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Dec. 14, 2018 - Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

01:58:43

With Jocko Willink: The Catastrophe of the Utopian Soviet State

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	This is Jocko Podcast number 155 with me, Jocko Willink.
	On the island, the dead were piling up.
	In the mission report, the head of the convoy wrote, at 2 p.m.
	on May 20th, I went to the island of Nazino with Commander Tepskov.
	There was a terrible scramble.
	People crowding and fighting around the bags of flour.
	Dead bodies everywhere.
	A hundred or more.
	And lots of people crawling about and crying.
	Give us bread.
	Boss, it's been two days since we've been given anything to eat.
	They're trying to make us die of hunger and the cold.
	They told us that people had begun eating the dead bodies.
	That they were cooking human flesh.
	The scene on the island was dreadful, appalling.
	May 21st alone the three health officers counted 70 additional dead bodies in five cases they emphasized the liver the heart the lungs and Fleshy part of bodies had been cut off On one of the bodies the head had been torn off along the along with the male genital organs and part of the skin and These
	mutilations constitute strong evidence of cannibalistic acts.
	In addition, they suggest the existence of serious psychopathologies.
	On the same day, May 21st, the deportees themselves brought us three individuals who had been caught with blood on their hands and holding human livers.
	Our examination of these three individuals did not reveal any extreme emaciation.
	And there's an elderly local peasant woman who reported the things we saw.
	People were dying everywhere.
	They were killing each other.
	There was a guard named A young fellow.
	He was courting a pretty girl who had been sent there.
	He protected her.
	One day, he had to be away for a while.
	And he told one of his comrades, take care of her.
	But with all the people, the comrade couldn't do much.
	People caught the girl, tied her to a tree, cut off her breasts, her muscles, everything they could eat.
	They were hungry.
	They had to eat.
	When Kostya came back, she was still alive.
	He tried to save her, but she had lost too much blood.
	She died.
	That was the kind of thing that happened.
	When you went along the island, you saw flesh wrapped in rags.
	Human flesh that had been cut and hung in the trees.
	And that right there is from a book called Cannibal Island by Nicholas Wirth, who's written books about communism, I think who's written books about communism, I think is most famous, is the Black Book of Communism.
	Cannibal Island specifically breaks down one of the small individual nightmares of the Soviet gulags.
	But the nightmare was not small.
	you And it certainly was not specific.
	It was widespread and it was broad.
	And it was almost incomprehensible.
	And very little about it would be known or not for one man.
	Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who not only survived the gulags, but lived on to write incredibly detailed and very well researched books about the gulags.
	Some of them were fictionalized.
	Like a day in the life of Ivan Denisovich and for the good of the cause, but most comprehensively in his three-volume tome, The Gulag Archipelago.
	And this series is a massive series and it's been cut down to an abridged version that was actually approved by the author himself.
	And the abridged version has just been re-released in Europe with a forward by a man that I think re-popularized that book.
	A man that is here today to discuss that book and among other things I'm sure a man that I needed to give an introduction to the first time he was on this podcast, but now who needs no introduction whatsoever?
	A man by the name of Dr.
	Jordan B. Peterson.
	Jordan, thank you for coming back on.
	That was a rough beginning, Jockle.
	Jesus.
	Yeah.
	I remember when I started listening to you, you would say something along the lines of that, you know, we are quite capable of creating hell for ourselves as human beings.
	And that, clearly, that situation, I don't know.
	I mean, that's hell.
	Yeah.
	Close enough.
	Yeah, and it's created by us.
	It's created by us, which I think is obviously horrific.
	And the Gulag Archipelago.
	You talked about that book a lot.
	And that book hits you hard, obviously.
	For me, there's a book called About Face by Colonel David Hackworth.
	I'm from a different world, I guess, than you in many ways.
	The book that hit me hardest in my life was that book, About Face.
	And it's one of those things that when I read it, I started putting it together.
	It's like things started to fit.
	I remember that.
	And I was wondering, I guess from my perspective, at what point did you read the Gulag Archipelago and at what point did you start to say, okay, there's something really, really important here for me to try and understand?
	Well, I read it back in the 1980s, early.
	I would say I'd read some Solzhenitsyn before that.
	I read Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich when I was about 13 or 14.
	And then I read the Gulag Archipelago in my early 20s when I was reading a lot of psychological material, too, when I started reading Jung and Freud and the great clinicians.
	I was reading a fair bit about what had happened in Nazi Germany at the same time, and also Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning.
	And Solzhenitsyn's book is, in some ways, like an elaborated extension of Frankl.
	Frankl, of course, described what happened to him in the Nazi concentration camps.
	It's a relatively short book, and it's a great book.
	But Solzhenitsyn's book is much broader and, I would say, deeper.
	And the thing that affected me most particularly was the psychological take on the totalitarian states.
	You know, I had been studying political science up to that point, and the political scientists and the economists, who I would say were Under the sway of Marxist thinking, although not nearly to the degree that they are now, we're convinced that the reason that people engaged in conflict was basically a consequence of argumentation over resources.
	It was basically an economic argument.
	And I never bought that.
	It never made sense to me.
	I mean, obviously, there are circumstances where that's true, but it didn't seem to be fundamentally the case.
	Like, tribal warfare isn't precisely about resources.
	Maybe it's about territory, or maybe it's about identity, but it never seemed to me to be simply about resources.
	Partly because Well, a resource is something that people value, but it isn't obvious why people value what they value, and so it doesn't solve the fundamental problem.
	Anyways, when I was reading Frankel and Solzhenitsyn, I started to more deeply understand the relationship between the individual and the atrocity.
	And that's what I found most interesting was that Frankl's claim and Solzhenitsyn's claim as well that it was the moral corruption of the citizenry that allowed the totalitarian catastrophes to occur and that that in some sense was the responsibility of every individual in the system who looked the other way or who participated actively.
	I mean, even in the gulag camps themselves, they were almost all run by the prisoners.
	There wasn't enough administrative manpower to run the prison system without the cooperation, so to speak, of the prisoners.
	So it is a surreal sort of hell where you imprison yourself.
	And Solzhenitsyn's fundamental claim, and this was true for Frankl as well, and also for Vaclav Havel, who eventually became president of Czechoslovakia, or at least of the Czech Republic.
	I don't remember which.
	They believed that it was the individual proclivity to accept lies that fostered the ability of tyrants to destroy the state.
	And then, well, and that also led to complicitness with regards to all the absolute atrocities that were occurring in both the Nazi state and in the Soviet state.
	And I think that's true.
	When I read Solzhenitsyn's books, and a lot of the books I read about Nazi Germany too, not as a victim, and not as a hero, but as a perpetrator.
	You know, which I think it's really important.
	It's something that's really important to do when you read history, is that it's easy to cast yourself as a victim.
	It's easy to cast yourself as the person who would have been heroic in the circumstance, but it's also unbelievably useful to understand that there's a good chance, had you been in those situations, that you wouldn't have been on the side of the good guys.
	And that's a terrible, it's really a terrible realization, but it's necessary realization.
	Again, just going back to this idea of what you get out of reading, because people ask me now, because I read books all the time on my podcast, and what you just said, it struck me as something that's People have told me, I read that book before, but I didn't really get out of it what you got out of it.
	And when I heard you read it, I was saying, wow, I need to go reread this book.
	And I think one of the key things is you looked at these books as you were not the victim but the perpetrator.
	One thing that when I read books, I know I read a lot of books mostly about war, For me, I always think about the peep.
	I don't always see myself as the person that goes and heroically storms the beaches and survives.
	In a war book, there's these people that get mentioned for half a paragraph or for two sentences, and sometimes they don't even have a name because you're the battalion commander storming the beach at Normandy.
	You're not going to name every single person.
	But for some reason...
	Maybe it's just my experiences of being in combat.
	When I read about that two sentences of that guy that gets shot, that gets killed, that gets blown up, I completely understand and relate to that person.
	I don't just see it as me being the guy that is always winning and always doing okay and always surviving.
	I feel and relate to those guys that didn't.
	And part of that is just because of my friends that I lost in combat.
	Those guys, they're people.
	And I think that key thing of reading it and going, man, every single person, like when you read about these, you're talking about millions of people that were tortured, died, murdered.
	Every one of those people, the key word is people, every one of those people is a person.
	To your point, every single one of those executioners, every single one of those murderers is also a person.
	You know, there's a great book called Ordinary Men.
	Oh yeah, we reviewed that on this podcast.
	Right, right.
	And so, you know, it's one of the greatest books written about what happened in the Second World War, I think, on the atrocity end.
	The author does such a lovely job of, well, it's a strange way of putting it in this context, but, you know, it's about this police battalion that was moved into Poland after the Germans went through and occupied the country, and they were there to establish order like police do, but also to participate in the mopping up, let's say, that was part and parcel of the war.
	And, you know, these were ordinary policemen, middle-class guys, most of whom had been educated and socialized before the Nazi The propaganda machine really got rolling so they weren't like Hitler Youth types.
	They were ordinary men and they were brought and they had a commander who Had made an explicit case that if they weren't able to tolerate the conditions in Poland, that they could go home.
	So there was no top-down order that you had to do this or else.
	And then they were, you know, first of all, they started rounding up, well, mostly Jewish people, men between 18 and 65.
	And then, you know, they started to participate in the entire atrocious mess.
	They were they ended up many of them taking naked pregnant women out into fields and shooting them in the back of the head and What the author does is outline how that happens to you You know one step at a time and so it's a really horrifying book and it's a brilliant book because There's no attempt to make the perpetrators like some creatures that aren't human, like just pure psychopaths.
	And of course, in a situation like Nazi Germany and in the horrors of the communist states, there was no shortage of places for psychopaths to prevail.
	But that's not really the issue.
	The issue is...
	Well, how does an ordinary person come to participate in a global horror, let's say, and what does that mean about being an ordinary person?
	And then the next question is, well, what does it mean about how you should conduct your life?
	And one of the things that...
	I mean, I think what happened to me when I read all this material in the 80s was that...
	I became convinced that there wasn't anything more important to do in the aftermath of what had happened in the 20th century than to try to build people who were responsible enough as truth-telling, courageous, responsible citizens so that the probability would increase that if they were in a position to make a terrible choice that they would make the right one.
	And I would say this lecture tour that I'm doing, which is now extended over more than 100 cities, is an extension of the same thing.
	Well, I think it's the same thing that you're trying to do with your book.
	Like we were just looking at your Mikey and the Dragons book, right?
	And you're trying to lay out...
	It's a psychological pathway that guides people towards responsibility and courage and truth and all of that.
	And that is the bulwark against tyranny and it's actually at the individual level.
	And we kind of know that.
	We know that in the West.
	I think that's part of the core ethos of the English common law system, certainly of the American way of looking at the world, is that Each citizen is the bulwark against tyranny.
	And that's actually true.
	And that's a terrible thing to think through.
	Because it means that you are responsible for the integrity or lack thereof of your state.
	And it's on you.
	And there's something great about that because it means that your existence actually matters to you and to your family and to the broader community in a really major way, in a way that's much more significant than you might think, and that your proclivity to abdicate your moral responsibility echoes way farther than you might consider, especially under some circumstances.
	You know, in Solzhenitsyn, one of the things that's so amazing about the Gulag Archipelago is his stories not only of the absolute bloody catastrophe of the Soviet state and his incredibly astute documentation of the role that the utopian political and philosophical assumptions of Marxism played in creating the system, right?
	It wasn't an aberration.
	It was a direct logical consequence of that collectivist viewpoint.
	And to document all that, but also to tell endless stories about people who were able, at least to some degree, to not become corrupted even under unbelievably horrific conditions.
	And that's something you also get out of Viktor Frankl's book, Man's Search for Meaning.
