Pivot

Oh, there's not a moment I go without his influence. I think I carry it with me. I carry The Algebra of Happiness on me every day. I read it. I quote it like the Bible.

When I was researching my book, The Algebra of Happiness, trying to understand happiness as it relates to societies, the happiest societies, seven of the 10 happiest countries are in Northern Europe. And happiness is not only a function of what you have and your relationships. The number one thing is deep and meaningful relationships, but also an absence of fear of something being taken from you or an absence of fear of something terrible happening creates happiness. And that's something that many Europeans have or an absence of that unfortunately we have is that if you find out your wife in America, if you find out your wife has lung cancer, there's probably a one in three chance you've also found out you're going bankrupt.

And by the way, speaking of rankings, hold on. Apple created a new category called News Commentary and who was number one for a good 36 hours last week? You and I.

And by the way, speaking of rankings, hold on. Apple created a new category called News Commentary and who was number one for a good 36 hours last week? You and I. That's right. It's not one dog. It's not one cat. It's a kennel and it's the best kennel in the world. Okay. That's right. Number one. That's our tire now.

I'm on a ton of podcasts. I'm on all the touchy feeling once now because of this book, Algebra of Happiness, number 13 on Apple Hardcover Nonfiction by Angry Depressed, professors with erectile dysfunction.

It was a nice book party for The Algebra of Happiness.

But you had a rant. You ranted in front of the power elite of Washington.

And then you talked about happiness, how they can be happy, which was...

Angry to press professor on happiness.

I felt very American and I felt loved and affirmed, which I need all of those things.

Read Scott Galloway's book. It's called The Algebra of Happiness.

Number three on Amazon as of today.

One behind Melinda Gates. Cure malaria, curing malaria, blah, blah, blah. Let me talk about happiness.

No, no, I'm sorry. Number 30. I'm number 30 on Amazon.

I'm number 30. But anyway, I always turn this back to me.

Everybody got by The Algebra of Happiness by Scott Galloway.

Oprah called my new book, The Algebra of Happiness, a wonder, a wondrously weird collection of short stories.

We got your book, The Algebra of Happiness.

Hi, Cara and Scott, it's Cecilia Kang of the New York Times and co-author with Shira Frankel of An Ugly Truth Inside Facebook's Battle for Nomination.

having recently read An Ugly Truth, the authors of which you had in your podcast.

Hey, Karen Scott, Shira Frankel. My prediction is the next year is likely going to mean a lot of time spent in Washington for Mark Zuckerberg, who as we know from people close to him has always joked that he is allergic to the nation's capital to Washington, D.C. But lawmakers seem incredibly energized by the recent reports from the Wall Street Journal regarding the harm that Facebook causes to teens.

I'm reading An Ugly Truth right now and she expected it to be a friendly environment but you know you can't really have all those things going on around you and not anticipate really tough questions

Oh fuck. How did we miss this?

We assess, the summary read, with moderate to high confidence that Russian state-sponsored actors are using Facebook in attempt to influence the broader political discourse via the deliberate spread of questionable news articles, the spread of information from data breaches intended to discredit and actively engage with journalists to spread said stolen information.

Mark Zuckerberg is the most dangerous person in the world.

If power equals danger then there may be truth to what you said Mark Zuckerberg is one of the most powerful people in the world because he's created a company in which there's no real oversight of his power.

I would go out I would say your problem's not facebook your problem is social media your problem is that Americans don't know how to use the internet despite probably we should be better than any other country we should be able to teach our kids media literacy we should be able to teach Americans how to find valid sources of information online we're not doing that there are countries all over the world including Singapore Estonia that are doubling down and saying our democracy is going to break down unless we start teaching people media literacy America's not doing any of that and I would tell the no way right and I would tell the Biden administration you this is not a Facebook problem this is a problem that is going to persist it's going to get worse deep fakes and AI are going to make it worse for all of us and unless you do something now where does democracy sit in 20 years 30 years time very good how you what the Biden administration is telling themselves actually which is that we've done a lousy job as a federal government of enforcing our own laws and there are so many examples of violations from facebook and other companies but let's just stick on Facebook for a second they say that you know the privacy settlement of 2019 was so long overdue there are so many other examples of violations I mean this is what I'm hearing from people in Washington is that there needs to actually be a real cop on the beat I mean they've the federal government allowed more than a thousand mergers by big tech companies over the last decade and they never challenged any of them so I think that what I'm hearing from them themselves is that we actually have to be bolder

There's a book coming out by Shira Franklin, Cecilia Kang of The New York Times called An Ugly Truth Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination.

They're very worried at Facebook internally about it. They're worried about the book?

I've been jonesing since I wrote my book The Four, available now on Amazon in 2017.

