If Books Could Kill - The Art of the Deal

00:00:00.000 Michael. Peter. What do you know about the art of the deal? All I know is that I'm ready to

00:00:04.920 confirm my suspicion that staging a coup is roughly half as bad as being a New York real

00:00:09.840 estate developer. All right, I am going to send you the cover of this book. Well, actually,

00:00:28.560 Why don't you describe to me what it says?

00:00:31.560 Honestly, I sort of hate how, like, good the graphic design is.

00:00:35.400 It's a black background and gold letters, of course, and it just says in huge font, Trump, the art of the deal.

00:00:43.060 Yeah.

00:00:43.260 And then the author is Donald J. Trump with Tony Schwartz, and it's a photo of Trump in front of, like, Vermont in November or something.

00:00:52.500 That is Central Park.

00:00:53.760 Oh, really?

00:00:54.480 Come on.

00:00:56.240 I don't know.

00:00:57.560 They don't have trees in New York.

00:00:59.920 Have you heard of Donald Trump? 1.00

00:01:02.680 You deciduous motherfuckers over there. 1.00

00:01:04.820 I have no idea what anything looks like. 1.00

00:01:06.440 So it's funny because it's this.

00:01:08.340 The book says Trump in big letters at the top.

00:01:10.680 And I just sort of thought that was because Trump is the author and he was putting his name big.

00:01:13.980 But actually what's happening is that the full title of the book is Trump, the art of the deal.

00:01:19.160 I'm pretty sure it's Vermont, though, Peter.

00:01:20.300 I see tall buildings in the background.

00:01:21.880 A lot of New Yorkers make that mistake.

00:01:23.340 The book comes out in 1988, co-authored by Tony Schwartz, who's basically like a business journalist.

00:01:29.140 Pretty obvious that he's doing all of the writing here.

00:01:31.900 It's not in Trump's voice.

00:01:33.380 It doesn't have that Trump cadence.

00:01:35.380 So it's not showing the early stages of dementia.

00:01:37.920 That's right.

00:01:38.340 The way that Trump's speech is.

00:01:39.700 He very accurately draws a clock in the middle of the book, you know.

00:01:44.320 He's reciting the alphabet backwards at various points.

00:01:46.860 So I want to level set a bit here because I guess this is theoretically a big topic.

00:01:51.520 And I'm not trying to give my comprehensive take on Donald Trump here.

00:01:56.360 I want to accomplish a few things, hopefully.

00:01:58.660 One, see if we can pull at any threads that explain Trump as we know him now.

00:02:04.580 Two, I want to prod around the period of Trump's life that made him famous.

00:02:09.740 Despite all the media coverage, most people don't exactly know what Trump was up to back in the 80s, right?

00:02:15.660 Unless you lived in New York.

00:02:17.400 I don't think you have your arms around exactly what he was doing.

00:02:21.020 Yeah, it was for most of us outside of New York, it was nothing, nothing, nothing.

00:02:24.700 Home Alone 2.

00:02:25.500 Which I watched as part of my program.

00:02:28.140 Really digging deep, Peter.

00:02:29.520 I do the work.

00:02:31.140 And third, I wanted to take our first step into the exploration of a genre of airport

00:02:37.720 book that I sort of realized we haven't touched on, which is the book written by celebrity

00:02:44.100 business bozos.

00:02:45.340 That's like a whole section of airport bookstores.

00:02:47.300 That's right.

00:02:48.200 It's sort of distinct from like the rich dad, poor dad genre, right?

00:02:52.640 This is more like a subgenre of low effort celebrity memoir.

00:02:56.700 Also, Art of the Deal is the perfect exemplar because so many of these books are neither

00:02:59.900 written nor read by the CEOs on the cover.

00:03:02.760 There are so many of these books.

00:03:04.900 Yeah.

00:03:05.060 Mark Cuban has one called How to Win at the Sport of Business.

00:03:09.100 I'm going to assume from context clues that that's a sports person, sports billionaire,

00:03:12.880 sports richy rich.

00:03:14.000 Robert Herjevic has one called Driven, How to Succeed in Business and Life.

00:03:17.640 That's a car-related billionaire. I'm getting all these, Peter. I'm banging them out.

00:03:22.500 Kevin O'Leary has one called Cold Hard Truth on Business, Money, and Life.

00:03:27.620 Oh, he was on SNL. I know that one.

00:03:29.100 Damon John has Rise and Grind, Outperform, Outwork, and Out-Hustle Your Way to a More Successful and Rewarding Life.

00:03:36.020 You made that up.

00:03:36.600 No, I didn't. But I was just trying to see whether you watch Shark Tank because these are just the sharks on Shark Tank.

00:03:41.740 So there's even a sub sub genre of like billionaires who have done reality TV shows.

00:03:47.240 Are we going to do like the top chef hosts next to just go through all the reality shows?

00:03:51.740 You know, you know that our podcast is coming to an end if we ever do a cookbook and we're

00:03:55.540 just like, this recipe sucks.

00:03:57.920 One cup, more like one in a third. 0.91

00:04:02.020 One of the hallmarks of these books is that they are often just like a series of anecdotes

00:04:06.460 more than they are a cohesive story.

00:04:09.200 That's what the art of the deal is like.

00:04:10.540 it goes through some of trump's early life and then it's just deals from then on like it's just

00:04:16.160 one deal after another there is also a lengthy photo insert section there's just like in the

00:04:21.780 middle of the book all of a sudden it's like it's picture time yeah and it starts out with

00:04:24.960 family photos and then it's just like trump with various celebrities i'm hanging out with cnc music

00:04:29.740 factory and then finally it's just pictures of buildings it's like and here's what i built and

00:04:36.580 Here's one I built. I'm going to send you my favorite, my favorite picture from the photo

00:04:40.940 inserts. And it's my favorite because of the caption. It's a photo of a building and it says

00:04:46.620 New York City's Jacob Javits Convention Center. I offered to oversee the construction,

00:04:52.000 but the city and state went ahead on their own. Not surprisingly, the project came in years late

00:04:56.980 and hundreds of millions of dollars over budget. So he's just like settling scores. It's like I

00:05:01.740 didn't do anything. In the middle of the photo insert, it's just a picture of a building that

00:05:05.560 he didn't build and he's like this building sucks but if i was involved it wouldn't have sucked it's

00:05:10.980 so good dude it sounds like he has nailed the voice because that is like the weird mixture of 0.88

00:05:15.100 like insecurity and resentment and just irrelevant information that trump is very good at you can

00:05:20.260 tell that trump was involved in the writing like it's like just a little too petty and weird to be

00:05:26.440 the voice of tony schwartz the co-author yeah the worst part about doing this episode is that i can

00:05:33.140 only talk about Trump for so long before every part of my brain wants me to do the Trump impression

00:05:39.200 that I can't actually do. And then it becomes permanent. And then just every episode from now

00:05:44.080 on. So I want to get into the substance of the book. It starts off with a sort of like week in

00:05:48.220 the life thing. His timeline starts at 9 a.m. on Monday. And by 2 p.m. he's getting deposed.

