. I've talked to media reporters. They're
00:18:38.820 terrified of this PR department. And apparently they have a rule saying, if you've been an anchor or
00:18:43.980 on the network, you can't come back. Now, I imagine they break that for somebody somewhere,
00:18:48.960 sometime, but they haven't broken it for me yet. And when I was there, I couldn't even get them to
00:18:53.340 meet me for lunch. And I was taken to the principal's office 13 times for tweets that
00:18:59.000 they thought were too controversial. Oh, when I hear stories like that, and I think about how
00:19:06.080 I go about my life, I probably wouldn't make it there by nine o'clock Monday morning. I wouldn't
00:19:12.200 last. And I've been wanting to ask you because I see your stuff. And it's one thing for any person
00:19:19.180 of repute to be doing the stuff you're doing and to be that bold and that blunt. But for a professor
00:19:24.680 in academia, you must feel like an outsider and a pariah all the time. And I always have felt like
00:19:33.040 that. And when I was writing about Elon Musk, I felt like that, that Elon probably, I just got this
00:19:39.080 sense that he wants to be loved. You see him on stage at those rallies and he's jumping up and his
00:19:44.300 belly's showing because the t-shirt's not long enough as he's raising. And he's just so happy
00:19:48.700 to be loved. And I think all of us have that and want that in basic nature. It's just that
00:19:54.200 some of us work a lot harder to win that love than others. And that is what drives us.
00:19:59.700 Well, and I think so in, I've, I've, I mean, I've been in very close proximity to President Trump.
00:20:05.900 I was invited to an event at Mar-a-Lago. He was maybe five meters from me, but I didn't get the
00:20:10.760 pleasure of actually interacting with him. So I, so anything that I'm saying is speculative and that
00:20:15.740 I don't really know him personally, but I feel that one of the reasons why Trump reacted often
00:20:23.880 the way that he did in his first term, much less so in a second term is that he just wanted the love
00:20:31.220 and appreciation and credit for doing things right now. Part of that comes from a sense of slight
00:20:37.780 narcissism, but we, any of us who are going to be in the public eye want to be patted on the back
00:20:43.420 saying, attaboy, you did well. It's human nature. So that's not so weird or creepy, but the, the more
00:20:49.500 that he didn't get it, then the more sort of indignant he would become. And then that would
00:20:54.600 come across as though he's not being presidential. The second term, that monkey is really off his back.
00:21:00.240 Guess what? You threw everything at me and I still came out winner. And so he just seems a lot
00:21:06.700 more at peace with his existential reality. Am I right here? Oh, you're so right. And you know,
00:21:12.160 the other thing is his winning 77 point something million votes more than Kamala, his winning the
00:21:18.320 all seven swing States, his winning both houses of Congress, his winning 312, was it electoral voids
00:21:24.360 something 42 more than required to win. He's feeling more loved now. Yeah. He's lost that anger of
00:21:30.580 feeling because, you know, I thought about this one time, imagine what it was like for him in his
00:21:34.700 first term. Imagine if he's utterly innocent and he was of all Russiagate stuff and all of these
00:21:40.980 thousands of stories saying this stuff about you. And it's not true. And it must've been like a
00:21:46.560 twilight episode zone episode for him. And about, I'll just add to that. I met the man twice before
00:21:52.000 he ever ran for president one-on-one, one time. And, and, and, you know, Stockholm syndrome where
00:21:58.160 you're taking hostage, you start to identify, there's some other kind of syndrome. There must be a name
00:22:02.040 for it. And you may know it where you can meet the worst man in history, but if he's nice to you
00:22:07.020 personally and polite, I will defend him for years to come because of my personal experience. Now, the
00:22:13.980 first time I bet the today show on the manager at Forbes, I do a hit and he's the apprentice, he's in
00:22:18.420 the green room and I'm about to leave because back in that day, they gave you a car to take downtown.
00:22:23.820 Instead of you having to get on the subway and, and suddenly they said, wait, can you, we'll get the car to
00:22:27.580 wait? Uh, Donald Trump is in the green room. He wants to introduce himself to you. I go in there
00:22:32.940 and he's, you know, and he's, oh, and have you met rich dad, poor dad author here? This is my friend.