And I have my books, The Four and The Altar of Happiness have been crawled by generative AI.

My first book, The Four, my publicist called around to try and get me on big podcasts.

I did like your book itself. I thought it was an interesting way to put it. I thought it was very smart.

He's reading The Four. He kept talking at me.

He thought you were tough on them.

I know you said you weren't tough enough on it.

He wants to talk to you about it. He wants some thoughts.

When I started writing that book, it was a love letter. I was...People don't remember this, but I used to literally be the biggest evangelist in the world for these firms. I thought they were just incredible. And by the way, they say you were talking, to kind of decade and review asked me what I was doing in 2008. I literally got run over by the recession

And by the end of the book, after really understanding them, the book as you know, turned into a cautionary tale.

So you know that study that five people who hang out together become each other. They become the same body mass, same political party, same income. That's true.

I'm trying to suss out what are the behaviors and attributes and strategies for the difference between making a good living and being wealthy. This isn't a book about getting out of debt or cutting up your credit cards.

I do think that America becomes more like itself every day and that is it's a loving, generous place for people who are wealthy and it's a rapacious place for people who are poor.

I spent a lot of time trying to understand the behaviors, assets and strategies that people end up wealthy.

The fastest way to snatch financial insecurity from the jaws of financial security is divorce and not only personal divorce but professional divorce.

And I did the whole cast of The Morning Show, which you like and I like on stage at the Paley Center. Who's the biggest surprise there in terms of how interesting they are in terms of the character?

And also, Superstar Reese Witherspoon is a good run of corporation. Boy, she knows a lot about AI and not fake knowing, actual knowing.

So anyway, how are you doing? Really well. Weekend of football, I went to this place called Mizan Manor with...

This is Algebra of Wealth, a simple formula for financial security.

I'm very excited to read it. I'm very excited. It's for your boys. You're done. You don't need to read it. You're done. It's for your boys. I'm going to read it to Alex in a second once I look through it. But I'm excited to look at it. I'm excited for your book and I'm excited to talk about your book. I know you have a lot of events and I will probably be attending one of your events as opposed to someone else who didn't communicate super with me.

My publisher came back and said we talked to the sales team and we didn't like it.

And they didn't like it. They feel like it's too wonky.

And they showed me all these books, and all these books are basically like how to get rich.

And I'm like, I just don't want to be that straightforward. I don't like that. I feel that feels very douchebaggy.

And the title, the working title right now is The Algebra of Wealth, Achieving Economic Security.

I will take we're talking about, and this is going to be scary about starting something called prop, you know, the original AI prop G and feed in my book, my most recent book on wrote something called The Algebra of Wealth feed in every transcript from every property podcast and create a generative AI that could potentially answer questions.

And I'm writing, you know, I'm writing this book, Algebra of Wealth.

Well then go on a board, go on a, you know, go to Stanford and become a high profile naysayer of these things or write a book like Burn Book, right?

I do believe in great possibilities and I hate what they've done to the place, so why don't they use the better parts of their nature to do things, which is I'm glad to hear you saying it's not gonna be some demented smart city.

Kara's memoir "Burn Book" is hitting the shelves, featuring fascinating and entertaining stories from her reporting days in Silicon Valley.

There was only a book that was coming out in three weeks that talked about this in detail.

Burn Book from Carol Swisher.

I'm not really interested in the book.

In 2017, I attended a tech event in Germany called DLD, Digital Life Design.

I watched as Scott Galloway, an NYU Stern business professor of brand strategy and digital marketing, delivered what was a wacko presentation that included him donning a wig and lip syncing to George Michael's Freedom 90 for way too long.

While Scott's casual arrogance was familiar to me, his insights were fresh and new. I invited him to join me on Rico Decode and he said yes.

Oh my God, my nipples are hard.

I have a lot more about you in there.

I'm not very good.

I think from what I've covered over the last 10 years, you know the potential for a cyber escalation here is very high.

prepare don't panic

This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends

It's a really great history to understand this right now because it will be escalating over over time

I would recommend listening to the interview we did with Nicole Perlroth. Her book is called This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyber Weapons Arms Race and that's what it is, that's really what it is.

Read Nicole Perlwals book and you'll be terrified.

So, the short answer is I had been covering these major attacks, and I kept seeing my name in the footnotes of other people writing books.

And I crammed everything in from the last seven to ten years of reporting.

And then I sent it in, and then this giant SolarWinds attack happened.

So in some ways it's the prelude to SolarWinds.

And so I was fascinated by this idea that our own government would preserve a vulnerability in Microsoft Windows so it could spy on Iran or so it could get into Iran centrifuges and take them out one day.

