If Books Could Kill - How To Win Friends And Influence People

Episode Date: October 2, 2025

Live like Dale Carnegie, neg like Calvin Coolidge.Where to find us: Our PatreonOur merch!Peter's newsletterPeter's other podcast, 5-4Mike's other podcast, Maintenance PhaseSources:Self-help Messiah: Dale Carnegie and Success in Modern AmericaThe Positive ThinkersAge of industrial violence 1910-1915 : the activities and findings of the United States commission on industrial relationsRepresentation and Rebellion: The Rockefeller Plan at the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, 1914–1942 Dale Carnegie and the Problem of SincerityNew York Times review from 1937Thanks to Mindseye for our theme song!

Yeah, I think I've got something, hold on, let me, I need to think about it. He prepared. Not you preparing for the podcast. I'm like so with it, Peter. He's so with it. Are you about to stand on business? Are you standing on business, Peter? Are you about to stand on business?

Not me is like the worst. That's so fucking annoying to me. That's like one of the signs of me getting old is like, I hear that and I just get pissed off. Yeah. It's not like, oh, I don't really get that slang. It's like, shut the fuck up. That is you about to turn 40. Yeah.

What is it? Not me being taken to the camps. That's like, that's a fucking TikTok a year from now. Also, the slang in this book has fucking ruined my vocabulary because he keeps talking about like fisticuffs. Not me resorting to fisticuffs. Not me scuffling with this vagabond. Okay. Peter.

Michael. What do you know about how to win friends and influence people by Dale Carnegie? All I know is that we've covered a lot of frauds and phonies on this podcast. And it's nice to. finally cover someone who did it the right way by having the same last name as a successful businessman. So the full title of the book is How to Win Friends and Influence People, No Colon. Wow. Kukakaka combo breaker.

We've never had this. It is published in 1936. It's sold. It's not clear how many copies it's sold, but somewhere in the tens of millions. It has been called the most popular nonfiction book since the Bible. So, of course, neither one of us are coming into this fresh, I assume. I'm not really familiar with the contents of the book. I am aware that this is sort of like the OG business self-help book.

Yes. But that's really it. Over the years, I have heard various things about this book. I've heard from people that this is like not that bad and that most of the advice in it is pretty reasonable. I've also heard that he's like a deep. demon sent from hell. So I went into this relatively open. I was like, this could be good, this could be bad. I picked up the book. I opened it. The second paragraph starts with, I have since 1912, been conducting educational courses for business and professional men and women

in New York City. Oh my God. So he's a seminar grifter. A hundred years ago was the same grifter. The first seminar grifter, I know. If Dale was born in 1991, he'd be hosting a podcast in aviators. Hawking some product. This picture. changed my relationship with my dick. So after he does his little, like, I teach seminars introduction. I'm extremely skeptical. He then goes into a litany of testimonials. He's like, this man attended my course, and then he achieved success.

Like, he had never known. And it just goes on and on. If you are willing to sit there for 20 minutes, reading about how important something is before you even know what it is, you're a natural sucker. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you're going to buy whatever they're selling. He then, of course, does the thing where he's like, this is such powerful wisdom, but they don't teach it to you in the same.

schools. In schools, they'll have you thinking that you should be focused on the giant world war that's about. Yeah, I know. Another, like, OG trick in this book is that he includes a lot of quotes from famous people. Hell yeah. So he has a quote from the former president of Princeton saying, education is the ability to meet life's situations. Whoa. Which is not a good quote. Two podcast bros just in awe. Yeah, Theo Vaughnvois. Wow. Oh, yeah. You got situations. and then you've got to meet him, man. So that's the first introduction. We then have another introduction called Nine Suggestions

on How to Get the Most Out of This Book. And it's all super self-aggrandizing. It's like, you mustn't only read this once. You must underline your favorite passages. You must tell your friends to purchase it as well. Sure. We then have another introduction, a biography of Dale Carnegie by a radio broadcaster

named Lowell Thomas. It's called A Shortcut to Distinction. So we then get all these biographical details, which I got to say, a lot of which struck me as like very fake or at least like slightly dubious. He is raised on a farm in Maryville, Missouri, which is where my grandmother is from. He says that his dog died by being struck by lightning. I believe it. He has all these stories about like, I had to wake up at 3 a.m. to feed the hogs. I don't think that's when you feed hogs.

He then says the hogs got cholera. he's traveling to and from school on horseback and like doing chores and then reading Latin by oil light at night. He then goes to teachers college, but then he drops out to become essentially a door-to-door salesman and starts selling like distance learning courses. Back when correspondence courses were like in the mail. He's doing Zoom grifter shit, but well before Zoom. He then quits as a traveling salesman to go to acting school and then drops out.

to join a circus. Apparently, circus has had, like, plays that went along with them as part of, like, the evening's entertainment. So he's an actor in the play that is along with the circus. He moves back to New York to sell used cars. Yes. He then quits to become a novelist and then starts teaching these courses at the YMCA, and there's a whole thing about, like, we can't pay you.

So we must give you a portion of the proceeds. And then, of course, before you know it, he's making, like, $1,000 a night because the proceeds are so high. It's like the success story. I see. This guy, Lowell Thomas, speaks of Dale Carnegie in these, like, weirdly reverent tones. Another thing that made me kind of suspicious, he says, A slave to no hard and fast rules, he developed a course that is as real as the measles and twice as much fun.

What? I mean, measles, many things are twice as fun as measles. Why is he so bad at identifying good quotes for a book? It's so fucking weird. Twice as fun. Maybe that was a saying. He also has a weird thing about, like, he's like, as the old saying goes, give a dog a bad name, and then you hang him.

I'm like, what? Like, is that the whole saying? As the old saying goes, shoot a lady in the face. Not me hanging my dog. So I go into this book, unbelievably negative. This guy's seminar grifter.

He has this like kind of too perfect backstory. He's already giving me a bunch of filler, a bunch of exaggerated stuff. I finally get into the core text of the book. The book is split into around 30 like principles,

principles of how to win friends and influence people. The first principle, is, don't criticize, condemn, or complain. Most of it is kind of like fine. He's like, you win more friends by being nice than by being mean. That's true. He quotes in full this thing called father forgets, which is like a little parable

that apparently ran in Reader's Digest numerous times because it was so popular, basically about like a dad who gets home and criticizes his son. They go to a baseball game. He criticizes his son. And eventually the father realizes that like, hey, I should be nice to my son. Okay. He then says this. this. I'm going to send it to you. We nourish the bodies of our children, but how seldom do we

nourish their self-esteem? We provide them with roast beef and potatoes to build energy, but we neglect to give them kind words of appreciation that would sing in their memories for years like the music of the morning stars. Wow. Yeah. This was the first time anyone ever thought about being nice to children. It was 1936 and he was like, I have an idea. We then get to principle two, which is give honest and sincere appreciation. And he basically says that like one of the core drivers of essentially all human behavior is that we want to feel important and we want to have our needs and our feelings recognized by other people. And so he tells the story of Charles Schwab, who was the first president of the U.S. Steel Company. He's apparently the first person ever to

make a million dollars as his salary. This is actually kind of interesting. The thing that is happening at the time is that we're basically getting the first green shoots of the knowledge economy. We're shifting from like the industrial production. Like your ability to succeed at work is based on how good of a producer you are, like on the production line, we're now switching to essentially the creation of like American middle management, American corporate hierarchies. And so a lot of the people who are attending Dale Carnegie's courses are these people who like used to be assembly line workers who are now in middle management and are like, how do I do this? Like it's not my skill at engineering that is going to get me up the corporate ladder.

