Leadership Lessons From The Great Books

Hello, my name is Jesan Sorrells and this is the

Leadership Lessons from the Great Books podcast. Episode

number one fifty. Yeah, that's

right. We've cranked out 150 of these. It's, it's.

I'm quite frankly shocked myself. So. But that means

that we're well on our way to our penultimate, our next

penultimate 200th episode, which I would

recommend sticking around the next couple of years for that.

So we're going to do something a little bit different today. Normally

for a bonus episode, we

would have on a special guest and there wouldn't necessarily be any

book reading on that episode. But today we're going to

go in a little bit of a different direction. So instead of doing a bonus,

a completely, totally pure bonus episode format, we're going to

combine a regular episode with a bonus episode and make a 150th

episode. Right. That's what we're going to do today. And I'm joined today

by our guest, Zac Stucki, who is the CEO

of Ignition Point Strategies.

Now, I'm going to pull directly from the Ignition Point website.

Zach is of course going to correct us all on this, but I'm

going to pull from the text from the copy on the site and read to

you directly from that. And I quote, Zach is a growth

strategist who specializes in helping B2C companies acquire and retain

their ideal users through deep customer insights. As the co

founder of Ignition Point Strategies, he unearths the often overlooked functional,

emotional and social dimensions that shape user behavior,

allowing them to develop the full customer experience around

delivering true value. In addition to writing, Zach is also

a speaker and a workshop facilitator.

It's that last part, more so than the first

pieces there, that are interesting to us today because I'm a workshop

facilitator and a leadership development

professional. Right. Been facilitating and been engaged in leadership

development for about the last almost 20 years.

And the insights that we can get from leadership development

that come through non traditional books are part of what we

are exploring on this podcast and part of what we're going to explore today with

Zach. Zach is a reader, a leader and a lifelong

learner. He and I connected on LinkedIn probably about six months ago at

the end of 2024 and after circling around for a little

while and having him ping me on email,

we talked about our shared interest in the value of

leadership and the need for leaders to be informed by more

insights than yet than those that yet another business

book could bring. Kind of goes along with the theme of this show.

We settled on the book we were reading today. The text we are looking at

today because of Zach's interaction with the culture that influences

the content, and culture always

influences content. Zach brings

a unique insight into the book we are going to talk about today, A book

we covered previously on episode number 22

in the first season of the show, which I thought I did not

do as well a job at as I probably could

have. And so we're going to recover this book

and we're going to cover it a little more in depth. The book

we're going to be looking @ for our 150th episode today is

the Art of War by Sun Tzu. Now, the

translation that I have, you can see this on the video or you can listen

to it on the audio and look at it in the, in the show notes.

Below the player is the version that is translated by Thomas

Cleary. Zach

copy, which you can see right there on the video is translated by

Ralph B. Sawyer. And Zach brings

a certain level of understanding to this as a

Mandarin speaker. So this is going to be very, very interesting.

And a person who had a. And we'll

maybe we'll talk about this on the show as well today, an engaging missionary

journey throughout. Throughout Taiwan. Is that

correct? Yeah, yeah. Taiwan, yep. And so we're going

to, we're going to talk about that today.

So leaders, I usually give you a little tip here at the beginning in the

intro. Leaders, prepare for the next

great moment which is right on the horizon.

Welcome to the show. Zach. How are you doing today? I'm doing great. Hy

son. Thanks so much for having me. Yeah, I'm,

I'm really excited to cover this material because there is so much here. We

were talking, you know, before we started recording this. There is so

much here that is applicable even today. When

you boil it down to first principles or, or what a mentor of mine

called lowest common denominators. And that, that

just apply that we, we often miss because we in our

arrogance think, oh, you know, this is the first world. We have the Internet. We

have generative AI now. And we don't need

those lessons. Oh, believe me, you do. As a leader, you

need these lessons. Well, and we sometimes make

very egregious and we don't really think about it too much, but we egregious. I've

been thinking a lot about this lately category errors, right? We,

we confuse one thing for another or

we merge two things together in our heads and then we speak to

other people and we expect that they've done the same merging and they haven't.

And so our, our analysis and our criticality is all off.

And now we're in a space where there's a lack of understanding between

two people. And sometimes this can happen in, I mean, this can happen in

families, this can happen in organizations, this can happen in

institutions. It's most egregious, of course, when it happens

in families. But I would say the second level where it's pretty egregious

is in the workplace, particularly between leaders and

followers. And so

category errors, over complicating things,

not understanding the lowest common denominator. These are all factors that

come in to our book today. And this book has been around for a while.

We could talk a little bit about the history of it. We could talk a

little bit about the background of it today as, as well. But before I

jump into all that, so why don't you tell the listeners, tell everybody listening and

watching our show today, what is it

that you do exactly? I read from the, I read from the Ignition

Point web Strategies website, but I'm sure there's way more to it

than that. Yeah. You know, if

talking about first principles, thinking, what I do is I help businesses

understand why high intent sales prospects still walk away

even after the sale. Right. So it deals with

improving customer retention and it deals with

helping businesses make sure that they

capture more of those high intent sales prospects before they

close as well. When you say high intent sales prospects,

what is. Break that down for me. What does that mean? Yeah. So

high intent sales prospects, typically we would define it as

someone who has a problem that you solve. They know

they have a problem that, that you solve and they have a

budget to solve it and a timeline in which they need to get

it solved. And if they have those four things,

we would consider them a high intent prospect, someone who's actively

looking to solve that problem as soon as possible. And so in looking

at the Art of War, in looking at sort

of. Well, kind of break this question

down because now we're going to go off script. So let me break this question

down a little bit. So in thinking about, thinking about those

high intent sales prospects. Right. And you said they had four, they had four

things in common. So they have a budget.

Yeah. And then what were the other, what were the other three?

So they have a problem that you solve, they're

aware of the problem. They have a budget and they have a timeline to

solve that. Right. So they have a budget, they have a problem, they have awareness

and they have A timeline. Right. What do you

think in your reading of the Art of War? What do you think Sun Tzu

would have to say about folks like that?

This is. This is. I love this question because this

is something that I have been shouting from the rooftops.

So when we talk about business strategy, and when we talk about

business strategy, typically what we do is we take

business strategy and we confuse it with

military strategy. I mean, we're reading the Art of War, for goodness sake,

right? But. But when we do that,

we're influenced by who we define as our competition.

Now, in military strategy, your competition

is someone who's competing over the same turf that you're competing for

same resources. In business strategy,

it's similar, but it's actually someone who's competing for the

same dollar in your customer's wallet. Now, what

we typically do is we misidentify our competition

and we say, you know, Burger King is competing with McDonald's, is competing with

Wendy's. There's a really interesting bit of research that was

done by a professor out of Harvard named Clayton Christensen,

who is kind of my dashboard saint. Like, I love the guy. And

in. In this research, he showed that actually

McDonald's at certain times was not

competing with Burger King or Wendy's. It was competing with bananas,

donuts, bagels, Snickers bar

smoothies. Right. And so,

but. But the military strategist would say, no, your

competition is Wendy's, Burger King, McDonald's.

And so when we do that, we fail to position ourselves

appropriately, which is some of the stuff that Sunza talks about.

Sunza talks about positioning. He talks about understanding who

you are. He talks about understanding your competition. He talks about the

terrain. He talks about spies. He talks about what you

should and shouldn't respond to. But unless you have that.

And. And I'm going to read from my translation here because it's going to give

some really good insight. Yeah, absolutely. If I

can find it. Let's see here.

