Rand Stagen on Long-Term Leadership, Business, and Life

In this podcast, Motley Fool co-founder David Gardner interviews Rand Stagen, managing director of Stagen Leadership Academy, and one of David’s favorite people in business. Rand shares his wisdom on the long-term development of leaders and organizations, why conscious leadership is crucial for businesses today, and the lessons we can all learn from playing the long game in every aspect of life. Along the way, they explore the balance of business, family, and legacy, and even tackle some buy, sell, or hold predictions for the future of leadership.

To catch full episodes of all The Motley Fool’s free podcasts, check out our podcast center. To get started investing, check out our beginner’s guide to investing in stocks. A full transcript follows the video.

This video was recorded on Sept. 11, 2024.

David Gardner: Investing rewards those who play the long game. Rule Breakers know that while trading might capture short term gains, true wealth comes from thinking in years, even decades. That’s how I beat the market. It’s not just investing, compounding returns apply in business, leadership and life. My guest this week, Rand Stagen knows this well. His life’s work is investing in people, building enduring businesses and developing leaders for the long haul. Festina lente, the Latin phrase meaning, make haste slowly. Reminds us that steady progress beats quick fixes. So let’s make haste slowly with Rand Stagen only on this week’s Rule Breaker Investing.

Rand Stagen is the Managing Director of Stagen Leadership Academy, which he founded 25 years ago, 1999. Stagen trains leaders across North America who are committed to long-term personal development and using their businesses as platforms for positive impact for good. Before Stagen Rand led Presidio Media Group, a publisher of newspapers and magazines, he’s long served on the Board of Conscious Capitalism. Rand lives in Dallas with his wife and two daughters. A sought after speaker, Rand brings his wisdom on conscious leadership to stages nationwide. But this week, we get him for free. Rand Stagen is one of my favorite people in business, so it’s both a pleasure and an honor to have him debuting this week on Rule Breaker Investing. Rand, welcome.

Rand Stagen: It is great to be here, and thank you for the invitation. We’ve been threatening to do this for years, (laughs) probably 12 or 15 years to do something together. So I’m finally celebrating that we’re making it happen.

David Gardner: Thank you, Rand. It’s because we’re playing the long game, and that feeds really well into my first question for you. I was thinking since I often say that this podcast is one-third investing, one-third business, one-third life. That maybe we would arrange our conversation that way. So let’s kick off an investing discussion with my first question. It’s a big topic. It’s been on your mind recently, time. In investing, we talk a lot about the long term and compounding returns. Rule Breaker Investors, I think, outperform traders, because we play the long game. Similarly, Rand, in your work at Stagen, you have a long term focus on the development of not public company stocks, but human beings. Could you help us by exploring into the parallels between long term investment in stocks and long-term investment in people.

Rand Stagen: As you know, this is one of my favorite topics, the way in which we as investors or as leaders in our organizations or as parents with our children or as members of our communities, not what’s happening in the world, but rather how are we relating to what’s happening in the world, and this idea of what is the way in which we relate with time itself. If we think about the idea of investing, if I have two daughters, as you said in the intro, and when I talk to them about the power of the long game in compounding investing, and I say to them, if you look at the S&P for the last 25 years, it’s a fascinating exercise, especially when they were young, we see a clear picture when we’re zoomed out. Obviously, when we zoom in in a more of a short term game, it becomes more volatile, it becomes more stressful. But if you just stay in the investing game, the outcome is very evident.

Well, now let’s take this in my world. So we run a leadership academy in Dallas, Texas, as you mentioned, and we work with thousands of leaders in practice-based programs every year. Sometimes these leaders fly to us from across North America, sometimes we actually send our team, our faculty out to their organizations to deliver programs. What we require in every program that we do is a commitment to a minimal threshold of practice. So when we work with a new organization, we say to the organization, not only are we going to require your commitment to playing a practice game with your development as leaders, but also your CEO has to go first. So leaders go first. We don’t work with an organization unless the CEO is going to walk the talk and model the way. We expect the CEO to commit to our flagship program, which is a 52-week practice-based program.

This is really important because the pushback we get is significant. People say, what are you talking about? What about a one-day program? What about a two-day program? I’m like, let me get this straight. What are you actually trying to accomplish? Well, Rand, we want to help drive more trust among our leadership team and throughout our organization. I say to them, “So you want to promote a culture of trust, and you want our organization to do a two-day program on that?” They’re like, “Yeah,” and David, they’re sincere in their request. What we’ve learned, kind of back to you is, the way in which the average potential customer of ours, which we say no, most of the time to new opportunities, they want the quick win. They want the endorphin release that they got entertained for a day or two around a topic. It could be communication, it could be trust, it could be execution, it could be teamwork. But the reality is, those topics require a discipline and a commitment to the long game. Fifty-two weeks for us just gets our clients to what we call a commencement ceremony, an opportunity to now after a 52-week orientation to the principles of conscious leadership, now we can actually begin the real work, which is a multi decade journey of development.

David Gardner: I love that, Rand. I’m curious, did you start it that way? Was that always how it was, or did you learn your way into that minimum threshold of commitment?

Rand Stagen: I like your frame, did we learn our way in? Yes, we learned our way in. When we started the business in 1999, we were opportunistically engaging where anyone was willing to hire us. We worked with small businesses, we worked with mid-sized businesses, and we worked with large Fortune 1000 businesses within the HR and training budgets. What would happen is, over the first 3, 4, 5 years, we started to see a pattern where there was a demand from the large companies in particular to go fast and to go quick, and the expectations of the opportunity to have a real compounding return weren’t there because a lot of times those executives in the big companies weren’t going to actually stay at the company long term.

So they weren’t even thinking about what were going to be the implications of this training and development two years, three years, four years, five years from now because they were not likely even going to be there. So everybody played the short term game in the big companies that we worked with. Now I want to be careful here. I want to say this again, in the early years in our experience, everybody in the big companies was playing the short term game. Now it’s taken 25 years, and I have met two or three CEOs of public companies who actually are demonstrating a long game orientation, but it has taken decades to find those outliers.

David Gardner: Wow. The long game, 52 weeks, that minimum threshold of commitment, of course, for investing, and anybody who’s listened to me on this podcast for the last week or last 10 years, knows that my view of the minimum commitment to an investment is three years. That’s generally how we think about the Motley Fool, there are probably different opinions because we are Motley. But for me, anyway, I’ve always laid down absolute minimum. When you buy a stock, don’t even touch it for at least three years. To think that the long game is just 52 weeks initially for a lot of people, that you got them there, that you helped them realize that if you want to work with us, you have to work at our minimum long game of one year, does suggest rampant short termism throughout our business world and our society. I’m not here for you and me, Rand, to stand up on the mountain top and say, what are all these people doing, because we’re human too. We get right into short term situations and start to forget that bigger picture of lower left to upper right that the S&P 500 you mentioned earlier demonstrates, if we just let it.

