The Art of War by Sun-Tzu (Translated by Thomas Cleary) w/Jesan Sorrells & Zac Stucki

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.