Seung Paik - Leadernomics

Seung Paik shares his inspiring journey from military service to authoring 'Leadernomics,' exploring how economics and leadership intersect to shape decision-making, relationships, and legacy. Discover practical insights on bridging the gap between 'what is' and 'what should be' through human-centered leadership and economic principles.

https://www.leadernomics.org/

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:24

Yeah. Oh yeah, I'll have the masters on for the next four days.

SPEAKER_01 0:28

It's it's actually a great right. This time of year is great for sports because you just concluded the March Madness tournament.

SPEAKER_00 0:33

Yep.

SPEAKER_01 0:33

And you got the Masters, you got spring baseball. I mean, it's it's just a fun, it's a fun season to be a sports fan.

SPEAKER_00 0:40

NBA playoffs will kick off.

SPEAKER_01 0:42

Yeah, yep.

SPEAKER_00 0:43

It'll be football before we know it. But so man, it is good to have you on the podcast. And I'll I'm glad I pushed record because me and you have already been chatting away for about 15 minutes, talking about all kinds of things and having a great conversation. And so, man, thank you. Uh, you and I connected a few weeks ago just from a simple LinkedIn connection. And uh I appreciate you responding back because it's an honor to have you on here.

SPEAKER_01 1:08

It's great to be here, Chris. And uh yeah, now listening and understanding uh the platform that you've created for guys to kind of come around books, to build a community around books, and uh just your passion and desire to have more people, more men reading earlier in their lives. Love it. I love everything about it. So excited to be here and thanks for for having me.

SPEAKER_00 1:28

Yeah, appreciate it, man. Appreciate it. But no, man, I would love I I want to talk about your book. And you were just explaining you're you're about to head out on a book tour across the country, really for the rest of the year. And I'm curious to know, Song, you have a very decorated military background as well, which I'd love for you to talk about. But in your book, we've got it on the Books for Guys website already, Leader Nomics. But tell your story, tell your story of growing up, getting into the military and spending many, many years there. And then what led you to writing your book?

SPEAKER_01 2:02

So without trying to go back too far, I suppose, uh, so my parents were born in South Korea. They left after the Korean War and came to the States in the early 70s. So we were kind of the first major wave of Korean immigrants coming into America, settled into Chicago, and that's where I was raised and grew up. And uh throughout my time in Chicago, the like maybe the two things I remember most is one loving sports. So I was a sports junkie, uh, cubs, bears, bulls, blackhawks. And then on top of being a sports junkie in high school, I got into uh gymnastics. And it was ironic because I really loved baseball. I wanted to play baseball. But going into high school, I was four foot ten, ninety pounds. And so there wasn't a single coach that was going to look at me for high school ball. And I know you played some type of sport. I'm not sure what sport you played. I'm I'm the football guy. You're the football guy. Small football, yep. Yeah. So I was I was the size of that football when I was entering high school. And so I had a couple of friends that were on the gymnastics team, and they said, Hey, son, you you should try out for gymnastics. You're like the perfect size. And, you know, I kind of took that as a gut punch because I really wanted to play baseball. But but then I went out, just thought I'd give it a try. And the first day of practice, I learned a few little tricks, and I thought this is pretty cool. And then I came back again and again and again. And next thing I know, four years later, um, I was in the state finals for Palma Horse and Parallel Bars, and then got some offers to college. And one of the schools that gave me an offer was the United States Air Force Academy. Now, at that time, I had no interest in going into the military. But my dad, being a product of the Korean War, he had an incredibly fond memory and experience with the American soldier when he was at a refugee camp in Korea. And he's never forgotten that moment of getting some candy from that soldier and uh more importantly, getting a little dose of hope. And he always would share that story with me and my sisters about his love for America, his love for the American military. And so when it came time to go to college and I had a choice to make, he just really impressed upon me, hey, why don't you think about going to like a West Point or Naval Academy or the Air Force Academy? And so went out to Colorado Springs, Colorado for a recruiting trip. And being from Chicago, where there's no mountains, I saw Rocky Mountains for the first time, fell in love and loved the mountains, loved the fact that I could do D1 gymnastics, loved the fact that dad was going to be happy. So next thing I know, I'm in the military. And uh little did I know that I entered day one and I'm needing to shine my boots, iron my shirt, I'm getting yelled at, and I'm thinking to myself, what in the world did I get myself into? That's how I, that's how my military life began. And one thing led to the next. Sometimes this is how the military works, and sometimes it's how life works. I said, hey, I'm I'm gonna do this amount of time and get out and go do something else. But it became one opportunity, one leadership experience, one incredible destination after the next. And next thing I knew, uh 25 years had passed, and then I made a career out of it. And so that was my life in the military. I called myself a CFO with body armor because I was always doing some type of work with resources and getting money and resources to the warfighter. And then basically the last four years, I started writing my book. And my book came from my uh education degree was always in economics, and uh fell in love with economics uh because I really viewed it as a framework for making decisions in life and leadership. And it kind of carried me through my whole leadership career in the military uh as a foundational way to look at decisions. So uh spoke on it a lot, talked to government, industry, military, and then I had a bunch of people start asking me, hey, when are you gonna write a book? And so I began the journey about four years ago, published it this past September, and now here we are going around and trying to uh tell people about literomics.

