The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – What Are the Odds: A Novel by David List

Episode Date: October 24, 2024

What Are the Odds: A Novel by David List Amazon.com The debut novel from screenwriter and producer David List, What Are the Odds, is an entertaining, binge-worthy, and addictive crime thriller. Ray Dawson--a former NYPD detective unfairly forced into early retirement--never thought he would get another chance to be with his second wife, and love of his life, Stephanie. So, when she opens the door to the possibility, he spends his savings on an extravagant, romantic getaway at a resort in Costa Rica. But Ray is still as much a cop as he is a man, and when, in the hotel elevator, he has a chance encounter with Wilbur Bailey--a wily, neurotic, and environmentally conscious fugitive with a $5 million bounty on his head--things get complicated. IRS Special Agent Phil Dancourt is determined to bust Mika Salko, the corrupt CEO of Houston based Amco Oil, and believes Wilbur Bailey--an Amco analyst with a conscience--is the one guy on the inside who could help bring Salko down. But in a bizarre twist, Bailey embezzles millions and disappears, putting Phil's job on the line. Now, after Wilbur is sighted in Costa Rica, Phil is sent to retrieve him. But from the moment he steps off the plane--and crosses paths with Ray and Wilbur--nothing goes as planned. The encounter propels the three men into a harrowing, death-defying, life-changing, and often hilarious journey, attracting unwanted attention from a heroin-addicted dishwasher, a powerful, corrupt CEO, bloodthirsty gangs and drug cartels, and pandering government watchdogs. Along the way, they come face to face, in unexpected ways, with life's larger questions: friendship, love, loss, faith, and the commitment to values larger than oneself. What results is a trio of unlikely friends, and Ray can only hope that, once it's all over, Stephanie will still be there.

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. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. 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 rollercoaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. It's Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. Ladies and gentlemen, the Iron Lady sings that makes it official. Welcome to the show. We'll see you tomorrow. this point i don't know we're in the top one percent what can you say anyway guys go to good reason.com forces chris voss linkedin.com forces chris voss chris voss one on the tickety-tockety

and chris voss facebook.com we have a wonderful gentleman on the show with us today we're talking about his new hot book that i think is going to be fairly topical there's some things going on the world today his book is entitled the age of outragerage, How to Lead in a Polarized World, out October 29th, 2024. We have Karthik Romana with us on the show. Did I get that right, Karthik? You got that perfectly right. Thank you for having me, Chris. I'm practicing learning everything because that's what you have to do to do this job.

He's the author of the newest book on that, and he is a professor of business and public policy at the University of Oxford's, I'm still going to butcher that, Blavatnik School of Government. Blavatnik is correct. Did I get it right? Yes. There's so much stuff that goes on the head at the beginning of the show. So he's a fellow of St. John's College. He's an expert in business, government relations, sustainable capitalism, and corporate reporting and auditing. He studies how organizations and leaders build trust with stakeholders, and his scholarship has won numerous awards, including the Journal of Accounting and Economics Best Paper Prize, the Harvard Business Review, McKinsey Prize for Ground

Baking Management Thinking, and three times the International Case Center's prizes for outstanding case writing, dubbed by the Financial Times as the Business School Oscars. Welcome to the show. How are you, sir? I'm very well, and thank you so much for having me, Chris. Thanks for coming. We really appreciate having someone of your astute knowledge and expertise on the program, because I flunked college. I didn't even go to college, so I'm a complete idiot. Anyway, so welcome to the show. GiveUsYour.com is where can you find people on the internet. My first name and last name, KarthikRamana.com. That takes you to a website where I'll have all of the resources that you would need in terms of my underlying scholarship, but also ways to contact me. And so it's KarthikRamana.com. Now, is this your first book? It is not.

I've written a book about eight years ago, which is a very, very technical book. It was published by the University of Chicago Press. And like most good University of Chicago Press books, it has probably as many pages of footnotes as it has of text. Congratulations on this new book that comes out October 29th. Give us a 30,000 overview. What's inside, please? So I wrote this book in part because of my day job, Chris.