00:22:37.280 He, as if he's not enough alone for me to meet. Okay. Right away. I'm a fan. Then a couple months
00:22:42.320 later, I'm dinner with a billionaire, six people. Trump comes up, sits next to me for the better part
00:22:47.420 of an hour. And he goes around the table and he doesn't talk about himself once. And he asks each
00:22:53.000 person, their story. And each of us, when we went home that night to our partner or something, you
00:22:57.440 won't believe it. I got to sit with Donald Trump and you ask, and what did he say? Well, he asked me
00:23:02.400 about this and I told him about that. Yeah, I already know that, but what did he say? So this guy was
00:23:06.680 so winning and I just defended him for, for years based on that personal experience. You know, it's
00:23:11.620 funny what you just mentioned about that sort of, let's call it the syndrome of you could take a bad
00:23:17.240 person, not that Donald Trump is a bad person, but you can take any person as long as there's a
00:23:21.020 personal affinity. Personal experience. Yeah. Guess who just experienced it? Bill Maher. Exactly.
00:23:28.640 He's getting red pilled before our eyes. He so wanted to go there and be snide, but instead you
00:23:34.240 end up liking the guy and the guy's been a salesman all of his life, right? He wants to be liked.
00:23:38.840 But what, what disappoints me in Bill Maher is that, is the fact that he didn't have the sort of
00:23:46.280 personal acuity, if I can put it that way, to have extrapolated that Donald Trump would have had
00:23:53.680 those qualities, even though he, he hadn't met him yet. So for example, when I often judge politicians,
00:23:59.680 even though I haven't met any of them, I always use the, would I like to have a beer with them,
00:24:05.480 even though I'm not much of a beer drinker. Right. And so, you know, George Bush, I think I could
00:24:10.160 really have, I mean, he just strikes me like a cool guy. Bill Clinton. Yes. He pretends that he's
00:24:15.200 listening to me, but he's creepy because he's looking for who's the hot girl that's passing
00:24:19.440 in his peripheral vision. Barack Obama is a, is a smug, malignant narcissist. And I'm not talking
00:24:27.240 politics. I'm not, I'm truly basing this on what I'm reading from their personal cues. Yeah. There
00:24:33.380 is no way in hell I could have not predicted that sitting down with Donald Trump, you would end up
00:24:40.020 liking him more. And yet it took Bill Maher to have personal interaction with him to be able to
00:24:45.640 come to that conclusion. And that is because Libs, Libwit, Demwit Democrats have been so poisoned,
00:24:53.420 haven't they, about this man. And when all you see in all of the media coverage is bad man, bad man,
00:24:58.600 bad man, that's what you end up believing. And it's, it's so unfortunate because it doesn't have to be
00:25:04.560 this way. I really thought things would change after he won this time around. I thought that
00:25:09.620 the Democrats would come back to the table and say, okay, you crazy, let's, let's go ahead and
00:25:14.480 let's work together on a few things here. But no, they've taken up the permanent opposition.
00:25:19.260 Trump has brilliantly pushed them into opposing some of the most rational, common sense policies,
00:25:25.200 and instead supporting some of the most radical, ridiculous things, using taxpayer money for
00:25:30.500 prisoner sex change operations. I mean, it just gets more and more bizarre, doesn't it?
00:25:35.760 Right. When, when you, when you first, let me put it up again. Let's get those sales going.
00:25:40.580 Buy this book, people. By the way, just for full disclosure, Eric Nelson is my editor for my next
00:25:47.660 book, Suicidal Empathy. Phenomenal book. As a matter of fact, what, just for you to, well,
00:25:53.520 anyways, let me first finish this one.
00:25:55.100 You're very lucky. He's great.
00:25:57.340 Yeah, yeah. He's wonderful. When you first sat down to write this book, had the Elon Musk,
00:26:06.100 Donald Trump link been officially made, or this was pre that?
00:26:10.600 No, this is before he, this is way before the assassination attempt. The assassination attempt
00:26:15.900 was the thing that switched Elon over from, I'm supporting him privately to, I'm getting on stage with
00:26:22.840 this guy when he saw that. And I was watching live at the time as well. And I cried when I saw him get
00:26:29.840 up and do that and, and say, fight. I mean, I was so moved by that. And I'm even moved now when I think
00:26:36.760 of it and how the media managed to memory hole and bury that story in that moment. Oh my gosh,
00:26:43.980 they're part of the great government psyop. It's just horrible. And, and Elon, you know,
00:26:49.280 he has done this at great personal expense, a great expense to me. I own Tesla stock. I watched
00:26:55.000 it fall from four 50 down to two 20 just on political backlash because how dare he come out
00:27:02.000 and speak up. And, and so he's done this at great personal cost. He's had two assassination attempts
00:27:07.400 over the past year or two, and yet he's done it anyway, because he really felt like we're in trouble.
00:27:13.680 You know, I have an essay on what's bugging me this, this week it's out or last week about creation,
00:27:18.500 destruction. I live right across the street from a block long construction site. They tore down a jail
00:27:24.020 that had been there since 1957 and, uh, they tore it down to build a new one. Okay. Well, it took him
00:27:30.440 a few months to tear that sucker down, all 15 floors of it. It's not going to be built up till 2029.