Rand Stagen: I even find myself cringing a little bit when you are playing back what you’re hearing me say about one year being long term because the reality is we think at Stagen in decades. We created a term for this and a distinction between a short termer and a decader. A short termer evaluates success in quarters and years, a decader evaluate success in decades or lifetimes. There is an existential dimension, and let’s call it a transcendent dimension to the work that we do as it relates to time, because we simply have chosen, not that it’s bad for other organizations, but for us, we will not work in environments where there are artificial time horizons. What that basically means is, and this took us many years to create the clarity I’m about to say. We work with owner operator businesses, which means mostly families, founders and ESOPs, owner operators who have a commitment to their investors, to their communities, to their employees, to their customers, to their strategic partners, and vendors, and this is the big one, owner operators with a commitment to stakeholders and have an indefinite time horizon for the business platform that they are stewarding. So that doesn’t mean a forever time horizon, it means an indefinite.

They’re operating, as Jim Collins might have said back in the ’90s, they’re operating with an orientation of a built-to-last company building approach. Will some of our clients sell their businesses? It occasionally happens. The good news is that’s not what their goal was. Their goal is not to sell the business, their goal is to build a great, enduring, profitable, successful business that creates compounding returns through time. We are afforded the opportunity to often be a partner along that journey, not just for a year or two or five, but we are now in continuous partnership with dozens and dozens of companies in the decades in our partnership. Partnerships that are now 15, 20, 25 years old, continuously, the same companies.

David Gardner: Which is wonderful. Fred Reichheld, the Harvard Business School professor who wrote. Well, he actually helped develop net promoter among other things, but the loyalty effect, organizations that can count not just using Rand Stagen parlance here, not just in years, but in decades, decaders, the number of years that they’ve worked with their customers, with their employees, with their partners and suppliers, with their shareholders. Yes, not all money is hot money out there, but speaking of, landscape views of the world, Rand, when you describe your business, looking for these owner operator companies that are truly building something, as you say, of indefinite, but definite value, how many are out there? Can you just shake the trees and they just drop down and Stagen Academy just keeps growing? Or is this the 1% of the 1%? I don’t have pattern recognition across all of business to know how often or rare this is.

Rand Stagen: We would answer that in saying that in the United States alone, that there are several 100,000 privately held mid-sized businesses, and because they’re private, the data is a little bit elusive to all of us, but hundreds of thousands.

David Gardner: What is mid-size?

Rand Stagen: In mid-size, we would say a couple hundred to a couple thousand employees. What might be called the lower mid market, an enterprise organization, like a software company might call this the lower mid market. So you’re talking about companies with hundreds of employees to thousands of employees. Most of the time, they are not yet professionalized. They’re still run by their family or they’re still run by the founder. Within those hundreds of thousands, we believe that there are tens of thousands that fit the profile that we’re talking about.

David Gardner: Wow.

Rand Stagen: They care about their communities. Now, people will say, so Stagen’s partnered with academics and think tanks, and we feel very confident in the caliber of our curriculum design based on the cutting edge theories and research around leadership and human development on the coast, let’s call this, some of our partners like professors at Harvard and other think tanks. Now, the assumption would be, if your curriculum is cutting edge, you must be working with companies on the coast. You must have a lot of clients in San Francisco and in Seattle and in New York and in Boston. The reality is, while we have clients all over North America, we have a very small concentration on the coast where we thrive is in the heartland. So our typical client is in Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Ohio, Illinois. We’ve just started to do more work in Alabama. We’re moving more into Florida, and so people are always surprised, why do you work in these sort of heartland states.

Why? We say because when we show up, and we talk about the values of taking care of your people, taking care of your communities, being an unapologetic capitalist. But also feeling like, and this is my private equity friends have a double take on this, what we say is the way to maximize profits is to focus on more than maximizing profits. This is the magic, is if I actually focus on the long game and taking care of my customers and creating value and taking care of my employees and retaining that talent and taking care of my vendors, and yes, I have to negotiate with my vendors but doing it in a way where it’s sustainable for all of us, and they can continue to make money so they can reinvest back in their operation and better serve us. That dynamic tension in stakeholder management. If we actually focus on all of that, we can actually make more money through time than just being maniacally focused on the profit. When we show up and talk to a second generation distribution business in Louisiana, they’re like, “That just makes sense to me. Why wouldn’t everyone think like that? There’s this almost natural fit in these more traditional environments relative to a Seattle or San Francisco.

David Gardner: You get the customers you deserve, certainly a truism in this world, also the suppliers and partners you deserve and we’re talking in and around conscious capitalism a little bit. I want to move our investing discussion briefly, there Rand, because conscious capitalism is central to the philosophy at stake, and you have been on the board. I was on the board for, I don’t know, eight years, and you were on the board like five years before that, and you’re still on the board. Rand you were one of the great living conscious capitalists, and I mean that sincerely and in the most beautiful way. I’ve learned a lot, and so many of us have learned a lot from you. I’ve never even been through the leadership academy. You have touched so many lives. What does it mean to you, Rand Stagen, to be a conscious investor? A lot of long time Rule Breaker listeners already know, in some cases, but we’re always reaching new people. You’re always reaching new people and when you say something like conscious investor, that just sounds like fru-fru language to some people. How do the principles of conscious capitalism shape the way you think about investing, whether it’s in companies or people or society?

Rand Stagen: I’ll just simply swap out the word conscious, and I’ll use a couple of other synonyms, deliberate, intentional, choiceful. It’s like, well, do we want to do our investing in a deliberate and choiceful and disciplined way, or do we want to do it in a more reactive scrambling way?

David Gardner: Random.

Rand Stagen: Random. I would say that a conscious approach to investing whatever we’re investing in is a form of playing offense as opposed to defense, and it’s a form of playing offense continuously, and this is important. I did not understand the difference between the word continual and continuous until just a few years ago, and I thought they were the same. I can tell you that if someone plays golf, let’s say they’re a junior high or a high school golfer, and they play just during the golf season, and she plays golf season in freshman year and sophomore year and junior year and senior year, so that would be an example of an athlete who only plays golf during golf season. That’s a continual orientation to golf versus someone who plays golf year round, including their season, that’s a continuous approach to the game of golf. Continuous is like a infinity symbol, and it’s just a constant commitment. I say a conscious investor is a deliberate investor whose commitment to whatever they’re investing in is continuous.

