 They're just thinking about very different incentives that are operating on the different players in this Middle Eastern conflict. It's definitely in Joe Biden's interest and in America's interest for this dispute, for this war, for this battle to get some kind of resolution because the longer that America is stuck supporting Israel while much of the world seems to be siding with the people in Gaza, then supporting, you're dramatically increasing the odds of some kind of 9-11 event hitting the United States. And when you get into a fight, you just never know how it's going to escalate. And so this is happening on Joe Biden's watch right now. It looks very much like Donald Trump, except will be the next president of the United States. So the more disorder, the more war, the more conflict, more uncertainty, the more threats to the free flow of trade, the less likely it is that Joe Biden will be reelected. So America is scared of the complication that could result from China also has to be concerned because China imports almost all its energy. So anything that could dramatically send up oil prices will be really bad for China. The one party that seems to be sitting pretty right now is Russia and Vladimir Putin, right? Because this is distracting the United States from supporting Ukraine. United States is getting distracted all over the globe. You've got Azerbaijan taking over Nagorno-Karabakh and ethically expelling 120,000 Armenians. You have unrest in the Balkans. You have the ever-present threat of China attacking Ling and taking over Taiwan. So it's definitely not in America's interest to have this fight. Iran doesn't seem to have much of an appetite for this fight. There doesn't seem to be any evidence that Iran directed this Hamas attack on Israel October 7th. This seems to be 100%, something that came from Hamas. Big story dropped down the New York Times behind Hamas' bloody gambit to create a permanent state of war. Mass leaders say they waged their October 7th attack on Israel because they believed the Palestinian cause was slipping away and that only violence could revive it. So Israel was increasingly making peace with various Arab nations because Israel had positioned itself as being so strong that the various Arab nations thought it's just not worth it to be in conflict with Israel. We just normalize relations. We increase opportunities for trade and getting into the goodwill of the United States and the Palestinian cause was not as much in the news. It was not as much of a concern to people anymore. And so that's why Hamas did what it did. It wanted to revive Palestine as an issue. It wanted to revive Palestinian people and it is what drove this massacre. They wanted to change the entire equation, not just have a clash. We want to put the Palestinian issue back on the table. Now, no one in the region is experiencing calm. So you'll encounter the same thing at work. If someone is experiencing sterman drying, if someone is experiencing a great deal of anxiety or pressure, many times they won't be able to just keep it to themselves, they will want to spread the contagion. They will want to spread the anxiety. And so Hamas wants a permanent state of war with Israel on all the borders of Israel. And they hope that the Arab world will stand with Hamas. But Hamas is not popular with the Arab world. Hamas is not even popular with both Gazans, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan. We'd be very glad to see the United States absolutely crush Hamas. So Hamas is gambling that Israel will become besieged on all fronts that the entire Arab world will stand with us. That's not gonna happen. So the incentives for Hamas are not the same as the incentives for the leadership in Egypt or Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, or Saudi Arabia. Now, Hezbollah is in a very precarious situation in Lebanon and so it does not want a war with Israel either. The Lebanese are quite sick of Hezbollah and Hezbollah would be placed in a very delicate situation that a struggle for its own survival if they emerged into a full-blown conflict with Israel. So right now it looks like the incentives operating on Hezbollah to only make a symbolic show of force to protest what Israel is doing in Gaza. Iran is also being very quiet. Now, some of its proxies are making token resistance against Israel, but Iran feels its own vulnerabilities. So its own incentives, Hamas war to escalate. Egypt definitely doesn't want the Israel Hamas war to escalate. They don't wanna be responsible for Gazans. They fear the destabilizing effect of millions of Gazans pouring into Egypt. Israel would love to be able to use the tension and conflict to expel effectively more Palestinians out of greater Israel. I mean, it's not in Israel's best interest to have the Gaza Strip, right? It's just a kind of a weird intrusion into what many Israelis would regard as greater Israel. Many Israeli settlers on the West Bank are driving out Palestinians, making life increasingly difficult for them. And so that's a good deal of the Israeli population and Israeli political spectrum that is going to try to use this war to ethnically cleanse Palestinians to create space for a greater Israel and for more settlers to move into Gaza and the West Bank and to take it over and return it or take it over, send it into Jewish sovereignty. Now, be beaten that in Yahoo, right? When this war is over, like his political career is over. So be beaten that in Yahoo, does not personally have incentives to wind up this war quickly. Because he's highly unpopular at home, the war finishes, there'll be a major investigation and his political career will be over. And so he wants to just try to stay on, grasp onto to power through any means necessary, the longer, the more brutal this war is, that probably the better it is for be beaten at Yahoo's political career. Also Israel faces incentives to be brutal in response to Hamas. So that Arab nations recognize that Israel is here to stay and that any Arab or Muslim group that attacks it will have to pay a very stiff penalty. So Israel is strongly incentivized to be quite brutal in putting down Hamas to signal to other nations, hey, this is the price you're gonna have to pay if you attack us. And Hamas, they felt they were strongly incentivized to be as brutal as possible to Israelis, the signal that we're here to stay. So both Israel and Hamas are both fighting to claim that we are here to stay. We cannot be moved. We are a vital force that must be respected and we deserve your attention. And right now it looks like Hamas is just getting absolutely mauled. Not quite sure what's going to follow behind it. Some of the more absurd commentary I've heard on this Arab-Israeli conflict is all these celebrities and other people saying, have