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Feb. 5, 2024 - Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
01:56:18
What Moves You Will Move the World | Jocko Willink | EP 420
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Hello, everyone.
I'm pleased to announce my new tour for 2024.
Beginning in early February and running through June, Tammy and I, an assortment of special guests, are going to visit 51 cities in the U.S. You can find out more information about this on my website, jordanbpeterson.com, as well as accessing all relevant ticketing information.
I'm going to use the tour to walk through some of the ideas I've been working on in my forthcoming book, Out November 2024.
We who wrestle with God, I'm looking forward to this.
I'm thrilled to be able to do it again, and I'll be pleased to see all of you again soon.
Bye-bye.
I never, like, gave orders.
I never had to say, hey, everyone, here's what we're doing, we're doing this.
I never had to say that.
The caveat is, we're in a gunfight, and, you know, I need you to take your element over there.
And even then, it's a strong suggestion, because I might say, Jordan, take that building over there.
You might look back at me and say, Negative.
The reason you're saying that to me is because there's something that you see that I don't see.
So the idea of barking orders and that idea that the military or any organization can be run through authoritarian dictatorship, look, you can make it work for a little while, but it's not a long-term solution.
And that's what we've got to watch out for.
Hello, everybody.
I have Jocko Willink here with me today.
Most of you watching and listening will know who Jocko is.
He's an ex-Navy SEAL, very broad social media following.
A talented author of children's books, an entrepreneur.
We've spoken a number of times in the past and that's always gone really well.
The conclusions that he's drawn as a consequence of his vast experience in the military and on the entrepreneurship front dovetail very well with what I've learned as a consequence of working as a clinician and a professor and in the entrepreneurial space over all these decades.
We talked about leadership and ethics, and I would say about invitational leadership and ethics, and fleshed out a landscape of description about leadership That makes it not so much a matter of top-down command and order,
but of bottom-up formulation of shared vision and shared goals, supplemented by continual communication.
And we also talked a lot about the pleasure of mentorship, which is a form of fatherhood, I would say, and the fact that people...
Men, particularly in relationship to fatherhood, have a vested interest and instinctual Tilt towards developing the best in other people.
And that that's a much better way of viewing the manner in which proper hierarchies are structured than one that relies on the assumption that people are fundamentally motivated by power.
Maybe the best of us is motivated by the opportunity to serve the best in other people.
And I really think that that's a possibility.
And I would say that's also a hallmark of Jocko's style and message.
Well, Mr.
Willink, let's start by talking about your tour.
So, when were you on tour?
A few months ago, I went on tour.
This was the second tour that I did.
And the first one I did was right at the beginning of COVID, right before COVID. In fact, I may have been the super spreader of COVID. Oh yeah, probably.
Because I did San Francisco, New York, L.A., DC. I was like in all the places where eventually COVID spread really quickly and I had been to all of them and who knows.
You helped us get over it quicker.
That's how I would look at it.
You're welcome.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So this one was a few years later and I just did five or six cities this time.
And what was nice was we, the one that was in Chicago, we brought a crew in and we filmed it and we're going to release it.
When is that coming out?
I'm not sure yet.
I'm not sure that all the editing and everything isn't done yet, but we'll put it out there.
So, why do you think people, and what do people tell you?
Why do people come and see you?
What is it that you're providing to people, do you think?
I think people want to come see me and want to connect with me in real life because they've listened to my podcast a lot.
So, I think that has a lot to do with it.
And then I think people, you know, I'm just up there sort of sharing experiences that I've had And I try and do the best I can in presenting the lessons that I've learned.
And really, one of the biggest lessons that I was talking about on this tour was, it's gonna be okay.
And I think that, especially when people go through traumatic situations, obviously, I deal with veterans a lot, law enforcement, and the whole PTSD that people have been going through and talking about for the last, well, I guess, since the wars have been on, last 20 years, And a lot of times, someone would go through a traumatic experience and they'd have bad feelings about it.
They'd have regrets about it.
They'd have things that they wished they would have done differently.
And one of the main themes I was telling people during this tour was, that's totally normal.
And it's okay.
It's okay to think Oh, I lost some friends and sometimes I feel sad about it.
Well, yeah, of course.
That's normal.
That's fine.
In fact, if you weren't sad about it, there may be something wrong.
Because I think that people have been told for a while that, oh, if you're feeling sad, there's something wrong with you.
I actually don't think there's anything wrong with when you feel sad.
You feel sad?
Yeah, you lost friends.
You're going to feel sad.
Oh, you were in combat.
You had to do some horrible things.
You did some things that you regret.
There's nothing wrong with that.
People make mistakes.
People think things don't turn out the way that they wanted them to.
We made decisions and there was a bad result at the end of that decision.
And instead of thinking, oh, I'm a terrible person.
No, it's like you made a mistake and that's okay and you got to move on.
Yeah, well, that's a...
That's the tricky part, I think, with regards to, say, post-traumatic stress disorder or regret.
You know, because it's one thing if you're sad because you've lost people.
It's another thing if you're blaming yourself because you believe, and maybe with some cause, that you've made a mistake.
And often people don't know what to do About the fact that they've made a mistake.
So maybe we could talk about that a little bit, because some of the people who are watching and listening will have made mistakes, and some of them are hanging themselves out to dry because of it, right?
I mean, especially if you make mistakes that have had fairly dramatic consequences.
So...
And this ties in, I would say, also to the motif of forgiveness, because there's not much difference between forgiving other people and forgiving yourself.
And you can't just do that by saying that you're going to do it.
So what I've observed clinically, and I think this works philosophically as well, is that what you want to do to set things right, which is to atone, is to lay out what you've done that you think was wrong.
Provide yourself with the best possible defense.
So, you know, there's a reason in our legal system that we start with the presumption of innocence, which is a miracle.
Because, like, tyrannies start with the presumption of guilt.
And the reason they do that is because everyone's done something wrong, and if you dig around enough in anyone's life, you'll find a reason that they're culpable, a reason to put them away.
And so the fact that we presume innocence is a complete bloody miracle, and I can't figure out how we ever managed to get that right.
But you've got to do that with yourself.
So imagine you're taking yourself to task because you did some things wrong.
It's like, okay, list them out in your imagination or write it down.
But then you've got to defend yourself as thoroughly as you possibly can.
Which doesn't mean you're trying to get yourself off the hook.
It means that you're trying not to take yourself apart more than is necessary.
And then you might ask, well, if I've done something terrible, maybe what's necessary is that I commit suicide.
Is that, like, I pay the ultimate price for my sins, and people will do that when they're depressed.
And that's not right, because actually what you want to do to atone is to set yourself back on the right track.
So, the precondition for forgiving yourself...
First of all, to sort out whether or not you're accusing yourself too viciously, like a tyrant.
But then let's assume that there's some leftover evidence, compelling evidence, that you did do something wrong.
Okay, now you have to figure out what you did wrong.
And you have to figure out what you would have done differently and what you will do differently in the future.
And then my sense is, and I think this works out psychologically, is that if you can set yourself up so that you've learned from the mistake you made so you wouldn't repeat it, then you get to go on with your life.
And I think that's also what you do with people around you.
I mean, you might want to forgive someone Maybe who hurt you when you were young, for example, because you don't want to carry that burden around.
You know, it's like, it's been 20 years, you're still mad about, it's like, well, you got tortured, plus you're still angry about it, so that's not good for you, but...
To forgive someone so that you can heal a relationship means that they have to confess what they did, they have to assess why it was wrong, they have to come up with an alternative way of behaving, and then they have to swear, you know, by all that's holy, so to speak, that they're not going to do that again in the future.
And then I think, and you know, we might say, The devil in your mind that's still accusing you might say, well, what you did is so terrible that you should never be let off the hook.
And I would say that is that if that's the criteria that you use for judgment, then everyone's doomed because everyone makes mistakes in their lives.
And I would say probably everybody makes unforgivable mistakes.
And so if we're going to take ourselves apart about that permanently, then we're all ruined.
Yeah, I was pretty lucky growing up in the military that I would get to see guys.
And I was probably 26 years old and I moved into like an instructor role in the SEAL teams.
And so you'd see these young leaders and they'd go out on some training mission and they would...
They're going to mess things up.
They're going to make mistakes.
And you always get this talk about, well, you made the best decision you could with the information that you had at the time.
And it kind of sounds like a cop-out in a way, but it's actually not a cop-out at all.
You make the best decision that you can with the information that you have at the time.
Like, what more can a human being do to make the best decision they can with the information that they had at the time?
When you get more information, or when the results come, as they may, that decision that you made might not have been a good decision.
It might have been a bad decision.
But there's, number one, there's nothing you can do to change it.
Like, it already happened.
You made the decision.
And then I would always look at the guys and say, what was their intent behind this decision that they made?
Like, why did they do that?
Because if we can decipher that, and their intent was they wanted to make a good move to get their guys out of a bad situation.
What more could I want from a leader than to make a decision that's doing their best with the information that they had at the time to maneuver out of a bad scenario to take care of their guys?
There's nothing more I could hope for.
So as long as I think you peel back the onion and you kind of review what happened, you say, oh yeah, I made the decision at this time.
Of course, if I had this other information, I'd change it, but I did what I did.
The result was not what I wanted.
It's not what I intended.
Here we are.
And now you can either beat yourself up or you can say, here's some lessons I've learned from it.
And, you know, the first book that I wrote was called Extreme Ownership.
The opening chapter of that was a fratricide that took place where I was the guy in charge, where one of my friendly, one of my SEALs killed a friendly Iraqi soldier in a terrible situation.
And, of course, you know, we could go back and the hindsight's 20-20 and I could have done this and I should have done this and I should have done something else.
And I didn't.
And that's on me.
And so I think, you know, that initial part, if we're going to talk about forgiveness, the first part of that is taking ownership.
Say, yep, this was my call.
This was my decision.
This is the move that I made.
That's me.
It's not anybody else, it's me.
Because the minute you start saying, well, this person did that, and this person, you know, the enemy did this, we didn't expect that.
The minute you start casting blame on other people, now you're, I think you're lying to yourself.
And I think that's going to cause more problems.
So saying, yes, this is a decision I made.
This is the information I had at the time.
It ended up being a bad decision.
Here was my intent behind it, and I've got to move forward.
If you want to, you know, I always talk about You want to learn, but you don't want to dwell.
If you dwell on the past, if you dwell on the mistakes that you made, like you said, everybody is just doomed.
Well, so the tricky issue there, I think, is that People who are taking themselves apart, they're often conscientious people.
And so, well, they'll say, they'll think, they'll assume that taking ownership, in your terms, means raking yourself over the coals.
And the crucial thing to establish there is like, well, yeah, you have to rake yourself over the coals.
Until you learn.
But no more than that, because after that, it's counterproductive.
What you're trying to foster is improvement.
And then, in terms of making a case for your innocence, that's where analysis of ignorance is useful.
You said, well...
And it's a question of conscience.
Did you make the best use of the information that you had available at the time?
And one answer is, well yes, but I had sparse information.
And then you have to ask yourself, well could have you been more informed if your eyes would have been more open?
That's a willful blindness issue.