David Gardner: Rand, you and I have talked over the years about business, we’ve talked a lot about culture. We haven’t talked a lot about stocks. Let’s do that briefly here. Many people don’t invest in stocks at all. They index, and certainly at Motley Fool, we have endorsed that from our very first book. We totally agree and get the idea to index your investments, especially if you’re paying a very low fee, and you’re not putting your money instead in overpriced mutual funds that underperformed. We’re huge fans of indexing, and I love stocks, I love investing directly in stocks. I think that being choiceful, your words, deliberate about picking good companies, not just all the companies, which, by the way, is what index funds do, they have to buy all the companies. That’s really worked well for me. Rand, do you invest in individual stocks? Do you have a story or two here? Do you just index? Share with us.

Rand Stagen: Yeah. I would say that I primarily orient my investing outside of the stocks and bonds world. I do have a more of an indexing approach just with my personal investments, with a wealth manager that I just trust, and we invest there. We also do private investing in real estate and in other private equity opportunities that are a little bit longer term. The real estate might be 10 years of orientation. Then I for fun, will invest in individual stocks, not as a way of generating long term wealth, but as a way of just being in the game, and so thanks to you and your brother, I found Markel Corporation, and that would be an example of an individual stock that I own that I will not be selling.

David Gardner: That’s fantastic, Rand. That’s more credit to Tom, who’s been more of the Markel fan over the years. Lots of Motley Fool Markel fans, and lots of people listening right now who own Markel. I totally get that, and I appreciate that. I’m curious, Rand, you meet so many great heartland businesses. You just spoke to that and costs too. Do you have a standard where you never invest in your clients? Or since you have an incredible window into your clients, now I know a lot of them are private companies where it would be a special investment, do you ever invest in your clients?

Rand Stagen: Well, I don’t have the opportunity to invest in my clients because the very nature of the client profile that we target is private businesses, and so.

David Gardner: You can still pick off 5%, Rand. You can still say we need a 1% to work with you guys, going that big.

Rand Stagen: I would say that I feel a great sense of ownership and mutual commitment with our long-term clients, our partners, that I am investing, David, to be honest with you. I might not be writing a check, but we invest our time and energy. This for us is an act of love, the work that we do with our clients. We are, and you talked a few minutes ago about the warm and fuzzy interpretations of consciousness. If consciousness is about awareness, yes, it’s about being deliberate, but it’s also about being aware. This idea of, with awareness, we have choice. Without awareness, only habit. When we’re conscious, the way we become choiceful is because awareness creates choice. Without awareness, only habits, habituation, reactivity, and we’re in those listeners out there that know the movie, The Matrix, that’s the idea of being asleep or being awake to our lives. When I say, love and people are like, that just sounds so squishy. You’re going to go hug some trees in California. It’s like, really? Let’s talk about the actual pragmatic part of love.

The way that we look at all of us with children, those of us who have children, how we create the conditions for an expression of love that’s supportive, a feminine love, and a version of love that is a more masculine, a more challenging, a more advocacy expression. We are willing to be in relationships, and we pursue relationships with our clients, where there’s an opportunity for that extending of ourselves to our client and for our client to extend themselves back to us, and that gets into trust and that gets into intimacy, and that gets into vulnerability, all of these attributes. By the way, if we were to look at some of the highest-performing sports teams, these are the attributes. The trust drives performance and drives results and drives return. You’re within organizational life and within any kind of team dynamics. People are always like, Rand is such a tree hugger. Really?

David Gardner: (laughs).

Rand Stagen: Let’s look at the performance. Let’s look at the success of the clients that we have the opportunity to work with long term. These are not stories of philanthropy. These are stories of excellence. These are stories of, in some cases of dominating industries. Southwest Airlines would be the cliche of the old days of, wow, they were all about love when Herb Kelleher was leading it.

David Gardner: That was their ticker symbol.

Rand Stagen: That was their ticker symbol.

David Gardner: It is.

Rand Stagen: They are one of the great examples during Herb’s leadership of commitment to a really differentiated way, a strategic mote of how we’re going to use the quality of our relationships to actually drive return for our investors and drive results. We’re not afraid to say that. Because we don’t work with public companies, for the most part, a few exceptions, as I mentioned, we don’t have to worry about the HR people saying, you can’t talk about love. You can’t talk about intimacy. Yes, we can, because the people we work with own the businesses, full stop.

David Gardner: Really appreciate that point, Rand. I love the word love, and I take it as love, and I don’t need it qualified. Although we’ve often heard the Greeks. The Ancient Greeks had 29 different words for love, and there are many different forms that it takes, of course. I think of often other-centeredness, which, by the way, is also known as customer centrism.

Rand Stagen: That’s right.

David Gardner: Jeff Bezos has done a pretty good job loving customers in that way, creating maybe the great business of our time by saying, at the very start, we’re going to become Earth’s most customer-centric company. We don’t even need to debate whether that’s true or not. That was the vision and look what it became. I think love recommends itself, as well as the ticker symbol. Southwest Airlines, not a fantastic stock last 10 years, but you mentioned the 40 or so years before that, and in an industry that was very hard to make profit, Southwest so admirable in so many ways.

Rand Stagen: I want to jump in on a little different angle than just love, because we can use a word care. That’s what Southwest extend it. That’s what Chick-fil-A extends in a much more relational sense of care. That’s what Jeff Bezos and Amazon extends, and people are always like, “Rand, what do you mean? Jeff Bezos and Amazon doesn’t seem like a caring company.” I say, well, when I am washing my dishes a couple of days ago and the brush I use in the kitchen sink breaks that I’m washing my dishes with, and I go to my laptop and I order a new brush, and that night, when I’m doing the dishes, I’m actually using a new brush, that is a form of care. It is the speed and the efficiency in the selection. I feel very cared for when that arrives in that tight window. I also feel a different form of care when I walk into Chick-fil-A and there’s a 16-year-old that’s extending this radiating smile. I’m like, just like you said, love has different expressions, care is expressed in different ways. Some people care at a systems level, and some people care at more of a relational level. There’s a beautiful quote that I love that comes to mind here.

It’s not attributed to any one person, it’s more of a big idea. “Tell me what you care about and I will tell you how big you are.” How big can you play in this lifetime? Are you able to actually extend care to your customers, and to your stakeholders, and to your employees in such a way that gives you a unfair competitive advantage? It continues to come back surprisingly to a lot of people, to a very pragmatic reality of performance through time. But if I’m only going to be leading a business at a public company for three years or four years, I don’t think this is easy logic for somebody to try on. I used to get very frustrated until I became friends with a lot of public company CEOs, and I started to empathize with what it’s like to be them. They’re put into the seat. The incentives are short term in nature, some would even say pathologically short term.