J.D. Vance has an issue with men and strongmen and the need to have them around.

You know what I mean? Like because and he's written about it in his book.

So I'm not like going off on a limb here because of his own father and everything else.

He's talked about it rather significantly in that book.

And you could see that like the need for a strong male figure in his life.

I like this book.

And then when I watch J.D. Vance now, I don't feel like I'm watching the same person who wrote that book.

I don't understand where he's coming from.

The weird word has worked beautifully.

It's actually weird as funny versus deplorables or any other word that's a Hillary use and stuff, which who wasn't funny?

I like this book.

And then when I watch J.D. Vance now, I don't feel like I'm watching the same person who wrote that book.

I don't understand where he's coming from.

It's funny that that special, it's called 'The New One', and it's all about how I never wanted to have a child and all the reasons why you, no one should ever want to have a child and why I was right and then ultimately why I was wrong.

The reason the couch joke arrived was that one night I was doing a show at Princeton and it was all mostly students and I, and it didn't have the couch joke in it that you just played and it was all about having kids and I've never looked at an audience that has been more disinterested in the topic that I'm discussing.

At some point it was just amoebas and then eventually these amoebas evolved to Tyrannosaurus rexes and it took billions of years he said what AI now is an amoeba but it'll get to T rex in about 10 years and I think he's right

I like you've all know Hari, the guy who wrote Sapiens. Yeah, Harari. Him with armed with AI, his next books, I can't even imagine the kind of content he's going to be able to produce because the way his mind works, his ability to connect instinct with human behavior and what the future might look like. I just don't think any AI can come up with that, but what he'll be able to do is say, all right, give me a history of homo sapiens in this era and what happened.

I had to listen to you all Harari with my 13 year old for hours on this college tour.

This is a big book, Senator.

I bought your book and I'm going to take that in the streaming or the video of the Irishmen and take three months and get through both.

It's a long book, Senator. It's a long book.

I think that people assume that everyone's following it every little detail. And most people aren't.

I start my book out with the story of a baby's heart valve drug that was 85 bucks per treatment for years and years and years.

I'm interviewing Amy Klobuchar, Senator Klobuchar on her book. Giant book. Called, called, this is very long. Antitrust.

You can tell a poodle with it is what I told her.

I'm reading her book. I read her book this weekend, anti-trust. It's very big. It's very thick. She's fantastic.

And a Clark bar and the book Dune

First off, one of the great books of, I think it was the 80s, Frank Herbert, a fantastic book that brought together politics and science fiction. The movie, okay, maybe even good, not great, not enough to get people to go into the movie theaters. If they had taken most of the edits and strung it out into eight 40 minute episodes, it would have been the talk of the water cooler or the virtual water cooler for eight weeks running, either how bad it was or how good it was.

Vivek's book is called woke Inc inside corporate America's social justice scam. It's all about ESG.

Ah, thanks Vivek Ramaswamy. Is that Ramaswamy?

Yeah, he does. It's one of his books. Anyway, it's a version of that.

That hurt.

But that's what he is. That's what he was wrote a whole book about. But go ahead.

Vivek Vivek's book is called Woke Inc. Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam. It's all about ESG.

He wrote the book Woke Inc., which is his branding thing.

This is horseshit, I'm sorry Vivek, it's just horseshit.

But then Walter Isaacson book actually mentions a glass house and then says Elon put off building it.

I asked him a lot of things. I was questioned some of his sourcing of trusting Elon so much. I asked him all the questions about why he left out all the racist, sexist, misogynist, anti-Semitic stuff. I asked him about that and what he thought.

Scott Galloway calls an idolatry of innovators that excuses cruelty, that excuses anti-Semitism, excuses misogyny, excuses being, quite frankly, not an ideal father, as long as you're really fucking rich.

I think he stuck to his guns on a lot of stuff. He did cop a plea, he said, on a number of things that he got wrong, including the Starlink stuff.

And I did manage to get him to admit that he has an opinion about Elon Musk, which was one of my issues with the book.

I think, of course, last night, right before he was about to drop, Elon did another anti-George Soros thing, which was crazy. A crazy tweet about that. And I sent it to Walter. I go, Walter, he's not a Shakespearean actor. He's just, you know, just a really terrible person.

Sad and smart son solely morphs into mentally abusive father. He abhors except for with rockets, cars and more money. Often right, sometimes wrong. Petty jerk always might be crazy in a good way, but also a bad way.

Pilo babies, not Steve Jobs.

He wants to have it both ways. Walter does as a writer.

It's a pleasing concept, an impulse control button that could diffuse Musk's tweet as well as his dark impulsive actions. So impulse, impulse. There's no editor around. And the demon mode eruptions that leave rubble in its wake.