But It's definitely worthwhile to, when you're making a case to defend yourself, to see how much of the sequence of events that resulted in the unfortunate conclusion Was attributable to situation.
There's a classic mistake in thinking that people make called the fundamental attribution error.
So imagine that you're driving along on the road and somebody cuts you off and you say, well, that son of a bitch.
And then, you know, you find two blocks later that you're in the same situation in terms of the positioning of the automobiles and you cut someone else off.
And It's harder to do a situational analysis than to do a personal attribution.
And so people will default to a personal attribution.
That's son of a bitch.
And that can turn around to bite you because it's difficult when you're retroactively assessing something you've done to...
To take into account all the situational factors, but that is definitely something you do if you're mounting a defense for yourself, and that's part of that presumption of innocence.
So we could say, if you're trying to get yourself out of something like post-traumatic stress disorder, we would say, well, how would you make the case for yourself if you began with the presumption of innocence and that there were situational factors?
Make the strongest possible case.
So you do that.
Now, if there's some residual issues that you have to contend with, like the fact that you were willfully blind, or maybe you weren't protecting your men, maybe you were going for the promotion because you're more ambitious than you should be, that speaks to intent.
But you shouldn't convict yourself until all the arguments that are in favor of your innocence have exhausted themselves, right?
And that is the way that our legal system is set up, and there's a good reason for that, too.
And then...
Knowing also that atonement is possible and forgiveness appropriate when you've learned your lesson.
You know, and that's also very useful when you're disciplining children.
So, for example, when my kids were young and I used to have them sit on the steps when they were, you know, acting like barbarians.
I should clarify that.
You discipline your children when they're acting in a way that isn't appropriate for their age in accordance with universal human judgment.
So, you should discipline your children when they're disgracing themselves.
And the reason you should do that isn't because they're bad kids or because it reflects badly on you or because you're angry, but because if they continue to act that way, other people aren't going to want to have them around.
And that's not good for your kids, so you discipline them.
So, I say to my son, for example, go sit on the steps until you can act like a civilized human being, or whatever terminology is appropriate when he's young.
And the rule was, well, as soon as you get yourself under control...
Problem solved.
Well, it's the same with past sins, so to speak, as if you failed to hit the target properly, but you figured out why, and now you know how you would chart your course differently in the future.
Done.
You know, and it's also the case that even most negative emotion that you experience in relationship to past memories is Only emerges because there's a hole in your adaptive structure.
So imagine at some point in the past you fell in a pit and you don't know how you got there.
Well, that emotion is going to remain hot and dangerous until you figure out why you fell in.
And the reason that you're Conscience keeps torturing you about that is because, well, you fell into a hole and you don't know why and so maybe you'll fall into another one and so you shouldn't be that comfortable.
But if you can figure out why and you can re-evaluate your aim or your course so that that isn't going to happen in the future, well, even psychologically, your own conscience will let you off the hook if you've reconfigured your pathway.
And you do that.
Well, partly by not taking yourself apart to any great degree.
All right, so you said that one of the things that people...
You think that people...
You said there were two reasons you thought that people were maybe coming to see you live.
They'd been watching your podcast and they actually wanted to make more personal contact.
Do you do meet and greets and that sort of thing at the end of the...
I do it the whole time.
As soon as people start coming in, I just hang out with them and then get up on stage and do the show and then hang out.
And the staff at the place will say, how long are you going to meet with people?
And I say, until everyone's met with me that wants to meet.
Oh, yeah.
And do you do that formally or do you do that informally?
Informally.
Informally.
See, at the end of my lectures, we have a formal meet and greet and people line up.
And there's a bunch of reasons for doing that.
There's a ticket increment.
That's associated with that.
So there's a financial reason, and that makes the tour more rewarding.
But it's also, because there's so many people that want to do that, formalizing it made it much more efficient.
You know, because everybody gets, it's not very much time, it's only about 15 seconds, probably something like that.
But the parameters are pretty nicely defined, and we can...
What would we say?
We can provide more people with what they want doing that.
And so, I really enjoy that, actually.
And 15 seconds isn't very long, but it's not nothing.
And if you're awake, you can have a bit of an interaction with someone that isn't only surface.
and that's also a really interesting challenge you know to be able to do that rapidly and efficiently in a way that's satisfying for everybody who's involved yeah well the weird thing is is people come up to me and they say i feel like i know you yeah right and and i say you do yeah yeah like you listen to the podcast there's hundreds and hundreds of hours of me talking about all this different stuff and if you listen all that you do know yeah right
and then i kind of know you too because we've had these shared experiences yeah going through all these topics together and so i kind of know you too And so you do have like a legitimate connection with people and they can come up and just tell you whatever it is they're going to tell you.
And they can ask me a question in 14 seconds and I'll give them an answer in 32 seconds and we're good.
And they're high-fiving and bro hug and we're moving on.
Well, that's a lot of contextual information.
Absolutely.
I feel exactly the same way.
You know, and like you said, the idea that The people who are coming have that they know you.
That's not a falsehood, unless you're being false in your podcast.
And I know that you're not false in your podcast, so they actually do know you.
Yeah, I really enjoy going.
I really enjoy going to her.
How long do you talk?
Two, two and a half hours, something like that.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
So quite a while.
And I'll do some Q&A in there as well.
There'll be some Q&A. Roll the dice with the Q&A. You never know what you're going to get.
Yeah, we use Slido.
Yeah.
I don't use that.
Well, it's this technology that, so everybody on the screens in the theaters, there's a code, and everybody can enter the code into their phone, and it brings them to the Slido site, and then they can ask a question, but more importantly, they can upvote the questions.
And so that's very helpful, because there's, so I talk for 90 minutes, about hour, 90 minutes, something like that, and then Tammy asks, I aggregates the questions from Slido, and she asks me the questions.
And because everybody can vote, it gives us a chance to sample the audience.
And it keeps the...
It's a good way of organizing it as well, too, because the problem with taking live questions is that people don't know how to handle the mic, and so no one can hear them, and then the audience starts talking, and then you get people who are just grandstanding or don't really have a question.
And Slido has worked extremely well for us for handling that.
I guess the only thing I would...
Can you then call that person out and have them come up and have them expand on it?
Well, you could.
I haven't done that.
That's not a bad idea.
We haven't done that.
Sometimes when you don't get the context around the question, you need more context to give a good answer.
Yeah, definitely.
So if you can't do that...
Yeah, well, you can solve that problem to some degree by selecting questions in the list of questions that don't require the additional context.
And I guess I solve that sometimes, too, by providing what might be A more generally applicable answer than something that would be specific to the person.
There's something kind of awesome, though, about just someone stepping up to the mic and you don't know what you're going to get.
Fair enough.
And I enjoy that.
It's like the no net tightrope walking, right?
Well, that's also what I like about the lectures, because I don't lecture from notes.
I mean, I prepare...
Beforehand.
And I have a question or two in mind that I'm trying to answer, but I never use notes.
And I think part of the reason that the live lectures are compelling to people is because they are without a net.
They are tightrope situations.
And one of the things I really like about speaking spontaneously like that is if there's a question at hand or two questions, they're questions that I seriously want to investigate.
And so I'm trying to investigate them in a new way as I go.
And if you do it right, you can bring the whole thing to a conclusion that's like a punchline, right?
And that's really fun to see if you can orchestrate that in real time.
That works on podcasts too.
What's your batting average on getting, you know, if you did a hundred shows, how many times do you land like right where you wanted to land and you walk off the stage triumphant with a grand slam in the ninth inning?
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Well, I would say, especially because I'm healthier again, I think I was less consistent when I was touring in 2018 because I'll put a lot of balls in the air and It's like you're going to see a complex movie, you know, now and then you go to a movie and there's 50 things going on and it's like an hour and a half in and you think, is he going to manage it?
Is he going to tie it all together?
And sometimes it's like it comes together and it's like, dad, that was a great movie.
And sometimes there's some fool thing that happens and leaves everything hanging.
In 2018, more frequently I would get a lot of things going and then maybe only tie them three quarters together.
But in the last...
Couple of years.
The talks, they almost always cohere.
I mean, sometimes you nail it, right?
And so those are particularly exciting times.
Batting average is pretty high now.
So you and I were talking about being rock stars.
You know, both of us probably would have been much better off if we'd been rock and roll stars.
So what I do at my talks is I make a set list, right?
Like, you know, the old days when I would go to shows, to rock and roll shows, they'd make a set list.
And if you could steal that thing or get a hold of it at the end of concert, you had something pretty cool, right?
The set list thing.
So that's what I do.
I make a set list.
I'll just have, like, different topics that I'm going to talk about.
And there'll be some kind of thread, but I'm...
Yeah, if you plan it out too much, it doesn't have the spontaneity that feels that good.
Yeah, definitely.
Then when you just roll with it, and you got your topics, and they're kind of out there, and I'm going to go talk about these things, and I'm going to...
Try and pull it off at the end and we'll see where it goes.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, it's a lot more exciting to do that because you don't know where it's going to go.
You know, that's the wind blowing where it listeth, right?
You have to follow that thread.
And it also enables you to really pay attention to the audience because one of the things you're doing when you're lecturing, when you're speaking to an audience, it's not lecturing.
That's the thing.
It's different than lecturing because it's not a set.
As you said, it's not...
What you have isn't set a priori.
When you're communicating with a crowd, you have to watch to see what's landing.
And that's partly what you're doing there, is you're putting yourself in tune with the spirit of the crowd.
Because everybody comes there, and it's a particular time, and it's a particular night, and there's particular things going on in the broader political realm, and so everybody's charged in a certain way.
And some topics are going to land more heavily that night than others.
And if you really watch the audience members and you listen for when you get silence, you can feel when you've got the words matched to the expectation of the audience properly.
And then you can track that thread.
And you can't do that if you prepare...
In too much detail to begin with.
So you use topics.
So I use questions.
I have questions in my head, but then I also have topics that I can use They're like greatest hits, I suppose, in some ways, right?
So that's that set list idea.
I was about to ask you about greatest hits, because some of that crowd probably wants to hear just the Jordan greatest hits.
They want to hear you go off about some lobsters, right?
Well, I talked to Douglas Murray about that, too, because we've done some events together, which has been very fun.
But, you know, one of the things Douglas pointed out more explicitly was that If you have a base of viewers and listeners, they have a certain set of expectations.
They want to hear something new, but kind of optimally new.
They want you to return to themes that they've become familiar with, partly because that's a good place for them to understand.
And it is, I think, akin to going to see a concert.
You want to hear some new material from your band, but...
You want to hear some of the things that you've come to know and love.
Now, why do you want that live exactly?
Well, I think because it gives the audience that opportunity to participate in real time with the unfolding of something that's Ordered and classic and new at the same time.
Yeah, and it's live.
It's real.
So it's not going to be an exact replication of what they heard before.
There's going to be some nuance.
You're going to take that solo, that guitar solo somewhere a little bit different every time, and they're going to get to see that.
Yeah, well, people can also evaluate then, too, if it's the real thing, you know?
And I think it's especially true for the kinds of podcasts that you and I do, which have this kind of motivational and psychological element to them, is people really want to know.
It's like, you know, am I selling my soul to the devil here, or is this person who they claim to be?