Well, I like. Oh, go. Well, while you're looking for the piece that you're looking

for, let me do this. So the way that

my copy with my translation is divided is

it's divided into a number of different parts. With the translator's

introduction by Thomas Cleary. We covered a lot of that on

episode 22, and we talked a little bit about Thomas, clearly, who actually

passed away in 2021, just before we launched the PODC.

The way that he has it divided up, he. He puts it into different parts.

So we have strategic assessments doing battle

planning, a siege formation,

Adaptations, Armed Struggle, Emptiness and

Fullness. So he's force. So he has these. Is divided up

into all these chapter sections with these titles. And in the first chapter

section around Strategic Assessments, which I, I suspect is probably where Zach

is going to again, the way that he divides this

up is he names the individuals who give these Twitter like

quotes around military strategy.

What the Ancient World, the Ancient world's version of tweets. Right.

According from Master Soon Lee Kuan, Dumu,

Jialin, Mei Yoshin.

And he's pretty much keeping this order throughout the book.

So that's the order that he's got the folks listed in. And so right at

the beginning, in Strategic Assessments from Master soon,

he quotes this. Military action is important to the nation. It is

the ground of death and life, the path of survival and

destruction. So it is imperative to

examine it. Yes,

and I, I will build on this because this is actually from the third

section. So in my translation, this, this

translator really tried to keep it more

tied to its roots. So he included things like the three armies, terms

that are archaic that we wouldn't comprehend. He

includes words like da, which have very deep cultural meaning.

In the Da Jing, which is the, the scripture of Daoist

religious philosophy, the first thing that it says is the

da that cannot, the da that cannot. The da that

can be written is, is not the true dao.

And when you boil that down and look at its deeper meaning, what it's saying

is dao is a state of being.

It is a state of moral rectitude. Because you have to synthesize this with

Confucianism, the two borrow back and forth. So it's a state of moral

rectitude. So when in my translation he's talking

about the dao of the general or the dao of victory,

it's this state of being that will create victory.

Interesting. Okay. And part of what he talked about in section

three, which is planning

offensives. Oh no, Section four, excuse me. Which is military

disposition. He says, as for military

methods, the first is termed measurement. The second,

estimation of forces. The third, calculation of numbers

of men. The fourth, weighing relative strength. And the

fifth, victory. Now this is, this is the important part.

Terrain gives birth to measurement.

Measurement produces the estimation of forces. Estimation of forces

gives rise to calculating the numbers of men. Calculating the

numbers of men gives rise to weighing strength. Weighing strength

gives birth to victory. So if we're setting this in a cause and effect sort

of thing, the very first thing that you have to get right in order

to be victorious is understanding the Terrain that you're competing on.

And all too often in general business strategy. And you know,

circling this back to my point, all too often in general business strategy, we

say that our competition is our market or the people who

are delivering like services because that is the, the

terrain that we perceive. The actual competition or

competitive space is the wallet of your customer. And

because businesses get that wrong, businesses fail all

the time. This is

an incredible insight because you're right in business strategy. And

even my myself have fallen into this. Into this trap. Right.

I mentioned before category errors. Right. We make this error.

Right. Of presuming that the position is the

terrain. Right. Which, by the way, I love the book positioning.

I love that book. Found that book back in the 19. From the 1970s

that was written by a couple of guys who. A couple of marketers

who were seeking to create a brand for

7Up and couldn't really figure out a way to.

To move the. The market, such as it were, but really about

moving people's perceptions from really thinking about Coca

Cola and Pepsi to thinking about 7 up. Right. And. And

the, the brilliant sort of idea that they came up with

was that there are quadrants in your brain and each one of these

brands occupies a quadrant. And so if you want to

successfully launch something else, you need to move into a different

quadrant in a person's brain. Right. Positioning. Right.

We now have folks that are floating around on Facebook and other places that are

talking about depositioning, which is a whole other idea.

This sounds a lot to me like Blue ocean. It is. It comes out. It

comes out of blue ocean strategy. It comes out of. Out of a different interpretation.

You mentioned Clayton Christensen. A different interpretation. Interpretation of Christensen. And so it comes

out of the merging of a bunch of different ideas together. But

that's depositioning. But I like the. I like the og I like positioning

because. And to your point about, about Sun Tzu,

we don't understand the terrain very often that we're on. And

by the way, in. In my translation, I found the exact same thing that you

quoted. It's in chapter four, but it's at the end underneath

formation. Yeah. And it says the rules of the military are

five Measurement, assessment, calculation, comparison, and

victory. The ground gives rise to measurements. Measurements

gives rise to assessments. Assessments give rise to calculations.

Calculations give rise to comparisons. Comparisons give rise to

victories. That's a subtle difference.

And there is a distinction inside of that difference. And yet

the core idea there, speaking of the Dow, the core idea

there is still the same. If you don't understand the terrain

you're on, or if you're confused about the terrain you're on, then you will not

have. Well, you won't even be able to set yourself up for

victory. And by the way, I see this in my background as

a conflict management and negotiation person.

Most, well, professional. Most people

are amateur negotiators for a whole variety of

reasons. But the biggest one is they don't understand

the ground, the psychological ground they're negotiating

on. Yeah.

You know, it's interesting because

just a couple paragraphs up above in, in my translation, it says, for

the victorious army first realizes the conditions for victory,

then seeks to engage in battle. And there's a lot there to

understand, like to realize the conditions for victory. It's not just

setting goals, right? It's like, no, how do you define

your conditions of victory so that you can say we are

victorious? And then how do I plan in

advance to set up those conditions? How do I make sure that

my team actually does those things that I ask them to

do that will bring about victory? How do I make sure that we're all on

the same page? This is all part of the dao of being

a good leader and the dao of creating victory,

Right? This is all part of what has to. And, and I say it that

way because dao is a state of being.

It has to be a part of who you inherently are as

a leader in order to actualize that

victory. And that's the thing that we, we

often think about, or fail to think about, I suppose, because we get so

busy going through the motions of these things that we're not

actually embodying them. So the

leadership culture that we've had and the business culture, the business strategy

culture that we've had over the last

hundred years, let's go back to Henry Ford, right? And,

and that, that, that, that Horiel gentleman of measurement all the way at

the bottom, Frederick Winslow Taylor. Let's, let's go back to, let's go

back to him, right? Because again, I'm an OG guy, right? I like to go

back to root causes. I'm a root cause guy. It does us

no good to. It does us no good to try to fix the

tree by trimming a few branches. Sometimes you got to go all the way to

the root, right? And at the

bottom of all of Henry Ford, no, at the bottom of

modern assumptions around leadership. And again, the last hundred years in the west,

at the basement of all those assumptions has just been

that

people don't need to be led.

Strategy does not need to be defined.

As long as the founder is the North

Star, which that's fine.

It works just fine. We see this, by the way, in the startup founders

that we have now. We were just talking about, before we hit record, we were

just talking about Mark Zuckerberg. Right. I think Facebook will be fine as long as

Mark Zuckerberg continues to roll Jiu Jitsu. And,

you know, well, you know, he's, he's a blue belt like me. So, you know,

hey, roll Jiu Jitsu. To roll Jiu Jitsu, choke people and it'll keep you young.

Right. You know, most you're doing, you're doing

Jiu Jitsu. I'm doing. All right. Continue to, continue to roll. Because

you do all that, you'll stay young forever. But at a certain

timeline, on a long enough timeline, everybody's survival rate, to

paraphrase in the movie Fight Club, drops to zero. Right.

