What Leadership Actually Looks Like: Resilience, Purpose, and Execution in Practice

What does leadership actually look like when it’s tested?

This episode brings together three of our most important conversations, originally affected by Apple ingestion issues, into one focused synthesis on resilience, purpose, and execution. The insights were strong. The substance was proven. Now the reach matches the value.

Featuring Savio P. Clemente, Dr. Doug Cardell, and Jim Tracy, this is a grounded exploration of leadership under pressure and what it takes to build something that lasts.

Savio P. Clemente brings clarity around purpose and the responsibility that comes with influence.

Dr. Doug Cardell expands the conversation into leadership development, challenging how we evaluate growth, systems, and human potential.

Jim Tracy grounds it in execution, showing what it takes to build culture and lead with consistency over time.

This is not repetition. This is reinforcement.

Not a rerun, but a strategic consolidation of conversations that define what leadership actually looks like when tested.

If leadership is built on clarity, conviction, and consistency, this episode brings all three into focus.

This is what winning looks like.

Transcript

Clarity Over Comfort

SPEAKER_01 0:00

This is not a podcast for comfort. It's a podcast for clarity. In a culture flooded with noise, dangerous narratives, and emotional uncertainty, this space exists to examine what actually matters and what actually works. Here we question power itself, belief systems, and the assumptions most people inherit without inspection. Most people accept instead of dissect. This podcast is about correcting that. Welcome. Bienvenue, Marhaban, Bienvenidos to the Magnificent Ones podcast. Some conversations start at the wrong time, not because they lack value, but because circumstances limit their reach. During a period of affected by Apple ingestion issues, three of our most important leadership conversations never receive the rollout they deserve. But substance does not disappear. Insight does not expire, and leadership, when it is real, deserves amplification. Today's episode is not a re-release, it is a cornerstone. Three voices, three perspectives, one unified conversation about leadership, responsibilities, and building something that lasts, featuring Savio Plemente, Dr. Doug Cordell, and Jim Tracy. This is the magnificent ones. We begin with purpose. Before leadership becomes strategy, before strategy becomes execution, there must be clarity. Clarity about why you lead, clarity about who you serve, clarity about what responsibility actually means. Savio Pli Comente brings that foundation into focus. Welcome. How are you doing today?

SPEAKER_03 1:42

Thank you so much, Oklahoma. I'm doing well. I appreciate the opportunity to be on this platform with you and to speak about something so searing like overcoming.

SPEAKER_01 1:55

Oh, wonderful. So since the introduction's already out of the way, I figured I'd start with my personal favorite question, which we talked about in the in the pre-interview. You said that leaders often perform best during crisis but struggle once it ends. Why do you think clarity disappears after pressure is gone?

SPEAKER_03 2:13

I think for the most part, leaders especially have to not only perform, but have to model and have to put on an armor. And I think when that pressure exceeds what is natural for them, then it becomes so troubling and so overwhelming that they have to seek refuge. And the only way they could do that is to pretend their way through it. But as someone like myself with a background and lived experience that I've had, that's not really how crisis and the after post-crisis works. It works because you have to face the discomfort and accept it and find strategies and tools in order to overcome them. And that's the hard part because you're not only leading yourself, you're leading a team, you're leading the organization. And that amount of responsibility can be overwhelming.

SPEAKER_01 3:10

So what's what's something that's changed after, you know, like say the survival mode is gone. What's one of the biggest changes that come out of that?

SPEAKER_03 3:21

I think a level of authenticity and also a level of presence. Those words are used interchangeably, and they're also used finitely, right? A lot of people use that word or those words in order to express what they think is the most cliche thing. But really, what that really means is that are you able to be very, very transparent with yourself and your actions and your motives and your directives with your team? In order to lead, you have to lead yourself. So your team and the organization models and mirrors what you put out, what you give out. And so oftentimes, especially in the areas of leadership, healthcare leadership that I study, it's when the performance has to still continue. How do you reconcile that? How do you negotiate that? And how do you accept that? And those are the hard parts that not only leaders, but people in general are not willing to face.

SPEAKER_01 4:45

And they've had this identity for say 20 years, 30 years, well, however long. And now they have to balance whether they pretend to still be that person that they've been all along, or they they struggle with showing people who they are right now. Have what's your experience in that realm?

unknown 5:06

Yeah.

When Pressure Hides The Truth

SPEAKER_03 5:07

I I would say to the large part that you have to have some level of professionalism. You have to have some level of boundary. So I'm not saying those need to bleed, but you do have to, to some degree, have a commonality with your team and the organization. Otherwise, what ends up happening is you become two individuals. You become the professional everyone leads on to, and then you become someone that people don't really trust all that well because they don't know the human outside of the role. And so I think your body in general sends stress signals, sends patterns. I know for me, if I didn't listen to those, the outcome would have been tragic. I was, as you know, diagnosed in 2014 with non-Hodgkins lymphoma stage three. I was in remission for a decade, and then just a routine visit to my ENT about a decade later, he actually said, Do you your lymphoma survivor, right? And I'm like, Yeah. He goes, Do you know B cells can live in the nasal cavity? And I'm like, What? I thought I was just going there just for nasal medication. And so then began 16 months of treatment, including a 29-day stay in the hospital, 26 pounds that I lost in the hospital, a visit to the ICU to get norephrinephrine, five months of an immunotherapy, four months of physical therapy. And then I also did a whole bunch of integrated modalities. And I'm reiterating this because I want people to understand that if there is something, especially medical, that's a huge boulder or mountain that just seems insurmountable to climb or to go through. I think the first step you have to do is assess within yourself, what are the tools, what is the knowledge, what is the strategies, what is the wisdom, what is the what is the insights that I can cultivate now in this moment. So the first thing to do is to really acknowledge that and to say to yourself, this is where I'm at. And so when I deal with and speak with healthcare leaders, especially, who deal with high stakes, I mean, they have responsibilities not only for their team and the organization, but they have responsibility for the other person, the patient that they're looking at. It's life or death for some of them. And so that pressure mounts because at the end of the day, it's a silent pressure because they have to be consistently aware and awake and also approachable and have that care and that understanding. I was fortunate that I had that, but so many people don't.

unknown 7:52

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 7:53

So so, and and and I I will speak briefly on this when it came to the whole concept of say survival mode, and I find that in a lot of high-performing individuals, that it's almost as if we need a crisis to solve sometimes, and we don't see that's to our detriment. And that becomes tied to our identity because we're the fixers and the the reliable ones. And and so as long as everyone's coming to us and like we have a sense of purpose because maybe you don't have that in your permanent personal life, but in your professional life, you get to be the hero, you know. And I almost feel as though we s we create a system in which it's a negative system, but we have a sense of purpose because there's a problem and it it could overextend us, it could put us at in a situation where we're not necessarily focusing on our bodies, our mental health, our health in general, and we're just we just keep going. And as long as we keep going, we feel like, hey, we're we're doing we're doing good work and and it we're not letting people down, but we're not seeing that we're not taking care of the the body, right? Or or the soul, or however you want to phrase it. We're not taking care of us. And by not taking caring of us, we miss things. And the addiction, I I do in some ways feel that it is addiction that we get so caught up in being the one that everyone comes to that we neglect ourselves in the process, and we don't see how far we've gone off the course and how deeply in imbalanced our health and to our professional, our profession ratio is. Was that ever the your case where did you ever focus way too much on work and not enough on yourself at any time?

Silence Stillness And Self-Regulation

SPEAKER_03 9:47

Well, initially when I had the first cancer bout, I was still working. But after the relapse a decade later, uh there's no way I could have because I knew for myself, Oakley, that I had to give 100% of my attention, my energy, my focus, my emotion, my mental acuity. I had to give everything to it because of what was involved in the treatment protocol. It wasn't as simple as the first time around. The first time around, it was just six rounds of a chemotherapy called RCHOP. This time it was two three-day hospital stays, getting chemo, then injecting myself in order to stimulate stem cells, going into an actual office setting and getting my stem cell harvested, getting a neck catheter, then being placed in a hospital. Typically, it's three weeks in a quarantine room. I was there for four weeks. I one night, because of the whole treatment, I had to go to the ICU. My pulse and would rise every time I would stand up to 160, 170, and they had to give me norephrinephrine. Like I mentioned, I lost 26 pounds. And in that whole process of the hospital stay, I think what I found as anchors, and I it wasn't even intentional. It's something that I just found in general. I was put in a quarantine room. And because I was in that room, and even though every four hours they would check my vitals, the nurse would come in and give me my medication, I had two things that were accessible to me no matter what the situation was, no matter what time it was, was silence and stillness. And those two things have been echoed in so many belief systems throughout time. But when you really sink into it and surrender into that silence and stillness, you find a power, you find an awakening. You also find that you touch something so deep and guttural because who are you? Who was I in that hospital bed tied to all those machines? I yes, the physical part of me was suffering. Yes, I was in massive discomfort. Yes, I was dealing with some side effects, but my spirit was still alive. I still had mental faculty still running. My emotions were open. So I had to really understand that maybe the process of this suffering, which I call a spiritual exile, so some context. I grew up Catholic and I went to elementary school, Catholic elementary school, I was an all to boy. But in college, I decided to study various belief systems. So I've studied everything from Buddhism up until Vedic philosophy. And for me, I find that there's truths in all those. If you just really germinate or really ferret out what is actually being said, that's that part is the responsibility of the person trying to understand. And so I speak to this because I want people to understand that you're much greater than your circumstance, you're much greater than the situation that's happening to you. And even though you are in that pain at the moment, because no one wants to be in a hospital, you can allow yourself to have a vision. As a board certified wellness coach, we talk about this idea of vision. Vision is not a goal. Vision is how you want to feel, how you want to be, how do you want to reclaim what was stolen or taken away from you? And that's a very large endeavor. And so the science and the stillness helped me to not only come to terms with it, not only to accept it, but to surrender to the situation at hand.

SPEAKER_01 13:37

Do you know, I think this is a very I'm not often at a loss for words, and you know, it's it's I think I when you when you can see so many people who they can be intelligent, but it doesn't mean they know when to stop and reassess their life. They usually it happens, you know, maybe they're 75 and they they're alone then, right? It's like their friends have passed or their significant other has passed, and it's like now they're they they're still because well they're a silence by nature, not hey, I've taken the time to consciously consider where I am in life and where I'm where I'm headed, right? And to have the ability to, you like you said, you had two things when you were in the hospital. You had silence and you had stillness, and to take the time to question, you know, that and questioning is the starting point of every scientific, you know, thinking, right? So by asking yourself a question, you can then focus on a roadmap to where you want to go, right? And what were some of the things that that came to you in your stillness?

SPEAKER_03 14:45

Yeah, it was really this idea of self-regulation. Like, what can I control? Oakley, can I control my hemoglobin levels? No. Can I control my white blood cells? No. Can I control my red blood cells? No. I can't control those things. And I have to defer to experts like doctors who actually can measure those things, can analyze those things and tell me if they work. Now, did I use AI when I was in? Yeah, I did actually. What happened is that every time they would take my blood every four hours, and let's say something came up high, I would copy and paste that into my AI. And I would say, is this a discussion for when the doctors make their rounds? And I would be bold and ask, I mean, at one point one day, they were like 13 doctors deep. I mean, doctors and nurses deep. I didn't, I wasn't afraid. You know why? Because people often defer their power over to what I call the wizard of Oz, the actual Oz. And that's not what healing is. Healing is not linear. It's not, it's, it's unstructured. It's highs and lows, it's underneath, it's over. And I knew I had to be in partnership with that team. And fortunately, I had a good team that they listened to me. They didn't dismiss me, they allowed me to freely speak. I even said to them one night, because I would survey the nurses that would come. I asked probably about seven or eight nurses throughout the whole 29 days. And I said, they're like, oh no, this stem cell is like serious. They're like, you're in a quarantine room for a reason because we want to stave off any infections. But they're like, there's so many patients, Savio, that want to rush home. And then they rush home and they have an infection if they come back. And they have to, you know, I I heard this throughout different nurses. I would just ask randomly. And so I told the doctors who'd meet the rounds. I was like, listen, I'm not one of your patients who wants to rush to get home. Don't get me wrong, I would love to go home, but I'm not one. I don't want to come back. So whatever you need to do to discharge me, if it's ready and it's time, then discharge me. Otherwise, I'm good. Um you're not going to hear a complaint, you know, with me. And I'm not trying to create a picture for those listening to this podcast because I dealt with diarrhea issues. I mean, I'm talking about every couple hours. Thankfully, I didn't vomit. I did have some dental issues as well. I felt extremely lethargic. There was one week, one whole week, that I had no desire to eat food. Like that the the thought of eating something was just like repulsive to me. One day I think I only ate black olives, black on my salad, black olives. And I even had to ask my sister to come and bring me Pepsi, which I don't drink really soda. I used to drink it when I was younger. I just don't drink it. And she's like, Pepsi? I'm like, yeah. I'm like, because they're giving me these fat pills. And I'm like, I just couldn't drink water anymore. It was just, I couldn't drink juice anymore. I needed something bubbly and like like Pepsi. I needed something like that. So she got it for me, thankfully. And so I don't want to paint the picture that it was hunky-dory, that I was like in this quasi-spiritual state and nothing affected. No, it was guttural, okay? It was nasty, okay? It was, it was, it was bad. But I also knew that if I did not give my full attention to it, did not give my full presence to it, did not give my full and and full spark of my whatever you want to call it, light or energy or soul, if I didn't give that to this, then I don't know if I would be speaking to you today.

SPEAKER_01 18:29

Man. Right, how many in in coaching, how many people do you have a similar conversation to, maybe not to that extent, right? To get them to understand like what's at stake for themselves if they don't reassess and reevaluate where they are right now. Because I'm sure with your persp your lived experience and from your perspective, you can see certain telling signs that this person, as a founder, CEO, what have you, or manager, whatever, they're a step away from not being in a in a in a good state. What are what are some situations that you you you encounter?

Coaching Burnout Into Discernment

unknown 19:14

Sure.

SPEAKER_03 19:15

So initially when I started coaching years and years ago, I was coaching regular individuals, and then I moved on to coaching cancer survivors. And oftentimes they would talk about this idea of betrayal. Why did my body betray me? Now I've obviously moved on to executive coaching. I coach healthcare leaders, and the talk is about the pressure, the talk is about the burnout, but specifically about certain terminologies that maybe to your audience doesn't mean anything. But we talk about things like preventing costly reversals, right? This idea of things that were widely adopted, but they realize it's not better than the standard of care. This idea of post-crisis, after the crisis has happened, how do you reorientate? So, for example, COVID-19 was great as an example. Innovation happened, the things were adopted, but did they really work out? There were holes in a lot of it. Then obviously we talk about this idea of like return on investment, right? The pressure is not only the patient side, it's also about the administration side, the bureaucratic side. And then we talk about this idea of converting that from like that disruption into discernment, having a more clarity and composure with that. So those are all logistical things. But at the end of the day, I will tell you, no matter if I'm doing, if I'm coaching an executive or I'm coaching just a regular person, the human truths are all the same. It's how do I live in a world where people are constantly pulling at me when I myself am doubting myself, when I myself have a role to perform. And at the end of the day, how am I bringing joy and spark to the world and to myself? How am I bringing my success into a world full of disruption? I mean, there's so much disruption now that I don't, I don't even know how people are dealing with it. There's political disruption, there's social disruption, there's technological disruption, people are getting fired left and right with AI. There's the advent of people having to upskill themselves to learn a new technology like AI. I mean, if you thought the DOM, the dot-com boom, and I lived through the dot-com boom, I graduated in the dot-com boom, and I also was a casualty of the dot-com crash. Not that AI is gonna crash, but I was. So the key elements here are how do I bounce back? So we talk about resilience, right? But I like to challenge that word and I say, let's talk about what was not only my professional understanding and my training, but this idea of my lived experience. I'm talking about adaptive resilience. That when you're in the S H I T, when you're in that discomfort, that pain, like I was, how do you? remain flexible? How do you make connections? How do you strategize and figure out for yourself, well, what can I do in this moment? What do I have control over? What do I not have control over? What can I announce, pronounce today? What can I allow myself to discover about myself through this particular problem?

