The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

00:00:00.940 Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.

00:00:06.480 Dr. Jordan Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety.

00:00:12.740 We know how isolating and overwhelming these conditions can be, and we wanted to take a moment to reach out to those listening who may be struggling.

00:00:20.100 With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way in his new series.

00:00:27.420 He provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that while the journey isn't easy, it's absolutely possible to find your way forward.

00:00:35.360 If you're suffering, please know you are not alone. There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better.

00:00:41.780 Go to Daily Wire Plus now and start watching Dr. Jordan B. Peterson on depression and anxiety.

00:00:47.460 Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve.

00:00:57.420 Hello, everybody. I have Jocko Willink here with me today.

00:01:15.380 Most of you watching and listening will know who Jocko is.

00:01:18.200 He's an ex-Navy SEAL, very broad social media following, talented author of children's books, an entrepreneur.

00:01:29.980 We've spoken a number of times in the past, and that's always gone really well.

00:01:34.740 The conclusions that he's drawn as a consequence of his vast experience in the military

00:01:40.080 and on the entrepreneurship front dovetail very well with what I've learned as a consequence of working as a clinician and a professor

00:01:49.080 and in the entrepreneurial space over all these decades.

00:01:53.600 We talked about leadership and ethics,

00:01:59.940 and I would say about invitational leadership and ethics,

00:02:04.860 and fleshed out a landscape of description about leadership

00:02:11.280 that makes it not so much a matter of top-down command and order,

00:02:19.200 but of bottom-up formulation of shared vision and shared goals,

00:02:24.240 supplemented by continual communication.

00:02:27.560 And we also talked a lot about the pleasure of mentorship,

00:02:31.680 which is a form of fatherhood, I would say,

00:02:35.180 and the fact that people, men particularly, in relationship to fatherhood,

00:02:41.700 have a vested interest and instinctual tilt towards developing the best in other people,

00:02:50.640 and that that's a much better way of viewing the manner in which proper hierarchies are structured

00:02:56.380 than one that relies on the assumption that people are fundamentally motivated by power.

00:03:01.180 You know, maybe the best of us is motivated by the opportunity to serve the best in other people,

00:03:06.660 and I really think that that's a possibility,

00:03:09.080 and I would say that's also a hallmark of Jocko's style and message.

00:03:15.800 Well, Mr. Willink, let's start by talking about your tour.

00:03:21.140 So, when were you on tour?

00:03:23.740 A few months ago, I went on tour.

00:03:25.700 This was the second tour that I did,

00:03:28.140 and the first one I did was right at the beginning of COVID, right before COVID.

00:03:33.940 In fact, I may have been the super spreader of COVID.

00:03:36.400 Oh, yeah, probably.

00:03:37.360 Because I did San Francisco, New York, L.A., D.C.

00:03:42.620 I was like in all the places where eventually COVID spread really quickly,

00:03:46.520 and I had been to all of them, and who knows?

00:03:49.920 You helped us get over it quicker.

00:03:51.700 That's how I would look at it.

00:03:52.940 You're welcome.

00:03:53.360 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:03:54.500 So, this one was a few years later, and I just did five or six cities this time,

00:03:59.400 and what was nice was we, the one that was in Chicago,

00:04:02.680 we brought a crew in and we filmed it, and we're going to release it, so.

00:04:05.460 When is that coming out?

00:04:06.580 I'm not sure yet.

00:04:07.440 I'm not sure of that.

00:04:08.140 All the editing and everything isn't done yet, but we'll put it out there.

00:04:11.200 So, why do you think people, and what do people tell you?

00:04:14.780 Why do people come and see you?

00:04:16.360 What is it that you're providing to people, do you think?

00:04:18.460 Like, I think people want to come see me and want to connect with me in real life

00:04:26.100 because they've listened to my podcast a lot.

00:04:28.200 Yeah, yeah.

00:04:28.480 So, I think that has a lot to do with it.

00:04:30.840 And then I think people, you know, I'm just up there sort of sharing experiences that I've had,

00:04:37.000 and I try and do the best I can in presenting the lessons that I've learned.

00:04:42.680 And really, one of the biggest lessons that I was talking about on this tour was, it's going to be okay.

00:04:50.280 And I think that, especially when people go through traumatic situations,

00:04:54.100 obviously, I deal with veterans a lot, law enforcement,

00:04:57.420 and the whole PTSD that people have been going through and talking about for the last,

00:05:04.280 well, I guess, since the wars have been on, last 20 years.

00:05:07.360 And a lot of times, someone would go through traumatic experience,

00:05:13.100 and they'd have bad feelings about it.

00:05:14.580 They'd have regrets about it.

00:05:16.240 They'd have things that they wish they would have done differently.

00:05:19.880 And one of the main themes I was telling people during this tour was,

00:05:27.040 that's totally normal, and it's okay.

00:05:29.460 It's okay to think, oh, I lost some friends, and sometimes I feel sad about it.

00:05:35.660 Well, yeah, of course.

00:05:37.280 Like, that's normal.

00:05:38.520 That's fine.

00:05:39.200 In fact, if you weren't sad about it, there may be something wrong.

00:05:42.840 Because I think that people have been told for a while that,

00:05:46.820 oh, if you're feeling sad, there's something wrong with you.

00:05:49.460 When I actually don't think there's anything wrong with when you feel sad.

00:05:52.860 You feel sad?

00:05:53.920 Yeah, you lost friends.

00:05:55.120 You're going to feel sad.

00:05:56.240 Oh, you were in combat.

00:05:57.460 You had to do some horrible things.

00:05:59.360 You did some things that you regret.

00:06:01.440 There's nothing wrong with that.

00:06:03.020 People make mistakes.

00:06:03.860 People think they don't turn out the way that they wanted them to.

00:06:07.200 We made decisions, and there was a bad result at the end of that decision.

