Pivot

It was based on a book by the guy who did the color of money and the hustler. I think anyway,

And the reason was I read his book and I thought these are some no look

And not everything he's done has been perfect his his fun that he's more down hasn't been as successful

So I wanted to get from is a lot of the coverage of him has been like Crazy Andrew with his like space mirrors, which by the way is not such a bad idea

I've been here forever. I haven't seen you so I don't know why they think that I was trying to get at The media covering him like he's a and he's got some percentages He's got one or two percent I forget he's got it like a lot more than others and some of his ideas about UBI is the smartest arguments I've heard around UBI as yet

There's a great book on mental illness called The Unquiet Mind and it's an interesting book just to understand. Not only everyone talks about flow but mental illness or this book is interesting. It's about understanding what I'd call a lack of flow and how you can get to flow.

I'm writing another book.

What is this book about? Leadership.

I was fascinated watching the world during COVID at how leaders were managing during this incredible crisis.

It takes a lot of empathy and a lot of courage. You have to put yourself in everybody else's shoes and really know what they're feeling.

You have to very carefully balance optimism with realism, making sure that you don't in any way kill people's hope or douse it at all, but also making sure you're preparing people for the worst.

The Everything Store was really about the first 15 years of Amazon. It came out in 2013, but really it's the rise during the dot com boom, the near death during the dot com bust and then the remarkable reinvention with the Kindle and AWS and Prime, which kind of brings you to 2011 or so.

What I mean by that is sort of unbound from the kind of normal rules of gravity that seem to impact most large businesses. The bigger you are, the more complex bureaucracy the less likely you are to invent new things, the more boring you become.

Jeff does not wanna spend his time answering those questions. He wants to float above it.

In the HQ2 saga I have the memos, the internal memos where they're selecting what's the HQ2 team selects Raleigh, Chicago and Philadelphia as the finalists and Jeff blows up the whole process but they also identified the critics who they're really wary of and you're in there.

I think the impediment to breaking up Amazon is that it's enormously complicated.

Ross Buettner wrote this book called Lucky Loser about Donald Trump's money.

If you read Secret City, a new book about Washington gayness, they kept it to themselves.

most women in the Bay Area are soft and weak, cost-added naive despite their claims of worldliness and generally full of shit

I was just reading, there was an excerpt from a new book about the Twitter takeover. And a lot of it was about people who knew better, or this was particularly around the blue rollout, which wasn't going to work. And a lot of us said this like, come on, internally that knew that and continued, tried to say it and then couldn't.

I'm joined by CNN's Audie Cornish, host of the podcast The Assignment and Politico's Eli Stockels, White House reporter and co-author of the West Wing Playbook newsletter.

It reminds me of like the Sonic redesign. They have to do a Sonic the Hedgehog redesign here.

The women, quote, just weren't articulate enough on this intellectual level. And the people of color, quote, didn't articulate at that level either.

what i tried to do in the book is look at the various modes that social movements and and people who try to make revolution in their societies uh what modes of communication they have at their disposal right so and and the criticism i have of the last 10 15 years is that we've sort of over relied on social media that the loud sort of bullhorn that twitter or facebook provides has has made it so that that activists dissidents people who are you know aching to make change don't recognize the smaller quieter spaces where they probably should be first communicating and strategizing

the thought is that you know all we need to do is gain this moment of visibility this moment of attention this sort of sugar high of everyone turning towards our way and our slogan and it's done and the reality is is we've seen sort of over and over again and I sort of track the beginnings of this to the quote-unquote twitter revolutions in the early 2010s and in the arab spring in particular uh what we've seen is that they do get these moments of attention visibility there's even you know moments where the conversation changes at a societal level and undoubtedly that's important especially when we're talking about the kind of progressive causes that we might all be on board on here but uh but then they just kind of fade away and they don't know how to translate that into the on-the-ground organizing and sort of uh you know moving laws in their direction kind of the actual real concrete tangible changes that that are in many cases the ultimate goals of these movements but that sort of gets swept away by by the by the hugeness of you know of that bullhorn

some of the movements that we that we look at today and we think about the kind of antisocial and terrible ways that they're affecting society they actually have had some of that quiet space and the reason is is that they've been sort of pushed down there right

I have a chapter on the white supremacists who sort of built up to Charlottesville and I was able to gain access to their chats sort of in the three or four months leading up to Charlottesville they were on discord you know the the gaming app because it was an extremely useful place for them to be they it was private they had their own moderators controlling their little chat rooms they could kick out anybody who wasn't sort of on board was what they were talking about and what I was able to observe there once I got past sort of the disgustingness of just even spending that much time in their presence was was people really incubating a certain set of ideas they were hashing things out they were they were working as a movement towards making the kind of change they wanted to make in the world and consolidating their visions figuring out hammering out ideology deciding optics optics was a huge thing for them you know they want to recruit more people to their worldview how are they going to do that you know what should they be wearing literally what should they be wearing and what should they not be wearing all of those questions had a space to really be discussed and worked out and one of my worries is that because the bullhorn is so attractive that the movements that are allowed to kind of flourish there take a black lives matter you know or a me too don't give themselves that space they and in fact we've kind of vilified those small quiet spaces you know we call them you know derisively safe spaces right and and I and my argument is that there is a definite role for them in the building and and and development of a movement

my book is focused you know on how kind of new ideas enter into the world and and the fact that the public sphere that we you know inhabit today is one that is not particularly good for generating those new ideas it's not twitchy and reductive twitchy and reductive and we know this this is not new you know we know this in almost every other realm of our life we know this right we've even in the time that I've been working on this book I feel like there's been such a more growing awareness of how how it's affecting us how it's affecting my kids but yet when it comes to the building of movements you know to change happening social and political change happening in the world I think we still hold on to this kind of romantic idea that all you need is a hashtag to go viral and like everything will change um and I mean I'm being a little flip but I do think a lot of people kind of still have that sense of it and what I would like people to do the extent that I have any recommendations for coming out of this book because it's essentially a book of stories that I hope people will sort of learn from but it is is that there are other modes of of communicating and that we should look for them and it's not that we can't find them online but we need to maybe stop vilifying the kind of value of seclusion a little bit you know and understand that that's important to connective tissue exactly and we need connective tissue it can't be through a tiktok dance video

John is an award-winning investigative reporter and author of the best-selling book Bad Blood Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley startup

whose book I bought this morning because I loved her interview so much

I'm speaking out because women and girls need to have options. Daniel Cameron would give us none.

I was raped by my stepfather after years of sexual abuse. I was 12. Anyone who believes there should be no exceptions for rape and incest could never understand what it's like to stand in my shoes.