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Most professionals spend 80% of their workday communicating — and almost none have a system for getting better at it. Conversations That Count changes that.
Hosted by David Shaft — President's Club Banker at Rocket Mortgage, Dale Carnegie graduate, and Detroit storyteller — CTC delivers real conversations with executives, industry leaders, and everyday professionals who break down the communication skills that actually move careers forward.
New episodes every Tuesday and Thursday. Professional multi-camera video production on YouTube. Full audio on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
What you'll learn:
• Workplace communication: better meetings, tougher feedback, and difficult conversations that don't blow up relationships
• Public speaking and presentations: how to open strong, handle Q&A, and keep any room engaged
• Professional networking: small talk that leads somewhere, LinkedIn outreach that gets replies, follow-up that builds real relationships
• Storytelling: how to tell your story in 60 seconds and communicate with impact in any room
• Leadership communication: negotiation, influence, and the Dale Carnegie principles that still work today
CTC is syndicated on the Mission Matters Network and features professionals across automotive, finance, tech, healthcare, and Detroit's growing entrepreneurship scene — because great communication looks different in every industry.
Whether you're a mid-career professional chasing a promotion, a manager who needs to run better meetings, or anyone who wants to communicate with more confidence, credibility, and impact — this show was built for you.
Free resource: Download the free Communication Playbook — 10 frameworks, scripts, and exercises to help you communicate like a pro. Get it at: https://ctcpodcast.media/free-playbook
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Stories That Stick. Skills That Scale.
David Shaft: Wisdom is a great thing. It's a great gift, but it often comes at a great price.
And today, I want to talk about the price of wisdom.
I know in other episodes, we talked about how nothing is really free.
There's an opportunity cost for things.
And looking at a story that everyone's familiar with,
and then I'm going to talk about a story that most people aren't familiar with,
but if you've heard anything about this book that's been pretty big in circulation,
a lot of people have talked about it, read it. Maybe you haven't.
It's called the Bible. There's this character in there, this person, named Solomon.
And he is known as the wisest man to ever have lived, will have lived, and to have ever existed.
That is his gift.
And he gets it because God asks him, I can give you anything you want.
Money, power, strength, health, wealth, whatever. Ask for it.
And he simply asks for wisdom.
And God is so proud of this response.
And so elated that he asked for the best gift that anyone could ask for.
That he doesn't just grant him wisdom. He grants him wealth, power, everything he could ever want.
More wives than he can count. He has everything that a man could ask for.
But it's not as simple as just he gave him the wisdom.
Solomon was given constant trials in order to get wisdom.
One of the best stories, most intense stories, that shows the wisdom
is there were two women arguing over whose baby was whose.
Because one had a dead baby, one had an alive baby, and they were swearing,
they're like, no, the one whose alive is mine. This is my child.
I'm paraphrasing, obviously.
But she's no, this is my child. The other ones know this is my child.
And Solomon's, okay, Nate's test doesn't exist right now.
So you know what? Chop the baby in half, give them both half a baby, and call it a day.
And one of them is, yeah, go ahead, do it.
Give me my half of my baby. The other one is like, no, no.
It's not even that deep, Solomon. I'm good.
Keep the baby. She can have it.
As long as the baby is alive, that's way better than the baby being dead.
And he's, okay, pretty obvious. You're the mom because a mom's going to want to protect the life of the baby
more than have what they think is theirs.
You're obviously not the mom because you're willing to take half of your child.
You're willing to have the child die just to prove that it's yours, right?
And that right there is an example of having to learn wisdom and solving those problems and issues
and accruing the wealth and the power, it took a ton of choices and overcoming a ton of challenges.
So wisdom is a great thing. It's a great gift.
But it often comes at a great price.
Wisdom is different from intelligence and knowledge.
Wisdom is a completely different, just entirely different thing to have.
And it's being able to solve problems and it's that competence, like in that story now.
Wisdom never comes easily.
So for those of you who don't know, I actually have a different podcast and channel that I also run,
completely based around sleeping and mythological stories because if you haven't guessed yet, I'm a nerd.
I enjoy learning about history and mythology. It's a ton of fun for me.
So I have this channel called The Sleeping Almanac and on the second episode,
I cover one of the most interesting characters that I probably read about in mythology, and his name is Odin,
who is the king of gods in north mythology, right? That's his thing. He's the man in charge.
And he goes through two trials, the irony being he was one of the first gods to ever exist, right?
So the irony being he didn't have to do any of these trials. He's already an all-powerful god.
But what made him the most special is that his entire pursuit was always on wisdom.
He was always known as the wisest god, and that is where his power and his trust came from.
And there's a lot of interesting things I could cover, but I want to talk about two specific trials.
So one of his trials comes with the sacrifice of an eye.
This is my rendition of an eye. I guess there's like little vaney things.