The CEO will say to me, “Rand, I’m probably going to get fired once the market wins turn anyway. There might be an activist investor that comes on and fires me. My own board may fire me. Since they’re probably out to get me, I need to take care of myself and so, yeah, I’m going to operate in a quarterly to one year orientation because at the end of the day, even if I want it to stay here, I’m not even going to have the opportunity to stay here. So why are you talking to me about 10, 20, 30 years from now? That’s not relevant for me.” They’re playing a different game. We’ve talked about the different qualities of love, we’ve talked about the different qualities of care, and we can also talk about the different qualities of urgency. There is a pathological urgency in our country and in the world right now that is most clearly illustrated by social media. The social media, the TikTok and the Snapchat, it’s just this constant alerts of like, “Give me your attention right now.”.

David Gardner: (laughs).

Rand Stagen: I see it with my kids, which is so disturbing. Then there’s a different urgency that can be called an existential urgency. When Martin Luther King took a stand in the civil rights era and said, “We’re not waiting, we’re going to actually act and we’re going to make change now.” That’s urgency, but it’s existential. What we work with our clients on is how can we tease apart the differences and the distinctions and not conflate the qualities of care, the qualities of love, the qualities of urgency, and this requires complexity. I didn’t want to use that word initially, but if you say, “Rand, what’s another way of talking about conscious leadership and conscious investing?”

I would just say a more complex approach to leading and a more complex approach to investing. Because when I’m higher up on the mountain, this elevated approach, a conscious leader is about our conscious capitalism, nonprofit, of which we’re involved in together, and so many of us around the world, our purpose statement is to elevate humanity through business. That’s the purpose of conscious capitalism, to elevate humanity through business. The elevation idea of moving up, vertically up the mountain, means when I get higher up, I can actually see more.

I have more breadth. I can see more to my right and left. I can actually see farther and here’s the coolest part people don’t often think about. The higher up I go, the more life experiences I actually have to draw upon that are beneath me so the depth is actually greater, the higher up I am. So that’s more wisdom. I think, obviously, your listeners are fans for the most part of Warren Buffett. This is using this idea here as a backdrop. This is an investor who I believe has an elevated view. An investor who can see what others can’t see, an investor who plays big. That’s why this isn’t some warm and fuzzy, unicorn conversation we’re having. This is a conversation again about performance and results.

David Gardner: You just said so many things there that could take us 17 different directions and we probably only have I don’t know, like, 30 more minutes. Although, you got to come back, Rand. How could I have waited to 2024 to have this conversation, which I’m enjoying so much? Let me just underline a couple of things. Statistics, most of which I make up, just to make a point, but they’re generally true. Statistics say things like the average public market CEO become CEO at the age of 63 and we’ll be on for 3.7 years. Again, a made up, but generally drastic true statistic and that so underlines what you’re saying. We understand how that person might be trying to hit every quarter. Just think in terms of a year, ironically, even though they’re well up the mountain of their own lives?

That’s where they’re behaving and you described that as pathological. Let me shift because I said we’re going to do investing business in life and that supposedly was all investing. But there was a lot of business and some life packed in already. Let me slightly more formally, aim at business now in this conversation. Our mutual friend Heath said, here’s the thing with Rand. You can have them on and you could just say, Rand, what’s been on your mind lately? The whole podcast can go from there. Well, that’s not the case because we’re in the middle of our tether right now. But Rand, what’s been on your mind lately?

Rand Stagen: Well, I would say that there’s a lot operationally in my own business of leading an organization like many of the listeners lead, whether it’s a full organization or a department or leading even a family unit. I would consider to be an organization. I’m constantly confronted with the challenges of just being me. People ask, what’s it like to be you? I say, it’s fulfilling. It’s meaningful, it’s rich. Sometimes it’s inspiring and fun and sometimes it’s confronting and terrifying and so I used to really work hard to pursue a day when I would be called happy. If there was a rubber band between my hands right now and that rubber band represented the anxiety of being alive and someday when I make the right investment and I have the right return and I have the right marriage and the right kids and the right clients, someday that the tension in that rubber band will actually disappear because as human beings, when we experience distress and we experience anxiety, we assume that something’s going wrong, so we want to actually relieve that tension. In the last decade, it’s a relatively new journey for me in this domain, I’ve really built.

Remember I said earlier, it’s not what happens. It’s how we relate with what happens. I’ve started to build a new relationship to this idea of anxiety and how can I start to see the difference between a productive distress? Like, I went to the gym this morning and I worked out and I worked out with a trainer, and he pushed me really hard. During the exercise, I was saying to myself, I don’t think I’d be doing this if I were here without a workout partner or a trainer. Like this is really hard. At the same time, I realized that I’m going to get that’s a productive distress. I’m going to actually my muscle is going to grow from that and so I’ve started to really recognize that when I have anxiety with my team, with my clients, with my family, that that’s an opportunity to actually see the only reason that I’m feeling anxious, defensive, insecure, threatened is because I have no other way of dealing with that particular moment than feeling those feelings.

What a gift, David? What a gift to actually be like seeing myself in a mirror, when I’m around people and I’m feeling defensive or anxious. Like, oh, what a gift. It’s like being in the ring with someone, and I’m a boxer and it’s a sparring partner. I keep getting smacked in the head with the left hook. I’m like, I need to keep practicing, defending myself against the left hook. The people that are in our lives who actually, we find ourselves most frustrated by actually are the greatest teachers that has been brought into our life. It’s like, wow, how cool is that? That’s on my mind right now of, like, how can I continue to be in a place of deep appreciation for all of the experiences I’m having that I’m not actually equipped to handle besides complaining and being in reactivity. That’s like a meta. I don’t know if that makes any sense, but that is it.

David Gardner: It does make sense. A past guest on this podcast, certainly a friend of this podcast, Shirzad Chamine, who wrote a wonderful book called Positive Intelligence. There’s so many books out there, Rand. I’m not going to assume you’ve read it. You might have. You’re very well studied. But one of the great points that Shirzad makes is he says. Okay, there’s a flame in front of you. You’ve put your hand just above the flame. It hurts. Is that good? Or is that bad? The correct answer is, that is good because your nerves are going to your brain and they’re telling you to take your hand away from the flame. But Shirzad says. It’s amazing how few people understand that with their emotions or their psychology. They keep in that bitter or dark or victimized place, and they return to it, they keep their hand over the flame. It’s really good, positive intelligence, the title of Shirzad’s book.