SPEAKER_01 22:24

Something that I find amazing is that people who, and this is me overgeneralizing here, who have the ability to ask questions, say pre-crisis, they ask questions during crisis and they ask questions after crisis. So they're always reevaluating. And so that maybe that's a component of your identities that you're always reassessing, right? And not many people take the time to just maybe look in the mirror over this is a cliche. Today I feel like I'm a five tomorrow I feel like a 10. But we don't take the time to just pause and just see where we are. And so we just keep performing, right? And even our job becomes a performance. And I'm not talking about getting the job done. I'm saying that we're like the actors, right? The unpaid actors that's showing up and everything's fine and we're smiling and we're shaking the hands and we're still not taking the time to do the check-ins. How how helpful do you think it would be if we just took the time to just do some check-ins with ourselves?

The ALOHA Framework For Change

SPEAKER_03 23:26

I'm gonna echo what Michael Jackson, the great Michael Jackson said. I'm starting with the man in the mirror asking him to make the change. I'm not gonna I'm not going to make your listeners listen to that any longer, but that is a human truth and he tapped it to something so beautiful. Because at the end of the day, and I echo this in my TEDx talk, so I did a TEDx talk about a year and a half before my relapse in June of 2024. It was entitled Seven Minutes to Wellness How to Love Your Inner Stranger. And people say to me, they're like, that's so ambiguous. What do you what's this inner stranger? And I said, well what's the inner stranger to you? I said I left it ambiguous on, you know, on purpose. They're like, okay, so what is it to you, Sabya? And I'm like, okay, well the inner stranger to me, if I really think deeply, is that young person who for me never felt grounded. I always felt, I mean, even so much so that a friend in high school used to call me nomad. He used to say that I was like a Bedouin nomad. I mean, it wasn't the most positive. It wasn't really said, said like to taunt me. He just said it. And of course I was young, right? I didn't, I didn't know much. And so it was, I never felt really rooted. I never felt really grounded. That has thankfully changed as as I've gotten older. And then when I said that to the person, the, the, the female was like, oh, actually, I think my inner stranger is that professional woman that I want to aspire to be, but I just can't reach. Or that great mother that I want to emulate, but I I just can't do it. Or that that sibling that wants to be there, but I I just can't, I can't be that sibling. That's my inner stranger. And so I mentioned the TEDx talk in relation to this question you just asked because I have a simple framework. So it's a framework within a framework. My official framework is called the adaptive resilience framework, leadership framework. But in it I talk about something called aloha. So Oakley, as you know, aloha in in Hawaiian means hello. So it's a hello to your inner self. And that's really the the the crux of why I'm even mentioning this to this question. Because and I made it very simple for people. So it's an acronym so A stands for acknowledge. So acknowledge where you are, don't pretend. So if that means that you need to do a word vomit, a paper vomit, a digital vomit, just vomit everything out that's happening, that you're feeling, that you're sensing, that that's a mental consternation for you, just do that. L stands for listening or listen to your inner self. So in Hawaiian healing modalities, there's something called Huna healing. And in Huna healing, they believe that the body gives energy, sensations, knowledge, wisdom. You just have to ask questions to it. And I don't expect you to talk to your body because that's a little strange in front of other people. But in the privacy of your own home, you could do that. And what I call the three brains, which is the head, heart and gut, they do. They do give off some information. So you need to just be quiet and still enough in order to listen and try to see what that may tell you. O stands for opening. So open yourself up to the information. So no matter what your belief system, even if you don't have a belief system, just open up to that information, that insight, because it can help guide you to where you need to go. H stands for harnessing. So harness that information don't be afraid to make the connections. Don't be afraid to even cross out things that may or may not make sense, but just allow yourself to harness that. And then A is the most important it's acting but I have a caveat and it's acting with courage. You have to have the courage in order to act. So don't be afraid to be that new version of yourself. Because I think the number one thing in a lot of spiritual books will tell you this is at the end of the day, if you change yourself, people have to change around you. That's just the way it works. Because even the great Einstein says you cannot fix a problem with the same consciousness that created it. So in order to recreate an environmental shift, whether that's in healthcare leadership or that's work or whatever situation that you're in, you need to change yourself. So in other words, it's like the adage of if you have a uh a cup of water, if it's full, you can't pour any water into it. It's going to spill over. So you have to pour out the contents in order to fill new waters in. And the new waters are people, situations, something that lights you up more so than the work problem that you have.

SPEAKER_01 28:04

Two things came to mind as as you were speaking and it was Gandhi be the change that you wish to see in the world. And you know that that's that speaks to me deeply and the that you're you're you the person at your core there has to be a relation with relationship with yourself because we take time to know other people we take time to learn scientific equations we take time to learn about AI take time to learn law, medicine, all these things when we should also take time to know ourselves like what what makes you know Savio take? What makes Savio happy? Why is it that the the main driver of what makes us successful is is us and our actions yet we don't take time to actually invest in ourselves until it's too late. It's like I'm 85 years old now when I take the time to invest in myself when we can invest in ourselves now, get to know ourselves now, right? And the more we take time to know ourselves, the better off we'll be in the long run, short run, because as you said, you can then create healthy boundaries because you know what your your your line in the sand is right you know what your boundaries are and you know what you're willing to compromise and and not. So why do you think in society as a whole, like people, that's not an emphasis to really focus on ourselves.

SPEAKER_03 29:25

It's just hey keep going keep going you know why do you think that is why do we just keep going so I think it's it's a few things the research and the validated studies will tell you that it's not only based upon performance, but it's based upon how others perceive you. And so you have to then feel that you are have to capture people's attention you have to one up this idea of the Joneses. And then also to a large degree it's if you don't create then who are you? If your identity is not tied to a role or something situational, then you're you're considered a bum. You're you're considered someone who doesn't have any aspirations. And there's a sense of lawlessness there, which I think what ends up happening is people then judge themselves and then unfortunately they get involved in things that are detrimental to not only their livelihood but to their safety. And so I think what's really important is echoing back to what I mentioned earlier about this idea of self-regulation and also even my trainings this idea of intentionality and the only way to do that is to really find and carve out days and opportunities for yourself where you can cultivate that. So the weekend doesn't have to just be about shopping and food prep and lounging around it could just be spending a few moments in whether that's meditation or prayer or light walking brisk walking or journaling or breathing exercise you can do a simple box breathing for in, four out hold and then you know repeat again. There's something that I like to use in my coaching and also in my keynote speaking is that this idea of psychological distancing. So before I get in trouble with any psychologist and psychiatrist, when I mean psychological distancing I don't mean detachment or disassociation. I mean having that distance between you and the problem. And by doing that you allow breath, the actual breath to form because Eastern philosophy will tell you they always look to nature Oakley they always say the seed germinates when it germinates it doesn't rush. Just like the river doesn't rush it knows its direction. So if there's stones or rocks or boulders in front of it it goes under, it goes over but it's patient. It knows the flow of how that happens and then what ends ends up happening is people want the current the current of the river to go faster. And I'll cop to the to this I've wanted it because if you look at my credentials, you look at my resume and you look at what I've produced beyond the cancer bouts that I've had, they would say oh wow you you must be like a type A personality and maybe to some degree I would be in their consideration for that. But for me it's never really been about trying to keep up and and okay maybe in in my younger days that was probably the case. But life has shown me that meaning is derived from what actually gives me joy and pleasure and how I extend that graciousness, that devotion to work, to other people. And so I think it's very important that we just assess and take a daily inventory or a weekly inventory or a monthly inventory as to not only what lights us up, but what are the subtle changes we need to make in order I'll give you an analogy so when you play an instrument it's not tuned in correctly what ends up happening to the actual expert year it's not played properly. And so I think it behooves us to try to understand what kind of notes we're putting out into the world and how we want it to be received and most importantly how we perceive what work we put out how it sounds to us how it reflects back to us.

SPEAKER_01 33:32

So how how are you able to discern like not now you know you're coaching, you have lived experience, how are you able to do to discern when someone is in a state of of crisis or maybe you know they've gone through pro prolong you know pressure how are you able to even help people identify that like maybe just give an example or story of that?

SPEAKER_03 33:55

Sure. So the number one thing we were always told is this idea that intelligence was like the number one quality to have then we were told no no no emotional intelligence is because the emotions make choices and they actually make decisions. Okay. But actually the research points to this idea of metacognition. So it's the thinking beyond the thinking and so when I'm in front of an audience noting or I'm coaching an executive or I'm even interviewing someone as a journalist, the one thing that I always notice and I think Oprah actually has said this herself is that when that interview or that speaking or that coaching session has ended, they always want feedback on how they did. And so I tie into this idea of metacognition because if you're thinking about the thinking and you're the person who's actually speaking or you're the person who's actually being coached, is your problem something that's actually present or are they just remnants of things from the past? So if you're living from the past, then you're not actually living you're just existing. You're just you're just responding to things. So are you actually responding? Are you receiving what are you doing? So that's the number one thing I know I look for but I also want to clarify to those listeners coaching is not mentoring. Coaching is not being a consultant either coaching is allowing the person in front of you to come up with the answers themselves because once they do, it sticks and they actually learn and generate because one thing that I learned initially when I started my whole coaching certifications and I have two of them from the ICF and also board certified from the national board certification is this idea of the trans theoretical model of change. It's called the stages of change. And was it what it posits is that it's not that people don't want to change it's that they don't know how to change. They don't have the tools necessary to know how to change. So in other words are they pre-contemplating it okay maybe I'll do it are they actually contemplating yeah I'm gonna do it are they in action of it? Oh okay are they willing to continue that and prolong that are they thinking about not doing it so that's a relapse so as a coach especially an executive coach like myself we actually guide the individual in that way to not only reframe problems. I'll give you a classic example when I was in the hospital I would have people tell me my people now remember this is a relapse so and I also as a as a journalist and also a bestselling author I've interviewed cancer survivors. I interviewed 200 of them I took 35 of their stories told my own wrote a book called I Survived Cancer Here is how I did it 35 cancer survivors share their journey. Thankfully became a bestseller in like four categories and to me it wasn't the fact that it was just the bestseller it was that it actually landed with people that people actually got some information from it because I wanted it was a compilation of the interviews and at the end I asked the people who contributed I said I want you to put your website I want you to put your social media they're like what I'm like yeah I want to I want you to promote yourself they're like that's odd I'm like no because I want people reading it to know that you're alive that you're living that you're thriving that you're doing that cancer doesn't have to be the end of the story doesn't have to be the end of your sentence it could be more than that. And so I say this all really for people to understand that the power does lie within us and there's horrible things that happened. Don't get me wrong since my relapse in June of 2024 I've known eight people who died of cancer and sometimes some of them it was just their first bat with it. So I don't take my work and what I do and what I'm saying very lightly. I take great responsibility because I look at it as a daily devotional to the work to myself and to others. So it's beyond gratitude because gratitude to some degree feels like it's rote like if you write and you write down okay I'm grateful for the grateful that one of my one of the individuals that I trained with he's a University of Pennsylvania professor says that the larger question to ask about gratitude is why so for example I am grateful for the house I live in okay why are you grateful for it? How did that actually happen? Well did it happen because you worked really hard, you saved you made some right investments you finally decided that you deserved it the why allows that stickiness to actually flourish and that's the key.

SPEAKER_01 38:35

So as you do talk about the why there has to be some slowing down to even begin to ask the why so do you ever encourage some leaders to just slow down and process, evaluate what does that look like with your line of work?

SPEAKER_03 38:53

Well in the job it's really hard for leaders because they have to make quick decisions, especially healthcare leaders. But what I ask them to do is to carve out that time that they think is suitable for them to do that. One of my favorite shows on TV is called The Pit. It's on HBO Max I don't know if you watched it but it stars Noah Wiley. And I'll tell you truthfully Oakley when I'm watching that show my nervous system is a wreck, my friend I mean even though I'm someone who's meditated for now over 20 years, I'm a wreck watching the show but I love it. I love it. But they make some high stakes decisions. I mean they really do and they put their not only their life on the line because sometimes these patients are extremely aggressive but I think the show and the show is slowly showing you that these healthcare leaders are in trouble and they need to take out that time. So whether that's like I mentioned you go to the basics it doesn't have to be so complex. It doesn't have to be that it has to be a spa day if it is a spa day wonderful but it doesn't have to be it could just be a couple of breaths it could be a couple of notes to yourself it could be writing in a journal it could be allowing yourself to look at the big bigger picture, having that psychological distance that I mentioned, having that adaptive resilience that when you're in the problem, you're able to have a more expansive viewpoint. And that's very, very key. So thank you for asking that question.

SPEAKER_01 40:20

So I guess my follow-up would be have you ever encountered an individual that is definitely in survival mode but doesn't realize they're in survival mode but all that their situation and their environment is is like hey you're in survival mode and then having them come to the realization that you're right now you're in survival mode. And and how do you help them navigate that once you've identified it sometimes we don't know there's a problem because it hasn't it doesn't have a name and it's not a name maybe it's not a name that you've ever associated yourself with. And so you're like that problem doesn't exist because I'm I'm a go-getter. I'm a I'm a force to be reckoned with have you encountered that at all?

SPEAKER_03 41:02

Yeah well there's a difference between survival mode and this idea of integration right survival mode is getting through the crisis but my lane and what I speak on and what I coach on and what I write about is this idea of after the crisis how do you how do you get back to your old self? That old operating system no longer works. So how do you reset? How do you gain the clarity the composure to do that? And so yes, are they in denial? Of course they are but at the end of the day I can't for I can't take them out of out of that survival mode. Survival mode is only realized and fully overcome when they feel safe enough that they can continue. That's not something that I can externally do for them. What we can do is do do the do the talk therapy I use tools like embodiment practices, somatic practices where the body like I said talks to talks to you or gives you sensation. We can delve deeply into that we can talk about the felt experience naming something that you can't really actually name but we you can actually name how and why it actually exists whether that's a visual a sound or a movement of some kind we can actually do things like actually go back into the past although you have to be very careful because that delves into the realm of therapy and coaching is not therapeutic in that sense but we can also inform where that starting point first started right I'll give you a classic example there was an executive that I coached and in the coaching session because my coaching sessions are meant to elicit whatever is there. So there's nothing there's literally nothing that we block off. You can go anywhere. And when he was talking I just randomly mentioned I'm like because he mentioned that he was a like a latchkey kid and he and I I I just asked him I said what was your favorite commercials and he was like huh? Like yeah what was your favorite commercials? And and he's like talking and he tells me there was like two of them and he's like that's a strange question to ask me like he literally broke the like the fourth wall so to speak and I'm like oh I just asked and then he realized he realized I didn't I didn't but he realized in that moment that's why he became an ad ad executive that's why he became an ad executive is because he in a marketing executive is because of that reason. And he didn't even put two and two together. And the thing is he was at that point in his life where he wanted to not be that anymore. So what I'm just getting at is that this is not forced information. This is information that's continually moving and it's about assessing, reassessing and then reassessing again until you come to that crux where it Change tips over. It's actually the actual tipping point.

SPEAKER_01 44:04

And so my I have a question for you that is if someone's realizing that they're over the crisis and survival mode has dissipated, and they're having trouble with clarity because now they have to figure out who they are, because you brought up that that old version of themselves is it's no longer there. There's a new integrated operating system. So how do they, or what steps do they take to get clarity, or how do you find who you are now? Because there was a version before you. So how do you establish clarity?