00:27:36.440 It is so much easier to destroy things than it is to build it up. And our country, 250 years
00:27:43.640 of working on building the best nation on earth that the world has ever seen. And we almost lost
00:27:50.440 it in a matter of two presidencies, Obama in eight years and Biden in four years, the nation was going
00:27:56.560 crazy. And Elon felt like I better stand up. And had he not bought the X platform. And by the way,
00:28:04.580 a huge risk, another rule says, bet on yourself and take on huge risks because what the hell he bet
00:28:09.980 $25 billion, I think it was of his own money on that acquisition. No one does that. In Silicon
00:28:14.500 Valley, you use other people's money, right? And a judge in Delaware forced him to go through with
00:28:21.180 that deal. He didn't want to do it, but that deal changed everything because now you can't cheat on
00:28:26.220 election because it'll show up on X. They've got video of somebody doing something. Now X was the
00:28:30.920 great equalizer that gave the other voice an actual megaphone instead of crushing it the way the
00:28:37.440 government did in the Twitter files expose. And the media buried that story too. That's why they're
00:28:42.680 mad at Elon. The media, I wrote more columns, okay, on that Twitter file scandal than the entire
00:28:50.400 staffs of the New York Times and the Washington Post combined. I did a count, okay? And they buried
00:28:55.900 the story. Why? Because it was only conservative voices being muzzled. But it'll be your voice next
00:29:00.940 time because the Trump administration came out and requested 5,500 liberal accounts be silenced
00:29:06.820 on old Twitter before Elon bought it. Yeah. Well, to your point, I wholeheartedly agree that of all
00:29:13.060 the things that Elon has ever done or will ever do, in other words, I'm going to be even more bold
00:29:18.400 in saying not anything that he's done, but anything that he could ever do could not be as historically
00:29:25.360 as important as the purchase of Twitter. And I actually said that you can go check it on my channel
00:29:31.260 probably within a few days of him having purchased what was then Twitter. I made that point because,
00:29:38.820 I mean, exactly to your point, I mean, I can't even begin to fathom or imagine where we would be
00:29:44.560 today. I mean, certainly my voice would be much smaller. I'm sure your voice, probably Kamala Harris
00:29:49.980 would be president. We'd all be, you know, getting taken off the thing because we say that men can't
00:29:56.620 menstruate. But by the way, to your earlier point about how, how is it possible that I can exist
00:30:01.600 within the most parasitized ecosystem called academia? You need to see my colleagues in their
00:30:09.160 antipathy, their unhinged antipathy toward Donald Trump. It's simply astounding. What upsets me the
00:30:17.320 most, Dennis, is that many of these guys are actually psychologists. They are behavioral scientists.
00:30:24.500 They teach decision-making in some of the leading business schools in the world. I mean,
00:30:30.360 and the reason why I know them well is because I studied and do research in psychology of decision
00:30:35.860 making. So I know all of the top decision theorists. And yet those same decision theorists
00:30:41.100 who are professors at universities that charge 80 and $90,000 a year for your kid to go there
00:30:48.000 suddenly lose their complete ability to be rational decision makers when it comes to even
00:30:54.280 finding a singular positive point about Donald Trump, which is the perfect manifestation of
00:31:00.940 the parasitic mind.
00:31:02.840 And it's amazing that they're unable to step outside themselves and realize that they're being
00:31:06.560 victimized by the great psyop. It's, it's, it's so strange. And one other thing though, you had
00:31:12.420 mentioned, you know, I mentioned, uh, lesson 11 talks about ironic outcomes are the most likely ones.
00:31:17.080 The internet was created to help rebels in, in terrible, oppressive countries fight government.
00:31:25.920 And the ironic outcome is that decades later, what it really is, is the platform that government uses
00:31:31.940 to conduct surveillance, mass surveillance on its own people. And that's happened in the U S
00:31:36.900 and that's happened in the UK and everywhere else. And it is such an ironic opposite of what the
00:31:41.760 internet was supposed to be. Indeed. Indeed. So tell us very briefly, what was, you said,
00:31:48.380 this is the fourth book you've, you've worked on, but the other, my own. Yeah. Your own. What,
00:31:54.220 what's the, the reason I'm asking this question, I just told you that before coming to this chat,
00:31:58.580 I was working on suicidal empathy myself. I've got my own, you know, writing, you know,
00:32:03.660 regimen or how I go about it. What's your, you know, you wrote a book with 11 lessons. Give us the top
00:32:10.180 three lessons for aspiring authors of what they should do to hopefully be able to be contacted
00:32:15.940 by Eric Nelson and call us to write a book. Well, then I, I'd say there's lesson five.
