The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Hearts Touched with Fire: How Great Leaders are Made by David Gergen

Episode Date: June 1, 2022

Hearts Touched with Fire: How Great Leaders are Made by David Gergen A powerful guide to the art of leadership from David Gergen—former White House adviser to four US presidents, CNN analyst, and founder of the Harvard Center for Public Leadership. As nations careen from one crisis to the next, there is a growing cry for fresh leadership. Those in charge have repeatedly fallen short, and trust in institutions has plummeted. So, what does great leadership look like? And how are great leaders made? David Gergen, a leader in the public arena for more than half a century, draws from his experiences as a White House adviser to four presidents, his decades as a trusted voice on national issues, and years of teaching and mentoring young people to offer a stirring playbook for the next generation of change-makers. To uncover the fundamental elements of effective leadership, Gergen traces the journeys of iconic leaders past and present, from pathbreakers like Ruth Bader Ginsburg, John Lewis, John McCain, and Harvey Milk to historic icons like Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, Winston Churchill, and Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt, to contemporary game changers like Greta Thunberg, the Parkland students, and the Black Lives Matter movement. Leadership is a journey that starts from within, Gergen writes. A leader must become self-aware and then achieve self-mastery. You cannot lead others until you can lead yourself. As you start to leap into the world, you begin your outer journey, overcoming setbacks, persuading others, empowering them, and navigating crises—armed with a sense of history, humor, passion, and purpose. By linking lessons of the past with the ever-changing practice of leadership today, Gergen reveals the time-tested secrets of dynamic leadership. An indispensable manual, Hearts Touched with Fire distills experience and wisdom of the past into an invaluable guide for leaders of our future.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. This is Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. The Chris Voss Show.com.

Thanks for coming by the show, guys. We really appreciate it. I think David's thoroughly in team here. He's on the show with us. David Gergen. guys we really appreciate it i think david's uh thoroughly in tater is on the show with us david gergen and it's probably the first time he's been on an mma uh wrestling federation style in the show you got that one right but i'm learning something they don't do this on cnn so we're excited to announce my new book is coming out it's called beacons of leadership inspiring lessons of success in business and innovation. It's going to be coming

on October 5th, 2021. And I'm really excited for you to get a chance to read this book. It's filled with a multitude of my insightful stories, lessons, my life and experiences in leadership and character. I give you some of the secrets from my CEO entrepreneur toolbox that I use to scale my business success, innovate and build a multitude of companies. I've been a CEO for, what is it, like 33, 35 years now. We talk about leadership, the importance of leadership, how to become a great leader, and how anyone can become a great leader as well. Or order the book where refined books are sold. Anyway, we have David Gergen on the show, as you've probably been figuring out right now. He is the author of the newest book, Hearts Touched with Fire, How Great Leaders Are Made.

It just barely came out, May 10th, 2022. So you want to get a chance to order this book up and check it out. I think you're going to love it. From my experience, we'll talk about it on the show. David, let's see. David is a professor of public service and founding director of the Center for Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School. In addition, he serves as a senior political analyst for CNN and works actively with a rising generation of new leaders. In the past, he has served as a

White House advisor to four U.S. presidents. Only four, David? Come on. Let's see. Both parties, Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and Clinton. He wrote about those experiences in New York Times bestseller, Eyewitness to Power, The Essence of Leadership, Nixon to Clinton, and now he has his wonderful book he's going to be talking about today. Welcome to the show, David. How are you? Terrific, Chris. I'm delighted to be here.

And we just, in the wake of it, we made the New York Times bestseller list this past Sunday. Woo-hoo! We're thrilled about that. Congratulations. Well, thank you. I wasn't sure if we were built for that or not, but so far it's been encouraging. We're delighted, and equally so,

delighted to be with your show. Congratulations, and it's an honor to have you as well. It is an awesome book, so it's definitely well-deserved and should definitely continue to be a bestseller. Give me your blogs, your dot-coms, wherever you might want to have people look you up on the interwebs to find out more about you. Well, I guess you can go to davidgergen.com, would work. Gergen is G-E-R-G-E-N. First name is Dave. There you go. So David, what motivated you to write this book?