Rebuilding Identity After Survival Mode

unknown 44:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 44:43

So whether that's my keynoting or that's my coaching, or even in my interviews, the first thing you have to establish is what's if we're coaching, what is the goal of the coaching? Because coaching is a conversation with a purpose. Otherwise, it's not, it's just a conversation. So that's not really what coaching is. Coaching is we have to get to some type of endpoint or some type of destination. Not complete destination, but a destination of some kind. And so the high performance that I work with is that they just don't survive the disruption. They don't just survive the adversity. They convert it into that strategic advantage. So it's really the ability to allow them to uh discover what the problem is, because that's that's where it all starts from, or what the pain point is. And then where would they like to go with this? And sometimes, especially in a coaching session, we don't know how it's gonna end. They might they may say, I want that result, but it might be something completely different, or we go off tangents. I mean, that's just life. That's just that's just how us humans are built. But the key element in all that is for you to have the ability or have the desire to want to work this out. Because so many times people just don't want to do the work. And if you don't do the work with anything in life to a degree, I'm not saying that it needs to always be so hard, because that is telling as well. But the work in and of itself allows you to figure out what's important, what do I want to keep, what do I want to let go of, and what is it that for me in my work, in my line, that I want to actually manifest. And I often tell people the best way to create that is to do a mental map or a physical map and just plot out the points, whether that is per quarter, monthly, and do an easy thing like reverse engineer. Find out for yourself what you feel the goal is and backtrack. Figure out what are the reverse steps that you need to where you are. And if you are just starting from the beginning, yes, that's gonna require a lot of effort. But if you're in the midpoint, then if you look at the physical map or you look at something that you plotted in real time, you're like, oh, I'm actually not as far as I think I am. But in your mind, because there's so much consternation and so much bubbling of information and stress and responsibility, we often don't see that sometimes we're closer than we think.

SPEAKER_01 47:18

And here's the the question. This is a personal question that I was so fascinated by. And I as I was looking through your work, I was like, man, Savio could have been 10 million different things, you know, and uh you you have a very extensive, you know, portfolio. Out of all the industries that you could have worked in, or you know, you've obviously worked in a lot, regardless. But as far as coaching is concerned, why did you choose healthcare? How did that come to be?

SPEAKER_03 47:52

So my actual board certification is called NBCHWC, National Board Health and Wellness Coach. And so for me, and then I also have an ICF certification. ICF just means International Coaching Federation is considered the gold standard in coaching. I wanted to make sure that if I was to be a coach, because I could have, like you said, gone into different areas. I think what appealed to me was the fact that I'm guiding someone on their own discovery. I'm not telling someone stuff. Yes, sometimes you can interject and say, well, what about this and what about that? I'm not saying that's off limits, that is permitted, so to speak. But coaching really inspired me because I feel like a part of what I discovered, a part of my own transformation, is then allowed to foster into another that somehow that bleeds into their own lives, so to speak. And I think I also liked the idea of coaching because you're also allowing other people to realize potential. And human potential is a very tricky thing because I don't, I am not of the ilk that I believe that you have you either have it or you don't. That's just, I don't believe that. I believe that we all are, and this is a tenet of the coaching programs that I'm certified in, is that we believe that people are whole and they are creative and they have all the answers. They it's just been masked, it's been overwhelmed, uh, it's been hidden. And our job is to unhide the things that are there. So it's the statues that Michael Angelo, I think he mentioned that the the work of art was always in there. He just chiseled away at what others couldn't see. He had the vision, he had the goal. But I I think the chiseling part is really what excites me in the area of human potential, human condition. And also I have to say it was healthcare because whether you believe in destiny or fate, this is what the cards were dealt for me. And I can't deny that I used healthcare and wellness to be here today speaking to you and to also do and act upon my own inner desire. And that's the truth. And the truth shall set you free.

SPEAKER_01 50:17

Are you are you working on anything else? Do you have anything up and coming that you'd like to share?

SPEAKER_03 50:22

No, at the moment, it's I have a few more spots for 2026 for keynoting. That's really exciting to me, and I'll tell you why, Oakley, because yes, I do coaching and yes, and it's great to do individual work, but when you're on a stage, especially with healthcare leaders who make such pressing decisions, and I'm not gonna deny, but the healthcare industry in the US does need work. But I also am of the feeling that people often say work in a corporate structure, it's so soul su uh soul sucking, soul sucking, this and uh you know why can't it be soul searching? Why can't we change the paradigm? And instead of saying it's soul sucking, it's gonna be soul searching. Maybe the goal is for you to work within the confines of that and find ways and means to create happiness from it. So keynoting is important because I feel like from the top, if you was to look like look at a shower head, it trickles down. So, for example, I'm talking to CEOs, I'm talking to CMOs, I'm talking to C-suite executives, and that information then gets disseminated to their team, to the organization, to the community, to their family, to their loved ones. I mean, it's it's just uh so rewarding. I am also at this point considering another book, but we'll see. I do have some media visits uh internationally as well that I'm excited about. I'm also, to a large degree, have always been entrepreneurial. So I'm looking at another venture that integrates AI, but not in, you know, when it comes to AI, journalism is very tricky because is the work being fostered by you or machine? And so I actually would want to combine even my background. So I graduated a computer science and information systems degree. I mentioned to you that I was part of the dot-com. I worked for many, many startups back in the day. So I'm also even considering something like that. But at this point, I'm just trying to live and try to be an example of the truth that was given to me and the opportunity that's still given to me. Because as long as I can breathe and I tell this to your audience as well, as long as you can breathe, there is hope. Because hope never dies.

SPEAKER_01 52:44

Wonderful. So with that, could you tell the those listening where they can find your work and maybe your website, LinkedIn, profile, all the above, so that they can feel free to reach out to you and and foster new stories for themselves.

SPEAKER_03 53:02

Thank you so much. So they can find me on my website, Savio P. Clemente. It's S-A-V-I-O-P-C-L-E-M-E-N-T-E.com. You can find my keynote work. Uh, like I mentioned, I still have a few spots for 2026. They can also look at my TEDx talk, Seven Minutes to Wellness, How to Love Your In Your Stranger. They can find my book on there as well. I also every Wednesday write a Substack newsletter about the head, heart, and gut intelligence and what people can glean in order to gain their own clarity, composure. I talk about interviews. I'm running a new interview series with CMOs and CEOs of healthcare leadership. And then if they want to follow me on social media, I'm at every platform at the human resolve. And the reason why I name that is because, especially in the advent of AI, and I named that years and years ago, is the fact that the human element is always the one that will always surprise you. And always the human element is always something that you should never underestimate. So they can find me at the human resolve. Oh, thank you, Salvio. Sure. Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 54:12

Purpose defines direction, but leadership also requires development. It requires growth, self-awareness, and the willingness to challenge conventional thinking. Dr. Doug Cardell expands the conversation, moving leadership from identity into evaluation. My guest today is economist and author, Dr. Doug Cardell, a thinker who approaches economics through what he calls evidentiary economics. Rather than beginning with ideology, Dr. Cardell begins with the premise economic systems should be evaluated based on evidence and outcomes, not political preferences or assumptions. He's the author of the book Why Socialism Struggles, where he examines the structural challenges that socialist economic systems encounter and explores the moral and practical arguments behind free market capitalism. Through his writing in public discussions, Dr. Cardell focuses on questions such as what economic systems actually produce prosperity? Why do some economic models repeatedly fail? And how should individuals think about value, wealth creation, and economic freedom? With that, welcome to the Magnificent Ones podcast, Dr. Cardell. It is a pleasure having you. Thank you for being on today.

SPEAKER_04 55:39

It's a pleasure to be here.

SPEAKER_01 55:40

Absolutely. So I'm going to take this moment to do a brief introduction so the folks at home can get to know a little bit about you and your background. So, Dr. Cardell, uh, before we begin today's conversation, it's worth introducing you as a guest of many talents. You've worked in various fields. You're an economist, an educator, and a policy analyst whose work is focused on evidentiary economics, an approach that examines economic systems based on real-world outcomes rather than ideological assumptions. Over the course of your career, you've served as an aide to a member of the United States Congress, worked as a corporate chief executive officer, and spent many years teaching mathematics and modeling in both secondary and post-secondary education. Your academic background includes advanced study connected with institutions such as the University of Arizona, MIT, Liberty University, reflecting a blend of analytical and technical and policy-oriented training. You're also the author of Why Socialism Struggles, where you explore the structural economic challenges that centrally planned systems often face, drawing on historical evidence, economic modeling, and real-world case studies. In today's conversation, we'll explore some of these ideas and examine evidence, incentives, and human behavior shaped and the way it shapes economic systems and how they function. So with that, thank you for being a part of the Magnificent Ones podcast. So today Oh, thank you for having me.

SPEAKER_04 57:19

I'm I'm Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 57:21

Dr. Cardell, I'd like to begin with the intellectual journey behind your work. So my question to you is what experiences or observations, you know, led you to adopt that perspective? How did you come up with this framework?

SPEAKER_04 57:51

Well, I I guess a lot of it has had to do with my background in mathematics, where obviously ideology doesn't matter. Two and two is four, and what you believe is irrelevant. And I I've also worked as an engineer, and the same sort of thing applies there. If you're building something, what you believe is going to happen is going to be dictated by the mathematics of it and the physics of it, not by what you wish would happen. And so it was a small step for me to apply that same sort of reasoning to economics and see that too many economists today are starting with ideology and trying to prove that their ideas work rather than actually looking at what does work and and actually studying that to find out why.

SPEAKER_01 58:46

You know, that's very interesting. You know, there's I don't want to jump ahead of myself because there I'm I'm actually very excited. What you're saying is that economic systems shouldn't be judged by ideology, they should be judged by real-world outcomes. Is that something that can be measured? Exactly. And that's that kind of goes into something that I, as I was, you know, going through your your uh your information and some patterns, some patterns of the uh that I recognize is you're you've somehow managed to bridge, bridge things, whether it's concepts or like, for example, you know, the social social security fix, for example, you've created a hybrid model of sorts that can please, you know, or satisfy multiple systems, right? I think that's very fascinating that it it's you're able to take philosophical things in nature and then have a mathematical approach to them that does have real-world outcomes and applications. So can you walk us a little bit through that?

SPEAKER_04 59:53

Well, yeah, I I I guess a lot a large part of that comes from my background as an educator and as an engineer. I I've learned how to look at how to solve problems, but I've also learned how to explain them to other people and to find the the clearest ways to communicate to others. And I'm certainly not perfect at it, but that's certainly part of my goal is to find ways to make the difficult seem obvious, I guess is the way I would put it. And I think most of the time that's possible as long as you don't get into the weeds of trying to explain stuff as though you were talking to another expert. Um, and too often I think that's what economists do. They they tend to explain things the way they would talk to another economist, and that doesn't work when you're talking to people that don't have that kind of background.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:48

Absolutely. You often say ideology asks for acceptance, intelligence asks for evidence. For listeners hearing that phrase for the first time, what does evidentiary economics actually look like in practice?

SPEAKER_04 1:01:02

Well, a really good example. I I'm a I already think I mentioned I'm a musician and I'm a Beatles fan, and John Lenham is terrific. But he wrote a song called Imagine.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:14

Yes, I saw that in a year already.

SPEAKER_04 1:01:16

In that song, yeah, he lays out a socialist agenda that he used the correct title. It's it's his imagination. And that's an example of his creating an imaginary world based around an ideology that has no hope of functioning in the real world. And so that's often a lot of the problem, is that the that a lot of the people who are advocating socialism are advocating things that can't work in the real world for several reasons, but uh probably the two most important are economic reasons and human reasons. And socialism fails on both grounds.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:00

I don't remember which article I read, but uh it it it had to do, it was with centralized planning. It was it was this was one of your work, and I was trying to to bridge it with with with corporations and how you know me working for a corporation, I have to do things such as forecasting. If I had to operate in in someone else's system and they were like, hey, this is what I planned, and you have to stick with it, versus forecasting, which is there are things that change, you know, I can adapt if I need to. There's a level of freedom there, right? And and I can account for variables. If someone has planned a system and I have to be confined to that system, it'll be very difficult for me to be able to navigate whenever I need to pivot. There'll be moments where maybe there's a hurricane. And so because there's a hurricane and we have supply chain and all of these things that'll affect it, if I still went by the plan that was set in motion for me and I didn't adapt to it, then I will my career would be over in failure. And so that's kind of like Mao's idea of you know collectivizing the farms, and a hundred million people died as a result of that. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:03:19

Yeah, that that's often the case. There are, I guess, three flavors of central centrally planned economies communism, socialism, and fascism. But they're all basically the same. They're minor differences, but that's all they are, is minor differences. And so it's easy just to refer to them all as socialism. That's the more central term. And yeah, the the the first problem is that you mentioned hurricanes. The the economy is a chaotic system. And that the the best example of that to most people is the weather. And a guy named Lorenz in 72 was working with a weather model, and he found out that a tiny, tiny input in an input variable could make a huge difference in the output.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:10

Yes.

SPEAKER_04 1:04:11

And so we spent the next good deal of time studying that. And you've probably heard his famous quote: can a butterfly flyback flapping its wings in Brazil precipitate a tornado in Texas?

SPEAKER_02 1:04:22

Yes.

SPEAKER_04 1:04:22

And yes, it can, because often any chaotic system is at a tipping point where the tiniest nudge either way can make a big difference in which way it falls. And I could make a similar statement about economics. Is it possible that somebody buying a pair of shoes in Peru consider a depression in Poland? And yeah, definitely. Because it's a chaotic system. And it's even more chaotic than the weather. And it's pretty easy to show that. I mean, there are 9 billion people in the world. For me to plan what is going to happen to the economy, I would have to look into the minds of those 9 billion people and try and figure out what they're planning a year from now. Well, that's clearly impossible. I don't know what my wife is planning a week from now. And so, how could I possibly read 9 billion people's minds and figure out? And in point of fact, even if I could read all of their minds and find out what they're planning a year from now, between now and then, many of them would change their minds. Yes. And so the economy is inherently a very, very unstable place. And so any kind of fixed system like socialism is guaranteed to fail because those predictions aren't going to work. Part of my research was to for my doctorate was to do a 30 year study of the Federal Reserve's look at the consumption index. And in my look at that consumption index, what I found out was that the Federal Reserve, I Looked at 30 years, looked at what the Federal Reserve predicted, looked what would happen a year later. They were right 46% of the time. They could have done better flipping a coin.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:10

Yes.

SPEAKER_04 1:06:10

Now, I'm not saying, and it's really important to make clear that I'm not saying that the Fed is incompetent. They're not. They're not even a little bit incompetent. I couldn't do any better. The problem is they're trying to do something that's impossible.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:25

Yes.

SPEAKER_04 1:06:26

You can't forecast what because the personal consumption index looks at what people are going to buy. And it's so it's forecasting, saying, here's how we think they're going to spend their money. And they were right 46% of the time, because we don't know how people are going to spend their money. And so if we want freedom, that first of all means we have to have economic freedom. And that means people get to decide what they're going to buy, when they're going to buy it, and that means we can't predict.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:55

Absolutely. You know what? I think that it's it's people forget the human component in the thing of things, right? So we talk about freedom, the freedom to buy this. And then we also have this thing called impulse. Maybe I did bring my lunch to work today, but as I was walking to the parking lot, I smelled a hot dog. I now go buy the hot dog, did not eat my lunch, because that's something that that happens as a human being. We change our minds, but we also have a freedom to change our minds. And, you know, even though the hot dog is a very simplistic example of that, you know, one of the things that I like to try to, I try to look at systems and deconstruct them. And you were talking about how, you know, all these variables affect each other. And I think we talked about everything being in chaos. Well, from looking at it from an international relations perspective, the world is in chaos, but it works a majority of the time, right? But because countries do whatever they want to do, there's no actual person or government entity telling everyone what to do and controlling the entire system, that's what makes it successful. Because if we were to say, Venezuela, you should only produce corn, and this country should only produce this, then what would happen if a hurricane, we'll use the hurricane analogy again, a hurricane hit Venezuela or a frost hit Venezuela. Now there's no corn for the rest of the world. So I I think that your your evidentiary economics, as you, you know, as you've coined it, is very important because we have to talk about the human component and the fact that people have the power to choose. So my my my my Yeah, a really good way Yes, please go ahead. Go ahead.

SPEAKER_04 1:08:47

A really good way to help people see that is the human body. Our bodies are also chaotic systems. We don't like to think of them that way. In fact, we don't think of them that way, but they are. We have trillions of cells.

SPEAKER_02 1:09:02

Yes.