you checked in with your Jewish friends to see if they're okay? I mean, it doesn't matter to me if you check in with me or not to see if I'm okay. That just seems strange. You should get your primary sustenance in life from your family. And then if not your family, your extended family, and your friends and your community, quaintances checking in to see if you're okay. I don't see the payoff to that. It wouldn't really mean anything to me. Like support is something that you should look for on your deathbed. But aside from my deathbed, I can't imagine looking for support. And so apparently many Jews on the left, perhaps they're of the more touchy-feely variety, are feeling quite hurt that people haven't reached out to them to see if they're doing okay. I don't share this. I've been hearing over and over again. All right, this is Ron Campius. He writes for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, JTA. And he's in conversation here with Robert Wright. Yeah, two friends contacted me. I have a lot of friends. This is a young woman I interviewed in Las Vegas for a story I want to write about what's going on in the community there. But just two friends called in. And this is a woman who's the woman I interviewed who's very much on the progressive list. She's an activist. And there's this feeling of abandonment. I think there's this feeling of aloneness that is mitigated to a degree, I think, by... So I'm a little, I'm not sure I'm clear on what the disappointment is. They had expected, so these are people left, but not far left. Progressive, maybe J Street types who are still hold out hope for two-state solution and advocate for it. And what... Who are critical in the Netanyahu government, very much critical. And particularly in how it's, not just in, you know, it's a judiciary thing, but also in how it creates a policy. And what did they hope would happen? Who would they hope would call and what did they want them to say? I think they didn't hope. They were just considering afterwards, wait a second, I've undergone trauma. This person knows that I have family in Israel. This person knows that I've lived in Israel and I'm not hearing from them. And instead, and what's happening is also they're looking, this is like the curse of social media. They're looking at these people's Facebook pages and they're seeing expressions of supports from Palestinians and they're saying, well, I never saw you say anything on October the 7th. And they didn't even get a private message from you on October the 7th about how devastating this can be. I mean, it's just even for people who don't have, you know, relatives in Israel or who don't have immediate relatives in Israel, who are the trauma of those visions of, you know, just other stories, the trauma of those visuals and of the stories that came with them are just so reminiscent of so much Jewish trauma. And you know, it's like the sort of thing that you grew up with and you heard from your relatives and you got in Hebrew school and you said, yeah, yeah, yeah. And suddenly it's like, oh my God, this really is happening in my time. These things that happened in the 1940s that I thought would happen again, not the whole obviously holistic thing of the Holocaust, but the particulars of the outer dehumanization of people, of children and of women, it's happening again. And there's just like, there's a residual trauma. Easy to victimize. It's really easy to, you know, experience all sorts of levels of trauma. Trauma has become the all-inclusive, you know, explanation for everything. It just strikes me as incredibly naive to expect, you know, acquaintances to reach out to you to see if you're doing okay due to events in the Middle East. Right, Robert Wright, increasingly believes that Donald Trump is going to be the next president. Benton Las Vegas a couple of weeks ago and he is the, he just seems inevitable. I mean, just going from the donor class and the grassroots people who turn out of that kind of thing. Right now he seems inevitable. And that's, you know, that's a plus for Biden, I guess. I think in terms of, although he is leading, like you said, he's, you know, in those swing states, Trump is leading, that's I think is, it's too early to like, to show the, to say those polls are going to be definitive, I think. Yeah, but if I had to bet, I mean, I hate to say this, but I would bet that Trump is going to be the next president. It's, I'm not happy. He's not happy about saying that. But yeah, right now it does look like Trump's going to be the next president. Another dimension to this conflict that I find interesting is that a lot of non-Jewish employees are not particularly supportive of the cares and concerns of their Jewish bosses because they probably feel like, hey, you know, my own people back in Guatemala or in Africa or in other parts of the Middle East have suffered and you don't seem to give a damn. And now when something happens in Israel, you know, that's supposed to be, you know, the moral issue of our time. So I noticed quite a few non-Jewish employees of Jewish bosses are quite eager to whisper to each other free Palestine, not because they necessarily have any strong affinity for the Palestinian people. They just, you know, are tired of their bosses and it's usually socially unacceptable to say things that are, you know, directly anti-Jewish. So just whispering, you know, free Palestine or quitting over your bosses' support of Israel and noticing this happening, all right, including at a cafe, a coffee shop in New York City, Fox News. Thank you. I'm a psychologist, a queen. And I, you know, I saw the post about all the workers walking out of here. I used to own a coffee shop, so I know how to make coffee. And so I cleared my day and I just came in. I waited about an hour online and it was worth it because we're supporting Israel. We're supporting our community. It was amazing to see how the community galvanized in an instant. And then I decided it's not enough just to come and buy. I'm helping behind, I'm sweeping. It's an amazing thing to have a strong in-group identity where you all pitch in to help each other out, look out for each other's businesses. If you don't live life with a strong in-group identity, I think you're really missing out. Well, it is an incredible story. A Jewish-owned cafe right here in New York City getting a major outpouring of support from the community. The owner of Cafe Aaron says his employees have taken issue with his pro-Israel stance with five of his workers quitting in protest since October 7th. The cafe was on the verge of shutting its doors just yesterday until members of the community came out in droves to work behind the counter while others lined the block to buy coffee and pastries. Aaron Dahan is the owner of Cafe Aaron, joins