So what do you do when the founder's gone? We see this with

Apple Computers. I always bring up Apple Computers. Right. So

Microsoft. Right. Or Microsoft. Right. Like Bill Gates isn't gone, but he might as well

be, for all intents and purposes, with that company. So

the assumptions that the founder is the North Star and that somehow

the founder is going to just via

osmosis, give this strategy to his, to his followers

is a, is a, is a dangerous strategy that we have all bet on in

business. Yeah. And, and I don't see

this is a comment. I don't see a way out of it. I don't see

us, I don't see us backing away from that anytime soon.

We. Well, and I think you're right, because we, as, as

America going back to root causes, 1890s

up to the 1920s, America changed culturally. We

changed from a culture of character. And you can

look at this in the materials, the, the, the books and the, the,

the things that were popularized from the pop culture up to, like the

1890s, it talked about character. So you would talk about

the pyramid of character. That man is a man of character.

1920s come around. 1890s to 1920s come around, and

it changes. It changes from

character to personality.

And we become a culture that's driven by personality. And I

would even argue that after the advent of social media, we

enter into a culture of hyper personality,

where you take the personality and you ramp it up to

100. Right? It's. This isn't Spinal Tap. This one goes to 11. This

is. We're going to 100. And, and the problem with that,

I'm glad you like that. The problem with that is that

it creates.

It don't think deeply about anything. All they have to do is be

hyper personalities in order to gain fame. And this is all

social media influencers do. They take their personality,

ratchet it up, and then they focus on one thing.

I'm the book person, I'm the makeup person, I'm the movie person.

And that's all they are. And culture loses its

complexity. And so we're putting these personalities on a pedestal

and we're trained to do that culturally. And the only thing

that's going to change that is the culture. And the problem with that

is that you were highlighting, and I think correctly, the problem with

that is that it doesn't create

longevity because you have

a company like Apple that is one of the largest

companies in the world, in the history of the world.

Right. Like it is larger than the

economy of the nation of Poland to give some

perspective. Like it's massive.

And Steve Jobs dies

and they try and put in Tim Cook.

Right? Tim Cooks. You try and put in Tim Cook. Tim

Cook is supposed to be Steve Jobs protege. And the

last real unique thing that

Apple put out was innovated by Steve Jobs.

Oh, yeah. I mean, they're just moving buttons around on the iPhone.

Absolutely. There is no real innovation. The thing that I saw that,

that was like, oh, this is a Steve Jobs level innovation was

the, the, the digital AI assistant pin

had. I've seen these. Yeah, Yep. That was the,

the last thing that I saw that was even close to a Steve Jobs level

innovation. And it came from a former Apple

engineer. It didn't even come from their own ecosystem

because we're built around these, these, this cult of personality

when we should be built around a cult of customer. So it's interesting

that you bring up character. Two things, two data points. One,

I just saw on LinkedIn that former

former four star general and White House chief of staff

member Stanley McChrystal is

out there promoting a book talking about character.

And I didn't read the whole post on LinkedIn. I didn't, I didn't really

need to because. And here's why I didn't need to.

When. When we talk in military terms about character and ethics and

integrity, there's something that undergirds that conversation

about character that doesn't exist currently in our larger culture, which is why

we've replaced it with a cult of personality. And the thing that undergirds that

conversation in the military is a

concept of tradition and ritual. And

we unfortunately live in a time. I was just ranting to somebody about

this the other day. But we unfortunately live in a

time when we struggle

as a national body to hold on to

national rituals, national traditions. So about the only

shared national tradition we have, but the only shared one we have is July

4th. And even that's getting chipped at the edges, right?

Because if you can remove that, if you could pull

that, the tradition out, right,

Then you can do all kinds of other things with the edifice. You can. You

can shape it and mold it and turn it. Right. And so

it's interesting you brought up the 1890s to the 1920s, because we just read,

before this episode, we just read Tender is the Night by F. Scott

Fitzgerald. And I'm a big fan of the

books that come out of that post World War I and even

pre World War I sort of European

American zeitgeist. Right. Because I do think

fundamentally, we still don't understand exactly what World War I did to us as a.

As a. As a. As a set of nation states around the globe. We're still

not fully. We still haven't fully wrapped our arms around that war or

the consequences of it. That's number one. Number two, the lost

generation, which mirrors, quite frankly, the nomad generation, of which

I'm the youngest. End of that generation I feel a lot

of affinity for, because they saw the

edifice fall down and they had particularly Intender as a knight. But

you see it even previous TO World War I in parades end by Ford Maddox

Ford, and then later on in Movable Feast by Tom by Ernest

Hemingway, and of course, A Farewell to Arms, John Dos Passos's

USA Trilogy, all of which we cover here on the podcast. You should go list

all those episodes. It's like a. It's like a feast for the years. It's like

eight hours of listening. But we're trying to

find the answers to why the edifice

fell down and that if it didn't just fall down in men and material,

it fell down. To your point about character, I think you're right. I think that

as a society, particularly as Western civilization,

we're still processing the. I mean, you look

at it, and when you talk about a lost generation, it literally was

a lost generation. And then when you compare that with Russia, I

mean, Russia after World War II, it lost

like one out of every three men. Like, it was a complete

shift in demographics that they have not

recovered from. And arguably the Ukraine war is partially a

result of that. And so we're looking at

this complete collapse of

societies, not a Collapse. But yeah,

collapse in trust in society's institutions.

Because In World War I, we had the

ultimate faith in society's institutions, particularly

as Western nations. And those institutions led to the

slaughter of millions of young men. And so

society is, is like processing.

I trusted you, government. I trusted you, king,

I trusted you, emperor, and you let me down.

And so it creates this modernist

interpretation of the world which then leads to

postmodernism, which is sort of the children of modernists

trying to make sense of what happened to mommy and Daddy as a result of

World War I. And, and it's, it's created this,

in my opinion, negative downward spike spiral of

complete lack of faith in any institution. So

you often see, and, and this is just anecdotal and I'd love your

insight on this, but I think that you often see

nihilism and postmodernism go hand in hand

because postmodernism gives birth to nihilism.

Oh, yeah. Well, I mean, you could even say, you could even assert. And we've

covered. Oh, gosh.

Well, I mean, we've covered books from the communist writer Milan

Kundera on here, who

wrote in the. In the face of.

Who wrote in the face of communism, sort of. What do we do now?

We've covered, we've covered Sartre on this

podcast, we've covered Camus, and we're going

to cover Camus again this year on the podcast

or the Stranger. You know, we're going to talk about that

and even you can even see it in our popular culture. So Robert

Heinlein, Philip K. Dick, Frank

Herbert. And we've covered Dune, covered Dune last year on the podcast.

A book that I had never successfully actually read through before.

I had to read it for the reading, for the show.

Great book. Actually. I found out what I was. What I was. Well, the first

time I encountered doing, I was eight and it was in the, it was in

the edition had like 8 point or 10 point type. It was really tiny and

it was. Book was really thick. And I'm eight years old. I'm like, this is

nonsense. I read like four pages. I was like, I'm done. I don't know what

they're talking about. I was gone from it. And that was always

my Dune story until last year. And then I finally read it and I was

like, oh, this is actually not, this is actually not

horrible. There's some, there's some really deep insights in here.

It's a libertarian treatise on the dangers of. Of

savior. It is, it is. And then you read Orson Scott card.

You read Andrew's Game, which is the book we've talked about, where you kind of

go in the opposite direction of that. And so

the nihilism and the postmodernism have to walk hand in hand

because if you, if you believe in,

if you believe in nothing but you gotta laugh in order to get through it.

