[00:00:07] Speaker A: Hi, and welcome to the Cosmic Circle. Or, I guess, the Cosmic Cafe. It's the cosmic circuses podcast. I'm very happy today. We have two amazing guests. Gentlemen, would you like to introduce yourselves?
[00:00:18] Speaker B: Sure. I'm Dr. Sai Islam. I'm an associate professor of psychology at Farmingdale State College and vice president of consulting with Talent Metrics Consulting.
[00:00:28] Speaker C: Hi, I'm Gordon Schmidt. I'm a professor of management at the University of Louisiana, Monroe, and I'm also the director of the School of Management there.
[00:00:37] Speaker A: And we're here to talk about psychology and the MCU. I have your book here, leaders Assemble Leadership in the MCU. And it was a lot of, you know, we're going to talk all about know, you told me a little bit about you. You talk about how this book came to be, like, how you guys met, how you started working together professionally, and where the kernel of this idea for this awesome book came from.
[00:01:08] Speaker B: Well, I like to say that this is Gordon's fault, mostly.
It's mostly his fault. But we met, I believe I'd applied for a job at Purdue Fort Wayne, where Gordon was. I can't even remember what year it was anymore. Maybe 2014, something like that.
Am I right about that? Yeah.
We're going to celebrate like a decade anniversary. I think you need to get me something wood, right?
[00:01:38] Speaker C: Green Lantern esque weakness.
[00:01:40] Speaker B: Yes, very much so.
And so I didn't end up taking that job. And we just stayed friends and we talked about a lot of very nerdy stuff. And then Gordon, I think you heard about the book series, right?
[00:01:55] Speaker C: Yeah. So this is our secret origin of the book is as all secret origins are based on list serves. So there's a listserve for organizational behavior, one of the things that we study, and somebody said, hey, we're doing a book series on exploring popular culture. No, exploring leadership through popular culture. And I was like, hey, Si, you want to write a book on Marvel? You want to propose that? And he's like, I've never written a book. I've never written a chapter. And I was like, don't worry about it, man. We got this. Let's submit something.
So they liked our proposal, and that led to us writing the book. So follow listserves, everybody. They're still vital, at least in academic publishing, which is 20 years at least behind the rest of society.
[00:02:45] Speaker B: The other thing I wanted to add is we've been talking about using pop culture in our classes for a really long time. So this book series is kind of part of that as well.
[00:02:55] Speaker C: Yeah, and so that's the other thing is like, cyanide do research on scientific communication related stuff.
How do we get people to actually understand what we've done? How do we actually communicate with the public about research supported ideas of leadership and management and psychology?
And so we wrote about that, that we need to make things accessible and we need to get that information out there. And so it makes the book very relevant in theory to our work, because this is us doing that. So we said we should we told other academics they should do something. And then oftentimes that means you never actually do it yourself. You just tell people. But this book is us actually doing that. I'm trying to get out here, talking to comic book podcast, talking to people that have never read an article, an academic article in their life, necessarily, and having the book be a way to introduce them to all this great research that could help them to be a better leader, better manager, whatever it is.
This is all work related, which I love saying. That's the case.
[00:03:59] Speaker A: Technically. This is work related for me too. I get to talk to you guys about comic books and comics. So it's the best of all worlds.
[00:04:07] Speaker C: Absolutely.
[00:04:08] Speaker A: One thing I really love about this book is that it's so accessible, and the fact that you guys study scientific communication and getting this stuff out, that comes through with the book. And I think just you did a marvelous job with that.
Many, many years ago, before there was an MCU, I went to business school, and I can remember the examples we had were, I think, Zappos and Enron and Arthur Anderson.
If I had had this, this would have been so much more fun and so much more so, like, I'm very happy for your so, you know, you you've mentioned you're both comic, you kind of connected talking about these nerdy things. I'd love to hear more about your individual journeys through fandom, how it started.
Were you into comic books? Did you start with shows? What's the story there?
[00:05:10] Speaker C: I can go first if you want. So I started in the comics just a little bit, sort of through my dad. So my dad had in the 60s, he had a chance to buy all the original Avengers and a lot of very important silver age stuff, but he loved war comics and science fiction comics and Dell movie things. So I've got all these comics that are out like the same month as stuff, or has ads for the first of issue of Avengers. I've got, I think, the 6th issue of X Men without the COVID That's one of the best. And I've got the first appearance of the Wasp. Oh, it looked like Sci-Fi, so therefore he bought it. But so my dad had read comics as a kid, and when I was in sort of elementary school, I was know GI. Joe the TV show and Transformers. And so he's like, well, we've got comics on this. And so I started getting the comics through these toy licensed stuff. He man and mask and all this stuff and elf.