It's actually my ability to like, yeah, get along with people and influence people. And so this is actually one of the core drivers of his courses. I need to get good at bullshit. I need to get good at fake nonsense. So he quotes Charles Schwab here. I consider my ability to arouse enthusiasm among my people, said Schwab, the greatest asset I possess. And the way to develop the best that is in a person is by appreciation and encouragement. I have yet to find the person, however great or exalted his station, who did not do better work and put forth greater effort under a spirit of approval than he would ever do under a spirit of grace.

criticism. He draws the distinction between flattery and appreciation. He says, like, you should think deeply about what you appreciate about other people and tell them that and give meaningful compliments. So here's what he says about flattery. The difference between appreciation and flattery? That is simple. One is sincere and the other insincere. One comes from the heart out, the other from the teeth out. One is unselfish, the other selfish. One is universally admired, the other universally condemned. Emerson said, every man I meet is my superior in some way. If that was true of Emerson, isn't it likely to be a thousand times more true of you and me? Let's cease thinking of our accomplishments, our wants.

Let's try to figure out the other person's good points. Yeah. So true. Yeah. This is before they figured out negging. The updated version is much shorter because here it just says, tell her, her shoes look really comfortable. It's chapter 10 of how to win friends, runes. We then get principle three, a rouse in the other person, an eager want.

Yeah. This is where it gets hot and heavy, folks. Which honestly sounds bad. I went into this chapter like, oh, where's he going with this? But this is basically just like find out what other people's interests are. And when you're negotiating, try to find an arrangement that genuinely offers something to both of you. Dale Carnegie, doing the Lord's work just out here introducing basic morality and human kindness to Americans in the mid-1930s. We then get principle four, become genuinely interested in other people. He says, you can make more friends in two months by becoming genuinely interested in other people, then you can. can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.

This is especially good advice for people who are really boring. Yeah. If you're not interesting, this is phenomenal advice. If you're super cool like us where you have, where your job is podcaster, you don't need to do this. That's something I appreciate about you, Peter, is the EQ of your voice, how I've made you attractive through the settings on the editing software. Using technology, Michael has made me attractive and appealing.

One of his, like, little life hacky tips is that when you see somebody who you like, like and appreciate and want to become friends with, like, stop what you're doing and greet them enthusiastically. Okay. I genuinely think that's, like, good advice. Like, someone who, like, drops what they're doing is like, oh, I'm so glad to see you. How was your day? Feels really good.

There's something very earnest about that that feels like you wouldn't get that in modern self-help because they're like, they would think that that's pathetic. We're like, enough of this nice guy bullshit. Right. I'm not going to walk up to you and be excited like an absolute schmuck. Yeah. Like a Carnegie reader. I'm going to stand in the corner looking disinterested.

We then get to the first. hint of problematicness. Principle five is smile. Ladies, listen up. You know he starts with an anecdote about a woman who like refuses to smile. Let me tell you a story of a woman who would have been a lot prettier if she smiled. I'm going to send you this. At a dinner party in New York, one of the guests, a woman who had inherited money,

was eager to make a pleasing impression on everyone. She had squandered a modest fortune on sables, diamonds, and pearls. Get it, girl. Sables. But she hadn't done anything whatever about her face. Her face. It irradiated sourness and selfishness. She didn't realize what everyone knows.

Namely, that the expression one wears on one's face is far more than the clothes one wears on one's back. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. This is, he doesn't, he doesn't understand or isn't willing to accept the power of a rich bitch. If you're a rich lady who has inherited a fortune, you don't need a smile for people. That's like the benefit. So here's his little conclusion. He's hammering the point home. Actions speak louder than words.

And a smile says, I like you. You make me happy. I'm glad to see you. This is why dogs make such a hit. So people like dogs. They're so glad to see us that they almost jump out of their skins. So naturally, we are glad to see them. I'm including the thing about the dog.

Also because some of this is like pretty good and pretty sweet advice, but this is a very dumb book. Part of why people like dogs is because dogs are so fucking stupid. Yeah, exactly. And they're dogs. They're not humans. It's just a different standard of behavior. I don't think you can operate based off that principle. But there is something to the underlying concept of just be excited and happy to see people. And they will probably reciprocate, right? Not me. I won't enjoy that. But a lot of people will. So then we get to our first life hack piece of advice. Principle 6 is, remember that a person's name is to that person, the sweetest and most important sound in any language.

Oh, no. This is something that I actually do. What? Remember people's names? Maybe this is slightly different. But I drop people's names into conversation. Really? The simplest thing is when I would send like a little thank you email to someone, I would say thank

you and their name, always. Did it feel like it worked? I, no. I mean, that was like a piece of professional advice I got when I was young. This is, again, pretty good advice, like remember people's names, obviously. But I've also done, especially like I've done interviews with like public figures, like politicians. They're like, that's an interesting question, Mike. Yeah.

Well, what I think, Mike... No, you don't want to force it. You can tell they're overdoing it and they're doing it in like a way that feels like they read it in a fucking self-help book. And it turns out they did. We then get to Principle 7, be a good listener, encourage others to talk about themselves. Okay. He says, if you aspire to be a good conversationalist, be an attentive listener. To be interesting, be interested.

This is nice. Yeah. But then we also see some of the darkness underneath this advice and where it's coming from with Dale Carnegie. So here's his like opening anecdote to this. Some time ago, I attended a bridge party. I don't play bridge. And there was a woman there who didn't play bridge either. She had discovered that I had traveled in Europe a great deal.

So she said, oh, Mr. Carnegie, I do want you to tell me about all the wonderful places you have visited and the sites you have seen. As we sat down on the sofa, she remarked that she and her husband had recently returned from a trip to after. Africa. Africa, I exclaimed. How interesting. I've always wanted to see Africa. Tell me, did you visit the big game country? That kept her talking for 45 minutes. She never again asked me where I had been or what I had seen. She didn't want to hear me talk about my travels. All she wanted was an interested listener. So she could expand her ego and tell about where she had been. Was she unusual? No. Many people are like that. So sort of like, I asked this lady a question and she answered it.

Well, 45 minutes is a long time, Mike. You got to admit. You got it. But also, we don't know the actual dynamics of that conversation. Like, I assume he's asking follow-up questions. I do think this is sort of right. Although this also feels like there's a discordance between this and, like, the earlier, just be nice, sort of friendly stuff. Because this is sort of like people are disgusting ego-driven animals. There's a little bit of cynicism that kind of pops through. So earlier in one of the principles, he says, every act you've ever performed since the day you were born was performed because you wanted something.

And so what you should be doing is identify other people's wants. But also, it's sort of like a weirdly cynical way to go through life. Like, well, everyone, you're only talking to me because you want something. That just isn't true of most interaction. How many people listening to this are literally wandering into a room right now where you don't remember why you entered that room? Right. Like Kyle Rittenhouse, you're doing many things at once. Imagine how many people are hearing that no context.

That wasn't a bonus episode. That's now lore. It's canonical, folks. I also am someone who like, maybe because I'm a journalist, I like asking people about, like, things that they like talking about and they're experts on. And like, I don't leave those conversations being like, oh, they just talked about themselves. I would say, like, I learned a lot from somebody. Like, I think you could also frame this a way of like, people have, like, treasures within them and you can unearth them and form connections and, like, learn things about the world through talking to people. Yeah, I think that's true. But I mean, look, this, so far, this has been pretty good advice, right? Yeah. Listen to people, engage with their interests. People want to be listening. to smile ladies, all the classics. I will say, like, most of the core of this book is good. Try to be nice to people. Listen to them when they talk.