	And so the Gulag Archipelago is a story about horror in some sense, but it's more a story of the triumph of of the fundamental triumph of the human spirit and perhaps no more perhaps most evident in the case of Solzhenitsyn himself because he memorized this book in some sense while he was in the camps and then wrote it under extreme duress afterwards and it's an immense undertaking and it's unbelievably emotionally intense the
	entire book it's like one You know, 1700-page scream of outrage.
	You just can hardly believe that someone can write at that white-hot intensity for such a long period of time.
	And, you know, his book had an unbelievable global impact.
	I think it sold 30 million copies.
	And it definitely, for at least a reasonable period of time, made it completely untenable for utopian, resentful utopian intellectuals to ethically justify their radical leftist collectivism.
	It just blew the slats out from underneath any ethical credibility that communism, that remained of the communist doctrine by the 1970s.
	And that's a hell of a thing for someone to manage on their own.
	It's a pretty big task.
	So while you were going through that, I was thinking to myself, I still talk to military folks, and I was talking to some military leaders, young leaders, so like platoon level and company level leaders.
	So these are guys that are in charge of 40 guys or maybe 150 guys.
	And you can have some real ethical problems.
	And one of the things that I said to this group was, I said, hey, in your platoon, You've got a murderer in your platoon.
	You've got someone in your platoon that is a sadist.
	And they were kind of looking at me suspect.
	You know, a little bit like, oh, come on now.
	Come on.
	What are you talking about?
	How big is the platoon?
	A platoon is 40 guys.
	Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
	You've got someone in there like that.
	And I was actually going to ask you how accurate I was.
	And then I was going to actually say that no matter what you say how accurate it is, even if it was one out of every thousand, you have to act as a leader as if in your platoon you've got one of those guys or two of those guys.
	That's the way you need to act.
	Well, look, there's another book called The Rape of Nan King.
	We've covered that one here, too.
	Yeah, well, so one of the things that was really horrifying about that book is, so imagine that there's, maybe, let's say that there's one in a hundred, just for the sake of argument, that's really got cruel and psychopathic traits.
	What do you think, professionally, what do you think that number is?
	Oh, I think one percent isn't unreasonable, and it could be higher than that.
	I mean, there's gradations, right?
	In a group of 40 people, there's going to be one guy in there who's Proclivity in that direction is sufficiently strong so that you better keep an eye on them.
	That's for sure.
	And this is a group of people that joined the military, right?
	So you've already got a group that's okay with theoretically having to kill other people.
	So if it's 1 in 100, it's probably pretty accurate.
	That's likely an underestimate.
	So I think your estimate is perfectly reasonable.
	And it might be conservative.
	What happened in Nanking was that the most sadistic people became the targets of imitation and emulation.
	And that's when things really get out of hand.
	And that's the same thing with the My Lai Massacre.
	So when I was talking to this group, and I said to them, I said, you're looking at me right now like I don't know what I'm talking about or like I'm crazy.
	Who knows about the My Lai Masker?
	And all of a sudden it got quiet because if you know anything about the My Lai Masker, it was a normal group of guys.
	It was a normal group of guys.
	It was a normal company of American soldiers.
	And you know what?
	They'd been through some stress.
	They'd had their friends killed in Vietnam.
	There was no one really to react against or to take your aggression out on because the enemy, you couldn't see them.
	They would hide.
	But then they turned, and they snapped, and the same thing.
	You had the leader, a guy named Lieutenant Kali, who was the platoon leader, who, you know, I'd love for you to do a psychological profile.
	I mean, he's one of these guys that was kind of like, was totally insecure about everything, right?
	And so he got those shoulder boards on, which is the way Solzhenitsyn describes his experience as being a platoon leader.
	And what it did to him, and he goes through that in this book.
	It's fantastic to hear when he talks about what he did.
	He's looking back saying, oh, I did this and I did that.
	He goes through this little rampage of things, how he acted as a commander.
	I ate the food, the good food, right in front of my guys.
	When they weren't getting, I was getting the good food.
	And he took advantage of all the little comforts that you got being an officer.
	Yeah, well, he was trying in the whole book, and especially in that section, which I think is in volume two, which I think is the greatest of the three volumes, especially the last half of it, which is just absolutely genius-level writing.
	Unbelievably compelling and brilliant and yeah I mean he he said that when he was in the camps that one of the things that he did especially once he started to identify people that he truly admired was to go over his life with a fine-tooth comb and try to Try to remember everything that he did wrong by his own estimation and then try to set it right in some manner.
	And so that's a repentance and then a redemption.
	There's a real fundamental, like a medieval Christian undertone to all of that.
	But one of the things that's quite interesting is that when you talk about issues that are this serious you're almost inevitably in a situation where you're going to find yourself compelled to use some kind of quasi-religious language because you end up discussing good and evil and and issues of redemption and issues of repentance and issues of conscience and and sin and all of that there isn't language that's deep enough to get at it otherwise and what Solzhenitsyn did was Scour his conscience and try to put
	himself together, partly because he was ashamed of himself in the face of these extraordinary people who seem to be able to keep their moral compass under circumstances where no one should ever assume that they would keep their moral compass.
	Because certainly, like I said when I was reading the Gulag and other books like that, I never assumed that if I was in those situations that I would have been one of the people who kept their head and were able to withstand the temptation to become a trustee, for example, and to take things the easy way and to lord it over the other prisoners and to adopt that position of authority.
	You know, it's like a head slave among slaves.
	But, you know, you could say, well, better to be the head slave than to be the bottom slave.
	Well, that's true in some sense with regards to creature comfort, but as Solzhenitsyn points out, it might be a little bit hard on your soul.
	And that actually turns out to be something of crucial, not only crucial importance psychologically, but crucial importance sociologically and politically.
	Because if you sacrifice that, then you warp the structure around you, which is exactly what happened in the establishment of these camps.
	The Soviet Union was just one big lie.
	What was their old joke?
	They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work.
	The whole book and the whole Soviet Union, when you read about it now, it seems like a bad movie.
	Just the way that...
	Stalin would do something.
	And the way that order would come down, it seems like one of those cheesy, you know, comedic movies about these decisions that they're making.
	Yeah, it's surreal.
	It's completely insane.
	You know, at one point he's talking about there was a new penalty for, what do they call it, clipping corn.
	Basically, a 12-year-old kid would be starving and he'd go into a field at night and clip an ear of corn.
	That happened in the Ukraine during the dekulakization, right?
	It was against the law to go out after the fields were harvested.
	It was against the law to go out and pick grain off the ground to feed your family.
	And the prison sentence was like a tenor, which is their little word for ten years.
	So you're going to get, you steal a piece of corn or you pick up corn off the ground and you're getting ten years.
	You can't comprehend that.
	That that's the way this nation worked.
	In the earlier parts of the book, when he starts going through the trials that they were doing on people, it's completely crazy.
	It's kangaroo court.
	Well, that's why I hate to see the kangaroo courts emerging all over the West, with the universities sort of at the forefront of that.
	We're building these alternative court systems constantly that don't follow standard legal procedure.
	And it's really...
	We're messing with things that we shouldn't be messing with.
	And yeah, the whole...
	I mean, there are accounts, I believe it's in the gulag, of applause after a Stalinist speech.
	Right, where people would stand up and applaud, and they'd applaud until literally the old people were falling over.
	Because if you were the first person to stop applauding, then you were, well, it was off to the camps with you.
	No, he absolutely outlines it.
	So that sounds so crazy to say.
	And he outlines a specific thing that happened.
	It's that right there.
	No one will stop applauding because they're afraid they're going to get ratted out by their people.
	By everyone else?
	Yeah, and by the people who are in fact watching.
	And I mean, you know, by the collapse of East Germany, one-third of the people were informers for the state.
	And so if you had a family of six people...
	Two of your family members were direct government informers.
	It's creepy in some sense.
	It's a very weak word to use in this situation.
	But when I was at New York University talking to Jonathan Haidt about, I don't know, it was about a few months ago, He just wrote that book called The Coddling of the American Mind, you know, and he took me into one of the men's washrooms there and there was a poster on the wall asking students to turn each other in for instances of bias or offensive speech and they have a whole bureaucracy that's designed to do nothing else but Adjudicate these instances of biased
	speech and these posters are up on the walls as if this is something to be proud of you know and the same thing is happening now in Scotland with the Scottish police are doing exactly the same thing they're asking citizens to turn each other in for for hate crimes you know and the problem with that is the fundamental problem with that and the the unsolvable problem is well who defines hate And where's the line drawn?
	It's like, well, anything that upsets me that you say is hate.
	And then it's worse than that.
	It's like, what happens is the people who define hate end up being those who are looking to take offense so that they can find someone they can define as a victimizer so that they can persecute them morally and justify that inner sadism.
	And those are the people who end up defining the laws.
	And then they mask this with the morality, saying, well, we're doing this to make our society a safe place.
	It's absolutely dreadful.
	And to see that happening in the UK was just, it's just awful.
	Because, I mean, you know, the UK is the center point of the idea of free speech.
	I mean, a lot of America, obviously, a lot of American ideals, America's a great center of free speech, but I mean, it's a variation on the English system.
	So to see that happening in the UK is just, it's awful.
	And to see the police doing this and being, you know, encouraged by the politicians, and to see this put forward as some sort of moral action, it's just...
	Well, it's an echo of this kind of catastrophe that we're discussing.
	So I think about that sometimes.
	And I also have a tendency to look at things and not be too worried about them.
	Like, hey, come on.
	What's really going to happen, right?
	And that's actually part of my personality.
	Part of that comes from my old job where, hey, I can't worry about these little things.
	Oh, there's some little problem going on over there.
	That's not going to affect us.
	And you gotta pay attention a little bit and make sure it doesn't get out of hand.
	But that thing about speech, and you just mentioned the kulak.
	Is that how you say it?
	Kulaks, yeah.
	They were the Ukrainian farmers who were good at farming.
	When I read this part, it got me worried about my own personal lackadaisical attitude towards things that I think, oh, that's not a big of a deal.
	Let me read this little section about the escalation of the word KULAK and where it started.
	And where it ended up.
	Yeah, that's good.
	So, here we go.
	In Russian, a kulak is a miserly, dishonest, rural trader who grows rich not by his own labor, but through someone else's.
	In every locality, even before the revolution, such Kulaks could be numbered on one's fingers.
	And the revolution totally destroyed their basis of activity.
	Subsequently, after 1917, by a transfer of meaning, the name Kulak began to be applied to all those who in any way hired workers.
	Even if it was only when they were temporarily short of working hands in their own families.
	And that doesn't stop there.
	The inflation of this scathing term, Kulak, proceeded relentlessly.
	And by 1930, all strong peasants in general were being so called.
	All peasants strong in management, strong in work, or even strong merely in convictions.
	The term Kulak was used to smash the strength of the peasantry.
	And I gotta go a little bit further because Hell of a thing for the Workers' Party to do, eh?
	Crazy.
	They went further, though.
	Beyond this, in every village, there were people who, in one way or another, had personally gotten in the way of the local activists.
	This was the perfect time to settle accounts with them of jealousy, envy, and insult.
	These are the people you were just talking about.
	A new word was needed for these new victims as a class, and it was born.
	By this time it had no social or economic content whatsoever, but it had a marvelous sound.
	And that meant a person aiding the kulaks.
	In other words, I consider you an accomplice of the enemy.
	And that's all it took.
	Yeah, well, one of the things I tried to outline in my foreword to the abridged version was I was thinking about this idea of, oddly enough, about intersectionality, which is a, like, social justice idea, you know, that the social justice idea is that we're best defined by our collective identity.
	And that the proper narrative in relationship to our collective identity is one of victim-victimizer, which is a replay of the old Marxist doctrine of bourgeoisie and proletariat.
