My Chat with Dennis Kneale, Author of "The Leadership Genius of Elon Musk" (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_823)
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Summary
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
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Hi everybody, this is Ghat Saad. It's never not the right time to have wonderful conversation
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with the folks, even if it's Easter weekend. Dennis Neal, I'm going to introduce you formally,
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but first I want to extend the welcome. Thank you for being on the show.
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It's so great to see you and I appreciate this opportunity.
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Thank you. Okay, let me just read the official media kit that I received in terms of who you
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are. Dennis Neal is an award-winning journalist, media strategist, advisor to senior executives,
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and the host of the What's Bugging Me podcast, which I've not been invited to yet, but I won't
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hold that against you. Hosted by the Ricochet Network, he was an anchor of CNBC and at Fox
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Business Network after serving as a senior editor at the Wall Street Journal and managing editor of
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Forbes. He helped write Wealth Management, a Wall Street insider on the dirty secrets of financial
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advisors and how to protect your portfolio by Ed Butowski. Neal lives in New York City. Am I
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missing anything before we drill down? No, my gosh, we probably run out of time for the interview.
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Thanks so much. And by the way, I record my interview for my podcast every Wednesday and I'd be honored
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to have you on. Guys out there who are listening to this, I want you to know, I've followed this guy,
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okay, for two or three years. I've just been in all of his tweets. He's so brave and courageous at a time
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when polls show that 40% of Americans, the boldest people in the world, 40% are afraid to post on
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social media because they might get canceled. And this man, he talks the talk and he walks the walk.
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And I've always tried to do that. And this man has 1.1 million followers and I have about 66,000.
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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
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to come on and talk about what's bugging you, that's a standing invitation. And then one day
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I shall owe you a favor. Thank you so much. Well, today what we want to talk about is this beauty
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right here, the leadership genius of Elon Musk with a beautiful sort of background. It's a gorgeous
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cover shot. Didn't HarperCollins do a great job, that kind of dark figure, especially now? You know,
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at first I thought, oh my gosh, this is great timing. He's controversial, controversy sells
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books. And yet I've been told that the sales are disappointing. And I suddenly thought, is
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this because half the population has been brainwashed into hating a man that is probably the best thing
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to happen to America, one of them in a hundred years? It's so bad. Absolutely. And I mean, I want
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to drill down in terms of how you decide when, when did you first say, this is a book that I need
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to write. So let's start there. Yeah. What was the process by which I think the book is broken up
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into sort of 11 leaders? Lessons. Lessons. 11 Lessons of Elon. I love alliteration. Let's start with
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inspiration. Yeah, go ahead. So, all right. So when I was an anchor a decade ago at Fox Business,
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I remember hearing these couple of young gals outside my office talking about this guy, because
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one, I'm a producer there, and now she's a very senior executive at another network, said, oh,
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my girlfriend is on a yacht with this billionaire guy, this PayPal billionaire, Elon Musk. And I thought
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that sounds like a cologne. And that was my first time ever hearing about him. And I was just so
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fascinated that one degree of separation removed from me through this producer was a woman who's kind
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of partying with this guy. Started watching him then. Then cut to years later, a very talented
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editor in charge of the Broadside Books imprint at HarperCollins. I worked with him on Lou Dobbs,
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the late Lou Dobbs' book. And he ends up sending an email one day simply saying, do you know of a
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business writer somewhere who could do a management book, lessons from Elon Musk? And I kind of thought,
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well, yeah. And within a weekend, I came up with a proposal. And that's for anyone out there who
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wants to write a book thinking about it. I once had a guy tell me, he said, you take a weekend to
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write a 10,000 word proposal, laying out the book, the ideas, the chapters, the flow. If you can finish
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the weekend doing that, that means that you really want to write this book. If you never get around to
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it, it's because you really don't want to write it. Well, this proposal was ready like that.
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Those 11 lessons with some help from the editor, Eric Nelson, came into vision. And I just had a
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criticism from a friend of a friend. He read it and he told my friend, frankly, I don't see what's
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so special. All of these 11 lessons are lessons that every executive should follow. And I just
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thought, thank you. Thank you very much. That would be good. And they are good lessons. But what I think
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is that I could double sales of this book. And that is why we are here, to get this book on the
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New York Times bestseller list in defense of Elon, in the New York Times, which hates Elon. And we
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could double sales if I can tell enemies out there, if you want to work against this guy, this book will
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show you how he operates. He's got, for example, two lessons going on, three lessons of the 11 that are
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involved in Doge. Lesson two is reduce, reduce, reduce, cut back everywhere on everything. I have,
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we have a $40 billion a year storage industry in this business, where we store stuff five miles
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from our home that if we really needed it, it would be here. But instead, we're paying to not
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throw it out, throw it out. He does that with Teslas, which have 10,000 parts compared with 40,000 in a
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Ford. He did it with SpaceX, reduced it down to stainless steel and fuel. Another lesson, the highest
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nail gets pounded down first, so strap on a helmet. Elon doesn't shrink from controversy.
