Open Book with Anthony Scaramucci - Why America Is Losing — And How We Fix It - Andrew Liveris
Episode Date: October 25, 2025Andrew Liveris is the former Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of The Dow Chemical Company and former Executive Chairman of DowDuPont. A recognized global business leader with more than 42 years at... Dow and experience in manufacturing, engineering, sales, marketing, and business and general management. Get a copy of his WSJ bestselling book Leading through Disruption: A Changemaker’s Guide to Twenty-First Century Leadership here: https://amzn.to/4pIjZU1 Anthony Scaramucci is the founder and managing partner of SkyBridge, a global alternative investment firm, and founder and chairman of SALT, a global thought leadership forum and venture studio. He is the host of the podcast Open Book with Anthony Scaramucci. A graduate of Tufts University and Harvard Law School, he lives in Manhasset, Long Island. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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Global isn't get a bad wrap.
of globalism, the interconnectivity has raised more people from poverty and raised living standards
just about anything that's ever happened. But we do have a bad rap on it now. There's a lot of
nationalist tendencies out there. When China came into the World Trade Organization and we left
them unchecked over a multiple decade period of time, it was massive technology transfer to China
from American companies. They were way better at it than we ever thought that they would be.
They've replicated a lot of that technology. In fact, we pushed it forward and actually made great
advances in that technology and are smaller cities. The Midland, Michigan's, have been left behind.
In some areas have been devastated. This is one of the things Mr. President Trump ran on successfully
was this globalism, resource allocation of human capital and capital capital outside of the U.S.
crushed us. People were happy with that until they started to see the erosion of big jobs in lots
of little towns. The middle part of America was suffering mightily from the loss of the ability of
their kids to get the decent jobs off to university into these industries.
Welcome to Open Book. I am your host, Anthony Scaramucci. And joining us today is Andrew Liveris.
He's a best-selling author. He's the former CEO and chairman of Dow Chemical. He's chair of the
Brisbane, 2032 Olympics, which, by the way, were you at the Sydney Olympics, Andrew?
Yes. Of course you were. One of the more exciting global events. And he's a global advisor on
business and policy around the world, lots of corporate boards that you're a member of as well.
A couple of different books.
First book, Leading Through Disruption, A Changemaker's Guide to the 21st Century Leadership,
which I loved, and then making it in America, the case for reinventing the American economy.
I wish we could drop that off everywhere.
We should probably have like an airdrop of that book, mostly around Washington,
maybe that 18-acre parcel of land that surrounds the White House.
But, Andrew, thanks for joining me today.
Pleasure.
You grew up in Darwin.
Yes.
So, Darwin, for those Americans that don't know Australia, is the north of Australia.
Right, exactly.
It's actually warmer.
We like to think of the north as so colder, but in Australia, because you're down under,
you're northern Australia.
And we have U.S. Marines in Darwin.
You know that.
You do.
You do.
A lot of Americans don't know that, but we have U.S. Marines there as part of our national security umbrella to help Australia.
Yes.
But talk about growing up in Darwin.
How do you go from Darwin to leading Dow Chemical, advising U.S. presidents, and now being the chair of the Brisbane Olympics?
Like you, I'm the son of immigrants, people who were courageous, in my case, from Greece.
My grandfather took the wrong ship, four ships from the little Greek island, found his way on a ship from Singapore.
And instead of going to the south of Australia, where Melbourne and Perth and Sydney are, he went to Darwin, which was a little settlement, 3,000 people, miners camp really, in the north.
And from there, he and then my father and his brothers built a building business, very successful.
I was the first to go to university.
There was no university in Darwin,
so I was sent to Brisbane, Queensland, back to the Olympics,
and did chemical engineering,
and you asked why chemical engineering.
Well, for some mutation, I was good in chemistry.
Don't ask me why.
And I just loved chemistry.
And I did chemical engineering,
and, you know, Dow hired me straight out of college in Brisbane.
But the Darwin experience gave me multiculturalism, Anthony.
A lot of Asian people there,
Like you had the gold rush in San Francisco.
We had the gold rush in Northern Australia.
And so a lot of Chinese came down in the 1800s.
So a lot of people from Indonesia, Malaysia, I got to mix with Asian races as friends.
