Pivot

There's a book for everything and they're in audio and they're on digital. And if you cool with shipping things to your house and leaving them on your porch for three days, they still make them physically. There was a great book literally called How To Be An Anti-Racist by Ibram X. Kendi by the book.

Informatics refers to the intersection of people and computing. And that's what I study.

I found that Attention Spans have declined over the last 20 years. So as the digital age rose, we see our Attention Spans getting shorter and shorter.

people are just as likely to interrupt themselves as to be interrupted by anything external to them.

the Internet itself was designed for people to be distracted with its node and link structure, and it maps on so well to the way that human memory is is organized as a semantic network.

Limit screen time for kids. I mean, really limit the amount of time because kids tend to, you know, they they do play dates or they do their recreation on the screen. And instead, they should be off screen when they do this.

Margot Atwood wrote a really amazing piece in The Guardian. It was, it was from his talk she gave. She of course wrote Handmaid's Tale. And she, I just think she's just a good predictor, not a, you know, she's writing about dystopia. And so it's really quite amazing, a lot of the stuff. In that book, Canada and Mexico were the were the good places and the US was not.

It is Handmaid's Talent. That book is a primer on some of the future, not every bit of it, of course, but it really is an attitude towards women's bodies. And she said enforced childbirth is slavery really of women. And I don't think she said that lightly. It's a very good piece. You should read it.

Kim Scott, former Apple and Google executive who wrote the book Radical Candor a few years ago.

She's out with a new book, Radical Respect, How to Work Together Better.

I think it's a prequel really because radical candor is all about caring personally and challenging directly at the same time.

We start by looking at lobbying over the last 40 or 50 years, and what we found out, which is really remarkable, is that companies right now are dominant in Washington.

But it wasn't always the case. Now for most of the last century, companies had very little influence in Washington.

So we found that sort of remarkable. We sort of- We dive into how companies got that power, how they wield it, and how they bend rules and regulations to favor the wealthy and the corporate elites and not the rest of us.

So we basically start the book in the 1970s, which is this pivotal period where corporations come to power in Washington.

And essentially what happened is corporations were on the defensive for the 60s and the early 70s.

The book quote does not represent who I am or what I believe today sacks insisted I'm embarrassed by some of my former views and regret writing them

Because nothing says I no longer defend rapists like hosting a half million dollar fundraiser for donald trump

She wrote OPERATING INSTRUCTIONS.

She's written tons and tons of books.

Bird by Bird about writing.

I just because money, like, you know, my first line of my book, it was capitalism after all in every one of these cases.

Yeah, I think Tesla has long been Elon Musk's spicy mistress, right? SpaceX has been his first love, his wife, but Tesla's that drama that just keeps getting his attention.

But you almost get the sense in recent years that maybe he's been a little bit bored with it, right? Model 3, once it was successful, was successful.

And there are all these other things that were kind of getting his attention.

And in a lot of ways, it feels like kind of classic Elon in that, he likes to shoot and then think about it later once maybe the decision is maybe not as, didn't play out the way he wanted, right?

But it kind of gets a little bit of the way he kind of operates as a manager in which he kind of believes in this power of momentum and the idea that-

And of all the things he wrote, the thing that moved me or stuck with me is he said something along the lines of, the stupidest thing I can imagine is people who only focus on what's wrong with their life.

I think that we all really do suffer from that. I know I suffer from it. I, on a scale of zero to 100, zero being someone whose life is full of tragedy and disappointment, and 100 is someone who just is the luckiest person in the world and a life full of love and achievement. You know, I would bet you and I are somewhere between a 95 and a 99, and I won't speak for you, but I focus on the four or five things that aren't right with my life and it's really stupid. And it just-

I'm a pretty positive person, I would say.

I loved it even as it tortured me.

I never turn anyone into a pig. Some people are pigs, I make them look like pigs.

Making art isn't about talent. It's really, it's about a whole lot of different things, but it's mainly about endurance.

The wind go through me.

It's really, it's a nothing sentence. Don't you think? Well, to me, it was the most beautiful sentence I had ever written in my life and the most beautiful phrase I'd ever written in my life.

You know, my Next book's about this.

That's what I'm writing about.

Yeah, with your brother.

And you're writing a book on health tech, right?

Well, health tech and cancer research and living on Mars and Ozempic, everything.

Anyhoo, Cara, I finished your book last month.

I feel excited about my next book, which is about sort of where tech in a good way, like all this climate change tech, healthcare tech.

The company is built more in Jeff's image and that's what we see today, even though he's not the CEO anymore, the culture is largely built around Jeff.

I don't see you know that sort of behavior elsewhere when I've covered corporate America.

I think Amazon is a monopoly and should be broken up.

I'm just really interested to know well two questions and one's unrelated to Amazon but do you think if they had to do it again they would have made the type of investment they needed to make and have the distraction of Amazon Prime Video.

I think they're still forging ahead, that's still the mandate is to get the 10 trillion.

And I just was saying previously, I admire your beard. You're going in the Malcolm Gladwell School of weird hair situations, follicular.

So, I had this problem where I'd come home from work and I would complain to my wife about my day and she would give me this really good advice, like, you know, take your boss out to lunch, get to know him better. And instead of being able to hear her, I would, you know, get upset and say, why aren't you supporting me? You're supposed to be on my side. And then she would get upset because I was attacking her for giving me good advice. And I wanted to understand what was going on.

And one of the things that we know now is that we think of a discussion as being about one thing, but it's actually many different kinds of conversations. And in general, they tend to fall into one or three buckets. There's practical conversations where we're solving problems, we're making plans together. But then there's emotional conversations where I tell you what I'm feeling and I don't want you to solve my feelings. I want you to empathize. And then finally, there's social conversations about how we relate to each other.

So, you know, you're from 1864, say Arizona. I look like Lenin if he was less sexy.

And so I went out to researchers and I asked them, you know, why am I miscommunicating? I'm a professional communicator. I'm an age of understanding communication. And one of the things that we know now is that we think of a discussion as being about one thing, but it's actually many different kinds of conversations.

Finish What We Started: The MAGA Movement's Ground War to End Democracy.

I'm not in the rebuilding business, I'm in the tearing down business.

Trump viscerally understands the aesthetics of power and how to make himself a vehicle a vessel for the grievances and desires of a lot of Americans

Trump is not dumb but that he's just the instrument to getting what he wants

it's a cookbook

A third of my book, "Strongman," is about Coups and Authoritarian Takeovers.

Trump has been very clear about his intent to have an American version of fascism.

He wants to turn the U.S., you know, the military if he could, but certainly law enforcement, to repress large numbers of Americans.

So that Trump is not interested in governance, he's interested in using public office for private benefit.

He's already said, you know, he's boasting that he accepted money during his first presidency from the Chinese for quote services, and I'm still trying to get somebody to ask him what those services were.