Hi, I am here with Joshua Spodek, He is a three-time TEDx speaker, #1 bestselling author of Initiative and Leadership Step by Step, host of the award-winning This Sustainable Life podcast, and professor at NYU. He holds a PhD in astrophysics and an MBA from Columbia, where he studied under a Nobel Laureate and helped launch a satellite (having emerged from some of Philadelphia’s most dangerous neighborhoods). He left academia to found a venture to market an invention that showed animated images to subway riders between stations.

Ari Gronich 0:07  

Welcome back to another episode of create a new tomorrow I am your host Ari Gronich and I have with me Josh spodek. Now, this is a guy I thought I had a pre interview with him, I was really excited to talk to him. He's a three time TEDx speaker, this guy has, he's a best selling author of this book initiative and leadership, step by step, the sustainable life podcast is award winning with that. Professor at NYU, you've even you know, taught leadership at West Point with the director of US Secretary of Defense, right?

Joshua Spodek 0:47  

Yes, he's since become the secretary defense. Is that because of working with me, I can't say for sure. Well,

Ari Gronich 0:52  

well, we'll get into that, we'll get into that. So tell us a little bit about your background and why leadership was such an important role. And the reason I want to preface this for the audience, the reason I'm so excited is because I am really looking at the deep dive into leadership and what makes people leaders, what makes people followers, and so on. So I'm really excited to have Josh here.

Joshua Spodek 1:16  

Well, glad to be here. And I'll start with a very brief part about beforehand. If you want to know more, let me know. Because growing up, I was pretty nerdy, pretty geeky, I got a PhD in physics, I helped build a satellite that's orbiting the Earth right now. And for a while I really thought physics, I want to be a physicist. And then I ended up leaving, after got my PhD to start my first company, and was very successful that was successful, then can the recession and it's difficult times, I got squeezed out by the investors, very painful experience. Could not by that point, I severed my ties with academia. So I couldn't really go back. I ended up going to business school. And that's where I found classes and leadership. Awesome. So we

Ari Gronich 2:01  

talked about this a little bit. And in my, in my witnessing of the world, right, I feel like Kennedy was probably, at least as a president, the last great leader of our country. And the thing that I think made him a leader is not only did he bring people along with his vision, but he gave mandates he gave direction to those visions, he said, we're going to go to the moon by the end of the decade, go do that. And then all of a sudden, people started flocking to create what he kind of mandated, we should do. So where do you think that that's lacking in the leadership? And how does your you know your vision of leadership, address those kinds of things, so that we can move forward faster versus wait for another great leader to show up?

Joshua Spodek 2:54  

Okay, so I'm gonna take the last that you said there, what can we what can we do ourselves instead of just waiting for the next great leaders show up? Is it learning social and emotional skills, performance skills, is different than learning things about factual recall things that you can take verbal tests for write papers about, you can write papers about leadership, but the actual practice of it, you have to face you have to understand yourself, you have to learn empathy, compassion, listening, as well as confidence. And these are not things you can read your way into, or write your way into. So

Ari Gronich 3:33  

just to go on in my background, right? Every time I've ever had a position of leadership, it was in a style of master apprentice, right. So I had somebody who was teaching me how to be a leader. And then as a leader, I would be teaching somebody how to be what I'm doing, right. So I always had a master apprentice kind of relationship in that way. And it was very experiential. And I just want to kind of come back to what you just said, about doing the practice of, and knowing your traumas, or knowing your history, because I've always told people that what I'm doing trauma, work with them if you want to get on a camera, but you're afraid of what people will think of you. The only way to do that is to get on that camera with people who are safe. And so if you keep rebuilding the same, or if you rebuild the somatic trauma with new somatic experiences, you'll be able to then reprogram that neuro pathway. And as you do that, you get more and more comfortable being on stage, for instance, that kind of what you're saying with regards to leadership.

Joshua Spodek 4:50  

Yeah, I mean, you said building neural pathways. It's the I would just simply say learning. It's to learn to do things. It is effective. Forming neural pathways you're learning. And you have to, you have to practice these things. I mean, if you simply read about leadership, you will learn how to read about leadership. That's different than it's like learning, reading about playing piano. It teaches you how to read how to play piano, but only fingers on the keyboard to it, that's the same thing that's going to certain neural pathways.

Ari Gronich 5:24  

Right. So tell me about about that westpoint gig. You know, you're you're working with professors who are also Captain through colonels, you know, typically, you're working with the student population who's looking to become the next leader, and officer. And I'll tell you the truth, when I when I spent four years of my life and Air Force Junior ROTC, which, you know, doesn't sound like a lot, but it was, it was an interesting experience, because my experience of the leadership was really all about ego. If somebody had joined two weeks before me and didn't know half of what I knew their word still got accepted as fact, versus what is the truth or optimization. And so, within military, I always find that there's so much what's the word overage of, of duties, like, somebody who's knows his business is being told to do his business and then has to do it twice or three times? Right. And so that leadership doesn't really translate to, to trust in the person that you have hired. Whereas in business, we're starting to learn that you've got to like, not micromanage. And so within regards to West Point, and what you're doing with the military there, how does that micromanage versus leadership, and, and breaking the ego of leadership so that it's really more of a service position versus a I am a leader? position?