When it comes to an eye that like connects to your brain and whatnot, whatever.
His eye, right? He has to pluck it out himself, pulls it out.
Never once complains either. Drop it into what is called Mimir's web.
So Mimir is known as also one of the wisest beings to ever exist in north mythology, right?
And he has to sacrifice this eye in order to gain just one sip from this well
so that way he can gain wisdom and future sight.
And there's a lot of different ways that has interpreted over time, right?
One of them is that in order to truly see he had to give up his vision, right?
His perfect vision, he had to give it up and sacrifice it in order to truly see both past, present,
and future. And there's an eye reading to a what, right?
In order to truly see he had to give up an eye.
He had to lose his sight in order to see something deeper.
And I think that is something that we all go through where it's like that ignorance, right?
How they say ignorance is bliss.
We have to kill a part of ourselves sometimes in order to see what it is truly like on the other side.
So we had to give a piece of himself, in that case it was his eye.
And sometimes we have to give up a piece of ourselves in order to get the wisdom that we think we want.
Now, what I don't know about all of you, but I complain a lot of the times when I have to make this sacrifice.
Maybe it's myself, maybe I complain to no one else.
But what's very interesting on how this story is told is it's never even questioned.
Oden's never, come on, man. We can't make a deal here. It has to be my eye.
Maybe I can give you some gold. I got a ton of money.
Maybe I can give you six wives. I can give you a long house.
I can give you soldiers. Man, what do you want? What can I give you?
He doesn't even haggle.
My mirror says this is the cost. It's an eye.
And he just reaches in, pulls the eye out, drops it in, and says, where's my sip?
Again, just a sip too. It's not like he can keep coming back and drinking.
He gets one singular sip for an entire eye.
That's it.
Whole piece of his body doesn't grow back.
It's not like he gave a kidney. No. His eye.
So, saying all that to say what is very interesting and the same thing with Solomon, these larger-than-life characters,
they don't complain about having to make the sacrifice for the wisdom.
It's not like an ask. He's not, hey, guy. I said wisdom.
I didn't know I was going to have to deal with all this.
So, man, I know I said I wanted it, but I didn't know it was going to be an eye.
He just gives the eye, moves on, ends up finding out the past, present, and future, and never complains about it.
He just does what he can to deal with the outcome of the wisdom because his ignorance is gone.
From that experience, he ends up learning how the world ends.
And he does what he tries different things maybe to get around it to overcome it, right, to learn how he can stop it.
But it's never something where he goes around complaining, hey, guys, I know the world's going to end things suck.
I'm so freaking sad. No, he just moves on with life, except the wisdom that he got.
Now, it doesn't stop here, actually, and I'm just going to draw this because it's a little dark, right?
And this is a noose. We're going to draw a little tree.
The tree's going to be green, right?
So, we have our little tree. The tree of the nine worlds, right?
Branches are much bigger. The branch holds a world. I don't even think that's nine.
Root, stretch, super far, right? Bad-ass tree. Really cool tree.
Tree of Idrisil. And he hangs from it for nine days.
No one even asked him to. No one even said, hey, you should go do this.
You should go hang from this tree for nine days. He does it in pursuit of wisdom, and it's called one of his trials, right?
And that's what they call it in Norse mythology. You put himself through a trial, which, if you look through a ton of history,
all the most legendary characters put themselves through a trial of some kind.
This is his. Nine days hanging from the tree, and he's a god, so he can't die.
He just hangs from it, puts himself through this intense, painful trial.
And again, he never complains about the trial. All he says after it's done is,
I hung for those nine days, and I was never offered food, drink. He would never offer assistance.
Oh, that's what he says. That's just what the writing says, right?
I am paraphrasing a pretty old poem, but he hangs from it for nine days.
Never complains, but he comes out of it much wiser than he was before.
And he can do amazing things, and he learns how to use magic and read runes.
And they say that on his trials is how he learned how to manipulate the world around him in a way that no one else had ever done before could do after.
And this is where they say the language came from, is through the trials and wisdom of Odin and what he was willing to sacrifice.
So I say all of this, right? And I use these colorful illustrations and very well drawn eye as a reminder that we're often going to have to go through trials.
And wisdom is a great gift, even though sometimes you may look at it as a curse, but if you truly look at everything you've learned gained, as they say every time you have to start over,
right? He had to start over, missing an eye. That's a crazy way to have to restart life. It's tough.
You're starting over from a place of wisdom. Even though he had to give up that eye, he was forever changed from what he had sacrificed and what he had learned.
So it made every trial from there on. He didn't need the eye because he knew how to overcome every trial.
I challenge all of us, including myself, to accept the burden of wisdom and knowledge and to embrace it and become stronger because of it.
Again, I look forward to talking to you all in the next episode, and I'll see you later.
Thank you everyone for watching another episode of Conversations That Count.
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