You know, this is one of the things I've always been impressed with about people like Joe Rogan, for example, is like, Rogan is just exactly who he presents himself to be.
Like, there's no...
And I've seen the other side of that often at political events, you know, go to political events.
I know the person who's involved, possibly.
Many of the political figures that I've seen perform have a political face.
They're not the same on stage.
They have an act, a political act, you know, and they're different people off stage, often smarter people, interestingly enough, and I think more interesting people, but Rogan doesn't have any of that.
I think when people are looking for motivational people, And delving into personal philosophy.
They want to bloody well make sure that the people that they're listening to are credible.
And that's something you can assess more particularly in a live situation.
Especially when you're watching people interact on their feet, right?
Because they don't have that...
Vivek Ramaswamy told me he wouldn't use a teleprompter during the campaign, partly because he wanted to avoid exactly that.
And I think this is one of Trump's real strengths, too, is that Trump might make mistakes when he speaks, but they're his mistakes.
And people are willing to cut him a lot of slack because they're his mistakes.
And there's a courage about that, too, because there is the possibility that you'll go spectacularly wrong, say something stupid or fail.
So you talked about intent when people are analyzing their motivations for their past conduct, for better or worse.
What's your intent in the tour?
And how do you orient your intent before you go on stage?
Mm-hmm.
So, interestingly, I had a woman that works for me, and she's the COO of one of my companies, great, incredibly impressive woman named Jamie, and she was at one of these live events, and I got asked during the Q&A, someone said, hey, why are you doing this?
Yeah, yeah.
She told me afterwards, she said, when I got asked that question, she wanted to hear what I was going to say because she never really thought about it.
Like, why does she do that?
Because she kind of knows my life situation, my financial situation, where I'm at in the world.
She kind of knows.
And she never really thought to ask me, like, why are you on tour right now?
Why are you doing this?
Why aren't you just relaxing, sitting by, doing whatever it is you want to do?
And she waited for my answer.
And my answer was to try and help people out.
That's it.
I mean, at this juncture...
Okay, so let's delve into that a little bit.
There's two things you brought up there that I think are particularly interesting.
One is the automatic assumption on the part of people who might be asking the question why, that if everyone had their druthers, they would be sitting on a beach relaxing.
And like, people ask me, I was home visiting my parents recently and my mother said to me, don't you ever relax?
Because I was, you know, I was working while I was there on all sorts of things.
And I said to her, you know, I don't know, I'm not that interested in relaxing.
Like, I don't even, to some degree, I don't even know what that means.
Like, if I'm tired, well, I'll sit down, you know, and...
Maybe I'll watch a stupid comedy or something, because that's all that's left of me, you know?
Tammy and I watched Legally Blonde the other night, and that was about right, because I'd been writing all day, you know?
And it was stupidly funny.
Yeah, right.
And so, fine.
But as a goal, like, my goal is not to relax.
Like, that's not...
I think my goal is to have as adventurous a time as I can possibly manage.
I've been writing about the book of Abraham in this new book I'm writing.
The conception of God in the book of Abraham is that God is the voice that calls you to adventure.
And that the most devout path is the path with the highest adventure.
Yeah, I really like that.
I really like that.
Because, you know, your life is not going to be justified by satisfaction or satiation.
That's for infants.
There's going to be plenty of pain.
And so there's no escape from pain.
And so you might say, well, if you can't be satisfied and there's no escape from pain...
Then there's no hope.
But if the point is the adventure, well, that's just not true, then the adventure can justify the pain and the lack of satiation.
So you said, back to the adventure, a tour is an adventure, but you said that your prime motivation is to help people.
Okay, so let's dig into that a bit.
We could get skeptical about it.
It's like people might say...
Like, the postmodernist types, the neo-Marxist types would say, well, that's just your cover for, like, your dominance, your power striving, you've made lots of money, you're famous, people know who you are, it's like, and because that's not enough for you, you have to add this overlay, it's, oh yeah, and by the way, I'm just doing this to help people, right?
So that's the very cynical attitude, but you can understand that That's a justifiable criticism.
And if you were narcissistic, it would also be a genuine criticism.
So why do you think it is that you find...
Why do you think your claim that you're helping people is justified?
And if it's justified, why do you think that you find helping people intrinsically rewarding?
Going back to my career in the military...
I think this is where I initially learned this because as you're coming up in the military, you know, you're going up in the ranks and you're getting moved into more positions of responsibility and you're going out and conducting operations and all those things that you do inside the military in your career.
And what I found more than anything else Where I got gratification and what felt like I actually did something good was when I'd see a guy that I had worked with, that I had mentored, that I had trained, when I'd see them step up and excel.
Be able to achieve things, be able to accomplish things.
That was more gratifying than me doing it myself.
And so I think that I started to notice that, that that's what really...
When did you notice that?
How old were you?
Probably...
29, 30, something along those.
So I was in a leadership position.
I started to have people working, you know, that were my direct reports.
But I realized, oh, I can really help this person.
Like, they don't know what to do, right?
And inside the military, inside the SEAL teams, it's like, there's a mission that you're going to do, and there's a certain way to conduct that mission.
And this person that had only been doing this job for three years might not know that.
And I knew it.
And there's not too many things that you know really well.
You go, oh, I can show you how to do this.
Yeah.
And instead of just saying, hey, I'm better than you.
I'm smarter than you.
I can show you how to do this.
You can follow my lead.
Instead of having that attitude, it's an attitude of like, hey, you're going to be just as capable as I am at some point.
I can help you along the way.
More even.
Yeah, that's the goal is to make them more capable.
And this is something that comes from jiu-jitsu as well.
In jiu-jitsu, if you and I train jiu-jitsu and we've both been training the same amount of time, sure, it'll come down to who's bigger and stronger, but...
I realized, hey, there's always someone that has been training longer than me, and they're going to be able to beat me.
That doesn't make them a better human being than me.
It just means that they've been training longer for me, and that applies to just about everything, right?
So the skill of being a SEAL and planning a mission, oh, I might be better than you right now, but over time, I should be able to train you, and you should be able to, like you said, get better than I am.
And so I felt that that Left the biggest mark on my soul of being able to help people out.
And then when I got out of the military and I started kind of teaching the same leadership principles that I had learned...
And then I started getting that same feedback, and then with writing kids' books, that was a whole new level.
When you have a kid that comes up and says, hey, I did my first pull-up, or I got an A on my math test, or I learned all my times tables, and the parents have tears in their eyes saying thank you, there's nothing better than that.
So I think that's actually true.
I do think there's nothing better than that.
And so, I've been trying to take that apart because that's a relatively radical claim.
So, you can imagine the attractions of hedonism.
And so, everybody has their base desires, and I would say base for a variety of reasons.
They're, you know, lust, anger...
Those are good examples.
They want what they want right bloody well now.
And there's some gratification to be had in obtaining that.
Now the problem with right now is it's sort of to hell with other people and to hell with the future.
And so maybe that's not an optimized path.
This is why hedonism per se is a dysfunctional Orientation.
It reduces everything to the moment and then it reduces everything to the whim inside the individual.
So there's no future, there's no time, and there's no other people.
Okay.
Power.
There's another example.
It's like, well, I could go for power.
I could compel and force other people to do what I want for my gratification, obviously, regardless of what they want.
Why shouldn't I do that if I could do it?
You know, and cultures like ancient Rome, cultures that are predicated on the notion that might makes right, they're predicated on the idea that, well, if you can do it, you should.
And the fact that you can and would makes you better, like by definition.
If I can force someone to do what I want them to do and they can't resist, then why shouldn't I just be contemptuous of them?
And I think the answer to that is, well, it backfires.
It's like you can enforce your will on people for a while, but even among chimpanzees, the probability that the moment you turn your back or show any weakness that you're going to get torn into pieces is extremely high.
So...
So hedonism, power, those are sort of alternative motivational states.
Well, this one, this pleasure in helping other people develop, I think, well, why shouldn't we think that that's just your cover story?
And I think the reason for that is, well, here's one reason.
Human beings are pair-bonding creatures, and our children are dependent longer than the offspring of any organisms.
So there's two pathways to reproduction.
There's two patterns of natural world reproduction.
There's the mosquito pathway.
These have technical names.
I can't remember.
One is K. I can't remember the technical names.
Mosquitoes on the one end, human beings on the other.
So the mosquito pathway, Strategy is a million offspring and if 999,000 of them die, as long as one survives or two, you've done your job.
No investment past sex, right?
And there are human beings who have that strategy as well.
No investment past sex, right?
The alternative is immense investment.
Maybe multi-generational investment.
That's parenting, grandparenting, great-grandparenting.
Maybe the establishment of a pattern that even works beyond that.
Human beings have staked their existence on the high investment reproductive strategy.
And so, to the degree that we're biologically prepared to be fathers, there's an instinct for mentoring.
And I think that what you're describing is the broader-scale manifestation of exactly that.
Now, you tied these things together.
You said you discovered when you were young that helping other people develop Was a great intrinsic pleasure.
And you said maybe the most rewarding of the intrinsic pleasures.
And I really do believe that's true.
It's quite stunning to realize that.
My graduate supervisor was a very great guy.
He's still alive.
Robert Peel.
And...
Bob was a really good professor and he got a lot of joy from lecturing.
He was a really good researcher, a good administrator.
Like, Bob had it all going.
And still, the thing he felt that he took most pleasure in across the entire expanse of his career was helping his graduate students in particular develop their careers.
He was very generous at that.
Of course, it paid back.
To him, immensely.
Because it turns out, if you share ideas, you generate more ideas because the ideas get rewarded.
And if you help other people develop their career, they tend to, you know, it reflects very positively on you.
There's a saying in the SEAL teams, if you take care of your gear, your gear will take care of you.
Meaning...
If you take care of your parachute and you prepare it and you pack it correctly, when you pull your ripcord, it will open.
Or your dive gear, when you're underwater, if you've prepared it and you've maintained it correctly, you can breathe underwater, which are really good things.
And you don't die.
And you don't die.
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Well, the twist that I put on that was if you take care of your people, your people will take care of you.
And that's absolutely true, even in what you're just talking about with Bob.
Because Bob invested in you.
He took care of you.
And look, could we again, could we play the Jordan game on this thing where maybe he was just doing that knowing that in the long run, all those favors were going to come back and he was going to get taken care of.
That'd be a really long-term strategy, and it'd be a kind of a gut check to put up with all these miserable graduate students this whole time, where you're just kind of putting chips on the table, hoping that these investments would pay off.
I also think, too, that at some point...
You have to flip the definition.
If your strategy is short-term gratification, that's one thing.
But if your strategy is long-term mutual reinforcement development, even if you can see that that's of benefit to you, if you're the sort of person that was only doing that because it was of benefit to you, you'd revert to the short-term immediately.
And so, at some point, if it's a long enough term investment strategy, there's no being cynical about it anymore, because the details of the strategy obviate the necessity for the cynicism.
So, I've been writing about the Gospels, and there's one of Christ's What would you say?
Commandments is to lay up treasures in heaven that do not rust, that moths cannot destroy, and robbers cannot steal, and rust cannot devour.
Treasures in heaven.
And so I've been trying to parse through exactly what that means.
So it means to live in the light of eternity, first of all.