And I think that as a young person taught me about diversity in the real sense.
You know, that people are people, it doesn't matter what they look like.
And so growing up there, no TV, no modern conveniences, I think it really shaped me.
American moment for me was JFK and the man on the moon.
As a nine-year-old, that just told me that America was this wondrous place, you know, that could do anything.
And so I always wanted to come to America.
And when Dow offered me the job as a 21-year-old, I jumped at it.
Well, I mean, there's a lot going on there.
So I don't want you to drop that Australian false modesty for a second.
I want you to channel your American bravado because you did live in America, right?
Yes.
And you had to run Dow from America.
What's the obscure town that Dow has its...
Midland, Midland, Michigan.
Right.
So you're in Midland, Michigan, living in, as we say on the coast, you're in America.
America.
Not America.
You know, that's like the hot dogs and the NASCAR America.
So, you know, you have this ambidexterity to your personality.
You get along with everybody.
What do you attribute that to?
Well, again, you know, growing up in Darwin and multiculturalism and then being of Greek immigrant parents, you know, we were discriminated against as Greeks. I mean, you know, we weren't the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant. So in Australia, you know, to get ahead in my era, you had to go to the right school, you know, very British in that sense. And so I was a mold breaker because I absolutely challenged the conventional as a young person. And I really felt that that meant that I was.
was inclusive and that you had to walk in other people's shoes, the proverb, right, to really
understand them. So I never judged people based on, you know, things that I heard and read
in the press, in particular the press. And so I lived, I'd lived experiences. And the American model
of taking Australians as an English-speaking nation, English-speaking nation, and putting
us in different places, my early assignments in Dow were all in Asia. And I loved it.
I went to China when it wasn't a thing.
And so I put it down to that.
That gives me inclusiveness as a primary way of doing work and business and relationships.
Relationships to me are everything.
You know, I was surprised by your book.
I'm going to tell you why, because I saw you as a, we've gotten to know each other.
Obviously, you're an incredible, amiable person, very personable.
But you're an entrepreneur.
And when I read the book, I was thinking, okay, Andrew is obviously a great guy.
incredibly personable. He's got to be this corporate leader. Dow is in the S&B 500. He's got to have
this sort of regimentation to your personality and this corporate structure. There was none of that
in the book. I would recommend this book to any entrepreneur that I come up with. So why is that?
And how are you able to maintain that despite this illustrious multi-decade career in corporate
America or a global, let's call it global corporate society, if you will.
You know, I'm going to give you a simplistic answer, as I'm prone to do, time zones.
I grew up in Asia, doing business in Asia, where Midland, Michigan, the either two is
headquarters in the middle of Tundra, nowhere, Michigan, was 12 time zones, 40-hour time zones away.
And before email and, you know, all the things that we're used to today, back then, you know,
you had to make decisions on the spot.
And so I learned that I didn't need the corporate policy book
to do what I needed to do to give Dow a front advantage.
And I became a corporate entrepreneur.
And so when I was selected into be CEO, you know,
and I was asked to come to headquarters
and, you know, they could smell me and see me
and, you know, see me in the corporate headquarters.
I was a building an entrepreneur from day one.
And so when I made the pitch to what I would do with Dow,
I said, we've gone to sleep.
We're a 100-year-old calcified enterprise that was great wants and has lost its way.
I would change how we operate.
I would change the culture.
I would be a culture buster.
And I would bring entrepreneurism back to, in this case, Daubert, the chemical industry in general.
So they wanted me for that reason.
And I said, okay, you hire me.
I am not going to rest.
I'm going to change us.
I'm going to tell you that was easy to say than do.
changing 60,000 people to being entrepreneurs when they used to the corporate rulebook,
great storied companies in America have died, okay, because they didn't do that change.
Right.
Well, I was given the mandate by the board to be an entrepreneur as I learned to be in Asia.
Right.
And that, frankly, is what I'm doing today.
I'm having more fun today than I had being CEO of Dow because now I can be an entrepreneur
across a whole plethora of different places, including the Olympics.
It's because you married Ray, liverist.
Okay.
You married right.
And you're getting the opportunity to finally enjoy your beautiful wife.
That's the reason you're doing so well.
But you got that right.