Think about what you appreciate about people. Where's the Korean Pilots chapter, Michael? We've talked a lot on the show about how essentially all mass market advice is just a way of people packaging their own biographies. They're all accidental biographies, these self-help books. As I was reading, How to Win Friends and Influence People, I was also reading, a book called Self-Help Messiah, Dale Carnegie, and Success in Modern America by Stephen Watts, which is very interesting and very good, and essentially tells his entire life story as it's going through, like, the legacy of the book, all of the threads of American society and

economy that were going on that kind of led to the book. And so I have this book, and then I also have this biography of the guy who wrote it. And it matches up very closely, the kind of life and interactions that he's having, and also the kind of advice that he's giving. So the first thing to note is that those anecdotes at first that sort of rubbed me the wrong way, they're all true. He had like an insane life. It appears his dog really did get struck by lightning or at least like there's letters home to his mom and shit that indicate that. And it's like a consistent story that he told. So to the extent that we can confirm it, it appears to be true. Right. The other thing that you note is that all of the tips that he's giving you for human interaction are essentially

coping mechanisms. So there's kind of two experiences. that feed into the kind of advice that he gives for the rest of his life. The first is that Dale Carnegie is an unbelievably insecure guy. So he grows up in, like, profound poverty. Like the kind of poverty that I saw when I used to do, like, human rights trips to Zimbabwe. Like, his dad would take out loans to, like, buy hogs or buy seeds, and then there'd be a drought or all the hogs would die of disease, and then they'd be, like, out of food and out of money. And so the only way they buy is basically, like, growing their own food.

Pre-New Deal style poverty, grapes or wrath, situation. situation. The kind of poverty that you don't see anymore and won't see for another two years. Because they're like, the only way that he got clothes was they would barter meat from the hogs into cloth and then his mom would sew his clothes. Give me that shirt. I'll give you this dog that was struck by lightning. And so, of course, he's like much poorer than the other kids at school. He's extremely insecure. Once he moves to New York, he's not quite one of these like East Coast sophisticates. Like, he doesn't really fit into that world. But he also doesn't really fit into like rural farm life the way that he used to either. He feels distant from kind of all of these

groups. His whole life, he basically like doesn't have a lot of confidence in his abilities. And when you think about the kinds of tactics that he's proposing here, like if you're afraid that you don't have anything interesting to say and that people are going to be bored or annoyed by you, a great way to get around that is just ask them about themselves. You're like, well, then I don't have to talk. I can just have people talk to me and then they'll like me. And if you don't know how to fit into social situations and you're nervous, about what people think of you, you're going to be obsessed with avoiding conflict, trying to ingratiate yourself to other people any way that you can, smiling, kind of taking this subservient

role in every interaction, because to you, you're just desperate to like be like, to get some form of affirmation and make your anxiety about conversation go away. This comparison might be a bit of a stretch, but it feels to me like he was sort of a tech bro equivalent where he has been catapulted into this like liminal class space. Yeah. Existing side by side with the rich, but not quite one of them. Yeah. With our tech bros, it turned them into Nazis. Right. I don't believe that happened to Dale. Well, there's actually a, there's a whole sequence in the book about how like he's really insecure about his ability to get women, especially when he's younger. Well, duh. He's like, even if a girl wants to go out with me, I can't take her anywhere because I don't have any money. And I wear the same clothes every single day and they don't

fit me. Like, he's so insecure about everything about himself that would appeal to the opposite sex. This is also a time when, like, you'd see a picture of, like, five-year-old children and they're all wearing suits. But it's also interesting is, like, there wasn't really right-wing propaganda for him to find at that time. I feel like he's the kind of guy that if, like, Reddit was around. He would have ended up in, like, a really bad place. But he basically found, like, the debate team and public speaking. And that's kind of how he, like, starts to gain self-esteem. And he just feels good at one thing. If he had lived in Italy, he is on the streets in the 20s cracking socialist heads for sure. So this is a excerpt from a really interesting article called

Dale Carnegie and the Problem of Sincerity by Gail Thane Perker. He was profoundly wrong about human psychology. His own experience, first as a poor farm boy later as a prosperous lecturer and author, led him to believe that survival and success were possible only if you were willing to disavow your strongest instincts, gloss over mysteries, and be satisfied with communicating as opposed to standing for anything. If you smiled, looked people in the eye and expressed an interest in what they were feeling if you never snarled, nagged, attacked, or asserted your rights, you could survive. And as an American survivor, you might hope for a nice car, a nice wife, and a nice home in a garden suburb. The rewards for improving your

social radar were not the satisfaction of deep personal needs, but the maintenance of comfort and appearances. He does seem to have been very good at, like, navigating these social interactions, but it also feels like he felt profoundly alone in these social interactions oftentimes. And he really struggle to feel connected to people when all you're doing in a conversation is like how can I meet the other person's needs? You don't feel like you're completely present in that conversation. You have this sort of this feeling of like being alone when you're with other people because you're kind of in this like low grade panic of just like, well, how can I make sure the other person is comfortable? It's interesting that this suffers from some of the same problems that pickup

artistry does, which is that if you're just trying to adhere to like the gamification of conversation, you will never actually have a real one. Exactly. You're not really participating. Yeah. All you're doing is like mapping out how the conversation should go and what you should do in your mind. And you're never actually engaging with this other person in a way that would like expose you to some vulnerability, right? Right. Right. You might be in danger of fucking the conversation up a little bit, right? Which is half of what makes a conversation fun, frankly.

And you're doing like way more work than the other person too. The lady's just yapping about Africa. And Dale is like, what is my next move in this conversation? So the book is informed by his deep insecurity. It's also very fundamentally informed by his experience as a door-to-door salesman. Despite the fact that he spends most of his life giving advice to, like, middle managers and career people, he never has an office job his whole life. And this public speaking thing is the only thing he's ever succeeded at. All one book, right?

I mean, it's so interesting that this is how you can trace the self-help grift back. You give 20 lectures and seminars and you've made a bunch of money and everyone's like, you should write a book. And you're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's another scam I could run. He goes to teaching college, but he never graduates because he drops out to do door-to-door sales. He's not very good at sales. He then gets another job, not selling correspondence courses. He's selling like lard and soap, like pork products. It doesn't appear he's very good at that.

He goes to acting school, but then drops out. He joins the circus. But that's only like a three-month gig, and he can't get any acting gigs after that. He then goes back to selling used cars, fails at that. He writes a novel that is so bad that his agent is like, I'm not even sending this to publishers. This is like an embarrassment. The only thing he's ever been good at is like debate public speaking. And so essentially in desperation, it's like, I can teach other people to do public speaking.

And again and again, his life, he tries to branch out from that and then fails and then comes back to public speaking. Yeah, right. And also, if you think about these tips of like smile and try to avoid arguments and greet somebody enthusiastically, a lot of these are tips for. making somebody like you immediately. They're not tips for like ongoing relationships. They're like, when you show up at somebody's door, how can you make a good impression in the first five minutes and establish trust very quickly?

I'll also say it's a very classic self-help that he tries to write a novel and it's just atrocious. They're like absolutely not. And then he writes a self-help book and they're like, yeah, this is great. It's also funny because when he tried to write the novel, he was already relatively well-known. He was like doing, he was like a radio. producer. He was like kind of a mid-level celebrity at the time that he pitched the novel.

The fact that his agent was like, no, we're not even trying. It must have been so bad. Maybe this was a time, maybe this was a time when they were like, we actually expect books to be relatively good. Maybe to try this in a hundred years, Dale. He also, the other kind of salesmanship tactic is that throughout his life and throughout his book, he gets over his skis as far as telling the truth. There's a really interesting episode in the book where as he's becoming a novelist, he's also, like, writing magazine articles on the side. He sort of has this little, like, stint in journalism, which, again, doesn't really go anywhere. But as he's writing these articles, they're mostly, like, profiles of business people.

He does this thing of, like, what's the secret to your success? He's really interested in this throughout the course of his life. But he also writes an essay in 1918 called My Triumph Over Fears that cost me $10,000 a year in something called American Magazine. And it's a story of a guy who was, like, so nervous. And he wasn't succeeding at business. But then eventually his wife is like, you need skills as a public. speaker, and then he starts attending public speaking courses at the YMCA in New York, and all of a sudden his career takes off. Wow. So I'm going to send you an excerpt from the book. This is from

the biography of Carnegie. Obviously, this true story of success was a thinly disguised parable about the usefulness of Carnegie's own course on public speaking. Having taken to heart the lesson of self-promotion, he wasted little time in distributing hundreds of reprints of this article. He added to the original manuscript by pointing out that Dale Carnegie was the teacher of the public speaking course and appended a post-script. Quote, the YMCA in your city conducts a nationally known Carnegie course in public speaking, the course studied by the man whose story you have just read. You are invited to attend without any obligation on your part one of the sessions of this course at your YMCA. It's like this is egregiously unethical. Never stop hustling.