Walter is engaging in our favorite pastime right now, and that's an idolatry of innovators that excuses cruelty, that excuses anti-Semitism, excuses misogyny, excuses being, quite frankly, not an ideal father. As long as you're really fucking rich.

I would recommend people seeing a movie called The Celluloid Closet.

Oh yeah, it's been around forever. It was a book by Vito Russo. It's the Documentaries Narrated by Lily Tomlin.

you talked about I figured out the professor who was sort of the evil guy of the show And you really said oh you mean the gay guy and you had brought up a few weeks ago this this movie I haven't seen called The Celluloid Closet talking about how media watch it. I haven't seen it I want to hear it. I will see it

It's such a powerful reminder like basically lesbians always committed suicide

Grant try the dark-haired lesbian always tried to grab the blonde lady and then get that has to die

And then the silly either the silly gay man or the conniving gay man

And it just it goes on and on and it just really does make you understand where these images come from

And why have people have feelings and how powerful Media is and what's astonishing about it?

And the author of *Think Again* and so many other books.

The overall idea is that we spend way too much of our time thinking and talking like preachers, prosecutors, and politicians.

I don't always want you to be psychologically safe, I want you to be psychologically strong.

I think the reason that I'm comfortable...I'm not dunking on college students here, I'm making a case that we're not doing a good job...

I want to know whether you would accept the results of a study before you know what it shows.

I want people to respect and admire me. I want to feel loved because in 30 years I'm going to be dead.

I was on Fox twice last week. Were you? You and Stacey Abrams, Stacey Adams as they call her on Fox News. I got so many people emailing me. It's so weird. You find out who is closeted Fox watchers. I get so many texts. Great, Hey, saw you on Fox. It's like, you watch Fox? Oh, wow. I mean, so many people are closeted Fox watchers. Oh, and what were you talking about? Adrift? What do you think I was talking about? Adrift, your book. That's right. Adrift in American 100 Shards. Yes, that's right. And it was zeroed on the parts.

Oh, Adrift. America in 100 Charts.

Did you see her picture of her sick and she managed to slip in my book?

How many of my books have you read? All of them. I just finished Adrift. Yes, I have. Yes, I have it. I haven't. I'm showing Clara through it. Yes, I am. And I made Alex read it. Yes, I do.

She has a book called Surveillance Capitalism where she has exactly the same messages, the hijacking of everything by these companies.

I imagine we'll talk about my book, Post-Corona from Crisis to Opportunity.

It's called Post Corona from crisis to opportunity.

It's orange, so you'll notice it when you go and buy it and buy it online.

I worked with Maria Petrova and Jason Stavros and a bunch of smart people on my team and my agent Jim Levine and tried to do this a different way.

If I'm a young man or woman trying to figure out what I do with my most precious capital and that's my human capital. Like what industries, what would be my approach to trying to create economic security for me and my family?

I think the biggest... It's interesting because today, Joe Biden gave a speech or yesterday, was pretty like that, just what you're talking about.

It's coming out this week. Everybody buy it. We're going to talk about it full show on Thursday.

it's dropping tomorrow.

I'm number two in hot new releases and economics. But you know who's number one? Jeff fucking Bezos is number one.

It's called laundering and investing or whatever. It should so be called Feel My Midlife Crisis.

Post Corona crisis to opportunity.

I'm a big fan of his books, "Thinking, Fast and Slow." Kind of like it was one of those books.

I want to apologize to the Daniel Kahneman fans or disciples. The Nobel Prize winner talked about wrote this great book around fast and slow thinking. And I misquoted him last week saying that people were subject to slow thinking. Slow thinking is actually the good part when you rely on the better notions of your instincts or your brain to slow down and really think through stuff and offer some nuance.

I think that it's really interesting. I think from an optic standpoint, we have Trump tweeting last week that, you know, Apple should kind of get on board and help the government. And then it's kind of like the right hand, maybe not knowing what the left hand is doing. The other side of the government working closely with Apple.

It's just again, going back to Daniel Kahneman, we need to we need to think this through.

I'm reading her book Prequel.

Prequel is great, but the two podcasts are... I got to tell you, I know she's a great broadcaster, but she's an excellent podcaster. The story is so great. You would love it, Scott Galloway. I was thinking of you the whole time.

I'm listening to season two and I'm listening to part of season one, but I'm going to go back and re-listen to season one. And it's all about Germans, America first, fascism. It takes place a lot in Germany, which is interesting.

Her book on fascism Prequel, she's talking about 20s and 30s Germany. Not just that, it's insightful. It's your insights to today. We talked a lot about that. We talked about a lot of things. She's very funny actually. You know what I mean?

Rachel Maddow has a book called Prequel about this