So it means to view everything you do in the moment As if it extended infinitely throughout time.
So Kant, the philosopher Kant, had this categorical imperative.
You want to...
Don't do anything that you wouldn't want people to do if it was distributed widely.
The biblical, especially in the Gospels, you see this, but it's more sophisticated.
It's like everything you do should be the sort of thing that would work if everyone did it over the longest possible time with the most number of situations simultaneously addressed.
So this notion of laying up treasure in heaven where it doesn't rust and where it can't be stolen, it really looks to me like it refers to something like reputation.
Because you might say, well, where is the safest place to store your wealth?
And the answer to that is, it's not in money.
Because money can inflate, for example, and it can be stolen.
There's all sorts of ways you can lose it.
The safest place to store your wealth is in your reputation.
And the most effective way of developing your reputation is to be of the most service you can possibly be to other people.
You know, and so when we're on tour, with Tammy and I on tour, we're thinking, well, this is a pretty good deal.
You know, we put this effort into it, but it's returned thousands of fold, right?
Because now you have people who are so happy with what you've done that they're thrilled to have you around.
And so, that's a pretty damn good deal.
And so, it's this perverse uniting of selflessness with...
What would you say?
With genuine reward.
Yeah, the luck that it just so happens that if you take care of other people and you sacrifice for them and you invest in them, it just so happens it'll come back to you.
Yeah, it just so happens that it is the best possible strategy that you could undertake.
Yeah, yeah.
I think there's no doubt about that.
And I also really wonder what the limit to that is because It's obviously the case that, so here's another, you tell me what you think about this, here's another form of fundamental reward.
If you've gone out of your way for someone, let's say, so you've made sacrifices for them, and then you see that that really helped them, and they let you know that that really helped them.
That's a really, that's a moving moment, you know, and I'm sure you've encountered that many times where people will come up to you, say, during the lectures or the tours, and they'll say, here's something you said because of something you learned, and here's how it helped me, and you think, like, that strikes a very deep chord, and that is one of the things that, well, for us anyways, for Tammy and I, that's certainly one of the things that makes the tour worthwhile, but it does speak to that depth of motivation in mentorship, and this is a very effective approach.
This is something very useful to know in the culture war that we're engaged in because the accusation of the radical metamarxist types on the left is that there's no other motivation than power.
No matter what anybody says, it's all about power, and power is the ability to compel and use force.
But this strategy, this isn't a power strategy.
This is a distribution of power strategy.
It's like you're genuinely acting in the other person's best interest.
And if that's also allied with an instinct that makes that deeply meaningful, and that's the instinct of fatherhood, as far as I'm concerned, it just makes a complete bloody mockery of the claim that the only fundamental human motivation is power.
Yep.
And going back to a leadership perspective, what I actually want as a leader is you, I don't have to do anything because you've stepped up and now you're running everything and I can look up and out and move on.
That's number one.
And number two, and I'd be interested in your opinion on this, I tell people all the time that intent has a smell.
Intent has a smell.
So if your intent is actually to take advantage of me and get things from me and you're taking advantage of my mentorship and you're eventually going to...
That intent will have a smell.
And sometimes it's hard.
Sometimes you meet someone and you go, man, that seems a little bit off.
This person seems a little bit off.
I'm not really sure about this person.
And I think in my mind, that's their intent.
It's seeping through.
You can smell it.
And you've got to watch out for that.
And I always have to remind people that...
There are terrible people out there.
There are snakes that I will invest in you and invest in you and invest in you.
And what you'll do at the end of that is you'll take it and turn away with it or turn it against me.
You bet.
I would say this, that is an absolute possibility.
It can absolutely happen.
But if you invest in 10 people, Nine of them are going to give back to you and you'll be in a better place.
One person will try and run away and they'll eventually, unfortunately for them, they'll dig themselves a hole.
Well, we also know that too.
So...
Psychopaths take advantage of other people.
They use power.
And so, for someone who's truly psychopathic, you're nothing but a set of opportunities for short-term gain.
But the problem with being a psychopath is that they have the same attitude towards themselves.
So they'll sacrifice, well, relationships, obviously, which is the future to a large degree.
They'll sacrifice their own future to take advantage in the moment.
And the consequence of that is they don't...
It's not a strategy designed for success.
You know, you hear all this, that there's all these psychopaths in positions of power and authority.
It's like most of the time, like the...
The real hardcore psychopaths are very, very likely to end up in prison.
But even the ones who fool some of the people some of the time, or even all of the people some of the time, the chickens come home to roost.
It is not an effective strategy.
You know, and this has even been documented among chimpanzees.
So now and then in chimpanzee troops, you get a leader who's a leader, a dominant male, who's risen to the top because of force, fundamentally.
But those troops are...
Not very functional, and his leadership is very unstable, and as I mentioned earlier, he's very likely to meet a dreadful end.
And so, that's another problem with the claim that power is the only true motivation, is that if you...
Only about, it's actually about 1 in 20 people who use it reliably as their fundamental motivation.
So the rate of psychopathy, narcissism, etc.
It starts to reach clinical proportions in about 1 person in 20.
So 19 out of 20 people that you help will respond in kind.
Right.
That's a good investment.
It is a good, it is a great investment.
That's right, that's right.
Usually not that hard to figure out.
I mean, it might take a little bit of time before you realize, oh, this person's definitely looking out for themselves more than anybody else.
And you said that has a smell.
So one of the things I've been working out with this character, Jonathan Pagiot, is, so there's these, there's an ancient idea that Imagine there's a pyramid of values, okay?
And there's a pinnacle value.
And in the Egyptian formulations, the pinnacle value was Horus, the I, which is the capacity to pay attention, which I really like.
It's like, everything should be subordinated to your capacity to actually pay attention, to watch, okay?
But you could think about that ability to watch as the thing that's at the top, or you could think about it as something that is at the top and operates at every level.
So the idea would be that if you pick a principle to guide yourself by, maybe it's the principle of short-term self-promotion, That's going to be your guiding star, but it's going to leak out in absolutely everything you do.
Every word you say, every gesture you manifest is going to speak of that.
And people are pretty good at decoding nonverbal behavior, and that smell is associated with that pattern of short-term selfish gratification.
And you're right, with repeated interactions, There's something off, eh?
You can tell, and other people can tell too, which is another reason why that psychopathic pattern of adaptation doesn't work socially, and it doesn't even work for the person that's applying it.
It's perverse, eh?
Because...
An active psychopath might be better off than someone who's so paralyzed by depression and anxiety that they can't move.
Right?
Because like a psychopathic attitude that's self-serving can take you out into the world.
And it's also unfortunately the case that it can...
If psychopathic men who are narcissistic have a reasonably good track record at fooling women...
Because psychopaths mimic competence.
And they do that by having false confidence.
And women use confidence as a marker for competence, but you can game confidence.
And that's what psychopaths and narcissists do.
They actually believe that they know more than they know, partly because they have such a dim view of everyone else.
And that can give them a glitz and an aura of confidence.
And what you see in the clinical literature is that works particularly well with the younger the woman, the more effective that is.
Because they're just not very...
They're not experienced.
They can't tell the Gastons from the, you know, from the, exactly.
Gaston's a perfect example of that.
And I always try and explain that to people, that one of the worst situations you can be in is when you think that the little moves that you're making, no one can see them.
And it's so obvious to everybody else.
Everybody else that's watching can see exactly what you're doing.
You think, oh, they can't see the maneuvers that I'm making to take care of myself.
No, they see, everybody sees, and it ends up destroying you.
So that idea of what you talked about, imposing my will on other people, you can get away with that for a If I'm the boss and I can fire you or I can give you punitive measures because you didn't follow my orders, that'll work for a little while, but it's not a long-term solution and eventually you're going to have a mutiny on your hands and you're probably going to end up...
They actually had a name for it in the Vietnam War, right?
We would frag you.
You're my officer.
You're imposing your will on me.
You're not listening to what we have to say?
Cool.
We're going to frag you.
We're going to get into a gunfight at night.
You're going to get shot by one of us.
They had a name for it.
Yeah.
That's like the chimps you're talking about, that goes across the board to all of us primates that are out there.
Well, so you can see how deep that goes because, again, the postmodern neo-Marxist claim is that human hierarchies are predicated on power, right?
And I already defined powers, the willingness and ability to use force and compulsion.
It's not ability, forget that.
That's not power, right?
Ability is the ability to get things done.
Power is the willingness and ability to use force.
Okay, you say, well, you can organize hierarchies around force.
That's what a totalitarian state is.
But your point is dead relevant.
It's like, well, that works fine, except when it doesn't work, and then it doesn't work at all.
And I don't believe at all that the functional hierarchies that men organize, they're If they're predicated on...
See, Piaget, Jean Piaget, the developmental psychologist, delved into this too.
He said there's another problem with a hierarchy that's built on power.
So let's say we've got an organization here that's top-down command.
It's like, you do what I say, or there's going to be trouble, right?
And there's another organization beside it, and that is more, here's the vision...
I'm going to aggregate a bunch of people who are on board with that, right?
So they're doing it voluntarily.
Now those are the sort of people to whom you can distribute the kind of responsibility that you described earlier.
So you want people around you That don't need you around, right, as you build an organization.
And you might say, well, I don't want to cede all that control.
That means you're power mad.
But the advantage to you is if you build those people underneath you who are competent in their own realm, you can keep moving your ambition higher and higher because you build this platform beneath you that's composed of competent people and all that happens is your expanse of opportunity increases.
Okay, so Piaget's observation was this.
There's costs to the power-oriented hierarchy.
The cost is you demoralize the participants because they're not chasing something they value, except under duress, and you have to monitor and discipline them constantly, and that's a cost.
So if you put system A power-based and system B voluntary-based, vision-based, let's say, in a head-to-head competition, The voluntary organization will always eventually stomp the power-based.
And I think that's exactly right.
When you go to these live events and you get asked questions, and I got asked a question, and it just kind of led to a whole thought process.
But somebody asked me, well, how do I get people to listen to me?
I'm in a leadership position.
How do I get people to listen to me?
And I said...
If you want people to listen to you, you need to listen to them.
It's the opposite of what people think.
It's not talk louder if I want you to listen to me.
If I want you to listen to me, I need to listen to you.
And that kind of opened up this whole idea for me.
There's a whole category of these things, right?
If I want you to respect me, what do I have to do?
I have to treat you with respect.
If I want to have influence over you, what do I have to do?
I actually have to allow you to influence me.
I have to open my mind up and allow you to influence me.
If I just stick with my own ideas, you close your mind as well.
If I have a closed mind, you're gonna close my mind.
If I want you to care about me, what do I have to do?
I have to care about you.
And by the way, in my opinion, these are the components of a relationship.
Yes, yes, definitely.
If we listen to each other, if we don't listen to each other, we don't have a relationship.
If we don't respect each other, we don't have a relationship.
If we're not influenced by each other, we don't have a relationship.
So if we don't care about each other, obviously, we don't have a relationship.
So when you want to build a relationship, what do you have to do?
You have to listen to the other person.
By the way, this applies to your employees.
It applies to your kids.
It applies to your spouse.
It applies to everyone.
If you want them to listen to you, you have to listen to them.
