From CIA Secrets to Bestsellers: Barry Eisler on Writing What’s Real

27:08Anyone can disagree with that. It's fine. I'm always happy to have these sorts of conversations with the minimum heat and the maximum light. So I could certainly be wrong. It may be that universal health insurance is a terrible idea. I'm open to that. I personally think it would be a good idea and I could talk about that at length, but that's not the point here. The point is this. At the time, so this would have been 2008, Obama was running on the notion of what they were calling healthcare reform. And immediately I thought to myself, why are you calling it healthcare reform? That's not in fact what it is.

27:39It's health insurance reform. Why would you call it something inaccurate that's unhelpful to you? Because I know very few people who like their health insurance. They're out there. Some people are fortunate to have great health insurance. Most people hate their health insurance. They pay ridiculously high premiums. Something happens, the thing isn't covered or only a percentage of it is covered. You got to fill out volumes of paperwork. Most people hate their health insurance. If someone comes to you and says, would you be interested in better health insurance? your defense response will be relatively low.

28:08You'll say, yeah, man, I hate my health insurance. Tell me about what you're selling. Whereas if someone comes to you and says, hey, I'm thinking about reforming your healthcare, you in? People have very personal relationships with their doctors and their bodies, their health. You're going to get a much stronger defensive reaction if you're trying to sell healthcare reform. And so I wondered immediately, it's not healthcare reform and people are not going to like what you're trying to sell. If you call it that, it's inaccurate and unhelpful. Why? I don't understand. And then the other aspect of it was they started calling it single payer, which is this wonky term that you have to really be reasonably well-versed in what is going on here to even understand what that means.

28:45Like if you ask someone who doesn't know, hey, they're going to reform your healthcare and it's going to be single payer. Do you like that? Do you not like it? I don't think I like it. Who's the single payer? There's going to be one. Is that me? It's like if I go to a restaurant with five friends and there's going to be a single payer, It might be good, but maybe it's terrible to the extent you have any sense of what it means in the first place. It's extraordinary how ineffective this communication is if the goal is to actually pass some kind of health insurance reform that will result in more ordinary Americans having health insurance to cover their medical needs, particularly medical emergencies.

29:21And so I wrote this whole chapter about why is this so terrible? What's funny about this is I don't remember when I published this essay, maybe 2011 or something. And what I said is, why are they not calling it Medicare for all? And eventually, as we know, Democratic politicians like Bernie Sanders did eventually, and I think AOC did start referring to Medicare for all. I don't think it's because they read the book. I think just if you wait long enough and people make enough mistakes, they'll eventually happen upon something that's more sensible. But here's the thing, all learning in some way is the process of attaching the new and unfamiliar to the existing and the familiar.

29:56If you think about it, that's always going on with learning. And it's even where cliches come from. Like it tastes like chicken. Where did that come from? It's because if someone says like, wow, I was in Arizona and I ate a barbecued rattlesnake. And someone says, well, I've never had rattlesnake. What does that taste like? You might say, ah, it's like chicken kind of, but like 10 year. We instinctively reach for the thing that the person already knows and then try to build in the differences. So I'm like, everybody knows what Medicare is. Basically, I think this is probably apocryphal, but apparently there were signs at rallies rallies, like anti-Republican rallies, and they would say stuff like, government hands off my Medicare, which is funny.

30:30People don't know it's from the government. But the point is, they know what it is, and they love it. Why don't you start with that and just tell people, hey, you know that program that you know and love? We're just going to expand it. Who's going to say no to that? But it took Democrats, I don't know, what, another decade or longer to figure out that if you really do want to sell this thing, that's how to do it. So that's one of the case studies in the book. It's quite obvious to me that, at least for the most part, maybe some of the Democratic politicians did read the chapters on the Affordable Care Act and learn from it.