SPEAKER_04 1:09:03

And we like to think our brain is in control of those, but it's not. First of all, more than half the cells in your body aren't even human. They're virus, fungi, bacteria, all kinds of other stuff, but they aren't human cells, so clearly our brain can't control those. But let's take a look at a cell in your kidney. What's that cell doing? It's just being a kidney cell. It's produ it's doing what it needs to do to survive and grow and multiply, and it doesn't know we exist. It has no idea of what we are. And so to those cells, to every cell in our body, we are simply an environment. That's all. And they do the best they can to deal with that environment. And we benefit from that, obviously. Absolutely. Now, there are times to go to your world idea when that system does get out of control. We call that cancer. And that's when some of the cells in our body decide to get greedy. And when that happens, government, our brain, has to step in and say, no, we're gonna do something about this. We're gonna go get treatment, we're gonna get radiation, we're gonna get chemo, whatever we have to do, we've got to kill those bad cells.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:10:22

That's the legitimate role of government. Even the coun in a country or in to deal with things when they don't work rather than trying to plan things unnecessarily. I think a lot of the problem is because people don't understand how that can work. But it works all the time in the environment. Look at squirrels. We like squirrels because they plant trees. But squirrels don't know they plant trees. They aren't going around going about their day going, gotta plant trees, gotta plant trees, gotta plant trees. No. They're just finding food and storing it up for the winter. Yes. They don't know anything about the environment trees and they don't care. And same with bees. Bees do not see their job as to pollinate flowers. Their job is to collect pollen to make honey. Yeah. And they don't care about the environment. They aren't interested in that. They're interested in making honey. And that's the way the cells in our body work. And that's the legitimate way for people to work in the world economy. Just do our own thing and let our doing that thing make the world better.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:36

I think I would tie this to one of your articles, is greed good? And part of, I do believe greed is good, but I think that it's the definitions of things. People don't understand the concepts that are being presented to them in the first place. Is greed good? My perspective? Yes. In this capitalist society that we live in, if I decide to start a business, am I starting the business necessarily because I want to benefit the world or because I want to be able to retire comfortably? The truth is, I work hard, I plan the business, the business grows, and as a byproduct of that, I get to hire people and to expand the economy be based on how much I'm producing and how much people are making and contributing to the economy at large. But my my initial driving factor was not because I wanted to make the better the world a better place, it was because I want to live comfortably. I am greedy in those terms, right? So my question to you is if someone wanted to evaluate economic systems honestly, what kinds of evidence should they look at or should they be paying attention to?

SPEAKER_04 1:12:48

Well, the first thing is what works. And since its inception and probably the 1500 to 1700 time frame, capitalism has brought more people out of poverty than any other system ever even imagined. And it does that because it makes the world richer.

SPEAKER_02 1:13:10

Yes.

SPEAKER_04 1:13:11

And that's a thing that people don't understand, is that you like you mentioned not doing things specifically to help other people. But in a sense, you do do things specifically to help other people. Yes. Why is that? Well, because in order to to to make money, you have to find out what other people want. Yes. And then we have to find a way to give it to them. And so if we don't do that, then we won't make money. So, like, as a musician, I've got several friends who are jazz musicians and it's their full-time gig. And they don't do great. They don't make a lot of money. And sometimes I've had them complain to me about that. And I said, Well, well, look, you know, if you want to make money doing something something, you have to find out what people want and give it to them. Yes. And they say, well, yeah, but but jazz is better music than pop. And I said, Well, I don't know what that means. I'm not in a position to decide what's better and worse. But an example I use in my book is The Beatles and The Grateful Dead. The Beatles have sold a whole lot more records than The Grateful Dead. But I don't think the Grateful Dead are whining about that. They knew what they were doing. They were making an altern a more alternative form of music. They had fun doing it and made a ton of money. Yes. The Beatles made a lot more money because they were better at producing what people wanted. Now, are the Beatles a better band than The Grateful Dead? I have no idea. That's an opinion question. That has nothing to do with evidence. But they were certainly better at figuring out what people wanted than the Grateful Dead were. And so when like right now, as we're talking, we are in competition with other podcasts. Yes. And part of our job is to give something to our listeners that those other podcasts can't or won't, or choose not to. And so our job is to create value for our listeners.

SPEAKER_02 1:15:20

Yes.

SPEAKER_04 1:15:21

And in order to do that, we have to have some sense of what they want. And I can probably rule out things that they don't want. I'm sure you can too. And so, you know, if we were screaming at each other and arguing, I'm sure that we'd be tuned out right away. So one of the things I think that we want to do is create value for others. But we have to do so in a self-interested way. Now, am I saying that the people, my friends that are jazz musicians, are doing it wrong? No, I'm not. There is absolutely nothing wrong with doing art for art's sake. But you're but you have to realize when you do that that you're doing it for art's sake, not for money's sake. And so you can't complain then when you don't make money doing it. You have to go, okay, I'm I'm doing what I want. I'm getting to make my music my way, and I'm getting a little bit of money for it. So that's great. I think another thing people don't understand about capitalism is the idea that what I would love to see everyone do is find out what what the things they really love to do. So to first of all, start with their bliss, to find out what they love. How do they want to spend their day? What what what's what things do they want to be doing every day? Does it involve machines? Is it involved people? Does it involve you know what does it involve? And then develop your talents in that area. Find out what your talents are and how you can use them to work with your bliss. And then take those two things and go out and create value for other people. And if you do that, you're gonna do fine in the world. Because it's that creation of value that makes capitalism what it is. Is you know, people whine about the rich. That's dumb. I mean, it's really, really dumb. I'm on a PC right now, I don't know what you're on, and we're talking on the internet. Without Bill Gates, we couldn't be doing this. Now, sure, he got rich, but look how he's helped our lives. And I'm on a Starlink, Elon Musk's system. I couldn't be talking to you at all if it weren't for Elon Musk. Yes. And and so when people complain about the rich, they don't know what they're talking about. I actually ran the numbers on Jeff Bezos, Amazon. Amazon has made every American two to three thousand dollars a year richer. Yes. So let me see if I've got this straight. I should be mad at Bezos because he has a lot of money, because he made me$2,000 or$3,000 a year richer. That's dumb. Absolutely. And most of the people that uh have done really well financially, at least in the U.S., are in that same boat. The richest top ten people in the world are all Americans, and every single one of them is self-made. They got there by creating value for other people. They didn't inherit the money, they didn't steal the money, they made the world a better place. And so that's what we want to do as capitalists is is invest today to make the world better tomorrow. And it's all it's a whole way of thinking. I uh before we started today, I mentioned to you that I got out running today and lifted lifted weights. And that's those are capitalist activities.

SPEAKER_02 1:18:58

Yes.

SPEAKER_04 1:18:58

Most people don't understand that, but that's capitalist activity because what I'm doing is investing time today for a profit in the future. And I would I would argue strongly that virtually every world religion is capitalist. Because if you're planning for an afterlife, you're investing today for something tomorrow. Yes. That's capitalist speaking. And so the capitalism is about how to make things better. And since the inception of capitalism, it has done so. Even in fairly recent times, in 1950, about 35% of the world lived in abject extreme poverty. Now it's 9%.

SPEAKER_02 1:19:46

Yes.

SPEAKER_04 1:19:46

Because of capitalism. And the chances are very good that in the next decade or so we are going to eliminate extreme poverty, except possibly in places like North Korea, where the socialist government forces people to stay in poverty.

SPEAKER_01 1:20:03

Yes. Yeah, different economic uh models, they they they it oppose different systems. For example, when you mention, say, you know, North Korea, for example, if you were to empower people, give them economic stability, then they also get the right to choose. You don't and that would destabilize their country. So there's they there's incentive for empowering their people by giving them more money, more access to information. It goes against their incentives.

SPEAKER_02 1:20:36

Of course.

SPEAKER_01 1:20:37

I I find it fascinating. You know, one of the interesting aspects of your work, and there's so many you know, different things I can pull from you know, you know, your work is it's so vast that it's hard to just choose, you say, five questions or even ten, because you have so many interesting things that it's it's like, okay, how do I stick to just one? You know, and so that's a good problem to have. And that being said, you know, one of the interesting aspects of your work that I think many people they defend capitalism primarily on efficiency grounds, innovation, productivity, economic. But you've argued that capitalism is not just efficient, it's morally superior. And that is the the the crux of it. I I want to dive really dive deep into that to so that we can really extract as much information from there as possible.

Capitalism As Moral Cooperation

SPEAKER_04 1:21:38

Sure, you bet. Yeah, I would I would argue that capitalism is the only moral system. First of all, it's the only system that gives us economic freedom. And if you don't have economic freedom, you don't have freedom. It's just that simple. A lot of people would argue that capitalism involves too much competition and not enough cooperation. I would suggest that that's a false choice. That in capitalism, we compete to cooperate. Right now, you and I are competing with other podcasts. Yes, but we're doing it to bring value to the people. We're trying to see who can do the best for the population. And so, yes, we're competing, but we're also cooperating. And that's the nature of capitalism, is you can't be people imagine capitalists as some sort of ruthless fanatics that are are going about trying to do anything they can to make money. But first of all, if they're doing things that are immoral, that's part of the job of government. Like we mentioned earlier, if I have a cancer, my brain has to take over and say, no, you're doing something wrong. And the same thing is true in capitalism. If somebody is doing something evil in the capitalist world, the government needs to stop that. And that's a perfectly legitimate thing for government to do. But in capitalism, again, the idea is for me to find out how can I how can I find the best way to create value for others. And the better I can do that, the more money I'll make, probably, but but more important, the more value I'm creating for others. The reason the people I mentioned earlier, Gates and Musk and Bezos, the reason they're rich is because they the three of them have had more impact on the world than hard almost anybody in human history. I mean, they've made the world so much better that that it's hard to even fathom what the world would have would be like today if it hadn't been for those three men. And I guess I would suggest to people that are complaining about that do what I suggested earlier. Find your bliss, develop your talents, and then go create value for others. And I guarantee that just thinking about it that way changes your life. Let's imagine for a minute, somebody in a burger joint, he's sitting there flipping burgers, and he hates his job. It's boring, it's not interesting, and he doesn't think he's getting paid enough, and and so on. Now, what if he just makes a little bit of a mind shift? What if he says, you know what? That guy that's pulling up to the drive-thru, he's here because he's hungry, he wants to eat. And either he can't cook or doesn't want to cook. He's paying me to make this burger for him. So I'm gonna make the very best burger I can make. And I'm gonna put it together and I'm gonna serve it to him in the happiest. I want to make his day when I hand him that burger. I want him to pull away from this drive from going, wow, that was a great experience. Now, I guarantee that if he does that for a week, he's gonna start feeling a whole lot better about himself. Because when you create when you see yourself creating value for others, that makes you valuable. You've done something to create value for other people, which means they have to be valuing you. And so that that's a good feeling. Now, if he keeps that up for a month, his boss is probably going to notice and he's likely to get a raise or a promotion. And if he keeps that up even longer, he may end up running the company. The the current CEO of Costco started out there 30 years ago as a forklift driver. And by creating value, he ended up running the place. And so we talk about we work for a living, but we don't. Work gets you nothing. I can go out right now and start digging holes and filling them up again. I'll have done a tremendous amount of work, but I won't get paid for it because I didn't create any value. And that's the whole ticket. We don't work for a living, we create value for a living. And so what we find is that the people that can create the most value receive the most value. In fact, I'll paraphrase the Beatles. And in the end, the value you take is equal to the value you make. And isn't that the way we want the world to be? Yes. Is it how can life be fairer than that when what you give is what you get? But unfortunately, too many people want to get and they don't want to give. Yes, that is so uh they want free stuff.

SPEAKER_01 1:26:48

Yes. And and and I think fundamentally, capitalism does work, but it's not pretty. And I think people look for the glamorization of things and ideas. It's not funny being, you know, relate this to my my personal story. It's not funny working a full-time job, going to school full-time, interning, not getting sleep, not being able to party like the rest of the kids in college. That's not glamorous. But when you graduate and you graduate in Magna cum laud, people thought, ugh, it was easy, right? Because people don't that if you if someone tells you, hey, in order to get this, you must not do this. So you have to sacrifice a little bit now. Being an entrepreneur requires sacrifice. If you look at Elon Musk's story, it wasn't glamorous. You know, choosing between what company would fail and making those, you know, really tough decisions, or even looking at Jeff Bezos when he was just in his garage and he looks like the crazy guy with a bunch of stuff, and people, you know, you know, look at his origin story. It's not glamorous. He's driving his beater car around everywhere. That's not glamorous. But now he goes to outer space. The guy that was in his garage. You look at, you know, Bill Gates, the story of his garage. You look at Steve Jobs, a garage, right? You have these very simple things that are actually universal. You take the time to hone your craft, and it doesn't mean it's going to be easy, because that's the hard part. And but people just focus on the end result, but not the journey it took to get there. And I think too many people are trying to bypass the journey to get there. That is how you earn it. It has to be earned, and that's why Merit Bates symptoms are so good.

SPEAKER_04 1:28:42

Yeah, and I would suggest too that to me, the saddest part about that is that the people that are that want that want something that is a sad way to be. And the top of that is self-actualization. And in McClellan's list, the top need is achievement. Notice neither one of them said anything about money or anything physical. Now, yes, at the lower levels in Maslow's list, you have to have food and shelter and so on. But once you get beyond that, what people really want is to achieve, to find self-actualization, to find to be the best you can be. And when people don't do that, they have a sad life. I mean, I I see it all the time around me. People that they go to work every day and they don't like what they're doing, and and it's just it it it it it breaks my heart that they're they're trying to do something. They want, they think, they see people like Gates and they see the money and they think that the money is the thing. What they don't see is that it's the achievement that's the thing, it's the self-actualization that's the thing, it's the accomplishment that's the thing. And the money just is an afterthought. It's what came as a result of that. But I'm betting that for none of them did they start out just thinking about money. I mean, Bill Gates sat in his garage writing code because he thought it was fun. Zuckerman started Facebook as a hobby in college. He thought it would be cool to make this way for people to talk to each other. And but all of them ended up making a lot of money because they they did things that helped other people. And but they were doing it in a spirit of self-actualization or achievement and letting the money come afterwards naturally. And so, yeah, again, I I would like to see people find their bliss and their talents and find ways to provide value for others by by becoming the very best they can be at what they're doing. And so I don't see how anybody can think that that's immoral or in any way evil. What it's about is everybody trying to be the best they can be, because that's the thing about the world, is that if we're all being the best we can be, we're all going to be better off because we we reinforce each other and make the world a better place.

SPEAKER_01 1:31:44

You know, I think that's a very important distinction because I think a lot of times, you know, in debates, people mostly, economists mostly focus on, you know, outcomes of wealth and inequality, and they they remove all the other factors that are associated with it. It's instead of simply saying rich or poor, how about we talk about what it took to get there, right? What does it take to make to be able to retire comfortably at 65? You know, those are the questions that should be asked because then we can then do the work because it's, you know, it is as as a as a fan of mathematics as well, as you say, you know, math is a language. And if we use the numbers to tell a story, we can also use the numbers to create a roadmap for how to live our lives and what pace to go on to say, hey, you know, maybe I should invest in a 401k because I am going to get turned 65 one day, and maybe Social Security won't cover all that cost. Or maybe, you know, we should privatize, whatever. But we need data, not just talking about why people are rich or why people are poor, but also the data to to to to mitigate some of those effects of this crazy world that we we live in.

SPEAKER_02 1:33:02

Sure.

SPEAKER_01 1:33:03

I want to ask you an important question. This is a long question, but you know, in your book, Why Socialism Socialism Struggles, you explore the structural problems that socialist systems encounter across different countries, cultures, and decades. Socialist experiments often seem to run into similar economic, you know, difficulties, regardless of the era. So what are the core weaknesses in socialist systems that tend to produce those types of outcomes?