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He says, bring it. And lesson four, tease your critics and torture your enemies. And man,
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Indeed. Well, you may or may not know, I've gotten to know Elon personally. And, you know,
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we've communicated many times. We've met in person.
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I have one response to an email, just one. And I feel like Wayne's world, where he looks at that
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guitar in the window and says, yes, one day I will have him. He will be mine.
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Hey, you know what I'm hoping for, Dennis? That I might actually be able to finish a sentence
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without you interrupting me. You think that's going to be possible?
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I'm Lebanese. So you've got to be able to ride with the jabbing. Don't worry about it.
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No, but what I was going to say is, I've gotten to know him personally. And knowing him personally,
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it frustrates me to see all of the nonsense that is spewed about him. Because once you know someone
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personally, you feel as though, you know, he's owed, not that he needs my protection, but for
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somebody to stand up. I was going to say, as someone who, okay, you don't know him personally,
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but you wrote this book about him. Do you get offended to see that here we've got this,
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you know, treasure? He's not an American treasure. He's a world treasure who is trying
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to always do the good thing, the right thing. And yet he is so maligned. Does that piss you off?
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It really does. It offends me for a couple of reasons. And number one is it's that old cliche,
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that old saying, no good deed goes unpunished. And I'm so sorry to see that come true. But more than
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that, because I was with CNBC and Fox and Wall Street Journal and Forbes, you know, I love journalists.
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And I respect journalists. And I did for a long time. And today, many of them, I don't recognize
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at all. And what they've done to this man and how they've made him the enemy simply because he allied
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with Trump because he was truly worried about our nation. And it's just appalls me that the media
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could side against him like that. They've turned from watchdogs who we at least try to hide what our
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bias was into liberal lapdogs who just ply the Democrat agenda, most of them. And I'm so sorry to
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see it because Trump broke them. Do you think that you're having written this book is going to
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ensure that you're not invited to the cool kids party anymore? It may, but I never have been. So
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that's okay. I've been on the B list. Why? Why? I don't know because I am anyone who sees me,
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they would know this guy's dying to be on the A list. He's desperate for the approval of strangers.
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Anyone who takes a full job, time job in television is desperate for the approval of
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strangers. But I don't know what, you know what it is, the differences? Because when I went to the
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Wall Street Journal at the start of my career, and I was from the University of Florida, and everyone
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around me in the New York office, the home office was from Princeton and Yale and Harvard.
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I didn't hear you mentioned Cornell, which is my alma mater.
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There you go. Okay. And they were from Cornell as well. All these Ivy Leaguers. And they have
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a sense of entitlement that things just come to them because they deserve them. And a guy like me
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who came from a lower middle class upbringing, and just my mom raising me for most of that time,
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we don't ever feel like we deserve or are entitled. And we have to fight and scrap for every little
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step ahead that we get. And I think those of the Ivy League, they spell that desperation in me.
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And so I've never been quite invited into their circle.
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You know, it's actually very refreshing that you're very open about some of these things,
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right? Because most people would have the reflex to not share that, you know, out loud. And the fact
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that you do actually speaks to the fact that you're probably ultimately quite confident about your
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abilities, right? Because it takes a lot of confidence to be self-deprecating. And so
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screw those Ivy Leaguers. You're doing well. You're writing a book on Elon Musk. Let's put it back. Go
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out there and buy this book. Tell us, how did you decide on why 11 lessons? Why not 10? Why not 12?
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Yeah. So 10 is cliche, and it's two lettermen, right? Seven would be a better number. Seven is a
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wonderful prime number. It's a lucky number. It's in dice games. So seven would be good,
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but it's not quite long enough. But then the one great writing technique I have, and this is my
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fourth book. It's the first one I've done on my own. The one great writing technique I have is
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alliteration. So 11 works so well with lessons and Elon, 11 lessons of Elon. And they work so well
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together. For example, lesson one is the most bizarre one, because it says that Elon may really,
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truly believe that we could be living inside a vast simulation right now that's so advanced that
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we just have no idea that it's real. And you think that's ridiculous. But then you realize,
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well, 10,000 years from now, actually, that's not impossible to perceive, to imagine. But then we
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realize the universe is almost 14 billion years old. And that means that there would be 1.4 million
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10,000 year stretches. So to Elon, the thought we've gone almost 1.4 million stretches without
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achieving that yet somewhere in the universe seems impossible. So it could be very true. And that means
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how do we, how do we know? Well, then what comes along? Lesson two, reduce, reduce, reduce. There's a
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physicist I interviewed in that lesson who has created a new law. He's a fascinating interview. You would love
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him. The second law of infodynamics. And it says that while the rest of the universe is given to
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entropy and complexity and more and more trash, information in our universe is constantly reducing
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itself. And he noticed this in nature, COVID, the original version versus 20 generations later,
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it kept shedding DNA characters. And scientists used to think that this shedding was mathematical error.