Well, I've been teaching for a long time and I thought I had some lessons I'd like to impart to people who came after my teaching. That was sort of the start of it. And that was two or three years ago, maybe four or five years ago, actually. And anyway, I had other obligations at the time, like kept on getting in the way. So I never really got started. But then, you know, we started having this cascade of crises in the country, kind of something that's very threatening to our democracy. And I decided I really wanted to speed it up because I think one of the ways we're going to get out of this mess, and one of the best ways we're going to get out of this mess, is for a new generation to come to power. So we have fresh

energy, fresh blood, fresh vision. You know, we've got a lot of folks like me, I just turned 80. You know, we shouldn't be running things anymore, You know, you're in your 80s. It's great to be on the sidelines and kibitz and give thoughtful sage advice. Of course, of course, we have sorts of sage things to say. But, you know, I think we need to I think we need to prepare the next generation. And the earlier we pass the baton, the better. That sounds a little ageist, David, to be honest with you. Sounds a little bit

ageist, as I say. Well, yeah, of course it's ageist. That's the way the world works. That's the way the world works. You know, listen, when I came to Washington, the World War II generation was in charge. Those were veterans from the war.

We had seven presidents from John Kennedy through George H.W. Different parties, all seven wore a military uniform. Everyone sacrificed something in his life to put their lives on the line. And frankly, they turned out to be terrific at covering because they were well prepared for it. They were hardened up. They fought under the same flag. Of course, they were going to work together to try to do good things back home. That was a wonderful generation. And, you know, Tom Brokaw aptly called them the greatest generation. But the generations that succeeded, then the sandwich generation, the Generation X, as they were called, they were born between 65 and 1980.

You know, that's you, right? And there have been some excellent individuals in the baby boom generally, but I think you'd have to say that overall, especially compared to the World War II generation, it's been a disappointment. Some things have piled up,

but we don't have much to show for it. The World War II generation left the stage. We were the strongest nation since the days of ancient Rome in terms of our economic power, our military power, our cultural power. We were respected everywhere. Right now, we're seen in retreat. We do some things right, but they're modest. And we're more paralyzed and poisoned than we are productive.

And is there anything you directly attribute to that? Is it because we need more fresh, younger leadership? Or what do you do? Why do I say that? First of all, I've had the privilege, as I say, of teaching in the classroom now for about a quarter of a century, mostly at Kennedy School. So yes, there are a lot of elite people who come there for graduate studies. This is for people who are basically looking for a master's, and they go off and try to do good things in the world. But I have seen the quality of people coming through fairly dramatically improve over the years.

So I see especially the young people. We've got a lot of scholarships now for veterans because we want them to complete their education and go on and do great things. I think they're going to be the leaders of the future. I'm right there at the forefront of the leaders of the future. We have a whole stream of young veterans who are coming through.

Come to the Kennedy School, come to other schools. They're running for office. They're running for Congress. They're running for the city hall. They're running for the teachers. They want to be there for PTA and things like that. These people are really serious about changing the direction of the country. The millennials and Generation Z, as they're called, I think are particularly well prepared to do that.

But we need to do more to prepare them than they are now. They're in the forefront. But I'm happy to be a big believer in national. I believe every young personnel to be encouraged to give at least a year back. Yeah, I even did to community. And if you can, give two years. And then you knock it off your debt, your college debt or whatever debt you piled up. You get a year, you give us a year, we give you a year debt reduction.

And we give you a chance to go work in places you've never lived before. You come out of Brooklyn or something like that, we're going to send you to the Rocky Mountains. You're going to be deep in the forest. This will be a good experience for you, and vice versa. People coming out of rural America need to come and see what it's like to live in the cities and why we have, you know, why do we have so much crime in our cities these days? What the hell is going on? Why are these mental health issues, all the different things that are accumulating now? We need fresh people to come in and deal with this and people who are more confident. Country right now has lost its confidence in our leadership.