SPEAKER_00 6:38

Yeah. No, I love that, man. And I I'm so glad you shared that. I remember I grew up in uh in an area where sports was was big. And I remember there was a kid I played against in football that that went to the Air Force Academy, and I remember his mom was actually my English teacher. That's how I knew him. But I played against him, so I we weren't really friends, but I knew of him, and he was a really good athlete. And he went there to do, is it decathlon at sports? He he played football too, but decathlon was I think was how he ended up there. But I remember just thinking, well, and learning how tough it is to even get into the Air Force Academy. And so uh I learned real quick that if you if you go there, it's it's a big deal. And so I think it's really cool. I mean, you did you did a lot to get there, so I don't want to under you to undersell that because that's a that is a big deal.

SPEAKER_01 7:26

Um what's funny, Chris, is that when I went there, I went there the year after the original Top Gun was released, right? The top gun was so you know, everybody and their sister wanted to go to either the Naval Academy or Air Force Academy to go fly jets, right? Yeah, and so so yeah, that it had a little bit of that uh that flair about it, which is also why I thought, oh yeah, I'll go there, man. Maybe I could maybe I could be like a Tom Cruise or something, but yeah. But no, it was it was it was quite quite the experience.

SPEAKER_00 7:57

Yeah. No, that's awesome. That's awesome. Well, go a little deeper into your book. And specifically, you talk about how economics, you use it personally to shape a lot of the decisions you do, and you think others should do the same. Dig in a little deeper on that and and what specifically, like what's going on economically that we should pay attention to to help whatever direction we need to go in in life. How how do you correlate that and put that together?

SPEAKER_01 8:28

A great question. So the book was really birthed out of the classroom. So when I, after becoming an officer in the Air Force, I think it was one, two, about five years after I became an officer in the Air Force, the Air Force Academy, my alma mater, asked me to come and teach economics, right? And so I went back to the to my uh stomping grounds and I started teaching and had to teach from the textbook. And every textbook economics, first economics 101 class will generally start out with your basic definitions, your graphs of supply and demand, and it will show you the math and the equations. And by the time you've gotten through about two weeks worth of class, you've already lost about 80% of the students, right? They've kind of checked out because unless they're gonna major in business or economics, they're like, okay, this is a core class, just teach me what I need to know. But they've kind of checked out from the depth and the foundation of economics. Um, and they just want to kind of get through the math and the equations. And so they never get through the corridor of what I like to say is the human endeavor of economics. Well, that changed, Chris, when I was teaching there from 00 to 03. We had 9-11, right? And literally overnight, I walked into that classroom of college students that used to be bright, happy, joyful, silly, and it became a very somber, sober group of young adults who were obviously going to a military academy, getting ready to become young officers and leaders in the United States Air Force. And you could just see the look on their faces. Some of them uh personal sorrow because they had family members or friends that they lost in the Twin Towers. But many of them just kind of confused about what they're facing in life. And no textbook was going to hit their hearts, let alone their minds, right? And so I made a pivot and I decided to take that entire semester after 9-11 and teach economics strictly from the perspective of storytelling and personal memoir, right? Because I really wanted to connect. And I didn't want them to lose uh the forest from the trees. I wanted them to get the heart of economics. Well, that class resonated. In fact, it became the most popular class at the academy at that time. And then I started speaking on this way of economics regularly, and then I coined it leadernomics, right? And one just really quick story is one of my students, while post-9-11, had brought up this article that he read, and there was a movie made on it. It was called Worth, uh, and Michael Keaton is in the movie. It's actually a very good movie. But the article that he mentioned to me was uh a compensation. It's called the VCF, the victim compensation fund, that Congress had developed post-9-11 as a means of goodwill and compensation for family members and victims of lost loved ones and also those who had been injured.