00:05:56.540 He says, nowadays, if your name is Donald Trump, everyone in the world seems to want to sue you. 1.00

00:06:03.140 if you're a huge piece of shit for your entire life that is true people will come after you 1.00

00:06:09.260 eventually so the very first thing he does in like his little week is have a phone call about 1.00

00:06:14.220 his purchase of holiday inn stock hotel motel and it's just like a quick aside about how he

00:06:20.820 purchased five percent of the company because he thought that their real estate assets were

00:06:24.080 undervalued and he was considering a takeover of the company i thought this was weird because this

00:06:29.880 is like activist investor talk do you i don't know what you know about activist investing but

00:06:34.680 like you know you you buy a bunch of stock in a public company to the point where you have leverage

00:06:42.080 over the company and you can either try to take over the company or just influence business

00:06:47.360 decisions right and i didn't know that trump was ever in this game at all this was a time when

00:06:52.780 aggressive activist investing and hostile takeovers were like all the rage like if you 0.99

00:06:57.100 ever read barbarians at the gate kkr yeah yeah yeah and this was like before any of this shit 0.99

00:07:04.060 got heavily regulated it was like the wild west and so a lot of scumbags were in the activist 0.96

00:07:09.280 investing game so i looked into the holiday inn story and what happened was that there was

00:07:13.980 animosity between him and holiday based on some prior dealings so he buys five percent of the

00:07:20.560 company, partially through backdoor channels to hide the purchases, which is illegal if you believe

00:07:27.060 the story of the Federal Trade Commission. Then he attempted what was called green mailing.

00:07:33.620 This is where you buy a bunch of stock, you go to the company, and you ask that they buy it back

00:07:39.380 at a premium or else you will attempt a takeover of the company. This is more or less illegal now.

00:07:45.480 At the time, it was just considered slimy.

00:07:48.560 Trump claimed in testimony that that's not what he was doing.

00:07:51.940 But in the book, he pretty flatly says that this was what he was doing.

00:07:57.160 This sounds like a form of sports to me, honestly, but I'll allow it.

00:08:01.100 I mean, that's probably the best comparison, right?

00:08:03.520 These guys are just dicking around, doing like posturing, but with money.

00:08:08.060 Holiday Inn attempts to defend from the takeover.

00:08:10.780 They do that by making payments to shareholders, which puts them into debt.

00:08:14.540 they end up like selling a bunch of properties and something like twenty five hundred people in

00:08:20.380 Memphis, Tennessee lose their jobs. The lesson I took from this was that even behind like a couple

00:08:26.520 of throwaway paragraphs about like a profitable stock sale in the very, very beginning of the

00:08:32.460 book, there's a story about like white collar crime and average people just getting wiped out 0.92

00:08:38.560 by this asshole you know i do assume that every single anecdote basically comes back to this 0.69

00:08:45.060 there's not going to be any where you're like oh wow he really like created a lot of jobs 0.99

00:08:48.540 right my understanding of his history is that like he just left awake of just like unsatisfied

00:08:54.700 and angry people like the uh the people that marched on the capitol on january 6th and just

00:09:01.840 got left with joe biden because trump trump could not deliver for them chapter two is called trump

00:09:08.340 cards, the elements of the deal. This is the only chapter that's like actually setting out to give

00:09:13.200 you affirmative advice. It's giving you his keys to deal making. It's also there is also something

00:09:18.520 kind of funny about other people reading these books. I mean, we talked about this with the 48

00:09:22.580 laws of power, but also like in your normal life, if you're a normal person, how much like deal

00:09:26.980 making are you really doing? When I do a post on Twitter, I consider that a deal. I did trick my

00:09:32.580 doctor into getting me a shingles vaccine, but that was just through like lying. All right. I

00:09:36.220 just sent you something? He says, my style of deal making is quite simple and straightforward.

00:09:41.220 I aim very high and then I just keep pushing and pushing and pushing to get what I'm after.

00:09:45.620 Sometimes I settle for less than I sought, but in most cases, I still end up with what I want

00:09:50.340 more than anything else. I think deal making is an ability you're born with. It's in the genes.

00:09:55.540 I don't say that egotistically. It's not about being brilliant. It does take a certain intelligence,

00:10:00.600 but mostly it's about instincts god he's weirdly insightful about himself it's just like i have

00:10:07.040 like a lizard brain sense of dominance yeah no i think i think that's right i think that he has

00:10:12.240 an understanding that he's not like a a particularly smart guy yeah you know he says it's in the genes

00:10:18.160 he's said that in like various different contexts before it feels like something that his dad told

00:10:22.380 him when he was young yeah you could even say it goes all the way back to sir francis galton so i

00:10:26.540 I want to go through his little rules for dealmaking, most of which are sort of self-explanatory.

00:10:31.500 He says, think big, protect the downside and the upside will follow.

00:10:36.020 Maximize your options, know your market, use your leverage, enhance your location, get the word out, fight back, deliver the goods, contain the costs and have fun.

00:10:48.140 Oh, God. Is enhance your location like don't meet on their home turf?

00:10:52.320 No, enhance your location is his sort of response to the idea that in real estate, it's location, location, location.

00:11:00.340 Oh.

00:11:00.800 He's sort of saying that's not actually true.

00:11:02.820 You can, like, make your location better.

00:11:05.400 You can improve it materially or you can just do PR.

00:11:09.580 It's actually not paying contractors, not paying contractors, not paying contractors.

00:11:13.660 So some of these are, you know, generic, like whatever.

00:11:17.200 Think big.

00:11:17.920 We're not going to go through them all.

00:11:19.220 but there are some threads I want to pull at because some of them are very distinctly Trump

00:11:23.540 and I think do help explain his success in the real estate game. He says protect the downside

00:11:29.240 and the upside will follow. This is interesting because I think it's something that Trump did do

00:11:33.500 well, although it was a lesson that he only learned a few years after publishing the book.

00:11:38.740 So I think everyone kind of knows that Trump's ventures into the casino business were fairly

00:11:43.500 catastrophic right he finances them with junk debt probably built too many too quickly he's

00:11:49.360 like betting on the revitalization of atlantic city funny story at one point he was about to

00:11:54.360 be late on a debt payment so his dad had a flunky buy three million dollars in chips at the taj

00:12:00.800 mahal to like illegally infuse the place with enough cash to make the payment is that illegal

00:12:06.320 yeah it's uh it's uh like an off the books loan basically mr lawyer over here okay that's not

00:12:11.800 just my opinion the government said that that was okay find them i just assume every type of

00:12:16.900 lawyer just knows all of the laws so the taj mahal files for bankruptcy in 1991 trump plaza in 92

00:12:24.620 and it's actually like quite devastating for trump financially not only were trump companies

00:12:30.660 in the whole three billion dollars and change but he had personally guaranteed nearly a billion of

00:12:38.900 that. Oh, OK. The reason that Trump got in that hole was basically because he wanted to expand

00:12:43.160 too quickly. And in the sort of like heat of all that expansion, he's like, all right, I'll guarantee

00:12:48.860 that debt. Right. So he's like assuring his business partners that worse come to worse,

00:12:54.480 they can come after him. Right. He's like, this is how confident I am in the deal. Like I've got

00:12:58.020 personal skin in the game. Right. So it's a way of getting financing. And so as part of the deal

00:13:04.100 that he strikes with his creditors in bankruptcy he delays all of his personal obligations to pay

00:13:09.720 off the debt and from there on out he stopped personally guaranteeing large amounts of debt