	It's just in its new guise.
	I mean, and that new guise developed at least in part in response to the gulag archipelago because the old proletariat-bourgeoisie distinction became morally untenable.
	So it just went underground and underwent this transformation.
	The intersectional theorists point out that you're Status as a victimizer or a victim is actually the intersection of your multiple identities.
	And that's actually the Achilles' heel of the collectivist notion, and we can get into why that is.
	But there's a horror that goes along with that, that's not obvious, that I think contributed to exactly why the Russian Revolution went so horribly wrong.
	And that is that, so imagine that I could characterize you along five or six different dimensions of group identity.
	It's pretty easy, you know, while you're male, you're male of a certain age, you're male of a certain age and economic class, you have a certain sexual orientation, you have a certain ethnicity, you have a certain race, that's six groups right there.
	And we could continue, you know, your parents had a certain socioeconomic class and so did your grandparents and And then your ethnic group had a certain privilege or lack thereof and you're attractive or you're not attractive and you're intelligent or you're not intelligent and there's temperamental variability.
	Like there's all sorts of ways of characterizing you according to your group.
	Okay, now we might say that if we were compassionate people That we would take one of those group identities or more and look at where you're dispossessed and victimized.
	Okay, and we're going to find some dimension along which you're less privileged than some people.
	Like maybe you come from a working class background despite the fact that you're like a straight male.
	And so you can be a victim on that dimension.
	And so...
	And that's kind of, that's at least in part an element of intersectional theory, right?
	And that maybe your oppression is the product of your multiple victim-like identities.
	But that can easily be reversed.
	Because it's absolutely the case that I can take any person, and I can do a multi-dimensional analysis of their group identities, and I can find at least one dimension along which they're the perpetrator, not the victim.
	They're the victimizer, not the victim.
	And as soon as I can identify a dimension along which they're a victimizer, then that justifies their persecution.
	And so one of the things that you saw happening in the Russian Revolution, and it's very much akin to what you just described, was that the borders of who was validly accused of being a victimizer essentially expanded to include everyone. was that the borders of who was validly accused of And that's actually right.
	In a perverse sense, it's right.
	Because if you position yourself properly in the historical flow, then you should see yourself as a perpetrator and a victim equally.
	Well, it's not the right way to see yourself at all, but if you're going to play that game, you're going to be on both sides of it.
	And then the issue is, and this is related to your idea about, you know, in your platoon, you've got one person who's sadistic.
	It's like, okay, well, let's even assume that at the beginning of the Russian Revolution that the vast majority of the people who were motivated by communism were actually compassionate with regards to the dispossessed peasantry.
	Now, I don't believe that, but we could say that that was even a significant minority.
	What percentage did you just say on it?
	What was your hypothetical percentage?
	Well, let's say it's 20% or let's even say it's 50% of people who are genuinely motivated by compassion for the dispossessed.
	But then there's another...
	Maybe we could even say it was only 10% to begin with, who weren't motivated by that at all.
	They were motivated by the jealousy and the spite and the resentment that Solzhenitsyn describes.
	And they were the ones who were after those to be persecuted.
	And the thing is, they got the upper hand really rapidly.
	And it might be because the carnivorous types, the predatory types, are much more dangerous and powerful than the compassionate types.
	They'll take them out instantly.
	We're willing to step up and smash someone, as opposed to the people that are saying, oh, we just want to help.
	Yes, exactly.
	Well, and there's someone I actually cited, a guy named, I think his name was Walter Latsis, in the foreword, who wrote in a journal called Red Terror, that if you were interrogating an enemy of the state, you didn't bother with niceties like their individual guilt.
	That was a bourgeoisie conceit.
	And that's a really important thing to keep in mind.
	What you wanted to do is to do a class-based analysis and find out, well, are they a member of, let's say, the KULAC or the affiliates of the KULACs, which is a lovely way of expanding your list of potential victims.
	And then you execute accordingly.
	And that would mean, well, the person that you're interrogating, right, or the class member that you're interrogating, and then their children, and perhaps also their grandchildren.
	And Latsas himself was eventually executed by the Stellanists.
	Somebody wrote to me after I wrote the foreword and told me that that was his eventual fate.
	And I thought, well, talk about standing on a chair and putting the noose around your own neck and kicking it out from underneath you.
	It's like, you know, he basically, he murdered himself.
	Fundamentally.
	And, you know, you could say in some sense that was the story of the Soviet Union to a tremendous degree.
	Yeah, there's one part, going back to the ever-expanding people that need to be destroyed.
	There's a point in the book where he's saying, hey, look, there's insects.
	Stalin's described, or maybe it was Lenin, was describing these certain people as insects that needed It'd be destroyed.
	And then that just starts off with, hey, people that are rabble-rousers.
	They're insects.
	And then it just expands and expands.
	And then it's got priests.
	And then it's got engineers.
	Oh, yeah.
	And physicians.
	And physicians.
	Oh, yes.
	Everyone.
	Wreckers.
	Yeah, wreckers.
	Wreckers.
	That's the word that he uses in the book for basically saboteurs.
	And that expands...
	Beyond comprehension.
	Yeah, because that every single problem that there is is the fault of some person out there that's sabotaging and and they they do this show trial and he talks about it in the book for I think that I think the phrase that he uses or that they use at the rush that the Soviets used was Organizers of the famine Meaning, like, oh, yeah, you're starving, and these people over here, they're the reason you're, these are the people that organized the famine, they're the wreckers of production of food.
	You bet, you bet.
	Well, it was either that, you know, you imagine that you adopt a worldview, and that worldview enables you to, at least in principle, organize yourself with other people and to provide you with a certain amount of psychological stability.
	And then things go dreadfully wrong.
	And then you have a choice, which is to re-evaluate your worldview, which is, of course, what Solzhenitsyn does in the Gulag Archipelago in a very deep way.
	He reorganizes his entire worldview.
	Or you can look for reasons why you're right and these things are happening.
	And Solzhenitsyn talks a lot in the Gulag Archipelago about, see, he had a moral conundrum.
	When he was in prison and he started his moral awakening, let's say, and he was trying to figure out how to treat other people who were imprisoned, he had a real moral conundrum when a committed communist was dragged into the gulag system, which happened all the time.
	He said those people were in particularly dire straits because not only had they been subject to the entire tyrannical weight of the deceitful state, but it was at the hands of their own comrades and friends.
	And then the committed communists would enter the gulag, and they would still be in their morally superior phase, right?
	That their incarceration was a mistake, and that things would be set right, and that there was nothing wrong with the system, and they would attempt to justify it.
	And Solzhenitsyn was never sure how to react to these people ethically, because on the one hand, well, they were, you know, devastated, because now they were political prisoners, and maybe they got a 20-year sentence, and they were in terrible situation.
	Stripped of their family and just ruined.
	But on the other hand, they were still avid supporters of the very fist that had crushed them.
	And so his eventual conclusion was that until they broke and repented, they weren't to be allied with.
	They were still essentially on the side of the, well, of the perpetrator.
	And it seems to me that that's right.
	That's unrepentant sin, let's say.
	And it isn't until you What would you say?
	Until you take responsibility for your own complicitness in your unfair interrogation that you get to join the ranks of valuable and suffering humanity again.
	And so...
	Yeah, the extension of the persecution is really something that's horrifying, to see how who constituted a victimizer, the ranks of who constituted a victimizer just grew and grew and grew and grew.
	One of the most shocking groups of people that ended up in the Gulags were the damn Soviet soldiers that had just got back from fighting the Nazis.
	That's the sort of thing you can't make up.
	Yeah, you can't make that up, including Solzhenitsyn, who was in close combat with the enemy.
	Yeah.
	And he wrote a letter to one of his buddies and said, yeah, this doesn't seem like to be a great decision by Stalin.
	And next thing you know, he's in prison.
	Yeah, well, Stalin decided that, yeah, this is something that you can't believe this.
	Well, it is.
	There is this – it's like if there's something satanic at the bottom of this, mythologically speaking – There's also something that's like a cosmic...
	It's like cosmic black humor.
	It's like the sign on Auschwitz that said, work will set you free.
	You know, that's a joke, right?
	It's a terrible, terrible, dark joke.
	And so much of this has the element of exactly that kind of surreal...
	I hate to say humor, but it's right.
	I mean, Stalin decided that the...
	Okay, so the Soviet prisoners of war were not covered by the Geneva Convention for the treatment of prisoners of war, because Stalin refused to sign that agreement.
	So, like, if you were an allied prisoner of the Germans, it wasn't like you were having a great time of it.
	Like, food was in short supply, and you were treated pretty brutally.
	But the Soviets were kept separately, and they were doing so badly that the Allies used to throw food packets over the fence when that was an option.
	So the Soviet prisoners of war were treated absolutely dreadfully, and Stalin didn't care about that.
	And then when they were released and went back to the Soviet Union, his dictum was that because they had been exposed to the capitalist West, or even the Nazi West for that matter, that they had now been intolerably corrupted on ideological grounds and had to be put in the prison camps.
	So that was your destiny as, you know, I mean, first of all, you were a frontline Russian soldier, which was just brutal beyond belief.
	Their army was completely unprepared for Hitler's invasion because Stalin trusted Hitler in his strange way.
	And so they were completely unprepared.
	And of course, then fighting in the Soviet Union with its winters, I mean, you just can't imagine what that must have been like.
	And then to be thrown in a prisoner of war camp At the bottom of the rung and then to be brought back to your country and then to be imprisoned as a traitor because as a class you've been exposed to the wrong ideology.
	It's unimaginably vile and surreal at the same time.
	You just shake your head.
	For me, it's such a shock to read the Gulag Archipelago.
	You just can't.
	It's like Dante's Inferno.
	It's like a trip into hell.
	Yeah, and I guess that's what I was trying to say when we started this conversation.
	I was trying to say that it's like you're watching this, like you said, it's like a bad comedy movie.
	And you'd think, well, that'd be really...
	You'd think, you know, when you take a comedy, one of the ways you can make people laugh is to take something ordinary and maybe make it much more extreme.
	And the more extreme you make it, the more funny it becomes.
	Yeah.
	That's what happened here.
	You're looking at this thing going, hey, oh yeah, they seem to be trying to make this funny because who could ever conceive that you could take your frontline soldiers who were captured and in misery and when they return home, instead of treating them like heroes, Instead, you put them back into a prison.
	Worst one, even.
	You can't even...
	That's just...
	I know.
	You can't make this stuff up.
	You can't make it up.
	No.
	Did you see...
	I believe that movie was The Death of Stalin.
	I did not see it.
	That's worth seeing because it's very interesting because one of the things about that movie is that it captures that surreal element because it's a black comedy.
	And there are comical things happening in the movie in that terrible, dark way, constantly, at the same time that in the background genuinely terrible things are happening.
	So it's that horrible...
	It's got that horrible satirical flavor that runs through books like the Gulag Archipelago, where you think, well, there's just no...
	This is so absurd that there's no possible way it could have occurred.
	And yet, that's...
	Not only did it happen...
	There was like a contest to top the absurdity.
	You know, to consider the engineers, for example, wreckers.
	Well, these people were building the Soviet system to the degree that it was built, and then to turn around and accuse exactly those people of being the ones who destroy and undermine it.
	It's part of...
	I really think that what underlies...
	This.
	Whatever this is.
	And I think this is what manifests itself in the worst of the leftist collectivism, is a real hatred for anything that smacks of competence at all.
	Like, I tried to imagine those Russian villages, because I come from a small town, a small northern town too, so I kind of, I tried to imagine, so imagine that you're in an isolated village, and It's a peasant village and the peasants weren't freed that long ago, right?