We don't think they're very good leaders, and the institutions they serve in don't lead very well either. Do you think that a lot of it may be the decline of the middle class over the last four years? Yeah. You know, and people just have gotten more desperate? Well, I think there's that element that people are living much, much closer to the bone now. And I think it's also, Chris, the fact that we see these problems and we all go, oh, this is awful, you know, whether it's Buffalo or whether it's going to be Texas or the shootings. But nobody expects anything to be done in a serious way. It's sort of like, I mean, people called me up to Biden when he was there, you know, do something, do anything, just do

something. And I think that reflects the sort of downcast quality of, like, can we ever get anything right anymore? And I think we can. You know, famously, Abigail Adams, who was the wife of John Adams, wrote a letter to their teenage son, John Quincy. And basically what she argued was adverse times, bad times, were actually what calls forward good leaders, great leaders. And she said, you know, the statesmen arise from the troubles we have in life. And I think that over time what you're going to see is that these new generations will help us bounce back. Chris, listen, I'm a short-term pessimist.

I think it's going to be pretty rough in the next five or six years. But I'm increasingly a long-term optimist. I certainly am hopeful. That was my next question for you. Do we have to hit a bottom before we bounce back? Well, I sure as hell would like to think we hit the bottom already. Well, hopefully a lot of people will. Did you hit more of a

bottom than donald trump presidency um yeah is that possible second term possibly second term but very possible yeah he's he remains a very very influential figure the most influential figure in the party and one of the most influential in in the country yeah so i mean was with your book this is a great book on leadership. You know, I love leading and leadership. You've written books on leadership. Yeah, Beacon's Leadership. But you kicked my butt on this one.

This one's awesome. And what's really brilliant about this book is not only have you just done almost an exhaustive study and inclusion of just about everything you could think of to developing yourself as a leader, thinking as a leader, also covering the pitfalls of a leader, but you've interwoven it with the history of the world, America, and your personal history and going to politics and your service to government. And it's really an extraordinary read. I'm just amazed it's it's just wonderful how long did it take you to write 68 years 60 years i was that was what i think

just as soon as i said that i i when i got serious about it came during the pandemic because i was you know i'm like everyone else i was sidelined for a significant period of time i had a lot of time on my hands I could use. And we have a little place down on the Cape Cod. And we went and settled there for a week or two at a time. And I just tried to turn to and write the darn thing. You know, some of it, as you say, because some of it is autobiographical,

that was easier to write than some of the historic. On the other hand, I felt that stories are really important. That's what moves people. That's what excites them. It's what motivates them to read. So I tried to interweave some of the stories that I find the most interesting or moving. Yeah. And when I was young, I tried to read Peter Drucker's books on management, leadership, everything.

It's like reading medical books. I mean, he was brilliant. He was brilliant, but it's dry. He was brilliant. I knew Peter Drucker and spent some time with him. He was, I'll tell you one thing that impressed me greatly is that he had CEOs. He was supposed to be in California, Southern California, and he had CEOs that fly across the country just to come and spend an afternoon

with him and get advice, And then they'd come back. He had a serious following. And I think that there are people who come since then, like Jim Collins, who's got a huge read. Warren Bennis, who was a dear, dear friend of mine. We lost Bill George, who really pioneered the work on True North. There have been a number of people who we might think have come a long way. But Peter Drucker, you have to say, in terms of business readership, number one. Yeah, almost like an encyclopedia. Yeah.

But the thing I loved about your book that I was leading into with Peter Drucker is it's a very easy read. Like I could give this to my Gen Z z nephew who right now is about 21 22 yeah and it's it it hops it's you go towards a lot of different points in the book that are easy to get through you know they're not long yeah like the arduous thing right move through it i'm not trying to run an academic i'm not up to it anyway it's far with yeah but i mean it's exhaustive i mean you've covered i i was going through it and i'm just like he's touched on like every single thing you can think of like like it's just extraordinary and and you even talk about some of the low parts of of the low arts of public leadership i thought that was kind of interesting you talk about falling down you know i read a lot of manuals on when i was growing up at 18 on how to be a leader, how to be a CEO. I was preparing

my first company. I started at 18, but I, I, no one ever said, Hey, here's the stuff you should watch out for the bad parts, the low parts. Yeah. You got to know that. But otherwise, if you don't, you know, it's like everything else. You know, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. But so many people have, especially kind of people who go to elite schools, you know, they've had their past streamed with rose petals, as the saying goes. But life is not like that. Life is not kind to anybody in that sense. So you've got Franklin Roosevelt.