00:13:14.580 and let all of these corporate entities eat the risk so in the mid-90s he's using company money

00:13:22.720 to like pay off his personal debts which you can do legally basically like trump had the company

00:13:28.820 buy properties that he owed money on, thereby sort of absorbing his debts. And the result of

00:13:35.260 all this maneuvering in general is that when the companies get hit by bankruptcy, for example,

00:13:41.420 Trump himself isn't very affected. It's the contractors and the shareholders and the

00:13:46.900 employees who get hurt. So credit to Trump for being honest here. This is, in fact, the reason

00:13:52.280 that he's still rich, right? There is a sort of snake-like intelligence in this. I mean, a lot of

00:13:57.060 this is just stuff that rich people do it's like the story of the structures that insulate rich

00:14:03.060 people you know like the fact that you can lose billions of dollars and still be rich despite

00:14:09.540 never having that money right it's like a product of the system that we've created right it's like

00:14:14.720 you know that's the cost of like fostering entrepreneurship or whatever right and there

00:14:20.620 are some people that just like latch on to that structure more aggressively than others and trump

00:14:25.200 is just a good example of someone who you know bled it dry right and it's an example of america's

00:14:31.100 like reverse spider-man principle where it's like with great power comes less and less responsibility

00:14:35.700 right so one thing you'll notice very quickly when you're reading the section and the book

00:14:41.520 generally is that even in the 80s trump's critics occupy like a way too large portion of his head

00:14:48.400 space oh yeah he says the other people i don't take too seriously are the critics except when

00:14:53.540 they stand in the way of my projects in my opinion they mostly write to impress each other

00:14:57.880 and they're just as swayed by fashions as anyone else one week it's spare glass towers they're

00:15:03.020 praising to the skies the next week they've rediscovered old and they're celebrating detail

00:15:07.060 and ornamentation what very few of them have is any feeling for what the public wants which is

00:15:12.760 why if these critics ever tried to become developers they'd be terrible failures who is

00:15:17.480 he even talking about here that's what's funny about this section is like now when he talks

00:15:21.320 about his haters he's talking about like the media and liberals and like democratic politicians but

00:15:26.300 at this point it's just like the new york times architectural critic so he has like all these

00:15:31.360 complaints about critics and then a couple paragraphs later he says i'm not going to kid

00:15:35.620 you it's also nice to get good reviews oh well it's so transparent you know he's just like first 1.00

00:15:41.460 of all these guys they don't know what the fuck they're talking about they're a bunch of fucking 0.99

00:15:44.360 losers second of all please like my buildings one of the sort of darkly fascinating things about 1.00

00:15:50.040 trump to me is that he does seem to judge other people exclusively on whether they're nice to him 0.92

00:15:56.860 right it's just like well how can you be saying that this person's a dictator they said nice

00:15:59.800 things to me i feel like this is why people think that he's a narcissist right because like he he's

00:16:03.840 definitely has that i also think this is the biggest mistake democrats made right away they

00:16:08.560 should have just been like trump rules you know if you just put me in a room with trump uh over

00:16:14.300 the course of his presidency by the end of it i could have had him just like voting for you know

00:16:18.720 Medicare for all. Right. There is something interesting about these guys where they're

00:16:21.700 actually quite easy to manipulate. Right. He has no like lasting beliefs other than like

00:16:26.080 racial grievances. Clearly, this this conversation sort of feeds into how in the book he talks

00:16:31.600 pretty openly and extensively about manipulating the media. It does sort of make it clear that

00:16:36.920 he courts controversy on purpose. Right. Which I think we sort of I think most people had a sense

00:16:41.680 of. But he talks about how he was criticized in the press for destroying some sculptures when he

00:16:46.740 was building trump tower and how the bad press actually drove up sales right yeah he also has

00:16:52.740 fight back as one of his elements of deal making and what's interesting is when he articulates why

00:16:58.240 he does it it's sort of just like well i'm getting my view out there like they get to say what they

00:17:03.420 want to say why can't i say what i want to say which is an interesting justification it's not 0.98

00:17:09.180 exactly strategic necessarily right it's just like well fuck them one of my like enduring beliefs 0.97

00:17:15.220 about trump is that i i don't think he's capable of a lot of strategic thought i think people people 0.98

00:17:20.180 will often do this thing where they're like he's trying to distract us from whatever he'll do like

00:17:23.920 some dumb tweet like he's trying to distract us from the muslim ban or something i really don't

00:17:27.820 think that he engages in strategic thinking that much i think it's mostly just like running on 0.74

00:17:33.620 instinct i want to push back a little bit against that because i think that part of this section of

00:17:38.680 the book reveals that there's a little more to it than that like for example he talks about

00:17:43.300 embellishing um let me send you something here okay he says the final key to the way i promote

00:17:49.580 is bravado i play to people's fantasies people may not always think big themselves but they can

00:17:54.860 still get very excited by those who do people want to believe that something is the biggest

00:17:59.000 and greatest and the most spectacular i call it truthful hyperbole it's an innocent form of

00:18:03.800 exaggeration and a very effective form of promotion yeah this is his thing of like we're

00:18:08.460 gonna have the best health care plan or whatever like you just say these superlatives constantly

00:18:11.880 So he admits to stuff in the book that's like basically fraud.

00:18:15.920 Like at one point, at one point he has construction crews pretend to do work to convince the Holiday Inn board that like construction is moving along.

00:18:24.800 Oh, my God.

00:18:25.240 And he's like bragging about this in the book.

00:18:26.660 Right.

00:18:26.820 He's just like saying it in the book.

00:18:28.660 But my point is that I think that you leave this early part of the book being like, OK, he's actually doing a lot of this stuff a little more consciously than it might seem.

00:18:38.420 And just like you, I went into this basically believing that Trump is sort of a collection of impulses more than more than a guy.

00:18:48.040 But I think you can see in The Art of the Deal that there's a little more to it than that.

00:18:51.180 He's more purposeful than he sometimes appears, or at least at one point this was purposeful.

00:18:55.880 And maybe now it's just purely, you know, purely reflex.

00:18:58.920 I agree that people often ascribe way too much strategy to him.

00:19:03.680 Like he's not trying to distract you from the Muslim man. 0.97

00:19:06.400 But I do think that he elevated the Muslim ban because he knew that that was going to

00:19:10.860 get headlines.

00:19:11.800 Well, I do wonder like how much of this is kind of conditioned to he just starts lying

00:19:16.920 and then he's like, wait a minute, this works.

00:19:18.620 Yeah.

00:19:18.800 This is another example of like how power works.

00:19:20.800 I think all of us do this where you sort of test like, OK, what can I get away with with

00:19:24.300 my boss?

00:19:24.840 Whatever.

00:19:25.340 Everyone does this.

00:19:26.560 But like when you're powerful and you're insulated from any form of accountability,

00:19:31.360 there's no reason for you ever to stop doing this.

00:19:33.660 It's only escalation, especially as your wealth and power grows and you're more surrounded

00:19:38.140 by like toadies and other forms of reward.

00:19:41.140 You can sort of see the psychology of someone who lies a little bit, gets rewarded, lies

00:19:47.260 a little bit more, gets rewarded.

00:19:48.720 And it eventually builds to a point where like you lose an election and then you're

00:19:52.720 just like, I won the election.