00:06:11.780 And instead of thinking, oh, I'm a terrible person, no, it's like,

00:06:15.560 you made a mistake, and that's okay, and you've got to move on.

00:06:19.360 Yeah, well, that's the tricky part, I think, with regards to, say,

00:06:24.800 post-traumatic stress disorder or regret.

00:06:27.580 You know, because it's one thing if you're sad because you've lost people.

00:06:31.200 It's another thing if you're blaming yourself because you believe, and maybe with some cause,

00:06:37.000 that you've made a mistake.

00:06:38.780 And often people don't know what to do about the fact that they've made a mistake.

00:06:44.300 So maybe we could talk about that a little bit, because some of the people who are watching

00:06:48.420 and listening will have made mistakes, and some of them are hanging themselves out to dry

00:06:52.080 because of it, right?

00:06:53.700 I mean, especially if you make mistakes that have had fairly dramatic consequences.

00:06:58.320 So, and this ties in, I would say, also to the motif of forgiveness, because there's not

00:07:04.600 much difference between forgiving other people and forgiving yourself, and you can't just do

00:07:09.060 that by saying that you're going to do it.

00:07:11.380 So what I've observed clinically, and I think this works philosophically as well, is that

00:07:15.820 what you want to do to set things right, which is to atone, is to lay out what you've done

00:07:23.420 that you think was wrong.

00:07:27.160 Provide yourself with the best possible defense.

00:07:30.800 So, you know, there's a reason in our legal system that we start with the presumption of

00:07:35.640 innocence, which is a miracle.

00:07:37.720 Because like, tyrannies start with the presumption of guilt.

00:07:40.200 And the reason they do that is because everyone's done something wrong, and if you dig around

00:07:44.160 enough in anyone's life, you'll find a reason that they're culpable, a reason to put them

00:07:47.980 away.

00:07:48.800 And so, the fact that we presume innocence is a complete bloody miracle, and I can't figure

00:07:52.520 out how we ever managed to get that right.

00:07:54.640 But you've got to do that with yourself.

00:07:56.440 So imagine you're taking yourself to task because you did some things wrong.

00:08:00.200 It's like, okay, list them out in your imagination or write it down.

00:08:04.020 But then you've got to defend yourself as thoroughly as you possibly can.

00:08:08.260 Now, which doesn't mean you're trying to get yourself off the hook.

00:08:11.560 It means that you're trying not to take yourself apart more than is necessary.

00:08:16.440 And then you might ask, well, if I've done something terrible, maybe what's necessary

00:08:22.040 is that I commit suicide, is that like I pay the ultimate price for my sins, and people

00:08:26.320 will do that when they're depressed.

00:08:27.800 And that's not right, because actually what you want to do to atone is to set yourself

00:08:33.580 back on the right track.

00:08:34.920 So the precondition for forgiving yourself is, first of all, to sort out whether or not

00:08:40.320 you're accusing yourself too viciously, like a tyrant.

00:08:44.620 But then let's assume that there's some leftover evidence, compelling evidence, that you did

00:08:50.820 do something wrong.

00:08:52.320 Okay, now you have to figure out what you did wrong, and you have to figure out what you

00:08:57.300 would have done differently, and what you will do differently in the future.

00:09:01.340 And then my sense is, and I think this works out psychologically, is that if you can set

00:09:06.620 yourself up so that you've learned from the mistake you made, so you wouldn't repeat it,

00:09:12.800 then you get to go on with your life.

00:09:15.500 And I think that's also what you do with people around you.

00:09:19.120 You know, I mean, you might want to forgive someone, maybe who hurt you when you were young,

00:09:23.300 for example, because you don't want to carry that burden around.

00:09:26.120 You know, it's like, it's been 20 years, you're still mad about, it's like, well, you got

00:09:30.680 tortured, plus you're still angry about it, so that's not good for you.

00:09:34.460 But to forgive someone so that you can heal a relationship means that they have to confess

00:09:40.200 what they did, they have to assess why it was wrong, they have to come up with an alternative

00:09:45.100 way of behaving, and then they have to swear, you know, by all that's holy, so to speak,

00:09:50.040 that they're not going to do that again in the future.

00:09:52.940 And then I think, and you know, you might say that the devil in your mind that's still

00:09:58.220 accusing you might say, well, what you did is so terrible that you should never be let

00:10:02.040 off the hook.

00:10:02.620 And I would say that is that if that's the criteria that you use for judgment, then

00:10:06.660 everyone's doomed, because everyone makes mistakes in their lives.

00:10:10.040 And I would say, probably everybody makes unforgivable mistakes.

00:10:14.980 And so if we're going to take ourselves apart about that permanently, then we're all ruined.

00:10:21.780 Yeah, I was pretty lucky growing up in the military, that I would get to see guys, and I was probably

00:10:29.280 26 years old, and I moved into like an instructor role in the SEAL teams.

00:10:35.940 And so you'd see these young leaders, and they'd go out on some training mission, and they would,

00:10:41.940 they were going to mess things up, they're going to make mistakes.

00:10:43.700 And, you know, you always get this talk about, well, you made the best decision you could

00:10:48.660 with the information that you had at the time.

00:10:50.440 And it kind of sounds like a cop-out in a way, but it's actually not a cop-out at all.

00:10:54.460 You make the best decision that you can with the information that you have at the time.

00:10:58.420 Like, what more can a human being do to make the best decision they can with the information

00:11:02.780 that they had at the time?

00:11:03.900 And when you get more information, or when the results come, as they may, that decision

00:11:12.120 that you made might not have been a good decision.

00:11:13.980 It might have been a bad decision.

00:11:15.840 But there's, number one, there's nothing you can do to change it.

00:11:18.940 Like, it already happened.

00:11:19.780 You made the decision.

00:11:21.220 And then I would always look at the guys and say, what was their intent behind this decision

00:11:25.740 that they made?