31:02But for the most part, it's obvious to me that the essay has been largely ignored by the people who I think could benefit from it. Well, I would say that that is the understatement of the Remarkable People podcast history. When I first read it and I thought, oh, you know, it's going to be a lot of great examples, how barack obama did everything right and you just started ripping obama and i said wow this is really interesting this is really great stuff so let me ask you something so i think the point that is the most powerful is that you have to control the narrative right and democrats are always reacting to the other side's narrative they never push their own narrative yes can you explain why the key is the narrative yeah and here what we're talking about is something it's why we're talking about narrative and so if you don't understand narrative and you're trying to be a novelist it's probably going to be a tough slog although it's iterative as you write books you learn more about the craft as with any other skill or craft or anything else you as you practice you learn more but here in terms of narrative we're talking about a really important tool of all novelists or screenwriters if you're writing dialogue you've got to understand the difference between text and subtext.

32:20Text is what's being said. Subtext is what's meant. And again, for anyone who's interested in fiction or screenwriting or whatever, just quickly, if you're curious, go read whatever you consider to be great dialogue. Go read that passage or fire up a YouTube clip of some of the best dialogue in a movie that you love and watch for what I just talked about. What are the characters saying? What do they really mean? The wider the gulf between what's being said and what's being meant, the better the dialogue. Text and subtext are two quite different things. And when Democrats are in reactive mode, as they ordinarily, as they customarily are, they don't like something that's been said and they say, that's not what we meant.

32:59We meant this or we meant that. They sound defensive. The subtext is we're reactive. I once heard Mitch McConnell say this, but it was exceptional. I was surprised to hear a Republican say it. It's a much more democratic line. We will not be bullied. What's the subtext of that? We get bullied. And I think it's almost genetic in humans to, if I had to choose between being led by a bully and being led by someone who gets bullied, probably choose the bully. Now, I personally think that even this narrative framework that I just articulated, and we're talking about narratives again, is misleading because it falsely suggests a binary choice.

33:37Really, ideally, what I would want to work with is a person who knows what it's like to be bullied, who hates being bullied, who understands that being bullied is unjust and it's a bad way to order the world, and has created enough strength, power, whatever, to prevent other people from bullying. That's a wise and compassionate person. That's the kind of leader I would want. It's not this false binary choice that Democrats often buy into. And so that's another aspect of narrative. Watch out for the false binary. Don't allow the other side to create that narrative structure, that narrative prison, and then buy into it.

34:13You'll already have lost. I'll give you a quick example from back in the day. And this was during the Bush administration. By the way, I was quite hard on Obama in that book, but it's not personal animus. I had high hopes for Obama. He was one of my many disappointments. But back to Bush Jr. and the so-called war on terror, when America started torturing prisoners, we call them detainees. It sounds so much friendlier. And we say enhanced interrogation techniques because that just bleeds all the emotion out of it. But we were torturing prisoners. And the narrative, the false narrative binary that I saw again and again was this, like, you don't want to torture them.

34:47What are we supposed to do? Give them tea and crumpets? That was the cliche that I, I was pretty active against torture and lobbying with Congress against torture with an organization called Human Rights First at the time. So I became quite familiar with the usual narrative structure that torture proponents wanted me to buy into, which is, hey, you can either torture them or give them tea and crumpets, which is it? And I'm like, are those the only two choices? That's the response. Do you have a good imagination to do? That's wonderful. In all your imagination, can you think of anything else you can do with someone who's been captured because they're suspected of a crime?

35:25Could be terrorism, could be a more ordinary crime. Like the police have a suspect in custody. And are you saying that the only thing the police can do is either torture the suspect or give the suspect whatever tea and crumpet, I don't even know what a crumpet is. Tea and crumpets, treat them with undue gentleness is what that means. And then hopefully I can get people thinking, see, it isn't just torture them on the one hand and give them a feather bed on the other. There's all sorts of things that we can do instead of that. And when people set up that false binary narrative, it's because they want a certain result.

35:56So they create a false framework that will steer things to the result they want. And the first approach to dealing with that sort of narrative strategy is to reject the narrative foundation right up front. Don't let the person fight the fight he wants to fight. Like Livia alone, one of my characters, Livia is pretty awesome martial artist. Her primary grounding is in grappling arts, particularly jujitsu. And if Livia has to have a scrap with someone, particularly someone who's bigger or stronger than she is, someone who let's say is a boxer, she doesn't want to box that person. That's his game.