This is, you know, listen, I feel I read your books in reverse order.
Okay.
I read leading disruption first.
Okay.
But then I read, you know, second book made in America second or making it in America.
Um, make it in America.
Excuse me.
But I felt like the first book is more relevant for 2025 in some ways.
You had some prescience in this book.
This book was written, correct, number wrong, maybe 10 years ago, right?
2013 or something like that.
Yeah.
So what did you see in 2012 and 13 that is now so eminently relevant here in America?
Yeah.
Look, the second book touches what the first book presented.
I was CEO for seven or eight years, go to Washington very regularly.
And frankly, it was like getting root canal surgery on a daily basis.
I would go to Washington and talk to legislators and educate, I mean, people in the executive branch, and I would get nowhere on what the American competitive advantage needed to be from a policy point of view.
You know, I was getting told what the policies were and had to be based on political expediency.
In other words, what gets me elected.
So the short-termism of government was now prevalent.
We already got short-termism in finance.
when we throw government on top of it and those two bodies that made America great were calcified
on policies that were relevant to the 20th century, I said for manufacturing in America,
only 11% of the economy, we will lose invention, we will lose R&D, we will lose to China
and other competitors who are investing in R&D for the long term because with manufacturing gone,
R&D goes. Every R&D lab is attached to a prototype manufacturing facility.
That was what made me write that book.
I was so frustrated.
Thankfully, it got President Obama's attention.
He made me co-chair of the Manufacturing Council for his two terms.
And then to my great surprise, I got the call from President Trump when he got elected
with President Elect, second day, to come in and do the same with his administration.
But your point, it's never been more relevant than now.
And I could write that book again now and change very little.
because you know what?
We're making great progress in digital technology and AI and all the things.
But the heartland of American inventionist materials and the things that go into building the real economy,
we've been losing and losing and losing.
And so there's a lot of things going on in the world right now, including tariff protection,
which I don't believe is a good thing because it's a blunt instrument.
But it does have the effect of bringing back capability to the US.
and not that I would go there as my lead,
I'd get the right policies in place first.
But to do that, I've got to educate the politicians,
and frankly, I've got to get a different genre
of politician elected, and that's a much longer game.
So the book was written with that in mind
to help the policymakers come up with competitiveness
for the New America.
You know, I got this wrong.
Hear me out for a second.
I want to get your reaction to it,
and then I guess the real question,
is what to do now as an industrialist and someone that's a beneficiary of our global society.
So I think globalism gets a bad rap, by the way.
I think the help of globalism, the interconnectivity, has raised more people from poverty
and raised living standards just about anything that's ever happened.
But we do have a bad rap on it now.
There's a lot of nationalist tendencies out there.
But one of the things that we got wrong is when China came into the World Trade Organization
and we left them unchecked over a multiple decade period,
There was massive technology transfer to China from American companies.
They were way better at it than we ever thought that they would be.
They've replicated a lot of that technology.
In fact, we've actually pushed it forward and actually made great advances in that technology.
And our smaller cities, the Midland, Michigan's, have been left behind, as you and I both know.
Yes.
In some areas have been devastated.
This is one of the things Mr. President Trump ran.
on successfully was this globalism, this resource allocation of human capital and capital
outside of the U.S. crushed us. So number one, am I exaggerating that or do you believe in that
or do you believe that happened? And then number two, what would you do to cure it if there is
anything? I feel like the globalist train has left the station, right? 60% of our parts that go
to a Boeing aircraft are coming from outside the U.S., so if you're going to put tariffs on them,
you're going to hurt Boeing.
But what would you say, am I right in this 25-year assessment?
Am I wrong?
And if I'm right, then what do we do, Andrew?
Globalization 1.0, the WTO ascension of China, early 2000s, was the right move if you
paralleled it, paralleled it, with an invention economy in R&D and sciences.
and said for these sectors, I've got to grow in the U.S.,
I've got to grow in the only consumption society on the planet.
Remember, what made globalization 1.0 work was U.S. consumption,
and the U.S. ability on its balance sheet to take on infinite debt,
which is a whole other topic.
So that consumption model, Europe was not a big consumer,
China was barely a consumer,
meant that all the capability was being built outside the U.S.
to supply the U.S. consumption model.
