198: How to Win Friends and Influence People

This American Life

Society & Culture, News, Politics, Arts

4.6 • 88.8K Ratings

🗓️ 5 January 2025

⏱️ 59 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

People climbing to be number one. How do they do it? What is the fundamental difference between us and them?

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Prologue: Ira Glass talks with Paul Feig, who, as a sixth-grader, read the Dale Carnegie classic How to Win Friends and Influence People at the urging of his father. He found that afterward, he had a bleaker understanding of human nature—and even fewer friends than when he started. (9 minutes)
Act One: David Sedaris has this instructive tale of how, as a boy, with the help of his dad, he tried to bridge the chasm that divides the popular kid from the unpopular — with the sorts of results that perhaps you might anticipate. (14 minutes)
Act Two: After the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, U.S. diplomats had to start working the phones to assemble a coalition of nations to combat this new threat. Some of the calls, you get the feeling, were not the easiest to make. Writer and performer Tami Sagher imagines what those calls were like. (6 minutes)
Act Three: To prove this simple point—a familiar one to readers of any women's magazines—we have this true story of moral instruction, told by Luke Burbank in Seattle, about a guy he met on a plane dressed in a hand-sewn Superman costume. (13 minutes)
Act Four: Jonathan Goldstein with a story about what it's like to date Lois Lane when she's on the rebound from Superman. (13 minutes)

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Transcript

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0:00.0	How to Win Friends and Influence People.
0:05.9	First published in 1936.
0:09.3	You know, and you read this thing, you can see why it is number one.
0:13.4	Dale Carnegie writes in this pepped-up style.
0:18.2	You don't think of the word moxie much anymore, but when you read this, this is typical.
0:24.1	He writes, in preparation for writing this book, he read everything he could find on the subject,
0:29.6	and then he lists all the stuff that he and his trained researcher read to figure out
0:33.4	how the great leaders of all ages had dealt with people.
0:41.9	He says, I recall that we read over 100 biographies of Theodore Roosevelt alone.
0:45.5	We were determined to spare no time, no expense,
0:49.8	to discover every practical idea that anyone had ever used throughout the ages for winning friends and influencing people.
0:55.0	Anyway, on page 61 of the edition that I have,
0:59.0	Dale Carnegie tells one of the many, many stories he uses
1:02.0	to illustrate the very main idea that underlies the whole book.
1:06.0	He says,
1:07.0	I often went fishing up in Maine during the summer.
1:10.0	Personally, I am very fond of strawberries and
1:12.3	cream, but I have found that for some strange reason, fish prefer worms. So when I went fishing,
1:17.7	I didn't think about what I wanted. I thought about what they wanted. I didn't bait the hook with
1:21.9	strawberries and cream. Rather, I dangled a worm or a grasshopper in front of the fish and said,
1:26.7	wouldn't you like to have that?
1:28.7	Why not use the same common sense when fishing for people?
	...

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