It’s really positively intelligent to as quickly as possible, pull your hand back from the flame. But what that requires in life, while also appreciate fame, which I think was part of your point, Rand. What that requires in life is self awareness to recognize what’s happening. That is a flame. I have a hand. I need to react in a way that preserves me and that is healthy. It’s physically obvious to us. Psychologically, it’s often not. Emotionally, it’s often not, but something that I’ve appreciated about you. Rand, you were one of the people I was telling my wife, Margaret, before starting the podcast today, Rand is one of those people. The ratio of, like, love the guy and have spent little time with the in the denominator. You’re like, about as high as anybody on Earth. Like, I love you, Rand and we haven’t spent enough time together, but the ratio is amazing. I’ve seen in my interactions with you, a self awareness, and a willingness to confront being uncomfortable and to express anxiety in a way that we can all relate to, and I only can imagine how beneficial that is for your clients. I’m not talking about one or two day off sites. I’m talking about decades so really appreciate that. I want to underline that. I just we’re not going to have time for all the questions I wanted to ask, Rand, but I do want to ask a little bit of the Stagen story here. You’re an entrepreneur. I deeply appreciate that. You’re in your 25th year. If you reverse the numbers 25, you get to 52, which is that minimum commitment weekly that you want people.

Rand Stagen: There you go.

David Gardner: They work with you, so 25 years, I’m not asking for the full story, but how did it start, Rand and maybe one or two inflection points or things we can all appreciate and learn from?

Rand Stagen: Well, the first thing I would do is say that we’re 25 years in we’re start up. Full on. I don’t say that lightly. It took us two full decades to run the warm up lab of our business. To like, just like I was telling someone that, imagine like back in the 70s with like the Red White and Blue headbands and the red white and blue like wristbands and like I’m stretching. I’m in like that movie semi pro. I’m like, OK, I just warmed up, 20 years, warmed up, got the fundamentals of the business model, pricing, segmentation, ideal customer profile, technology. We are doing something in this business, which is in some ways, incredibly exciting because it’s never been done before. In other ways, it’s terrifying because it’s never been done before. There’s a pioneering spirit to what we’re up to.

David Gardner: What are you doing that’s never been done before?

Rand Stagen: The stand that we’ve talked about of recognizing the difference between training and development. There’s nothing inherently good or bad about either. They’re just different. Training is something that we do that is a now need. We hire someone into our company and we have sales forces as our technology platform. We need to train them on sales force, and that needs to happen within a couple of weeks. The ROI on building that skill is immediate and it’s beautiful and we all want to actually use training. But that’s very different than development. Development is something that we do for the long term, and it’s something that we do around true growth. Let’s give a very simple way of describing this. An acorn, if everyone can just visualize an acorn, an acorn, if I were holding it up in front of you, inside of an acorn exists the entire blueprint for an oak tree. This is a little bit of a cliche, like, oh, an acorn has everything it needs to become oak.

David Gardner: It’s sill amazing to think about.

Rand Stagen: Now, let’s talk about what is not discussed. If that acorn falls out of a tree onto a brick road, a piece of cement, nothing happens with that latent potential. If you plant that acorn in a courtyard that’s got four feet by four feet, surrounded by cement, but it has some nice soil and you water it, make sure it’s in light conditions. Within several years, a beautiful tree will emerge in that, let’s say, it’s in the back of an office in that courtyard. If we were to take the exact same acorn, and we were to put it into an open field, and we were to have no physical constraints, and we would allow it to grow for not just decades, but for hundreds of years, we would see an enormous angel oak, which we have around the United States. These huge trees. What’s the difference between the cement, the small courtyard, and the angel oak? It is the environment. It’s not the cliche of the acorn, it’s the environment.

As leaders, what environment are we creating to actually set the conditions for the latent potential to actually emerge. Now, with our children, we absolutely understand development because we see what’s possible in our children when they’re 7-years-old, and we say, I could see a 17-year-old here. I have a 17-year-old, I could see a 27-year-old here. I could see a 27-year-old, I could see a 47-year-old, and so we have this natural capacity to be oriented to development with our family and our children, and what Stagen is doing is bringing these same timeless principles into organizational life and saying, how do we create the conditions for something magical, to emerge from the people who are ultimately under our care. It’s like you and I know Bob Chapman. I don’t know if he has he been on the podcast?

David Gardner: Bob has not been on this podcast. Another neglectful move on my part.

Rand Stagen: He is Barry-Wehmiller’s organization, and he’s thousands of employees, and it’s amazing family of organizations. He talks about this idea that when we think about our children, and we think about our children going off to work. Eventually, they leave, we empty nest, we send them off, and they go to work, and we think about, what do we want for our own children in the context of long term development? Well, the reality is that the people who work for us, and this is Bob’s idea, they are someone’s children. They are someone’s children who are actually under our care. They are acorns that are working for us. What are we doing to actually create the conditions and take on that responsibility? When we talk to organizations and leaders, in particular, the CEO about this, if this is dismissed as something that has nothing to do with business performance, we just say, no, we don’t work with those people because they are not a fit for us.

This is about customer segmentation and customer fit. This is what’s new and different and so if you were to say, let’s mention another Conscious Capitalism board member, Greg Massey. I met Greg and it was many years ago. The first United Community Bank, was 1.6 billion in assets. They were just in Oklahoma at the time, second generation family business. I talked with Greg, and I said, Greg, we had a three hour initial meeting. We were introduced by a mutual friend. I said, Greg, when you think about the future of First United, how far out do you see? Even back then, he knew my commitment to long termism. He said he paused and he said, you know, I actually have a sense for the next 25 years, directionally, what I want for First United Bank. After 25 years, it gets a little fuzzy, and then he paused and he wasn’t joking. He said, is that a long enough answer for us to consider working together? I laughed and I said, absolutely. Well, David, that was 17 years ago.

We have been continuously partnered with Greg and his organization, my faculty, his team for 17 years, continuously with no interruption. The ability to ride shotgun, just like you ride shotgun on an investment that you make, or your listeners are actually able to stay with a company for five, 10, 15, 20 years, we’ve been with First United Bank. They’ve gone from 1.6 billion in assets. They’ve just hit about 16 billion, and they’re on their way to 20 billion, and they are currently the fastest-growing private bank in the United States. Now, here’s the fascinating part. I told Greg 15 years ago, the day is going to come when people are going to start coming from around the United States and visiting you like they did with Southwest Airlines and HR directors and leadership teams, to try to find out what is it that you’re doing? What’s your secret sauce? That is now happening. There are people visiting their corporate headquarters, constantly wanting to learn from them. It’s another cliche, the 20 year overnight success. Now, let me just finish this story with Greg, because it’s all about Greg. You talked about, we get the customers we deserve and we get the stakeholders we deserve, we say that leaders get the organization they deserve. The organization couldn’t evolve beyond Greg. No organization can evolve beyond its top leader or top leadership team, they’re the glass ceiling there. Nine years into our work with Greg. I was at the Conscious Capitalism CEO Summit in Austin. You were probably at that event that I had this conversation. A guy comes up to me and says, I just met Greg Massey, he says he’s been working with your leadership academy, him and his team broadly for nine straight years. Oh, my gosh, that’s a long time, this guy said to me. (laughs) Then he said.