SPEAKER_04 1:33:37

Well, there there are two. The first is the economics part of it, and the second part is the human part of it. And uh my first dealing with the human part of it was I was probably 12 or 13 years old, and somebody was trying to convince me that communism was wonderful. And I listened for 10 or 15 minutes, and I said, Well, that won't work. And she said, Well, what do you mean that won't work? I said, Well, it assumes that people are saints. It assumes that we will all put our own self-interest aside and do nothing but work for the benefit of a group. And I said, People aren't built that way. And in fact, it's not just people. All life is not built that way. Every living organism must pursue its self-interest or it will die. It's just that simple. And so we talked about that cell in your kidney. That cell is pursuing its self-interest. It's not trying to help you, it doesn't know about you. It's pursuing its self-interest, and you're benefiting from it. The same thing happens if I pursue my self-interest in the world. The world will benefit because I'll be creating value for others if I'm really pursuing my self-interest. It's all my the only thing in my self-interest, in my true self-interest, is to create value for other people. Because if I can't do that, I won't be happy and I won't make a living. And so that's first of the first way that socialism fails. Now, collectivism was actually the first thing that was tried in America. The Jamestown colony and the Mayflower Colony both started out as collectivist or socialist enterprises. And they found out very quickly that it didn't work. Both colonies went through what was called the starving time, where the colony was almost almost died as a as a colony. And it was because human nature. People noticed very quickly that those that weren't working were getting the same benefits as those that were working. So people worked less and less and less. And because of that, it almost didn't until they gave people private property and said, oh, just go make your own farm and sell the stuff to the rest of us, that has started working. But before that, they were eating their shoes, eating their pets, digging up corpses to eat. I mean, it was a truly horrific situation, all because this pipe dream of collectivism or socialism or communism, wherever you want to call it, because it tries to make people into something other than people. It tries to take life and make it death, because that's really what it's about. It's all life from this from cells. I mean, if you put a plant in a room, it's gonna grow toward the window. It's just gonna do that because it has to do that to survive, and and every organism does have to do that. And so that that's the human part of the thing. On the economic part, it doesn't work because it can't work. It assumes things about economics, like first of all, planning. We've already talked about a bit, that it's impossible to plan an economy. And so, if you can't plan an economy, how can socialism ever work? What would that mean? I mean, the only way that an economy can actually work is if we let the people decide. And that's why in most communist countries, there's a flourishing black market. And people in North Korea, every day, literally every day, are executed because they're using the black market. So even though they can get killed if they do it, they're still going to be pursuing free markets on the black market. And so it's it's capitalism is the natural human state. And socialism is an attempt to make the natural human state into something completely unnatural.

SPEAKER_01 1:38:13

Oh. And in a sense, it's it's ca, you know, communism or centralized planning systems, they're trying to override human nature in a sense. If I had to put it in the guy.

SPEAKER_02 1:38:26

Exactly.

Why Socialism Stays Seductive

SPEAKER_01 1:38:28

So despite these, you know, historical patterns, you know, uh and you know, why do you think socialist socialism's or collectivist economic models remain attractive to societies even after these ex examples of of failure? You whether you're in North Carolina North Korea being executed for utilizing a the black market because you have to go by a rationing system, or you're you're in you know, Mao's China, and and and 100 million people dying, or you're in Stalin's Russia and you have, again, millions of people dying. Why do you think that in this era there seems to be this rebirth? You know, in the 60s they were very popular, and now there's a rebirth of these ideas in today's societies. What do you think makes it so attractive?

SPEAKER_04 1:39:21

Well, I think there's several reasons. I think we sort of touched on one earlier. Because capitalism is a chaotic system, it's messy. And a lot of times people don't like messy. They would like to think that things will go the way they want them to go. And in capitalism, that doesn't happen. It's messy because we've got nine million voters, nine billion, sorry, voters out there deciding what's going to happen next. And we don't know what the answer to that is going to be. And so a lot of people are very uncomfortable with that kind of ambiguity. I think another reason they are concerned about, or they are why they're attracted to socialism, is this comp competition versus cooperation mindset. That shouldn't we all be nice to each other and cooperate? And and of course we should. We should be nice to each other and cooperate, but that doesn't mean we can't compete to do that better. And and a lot of that problem comes from the idea that that people don't get that the consumer gets to decide value. I mean, that's I would suggest that that is the most fundamental freedom there is. That on anything else, I get to decide what's valuable to me. And nobody can have anything to do with that. And the the difficulty occurs because at some level we we we we want to convince other people to value things the same way we do. But you can't do that because we all value things differently. Ask any married couple, and you'll find out. Yeah, it's obvious that that people value things differently, and because of that, there is going to be a certain amount of interplay between cooperation and competition. And so let me give you an example. Let's say you and I go out to eat, and it turns out that you really love salad and I really like bread. And so when they come with our first little setting, they bring a plate of salad for each of us and a plate of bread for each of us. And I say to you, hey, since you like salad and I like bread, why don't we trade? And you take my salad and I'll take your bread. And so now I've got nothing but bread, and you've got nothing but salad, and we're both happy. Now, a lot of people then look at that and say, Yeah, but but the salad had a higher menu price than the bread. So Dr. Doug got screwed in this deal. But that's not true. I got what I wanted, and you got what you wanted. And that's the whole basis of capitalism is that I take something that I value less than you value it, and I trade it to you for something that you value less than I do, or more than I do, and and we trade. And so that's the whole secret of it, is that since we all are different people, we all value different things, and that's what makes trade possible. If we were all, if if we didn't have that, trade would be impossible. Why would I want to trade with you if we all had exactly the same values? You if we've if we both value this thing, Sal, and let's say, exactly the same, we're never going to trade. Because there is neither of us has an alternative that supersedes the other. And so in order to have trade, you have to have disparate value. And and it's that disparate value that makes the economy a little bit messy. Because I was on a show the other day and somebody said, Well, capitalism is messed up because they should have chosen Betamax as the tape recording format rather than VHS. And that's just silly. That's that's fascist thinking. That's saying I get to decide what you want. I've decided Betamax is better, so that means that it is better. But what happened in reality was people fought people looked at the two and said, yeah, Betamax has a better picture. That's true. But the tapes are only an hour long, and I want to record movies, and those are two hours long. And the VHS is two-thirds the price. So I'm gonna get we want we're gonna go with the VHS. Now, yes, Beta had better picture quality, but that's not the only thing people decide on. And in fact, people don't decide much of anything on Unitarian issues. They don't go, this is the only reason I'm making this choice. They look at a balance of things that any item has and put together the the best way that works for them. And it's very, very, very likely to be different for everybody. Like I said, ask any married couple. I mean, my wife and I don't like exact the same things. And so we have to negotiate that from time to time. And and that's a good thing, not a bad thing. Because if if my wife were exactly like me and liked exactly the same things I'd like, it would be a much less rich environment for me. It wouldn't be nearly as much fun, and and it wouldn't be it would just be boring. I mean, I'd be spending my life talking to myself.

SPEAKER_01 1:45:09

Variety is the spice of life. You know, I I'll share a small story with you. I'm wearing this watch right now. The story of this watch is this. I have a friend that's a doctor, and I was wearing another watch. And he says to me, I really like your watch. I'll trade with you. Similar to what you were saying. The watch that I bought was maybe$90 on Amazon. Right? Like I liked it, I thought it looked good. That was the be all end all of it. My friend sees it, he says that he wants to trade right there on the spot. His watch was more expensive than mine, but we value things differently. So for him, it was more valuable, and but he made the choice, and I made the choice to trade with him. As a result, we're both happy from that interaction. He paid a higher price, he was still happy because he got to choose.

SPEAKER_04 1:46:08

That's the whole point. That's it. I couldn't have said it better myself. That's exactly the way to look at it, is that what we're looking at is trading value for value. And the only the only value that exists in the world is the value in the minds of all the consumers. Nothing has intrinsic value. Nothing is valuable just because it exists. And so it's all these all these different values that make make life interesting and fun and and worth living.

SPEAKER_01 1:46:41

You know, I I remember I sometimes I get my philosophers mixed up, especially when going through Plato, and Aristotle and Socrates. I'll say the work, but I'll get the teacher wrong. But I believe it was Aristotle's the just price, if I'm not mistaken. And Aristotle, I believe, said that one of the greatest crimes of mankind was that we the concept of making money from money is bad as opposed to money from things. And I think that a lot of people kind of somehow use that to justify why capitalism is bad. There's they're they're saying, oh, you're greedy because you're exploiting, and they use these buzzwords such as exploitation, that it's wrong to put you know uh a dollar in the bank, the dollar splits it, and you know, I mean the bank splits it and creates more value or whatever. But that's how the system works. That's how interest is created, that's how wealth is generated. People, why do you think that you know people still misunderstand capitalism even though they live in a capitalist country? Why do you why how is it that they live, they benefit from it, and they still misunderstand it?

SPEAKER_04 1:47:57

I think a lot of it, I'm not gonna say it's in our DNA, but it's it's probably close to that. If we look at history, around the year zero, we started getting halfway decent records. And so we can look at the how things were back in the year zero, or actually technically, I guess it was the year one, um, to about 1500. And during that 1,500 years, per capita GDP, that is how much stuff per person existed in the world, didn't change a drop. So for 1,500 years, the world didn't change economically. Now, what does that mean? Well, there's it means there's a fixed amount of stuff. There's only so much stuff, and it's not changing. So, what that means is if I want more stuff, I've got to take it from somebody else. That's where the idea of Robinhood came from. Back in 1500, or I guess he was 1400, but close enough. Back in that time, the rich really were the bad guys because they weren't helping anybody, they were taking stuff from everybody. That's how they got rich. That was the only way you could do it. But between 1500 and 1700, the world started changing. Capitalism was basically invented, it it gradually evolved for a couple of hundred years. And starting at the end of that period, 1700, 1800, the world suddenly experienced the biggest boom it had ever had. Because the difference is that in capitalism, there isn't a fixed amount of stuff anymore. Everybody that is creating is creating more wealth for everybody. In economics, we call that growing the pie.

SPEAKER_02 1:49:52

Yes.

SPEAKER_04 1:49:53

In other words, back in 1500, if I wanted a bigger piece of pie for myself, I'd have to take it from somebody. What happens now, though, is people like Gates and Bezos and Musk grow the pie. They create wealth that we all share. And so the rich are no longer the bad guys. The rich are now the good guys. But somewhere in our minds, we're still confused about that. We still think that the only way somebody got to have something is by taking it from somebody else. And that's just completely false. Nowadays that doesn't happen. Nowadays, as I said earlier, the top ten richest people in the world got rich by creating value for others. They didn't get rich by stealing from somebody. They didn't get rich by exploiting people. They got rich by paying people good money to do good things. Absolutely. And and and made the world better doing it. And so I think that's a lot of it, is that we were still stuck in this mindset of if somebody else has something, it must mean I have less. But it doesn't work that way. When you grow the pie, what happens is the person that grew the pie gets a bigger slice. But so does everybody else. Now they may not get as big a slice as the slice he got, but it's bigger than the slice they would have had if the pie had stayed the same size.

A Social Security Fix That Works

SPEAKER_01 1:51:40

Because your mind can allow you to see things that aren't actually there. Culture can blind you because of influence. But when you go by data, which does not have feelings, it's just data, say that you're not, say that millions of Americans aren't paying using their tax dollars to fund, you know, NASA not recycling rockets. So that billions of dollars are saved by by that. Say that you're not now, you're no longer paying hundreds of millions or billions of dollars in wire transfers because someone came up with PayPal. And it's instant. And it's it's convenient. We a lot of times people don't look at what took it took us to get there, who had the idea and the and took the risk to make it happen. But it's easy to vilify these individuals because they are on a big platform and they're human, and maybe they don't say things the right way or just right, but it does not mean they're not benefiting each and every one of us. The work speaks for itself, as they say, the proof is in the put-in, which is the numbers. So another aspect of your work that, you know, that you don't just critique economic systems and you also explore possible solutions. That's something that I value in any human being. Anyone can tell you what's wrong with something, but not everyone proposes a solution. And so I wanted you to talk more about the social security fix. I had to just put one of your uh your articles in there just to really talk about it because I was very fascinated by that. So if you could expand on that for us, please.

SPEAKER_04 1:53:22

Well, sure. I mean, the I think the idea of the government doing something to encourage people to save for the future is inherently a good thing. Yes. The idea of taking their money and putting it where they think it ought to be, I think is a really bad idea. And so what I suggest in the article is that the government take the money, create an account in your name, and put it in a safe investment. Let's just say a uh an SP tracking fund. That's probably about as safe as you can get. And and then letting you reap the rewards of that when you retire. Now, at this point, then the money is always it's it's in an account in your name. You can't access it until you're 65 or 70 or whatever retirement age we're we're looking at. But but it's it's it is literally your money. And it it's gonna grow. It's basically like a forced 401k, if you want to think of it that way. And I don't have a problem with government doing things like that because it it still gives us a lot of choice. And there are people out there, sadly, that don't plan ahead. And so, because of that, there there is some benefit in the government saying, well, we're gonna have to do that for you, because otherwise we're gonna have to end up bailing you out later. Because we, you know, we're not gonna we don't have the the heart to sit to watch you starve to death because you root because you didn't plan well. Uh and so to to prevent that from happening, we're gonna do you know, we're gonna take some action. But the current system isn't gonna work. It it it was designed badly, and I don't know where it's gonna end. I think you know there are things we could do that that would mitigate things somewhat, but but the system is was designed for a time that we're not in anymore. And so back when Social Security started, we had tons of people paying in and very few retirees, and so the whole thing worked out fine. But now, as people get older and older, the people in the system get older, now there's a lot more retirees than there are people working paying into the system. And since the system is based on the payer-inners paying for the retirees, it can't work. And so that's why I think it would be better to have our own individual accounts that could be put in a safe investment on our behalf.

SPEAKER_01 1:56:11

There's uh an article that I wrote, and I'll quote it directly. In the article, I wrote that the world has changed, but we're still playing by the same rules as though the world has not changed. You know, we have we people are no longer getting pensions, and and you know, we have 401ks, which is also which are also retirement accounts, but they're investment accounts, which does help the economy because we're investing in the economy as a result. What you're proposing would also help grow the economy as well, because we're investing into the future. And so there there's you're you're you're doing one thing, but it has multiple positive effects, reverberating, you know, it effects, right? And I think it's brilliant. But a lot of people like aren't taking the time to then talk about the numbers because there's a cost for everything. And whether it's a policymaker or you know, uh any politician, they don't want to ever have to explain the grim reality of something of what must we sacrifice to get from point A to point B. And it it it it it it kicks the bucket down the road a little bit more, but eventually the bucket has to stop, right? And so, you know, as we we we're beginning to close our you know, our conversation, you know, I'd like to take a look at the bigger picture, which is the future, right? For someone who is listening today who wants to think about economics more clearly, you know, beyond politics and beyond ideology, you know, what principles would you encourage them to adopt when evaluating you know economic systems?