I was the director until last year of the Master of Public Policy program here at Oxford University. And over the course of the eight years that I did that, we convened about 1,000 public leaders from 150 different countries. These are incredibly bright individuals from, you know, who are incredibly committed and passionate about government, from countries like the US and China, Russia and Ukraine, Israel and Palestine, India and Pakistan. And I sat there scratching my head saying, how do I at least do no harm in the context of convening all of these people together, and perhaps more aspirationally, do some good. And so what we did was bring together some wisdom from around the world, leaders who have been managing some of the most complex and difficult situations around the world,

and say, what can they teach us about what it means to lead in this age of outrage? Yeah, it's definitely interesting. And I think you opened the book or the introduction talking about how Disney stepped in it and some of the experiences they had. Is that correct? That's correct. Yeah. So, Disney is an interesting case study because, you know, companies these days recognize how difficult and challenging the political environment is. And they try to sort of, you know, throw up their hands and say, but we're a business, we make money, and we really don't have a point of view on, you know, whether things should be

on the left or the right and Republican or Democrat, etc. But that only works to a point, because in a case like Disney, firstly, whether they like it or not, their product is inherently political. What, you know, Disney princes and princesses sort of do in their movies, that shapes the America of tomorrow. So whether they like it or not, Disney will be political. It's also Disney as part of its strategy, making money, has played a very active role in harnessing some of the sort of identity politics and cleavages in the world. So they've, you know, actively embraced and perhaps for good measure, you know, the LGBT communities around the world. And so when Florida starts passing anti-LGBT legislation, for Disney to then throw up its hands and say, oh, you know, we're neutral on this issue,

that just sort of comes across as hypocrisy. And that's how Disney gets itself into trouble. And of course, not just Disney, every company will find itself in this kind of trouble. I know we want people to read the book to find out all the details. But it's really hard to navigate this because you don't know what's going to blow up. You don't know what's going to go viral. Sometimes the most innocuous or what people think is innocuous, let's put it that way, some PR agent in some room somewhere decides to tweet something or x something or whatever it's called this week bankruptcy court the basically you know puts out some sort of pr thing and they think maybe it's either cute or funny or

you know tongue-in-cheek and and then it ends up blowbacking in their face and then then you you i imagine in your book you're talking you in talking with these your book, you're talking with these leaders, you're talking about, you know, how to respond to some of this stuff, right? How to deal with, you know, when you have an outrageous event of a viral moment that blows back on your company. That's right. And probably the first and most important thing that companies can do is not be surprised by this age of outrage. If there's one thing we know for certain, it's companies, whether it's Disney or Google or Microsoft or whoever it might be, Bank of America, they're going to find themselves in trouble one way or the other, whether they like it or not. So just don't be surprised. And if you know that this is going to happen, you can start preparing for it from day one.

You know, no matter what happens in a few weeks with the U.S. elections, we're still going to be a very divided country. And once the results of the elections will be clear, it'll become apparent that the country will need to sort of reconcile and deal with some healing. Now, businesses would like to say, oh, this is not our problem. But many of them have already made implicit commitments that they will somehow through their products and services, help with the healing. And even if they don't experience this as something that they've committed to doing, their customers or their investors or their employees have experienced them as something they'd be committed to doing. Being prepared for it is probably the first step. And we can start there. Be prepared, because stuff probably the first step and we can start there. Be prepared because stuff's going to go bad. It's business. This is the fun part of being an entrepreneur and being in businesses. Sometimes you never know what's going to come at you. It's

whack-a-mole solve all the problems every day that come at you and tomorrow there'll be new ones. So tell us a little bit about yourself. People like to hear some of your upbringing, your influences. What got you into academia and studying some of the things you've written about? Yeah. So, I actually didn't think I was going to be an academic. It was a chance class that I took when I was sort of doing a graduate program, a sort of a master's program, where the teacher of the class thought I was doing rather well on the class and said, you should go on to be a professor and you should get a PhD. And if it weren't for that teacher sort of encouraging me to think about that, I'd have

never considered a career in academia. And then I went on to get a PhD at MIT. I trained as a fairly quantitative economist. And my first job coming out of MIT was to be a professor at Harvard, where I was teaching finance and accounting to Harvard MBAs. And I did that, and I enjoyed it. And then the financial crisis hit in 2008. And I had a bit of a personal crisis. I said, the great problem in the world isn't that there aren't enough MIT trained economists teaching Harvard MBAs how to make more money. There seem to be bigger problems in the world. So I went to the dean of my school at the time and I said, look, I have this crisis

and I'd like to do something different. And the dean said something very intriguing to me. He said, why don't you take a year off and go self-study in the art of leadership and then come back and teach the required leadership class at Harvard? And I said, you must be crazy. I'm a quantitative economist. I don't know anything about this. And he said, No, trust me. And so I did. And I very much enjoyed it. And here I am, now almost 15 years later, still teaching leadership, but now at Oxford. Leadership is such a great thing. And so and seems to be so overlooked sometimes in the corporate world. And people leave companies if the leadership isn't good,

if they don't feel like they have good bosses, the good people that lead them. And in life, too. I mean, there's leadership in parenting. There's leadership in teacher at schools. There's all sorts of ways we all really kind of take part in leading at some point in time or another. At least I do.