And you can't just...
You know, I'll stop talking as I prepare my counter for what you're saying right now.
It's like I'm literally going to listen to what you have to say and try and open up my mind and open up my perspective so that I understand your world as well as I possibly can.
I'm going to integrate that into what my thoughts are and we're going to come to an understanding.
We're going to move forward with a better solution.
This is why when I was in the military, I never, like, gave orders.
I never had to say, hey, everyone, here's what we're doing.
We're doing this.
I never had to say that.
Never had to say that.
The caveat is we're in a gunfight and, you know, I need you to take your element over that building.
And even then, even then, it's a strong suggestion because I might say, Jordan, take that building over there.
You might look back at me and say, negative.
I don't say, hey, shut up, you insubordinate bastard.
No, the reason you're saying that to me is because There's something that you see that I don't see.
Because that's the other thing, trust, right?
How do I get you to trust me?
I have to put trust in you.
So the idea of barking orders and that idea that the military or any organization can be run through authoritarian dictatorship, look, you can make it work for a little while, but it's not a long-term solution, and that's what we've got to watch out for.
Yeah, well, one of the things I've read in relationship to military history, and this is particularly true with regards to the U.S., is that part of the reason that the U.S. military has been such a formidable force is that a fair bit of responsibility is devolved down the ranks,
is that people are expected to Use their decision-making power as appropriate with the maximum amount of allowable freedom at their level of authority.
And you can imagine why that's much better, because it's the same thing, it's the free market equivalent in the military.
If there's a thousand people, and some of them are troops that are on the front line, Some of those people on the front line are going to have much more accurate information than the people who are aggregating information at a distance, both temporally and spatially.
So you want to open yourself up to being informed by people who Have skin in the game and have their eyes open in the immediate circumstance.
I've seen this with great political leaders, like the great political leaders that I've met are very, very good at listening.
And partly what they do, even when they're campaigning.
So I met this guy, Preston Manning.
He started a political party in Canada.
And out of nothing, now he came from a political family, so he had some connections, but he basically produced a political party in Canada from ground zero, and they became the official opposition, right?
And then it eventually merged with the current Conservative Party.
So it was a Western party and a populist party.
Populist.
But...
I asked him at one point, well, how the hell do you do that?
Because that's really hard.
And he said he went from arena to arena across Western Canada, and he'd give his stump speech.
But what he really liked were the questions and the answers, the Q&As, because people would tell him what their problems were.
So you can imagine if you're a political leader and you go talk to a thousand people, and all thousand people tell you their problems because you listen, Well, now you've got the questions right.
Because one of the things that's really impossible to figure out if you're a leader is like, well, what problem are we trying to solve here?
What direction should we be going in?
And it's a lot easier to lead people in a direction that they want to go.
And so if you listen to people...
Now, Jimmy Carr told me the same thing about him preparing his comedy routines before he goes on tour.
So comedians do this generally, and they all know this, although Carr was very good at elucidating it.
You go to 50 small clubs.
You try out your idiot material.
You know, 90% of it falls flat, but 10% of it makes people laugh.
Well, if you're listening, you can tell when they laugh, and you just put a check by that joke.
And after you've done 30 shows, and you now have two hours of material that makes people laugh, even if you're not that damn funny to begin with, If you pay enough attention to what the audience responds to, you can aggregate the material and you can go on the road.
And that's really, as far as I can tell, that really is the essence of leadership per se.
It's certainly the essence of political leadership.
Yeah.
Well, this is the fourth law of combat leadership that I used to teach in the SEAL teams that now I teach to corporations and companies and teams.
Decentralized command.
That's everything you just said.
Decentralized command.
I want my subordinate leadership I want them to understand where we're going and I don't really care how they get there.
And I can put some parameters on them.
Hey, you can't do this, you can't do that.
But everything else inside that box, you can do.
Make decisions, go make things happen.
That's decentralized command.
And yeah, that's why we have a great military.
And when we get away from that is when we start having problems.
That's why you hear about the Vietnam War.
What was happening during the Vietnam War?
Well, you had Johnson back in D.C. making decisions about what targets we were going to hit in Vietnam.
That's the way to run a war.
And that's why you have problems in those situations.
So definitely decentralized command as a leadership system, it's really vastly superior to any And that's why that group that pulls ahead.
And the other thing that you talk about, that group that's based on values and based on, really, to me, relationships.
It's the same thing, right?
If I have a team and we all get along and we all can talk to each other, we trust each other, we care about each other, you put that team against a team that has a bunch of animosity and they don't trust each other, the team that has good relationships is going to annihilate the team that doesn't.
And we see this over and over again in the business world.
We saw it in the SEAL platoons.
In fact, this is funny.
In a SEAL platoons, so I was running the advanced training for the SEALs where I was You're getting SEAL platoons ready.
They've already gone through all the basic training.
You've got experienced SEALs, some new SEALs, but experienced SEALs and some newer SEALs, but they're getting ready to go on deployment.
And it's a very strenuous, arduous training cycle.
And you're pretty much training them some collective skills, but then you're putting them in mission scenarios where they're going to go out and do simulated combat missions.
And if you would see a fracture...
Between guys in the platoon, you'd watch it.
You'd pay attention.
And if it started to get worse, the platoon was going to fall apart.
Like, the platoons that occasionally would fail a block of training, they'd fail land warfare, they'd fail urban combat, or they'd fail close quarters combat.
The reason they would fail was because they had fissures in the platoon that would break them apart.
How would those fissures develop?
Ego.
Okay, so they're developing around people who are playing power games.
Yep.
So you're the platoon chief.
So in a SEAL platoon, the platoon chief's probably been in for 12 to 15 years.
He's got a lot of tactical experience.
And then you've got the platoon commander, who's an officer.
He probably has four or five years.
He's a little less tactically experienced.
But he's the guy that's overall in charge, right?
He's the guy that actually is the head of the platoon.
So a good platoon chief is going to offer suggestions and a good platoon officer is going to go, yep, chief, that makes sense.
Yeah, yeah.
That's a beautiful thing.
And everyone can kind of see that the platoon chief is sort of running the platoon.
Yeah.
With the permission of, for lack of a better word, the permission of the platoon commander.
Well, occasionally you get a platoon commander that wants everyone to know that he's the one that's making the decisions.
And he starts, well, we're not going to do it that way, and right there you've got friction.
Or it can be the other way around.
It can be the platoon chief that wants everyone to know that, hey, we're going to do it my way.
And the platoon commander doesn't want to do that because he's an idiot.
And you just end up with this explosion.
Well, that's that narcissism, eh?
That idea that you want to be the one that people know did it.
Right?
That's a big problem, right?
Because then you're doing it because you want to be known.
Right?
And that's a false form of prestige, right?
And the narcissistic types are always after the false forms of prestige.
Like real prestige comes when people know that you're good at delivering something they want to have delivered, right?
And that's the equivalent of real ability.
And so, there's something else that's...
I think we can tie together what we talked about to begin with.
So, here's how kids develop friendships.
So...
Two kids will start interacting with each other on the playground, right?
Say they're like four years old, a boy and a girl, and the boy proposes some possible play topics.
So that could be a game or it could be like a drama.
So kids will pretend.
So maybe the boy will say, do you want to play house?
Okay, now he doesn't say to the girl, you have to play house because Because then, if she does play, it's not going to be any fun.
Plus, she isn't going to play, and she's going to be looking for an escape or some other kid to play with, like, instantly.
So, it has to be an invitation, right?
And then, they have to jointly negotiate the rules.
You know, because if you're playing house, you could play husband and wife, or you could play, you know, husband and daughter, or there's all sorts of different roles, or you could play two sons, or one of you could be the cat.
Like, there's a lot of roles that can be taken.
And the next rule is...
Both kids have to agree on the rules and they have to want to play.
And play is particularly interesting in this regard because if there's any element of compulsion or fear, the fun stops.
It's a very delicate motivational state play because any other motivational state will take it out.
So you have to do it exactly right to get the spirit of play going.
So if the boy does this well, then he'll play this game with the girl and it'll be fun for both of them.
And then, so then you imagine there's a fairly tight set of constraints that are operating to make that game fun for both, volunteerism being one of them.
They have to pick their roles, they have to share their aim, they have to agree on what the game is going to be, they have to agree on the principles, so then they can play the game, and now they're experimenting with communicating with one another within that framework.
Okay, now, if that goes well, they'll end and they'll say, well, that was fun.
And they'll say, you know, would you like to play again?
Okay, so now what you're having is a sequence of games, right?
And a friend is someone that a sequence of games can be played with, a variety of different games, and that's a relationship.
So now imagine that, you know, there are pretty tight constraints on how you have to play a game to make the game fun.
You have to have a goal.
You have to try to make the goal.
You have to compete because you want to do a good job.
Maybe you want to do a better job than the person you're playing with.
And you have to cooperate because you have to stay within the confines of the game.
Okay, so that's a pretty tight set of constraints.
Now imagine that across a set of games, the constraints are even tighter because now you have to be able to do that flexibly in a bunch of different situations with a bunch of different games with the same person.
And they have to want to continue it.
Okay, that's a friendship.
Now imagine that there's a pattern of behavior that makes that, an attitude that makes that more possible.
Okay, that's an ethical attitude, and there's nothing morally relativistic about that.
You can see that, right?
Because there's...
Imagine that you have a friend and it's fun to play chess with him and it's fun to play basketball.
Right?
Well, there's not a lot of commonality between those two games, but there's a commonality of attitude that can be brought to bear across those games.
And that's the principle that's antithetical to power.
And I think that what you're doing when you're mentoring people is you're teaching them how to play that game, that long-term iterative game.
And the pleasure in that, imagine it's an instinct.
The people who were best at that had the children who thrived.
Because they taught their children how to play games that everybody wanted to play, so that they were always being called upon to play.
And so that was a radically effective reproductive strategy.
Effective enough to become an instinct, and an instinct that's so powerful that it makes itself manifest as that pleasure in mentoring that you described.
Yeah, and that thing you...
When you mention about these people you want to interact with, even when you're a little kid, it's trust, listen, respect, influence, and care.
If you and I are going to play the game together, but you're just imposing your rules on me, I'm not going to like it.
Or you don't listen to any of the input that I want to give, I'm not going to play with you anymore.
If I can see that you don't care, that I'm the one that keeps falling down on the ground every time we do this part of the game, You don't care about me.
This isn't going to last very long.
And in order for us to build a relationship, you've got to give this stuff.
You've got to give that trust.
You've got to listen to what other people have to say.
What about also psychological reactance?
Have you ever heard of this?
No.
So I guess it's some...
Some instincts that human beings have that when we get told to do something, there's some level of we don't really want to do what we've been told to do.
That's especially true for disagreeable people, by the way, and men are more likely to be disagreeable.
Yeah, well, if you're agreeable, You're more likely to cooperate if someone suggests or even demands.
And the advantage to that is, well, you're more cooperative.
But the disadvantage is the psychopaths and the narcissists can have their way with you.
And this has been very well modeled.
Like, you can produce, say, fictional worlds that are only composed of cooperators, and they do extremely well.
But if you drop one malevolent actor, they take everything.
If all the people can do is cooperate, They take everything.