It's like so bad. Never stop hustling. You fabricate a story, which is totally not true about this guy that achieved success. You pitch it to a magazine somehow get it published, which is already unethical enough. You then reprint hundreds of copies of the article and go, look, American Magazine wrote an article about how good my course is. I'm not sure that the postscript is that much more unethical. I feel like you basically cross the sort of threshold of unethicalness once you publish the full-on fake story. Right. And so at that point, you might as well add the grifty post script. I think he was doing great. Go to the sentence. He added to the original manuscript. Yeah. Do you notice anything about his name?

Yes, it's not spelled the way that I'm familiar. It's spelled C-A-R-N-A-G-E-Y. Yeah. And it's pronounced Carnegie. Interesting. So the other little bit of salesmanship is that he legally changes his name to Carnegie. Oh, to match Andrew? I mean, he never really admits to this, but it's like, yes.

Of course. I mean, well, I'll tell you this. It worked because I mean, it really worked. I'm pretty sure if you would ask me five years ago. Who's Dale Carnegie? I would have been like, Andrew Carnegie's brother, right? Oh, yeah. For sure.

I think that he, like, accurately read that, like, most people will see the name and just, like, it'll trigger all of these associations. Like, I think that was a correct read. But also, it's, like, unbelievably cynical to do this. The sort of story about him being insecure about his origins is now, like, it's now complete, right? Where he just, he won't even keep the name. Right. He sort of seizes on to the spelling of someone from high society.

We're going to sort of jump around now because, like, if we do every principle, it'll take us many hours, but you start to see the flaws of Dale Carnegie's personality showing up more clearly in the book as it goes on. The book starts to show his like pathological need to avoid conflict and just kind of get along in conversations and not make any waves. So principle 10 is the only way to get the best of an argument is to avoid it. Okay. Principle 11 is show respect for the other person's opinions never say you're wrong.

One of the reviews that I read of this noted that throughout the entire book, there's no actual conflicts between people. Everything is a misunderstanding. And everything can be solved by just phrasing things slightly differently. So, you know, this whole thing of like a compliment sandwich? Right. You squeeze the, you squeeze the, uh, the despicable insult in between two compliments. By the way, I, I heard of this when I was really young, like in college or something. And then I clocked it every single time a boss ever did it to me and it just pissed me off every time. I'm like, you think you can use fucking tricks of psychology on me? piece of shit. I know what you're trying to do. It's so entrenched in like workplace bullshit now that

everyone knows. As soon as you get a compliment, like, oh, if they're starting with a compliment, I'm going to get the actual message they want me to receive. And I can just, I can just ignore the bread in the sandwich. It's really hard for me to understand how normal people do this. But because I have always felt like I'm slacking off too much at every single job I've ever had, I am basically in every performance review being like, have I been caught? Yeah. Yeah. Have they realized that I do seven hours of work a week. That's the only thing I'm thinking about the whole time. Until you actually went to a meeting where they did, in fact, fire you. We found out that you're just a full-time podcaster. Did they do a compliment sandwich? But they're like,

you're the best dresser in the office. However, you can never come here again. Work-wise, spectacular. Employment-wise, un. So here is his example for this one. A friend of mine was a guest at the White House for a weekend during the administration of Calvin Coolidge. Drifting into the president's private office, he heard Coolidge say to one of the secretaries, that's a pretty dress you're wearing this morning, and you are a very attractive young woman. Bread, that's the bread. Here comes the meat. That was probably the most effusive praise Silent Cal had ever bestowed upon a secretary in his life. It was so unusual, so unexpected that the secretary blushed in confusion.

Then Coolidge said, now don't get stuck up. I just said that to make you feel good. From now on, I wish you'd be a little bit more careful with your punctuation. I fucking love this story. I need a sign from God that this is true. Please tell me this story is true. To say something nice and then immediately be like, I didn't mean that, by the way. The whole point of the compliment sandwich is defeated when you're like, don't get stuck up, young lady.

I just said it to make you feel good. I was fucking lying to you. What I'm serious about is that you are shitty at your job. Don't get stuck up. That was a lie I told you to make this part feel better. You're dumb as hell. You bat at your job and you're ugly. That's how Calvin Coolidge talked, by the way.

I don't know if our listeners know that. Who knows that this is true, but also it's so funny that Dale Carnegie is presenting this as like, good advice. You're a hot young number and it's nice to see around the office. Now, you're terrible with words. There is something in the male mind where you will compliment like an objectively attractive lady. And if they're like, oh, that's nice. That makes me feel good. You're like, you better hop off that pad to still bitch.

You got to throw a bucket of water on it immediately. Right. It's like, what do you talk? You were just groveling at her feet, dude. Yeah. Calvin, you were just grovelling at her feet. Don't talk about our punctuation now. So, Peter, I can't, we can't do every single one. No, but I would like to hear about everyone that involves Calvin Coolidge from here on in. I'm sorry to just keep reiterating that anecdote. It's so funny. It's so funny. I will be, I will be bringing this one to my wife as soon as she arrives home from work.

There are so many anecdotes in this book of like someone saying something mean or like basically, acting against somebody else's interest. And then Carnegie is like, but he phrased it the right way. And so they didn't notice. The real, like, jewel in the crown of these anecdotes. This might even be better than the Coolidge one, Peter. Carnegie talks about how there's a park near his house where, like, youths keep starting fires. He says, the youngsters go out to the park to go native and cook a Frankfurter or an egg under the trees.

You kids cooking fucking eggs over there. I love the idea of, like, five teenagers all huddled around, like, one egg boiling. I love, this is like before they invented frisbys, you know what I mean? Like they had nothing. They were like, let's go fry some fucking eggs. So the fires, concert fires are bothering Carnegie. He eventually goes up to these youths. And he says like, hey, this is illegal.

You need to not do this here. You all look beautiful in those outfits. Now you got to stop cooking those eggs. Don't get cocky boys. I only said that because I want you to stop cooking those eggs. So after this sort of like threats and cajoling, he says, the result, they obeyed sullenly. and with resentment. After I rode on over the hill,

they probably rebuilt the fire and longed to burn up the whole park. Yeah. So being mean doesn't work, right? Right. So then he says the next time he goes to the park, he's going to try like a nicer, kinder approach that is going to be much more effective.

So he then gives a speech to the youths, which I'm going to send to you. I'm going to start doing everything in this bullshit transatlantic accent I'm doing. Having a good time, boys? Having a good time, boys? I can't do this the whole time. Having a good time, boys? What are you going to cook for supper? I love to build fires myself when I was a boy, and I still love to.

But you know they are very dangerous here in the park. I know you boys don't mean to do any harm, but other boys aren't so careful. They come along and see that you've built a fire, so they build one, and don't put it out when they go home, and it spreads among the dry leaves and kills the trees. We won't have any trees here at all if we're not more careful. You could be put in jail for building this fire. But I don't want to be bossy and interfere with your pleasure. I like to see you enjoy yourselves, but won't you please rake all the leaves away from the fire right now,

and you'll be careful to cover it with dirt a lot of dirt before you leave, won't you? And next time you want to have some fun, won't you please build your... It goes on so long. And next these boys are just like, get this fucking guy away from me. They're already like shooting him with pellet guns at this point.