And basically a big event for me was my dad loved to buy stuff from flea markets. We'd then sell it for a profit at the garage sale. And so, at a flea market, he bought this huge box of comics. And so it was partly the goal of making some money on these comics, but it was all late 70s, early 80s, mostly marvel comics, which I had never read, really. And so that's how I read my first spider man, my first avengers. All kinds of stuff came out of this box. And so, by the time we had the garage sale, I was a fan of spiderman and avengers and just continued on in there. And so that's kind of my introduction to the superhero comics. And so, really, being a comics fan in the early 90s, when we didn't have movies, and it wasn't cool in any way, really, that's kind of at least where my origin is. So the idea of good comic book movies feels a little weird to me. And it seems weird for people to be angry that there's too many now and they're doing too well.
Still blows my mind a little bit, although I've read enough of twitter or x, I guess.
Understand that's how some people feel very strongly that we need to stop the marvel universe or something.
But growing up, man, this stuff was like the greatest dream in the world to me. The amount of content we have and the amount that this is, like, driving so much of our society is these nerd things that are now everybody's debating it of what's going on. So that's my origin story.
[00:08:01] Speaker B: So mine is similar.
I got into comics because of my brother. My brother had a box of comics, and he was kind of going off to college. My parents were trying to get me to read more. I think I was watching just watching too much, like sesame street or whatever, and they were like, hey, give him these comics. Maybe he'll like them. And I did. The first comic I ever read was, I want to say, mighty thor, number 138 with the gray gargoyle, which was okay. I was like, thor guy is all right, but let me see what else I've got in here. And I got into captain america and the falcon. I don't know why. My brother had so many issues of captain america and the falcon, and he had a bunch of issues of, like, power man and iron fist and a number of avengers issues. What really got me hooked, hooked, I think, was eighty s and ninety s. X men and spiderman.
X men. I liked the metaphor.
I enjoyed the characters, and it's funny that I liked x men so much. And now I'm a professor. I always wonder if that why we became professors, because we thought we were going to have telekinetic powers and all of these things, but it was fun. And I used to go speaking of flea markets, gordon, my mom and I used to go to this church flea market where I would walk. My mom haggle over certain things that she cared about. And I would go and I would just find a ton of comics. For a dollar, you could get like ten comic books that were just used, and I collected as many as I could. And I really got into it. And it is strange now as a kid, being a comic book fan, especially going into middle school and high school, became more and more disreputable as you got older. It became less desirable as a thing to do. And I was like, oh, these are still cool.
And now to see everybody watching the movies or talking about them or like, you know, the fact that Antman has huge movies is like, ridiculous to me. Right? If if you told me, yeah, three movies.
Yeah, three pretty good movies.
Ten year old me is like, what do you mean? I don't even like it, man. Why is he getting three movies, right? But it's kind of incredible to see that come to fruition.
[00:10:29] Speaker C: Our summary is we are old and have unrelatable experiences to modern people. That's the crazy part. It's just a completely different time.
[00:10:40] Speaker A: Yeah, it's funny that you guys mentioned like you both mentioned the box because now you just are on your Kindle or Comixology or whatever. It's very different. And kids don't necessarily have the same experience of going to the comic book store and getting the pull and all of that stuff. So it's like a very different world.
[00:11:01] Speaker C: Oh, yeah. And manga too. We just did not have there was not an alternative. Comics, you read comics, they were American stuff. They're mostly off the rack, and they were Marvel or DC mostly. And then image came along, but that was mostly more of a comic shop thing. So yeah, we didn't have like a big other comic alternative where we could be reading My Hero academia or something. It was like, this is it, kid. This is the thing that nobody else likes. You are too old for it. Your only option is hopefully go to these disreputable shops or flea markets and buy some random pile of comics or whatever.
[00:11:38] Speaker A: And now my daughter can get graphic novels and stuff in her elementary school library, which is awesome for her, and it encourages reading. So I'm all about know you. The book covers the MCU. It doesn't cover comic books as much. Can you talk about your prep for this?