He had a gorgeous life for 20, 25 years. It looked like he was going to be, but he was seen as very light, light in his shoes. And then he was struck down by polio, the worst scourge of his day. People thought it was contagious. You know, they hit people up in the attic and that sort of thing. They came down with it. But that was Roosevelt's crucible moment, as we call it, in leadership literature. And some people in the crucible moment, the research shows a bunch of people who go through

crucibles and get knocked down really, really hard, they never get back up. There's also another group of people who within a year or so, because they have a lot of resilience, within a year or so, they're back up. They're not going great, but they're fine. I mean, they're where they were before they got hit. Then there is this third group that's really the most interesting. And that is the group that goes down. They're down for a while. Roosevelt thought God had forsaken him and God had forgotten him.

And he tried for seven years to walk again, never managed to do that. But it was that through that experience, that crucible, he, Roosevelt, and so many others have found that they actually gained strength. They especially gained in moral purpose. You know, it was like Reagan after he was shot and telling everybody, telling us on staff, you know, I was spared, and I owed the rest of my life to God for sparing me. And that was, that was sort of a, it was a religious commitment, but it was a way of life commitment as well. And that's what you find.

And I found out with Katherine Graham that they went to Washington Post when her husband committed suicide and she was a house frown. And she rebuilt herself into Katherine Graham, the publisher, and with the most successful publisher of her day. There are people like John McCain. You know, there's a guy named Jim Stockdale. You probably don't know that name, but he was one of the people like McCain who was shot down over Vietnam and, you know, wound up spending time at the Hanoi Hilton. That POW experience for McCain, Stockdale, and other Americans, longest time in a prison, foreign prison of any generation. And yet they came through,

came out of it, stronger. That's remarkable. It says so much about who they are as individuals, but what's possible? Because you think about it at the beginning, you think, oh my God, you're going to get struck down by cancer or this or that. It's unbelievable. Somebody just sent me a story of Art Garfunkel and a fellow he grew up with.

And Garfunkel, his best friend, had eye disease and wet blood. And Art Garfunkel stood by him and it was his lightness. Their song about the darkness let the light go in came from that experience. Wonderfully inspiring stories. There are so many of these inspiring stories that we have to tell young people. Give it your best shot. You may well get knocked down. Things may go badly for you.

You may lose a parent. You may live to worse. You may lose a child. All these things can happen to you, but you still can make a difference. And you can be a force in your community. We don't need in this new generation,

we do need some people to top. Where are our Zelenskys in the United States? Why haven't we had Zelenskys among our bed? But there's an awful lot of work to be done at the community level, building up neighborhoods, having growth come from the bottom up. And I will tell you, I think that a lot of black women are showing the way. They're the ones who I think are bringing a moral quest and a moral commitment to the arena, which has been, and I don't like some of their politics. They're too liberal for me in some cases for this, the Black Lives Matter movement or the Me Too movement or so forth.

And AOC in particular, I'm part company with their own policy. But I think, Chris, we should celebrate the fact that they're in the arena. They're giving it their best shot. Yeah. Here's their perspective. Good. We need to get your perspective. Everybody's got to have a voice.

Yeah. You bring to get your perspective. Everybody's got to have a voice. Yeah. You bring up a good point. And I like how your book is written in a way that can help people have a broad-based painting of leadership, not only to build it. And you have so much stuff that you've put into it from all, even just little things, like little character bits and little pieces of like, here's what to do here. And like I say, I read a lot of books on how to succeed when i was young i could have used some more books like yours where there was a part in it like here's what happens when you fail you know my cathartic times that i went through uh crisis in my life definitely you're down your own crisis yeah yeah i've survived i think i have Let me pinch myself. But what are some other things that you want to tease out about the book to encourage readers to pick it up? Well, I think

a couple of things that are not well appreciated is I think they should be in leadership development. I tucked them away at the back of the book called Booster Rockets. one is, just as a leader is not born, but is made, and in my judgment, self-made. So is, in some ways, so is a public figure who takes seriously the ideas of public service and tries to translate them into progress. You know, we have people who are self-educated. Impress the hell out of me. Take Harry Truman, for example. And when he graduated from high school, his parents were too court-sent him to college. So he went back to the family farm, and he lived behind a farm mule plowing that farm for seven years. But during that time, he got self-educated. He read and he read and he read.