36:32Livia wants to force the other person to play her game. That's the first thing if you're having any sort of a debate. I know you've had Mehdi Hasan on the show and I'm a little mixed Don Meddy, he's a really smart guy and he always preps well for an interview, but sometimes I feel like his goal is to win. That's not really my way. I'm much more interested in discussion than I am debate. I think you get discussion leads to more truth than debate does, but debate is more interesting because it's a contest. But Meddy will definitely tell you that if you want to win the debate, you've got to make sure you're fighting on your ground.

37:07You've got to impose the narrative structure that gets you to the result you want. And that means you can't let the other person do that to you. So this is a lot of what The Ass is a Poor Receptacle is about. And yeah, I wish people with good policy goals who keep buying into false narrative structures and they don't understand the difference between text and subtext, I wouldn't mind if they pick up a copy and maybe consider some of what I point out. Well, Barry, I am trying to ensure that a copy of that book gets to a potential presidential candidate let me just say that but i okay so i hope he or she will benefit from it and use the lessons in that book to good ends so barry let's pretend that magically guy is now the cmo of the democratic party okay and i just read your book and i said to myself barry's absolutely right we got to change the narrative so you grade me on this narrative so I want to change the narrative to the Republicans are the war party.

38:13They are on wars. And so there's a war on truth. When the Bureau of labor statistics report something we don't like, we fire her. There's a war on decency. We separate families at the border. There's a war on women. We're telling women what they can do with their body. There's a war on voting. We're gerrymandering. The Republicans are the war party. How's that for a narrative? As you articulate it, Guy, it honestly makes me really sad. And the reason is because it's something that I call true but misleading. And what true but misleading means to me, I was not a Dianne Feinstein fan, but I remember, I think it was Michael Hayden, then head of the CIA, or maybe it was the NSA, because he was both, I forget what he was at the time.

38:56He said she was very upset by torture, revelations of CIA torture. And he said, no, you know, she's upset because women are very emotional. He said that. And that, to me, was a classic true but misleading statement. Women are emotional. Why? Because they're human. Humans are emotional. So to suggest that women are emotional misleads people into thinking that men are somehow Vulcans or computers or logical or whatever, which is completely untrue. Humans are emotional. And it is true that the Republican wing of the party is pro-war, but it's misleading to say that because it ignores the fact that the Democratic wing of the party is also pro-war.

39:33In fact, I think if you really want to understand partisan politics in America, you have to understand that people resist this notion. I'm just going to say it, even though I know people will resist. If you want to understand partisan politics in America, it's much more accurate to think in terms of one party with two wings than it is to think in terms of two parties. And there's a lot of propaganda that feeds into this. Like how many times has someone said, we're really needing America as a third party? This is text and subtext. What slides right by you when someone says we need a third party?

40:01It suggests, it implies, it requires that we already have two. I don't think we do. I'll settle for a second party. I'm ready for a second party. By the way, I know you've had Andrew Yang on the show. He's all for a UBI, very thoughtful guy. He's an interesting guy. He talks about a third party, but I think if I were to talk to Andrew Yang, he would probably admit, yeah, I get what you're saying, Barry, about how we need a second party. And the forward party would be a great second party. Anyway, if you just look at behavior, ignore brands. The late great novelist Andrew Vax used to say behavior is the truth.

40:29And that's what I try to look at. I don't try to think, oh, it's a Democrat doing this, it's a Republican doing this, and grade them accordingly. If you just look at what do Democrats and Republicans vote for in terms of military spending, it's virtually lockstep. Sometimes Republicans will want to spend even more on the military than Democrats, but not always. Trump requested a military budget. I think this was during his first term and Democrats exceeded it. So is it fair to say that Republicans are the war party and Democrats aren't? I don't know. Every time we send another tranche of$10 billion to fund the war in Ukraine or what Israel is doing in Gaza and the West Bank, it is utterly bipartisan.

