The Win Friends and Influence People Expertease

Clare Sera, you are an expert in self-help books. And so I thought we could probe your area. Pardon me? Of expertise. Spelled wrong? Naturally. You're listening to Expertise, spelled wrong. The podcast where the world's most expert experts discuss their areas of expertise expertly. Expert comedy writer Clare Sera and expert comedy writer Danno Sullivan bring their expertise to other unrelated expertises. Ladies and gentlemen, listeners from around the globe, welcome to the podcast Expertise. My guest today is Clare Sera, who has read and analyzed the self-help classic, How to Win Friends and Influence People.

Clare, can I just ask right off the bat, do you have many friends? I have over three friends that I could count on the back of one hand. Three friends in this day and age, Clare, does not seem like a lot. Was that a lot of friends in 1920 when Dale Carnegie wrote his classic self-help book, How to Win Friends and Influence People? Well, that is one of the greatest misconstrued things of the self-help world. Today's social media, Facebook, oh, I have a thousand friends. Instagram, oh, I have 30 friends. Yeah, and what is a friend? Right, what is a friend? And back in the day, one of the things that I agree with, back in the day of Dale Carnegie, a friend was categorized as somebody who would bring you a loaf of bread on a Sunday.

So can I interject there and just ask, is it specifically that, or is that an example of a type of thing a friend would do? Well, it's an example, but it is specific to the time. All right, so out of your three friends, how many have brought you a loaf of bread on a Sunday? Yeah, three, all three of them. That's how I categorize them. It's loaf of bread on a Sunday, bind a wound on a Monday, chat with your dairy man. Tuesday was chat with your dairy man. What was Wednesday? Share a glass of port. Boy, these are wonderful friends. Thursday? Let's not talk to each other.

Because sometimes you need a break from friends, right? Good friends know when to leave other friends alone. Yeah, that's wonderful. Thursday is let's leave each other alone day. Friday, I'm in love. And then Saturday? Saturday is do you have a baby? Do you need a baby? I'd love to come back to that in just a second, but I wanna hear about the end of the week, Sunday. Well, Sunday is bring a loaf of bread day. Oh, right, I completely got caught up. Let's go back to Saturday for just a minute, if we can. Saturday, you said is? Saturday is do you have a baby? Do you need a baby?

Yeah, so what do friends do on Saturday? So if you say, and now we're talking, this is from, you asked me, the 20s and 30s. Oh, yeah. So babies were like the collateral of the day. People didn't really know where babies came from in those days. Because of that, some women had 10 and some women had none. And that's hardly fair. And I think in the name of friendship, it's only decent to share the bounty. That's exactly what would happen on a Saturday. The marketplace at that time, open-air markets full of disease and rats, but also fresh produce. Now, are you referring to babies as fresh produce?

Is that slang? I wasn't, Dano. That would be funny, but that's not. They were babies. They were babies. And it's just that if you had a baby and you would go to market, the sellers would look kindly upon you, maybe give you an extra slice of cheese. You need a baby because then you're able to get those extra benefits that having a baby would instill. That's right, yes, yeah. When do you give the baby back or do you at all? See, this is where there aren't specific rules because friendship has to be a little bit organic. So would babies just pass family to family?

Depending on the market needs. It's where the hand of the market phrase came from. It was actually a baby's hand that that phrase came from, the invisible hand of the market. Yeah, it was originally the tiny hand of the market. And they're so tiny sometimes that they seem invisible. How Keynesian. Yes, it is very, it is Keynesian, Dano. It was started in England. What was, the baby swap? Yes. America adopted it as we adopted so many British customs. And British babies, I'm sure. And so many British babies. A lot of babies did get lost and became unaccounted for during that time because there's a lot of, do you have a baby?

I need a baby. Now I've got three babies. Do you have a baby? I need a baby. I don't need a baby. I think in some ways that's one of the ways that we have made improvements in modern times. I think there's a lot to be said against some modern parenting techniques. But the idea of a parent knowing roughly where the baby is at most times of the day. Yeah. Their ears are tagged now, isn't that right? So. Yes. For easy tracking. Right, right. In fact, with our baby, after we had it tagged, we were so excited to just release it back into the wild. Yeah. So you have other babies, I'm assuming.

Oh yeah, yeah. You didn't need that baby. And I feel like it's part of God's great plan to let these babies go where they're freest and able to most be themselves most naturally. Yes. In our case, it was a marsh. A marsh, interesting. I'm guessing that's where the name Marsha came from. So Dale Carnegie's 1920s self-help classic, How to Win Friends and Influence People, is chock full of other tidbits. Most of them are aimed at getting ahead in the business life. What you've been describing is getting ahead personally. So I felt that, as you know from my book, I am really more interested in the organic nurturing of friendships.

Because I do feel like in this age of social media, we are losing true, deep, reliable friendships that challenge us, that help us grow. And that when we are done with, we can say to their face, be gone thee, be gone thee. Which I keep that from the 1920s. Wow, that's not what I was expecting there. So that's how you end just a conversation, a little chit chat at the coffee shop, or is that the end of a relationship? That's the end of a relationship, which is another thing that we have forgotten the art of how to end a friendship. Why would you end a friendship if it's a friendship?

Sometimes a friendship sails, Dano, when that person is no longer beneficial to you. Perhaps they've lost a job, they've become poor. Perhaps their social views have changed from yours. So you're no longer able to extract a benefit from the relationship. Exactly. And therefore it's no longer a friendship. That's right. Then, I mean, you want to be on a friendship, not the Titanic. Nice. So you had some disagreements with the lifestyle of Dale Carnegie himself, the author of the 1920s classic, How to Win Friends and Influence People. In your counter book, you mentioned, and I quote, Dale Carnegie was a bad, bad person.