Laughter only works for certain, a certain type of person,

interestingly enough, at a certain type of class level, which is why most nihilists

are Marxists and only works at a certain

type of a sort of intellectual status level,

which is why most post modernists come out of

academia. I've never met yet a

blue collar postmodernist. I have met people

who operate on, on postmodern assumptions and happen to do blue

collar work and don't understand where those assumptions come from.

So yes, the blue collar guy

who's driving a tractor or picking up garbage

and is on his second divorce and doesn't understand why he's

operating in a society that's driven by postmodernist assumptions

around freedom and hedonism and libertinism.

And he hasn't examined any of those power structures.

Correct. And he hasn't examined any of those because no one's helped him examine any

of those, which is part of the reason why we do this podcast. We could

talk about it, but. But, but,

but he's not a postmodernist. He's not educated enough to be a

postmodernist. However, I've run across many folks in

academia who will claim to be postmodernists.

And here's the rube. Here's or here's the rub. They will claim

to be postmodernists. They will claim to be in favor of

hedonistic licentiousness, and yet

they've been married to the same person faithfully for 30 years.

That is interesting. That is utterly fascinating to me. Something doesn't

match, and it's because.

It's because of the cynicism that's inside of these systems. And when you can be

cynical, but your economic status keeps you safe

from the results of your cynicism. This is Rob Henderson and

luxury ideals, right? You can afford to hold all these luxury

ideas that have no absolute, no consequence on your real life.

However, when luxury ideals

transpose down through a society in which

institutions are fractured because of a lack of character, going back

100 years or going back 80 years, and no one's bothered to explain that to

anybody, including, quite frankly, the Christian church, which should have

completely, should have explained that specifically in the west, but I'll leave that

aside for just a moment. But even they were captured by these ideas. So.

But you know, you go all the way down and these ideas are not explained.

These luxury ideals now have deleterious

consequences for people who don't have the status

to survive. The consequences of these ideals.

Right, if. You'Re a garbage man, I'm sorry, look, you may be

making 80, 80 to $120,000 a year to pick up my

garbage, but that's not enough security to be on your

second marriage and have four kids that hate you from two different women.

And that's, that's really hard, right? Like, and that's the thing

when we, that is why postmodernism, nihilism is

so dangerous, but also why it's a reaction

to the First World War and that lack of character, right? Because the

First World War, we had been lied to, we had been

propagandized to believe that our leaders were as

morally righteous and upright as we thought we were.

And then it exposes that, that dark,

chaotic, hedonistic, licentious underbelly. Like,

read the Last Lion. It's, it's a three

volume biography of Winston Churchill that is just

amazing. And one of the first things

that it talks about is the ideals of Victorian England

as opposed to the actualities, particularly for the

royals. Like the royals, it was morals for thee,

but not for me. Like, King Edward

had a chair made so that he could have threesomes.

Like the. Winston Churchill's mother

was a darling because she was really good in bed and

she was sort of like this exotic beauty from across the ocean

and all these of men tried to woo her, like,

and, and she allowed them to. That's, you know, so

you have this, this sort of understanding

that all of a sudden all of that comes out and now these

postmodernists are saying, well, all power structure is inherently

stupid and needs to be questioned. And, and it leads to this

lack of, like to your point, lack of trust in institutions.

Institutions make up society. You cannot have a

functioning society and you cannot have a functioning business.

You cannot have a functioning church. You cannot have a functioning

organization if every member, or at least the majority of

the members involved in it, question the very fabric of

the, the rules of conduct. Right? And that's

we're experiencing right now at a larger level in our

culture. And

yeah, I mean, it is

poison. It is absolute poison. And that garbage

truck driver that, you know, you know,

UPS driver, whoever that, that's making $120,000 a

year, they're they're doing pretty good. They have been lied to by

society. And the women who that man was

married to who divorced, have been lied to society.

Lied to by society as well. Right. Like, there

are so many different aspects of this, because third

wave feminism is really just a diaspora product of postmodernism.

Oh, oh, hold on to that thought. We're

gonna go back to the book. Hold on to that

thought. Back to the book. Back to at least my

translation and. And Zach's translation of the Art of

War. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I'm going to

dive into strategic assessments.

It's actually called strategic assessments in my book. I've marked this up quite ext.

What number B in my book is marked number one.

But it may be marked differently in. In your book. I. I

have. I have the same number of sections as you. The titles are different,

but the sections, if you look at the base, they're the same. So. All right,

cool. So I'm going to pick up in Strategic Assessments, I'm

going to go through four pages in. I'm going to start the.

Figure out the ground you're on. Yeah, I have this right here. So. So

master soon. Right. Therefore, use these assessments for comparison

to find out what the conditions are. That is to say,

which political leadership. You talk about, the dao, which political leadership

has the way, which general has ability,

who has the better climate and terrain, whose

discipline is effective, whose troops are

stronger, whose system of rewards and punishments is

clearer. This is how you can know

who will win. One

of the points I want to make on that is that. And we

sort of have a jog through, as we do usually on this podcast, we start

with something very narrow, and then we broaden it, and then we go back to

the narrow thing, sort of the flow of what we're doing here.

One of the things that Jocko Willick, very famous Jocko Willick, right.

Says on his podcast, the Jocko Podcast, all the time. He's become notorious for.

It is. And it's a titular line because

it's. It's. It's amazing, actually. Discipline equals

freedom. Yes.

And again, he comes out of a military tradition with strong

rituals, strong orientation towards character

ethics, all that, even though things are framed at the edges there, too,

but still a strong orientation towards that. Right.

And being a good leader,

being able to not only understand the terrain that

you're on, but being able to engage in the discipline of doing

things and making assessments

that may not

necessarily, for lack of a better term, be sexy or be

popular, and then committing

Directly to that, to that strategy, to that forward direction,

is the hallmark not only of a good leader, but it's also a hallmark of

a leader with character. Now, that doesn't mean that that leader is flexible.

What it means is the reed bends in the wind, but

it never breaks, Right? Or another way to frame it in a more

Western context. I kind of always tell the story from the great Zig Ziglar,

the great motivational speaker Zig Ziglar. If Zach and I are on a

plane, right, and we have bought a ticket to Denver, let's

say we're flying to Denver from, I don't know, St. Louis, right? Let's just pick

a random place, right? If I'm going from St. Louis to Denver and it

says on my ticket, I'm going to Denver, Zach and I get on the plane,

pilot, you know, takes off, we're going, and all of a sudden

a storm pops up. If the pilot comes on the radio and says,

listen, listen, we've hit some

turbulence and we're turning and going back to St. Louis,

Zach and I will riot on the plane. We're not going back to St.

Louis. We're going to Denver. Denver is where it says on my

ticket that I'm going to be at. I made commitments in Denver. Zach made

commitments in Denver. Doesn't matter if we still share the same commitments. We need to

go to Denver. And by the way, the pilot knows this. So what does the

pilot do? The pilot doesn't turn around and go back to St. Louis. The pilot

just adjusts his flaps, he raises or lowers the

plane, and we keep going to the destination. This is the Western

way of thinking about the reed bending but not

breaking. This is still discipline, though. It

requires discipline to be inside of the turbulence of the wind or

the turbulence of the turbulence and be able to

maintain discipline when everyone around you and

everything around you is, for lack of a better term. And to mix a

bunch of metaphors together, which I love doing on my own show, when everything

around you is on fire, right? One of the

challenges we have today. Here's a question. I do have a question embedded in here.