00:11:26.220 Like, why did they do that?

00:11:27.400 Because if we can decipher that, and their intent was they wanted to make a good move

00:11:32.180 to get their guys out of a bad situation.

00:11:34.360 What more could I want from a leader than to make a decision that's doing their best with

00:11:40.480 the information that they had at the time to maneuver out of a bad scenario to take care

00:11:45.020 of their guys?

00:11:45.620 There's nothing more I could hope for.

00:11:47.820 So as long as I think you peel back the onion and you kind of review what happened, you say,

00:11:52.860 oh, yeah, I made the decision at this time.

00:11:55.760 Of course, if I had this other information, I'd change it.

00:11:58.460 But I did what I did.

00:12:00.420 The result was not what I wanted.

00:12:02.160 It's not what I intended.

00:12:03.680 Here we are.

00:12:04.480 And now you can either beat yourself up or you can say, here's some lessons I've learned

00:12:09.340 from it.

00:12:09.920 And, you know, the first book that I wrote was called Extreme Ownership.

00:12:13.920 The opening chapter of that was a fratricide that took place where I was the guy in charge,

00:12:19.980 where one of my friendly, one of my SEALs killed a friendly Iraqi soldier in a terrible

00:12:27.720 situation.

00:12:29.040 And, of course, you know, we could go back and the hindsight's 20-20 and I could have

00:12:34.040 done this and I should have done this and I should have done something else.

00:12:36.800 And I didn't.

00:12:38.120 And that's on me.

00:12:38.800 And so I think, you know, that initial part, if we're going to talk about forgiveness,

00:12:43.900 the first part of that is taking ownership.

00:12:45.620 Say, yep, this was my call.

00:12:47.360 This was my decision.

00:12:48.420 This is the move that I made.

00:12:52.300 That's me.

00:12:53.080 It's not anybody else.

00:12:54.020 It's me.

00:12:54.580 Because the minute you start saying, well, this person did that and this person, you

00:12:57.980 know, the enemy did this.

00:12:59.220 We didn't expect that.

00:13:00.160 The minute you start casting blame on other people, now you're, I think you're lying to

00:13:04.700 yourself.

00:13:05.180 And I think that's going to cause more problems.

00:13:07.200 So saying, yes, this was a decision I made.

00:13:09.500 This is the information I had at the time.

00:13:11.360 It ended up being a bad decision.

00:13:12.780 Here was my intent behind it.

00:13:14.220 And I've got to move forward.

00:13:16.100 If you want to, you know, I always talk about you want to learn, but you don't want to dwell.

00:13:21.880 If you dwell on the past, if you dwell on the mistakes that you made, like you said,

00:13:26.100 everybody is just doomed.

00:13:28.120 Well, so the tricky issue there, I think, is that people who are taking themselves apart,

00:13:34.800 they're often conscientious people.

00:13:36.240 And so, well, they'll say, they'll think, they'll assume that taking ownership, in your

00:13:41.500 terms, means raking yourself over the coals.

00:13:44.680 And the crucial thing to establish there is like, well, yeah, you have to rake yourself

00:13:49.400 over the coals until you learn.

00:13:52.460 But no more than that, because after that, it's counterproductive.

00:13:55.600 What you're trying to foster is improvement, right?

00:13:59.680 Now, and then in terms of making a case for your innocence, that's where analysis of ignorance

00:14:08.640 is useful.

00:14:10.060 You know, you said, well, and it's a question of conscience.

00:14:14.220 Did you make the best use of the information that you had available at the time?

00:14:19.000 And one answer is, well, yes, but I had sparse information.

00:14:22.660 And then you have to ask yourself, well, could have you been more informed if your eyes would

00:14:26.480 have been more open?

00:14:27.300 That's a willful blindness issue.

00:14:29.220 But it's definitely worthwhile to, when you're making a case to defend yourself, to see how

00:14:37.480 much of the sequence of events that resulted in the unfortunate conclusion was attributable

00:14:45.780 to situation.

00:14:47.120 There's a classic mistake in thinking that people make called the fundamental attribution

00:14:53.420 error.

00:14:53.760 So imagine that you're driving along on the road and somebody cuts you off and you say,

00:14:59.420 well, that son of a bitch.

00:15:01.120 It's like, and then, you know, you find two blocks later that you're in the same situation

00:15:06.300 in terms of the positioning of the automobiles and you cut someone else off.

00:15:10.800 And it's harder to do a situational analysis than to do a personal attribution.

00:15:17.520 And so people will default to a personal attribution, that son of a bitch.

00:15:21.500 And that can turn around to bite you because it's difficult when you're retroactively assessing

00:15:27.220 something you've done to take into account all the situational factors.

00:15:34.000 But that is definitely something you do if you're mounting a defense for yourself.

00:15:37.540 And that's part of that presumption of innocence.

00:15:39.240 So we could say, if you're trying to get yourself out of something like post-traumatic

00:15:43.520 distress disorder, we would say, well, how would you make the case for yourself if you

00:15:48.540 began with the presumption of innocence and that there were situational factors?

00:15:52.540 Make the strongest possible case.

00:15:55.340 So you do that.

00:15:56.120 Now, if there's some residual issues that you have to contend with, like the fact that you

00:16:00.060 were willfully blind or, you know, maybe you weren't protecting your men.

00:16:04.180 Maybe you were going for the promotion because you're more ambitious than you should be.

00:16:07.780 Like that, that, that speaks to intent, but you shouldn't convict yourself until all the

00:16:13.940 arguments that are in favor of your innocence have exhausted themselves.

00:16:17.680 Right.

00:16:18.140 And it is, that is the way that our legal system is set up.

00:16:20.580 And there's a good reason for that too.

00:16:22.380 And then knowing also that atonement is possible and forgiveness appropriate when you've learned

00:16:30.020 your lesson.