They're putting full-ass rocks into slingshots. And next time you want to have some fun, won't you please build your fire over the hill there in the sandpit? I can't do any harm there. Thanks so much, boys. Have a good time. So according to him, this works like a charm.

good time boys? What are you going to cook for supper? I got a fresh egg in my pocket for you if you just build your fire over in the sandpit. This is pissing me off just like listening to it now when I'm 40. Just the length of it. Yeah. Just some some old guy who's obviously condescending to you. I used to do this when I was a youth. I used to love to boil a Frankfurter back in my day, but of course I was always very cautious about fire safety. It's just like I imagine him like turning a baseball cap around backwards and, like, sitting in a backwards chair, like, hello, boys. He's 58 and he's putting, like, a slingshot in his back pocket, like Dennis the Menace.

I might seem like an old guy, but I'm actually one of you. I can't get over how boring being a child was. They were just like, let's go cook food. Now let's go throw rocks at ladies on the street. Okay, so again, you can see Dale Carnegie kind of, like, refusing to believe that people have different interests and thinking that, like, wording will solve things. What if we told the children that their actions have consequences? This does tip into, like, misinformation and, like, really bad politics at various points.

You know who knows how to speak to people is that fell out of Germany. So this is from Principle 13, begin in a friendly way. In 1915, John D. Rockefeller was the most fiercely despised a man in Colorado. One of the bloodiest strikes in the history of American industry had been shocking the state for two terrible years. Irate, belligerent minors were demanding higher wages from the Colorado fuel and iron company. Rockefeller controlled that company. Property had been destroyed. Troops had been called out. Blood had been shed. At a time like that, with the air seething with hatred, Rockefeller wanted to win the strikers to his way of thinking. And he did it. How? Here's the story.

Hey, boys. So you're enjoying your strike over there. I used to enjoy a striker too. Give you two free eggs if you go back to work. After weeks spent in making friends, Rockefeller addressed the representatives of the strikers. This speech, in its entirety, is a masterpiece. It produced astonishing results. It calmed the tempestuous waves of hate that threatened to engulf Rockefeller. It won him a host of admirers. It presented facts in such a friendly manner that the strikers went back to work without

saying another word about the increase in wages for which they had fought so violently. He gave such a good speech. They forgot about how much they're making at work. Okay. Well, yeah. So I'm excited to hear the speech. as I imagine it will de-radicalize me. I condensed this slightly.

He has like a very long excerpt, but this is the sort of the heart of it, and it's still pretty long. This is Rockefeller speaking to striking minors in 1915. This is a red-letter day in my life. It is the first time I have ever had the good fortune to meet the representatives of the employees of this great company. I've had the opportunity of visiting all the camps

and visited in your homes and met many of your wives and children. We meet here not as strangers, but as friends. And it is in the spirit of mutual friendship that I am glad to have this opportunity to discuss with you our common interests. It is only by your courtesy that I am here, for I am not so fortunate as to be either one or the other. And yet, I feel that I am intimately associated with you men,

for in a sense, I represent both the stockholders and the directors. Hmm, moving. So I went back to the original text of the book to be like, did I miss something? He's only quoting the sort of boilerplate introduction of Rockefeller speech. He's like, I'm glad to be here today, but he's not quoting any of the substantive parts of it.

Right. Maybe this is just because we're all surrounded by so much corporate boilerplate at all times. This is the way that like Southwest Airlines starts a letter telling you your flight has been canceled. Yeah. Again, it's like this is the first time that anyone did corporate boilerplate. Yeah. Right. And so everyone's like, oh, fuck.

Wow. This guy. This rocks. And now like every 23 year old out of college knows how to talk like this. So I did look into the basic fact of this. It's the Colfield Wars, right? Or whatever it was. Colorado Coalfield War. Yeah. So for this, I looked at a book called Representation and Rebellion, the Rockefeller Plan at the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, 1914, and 1942. And the report that was produced on this called The Age of Industrial Violence, 1910 to 1915. So, yes, this is the Colorado Coalfield War. Basically, as you can imagine, in the early 1900s, the working conditions of miners were extremely bad. Eventually, they start trying to form a union with the United Mine Workers of America, they issue a bunch of demands. The company rejects their demands. And because they're all,

living in company provided housing, the company also evicts everybody. So they all have to start living in tents on the mining site. There's sort of back and forth about like various demands, various pushback, different authorities are brought in. Eventually the feds call in the National Guard. And it's sort of unclear who starts it. But this is basically just like they shoot into a fucking crowd. Right.

And they kill eight people, including one 12 year old boy, 11 people who are hiding from the shooting. they're like hiding under mattresses or like in a sort of cellar are asphyxiated during this. So it's like really awful. There's then sort of retaliatory acts by the union. This goes on, the kind of entire incident goes on for five years and results in 232 deaths. And so Rockefeller owns 40% of this mining company. He's actually not like as in control as the sort of media depicts it at the time.

But Rockefeller becomes the target of a huge amount of national unrest. People are, like, showing up outside of his offices and, like, picketing and shit. It's a huge deal. This is oftentimes seen as, like, the beginning of crisis PR. So he hires a PR firm to be like, how do I salvage my reputation from this? He does actually, in 1915, visit the mines. Although, Carnegie leaves out the fact that he doesn't visit the mine where workers are striking. He visits, like, an adjacent mine where there's been some labor unrest, but nothing like the Ludlow massacre.

He does meet with people. He does kind of this whole, like, PR campaign thing. he does give this speech, but the way that Carnegie presents it, he says the speech presented facts in such a friendly manner that the strikers went back to work without saying another word about the increase in wages for which they had fought so violently. That is not true. Basically, he proposes something called, that is eventually known as the Rockefeller Plan, which is a series of like updates to working conditions. And he doesn't actually recognize the union. It takes many more decades of like labor unrest to recognize the union. But it sets up essentially a company union,

which is not great, but it's way better than what they had. And he also agrees that the company will not reduce wages without notice. And also, if mines in the area, so like mines in adjacent states raise wages, he has to raise wages too. So it doesn't result in like sort of specific wage increases, but it does establish a procedure that results in the miners making significantly more money over the following years. Right. There's also, I mean, he focuses on wages here, but there's also very meaningful safety improvements as a part of this. And also, it sets up a government body within Colorado to also monitor safety conditions in the minds and give actual punishments for minds that do not follow the procedure.

So it's not like he gave a speech that was so good. People were like, did we get more wages? I don't even know. Oh, I forgot because like his speech was so good. He made meaningful reforms. It's so interesting how even before communism was like a boogeyman to the extent it was in the post-war era, It was just considered this unequivocal good that the workers went back to work with no raise. Yeah.

Even by this kid, this guy was raised poor. I think it's so interesting of like the sort of the limitations of his thinking because it's like he seems to think that every conflict can be papered over, which I think if you're a door-to-door salesman kind of works. Yeah. Yeah, right. Because that's his understanding of what conflict is, is like your objective is to like convince someone. Right. You can just sort of like manipulate words and stuff because that's what convincing is. is, right? To at least to some degree, the idea of like real struggle, sort of, you know, zero-sum

struggle with your employer doesn't really compute with him. He also has some of the most passive-aggressive advice I've ever seen in one of these books. So here is a guy talking about how he resolves conflict in his home. Gladstone never criticized at home. When he came down to breakfast in the morning, when the rest of his family was still sleeping, he had a gentle way of registering his reproach. He raised his voice and filled the house. house with a mysterious chant that reminded the other members that he was waiting downstairs for his breakfast all along. Ooh, for hours.

Diplomatic and considerate. He rigorously refrained from domestic criticism. Is that considerate? A lot of people criticize their wife for not feeding him. Meanwhile, I go downstairs. I put silverware in my hands. I sit at the table. Took a napkin in like a bib.