us now live. Aaron, thank you so much for joining us. What an incredible story. I'll put the cover of the New York Post back up for people to see. First, what was your reaction to those long lines in your story hitting the cover today? I mean, it was something spectacular. Our community really came together for us. People told me the line to come yesterday was longer than lines to boat. We were on Lessington Avenue, we went around the block all the way to park and people came together, our community. Fortunately here in New York, we know terror all too well and when it was happening in Israel, then we thought we were gonna close because our staff. Hey, a confrontation here in Los Angeles led to a death. Yeah, ever since this happened, Sunday here at the corner of Westlake and Thousand Oaks Boulevard, this makeshift memorial has been growing and increasing number of flowers and candles brought here to remember Paul Kessler. And today, a man who was with Kessler Sunday spoke out about what he saw. I see a punch. The reason I know that I could see the punch was because it was the white megaphone flying through the air. It was Sunday afternoon when according to Jonathan Oswax, he and Paul Kessler went to represent a Jewish perspective at a pro-Palestinian protest. The 69-year-old Kessler was... That's a really bad idea to represent a Jewish perspective at a pro-Palestinian perspective. Don't go representing the opposite perspective at any passionate protest unless you wanna take your life in your hand. I've always deliberately avoided physical fights to the extent possible because once you get into a physical confrontation, you never know what happens. You can just get shoved and fall back, hit your head and die, which is apparently what happened to Paul Kessler. Seen holding the Jewish flag, you wanted to take the flag from him, he wouldn't let you. That's correct. Oswax says Kessler fell to the ground. According to Ventura County Sheriff Jim Fryhoff, he fell backward and struck his head on the ground. What exactly transpired prior to Mr. Kessler following backward isn't crystal clear right now. Fryhoff said the case is under investigation but did say a suspect was interviewed. The suspect was cooperative and indicated he was involved in an occasion with Mr. Kessler. And there was a search warrant of his home. I cannot comment on the results of that search warrant as the investigation is ongoing. At the corner where it happened, there was anger and frustration. After seeing this, this is just devastating. And here we are in 2023 and there is terror everywhere. As for Jewish community leaders here, so much anger. Let me be clear. A man was killed in this spot for having an Israeli flag. Elon Carr. No, he wasn't killed in that spot for having an Israeli flag. He was killed in that spot because he got into a confrontation with somebody that led to shoving and then he fell back and hit his head and that killed it. But there is a wonderful life to be made stoking your in-groups resentments. And so you have various Jewish leaders rushing to the scene before we know the full facts on the ground, there's stoking in-group resentment here. Or is the CEO of the Israeli-American Council? Enough is enough. We're done with attacks against Jews. We're done with attacks against Jews in the Jewish homeland and we're done. Look, you go to a Palestinian rally waving in Israeli flag. That is experienced by those Palestinians as an attack. If you have a strong in-group, if you have a strong hero system, all right, let's say you have a strong heterosexual hero system and you are at a rally for keeping the definition of marriage is between one man and one woman. And people come up to you waving flags supporting same-sex marriage. You're gonna experience that as an attack is gonna be experienced by you just as much as a visceral attack on you as if they pushed you or shoved you. Done with attacks against Jews in New York and in Los Angeles. Finally, a prayer from the Cantor at Kessler synagogue. Okay, everyone's got a hero system, but they frequently differ and it just does not behoove one to unnecessarily provoke somebody about their differing hero system compared to yours. Just not too smart. Let me get my act together. Here is the podcast, If Books Could Kill, reviewing the 48 Laws of Power. And the spectrum. There's people who have what's called social dominance orientation. Yeah, that's me. That physically cannot see situations as win-win. You can explain to them in very clear terms, both people benefited from this interaction and they'll be like, no, he won. So it's like this idea that like, you can't look for win-win scenarios because you don't think that they exist. Well, you know, a little peek behind the curtain for listeners, but you were recently at my wedding and I just wanna ask you, who do you think won? The world, because there's one fewer single straight man in the world walking around, everybody won. No, look, I told my wife right afterwards, I was like, I think I won this one. This entire episode is a sub-tweet of you here. This is an intervention, this is why I do any of the books. I think that everyone knows people like this to some degree or like they have some version of this, right? I don't mind competitive stuff with my friends, but there are people who in the workplace, in personal relationships, et cetera, just cannot tolerate the idea of someone else doing well. And just to give an example of where this stuff might lead, I think that a lot of these mindsets sort of feed into things like in-cell culture. These guys create an adversarial relationship with women in their minds, right? They can't help but view women as their enemies, even though they are fundamentally trying to connect with them. This is actually kind of where I was going with this, because they've measured this in various countries and across time periods, et cetera. And typically what you find in societies that zero-sum thinking is more common among majority groups. So like white people, men, depending on the country, Christians are more likely to engage in zero-sum thinking. Basically, this is one of the major things that prevents policies that would increase equality, because people like physically cannot process the idea of more equality as not taking something away from them. So there's actual studies on this where they give people like scenarios. They're like, okay, Latinos are less likely to get home loans than white people. So like the mayor is going to pass a policy that like promotes home loans for Latinos. This will not affect white people. And then- Right, yeah, it will not affect white people. But then you change the standards for home loans, and what happens? So you've got different groups now who have to meet different standards to get