That's what a cult consists of, I assume.
Yes.
Something along those lines.
Something like that.
That's right.
That's right.
You've got all these people who are cooperating and one shark in the middle.
So this is why...
So in Beauty and the Beast, the beauty falls for the trainable monster, right?
She doesn't want the narcissist and she doesn't want the weak man.
Those are like the dwarfs in Snow White, which is why you can't get rid of the bloody dwarfs, by the way.
It's like, you know, the typical beautiful young woman is surrounded by dwarfs.
Right.
And so she's not interested in them.
And so then you might say, well, who's the prince?
And then you could say, well, one sort of prince is Gaston.
And another sort of prince, apparently in the Beauty and Beast motif, is the trainable monster.
And you might say, well, why do you want the monster?
And the answer is, well, someone's got to keep the psychopaths at bay.
Right, right.
And trainable, so you want someone who has the capacity to say no, but who can be enticed and invited into a relationship, like a mentoring relationship and one of provision cooperation, right?
So it's a very tight line for women to negotiate, right?
Because...
If they find a man who's got no capacity for monstrosity whatsoever and a monster comes along, he's done.
But if they pick a guy who's too monstrous, then he can't cooperate and he's not going to be cooperative with her and the children.
So that women have a very, very...
Small eye hole in the needle to thread.
And the reason I make much of Beauty and the Beast, by the way, I do think that's the fundamental female myth.
And part of the reason I think that, this is very comical, I think.
So, the Google boys...
You ought to meet my wife and see who she married.
Yeah, right, right, right.
Well, so the comprehensible story.
So, the Google boys, a long while ago, got together and analyzed...
Female pornography use online.
Billions of data points.
And they identified the core female pornographic narrative.
And women use verbal pornography, not visual pornography.
So you can see this.
It's like an erotic, harlequin romance.
It's always the same thing.
There's five cardinal male figures.
Surgeon, pirate, billionaire, werewolf, and vampire.
Those are common...
Protagonists.
And the theme fundamentally is that this male is attractive to many other males and is dangerous, but can be enticed into a relationship across time by the right woman.
It's the beauty and the beast motif.
And that's the core motif for the vast preponderance of female pornography.
Like the narrative theme is being identified.
It's exactly what is in...
Fifty Shades of Grey.
Right, right, right.
When the toxic masculinity started being talked about a lot, and I got asked a bunch about these things, and what I answered that question with a lot was, well, if you take any Characteristic or any trait of a human and you take it to an extreme, of course it's going to turn out.
It doesn't really matter.
Even something like being generous.
If someone is generous, they're so generous, they give everything away and they get taken advantage of.
Any trait, if you take it to an extreme, it'll become a negative.
With the traditionally feminine traits and the traditionally masculine traits, it's the same thing.
To say it's bad to be aggressive or assertive, Well, yeah, can you be too aggressive and too assertive and now you don't listen to anybody else?
You just go running around slapping people?
Like, yes, that's terrible.
But the other end of the spectrum is now you're just kind of You're complying to the whims of whoever's around.
It's an equally bad scenario.
So what you want to be as a human being is be balanced.
And yeah, you've got to have some capacity to be a bit of a monster when you need to be, but you've got to be able to contain that and discipline that, and you'll end up in a pretty good spot.
And that goes with just about every characteristic that a human being can have.
Well, you see this very clearly in analysis of Personality trait distribution.
So, you can imagine that there's advantages of being extroverted, but there's disadvantages.
Impulsivity.
And there are pathologies.
Mania.
Like, mania is a pathology of extroversion.
Impulsivity as well, because one of the things that positive emotion does...
And extroverts are higher in positive emotion.
You think, well, you can't have too much of that.
It's like, yes, you can.
Mania is too much positive emotion.
And so is impulsivity, because positive emotion makes you much more likely to act precipitously in the present.
Because your nervous system is saying, well, everything's good right now.
Make hay while the sun shines.
And so, if you have a pronounced proclivity for positive emotion, it'll manifest itself in impulsivity, right?
And so, as you pointed out, so you might say, well...
It seems cosmically unjust that talents are distributed inequitably.
But if you understand that there are no talents without a corresponding cost, then the situation becomes much more complex.
This is even true of intelligence.
Like, I think there isn't anything that you could be granted by the genetic lottery that will make more of a difference in your life than raw IQ. And a huge part of that is biologically determined.
Far more than people would ever want to admit.
And it's really quite...
Shocking.
But the biggest, traditionally, the most unforgivable and deadly sin has been associated with the intellect.
Because the intellect is so powerful that it can fall in love with itself, and then you get the Luciferian intellect, essentially.
You get the sin of pride, you get arrogance, and intellectual arrogance is probably the worst kind.
And so, sure, it's great to be smart, but the downside is, yeah, well, you fall in love with your own intelligence, boy, and you're going to be in some sort of trouble, because I don't care how smart you are, you're not smart enough, and that is not the only virtue.
And then you said something else interesting, too, you know, you talked about this balance.
And so, The classical conception of God is something like the sum of all that's good.
But I think that's in some way a misapprehension, that it's more like the harmonious balance of all that is good, rather than the sum per se.
And so, you could imagine that a person who's maximally admirable, Has the capacity to bring to bear whatever temperamental trait is most appropriate in that situation, right?
So they've got an array of tools to choose from, which is why becoming skilled is so useful.
you increase your tool, well, you increase the toolbox that you have at hand.
But then that virtue itself seems something like the harmonious balance of potentially competing virtues.
Maybe virtue itself is the game that virtuous traits play.
It's something like that.
And then, so you can't reduce it to any one thing.
You can't say, well, the most aggressive guy is the best or the most intelligent guy or the most cooperative guy or the best looking guy or any of that.
It's not reducible to a single dimension, no matter what the dimension is.
But that doesn't mean that there isn't something that all the virtues point to.
And I do think, too, that that pleasure that makes itself manifest in mentoring is probably an index of the virtues being balanced properly, right?
Because if you're in a mentoring relationship with someone and you're really attempting to operate, let's say, not only in their best interest, but in the best interest of all the people they could serve.
So, like when I was training graduate students, you know, part of what I'm thinking is, well, If this person is now under my supervision, they're going to become a professor.
Well, they're going to develop a research enterprise, and God only knows where that'll go.
Like, that can be very influential, and they're going to train.
They're going to have a pretty direct influence on at least thousands of people.
And so, you can imagine that you're trying to work In that person's best interest, but you're trying to work in the best interests of that person insofar as that person is going to be willing to serve the best interests of all the people that they're going to serve.
And that's something that you're going to have to develop the feel for with these individual human beings because they're all a little bit different.
So there might be one individual that you have to be a little bit more aggressive to get them to step up, and there might be another individual that you have to back off a little bit.
I've talked about leadership and saying that You get these tools, right?
And it's like woodworking.
So woodworking, you've got to learn how to operate the tools on wood, right?
The saw and the drill and the chisel.
You've got to learn how to work those tools.
But then you've got to remember that there's different types of wood.
And you've got pine, which is very soft, and you've got ipe, which is very hard.
And then you've got to learn how to work those tools on those pieces of wood.
And then with human beings as a leader...
You've got to remember that each piece of wood is different.
Each piece of pine, this one has a knot and this one has a different bend to it.
So you've got to really pay attention to balancing out these various tools that you have, because if you go too hard on a piece of pine, you'll destroy it.
If you don't go hard enough with a piece of ipe, you won't make any impact.
So, yeah, what you're talking about, very true, and this is what makes leadership and just human interaction so difficult because everyone is a little bit different.
Everyone is unique.
And you still have the same tools.
It's not something that I can't train you.
You say, well, you know, every piece of wood is different, so therefore you just can't.
It's just unmanageable.
No, here's the tools, and you've got to learn the art of working on the hardwood versus softwood, and it's the same thing with leadership.
Like, I can't give you the, oh, here's the answer 100% of the time with all human beings, you do this.
No, actually, here's the range of tools that you can utilize in those types of situations from a leadership perspective.
And you've got to figure out how much pressure to apply, what angle you're going to use, and it's going to be a little bit different.
And that's why it takes experience and it takes time.
But unfortunately, sometimes people think that leadership is just something that you're born with.
Yeah, or it's a set of rules.
Yeah, or it's a set of rules.
It's like, this is what you're born with and you have these capabilities and, oh, did you see that guy give that speech and tell everyone what to do?
Man, he was awesome.
I could never do that.
Well, no, actually, you can do that.
And you can learn to become more articulate.
You can learn how to have a better command presence.
Are you going to have the same command presence that that...
Charming and charismatic individual hat?
Maybe not.
Maybe you can't get there.
But you can definitely improve and you can definitely get better.
And then you can bring someone on your team that has a huge amount of charisma.
And maybe when it's time to get up and shock the troops into action, you let that guy step up because he's better than you.
Well, you see that in the story of Moses, which is a classic leadership story.
Moses isn't verbal.
And he tells God that when God comes along and says, like, well, you're going to stand up against tyranny and you're going to lead the slaves out of captivity, which is what people are always doing in their life if they have any sense.
Moses' first objection is, well, you know, the tradition has it that he had a speech impediment or something like that.
Like, it's actually quite a severe impediment.
So, he has Aaron, who's his communicator, right?
And so...
You know, you pointed to something there.
People often assume that leadership means charismatic speaking, for example.
Well, the kind of public communication leadership that you and I are doing depends on that, but that's by no means the only way of being an effective leader.
I would say it's probably much more akin to what we've been talking about in terms of play.
It's like a good leader is someone that Who can continue to create games and present them to people that they want to play.
And there's lots of ways of doing that.
You can do that and be quiet.
Like I had a client, a lawyer.
He ran a big law firm in Toronto.
I worked with lawyers like that for quite a while.
And they were sent to this little organization I was part of.
The value proposition to the law firms was, you send me your best people and we'll work to make them 15% more productive, which for those people meant a lot, right?
But we work for them, not you.
And so then, what we were doing with each of these people was radically different.
It really depended on the person.
And one of the guys that really struck me, he's very, very quiet.
And all he did in his office, all he did, was go around and listen to people.
And actually listen.
And so he could get wind of interpersonal conflicts of the sort you were describing, you know, the power game conflicts, just before they were developing, right?
People would tell him what was wrong.
And because he was listening, he could fix the things that were wrong with just like a tap and a nudge, right?
Because he did it before they got out of control.
And it was really interesting to watch him operate because it really looked, Even to him, like he was doing very little as the manager of this law firm, but what he was doing was exactly the right amount at exactly the right time, and he was doing that because he was, like, and his orientation was true.
He wanted the firm to function as well as it possibly could, and that's genuinely what he wanted.
And he didn't care whether people...
He didn't even care if he knew that what he was doing was effective.
So there's a gospel statement that's very mysterious.
You shouldn't let your right hand know what your left hand is doing.
It's like, well, what does that mean?
It means you shouldn't even be concerned about whether you give yourself credit for what you've accomplished.
You know, now there's a boundary on that because credit where credit is due.
But if you're Undertaking the task just so that you feel better about yourself in your own eyes, you're contaminating the motivation.
The better motivation is this mentoring motivation.
And I think it really is.
It's a cause for optimism that that's such a deep...