And then I slam my fists on the table while I was shouting, breakfast, breakfast, breakfast, breakfast. And then when she comes downstairs, I'm like, oh, were you up? Oh, hey. But I'm not criticizing. He's downstairs like, bring me eggs. Bring me eggs. Okay, this is too many examples. I might cut these in the edit, but this one's also just so delicious. Okay, here's another one. Marge Jacob of Woonsocket Rhode Island told one of our classes how she convinced some sloppy construction workers to clean up after themselves when they were building additions to her house. For the first few days of the work, when Mrs. Jacob returned from her job, she noticed that the yard was strewn with the cut ends of lumber.

She didn't want to antagonize the builders because they did excellent work. So after the workers had gone home, she and her children picked up and neatly piled all the lumber debris in a corner. The following morning, she called the foreman to one side and said, I'm really pleased with the way the front lawn was left last night. It is nice and clean and does not offend the neighbors. From that day forward, the workers picked up and piled the debris to one side. I love it.

Ah, yes. The classic move of doing something. and then telling someone that they did it. Yeah, and then thanking them for something they didn't do. Maybe this is the annoying suburban homeowner in me now, but it's just like, you are paying them for work. Just be like, hey, can you pile that on the side there? Yeah, exactly.

You just like directly ask like, hey, sorry, could you clean up after you're done? It's not. I don't want to antagonize them to relax. I don't think they would feel antagonized. It's like, put the wood over there. Please, that'd be great. Thank you. This is like this weird need to like avoid conflict,

but also by avoiding conflict, you're being ruder. I found a way to be passive-aggressive and also do labor that I didn't need to do. This culminates in a story about firing people. Okay. He's talking about a guy who works at a taxation firm where, of course, they, like, have a big rush, and then they have to, like, fire a bunch of their employees. So here's the original way that this guy was firing people. Sit down, Mr. Smith.

The season's over, and we don't seem to see any more assignments for you. Of course, you understood you were only employed for the busy season anyhow. A little terse. little terse. Yep. So then after he takes the Carnegie course and he learns about principle 26, let the other person say face, he then does it with these words. By the way, this doesn't matter. This guy is fired regardless.

We'll get there. We'll get there. We'll get there. We'll get there. Mr. Smith, you've done a fine job. That time we sent you to Newark, you had a tough assignment. You were on the spot, but you came through with flying colors and we want you to know the firm is proud of you. You've got the stuff.

You're going a long way wherever you're working. wherever you're working, which brings me to my next point. Speaking of which, since we're on it anyway. This firm believes in you and is rooting for you, and we don't want you to forget it. I love how he doesn't tell him that he's fired in this. Wherever you happen to go Monday morning at 9 a.m., I'm sure you're going to do great. And then Carnegie, of course, has like a little thing afterwards where he's like, this guy didn't even mind being fired.

No, I think people notice when they get fired, Dale. Dude, this is before the welfare state even existed. This guy is fucked. This guy's like, okay, my children are going to starve. My son's been frying eggs in the park. I don't even understand what this is like meant to accomplish other than making you feel better about the firing process. A lot of it is telling that a lot of the stories in this book are from the perspective of like CEOs. That's the people taking his little course, I guess.

Because I mean, this is the Great Depression too. Like he's giving people this advice in like 1936. So like things are not great in the country, right? And yeah, you get the sense that this is, this is appeasing. the ego of the guy doing the firing, it's like, they don't even mind. Maybe they don't tell you because you might want to rehire them in six months because it's a tax firm, but like, this doesn't do anything. Ninety-nine percent of your emotional reaction to being fired is the fact you're being fired. The wording doesn't really matter that much. And there's no wording so good

that's going to make you forget that you're being fired. Like, no one is that this is not how humans work. People know their own interests. How was work today? Actually pretty good. I got fired real nice. You can imagine this being baldly cynical, right? The kind of person who's just like, ha, ha, ha, manipulate them with these words, but then, like, treat them ruthlessly, right? Yeah, yeah. But when you look at Dale Carnegie's biography, this actually isn't what you see. What you see is an extremely earnest guy who just can't think very deeply about anything.

Dale Carnegie appears to be, like, a really great husband and father. His first wife, it's kind of weird. He ends up marrying this, like, Habsburg-adjacent German. an aristocrat lady. Oh, that's the dream. One of the biggest fights in their marriage is that, like, he is able to just identify, like, very basic injustices. He's like, isn't that weird how, like, nobility have, like, lots of money and then

other people don't have money? And she's like, you can't say that, Dale. He's dodging her jaw in the argument. He's like, some people have no money and other people have six fingers on each hand. It's incredible. Her eye is, like, falling out of her sock. She's like, this is my birthright, Dale. And then with his second wife, his second wife.

has a daughter from a first marriage. And like, Dale is just immediately like the coolest stepdad. He's like bragging about his daughter's achievements. They eventually have a kid on their own and he's like basically a stay at home dad and is like super excited about having a daughter. He's also like a very good husband, it appears. He's super respectful of his wife. It seems like it's actually a fairly progressive relationship. It sounds from other people that his wife is able to stand up to him and be like, no, Dale. And he's like, oh, you're right. Yeah, I should rethink that. He just seems like a genuinely like nice guy. He also has like a very weird political consciousness. So during the Great Depression, he turns $25 into dimes and he goes down to the local homeless shelter and just like starts giving

away dimes to people. He's like, these people are in need and I have a decent amount of money. I should give money away. He's not someone who's like incapable of seeing basic morality, but also at the same time he has no like political understanding of like what would have caused the Great Depression. It doesn't like radicalize him in any way. Around the same time, he, also spends a month traveling around China. And when he comes back, he's sort of like, well, these people wouldn't be so bummed out if they knew how poor Chinese people were. You got it way better off than the Chinese. Okay. So he would be a Democrat. There's interviews with him during the run-up to World War II where they ask him about all of the really horrific shit that

Japan is doing in China. And they're like, what do you think about this? And he's like, I traveled around Japan. I saw no signs of violence at all. They just don't seem like a violent people to me. I think it's a big old misunderstanding. They also ask him about Hitler. And And, like, he is a good enough person to understand that, like, Hitler is the bad guy. Like, he doesn't do any both sides saying. But he's like, well, the problem with Hitler is just, he's so selfish. And if he wasn't such a bad guy, we wouldn't have these problems. Yes.

It's like, I think we've been doing the wrong voice for him. I don't think it's the Al Capone voice. I think it's the Jimmy Stewart voice. Where's like, now you see here, mister, if you were just a little nicer, we wouldn't have to resort to fist of cuffs. Okay. Well, easy for you to say when you can do the voice. I can't.

So I'm just going to stick with the one I can sort of do. There's also a thing of, you know, the seminar grift that he's doing. You know, we've seen a lot of these guys who run these seminar grifts and, like, they fucking know they're scamming you, right? They're like, oh, yeah, call your credit card company at lunch break and have them raise your limit and then pay us for like elite gold package and they just provide you with nothing. Like, they know that what they're doing is snake oil. Dale Carnegie, the only stories in the book of him being mean to people is when people show

cynicism about the course. So at one point, the course is kind of a franchise at this point. he travels around to like different satellite, you know, the Boston Carnegie course or whatever, he goes and he overhears one of the instructors talking about like, oh, I've got to teach these robs once again, like these idiots tonight. And Carnegie just fires him on the spot. And he's like, no, we are providing a service to people. These are people who need something. And they're paying us and we should take that obligation really seriously. Yeah, but I bet he fired him nice. I bet he fired him real nice. You've been doing a great job teaching this seminar. To be clear, you are fired.

From later academic analyses, it seems like the course was pretty good, not because he was saying anything particularly profound. Like most of the public speaking stuff was fairly standard advice. Like the biggest thing in the course is that he'll kind of make people stand up and give like a 90 second speech about themselves. And then he'll critique it. Like, oh, you could do this better. You could do this better. And like, that's actually really useful for people. And it kind of became a kind of support group.

Warren Buffett and Lee Ayacocca were both people who took the course and both spoke about it very positively. So he seems like a very good-hearted guy. But also, no depth. Yeah. Before he wrote the book, he had a radio show called Little Known Facts about well-known people, which was exactly what it sounds like. Dude, that sounds like a podcast right now. Yeah, no, I was actually thinking, like, can we steal this, please?