You know, did you watch a lot of that? We mentioned it earlier. The MCU has a lot of stuff going on. What did you do when you were forming the idea, forming the proposal for this book? Because you had to start from somewhere.
[00:12:16] Speaker B: So for the proposal, I think we wrote what we remembered.
Hopefully I was going to say we aren't listening to this and aren't realizing that we just wrote whatever we remembered. But in the process of writing the book, I think we both rewatched as many movies as existed through, like, endgame. I think we watched all the Marvel Cinematic Universe movies. We do mention some non MCU movies like the Raimi Spiderman movies.
[00:12:45] Speaker A: And there's X Men in there, too, a lot, right?
[00:12:47] Speaker C: Yeah.
Good content on it, too.
[00:12:50] Speaker B: And I think Spider verse might pop up.
[00:12:52] Speaker A: It is in, yeah, the mentoring chapter.
[00:12:56] Speaker B: And then we also know we talked more about comics in a chapter we wrote for a book we collaborated or a chapter we submitted for Travis Langley's Spider Man Psychology. So that's all rooted in comics. The leaders assemble is specific to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, mostly because for us, from a teaching perspective, we're like, I don't know if we can convince professors to assign actual comic book, but we can definitely get them to throw on, like, a video clip of Captain America or something.
[00:13:30] Speaker A: Now, what's the response been from other professors? Have you heard positive feedback? Have they incorporated stuff into their teaching and even from other students?
[00:13:43] Speaker C: Yeah, I've heard positive feedback. The book was used in, I think, a strategic teamwork class that somebody used who said it went very well. And we've seen a lot of people are very excited by the concept because it's sort of an interesting it's a very interesting thing to be like, oh, we should use this, or we have a lot of people, academics who have read the book and think it's pretty interesting on what they did. So we've got a lot of positive feedback from people on it, both in academics and then just like normal folks. Like, a comedian I knew read the book and was writing how much he loved the know. It's really seemed to be pretty accessible, which was our goal to just a whole range of people saya, You've got any stories?
[00:14:31] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, I believe some people have learned how to become supervillains, which was not our intent from the book at all.
I remember there's a university in Chicago that used it for their student leadership program. Right.
And what we've heard back from other academics has been that they've really enjoyed it, that their students seem to engage with it a little bit differently than some of the examples that you'd given earlier of, like, Zappos and Arthur Anderson. Now, we're not saying you shouldn't use those examples, but I think having a little variety and how you describe those examples can be a little bit different, especially when we talk about something like leadership, which in the book we describe as an influence process. It's kind of hard to envision that. But you can watch a conversation between Captain America and Iron Man. You can start to see that happen, or you can watch a scene or two from Black Panther, and you can start to see that happen. And that's been some of the feedback that we've gotten that's been really heartening for us, both as enormous comic book nerds and as instructors.
[00:15:39] Speaker C: To me, that's one of the weird things about the book is I would almost say using the Marvel movies makes it more similar to the workplace than a lot of examples of actual workplaces. Right? Because a lot of examples are like there's some amazing CEO dude and it's usually a dude who fixed everything on his own and didn't do the work, right. Basically picture how people talked about Elon Musk before buying Twitter, right? Genius that never does anything wrong. And so to me as a student, you're probably not a CEO right now. You probably might think you might never get there. And so to be like, oh, just do these five things. Or like I remember an article is like mark Zuckerberg wears the same shirt every day. He just has twelve copies. And that's how you become a good leader, right? Hopefully that wasn't used in classrooms. But it is sort of this idea we've got people that are so detached from reality and from day to day interactions. Superheroes are very different from us. But superheroes as I see them are highly talented people that are successful in what they do. They save the day, right, from supervillains these big situations. But they also hurt those big threats like thanos they have to come together and work together. These very different people with very different goals and different ideas of what's the right thing to do. And they have to figure it out together. When you can't just have big boss says do it, so you do it. To me that's what real work is like, right? Your boss usually can't just force you to think exactly what the boss wants you to do and to act exactly. You might go along because you don't get fired, but he can't motivate you just by saying hey, do this. And so to me, that negotiation between people, us influencing each other that we see in Marvel movies and hero movies is actually a lot more like what real life is. A bunch of people trying to figure things out, trying to work together when we don't always agree, when we have very different ideas, very different skills. So weirdly, it's almost more realistic to me talking about some of these things than talking know, Jack Welch, I don't know, invented great business or some other completely made up thing that you might hear.