41:13So when you look at these things, Biden was bombing the Houthis. Biden was doing really, in many ways, the Trump foreign policy, tariffs aside, Trump's approach to war and military spending is virtually indistinguishable from Biden's. I know this upsets people in both directions and which seems like a complete loss. I can't even please one tribe or the other, but I'm just trying to be as accurate as I can. So what I would recommend to either party, if you want to appeal to ordinary voters, guy. I know you might not agree with this and that's wonderful because I love having good discussions about these things, not debates.

41:48Probably the most consistent anti-war congress person that I know of right now, well, maybe Thomas Massey, who's Republican, but really best understandable as a libertarian. Rand Paul's pretty good too, also a Republican and libertarian. Marjorie Taylor Greene, extremely consistent on spending money on ordinary Americans and against war. I know she says some things that are out there and she's the bit noir of Democrats and it's fine. I'm not really interested in tribal wars, but she seems to sense that there is an appetite among ordinary Americans for less military spending, certainly less spending, less American taxpayer dollars on foreign wars and spending some of that money on home.

42:32I would like to think that whoever adopts a platform like that will make it into a winning platform. I'm pretty sure that ordinary Americans don't want to keep sending so much money to foreign countries to fund foreign wars. I'm pretty sure that ordinary Americans don't get out of bed and think, geez, I hope we're going to spend another trillion dollars on the military. That's really going to improve my life. I feel so safe now knowing that we're going to spend a trillion dollars over the next 10 years to modernize America's 5 ,000 or 6 ,000 nuclear warheads. It's, wow, I couldn't sleep last night thinking that the triad was aging, but I'm better now.

43:08You don't have to conduct a poll to know that ordinary Americans don't care about these sorts of things. Whatever they care about, it's not these things. So somebody, I would like to think, could turn this into a winning platform. The problem, the challenge is exactly what thematically I'm laying out in the system, which is that real power in America is not exercised by voters. The choice we're presented with at the end of an election cycle is like a magician forcing a card. It's not real choice. And I could go on and on about this and it would be somewhat of a separate topic. There are some solutions to the problem.

43:47One of them is ranked choice voting, which New York City just did in its mayoral campaign, which is great. Maine's got ranked choice voting. What ranked choice voting means very briefly is just this. You don't have to choose between the lesser of two evils. And I know we're largely encouraged. I personally do not vote for the lesser of two evils. I vote for whoever I think is going to be the best candidate. If that's from a third party and as it happens, it typically is. That's the way I vote. Otherwise, I feel like a slave being presented. You can have the shit sandwich on rye. You can have the shit sandwich on whole wheat, which do you prefer?

44:14I'm like, how about if I don't eat a shit sandwich? There's a nice sandwich right over there. It's like turkey or whatever. I'm going to eat that sandwich instead. And you guys can do. But all that said, the lesser of two evils is a coherent, defensible approach to voting. I don't look down on it. I don't sneer at it. I understand it. I don't share it and I don't personally wish to engage in it, but it is completely sensible to say, I know these are now our choices and they're both very bad and I'm just trying to choose the less bad one. That's not crazy. One way away from this is ranked choice voting, where if you vote for a candidate who doesn't make the top two, that you rank it so that, okay, my preferred candidate didn't win, but my vote will now go to whoever's left.

44:56So you don't have to worry about, well, people tell me, like, Barry, you voted for a third party candidate, so you threw away your vote. And I could dispute that nomenclature, that framing, but I'll just say that ranked choice voting is a way you never have to worry about throwing away a vote. Vote for who you want to. It won't be thrown away if it doesn't work out the way you hoped. Up next on Remarkable People. I don't know of any other country on earth that's constantly talking about dominating the way America does. It's wild. And even what gets framed as we want stability and we want peace, those things make no sense at all if you measure them based on our behavior.

45:31But if you look at stability and peace as terms of art that really mean domination, then suddenly the behavior of the blob, the establishment, the power structure, whatever, the statements of Peter Thiel and Alex Karp and other leaders of the military, especially the new military industrial complex, it all makes perfect sense is people don't actually want peace and stability. What they want is domination.