And people were happy with that until they started to see the erosion of big jobs in lots of little towns.
The middle part of America was suffering mightily from the loss of the ability of their kids to get the decent jobs after university into these industries.
And pick your favorite sector, automotive, chemical, you name it.
They all suffered.
Materials, science, you know, aluminium.
So globalization at one point I was bound to run out a runway.
if different consumption societies didn't get created.
And here's the problem with the different consumption society created in China,
and for that matter, Japan, now the forerunner of China.
They have barriers to entry for foreign multinationals.
They create not just financial barriers, but specification barriers.
I used to say about Dow, we were big in every country in the world,
but I could never be big in Japan,
because they created specifications just for Japanese companies.
So the non-tariff tariff barriers meant globalization 1.0, equal access to every economy was doomed to fail.
So now we've gone too far.
What's globalization 2.0?
Well, I think we're going to see the reinvention of supply chains coming from countries that accept our labor standards,
accept our environmental standards, and enable equal access to their economies.
So then you select in countries to do business with.
Globalization 2.0 will be regional alliances, Anthony.
And who will be the forerunner and creator of those?
I'd like to think the policymakers and the politicians,
but honestly, they don't understand the globe the way business people do.
So what you need is to have business people at the table
working with policymakers to say,
how do I create equal access?
How do I make my trading partner do what I do
to treat citizens well on those standards that I'm talking about?
The Daos, the IBMs, you name the companies.
The companies that are big around the world understand this.
When I was the general manager of Dow in Thailand, I had to build Dow chemical plants in Thailand.
And if I went by the Thai standard, they would never ever be approved in the US.
So what Dow did, I had to build them by US standard.
Today, every Thai plant is built by the US standard.
We exported our standards so that Thailand could benefit from it.
Those regional alliances, people are seeing the tariff question as just a pure financial penalty one way or the other.
What they've got to see is it's creating a new trade paradigm, forcing countries that took advantage of the U.S. consumer to open up their markets on equal standards.
That, for me, is Globalization 2.0.
Well, I think it's very well said.
I want to go to something in your book that I admire this about you.
You talk to my ministers, presidents, you mentioned both Trump and Obama, which I should probably
call Trump to let them know that you were tight with Obama.
That would really set him off.
You know what I mean?
He knew it.
He knew it.
He knew it.
He was trying to make the point.
I know.
I know that stuff sets them off.
But anyway, first of all, how do you create that chemistry?
and then without giving up names, tell us about one conversation behind closed doors that really
struck you.
You know, we saw leadership at its best or worst or I think what sometimes happens to people
that are not close to leaders, Andrew, is we either demonize them or we create this heroism
and hagiography about them, where, as you and I both know, neither are true, they're just
human beings in high-profile positions, high-stress positions, ambitious and smart, certainly,
but also prone to the human foils that we all are, the vulnerability that we all have as human
beings. So tell me something, give me some instruction, give me some guidance, a lot of young people
listen to this podcast and tell us something. Everyone's putting their pants on the same way.
Tell me some good things and some bad things that you've seen. Again, without names, just concepts.
I'll give you a couple, including one that's in the book, but one that isn't.
But I want to sort of lead with this notion that I learned in Asia.
And I've created an academy at my alma mater at the University of Queensland.
I've got 110 scholars there where we're teaching this.
And this is a very important thing for young people to your point and people who listen
to your incredible podcast, Anthony, which is, you know, I learned a long time ago the two
years one mouth philosophy to be an incredible listener.
and to make sure that I hear people when I listen.
You know, I see them.
Because I think in our short-term ADD-driven society,
we are losing that ability to be not just great listeners,
but then internalize the message and then reflect on it
and come back with an answer and a measured solution
or whatever it is, and even an opinion,
where people say, okay, he's thought about it.
He said, this is actually something that matters.
Giving that respect to anyone, I will tell you that my time of Dow's CEO,
I gave as much time to the janitor and the person running the forklift truck in the warehouse.
I'd make a point of when I visited a Dow site,
I'd be in the factory listening to the control room operator and making sure I was hearing
what they were saying about their roles.
And I would educate them back on matters, for example, trade and what we were doing to help
preserve their jobs, whether it's in the U.S. or elsewhere.
So that skill I learned early.