[00:17:57] Speaker A: And you cover that, right? You cover that in the book. You talk about teams, you have these eleven topics. I want to say that you have these concrete MCU examples to illustrate. That all.
Was there anything that was, know, surprising to either of, you? Know, you kind of maybe didn't realize that this movie was illustrating this point, but when know, sat down and watched and thought about it, know, it popped for you.
[00:18:27] Speaker B: So Gordon, I think we need to talk about Black Widow.
[00:18:30] Speaker A: I'm wearing her shirt.
[00:18:31] Speaker B: You're wearing her.
[00:18:32] Speaker A: Okay, I'm ready to talk about that chapter. If you want to talk about that, because that was really good.
[00:18:37] Speaker B: Yeah, because there's something that we figured out. As we know, actually, after the book came out, we realized something about the Marvel heroes. Number one, we have a chapter about gender and leadership. There just aren't that many female leaders in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But as Gordon and I were talking about the Blip and the time period that we don't really see very much between Infinity War and Endgame during that time, one thing that we realized is that the MCU has a good example of something called the Glass Cliff. So most people are familiar with the glass ceiling, which is that women and minorities, they cannot get into higher level leadership positions because there's this glass ceiling that says, like, no, you have to stay at this level. The Glass Cliff is when an organization or company is doing very poorly and a woman or a minority is given a role or position of leadership and the company says, well, we're kind of screwed. Why don't you lead us? And so, Gordon, you're the one who figured this out. So what is so important about Black Widow?
[00:19:45] Speaker C: Yeah, and so and, you know, we touch on this some of the book, but it really has come together for more for us as well. Post book is just like, all the white dudes that were in charge leave, right? Even the people that weren't in charge, but could be like, the Hulk, please. He's going to focus on himself.
Thor. Cap. Everybody's gone. And so they're like, we need somebody to leave who's still Hawkeye leaves. I wouldn't put Hawkeye in charge. No offense. No offense to Hawkeye, but never.
But Black Widow is the one who's like, I'm still going to do the job. All the dudes have left to find themselves.
Somebody needs to make sure the world still runs. And so during this Blip period, and we see sort of the end of this period, essentially, the world's in a pretty good place.
Things seem to be running. People are sad, as they should be. It's a huge tragedy.
[00:20:38] Speaker B: But the world is everybody.
[00:20:40] Speaker C: Yeah.
An event as catastrophic as you could get almost, right? But the world looks in pretty good shape overall. And when you look at kind of the meeting of who's in charge at that sort of end of Glip period before we get Ant Man to come back to bring back the world, for white men to be in charge or whatever, is that? We've got a got it's got okey. It's got war Machine is there. Who knows if he's a skrull at that point.
[00:21:08] Speaker A: Who knows? I have thoughts on that.
[00:21:11] Speaker C: I don't know how long they are going back. I was really hoping kind of Terrence Howard would be found in there, but that would really make it clear. But we've got him. We've got Captain Marvel's, part of this team. And so we have a team that is very female that know a minority member as an African American, as a major member, and they're the ones who are kind of running the whole superhero world and keeping things.
[00:21:34] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:21:35] Speaker C: Once we get an idea by Scott Lang of how to fix things, suddenly all the old white guys become interested again. And by the end of movie, Black Widow sacrifices herself so we can keep Hawkeye around. I like the Hawkeye series, so maybe it was worth it, but Kate probably could have done it on her own. Just going to throw it out so all of her stuff kind of doesn't get recognized. I don't think the movie does it. And so Si and I have talked about this before of the degree we'd love to see sort of a movie about the blip and how did we resolve all this stuff, what were some of the things Blackwood and others went through? Because it seems like they did a very good job based on what we've seen, but they haven't really gotten the credit, which really is very glass.
It's very much you're. You're darned if you do or darned if you don't.
And a lot of women in minorities are put in that situation as CEOs. If things get better, they get replaced. If things go badly, they get fired. And it's just another example of we shouldn't have given somebody a chance. And it's a very tough situation to be in. Please see Twitter and X on their current CEO as well for a bad situation the woman has been put in. I don't know what she really thinks, but I'd be hard to believe it's what she has tweeted. Can't there's so many jokes about what you're supposed to call tweets now that I don't even know what they are. But it's still Twitter to me.