00:32:22.520 Most people are loafers work harder than you ever have before. There's some great data in there on how
00:32:28.480 little young people, how much less they work than their predecessors, how 15% of young men are utterly
00:32:34.900 detached from the workforce and haven't had a paycheck in a, in a whole year. And they spend their time
00:32:39.140 playing video games. So you've got to work harder. Every time someone comes to me, they want to do a
00:32:43.240 proposal of a column. I say, write the column and send that. Okay. Lesson six, free speech is
00:32:48.160 everything. Stand up and be heard. You got to speak out. You've got to say something important and sing
00:32:53.720 it to the rafters. Lesson seven on the media to hell with them. They are shameless shills. And I'm a 30 year
00:33:01.780 journalist. And maybe that's one reason why some of the more liberal media haven't yet been booking me to
00:33:06.080 talk about this book, but just think if I had called it the leadership failures of Elon Musk,
00:33:12.580 would I suddenly be everywhere in the media and being interviewed like. Number one New York
00:33:18.460 Times bestseller. Yeah. I mean, look, character limit to New York times or three New York times
00:33:23.460 reporters did this latest Elon book on how he's destroyed Twitter character limit. He has a limited
00:33:28.860 character. And there was breaking Twitter by the guy who did the big PayPal book. And I, you know,
00:33:33.900 two years after that acquisition, come on, man, it is the single most important media platform in the
00:33:39.840 world, right? Because of its openness that everyone decried. Well, and by the way, I often will get a
00:33:46.860 blowback from fellow Jews, right? I'm Jewish. And the Jews will write to me saying, how could you be
00:33:54.720 friends with Elon and not go after him when he tolerates all these anti-Semitic accounts? And then my
00:34:01.200 answer is, have you ever been slapped by this thing called freedom of speech? I mean, you, I mean,
00:34:07.060 imagine the chutzpah, right? Forgive me for using a Jewish term. Imagine the chutzpah whereby
00:34:13.480 you're speaking to a free speech absolutist, right? I defend the right of Holocaust defiers
00:34:18.920 to spew their most insulting nonsense. You expect me to go to Elon and say, hey, Elon, can you please
00:34:26.280 take out? Here's the list of all of the accounts that I'd like you to take out. But in the, in the
00:34:31.960 minds of those Jewish folks that write me all this nonsense, they view freedom of speech through a
00:34:37.520 consequentialist lens, right? What's wrong with you speaking to Elon so that we can get rid of hate?
00:34:44.260 But then that also applies to when I criticize Islam, but then wouldn't be the Muslims be perfectly
00:34:50.800 justice. In fact, it applies even more for Islam. Because let's remember that the Biden administration
00:34:57.040 came out with an order protecting Islam and discouraging Islamophobia after the October 7th
00:35:03.660 attacks, not for an order for anti-Semitism. And I looked into the stats and it turned out that
00:35:08.960 anti-Semitism per 100,000 Jews was two to three times the rate of attacks of Islamophobia per 100,000
00:35:17.020 I'm surprised that it's only that. I would think it's much higher, but go ahead.
00:35:20.660 Right. And all right. So that was one thing. You had a few things to unpack and now I've just lost
00:35:25.600 it. I should have.
00:35:26.180 That's okay. We'll come back to it. But the bottom line is that this idea that, you know, freedom of
00:35:32.680 speech is great. And then you put a, but the second that you put a, but you're entering the
00:35:38.060 consequentialist word, but go ahead.
00:35:39.620 It turns out this group has taken for 25 years, polls of Americans on their first amendment views,
00:35:45.080 free speech. And the latest poll, I mentioned this in the book shows one third of America
00:35:50.580 believes it is more important to prevent hate speech than it is to preserve free speech. The
00:35:58.980 first amendment protects, literally protects hate speech, but they think one third and then
00:36:03.360 disturbingly another third. I'm not sure. I'm not sure about that balance. So two thirds of America
00:36:08.740 failed to realize that the first amendment is everything. It protects all kinds of speech and
00:36:14.200 that's okay. The way to drown out that speech is not to muzzle it. It's to come up with better
00:36:18.660 speech that out argues it. Let those cockroaches bathe in the sunlight and let them say their
00:36:24.260 hateful things and then rip them apart with their own words. You know, I'm just, and here's
00:36:30.180 where we went down the wrong road. Okay. This phrase harmful content became accepted into the
00:36:39.260 lexicon and words cannot leap off the screen and smack you in the face. Only a human can do that.