	They were basically serfs until about the middle of the second half of the 19th century and so they had been emancipated and then some of those people who were emancipated got a little bit of land and started to have a life, you know, started to be successful peasants and they were also the people that grew the bulk of the crops because What you see happening in any productive domain is that a small percentage of people do almost all the productive work.
	So there's a small percentage of productive farmers who grew all the crops.
	And then there's all sorts of farmers who were only farmers by name and they weren't successful at all.
	And then there was a certain relationship between being productive as a farmer and developing some wealth.
	Maybe you had a house and maybe you could hire a person or two.
	Which you'd think would actually be a good thing, especially if you're also growing food.
	Okay, so imagine you get a village, and now there's a bit of a socio-economic pyramid, and there's some people that are doing well.
	And it isn't the crooked people that are really annoying.
	The people who, like the genuine kulaks, let's say, that small percentage of psychopathic types who are basically Profiting criminally off the efforts of others.
	Those aren't so annoying, those people, because they're rich but they don't deserve it.
	And so they don't stand towards you as a moral ideal that shames you.
	But the really annoying people are the ones who are doing well and deserve it.
	Especially if you're someone who's doing nothing and is bitter.
	Okay, so now, so there's the village and you've got your people who are doing alright and then you've got a huge strat of people who aren't upset about the people who are doing well.
	They might even admire them and be happy that they're around because they're making the community thrive and growing some food.
	Then you have this little...
	This little strata at the bottom of people who are ne'er-do-wells and on the more psychopathic end of things, and they are bitter and resentful and waiting for their bloody opportunity.
	And then the communist intellectuals come into town and say, you know those people that are doing well?
	They actually, everything they've got is ill-gotten and they stole it.
	And they stole it from you.
	And look at how badly you're doing.
	And the reason you're doing badly is because these people who are lording it over you and who have all this creature comfort, they took that from you.
	It's yours by right.
	And so then all that resentment and jealousy and hatred and rage, alcohol-fueled, as you might well imagine, has this moral...
	There's no reason to go with pitchforks and in a mob and surround those houses and to strip them of everything they have and to rape the women and to kill the occupants or to ship them off to the middle of Siberia where they froze to death because there were no or died of dysentery or whatever other plague managed to, you know...
	Weave its way through these camps.
	And so you have the intellectuals providing the moral rationale for the worst ethical actors in these small villages doing the worst possible things under the guise of compassion.
	Right.
	And that's part of that victim-victimizer narrative.
	It's just...
	And you can imagine that.
	You can imagine a dark night.
	You can imagine the winter.
	You can imagine the alcohol.
	You can imagine the rage that fuels these people who are drinking too much in the pubs that have been sitting there for the last 20 years.
	Like, what would you say?
	Eating up their own souls with resentment and bitterness.
	And then someone comes in and says, you're the true victim here.
	And here's the people that you can go after.
	And then, like, if you play that on your imagination, you get some real sense of exactly what sort of horror that would produce.
	You know, you think about the rape, for example.
	Or just the theft.
	But it's the rape that you can really think about as...
	Absolute revenge for all that bitter resentment, all fueled by the fact that you'd sat there for the last 20 years being completely goddamn useless and bitter and angry and fantasizing about the day that would come where you'd have your opportunity.
	God, and then the whole country, and that was the whole country.
	It's just unbelievable.
	Yeah, and I think he spells that out very clearly.
	And he says it's, you know, what he's saying, you know, I'm saying that you've got a psychopath in your platoon.
	He's saying that psychopath, all that psychopath needs to flip is someone to tell him that that's the right thing to do.
	And that's exactly what happened.
	What you said, that's it.
	Those guys that were slightly psychopathic.
	And then it becomes, okay, I'm the head psychopath.
	And you're in my village, and let's say you're one of those people that are in the middle.
	Well, whose side are you going to be on?
	I'm a psychopath.
	If you're not on my side, I'm going to kill you next.
	So you go, well, no, I'm on your side too.
	And that's how it expands indefinitely.
	Look, it's not like it takes much pressure.
	On people to have them fold.
	I mean, one of the things you see happening right now in our culture is that's happening to people all the time with these Twitter wars.
	You know, someone will say something, they'll express an opinion, and then they'll get mobbed, but only abstractly, right?
	It's not like there's pitchfork-wielding mobs at their house.
	And I'm not making light of it.
	It's no pleasant thing to be mobbed on Twitter.
	That's an abstraction compared to these people showing up at your house.
	And what'll happen is that people will go through an abject apology and they'll say, well, I really didn't mean it and now I understand what my privilege is and I see how what I said could have been very hurtful to people and they wander through that entire apology and fold almost instantly.
	And that's under almost no pressure compared to what real pressure is.
	Real pressure is when the wolves are actually at your door rather than just barking off in the distance.
	But people will fold just when they're barking in the distance.
	There's one lawyer that he talks about in here.
	Same thing as the story that you described.
	I forget the guy's name, but this guy was like the premier prosecuting lawyer for the Soviet government.
	And he just rips people apart over and over again.
	And as you read about what happens to him, sure enough, he's one of the guys that ended up on the defensive and being executed.
	Yeah, it's like these people, they built a place of butchery and then threw themselves into it.
	And you see Solzhenitsyn documents this very carefully.
	I mean, Stalin killed all the people who were foremost actors in the Russian Revolution.
	So, I mean, everyone was fed into the great grinding machine.
	And Stalin himself.
	It looked to me like...
	See, he got himself into something approximating a positive feedback loop, which is a very dangerous thing to have happen.
	And I think Solzhenitsyn does a lovely job of detailing this as well.
	So it's like, imagine that I have a fair amount of contempt for people to begin with.
	And then I find that people are...
	I'm not a trusting person.
	And I find that I'm very paranoid about the fact that people are lying to me.
	And then I develop a certain amount of power and a reputation.
	Well, then people really do start lying to me all the time in every gesture, you know, because every time they come near me, they're absolutely terrified.
	And they're going to tell me anything that I want to hear.
	And of course, then all that does is validate my view of how pathetic and contemptible everyone is.
	And so, and the more that view gets validated, the more I think that it's okay to destroy people because look at how pathetic and contemptible they are, how they always lie.
	And all that means is that they lie even more.
	So this whole thing just spirals out of control.
	Stalin basically started out as the brutal enforcement henchman for Lenin.
	The killer for hire.
	Not like Lenin was above that sort of thing himself.
	But he trained Stalin.
	And then Stalin's proclivity to be murderous just kept expanding without limit.
	First of all, it was individuals, and then it was groups, and then it was nations, and then, well, by the end of his life, well, what was it?
	The plot to destroy the entire world, to initiate the Third World War, to wipe out Europe, to maybe destroy everything.
	And like there's no limit.
	There was no limit to that, you know, and there's some evidence that that's perhaps why he was killed, you know, because Stalin himself even went too far for the horrible for the horrible What semi The corrupted compadres that he had arranged around himself.
	He went too far even for them.
	And thank God for that.
	The thing that the Gulag Archipelago did for me, This was also in keeping, as a consequence also of reading Jung at the same time, but it was certainly the Gulag in large part that did it.
	I would say that in some sense it scared me straight.
	I thought, I see the consequences of unethical behavior, deceit, the willingness to turn a blind eye.
	So even sins of omission rather than sins of commission, just to turn a blind eye, the consequences of that are so absolutely dreadful that it's not acceptable.
	And I think that's the right lesson from the 20th century.
	It's that you have a much more important moral role to play in keeping things straight than you want to believe.
	You know, people think, well, my life is basically meaningless.
	It's like, well, that's quite terrifying.
	It's like, yeah, it's kind of terrifying, but it means you don't have any responsibility.
	So there's a big advantage to thinking that.
	If nothing you do matters, then nothing you do matters, and so you can do whatever you want.
	And that's horrifying in a nihilistic sort of way, but there's another kind of horror that's more associated, I think, with the horror of hellfire that was characteristic of the medieval Christian view, which is something like And if you strip it of its metaphysics, it's something like, no, you don't get it.
	The things you do or don't do, they actually do matter.
	And they tilt the world towards, you know, something approximating good, let's say, or towards something that very closely approximates hell.
	And that's actually on you.
	It's literally your fault.
	It's literally your responsibility.
	It's like, man, that's a terrifying...
	That's a terrifying idea, but I can't see how you can read this literature without coming to that conclusion.
	It wasn't one that I wanted to leap to.
	It's sort of the ultimate in horrifying conclusions that everybody who participated in this system was at fault for all of it.
	You know, and Dostoevsky made the same sorts of claims in the last part of the 19th century.
	I mean, he was a very weird, mystical sort of person, you know, and he made claims, or some of his characters did, but on his behalf, that, you know, not only are you responsible for everything you do, but in some sense you're responsible for everything that everyone else does, too.
	And you think, well...
	Obviously, there's a way in which that isn't true.
	It's delusional in some sense, but there's another way in which it actually is true.
	Well, I wrote a book called Extreme Ownership.
	This is a whole thought here.
	So, you know, when I read the book About Face, which is not about leadership, it's not a leadership book.
	It's a book about a guy that was in the leadership position, but he doesn't say, here's how you lead, here's what you do here.
	It's a book about his experience and what I took away from it, especially because I was in leadership positions In in the military in combat situations that I started seeing all these leadership things that he did and there's all this crossover because For instance and so for me the crossover was well I started learning about tactics when I was a young kid because I was in the military as in the SEAL teams and you had to learn about How to fire and maneuver like that's what you do and
	And then so you start learning about leadership and then I started training a lot of jujitsu and so those things kind of all fit together and it's very strange how those things started to weave together in my head that, oh, if on the battlefield, if you want to attack the enemy, you don't do it head on, you flank them.
	You distract them and then you flank them.
	You come in from the other side.
	In Jiu Jitsu, if you want to submit your opponent, you don't just grab their arm, no, you start to choke them, and while they're defending the choke, then you get their arm.
	As a leader, if you want somebody to do something, you just don't bark that order at them.
	You flank them and you let them understand why it's happening.
	When I started this podcast that I do, I started off by saying, in the beginning, I'd say, yeah, it's a podcast about leadership viewed through the lens of war and atrocity.
	And the more I did it, and it didn't take me very long, where I was saying, well, it's actually a podcast about human nature, really, is what it's actually about, because the better you understand human beings, the better you'll be able to do as a leader, because you'll understand what's happening with those dynamics, which I guess is now leading me into some sort of psychology,
	which is kind of where you ended up with, of you read this book, and you said you were studying political science when you read this book, and then you said, oh, you looked at the psychology of it, and an example that you just brought up, and this is just What you learn when you read and when you understand history and when you understand the way people think, Stalin surrounded himself with people that would say yes to him.
	And anybody that didn't say yes to him, he killed them.
	And I'll say this again.
	I'll talk to military.
	Of course, he also killed you if you said yes.
	Yeah.
	I'll talk to military for sure, but also any business leader.
	We talk to business leaders all the time.
	And you don't want people, you don't want your subordinates or your superiors when you tell them what to do to just nod their head and say yes.
	You don't want that.
	Now, the immediate thought, especially for a military guy, they think nothing would make my job easier than if I bark an order at you, Jordan, you work for me, you're a private, and I'm a captain, and I bark an order at you, you just shut up and go do it.
	That seems like the best thing in the world.
	It's absolutely not true.
	Because there's things that you know on the front lines that I don't know.
	And if I really want to be a good leader, I want you to push back on me and say, hey, boss, we don't want to do that.
	Here's what's going on.
	Let me tell you the situation.
	And you want to be able to do that.
	You want to be able to teach your subordinates to do that without being insubordinate, right?
	Because then it's not a power play.
	It's that your interests are aligned.
	Our interests are aligned, and I actually, when I talk to the subordinates, because I talk to subordinates too, and I say, listen, when you say something to your boss, you don't say, why the hell are we doing that, boss?