I got taught that by some great mentors.
A couple of moments that I've had over the years that showed me the point you're making
about human vulnerability at every level.
One of the top vice premiers of China, when I was going to China in the 90s, when it
wasn't bog, I got one-on-one audiences quite often.
One vice premier in the early O's when I was CEO, just CEO,
shared with me this incredible journey China's been on from a personal level,
told me his backstory of being persecuted under the Mao era,
the massive revolution that occurred in creating the communes.
And now he came through that as a young boy all the way to being vice premier.
And he said, what the West gets wrong about us is they don't realize that our human story,
is very fresh in our minds.
Your story is 200 years ago of revolution
where you had to lose people
in a massive revolution
against England and then
you had your own civil war.
That effect on your society is long gone.
In other words, you're not living that anymore.
We're living what happened to us.
And you know what happened, Anthony? He teared up.
He teared up. He said to me,
I have a huge responsibility to the millions of people in my country that have never had that opportunity.
And now that I'm in this role, that's what I'm geared to do.
I'm going to give them the opportunity.
And you know what?
He said to me, democracy is not our answer right now.
It may well be one day in the future.
That was a very human moment that I had with that Vice Premier.
And then the one that I do refer to, I mean, I met Likwan.
you, the creator of Singapore, okay, when Singapore was struggling in the 80s and 90s and listened
to him on a one-on-one basis about his vision. I mean, he was, he was envisaging the 21st century,
okay, in the middle of the 20th century. I mean, this is why I'm doing so much work with the
Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia. I see these visionary leaders that come around. And then when I get
close to them by being good listeners and hopefully good advisors like Lee Kuan Yew,
I see that they have a perspective that helps them be resilient through the tough times.
And this is what I want young people to learn.
I want them to learn that being knocked down or seeing the short-term setback
is an opportunity to actually create the long-term better answer.
And I teach that at the academy, and it's basically how I was taught.
So I'm an optimist by heart.
I'm resilient, I'm persevering, I persevere, and I never give up, and I live life on the numerator, not the denominator, like I talk about on the book.
I think that's very important for young people alone.
I think it's so well said.
I think it's, you know, I mean, it's also important to remember the human element.
I think one of the other things that I really appreciated about both books, but particularly leading through this disruption is the human element.
You know, it's not just measured in shareholder value, but you also put a lot of emphasis on societal impact, customer relations, customer development, and employee development.
And I think that that's some old school stuff, Andrew, because that's a, when I got to Goldman Sachs, John Weinberg always said, put the customers first, we'll figure out everything else. You know, the investment banks today are more about counter parties.
You're no longer a client to them.
You're just someone they're going to potentially trade off of.
But how do we emboldened that?
How do we get that message from your book to as many people as possible?
Well, thank you for doing the podcast.
I've done my share of message transmission like this.
But to your point, I need ambassadors.
I need people who believe that the long-term effect on society is what we're
we're all here for, that the economic incentive that capitalism brings us is doable,
but you do it in a way which affects society in the positive way.
So take the risk.
Be the company, be the leader that puts in place the policies working with government,
the regulator and the regulator should be a partner that absolutely sets the highest standard
on environment, on society, on all the things that society is caring about,
digital, digital access, take that risk for your enterprise, take that risk for your company.
So in the book, I finished with the whole last chapter on that business has to lead, but not by
tell, but by show, and that by absolutely working together with government.
And that that also means that I need a generational change in the type of CEOs to get to the C-suite,
and I need a generational change in the type of people that run for public office.
So I finished the curricula of my academy saying your first job should be to go out there and serve.
Go serve in any role you wish, whether it be in government, you know, local council,
whether it be, you know, I don't know, the people that actually do philanthropy around the world,
like teaching America and other philanthropies.
I mean, go serve to be a servant leader.
And so when you come back and then do the big things you're going to do in life,
or maybe all the way to CEO, maybe all the way to being a senator or a legislator.
You have learned that your presence absolutely sets the context for how things get done for society
by thinking about the people alongside you, not the people below you.
The old command and control model of most economies doesn't work because we're serving everyone
equally all at once like that movie and getting no result.
And we're creating divisions and classes.
This country, America, what a wonderful institution, a great constitution.