46:03Become a little more remarkable with each episode of Remarkable People. It's found on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Welcome back to Remarkable People with Guy Kawasaki. i i think from a marketing standpoint the problem with rank choice voting is it's so hard to explain and it's like a black box right but barry backing up here so this guy as cmo of the democratic party just got fired and now they call up barry eisler say barry we read the system we read your book about the ass is a poor receptacle for the head we want to make you cmo of the democratic party What is our narrative, Barry?

46:49So what would your narrative be? You know what? I've never done this, so it's not going to be quite as boiled down as it should be. I actually think Zoran Mondami has done a pretty good job of this in New York City. So you could learn from worse than him. We'll see how he handles actual power if slash when he's elected. Well, as usual, I have my hopes up. And as usual, they'll probably be dashed. So, pocketbook issues, building an economy that's based on hope rather than fear, that would be a huge change in America right now. I think for the most part, what makes people go to work is fear. If I don't go to work, then I won't be able to have a house, could be a medical catastrophe, and I don't have health insurance, and I have very little savings, these sorts of things.

47:35So I would immediately say we're going to cut military spending in half, in which case we'll only be spending five times as much as the next biggest military spender on earth. But hopefully we'll find a way to survive. And we're going to divert that money into infrastructure issues, better roads, better bridges, schools, hospitals, education. We're going to have health insurance for everyone so that no one has to worry about this stuff anymore. You don't have to stay with a horrible job because you need the health insurance. It'll create more mobility. It will create a more dynamic economy this way.

48:02And really what I just did is substantively, I think it's not bad, but in terms of boiling it down into kind of a sound bite that almost like a book title that captures the essence of the whole idea and amplifies it in a way that really sticks in people's brains that I haven't worked on. So I don't have something that's really pithy in response to your question, but issues like this, you know what I'd really love to see? And this expresses itself in the book. And that's funny. There's been some criticism for this in Amazon customer reviews. Most of them have been very positive. I'm glad to say, But Valeria is a big proponent of a universal basic income.

48:36And Andrew Yang, if you're watching, you should really promote this book because it's the first universal basic income thriller, as far as I know. I actually think a UBI is a great idea. But this is something, again, rather than I would love to see the Democrat or the Republican wing, I would love someone take this idea. Andrew Yang's doing a good job with that. And Ro Khanna has occasionally talked about it. Somebody needs to make this their mantra because AI and self-driving vehicles, particularly trucks are going to make a UBI essential. We should manage this transition rather than having it happen abruptly and out of our control.

49:09So I think I would love to see Guy, you as the CMO of the Democratic wing of the party, start talking about a UBI. Talk to Rutger Bregman. He wrote a book called Utopia for Realists. Great book. His recent book is also great, Moral Ambition. And a lot of people are against a UBI because they immediately, here, this is back to narrative. Immediately they think, wait, people are going to get paid to not work. We're just going to give them money and they don't work. And it's offensive. It's emotionally offensive. And I get that. I understand it. But I don't want to stop there with this emotional approach to policy.

49:39I want to think about what would be the benefits if we changed the income redistribution. People have talked about, this is propaganda. This is a false narrative. Oh, the Democrats, they want to have income redistribution. My response to that is we already have income redistribution. What do you think? Like what we have now is ordained by God or the laws of physics and the evil Democrats want to redistribute, they want to change God's own ordained laws. That's crazy. These are human made distribution systems. They may be good or they may be bad or whatever, but they're constantly getting tweaked.

50:09Why is the tax code 10 ,000 pages long? Because we're constantly complifying the tax code. Every administration does it. It just gets more and more complex. So this is already a human design solution or problem, whatever you want to call it. We're not doing income redistribution. We're just changing the current distribution, which is a change over the previous distribution, et cetera. Okay. What would happen if all Americans had money to spend, how much it is,$30 ,000 a year, something like that, and they could spend it any way they wanted? There's the theory of it. Here's another thing that interests me.