SPEAKER_04 1:57:51

Well, I think the first one is look at the freedom. Look at people that are in those systems and look at how much freedom they have, how much happiness they have. And often at this point, people bring up the Nordic countries and say, well, yeah, but people in Sweden are doing fine and they're socialists. No. The people in Sweden is not a socialist country, it's a capitalist country. And in fact, most of the Nordic countries have a freer economy than the U.S. does. Right now, the U.S. is ranked about 20th in freedom, and most of the Nordic countries are actually ahead of us. Now they do have a larger social safety net, but and and they call themselves social democracies. Somehow that's been twisted around, and people in the U.S. called it democratic socialism. That's just dumb. Democracy and socialism are incompatible. You can't have that because if you don't have economic freedom, you can't even vote with your money. And that's what we do in capitalism. We vote with our money every day. We decide what products get made by what we vote for. And so, yeah, I would say, first of all, look at freedom. Look at where the freedom lies, and that's the place that you want to be. I think the other thing is to think about this notion of creating value for others and finding what you love, finding where your talents lie, and then finding how to use that to create value for other people and then reap the rewards of that. And so look for a system that can do that. Well, in socialism, as an example, you don't get that. They tell you what your job is. You don't get to pursue your own talents, you don't get to pursue what you love. You get you have to do what the government tells you to do. If they decide you're going to be a mine worker, you're a minewalker. Case close. Absolutely. And so, yeah, it's ultimately all about freedom. And capitalism offers by far the most freedom of any system ever imagined. The biggest place that capitalism runs into trouble is when the government tickers with it. The government gets in there and starts messing around. I mean, that's what caused the Great Depression. That's what caused the recession in 2007. Is the government messing around in things it doesn't understand? Now, again, I want to be clear that the government setting the guardrails for capitalism is an important function. If there's cancer, the government has to get in there and apply radiation in chemo. Okay? But as far as trying to tinker with it, it's like it would be like your brain trying to tell your kidney cell how to behave. And that's just a silly idea. You have trillions of cells in your body. If you could send a command one a second, it would take trillions of years for you to send a command to every single cell one time. The system is too big to mess. And exactly the same thing is true in capitalism. So another thing I would encourage people to do is if you're voting for politicians, vote for politicians that favor freedom and are against government messing with the economy. You know, I would go as far as to say I don't think we need a Federal Reserve. I think it's probably the f like I say, it caused the Great Depression. And they've admitted it. I mean, it's not like that's a mystery to anybody. Everybody knows that that's what happened. And so and and again, the main thing is look for what works. If it's if it's working, it's good. If it's not working, it's not. And one way to evaluate that is to look at people voting with their feet. One of my articles is that. And yeah, you don't see people in the United States clamoring to move to North Korea. That tells you who has the best system. I saw a Reuters poll, I think it was not long ago, that close to a billion people would move to the U.S. today if they were allowed to. What does that tell you? It tells you that people think that the U.S. is the best place in the world to be. And so, and if you look within the country, everybody by now knows that people are leaving New York, they're leaving California, they're leaving Illinois to move to places like Texas and Florida. And they're doing that because they want to get away from controlling governments and move to areas where the government is less controlled. And so believe your eyes. Don't believe what people tell you. People may say socialism is better, but look, observe with your own eyes and see where people are voting to go. And that will tell you where the best places are. That will tell you what the best systems are.

SPEAKER_01 2:02:58

Absolutely. I think I'll do the follow-up question for you is what are habits of thinking, you know, that would better help people understand how, you know, economics actually function? That'll be my th final one to you.

SPEAKER_04 2:03:14

Well, the first one is the one we've talked about a good bit already, and that is finding encouraging everybody to find their bliss, to find their talents, and then go out there and and be the best you can be. Pursue achievement and self-actualization, and and be the very best you can be, and use that to create value for other people. The other things I would suggest is to try and eliminate envy from your mind. I think envy is is the most destructive impulse human beings have. It it it serves no useful function and does a lot of damage to people. And so I would try and eliminate envy from our lives. And and to to help others, but to be careful how you do that. When when uh for a while I was commuting a long distance uh work every day, and I would see a lot of people on the street corners asking for money. So what I did was I'd go to Costco and I would buy a case of beans. And if they uh wanted a handout, I would give them a can of beans. Now, why did I do that? Well, if somebody's hungry, I'm happy to help cooperate. But I'm not gonna give somebody money to have them go spend on wine or cocaine. If I'm gonna help somebody, I'm gonna make sure that I'm actually helping, or at least do the best I can to do that. And so that's the other thing I would suggest is that as you try and help others, remember that their values are not necessarily your values. And so you you can't you can't make them do things your way. You have to try five try and find ways to help them that are is both beneficial, but that honors their choice. And so, like I say, if somebody's hungry, I don't mind giving them food. But if somebody wants money, I start to get a little worried about that.

SPEAKER_01 2:05:25

That reminds me of your article, Jevins. Uh is that how you pronounce the name? Jevin.

SPEAKER_04 2:05:31

Jevin, yeah, Jevin's Paradox.

SPEAKER_01 2:05:32

I mean, that's that's that that's the way I forgot to add that. So it was 10 articles that I went through then. I went through 10 of the articles, not nine. You know, so I again, you know, you know, I have really enjoyed, you know, going through a lot of your your information because as an academic, it's refreshing to see things that can be applied in real life. Information isn't useful if you can't use it, it has to have utility. And a lot of the concepts that you go over, there is utility, whether you're talking about the the Alaska model and such. I it's it's very the real world applications to the things that you're saying. It's not just, hey, I have an idea. It's here's a problem, here's a solution. And I think that's where the engineering brain comes in. So, you know, it has been a very thoughtful and fascinating conversation for me. You know, one of the themes that stand out is the importance of truly evaluating the economic systems that we're in. We should ask questions, right? As a part of the scientific method. If you you ask, there's a why. Why do things operate the way they do? And we can then get data. You know, there's a method methodology to everything. And I think too much of society now gravitates towards ideology as opposed to gravitating towards facts and what actually works. And we need to, those things they end up dividing us, and we don't reach a point to where we can work together to meaningful solutions. So, you know, uh, you know, for the listeners who want to explore your ideas further, I would definitely recommend them to check out your website, dr uhcardell.com, and also please, you know Doug Doug Cardell. I apologize my apologies. And don't they could and they could also my book. Yes, and that's that's I'd certainly be happy for them to do that. Yes, uh the as the author of Why Socialism Struggles and that is out and ready to be consumed. So I would recommend you reading the reading the book. You don't have to agree with everything, but having a different perspective is also important for growth.

SPEAKER_04 2:07:52

And so I would highly recommend you you I've had a yeah, it's an it's an Amazon best Amazon bestseller, it's got f five-star reviews. Four.

Culture That Outlasts The Leader

SPEAKER_01 2:08:04

Ideas shape leaders, but culture sustains them. Leadership ultimately lives inside teams, organizations, and the environments we build. Jim Tracy brings the conversation into execution showing what it looks like when leaderships become a culture. Not just longevity measured in years, but longevity measured in trust, in leadership and in the invisible structures that hold people together over time. Most organizations speak endlessly about culture, but very few truly understand how culture is built, and even fewer know how to sustain it across decades and generations. Leadership today often prioritizes speed, disruption, rapid growth, and yet leaders who lead the deepest impact are often the ones who understand something different. That meaningful cultures are not built quickly, they're built deliberately. They're built through relationships, they're built through conflict, through moments where leaders are forced to choose between authority and influence. Today's guests understand those dynamics deeply. Jim Tracy is a former CEO, an inductee into the Wireless Hall of Fame, a keynote speaker and a best-selling author. Over the course of his career, he has worked at the intersection of leadership, organizational culture, and generational collaboration. But perhaps one of the most compelling aspects of his story is something profoundly human. Jim has been married for 46 years and frequently helps generations learn how to work together rather than working against each other. In an era where leadership often focuses on short-term wins, Jim has offered perspective grounded in longevity, culture, and relationships that endure. Jim Tracy, with that, welcome to the Magnificent Ones podcast.

SPEAKER_05 2:10:06

Wow, I am so honored to be here. Thank you for asking. I'm just I'm touched.

SPEAKER_01 2:10:12

No, I I before I even ask my professional question, and this is going to tie back into the podcast later on, is I uh I personally believe that a true marker of success is the individual that is able to sustain their personal relationships and having those personal healthy relationships outside of work often mirrors what work looks like. So if they have a toxic relationship, sometimes they have a toxic work relationship. So if you've had 46 years of success in your marriage, I can confidently say that you've had 46 years of also professional success, probably even longer.

SPEAKER_05 2:10:56

You know, I would say that the the key to longevity is is is marry someone who's significantly better than you are. In every way. And and and then desperately work hard to try and hang on to it. But frankly, you know, our marriage would have probably been in tough shape had we not been, you know, five years in and come to faith. And so that's really at the center of not only who we are as a couple, but who we are as a family. So I don't get credit for that. Let's give God the credit. He deserves it.

SPEAKER_01 2:11:33

Absolutely, absolutely. That's actually something we'll touch on later on as well. And I would say, you know, leadership is one of those things that people constantly use, you know, when everyone talks about what it means to be a good leader, but often, you know, people don't just define culture, that the culture that it takes to have, you know, an environment where people know how to connect with each other, people can actually communicate with it with each other, and having a Environment where communication is key and people feel comfortable to even voice their concerns or opinions as important. Why do you think that a lot of leaders miss that component where they focus on maybe the operations, but not necessarily the culture or even know what culture is?

Servant Leadership People Can Feel

SPEAKER_05 2:12:16

Yeah. Well, you know, I've found over the years that I looked, and there's a popular saying that kind of supports this, everybody, everybody wants to be a servant leader until someone treats them like a servant. And and I always made a practice out of being the first one at work, and I would make coffee for our people. And when there were dirty dishes, I made a point, even when we got to be a large organization, I made a point to be the one who took the coffee cup to the dishes from the day and stacked the dishwasher. And I didn't intentionally do it while people were watching, but I didn't shy away from it when people are watching either. And I even had people saying, Hey, I mean, I I I knew that I was slipping when people called me Mr. Tracy instead of Jim. So they would say, Mr. Tracy, let me do that. And I'm like, no, man, I like this is, I mean, I like emptying garbages, and I like doing dishes, and I like sweeping floors, and I and I don't mind people seeing that because I don't want them to feel as though they can rise above that. We're all there to serve one another, and that kind of culture really does resonate with the people at the grassroots of any business. I remember when, I mean, there's a lot of people, rightfully so, because of his his uh presentation that that uh that uh are are very anti anti-president Trump. And and I'm I'm not a I'm not uh I'm not here to discuss politics, but I can tell you I think he won the election when he leaned out a window at McDonald's and served somebody a hamburger.

SPEAKER_01 2:13:57

No, listen, that that but that it but it works though, right? It it's you have to mirror the behaviors that you want.

SPEAKER_05 2:14:02

It's a classic, classic move. Everybody knows that he doesn't make a living at McDonald's and everybody knows it was staged, but everybody also knows what it's like to drive up to that window and either get a burger out of it or or or hand a burger out to somebody. And so, and and that in large in large sense is really an important statement of of what kind of leader you're gonna be. What are you willing to do so that your people can relate to you? Not so you can relate to them, but so that they can relate to you.

SPEAKER_01 2:14:36

You know, that's that's the mistake that I've I made early on when I when I first got promoted was you you're happy and you're like, oh, I'm gonna change everything and I'm gonna push and I'm gonna, you know, I'm gonna, you know, all of our KPIs and our sales goals, and you know, I'm gonna outperform everyone else, and you know, and it's like, and that is the worst decision that I made because people were unhappy, you know, and I've learned I've since learned to slow down, you know, take the time to know, yeah, know the lay of the land, know my people, and and you know, just simple things. Know what's going on in their lives because if you treat people like a number, they'll respond to you as they're as a number as well, you know. And all the my personal philosophy is that all business is personal because you're a person on the clock and you're a person off the clock as well.

SPEAKER_05 2:15:25

For sure, for sure. You know, there's a lot of old sayings, and and you know, it frankly, I've put together a new book that's coming out, it's called Management by Cliche. Well, some of those cliches are people don't care what you know until they know that you care. Yes. And and that is an oldie but a goodie. But the reason that it resonates with people is it's true. And and truth is more important than KPIs, if you will.

SPEAKER_01 2:15:56

You know, I I remember uh so you know, I I went through one day and I was talking to my boss and I was you know telling him this KPI story. It's like, oh, here's all the numbers, and you know, this is a sales projection, and this is we're gonna hit it this by this time, and blah, blah, blah, blah. And she said, slow down, slow down. Did you did you ask that person how they were doing today and this? And and I said, No, I said good morning, and I and I got to work. And she's like, No, no, no, no, no. I said, I don't care about your paperwork, you know, go back and ask everyone how they're doing, like how they're really doing, and then we can talk. And so I'm happy that I am I'm happy I had those those moments. So I want to ask you something a little bit deeper, but because it we have such a plethora of of knowledge, I have all these questions listed, and I'm so excited. I don't even know, even though they're sequential, I still don't know which one to ask for, you know, because I'm so excited.

SPEAKER_05 2:16:56

But the question is fire away, man.

SPEAKER_01 2:16:59

Was there a specific moment in your career when you realized that leadership was far more than, you know, far more complete complicated than you originally thought it was before you entered into leadership?

SPEAKER_05 2:17:13

Wow. I don't think that leadership is complicated. I never have. And I, you know, I I entered the business of wireless infrastructure with my son, who was then just turned 18 years old. And we had we went into the office of a very large multinational firm, and we sat at their table, and there were like 13 of them on their side of the table, and there were two of us, a father and son on our side of the table. And a lot of people in that room were trying to make a name for themselves. And there was one man on the on a younger fellow on the end of the table, and and he really wasn't in a position where he could challenge me, and we were looking to be a vendor, so I just wanted to be a nice guy, and and so, but he kind of took it on himself to to challenge my son. And and and that's when you learn to really shut up as a dad, too, because they got to carry their own weight. And anyway, he said, he said, you know, you have these crews that are going out, and you tell them that that uh the quality standards are this and that. And he says, How do you get them to do that? And he said, Well, you know, we we we tell them that they a requirement to work for legacies is that they do the right thing. So we tell them to do the right thing. And that wasn't good enough for him, and he said, Well, wow, you know, what happens when they don't know what the right thing is? And Ryan is a pretty quick study, and he says, Well, we we we instruct them specifically then to do the best right thing. And this irritated the young man, and he came back, and so he doubled down against a pretty smart individual, and he said, Well, what if they don't know the best right thing? And he says, Well, we give them a phone on your service so they can call us and ask what the best right thing might be. And everybody in the room knew that that there was this 19-year-old kid here that just schooled someone that was older than him just by just by being clear and plain spoken and giving the truth. And in a way, that really is a picture of leadership. If you communicate clearly what the truth is, if you're having a problem and you ask people to help you with your problem, people don't want to see you get in trouble. People want to help you. And if you're clear with them, but if you shield the problem with them from them, they're gonna look at you and they're gonna go, well, yeah, I'm not, I can't help him. He doesn't want my help. I don't know about the problem. I can't, I'm not part of the solution. But in truth, everybody in an organization is always part of the solution as long as they know there's a problem and they've been invited to help. Yes. That's why when you go to when you go to the companies that I have been a part of, and this goes back into the early 1980s, all the companies I've been a part of, I was schooled by a man who said everybody in our organization is the best salesman we have. Yeah. And all of a sudden, now everybody is rooting not only for the sales team, but to make the sales team look good.

SPEAKER_01 2:20:20

Yeah, there's buy-in.

SPEAKER_05 2:20:21

And when that happens, that when that happens, you become an unstoppable force.

unknown 2:20:26

Yeah.

Building A Business With Your Son

SPEAKER_01 2:20:27

You know, speaking of that story, Peter, I was gonna bring this up earlier, but you brought it up just now with your son. Now, I I have a six-year-old and I have a three-year-old, my my son Atticus, he's an older one. Now, I'm sure we'll have a moment like that at some point. But I I I recall uh watching one of your interviews, and during the interview, I guess you and your son were on a job site together, and well, I guess he called you out and you told him all the things that you think you were basically, what are you doing? And later on that that evening, you know, you you and you guys decided to to do it yourselves. Like what was that that full transition like to make the decision to go into business with your son?

SPEAKER_05 2:21:17

Yeah, well, the story that you're talking about is he went out. I I was uh I was a welder when I was a young man, and I built towers uh in power line situations across northern Minnesota. And and so that led him to be really enamored with what I did when I was a kid. And so he, as a young man, got into the tower business, and I went out to his job site, and they weren't very safe. And so I really went after him and said, listen, this is not a good thing. Somebody's gonna get hurt or even killed out on this job site. And so, and I and I kept I kept kind of pestering him about that. And one night he came home and at the dinner table he said, if you think you're so smart, let's just do it ourselves. And because I wanted my son to be safe, we just like that decision was a it's an easy decision to make, but it wasn't without a little bit of fear. Um, because when you have a good job and you walk away from that good job and invest your retirement and all of your savings and all of your political capital into a new venture with an 18-year-old. Some people would say that's the height of insanity, but it worked for us.

SPEAKER_01 2:22:30

Yeah, you know, you're the only you're the second human being that I've ever heard done that before.

SPEAKER_05 2:22:36

Like I hope the first one was successful as well.