a mortgage. And you have preferential groups who get to meet lower standards and banks are forced to extend mortgage loans to groups that are much less likely to pay them back. And as a result, you get the global financial crash of 2008. But these two lefties of this podcast talk as though, oh, you give certain favored groups different standards, lower standards, less daunting standards to get mortgages or to get into medical school. This isn't going to hurt white people. Well, it took down the entire world economy, this very sort of practice that he's talking about. Like the survey question is like, will this affect white people? And survey respondents are like, oh yeah. Big time. Like even like in black and white, you're like, this will, like this is a fake scenario. I have defined- Right, right. It will not affect the intro. Be like, oh yeah, I'm getting fucked by this. So much kind of political debate takes place on the sort of implementation of policies or the specifics. But it's like when your understanding of society at this most basic level is just that no one can get- Look, if you do special things for one group, right? Other people inevitably get hurt, all right? So Harvard and other elite universities say, oh, we never use race to impede somebody's admittance into university. We just use race to give advantages to oppressed or downtrodden groups. But those advantages to other groups that come at the expense to different groups, right? Different groups have different interests, right? You expand civil rights, all right? So you had a massive expansion of civil rights in the 1960s. And that meant that traditional freedoms and traditional rights were consequently reduced. You can't increase rights for some groups and not take away rights for other groups. So rights to freedom of association were severely reduced by civil rights legislation. Civil rights legislation has the government interfering with who you can rent to, who you can employ. Extending rights for women limits the rights of free association for men. What if men wanna create a male-only cultures or male-only workplaces that's now illegal? So you create same-sex marriage and that comes at the hero systems of those who believe in traditional definition of marriage and many men who are already on the fence about getting married, they become so turned off by the spectacle of same-sex marriage that they're probably less likely to commit to the heterosexual version, not most, but a number, right? It changes a culture and anytime you expand rights for, say, one group, that's always gonna come at the expense of rights for other groups. You've talked about how most of it is sociopathic advice and these weird irrelevant anecdotes. The other main pattern, we're now down to the remaining 25% of the book, most of it is just sociopathy and weird anecdotes. The rest of it is just straight-up bad advice. So I'm gonna send you the opening anecdote of Law Six, Court Attention at All Cost. Oh my God, thank you. It is the story of P.T. Barnum opening like his first museum where people could come and he was basically trying to get them to attend his new museum through marketing efforts. Got it. So here's this. Barnum would put a band of musicians on a balcony overlooking the street beneath a huge banner proclaiming free music for the millions. But generosity, New Yorkers thought and they flocked to hear the free concerts. But Barnum took pains to hire the worst musicians he could find and soon after the band struck up, people would hurry to buy tickets to the museum where they would be out of earshot of the band's noise and of the booing of the crowd. So like, you should be obnoxious to people so they go to your museum, I guess? Who would flee into a museum? By the same guy who's providing the music. Right, by the guy who just proved to you that he cannot entertain you. That's why our main feed episodes are just two hours of the sound of a baby crying so that people seek refuge in our bonus episodes. What I often do is go to the hip parts of Brooklyn and just blast an air horn, thus driving people to podcasts and they will eventually find if books could kill. So then after this deranged, kind of funny but not clearly relevant anecdote, he then says, this is the advice that we're pulling from this. He says, at the beginning of your rise to the top, spend all your energy on attracting attention. Most importantly, the quality of the attention is irrelevant. What? No, I think if you're an intern at a company you wanna get a promotion, you do need positive attention. Running into like the board of directors meeting and like doing a here yee, here yee. I don't even understand what quality. Yeah, for almost everyone, there's never a time where the type of attention you get doesn't matter. Right, there's all sorts of attention that's really, really bad for you. I mean, I know it's often said that all attention's good attention but that's really correct. So I think they make some pretty good critiques of the 48 Laws of Power. Right, this is, I thought it was an important piece on ABC News from 11 years ago. True Confessions, XHR Executive, tells all. True Confessions continues. Now, Deborah Roberts with Confessions from the Corner Office. So why don't you describe yourself, Mr. Dupre? I'm not a workhorse. If you're looking for a Clyde sale, you're probably not your man. Incidentally, what's your policy on Columbus Day? Yeah, we work. Really? Between you, me, and Dupre, most of us know the wrong things to say in a job interview. My resume. But in her book, Corporate Confidential, former company hatchet woman Cynthia Shapiro reveals that what you don't know could not only prevent you from getting hired, but could get you fired. This is a great book. I think it's the best book I've read on understanding how corporate culture works. Who are essentially giving all those dirty little secrets that HR does not want us to know? They're definitely dirty, they're not always so little. And they can be sneaky. If you see family photos on the interviewer's desk and start bonding over having kids, you may have fallen into a secret trap. There's an HR director that I know and when you come in for the interview, she's got a picture of two adorable little kids that are facing you in the interview. She doesn't have kids. This is a trick. What she has is an edict from upper management to not hire moms. So if you start talking about your children. Right, so the more laws we get, the more civil rights laws and more litigation we get, then the trickier companies and bosses and HR has to be with you so that they can pursue their own goals, but there's less and less room for honesty. And so what people say and what corporations proclaim are their core values, not necessarily true. Children, she knows