[00:22:58] Speaker B: Gordon I agree.
[00:23:01] Speaker A: Yeah, it's still Twitter. And I think I literally highlighted like because it stood out because it's true. Right. She didn't get any credit for holding the world together, essentially while everyone else was off doing whatever, dealing with things.
So I'm really glad this chapter was there and I'm really glad that you guys talked about it. And I would be curious to see as the MCU has expanded your thoughts on things like Miss Marvel and she Hulk and whether or not there are leadership lessons that you can draw from.
[00:23:40] Speaker B: Yeah, I think we're both fans of both shows. I think we're fans know Ms. Marvel and she Hulk. I would say Ms. Marvel's probably my favorite of the kind of new batch shows. I'm a little biased because know brown Muslim guy from New Jersey. So it's like really playing to me specifically. But what I really like about Ms. Marvel and something I also like about T'Challa as well, one of the leadership lessons we can take from that show in particular is that she doesn't usually when we think about leaders we think of really coercive leaders, right. People that are pushing you to do things, making you do things. And she really is community based, right? She's represent, you know, not only does she represent New Jersey or Jersey City, but she's really fighting for that.
You know, feel comfortable with her in the community. And she's listening to folks in the community, both in the comics and I feel in the TV show as well.
And I think that's really important, especially given the damage control kind of villain that she's got to face. This is an outside force coming into her community. She's going to lead everybody out of it.
[00:24:56] Speaker C: Yeah. No, that's a great series. She Hulk, I think, has a lot of interesting questions on mentorship and so much meta commentary on kind of online backlash for kind of the overall, this phase four and phase five we're going into.
There is certainly some it's expected, but also sad. The degree to which the first phase we have, which has more women, more minorities, more different views, is also the one that seems to have got the most negative plaque and that we're in decline and everyone's sick of superheroes now. We've seen enough superheroes. We saw the right type. We're done now that type of dialogue with some of the great work that's come out, especially on TV, I feel like TV has been very good. TV to me has been the base of the MCU where the series have been very strong overall, while the movies to me have disappointed a little bit know, I think Wakanda Forever has some amazing acting and a lot of cool stuff going on.
But it's sort of a weird setup. And what's going on is kind of confusing to me, at least compared to what would be best and things like Eternals.
I don't know if Eternals was ever going to work just because I don't think Kirby's original, frankly, works very well. I was reading Eternals and I'm just like, this is just a weird setup.
I don't know if you're aware. There's a whole 70s thing of like, aliens came down and created the pyramids and everything that a non white person made. Eric Van Donovan's, chariots. The gods and all this stuff.
That's what eternals is. It's like, oh, those pyramids. Don't worry. Some white guy from space made it.
And it's just such a weird set up. The other part with the Kirby is like, the Eternals are going to wait. The Celestials are going to wait 50 years to decide. So it's just like, well, I guess 50 years of incontinenity time before anything exciting happens. And so it's just a really weird base. I think Neil Gaiman's work on Eternals, it was kind of good, but it still is kind of a weird base of what to use for it now. Guardians of the Galaxy looks nothing like Gardens of the Galaxy in the comics, but was pretty great. But Eternals to me is not a great base to do anything from the original. So I think it's the movies, I think, have been more rocky, but overall, the TV has brought it through very well in being interesting and engaging.
Yet I would say with Secret Invasion with man has a lot of problems. But most of those series have been very good or have at least tried to be very good.
As Cy will know. Anything with Doctor Strange, I'm against. So what if was my previous.
[00:27:56] Speaker A: You.
[00:27:56] Speaker B: Know, so Gordon is anti Strange.
I really like multiverse of madness because I'm a sucker for Sam Raimi and I'm bigger horror guy than Gordon. So I enjoy all the silly there.
[00:28:12] Speaker C: Were some horrible things in that movie. I agree with you.
[00:28:14] Speaker B: Yes. There we go. That seeds starting with can't you can't escape.
I like Multiverse of Madness a little more than the original the first Doctor Strange movie. I'm also amazed that we're getting big budget Dr. Strange movies, which is a character who I mean, he's never been the most popular Marvel character. And same thing with Eternals, right? Like if you told me I picked up eternals issues in a flea market box, like all twelve of them, however many of the original Jack Kirby ones for like $2. And if you had told me they're going to make a huge, big budget movie of this, this super weird comic that is Jack Kirby's, all of his strange hopes and desires all on the page, I was like, I don't think it's going to happen.