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And along comes the physicist who says, no, no, this is nature's efficiency. They're doing this on
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purpose. The organism does the same old stuff with far fewer letters and characters. And he says,
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and all through nature, they're constantly reducing information required. Why? And then he suddenly
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thought, if this were a simulation, they have figured out it would take 45 planet Earths of computing power
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to do a perfect simulation. Okay. And if this were a simulation, you'd want to cut down on information
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and storage as much as possible everywhere. So the lesson works. And then lesson 11, Elon says,
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I'm looking at the lessons. Go on. I'm listening. Elon says the most likely outcome in life
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is the most ironic one, the most opposite of what you tried to make happen or what you thought would
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happen, or it's the most entertaining one. Well, that hooks into the simulation because think about it.
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A physicist who first came up, Bostrom, in 2001, came up with seminal paper on the simulation.
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And he said, if there is a simulation, the guys who are running it, they wouldn't do it to come up
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with boring outcomes. They're doing it for entertaining outcomes. And so that kind of teaches
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you to live your life bigger, louder, fuller. It all might be a game anyway.
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Right. Well, I mean, there are so many things I want to jump off from what you just said.
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But number one, speaking of physicists, one of the... By the way, what's the name of the
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But I just love the guy. And I spent an hour and two hours on Zoom with him. He was so wonderful.
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Okay. I'll check him out. Here's another guy you might want to check out. I'm giving
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him some free publicity. Do you know David Deutsch?
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Yeah. Well, David Deutsch is a gentleman who recently came on my show twice. He came back
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to back for... We had such a great first conversation that we ended up having a second conversation.
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And to me, he epitomizes what a real intellectual should be like. Because one of the great disappointments
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in my long academic career, and I've been a professor for 31 years, very difficult for
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me to imagine that that's true, is that many professors are actually not intellectuals,
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right? They're hyper-specialists. They know their small, restrained field, but ask them
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to talk about art history or to talk about, you know, whatever, geopolitics. If they only
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know physics or chemistry, that's all they're comfortable talking about.
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Right. David Deutsch was certainly not that, albeit he is a quantum computing
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and quantum mechanics guy. So he certainly has the scientific imprimatur. So, but what
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I was going to go back to one of your earlier lessons where you say, you know, kind of tease
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Orchure your enemies. So I think I would put that lesson as part of a greater mindset.
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Thank you so much. In the last chapter, I talk about activate your inner honey badger.
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And the honey badger, of course, is a ferocious, fierce animal. And I recently released a clip
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on my channel where I said, here's what's the greatest commonality across Donald Trump,
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Elon Musk, and Joe Rogan, is that they are true honey badgers in their own domains. They
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all don't give an F. So would it be fair to say that encapsulated in one or more of your
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lessons is the honey badger? Exactly. Yeah. That, that lesson three, right before lesson
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four, which says, hey, highest nail gets pounded down, strap on a helmet. And, you know, instead
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of our fleeing controversy, instead of our fleeing reprisal, maybe we should say, I don't give
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an F, like you say. And that's what Elon does. And maybe it turns out greatness requires being
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willing to not give an F. Well, and I think, so I often mention this maybe once a month, I'll put
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out a tweet on this and I'll say, look, the great people of history, whether they be negative forces,
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Hitler, or they be positive forces, are not equivocators. They're not fence sitters. They see a vision
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and they go full throttle in, right? So your very kind words at the start of our show, when you were
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talking about sort of my public engagement, I can't be anything other than exactly what I am,
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which is if I were to modulate a millimeter of what I want to say, I would feel fraudulent.
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And therefore I just go full throttle and I don't give an F. Right. And, and that's really worked for
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you. Whereas for me in 2014, when I left Fox with 15 minutes notice, and they had a security guard
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escort me out of the building, literally, I, I, I almost fainted. I had to hold up a wall.
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You know, I waited for those offers to pour in because by golly, I got, and this guy, he says
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what he really feels. None came. I mean, nothing, nothing. Why did you get, if, I don't know if
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you're allowed to speak about it or not, but what, what led to your very ceremonious departure?