00:16:31.320 You know, and that's also very useful when you're disciplining children.

00:16:34.380 So for example, when my kids were young and I used to have them sit on the steps when

00:16:38.960 they were, you know, acting like barbarians, I should clarify that.

00:16:44.240 You discipline your children when they're acting in a way that isn't appropriate for their age

00:16:48.400 in accordance with universal human judgment.

00:16:51.780 So you should discipline your children when they're disgracing themselves.

00:16:55.040 And the reason you should do that isn't because they're bad kids or because it reflects badly

00:16:59.680 on you or because you're angry, but because if they continue to act that way, other people

00:17:04.500 aren't going to want to have them around.

00:17:06.640 And that's not good for your kids.

00:17:08.100 So you discipline them.

00:17:09.200 So I say to my son, for example, go sit on the steps till you can act like a civilized human

00:17:15.340 being or whatever terminology is appropriate when he's young.

00:17:18.460 And the rule was, well, as soon as you get yourself under control, problem solved.

00:17:26.060 Well, it's the same with past sins, so to speak, as if you failed to hit the target properly,

00:17:32.220 but you figured out why.

00:17:34.560 And now you know how you would chart your course differently in the future.

00:17:38.400 Done.

00:17:38.780 You know, and it's also the case that even most negative emotion that you experience in

00:17:47.840 relationship to past memories only emerges because there's a hole in your adaptive structure.

00:17:56.040 So imagine at some point in the past, you fell in a pit and you don't know how you got there.

00:18:01.440 Well, that emotion is going to remain hot and dangerous until you figure out why you fell

00:18:08.120 in.

00:18:08.840 And the reason that your conscience keeps torturing you about that is because, well, you fell

00:18:15.680 into a hole and you don't know why.

00:18:18.480 And so maybe you'll fall into another one.

00:18:20.500 And so you shouldn't be that comfortable.

00:18:22.480 But if you can figure out why and you can reevaluate your aim or your course so that that isn't

00:18:28.760 going to happen in the future, well, even psychologically, your own conscience will let you off the hook

00:18:34.800 if you've reconfigured your pathway.

00:18:38.120 And so, and you do that, well, partly by not taking yourself apart to any great degree.

00:18:44.240 All right.

00:18:44.500 So you said that one of the things that people, you think that people, you said there were

00:18:49.540 two reasons you thought that people were maybe coming to see you live as they, they've been

00:18:53.520 watching your podcast and they actually wanted to make more personal contact.

00:18:56.760 Do you do meet and greets and that sort of thing at the end of the?

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00:20:38.480 I do it the whole time.

00:20:39.860 Like, as soon as people start coming in, I just hang out with them and then get up

00:20:43.660 on stage and do the show and then hang out.

00:20:46.260 And the staff at the place will say, how long are you going to meet with people?

00:20:49.920 And I say, until everyone's met with me that wants to meet with people.

00:20:52.920 Oh, yeah.

00:20:53.280 And do you do that?

00:20:54.300 Is that, do you do that formally or do you do that informally?

00:20:58.720 Informally.

00:20:59.400 Informally.

00:21:00.040 See, at the end of my lectures, we have a formal meet and greet and people line up.

00:21:05.120 And there's a bunch of reasons for doing that.

00:21:09.680 There's a ticket increment that's associated with that.

00:21:13.640 So there's a financial reason that makes the tour more rewarding.

00:21:16.500 But it's also because there's so many people that want to do that.

00:21:20.860 But formalizing it made it much more efficient, you know, because everybody gets, it's not

00:21:26.380 very much time.

00:21:27.200 It's only about 15 seconds, probably something like that.

00:21:30.020 But the parameters are pretty nicely defined.

00:21:33.400 And we can, we can, what would we say?

00:21:37.300 We can provide more people with what they want doing that.

00:21:40.760 And so I really enjoy that, actually.

00:21:42.620 And, you know, 15 seconds isn't very long, but it's not nothing.

00:21:46.640 And if you're awake, you can have a bit of an interaction with someone that isn't only

00:21:53.520 surface.

00:21:54.340 And that's also a really interesting challenge, you know, to be able to do that rapidly and

00:22:00.340 efficiently in a way that's satisfying for everybody who's involved.

00:22:03.820 Yeah.

00:22:04.120 Well, the weird thing is, is people come up to me and they say, I feel like I know you.

00:22:08.520 Yeah, right.

00:22:09.220 And, and I say, you do.

00:22:11.500 Like you listen to the podcast, there's hundreds and hundreds of hours of me talking about all

00:22:16.740 this different stuff.

00:22:18.380 And if you listen to all that, you do know.

00:22:20.100 Yeah, right.

00:22:20.860 And then I kind of know you too, because we've had these shared experiences of going through

00:22:25.900 all these topics together.

00:22:27.460 And so I kind of know you too.

00:22:28.760 Yeah.

00:22:28.900 And so you do have like a legitimate connection with people and that's, they can come up and

00:22:33.280 just tell you whatever it is they're going to tell you.

00:22:35.720 And they can ask me a question in 14 seconds and I'll give them an answer in 32 seconds and

00:22:40.600 we're good.

00:22:41.080 And they're high-fiving and bro hug and we're moving on.

00:22:44.700 Yeah.

00:22:44.720 Yeah.

00:22:45.160 Yeah.

00:22:45.480 Well, that's a lot of contextual information.

00:22:47.680 Yeah.

00:22:47.920 Absolutely.

00:22:48.520 I feel exactly the same way.

00:22:50.080 Yeah.

00:22:50.540 You know, and like you said, the, the idea that the people who are coming have that they

00:22:55.440 know you, that's, that's not a falsehood unless you're being false in your podcast.

00:23:00.480 And I know that you're not false in your podcast.

00:23:02.440 So they actually do, they actually do know you.

00:23:04.960 Yeah.