SPEAKER_00 11:34

Yep. I saw that movie a couple years ago, so I know which one you're talking about.

SPEAKER_01 11:37

Yeah. Yeah. And so that fund, the optics of it, you would think would be good, but the optics weren't that good for two reasons. One, because behind the scenes, they created that fund as a means of goodwill so that family members and relatives would not sue the airline industry. So that was kind of a hidden agenda. And then the other thing is that the fund wasn't unlimited, right? It was it was cap. And so the way they went about determining who would get how much in terms of payout, it came down to data. And they would throw the data into some type of formula, like actuary scientists do, and then out comes a number. So if you're a janitor in the in the 9-11 events and you lose your life, right, you're a 50-year-old janitor. They're gonna take your age, your job, your salary, your health, they're gonna throw that into the database, and out comes maybe a six-digit figure, and they're gonna take that check to the lost loved ones. But if you were a 35-year-old executive that went to Harvard, they're gonna throw all that into the database and out comes an eight-figure check, nine-figure check, who knows? And they're gonna take that to the family, right? So there was this huge disparity. One life lost, another life lost. Someone gets a six-figure check, someone gets an eight-figure check. But even aside from that disparity and kind of the poor optics surrounding that, the even greater disparity is that there's gonna be no lost loved one that receives an either check and says, That's about right. Right? Because they lost their mom, their dad, their brother, their sister, their son, their daughter. It's priceless. And so a student said to me, sir, how do we reconcile this? How do we reconcile this pricing of life when we all know inside that our loved ones are priceless? How does the market, how does economics reconcile that infinite gap? And I said, Well, that's a great question, right? That is what we're gonna journey. And I'll tell you something economics has something to say about that. Economics has an area of economics called positive economics, which is what is, right? What is, what do we see, what does the market tell us about price? And then there's a whole side of economics called the normative, what should be, right? So just because there's a supply and demand for human organs, should there be a market for human organs, right? Big gap, what is versus what should be. And economics is constantly bridging that gap. Well, you know what else is bridging that gap between what is and what should be? Priceless, impersonal, impersonal, leadership. Leadership. That's what leaders do, right? Leaders bridge that gap from what is to what should be. And so the two worlds, leadership and economics, they come together perfectly. That's the essence of leaderonomics. And so that whole semester, I was telling my students through personal stories and memoirs, how that gap gets bridged through an economic framework and through economic principles. That's leadonomics.

SPEAKER_00 15:23

Yeah. Dang, song, I've never heard it. I've never heard it broken down like that. And obviously that's why you've written a book and you're teaching this, is to to put that out there because I've never once heard any professor or anyone that I've been around in regard to economics talk about the leadership aspect and that being the bridge between the what is and what should be. You always hear, you know, a market, here's where it's priced, here's where the data says it should be, but you know, there's that's just numbers, but there's a lot more to it than just data. There's a lot of things in there that are, I don't know, like you said, it's hard to put a number on, you know, a family member, what they're worth. Cause yeah, you're right, they're priceless. And so how do you do that? And so your approach to this, how did you how did the light bulb click for you personally to where you came up with this not formula, lack of a better term, but this process of understanding that leadership binds these two together? Did you did somebody guide you and teach you that? Or how did you figure that out and say, this is something that needs to be taught? This is something, this is a way we need to approach this instead of just data and numbers, but there's more to it. How did you figure that out?