SPEAKER_01 2:22:39

It was, it was. It was just to me, you know, an older gentleman friend of mine, when he said that he was gonna, you know, just go into business with his son, I was I was shocked. I was like, what, you're just gonna retire? And he's like, Yeah, it's like I'm just gonna do it. We get to spend more time together. You know, that and that's that's the height of fatherhood. Is like it's like we get to learn and grow together, and eventually he's thought he'll start teaching me things. And like, okay, you know, that that's not good. So, you know, every leader eventually faced the yes, yes.

SPEAKER_05 2:23:09

What were you saying? Yeah, we grew up together. We we actually, you know, I was in, I was, I was, I was in my early 40s, and he was, you know, entering his early 20s and when we started this up. So everything that we learned about the business, we learned together. Now, I had business experience, even international experience from my previous careers, but but boy, what when you when when you learn the hard way together, you learn really good lessons. And when you learn the easy way and teach one another so that it makes less trouble, then that's a great way to learn too.

SPEAKER_01 2:23:43

So now is is the I'm grateful. Is the takeaway that it's easier to to problem solve because whatever problems you had on the site, you guys could work it through at dinner time. You know, kind of like a feedback system. Did that did that make things easier, or would you take away like that?

SPEAKER_05 2:24:03

When you're and I I get asked a lot about work-life balance in an entrepreneurial situation. And if you're in a family business, especially with your children during the early years, there's no such thing as work-life balance. Everything that we think about, everything that we talk about, we're always in survival mode. And so my wife kept the books, my daughter was our secretary, my son was the lead out in the field, I was I was selling and sometimes shoveling and sometimes sweeping. And and it so you're never very far from the business. And so I think that I think that I would encourage people to be able to, I've been able to establish a switch and I don't know when I got it, but I can actually take and I can turn that business off now. But during the early years, there's no way it turned off.

SPEAKER_01 2:24:54

So I I guess I have another question. I I think part of the reason why some people aren't successful is because they they love being comfortable and they don't allow themselves to be uncomfortable. So that being the case, what was the most uncomfortable uh transition into going into business, you know, with your son, you know, all those years ago?

Founders As The Hidden Bottleneck

SPEAKER_05 2:25:16

Well, I would say the most uncomfortable transition for starters, you you know, I had the support of my wife, and that is just so important. Absolutely. But there's several transitions that I can look at. When you get to and and when I do consulting with other businesses, I talk about this a lot because it's something that we all have to learn. If when we got to five million, I had to in revenue, I had to figure out how to get to 10. And and as I looked at it, there was there was a bottleneck, and the bottleneck was me. And I had to learn, like, Jim, you don't have to do every bid. I was good at estimating, but I had to teach someone else how I estimated so that we could do twice as much estimating. And then ultimately, you know, I would they would like, I would be like, well, if there's a job over$10,000, I gotta look at it and be involved in it. And then pretty soon it was like, they were doing a better job than I was at that. So I'm like, well, maybe if it's over$20,000, I better look at it. And then it's over$100,000. And it wasn't too long before I was going, you know, I'd really like to see everything we bid that goes over a million. And these people who we taught how to estimate were making more money on their bids than I had because they were more detail-oriented and they and they followed instruction. And so the art and the science of estimating lost its bottleneck, which was me. And so those are the things as founders that we have to learn to take the things that we think we do that were irreplaceable, and we have to actually train a replacement. And it's difficult to do because you don't recognize yourself as the bottleneck. And so when I consult with businesses, I'm like, I sit with CEOs all the time. I'm like, okay, I want you to give me the three things that you hate about your job the most. One of the things I hear all the time is employee reviews. Well, of course, nobody likes to do employee reviews, but you can hand them off to someone who will take the emotion out of it and do a better job of it than you, and then you can be in the review of the reviewer position and give them guidelines, give them cardrails. And and because I get so many founders who come to me and they're like, hey, man, I've built this tremendous business. We're profitable, we're growing, not as fast as I want, but this is going on, that's going on, but I hate my job. Like, well, you didn't design a business where you hated your job, bro. Come on, let's find out why you why you are not enjoying the fruits of your labor, and let's fix it. Yeah. So, uh, and that's really a lot of fun because when you see the light bulb, when you boom, when the light bulb goes off on an entrepreneur's head, you can watch it happen.

SPEAKER_01 2:28:07

I think I think that's what you you know what you said. It it's the fruits of your labor, right? And it's the seeds that you sow, they will bear fruit, either good fruit or bad fruit, you know, it but it all on the seed that you sow. And uh, you know, you know, and I'm gonna touch back, you know, to to a point you made earlier, that a cornerstone in a I think in your success, you you you your family front, everything is taken care of care of. Not just that you were working with your family, but you're also in alignment with your with your wife, that you had her support. And what that does to an individual when all things, you know, all is clear on the home front, right? Everything's good, everything's a go, everything's green. It's like, you know, win to a sales, right? It's like you can accomplish anything because you're not fighting a battle on the home front, you're enjoying peace and and and and and and prosperity and growth, and you all have a shared vision and working towards that vision together, you have unity. And so I maybe that separated you from many other people from getting to where you are today.

SPEAKER_05 2:29:20

Yeah, and I think too, one of the things that comes into play that I've experienced firsthand, and that makes it super important because I watched it happen, and when my wife built me up and gave me confidence, when I walked out the door, there was you couldn't beat us. There's no way because my wife believed in me and and and that didn't put pressure on me, that gave me confidence. And and and then when you know that the people that you're working with that you've invested in over such a long time, they are they are doing and carrying out the expectations you have for safety and quality and and customer service. And and when you set those bars high and you know they're being carried out, then you go out and and you get to sell more with with such confidence, you're unbeatable.

Culture Audits And Human Signals

SPEAKER_01 2:30:17

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. There's nothing, there's nothing better than that. So in in talking about culture and business, as you've been navigating the corporate world and you know, and what was it like witnessing, maybe from a consulting perspective, cultures unraveling, but the maybe the founder or the CEO, they thought they knew what their problems were. And then you maybe you perhaps highlighted that those problems are not the real problems. You're you're really discussing the side effect. Here is the root cause. Have you encountered that a lot?

SPEAKER_05 2:30:52

I have. Especially when I get a consulting gig, I I will go visit the business before I sit with the owner on a long-term basis, especially, and and and think of it like a secret shopper. Um, I I went to a business recently and I was able to walk in the back door and I was in their shop for 20 minutes before someone said, Who are you? Why are you here? And and and I was like, Well, wow, there's a really strong indication that the people who work here don't have a lot of ownership over this space. And when you go in, you can see uh you can see order or you can see chaos. And there's not a lot of middle ground. If you go into a manufacturing space, I've done a lot with engineered wood manufacturing and things like that. And so you go into a space and you look at it, and it and there's only there's only two opportunities, and one is order and the other is chaos. And if the manufacturing floor looks disorganized, guess what? The systems are disorganized, the directions are is organized, and the standards are low. And you can tell that just right out of the gate. And so when you walk up and you say and you ask a CEO, I mean, here's a question. One of the first questions that comes out of my mouth, how often are you, and it doesn't matter whether it's a sales floor, it doesn't matter whether it's a manufacturing floor, it doesn't matter whether it's a job site or a distribution center. How often are you touching the people? Well, you know, I'm just so busy. Really, really, I don't think I can help many people like that. Yeah. People ask me all the time, like, what was your most important job as a CEO? And I thought about that for a long time. And I've said this a hundred times, and people don't believe me, but it's true. The most important thing I did as a CEO was when we got to close to a couple of hundred people, I was still writing handwritten birthday cards to every employee every month. And when I did that, I had people who were engaged and they knew that I knew them or I knew of them because I wrote something about their work environment in a birthday card to them. I had I had grown men walk up and throw their arms around me and hug me and thank me because they'd never got a birthday birthday present or a birthday card from anybody in their life. And it was, it's just, it becomes a a study, a fascinating study of human nature about how we always take the easy way instead of like it would be easy to do a computer generated card. It would, it would be easy to have an auto pen sign it, it would be easy to have it automatically mailed, but these are hand addressed. Now, I didn't address all of them. I truth be known, the envelopes came to me, they were already addressed, but I picked up a card and and sometimes I didn't even know the person. Because they were a remote location, but I stopped what I was doing and I went and I found out something about them so that I could say, listen, you're important to me. Yes. And when that happens, it creates magic. And it's like walking out to a floor and saying hi. And the one of the things that started this is I walked out on our on our shop floor and I said I asked somebody what they were doing there and they they were kind of stunned. And they're like, I work for you. And I was like, whoa, I don't even know their name. Like, I gotta fix this. My post important job was birthday cards. Yes. Still is.

SPEAKER_01 2:34:40

Oh gosh. One of the most uh compelling things for me in interviewing you is thinking about scale and how you I believe you went from 50 to 800 something in one of your your interviews. And I, you know, I couldn't imagine writing 800 or you know uh cards for birthdays and and things of that nature. That's intimidating. But if you know if you practice it, I'm sure it gets easy with time.

SPEAKER_05 2:35:11

You know, there were five businesses that we merged together, and so I only had one of those, and so the ultimate size of the organization was about 800 of those. I only wrote 200 birthday cards. So don't worry about it. Okay, okay, okay.

SPEAKER_01 2:35:24

That's I'm just like, man, 800. I was thinking that's that's quite a task.

SPEAKER_05 2:35:30

Now but I encouraged the other CEOs who were part of that business to to engage their people in that way, and the ones who did were were ultimately successful.

SPEAKER_01 2:35:41

What was the productivity like after that? Because now someone feels people feel valued. You have 800 people that show up in an environment that now feel valued and heard and seen. And now there's a personal stake there for them. Not just what they're getting in in their paycheck, but the added investment of you took the time to reach out and say, hey, happy birthday. I know X, Y, and Z about you. You are important. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 2:36:08

But one of the things that it's really difficult to convince corporate America of, and I'll use a really, really easy example, safety. And they want to say, give me a program that's scalable. Wow. Give you a safety program that's scalable. I can do that. I can do that. I'm gonna train each individual to make good safe decisions. I'm gonna train them like if you're talking about something like when you ascend towers for a living, it's really not a good thing to fall. And so we have to tie off. And so I'm gonna tell everybody, I'm gonna train everybody, and then I'm gonna encourage everybody to make a good decision. And then I'm gonna give them a why. And the why is personal and it's selfish. I want you to tie off so I don't have to go tell your wife, mama, girlfriend, significant other that you were stupid. Yes. And and then I would tell them about a story about safety that made it deeply personal. Because when you look at things like that that are so important, it doesn't matter whether you're working on a, I mean, if you're working with a crew of truck drivers, who wants their wife to know that they died in a truck wreck because they didn't do what we told them to do? Well, no one does. So let's be, let's choose. So the only thing that scales about safety is individuals making safe choices on a moment-by-moment basis with that being a core value instead of simply just a priority. Because if it's only a priority and you get a call from the IRS, all your priorities just changed. Yes. So if it's a core value, our decisions are only based upon what we need to do at that moment to get home to our family.

SPEAKER_01 2:38:00

Yeah, absolutely. Now in in this era, and something that I've noticed is that now in in the corporate world, maybe all aspects of business, is that leaders have to wear many hats. Like some days you have to go in, you're the you're the football coach, you're the you're you're the cheerleader, you're the motivational speaker. It's it's you have to wear these hats because if you don't, the alternative is that it'll be like during the pandemic where if you didn't care about me, well, I'll show you how much I care about you and just not work.

SPEAKER_02 2:38:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:38:38

And I don't think we I don't think that the world has truly recovered from that mentality yet. I think that the investment piece has to be there and we have to wear these hats. What are some of the hats that you've had to wear throughout the years?

SPEAKER_05 2:38:54

Well, you know, we've worn a production hat, we've worn a management hat, we've worn a HR hat, we've worn a finance hat, we've worn them all. But there's no hat that's more important than the hat I'm gonna tell you about now. If you walk in to the place where I used to work or any of the places where I used to work, what you're gonna find is my reputation is still there. And and you and if you ask those people about me, and and you say, what is it about Tracy that that made you work here for 25 years? They're gonna say, Oh, he loves me. If we can convince our employees that their comfort is more important than my comfort, and that I will become uncomfortable so that they can become uncomfortable, or I will get uncomfortable beside their discomfort, all of a sudden they know that I place them on a higher pedestal than I place myself. And they will, their, their, you know, their why monitor is pretty sensitive and very accurate. They're gonna know if you're blowing smoke, and they're gonna know if you're not, if you're not being real with them. If you're not you look up the most researched word in 2023, guess what it was? Real. Authentic. Authentic. If people, if people's BS meter is going off because you're not authentic with them, you'll get no loyalty. It's the that's where the quiet quit has its root. Regardless of what your hat you're wearing, make sure your people know that you love them. And why should you love them? Because they're feeding your family, because they're making your customers happy, because they're making your house payment. I never made any money, never have. All these guys who work for me, all these gals who work for me, they just loaded my checkbook and I love them for it, and so I tried to load theirs back.

Bridging Generational Tension With Respect

SPEAKER_01 2:41:10

Reciprocity. Look at that. Reciprocity. What a concept. Now, in in in in in in in this era, you know, I some of the things that I've noticed is sometimes there's generational tensions in corporate America where either the younger professionals they feel dismissed, or vice versa, the the the older professionals they feel like they're overlooked. Is is that something that you've had to navigate while you're consulting that you've experienced, you know, when dealing with every day. Okay. Every day.

SPEAKER_05 2:41:48

But you know, I find it one of the most confusing things still. Um, and I'm gonna use two approaches. I'll tell you about my personal journey first. Yes. My grandfather was born in 1903, and my youngest granddaughters were born in 2025. Well, wow, that's a 200 or that's a 122-year spread of people. And so I crossed seven generations, and I have gotten along with every generation. So if I can do it, you can do it. Well, then that comes to the how. When I stand up on stages and I talk to audiences, they're usually segregated. It's very predictable. And and if it's a corporate setting, it's gonna be the young people on the left and the old people on the right, and then in the middle is management. And and you ask them this lovely, lovely question that always works every time is respect given or is respect earned? And the young people say respect is given, and the old people say respect is earned. It's almost universal, it never fails. And my reply to that is if I earn respect before it's given, and I give respect before it's earned, who wins? I don't think everyone wins. I want to earn your respect before you give it to me, and that's a gift. Yes, but I also want to give you respect because of your humanity before you get a chance to earn it, so then we can actually engage in the big C word, communication. Yes, we can't talk to someone who doesn't respect us. This is true. We can't even hear someone who doesn't respect us. So why and that goes into another? There's a three. I give a keynote and I'm like, so the most important thing is generous listening, and then the most important thing is taking time and energy to build a relationship, and then the most important thing is respect. Give it and earn it. So there's a there's a ten thousand dollar keynote for you. Free of charge.

SPEAKER_01 2:44:02

So I I appreciate that. Um I feel like that this interview itself is its entire, you know, keynote, keynote in itself speaking event. So can you uh give a specific you know, or name a specific generational conflict that you've had to resolve, had to resolve. Uh oh, sure.

Turning Conflict Into Alignment

SPEAKER_05 2:44:23

I had I had two gentlemen who were one generation apart, and one was on the sales side, and he was driven. He was driven towards revenue and volume, and there was just no stopping this dude. He's still a good friend, still love him. And I had a production manager who was who was so quality and production focused that he was unstoppable, but they were unstoppable with different methods of motivation. One wanted one wanted perfect product and the other one wanted perfect revenue. And never could they meet. And so I went to them and I'm like, okay, so here's the deal. If you can't get along, this company will fail. Simple as that. If production and sales can't get along and can't speak with one another, the company will fail. And so it's on your problem, it's on your shoulders, it's your job to restore it. And after a week, they were at each other's throat again. So I said, okay, we've got a we've got this conference coming up, and I booked a room and a flight for the two of you. You're getting a taxi together, you're driving to the airport together, you're taking the plane, sitting next to one another. I don't care who sits in the middle seat, you're not going first class. And you're sharing a hotel room, but there's two queen beds, and you're going to sit together at the conference, then you're going to get a taxi home, and then you're gonna fly home together, and then you're gonna come and you're gonna write to me a list of the 10 best things about the other person. Wow. You know what? All of a sudden, they were in a position where they were forced to align with the needs of the company and the needs of the people who were at the company instead of their own selfish desires. Now, their own selfish desires were innately good. But in order to in order to understand one, you first had to empathize a little bit with that other person. Yeah, you couldn't do that if you couldn't hear them. So what we did is we kind of locked them in a jail cell over a week together so that they would begin the process of speaking. And it was it one one became the general manager, and one became the and and after that, after I left that company, the the guy who was the sales side left and got a huge bump and raise and a new big promotion. He brought the production manager with him. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:47:04

His best friend, his his best friend. Yeah. You know, I think sometimes I I feel that in a work environment, people aren't allowed to truly just work their differences out. Sometimes it's just all right, let's just separate them and that's it. Or let's move this one to this location, and then people then don't learn how to work through problems together to overcome that, which is a natural part of life. And that's a component that's missing in society today that people don't know how to work through their differences.