It has got the ability to flex on the paradigms of change without changing its core values,
which is why I see government as absolutely totally a transient thing.
What's the long-term thing?
Okay, how can you impact it fully long term?
What's the visionary?
What's the Alexander Hamilton moment to use that, okay?
You know, that this country needs.
I think this is where young people need to take on the change management of that,
and that's what I'm hopeful for.
Meantime, my message in this book and elsewhere, the book's been well received,
I'm doing as much as I can, thanks again to you today, to transmit it.
Well, I mean, it's not me.
I mean, you've done such a great job.
I mean, this book has been a bestseller over the last two and a half years since it was published.
I guess the message is a common sense message.
Where I love about your message and I love about your realism is it's a blocking and tackling.
I find that a lot of people I talk to are to overcomplicate things.
You know, when I had the opportunity to meet with Mr. Buffett many years ago, Warren Buffett,
and he took me through his investment process.
I walked away from it, and I said, that can't be right.
That's what he does.
And that can't be right.
And then it dawned on me.
It took me about 10 years to figure it out that the patience and the discipline and the
honing of the skills is as important as IQ and getting good test scores as a chemical engineer, right?
Yeah.
And look, my Warren Buffett moment, which I had as well.
came in the first half hour of our conversation,
I would never invest in your company or your industry.
Now, this is the Oracle of Omaha.
This is telling me, you know, the investor of the century,
telling me my sector and my industry is not an investment proposition.
Now, what did I do with that?
Okay.
I listened carefully to the reasons why.
And he had that famous book that he'd lowered everything from, right?
And he'd turn me to page, whatever it was,
and read to me the principles of investing.
And I walked away from that.
And three years later, when I did the Roman house deal, he invested in us.
Now, again, you could take messages like the one you just talked about.
The simplicity of his message hit me straight where it needed to hit me.
So I believe in that.
I believe, and you do too, I believe that you hit people with the simplicity of the message.
And then you hope there's an audience out there that internalizes it.
I think young people are looking for that, Anthony.
That's exactly what they're looking for.
No, no, quite.
Well, you and I are in the absolute same camp as it relates to this.
I believe that you have to empower people, but give them that simplistic stuff.
You know, I mentioned this to you because there's something else that you're doing, which I really love.
Okay, you didn't really retire.
You sort of rehired yourself into different areas of life.
And when I saw Mr. Buffett, this is a little embarrassing for me, but I'll share this with you.
I pitched him on the idea of creating a presidential library, but an investment library in Omaha, Nebraska,
where all of his writings, his teachings, book recordings, books on investing, seminars on investing,
that you could turn this into a learning center for people.
and it could be a legacy and monument to his work.
It was about 20 years ago.
He's probably 75 at the time.
And he out of hand rebuked me.
And he proceeded to tell me that he's just getting started.
That he's 75 years young.
And there's no place in his life to write a book to describe his legacy because he's just getting started.
He's as fresh as a spring chicken.
And that as far as he was concerned, that he would never want to do that because that would
that would be the big process of digging his own grave.
And I want you to react to that because I see you like that.
I see you as somebody who is young at heart, young in spirit,
and somebody that you're working incredibly hard today,
probably working differently and perhaps even more invigorated.
And so what lessons can we learn from that, Andrew?
Yeah, look, walk the talk.
I mean, I did this throughout my doubt career.
I lived on the precipice.
I looked over the precipice often and didn't see a black hole.
I saw a bridge.
And I just see the black holes all over the place now.
The precipice all over the place.
And I have the freedom of deploying myself to absolutely help solve these intractable problems.
And I am born with the addiction of being a workaholic, and I only do hard and complex.
there's something about my wiring that loves hard and complex
and the easy stuff, you know, plenty of people will go at that.
But when I see the collision of geopolitics,
digital, environment, societal,
I see these pressure points that are going on and colliding
into big-time policy discussions
and big-time, you know, country discussions like tariffs
and big-time everything.
I say to myself,
I'm going to deploy myself against all of
those, and you're right, I'm busier today than I was running Dow, I will then be in those
enough to know enough about the content and then elevate out of them and help provide solutions
of being a good advisor and a good board member and a good investor, actually. And so, I mean,
one of the fun things I'm doing is I've set up a family office like you have, and I've got my two
sons involved in it, you know, and I'm mentoring them. And what better fun and what better legacy to
your own family than that. And then to these 110 kids in this academy, I get, you know,
over a thousand applications for that around the world already. And they want to learn this stuff.