right away to strike you off the list. Exactly right. That's terrible. And you'll never know. And there's even a secret backup plan that might keep moms from getting hired. The let me walk you back to your car trick. They're looking to see if you have a baby seat in the back. Aha, so they come over here and they see. Well, these people do. And that could cost you the job. That will cost you the job. But even if you land the job, Shapiro says prepare for a game of survival where only your boss knows the rules. Violate them and you may end up on the dreaded top secret layoff list. There really are layoff lists? Yes, there are secret. Yes. There are secret layoff lists. She confesses that all kinds of things can get you on the layoff list, including, get this, your vacation plans. Piker asked how much vacation time you get in the first year. Vacation time. What vacation? In Australia, everybody gets a minimum of a month off. I think America's the only first world country where there's no minimum vacation time. Time, go teach third grade public school. But if you don't work in a boiler room like the guys in this film and you actually get two weeks of vacation, Shapiro says no one tells you that you probably shouldn't take them all at once. Companies move too fast. They'll find a way around you in two or three weeks and they'll realize they can do without you and they will. And watch out for those My Ties and Margaritas on your not longer than one week vacation. Oh yeah, we've got to trim some of the fat around here. What do you mean by trim the fat? I want you to fire the fat people. Like in the movie, there are horrible bosses. Shapiro says who'll put you on that layoff list, simply for how you look, especially if you're looking too old. Only executives get to have gray hair. It's not fair, but that's how it goes. You want to look good, but not too good. Debra Lee Lorenzano claims she was fired by Citibank because they thought her sexy looks were too distracting, even though she wore business clothes. The worst feeling was knowing that Asia was not there to help me, but to help Citibank. Citibank insists Lorenzano was let go for poor job performance. We know what's under that jacket. Your pregnant have been for a while. So unfortunately, didn't tell us because you would have found out that we thought it's gray. Really? And believe it or not, Shapiro says being pregnant isn't always celebrated, as in this scene, even though there are laws to protect women from being fired. OK, looking at the chat, it says, ask ChatGBT to write me positive poem about Donald Trump, and it won't do it, yet it will do it for Joe Biden. That's what people like me were paid big bucks to do, to find the gray areas around the laws that would allow the companies to do what they want to do. Which is what 25-year-old Tess Adams says happened to her. And Crash says telecom companies, defamation lawsuits, most hated men in porn. Is any of that stuff true? For what is it all true? There is truth to many of those things. Recently had a stellar performance evaluation when she was suddenly fired for cause. Her bosses said she was a poor employee. Why do you think you were fired? I think I was fired because I was pregnant. Do you think that maybe it was related to your work? There's no way. No way. I never had a complaint until I told him I was pregnant. In fact, Shapiro says the dirtiest secret of all is that companies rarely tell employees the real reason they wound up on the layoff list. For fear of being sued for wrongful termination. We're going to need to go ahead and move you downstairs into storage, be some new people coming in. If your office space changes for the worst, like in this film, maybe you're being managed out. Clever way companies get rid of unwanted employees, along with dead-end projects. It's all about building a paper trail, proving you're a poor worker. The HR people are going to kill me for disclosing this on TV. But they will create documentation that makes the employee look like they're not doing their job. They fake documentation? They create it. It's all how you look at it, right? Shapiro says she was fed up with all that deception, so she quit her high-paying HR job and became a whistleblower. Today, she's on the other side of the fence. Is there an area the company is guiding you towards? Yeah, HR is not your friend. They are the friend of the owners. They're definitely not your friend. But I was thinking about her book, which is just a terrific read. This read I've seen on corporate portraits called Corporate Confidential. 50 Secrets Your Company Doesn't Want You to Know and What to Do About Them by this woman, Cynthia Shapiro. And I was thinking much of her analysis applies to Tucker Carlson. Like, why did Tucker Carlson get fired? And I think ultimately is because the same reason that the millions of people get fired, they irritate their bosses, right? If your boss does not like you, it does not matter how good you are at your job. You're a dead man walking. And Brian Steltzer, formerly of CNN, has a book coming out on this network of lies, the epic saga of Fox News, Donald Trump and the Battle for American Democracy will be released November 14. And Vanity Fair published an excerpt, October 31, mainly on Tucker Carlson's firing. Why did it happen? So here's some excerpts from this Brian Steltzer book. And Fox News media CEO, Suzanne Scott. And Tucker did not like Suzanne Scott. I mean, he'd call her the C-word, right? But she called Tucker Carlson 1115 on Monday, April 24 of this year and said, we're taking you off the air. She didn't give him a reason. And to Tucker Carlson and his fans, this is absolutely unthinkable. He was the highest rated host across all of cable news and he was suddenly removed from the air. And Tucker Carlson claims that his ouster was a condition of the Dominion suit, but there's no evidence for that theory. So why did Tucker get pushed out because he consistently outshone his bosses? Now, Tucker was supposed to have hypnotic power of the GOP base. He was supposed to be irreplaceable, but he alienated many of his superiors at Fox News. He was responsible for many internal and external scandals. He fanned many flames of controversy. His firing was inevitable. He'd been fired from CNN and MSNBC earlier in his career. So the best predictor of future results is what's happened in the past. So at Fox, he puffed out his chest. He pretended to be immune to attack, but in the end, he got pushed out and his staff were not shocked. They knew that they had pushed the envelope far past the point of a paper cut. It was always going to end badly, one Carlson producer said. We knew we were burning too bright. So Tucker portrayed his production team and only his team as a force for good in the battle against the