Joshua Spodek 7:07  

Well, just a lot there. I don't know if I can cover all of that. And you distinguish between micromanagement and leadership, that what I heard, I would make the distinction between authority and leadership. And, and so your experience in the military is much greater than mine. And by the way, I appreciate your service. And it was, it was just Memorial Day. And it's, I have a deep appreciation for the and a greater appreciation for the freedom that I have as a result of having spent time with the military, very limited time. But my understanding is that there's a chain of command. And if you're given a direct order, you gotta follow a lawful direct order. But that's the last thing you want to rely on. You can rely on authority if you have to, and what is authority, if not, the ability to hurt someone, if they don't do what you tell them to do? Well, that's almost an invitation for them to undermine that authority if they can, because I don't want you to hurt me, if I don't do what you tell me to do. But if you can find out why I, if you can find something, a motivation inside me that you can connect with the task, then I'll want to do it for my intrinsic motivation. That's what I really work on. That's not very well taught in school. And, and yet, it's not that hard to teach.

Ari Gronich 8:24  

watching out for the manipulation. Right. So I want to just kind of break that part of, you know, we're talking about motivation can be used for good or bad, right? So once you get a hold of their motivation, right, so how does somebody tell if somebody who's leading them is gathering their motivations for the benefit or the not benefit? So motivations that could be like, well, I want you to take this poison, because it'll be good for the country, right? Or I want you to, you know, it's like, so how do I get Okay, so I know that you're really, really patriotic, right? And so you will take that poison, because you believe fully that it's good for the country. So that would be to me like a, what could possibly be an abuse of leadership versus something that would be more positive? So how do we how do we, as a listener, as an audience member who's maybe being led or wanting to lead, how do they make sure that they do it with pure motivation? Or that they're being led from somebody who has pure motivation, versus being led through fraud or, you know, that's the word. withholding of information not being completely authentic?

Joshua Spodek 9:54  

Well, this so this is pretty powerful stuff and you're working with people's deep emotions and you could easily hurt someone this way. You definitely when you do this, and it takes months to develop it, or years, some people stumble on it maybe founded as a child just to happen to get a technique like it. And Eisenhower said, you know, leadership, paraphrase here is getting him to do your thing for his reason. And so if the very similar to what I'm talking about, and you will, when someone opens up with you and shares these things, you will feel a Machiavellian feeling of like, Oh, now I can get them to do things. You will also, even from a purely Machiavellian standpoint, you will recognize, if you use that once that way, that's it, you've lost that you've made an enemy of that person, they're gonna hate you. And so even if you were purely psychopathic, you would recognize I can't speak to what it's like for somebody psychopathic, but if you're, you're gonna realize you, you got one shot at ruining the relationship, this person forever, and you're not gonna want to do it. But they're also going to

Ari Gronich 11:07  

have that set up. That's on a one to one. Let me I'm just gonna interject. So you you consult with politicians. So politicians are famous for making promises and leading people into places where they are literally where the people are literally voting against their own self interests. Right? So yes, on a one on one basis, the person may know, okay, my motivation is a little Machiavellian, I might want to turn that down so that I don't isolate this one person who I'm in relationship with. But when you're a politician, and you're ruling over 100,000 1,000,002 million, or however many, and you don't have those personal relationships, you tend to get led down a wrong line. And so as a as an audience, let's say a voter, right, who's voting for for policy, who wants to know that they're being led by somebody who is being authentic? and non Machiavellian, right? How do they recognize that?

Joshua Spodek 12:10  

Well, I want to recognize that we've completely switched domains. Learning to play piano is one thing, learning how to command an audience at Rock, not rocking at Lincoln Center say, it's a very different thing. showmanship on stage is very different. There's a lot of stage music, session musicians, who are technically proficient and you play music better than anyone, but they can't, you know, work a crowd, right? Likewise, is playing musicians who can they know to chords, but they can work crowd. And so it's very different sets of skills to lead one person one on one was what we were talking about, and leading a large group of people.

Ari Gronich 12:46  

Absolutely, thank you so much for, for coming on. You know, I am a I'm a believer that in order to create a new tomorrow, we have to challenge ourselves like a lobster in its shell, you know, got to break free from one shell before we could get to your next show. It's not comfortable, it's not easy. But if we have more conversations that explore these kinds of, you know, topics, then we'll get to a deeper truth. And that deeper truth, my hope is, will help to activate people's vision for a better world so that they can truly lead themselves and lead others. And, and we can change the world together. So I really appreciate you being on here. So thank you very much for coming.

Joshua Spodek 13:35  

Thank you for having me. I hope that I think I said things that I think me in the past would have benefited from different people may resonate or not, but I hope I hope for some people at least, that we things that we shared, help them further their path.

Ari Gronich 13:50  

Absolutely. Well, thank you so much. And this has been another episode of create a new tomorrow. I've been your host, Ari Gronich with Josh spodek. Thank you so much for coming on. And remember, we're activating your vision for a better world. So what are you going to do today, tomorrow and next week, to really live your perfect life.