50:41There's tons of empirical evidence to answer this question. And it's a thing I've noticed about humans or what my character, Monty Cranston, in the book calls the humans. The thing I've noticed about the humans is that when they're attached to an idea, they'll often ignore empirical evidence in favor of theory. The theory is great and theory is important. If it's something that's never been tried before and we don't have any actual data or evidence to know one way or the other, then we have no choice but to operate as best as we can at the level of theory. But there's a ton of empirical evidence showing the massive benefits you get when you put some amount of living money, wages, income, whatever, in ordinary people's pockets.

51:20First of all, it gets put back into the economy. It doesn't get stuffed under a mattress. It makes the economy run faster. People spend it for quite interesting things. Today, guy, you come from Silicon Valley and I live in Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley is rightly celebrated as this innovation center in America and the world. Incredible inventions and progress and economic drivers have come out of Silicon Valley. But if you want to start a company, it's scary. You got to have some kind of a safety net or at least it's very helpful to know, look, I'm going to try. And if I try mightily and fail mightily, thank God I've got parents who can help me out, back me up, provide some sort of a safety net.

51:57And then if it's good enough, maybe I can even try again. And then I'll learn from my failures. And eventually I'm going to start this world beating company, which comes up with this fantastic innovation that drives the economy and benefits tens of millions of people. The people who are best positioned to do these sorts of things are people who already have some sort of safety net. What if everybody had a safety net like that? How much more innovation would there be? How much would that fuel the economy? Well, the evidence suggests quite a bit. This is a great idea. And to stop and to fail, to refuse to implement it because it's like, oh, I don't think we should give people money unless they work for it or something like that.

52:32And I'm like, you're hurting yourself. You're hurting all of society so much because you've gotten enslaved to this notion, which I do understand, but it's hardly the whole story. So I will be talking about a UBI, cutting military spending, building an economy based on hope rather than fear. I guess that's what I would do. Maybe three things, three has power. I suspect that Peter Thiel and Mark Zuckerberg might not agree with you, but... Since you mentioned it, I find this very interesting. It's reasonably short. Jeff Jeff Bezos is the example I've thought of, but it applies to all these guys who I can, I think you can think of them as oligarchs.

53:08I know that's a word we tend to. It's only Russia that can have oligarchs. Define oligarch. I don't know. It's someone with an incredible amount of money and disproportionate media power, influence in the councils of government by virtue of the money. That's got to be an oligarch. So look, don't take it from me. The former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, Simon Johnson, wrote an article called The Quiet Coup in the Atlantic in 2009. And it's all about America having the best oligarchy on earth. So anyway, but I was thinking of Bezos in particular, and here's why. So Bezos has a company that is the book called The Everything Company.

53:41You can buy anything on Amazon. And we all know everyone spends a lot of money at Amazon, and most people do. During the pandemic, when people had to order even more stuff than usual from Amazon, Amazon did very well during the pandemic. And Bezos's fortunes increased from, I don't even keep trying, like what, like 100 billion to 200 billion or some inconceivable numbers like this. But factory warehouse, rather, conditions in Amazon are notoriously bad, inhuman. The workers are treated very badly. I can go on and on about this, but the Seattle Times has done a number of exposés over the years.

54:13Let's just say there may be advantages and you may have no choice. You may be desperate. You may be living in an economy run on fear rather than hope. And so you'll take one of these jobs, even though you have to urinate into a bottle because you have no time to take a break and there are actual trackers on your fingers knowing where you are and how you're moving at all times. But you'll take the job. what's the biggest threat to Amazon? And I'm Jeff Bezos. I'm like, this is my company. This is my baby. I built this from nothing. I had the vision and all this stuff. What's the only real, at least near-term threat?

54:40Government action. That's pretty much it. If the government were to break up Amazon, that would be a big blow. I think it's fair to say. It's not something that Jeff Bezos wants. So if I were advising Bezos, if I were his friend or his brother or something, I would say, is there something you could do for PR that would head this possibility off? It won't cost you very much. How about if you create a stock fund like they do in Silicon Valley, but for all your employees, not just the white collar ones, everyone in the warehouses, they all get stock. And maybe it has to vest over a certain period of years, but whatever.