It's actually a really good idea. But the author of the biography notes that he'll do an episode about, like, Gandhi. And he's like, he wore false teeth. He had to put him in before he ate, and then he took him out. And that's today's show, folks. We'll see you next week. And, like, his episode on Lenin, where the only thing he actually. actually says about like his life. It's like he embarked on an economic experiment. And then the

whole show is just like fun facts about how he used to write letters to people with like invisible ink. And they had to like dip it in water to read the letter. But it's like they'll, was there a reason why Lenin was an important figure? Or a reason why he was using invisible ink. Yeah. There's something, I feel like this reminds me. There's like a certain type of person who's like, whoa, fun facts. Hitler was a vegetarian. What? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's just, And, like, that's where their interest ends. They're just like, isn't that crazy? Throughout how to win friends and influence people,

Carnegie will sort of offhand mention, he's like, I've been pouring over biographies of Abraham Lincoln and, like, trying to understand the minds of the great people in history. And according to the biography, that is roughly true. But also, he could only read readers digest summaries of books. He wasn't a guy who read, like, primary sources. He was very interested in the world around him. And he liked talking to people, and it seems like he really was, like, a very active

listener in his interpersonal relationships. But he couldn't like read a full book or like engage with actual literature. He's like, I just want the condensed version of it. So there's interest, but there's not like ability. Compliment sandwich. Love your courses. You are illiterate. Again. Incredible courses. So here's an excerpt from the biography. Carnegie blithely ignored interests of all kinds. Economic, regional, racial, religious, ethnic, ideological, to insist that political success was largely a matter of personality. Carnegie claimed that Theodore Roosevelt's intense interest in other people was the secret of his astonishing popularity. He argued that James Farley, FDR's key political manager, helped sweep his boss into the White House

because he had memorized the names of 50,000 people, and upon meeting one of them, he was able to slap him on the back and inquire after the wife and kids. Even at the highest levels of political operation, Carnegie contended personal interactions trumped everything. When Woodrow Wilson was unable to win American cooperation with the League of Nations at the end of World War I, it was because he failed to use human relations skills. Carnegie argued that Congress rejected his proposals because Wilson mishandled prominent Republicans. Quote, he refused to let them feel that the League was their idea as well as his. He should have sat at the breakfast table chanting until they signed the League of Nations. Can we pause? This guy definitely didn't have 50,000.

names memorized, right? That's another thing that Carnegie doesn't seem to be able to, like, show a little skepticism to some of these anecdotes. These are fun facts that go around, but it's like, that's probably not true. But there's also, there's a book from the 1980s called The Positive Thinkers by Donald Meyer, and it has a chapter on Carnegie. And he points out that it's a little weird how many of these stories in the book

are about, you know, CEOs and presidents. And every single time, Carnegie just says, like, well, the reason they're successful is because they're nice as a person. Right. He genuinely believed this. And he sort of needed to believe this. This is his theory of everything, right? That, like, that being, being nice and friendly and open will lead to success.

And that, and also, if you are successful, you must be nice and friendly and open. Yeah. He was like, what if someone rose in the morning and then immediately grinded? Yeah. And he was the first guy to think about that. And you have to give him credit for that. You can't. It's not derivative.

It's like, well, gee, mister, you just got to get up and rise and get on your groin set. I'm going to do that voice all the time. That's the one that I can do. But then, okay, I would be remiss if we didn't talk about the final section of the book. I think all of these threads of Dale Carnegie's life culminate in part six, seven rules for making your home life happier. Oh, my God. Is this our Korean pilots?

Does the theory go back to 1936? So rule one is don't nag with three exclamation points. Do you want to guess who this advice is directed at? Peter? I do want to guess. Is there a specific person in the household who should be told not to knack? I'm going to say that this is directed towards the woman, the adult woman. Incredible. Because of their proclivity, their innate, God-given proclivity for nagging. Your mind, Peter, your mind. He immediately says many a wife has made her own marital grave with a series of Little Diggs. When you say that in 1936, it makes me think you're being literal where it's like, yeah, some men have had to kill their wives.

Yeah, unfortunately. Because they're nagging so much. He does blame Napoleon's wife for him cheating on her, like, systematically. Oh, you haven't even conquered the whole continent yet. Why are you doing, Napoleon? You're a loser. Also, a powerful French man cheating on his wife? I don't know.

It must be the wife's problem. So this is, he quotes some author at the time saying, if young wives would only be as courteous to their husbands as to strangers, any man will run from a shrewish. tongue. And then he gives us this example. The wife of Count Leo Tolstoy discovered that after it was too late. Before she passed away, she confessed to her daughters, I was the cause of your father's death. Her daughters didn't reply. They were both crying. They knew their mother was telling the truth. They knew she had killed him with her constant complaining, her eternal criticisms and her eternal nagging. Get him, Dale. It does say that in Leo Tolstoy's Wikipedia entry, cause of death, eternal nagging.

They were like, we know, Mom. We know you killed him. Yeah, I know. I love the detail that the daughters are like, oh, you definitely killed him. What is this? What is this based on? Dude. How's he getting so much gossip about the wives of these powerful men?

So in his defense, this was a fairly widespread urban legend at the time. It's kind of the Yoko broke up the Beatles of its era. They were having an argument or like it was a tumultuous time in their home life. This is October of 1910. He basically like goes out of that. He's like, oh, fuck this. goes out of the house, dies of pneumonia. That's kind of like the way the story is typically told.

Like, okay, so he's running away from his wife and he gets pneumonia and dies. Wasn't he like 90? No, he was, first of all, he's 82. So an 82-year-old man dying is like not something that like needs that much of an explanation. Secondly, he died of pneumonia 11 days after he left home. So it was true that like they were having a lot of conflicts. Like he basically had this like born again transformation late in his life and he wanted to give away all of his copyrights.

And they're having all these fights where she's like, would like our children and myself to be like financially taken care of. And he's like, why are you, why are you concerned with worldly possessions? You're like 80 years old and your husband's like, I'm going to give away everything. And you're like, well, what about our like, what about the stuff we need to survive? And he's like, why are you so obsessed with this shit? Right. And also she's like 20 to 30 years younger than him too. So she's like much more interested in this thing he is. She's like, I've got a ton to live for it. But then it does seem like they were fighting a lot in the house. But then when he left, he had like a whole entourage around him. And he was traveling around Russia.

and there were basically the 1910 equivalent of paparazzi following him around. He was really ambivalent about fame, ambivalent about the way that he would get mobbed by people wherever he went. He was depressed. It's like any monocausal explanation of this is just like going to be really ridiculous. So he does die of pneumonia, but that is caused by like all the other things that he was doing for like the 11 days after leaving his home before he died. So it just is not true that like he rushed out of the house in like a t-shirt and shorts

and then like immediately died. I don't even know why I'm bothering to debunk it. Like, of course, of course, he was not nagged to death. I know. I love that you're explaining. You dug way too deep on the research for that one. I know. I was mostly just curious.

I was like, did Leo Tolstom's wife kill him? Because this is why you don't like women. You've always told me. It's your fear of being nagged to death. The thing is, we know men die of nag to death all the time. I'm just wondering if it's true in this case. We see this all the time in the self-help books about relationships. where the advice is actually directed at the guy's wife.