00:19:54.960 And like everyone around you is like, yeah, you did.

00:19:58.860 I can't even say that I wouldn't do that.

00:20:01.020 Yeah. Like, you know, you're just like playing a game with someone and you lose and you're like, I won.

00:20:05.000 And everyone in the room is like, you won, sir.

00:20:07.460 I can't tell you for sure that I wouldn't do that.

00:20:09.720 Also, this is the same mechanism by which our episodes keep getting longer. 1.00

00:20:12.760 I'm like, you fucking weirdos. I wasn't a 115. Let's try 120. 0.99

00:20:16.180 OK, 130. It's all an experiment.

00:20:18.540 No one's been like, hey, tone it down, Mike.

00:20:20.720 All right. Let's talk deals, baby.

00:20:22.480 Deals. The majority of the book.

00:20:24.320 It's just him talking about deals.

00:20:25.620 And it's interesting to see how he talked about them in retrospect and what he thought he was going to accomplish at the time.

00:20:32.920 I think most people's knowledge of Trump's business dealings is pretty vague in general.

00:20:37.540 And that's certainly where I was.

00:20:39.720 I'm not even sure that I know what like real estate development is.

00:20:43.600 That's a very funny part of the book because like my dad was a contractor.

00:20:47.880 I wasn't that close to like the industry.

00:20:50.800 I think you could just read the whole book and not know what Donald Trump's job is.

00:20:55.060 Yeah. Because like he's not doing the actual building. Right. That gets like contracted out. Right. He's not really doing the financing. Right. He gets financing from elsewhere. All he is really is someone who like expedites things and make sure that things are moving along.

00:21:11.240 Right. It's almost like a weird middleman thing where he's like connecting like the money people to the architects, to the contractors.

00:21:17.180 And he does promotion.

00:21:18.260 Yeah. And then promotes it.

00:21:19.280 But yeah, it is sort of like a fake job in the sense that like he's not really creating anything.

00:21:25.660 You know, he's just sort of he's just sort of making sure that things are flowing.

00:21:29.180 A thousand voices just screamed out in anger at a podcaster saying that someone else has a fake job.

00:21:34.280 The whole world.

00:21:35.280 Oh, Peter, I don't know.

00:21:37.080 We are artists and and also scientists.

00:21:42.240 Scholars and statesmen.

00:21:43.580 It's the opposite.

00:21:44.280 It's the opposite of a fake job.

00:21:45.680 No one is creating more than we are.

00:21:48.680 So, all right, I want to start with the most emblematic deal.

00:21:53.840 Have you ever heard of Trump City?

00:21:55.700 Oh, my God.

00:21:57.080 No, but it sounds like Joe Blutzig from Arrested Development.

00:22:01.200 So this is a great introductory story for 1980s Donald Trump.

00:22:05.980 Everyone under the age of 50 I spoke to had never heard of this.

00:22:09.700 Everyone I spoke to who was like a boomer who lived in New York at the time remembers this vividly.

00:22:14.880 Yeah.

00:22:15.060 There was a great Politico piece from a few years ago about this by Michael Cruz that I'm cribbing from quite a bit.

00:22:21.160 Oh, there was a video about plagiarism recently, so we need to make sure that we –

00:22:24.040 That's why I'm – usually I would not credit someone.

00:22:26.300 Yeah, usually just read it verbatim.

00:22:28.380 I've pieced together a story from history.

00:22:32.200 So, all right. In the 1970s, Trump is like an up-and-coming real estate developer, mostly known because he's the son of Fred Trump, who was a prominent developer specializing in subsidized housing.

00:22:45.720 Fred brings Donald on board basically right after college, makes him president of the organization by the time he's like 25 in 1971.

00:22:54.600 He's working alongside his father. He's also trying to make a name for himself.

00:22:58.140 And, you know, depending on how much armchair psychology you want to do, probably trying to impress his dad.

00:23:03.980 So in the mid 70s, a company called Penn Central Railroads is in bankruptcy and its various properties around New York City are being offloaded.

00:23:15.440 Some of them are in prominent locations.

00:23:17.100 So they're looking for like a developer with political connections.

00:23:21.240 Trump is looking to make a name for himself.

00:23:24.020 It's a good match.

00:23:24.860 He gets the option to develop three properties.

00:23:29.720 One is the dilapidated Commodore Hotel over Grand Central.

00:23:34.280 He turns that into the Grand Hyatt Hotel, which it still is today.

00:23:38.980 Second location is a set of old rail yards on the west side in Midtown.

00:23:44.380 He sells that to the government so that they can build the Javits Convention Center, which he would include in his photo insert and complain about. 0.98

00:23:52.040 Which famously sucks shit because Trump wasn't involved. 0.97

00:23:54.180 The third property is another set of old rail yards, these on the Upper West Side. 0.99

00:24:00.020 Trump develops these like big grandiose plans for this plot on the Upper West Side.

00:24:05.660 And if we fast forward a bit, this notoriously powerful local community board, Community

00:24:10.200 Board 7, scuttles the plans.

00:24:12.500 They're not going to let it happen.

00:24:13.660 He gives up.

00:24:14.480 Someone else buys the plot.

00:24:16.160 But by the mid 80s, it's still not developed.

00:24:19.220 And Trump swoops in to buy it.

00:24:21.240 Trump, at this point, he's at the height of his success in his real estate career, right?

00:24:25.480 He developed the Grand Hyatt.

00:24:26.940 He developed the Trump Tower at about the same time, a string of other properties, too.

00:24:31.340 He's just started to branch out into Atlantic City.

00:24:33.360 He's opening his first couple of casinos.

00:24:35.320 He's getting tons of press coverage, right?

00:24:37.640 The New York Times is describing him as like a modern iteration of Robert Moses, what all that entails.

00:24:44.720 We're also coming out of an era where the city struggled financially.

00:24:48.440 New York nearly went bankrupt in the mid-70s.

00:24:50.800 So Trump is sort of a symbol of the city's rebound for better or for worse.

00:24:56.080 Right.

00:24:56.420 And according to a lot of reporting and contemporaneous accounts, Trump thought that this plot of land on the west side was going to be his crown jewel.

00:25:04.920 He was going to do something like 8000 apartment units, a massive shopping mall, a hotel, parking garages, parks and the center of it, a hundred and fifty story tower, which would have been the tallest building in the world.

00:25:18.960 And what is he going to call it, Peter?

00:25:20.100 Well, initially, he calls it Television City because he wants to lure NBC to move their

00:25:26.080 studios to the complex.

00:25:27.720 And this is basically where the book leaves off.

00:25:29.860 That's like he's in the midst of this planning.

00:25:31.840 He's like, yeah, this is going to be great.

00:25:33.520 Lots of people have complaints about this proposal.

00:25:36.380 Architectural critics hate it.

00:25:38.020 People are concerned that it's like a walled off city within New York, which Trump himself

00:25:42.440 like sort of admits he's like, you know, it's the mid 80s.

00:25:45.840 He's capitalizing on fears about crime and safety.

00:25:47.940 Yeah. And he's offering wealthy people like an oasis, right?

00:25:51.960 Yeah. But you'll have a mall. You'll have your tall buildings. You don't have to even leave.

00:25:55.980 Yes. All of the urban vibrancy of Saudi Arabia.