00:36:45.820 Blame the human who did it. Don't blame the words that he read. That's his fault. And this thought
00:36:51.460 that content will harm you, change the channel, we used to say. And it's just ridiculous. And
00:36:57.500 everyone's looking for a safe space and everyone shops for Umbridge. He hurt my feelings. He said a bad
00:37:03.540 thing about me. How about you not be such a baby? Last week, New York Times op-ed section, big op-ed
00:37:09.860 from, I think his name's Adam Grant, organizational psychologist, far more qualified than I am.
00:37:15.980 And the wrong lessons we're learning from Elon Musk because he's mean. He yells at people. And I did an
00:37:22.300 essay in my podcast this week saying, you know, if you're working for one of the most amazing minds of
00:37:28.080 the past century and he yells at you, maybe it's up to you to decide whether you're going to let that
00:37:33.580 hurt your feelings. Maybe it's not what he says. Maybe it's how you decide to respond. And maybe you
00:37:38.720 should stop being such a wussy. I'm not surprised that that would be the conclusion that Adam Grant
00:37:46.040 arrives at. I'll leave it at that and let you decide what you think I might, how I might view Adam Grant.
00:37:54.600 But anyways, by the way, he represents exactly, uh, and I'm sure I'm going to get somebody who's
00:38:00.620 going to write to me. Why were you mean to Adam Grant? I don't know who he is, but I certainly
00:38:03.820 know of his positions. Uh, I've always said, uh, I mean, jokingly, but I'm being jokingly only in the
00:38:11.460 way that I say it, but I truly mean it that I have discovered a new species in the animal kingdom
00:38:17.120 and they're called the invertebrate castrati and they represent academia because it's not only that
00:38:23.420 they are without testicles, both men and women, but they're also spineless because think about it
00:38:30.040 for a second, Dennis, what's the point of tenure? Isn't tenure the institutionalized mechanism that
00:38:36.780 ensures that if you are too, you know, lacking in courage to speak, well, now you have tenure that
00:38:43.480 ensures that you will be protected. So you don't even have to be a courageous person to stand up and
00:38:49.320 speak because you are protected by tenure, but I have never in my life seen as much of a constellation
00:38:56.960 of cowards as I have in academia. And, and I mean, I don't say this to be a reverend or to, you know,
00:39:03.880 to be egging on my academic colleagues, but it really is true, right? I mean, I always say whenever I
00:39:09.960 write a list of how to save our universities, there's always one item that says we need to train
00:39:15.220 our future thinkers and leaders to be intellectual Navy SEALs, right? Navy SEALs are physically
00:39:22.940 courageous. They have to be able to withstand certain physical rigor that the rest of us can't
00:39:28.020 do. Well, that's exactly what we should expect from our intellectual Navy SEALs, boldness, right? I mean,
00:39:34.720 exactly the kinds of traits that this guy exemplifies, right? Boldness, non-fence setter,
00:39:41.000 honey badgers, but we do exactly the opposite to that in academia.
00:39:46.060 This is another one of those lesson 11 ironic opposite outcomes because academia, free expression,
00:39:53.720 free ideas and thought, and yet academia and the college campus is where I think the erosion of
00:39:59.320 free speech has been the worst, where it began. The whole trend began there because there are professors
00:40:04.560 on campus who are afraid to speak up if their view is anything other than lockstep Obama libwit
00:40:10.860 stupidity. And it's so sad to see. And look at what happened in Columbia and now Harvard. What do
00:40:16.760 you think of this Harvard thing? You know, $50 billion endowment. And you guys are, you know,
00:40:22.200 during the COVID handouts, do you know that our government, U.S., gave universities $115 billion
00:40:30.160 in aid? And this was, I did some research on this, triple what they, any loss they could have claimed
00:40:36.080 because of COVID. And even though the university shut down their campuses and they were running
00:40:41.080 super cheap and charging full tuition for online courses, they got billions of dollars. And Harvard
00:40:46.680 was right there lining up with their handout, even though they have a $50 billion endowment. You know
00:40:51.900 what? Screw you guys. Again, it's my whole Ivy League problem. I'll tell you a story. I don't think I've
00:40:58.420 ever shared this publicly before. So you're now threading on new territory, Mr. Journalist. You're
00:41:05.440 getting exclusive. So in 1993, as I was entering my last year of my PhD at another Ivy League called
00:41:13.120 Cornell, I had made it to the final cut for an assistant professorship, right? The first rank of
00:41:19.880 professor at Harvard Business School, which just to get to that point is impossible. It's like one in a
00:41:26.000 million. And so I was very keen on it because, you know, Harvard Business School, you know, would sort
00:41:31.800 of be the dream job, even though it would be very unlikely for most people. And certainly one who ends
00:41:37.100 up having the kind of mouth and spicy pen that I have to ever have gotten tenure, but who knows?