SPEAKER_01 16:45

You know, I think part of it is through just my own kind of reading and understanding and development through the principles of economics and how economics guided me and my decisions. But I definitely also saw it throughout 25 years in the military, where that's that's something very interesting to me is that in the military, almost all of us are given uniform training, consistent leadership development throughout our career. It's not like somebody's getting far superior type of leadership training and another one's getting a lesser form of we all kind of go through the same courses and the same classes. And so then how is it, Chris, that we're all going through kind of the similar type of development, similar ranks, similar uniforms, similar core values? But our leadership styles, approaches, and philosophies, how is it so different? And if it's not different, why is it manifested so differently? Why do I have this general who behaves this way, and I have this general who behaves that way? Both of them are effective, perhaps, but is one far more effective and why, right? So I used to like to give this one um, and I and I actually talk about it in the book. I had the privilege of working at the Pentagon from 2003 to 2006, and I call that whole season of my 2003 to 2006 life at the Pentagon as the tale of two generals. Because I worked for two generals simultaneously. One was relational, one was transactional. One was very much in tune with how to get the most out of people, the other one was in tune with how to get the most for themselves. And it was very clear that both were successful, both got the mission done, and both were on a track toward higher rank and higher platforms. But if you asked any one of us underneath those two generals, right? If you asked either of us, what do you think? Unanimously, all of us would have pointed to one person and said, That's my general. The person was the same rank, same training, same development, same flew the same type of jets, but no one would have said, That's my general. This one, everybody would have knocked down walls, climbed fences, will crawl through the mud for that general in a heartbeat. And so it's amazing the amount of performance and productivity that can be altered and grown by the type of leadership presence. One that is constantly taking what is to what should be, and the other one who's constantly settling for what is. And when I say settling for what is, that other general pretty much got what they asked for because they asked a lot, and that's what they got. This other general, they cared about us and they cared about what we could deliver, and we did so much more, better, faster for that general. So it was it's such a dichotomy, even though the training was very similar.

SPEAKER_00 20:01

Yeah. The two words that come to mind they're just circling, is like there's a lot of psychology and philosophy, the way you would think of things and do things that are intertwined into this leadership, you know, because uh you're sitting there describing two different people. I've experienced that. I've experienced two different leaders exact the same. One that's more relationship, people caring. I'd run through a brick wall for them. The one that's a little more uh I I and I always use the term a little more militaristic, you know, beat you down until you get what they want. I hated it. Still did the work, though. So, you know, it it got done. But I just the philosophy that people take and their own, their own definition of how they think they should lead. And it you go, it goes back to that book I was telling you. I was reading about Tony Dungey. His coaching approach, so different. He never cussed at players, he never yelled at players, but then you then you see a Nick Saban and he's cussing and yelling, two different things, but both leaders and both getting things done. So you you just and I don't know how that correlates, but I'm just sitting there thinking of all these different things and how you're describing it. And there's just there's a lot to it.

SPEAKER_01 21:12

You know, I think it's it's interesting because both, both very different styles can both be incredibly effective. But I would ask the question in terms of just not only in terms of effective for the short term, but in terms of long-term development, right? Because that's a part of what we get into when we talk about leader nomics and going from what is to what should be. It's not for the momentary success, it's not for the immediate delivery and performance. There's also the question of legacy, of multiplying, of what do we want to spread in the way of influence that even when you're not in the room, it will carry far beyond that duration and that purpose. Person and that time, right? And generally speaking, what we have found is that love, or what I would say compassionate, caring, people-centered leadership, right, tends to go a lot further than directive, fearful, almost a bit of a commanding type of leadership presence in somebody's life. Because the two can maybe result in the same outcomes in the immediate, but the long-term path of either are quite different.

SPEAKER_00 22:30

Do is there a median that has to be found, though? Because I'm sitting here thinking like, if somebody's just all caring in love, but doesn't really get you to do what's needed to be done, but also you've got this other person who can get you what needs to be done, but you kind of maybe don't do it as well because you don't care as much. Is there a is there a median that's the ideal leadership aspect to where both of those can correlate and be together at the same time?