One of the challenges we have here today in our time, and you're a

native Mandarin speaker, and I want to explore this a little bit here,

is we are currently in an era of business

turbulence and terrorists is a symptom of a much

larger disease. The

larger disease is the breakup of the global order established after

World War II. The Bretton woods agreement is basically

over, but we don't know what comes

after that. And so, for lack of a better term, in

a multipolar world, we're throwing a bunch of spaghetti at the wall, trying to see

what sticks. Our biggest spaghetti thrower is Donald Trump. Whether you like it or not,

that's the biggest spaghetti thrower. But also Xi Jinping is in there.

Vladimir Putin is in there. Edge Organa. Turkey is in there.

Mbs. Saudi Arabia is in there. You know,

Modi in India is in there. Macron. Oh,

absolutely. Care Stamar. By the way, we did a whole job,

a whole geopolitical jog when we were reading

Parade's End. You should go listen to that episode where I basically put

forth my theory that

France will wind up running the EU in the next 20 years.

Oh, that's 100. Because I don't see anybody else. I don't see anybody

else on that continent that's gonna, that's gonna mount up to be able to control

that entire entity. Well, in Germany, Germany

has, has. The demographics aren't solid enough. France is the only nation that

has solid enough demographics, and the UK is cozying up to the United States.

So there's no one in that sphere who is strong enough to

stand up to a. A rising Turkey and a

potentially militant Russia. Right. And. And, and you

talk about the Brits cozying up to the Americans. The Brits can only cozy up

to the Americans if the British can figure out what it means to actually be

British. And if they can't figure out

how to do that, if they can't figure out what that, they can't wander back

to what that means. One of my buddies believes

that there will be a lot of internal strife and potentially

a civil war in, in England. I don't know

that it'll go that far, but I think, I think they're going to have a

very vibrant conversation about what it means to be British for about the next decade,

and they're going to have to come to some conclusions about what that actually means.

My point is this. My question is this. You're a native Mandarin

speaker. You have some insight into, by knowing the

language, you have some insight into the mind of. Of at least,

if not, if not Chinese culture, at least

a glimpse more than maybe I've got.

What should we be thinking about in the west in terms

of strategy in relation to

and relative to China in a

multipolar world? And you can speak from Sun Tzu in

relation to strategy around this? I think that there's an open door there.

Yeah, you know, I, I think that's A really good question. I think that one

of the things that we don't understand because we don't have the same cultural roots,

to remember that China was separated from Europe for a really

long time. And so they have two different cultural upbringings, right?

China, Asia, arguably Asia ex,

excluding Japan, has a Han sort of

ethnic Han cultural root the same way that

the west has a Greco Roman cultural root.

And so it means that people like Sunza and

Confucius or, or Kongzi as they call him,

and, and Taoism are to them

what Plato's Republic and Stoicism

and you know,

a Periclean democratic thought is

to us. And because we don't understand that

root, we, we enter into this sort of

ethnocentrist state of, of thought.

And what I mean by that is that we think that our way is the

right way. We're unwilling to acknowledge the things that we don't know that we don't

know. We're unwilling to acknowledge. Hey, maybe China has some ways that they do it

that are better. China isn't that way.

China right now is,

if you believe the, the demographics that are coming out and what the analysis on

those demographics are, it's could be terminal.

Could. Could, right? And, and yeah, you have to go like this because

it's a could be. But, but China is very much

at a place of, of

inflection, let's say. And so as we move into

a multipolar world, there are a couple of, of things that you need to be

aware of that are cultural roots for the Chinese

and for Asia in general. One is face. The concept of

face. We don't have that concept here.

The closest thing I would say is like, honor, right? And when

we talk about honor, we, we kind of go in our minds to like the

glove slap. And you, sir, have impugned my honor. And

like, that's not at all what it is. Faces

deeply, deeply ingrained in their culture, such that if a young

person does not get the right source score on a test, they will commit

suicide because it's a loss of

faith for themselves and their family. And

so that's one thing that, that we don't understand

because we go in and we don't have that concept of face. In

fact, we don't have the same level of familial

piety or loyalty that

they do. Found found family, which,

you know, has its merits, but found family

is a constant and massive part of

our cultural zeitgeist right now. It is not

in Asia. The found family is like, what are you

talking about you can hate your family, but they're still your family and you're still

going to do whatever it takes to help them. Like, that's part of their

cultural zeitgeist. And so like that.

That whole concept of face is really

important to them. And so when we come in and I'll

just give you an example of contract,

business contracts. So when we come in, our typical thing is that we're

going to write up a contract and we're going to say, these are the terms

of the contract. I expect you to abide by these contracts.

The Chinese culture is really good at finding the liminal space,

and so they will do just about anything

but what's in the contract sometimes. And

so if you go in there and you start telling them, how dare you

violate the terms of the contract, I'm going to sue you, and blah, blah, blah.

That's causing a loss of face for them.

And it means that they have to culturally plant in their

heels because if they give any ground, it's a further loss of

faith face. So, you know,

love him or hate him, Donald Trump's approach to handling

the negotiations with North Korea were probably pretty

good because he was coming in, he was

giving Kim Jong Un face and saying, yeah, we're buddies, blah,

blah, blah. He doesn't believe that. He's just giving Kim Jong Un

face so that he can get what he wants out of him.

And that's, that's what we overlook. So you

have to think about this and you have to give them face. You have to

think about this strategically. In what can I do to preserve their

mobility, preserve my mobility in, in the art

of war, it talks about. And I don't know if I'll be able to find

it here. Here it is.

Maybe it talks

about controlling. Here it is

thus. And this is section four. It says thus, one who excels

at warfare first establishes himself in a position where he cannot

be defeated while not losing any opportunity to defeat

the enemy. So it's about preserving your own

mobility and boxing in the enemy. And that's what the Chinese

are really good at. And we like, as leaders,

we don't think that way because it's not a part of our cultural tradition,

but it would be an incredibly beneficial tool to have in our tool belt.

Well, and we can't get there because the thing that would have

helped us understand that

is the one. And I remember I said I was going to get back to

Christianity in a minute. Here we go. Well, here we

go. So to paraphrase through the New

Testament. From my buddy Paul.

From my buddy Paul, a little leaven gonna work through the whole loaf, right? You

know, like we're gonna, it's gonna, it's gonna work through, right? And so

the Western mind, shorn of Christianity

hears what you just said and goes, well, that's just

deception. Crush those people. Like, that's just the pagan

Roman approach to that is, oh, you break contract,

I, I kill you, I put an ax in your face. And

not only that, I burned down your house and I burned down, like,

enslave your children and your wife and then I salt the

ground of your crops. Yes. The

only reason we don't do that to each other now is because of a

guy who died on a cross and rose again three days

later. And that entire story, which no one has ever

denied, has gone out like leaven through the loaf

over the course of 2,000 years throughout the entire West. And it

is only in the last 200 years, with some success

that we've managed to drain, we talked about postmodernism

and nihilism, we've managed to drain some of that leaven out of the

loaf and replace it with stuff that is closer

to the paganism of the past rather than

a perception of Christianity in the future. Okay? So the

neo pagan mind of the 2000s and of the

2000s hears that and goes, oh, those people just aren't trustworthy.

That's just deception. The Christian

mind hears that and goes, well, okay,

so we'll just deal with those folks with an open hand and they

will perceive us as suckers. But that's okay, because

Christian charity will convert them. We will convert them by our deeds.