	You actually have to be very tactful.
	Yes, exactly.
	Hey, boss, I want to make sure I'm executing this exactly how you want it.
	Can you explain to me why we're doing this so I can really, really make it happen out there in the field?
	And that's a key thing.
	So these ideas of...
	Psychology, I guess now, I hate to use that word because I was just calling it human nature, but these ideas, they all kind of come together.
	And so now you're talking about ownership, right?
	Extreme ownership and this idea that, hey, I'm responsible for everything.
	And so here's what I'll get from a leader.
	They'll say, well, whether it's a business leader or it's very easy to use a military leader.
	So I'll get a platoon commander.
	My machine gunner shot in the wrong direction.
	How can that be my fault?
	Because my machine gunner shot in the wrong direction.
	I'm not holding his weapon.
	I'm not pulling his trigger.
	How can that possibly be my fault?
	That's not my fault.
	Wrong.
	Who's in charge of that machine gunner?
	Who's in charge of making sure he understands what his fields of fire are?
	Who's in charge of making sure he understands when and where he's allowed to shoot?
	You are.
	You're the boss.
	This is absolutely your fault.
	Another interesting example of the weather.
	The weather's bad.
	We couldn't execute our mission.
	That's why we failed.
	Because we couldn't launch our helicopters.
	It's not my fault.
	That's a hard one to argue against.
	Except for the fact that if you're a good leader, you'll say, hey, here's our plan.
	We're going to use these helicopters, and here's our contingency plan if there's bad weather.
	If you don't take that ownership of what's going on, if you don't take responsibility for it, you're not going to change it.
	You're not going to fix it.
	And that means you're never going to get any better.
	You're not going to win.
	Right?
	But the minute you, and obviously, This applies to you know people to purple and you know you tell people take responsibility You know tell them take ownership of what's going on in your world It's this it's the same thing but at the end well, it's also it's also seems to me to be the case and I think that this is part of the Ethic that's embedded in in it's deeply embedded in Christianity with the idea that The idea that the ultimate sacrifice that you can offer to the world is the sacrifice of yourself.
	It's like, well, imagine that you have to sacrifice something to set the world right.
	Well, you do, obviously, because you have to give up things now in order to make things better in the future.
	So the sacrificial idea is a very deep one.
	Then the question might be, well, if you're going to sacrifice something, is it going to be someone else or is it going to be you?
	And I really think that's the fundamental question, and the right answer to that is that it's going to be you.
	It's your fault, right?
	You take that on, or at least you take on that responsibility.
	And it's a weird thing, weirdly difficult to distinguish fault and responsibility.
	I think responsibility is the better way of thinking about it, but it's tied in with the idea of fault.
	If it doesn't go right, if it isn't going right, it's because you're not good enough.
	Now, that can be crushing.
	There is a problem with that.
	And you see sometimes people who develop psychotic depression, and they suffer from a delusional condition, in some sense, that the entire moral catastrophe of the world is literally their fault.
	And there's an element of that that's not productive, although there's a truth in it as well.
	And it's hard to find the balance so that you can take on that responsibility without it simultaneously being a crushing weight because there's a lot of things in the world that are really not good and if they're your fault, well, that's rather hard on you.
	I mean, one of the things that the Catholic Church does to help people with that is that it gives them the opportunity to sort of wash their sins off themselves, right?
	You can go to church and you can say, well, look, here's a bunch of ways that I've been being not who I could be.
	And the church authorities say, well, you know, that's not good and you should straighten up and all of that and fly right.
	But human beings are fallible and you're fallible and we can't just crush you because of your insufficiency.
	So we'll wash the slate clean and you can go out there and try again.
	And it's very hard to get the balance between those things right.
	So that you can take the responsibility on without being crushed by it.
	But it's still the case that it seems to me that it's either your fault or it's someone else's.
	And as soon as it's someone else's, then you better be careful because that idea that it's someone else's is definitely going to appeal to the worst in you.
	That's definitely going to happen.
	And if you don't see that, then you're naive or willfully blind and all that is going to do is make the situation worse.
	Yeah, especially because if it's not my fault and it's your fault and I can't control you, what do I do about it?
	I sit there and just suffer the consequences of the situation as opposed to, okay, here's what's going on.
	I'm going to take responsibility and ownership for it.
	I'm going to change it and make it happen.
	You talked about turning a blind eye, and earlier you talked about turning a blind eye to the truth, to a situation.
	And I know there's a point in this book where he talks about, he's got a buddy that says, amnesty is coming.
	Amnesty is coming.
	Let's just keep our mouths shut.
	Let's do what we're told to do, and we'll get out.
	Amherst is coming.
	Solzhenitsyn says, he's saying, okay, yeah.
	And then he says to himself, wait a minute.
	If I'm not living in order to live, then is it worth it?
	And this is a question that I get asked a lot, because people get themselves into situations Where they've lost some kind of control, whether it's they're in a crappy job or they've got a bad boss or whatever.
	Maybe they're in a bad relationship.
	Maybe their family's...
	But they're in a situation and they don't know what to do.
	And part of them, I think, anticipates the answer from me to be, listen, hey, listen, if you're not living in order to live, then that's wrong.
	But what I actually tell them Universally almost, and there's a couple situations where it goes outside this, but what I tell them is, what you need to do right now is you need to play the game.
	You need to play the game to get the situation to a point where you can act, right?
	So if you've got a bad boss, right?
	Oh, okay, you've got a bad boss.
	I want to tell this guy to go screw himself.
	Hey, guess what I'm going to do?
	When my boss tells me something to do that doesn't make much sense, you know what I'm gonna do?
	I'm gonna do it.
	And I'm gonna do it well.
	And what am I doing?
	I'm building that relationship with him.
	He's starting to trust me.
	And he's gonna tell me to do something else.
	Now these things aren't massive catastrophes.
	It's like he's telling me to do something, maybe there's a better way to do it.
	You know what I'm gonna do?
	I'm gonna do it that way.
	And I'm gonna play that game and I'm gonna build up that relationship.
	Now when eventually he tells me to do something that is totally stupid or it's gonna cost lives or money, then when I say, hey boss, That's not a great way to do it.
	I think I know a better way.
	Couldn't we try something else?
	He actually will listen to me.
	So I'm gonna play the game a little bit.
	And I'll tell you, my gut instinct, if now, I guess it's easy to look from the outside and say, hey, if I was in this prison camp, my gut instinct is like, okay, Jocko, you know, you've been through these kind of things before.
	Play the game.
	You're gonna play the game.
	Which is horrifying.
	Because part of playing that game to the fullest extent here, or in a Nazi prison camp, would be coming a capo.
	Oh, you're playing the game.
	Yeah, you're playing the game.
	And that's really the things that I said that are outlying.
	I always make the caveat that if you're getting asked to do something that's immoral, illegal, or unethical, Then you actually have a duty to say, no, I'm not going to do that.
	No, that's the line, which you reached that line in the sand with Bill C-16.
	Which is, hey, I'm not going to do this.
	But the idea that sometimes you got to play the game.
	And sometimes even from you, when you just said to me, you said, well, sometimes it's not right to turn a blind eye on things.
	And it's like, Sometimes you have to, if you want to get yourself to a position.
	It seems to me that you're making a distinction between discipline and strategy, and impulsive moral responding.
	Let's say that you are in a situation where you have a boss who's intolerable.
	And maybe what you'd like to do, you know, the resentment has built up over five years and you'd like to go in there and yell at him and tell him everything you think.
	And you think, well, that's the truth.
	It's like, well, it's actually, it's not a very sophisticated truth because you're doing a shallow and impulsive analysis of the situation.
	It would have been the case that you've already compromised yourself in 500 ways.
	And I'll get back to the playing the game issue.
	Because you do have to discipline yourself too.
	And you have to discipline yourself to some degree by allowing yourself to do arbitrary things that are part of the system.
	That's a necessary part of discipline.
	And discriminating that from compliance with unethical activity is very difficult.
	So that's a hard situation.
	But let's say you're going to counsel someone who has an intolerable boss and they come in and they're right at the end of their tether because maybe that's why they come for counseling.
	They say, I really want to tell that son of a bitch what I think of him.
	And you think, well...
	Wait a second here.
	Okay, first of all, you've already eradicated from the list of reasonable possibilities that decision by failing to say small things that you could have said all the way along.
	And it's not like you can just all of a sudden blurt all of that out now and that wipes the slate clean and that constitutes truth.
	It's too unsophisticated.
	So let's think, okay, so what is it that you want?
	Well, I don't want this job anymore.
	It's like, okay, now let's actually have a strategy about this then.
	You don't want this job anymore.
	Can you get another job?
	Well, I don't think so.
	Well, so you can't just quit.
	Well, no, I can't because then I don't have any money and my family depends on the job.
	It's like, okay, so you can't just stop this.
	That's not a viable solution.
	You go out of the frying pan into the fire.
	Or, you know, you substitute one set of unethical actions for another set of unethical actions that are even worse.
	That's not helpful.
	Alright, so let's start thinking about what exactly it is that you want.
	It's like, well, maybe I want a better job.
	I want to work for someone who's more reasonable.
	Okay, so what's stopping you?
	Well, I don't have my CV in order.
	My resume isn't up to date.
	Well, why is that?
	Well, I haven't done it for five years and I don't like doing it.
	Well, why is that?
	Well, because I'm kind of embarrassed about it because it has holes in it and it shows where I'm lackadaisical and where I'm not prepared.
	It's like, okay, how many things are there like that?
	Well, there's a bunch of things and they're all associated with how I procrastinated in the past.
	It's like, okay, what are we going to do to rectify that?
	So I'll say to people, why don't you update your CV? That's what we'll do first.
	Because if you're going to look for a different job, I'm not saying you're going to look for a different job.
	But if you're going to look for a different job, you're not going to unless your CV is updated.
	And you're also not going to unless you can get a good recommendation from this boss that's a tyrant.
	That's right.
	You've got to play the game sometimes.
	There's 10 strategic actions that you're going to have to take in order to make yourself able to move laterally or up.
	And the truth isn't going in and yelling at your boss and telling him everything you think about him.
	The truth is...
	Trying to figure out the very, very difficult process of how you put yourself in a better position.
	One of the things that's quite fun about this lecture tour is the letters that I receive or the stories that people tell me about switching jobs.
	Because they do realize that they're, and I often talk to people about consulting their resentment.
	Resentment's a really useful emotion, like it's really dangerous.
	It's one of the most dangerous psychological states, I believe.
	But it's unbelievably useful because resentment usually only means one of two things.
	It either means quit whining and take it on because you're immature, or it means you're allowing yourself to be taken advantage of and you have something to say or do.
	And so you want to sort out the first part and find out if you're just being immature.
	And you can think that through and you can talk to people.
	But if it's the second, it's like, no, you've compromised yourself in a variety of ways and you have to figure out how to get out of that.
	And if you're resentful, that's evidence that you have in fact done that.
	Okay, so now the issue would be, well, how can you set your life up so that you can be without that resentment?
	And so that's when you start to develop a strategy.
	There's actually an adventure in this, too.
	I mean, I've had a number of clients who have been in jobs that they didn't like at all.
	They were tyrannized by someone, for example, and they were also working below their hypothetical level.
	And we'd put together a plan.
	It's like, okay, You're going to make three times as much money in five years.
	That's the plan.
	But, like, that's not going to be simple.
	So, there's education.
	You've got to educate yourself, maybe formally, because you've got holes.
	You've got to fix up your resume.
	You've got to overcome your fear of being interviewed.
	You have to start sending out, like, 50 resumes a week on a regular basis and be prepared for a 99% rejection rate.
	You're going to look for a different job.