SPEAKER_01 22:59

Or yeah, so I I do think there's an ebb and flow, right? So I mean, I think the the tone and the way, and this is this is part of economics too, right? Because a big part of economics is about human behavior, right? It's it's the study of how humans behave and how humans make decisions when they're faced with allocating resources under scarcity, right? So so scarcity is universal. You and I deal with scarcity every single day, whether it's time, money, assets, gifts, talents, emotions, energy. We never have all or unlimited amounts of any of that. And so, how do we make decisions when we're dealing with scarcity, right? And so economics studies human behavior. What motivates you? What determines your preferences? What incentivizes you and drives your behavior toward a particular decision, right? So, as we as leaders, if we understand that, if I understand that someone motivates and is incentivized by a swift kick in the butt, then that might need to be the way I convey and communicate with that person. On the other hand, if there's a person over there that that deals much better with an attentive, compassionate listening heart, right? And who gives a delivery of feedback in a much more gentle way, that's going to incentivize and motivate them in a very different manner, right? Because that resonates. So I think, I think it's the understanding of human behavior and what incentivizes each person toward maximum outcomes. And then a leader who's attuned to that, right, because they're attuned to economics, right? They're attuned to preferences, motivations, and incentives. They know how to address people differently. They're not going to address everybody like a homogeneous robot, right? They're going to address people as people, and people are different. So that's how we do it. And I think that's kind of the median. And then if there's one thing I could say, Chris, about care, you know, care gets sometimes it gets overused or gets a bad rap. And I would say the most caring leadership often and compassionate often centers around truth, right? It centers around honesty. So if compassion means withholding truth, that's not very compassionate. That's not very caring. That's not very loving. And so, you know, one of the greatest things that we do in leadership is we give feedback and we give constructive criticism when necessary. We don't withhold that. We don't refrain from that. We don't, we don't coward us from that as leaders. And uh, and we've got to do that. And is that not caring? No, no. The delivery may not be caring, but if we deliver it properly and we do it from the perspective of truth and honesty to serve that member to become a better member, and that's about as compassion as you can get.

SPEAKER_00 25:51

Yeah. Yeah. Man, this is powerful stuff, song. This is good and powerful stuff. Um, as you embark on your book tour and you're going out and you're speaking with people, and people are requesting you to come talk to them. And as this grows and your platform grows to be able to share more and more about this message, what do you hope is obtained from your book and from your message? If nothing else, what is one piece of information or one nugget that you hope people take away after they hear you speak or they read your book?

SPEAKER_01 26:27

Great question.

SPEAKER_00 26:29

There's a lot too. I mean, there's so much to dive in on that. I mean, you've got my head spinning, but I'm just thinking, like, what's maybe the first thing, you know, the easiest thing for someone to pick up on and take away from it?

SPEAKER_01 26:42

Sure. I'll I'll give you two and and they're they're fairly quick. One, I hope that anybody who hasn't had economics that this would whet their appetite and that they would start from a human endeavor perspective, not from the math, not from the graphs, not from how much money can I make, but can they see and desire what's the human part of economics? And can I start with that? And leadernomics will start you with that, right? So if you haven't had it, I hope it wets your appetite. If you've had it and didn't like it because of all of those reasons of math and graph, I hope you give it a second chance. Take another look, see what the human endeavor of economics is about. The second thing that I was saying, it gets back to what I said earlier about leaders bridging that gap between what is and what should be. I intentionally did this book tour in a very interesting way. I first called. I'm an independent author, I'm an indie author. I don't have a top five publisher, I'm a military, foreign military guy entering into the public civilian world. Nobody knows who I am. I'm not no four-star general that was on CNN or C-SPAN, right? And so, who's this sung pad guy? What's this book about? And why should I, as an independent bookstore, welcome this indie author? And so, Chris, when I first started out and I started in California, called about 50 bookstores, I think I got 50 rejects. Made sense. And then that's when I kind of had an epiphany and I said, you know what? I think I need to take the book and apply the book exactly in the manner that I apply it for leadership to bookstores. And so I changed the narrative. I called the bookstores and I said, Hey, listen, I want to come visit your bookstore. I have a book called Leadernomics. And the theme of it is taking things that we see at what is, but they really should be seen at what should be. And I can't think of a better local institution than the bookstore. Bookstores, right? Nobody buys a bookstore to get rich. Nobody makes a ton of money selling used and new books at a local neighborhood bookstore. So why do they exist? How do they survive? Well, you know why they exist and they survive? Because they have a relationship with the community, and that community views that bookstore as what? Priceless. They view it from a standpoint of having a value that exceeds market value. Right. And so I called them, I said, I saw your bookstore, I researched it, I love it. I would love to come visit it and tell you about literonomics, but really what I want to do is I want to write a story that captures your relationship with your community. All of a sudden, those 50 no's turned into about 49 yeses. And I started going to every single bookstore, and you know what I found, Chris? I found that every single bookstore, local independent bookstore that is surviving and thriving today, it's because that community sees that bookstore not as what is, but as what should be. And when people see things as what should be, it turns the what is, the market, it turns it upside down. That's what happens. And so my second takeaway through this whole journey and this whole uh leaderonomics is I want people to be able to see through the human endeavor lens of economics so that they can see things first through what should be, and when they do, it will flip what is upside down, both in life and in leadership.