We will show our belief by our acts, right? And

over the long course of time, over a 2000 year

long stretch, which who knows if we have another 2,000 years, but

let's just say we do. Over 2,000 year long stretch, we're going to

get those people. And this is why when

I hear, and I do hear of Christian

missionaries going to China, you do hear about

the challenges that they have in that country. You do hear

about folks being locked up in gulags and house

churches, you know, being the communists, try to find house

churches, as many as they can, but they can't stomp it out. And

here's the interesting thing, they don't know why. They

don't know why they can't stomp it out. And I would tell them, but they

wouldn't listen. They're not listening anyway. But I'll just tell the

communists, who are basically atheist Confucians. Let

me, let me tell you why it's not working. It's not working because

there's a power called the Holy Spirit. I fundamentally believe

that's working through the prayers of about.

And doesn't have to be a billion. This is why I sort of waved my

hand a little bit. Let's say it's around 850 million people.

That's a lot of prayers. Even if it's just 1%. That's a

lot. And God, I fundamentally believe from a Christian

perspective, will answer those prayers regardless of what the

state does. And by the way, we have a perfect example of this happening in

the 20th century. That was the fall of the Berlin Wall.

What crushed the Berlin Wall was a combination of Margaret Thatcher, Ronald

Reagan, and here's the third guy that everybody forgets about, the Pope,

JP too. So, you know, my, my process brothers and sisters are going

to rebel and send me a bunch of nasty Graham letters. And that's

okay. You can send me a bunch of emails, it's fine. We could have a

chat about Billy Graham and how he had to struggle to get on board with

the anti abortion train. And then you can go away and leave me

alone. You can just go away and leave me alone

after that. We all have our foibles and sins. No

one is perfect. And see, I'm a Latter Day Saint. I'm a Latter Day Saint.

So I just sit on the sidelines and just eat. That's okay. You sit there.

You sit there and you eat popcorn. We'll get to you in a minute. I

know, I know, I know. I know my churches. So

my point is, if you, if you have that,

if you have that dynamic, right?

But we're approaching the very secular moment of

trade, right? In a multipolar world, I don't know how

you can negotiate in a way

that saves face without having some sort of,

for lack of a better term, transcendent belief system back there that

gives you the cultural confidence to negotiate with them with face,

you know, And I. Would say that when in Rome, do as the Romans do.

Face is not faces. Like

it's brown nosing, but it's a lot more subtle than that. It's like,

you know, so I'll give you an example. Anytime I go into

a Chinese restaurant and I, I know how to pick them because

the good names are not run by Chinese people and the food is always

terrible. If it's like the Lotus Garden at Emperor's Way,

you know, all right, this. Is not going to be terrible. Chinese food.

Oh, yeah. But if it's something like China Magic Noodle, you're like, all right,

that's my jam. This is going to be good. And so,

and so I'll go in and one of the things that I learned

when I was in Taiwan is that one of

the best things you can do to give someone face in a

very short amount of time is to call them shinku, which means

burdened. Oh, you're so. Shinku. You're working so

hard. You're so burdened. You have so much responsibility on your shoulders.

You must be very trusted. And there's all of this cultural context

that goes in with just calling someone Shinku. You're

burdened because you are trustworthy, you're responsible,

you're working hard. The boss sees what you're doing, and man, he knows that

you can, you, you can really deliver. Like, there's all of that wrapped into one

word. And we don't understand that because

our language is a, a semi

phonetic Alphabet. Right. You know, it's weird. But

theirs is a pictograph system, and their pictographs,

I'll give you an example. Their pictographs have deeper meaning. So

the character for man means it has two, what they

call radicals, which are sub pictographs. One is a field, and

I write on my hand because that's what they do. They'll write the character out

on their hand. One is a field, and then they partner it with power. So

men have strength in the field. I'll give you another example. The

character for good is a radical of a woman and a

child. Because women have strength in childbirth. Yeah, okay.

Or goodness in childbirth. Or it's good. Women.

It's good for a woman to have a child. I'll give

you another example. The character for relieve is a

cross and three radicals for power.

Okay. So their, their language

is 5, 6, 7, 8,000 years old

and buries the cultural weight of 8,000

years of societal teaching. And they see it

every day. So fundamentally

then. And

we'll get, we'll get back to the book here in a minute because I'm working

on an idea here. No, no, this is good because these are things that normally

we don't, we don't, we don't talk about on the show. Normally we don't have

a guest that's versed in this, that's versed in this space and can, can at

least introduce some of these ideas to our listeners. So

how would. Okay, let me frame it this way. So thinking about what you do

with ignition point strategies. Right? Thinking about those high intent sales, right.

How would that model. This is something that's, that's interesting to me

in a multipolar world, right? How would that model or would

that model translate into a,

into a Han cultural

context? How would, how would that work? Or is there a one to one

translation? Or is it just not possible because too many of the

assumptions that exist underneath, like your actual core

of the business are too, are still too Western?

How does, how would that work? I would say

that it does translate because the, the thing that we do is we focus

on human nature and we focus on causal mechanisms. So

what we're looking at is,

we're looking at where do, like does your process call, think,

cause things to stall? Does your, your people cause things

to stall? Is there a lack of understanding? Like there's a whole, whole thing

that we do to really get to the root of

where are your high intent sales prospects walking away?

And I'll give you an example. I was reviewing a phone call,

a sales phone call the other day and this person brings

up something that was really important to them, that they had

achieved preferred status from a business partner.

And they didn't bring it up once, they brought it up twice. And

the salesperson missed was

obviously important to the prospect because they brought it up twice.

And so when that is called out, now you

can say, okay, why does that matter to the client or to the prospect?

How are we failing to give them those same outcomes that,

that, that preferred status gives them? How

can we give them those same outcomes? And so it

strengthens your position in the market because we're focused

on outcomes, we're not focused on product features and benefits,

we're not focused on specific objections

or, or anything like that. We're just coming in with a completely agnostic, agnostic

perspective and saying, what is this person trying to create?

So when they go to China Magic noodle, what is the experience they're

trying to create when they hire?

Geez, send,

send, shoot. What is it?

I don't know. We'll make up a company syntax when they hire syntax,

why are they hiring syntax? What is the overall outcome that

they're trying to create? And that outcome has social,

emotional and functional implications. And

often we focus on the functional and overlook the social and

emotional implications. So if I have preferred status

with a business partner, that is not a functional thing

other than yeah, maybe it allows me to do this thing better or faster or

get easier access, but there's also the social and emotional

implications that was something like that bear a lot more weight.

And so we're coming in and we're helping these sales teams realize those

tiny, subtle, underlooked things that are actually major

stall points for their, for their sales

and that, you know, they, the clients think,

oh, this is going to be there. Then they get involved in the product

and they experience the service and it doesn't align. And so they churn

out. We clarify and highlight those

so that firms can then act on that. Okay,

no, that, that makes sense. And I could see how, how that would

translate because. Because again, these are things that are going to be.

To your point about human nature, term we often use on the show is

universal. Right. These are things that are going to be universal across

all times and climes.

Something you brought up that, that reminded me of something in the book around

emptiness and fullness. I want to go to the chapter on that for just a

second here. Yeah, my translation. It's

vacuity and substance. Oh, there we go. I kind of like that better. Vacuity and

substance. So

couple of different ideas in here. And it goes directly

to the tie in of face finding the liminal space,

absence and presence, which is something that unless you've really taken

an art class in America, which is why the decline of art education is

a real tragedy, you're not sensitive to,

you know, we over index for. We over

index for the verbal in our society, which is, which is fine as a person

who makes their living saying stuff that works for me.