55:12Collectively, this stock will be worth billions, tens, even$100 billion, which would leave you, Jeff, with only$100 billion. And you would absolutely change the narrative about Amazon. on, you'd suddenly become the company to work for you, that people wanting to work in the warehouses, they'd be motivated because they could make more money with their stock options or whatever. You'd look great. This makes so much sense to me. What would keep a guy like Jeff Bezos from doing what I just said? And I think the answer is control. Control. Humans have a deep-seated innate need for control. That's how we're wired.

55:44We just really like to have control. And guy, I'm sorry, I'm going to talk about one more thing, but this one really is short. If you want to know the secret to American foreign policy. All our motives, all our pathologies, they come down to one word, domination. I promise you, once you have the skeleton key to U.S. foreign policy since World War II, you will see it everywhere. It leaks through in text, not just subtext. And one of the longest end notes I have in the system is all the times that U.S. leaders, business leaders, political leaders continually, repeatedly refer to the criticality of American domination.

56:20I don't know of any other country on earth that's constantly talking about dominating the way America does. It's wild. And even what gets framed as we want stability and we want peace, those things make no sense at all if you measure them based on our behavior. But if you look at stability and peace as terms of art, that really mean domination. Then suddenly the behavior of the blob, the establishment, the power structure, whatever, the statements of Peter Thiel and Alex Karp and other leaders of the military, especially the new military industrial complex. It all makes perfect sense. These people don't actually want peace and stability.

56:54What they want is domination. And then their behavior and their goals and their rhetoric at all suddenly makes perfect sense. Sorry for ranting so much. You know exactly what buttons to press. So people came to this episode saying, oh, that's a really interesting novelist. I love John Rain. I love that Hoppe Judo guy who's kicking ass all over Tokyo. and oh my god it turned into a whole political discussion and he's telling us that mtg is a good person and oh my god so just to be clear like again i'm not opining about mtg's goodness as a person or anything else or anybody else's democrat republican or whatever i really try to do the andrew vax thing which is behavior is the truth and if mtg takes a position that i agree with i will say that's a good position i agree with it and likewise if kamala hires same thing same standard so if you're listening to this podcast still and you're like scratching your head i want to give you one more insight into this book okay barry i don't know if he's come to grips with this but barry is a frustrated social psychologist and marketing person and There are passages in the system.

58:08As a marketer, as an entrepreneur, you will learn so much. Here's a few pages about there where he's talking about the power of alliteration and the power of imagery in a novel that applies so well to business and entrepreneurship. It is really a quite practical marketing book in my humble opinion. Guy, I am really honored. Thank you. I've been reading you since Rules for Revolutionaries. Thank you. I really appreciate that. Well, I want to pay the psychological debt. I feel to you that you named one of your characters Kawasaki because, man, I... He's Guy Kawasaki. I had to change the spelling a little bit because he's a Japanese guy.

58:57And they wouldn't spell G-A-I, right? Yeah, exactly. G-A-I. That's right. there's no jeff bezos or bizai there's no jeff bezos in my books only by implication all right i'm gonna let you go and i'm gonna go work on my narratives right now i really appreciate it and this was so much fun i hope it wasn't too much politics for anybody who's more interested i'm gonna go i'm gonna go pull my head out of my ass you don't need to But the Democratic leadership, yeah, maybe a little bit. Let me thank the Remarkable People team. That's Madison Nisman, who's trying to keep a straight face, and she is muted right now.

59:43There's Tessa Nisman, who did the research, and there's co-producer Jeff C. And sound design engineer Shannon Hernandez. And that's the Remarkable People team. And again, I just want to reiterate whatever you feel like politically, the lessons of the system in terms of marketing are first rate. And also, I would say this book about, you know, the ass is a poor receptacle for the head is also a very good book to read as a company. You also want to control the narrative and not let your competition control the narrative. There is a lot to learn in that book.

1:00:24This is Remarkable People.