evils that he took on nightly. His entire show was about us versus them and this approach extended to the rest of Fox, where Tucker Carlson tonight had the appearance of a rogue unit. If you're in a rogue unit at work, you're probably not long for that job. So Brian Salter found that Tucker Carlson's producers, writers were far more loyal to him than they were to Fox. They were Sabotage Squad of true believers. They regarded the mother ship as almost enemy territory. Because as a Fortune 500 company, Fox Corporation had to have policies in place promoting diversity and supporting transgender employees and very types of things that Tucker Carlson railed against on the air. Now, Tucker usually genuflected to Fox in public, but his public expressions of gratitude did not fill management because they knew how he acted in private. So he frequently berated Fox News executives. He belittled people who scrutinized him and he became unglued. So Tucker liked to claim that he worked directly for the Murdochs. And so he tried to give off the aura that he didn't have to really report up the chain, such as to Suzanne Scott. So he generally badmouthed Suzanne Scott as well as the head of public relations, Irina Briganti. And he had many critics of Fox who thought that he displayed a tremendous amount of misogyny hatred of women. Tucker is very titillated by misogyny when Fox host said and Tucker claimed that he knew Lachlan Murdoch personally, but he wasn't really that close with either Lachlan or Rupert Murdoch. The Fox board retained Wachtail, Lipton, Rosen and Katz and toruously powerful white shoe law firm to investigate Tucker Carlson. And when management hires investigators, right, they're usually going to get the investigations that they want. So there are major concerns about liability. And no employer is going to want to have you around if you are likely to be a liability. So why was Tucker fired? Because he repulsed large swaths of the company he worked for. He created a great deal of internal strife with his conspiratorial commentaries. He exposed Fox to defamation suits from the likes of Ray Epps. He offended key executives and seemed to take delight in doing so. His managers believed that he broke the rules and the norms just to show that he could. He strained friendships, he triggered so many ad boycotts and turned off so many advertisers that his time slot was not so profitable for Fox and he committed the cardinal Fox sin, but this applies to any workplace acting like he was bigger than the network he was on. So Stelto concludes it was a tale as old as TV stardom as a potent and often destructive drug. Icarus flew too close to the sun. He got his wings melted. Tucker Carlson flapped away higher and higher until one day the Murdoch's just could not tolerate him. He was flapping anymore. He got too big for his boots, Rupert told at least one confidant. So maybe Tucker should have read the 48 Laws of Power but he definitely should have read Cynthia Shapiro's book Corporate Confidential, 50 Secrets Your Company Doesn't Want You to Know and What to Do About Them. Back to the If Books Could Kill podcast. All of you have attention means actually, but all right, nevermind. This is stupid, I can't. This is making me mad. We're already spinning our wheels. This is making me mad, it's making me mad. So that was Law Six. In Law 14, pose as a friend, work as a spy, he's talking about how like sort of elder statesmen, he loves this political advisor to Napoleon named Tally Rand. He has 29 anecdotes featuring this Tally Rand guy and apparently in these sort of cocktail party diplomatic conversations, he would constantly be like spying on people to try to get intel on them, which honestly is like a thing that people do in like the diplomatic world to like find whatever, but also not what you should be doing at like work happy hours. He says, a trick to try in spying comes from La Roche Foucault who wrote, sincerity is found in very few men and is often the cleverest of ruses. One is sincere in order to draw out the confidence and secrets of the other. By pretending to bear your heart to another person, you make them more likely to reveal their own secrets, give them a false confession and they will give you a real one. Another trick was I didn't- I do use that. I have like ready made vulnerable sounding things to say in social or work situations. So I give the, or the appearance and the feel like I'm bearing my soul, but I'm not actually revealing anything that could be damaging. So I do think many people benefit from having that kind of faux vulnerability on hand and ready to retail. Identified by the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer who suggested vehemently contradicting people here in conversation with as a way of irritating them, stirring them up so they lose some of the control over their words. In their emotional reaction, they will reveal all kinds of truths about themselves. Truths you can later use against them. What? So make up shit to confess to people like I'm addicted to Coke. Oh, you're also addicted to Coke. Ha ha, now I know you're addicted to Coke. Yeah. Well, that one at least makes like, has like an internal coherence, but the other one is just like get someone mad and they will start confessing things somehow. Be super fucking irritating to the point where someone blows up at you and they're like, ha ha, now I know what makes you blow up. In the course of blowing up, they're like, you piece of shit, I'm addicted to cocaine. Oh no. Oh God, I can't keep doing this, Peter, but there's one more. This is the perfect like tryptic of anecdotes. This is from law 20, do not commit to anyone. Oh fuck. He has a bunch of like weird sort of quasi dating advice. Just after I got married. He says, when Picasso, after early years of poverty, had become the most successful artist in the world, he did not commit himself to this dealer or that dealer. Instead, he appeared to have no interest in their services. This technique drove them wild and as they fought over him, his prices only rose. So Picasso. When Henry Kissinger, a US Secretary of State, wanted to reach detente with the Soviet Union, he made no concessions or conciliatory gestures but courted China instead. So use the rules on the Soviet Union. He then refers to the author of this tally rand biography that he uses a million episodes from. He says, this tactic has a parallel in seduction. When you want to seduce a woman, Stendfell advises court her sister first. Rule number 46, bring a black light to parties. This goes to your one book theory, Peter. It's all one book. Fuck, this doesn't work for me. I dated twin sisters and it did not work out well. I've dated sisters. It's not a useful strategy in my experience. Baby. Because it's ultimately fucking