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

Episode Transcript
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(00:01):
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

(00:24):
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

(00:47):
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.

(01:10):
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

(01:31):
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

(01:54):
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

(02:17):
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

(02:39):
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

(03:02):
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

(03:24):
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

(03:45):
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

(04:07):
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

(04:29):
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

(04:49):
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

(05:11):
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

(05:34):
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

(05:57):
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.

(06:19):
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

(06:40):
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

(07:02):
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

(07:24):
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

(07:47):
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

(08:07):
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

(08:29):
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,

(08:52):
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

(09:14):
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

(09:38):
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.

(09:59):
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.

(10:21):
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

(10:43):
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

(11:06):
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

(11:27):
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.

(11:50):
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,

(12:12):
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.

(12:34):
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.

(12:56):
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

(13:17):
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

(13:39):
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

(14:02):
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

(14:25):
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.

(14:49):
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

(15:09):
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

(15:32):
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.

(15:57):
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,

(16:21):
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

(16:43):
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

(17:06):
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

(17:28):
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,

(17:52):
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

(18:12):
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

(18:34):
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

(18:57):
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

(19:19):
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

(19:41):
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

(20:05):
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,

(20:26):
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.

(20:49):
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

(21:12):
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

(21:34):
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

(21:56):
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

(22:17):
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

(22:38):
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.

(23:02):
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

(23:23):
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.

(23:45):
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.

(24:08):
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

(24:31):
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

(24:54):
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.

(25:15):
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

(25:37):
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

(25:59):
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

(26:20):
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

(26:44):
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

(27:07):
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

(27:28):
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,

(27:50):
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

(28:12):
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

(28:34):
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.

(28:57):
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

(29:19):
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

(29:41):
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?

(30:01):
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

(30:24):
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

(30:45):
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

(31:08):
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,

(31:29):
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

(31:52):
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

(32:14):
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,

(32:38):
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

(33:00):
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

(33:20):
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

(33:42):
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.

(34:04):
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

(34:26):
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

(34:47):
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

(35:08):
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

(35:30):
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

(35:54):
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

(36:16):
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

(36:38):
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

(36:59):
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

(37:22):
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.

(37:46):
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.

(38:09):
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

(38:32):
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

(38:53):
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

(39:15):
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,

(39:39):
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

(40:00):
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,

(40:23):
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

(40:46):
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

(41:08):
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

(41:29):
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

(41:51):
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

(42:13):
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

(42:35):
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,

(42:57):
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

(43:19):
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

(43:42):
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

(44:06):
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,

(44:27):
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

(44:50):
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?

(45:10):
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,

(45:33):
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

(45:57):
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,

(46:20):
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

(46:42):
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

(47:05):
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

(47:27):
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

(47:50):
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.

(48:12):
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.

(48:34):
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.

(48:56):
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

(49:18):
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

(49:41):
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

(50:03):
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,

(50:26):
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

(50:46):
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

(51:08):
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,

(51:30):
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

(51:53):
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

(52:15):
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

(52:37):
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

(52:58):
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

(53:20):
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

(53:42):
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

(54:04):
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,

(54:28):
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

(54:49):
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,

(55:11):
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

(55:33):
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

(55:57):
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,

(56:17):
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.

(56:40):
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

(57:03):
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

(57:25):
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.

(57:48):
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

(58:10):
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

(58:32):
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

(58:56):
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

(59:19):
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,

(59:42):
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

(01:00:05):
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

(01:00:28):
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,

(01:00:50):
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,

(01:01:14):
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

(01:01:35):
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.

(01:01:57):
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

(01:02:20):
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

(01:02:43):
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

(01:03:09):
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,

(01:03:29):
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,

(01:03:51):
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

(01:04:15):
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.

(01:04:38):
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.

(01:05:00):
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

(01:05:20):
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

(01:05:42):
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

(01:06:05):
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

(01:06:27):
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

(01:06:49):
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

(01:07:10):
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

(01:07:33):
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,

(01:07:57):
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.

(01:08:19):
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

(01:08:40):
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

(01:09:03):
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

(01:09:25):
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

(01:09:49):
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?

(01:10:11):
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,

(01:10:33):
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

(01:10:54):
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,

(01:11:14):
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

(01:11:38):
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

(01:11:58):
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,

(01:12:20):
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

(01:12:42):
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

(01:13:04):
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,

(01:13:25):
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

(01:13:47):
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.

(01:14:08):
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

(01:14:30):
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,

(01:14:54):
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

(01:15:16):
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

(01:15:37):
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

(01:16:01):
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

(01:16:25):
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

(01:16:46):
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

(01:17:07):
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

(01:17:30):
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

(01:17:52):
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

(01:18:13):
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

(01:18:35):
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

(01:18:57):
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

(01:19:18):
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

(01:19:41):
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

(01:20:03):
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

(01:20:27):
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

(01:20:50):
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

(01:21:12):
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

(01:21:35):
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

(01:21:58):
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.

(01:22:21):
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

(01:22:43):
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

(01:23:08):
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

(01:23:28):
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

(01:23:50):
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

(01:24:11):
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

(01:24:33):
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.

(01:24:55):
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

(01:25:17):
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

(01:25:39):
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.

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