SPEAKER_00 30:20

Yeah. Love that. Love that. Just a two more questions for you, son. One of them is just your your overall view of how it could be anyone, but I'm I'm just thinking of America in general on on how we approach economics because you're again, we're we're fed all the numbers and data and charts and what you're putting out there is is again focusing on the human element of all this as well. It should be almost more important, probably. Do we, as a country, do we it doesn't seem like we do a very good job of that? And I'm a I'm a guessing that's why, you know, you're sharing this message to try and like maybe get that thought a little more, give it some more weight, rather than just being transactional and numbers and not having that emotion tied to it. But just where what's your opinion on the current state of our country and and our overall economic views and and where we're at? Is it is it in a dangerous spot? Are we okay and we just need the pendulum to swing a little bit more to the to the other direction? Or just what's your opinion on that? Man, so that was a head, that was a heavy question for you right there.

SPEAKER_01 31:37

It's it's a great question. It's it's I mean, like this is the kind of stuff I wish I I wish I had in the classroom for like a whole semester and I can just talk to students about this kind of stuff. But you know, back when economics first had its, what I would say, its underpinnings in America, the whole discipline was intended to serve the mainstream citizen, right? It was not a subject that was left for the high tower of academia. It was intended to serve the public, to serve the farmer, the agriculture person, the rural citizen, not just the urban elite, right? The whole concept of economics was to show hey, this is going to help you understand how policies and how decisions can help not only your community and yourself, but society at large. And then as years have passed, uh economics has, I think, gotten more and more rigorous in the academic intellectual elite realm to where, like if you were to open up a journal, an econ journal at the collegiate or graduate level, with the exception of the abstract, the one paragraph abstract at the beginning, 99% of the people won't be able to read the next 10 pages because it's all covered in mathematical formulas and theory. And so the whole practical aspect of economics, I believe, has completely changed. And with it, if you think about it, because it's almost monopolized at an intellectually elite level or at think tanks, right? The common layperson citizen hasn't been equipped with the principles in a very practical way in which to look at their relationships, their family, their community, right, and policies that impact our nation, right? They should be equipped with the basic principles to do that. And so, how do I think that's important for how things are today? I think if that were the case, I think if people understood the basic human relational aspects of economic core principles, it would alter the way in which people not only see people, but it would alter the way in which people see relationships. And if you think about the m market, the economy as a market, Chris, it's all relationships. Suppliers don't exist without consumers. Producers don't exist, right, without suppliers. You don't have labor without employers, right? And you don't have leaders without followers. Everything in the marketplace exists in a relationship context, a human context, human to human. And so that's why I believe that again, we have to go back to teaching economics from a human endeavor, right? Which is gonna alter the way people see relationships, which is gonna alter the way people relate and have market relationships with each other. And that'll change the economy.

SPEAKER_00 34:43

Yeah. There's a lot, there's a lot of moving parts that have to come together to make it an ideal space. It's just it's in it's interesting, son. This is something that just personally I find very interesting to learn about and how all these parts work together and what is, how how can it be what should be? You know, is it realistic in this particular area? Is it not? It's just it's all fascinating to learn about and hear you speak about it. It's just it's it's fantastic. I'm learning so much from you.

