Go Help Yourself: A Comedy Self-Help Podcast to Make Life Suck Less · Misty Stinnett & Lisa Linke

RE-RELEASE: How to Win Friends & Influence People by Dale Carnegie

January 7, 2025·53 min·3 clips

Carnegie’s “dramatize your ideas” advice turns into pennies, socks, and factory demonstrations.

Lisa and Misty reopen their review of How to Win Friends and Influence People. The episode leans on the show's familiar split: Lisa says she hates self-help as a general rule, while Misty keeps searching for the nugget of wisdom in everything, and that tension carries the whole conversation. Smiling is the main target. The hosts spend a long stretch on the book's principle about smiling, reacting to how it treats a simple expression as something that can shape customer service, complaints, and business relationships. The examples keep rolling in. They talk through how a smiling customer service representative can change the tone of an interaction, how people can lose huge clients by refusing to smile, and how often the book repeats the point. Names come next. The episode lingers on Carnegie's advice about using people's names, with the hosts riffing on how strange it sounds when someone pushes too hard on personal address in ordinary conversation. A coworker bit lands too. Misty tells a story about asking a coworker what book she was reading, only for him to turn around with the biggest smile he could manage and keep it there for the rest of the day. The episode stays playful. The hosts joke through the material, but the criticism remains grounded in what the advice assumes and when it starts to feel unnatural. The result is a mix of skepticism and real usefulness: the book gets teased, but the hosts still keep looking for the small piece of advice that holds up in real life.

As heard by us

A smile rulebook gets pushed, prodded, and made more interesting than it sounds.

Go Help Yourself turns Dale Carnegie's smile advice into something that can actually breathe. Lisa Linke and Misty Stinnett keep it funny without letting it go soft.

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Why you'd press play

You want a comedy self-help take on Dale Carnegie with jokes, skepticism, and a little grudging respect.

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