00:25:58.760 Community Board 7 once again does not like it. And the wealthy and powerful and often famous locals don't like it. 1.00

00:26:05.860 Just say elderly gays. This is taking forever. 1.00

00:26:08.580 They start organizing. They get like celebrities like Jerry Seinfeld and others to raise money for lawyers.

00:26:15.480 OK. They also brought like Betty Friedan in. What? Like the coalition of people who like stood against Trump on this is fucking hilarious, dude. It's like. Yeah. All of these like 80s New York sort of weirdos. The low rise mystique. They have a very powerful ally. Mayor Ed Koch does not like Trump. Famous elderly gay.

00:26:35.140 refuses to give him any tax breaks and not only that he gives tax breaks to nbc to keep them in 0.74

00:26:42.100 rockefeller center so they don't leave for trump's new location once nbc is out trump eventually

00:26:49.660 changes the proposed name to trump city okay he's sort of like a standstill he's butting up against

00:26:56.200 all these rich folks and he sort of veers off into other ventures he buys the plaza hotel for

00:27:01.120 like 400 million dollars financed by debt, buys the Taj Mahal by issuing like 700 million dollars

00:27:08.300 in junk bonds. You know, this is sort of what we touched on earlier. This is how he like gets into

00:27:13.300 severe debt. And that really weakens his hand in Trump's city. He's sort of in a position where

00:27:18.140 he needs to do something. His other properties are bleeding money. The interest rates are

00:27:23.800 fucking crazy on his debt. And so what ends up happening is he's basically forced to accept this 0.96

00:27:29.260 very modest proposal put together by some like community organizations called riverside south

00:27:35.620 which is what it's still called it's just a bunch of nice little buildings and like the weird

00:27:39.640 anti-climax to the story is that like trump goes into a meeting sees their proposal and they're 0.98

00:27:45.180 ready for him to be like get the fuck out of here i'm gonna build something disgusting here

00:27:49.020 and instead he's like i love it let's do it so a couple a couple things here one is i was reading 0.96

00:27:54.260 this. And it's not the only time in the book, but it's, you know, one of a few times where you're

00:27:59.180 like, wow, the rich weirdos in the Upper West Side are the most powerful people in the world.

00:28:05.680 Yeah, we're currently struggling to preserve American democracy. But one thing we don't

00:28:09.980 struggle to preserve in this country is the views of bodies of water from rich people's apartments.

00:28:14.820 The story of Trump is really the story of like the media creation of Trump. And this sort of

00:28:19.880 like puts his name on the map, I think, for the median New Yorker. In the late 70s, early 80s,

00:28:26.500 he goes from just being this like rich kid with connections to the most talked about developer

00:28:32.760 in New York City, in large part because of this deal where he just gets the option to develop

00:28:38.300 these properties and combining that with someone who clearly likes to self-promote, right?

00:28:43.980 Yeah.

00:28:44.160 Building a tower, what am I going to call it? What else would I call it? Trump Tower, right?

00:28:47.980 Sure, yeah.

00:28:48.480 It's a big grotesque thing. 0.99

00:28:49.600 He's got the – and he's – his style is like ostentatious, you know, like tacky as shit. 0.98

00:28:55.600 By the way, there are a couple of points in the book where he actually calls someone else's work tacky. 0.98

00:29:00.240 And he's like, Jesus Christ, what did it look like?

00:29:02.680 He's like a gold toilet, really?

00:29:04.580 Isn't that a little much?

00:29:05.700 He talks about this in the book.

00:29:07.240 His ambition brought a lot of headlines because he would just be like, I'm going to build the tallest building in the world and it's going to be in New York City.

00:29:13.140 He is a kind of self-made man in like the most like parentheses derogatory way. 0.96

00:29:18.480 That he just, like, he invented himself as a fucking celebrity despite never really doing anything. 0.99

00:29:24.120 Exactly. 0.99

00:29:24.720 Self-promotion doesn't work on its own.

00:29:26.300 He's not standing on a street corner shouting into a megaphone about his sweet tower, right?

00:29:31.540 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:29:32.280 He's manipulating press members whose job is to not be subject to manipulation.

00:29:37.240 Right, right, right.

00:29:37.860 This is the whole job. 0.99

00:29:38.700 If we're going to have, like, quote, unquote, savvy journalists, this is the shit they need to be savvy about. 0.97

00:29:43.320 The fact that a guy can be like, I'm going to build the tallest building in the world. 0.96

00:29:47.100 and basically get absolutely nowhere.

00:29:50.480 But like my parents still remember it.

00:29:53.120 You know what I mean?

00:29:53.800 It also shows that like in one of the few times

00:29:55.980 that people stood up to him,

00:29:57.680 he just like took it and moved on.

00:29:59.240 That's actually a lesson you can learn from the book 1.00

00:30:02.220 or at least reading about the shit 1.00

00:30:04.260 that he talks about in the book. 0.99

00:30:05.900 There's another example of people standing up

00:30:08.160 to Donald Trump.

00:30:09.360 This is 100 Central Park South.

00:30:12.060 This is one of the first bouts of bad press

00:30:14.600 Trump ever got.

00:30:15.700 It's 1981.

00:30:16.300 He buys a couple of buildings right along Central Park, the Barbizon Hotel and 100 Central Park South, which is a residential building. 0.80

00:30:24.760 His plan is to demolish the buildings and replace them with some luxury monstrosity for rich perverts.

00:30:31.820 The problem is that 100 Central Park South is a rent controlled building, meaning that the like 60 or so tenants there were paying like well below market in a beautiful location.

00:30:43.140 And therefore, they are extremely inclined not to leave.

00:30:47.600 They lawyer up and things get very ugly very quickly.

00:30:52.480 And one of my favorite parts of the book is reading Trump's description of how this happened

00:30:57.480 and then going to the public record and finding out what actually happened.

00:31:02.100 So I'm going to send you something.

00:31:04.540 You know, the basics of what's happening here is Trump wants these people out so he can

00:31:07.600 demolish the building and they want to stay, right?

00:31:09.600 Okay, so he says,

00:31:39.600 Nor would I have done it for practical reasons.

00:31:41.840 I buy buildings in my own name and I have a reputation to uphold. 0.98

00:31:45.800 This guy's not doing the truckload of junkies and prostitutes. 0.97

00:31:49.040 You know what? 0.95

00:31:49.260 This is a whole paragraph being like, look, if I were a bad guy, maybe here's what I would have done.

00:31:54.820 Yeah, yeah.

00:31:55.280 This is like the Uber driver that I had that was like, some Uber drivers sell Coke.

00:32:00.520 You know, I don't know.

00:32:01.440 Some people are out here.

00:32:03.420 Can't say who.

00:32:04.420 He goes on to say,

00:32:05.560 The tenants at 100 Central Park South got an abundance of heat and plenty of hot water.

00:32:10.900 What I didn't do was run 100 Central Park South as if it were a white glove Park Avenue building.

00:32:17.360 The rent roll, which barely covered my basic expenses, simply couldn't support luxuries.

00:32:22.520 Nor did tenants paying tiny below market rents have any right to expect them.

00:32:27.640 Okay, this is like I'm a slub lord.

00:32:29.540 Yeah, yeah.

00:32:31.240 I didn't provide luxury services, guys.

00:32:34.080 Right.

00:32:34.500 Right. He's trying to tell a story of like, look, I didn't do shady things to harass them out, but they pay below market rents, which only gives me so much money.

00:32:45.620 So I had to lower the quality of services.

00:32:48.760 No choice.

00:32:49.300 He claims that he basically just like reduced some basic services, made the doormen dress in more casual uniforms to save on dry cleaning, replaced the light bulbs with lower wattage bulbs.

00:33:01.600 And that's basically it.

00:33:02.540 This is like you listening to Yasha Monk's anecdotes of like, they're segregating the kids. 0.93

00:33:06.660 And you're like, all right, let's just get to the part where we find out what really fucking happened. 0.73

00:33:10.180 What do we know about this?

00:33:11.740 Well, look, if you believe the lawsuits filed by both New York City and New York State, what Trump actually did was threaten the tenants with imminent demolition, drastically decrease essential services, persistently delay in repairing defective conditions with life-threatening potential,

00:33:30.840 and instruct employees to obtain information about the private lives and sex habits of tenants. 0.99

00:33:38.840 Holy shit. 0.99

00:33:39.640 Yeah, that's based on testimony from the superintendent who said someone from the management company that Trump hired, 0.99

00:33:45.080 which, by the way, Trump says in the book specialized in relocating tenants.

00:33:50.540 Asked the superintendent to spy on the tenants.

00:33:52.960 The superintendent's like, no, I'm not going to do that.

00:33:55.500 And the guy goes, what, are you a born again Christian?

00:33:57.660 how is that the one time you don't use the jersey accent so to give some specifics the previous

00:34:04.800 owners of the building had allowed tenants to make renovations including things like knocking

00:34:09.940 down walls in some cases some tenants had done it in some cases like decades prior like people

00:34:15.340 there were people whose like parents lived there and they had inherited it and their parents had

00:34:19.960 made renovations right trump demands that they undo the renovations in 12 days or be evicted oh

00:34:25.980 Like we're talking about walls that would need to be replaced, right?

00:34:29.440 The tenants claimed that he turned off hot water and heat during the winter, stopped all repairs, allowed a rodent infestation.

00:34:36.500 One elderly woman with emphysema said that they did construction that filled her apartment with dust.

00:34:41.600 He tried to evict a tenant for nonpayment of rent when it turns out the guy had in fact paid.

00:34:46.720 Oh, that happened to me once.

00:34:47.540 There was another tenant that they tried to evict, but they didn't give adequate notice to him, the legally required notice.

00:34:54.840 Here's what Trump says about that.

00:34:56.400 He says, in another situation, we failed to give a tenant sufficient legal notice of an

00:35:01.440 impending eviction proceeding.

00:35:03.340 Our case was legitimate, but the court ruled that we should have known the law had been

00:35:06.720 changed recently to require longer notice.

00:35:09.480 Was it a legitimate case or did you not give him the legally required notice?

00:35:13.520 You know what I mean?

00:35:14.520 When you're reading this section, you very quickly realize that what actually happened

00:35:18.020 here is that Trump got a shitload of bad press for all of this.

00:35:20.640 And this is like his effort to do damage control.

00:35:23.160 Let me tell you my side of the story, right?

00:35:25.760 What happened was that the tenants got a lawyer and sued Trump.

00:35:29.140 Trump sues them back for over $100 million.

00:35:35.540 For what?

00:35:36.460 What did he sue them for?

00:35:37.480 He alleged that the tenants and the lawyers were extorting him, that the lawyer was engaging

00:35:42.580 in racketeering in violation of the RICO predicates.

00:35:46.340 Nice.

00:35:47.220 That suit gets tossed out pretty quickly.

00:35:49.100 Here is what stirs up the most controversy.

00:35:53.160 goodness. We're at the controversial part. Okay. He says, I had more than a dozen vacant apartments

00:35:58.980 at 100 Central Park South. Because I still plan to demolish the building, I had no intention of

00:36:03.720 filling the apartments with permanent tenants. Why not? I thought, offer them to the city for

00:36:08.000 use by the homeless on a temporary basis. He's doing the truckload. I'm not going to pretend

00:36:14.460 that it bothered me to imagine the very wealthy tenants of 100 Central Park South having to live

00:36:19.700 alongside people less fortunate than themselves for a while.

00:36:23.120 I genuinely felt it was a shame not to make use of a few vacant departments when the streets

00:36:27.560 were filled with homeless people.

00:36:29.140 Oh, out of the goodness of his heart.

00:36:30.920 He's trying to cast them as like wealthy elites.

00:36:32.980 Some of them actually were quite rich.

00:36:35.200 Others were elderly folks on Social Security.

00:36:38.040 So he tries to like paint this picture in the book of rich people who didn't want to

00:36:43.580 move because they had it too good.

00:36:45.180 And that's not like a totally unfair statement about some of the folks there.

00:36:49.700 But even within the book, he admits that some people there were just not quite well off. 0.95

00:36:56.160 It's very funny to be like, now, what some slumlords do is they bring in a truckload of undesirables and then deep breath. 0.97

00:37:06.140 So I brought in a truckload of undesirables. 0.99

00:37:08.760 Like you didn't have to say the first part.

00:37:11.920 So Trump takes out newspaper advertisements saying that he would house homeless people in the building's vacant units.

00:37:18.600 Obviously, like everyone from the tenants to the press just immediately calls this out as a gross ploy.

00:37:25.560 You know, he's just leveraging homeless people to scare off the tenants.

00:37:28.940 He quickly follows it up with this paragraph.

00:37:32.520 He says, it didn't help make my offer seem sincere when one columnist wrote a story saying that I'd refused a subsequent plea by a group representing Polish refugees seeking to use the apartments.

00:37:43.920 In fact, by then I'd had second thoughts about the whole concept. 0.60

00:37:47.960 My attorneys had researched the situation and determined that if I permitted anyone to move into the apartments, even on a temporary basis, I'd have a very hard time ever getting them out legally.

00:37:57.320 So here's what's happening. After he takes out the newspaper ad, a group representing Polish refugees says, hey, we could use the apartments for refugees. 1.00

00:38:06.840 And Trump declines. And the reason that he's giving for that is that he learns that the homeless folks might end up having tenants rights themselves.

00:38:16.880 Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. 0.95

00:38:17.640 and therefore he's like well then fuck it right so like it's very funny to me that he 0.98

00:38:24.540 frames it like this in the book like bro you can say whatever you want it's your book no one's 1.00

00:38:30.180 fucking fact-checking this and even in his telling he sounds like an absolute fucking scumbag 0.99

00:38:36.240 but then that's also part of his weird psychology too right it's almost like 1.00

00:38:41.080 he doesn't seem to understand like how like repellent he is as a person i think he also

00:38:46.840 has a thing in his brain where business is like a justification for an enormous amount of

00:38:53.400 misconduct. To be fair, that is the ideology of like our entire economy. So he's not wrong in

00:38:59.280 thinking this. Yeah. So at the end of all this, the tenants basically successfully hold out and

00:39:04.280 Trump still ends up making money because the property value basically just goes up

00:39:08.900 while he's holding on to the building. And so he's like, it was a winner, you know,

00:39:13.160 Like, I did great just through no fault of his own at all.

00:39:16.300 Right.

00:39:16.440 Just absolutely did nothing that he's at the end of the day.