00:23:05.120 I really, I really enjoy going.

00:23:06.920 I really enjoy going to her.

00:23:08.180 How long do you talk?

00:23:10.360 Two, two and a half hours.

00:23:11.660 Something like that.

00:23:12.000 Oh yeah.

00:23:12.480 Oh yeah.

00:23:12.860 Oh yeah.

00:23:13.040 So, so quite a while.

00:23:14.140 Okay.

00:23:14.280 And I'll do some Q and A in there as well.

00:23:16.000 There'll be some Q and A.

00:23:16.900 Roll the dice with the Q and A.

00:23:18.640 Yeah.

00:23:18.780 You never know what you're going to get.

00:23:19.680 Let's go.

00:23:20.340 We use Slido.

00:23:21.640 I don't use that.

00:23:22.320 Well, it's this technology that, so everybody on the screens in the theaters, there's a

00:23:27.720 code and everybody can enter the code into their phone and it brings them to the Slido

00:23:31.720 site and then they can ask a question, but more importantly, they can upvote the questions.

00:23:36.880 And so that's very helpful because there's, so I, I talk for 90 minutes, about hour, 90

00:23:43.080 minutes, something like that.

00:23:43.960 And then Tammy aggregates the questions from Slido and she asks me the questions and because

00:23:50.500 everybody can vote, it gives us a chance to sample the audience and it keeps the, it's

00:23:55.840 a good way of organizing it as well too, because the problem with taking live questions is that

00:24:01.500 people don't know how to handle the mic and so no one can hear them.

00:24:04.800 And then the audience starts talking and then you get people who are just grandstanding

00:24:08.100 or don't really have a question.

00:24:09.480 And Slido has worked extremely well for us for handling that.

00:24:12.980 I guess the only thing I would, can you then call that person out and have them come

00:24:17.780 up and have them expand on it?

00:24:20.740 Well, we, you could, I haven't done that.

00:24:22.780 That's not a bad idea.

00:24:24.080 We haven't done that.

00:24:25.580 Sometimes when you don't get the context around the question, you need more context.

00:24:30.280 Yeah, yeah, definitely.

00:24:30.840 Give a good answer.

00:24:31.640 Yeah, definitely.

00:24:32.200 So if you can't do that.

00:24:33.080 Yeah, well, you can, you can solve that problem to some degree by selecting questions in the

00:24:38.080 list of questions that don't require the additional context.

00:24:40.840 And I guess I solve that sometimes too, by providing, you know, what might be a more

00:24:46.480 generally applicable answer than something that would be specific to the person.

00:24:51.360 There's something kind of awesome though, about just someone stepping up to the mic and

00:24:55.480 you don't know what you're going to get.

00:24:57.200 Fair enough.

00:24:58.040 And it's, I, I, I enjoy that.

00:25:00.220 It's like the no tightrope, no, no net tightrope walking.

00:25:03.320 Right.

00:25:03.520 Well, and well, that's also what I like about the lectures, you know, because I don't lecture

00:25:08.280 from notes.

00:25:09.000 I mean, I prepare beforehand and I have a question or two in mind that I'm trying to

00:25:14.740 answer, but I never use notes.

00:25:16.400 And I think part of the reason that the live lectures are compelling to people is because

00:25:22.620 they are, they are without a net, they are tightrope situations.

00:25:26.380 And one of the things I really like about speaking spontaneously like that is if there's

00:25:31.180 a question at hand or two questions, they're questions that I seriously want to investigate.

00:25:35.820 And so I'm trying to investigate them in a new way as I go.

00:25:38.460 And if you do it right, you can, you can bring the whole thing to a conclusion.

00:25:43.520 That's like a punchline.

00:25:44.880 Right.

00:25:45.360 And that's really fun to see if you can orchestrate that in real time.

00:25:48.260 That works on podcasts too.

00:25:49.820 And you, what's your batting average on getting, you know, if you do, if you did a hundred shows,

00:25:53.740 how many times do you land like right where you wanted to land and you walk off the stage

00:25:58.260 triumphant with a grand slam in the ninth inning?

00:26:00.880 Well, I would say, especially because I've been, because I'm healthier again, I think

00:26:08.360 it was, I was less consistent when I was touring in 2018.

00:26:14.840 Um, because I'll put a lot of balls in the air and it's like, you're going to see a complex

00:26:23.420 movie, you know, now and then you go to a movie and there's 50 things going on and it's

00:26:27.220 like an hour and a half in and you think, is he going to manage it?

00:26:30.800 Is he going to tie it all together?

00:26:31.940 And sometimes it's like, it comes together and it's like, dad, that was a great movie.

00:26:35.700 And sometimes there's some fool thing that happens and leaves everything hanging.

00:26:39.560 Um, in 2018, more frequently, I would get a lot of things going and then maybe only tie

00:26:47.140 them three quarters together.

00:26:48.640 But in the last couple of years, the talks, they almost always cohere.

00:26:58.540 I mean, sometimes you nail it, right?

00:27:00.500 And so those are, those are particularly exciting times.

00:27:03.840 But batting average is pretty high now.

00:27:10.280 So you and I were talking about being rock stars, you know, both of us probably would

00:27:14.320 have been much better off if we'd been rock and roll stars.

00:27:16.400 So what I do at my talks is I, I make a set list, right?

00:27:19.520 Like, you know, the, the, the old days when I would go to shows, to rock and roll shows,

00:27:23.480 they make a set list.

00:27:24.260 And if you could steal that thing or get ahold of it at the end of concert, you had something

00:27:27.260 pretty cool, right?

00:27:27.960 This set list thing.

00:27:28.940 So that's what I do.

00:27:29.800 I make a set list.

00:27:30.620 I'll just have like different topics that I'm going to talk about.