	It's probably going to take six months to a year and almost all of that is going to be rejection.
	You've got to steel yourself for that and prepare.
	And maybe this is going to be a three-year process.
	It's no trivial thing.
	But, you know, it's almost inevitably I can't remember a single example.
	Where the consequence of that very careful, detailed, strategic thinking wasn't a massively substantive improvement in socioeconomic positioning and a great movement towards an improving trajectory.
	And there's advantages even along the way because even before that happens, the fact that you're taking genuine steps to put yourself in a better situation immediately starts to reduce your resentment even if it isn't having positive consequences to begin with.
	But you have to be realistic about it.
	It's like, look, it's going to be hard to update your CV because you're embarrassed about it and you should be.
	It's no wonder you're embarrassed about it.
	And then, well, of course you don't want to go be interviewed because you're not very good at it and there's holes in your story and you can be made nervous easily and you're not a very good advocate for yourself.
	So there's a lot of improvement that needs to be done there.
	And then you have to withstand the punishment Of being constantly rejected when you apply for jobs because the baseline rejection rate for the typical job applicant is like 99%.
	It's like the rejection rate for everything.
	Is this going to work?
	No.
	But if you do it 100 times, it might work once.
	And that's all you need.
	That's exactly it.
	You only need that once.
	And so the truth there isn't to yell at your boss.
	The truth there is to get your life together.
	Yeah.
	Play the game.
	You've got to play the game sometimes to get a strategic win, to me.
	And another interesting thing here is, as I say, you don't want to surround yourself with yes-men when you're in a leadership position.
	You also don't want to be your own personal yes-man that just thinks you're great and agrees with everything that you're doing and won't tell yourself the hard truth.
	You can't lie to yourself.
	Every little one of those things that you just listed off, Are the kind of things that people just lie to themselves and say, ah, you know what, well, you don't really need that.
	That person didn't learn anything in that course.
	Why should I go to it?
	You know, it's like if you don't tell yourself the truth about what your situation is, it's going to be problematic.
	Just like if you don't have people on your team above you or below you in the chain of command that tell you the truth, that's going to be problematic as well.
	Which is something you...
	Which is something that's easier said.
	So the playing the game thing, so are you thinking about that as a consequence of necessary discipline?
	Because it seems to be, you're making two cases at the same time, right?
	One is that you should obviously not undertake unethical actions.
	But then by the same token, you have to subordinate yourself to the realities of the situation.
	And I think that that's psychologically true because you're always in a situation where if you're in an organization, there's kind of an arbitrary and tyrannical aspect to it because it's never working perfectly.
	And then there's the positive aspect to it too.
	And so whenever you're doing a job, it could be that you're called upon to do things that What would you say?
	That are a necessary part of the operation of the machinery.
	I guess that would be particularly true in military situations.
	Yeah, and let me give you an example.
	Just a broad example, right?
	You know, my personality and my reputation.
	When I was in the military, it's like, oh, it's Jocko.
	If someone tells him to do something he doesn't want to do, he's just going to say, screw you.
	We're doing it my way.
	I got the nut.
	But that was kind of the impression people would get from me.
	If they didn't know me from the outside, they'd think, oh, this guy's a knuckle-dragger.
	He's just going to go forward.
	He's just going to make things happen, and he's not going to listen to anyone else.
	That was the impression from the outside.
	The reality is, A, you can't do that.
	And B, the reality is, a young lieutenant would come to me and say, hey, my bosses tell me to do this, this, and this.
	And what they'd think I was going to say is, bro, you don't do that.
	You stand up and you tell them, screw you.
	That doesn't make any sense.
	And they'd get this look in their eyes of surprise when I'd say, oh, your boss wants you to do that?
	Do it.
	Do it well.
	Play the game.
	That's what I'm telling them to do is play the game because these things are meaningless.
	It's something as pathetic as like, oh, you've got to fill out a form a certain way.
	It's like, hey, shut up and play the game.
	So is that a matter of picking your battles?
	It certainly is a matter of picking your battles.
	Because that's part of strategy, right?
	Everything can't be the war.
	Exactly.
	And it's exactly what it is.
	But a good example, and we wrote about it in Dichotomy of Leadership, which is my friend, my guy that worked for me, Leif Babin, we were getting told to do all this paperwork.
	You've got to fill out these forms.
	You've got to have a serialized inventory of everything.
	It's got to be signed off this many days.
	We need to know the qualifications of each and every person and when their qualifications come up due and all these just ridiculous paperwork.
	And Leif came to me and with the other platoon commander, a guy named Seth, they came to me and said, oh man, this is bullshit.
	Why do we got to do all this paperwork?
	We're here training for war.
	We're getting ready for war.
	Why do we got to do this?
	And Leif will tell you, his expectation was that I was going to be like, you're right.
	I'm going to go to the commanding officer and tell him, screw this.
	We're not doing this stuff.
	This is crap.
	Because we were in training getting ready to deploy to Iraq.
	This is crap.
	We're not doing this.
	And I looked at him and said, oh, we're doing all this paperwork.
	And not only are we going to do this paperwork, we're going to do it better than anyone else and we're going to turn it in before it's even due.
	Both him and Seth were kind of taken aback, the fact that I wasn't standing up and saying, we're not doing this rap!
	And then I explained to him, here's what we're doing.
	We're building a relationship with my commanding officer, with our commanding officer.
	We're going to do these little things for him.
	We're going to play the game.
	Because at some point, two things are going to happen.
	Number one, we want to build trust with my boss.
	I want my boss to look at me, and when he tells me to fill out paperwork, he knows it's going to be filled out.
	If he wants me to take down a building, he knows it's going to get taken out.
	If he wants me to execute a larger mission, I'll go and get it done.
	If I can't fill out paperwork correctly, How can you trust me to go on a real operation and have guys' lives at risk?
	So the idea is like, hey, we're going to play the game.
	And I think sometimes people start to hear me, they start to listen to me, and their first instinct is, Jocko wouldn't put up with this shit.
	And that's why these, you know, they'll hit me up the same thing.
	They'll write me an email, they'll write me a letter and say, here's the situation I'm in.
	Whether it's a boss, whether it's a military, it's any of them.
	Whether it's their wife.
	Like, my wife expects me not to train jiu-jitsu.
	It's something as stupid as that.
	Like, my wife won't let me train.
	It's driving me crazy.
	It's really starting to bother me.
	Why won't she?
	Well, what's the problem?
	Hey, have you taken her out for dinner?
	Do you know what I mean?
	Like, play the damn game a little bit so that you can win strategically.
	And it's the same thing, I think, with the 12 rules.
	We're like, hey, tell the truth or at least don't lie.
	It's like, I get it, but there's a dichotomy in that statement, and that is if you run around telling the absolute truth to everyone, it's gonna be like that Jim Carrey movie where he can't say anything that's not 100% true.
	A woman says, good morning, and he says, you look fat.
	It's like one of those.
	That's not good.
	And so you gotta learn to play the game.
	And I guess, again, going back to this book, it's like, That's a tough call to make in these situations.
	How much do you play the game?
	And there's an ethical line that you could cross at some point.
	If I become a capo, hey, you played the game and you went too far with it.
	And just like in a leadership situation, If you're my boss and I'm just kissing your ass and doing whatever, my guys lose respect for me.
	My team will lose respect for me.
	If you tell me to do something completely stupid and I say, hey guys, that's what the boss says, we're doing it, my guys will lose respect for me and I won't be able to execute missions the way I should.
	If, when the pushback is proper, I say, hey, Hey boss, that doesn't make any sense.
	We shouldn't do that.
	And I go to the guys and say, listen, I talked to him.
	We're going to see what he says.
	But trust me, if we have to do this, we'll figure out a way to make it work.
	Because if you're just the guy that's totally on board, if you're a brown noser, your guys will lose respect for you.
	100% they will.
	They'll lose respect for you.
	If you don't play the game at all and you push back on everything that your boss says, You're gonna get fired.
	That's another ethical situation.
	If you're my boss and you tell me to do something that I don't believe in or it's like a bad plan, and I draw the line in the sand and say, screw you, Jordan.
	We're not doing it.
	You can fire me.
	You're like, okay, fine.
	You fire me.
	You get some yes man to come in.
	He takes my guys out on the mission and gets them all killed.
	He didn't mitigate the risk properly.
	It's better for me ethically to say, Hey, look, Jordan, I don't agree with this plan.
	I really wish we could do it another way.
	Is there any way I could flex on it?
	You say, nope, you're doing it this way.
	It is better for me in many situations to say, okay, I got it.
	Well, that's a good indication of the complexity of the truth.
	I mean, one of the rules of thumb that I think is worth abiding by, and I guess this is something that makes me somewhat conservative in some ways, Is that you should do what everyone else does unless there's a very good reason not to.
	And I think that's the same idea that you're putting forward, which is that if you do fight back against everything, then you're just a rebel without a cause, right?
	And you discredit yourself entirely.
	And if you accept everything, well, then you're not even there.
	And so there's some judicious analysis of the situation that helps you understand when the time for action is right.
	And most of the time, what you're doing in life is you're doing what other people do, and that's going along with the game.
	That's part of being socialized.
	But there's going to be times when the right thing to do is to break a rule and to do it very carefully.
	And so, there's a scene, I think this is a New Testament scene, but it might be in some of the apocryphal writings.
	I don't remember.
	So Christ is walking down the road on the Sabbath.
	And there's a ditch by the road, and it's very hot.
	And in the ditch there's a hole, and in the hole there's a sheep.
	And so the sheep is stuck in the hole, and this shepherd is trying to get the sheep out of the hole.
	And Christ walks by and he says, if you don't understand what you're doing, you're a transgressor of the law and you're cursed.
	But if you do understand what you're doing, then you're blessed.
	So it's a perfect example of that, because it's like if you're...
	Okay, now, here's your situation.
	You're a shepherd, and you're supposed to be taking care of that sheep, right?
	But it's the Sabbath day, so you're not supposed to be working.
	Now, if you have decided, you've thought this through, you think it's the Sabbath day, this is something that everybody needs because everybody needs to take a rest, and this is a rule I shouldn't break because everybody needs to take a rest or things degenerate.
	I understand that and I have a lot of respect for it, but I think that in this situation it's still Morally appropriate for me to break that rule in this slight way and get this poor sheep out of this hole then Well Christ's judgment was well, then you're exactly on the right track But if you're doing it carelessly and stupidly you're breaking that rule Then we're a transgressor of the law and you're cursed and I think that's exactly at the essence of what you're describing It's like you play by the rules But then there's a meta-rule,
	which is now and then you break the rules.
	And you do that very, very carefully because when you break the rules, you're breaking the rules.
	And the rules are what keep peace.
	They're what keep peace and order.
	And so you break them only in the service of a higher peace and order.
	And so that seems to be...
	And I think that's...
	You see this in...
	Well, the sorts of stories that are influencing even the things that you're writing, like in the Harry Potter series, for example.
	Harry's friends and compatriots are quite disciplined, Hermione in particular, because she's an absolute master of her craft.
	But they still break rules when it's necessary, only when it's necessary.
	And that's what makes them more than the people who are just breaking rules all the time, the villains, so to speak.
	And also makes them more than the people that are just being good by being conformist.
	So you need that...
	There's a touch of rebelliousness, but it's got to be a flavoring and not the whole diet.
	Absolutely.
	I've actually talked about that on this podcast before.
	There's people in the military that they are like meta rule followers.
	These are people that have been following rules their whole lives, and they've got perfect grades, and they have the team cap, all these things.
	And they're going to make really good, solid leaders.
	They're going to be great leaders.
	But then there's just one group above them that have that same thing, but they also have that little bit of rebellion that they'll say, you know what?
	We're not doing that.
	It doesn't make any sense.
	And that is really an important factor to have.