00:39:18.940 A lot of his early success, especially, is like, well, he's buying New York City real

00:39:22.700 estate in the late 70s and early 80s.

00:39:25.020 So, like, even when things go wrong, you're fine.

00:39:28.400 Right.

00:39:28.760 This is why, like, every boomer thinks they're a financial genius.

00:39:31.840 Right.

00:39:32.420 There's also a very Trumpian thing in this chapter, which is that he spends several pages

00:39:37.920 just railing against rent control.

00:39:39.800 Oh, yeah, of course.

00:39:40.600 That it, like, tends to benefit the already well-off, that it restricts housing supply.

00:39:45.280 This is what more libertarian-minded folks say about rent control, right?

00:39:48.720 And what makes it so Trumpy in my mind is that, like, he doesn't have a coherent ideology,

00:39:53.820 right?

00:39:54.280 His beliefs are just sort of like a patchwork of grievances that he has personally experienced,

00:40:00.420 right?

00:40:00.720 So, like, it's not as though he opposes rent control because he's a free market guy and

00:40:06.940 this slots into that framework, right?

00:40:08.860 Like he opposes rent control because it's been an impediment to him personally. 1.00

00:40:12.140 Yeah, he's a fucking landlord. 0.99

00:40:13.160 That's why I feel like Trump is like the quintessential reactionary, right? 1.00

00:40:15.740 Because he's really only engaging with what's directly in front of him.

00:40:19.940 Like every grievance feels sort of compartmentalized, you know?

00:40:23.080 This is like us being in support of a law that makes it illegal to write emails complaining

00:40:26.980 about other people's upspeak.

00:40:28.640 Like, look, just my principled beliefs lead me to this conclusion.

00:40:33.220 I don't do that.

00:40:34.060 so he does talk about other deals in this book they're not quite as interesting he he loves

00:40:40.880 talking about woman's rink the ice skating rink in central park because basically the government

00:40:47.260 was handling it they were doing a terrible job over budget too slow he takes over does it quickly

00:40:53.700 does it under budget he evicts a bunch of the kids that are skating there 0.99

00:40:57.200 Get the fuck out of here. 1.00

00:40:58.360 Bring a bunch of homeless skaters. 1.00

00:40:59.740 Even when he sort of fails objectively to achieve his goals, he sort of just sort of

00:41:05.220 pivots and reframes it at the end.

00:41:07.220 And that's something that, like, for example, with Trump City, people have kind of credited

00:41:11.280 him for it.

00:41:11.780 Like, he will pivot if he realizes he's hit a wall.

00:41:15.300 I do wonder if that instinct of his has faded over time.

00:41:18.900 It's hard to tell because he doesn't admit defeat anywhere, right?

00:41:23.580 Yeah.

00:41:23.760 But you can see by his actions that he understands when he's been like outmaneuvered.

00:41:29.140 Right.

00:41:29.280 But I think the fact that he hasn't admitted that he lost the election feels relevant here.

00:41:33.420 Yeah.

00:41:33.520 We've gone from Trump city to Trump country.

00:41:35.400 It's real, real progress.

00:41:36.740 Renaming the whole nation Trump country.

00:41:38.620 I if there was a nationwide referendum, I would vote yes, because I feel like we deserve it.

00:41:43.540 It's accurate, at least.

00:41:44.880 Yeah.

00:41:45.180 This sort of segues into this thought that I had throughout the book about Trump, which

00:41:50.080 is like one of the things that makes him an outlier is that usually when a business guy

00:41:54.220 shows up on the political scene, they're sort of like a libertarian on economic issues,

00:41:59.020 right?

00:41:59.240 They want to like get rid of regulations because for most businessmen, regulations are a big

00:42:04.320 impediment.

00:42:04.800 And one of the first ways that Trump distinguished himself as a presidential candidate was that

00:42:08.640 he didn't do that too much.

00:42:10.320 Instead, he's like talking about a more hawkish trade regime, right?

00:42:13.880 Like a more aggressive government involvement in the economy, which is weird because he

00:42:18.300 does seem to have all the ingredients of an anti-regulation crusader he comes out of like 0.95

00:42:23.520 the most heavily regulated industry right and he's constantly talking about fucking zoning laws that 0.94

00:42:28.940 get in the way and all sorts of shit right but i think what's happening is that he views like 0.95

00:42:33.240 navigating politics and navigating bureaucracy as like part of the game and something that he's good 0.88

00:42:38.520 at his father keep in mind made his bones in federally subsidized housing and on top of that

00:42:44.700 had extensive political connections in new york trump himself received a bunch of government

00:42:50.320 subsidies and tax breaks sort of like built his early career on the back of his dad's political

00:42:55.720 connections and when you read through some of these deals you can see that he takes pride in

00:42:59.660 his ability to like navigate bureaucracy like it was always a running gag that he'd be asked

00:43:05.320 how he was going to solve complex problems and he'd respond that he'd be like hiring the best

00:43:10.920 people, which I thought at the time was just his way of dodging questions. Right. But then you read

00:43:17.640 the book and you're like, actually, I think this is how he thinks problems are solved. Like when

00:43:22.060 he does woman's rink, he like goes to Canada to find people who specialize in making the ice,

00:43:28.660 you know, like he really views problem solving as like you find the best people, you hire them and

00:43:34.120 you put a lot of pressure on them. Right. So a lot of the things that he said in 2016 that previously

00:43:38.960 clocked to me as him just bullshitting now registered to me as him more like honestly 0.57

00:43:44.680 relaying his plan, even if it's just a dumb plan, because like that is that has worked 0.97

00:43:49.820 for him.

00:43:50.280 It's also reminds me of like my career in human rights that what you see in a lot of

00:43:54.120 dictatorships is corruption is basically an opportunity for entrepreneurship that a lot

00:43:58.860 of these like low level civil servants, basically what they do is like, well, I can expedite

00:44:02.560 the permitting process for you.

00:44:04.080 I think Trump like understands this on some level that like if you got rid of these regulations,

00:44:08.520 There's no real reason for a lot of these things to exist.

00:44:10.680 And it basically destroys this like rent-seeking sector of the economy.

00:44:14.940 Yeah, I think it's an interesting angle.

00:44:16.180 I think that Trump doesn't really understand corruption as a concept.

00:44:19.900 Right.

00:44:20.040 The definition of corruption is the use of entrusted power for private gain, which is

00:44:24.480 something Trump did constantly in office, right?

00:44:26.760 Like he's hiring his own children.

00:44:28.240 That's why he sought power, right?

00:44:29.780 In his mind, this all flows naturally.

00:44:32.400 Yeah, exactly.

00:44:33.060 And it's sort of like there's almost like this confusion, like, well, why wouldn't I

00:44:36.640 be using this power for my private gain. Like that's the reason to have the power.

00:44:40.840 Right, right. He struggles to view anything as systemic. And that's why, again, I think he's

00:44:46.420 the quintessential reactionary where almost everything is atomized. So when the zoning

00:44:51.160 board is interfering with his project, the real problem isn't that the zoning board's power is

00:44:56.060 too broad in his mind necessarily. The real problem is that the zoning board doesn't like

00:44:59.720 his project. They're stopping me from getting what I want.

00:45:01.440 Right. And so when our health care system needs work, the problem is you need better people.