I just put a parade together every week and roll down Main Street and usually get upset with the cops because they're like, you don't have a permit. No, I'm just kidding. Anyway, we don't do that folks, so don't watch for a parade. That's a joke. Anyway, getting back to your book, one of the other outrages that you talk about in the book is GoFundMe, where they were pressured to cut off the funding of the protesting trucks in Ottawa. That thing was hilarious. Yeah. Yeah.

Talk to us a little bit about that example, if you can. So, that's a really tricky scenario, right? Because basically, you had these anti-COVID protesters or anti-vaccine protesters, I should say, who sort of, you know, started sort of blockading the roads into Ottawa, the capital city of Canada. And, you know, the government started clamping down on that, because obviously, that was hugely disruptive. And meanwhile, the protesters were raising money through GoFundMe in order to continue to do what they were doing. So GoFundMe was under a lot of pressure to cut off the sources of supply to money supply to these protesters. And that meant taking sides in a political debate in what was an active political debate, you know, because there was sort of a substantial fraction of people in Canada that felt that, you know, some of the policies on COVID had gone too far. So now should a company get involved in that kind of politics? That was sort of the big question for them. Yeah. And it's kind of hard. I think there's isn't Blackstone or somebody who owns a lot of interest in these companies

pushing for, you know, more DEI and more sort of woke policies or, you know, trying to get more companies to, there's like a percentage or something they have of, they have to be involved in certain things. Yeah, a lot of finance companies, you know, this started about, I'd say, seven or eight years ago, right after the 2016 elections and the election of Donald Trump, a lot of sort of the liberal side of the political spectrum started weighing in on finance companies and asset management companies to put political pressure on the industrial companies in which they invested to take more active stances, causes that were dear to the left of the political spectrum. And initially, the financial investment community took on this sort of pressure with great gusto and enthusiasm. And you saw growing calls for various sort of DEI and ESG type activities, large asset management companies weighing in on all of the sort of grand

responsibilities that business would take on. But very quickly, they realized that, you know, this sort of posturing without real action, without actually following up with real action would actually invite more trouble than simply having stayed silent. And also that kind of real action is costly. And sometimes it comes not just at the cost of profits, but it comes at the cost of alienating many of your customers who may not be sympathetic to those perspectives. You know, there was a backlash then. And now we're seeing a lot of these finance companies that were making bold and brave statements on DEI and ESG five years ago, backing away from it and saying, actually, not you know what we do yeah it's been kind of interesting to watch the whole kind of rise of you know a lot of vocism on the i'm a moderate democrat but i'm not a fan of the extremists of either party and and so it's been kind of interesting to see how that whole thing blew up you know the the interesting thing with walt disney was you know they took away their i don't know if I think it's still litigation but they took away

their their ability to govern themselves I guess in Florida that's right ease and yeah it was kind of interesting the blowback that they got and and yet it seems like probably every politician is probably calling them for money one way or another that's right yeah and it's interesting how corporations, you know, will play both sides. They'll put money in the coffers of everybody. And a lot of people do that. I mean, even Donald Trump did that. And he would pay Democrats and Republicans.

And so they hedge most bets. And, you know, with the overturning of, with the ruling of SCOTUS of Citizens United and other things that made it legal to buy your own politician, you know? I mean, all you need to do is give a SCOTUS representative now an RV, and I guess you can get whatever you want. It's a low bar. I'm saving up to buy my first SCOTUS. I'm working on that. I think, what's an RV go for now?

I wonder if he'll take a used one. Anyway, or she, or pick your conservative. Anyway, yeah, so it's interesting how these how these are kind of rose and now it seems to be falling back it seems to be there's a lot of dial back of dei you've heard of a lot of people canceling the di programs i mean i knew that was going to get out of control like a government thing i'm not a real big fan of hearing the word microaggressions i'm like like, are you kidding me? And you guys have kind of seen universities, you know, I'm not sure what the outbreak was at your university, but like the recent October 7th Israeli-Palestinian-Hamas protests on campuses have been a real upturner as well. I mean, you've had some deans that have had to resign,