	But that's one of the reasons I like this guy, Colonel David Hackworth.
	This guy was the ultimate rule follower for his whole career.
	At the end, in Vietnam, He did an interview and said, if we keep fighting this way, we're not going to win this war.
	And they drove him out of the army.
	But that's the thing.
	Because all along the way, there were other times where he'd do that.
	His guys weren't getting taken care of.
	He'd break a rule and bring him beer.
	He'd do that along the way.
	So far outside the bounds that it would jeopardize his career.
	Because if he would do that, then you're not in charge of these guys anymore.
	Now you're not going to have any impact anymore.
	So let's not get fired.
	Let's not get stupidly fired.
	That's not an improvement.
	Exactly.
	Well, that's awesome.
	I guess I know you've got to go.
	So I can't think that we could get to a better little crust or little capstone of the conversation than right there.
	Thanks for coming on again.
	Hey, my pleasure, man.
	And I'm glad we got a chance to talk about this book.
	This is a book that everybody should read.
	And I ordered a copy of yours with a Ford from Europe.
	You can't buy it from Amazon here.
	You have to buy it from Amazon.
	So it'll be here.
	When will it be here?
	Well, I don't know.
	We're still negotiating the rights because the rights holders differ in North America.
	And so that's the issue at the moment.
	So I worked with an English publisher, Penguin, in the UK that put out the, I think it's Vantage Books, if I remember correctly.
	I should just check and make sure that that's exactly right.
	Harper Perennial Modern Classics.
	That's not the British one.
	Oh, that's not the British one.
	The British one hasn't gotten to my house.
	Yeah, it has to be ordered through Amazon UK and we're working on a couple of things maybe to also maybe get the audio rights to the abridged version because I'd like to read it.
	Nice.
	And that would be good so that people could listen to it because it's an absolutely necessary book.
	Yeah, and it's written, actually, I like it because it's written very conversational.
	I mean, he's cracking jokes in there and he's making observance.
	It's a brilliant piece of literature as well as, I mean, it's a very readable book, although it's unbelievably harsh and demanding and draining to read.
	But it's brilliantly written.
	It's an unbelievably engrossing read in the most horrible possible way.
	And it is the case that it's written at this white-hot pace.
	It's like talking to someone who's Righteously, not self-righteously angry, but righteously angry for dozens of hours.
	And you just can't believe the levels of outrage that are being...
	That are being so incredibly well expressed and so effectively expressed.
	And again, I think it's also worth emphasizing the fact that Solzhenitsyn's real contribution in many ways was to lay the catastrophe at the feet of the doctrine and not to say, no, this wasn't an aberration because of Stalin or Lenin being the great leader and then Stalin being the monster, because Lenin was plenty monster himself.
	And Stalin was the logical conclusion to Lenin, not an aberration.
	But to say that, no, the horrors of what happened in the Soviet Union were implicit in the collectivist system, utopian system that gave rise to the philosophy to begin with, and that that's also an explanation why the same catastrophes occurred wherever the Soviet system was applied everywhere else in the world.
	It's something we really need to know.
	I mean, we fought a whole cold war over that.
	We damn near put the world to the torch because of this.
	And the fact that these ideas are creeping back is really unbearable as far as I'm concerned.
	Well, hopefully, people reading this book and the re-release of this book with your foreword will prevent that from happening in the future.
	Well, at least, hopefully, it will be a drop in a bucket that many other people can put drops into as well.
	And so, I'm hoping.
	I mean, I think the book has sold 15,000 copies since the beginning of November, which is pretty good for the reissue of an old classic.
	But, like, it's required reading for an informed citizen of the 21st century.
	It's not optional.
	You need to know this material.
	You don't understand your position in society as an individual or a citizen without knowing this material.
	So it's like not knowing about what happened in Nazi Germany.
	It's not acceptable to not know.
	Read the book.
	Thanks for coming, Jordan.
	Really good to see you again, man.
	Absolutely.
	Yeah, you bet.
	Appreciate it.
	And with that, Jordan Peterson has departed the recording studio.
	And if you noticed that Echo Charles was not present during the recording with Jordan Peterson, but through the miracle of technology and recording, Echo has now joined us for the support portion of this podcast.
	So, good evening Echo.
	Good evening.
	Alright, so if people listen to this podcast, which we appreciate, and you want to support this podcast and support yourself, there are ways to do that.
	Echo can fill you in.
	Sure.
	So, first way is when you're doing jiu-jitsu because we're all doing jiu-jitsu.
	Yes.
	It might sound a little bit repetitive, but to me, when you do jiu-jitsu, you're going to be doing it every single day.
	Every single week, at least.
	Even if you're doing it two times a week, three times.
	I get it.
	Either way, you're going to need a gi and a rash guard.
	So, there is no question which kind of gi you get.
	You get an origin gi.
	Straight up.
	Made in America.
	I watched one of their videos yesterday.
	And it's kind of an older one, too.
	But it made me, like, love Origin even more.
	Because it's, like, you'll see, you know, the people that make them and all the ladies there.
	And then Pete, like, he has, like, longer hair and stuff like that.
	It's like, oh, man, it's kind of more the beginnings of Origin.
	You know?
	Anyway, I thought it was good.
	Nonetheless, again, Made in America, quality stuff for Jiu-Jitsu.
	It's not like a blank gi they get from over wherever, some other place, and then slap an embroidered patch on it.
	No.
	This is made for jiu-jitsu in America.
	Yeah, everything made in America from where we grow, the material is grown in America, woven in America.
	Woven in Maine, as a matter of fact, custom woven by Origin.
	We weave it up there and make the best geese in the world.
	Also got some other stuff for, you know, you got t-shirts, you can get sweatshirts, and also coming in 2019, jeans.
	Yeah, jeans.
	Origin denim.
	Origin denim.
	I just call them jeans, though.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, I dig it.
	That starts to like, I don't know, move towards a fashion thing.
	What?
	If you say denim?
	Denim.
	Well, I feel, yeah, I dig it.
	I don't feel that.
	Yeah, I feel like it's like origin denim they make it, you know?
	Yeah.
	And then, yeah, they make origin jeans for sure.
	But what if they make like a jean jacket?
	Like a denim jacket?
	No, that'd be true.
	But it'd still be a jean jacket.
	That's true.
	I dig it.
	Cool.
	Either way, yeah.
	And I don't get excited for jeans in general in life.
	Oh, really?
	Yeah, like, you know, you see it on TV. I don't know.
	JCPenney has a sale.
	You know, Black Friday or whatever.
	And, you know, some jeans.
	I don't get excited.
	I'm assuming you don't either.
	Maybe you do.
	I don't know.
	But when Pete...
	Posts little like videos of the close, you know, close up of the buttons, the jeans.
	Come on, bro.
	That's kind of exciting.
	I'm just saying.
	Either way.
	Yeah.
	Either way.
	Also, we have supplements too.
	Affirmative.
	Origin Labs, which is expanding.
	Yes.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	We bought another building up there.
	But yeah, so they're making, we are making supplements too.
	Joint warfare, krill oil, super krill oil, by the way.
	Discipline.
	The trifecta.
	Yeah, yeah.
	My wife went on a trip.
	Didn't take joint warfare with her.
	Yeah.
	She's there for three, four days.
	Her knee starts bothering her.
	It bothers her the rest of the trip.
	She comes home.
	She goes back on joint warfare for three, four days.
	Knee's fine again.
	Yeah, same exact thing.
	That's just crazy.
	That's just the reality of it.
	So joint warfare, good for your joints.
	Crill oil, also good for your joints and good for your whole life system.
	Is that a thing?
	Life system?
	Life system, yes.
	Okay, well yeah, it's good for that too.
	Discipline when you need that focus and also discipline go, which is my pre-cognitive enhancement tool.
	Go-to.
	Go-to, yeah, yeah.
	That's my go-to.
	Yeah, it's funny.
	I had the same situation, too, by the way.
	Krill oil and joint warfare didn't bring it.
	By the way, in Hawaii, which is the reason why I didn't appear on this episode of the podcast in Hawaii.
	So my father-in-law came.
	I told him the story about how he'd always talk about krill oil.
	And he's just sort of looking at me like, whatever.
	And...
	He used to tell me, oh yeah, cruel oil is good.
	Good for you, all this stuff.
	And he used to not listen, because he's more of like a health dude.
	And then when you started talking about it, literally the day you start talking about it, I start taking it.
	And he was like, he didn't care.
	It kind of went right over his head, and he was like, oh, so did you feel the difference?
	That's what he was concerned about.
	He didn't even care.
	Also on top of that, he's got milk, which is Which is mulk, basically.
	That's what it is.
	It has protein in it.
	You mix it with milk.
	I've got to make that statement.
	You can mix it with almond milk.
	You can mix it with coconut milk.
	You can mix it with regular cow milk.
	If you mix it with water, I'm not jumping up and down about it and telling you it's the most delicious thing in the world.
	If you mix it with milk, whole milk especially, I will tell you it's a dessert straight up.
	It's a dessert that will make you stronger.
	Thank you.
	So, you know, like hot cocoa.
	You ever make hot cocoa?
	Oh, yeah.
	I'm a fan.
	That you can put in water, right?
	Do you put in water or milk?
	That is not hot cocoa to me.
	I know what you're talking about.
	You get the little packet that you're supposed to mix with water.
	It's got the little crappy marshmallows in it.
	Yeah, that's a non-starter for me.
	Yeah, so that's kind of the point there.
	It's sort of along the same lines where it's like, cool, do it.
	It's okay.
	You can do it, yep.
	And there's probably many, many, many people who do that.
	And I'm not mad at them.
	But you put the milk, that's the good one.
	That's my opinion.
	And by the way, you can't have hot chocolate milk.
	That is a thing, for sure.
	It's good.
	It's right up there.
	Especially the Warrior Kid one.
	Yeah, so you got mint chocolate, peanut butter chocolate, vanilla gorilla, and the darkness.
	And then there's the Warrior Kid Mulk, which has a little bit less protein in it, unless you double up on your scoops, like I do for the strawberry, because the strawberry is ridiculously good.
	So, give that a shot.
	And by the way, all these things are available at OriginMaine.com, and that's the state of Maine.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, not just Maine.
	Like the main spot.
	Even though it is the main spot.
	Check.
	Cool.
	Also, if you want to represent, get a discipline equals freedom shirt or a rash guard.
	Get after it.
	Anyway, you want to represent the path.
	Go to JockoStore.com.
	That's where you can get all this stuff.
	Hoodies.
	You know, hey, Christmas is coming up.
	Let's face it.
	There's no avoiding it.
	It's coming up.
	You know?
	So you want to grab something.
	That's a good place to grab something.
	Some new stuff on there, too.
	But yeah, if you want to represent while on the path, JockoStore.com Good spot.
	Also.
	Jocko White tea.
	So these claims of deadlifting 8,000 pounds, I haven't deadlifted in a while.
	So I was like, you know what?
	I'm going to test it.
	The cans, right?
	Tea, drink it straight up deadlifted 8,000 pounds.
	Just like that.
	Just like that.
	No warm-up even.
	No, you don't need it.
	You know, it's real.
	Well, the warm-up is drinking some Jocko White tea.
	Yeah.
	That is the one.
	Then you're warmed up and you're good.
	8,000 pound deadlift.
	So yeah, this is the only product in the world in any capacity that guarantees 100% 8,000 pound deadlift minimum.
	Yeah.
	100%.
	But yeah, so yeah, you get them what?
	In the dry teabags, if that's your thing, when you seep them.
	Seep.
	That's the word, right?
	Steep.
	Okay.
	Boom.
	If you like that gig.
	Oh.
	Hot, cold, whatever, and then the cans, which I recommend.
	I recommend the cans.