00:45:07.740 Everything is compartmentalized. Everything exists in a vacuum. There's no systemic change

00:45:12.520 because there are no systemic problems. The last thing I wanted to talk about is,

00:45:17.380 when I was reading this book, I kept thinking to myself, when did this type of guy become

00:45:21.620 a celebrity? Why did a market for this book even exist? Developing buildings has to be the straight

00:45:27.720 up most boring type of business on earth. Right. Right. I tried to trace the origin of like the

00:45:33.100 celebrity businessman as far as I could. And I honestly can't find a clear lineage. Yeah. Like

00:45:40.080 de Tocqueville was writing about Americans admiration of entrepreneurship in the fucking 0.66

00:45:44.900 1830s, you know, and then like the ultra wealthy families of the Gilded Age had like some level 0.84

00:45:50.860 of celebrity. The first like modern celebrity CEO in the vein of Donald Trump, I think was

00:45:58.840 basically his contemporary Lee Iacocca. Oh, right. GM guy? Chrysler guy? Chrysler, right.

00:46:03.880 He was an executive with Ford. He is well known for developing the Mustang. He has a falling out

00:46:09.700 with whatever Habsburg grandson of Henry Ford is in charge of the company at the time and gets

00:46:16.440 fired he basically becomes famous because he joins chrysler when chrysler is absolutely in the tank

00:46:23.060 getting like government bailouts completely turns the company around not only that but he becomes

00:46:30.160 the public face of the company in a way that was like fairly novel like he was appearing in tv

00:46:35.800 commercials he's making like media appearances on talk shows he is often credited for like the trend

00:46:42.560 of really public-facing CEOs, like Wendy's started featuring Dave Thomas in its commercials,

00:46:48.260 right? And then Microsoft and Bill Gates, like that was sort of a novel thing to just have your

00:46:52.580 CEO be out there. Yeah, Colonel Sanders, Tony the Tiger. And importantly, for our purposes,

00:46:57.360 in 84, he publishes an autobiography titled Iacocca, an autobiography, which is like a

00:47:03.020 best-selling sensation. Trump references Iacocca a bunch in The Art of the Deal. They went into

00:47:08.340 business together on a relatively small property in 1986 so i think it's like safe to say that trump

00:47:15.140 is taking cues from iacocca's celebrity he's certainly like manufacturing celebrity in a way

00:47:22.240 that it feels like people in his position didn't really do before lee iacocca at least not to that

00:47:27.560 extent it's also maybe like the origin story of our show in that what we're documenting is the

00:47:33.560 rise of this kind of ideas industry and like these thought leader dudes that are basically full of 0.97

00:47:38.020 shit, end up selling these airport books. It seems like it's wrapped up in this thing where 0.98

00:47:42.180 it's not enough to be a CEO anymore. All of these fucking guys want to be like influencers. 0.99

00:47:48.160 Right. I also think there's a degree to which these guys learned how easily the business press 0.99

00:47:54.900 is manipulated. Tony Schwartz, the co-author here, is a business journalist. You're a business

00:48:01.200 journalist who's laundering Donald Trump's version of events about his like slumlord behavior.

00:48:08.020 it's just a completely hollow segment of our media and i i feel like trump iacoga jack welch

00:48:17.100 these guys come out of this like 80s milieu that like felt like the golden age of the great 0.92

00:48:23.300 american asshole you know i feel like this whole thing was leading up to you getting that tagline 0.65

00:48:29.260 out that's good the the thought i kept having while reading this book is just like why would 1.00

00:48:34.840 anyone read a book about this fucking guy building buildings yeah it's this combination of trump's 0.98

00:48:41.240 talent for self-promotion and also an american culture and media ecosystem that is ready to just 0.99

00:48:48.880 like swallow it whole it's also dark because this book comes out back when there was at least a case 0.96

00:48:55.420 for donald trump being a successful businessman like he was doing actual business shit whereas 0.73

00:49:00.320 after this book he basically primarily focuses on being a celebrity this book is like the culmination

00:49:05.520 of a period in his life where he believed that he was infallible and that's why things start to

00:49:09.220 unravel because he's he's like oh i can take on a billion dollars in debt to like buy the plaza

00:49:15.200 and a casino all of this starts falling apart house of cards style in the early 90s and he's

00:49:22.820 like oh i need to reevaluate insulate myself and then branch out into just slapping my name on 0.99

00:49:29.900 whatever fucking trash anyone is willing to buy, right? 0.98

00:49:34.000 And none of this seemed to affect his public reputation either. 0.99

00:49:36.460 His reputation was always as like a successful businessman, even though for most of the time 0.97

00:49:40.180 that we knew him as a public figure, he wasn't meaningfully doing business shit. 0.91

00:49:43.760 He was just like licensing his name to stuff. 0.89

00:49:45.360 It seems pretty clear that he's obsessed with the idea of celebrity.

00:49:48.820 And so once he achieves that, why focus on real estate, right?

00:49:52.480 Real estate was a stepping stone to get famous.

00:49:55.300 Yeah. I really believe that his career long trajectory towards the presidency is just because Donald Trump believes that that's the most famous you can be.

00:50:06.620 Yeah. Also, I mean, to me, that's why this is so much more a media failure story than anything else, because, I mean, plenty of people want to become famous. Right.

00:50:15.600 But basically, Trump gets this like media fellatio for years and years and years where 1.00

00:50:20.760 nobody presents him to the public as like just a fucking slumlord asshole. 1.00

00:50:25.760 They present him as like, oh, a successful businessman, like, oh, he's kind of charming 1.00

00:50:28.820 and he makes jokes or whatever.

00:50:30.140 I mean, America's willingness to hoist up wealthy sociopaths and just describe them

00:50:35.900 as brash and eccentric.

00:50:37.300 Telling it like it is.

00:50:38.280 Yeah, right.

00:50:38.880 It really goes to show if you have a certain amount of money, there is no behavior that

00:50:45.200 won't get whitewashed by the press right right if ted bundy was worth like 500 million dollars

00:50:51.460 they'd be like a newsweek piece that's like the millionaire with an interesting view about human

00:50:56.840 life i think to me the most striking thing about going through this book is how early he figured

00:51:01.640 out this media cheat code like you mentioned part of his job as a real estate developer is to promote

00:51:07.800 the buildings yeah you can just say oh we're going to build the tallest building in the world and

00:51:12.160 then get a bunch of headlines and a bunch of attention. And like getting attention is kind

00:51:16.280 of your job in that role. And then it seems like over time, because that's basically the only thing

00:51:21.200 he's ever been good at in his entire life is like getting attention and manipulating the media.

00:51:25.400 The media continues to give him attention, even though getting their attention is kind of his job

00:51:31.020 and is like a way of enriching him. And as politicians have come to resemble celebrities

00:51:36.440 more and more, it sort of makes sense that he would drift into politics.

00:51:40.540 Right.

00:51:40.720 The combination of like the incentives of media and his own weird like personality flaws

00:51:48.080 sort of perfectly collaborated to create this monster that like might end up winning again

00:51:55.180 in 2024.

00:51:55.840 And I look forward to living in 2025 in Trump's America or America by Trump.

00:52:04.240 What do you think sounds better?

00:52:06.440 Ha, ha, ha.

If Books Could Kill - January 11, 2024

The Art of the Deal

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