Last week Jason Gay of the Wall Street Journal had this to say about “Ted Lasso,” an AppleTV comedy he resisted, as did I, until well after its first season was complete:
“Ted Lasso” turns out to be the ideal television distraction for these times, almost a salve, simply for the fact that it radiates a rare commodity in a deeply toxic moment: Optimism.
The show is about a second-tier American college football coach, played by mustachioed “Saturday Night Live” alum Jason Sudeikis, who is hired to run a fictional Premier League football club, AFC Richmond, and set up to fail by the team’s owner.
I avoided the show, like Gay, in expectation of a lot of lame jokes on the differences between football and football, and about tea and bangers and boots. But I gave it a shot over the holidays and I, too, was seduced, from the first episode.
All the lame jokes are there. Every cross-the-pond punchline ever written, before episode four. The optimism is also there, a sunniness jarring amid a pandemic and political and cultural turmoil. What’s missing is credit to that optimism’s source, which is also enjoying a moment right now.
When it comes to radiating optimism, there is nothing like Dale Carnegie’s century-old self-help classic, How to Win Friends and Influence People, which, simultaneously with the applause for Ted Lasso, has climbed back into the Amazon non-fiction top twenty.
I’ve yet to see it mentioned by any of the show’s writers but the influence of Carnegie’s classic on Ted Lasso is unmistakable. The character is drunk on its spirit. It’s as though the writers have the book open in front of them at script meetings.

- Don’t criticize, or complain, or dwell on negatives.
- Smile. Maintain eye contact. Show an honest appreciation of other people, and a genuine interest in them. Remember their names, because people love to hear their own names.
- Encourage people to talk about themselves, and be a good listener. Try to see things through their eyes, and be quick with praise and encouragement.
- Acknowledge your own mistakes, emphatically and quickly. Avoid fights and confrontation. Ask questions rather than make demands. Don’t worry about your own importance; try to make others feel important.
- Remember, a great man shows his greatness by the way he treats little men.
From the first glimpse of Lasso in the show’s pilot, he is smiling. Smiling and dancing with his players, full of joy. Told by a stranger on the plane to London that he’s bound to fail, he smiles and says, “Yup, I’ve heard that before.”
He lands at Heathrow airport, finds the chauffeur holding a “Lasso” card, smiles, locks eyes, asks his name, and shakes hands. He then insists on carrying his own bags and, after Ollie the driver has shown him the sites, thanks him for his consideration.
Arriving at his new stadium, Coach Lasso is run off the turf by the equipment manager who mistakes him for an interloper. Lasso calls this most junior of employees “sir,” apologizes for being on the grass, and asks his name. “No one ever asks me my name,” says the young man who, asked again, coughs up “Nathan.”
“Oh I love that name,” says Lasso, before teasing, “hey, love your hotdogs.”
Nate’s never heard of Nathan’s Hotdogs
“I love this kid,” says Lasso, taking Nate (below) into his inner circle.

If Ted Lasso has a stock phrase, it’s “I appreciate that.” Or, “I appreciate you.” People, said Carnegie, want nothing more than to be appreciated, and Lasso appreciates them all. The buskers on the street, the kids playing football in the park, the talents of the most assholic players on his roster. There are no cracks in his veneer, because it’s not a veneer. It’s all genuine, as Carnegie insisted it be.
How to Win Friends and Influence People has always had detractors. They note that Charles Manson found the book useful. Donald Trump, too. The novelist Sinclair Lewis (not smiling, below) famously called it a manual for con artists, teaching them “how to smile and bob and pretend to be interested in people’s hobbies precisely so that you may screw things out of them.” More mildly, a New Yorker piece two years ago said Carnegie’s “great epiphany is that when you are nice to people they are more likely to be nice back. My kindergarten teacher had covered similar ground.”


Why Amazon won’t rule forever
We’ve talked before about the clutter on Amazon’s site. What began as a simple book retailing operation now sells detergent and gadgets and clothing and everything else under the sun. Finding the books you want is increasingly difficult, and once you find them, you have to wade past Amazon’s preferred formats—ebooks and audiobooks—to find a physical copy, and then there is often a range of options from a range of sellers of the physical copy. These are the 133 current options for Obama’s A Promised Land:
Yes, Amazon’s prices are difficult to beat on bestsellers but it’s a messy and increasingly unpleasant user experience. A friend this week pointed out two other ways in which the mega-retailer is deteriorating.Search for a successful book such as Chris Voss’s Never Split the Difference and up pop seven Never Split the Difference rip-offs, “books” that gut the contents — i.e., steal the intellectual property of — bestsellers. Amazon not only allows these scam artists to list their wares, but its search results push them at buyers:

