Pivot

Oh, really? The new idolatry of innovators. Yeah, he's getting a lot of pushback. I'm gonna have an interesting conversation with him. You know, a lot of not good reviews for this book. Say a little too in love with SBF.

I also had the opportunity to interview her for my book, When Women Lead.

In the book, I talked a lot about her efforts to reform the industry and push through regulation, and copies of the book are in the lounge over there.

The most important point is that we have to define that really as a international project and not as a form of unilateral decoupling.

We need to form a free alliance of democracies that do business together based on three criteria, acceptance of the rule of law, acceptance of human rights, and acceptance of certain CO2 targets.

America can do it alone, Europe can do it alone. This transatlantic alliance is the basis. But then as many democracies as possible should join from Japan to Canada and Australia to democratic parts of Asia, Latin America, and very importantly, India.

The biggest threat to free trade is unilateral decoupling which is going to foster nationalism and that is very unhealthy because we live in a global world and we can only solve the challenges from climate change to the kind of big economic challenges. We can only solve that together and we cannot solve it in a kind of isolated, isolationist, nationalistic manner.

his new book, The Einstein Effect, how the world's favorite genius got into our cars, our bathrooms and our minds, and what it's like to manage Albert Einstein's official accounts on social media.

I got the job because I'm a journalist and I'm obsessed with Albert Einstein.

And Einstein has more Facebook fans than Tom Hanks. 20 million? Yeah, than the Rolling Stones.

the next time you have a pizza delivery or an Amazon delivery or an Uber driver find you, it's all thanks to Albert Einstein.

And so I think it was probably, I would venture to say, the biggest regret in his life that his name is associated with the atomic bomb.

I've just been doing stuff. With Walter? Yeah.

Okay. Just so you know, the Chick-fil-A controversy was that its CEO directed a lot of money going to charitable donations to anti-LGBTQ organizations. And then in 2019, a couple years ago, they made major changes to its charitable foundation and they ended the donations.

The CEO, Dan Cathy... The founder made some homophobic comments that he justifiably got real strong pushback. But what's interesting is that it's been like a poltergeist haunting them for the better part, 11 or 12 years.

I was talking, I saw a lot of people yesterday from both sides of this case. And I've just interviewed John Cantor and others. And, you know, the Google side, of course, is like, well, we're doing good things. This is the la la la. And I keep saying 91%.

I didn't want to read a Mitt Romney book, but it looks fantastic. The guy's going in the way it came out.

when I left Amazon after 12 years, I didn't get a formal Exit Interview. And I felt like I had something to say.

Amazon made me so much smarter in a lot of ways.

My Nextbook's coming out in March.

Well, my Nextbook's on financial security, but my book after that, you know, I'm writing a book on masculinity.

Well, I got a lot of feedback from people that the profanity and the penis jokes are just a little much.

In his new book, End Times, which is a really happy title for a book, he says, we cannot understand social breakdown without a deep analysis of power structures within societies.

He's written a new book about how Amazon and Walmart have been fighting for your online retail dollars. Interesting book.

I've read quite a bit of it and it's quite good.

You've been covering it for a very long time. But you call this rivalry, quote, the defining business clash of this generation, at least in e-commerce.

I wrote the book because I think it's kind of a deeper problem than that and I wanted people to understand it.

These are a process that sort of accumulated or accreted over time and it's been no one's job to go back and look at them and say wait a minute These are just records in a database We can find all the ones that are eligible and we can change them and you know It's it's really got to be someone's job to actively design these services that work for people.

It's not just that we you know It's not just that we don't do it, right? It's that we have these processes that often force us to do it wrong.

I think that it is not about a certain technology that we should get behind. I think it's about Really in the end of the day empowering public servants to use their judgment.

Reviews are saying it should be quote required reading for politicians and policymakers

GPT-4 gives the illusion of doing that, but it's not actually that great at it. It can talk about anything, but it's not reliable.

I took stock of myself and realized that sort of my ability to talk had helped me in a lot of ways, but it also landed me in trouble.

And in the early days of the pandemic lockdown, it was sort of taking stock of a couple of bad things and realized it all kind of boiled down to this compulsive talking, this impulse. And I discovered there's a thing called talkaholism.

One is that you have more time to listen. And the biggest thing I probably learned in this whole journey was that it wasn't just about me talking less, it was about me listening more.

But the really big thing was you improve the lives of the people around you. So, for example, with my daughter, I had a sort of rocky relationship with her. And learning how to shut up and just be with her and listen to her really transformed our relationship.

What I found, Scott, though, is that it can be psychological. It actually can be related to things like ADHD or bipolar 2 that creates a compulsion. But there's another guy who did a lot of work.

Bobby was this diarist. He wanted to be a novelist. He kept all these diaries since he was a teenager. And his last diary was sitting on his desk when he died.

And his father, in this total fugue state, gave that diary away to the woman that Bobby was about to propose to because she saw that her name was all over it and she wanted it.

But after he did it, his wife was like, how could you have done that? How could you have given away the last thing our kid ever wrote when this was a chance to hear his voice one last time?

She was so broken by this. And she was desperate to get this diary back. And she asked this woman, her name was also Jen, would you give me this diary back? And she wouldn't give it back. And yeah, I wanted that diary back. And that's the story.

So a really good example is that Jen, the almost-fianc, because Bobby had bought a ring for her, just hadn't proposed...If you asked Bobby's younger brother, she stayed there with them for six months. If you ask Bobby's mom, she stayed there for a week. Wow. And she remembers having stayed there for two months.

When I started this project in the spring of 2020, I thought, like most people, that it would be over by the end of the year and that I was kind of aiming for some very clear endpoint. And it never came.

But to kind of kick it forward and say, like, how does this change the job of a CEO? How does this--what does this say about the tradeoff in any economy between resilience and efficiency?

One is just very basic balance sheet management, which is we learn this lesson every 10 years from one direction or another, which is that you're never as liquid as you think.

And so, you know, being early on just the kind of blocking and tackling of management. The other is like, I guess my takeaway is make a lot of decisions and make them quickly.

American business comes out of this stronger. And I'm obviously at a huge cost of personal toll and a lot of death and disability. So I don't in any way want to diminish that.

There was a book. Sure. And essentially, let me save you reading the book.