SPEAKER_01 35:12

Yeah, I mean, I like to I like to say, I mean, um, Chris, I didn't even ask when we first started, but are are you uh do you do you have a family? Are you married and have kids? Married and a four-legged dog. Love my immediate family anyway. We got a four-legged dog too, but I will tell you, you know, I cannot tell you the amount human-centered, human endeavor economics, the core principles. I cannot tell you how often it has helped guide me in the decisions of our marriage and in how I relate with my wife. It has guided how I make decisions and how I perceive the decisions and the impact to my children and how I've raised my kids. And so if you can call a household an economy, you can begin to see how has the welfare and the social maximizing well-being of this little peck household been because of their understanding of economics. And now I just extend that to a community and then I extend that to society, right? That's the power of economics. If you understand the foundational human endeavor concepts, and then you're able to bring that to each relationship, it will alter the marketplace. It will alter how we perceive value. We will no longer see things strictly from price. We'll begin to see things from a sense of inherent value and priceless worth. And the minute we do that, it changes decisions, it changes relationships, and it changes policy.

SPEAKER_00 36:37

Yeah. No, that's that's that's good stuff. That's uh you're gonna have me and uh you're gonna have me having a conversation with my wife later, planning out our own our economics of our households. So I got one last question for you. This has been amazing. Um, but I ask everybody this that comes on the podcast just from a books for guys perspective. I'm always interested to know, and this may be a hard question, but what is a book or two that has meant a lot to you personally or professionally? And what's a book or two that you like to recommend to others?

SPEAKER_01 37:14

Boy, so many. I'll say one. There's a book that I love. It's called The Screw Tape Letters by C.S. Lewis.

SPEAKER_00 37:20

I've heard of those.

SPEAKER_01 37:22

Yeah. Um, I was gonna give a really classic. I was gonna say Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky, but but that's a long book. It's a deep read. So a much shorter book, but I think an equally probing look at the human heart and the human motives, incentives, priorities, and how deceptive things can be in life and in leadership. I think this book called The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis, it's the goal mine. It's short, it's enjoyable, it's an easy read, but it's one of those books where after every page and every chapter, in particular if you're doing it as a book club with a bunch of guys, there are so many aspects of questions and probing and thoughts that can come forward from a book like this. And it's one of those books that not only have you thinking quite deeply, but it will challenge your character to grow. So that's that's one of my favorite books. And again, I before we do sign off, Chris, I just want to tell you I love your platform. I love what you're doing. As an author, I've come to learn a little bit more about the book industry. Not a lot of people buy hard copy books anymore. Even if they buy them, I think 30 or 40% of books bought, you're not gonna believe this, they never get opened. And then if it's a non-fiction book, this stat blew me away. If it's a non-fiction book, they buy it, they open it, but then if it's a non-fiction, only 10% will read it from front to cover, cover to cover, right? So it takes 10 buyers to have one book read. And you know, there's something to be said. I don't know if that speaks to the generation, I don't know if that speaks to poor writing. I I don't know what that exactly speaks to, but there is something about your platform encouraging and inspiring and just kind of giving another avenue for people to gather, especially guys to gather around books, to fellowship around books, to challenge each other with books, to laugh through stories and lessons. It's priceless. What you're doing is what I call the what should be, right? That's what should be. And it's priceless. You can't put a price tag on that. You're you're flipping the market inside out with what you're doing. And so that's why I appreciate and I value uh this conversation and your platform.

SPEAKER_00 39:50

Yeah. Well, that means a lot coming from you. And yeah, if there's uh that's the whole that's the whole purpose and mission behind these conversations. It's it's one thing to get recommended a book, it's another to hear a conversation and and really get your interest going. And there's been several podcasts I've listened to where I go buy a book because I actually listened to the person talk about it. And I was like, Oh, I gotta get that guy's book. Like I'm so interested in this person. Exactly. There was that connection that was built. And so that's the whole purpose behind this. And so we're proud to have your book on the website and proud to spotlight it. And man, wishing you the best of luck on your book tour and hope you get to meet and talk with many, many people and have uh a major impact with it. And man, we're here to help and support any way we can. And man, thank you so much for doing this. It means a lot.

SPEAKER_01 40:39

Love it. And if you do a book club with Leaderonomics, I might join in.

SPEAKER_00 40:42

Heck yeah, we'll do it. All right. Thanks, Sam. You bet.