But we under index on things like

body language, tone of voice, pacing, vocal

intonation, and of course the magic of,

well, that right there.

The magic of the pause, the magic of silence. And so there's a

couple different ideas in here that I think relate to what you're talking about,

particularly in that absence and presence space.

And I, again, I relate to this as a jiu jitsu and a martial arts,

you know, practitioner. But it does apply as well

to, to business. I'm going to read a couple of different things from here

for master soon appear where they cannot go. Head for where they

least expect you to travel hundreds of miles without fatigue. Go over

land where there are no people. Interesting. Here's another

one. To unfailingly take what you attack, attack where there is no

defense. For unfailingly secure defense.

Defend where there is no attack.

So in the case of those who are skilled in attack, their opponents do not

know where to defend. In the case of those skilled in defense, their

opponents do not know where to attack. Or here's

another one. People are familiar with this if they're familiar with Bruce Lee. Be extremely

subtle, even to the point of formlessness.

Be extremely mysterious, even to the point of soundlessness.

Thereby you could be the director of the opponent's fate.

Or here's another one. To advance irresistibly, push through their

gaps, to retreat elusively, outspeed them.

And finally, therefore, when you want to do battle, even if the opponent

is deeply entrenched in a defensive position, he will be unable to avoid

fighting if you attack where he will surely go

to the rescue.

Drawing people out. Yeah, the faint, the slip.

Drawing people out. In. In my jiu jitsu game, I'm a big

fan of setting traps and doing one thing in one area or

over, over indexing in one area and then going and doing

something else in another area. I'm also a big fan of the game of chess.

I taught my kids how to play chess. All my children and

all of them, except for the youngest one, are at a stage where they can

beat me. Now, which is, which is good, actually, it's really good.

And, and how I tend to play the game of chess is I

use traps, I use pincher moves, I use subtle attacks. I hide

behind things I don't. You know, I tend not

to telegraph my movement as much as. As much as

maybe, you know, someone who's less experienced might.

But I also have a good holistic sense of. To a point early

about terrain. Look at sense of what I can do with the terrain. Like I've

been experimenting recently with if anybody knows how the

chess pieces move. I've been experiencing recently with how the knight moves and

how you can put. And put some. An opponent in

check. Because increasingly I'm noticing

this. People can't do geography in their own or not geography or geometry in their

own head. They can't draw shape of an L, they can't reverse that, they can't

flip that around, they can't turn it around. And so if you could do that

a couple of times in a game, boom. You can go where they're not,

or you can set up a faint and use it to do something else. And

now you can go in a different direction. So thoughts on that though?

Formlessness and absence and presence.

I think that what sun is highlighting here is what I talked about with the

contract earlier in, in my

translation. He says,

thus, when someone excels in attacking, the enemy does not know where to mount his

defense. When someone excels at defense, the enemy does not know where to attack. Subtle.

Subtle. It approaches the formless spiritual. Spiritual it

attains the soundless. Thus he can be the enemy's master of

fate to affect an unhampered advance. Strike their

vacuities to effect

a retreat that cannot be overtaken. Employ unmatchable speed.

Thus, if I want to engage in combat, even though the enemy has high

ramparts and deep moats, he cannot avoid doing battle because I attack

objectives he must rescue. So to me,

remember how I said that they will do just about anything that's not in the

contract. The liminal space. Like the liminal

space. That's what he's talking about there. And they have, you

know, I forget how old this work is, but they have literally

thousands of years of being trained to look for the liminal

space. We don't.

We see what's there. We don't see what's not there.

We are trained from childhood. Look at this picture.

Compare these two pictures. What's here that should not be here?

We're never asked what's not here that should

be here? And

that's a huge cultural difference. But as a leader,

if you can master both of those skills,

all of a sudden you become very valuable. Because what's

not in my sales messaging that should be here. What's in

my sales messaging that shouldn't be here? What's

in my competitive set that should not be

here? And what isn't here that should.

I call it Mastering the Art of. Of the unknown

Unknowns. And this is something that I get from Werner Earhart,

who talks about, you don't know what you don't know. That's

exactly what this is. In a macro context. The

Chinese are trained to look for what is not here that should

be here. What don't I know that I don't know? And

we're trained for what do I know that I know?

And so it creates a difference. But if you can. Can learn and

train to look for that liminal space, there is literally an

infinite number of moves that you could take in that liminal space. That's

why we were so shocked when China went out and they started dredging

up islands for remote air bases in the middle of the South

Pacific. And why we were so surprised when they went out and

started doing the. The Belt, the and Road initiative in Africa and

South America, because they were looking and they were saying, what's not here

that should be here? Well, there's harbors that should be here that aren't

here. There are trains that should be here that aren't here?

Well, let's Go give these countries, these developing countries, money

with earmarks so that they will do what we want them to do.

Well, and, and I, I looked at all that, I got to admit, I looked

at all of that sort of behavior over the last, now 25

years from, from China. And I got to

admit I'm one of the rare people who sort of went,

oh, okay. Well, I guess they've decided to behave like old school colonialists.

I guess they've picked up that lesson because they're doing

exactly what the British would have done

between the, you know, 15th century and the

17th century across every land mass they could

land a ship on. They've done what they're

also doing. The opium wars against us, correct? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

With fentanyl this time. Oh, yes. Huh? Oh, yeah.

And so some of this is,

and it's interesting so we talk about, and we even have fallen into this sort

of paradigm in, in this conversation here. You know, we,

we sort of fall into an east versus west kind of dynamic.

And the real,

for lack of a better term, the real insight is it's not east

versus west to your point, it's east and West. Right. We

both need each other. Right. You know, as you've been, as you've

been talking, I've been thinking repeatedly about the yin and Yang

symbol, right. Which is a visual representation of

this sort of idea, but also

thinking about the, the nature of, and you talk

about human nature, the, the nature of

how human nature molds itself

to certain perceptions of power

and status. Right. When you're high enough off, high enough

up in a hierarchy. Right. And so

I do think part of the creation of the multipolar world

that we are getting into, I think that's going to be happening over the next,

I would say conservatively, the next 60 years is,

is, well, at least another generational four, generational cycle. We have

to go through another four turnings on this, I think, is going to be a

state of the elites. And this is the

people who are most impacted by this news at

11. The elites who have made all of

their bones and their status and their billions based

on certain rules, in a certain

order just working, are the ones most upset right

now because they cannot

successfully figure

out how to strategize for a future they don't understand

and they never expected, interestingly enough, I don't think they ever

expected this to happen to

them. I think you're right. And, and

you can look at the things that are sort of the

hangouts of the elite, like Davos and things like.

Yeah, what, what you can see is that. And I,

I don't really like the term elites because they're like, to me,

elite is like, that's the term they set for themselves. I

have a different context on, on elite, but let's call them that,

right? So the elites. And I know it's

semantics, the elite, they're, they're

over at Davos and they recognize

exactly what you talked about. And so what are they doing?

They are actively working to shape the future

through things like esg, dei,

you know, what is it,

cbdc, Central banking, currencies, things like that.

They're actively working to preserve it. And the thing that

threw the huge wedge the, into the, the wrench

into the machine here, people think it was covet. It

wasn't Covid. Covid was a. Covid was right on track, I

think, with what they had planned for. I don't think it was a deliberate release

like other people do. But, but they

had planned for it the eventuality of a pandemic.