David Gardner: Would you do a two day off side for us Rand.

Rand Stagen: Exactly. The guy is a little bit perplexed, and he goes nine years. How’s it going with Greg from your perspective? I took a breath and I wasn’t joking, and I looked at him and I said, it’s too early to tell. It’s only been nine years. If you were to say to me today, Rand, 17 years in with Greg and his team, how are you feeling? I’m really encouraged. We’re almost at that first 25 year milestone. When Greg talks about First United, he talks multi generationally. Greg is not trying to figure out how he’s going to sell this to a strategic buyer. What he’s already got an ESOP component, so he’s already got his business family as equity stakeholders. But this is a quality of leadership. This is a commitment to a long game. If anyone wants to go because it’s all public and see the performance of First United Bank, relative to their peers, this is not something to take lightly. He has a high performing and his return has been phenomenal. It’s like people think, I’m either going to be this warm and fuzzy, philanthropic, make the world better person, or I’m going to be this hardcore capitalist.

David Gardner: Nope, the both.

Rand Stagen: We’re going to do both. We’re going to integrate and that goes back to complexity. How do we pursue an integrated life as opposed to a compartmentalized life? Because when we compartmentalize our life, we have to spend all this energy putting these walls up between our work and our family and our spirituality and our hobbies, as opposed to how do we pursue an integrated life?

David Gardner: That’s so eloquent and what a great example you just shared Greg Massey and First United. I love the 25 year answer that you initially gave and that you’re coming upon that. Rand, you’re at 25 years for your own company. Again, this is not a deep dive on the Stagen story, but congratulations on a remarkable first quarter of a century for what you started 25 years ago. Again, there are 17 directions I’d like to go and dwindling time. We’re going to be playing buy seller hole to close, so I already know that. Probably I only have two awesome questions left to ask you, and I have to pick from each. I’m going to go with the role of business in moving society forward. Some of this could be construed by the alert listener from what we’ve already talked about, but I want you to take us forward from anything we’ve already said, Rand Stagen. It’s often said we live in a polarized world.

By the way, if we keep saying that all the time, I’m not sure how we get unpolarized. If everybody keeps saying we’re hyperpolarized, I don’t know how we stop saying that. I’m a little tired of saying that, but it is an election year, etc. Rand, you’ve said that businesses, particularly the leaders within them, must be the agents of change. Again, a lot of people think it’s the vote they cast in November. That’s going to be the mandate for change or preservation. Rand how do you see private businesses playing a role in moving society forward?

Rand Stagen: I think many of your listeners already know the broad data on this around trust, and the Edelman Trust Index and where are the trusted stakeholders in society? Americans no longer trust our politicians. Americans do not trust the nonprofits and the NGOs, the way that we did back, 30, 40, 50 years ago. The highest trust in leadership is actually within corporate leadership, and in particular, within private businesses, where they know they’re actually being led by someone who has a commitment to the long term of that organization. At Stagen, we say with awareness creates choice, and we’ve already talked about that. We have one more build. With awareness there is choice, and with awareness and choice, there is responsibility. When we get higher up on the mountain, and we can see things that other people can’t see, and we’re business leaders who have the trust of our employees and our stakeholders, we are responsible. There is a noblesse oblige.

There is a noble obligation here to actually lead, not just lead my business, but lead my teams and lead my stakeholders in service of a future on the other side of this hot mess, which is our current state. I’ll give yo very simple and very powerful, slightly academic way of thinking about this. Sometimes called the dialectic. There’s three elements of the dialectic. There’s the thesis, there’s the antithesis to that thesis and then there is, here it is elevation, a higher-order, synthesis. The part of America that is American exceptionalism and the foundations of classical liberalism that this country is based on. There are people in that camp, let’s call that the thesis camp that actually are committed to protecting and preserving what’s right with America. I want to honor those people. There are things that need to be protected and preserved about America. That’s more on the political right, the conservatives to conserve.

Then on the political left, we have the progressives with their fists up in the air saying, there are things about America that are not working that we need to fix. It’s like, I honor those people. They want to fix what’s wrong with America, and other people want to preserve what’s right with America. Now, the shadow of that is that instead of seeing the partial benefit and truth in both of those sides, we actually see those sides, only seeing the worst in each other. They only see the shadow in the other. Then there’s this third group, which is where we’re trying to take our clients, and which is what I’m trying to in some small way, help conscious capitalism create, which is that higher-order synthesis camp. That camp that says, we actually see the value and the beauty in both of those positions, the conservative position, the progressive position. We actually are going to synthesize and create something. This is not a centrism move. We need to find some common ground around our common humanity to create the foundation for us to then use to go to higher ground. The common ground creates the solid ground that then allows us to move up to a higher ground, to a synthesis. We have to ask ourselves, all of us who are on the podcast right now. I don’t want to say that the higher ground is the right camp, because if we don’t have the conservatives and the progressives banging into each other like tectonic plates, we don’t have the energy for transformation and change.

We need both of those spirits, and we also need the synthesizers. I am not going to surrender to this deconstructing moment of our country. I do not believe that America needs to be deconstructed, destroyed, and we need to start over. I believe we need to reconstruct America based on the parts of our country that need to be preserved, and the parts of our country that need to be changed and transformed for the future. This is, David, if you’re like, what’s really on my mind? What’s really on my mind is how are we going to mobilize, I don’t care if you call them conscious leaders, or if you call them higher ground leaders, or if you call them integral leaders, labels are not important. What’s important is that everyone listening, recognize that we don’t have the luxury to simply be in the stands and just watch this. We’ve got to get in, we’ve got to participate, and we’ve got to find our common humanity in each other because that is the place that solid ground exists and there is a beautiful future for a generation. I don’t know if it’s going to be ours or our kids or our unborn grandkids. But I’m remaining very committed to the role of business leadership in healing, transforming and advancing our world.

David Gardner: Beautifully said. Arthur Brooks, who has written many wonderful books, writes for the Atlantic, the Happiness Cum, but Arthur Brooks wrote a great book a few years ago called Love Your Enemies. We talked about it on this podcast. In particular, he was underlining contempt which, by definition, basically means talk to the hand. I don’t even think of you as human person on the other side who disagrees with me. I’m not going to treat you with dignity or respect. That is the fundamental problem, sometimes being modeled by leaders in our society. Often then getting the clicks by the media companies that for-profit and I like for profit, but let’s face it. A lot of this is being force-fed to many through the media that they are choosing to consume that has them treating other people in a dehumanized fashion. We know that at its worst, humanity does that. That’s what leads to all kinds of horrific crimes against humanity over the centuries when we don’t treat the other as human. I totally appreciate that point about our common humanity. I think most of us listening, get it.