00:41:43.020 I remember one thing that really turned me off. Otherwise, I was completely enamored with the glory and
00:41:49.920 glitz of the place. Yeah. I remember I was invited to a joint meeting where I think there were eight
00:41:58.020 sections of introductory marketing class that was taught to the first year MBAs. And the eight
00:42:06.480 professors who taught those eight sections had to get together for a coordinated pedagogy class where,
00:42:14.680 I mean, they literally agree on every single syllable that's put on the board and what's because they
00:42:21.300 want to create the standardized thing. And right away, I thought to myself, that's not going to work with
00:42:27.520 me because I am someone who operates in complete freedom, right? I mean, and I mean, you saw it later
00:42:34.660 in my career when you see me interacting with the public, right? I can't be reined in. It would
00:42:40.560 completely remove any of what constitutes Gadsad. And so even then, 32 years ago, when I went to Harvard
00:42:50.280 and saw the standardized wussiness, I was like, this may not be the right place for me. You just got
00:42:56.340 this as an exclusive, sir. Wow. So you turned them down? Well, I didn't turn them down because here's
00:43:02.460 what happened. No, I wish I could have ended the story that way. But so I think what I heard from
00:43:09.380 inside sources is that it was ultimately down to me and another person. And in a very early
00:43:16.660 manifestation of DI, diversity, inclusion, equity, I heard that that person had gotten the job
00:43:23.320 because she ovulates and I don't. Now, I can't confirm that, but that's what I had heard. So there
00:43:30.760 you go. So no, I didn't turn them down. And to be honest with you, I remember when I didn't get the job,
00:43:35.000 my first reaction is I was disappointed because already the salary differences between what I
00:43:41.280 could have made at Harvard Business School versus anywhere else was quite pronounced. Not that I've
00:43:47.180 ever been driven by, you know, pecuniary pursuits, but, you know, I was a single guy. I had studied my
00:43:53.740 whole life. I'm in my twenties. I'm now going to get out and get a professorship. It was hard not to
00:43:58.960 be crushed by the fact that I had been rejected by Harvard. But so, you know, this, this kind of
00:44:04.420 feeling that there's this in group and, and I'm on the outside looking in, I think certain mavericks
00:44:10.880 have that. I think Elon Musk has that. I think I always have had that, even though other people
00:44:17.640 would look at me and say, what do you mean? You've been in New York with the media for all these years.
00:44:20.800 You are part of it. But no, no, I'm just not. And what happens is because you have no other choice,
00:44:27.040 you're this outsider, you're this pariah. I end up identifying with it even more. I put on that
00:44:34.100 jacket and by golly, that is the suit of armor I now have. You guys wouldn't let me into the club.
00:44:39.440 You forced me into this, but now I'm going to make the most of it. And I'm going to rail and,
00:44:43.440 and call out hypocrisy. A lot of the disapproval of Elon Musk and Donald Trump, it feels like it's
00:44:51.380 the cool kids in the club who, you know, are looking outside down their nose at these outsiders who
00:44:56.840 don't know how to behave, you know? Oh, can I interrupt you? Forgive me. There's a great
00:45:02.060 story that I tell. I shouldn't say great story when I'm the one who's telling the story. So forgive
00:45:06.920 that. There's a story that I tell in chapter one of the parasitic mind, where I had been invited to,
00:45:14.580 you know, arguably one of the top two or three meccas of academia, the Stanford business school
00:45:18.900 to give a talk, a scientific talk on, you know, my evolutionary psychology work and so on.
00:45:24.040 And the night before the gentleman who's sort of hosting me, who's a professor in the business
00:45:30.420 school, uh, looks at me when we're out to dinner and says, Oh, I, I didn't know that, you know,
00:45:35.520 you'd been, uh, very, very often on, uh, Joe Rogan. Uh, I said, Oh yeah, you know, Joe and I know each
00:45:42.040 other well, and I've, I've been many times. And so he kind of puts on exactly the smug look that you
00:45:46.980 were alluding to. And he goes, well, you know, at Stanford, you know, we don't condone that. I said,
00:45:51.380 you don't condone what at Stanford. He goes, well, we don't, we don't do our research so that
00:45:55.880 it could be sexy enough so that we can go and talk about it on Joe Rogan. I said, well, I don't do
00:46:00.200 that either, but doesn't it make more sense for me to be able to do research that hopefully can be
00:46:05.620 exciting enough to share it with 20 million people on Joe Rogan, rather than only publish the paper
00:46:11.580 in a peer reviewed journal. And here's, here are my exact words that is going to be read by your mom,
00:46:16.920 your girlfriend, two reviewers and an editor, and you should have seen his face, right?