SPEAKER_05 2:47:37

So my question to you is And that communication level, that let that communication level is really, really critical because if I get two people who aren't going to get along, then I take them, like usually I would take them in a private place. I hate conference rooms, so I'll walk outside and I take them outside and we sit down at a picnic table or something like that, and I say, okay, it's become apparent that the two of you don't like one another. What is it that you don't like about him? Wow, you mean you want me to talk? And and you know, if someone's gonna bring up the bad stuff, then it opens the door for the other side to bring up the bad stuff. But you know what? That bad stuff, that friction, that conflict has to come to the surface. Yes. So whatever I have to do to bring that up to help them, because I mean I can solve it or they can solve it. Their solutions will be better than mine. I promised them that. I bet it would. I bet it would. My solutions are always violent, man. I only have the power of the checkbook. Yeah. So I so it you either get to work here or you don't get to work here. So let's find a remedy together. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:48:55

I love that. So how do you think you know that leaders could be more, you know, use more productive measures to resolve a conflict? As I you know, we're talking about, yes, as as the the the leader founder, you do control the the checkbook. But a problem like that can resurface again. So how can we just be more productive, you know, and create a culture where, hey, you guys don't get along, but here's how we can turn this chaos into productivity.

SPEAKER_05 2:49:27

Yeah, well, our especially as at founder level businesses, our our desire is to follow our nature. And so we're fixers. So we want to throw a wrench around that problem. We want to fix it ourselves. And I think that is the first tendency of most founder-led uh businesses. And so I would encourage people let's just take a step back and let's get in a room with the people who don't get along and listen. When we listen to them, we're gonna find out a deeper root cause that they're gonna let on initially. He's he's just a jerk all the time. Really? What does that look like? And then turn the key and shut up and listen. And when we listen, we're gonna find that the deeper root cause to the problems might be, it might not be. So if you have a production line issue, it might be, it might be a bottleneck that is completely unrelated to the two personalities involved. And so now, unless we fight, you know, it might be two people up uh up the production line, it might be it might be a piece of paper that's getting that's getting in the way of two people getting along. Well, it's then you have an opp if you listen, you have an opportunity to actually affect repairs.

SPEAKER_01 2:50:47

Yes. So at what point in your career did you realize that power and influence, you know, authority and and and influence are not necessarily the same thing. Like do you have like a specific story or uh a nugget, a nugget plus?

Character Authority And Real Influence

SPEAKER_05 2:51:06

I had you couldn't do this anymore, but I was I was recently graduated from college. I had my first job out of college. I worked for a lovely man who I can't even I can't even express to you how much admiration I have for him. His name was Leroy, and and I was gonna go out in the field on sales. I had done the production side, I had done the estimating side, I had done the customer service side, and the way to get ahead there was to to uh be in outside sales. And so I went into outside sales, and as I did, it became it became an opportunity that I couldn't pass up. So I'm let it, I'm headed from Minneapolis to Des Moines, Iowa on a Sunday night uh to go out and hit the road, hit the bricks right away on Monday morning. Uh Friday afternoon, Leroy calls me into his office. He said, JT, he said, give me your business card. And so I handed him my business card and I was pretty proud of it. It said, sales engineer on my card. And he said, JT, whose name is on that card? And I'm like, oh, Leroy, my name is on that card. He goes, no, sir. My name is on that card. And if I ever hear you going into a bar alone on the road, if I ever hear you stepping out on your wife, or if I ever hear you misbehaving while you're carrying my business cards, I will immediately fire you. Do you understand? Whoa, here's a man who said that character is more important than anything I was walking out of there with. It was more important than knowledge, it was more important than responsibility, it was character. And if you act in a way that doesn't embarrass your company, you'll be successful. That's what he told me. Now, that kind of authority is not really practiced anymore because we can't say, hey, if you, you know, do this or do that. But you know what? I've I've taken people aside and said, listen, I can see that you're doing the wrong thing. I can see that you're not coming to work drunk, but boy, you're sure hung over. I can see that you're in a struggle. I want to come alongside you, but you've got to choose to make some decisions that will help you and help your family and help my company. And then they know that the secret's out. And there's so there's many different, there's many different times when leadership and authority merge where you care for people. And if you care more about, you know, like I said, when I want people to be safe so their wife doesn't have to experience trauma and tragedy. And when when people understand that you love them enough to you love them just like they are, but not enough where you want them to stay that way, yeah, they they feel it, they know it.

SPEAKER_01 2:54:02

Now, and as you said, you know, they feel it, they know it. When you looking back, because you were just talking about an an instance in the past where someone said, your character matters. Now, as as a as a leader, you know, back then, if you looking back, did you picture yourself where you are today? Like, did you did you ever imagine at the time that, hey, I would be here, eight, you know, you know, merged and have eight, you know, eight hundred employees, you know, uh in telecommunications, not a welder, not, you know, but you're a telecom consultant, you know, all these things.

SPEAKER_05 2:54:43

No, in a word, no. I was a kid, I was a kid, I grew up in a family of eight children, uh, plus two more adopted. So there were 10 of us, 12 around the dinner table, 13 if my grandma was there and she was there often. Um, and and I was the dumb one and I was the slow one, and I stuttered when I was young, and I had a learning disability with math, and I had no, I never took algebra until I was a freshman in college. Oh. And so I I had I had no concept, no clue. When I started getting people who started building me up, it started pretty young, but but then it really accelerated as as I got into business, especially with that first guy that I just told you about who gave me that chat. And and the farther I went, the more mistakes. What I learned is is that mistakes are awesome because that's tuition that you just paid. And if you're smart, you don't have to be like book smart, brain smart. You just have to say, That hurt. I don't want to do that again. And if you learn from those mistakes, you have prepaid tuition that you never have to pay. again and it's gonna pay dividends. Yes. And and so as the as the kid who was the slowest, who was the dumbest, who got the worst grades, I mean, I I I've got six brothers, so I've I've heard every slam you can get, you can have. And they love me, but they're also my brothers, man. That's the only deal. They'll be the first ones to defend me and the first ones to punch me. Listen, it gives you it gives you strength. There you go. There you go. And they and they and they you know they were also very influential in my youth and in my upbringing. When it comes to character, when you're from a small town and you do something wrong, the whole town knows right away. And and and if if the whole town knows then your brothers know and if your brothers know you're gonna pay a price. So we did we did a lot to not embarrass the family name but no I had no clue that there would be a a a leadership like this in my future.

SPEAKER_01 2:57:00

So and and so I'll pivot to the next thing so 46 years of marriage right I I think that marriage is its own form of leadership personally that's my personal belief and right where you know you have the executive branch and so forth and you have your kids and you know we can get into that but what are some takeaways from your marriage 46 years of marriage that you were able to then you know cross over into business to then have the same longevity that you had in your marriage have it translate into the into business as well.

SPEAKER_05 2:57:40

So uh the truth in advertising is 45 years until April 19th so whenever you publish if it's after April 19th then it'll be 46 years. But at the end of the day I think one of the most important things that I have come to learn is that it's really important when when when you step in alongside someone and you make a commitment that says till death to us part, it's not all champagne and roses it ain't all chocolates and caviar there's been many times where I am certain that my wife could have should have and probably without faith would have walked away from this colossal loser. I have I have had as many business failures uh more business failures than successes we moved to Denver because a business that Jim tried didn't work out and then we moved from Denver to Seattle when a business that Jim had and the economy tank started failing and then he got a great job and then he started another business with his son that by any measure shouldn't have succeeded but here again I have been blessed by someone who has a great deal of confidence in me not because of who I am but because I am first and foremost the protector of my wife and my family. Yes. And in terms of marriage we have very distinct roles my wife is infinitely smarter than I am and I mean that in in and it's not in a it's it's not in a generous way it's just the fact she's so smart and she homeschooled five children from to be five incredibly independent and competent individuals in their own right and and she did so why keeping the books at her office for the first decade and I mean building a house and uh building another house and building our shop etc etc but through all of this her faith in me expressed as confidence was such an invaluable thing and I just couldn't have done any of this without her so in a true spirit of partnership 15 years ago she was in a snowmobile wreck and she suffered a stroke and I do a I'm doing a whole bunch of keynotes in the healthcare industry right now because of this I describe what it feels like in healthcare when you're the husband of a victim and and she suffered a a very traumatic uh facial trauma and stroke and and I learned how to do dishes and do the laundry and I learned how to cook and I I mean I could barbecue before then but I didn't know how to cook. And so I became I became the person who picked up the slack for her instead of the previous first 25 years where she picked up the slack for me. And that's the kind of teamwork that it takes in a business that's the kind of teamwork that it takes in a marriage. If we care so much about someone that we'll do the hard things for them because they're so important business, family, marriage, friendship just love people, man. It's the secret to everything and love them by what you do not by it's not it ain't a feeling it's I I remember my daughter one time she accidentally left the freezer open during the summer in our garage and by the time I figured it out it was because I smelled it and she'll never make that mistake again and it's not because not because she got a spanking it's not because she got you know disciplined it's because she got to watch her dad clean up this horrible mess and not complain about it. And and I never have to worry about freezers being left open again.

SPEAKER_01 3:01:47

There's the bonus yeah you know you know at this is this stage in life you know you've worn many hats you've you're and you're still wearing many hats you're you know father husband grandfather entrepreneur and and all those things so in this great grandpa in July just saying this is a this is a scoop for you.

Defining Legacy Through Impact

SPEAKER_05 3:02:09

Yeah to be a grandgrandpa this July well you know congratulations in advance Jim now what what what is legacy for you at this point now that is is wow you know I think that this is your legacy you know especially now it's great there is great attached to Jim not just grand but great yeah so one of the things that Sarah and I have done over the years is we go away the first part the last part of every year or even sometimes like this year, the first part of this year very first week of the month we went away for a weekend and we decide that what our focus for that year is going to be and then we pick one word that's going to define that. And that has really been a guiding principle for us for I guess a couple of decades because it helps us stay centered and focused on on what we want to do. There's it as you get older you get more options and options are really cool but you don't want to spend your time on foolish options either because because there's so little time left when you're when you're my age you want to make the most of it man and and when people tell me Jim hey just go retire and sit back and play golf or go fishing or go hunting or whatever you know do what you want I'm like I am doing what I want. And so the word for this year is impact. We want to have impact for people and how do we do that? Well I have a podcast that's just exploding I have a business where she is coming alongside me and we're traveling together to speak to groups and and you know when you get 2000 people in an audience when I get off stage I have given everything for an hour or two hours and she helps me get centered get grounded and she talks to people so I don't have to talk to everybody because people want to you know talk to you and shake your hand and stuff after you get off stage. So uh with the books what we're doing is we're creating methodologies where we can impact more people and we can impact them for the right reason. It's not for money it's not for glory. It's because we think that the messages that we can give are going to help them. And if we can help people there is no more noble cause than that other than sharing our faith. And so with that the impact the greatest impact that I can have I'm doing some I'm doing some speeches where I do pro bono work and I'm gonna tell people that my life is better because of Jesus and I hope that they can come alongside that and I'll tell them all about it if they want.

SPEAKER_01 3:04:50

Amen to that I you know thank you know I want to say sincerely no thank you for that I I there's something that I believe in. You know we say you know servant leadership but there's a man that lived you know 2000 years ago and he taught us about sacrifice and when we learn how to sacrifice it we see the the fruits that that bears right it's like oh I'm not going out every weekend slamming back you know drinks or whatever and as a result maybe that's why I'm living a healthier life you know it's it's sacrifice. You sacrifice certain things so you can have something better at the end. And you know thank you truly for for sharing that there's one last question I want to ask you before I forget and I think that you know with families and I said this in the beginning that there's a there's kind of like a like a mirror of healthy family healthy workplace if you're the founder CEO what have you and if you can mirror the healthy family structure that you have at home with the healthy corporate structure that you have then you can have success on on both fronts.

Raising Expectations Without Apology

SPEAKER_05 3:06:06

Is that something that you you've witnessed to be the case yeah and and there's a methodology that I think is really, really missing in today's families and in today's culture, but also in today's business societies and practices. And that is expectations. We live in a society that says that we have to dumb down our expectations so that people can meet them. And I think the opposite is true. I think we have to raise expectations and hold them higher so people can strive to meet them because I was I did a job on on a large military base and we went on base and the head civilian at the base came to me and he says he says so I need to know understand your quality procedures and I'm like okay our our quality procedures are wrapped up in a sentence are you ready? And he's like no I want a book I'm like well we can't give you a book if you want a book there's an ASTM book we can give you that will detail that and and he's like he's like okay I'll play along what is your sense perfect is good enough his response was unbelievable he said he said you're gonna discourage all of your people your people will hate working for you if you expect perfection and I said no sir I don't expect perfection I just know that perfect is good enough and if they strive for perfect and they hit awesome you're gonna be the happiest customer on the planet and he's like well I'm gonna roll this up the I'm gonna roll this up the food chain. Well fortunately for him by the time he got it backed off a food chain and told me that he needed a book we had a book for him and it was an ASTM book that was 400 pages long and it cost 175 bucks to get it and it tells us how to put up towers and how to maintain towers and how to do it safely but it had nothing to do with the quality of the product that we actually had already built for him on the site where it was perfect and so I would tell you that if you have expectations for your children and that that's their grades that's their behavior that's how they respect their mother that's how they don't fidget because they don't have an electronic that if you have expectations for your employees that they keep a clean truck that they make sure and make safe decisions at every turn it's no different than my wife having expectations that I'm gonna be a good provider and come home and take the garbage out. And like man it's every it's part of everything we do. So raise those expectations America and let's show everybody in the world what it looks like to be a winner.

SPEAKER_01 3:09:00

Yes yes easy it it is it's easy because perfect is good enough you know I I I love that you should put on in a shirt that should that should be shirt it should be you know Jim it it it has been a a great time having you and I truly you know thank you thank you for for reaching out and thank you for being a part of the podcast it really means a lot to me because I I've never intended on doing a video podcast and something told me that this was going to be the one that I was going to do it. And so that's why this is the first so Jim you're the you're the first uh the Magnificent ones podcast to to be on video because normally I was just doing audio only so thank you sincerely for being a part of that.

SPEAKER_05 3:09:48

Okay man I'm so humbled to uh to be able to impact your audience. Hopefully it's something that I said could impact someone and now Sarah's going to be really happy that I used our word.

Final Takeaways And Charge Forward

SPEAKER_01 3:10:01

Well tell her thank you as well and thank you you know thank you very well. You know I d just give me one moment here. Leadership is not defined by titles. It is defined by the cultures we create and the people who continue building those cultures long after we are gone. The strongest leaders understand that relationships, trust shared purpose are not built in a moment. They're built through decisions repeated over years, sometimes decades. Jim Tracy, thank you for joining us today on the Magnificent ones three conversations, one foundation purpose development and culture these discussions did not receive the rollout they deserved at the time but leadership is not measured by timing it is measured by impact this episode is an amplification a cornerstone a reminder that meaningful leadership is intentional and never accidental if this podcast challenged you good clarity often does the point here isn't consensus or reassurance it's to leave you more precise than when you arrived keep what sharpens your thinking discard the rest but don't confuse familiarity with truth if this conversation mattered follow the podcast and share it selectively with people who value depth and not noise. Until next time stay disciplined with your thinking selective with your attention and honest about what you're really optimizing for.