The movie was okay. I just feel like sometimes the demands of being in the universe can be a little hard.
And especially if you're not used to making big budget movies, I think that can be really difficult.
And so the movies have been okay. I think once we start figuring out once they start figuring out what the bigger arc of the next set of films is or what that big story happens to be, I think people might get back on board with it.
I think the response to across the Spiderverse and Guardians three kind of shows that people they still want to watch these stories. They may not want to show up for every single one of them, but I think there's still a demand for high quality versions of them. And luckily for me and Gordon, that means there's more leadership examples that we can pull from the movies.
[00:30:01] Speaker C: I was going to say the got in my original comic book box. I did get eternals issues and I read them and left them to be sold in the garage sale of which it took many years for them to sell.
I agree with that.
[00:30:18] Speaker A: Now, you mentioned Secret Invasion and I think on your site, right, for your company side, I think it was a guest post by Gordon. There was about the leadership of showcased in Secret Invasion. Can you guys talk. About that. I know it's not the book, but it's super relevant, and I thought it was really interesting.
[00:30:39] Speaker B: Yeah, sure. So we basically watched Secret Invasion, and being in academics, what we saw was that there was a good example of something in the academic literature that's called leader member exchange. Leader member exchange basically says this theory basically says that if you want to express or manage other people, or it also works for you if you're part of a team or a group, what you really have to look at is the relationship between the leader and the member of the team. And anybody that the leader is really close to, they're in what's called an in group. They're the folks that they lean on. They're the ones that they go to consistently. So, for example, Steve and Wilson, that's the in group right there. But then people you don't interact with as much, that's the out group. Right. And you can see this not just in Secret Invasion, where you see that Nick Fury flipping out affected the relationships that he had, and his return really impacted how well he was able to maintain those relationships. But you can see this even in the original Avengers movies, right? Like, Tony really likes hanging out with Bruce. They're science bros. Right. That's very strong leader member exchange there between the two of and Natasha. And any of the Shield folks are closer to one another. They have a deeper understanding of one another. And so if you're going to be leading groups, you really have to understand who's in your in group, who's in your out group. If I need to ask somebody to do something, how do I manage this relationship? How do I make sure that this relationship functions effectively? Because that's the only way that leaders can be effective. Leaders that just do everything themselves tend to burn out. So a good leader knows how to delegate, even to a team member that maybe isn't their favorite or isn't the one that they always want to turn to, but they try to manage that relationship in that way.
[00:32:45] Speaker C: Yeah. And really that trusted influence is so important, is I trust you, that you care about my interest, that you want the best, and therefore I let you influence me and I do what you want. And there's a scene in Secret Invasion, I think it's Atelius, where he's just like, we trusted you, that you were going to get us the and yeah, with the bad guy, there was like, we did your dirty work, we did all this stuff for you, but then you never followed through. Right. And so all the scrolls are kind of betrayed by Nick not following through, and also not being honest with them either. Right. And I think some of the scenes where we've got a lot of tension between Fury and Tillos is like, if we were feeling closer together, I could criticize you and be okay, because that would be honesty. But you criticizing me is now just insulting and our relationship is frayed. And so this is a damaging situation versus one where we're just being honest with each other. And it really causes a lot of problem in that setup of why we have the scroll issue, why we have this all going on, and a very different thing than a comic book set up of what's happening in there.
It was an interesting thing to kind of see those leader dynamics and how important they were. It's less about shapeshifting and more about shapeshifting of our relationships into a bad spot. That's a tortured line right there.
[00:34:16] Speaker B: Good save for me. I appreciate that.
[00:34:19] Speaker A: Now, I know we're getting somewhat close to time, but I have a few last questions for each of you. What do you think the biggest lessons in leadership that people can kind of apply to their everyday lives if you can distill it, I don't know if this is a thing you can possibly do that people can use in their everyday lives. From the MCU, is there anything that really stands out?
[00:34:48] Speaker C: Well, one I would say, and I think it's true in general know leadership is about us influencing each other regardless of who's the boss or who's in charge. Because the Avengers come together and they need to convince each other what to do and what's going on. The Guardians are a great example of a team where they're all very different. They got their own ideas, they don't have to be together.