00:46:23.620 That speaks exactly to what you're saying, right? It's, it's an ego defensive strategy, right?
00:46:29.140 Why is that bastard Donald Trump ascending to the highest office when I went to all the right
00:46:36.440 schools and I hold the espresso with my pinky up and I speak with the progressive lisp and I have the
00:46:43.600 obnoxious New York affectations of Wellesley College and so on. But yet this brash, obnoxious
00:46:51.240 aesthetic injury is now the king of the world. If he's right, it invalidates my exterior, my existence.
00:46:59.300 Well, the people with their pinky extended, they're doing that out of fear. They're doing that out of
00:47:06.460 the need for conformity because they don't want to be called out. And then they see someone like
00:47:12.520 Elon Musk or Donald Trump and some brash person who's not apologizing for their presence, who's
00:47:19.040 not living in fear of all at all. And they, they resent that. And, and, and, uh, you know, the reason
00:47:25.420 women are attracted to men who make them laugh, men with a sense of humor, it's not because it,
00:47:32.040 you know, it shows they're smart. It's because it shows they're bold and women. I've, I read this
00:47:37.520 someplace. This is not mine. You know, when they see a man in a circle, social circle, willing to step up
00:47:42.520 make a joke, bring attention to themselves only to be disdained by the others in the cool club,
00:47:47.980 you know, women kind of think, man, he's got something going on there. And, uh, and I've
00:47:52.760 always been like that. Uh, and, and I think it's a good, it's a good way to be because we live truer
00:47:59.560 to ourselves. We might get the idea of a simulation and this could be a game. So I'm going to make
00:48:04.860 life as entertaining as hell if I can. I hadn't thought about that particular signal associated
00:48:11.560 with humor. I've, I've written and I actually had a postdoc work with me at one point whose
00:48:17.320 doctoral dissertation was on humor as a sexually selected trait. And, and exactly to your point,
00:48:23.800 the, the, the typical argument is that humor serves as a proxy measure of intelligence, but your,
00:48:31.140 well, I know, I know it's not your idea, but the one that you espoused that it, it actually
00:48:35.920 demonstrates boldness and risk-taking, especially happiness. Yeah, exactly. So I like that. That's
00:48:41.500 very, I do know that's, and I mentioned this earlier, self-deprecation in general and self-deprecating
00:48:48.160 humor is actually a sign of confidence because when you're turning the weaponry of mockery towards
00:48:55.500 yourself, by definition, you have to be someone who is confident in who you are. So for example,
00:49:01.120 I used to be a lot heavier at one point. Now I've, I've lost the weight, but I could still make fun
00:49:07.200 of myself and call myself a beached whale and a, and a walrus and so on, because I, even when I was
00:49:13.580 fatter, I was very confident in my skin. So that's a great point. Now, just in terms of trying to make
00:49:20.260 myself interesting here and take another side of that trade, I used to do this a lot because I come
00:49:25.480 across so forcefully that I felt people just looked at that guy and they think he's so arrogant. So I
00:49:30.960 would undercut myself a lot and make fun of myself. Well, I'm at a party once I've just left
00:49:35.300 CNBC. They wanted to cut my salary 35%. They told me you're just no anchor. We've decided now that
00:49:40.580 we've had you here for three years as an anchor. And so I jumped over to Fox without having to take
00:49:45.260 any pay cut, but Fox business was such a, you know, kind of a distant number two that I was kind of
00:49:50.560 embarrassed of this change. So I'm at this wedding reception for the CEO of the IMAX big screen
00:49:55.740 company. And with this really hot PR woman, she's advised Bill Gates and Bill Clinton. She's
00:50:01.940 amazing. And I keep doing this. Well, you know, it's Fox. I mean, I had to leave CNBC and I'm
00:50:06.300 apologizing, kind of taking myself down. And she takes me off to the side. She says, you've got to
00:50:10.780 stop doing this. I said, wait, I think most people think I'm kind of arrogant. I want to show them I'm
00:50:14.580 modest. So I just, she said, that's fine for a little bit. But at some point, if you keep undercutting
00:50:19.040 yourself, they will believe you and they will take you less seriously because of that. And I
00:50:24.740 stopped doing it quite as much. And the, then I took some training and mind control. That was
00:50:29.160 amazing. 150 hours of training changed my entire life. And I learned there that your unconscious
00:50:35.180 mind, and you would know, this is like a five-year-old child that believes every single thing
00:50:38.940 you say. And so when your unconscious mind hears you say, I'm such an idiot. I so blew that it believes
00:50:44.840 that. Wow. And we should be a lot kinder to ourself. So even if we're going to take ourselves
00:50:49.520 down, we should do it with sweetness instead of, you know, humiliation. Did you stay in touch
00:50:56.060 with that very bold woman who had the balls to take you to the side and tell you that very
00:51:02.400 tough feedback? I stayed in touch with her, but she didn't stay in touch with me because once
00:51:08.120 I was no longer an anchor, once I was no longer in the official media, I had lost salience
00:51:14.480 and usefulness to her. But I like her a lot. And the great thing is always leave your door open.
