John Amaechi: "Excellence Isn't Sorcery"
The Gist
Mike Pesca
4.4 • 3.6K Ratings
🗓️ 18 November 2025
⏱️ 49 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The former NBA power forward and unmistakably English John Amaechi talks leadership, psychology, and the everyday skills that make organizations work. His book It's Not Magic: The Ordinary Skills of Exceptional Leaders anchors a conversation about accountability, ambition, and what people misunderstand about excellence. Also: Europe's frozen-assets loan scheme, Macron's future-jets promise, and the contrast between Brussels' legalism and Trump's "sea boat, bomb boat" simplicity.
Produced by Corey Wara
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | It's Tuesday, November 18th, 2025 from Peach Fish Productions. It's the gist. I'm Mike Peska. |
| 0:10.6 | I understand the appeal for Donald Trump of his foreign policy or his military engagement. |
| 0:16.3 | Sea boat, bomb boat. It's pretty simple. The pushback you get, get I don't know weenies who like you to |
| 0:22.4 | follow the law you could just say I got a boat they were druggies they were gonna kill |
| 0:27.4 | 250,000 people see boat bomb boat now the Europeans do it a little differently for |
| 0:33.5 | instance Vladomira zolens, and just a side note, |
| 0:38.1 | Voloadimir Zelensky was supposed to say, right? |
| 0:40.3 | Vyloidemir, and I'm sure that's how you say it. |
| 0:42.4 | But Vladimir Putin, friends, he has none. |
| 0:45.9 | Someone once called him Vlad, because that's what you call Vladimir's. |
| 0:50.5 | If you have a Volodomir in your orbit, do you call him Vlode? Or do you say Vlad? But it is sort of like Vlod because in the Ukrainian way of saying things, Vlad becomes Vlod. What I'm trying to think, and it's kind of a Vloaded phrase, I think we might be going overboard with Vlodomir. I think that maybe the Ukrainians like, yeah, it's just like Vladimir. |
| 1:11.7 | But we just say it a little Vlodomir. They have a different alphabet, you know. |
| 1:15.9 | So Vlodomier Zelensky was in France the other day. And Emmanuel Macron said to him, |
| 1:24.6 | you will get some planes. Our famous Rafael fighter jets. |
| 1:30.7 | Here, either speaking through an interpreter or doing a cool trick |
| 1:33.8 | where he simultaneously speaks in French but louder English, |
| 1:37.6 | here was Mahon's announcement. |
| 1:39.9 | And the acquisition of up to 100 Rafael fighter jets, the state-of-the-art jets with their full armament systems. |
| 1:52.0 | Yeah, downside of this. And it sounds great, right? So I started off by speaking about how Donald Trump likes being straightforward. It's kind of straightforward. Here are some planes. All right, that's not going to be delivered until 2035. So it's really the idea of planes. But how are the |
| 2:07.1 | Ukrainians going to pay for the planes? Well, they have a plan. The European Union is going to use |
| 2:13.8 | frozen assets to give a loan to Ukraine to buy planes |
| 2:20.3 | that maybe will come 10 years from now. And the loan, like I said, backed by the Russian |
... |
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