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Because my, because my friend, someone I just adore and admire so much, Maria Bartiromo.
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Right. A huge career risk. She was so hurt at CNBC because they were going to try to, you
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know, uh, kind of start to phase her out perhaps, or cut her salary. So boom, she risks everything.
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And she leaves that network that she was part of for 20 years and goes to Fox business, which
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was the second also ran and wasn't yet big. And the very day she shows up for work and she
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comes through the turnstile. She says, Dennis, I'm so sorry. You know, you don't blame me.
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Do you, she knew already I was being fired that day. And I didn't know. And because I
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knew I was losing my anchor chair and they're shaking up the schedule to make room for Maria,
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but it turns out they had to make room in the budget. She's coming in costing 6 million
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a year reportedly, and they needed to cut a million. So cut me and two other producers.
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And the three of us six months earlier had been in the office of one of the senior executives,
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bitterly having an argument, you know, the two of them against me. And then we all three
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were taken out together on the same day, six months later. And suddenly I'm thinking,
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I like those two guys more than I knew. They had to cut the budget.
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Have you maintained a working relationship with Fox? Did you ever appear on any of their
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shows? Well, you know what? It's interesting because why is it that my two alma maters,
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Fox Business and CNBC, have yet to have me on air to talk about this book? At CNBC,
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it would be because we're liberal and Elon's a bad man. At Fox, I have heard the PR department,
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the most feared corporate PR department in the land. I've talked to media reporters. They're
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terrified of this PR department. And apparently they have a rule saying, if you've been an anchor or
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on the network, you can't come back. Now, I imagine they break that for somebody somewhere,
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sometime, but they haven't broken it for me yet. And when I was there, I couldn't even get them to
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meet me for lunch. And I was taken to the principal's office 13 times for tweets that
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they thought were too controversial. Oh, when I hear stories like that, and I think about how
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I go about my life, I probably wouldn't make it there by nine o'clock Monday morning. I wouldn't
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last. And I've been wanting to ask you because I see your stuff. And it's one thing for any person
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of repute to be doing the stuff you're doing and to be that bold and that blunt. But for a professor
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in academia, you must feel like an outsider and a pariah all the time. And I always have felt like
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that. And when I was writing about Elon Musk, I felt like that, that Elon probably, I just got this
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sense that he wants to be loved. You see him on stage at those rallies and he's jumping up and his
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belly's showing because the t-shirt's not long enough as he's raising. And he's just so happy
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to be loved. And I think all of us have that and want that in basic nature. It's just that
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some of us work a lot harder to win that love than others. And that is what drives us.
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Well, and I think so in, I've, I've, I mean, I've been in very close proximity to President Trump.
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I was invited to an event at Mar-a-Lago. He was maybe five meters from me, but I didn't get the
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pleasure of actually interacting with him. So I, so anything that I'm saying is speculative and that
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I don't really know him personally, but I feel that one of the reasons why Trump reacted often
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the way that he did in his first term, much less so in a second term is that he just wanted the love
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and appreciation and credit for doing things right now. Part of that comes from a sense of slight
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narcissism, but we, any of us who are going to be in the public eye want to be patted on the back
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saying, attaboy, you did well. It's human nature. So that's not so weird or creepy, but the, the more
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that he didn't get it, then the more sort of indignant he would become. And then that would
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come across as though he's not being presidential. The second term, that monkey is really off his back.
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Guess what? You threw everything at me and I still came out winner. And so he just seems a lot
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more at peace with his existential reality. Am I right here? Oh, you're so right. And you know,
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the other thing is his winning 77 point something million votes more than Kamala, his winning the
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all seven swing States, his winning both houses of Congress, his winning 312, was it electoral voids
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something 42 more than required to win. He's feeling more loved now. Yeah. He's lost that anger of
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feeling because, you know, I thought about this one time, imagine what it was like for him in his
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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
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twilight episode zone episode for him. And about, I'll just add to that. I met the man twice before
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he ever ran for president one-on-one, one time. And, and, and, you know, Stockholm syndrome where
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you're taking hostage, you start to identify, there's some other kind of syndrome. There must be a name
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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
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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
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wait? Uh, Donald Trump is in the green room. He wants to introduce himself to you. I go in there
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and he's, you know, and he's, oh, and have you met rich dad, poor dad author here? This is my friend.
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He, as if he's not enough alone for me to meet. Okay. Right away. I'm a fan. Then a couple months
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later, I'm dinner with a billionaire, six people. Trump comes up, sits next to me for the better part
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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,
00:25:57.340
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
00:31:02.840
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
00:35:26.180
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
00:35:39.620
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,
00:51:38.300
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.