you know, that spoke at the Congress thing. That's been a thing for universities as well, I imagine. That's right. Yeah. So, look, I mean, there's a fine line here to navigate, right? Because organizations can't throw up their hands and say, oh, look, we have nothing to do with the real world and we have nothing to do with politics and so forth. Because if you do that, then obviously you will find yourself in trouble too because implicitly you will be committing one way or the other to a particular political position. But at the same time, what's important is to set clear boundaries

about what it is that you will and will not commit to. Because what really gets organizations into trouble is experienced or perceived hypocrisy. If you say one thing and do another, or if you say you're not going to do something and then secretly do it, that's what really gets you into trouble. But, you know, so building a clear strategy and then being committed to it is usually the safest way to navigate this. Well, you know, some universities have done better in this context than others. Here at Oxford, we set out, particularly in the Master of Public Policy program, because we had such a diversity of political talent in the room.

And we realized that, you know, we couldn't even get half of our students to agree that democracy was a useful way to navigate, you know, society because we had students from China and Russia and Saudi Arabia and you name it. So we set out some sort of rules of the game really early on, not what we would call substantive values, but procedural values. And we have three simple procedural values which have worked really well for us. Number one is to say, really, you know, everybody is here to be able to speak whatever they want to speak to. There should be no circumstance under which you feel censored to say what your speak your truth on a particular issue. Number two is the corollary of number one, just as much as you're free to speak your mind, everybody else is free to speak their mind too. So you can't be outraged just because somebody else is saying something that you disagree with it. Number three is what's really important to make this all work. And which is to say, we are a leadership community. We were talking about, you know,

the importance of leadership earlier, which means that leaders don't just simply drop the cleverest argument they could find and wait for their opponents to pick up the pieces. That's not leadership at all. Leaders actually are like good managers. They take responsibility not just for what they say, but for how their words land on others. That's what sets us apart. We say we're free to speak our mind on something. We're free to speak what we see as the truth on something, but we take responsibility for helping others experience those words. We take responsibility for how those words land on others. Yeah. It's really interesting how the whole thing is playing out

and where we're going as a country. I guess November in the election here, I guess, which is coming up, because I can't believe it's already here, it's going to tell us, I guess, where the country wants to go. I suppose not really, actually, because it's never the popular vote that wins. And, I I mean it's really just coming down to one or two states it's really hilarious

how how this is really backfired having the electoral college but it'll be interesting what we do here yeah a lot of universities got hit with it you, trying to explain their positions on, you know, Hamas and seeing these people support Hamas and on universities, schools here in, in America. It's really, it's really kind of amazing in how they're trying to throw the needle and respect first amendment rights, but then you're a public company that receives money from the government or, you government or donations and stuff. But it's really interesting how it's playing out and what it's doing. So you help leaders turn down the temperature, analyze root causes, you know, you can be a small guy and do something and end up on the front page of the news these days, huh?

That's right. Yeah. I mean, you don't need to be a leader sitting at the top of the hierarchy of the organization to say, okay, now here's my check. Now that I've climbed to the top of the organization, now let me try to do something about it. The beauty of leadership is it's different from, say, positional power. It's different from management. You don't have to be sitting in some sort of formal position of authority to shape an organization. In fact, the best, cleanest, simplest definition of leadership I've encountered is you leave a situation better than you found it. And anyone really with the right intent, with the right skill, has the capacity to leave a situation better than they found it.

So even if you're entry level, you can manage upward and have a tremendous impact in your organization as a leader. And so what we talk about is the sort of five steps in the framework for the age of outrage is really to help anyone in an organization. Again, whether it's a business organization, a government organization, a not-for-profit organization, figure out what are the steps that you can do to really lead in this situation. Sometimes that's managing up, sometimes it's managing down, sometimes it's managing laterally, but the world is full of problems that you with the right instinct can make a difference in. As we go out, give people your final thoughts, tell them where they can find out more about you on the dot-com and where to pick up the book. Yep.

You can pick up the book at Amazon or any of your favorite bookshops or any of your favorite sort of websites. It's the age of outrage, how to lead in a polarized world. And again, my website is Karthik Ramana.com. That's K-A-R-T-H-I-K-R-A-M-A-N-N-A.com. Thank you very much, sir, for being on the show.

We really appreciate it. My pleasure. Thank you, Chris. Thank you. Order up the book where refined books are sold, The Age of Outrage, How to Lead in a Polarized World. Thanks to my audience for tuning in. It's available October 29th, 2024, by the way. So pick that up, pre-order it so you can get your copy as soon as it releases and be the first one in your book club to say you read it. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other.

Stay safe. We'll see you next time. And that should have us out, man.