00:27:33.040 And there'll, there'll be some kind of thread, but I'm, yeah, if you don't, if you plan it

00:27:39.900 out too much, it doesn't have the spontaneity that it, that, that feels that good.

00:27:44.700 Yeah, definitely.

00:27:45.420 Then when you just roll with it and you got your topics and they're kind of out there

00:27:49.040 and I'm going to go talk about these things and I'm going to try and pull it off at the

00:27:54.180 end and we'll see where it goes.

00:27:55.780 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:27:56.140 Well, it's a lot more exciting to do that because you don't know where it's going to go.

00:27:59.340 You know, that's the wind bloweth, blowing where it listeth, right?

00:28:02.760 You have to follow that thread.

00:28:04.100 And it also enables you to really pay attention to the audience because one of the things you're

00:28:09.380 doing when you're lecturing, when you're speaking to an audience, it's not lecturing.

00:28:14.900 That's the thing.

00:28:15.600 It's different than lecturing because it's not a set.

00:28:18.340 As you said, it's not what you have isn't set a priority.

00:28:22.600 When you're communicating with a crowd, you have to watch to see what's landing.

00:28:29.080 And that's partly what you're doing there is you're putting yourself in tune with the

00:28:33.940 spirit of the crowd because everybody comes there and it's a particular time and it's

00:28:37.500 a particular night and there's particular things going on in the broader political realm.

00:28:41.980 And so everybody's charged in a certain way.

00:28:44.540 And some topics are going to land more heavily that night than others.

00:28:49.120 And if you really watch the audience members and you listen for when you get silence, you

00:28:53.800 can feel when you've got the words matched to the expectation of the audience properly.

00:28:59.540 And then you can track that thread.

00:29:01.280 And you can't do that if you prepare in too much detail to begin with.

00:29:07.900 So you use topics.

00:29:09.340 So I use questions.

00:29:10.940 I have questions in my head, but then I also have topics that I can use.

00:29:15.880 They're like greatest hits, I suppose, in some ways, right?

00:29:19.440 So that's that set list idea.

00:29:21.100 I was about to ask you about greatest hits because you got to, some of that crowd probably

00:29:24.720 wants to hear just the Jordan greatest hits.

00:29:27.140 They want to hear you go off about some lobsters, right?

00:29:29.220 Well, I talked to Douglas Murray about that too, because we've done some events together,

00:29:32.960 which has been very fun.

00:29:34.020 But, you know, one of the things Douglas pointed out more explicitly was that if you have a base

00:29:41.660 of viewers and listeners, they have a certain set of expectations, they want to hear something

00:29:46.620 new, but not, but kind of optimally new.

00:29:50.760 They want you to return to themes that they've become familiar with, partly because that's

00:29:55.380 a good place for them to understand.

00:29:56.720 It's like, and it is, I think, akin to going to see a concert.

00:30:00.620 You want to hear some new material from your band, but you want to hear some of the things

00:30:06.740 that you've come to know and love.

00:30:08.780 Now, why do you want that live exactly?

00:30:11.800 Well, I think because it gives the audience that opportunity to participate in real time

00:30:16.880 with the unfolding of something that's ordered and classic and new at the same time.

00:30:22.220 Yeah.

00:30:22.540 And it's live.

00:30:25.140 It's real.

00:30:25.820 Yeah.

00:30:25.960 So it's not going to be an exact replication of what they heard before.

00:30:29.900 Yeah.

00:30:30.260 There's going to be some nuance.

00:30:31.320 You're going to take that solo, that guitar solo somewhere a little bit different every

00:30:35.260 time, and they're going to get to see that.

00:30:37.420 Yeah.

00:30:37.640 Well, they can also, people can also evaluate then too, if it's the real thing, you know,

00:30:41.780 like, and I think it's especially true for the kinds of podcasts that you and I do, which

00:30:46.260 have this kind of motivational and psychological element to them is people really want to know.

00:30:50.940 It's like, you know, am I selling my soul to the devil here, or is this person who they

00:30:54.900 claim to be?

00:30:56.100 You know, this is one of the things I've always been impressed with about people like Joe

00:30:59.400 Rogan, for example, is like Rogan is just exactly who he presents himself to be.

00:31:03.620 Like there's, there's no, and I've seen the, I've seen the, the other side of that often

00:31:10.080 at political events, you know, go to political events.

00:31:13.420 I know the person who's involved, possibly many of the political figures that I've seen

00:31:18.900 perform have a political face.

00:31:22.060 They're not the same on stage.

00:31:24.040 They have an act, a political act, you know, and they're different people off stage, often

00:31:28.220 smarter people, interestingly enough.

00:31:30.300 And I think more interesting people, but Rogan doesn't have any of that.

00:31:33.940 And I think when people are looking for motivational direction and, and, and, and, and delving into

00:31:42.920 personal philosophy, they want to bloody well make sure that the people that they're listening

00:31:46.980 to are credible.

00:31:48.220 And that's something you can assess more particularly in a live situation, especially when you're

00:31:54.640 watching people interact on their feet, right?

00:31:56.860 Because they don't have that scaffold.

00:31:59.600 Vivek Ramaswamy told me he wouldn't use a teleprompter during the, he swore he wouldn't

00:32:03.800 use a teleprompter during the campaign, partly because he wanted to avoid exactly that.

00:32:08.340 And I think this is one of Trump's real strengths too, is that Trump might make mistakes when he

00:32:14.200 speaks, but they're his mistakes.

00:32:16.060 You know, and people are willing to cut him a lot of slack because they're his mistakes.

00:32:20.340 You know, and, and there's a courage about that too, because there is the possibility that you'll

00:32:25.340 go, you know, spectacularly wrong, say something stupid or fail.

00:32:29.400 Yeah.

00:32:30.020 So you talked about, you talked about intent when people are analyzing their motivations

00:32:36.180 for their past conduct for better or worse.

00:32:39.280 When, what's your intent in the tour?