Yet it’s not, as you just said, Rand, it’s not enough to get it, get in the game, and I really appreciate that point. Maybe one other point that comes to mind, Rand, this is perhaps a pet point, not P point, pet perk of mine. That is a reminder that often in America, but many other countries, besides, people tend to look at the government as if it’s this massive thing. It certainly is a larger bureaucracy in the United States today than it was 100 or 200 years ago. But often, I think people forget or just don’t know that the private sector is so much larger than the public sector.

I’m born in Washington, DC. It might look like Washington DC is a big deal in the federal government and your state government is a big deal. They are incredibly outnumbered by businesses and indeed, businesses every day are delivering the products and services that brush that helps you wash your dishes tonight that’s being delivered by the private sector. We have proliferated in a beautiful way, especially in the US, but many other countries, besides solutions, products and services every day that enrich our lives and enable us to flourish. The vast majority of that’s coming from the private sector. Most of us work for the private sector creating those products and services. By the way, some of the biggest multinational corporations, Apple comes to mind, have larger cash hoards than many other sovereign governments. I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I think Apple has been well motivated to care for me as Amazon has, and has built up the goodwill in the form of strong balance sheets in a way that many governments don’t. Ironically, I’m not going to continue this Rand much past this. Ironically, multinational corporations are so much more powerful than governments because they can go across borders. Their is a remarkable capacity for the private sector.

I’m not talking about the future. It’s already happening. It’s been happening for decades. When you see those market caps roll up to trillions of dollars these days, that’s for very logical. I believe generally good reasons, and we’re invested as Fools and Rule Breakers in those companies. I do want to point out, in this election year, while so much of it, especially because it’s put out there by the media for understandable reasons, it seems like it’s all about a day in November. It really isn’t. The day before, your private sector is delivering you the things that you probably love and need and the day after as well. Rand, we’re about to go to our final pre-game section. But I want to give you an opportunity just to react to anything I just said there (inaudible).

Rand Stagen: I don’t have much to add. You and I are both unapologetic card carrying capitalists. We recognize that capitalism has a light in a shadow, just like everything, and that when the shadow is portrayed as the totality of something, which is what is often the case when capitalism is criticized, we’re being portrayed as the worst parts of capitalism which, by the way, there are externalities, and there is greed and cronyism, and there are always environmental destruction. These are true. There are so many positives that outweigh those negatives. I like you, will continue to stand for the continued progression of capitalism, and this is the idea, how do we have capitalism, not replace capitalism, not deconstruct capitalism, not destroy capitalism, but to evolve capitalism?

Your idea of, in recognition of the multinational and let’s global nature of this one market that we live in. You’re making my point again, the responsibility to be a leader of even a mid size or even a small business in America. It used to be your scope of concern would only be in the geographic area that you served. But now small businesses are having customers all over the world. What is the responsibility to lead in a global marketplace? It’s back to private businesses. I would say.

David Gardner: Indeed, we have two last parts of this conversation together. We’re going to close with buy, seller, hold. You don’t know what’s coming. I’m looking I’m already rubbing my hands together. You’re going to play the game. But before that, I asked you cause again, our mutual friend Heath said, I don’t know if you know this about Rand, but he loves great quotes. He’s got them. He’s a decade or building up great quotes. You probably don’t know this Rand because I wish you did, but I don’t think you listened to my podcast. Every week.

Rand Stagen: Every week.

David Gardner: Over the course of 500 or so podcasts, every week, Cal Ripken never taken a day off here for into 10 years now. Have done 19 separate episodes called Great Quotes Volume X. One through 19. Each of those is about a 40 minute thought trotting out five quotes that I love that I want to explain for investing for business and for life for Fools and Rule Breakers, why I love this quote. As soon as I heard from Heath, Rand has this. I’m like, this is not a new great quotes episode. This is a sampler, but Rand, I asked you, would you bring maybe up to five beautiful quotes. We don’t have time really to do much more right now than just listen to them. But I would love for you to share up to five quotes. Sure, add a sentence or two of stake and context, if you like. But that is a chapter I’ve been waiting for for this conversation. It’s the pen’s ultimate chapter.

Rand Stagen: If I have properly curated my quotes, I will need to add no commentary to my quotes. So (inaudible) please I printed out about 10, and I’m going to pick five based on our conversation wherever I feel called to go. Number 1, if you’re not confused, you’re not paying attention, (laughs) Tom Peters. Number 2, reality is an acquired taste, Robert Fritz. Number 3, and this one’s new to my collection just last week. Only the future is certain, the past is always changing Douglas Schofield. Number 4, cherish those who seek the truth, but beware of those who find it Voltaire. That speaks to our righteousness in our society right now. This last one, I’m going to go six because I got to smuggle in Bill Gates.

David Gardner: You know what? This is the Rule Breaker podcast. You can do that.

Rand Stagen: This one, I’ve been saving the entire podcast for the end. Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in 10 years, Bill Gates, how might we all be underestimating ourselves as future decades. Last but not least the existential philosopher Peter Koestenbaum, one of my personal heroes, 97-years-old, still alive?

David Gardner: I don’t know him.

Rand Stagen: If Aristotle were alive today, he would be reincarnated as Peter Koestenbaum and here it is. The only problem rests with people who do not have a commitment to greatness, who drift, running on idle most of the time. They do not value the fact that they are alive and they feel no obligation to make sense of their lives. They coast, slumber and do not wish to be awakened. They are not the artists in business, the reformers in life or the missionaries and organizations. They live below the line. Peter Koestenbaum.

David Gardner: So we are readers. We just came off of August, which annually on this podcast, I call authors in August. Is there a book? Is there a title that comes to mind of Peter Koestenbaum work? Again, I’m not familiar with I obviously should be. He’s Aristotle, and he’s 97. I’ve been living along inside him for 58 years. Or is he somebody who emerges through academia through white papers, etc. Rand, do you have a reading recommendation?

Rand Stagen: He’s more of an academic and I wouldn’t want people to try to tackle his work. However, if everyone would go to (Alphabet‘s) Google and Google his name, Peter Koestenbaum, K-O-E-S-T-E-N-B-A-U-M, and Fast Company Magazine. From 2000, a very short four-page interview that he did with that magazine with Polly Lobel, Conscious Capitalist. Polly told me when I met her 15 years ago at our Conscious Capitalism CEO summit. I was like, you did the interview with Peter Koestenbaum. I’ve read it now over 150 times. I still don’t understand it. It’s four pages. She said she was one of the founding editors of Fast Company and she said, he was the most challenging piece I’d ever done in my career up to that point because he is a Harvard physicist. He’s a psychologist, he’s a philosopher and he has a PhD in theology. This is one of the world’s leading thinkers that’s still breathing, like, litter down playered Earth, in my opinion. This Fast Company interview written by Polly Lobel will blow your listener’s mind.