	Actually, I don't know if I'd recommend it, but I prefer the cans.
	I like them both, depending on the scenario.
	Sure.
	Boom.
	There you go.
	Also, subscribe to the podcast on iTunes and Stitcher and Google Play, wherever you listen to podcasts.
	There's a lot of new ones out there.
	There's apps for podcasts.
	And there's a lot of podcasts out there.
	You can listen to a bunch of them.
	And one of them that you can also listen to, in addition to this one, if you want, you can check out the Warrior Kid podcast.
	That's basically directed at kids.
	But I'll tell you that Uncle Jake has lessons for everyone in that podcast.
	And also we got the YouTube channel.
	The YouTube channel where you can watch this podcast in its full length and you can see what people look like if you don't know what Jordan B. Peterson looks like.
	If you don't know what Echo Charles looks like or if you don't know what I look like, you can watch the YouTube channel and you can see all of us.
	If you've never seen Echo before but you've only heard him, he probably doesn't look like what you think he looks like.
	Yeah, allegedly.
	And I don't know if that's good or bad.
	I don't know if that's a backhanded compliment or a backhanded derogatory statement about you, about your voice.
	Probably both, yeah.
	A little bit of both.
	Yeah.
	But we'll suffice it to say that he's not what you expect when you see him in reality.
	And he also makes videos that are enhanced by imagery and music.
	Yeah, sure.
	Exactly.
	And those are on there, too.
	So you can check those out.
	You can subscribe to that YouTube channel.
	Also, we got the Psychological Warfare album that has tracks on it of, well, they're of me telling you pragmatically why you should or should not do something like skip a workout.
	You should not skip a workout.
	Mm-mm.
	Eat donuts?
	You should not eat donuts.
	So just some little things like that.
	You can check that out.
	Psychological warfare.
	Echo claims that it has 100% effectiveness.
	Yeah, it does.
	100%.
	Should you go to the gym?
	Yes, you should.
	And if you listen to the track, you will go to the gym.
	It's 100% effective.
	A lot of claims being made about effectiveness on this scenario right here.
	If it's real, it's real.
	Double-blind, placebo-tested.
	Well, you know, single blind, maybe.
	I don't even know what that means, but it does sound official.
	And it is official when, okay, and I kind of tried to psychologically analyze psychological warfare.
	Like, why does it work every single time?
	And here's part of it.
	Even you, you know, like when you get hypnotized, I'm not saying you're- I should have asked Jordan this question.
	Yeah, he'd agree with this, I think.
	Maybe next time we're going to ask him.
	Let's hear Echo's bro theory on this.
	So, you know, like being hypnotized, for example.
	I've never been hypnotized.
	Yeah, me neither.
	It looks real when it happens to some people.
	Have you ever said, volunteered to be hypnotized?
	Okay, me neither.
	Same thing.
	So, hypnotism, from what I understand, is you have to be, what do you call, suggestible.
	Open to it.
	Yeah, open to it, yeah.
	So if you're a suggestible person, that's like you have a certain kind of mind.
	And then on top of that, even more consciously, you have to volunteer to be hypnotized.
	I mean, I'm sure there's methods that you can sort of hypnotize someone without them knowing it or something, but usually...
	I shouldn't even say I'm sure, but...
	Oh yeah, that's right.
	Psychological warfare.
	I wouldn't be surprised if you can hypnotize someone and they don't know it.
	Nonetheless, usually the hypnotic sequence goes through, hey, you volunteer.
	Like consciously, yeah, sure, I'll be hypnotized.
	And you sit there and you count to 10 and you're closing your eyes and breathing.
	Anyway, so you consciously volunteer to be hypnotized.
	So you're open to being hypnotized and then blah, blah, blah.
	So psychological warfare is like, hey, you recognize, okay, I have this weakness.
	I'm about to skip this workout right now.
	You're basically saying, hey, I need help.
	I need a little spot.
	You're volunteering for help.
	Volunteering, yeah.
	It's not like I'm sitting in my room.
	It's not completely against your will.
	Exactly right.
	You're not just busting in the door and saying, hey, don't skip the workout.
	Meanwhile, in your mind, you're already committed to skipping the workout.
	It's different.
	You're not committed to skipping the workout.
	You just are running the risk of skipping the workout.
	That weakness just creeps in and you're like, hey, I see your weakness.
	You're creeping in right now.
	Basically, I'm going to tell Jocko that you're in here and he's going to make you leave.
	You play the track or whatever.
	You have it on your phone.
	You have all your playlists on your phone anyway.
	You just play the psychological warfare one and you won't skip the workout.
	See what I'm saying?
	Because you don't want to skip the workout.
	No one wants to skip the workout.
	No one's thinking, tomorrow I can't wait to skip this workout.
	It's not like that, you know?
	So, you come in and you just give that little nudge.
	That's why it works so good.
	It's true.
	It's absolutely true.
	I like it.
	Nonetheless, psychological warfare is very effective.
	100%.
	Also, while you're working out, and if you're bored with your squats and your bench, Get some kettlebells from Onnit, in my opinion.
	Onnit.com slash Jocko.
	Good stuff on there.
	Jump rope, battle ropes, kettlebells, clubs.
	Be careful with the clubs.
	I was watching a video of a guy doing this club routine.
	I was like, dang, it took a lot of coordination.
	Like, I'm looking at it, and he had like the 40, I think.
	Like a big one, yeah.
	I can't even imagine trying to do anything coordinated with the 40.
	Because I only have the 20.
	Yeah.
	And, yeah, and they come off real, a lot more heavy than they look.
	Oh, yeah.
	Like, when you grab them.
	I mean, at the end of the day, if it's 20 pounds, it's 20 pounds.
	There's no getting past that physically.
	But when you pick it up, it's like, you know, when you pick up your friend.
	Yeah.
	You know, or your kid.
	Freaking, and they weigh 70 pounds.
	It's like, shh.
	I pick up 70 pounds with one hand.
	It's no problem when it's a dumbbell.
	Try to pick up your kid when they're 70 pounds with one hand.
	Can't do it.
	It's hard.
	Unless that's how these clubs are.
	Anyway, so watch out for those.
	Anyway, go to Onnit.com slash Jockley.
	You can get some really cool stuff on there.
	Really cool.
	Awesome.
	Hey, we got some books as well.
	First off, Mikey and the Dragons.
	I know Jordan and I talked about it a little bit today and it was actually sold out for a little bit.
	It is now back in stock and have many, many, many thousands and thousands of copies.
	That are inbound, that are being printed.
	So if you want Mikey and the Dragons, go to Amazon and order it.
	There's a little video on there if you want to know what it's about that Echo put together, and it's a solid video.
	From what I understand, the kids like to watch the video.
	Oh, yeah.
	It's like a little mini short.
	It's super fast.
	Yeah, it's two minutes.
	It's two minutes.
	And even my kids, so we're on...
	I watch the video.
	Yeah.
	When you first sent it to me, I watched it like 14 times.
	Because there's a lot of elements in it.
	A lot of things going on.
	To my son.
	It's like a micro cartoon, kind of.
	No, it's like a micro movie.
	Well, it's a cartoon because there's illustrations.
	But yeah, it's fun.
	We put it on the TV when I was in Hawaii.
	You know, you have a smart TV in there.
	You can put YouTube on there and stuff.
	Oh, you put it on there?
	I put it on the TV and my kids are all jumping up at that mic and the dragons.
	You know, it's two minutes long.
	Yeah.
	No, I... You know, Jordan and I were talking about it.
	And, you know, obviously, it's about facing your dragons.
	And there's obviously a metaphor there.
	And it's a...
	There's real...
	True, pragmatic, simple to understand lessons of how to stand up and confront the world and confront your fears that little kids will clearly and easily understand.
	And it'll leave an impact on anybody that reads it.
	So, Mikey and the Dragons, you can get that book.
	On top of that, if you've got kids, you can also get them The Way of the Warrior Kid, which is another book about a young kid who's...
	Going through the problems that normal kids have, and luckily it's Uncle Jake, who was a SEAL in the SEAL teams, shows up for the summer and helps him overcome those problems, and then that series carries on in another book called Mark's Mission.
	You can pick those two books up and give them to whatever kids you, those books, when you read those books, you'll wish you had that book when you were a kid.
	I know, I absolutely wish I had that book when I was a kid, and I wish I had that book when my kids were kids.
	Because it teaches them what it is they need to know.
	Period.
	That's it.
	The Discipline Equals Freedom Field Manual.
	That book.
	That's how you...
	It's just a field manual of how to be on the path of discipline.
	That's what it is.
	Look, the path of discipline is not easy.
	And there's no field manual for it.
	Oh wait, there is now.
	But there didn't used to be.
	There didn't used to be, look, I know discipline will help me.
	How do I get discipline?
	Where does discipline come from?
	None of that information was assembled anywhere.
	I made a field manual for it.
	It's called the Discipline Equals Freedom Field Manual.
	It's not like any other book you've ever seen or read, period.
	It's not.
	But it's very popular.
	It's great.
	There's another thing.
	Did you say Christmas is coming?
	This is a Christmas scenario, right?
	This is a Christmas scenario.
	Give this book to somebody that needs help or needs to stay on the path or get on the path.
	This book will be extremely beneficial to them or people that are on the path getting after it.
	This will keep them there.
	So that's the field manual.
	If you want the audio version of that, it is not on Audible.
	It's on iTunes and Amazon Music and Google Play as an MP3. Also, the first book I wrote with my brother Leif Babin, it's called Extreme Ownership.
	That is a book taking the leadership lessons we learned on the battlefield and translating them to your business and to your life.
	And then the follow-up to that book is The Dichotomy of Leadership, which takes those lessons that we learned in combat and goes granular in teaching you how to balance the various dichotomies that you experience as a leader.
	So both and all those books are available on Amazon and wherever else you might buy books.
	Also, we got Echelon Front, which is my leadership consultancy.
	We solve problems through leadership.
	That's what we do.
	And we work with companies all over the country and internationally.
	If you want us to come and align the leadership at your company for victory, then go to echelonfront.com.
	We have a leadership conference called The Muster.
	And we've done six musters.
	We are doing three in 2019.
	We're doing one in Chicago in the spring.
	We're doing one in Denver in the fall.
	And we're doing Sydney, Australia in December.
	So if you want to come to one of those events, all the events that we've done have sold out.
	All of them.
	These are all absolutely going to sell out.
	So if you want to come, go to ExtremeOwnership.com and register as quick as you can.
	And then lastly, we have EF Overwatch.
	We are connecting special operations veterans and combat aviation veterans that are looking for work that are proven leaders, that are experienced leaders, and we're connecting them with companies out there in the civilian sector that need leaders.
	So if you want to come at that from either side, whether you're a vet or whether you're a company, go to efoverwatch.com to get in the game.
	And if you have any more questions for us or answers for us, we are available on the interwebs on Twitter and on Instagram and on Facebook.
	Echo is at Echo Charles and I am at Jocko Willink.
	And I started out this podcast today pretty heavy, pretty rough.
	And I think it's important to remember something that I always refer back to and that is that evil does exist in the world.
	It's out there.
	And with that I'd like to thank all the military personnel Throughout the globe that stand up to evil in the world and thanks to police and law enforcement and firefighters and paramedics and EMTs and correctional officers and Border Patrol and all the first responders that stand up and face evil here at home and To everyone else out there If things are tough and I know they get tough
	life is hard and But there's still reason to be thankful.
	Be thankful you're not in a gulag.
	Be thankful that you're not being tortured.
	Be thankful that you have food to eat.
	Be thankful you have a bed to sleep on.
	And then do your best to watch out for those little seeds of evil that are planted around you and planted in you.
	And keep those seeds of evil in check by going out into the world and doing good.

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