Yes. Those are strong words. But I think you misunderstood. You misconstrued the sentence, Dano. He was a great person. He was bad at being bad. I have- Oh, he was a bad, bad person. Yes. Yes. He was a great, good person. Claire, I wish you'd been a little more clear about that in your book because that completely changes my appreciation of your appreciation. Well, and Dale Carnegie, interestingly enough, subscribed to my criteria for friendships, the seven days of friendships, before I had codified them into an actual, you know, metric for friendship. And unfortunately he did keep too many babies.

How did that play out? What was the result of having too many babies? It broke his bank. You may have read that, Dale. I think, are you getting Dale Carnegie mixed up with Andrew Carnegie? I might be, I might be. I didn't do a lot of research on any of the Carnegies. So that would explain chapter 26 of your book. Is it Dale Carnegie or Andrew Carnegie? And that, I have to, that was baffling to me when I got to that chapter. It seems pretty clear that I'm not clear. That I understood, but I had to get a whole second book about Andrew Carnegie to understand your book about Dale Carnegie.

I felt like I was just being honest. It's like, I realized as I came to the end of my book that I, now I wasn't sure anymore. So I just, oh, well, I'll add a chapter where I say, I'm not sure if I have been talking about Dale Carnegie or Andrew Carnegie. Can somebody clear this up? So, and the, my publisher is a friend of mine. Susan Carnegie. Susan Carnegie just published it as I wrote it because she felt as a friend, she didn't want to correct me. That's wonderful. And that explains a lot of the typos and things like that. This brings me to one of the most interesting segments of your expertise, which is your reading at Andrew Carnegie Hall of Dale Carnegie's 1920 self-help classic, How to Win Friends and Influence People.

How did that come about? You're referring to the day I read my book about Dale Carnegie. On the stage at Andrew Carnegie Hall. That was the most thrilling day of my life to date. Absolutely the most thrilling day. And it came about in the oddest of ways, Dano. You were a Rockette for a short while, right? I was, I was a Rockette. Did that have any impact on the event that we're discussing? Well, yes, it did. And what happened was, after the show one night, we were all bathing our legs in ice. That's, you come off stage and just, they have tubs that you just step into and they have ice up to the thigh point because they don't care for any other part of your body.

Your legs are insured when you're a Rockette. I mean, I had boils on my chin. I could not get medical coverage for it. Oh, I wanna hear more. That's for another book, my days as a Rockette. I mean, if it could be shaded with makeup, you're not gonna get it treated by a medical doctor, but anything to do with your legs. Oh boy, put them in ice, give them a massage, take them out for dinner, but I felt like I wasn't there with them. Claire, I have to interrupt and apologize because I was not changing the subject asking about your career as a Rockette, but I realized that I mixed up two things.

That was, the Rockettes are at Radio City Music Hall. And you were reading Dale Carnegie at Andrew Carnegie Hall where there are no Rockettes. So that was fascinating insight to another aspect of another career. We'd love to have you back on. I would love to, I'd love to talk about it in two years when my NDA expires. Oh, very good. Can we leave that in about the boil? Yeah, you can leave that in. But you know, it's funny, Daniel, it's because I had been a Rockette and I was invited over for a glass of port on Wednesday's port night. And I got it wrong. I thought they had said a fortnight from Wednesday.

So I missed the first two Wednesdays, but then I showed up for port on Wednesday night with my friend and she was friends with Andrew Carnegie's manager. Andrew Carnegie's manager, the Scottish tycoon who had died in 1890. Well, she managed his estate. I see, I see. And also booked the hall. So you were on the port side of the hall? Absolutely. And I had not met this woman before, but on this night of port- Your friend, you had not met your friend before? My friend's friend, the manager. She was my friend within two minutes because of course I know how to do that.

I'm a professional. You won her and influenced her? I did, I did. Just like that. And by the end of the night, three bottles in, I was booked to read my book about his book at Carnegie Hall. Now, my mistake, I thought it was Dale Carnegie Hall. Now, the New York Times review of your performance, first of all, it says here, we're not sure if this should be a book review or a concert review. Fair enough. Ms. Sarah's decision to sing the contents of Dale Carnegie's 1920s self-help classic was unusual to say the least. Okay, so that's not an entirely accurate, you know, reviewers, right, critics?

Sure, yeah, yeah. It's not entirely accurate. I did not sing the whole book. I sang every other sentence. Now that, I have to say, as a concert goer, that would put me off a little bit. I wouldn't know, is she gonna speak? Is she gonna sing? How do I know what to expect? This is not someone I want to be friends with. Yes, exactly, exactly. Really? Do you see? Ultimate irony? Yes, absolutely. People got up and walked out of that reading slash concert. So you influenced them to the point that they no longer liked you. So even though you'd lost their friendship, you had exaggerated your influence.

That's exactly right. My knowledgeable guest today has been Claire Sarah, an expert in the 1920s self-help classic by Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People. Claire, you have both won me and influenced me. Tomorrow is Saturday and fingers crossed that someone's gonna knock at the door and ask. Do you want a baby? Do you need a baby? Fingers crossed indeed. And I'd like to thank you for being on today's program. Thank you, Dano. It was a pleasure. The Expertise, spelled wrong, podcast is free. And like the Amish, all are welcome. Be sure to sign up for our email announcements at funnypodcast.com and follow us in your favorite podcast app, like the expert podcast listener we know you are.

I think I pushed the limits of my friendships, but you know, I'm an anthropologist as well as a person. Not to mention a rocket. And a rocket.