00:32:42.540 And do you, how do you orient your intent before you go on stage?

00:32:47.640 Mm-hmm.

00:32:49.560 So interestingly, I had a woman that works for me and she's the COO of one of my companies,

00:32:56.500 great, incredibly impressive woman named Jamie.

00:32:59.080 And she was at one of these live events and I got asked during the, during the Q&A, someone

00:33:04.680 said, hey, why are you doing this?

00:33:05.900 Yeah, yeah.

00:33:06.500 You know, and, and she, who hears me speak all the time, she told me afterwards, she said,

00:33:11.620 when I got asked that question, she wanted to hear what I was going to say because she never

00:33:13.860 really thought about, like, why does he do that?

00:33:15.140 Because she kind of knows my life situation, my financial situation, where I'm at in the

00:33:19.960 world.

00:33:20.160 She kind of knows and she never really thought to ask me, like, why are you on tour right

00:33:24.140 now?

00:33:24.240 Why are you doing this?

00:33:24.700 Why aren't you on just relaxing, sitting by the, what, doing whatever it is you want

00:33:28.300 to do?

00:33:28.640 Yeah.

00:33:29.620 And she waited for my answer and, and, and my answer was to try and help people out.

00:33:36.360 Yeah.

00:33:36.560 That's it.

00:33:37.120 I mean, at this juncture.

00:33:38.080 So why do you, okay, so let's delve into that a little bit.

00:33:42.300 There's two things you brought up there that I think are particularly interesting.

00:33:45.220 One is the automatic assumption on the part of people who might be asking the question

00:33:53.160 why, that if everyone had their druthers, they would be sitting on a beach relaxing.

00:33:58.140 And like, people ask me, I was home visiting my parents recently and my mother said to me,

00:34:05.220 don't you ever relax because I was, you know, I was working while I was there on all sorts

00:34:10.760 of things.

00:34:11.240 And I said to her, I, you know, I don't know.

00:34:13.380 I'm not that interested in relaxing.

00:34:15.540 Like, I don't even, to some degree, I don't even know what that means.

00:34:19.000 Like, if I'm tired, well, I'll sit down, you know, and, and maybe I'll watch a stupid

00:34:24.320 comedy or something because that's all that's left of me.

00:34:28.160 You know, Tammy and I watched Legally Blonde the other night and that was about right because

00:34:32.780 I'd been writing all day, you know, and it was stupidly funny.

00:34:36.100 Yeah, right.

00:34:36.640 And so fine.

00:34:37.420 But as a goal, like my goal is not to relax.

00:34:41.560 Like, that's not, that's, I think my goal is to have as an adventurous a time as I can

00:34:47.760 possibly manage.

00:34:48.980 I've been writing about the book of Abraham in this new book I'm writing.

00:34:52.220 And Abraham, the conception of God in the book of Abraham is that God is the voice that

00:34:57.920 calls you to adventure and that the, the, the most, the most devout path is the path with

00:35:04.440 the highest adventure.

00:35:06.140 Yeah, I really liked that.

00:35:07.380 I really liked that because, you know, your life is not going to be justified by satisfaction

00:35:12.640 or satiation.

00:35:13.740 That's for infants.

00:35:15.000 There's going to be plenty of pain.

00:35:16.860 And so there's no escape from pain.

00:35:19.000 And so you might say, well, if you can't be satisfied and there's no escape for pain,

00:35:22.360 from pain, then there's no hope.

00:35:26.220 But if, if the point is the adventure, well, that's just not true.

00:35:29.720 Then, then, then the adventure can justify the pain and the lack of satiation.

00:35:33.860 So you said, back to the adventure, a tour is an adventure, but you said that your prime

00:35:39.500 motivation is to help people.

00:35:41.040 Okay, so let's, let's dig into that a bit.

00:35:43.480 We could get skeptical about it.

00:35:44.920 It's like people might say, like the, the postmodernist types, the neo-Marxist types would

00:35:50.580 say, well, that's just your cover for like your dominance, your, your power striving.

00:35:55.880 You've made lots of money.

00:35:57.540 You're famous.

00:35:58.560 People know who you are.

00:35:59.760 It's like, and if, because that's not enough for you, you have to add this overlays.

00:36:03.980 Oh yeah.

00:36:04.380 And by the way, I'm just doing this to help people.

00:36:06.480 Right.

00:36:06.740 So that's the very cynical attitude, but you can, you can understand that that's a justifiable

00:36:12.300 criticism.

00:36:13.340 And if you were narcissistic, it would also be a genuine criticism.

00:36:16.640 So why do you think it is that you find, why do you think your claim that you're helping

00:36:22.780 people is justified?

00:36:23.920 And if it's justified, why do you think that you find helping people intrinsically rewarding?

00:36:31.100 Going back to my career in the military, I think this is where I initially learned this

00:36:37.060 because as you're coming up in the military, you know, you're, you're, you're going up in

00:36:41.260 the ranks and you're getting moved into more positions of responsibility and you're going

00:36:45.480 out and conducting operations and all those things that you do inside the military in

00:36:50.460 your career.

00:36:51.060 And what I found more than anything else was where I got gratification and what felt like

00:36:58.240 I actually did something good was when I'd see a guy that I had worked with, that I had

00:37:04.340 mentored, that I had trained, when I'd see them step up and excel and be able to achieve

00:37:09.220 things and be able to accomplish things.

00:37:10.420 That was more gratifying than me doing it myself.

00:37:14.780 And so I think that I started to notice that, that that's what really...

00:37:19.000 When did you notice that?

00:37:20.180 How old were you?

00:37:20.780 Probably 29, 30, something along those.

00:37:26.000 So I was, I was in a leadership position.

00:37:27.260 I started to have people working, you know, that, that were my direct reports, but I realized,

00:37:33.300 oh, I can, I can really help this person.