And so to me, leadership in MCU shows it very well is of this idea of influence, of really working together and figuring out how can we together reach a better goal and get what we want. Because that's real life. Most of the time, no one has enough influence to force you to do anything that you don't want. Especially to do it well or to do it creatively. And so the MCU gives a lot of examples of that, of people working together, talking to each other, arguing with each other, and coming up with a good solution. And a lot of the tragedies in the MCU, the Avengers breaking up in Civil war, secret invasions, issues between the Skrulls and Nick Fury, is because people did not work on their relationship together. They didn't figure out how can we collaborate and compromise or come up with a better solution? It was my way or the highway. And in real life, that leads to all kinds of issues for us. And so leadership is not forcing people to do stuff. It's influencing them based on their interest. It's talking together. It's that relationship matters a heck of a lot more than I'm the boss and I got a fancy title.
[00:36:24] Speaker B: Yeah, I would agree with that. I think one of the things to remember, and I think one of the cool things about the MCU is that there's lots of different types of characters in the show. So some of the characters are kids like Spiderman, some of them are women, some of them are people from different countries. And everybody has something to contribute, especially from a leadership perspective. Right. There are times where Scott Lang is leading. There are times where T'Challa is leading, there are times where Akoye is leading. And so if you can recognize that and recognize what good leadership looks like in a lot of cases, looks like good coordination between teams, that is something that I think that everybody can take away. And hopefully it gives everyone both the sense that they themselves can lead. And that's one thing that we try to give to our students as well, is that if you want to be a leader, you can. You just have to find out how you best influence people. And I think there's a lot of value in that, in people seeing themselves as having the ability to lead and also understanding who they should follow. Right. This is one of the things we're seeing, whether it's in politics or in the workplace, we're seeing the importance of good leadership. And so hopefully we can illustrate some of those things about what makes a good leader, what makes somebody that should be followed versus somebody who shouldn't be followed.
[00:37:52] Speaker A: Well, I think that's wonderful. And now, is there anything that you're working on next?
Is there another book coming out? Are you maybe going to talk about DC?
What's next on the horizon for you both?
[00:38:09] Speaker B: So we've got a book about Avatar The Last Airbender that we're working on now. We're hoping that'll be out soon. We both love Avatar. The last airbender. Not the Blue people, the anime. Right, the anime, yeah, the American anime.
And so that's going to be it's been a lot of fun to kind of think and write about now. And so hopefully people are enjoying that we're still as new kind of Marvel Cinematic Universe stuff or other kind of nerd stuff that we're interested in comes, you know, posting blogs and writing about it, thinking about leadership in those different contexts.
[00:38:48] Speaker C: Yeah. Working on a Barbie one. Right much for that. It's an interesting angle, I think, but it fits very well to what we actually look at in our stuff. And I think part of our thing too, is just continuing to be out here in the public talking to people about it, spreading the word, and that's part of what we're doing. I think we're doing a little bit more comic book stuff as well. As Syed said, we've got a Spiderman and psychology book that we've got a chapter in about mentorship and Spider Man in the comics. And we've been going to some Comic Con. So I've got some panels coming up at Galaxy Con in Austin, and we did one at Mississippi Comic Con as well back in July. And then Si is presented at San diego. Comic Con.
[00:39:36] Speaker B: That was last year.
[00:39:37] Speaker A: Yeah, I saw that. That's amazing.
[00:39:39] Speaker C: A lot of cool stuff.
[00:39:42] Speaker A: Well, thank you both very much. It has been an honor speaking with you. And people aren't going to be able to see me because this is just an audio podcast, but I'm holding up the book and you should go check it out because it's really good.
[00:39:56] Speaker C: Yeah, check it out. Addison x or LinkedIn, whatever you prefer. LinkedIn has had to become more fun lately because I don't know, that's where I post the most.
It's gotten looser for me. I don't know if we lose X, that's what we got, is LinkedIn.
[00:40:16] Speaker B: Thank you for having us. This is great.
[00:40:19] Speaker A: Thank you for listening. You can find the companion article for this podcast along with all the other news. For those who like superheroes, science fiction and fantasy films, TV shows and other
[email protected]. Have a great day.
[00:40:51] Speaker C: Sam, our channel.