We saw this in Meta from Mars, right? There's also another thing, you know, when I was reading that anthropology book for our manhood episode, one of the things he mentioned in there was that this thing of like women as nagging, this is actually a fairly common trope of gender relations in like almost every society. Interesting, ladies. Anything to say for yourselves? Well, the thing is you don't find it in more equal societies, partly because nagging is

a function of power relations, right? When you don't have power in a relationship, when you can't open a bank account as a woman in a relationship, you have to nag. Right. Did you pay the electricity bill? Did you pay the electricity bill? That's the only way you can get the electricity bill paid. So you're saying that women do nag, but you blame inequality. The concept of the nag is always very interesting because it implies that you're not doing something that you're asked to do, right? But also that perhaps you haven't provided a reason. So there are seven rules in the section. I was ready after the nagging thing for this to be like absolutely atrocious. It's actually mostly okay. You know, rule two is don't try to make your partner over. I mean, this is paternalistic,

but he has a thing where he's like, you know, women have this strange thing where they want you to remember their birthday and anniversaries. And guys, you should remember the fucking birthdays and anniversaries. Like, even if you think it's dumb that that's important to them, it is important to them. And so you should do it. But for the time, I'm like, okay, great. It's not about like how to litigate that or how to talk your wife out of that? It's like, yeah, this is a fairly small ass. Just remember her fucking birthday and anniversary. There is something, like, this reminds me of those, like, Jimmy Kimmel street interviews where they go up to couples and they're just like, what's her birthday? What's her mom's name? What's her middle name? And like, guys are just

swinging and missing at preposterous rates. I don't get it. The best one of my favorite one is Rule 7. This is the final rule of this section and this book. Rule 7, read a good book on the sexual side of marriage. What would a book from 1936 say? I know. It's very funny to me to be like, this is how you break a coal miner's strike. This is how you run the country. This is a lesson from Gandhi. When it comes to sex, he's like, oh, just go read a book. I'm not going to give you anything. Just hear some books. Yeah, I would have liked to hear his advice. But I want to, I want to scope those books. Right. Because there's probably no sex ed, right? So you're just sort of experiencing human genitalia for the first time, which that's pretty crazy.

The perfect encapsulation of the good parts of Dale Carnegie's personality and the bad parts come at the end of this section of the book where he has a questionnaire about how good of a marriage partner you are. So the first set of questions are for husbands, Peter, and I want you to think deeply about whether you are doing any or all of these. Do you still court your wife with an occasional gift of flowers with remembrances of her birthday and wedding anniversary or with some unexpected attention, some unlooked-for tenderness? Are you careful never to criticize her before others?

Do you give her money to spend entirely as she chooses above the household expenses? Do you make an effort to understand her varying feminine moods and help her through periods of fatigue, nerves, and irritability? Do you share at least half of your recreation hours with your wife? Do you tactfully refrain from comparing your wife's cooking or housekeeping with that of your mother or of Bill Jones's wife except to her advantage? Do you take a definite interest in her intellectual life, her clubs and societies, the books she reads, her views on civic problems? Can you let her dance with and receive friendly attentions from other men without making jealous remarks? Do you keep alert for opportunities to praise her and express your admiration for her? Do you thank her for the little job she does for you, such as sewing on a button, darning your socks, and sending your clothes to the cleaners?

I would never let my wife darn my socks without saying thank you. The thing is, this advice to men is, like, more progressive than, like, half the advice we cover on this show. Pretty good. It's like, look for opportunities to compliment her. Take her intellectual ideas seriously. Thank her for stuff that she does around the house. Notice the little things that she does for you. Some of the language obviously is outdated.

Some of the ideas are outdated, but it's mostly pretty good. Yeah, this is all pretty reasonable stuff. But then, Peter, we also have to cover the advice to wives. Hell yeah. So read this with your dulcet tones. I want all female listeners to listen closely and think about their own behavior. Yeah. Listen up, ladies.

You know? Time to lecture our audience of lesbians and cat owners. Do you give your husband complete freedom in his business affairs? And do you refrain from criticizing his associates, his choice of a secretary, or the hours he keeps? Mm-hmm. Do you try your best to make your home interesting and attractive? Keep it clean. Do you vary the household menu so that he never quite knows.

what to expect when he sits down to the table? Do you have an intelligent grasp of your husband's business so you can discuss it with him helpfully? Can you meet financial reverses bravely, cheerfully, without criticizing your husband for his mistakes or comparing him unfavorably with more successful men? So if he gambles away all of your income at the horse track, are you complaining, ladies, or are you chill? Do you make a special effort to get along amiably with his mother or other relatives?

Do you dress with an eye for your husband's likes and dislikes in color and style? Do you compromise little differences of opinion in the interest of harmony? Do you make an effort to learn games your husband likes so that you can share his leisure hours? And do you keep track of the day's news, the new books, and new ideas so you can hold your husband's intellectual interest? So. Yeah. There is an imbalance here. Yeah.

She has to sort of like psychologically mold herself to the shape of her husband. Yeah, I mean, to me it's the perfect encapsulation of both the good things of his personality and also the limitations of it, that he's basically asking the person with more power in the relationship to, like, show kindness and grace to the person with less power. Yeah. But he also can't imagine a world

where he doesn't have more power. He should have been the guy to come up with first wave feminism. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, you can't judge people on, like, the standards of right now. And I genuinely think, like, this is fairly progressive for the time, right?

It's also, of course, very limited. Yeah, yeah. Honestly, I sort of ended this book and I ended the biography, mostly liking Dale Carnegie. He seems like a good, guy. He seems like he started a lot of the threads of self-help that have toxified over time. But most of this book is not toxic. Most of this book is like, be nice to people and try to think

about other people's needs and don't be shitty. And it sounds like he lived according to these principles. Maybe to a fault, right? Just a guy who believed in the power of being nice. Yeah. The worst you can say, maybe a bit of a sucker. Didn't quite grasp the world around him. But this was, again, this was like one of the first times that anyone ever thought of being nice. It is interesting that the critical reception to this book when it came out, because of course it was a runaway bestseller and so it got reviewed everywhere, the critical reception was super negative. And people basically had this like snobbish response to the book at the time. So Colliers calls him a man with a magnificent grasp of the obvious. Got him.

I do think that like this is pretty obvious advice, but also it's worth reminding people of the obvious advice. And so much of the advice now is such fucking sewage that if what you're reminding people of is like, try to be nice to other people around you, I'm willing to forgive like a lot if that's the core message of your book, right? It's not useless just because it's obvious. Sometimes it's like a good refresher, right? There's a reason that this stuff is helpful for people, even though it's sort of like, yeah, I kind of knew that. I just needed to be reminded. I need to keep it front of mind, right? I think that's totally fine in theory or in a vacuum.

It gets worse and more cynical over time because there's a thousand books like this now. Publishing a new one that says the same thing is actually griftier and worse each time. Each time becomes more derivative, more cynical, more grifty just by its nature. Carnegie was one of the first people to come up with this idea that like, well, you can make a lot of money by teaching seminars to people. But then I think later on, people were like, oh, well, you can make even more money by overpromising. You can make even more money by fleecing people. There are people who teach seminars because they have an idea they want to teach. And there are people who first thought, I need to teach a seminar.

And then they jammed an idea into it, right? Yeah. And those are very different types of people. And one of them is grifty. And one of them is at least theoretically not. So I want to end with a quote from the book. I think this is like a really good summation of the book's kind of overall theme and message. And I just think it's worth dwelling on.

So here's this. This is from Carnegie. philosophers have been speculating on the rules of human relationships for thousands of years and out of all of that speculation there has evolved only one important precept due unto others as you would have others do unto you you want the approval of those with whom you come into contact you want recognition of your true worth you want a feeling that you are important in your little world you don't want to listen to cheap insincere flattery but you do

crave sincere appreciation you want your friends and associates to be as Charles Schwab put it, hearty in their approbation and lavish in their praise. All of us want that. So let's obey the golden rule and give unto others what we would have others give unto us. How, when, where? The answer is all the time everywhere. Oh, what a sweetie. I like find this genuinely moving.

It's nice. All the time everywhere. I like it. All the time everywhere, yeah. And how would I like to be treated? I would like someone to tell me that I look cute and then tell me, don't get stuck up. Don't get stuck up. You can't spell.

Ha ha ha ha.