dating advice. There's no, you can't get like a straight guy writing 500 pages about the laws of power without him being like, here's some tips for getting pussy to FYI. Don't text back. And also fucking someone's sister is not a great way to fuck them. Even if you don't think it's morally repugnant, it's just like, this is bad advice. If it works, you have successfully seduced a very unwell person who needs therapy so badly, right? That's a great point when you use the game, when you use these tactics to seduce women, right? They primarily work on the mentally unhinged. If someone is like that vulnerable to insecurity, then they're definitely the kind of person where you can just do the lint trick too, right? You don't have to go through, you don't have to go the whole sister route. So this, after all this shit, I'm sort of like halfway through the book now. And I'm like, okay, who is this fucking guy? Like who's this author, right? His name is Robert Green. He hasn't really done anything else. If you Google him, it's like he's one of these people that sort of rode this book to like a bunch of other books. That's weird. I thought he would have risen to the top of the global order by now using these sick laws of power. I do wanna say there are two very interesting things about the author of this book. The first, and this is I think unique on the show is that he's an actual subject matter expert. He grows up in LA, he grows up in like a seemingly middle class family. And then he goes to the University of Wisconsin, Madison and graduates with like a Class X degree and he speaks five languages. What the fuck? He like actually knows all this like Greek mythology and shit. And when he speaks about like the Roman Empire and stuff, he does actually seem to be drawing on some like legitimate expertise. I'm sorry, but like what a waste of a life. You learn five languages and you're like, I'm gonna write a book about power for the boys. There's also something really funny about how this book comes about. Like no one ever talks about these books as basically like as artifacts of marketing, right? You're coming up with a title and a cover and that's why like 95% of people buy it. It's not really the text of the book. So he basically graduates with this Class X degree in 1980 and then he like bounces around. He says he has 80 jobs over the course of the next like 10 or 12 years. He eventually moves to Hollywood and tries to make it as a screenwriter. And like he has zero IMDB credits other than the Quibi series. So it doesn't seem that that like hit for him. This is the Ben Shapiro arc. He somehow gets his fellowship in Italy. I think Italian is one of the languages that he speaks. And he basically meets a book marketer, this guy that like does coffee table books named Juiced Elfers, who's actually listed in some printings as a co-author of this book. And then he says that like the genesis of this book was that he's like telling this book marketer guy. He's like, I've been trying to write a biography of Julius Caesar for the last like five years, but like I just can't really, I don't know if it's like a motivation thing or he can't really get the framing or whatever, but like that just isn't working this Julius Caesar biography. And then my theory is like between the lines, this guy who's like a book marketer is like, why don't you just put together all your Greek and Roman shit into like a fake ass self-help book? Your Julius Caesar biography isn't coming together. What if I proposed to you doing something much dumber? Would you like that? So the second interesting thing about Robert Green I cannot fucking believe this is that he actually has good politics. So I'm gonna send you an excerpt from an interview that he gave to the Guardian in 2012. He is now working with labor organizers in Latin America and his liberal politics disappoints some of his fans in the business world who expect him to be a champion of the ruthless go-getter. I'm a huge Obama supporter, he says. Romney is Satan to me. The great thing about America is that you can come from the worst circumstances and become something remarkable. It's Jay-Z and 50 Cent and Obama and my Jewish ancestors. That's the America we want to celebrate, not the vulture capitalist. These morons like Mitt Romney, they produce nothing. Republicans are feeding off fairy tales and that's what did them in this year and hopefully we'll keep doing them in forever because there are a lot of scoundrels. I forgive him. You know what? That's Robert Green author of the 48 Laws of Power. Okay, so I read Corporate Confidential yesterday, 50 Secrets Your Company doesn't want you to know what to do about them. And then as I was out for my morning constitutional today, I thought I wanna reread Cynthia Shapiro's 2005 classic and look for where its analysis applies to people like Tucker Carlson. And remember Glenn Beck? Glenn Beck was a ratings monster on Fox News between 2009 and 2011, but he too got too big for the brand and so they fired him. So here are some books, here are some excerpts from Corporate Confidential that I think apply to people like Tucker Carlson, have applied to millions of people, I think. So number one, remember your company's number one motivation is protection, right? If a company feels you are opening them up to any severe liability or inconvenience, even if you are 100% justified, they will remove you as quickly as possible, right? When you put your own needs ahead of a company's needs for protection, you are red flagging yourself for someone who's not a team player and cannot be trusted. Tucker Carlson was clearly not a team player. Today's litigious society, many companies value protection above all else. So threatening a company's sense of protection is the number one cause of job loss. I think that's a great point. Threatening a company's sense of protection is the number one cause of job loss. If you don't show support, right? If your company feels for whatever reason you do not openly and enthusiastically support the company, their policies, their positions and their direction, you will be out, right? Companies don't like critics. Even if you have the best skills in the company, you will have no job security. None of your needs will you met. No doors will be open to you unless the company trusts you. Trust is based on the company's perception of you. Whatever that perception is, that will determine your job security and your value. So you have to learn what the company's true agendas are. You can't go to the website or statements, right? You have to look at what your company truly protects, rewards and values. And then hold up a mirror to yourself and evaluate your actions in the workplace. Look at your actions through the eyes of an owner. Do you outwardly act like