David Gardner: I can’t wait.

Rand Stagen: Yes.

David Gardner: I can’t wait, plus, I was asking for, like 254 pages. You gave us four. You’re a hero. Who doesn’t love a good four-page espresso shot. I’m really looking forward to that. Thank you. I was gonna misguess the spelling of Peter Koestenbaum, so really appreciate that as well, Rand, are you ready to play buy, seller, hold on Rule Breaker Investing?

Rand Stagen: Ready to play buy, sell, hold.

David Gardner: Great. These are not stocks. These are things. But if they were stocks, Rand Stagen would you be buying, selling or holding? Let’s get started. The first one up. Long-termism in business, overtaking short-term thinking by 2035.

Rand Stagen: Hold.

David Gardner: Why?

Rand Stagen: It doesn’t warrant an answer. It’s so clear. (laughs)

David Gardner: I was having fun putting a time frame on it that was 10 years. I’m not even sure how we’d measure whether long-term and business had overtaken short-term thinking by 2035, but I just wanted to lead off with it. We’re holding.

Rand Stagen: We’re holding, baby.

David Gardner: Next one up. The rise of AI means the CEO of 2050 will be an AI program, not a human buy, sell or hold?

Rand Stagen: Sell. AI is going to be a tool. Obviously, there’s concerns about what happens if AI become sentient and I believe in humanity’s ability to innovate our way through those real dilemmas. But I believe I’m long on humanity and I can’t get behind anything or anyone who says that we’re at the end. I’m not going into the terminator lands. I’m not going there.

David Gardner: Let’s stick with humanity Number 3 of 5. Ted Lasso. Is it the greatest leadership show on TV with lessons that rival any business school Ted Lasso, buy, sell or hold?

Rand Stagen: I would say Season 1, buy. Just keep it there. Keep it there on TV, baby. Just season 1. Amazing. Watch it over and over again.

David Gardner: Well said. No spoilers for those who have it like me, actually finished the show. I think I’m mired somewhere in Season 3. The Mustache. Obviously, a distinctive thing about Ted Lasso, Rand, I’ve known you as a clean cut guy here for the 12 or 13 years, I’ve known you. Have you ever tried the stache?

Rand Stagen: I have never tried to stache. Although my hair style has said to me on Saturday, maybe I should grow for November. I should grow out a mustache. Maybe this is synchronicity is the second time in 48 hours. Someone’s asked me about this. (laughs)

David Gardner: I’ll keep my eyes peeled. I know I’m going to see you in October at the Condo Capitalism summit beforehand, so we can talk more about that. Number 4, buy, sell, hold Rand Stagen, in the future, that most leaders will have embraced a four day work week, but still secretly work six days buy, sell or hold. That’s a complex one, because I threw a couple of things at you in one question.

Rand Stagen: You did. Is that going to be the future reality that I want to I sell that. I don’t think that’s going to happen. I think that we’re going to get to a really productive four day week in which we’re going to be so aided by AI and technology. We’re going to be so productive that I think that we’re going to maybe, for the first time in the history of American capitalism and workforce. We may actually find ourselves in a much healthier version of work. I see that on the horizon.

David Gardner: I really appreciate that. Again, it was almost an unfair question, because I’m asking you both, is the four day work week a thing? Yet, there can be the tendency sometimes for leaders publicly to embrace something, but then they themselves are not working four days. They’re working seven or at least six.

Rand Stagen: This is the dilemma here for your question. I think your question has incredible flaws in its logic.

David Gardner: Thank you.

Rand Stagen: We’re suggesting that my work in my play. You’re welcome. My work and my play must be separated. Remember I said earlier, if we compartmentalize our lives. Robert Fritz has a poem that has aligned something to the effect of where my two eyes make one in sight and work is play for mortal sakes. Is the deed ever truly done for heaven and the future’s sake. I actually believe that we can have a way of being a much more integrated life where we don’t go to work clock in clock out and then have three days off, where our work and our life, our vocation and avocation are one and this is really my vision and hope for the future of humanity that we don’t have this separation that’s so artificial. I refuse to answer. I rescind my answer. I do not agree with the question.

David Gardner: Truth be told, I didn’t really like the question either. Although it was awfully complex and I know earlier anyway, we were embracing complexity on this.

Rand Stagen: The religious scholar at Snowden Vin Dave has a quote, I’m sneaking to another quoted. Complexity has a PR problem.

David Gardner: Nice.

Rand Stagen: Complexity has a PR problem.

David Gardner: Well, let’s stick with the future for our final buy, sell or hold. We’re asking Rand Stagen to cast his eye toward the year. Let’s go with 2050. Buy sell or hold Rand, the concept of retirement disappearing by 2050 replaced by lifelong learning and purpose driven living.

Rand Stagen: Buy.

David Gardner: Why?

Rand Stagen: That’s to my earlier statement. I feel like we are evolving and becoming more complex and becoming a more integrated species. I think that the days of compartmentalization and unnecessary separation are going to be in the rear view mirror. I think there’s going to be an incredible future. Now, I don’t think we’re going to get there, just like up into the right. When we zoom out and look at the S&P. Oh, it’s a great picture. But when we zoom in, it’s really rough. I think we’re in for a rough decade. I think this is going to be a painful decade or two, geopolitically, culturally, even with all my optimism, I feel like one of the reasons that we need to stay in the tension is that this is going to require resilience in leadership that is operating not from the finite game, as author James Carse would say, but the infinite game. The finite game, we want to win the game. The infinite game, we want to ensure the game continues. Humanity continues.

David Gardner: We want to keep playing. But one things for certain people are certainly living longer than ever before, and probably even more than that into future. I think it’s fair to say, more and more of us are craving more fulfilling lives. That concept of retirement, you’re right, compartmentalizes the work portion of our time on Earth. Then I don’t work anymore. We try to narrow, ideally, a lot of us think the work portion, and then we try to have this great long retirement, except that a lot of people once they hit retirement, find they get bored of golf after six months, and they’re trying to figure out what they should do. Next. Anyway, Rand Stagen, you have been generous with your quotations, with your insights with the love and I mean that with the L and the help that you gave me and our Rule Breaker listeners. I’m delighted. This was your debut on this podcast. This will not be your only appearance. I wish you the best, my friend, and I’ll see you in October.

Rand Stagen: Thank you so much. I love that I got to break a few rules and I would like to come back and break some more with you.