And the thing that stands out to me is that

generative AI is the one that has thrown the

biggest wrench into everything that they are doing. Because

if you notice now, 10 years ago,

nuclear energy was the worst thing

possible. Now that generative

AI has come on board and these elites

recognize what they can use it for. They can use it to

control people's thoughts. They can use it to, to

make more money. They can use it to preserve their status

and their, their livelihoods and their way of living while keeping

everybody else down. And that's obviously conspiratorial talk,

but they can at least preserve their lifestyles. Oh,

I don't think it's conspiratorial talk. I think they don't have any better ideas than

neo feudalism. I don't think they have any better ideas than that. They're not,

they're not geniuses like we, we, we attach elite to this idea of maybe

intellectualism. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,

they're not. I've said this before on the show. We'll say this again.

They are not smart.

They're D level students who graduated from Harvard.

A D level student from Harvard is the same as a land grant student who's

a B level student. It's just they had enough

money to provide a cushion to cover up

the fact that they're not that bright. Right? That's

all. That's all. They're really not that bright. And so we're not bright

person can only really ever do or

repeat in new ways old things that haven't

worked. They can't actually innovate to the future. Neo feudalism

or feudalism with AI or feudalism with ESG or

feudalism with DEI is still at the bottom.

Feudalism. Yeah. Well, and I

agree with that. And my point is, is that if you look at it,

their plan

all of a sudden shifted because of generative AI. They were

winding down electricity consumption in the United States. They were

telling people, get ready for rolling brownouts because renewable

energy is where we have to go because climate change is the problem.

They knew the whole time that nuclear energy was a viable

option, that it's the cleanest, safest form of energy we have

created to date. But they decided to ignore it

because they couldn't monetize it as well as they could monetize other

things. But now that AI has come out, look at

what's happened. France and Germany, all of a sudden, oh, we're

renuclearizing. Yeah. China

is building thorium based nuclear power plants. The United

States. We've got to cut bureaucratic red tape so that we

can input nuclear energy so that we can meet the

growing energy demands of generative AI.

That's, that's what's coming. And that's the biggest thing

that threw their wrench into the plans. And they were not

agile about it. Right. So now they're having to

scramble. And that's one of the things that he talks about. You know, he talks

about be subtle so that it approaches like it's

formless. Be spiritual so that it's soundless. He's

not talking about like be very quiet and

subtle. What he's talking about is understand

the subtleties of the movements that you have to make and

don't draw attention to them. It's like what

Napoleon says, don't interrupt your enemy when they're making. Correct.

That's right. So we

talked, we've talked a little while here and I want to, I want to thank

you for coming on the show today. This has been amazing. We found out

more about, about, not only about

your, about your, your work at Ignition Point Strategies, but also

just how, but also just how we, how we, how

we integrate. And so I want to close out our show because we are, we

are winding around towards the end here. I want to take,

maybe we could do it in two minutes, maybe three, and talk

a little bit about. Because we were talking before we even hit the, we

hit the record button. Talk about generative AI. So

I guess my 30 second rant is this. I'm not worried about generative AI,

like stealing my mind or starting World War III. I'm really not worried about

that. I'm worried about human beings engaged in that process and human

beings starting World War III because of human foibles and human

failings. But I'm not worried about an algorithm

convincing people to. No, I'm not worried about that.

I am fascinated in that

prompt thinking. Let's, let's, let's leave it, let's put it this way. Prompt thinking

is different than search thinking. So search thinking is based off

of the idea that I have to go out and

seek something, bring it in, and whatever I bring in,

then I have to somehow make work for me. Prompt thinking is

based in the idea that I don't have to seek.

I instead have to curate what is already there

and from that curation, edit, put things

together, build, and then boom, I have this new

thing. So we have prompt thinking and we have search thinking. Most people for the

last 20 years in small, medium large sized businesses, corporations, organizations,

all the way up to our institutions have engaged vociferously. And because

it works in search based thinking, that's what Google brought us.

AI systems and all the large language models are now bringing this

prompt based thinking. This is causing a lot of consternation

among many people. If

you were advising a

22 year old college graduate, what would you tell them to do?

What would you tell them to look at or pursue? And even better,

this is get to the book Congress will get to the book piece too. What

books would you tell them to read to be able to

influence their thinking around this

prompt based sort of mindset that is probably

going to dominate for the next 20 years.

Yeah, you know, I think the

first thing that I would tell them is get grounded in your

humanity. Get grounded in your

humanity because that is the one thing that AI can never duplicate.

They claim that they've been able to create AI that passes the Turing test, which

means that it's indistinguishable from a human. But I don't, I, I

don't believe that there, you can always sense that

something's off. Even with AI generated images at this point, you can always sense

it's the, the saturation in the color is wrong or something like that. Like

we just don't have the words to put to it. So I would say get

deeply grounded in your humanity because to me

that is the thing that is going to separate you and make you

incredibly

valuable in the church. So I would. To that point, I would recommend

reading things like A Tale of

Two Cities by Charles Dickens. Deeply grounds in

humanity. What. What does it mean to love?

You know, Les Miserables is an. Is another example of that. What does

it mean to love? To love another person is to see the face of God.

Like, oh man. Another one. The great

divorce by C.S. lewis.

Because C.S. lewis points out he

wasn't trying to make an accurate exegesis of heaven and hell.

What C S Lewis was trying to do was show us how we create heaven

and hell right now and how

we are choosing to isolate ourselves or

to move closer to our humanity and our divine potential

as sons and daughters of. Of God.

I think another one is Alas,

Babylon, which is

a 1960s World War III book.

But the reason I love it is it's very much a

ensemble piece and it talks about how humanity and how you

working with your neighbors to preserve your humanity

will allow you to weather any storm, regardless of

how difficult it is. And you have this compare and contrast

and. And then just my. The last

recommendation I would have. And obviously there are business books like Competing

against Luck or the End of Competitive Advantage that just shape my

business thinking. But. But Grant and

Sherman, the Friendship that Won the Civil War, or

alternatively Team of

Rivals. Because what those books show is

that great accomplishments are never done

in isolation. There's a. There's a. An

African proverb that says if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want

to go far, go together. And I think that's what those books highlight,

is that people who do business and focus on their

humanity and bring in other people who focus on their humanity and who

have strengths that make up and complement their weaknesses are the people

who will find success in the end. And so that list of

books is what I would recommend. Focus on your

humanity, your authenticity, and focus on

finding other people who do the same thing. And then you can do amazing

things. You'll understand how to use tools like generative

AI for the best. Awesome. But you will firmly grounded

in your humanity. I like that. Stay firmly grounded in your humanity and

find other folks who are also firmly grounded in their humanity.

Join hands across the aisle and start building

your, for lack of a better term, tribe. And the

tools will come along and be in their

appropriate place, as they should be.

Awesome. Yes, Awesome. I want to thank Zach Stuckey for

coming on the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books Podcast. This was our 150th

episode. Great episode. Real barn burner. I'd recommend

you check out his book list that we're going to have

in the show Notes. I recommend you pick up those books. And of course,

we have episodes featuring C. S Lewis and Charles

Dickens, not A Tale of Two Cities, but we definitely have covered some of

Dickens's books on here, as well as

C.S. lewis. A book that I would add, maybe in addition to that

list, is the Abolition of Man, which.

Yes. Which tells us men without chests, which.

Tells us all men without. What the result will be if you keep going

down the road that you're going down. And who wants to have

that? Once again, I'd like to thank Zach for

coming on the podcast. And with that, well,

we're out.