So I don't see it as retirement. I see it as, you know, I don't know, keeping yourself relevant
on the things that matter in life. And of course, you said it earlier. Being a great husband,
just had our 42nd wedding anniversary, being a great dad and great grandfather. Yes, yes. But I never
want to be a solo
something. I want to be
on multiple playing fields
so I can learn as much as I can.
And no better example in metaphor than
the Olympics, right? I mean, you know,
I'll be talking about being on multiple playing fields.
No, no
questions. Let's talk about that. I wanted to
ask you about that. This is
it'll be 32 years since the Sydney
Olympics. It's a huge
project. You've got
a global impact.
It's again, inspiring,
motivating people, the legacy aspects of this, it's your beautiful country that you love.
What do you want those games to symbolize about your philosophy and leadership?
Thank you for saying it that way.
I've just come back from a trip to Japan with the Queensland State Premier, and we're on a
trade mission advertising the benefits of the state of Queensland in Australia, but of course
the Olympics became a centerpiece.
and in the room, I could see the dozens and dozens of people we were talking to,
CEOs and chairs of major Japanese corporations, politicians, you name it.
I could see that the Olympic brand elevates the conversation.
It makes people think people to people, not people against people.
It makes people think of excellence and performance.
And yes, gold medals for my world.
country. It makes people think about equality like Paralympics and Olympics now has become an equal
brand. And, you know, my peer, Casey Wasserman, who you know well out in L.A., is putting a lot of
effort into that. And so what I want the legacy that I have on presenting the two games in Australia
is, of course, number one, to show the Australian attribute, warmth, hospitality, friendliness,
good-naturedness, amazing location in terms of geography and nature, our addiction for sports.
Yes, all of that would be on display. But I also want, because of my unique position in life,
I want to show that globality, you touched upon this earlier,
globality is a good thing, okay? It enables things to happen. I have an impression, an image
from the Paris Games. I've toured the village during the Paralympics. I went to Osabok,
which is a company out of Germany's facility in the Paralympian Center.
It had prosthetics and artificial limbs and all that available for the athletes to come in.
They showed me the countries that would come in every four years and replace their limb
with modern technology free of charge subsidized by the Olympic movement
and the previous manifestation of their technologies.
And it elevates humanity equally to have access to them.
that. That's what I want all of us to feel after these Olympics, that yes, it's a sport event,
but it's a human event, to your point about human element. And I want that presentation to be on
full display. If not us, by the way, then who? We're a first world nation. God bestowed upon us
and incredible gifts of natural resources. We have a manageable size population. We live an incredibly
charmed life. We live the lucky country, as we're called. If we can't do it, then who? I want us to be
the displayer of that. I love it. I mean, it's so, it's so well said. All right. So we're down to the
point in this podcast where I pick out five words from your two books. I'm going to say the word,
Andrew, then you're going to give me a one or two sentences or a word that comes to my. Okay, you ready?
Yes. Disruption. I black hole precipice, an event.
that looks insurmountable that in fact needs solution.
It happens all the time, though, right?
Yes, all the time.
You have to be ready for it.
Leadership.
Leadership means being wide, not just deep,
having the bandwidth of walking in other people's shoes.
Legacy.
Impacting generations, not for your personal brand,
but for their personal uplift in the human spirit.
Brisbane.
The little engine that.
could growing up before our very eyes to be a top-tier city in the world.
Resilience.
You know, Pim of Error and the famous boxing match being yelled at, stay down, stay down.
But nope, he didn't stay down.
He was being pummeled.
He got back up and soared through.
I mean, it's so well said.
I mean, there's nothing left for me to say, brother.
Okay, I love that.
Okay.
I appreciate you joining us on Open Book.
the title of the book is leading through disruption.
And the second title is built in America.
And I got to tell you, I love both books, but I'm going to tell you the leading with
disruption should be at every business school and should be a manual for people.
Thank you, and I appreciate you joining Open Book.
It's always great to be with you.
Kyle White to work together again.
Amen.