And by the time he, you know, got into public life, he was the best read. He's the only president in the 20th century who never went to college. And yet he was the first president. He was probably the brightest figure in that whole group in terms of being self-educated. And look at General Mattis. He's another. I became friendly with General Mattis through writing this book and working with him, reading his stuff. And we talked a lot. And we're going to try to do some things on the road together. But he's a wonderfully self-educated man.

He is as a Marine. He just read and read and read. When he had one of his last assignments, they said he could take his books with him, his personal books, his personal library. Turned out he has 7,000 books. Holy crap. And he read them. Wow. He read them.

He was sort of, you know, that's a remarkable thing to start with. And I do think it's important. I think it's important to read and to keep your mind open and to keep learning because we live in a very quickly changing world. And it's going to be one of the most important things, as historians will say, is history sped up a lot during our current time. So that's one issue that I think is really important. It doesn't get enough attention.

But the other, I think leaders, to be really effective, truly need a good sense of humor. I think you've got to be able to, you know, some things are so painful you just got to laugh. That was sort of what Lincoln found. And that's true. And the presidencies, I remember one of the reasons I'm nostalgic for the Reagan

presidency, even though I'm not as conservative as he is, I'm obviously more eccentric, but Reagan had a great sense of humor. He just, you know, he could just pull you over with it. He didn't need the presidency. He wasn't like Nixon, you know, he could just bow you over with it. He didn't need the presidency. He wasn't like Nixon, you know, whose life would have been judged a failure had he not made it to the White House.

But with Reagan, he didn't need to go to the White House. He'd already had a great opportunity. But he came to understand. So we had a lot of pranks in those days and just good times. I tell people, I remember how Reagan and Tip O'Neill got along. Reagan, the most conservative president in a long time. Tip O'Neill, the most liberal speaker of the House in a long, long time. And yet they hit it off together.

And they had a little pact between them that you could knock your opponent up until about 5 o'clock in the afternoon. But after that, you're supposed to put down your differences and raise a class. And you can have, you know, tell old Irish yards and have a laugh and scratch, have a good time. And they began working together. And then, Chris, over time, they began to trust each other. They got big things done.

They got a major overhaul of Social Security, a major overhaul of the tax code, things that nobody else could have done. They got done. But he also, you know, developed this very, very nice relationship with Tip so that when O'Neill turned like 65 or 70, I can't remember which one, Reagan invited him to a birthday party down at the White House and invited all his friends. He had a big group there.

And after lunch was over, Reagan got up to make a toast. And he said, Tip, if I had a ticket to heaven and you didn't have one too, well, I'd give my ticket back and go to hell with you. That's a great line. I love that line. You know, like you say, reading is so important and educating yourself. And do you feel like a lot of the young people do that nowadays? Because I don't know.

I mean, it's something they need to do. I think they don't read the daily newspapers anymore. That's for sure. Maybe the Sunday, maybe they'll take a look at. But so much of it comes across on social media. And social media, we've discovered, is a two-edged sword. You know, on one hand, it produced access for a whole lot of people who would never have a voice in the nation's discourse. They can go right on there and get right in the middle of the tweet and build

a following and, you know, all the rest. So that's the good part. The bad part is that so many people are learning how to exploit it and put out this information that's just not true and to sort of get the nation all tangled up and what's true and what's not true. And after a while you begin not to, not to trust anybody because you don't know what the hell you're reading. Yeah. If it's,

if it's probably wrong, it's going to set you off in the wrong direction. So I'm sympathetic up to a point that people aren't reading as much as they should. But I do think if you're serious about public life, it's better to be a reader than a non-reader. I'm going back to Harry Truman. I went out to his library. It was a wonderful library because it's so modest. But I found a copy of a speech he liked to give to high school students that would come

through Independence and come out to his library. And he said, he told the students, not every reader is a leader, but every leader, there's much to be said for that. There really is. I mean, I started my first company at 18, but I was an accidental entrepreneur. And I was set up to go to college at the Pell Grant. My parents are poor, nothing wrong with that. But, you know, I had a Pell Grant, and I was making what I thought was really good money for being 18 and living at home at 18. And I put school, but I knew I needed an education. So I started reading voraciously.