Source of meaning, you know, because you know as well as I do that there are lots of young people, we'll talk about young men for a moment, who feel lost.
Like, where am I going to find the meaning in my life?
And if you can let people know that one of the deepest possible sources of meaning that you can tap that's more or less unfathomable, right?
It never stops giving is the Meaning that comes as a consequence of working on behalf of the appropriate development of other people.
Yeah.
When people come to me and they say, well, I just don't know what to do.
I don't know what my goals should be.
I'm just kind of lost.
I always tell them, go help other people.
Right.
Go help other people.
Right.
Like, you'll find some direction.
I don't care if you go down to a soup kitchen or you go to a boys club where their kids need mentoring or they need someone to teach them how to throw a baseball or whatever the case may be.
Whatever you can do, you go and help people and you're going to find some direction really quickly.
Yeah.
When you realize that you're just a little bit ahead of them in life.
Yeah.
And you can give them so much and that's going to be very powerful.
Yeah.
Well, so one of the things that psychologists discovered, although not nearly enough has been made of this, is so imagine we've discovered the basic dimensions of human temperament.
Extroversion, positive emotion, neuroticism, negative emotion, agreeableness, so that's like, say, aggression versus cooperation, something like that, with the attendant problems on both ends.
Conscientiousness, dutifulness, orderliness, industriousness, and creativity.
Those are the five.
All right, so let's look at neuroticism.
Proclivity to feel negative emotion.
All the negative emotions clump together, so they have a common core.
It's probably something like stop and leave.
Something like that, right?
Because if you're threatened, you should freeze or get the hell out of there.
So that's the core reaction around which all the negative emotions are built, and they all associate.
Okay.
We've been able to do analysis of traits and attitudes that are tightly associated with negative emotion.
Self-consciousness is indistinguishable from negative emotion, which means like it's indistinguishable.
In fact, in one of the major personality trait measures called the neopir, one of the early big five personality dimensions, self-consciousness is a facet of negative emotion.
That's how tight it is.
It's the same thing.
So what it means is, and this is very germane to your point, if you're thinking about yourself, You're miserable.
Those are the same thing.
And so then you might say, well, how do you get out of that?
And you can't get out of that by not thinking about yourself.
That's just going to backfire, right?
So if you're anxious and you go to a party and you think, I'm not going to think about myself, and that's all you're thinking about, like you're dead.
I used to treat my socially anxious clients, say, go to a party and do everything you can to make other people feel comfortable.
So, I would explain to them what I just explained to you, but I would say, that doesn't mean you can stop thinking about yourself.
It means you can start only thinking about what you can provide to other people.
And that was invariably an improvement on the strategy that they had been using.
But this is so crucially important, you know, because we are so reciprocal as human beings.
That you are lost if you only serve your own whims.
It doesn't work in the long run.
It alienates people.
It produces a life that's devoid of meaning.
It makes you anxious and isolated.
And it makes you self-conscious and miserable.
And so it is the case, as we alluded to earlier, that, perversely enough, the best possible thing that you can do for yourself, all things considered, over the longest possible run, is to work as hard as you can on behalf of what's best in other people.
Yeah, and you and I talked about this the last time, I forget, it was a couple years ago, I think, but...
I was talking, or you asked me what makes a good seal.
Like, what makes a good seal?
And I said, well, it doesn't matter.
Look, you've got to be a good shot, of course.
You've got to be in good physical condition.
All those things are important.
You've got to have the skill set.
Far and away, what makes a good SEAL is someone that puts the team before themselves.
That's it.
That's the thing.
And if you're the best shot, you're the fastest, you're the strongest, but you have yourself above the team, I don't want you in my platoon.
And no one wants you in the platoon.
That's the way it works.
So it's interesting that psychologically, if you're focused on yourself, it's going to cause problems.
Either the problem of egocentric arrogance or the problem of Like, paranoia, or what'd you just use to describe it?
I mean, when someone's just focused on- Self-consciousness.
Self-consciousness.
That's the thing that I, when I see people that are self-conscious, I was like, hey, you know who notices that you have a zit on your cheek right now?
You.
No one else cares.
No one else cares.
No one's, it doesn't matter.
When you walk into a room and you feel like you don't have the experience to be in a leadership position, the person that's thinking that is you.
It doesn't really matter.
Yeah.
Now, if you go in and try and overcompensate for that by saying, listen, I just graduated from college and I really know how to execute this stuff, you're going to get crushed.
Yeah.
Because you're trying to make up for the fact that you actually don't know what you're doing.
Everyone knows you don't.
You just got here.
So, we know you don't know what you're doing, but we don't really care about it.
No, we just care if you think you know what you're doing more than you actually know.
Then it's a problem.
Yeah, then that's definitely a problem.
And that whole thing about the authoritarian mindset.
And I did this series of podcasts about this book called The Psychology of Military Incompetence.
And they have these authoritarian people, and when they look at the military— They think, they're like, oh yeah.
Yeah, you get that in the police too.
Yep, you get it in the police, you get it in law enforcement.
You get these people that have that authoritarian mindset.
They see what it looks like from the outside and they think, oh, this is going to be awesome.
This is where I belong.
And so they go and everyone's going to wear a uniform.
They're going to have to call me sir.
They're going to have to obey what I say.
It's like a dream for them.
And In non-combat situations, those people can perform pretty well because we're on the parade field.
I need everyone in the same uniform.
I'm going to inspect your barracks rooms.
I'm going to make sure that you follow my orders as soon as they're given.
That's like a beautiful place for that authoritarian mindset is a non-combat situation.
But you put those people in combat.
And now all of a sudden, there's literally no rules anymore.
There's a very small number of rules.
And now you have to deal with, you know, Jordan, who listened to me when we were on the parade field, but now he's scared to death that he's going to die, and he's not listening to me anymore.
Now what do I do?
How do I do that?
Yeah, and he has reason to be scared.
He has reason to be scared.
So you would see, and I got to see this a lot inside the military, that people that had the authoritarian mindset, the closed mindset, Right.
It's a real problem.
Well, yeah.
Well, like you said, I don't think there's a better definition of chaos than warfare.
Like, obviously, that's a place where the rules are suspended.
So then the question would be, well, what's the best possible mindset to bear on a situation where the rules have been suspended?
You can certainly see that distribution of responsibility and an appeal to voluntarism is going to be of great utility under those, not least so you don't get shot in the back by your own men.
Yeah.
And then the creativity aspect, right?
Because all of a sudden there's no rules, right?
And or there's a very limited amount of rules.
And if we've got to find out a different way to execute these missions, that's going to make more sense in this particular environment that we're in, that no book and no training has prepared us for.
You know, I got asked a little while ago about, well, you know, if we were going to war with China, And I was leading my troops into combat.
What would I be thinking about?
And I said, the thing I would be focused on, the same thing I'm always focused on, especially going into a combat situation, and that is keeping an open mind.
Because I don't know what's going to happen.
The enemy doesn't know what's going to happen.
I don't know exactly how my troops are going to react.
I don't even know how I'm going to react.
And if I get a fixed mindset where I'm saying, this is what we're going to do and this is how it's going to be, as soon as that combat starts, you can throw that thing out the window.
And now if I have a closed mind, I fall apart.
If I have an open mind, I look around and say, okay, I see some adaptations we can make right now.
Here's what we need to do.
Here's some adjustments we can make.
And that's what, when I ran training, that was the purpose of my training was to open people's minds.
Put them in situations where if they stuck with a fixed mindset and they didn't open their mind and they didn't see other perspectives, they were going to fall apart.
So that other perspective, that's got to be allied with that willingness to incorporate information from the bottom up.
So that's where the diversity claims of the radical left have some utility.
In any open-ended situation, you want a genuine diversity of viewpoints Because the situation is shifting, and the more options you have in front of you, up to some limited degree, because, you know, time to...
Process all those options also matters.
You don't want a uniformity of opinion because you're going to run into this problem that you just described.
Here's a good example.
The Iraqi military, right?
It's basically a caste system.
You have the officers at top, and then you had a bunch of, you know, almost slave labor a little bit.
Yeah, yeah.
And the officers would skim money off the paychecks of the soldiers.
Right.
That's how they operated.
Right.
There's a loyalty building exercise for you.
Not the best loyalty building exercise at all.
So the rule is, don't rip off armed subordinates?
How's that for a rule?
Here's the thing that's interesting.
So our chain of command found out that this was happening.
And there was a lot of pressure throughout the U.S. military like, we've got to stop this.
These soldiers are getting ripped off.
This is terrible.
We need to prosecute the officers that are skimming money from the paychecks.
So I went and talked to like, brought my interpreter and we'd go talk to these soldiers.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And you say like, hey, is it true that your boss is skimming money off your paycheck?
Yeah.
Like, ready to write it down and let...
And they go, well, of course.
He's the boss.
Of course he's going to take some of the money.
I mean, that's sort of what we...
You know, that's totally normal.
They weren't angry about it.
They were just like, "Oh yeah, well, he's the boss.
He's gonna take some money, and then when I get promoted, I'll be able to take money." That's the way their system functions. - Uh-huh, uh-huh.
See, I jumped to the wrong conclusion. - That investment, that was my conclusion too, 'cause I was a young enlisted guy, and if my officer would've been stupid with my money, I would've been totally against it.
But that was a very normal thing.
And so we, I kind of try to back off and say, "This is the way their culture is." That's the way their culture is.
It's different than ours.
It's unacceptable.
Were there parameters of skimming?
Yeah, there are.
There's parameters of skimming.
Right, so you could take some percent.
Yes, yes.
And it's the same thing with the Iraqis.
We'd say, hey, you know, we're going on an operation tonight.
We've got an operation tonight.
Can you bring 30 guys tonight to conduct this operation?
And they would tell you 100% of the time, yeah.
Yeah.
Yep.
And they'd show up with nine, or they'd show up with six, or they'd show up with 48.
And because it's inshallah, right?
God willing, we'll have 30 people.
If that's the way it's supposed to be, that's the way it'll be.
And instead of us going, hey, this isn't the way we do it, we have to say, okay, well, how do they operate?
What do they think like?
How can we incorporate their perspective on things into our culture?
And how can we merge these cultures together so that we can communicate with them in an effective way so we go, okay, cool.
How many people do you think you can bring tonight?
And they're going to give you a better answer than if you say, can you bring this many?
It's a little nuance in the way that you interact with them.
Well, that might have even been a politeness norm, eh?
Because their response to you might have been, well, the polite thing is to tell the person who's asking what they want to hear.
And that is different than saying, well, how many people do you think you could bring?
Totally different.
So if I had a fixed mindset and a closed mind, it would have been saying, this is the military.
A platoon is 40 guys.
You need to bring a platoon tonight.
If you don't bring a platoon, the world explodes, right?
Nothing's going to work.
But the open-minded attitude is like, oh, they think a little bit differently than we do.
Hey, how many people can you bring?
And all of a sudden, okay, you can bring 12.
Okay, then we'll bring 18 and we'll have 30 and we'll be able to get this thing done.
We'll make it happen.
But when we have a closed mind, we don't hear other people's perspectives, it's actually insane.
I've seen people, we have intelligence come in, information come in, and just be like, no, just shut it off, as if it doesn't exist.