00:51:20.820 She can come back into my life anytime. And I would welcome her.
00:51:24.160 You know, I thought you were going to say when I, when I said, have you stayed in touch with her?
00:51:29.340 For a moment, the romantic part of my brain said, not only have I stayed in touch with her,
00:51:35.160 I married that woman. Apparently not.
00:51:38.300 I am a journalist who doesn't let the facts get in the way of a good story. So I may tell that story
00:51:42.280 next time around. Exactly. Please change the story a bit. That's a white lie. It works. All right.
00:51:47.120 Well, what are some projects that if you, if you'd like, if you feel comfortable, you'd like to share
00:51:52.620 with us that are not yet public, take this opportunity to tell us what is keeping Dennis
00:51:57.920 Neal uptight with excitement. Well, I'm really building what's bugging me, my podcast. I'm really
00:52:04.460 working on building that audience and I'm working on a new deal with Newsmax. Newsmax is doing an
00:52:09.120 extraordinary thing right now. This network has been so good to me. Okay. And they are now
00:52:14.500 hawking my book, the leadership genius of Elon Musk. When you order their, their Newsmax,
00:52:21.260 a magazine subscription, they'll give you a free copy of my book. And Chris Ruddy, the owner of the
00:52:26.960 network told me that typically when they do this promotion for every book, they, they give away
00:52:31.500 two more sell on Amazon. So I want to build the podcast and build the book. And I'm thinking about
00:52:36.500 the next book idea and no one can do it as well as I can. So I'll just tell you what it
00:52:41.360 is. Walmart is a national treasure. Walmart has done more for poor people in this country
00:52:48.680 than $20 trillion in government spending since 1964 and the supposed war on poverty. Walmart
00:52:56.180 is an amazingly well-run business and it makes other businesses even better and has put people
00:53:01.980 through college and has turned people into millionaires. And yet it's a pariah. And again,
00:53:07.120 see, there's something that draws me to that kind of character. And then I wanted to go contrarian and
00:53:12.300 say everything, you know, about this company or this person is wrong.
00:53:17.280 So basically you'd like to write a biography of Walmart.
00:53:20.060 Yeah. You know, the way, um, Bill, uh, Bill O'Reilly has these great, uh, contemporary history
00:53:27.040 books, you know, like the assassination of Lincoln. And he just does it, you know, a clip
00:53:30.760 job with a ghostwriter. I want to do a series of books on business biographies, Amazon, you
00:53:35.860 know, Walmart, you know, these, these heroes of capitalism and how, how they created what
00:53:41.660 they created and what we can do and how we can borrow from that to improve our own lives.
00:53:46.280 I think there's a stencil there, a template that you could, you could work with, right? Because
00:53:50.180 people want guidance. People, we want to get somewhere. There's the poet and the living lives
00:53:56.740 of quiet desperation. I want to push people out of that. I think we need to live more and love harder
00:54:02.600 and live louder. You know, we only get one shot. When, when that book comes out, is this going to
00:54:09.140 be under the auspices of Eric Nelson? Well, I mean, I haven't pitched it to him yet. I probably
00:54:14.160 shouldn't be talking about it, but again, I feel like this is my idea. Someone else can steal it.
00:54:18.420 They'll never do it as well as I will. There's the confidence again. Well, Eric Nelson, I'm sure
00:54:25.160 he has stewarded you through a very good and successful project. People go out and get this
00:54:32.140 book. Dennis, such a pleasure to meet you. Stay on the line so we could say goodbye offline. Come back
00:54:37.080 when the Walmart story is told. And I look forward to my invitation on your show. By the way, I have a
00:54:43.020 series. You, what is it? You, it's called what, what's bugging me? What's bugging me? So I've got
00:54:47.820 a series on X, uh, you know, like on X where I, I just go, it's called things that are pissing me
00:54:55.760 off. I just get on and for like an hour and usually I don't drop F bombs, but this is where I'm somewhat
00:55:03.080 more liberal with my F use. And so, uh, so there is, I understand your, uh, your frustration.
00:55:09.500 Thank you so much for coming on, Dennis. Talk to you soon. I love you, man. I appreciate it. Thank you. Cheers.