I ordered the Harvard Business Reviews courses. They're magazine that they, I think, every quarter they would put out. I think they still do. But I did everything to train to become a CEO of a big company their magazine that they i think a recorder they would put out i think they still do but i i did everything to train to become a ceo of a big company for the multi-millionaire companies i eventually built and and i and i planned it that way but i read i i knew that even though i wasn't going to college i needed some sort of education and reading was the way that i got there and a lot of people like you mentioned did huh that's so's so interesting. I did not know that about your background.

Yeah. Parallels to other people who have come through life and I think done well because it's also true that the time some people would use, we spent too much indoors. You are out there in the real world trying to develop somebody, having an idea, following your bliss, but trying to build an organization at 18, that's a remarkable thing to do.

I would imagine that's been a big booster in your own life. Oh, definitely. It really helped me understand what I would need to do when it got to this scale. Now, like I said, I didn't read any books like yours that say, hey, there's some dark times. You do want to Watch out for that.

But thank God for Harvard Business Review or something. Yeah. Well, they charge an arm and leg, but you get your money. It was well worth it. I think it was like 75 bucks a pop back then, back in the 86, 80s. So this is a great book. You know, you talk about how a lot of our leaders now, I think I've seen different interviews about discouraging Biden and Trump from running.

You know, we have House leaders and other people. And they're wonderful folks, but when I see them trying to deal with some of the AI and technology and some of the newer stuff, you know, you saw some of the Senate and congressional hearings on them, they were just embarrassing because these folks just weren't up to par. And maybe there is a need for, I mean, do we need to, that was the question I had for you. Is there a cutoff we should have for Congress instead of an... I think we need a general cultural shift to say that, you know, once you get past your mid-60s, you really ought to be, you know, starting to step back a little bit.

I think in the case of some individuals, you can go into your 70s, but I don't think you ought to be starting to step back a little bit. I think in the case of some individuals, you can go into your 70s, but I don't think you ought to be running big organizations. I understand the routine of most businesses in the country. With the CEO question of how old should a CEO be, they generally see 65 as a good time to be moving back. I mean, you can go on and you can be a consultant to the company or you can work with the CEO or work with the board or whatever. But as a general proposition, I think, you know, especially for a big company, you need STEM and traveling around the world.

And frequently, if you're doing global kind of work, you've got to be in a plane half the life. You know, you can get beat up on that. But there are other ways. I just think it's inappropriate to become president when you're in your 80s. You're asking the whole country to take a risk, which we shouldn't have to take. And that is, will you be compass mentis over these next four years. What do we do if you start, you know, if you start deteriorating in terms of your mind or your emotions or anything else? How do we handle that?

I mean, we went through this once with Woodrow Wilson when he had a stroke. Yeah. And his wife basically ran the company country. But you could never do that today. You can never have that kind of secrecy about it. We know within a flash. And even now, people are uncertain about the health of either one of these guys.

We've got people on the Hill. Leaders of both parties on the Hill are into their 70s. And I just turned 80. And I can tell you from just personal experience, you lose something. You lose some of your energy. You lose a little sense of having a long runway. You don't sign up quickly for a project that's going to be a 10-year

long project. And so it's like I think the country would be safer. And it would be good. I think there ought to be some couple of heavyweights around the president. Whoever the president is think there ought to be some couple of heavyweights around the president whoever the president is you want to have a couple of heavyweights i mean that's the one thing we talk about with the silicon valley i mean i see a lot of silicon

valley startups they'll bring a lot of young kids in yeah and and they love the young kids because they work fairly cheaply and they they'll work their butts off you know they'll do the 24-hour stuff that i did when I was young. But, you know, a lot of times they don't bring a mix of the older folks that have the experience and knowledge. And then those, I'll see, I mean, I'll see multimillion-dollar startups fail. Billion-dollar valuations fail. And you just go, you could have hired a couple old people who might give you some good advice. Well, I really love the book. I mean, just reading i just just reading through it i'm like wow he thought of everything and and i was just amazed uh

persuasion digital world master eloquence and then of course you weaved it in with being service to the government and everything else just just just great stuff and it's so simple and easy to go through it. It's a read that keeps you captivated. So I just love that book, and I think you did an awesome job on it. Well, Chris, you're very kind, generous with your comments, but I do want you to know I appreciate it. I appreciate the chance to be here with you.