Instead of saying, oh, well, at a minimum, where'd that information come from, right?
I might not agree with that information, but we've got someone telling us that there's a machine gun nest in this location.
No, that's impossible.
Yeah.
I've heard people say those kind of things.
People do that in their own marriages all the time.
Yeah, it's totally ridiculous.
So to put your ego in check and say, oh, that person might understand or this intelligence may come from a place, something that I don't understand or I don't know about, let me open my mind and at least ask some questions about it.
And we're seeing this in the political world right now, right?
The divisiveness in the country is like, oh, I'm right, you're wrong.
Therefore, everything that you say, I don't listen to anything that you say.
And that's the way it is.
And...
End of conversation.
I don't want to hear anything that you have to say, which is a real problem.
Instead of having conversations with people and trying to understand what your perspective is, crazy as it may seem to me, I still have to listen to what you have to say and try and integrate that into...
Well, it's especially true when you have to live...
I was on Bill Maher's show at one point, and...
It was me and a bunch of people who were, at least under the current circumstances, more liberal than me.
And they were going off on Trump and the megatypes.
And I brought the conversation to a halt by asking them how that attitude, essentially of contempt that they brought to bear on the situation, was going to serve them, given that that was 50% of the population and they're going to have to live with them.
Right?
And so...
This ARC thing that we've put together in London, the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, one of the rules that we're attempting to implement, we're afraid that any enterprise that's international visionary, let's say, will have a proclivity to turn into something authoritarian will have a proclivity to turn into something authoritarian in like no time flat.
You could make a cool movie about that.
Yeah, well, no kidding.
The ARC goes wild.
Well, no kidding.
Absolutely.
One of our principles is that any policy that you have to implement by manipulation or force is at minimum suboptimal, right?
That you need voluntary buy-in.
And that's something like consent of the governed.
But I also think that it's more just a counsel of wisdom because it's a lot easier to lead people where they want to go.
And it's really incumbent, it's kind of a definition of leadership, you know, is that you have to find out where people want to go.
And you should assume that maybe they have the reasons for the decisions that they made.
And then you can help them strategize about how that might be undertaken and what their respective roles might be.
And it's very useful as well to give, not to give them something that's important to do, but to encourage them to take on something important to do and then to back the hell off so they can do it.
Right.
No better tool in leadership than giving people ownership of what they're doing.
You know, the classic in the military is I don't say, hey, Jordan, here's the mission.
Here's the people I want you to take.
Here's the weapons I want you to use.
Here's the vehicles I want you to bring.
Here's how I want you to assault the building.
Here's the time I want you to hit the target.
Here's the time I want you to, the route I want you to take to get back here.
And here's what time I want you to do the debrief.
So take ownership of that and go execute.
That doesn't work.
Yeah.
What we want to do in a decentralized organization is say, hey, Jordan, here's the target you've got to hit tonight.
Go figure out how you want to do it.
And if you're a good leader, then you turn to your team and you say, hey, guys, here's the target we've got to hit tonight.
How do you think we should do this?
And all of a sudden, you have ownership over this.
How do you negotiate agreement on the original target?
Well, that's the thing is, if you say to me, hey, Johnco, why do you want to hit that target?
I should be able to say, well, we found out that that's the node that's been making explosive devices that's been hitting all of our bases.
Here's our prioritization rationale.
You say, cool, got it.
Occasionally, and I can't be afraid of this, occasionally you say, hey, Johnco, why are we hitting that target?
And I say...
I'm not sure.
Right, that's not good.
That's not good at all.
In fact, that's, to me, you know what, let me go find out.
Right, definitely.
And also occasionally, I might say, we want to hit the target because we've been getting bombed and we want that to stop and this is the node that's been making these explosives.
And you might say to me, hey, the road that you want us to go down and hit this target has had roadside bombs on it every day and there's no other entry in there.
I don't think we should do this.
Mm-hmm.
And then what should I say?
I should say, oh, I did not know that.
Right.
And then it's up the chain of command.
How can we find another way to prosecute this target?
And because I listen to you, now when I come back and say, hey, actually, we did some analysis.
We are going to get you some helicopters.
You're not going to have to drive down the road.
Here's the new tools you have.
And you say, great.
And so we move forward down the path, not by me dictating to you and not by you protesting and calling me an idiot, but by us having a relationship and working together to figure out the best solution to the problem.
You can never be afraid as a leader to not know the answer.
To say like, well, I'm actually not sure about that.
Let me find out.
People are scared of that.
People are scared of when someone on their team raises their hand and says, hey boss, why are we doing this?
A lot of times their response is because I told you to.
We say that to our kids.
This is a terrible answer even for your kids.
Even for your kids.
The answer should be, well, let me explain it to you.
And by the way, clean your room.
Why?
Why?
I've had this with a thousand parents.
Why should I clean my room?
And there are some whys, right?
You can say, well, you know, if we have a fire and the firemen come in here and you've got toys all over the floor, you could trip and fall and it could be a real problem.
And your kid might buy that, right?
They might buy that.
But they might be like...
Low probability.
Yeah, low probability.
I'm not cleaning the room.
And occasionally, if you don't really have a good answer, okay, well...
If you want your laundry done, at a minimum, you got to put your clothes in the hamper.
Other than that, you can leave the Tonka toys all the way.
And you think, well, then you're creating this undisciplined child.
No, actually, you're giving your child the ability to learn from themselves three days later when they want to go to school and they can't find their Tonka truck.
It's like, where's my Tonka truck?
Well, it's somewhere in your room.
Where'd you put it?
I don't know.
So thinking that your kid is going to just devolve into this savage human being that's undisciplined throughout their life is the wrong answer.
Well, you highlighted something there that's also of extreme importance from a leadership perspective too, which is the refusal to make rules, to make unnecessary rules.
A good leadership...
What would you say?
Set of principles is not too many rules, but enforcement of the rules, of the minimal set of rules that do exist.
And then you might say, well, how do you know what the appropriate rules are?
And one answer to that would be, well, if you don't have a series of deep reasons for your rule, and it boils down to because I said so, that's probably not a rule that you are in a position to To advance or assist upon.
It needs to be placed exactly as you said in the military situation.
Here's a target.
Here's the cost to attempting to hit that target, which is not a trivial cost at all.
The right response on the part of the men is, well, why is that worth the cost?
And so they're going to reflect that back to you unless you have enough reasons behind that strategy to eliminate their concerns.
At least compared to any other plan they might come up with.
Their appropriate response in some ways is to not, they're certainly not going to be enthusiastic about the mission.
They're certainly not going to think, well, this clearly needs to be done.
Yep.
And there's situations in Vietnam War is a great time to talk about this because there are situations where I said, Jordan, you got to go execute this.
Yeah.
And you said, why?
And I said, well, because it's coming from higher ups.
Yeah.
And you go, okay, boss, got it.
Yeah.
And you take your patrol 100 meters outside the wire.
You sit in the bushes for six hours.
You come back and you say, yeah, boss, we tried.
We didn't see anything out there.
Right.
But you didn't execute anything you were supposed to execute.
Right, right, right, right.
Definitely, definitely.
So understanding why you're doing what you're doing, absolutely critical.
And yeah, from a governmental perspective, Well, those explanations also give people the option to think on their feet when they're actually in the complex situation because if you provided them with five rationales for this target and then things go astray, they still have those five rationales to build new targets out of, right?
So that's why they need to be informed.
And being able to admit when you're wrong about something and being able to say, you know, actually, the last target we hit that you pushed back against and I told you to just do it, you were right and I was wrong.
We shouldn't hit that target.
That's okay.
And you don't see this from politicians at all.
You never hear a politician say, yeah, you know, what I was thinking at the time was wrong, and here's my adjustment, and here's what I want to do moving forward.
It was kind of ridiculous during COVID. The way those things just piled up.
Oh yeah, that's for sure.
It was ridiculous.
Yeah, well that's, you know, part of that I would say, and maybe we should close with this, part of that was likely the fact that there was a decision made very early on that it was okay to compel people by force.
As soon as, as soon as, I'll tell you, maybe this is a good closing.
This is cool.
There's a scene in Exodus.
I did this Exodus seminar recently, and we're talking about leadership, so this is perfectly appropriate.
So Moses is an archetypal leader, right?
He's leading people away from tyranny and away from their own slavery, right?
And so when every leader does that, when you're trying to make people autonomous, you're trying to lead them away from their own slavery.
When you're trying to help inform them that they shouldn't be using power, you're trying to lead them away from tyranny.
Okay, so Moses does a pretty damn good job of this.
And he's got his people right to the edge of the Promised Land, and this has taken 40 years, right?
It's taken his whole bloody life, right?
And so, they're still in the desert.
They're lost.
They're wandering.
They're still in the desert, but the Promised Land is at hand, and they're out of water.
And so, the Israelites start bitching and whining about this.
They come to Moses, and Moses, they say, go talk to God, because you're in with him.
And God says, I Ask these rocks to deliver water for your people and they'll deliver water.
And so Moses listens, but then when he goes to the rocks, he hits them with his staff.
He uses authority, he uses power twice, bang, bang.
When he was told to ask.
And so the rocks deliver water and the Israelites are no longer parched.
But God punishes Moses by telling him that he will now die before he enters the promised land.
And so, it's an extremely interesting twist.
It's a very short part of the story.
But Moses, throughout his leadership career, uses excessive force a number of times.
It's his weakness.
And Despite the fact that he sacrifices for 40 years and is probably the most effective leader in the entire Old Testament corpus, he's stopped from attaining his highest goal because he relies on force.
Right.
Yep.
Right.
I say constantly to lead with the minimum force required.
Right, right.
This is, of course, a term when you're interacting with a potential prisoner, you want to use the minimal force required to subdue them.
Yep.
And it's the same thing as a leader of human beings.
You want to lead with the minimum force required.
Yep.
Hopefully, hopefully, in an ideal world, That's nothing.
My team knows what to do.
They know what the goal is, and they can move there.
Hey, occasionally, do you as a leader have to step in and say, hey, everyone, we've got to make a change.
This is where we're going.
Yes, you occasionally have to do that.
You want that to be as rare as possible, and what you really want is you want people stepping up and moving because they know the direction that we're heading.
Well, that's a great place to end.
And so, thank you very much.
It's always a pleasure talking to you.
We were going to cover a lot of topics today that we didn't cover, but I'm very happy that we covered the topics that we did cover.
For everybody who's watching and listening, most of you know this already, but I'll point it out anyways.
I'm going to continue talking to Jocko for another half an hour on the Daily Wire Plus side.
I think I'm going to talk to him about the political situation that surrounds us at the moment in relationship to leadership.
We'll talk about Biden.
We'll talk about Trump more from the psychological and philosophical perspective.
And so if you want to join us for that, please do.
I always think it's useful, at least in principle, to throw some support behind the Daily Wire Plus team.
They're doing a good job on the free speech front as far as I'm concerned.
And they facilitate these conversations.
And that's been very useful to me and hopefully to all of you as well.
So thank you, Jocko.
Very good to see you again.
To everybody watching and listening, thank you for your time and attention.
The Daily Wire Plus people and the film crew here, thanks for your help.
Ciao.
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