someone who supports the company, his policies, its interests, no matter what you think on the inside? Do you openly behave and speak like someone with ownership and passion or someone just looking for a paycheck? Look at your actions through the lens of the company's real values. How close in alignment to your action scene when viewed from the outside? So Tucker Carlson was operating a show that was in large part at war with the rest of Fox News. Because any legal complication for the company, you cause any legal complication for the company, and Fox News was getting sued because of Tucker Carlson, such as Byray Epps, that is going to wreck your career in the company. Legal matters cost your company huge amounts of money and wasted hours for high level people who should be spending their time making money, not evaluating situations that lead to lawsuits. So one lawsuit, such as what Fox suffered with Dominion, they lost what was it, a billion dollars essentially to settle the Dominion lawsuit. If you don't seem like you are personally feeling vested in the ownership of the company and its interests, you're not going to be viewed as loyal, putting yourself in your personal interest before the company will make you seem like a trader, not to be trusted and not to be invested in. Tucker Carlson put himself and his interests for Fox News, and so he was widely regarded within Fox News as a trader. The closer you bring yourself into the appearance of alignment through your daily actions and choices with the company, the more favorable companies' opinions of you will be and the more secure your job will be. But highly skilled employees with seemingly great value to their organization, such as Tucker Carlson, are fired every day because they perceive to be a potential risk and they cannot be trusted. Companies will tend to value younger employees more than older employees because they have enthusiasm, passion, fresh thinking, energy and relatively low cost. Tucker Carlson was very high cost and he was in his 50s. Companies value older employees for experienced knowledge, professionalism, consistency and level-headedness, but older employees lack flexibility. They tend to stagnate in their thinking. They tend to have a lot of health issues. The companies look at your appearance as a sign of the way you think. Dated clothing translates into dated thinking. No matter how good you are at your job, a dated appearance will give you an image of someone behind the time, someone who might keep the company from moving forward. There's no right to free speech in the workplace. When you go to work, you are effectively a slave. You are an instrument. You are like software for a company. You say anything against the company or its policies, very likely to be retaliation. Companies will not employ someone who's speaking out against their policies, their interests, their work environment, their practices. Companies only want employees who are openly supportive, not subversive. Tucker Carlson was subversive. Employees may feel it's their right to speak out on a policy they disagree with or a boss is causing problems. My Tucker felt free to speak out privately against all sorts of Fox policies and Fox executives. Felt free to talk about situations that made him unhappy or less productive. Yeah, it's your right, but every time you voice a negative opinion, you are creating an image of yourself as a trader, as a victim, as unlucky, as unsuccessful, as someone to get rid of. Negativity is highly contagious. Companies know all it takes is one rotten apple to turn a group of happy employees into a massive disgruntled workers, seething with the seeming injustices of their situation. Now, who has the person who has tremendous power over your career? It's your boss that is support. Your career goes nowhere. Bosses do not take kindly to insubordination. You'll be expected to support your boss no matter your personal feelings. You have to respect your boss. If for no other reason than his ability to propel or destroy your career, Tucker Carson clearly did not respect his bosses at Fox News and they destroyed him. So in the eyes of the company, you are your boss's opinion of you. Your job security lies solely in your boss's hands. It's just way too tempting to remove any employee who becomes a thorn in the side or who are perceived as unsupportive or unfriendly. It's just too tempting. So no matter your skills, ability or fairness, whether you stay or whether you get fired, it's largely gonna be based on whether or not the boss likes you. You may think bosses come and go, but their feelings about you will haunt you for the rest of your career and references, lost opportunities, HR files, right? You get a new boss who's very likely to ask the previous boss who the troublemakers are and who to watch out for. Every time you interview for a job, your potential new employer will track down your previous bosses to get their opinions of you. So pitting yourself against the boss is a losing battle because companies always side with their managers, right? A company will always take the manager's word over yours. That's the way the world works. This is a much smarter guide to power than the Robert Green book. It's basically impossible to swear this with the book. It's fascinating. Is it the same guy? Like I Googled, like I forgot to put in his birth date and it's the wrong Robert Green. No, but you know it's the right one because he's talking about Jay-Z and 50 Cent who presumably he knows of their existence because they talked about his book, right? No, he wrote, he co-wrote a book with 50 Cent called The 50th Law. You're really making me wonder what the 49th Law is. But then what is interesting to me is he also has the same blind spot that we see in so many of the authors where he doesn't seem to think that he's doing anything to promote this worldview. So in the Guardian interview, it says Green states that he doesn't try to follow all of his advice. Anybody who did, he says, would be a horrible, ugly person to be around. Why do these authors keep doing this shit? I do genuinely find this fascinating. I listened to a bunch of podcast interviews with him where he talks about like he believes in climate change. After 2016, he started going on TV to talk about Trump and be like, this guy is not applying my rules. He's really kind of, I'm sorry, but is there anyone who's doing this better? Seriously. Is there anyone who's more tightly adhering to the 48 Laws of Power than Donald Trump? Come on. But then to me, the core of his blind spot is this thing where he says, oh, I'm not telling you to do anything. I'm just telling you how the world worked. And the chat says, I've heard commentators talk about the future of Israel surviving, but in a state of desiginization, how.