Yeah, and we appreciate it too. Anything more you want to tease out on the book before we go? No, I think other than the fact that we need a sense of urgency. We can't go on like this. We're on a non-sustainable path. As I've written, and perhaps I came to my head from somebody else, but it's as if we were in a car driving along the side of a cliff. It's 3.30 in the morning with no headlines and a rainy night.

And, you know, you can do that for a while, but you're taking huge danger. You're taking real risks to the future. And we cannot afford a failed future. Too much depends on getting this right in the next few years. No matter who gets elected, we need to be able to govern as a people. If it's Donald Trump, it's Donald Trump. Unless you make it work. Do we need a new John F. Kennedy?

Yes. Remember when John was young? And people were like, he's too young. Yes. I think that charisma made a huge difference for him. Yeah. And people liked him. And, you know, and he also told the truth.

When he had the Bay of Pigs the first hundred days, you know, it was a failed coup attempt against Castro in Cuba. And Kennedy got in and he dramatically lowered the profile of the United States, how many planes and so a disaster. And then Kennedy basically went into the Rose Garden and said, you know, defeat, victory has many fathers, but defeat is always an orphan. And we're not going to let this be an orphan. He said, I take responsibility for this. I'm the commander-in-chief. I'm the one who was at fault.

Blame me, nobody else. And you know what? Because he was transparent, he accepted the responsibility, his Gallup poll ratings went up. They went up by 10%. Wasn't it David Schlesinger's book, 1,000 Days? Yeah. Arthur Schlesinger. Arthur Schlesinger.

Yeah. Yeah. He was there. He was a professor at that time, I think, at Columbia. Mm- Columbia. And he came in, he was a very close buddy with him. Kennedy wanted an intellectual, public intellectual to be inside. He wanted him to be able to analyze what happened in that presence. He was a smart move. That's what I mean by having two or three heavyweights you wouldn't necessarily have in the chain of command, but you're there to help you think about, you know, what's right here, what's wrong, what's good, what's bad. I remember reading that when I was young, my mother had like an original thing. She had a lot of, she still has a lot of Kennedy newspapers from his passing and stuff. And I remember reading 1000 Days and that the Bay of Pigs thing really, it really made

me think about leadership and how he handled it because he had that choice and he owned it. And I think he was, I think really a lot of presidents hadn't owned it at that point in time. But maybe we need that youthful vigor, that power. And we need a new Camelot. Absolutely. Look at what Zelensky has done. You know, leaders can be found.

They'll emerge in times of adversity, as I mentioned. Leaders, that's one of them. Zelensky, well, he was an entertainer. And then he came out, he ran the government, and he sort of botched that up. It wasn't in very good shape. And then the Russians came in, and this guy just sort of rises to the occasion. He's captivating, and he's engaging with the people of Ukraine as well as people around the world. And, you know, he's nightly.

It reminds me of FDR and the radio talks he used to give. Zelensky gives these TV talks. And he really kept the country together. Who could have imagined them taking on the Russians as they had? Yeah, and a little bit of Churchill, too. A lot of Churchill. They often say, you know, Zelensky is a Churchill in a baseball hat or something. That was the husband.

What we used to say about Rudy Giuliani. Remember that? When they, with the 9-11. Yeah. I love Churchill. He's been amazing. Well, David, it's been wonderful to have you on the show. Give us your plug so people can find you anywhere.

Please, sir. Okay, fine. At davidgerding.com. And always remember Chris Voss. He was very important to getting me here. Thank you. There you go. Thank you very much, David, for being on the show.

We certainly appreciate it. Thanks for tuning in. Go to YouTube.com, Forges Chris Voss. Go to Goodreads.com, Forges Chris Voss. All the places you see us on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and all those places in between. Be good to each other, stay safe, and we'll see you guys next time. And that's it.