00:37:34.900 Like they don't know what to do.

00:37:36.360 Yeah.

00:37:36.600 Right.

00:37:37.060 And, and, and inside the military, inside the SEAL teams, it's like, there's a mission

00:37:40.600 that you're going to do.

00:37:41.160 And there's a certain way to conduct that mission.

00:37:42.640 And this person that had only been doing this job for three years might not know that.

00:37:46.440 And I knew it.

00:37:48.120 And there's not too many things that you know.

00:37:49.800 Yeah.

00:37:50.100 Well, you go, I can, I can show you how to do this.

00:37:52.320 Yeah.

00:37:52.820 And instead of just saying, hey, I'm better than you.

00:37:55.460 I'm smarter than you.

00:37:56.420 I can show you how to do this.

00:37:57.340 You can follow my lead.

00:37:58.240 Instead of having that attitude, it's an attitude of like, hey, you're going to be just as capable

00:38:02.920 as I am.

00:38:03.580 Yeah.

00:38:03.760 At some point I can help you along the way.

00:38:05.380 More even.

00:38:05.720 Yeah.

00:38:06.000 That's the goal is to make them more capable.

00:38:07.680 And this is something that comes from jujitsu as well.

00:38:10.020 In jujitsu, if you and I train jujitsu and we both been training the same amount of time,

00:38:15.220 sure, it'll come down to like who's bigger and stronger.

00:38:17.200 But I realized, hey, there's always someone that's going to, has been training longer

00:38:22.260 than me and they're going to be able to beat me.

00:38:24.180 That doesn't make them a better human being than me.

00:38:26.660 It just means that they've been training longer for me.

00:38:28.440 And that applies to just about everything.

00:38:30.180 Right.

00:38:30.540 So the skill of being a SEAL and planning a mission, oh, I might be better at you, better

00:38:36.020 than you right now.

00:38:37.080 But over time, I should be able to train you and you should be able to, like you said,

00:38:40.680 get better than I am.

00:38:41.920 And so I felt that that left the biggest mark on my soul of being able to help people out.

00:38:50.660 And then when I got out of the military and I started kind of teaching the same leadership

00:38:55.160 principles that I had learned, and then I started getting that same feedback.

00:38:59.660 And then with writing kids' books, like that was a whole new level.

00:39:02.980 When you have a kid that comes up and says, hey, I did my first pull-up or I got an A on

00:39:08.520 my math test or I learned all my times tables and the parents have tears in their eyes saying

00:39:13.180 thank you, there's nothing better than that.

00:39:15.740 Okay, so I think that's actually true.

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00:40:25.560 I do think there's nothing better than that, and so I've been trying to take that apart

00:40:33.220 because that's a relatively radical claim.

00:40:36.560 So you can imagine the attractions of hedonism, and so everybody has their base desires, and

00:40:46.160 I would say base for a variety of reasons.

00:40:48.700 They're, you know, lust, anger.

00:40:51.700 Those are good examples.

00:40:52.980 They want what they want right bloody well now, and there's some gratification to be

00:40:58.760 had in obtaining that.

00:41:01.240 Now, the problem with right now is it's sort of to hell with other people and to hell with

00:41:07.840 the future, and so maybe that's not an optimized path.

00:41:10.400 This is why hedonism, per se, is a dysfunctional orientation.

00:41:17.620 It reduces everything to the moment, and then it reduces everything to the whim inside the

00:41:22.960 individual.

00:41:23.600 So there's no future, there's no time, and there's no other people.

00:41:26.860 Okay.

00:41:28.220 Power.

00:41:28.800 There's another example.

00:41:29.940 It's like, well, I could go for power.

00:41:32.260 I could compel and force other people to do what I want for my gratification, obviously,

00:41:36.940 regardless of what they want.

00:41:38.500 Why shouldn't I do that?

00:41:40.160 If I could do it, you know, and cultures like ancient Rome, cultures that are predicated

00:41:46.060 on the notion that might makes right, they're predicated on the idea that, well, if you can

00:41:50.720 do it, you should, and that the fact that you can and would makes you better, like by

00:41:57.060 definition.

00:41:58.280 If I can force someone to do what I want them to do and they can't resist, then why shouldn't

00:42:03.520 I just be contemptuous of them?

00:42:05.080 And I think the answer to that is, well, it backfires.

00:42:09.640 It's like, you can enforce your will on people for a while, but even among chimpanzees, the

00:42:15.600 probability that the moment you turn your back or show any weakness that you're going

00:42:20.060 to get torn into pieces is extremely high.

00:42:23.620 So hedonism, power, those are sort of alternative motivational states.

00:42:28.880 Well, this one, this pleasure in helping other people develop, I think, well, why shouldn't

00:42:36.680 we think that that's just your cover story?

00:42:39.820 And I think the reason for that is, well, here's one reason.

00:42:44.220 Human beings are pair-bonding creatures and our children are dependent longer than the offspring

00:42:51.060 of any organisms.

00:42:52.460 So there's two pathways to reproduction.

00:42:54.620 There's two patterns of natural world reproduction.

00:43:00.380 There's the mosquito pathway.

00:43:01.920 These have technical names.

00:43:03.460 Can't remember.

00:43:04.200 One is K.

00:43:05.260 I can't remember the technical names.

00:43:07.020 Mosquitoes on the one end, human beings on the other.

00:43:10.420 So the mosquito strategy is a million offspring and if 999,000 of them die, as long as one survives

00:43:19.480 or two, you've done your job.

00:43:21.340 No investment past sex, right?

00:43:24.220 And there are human beings who have that strategy as well.

00:43:27.300 No investment past sex, right?

00:43:29.220 The alternative is immense investment, maybe multi-generational investment.

00:43:34.460 That's parenting, grandparenting, great-grandparenting.

00:43:37.740 Maybe the establishment of a pattern that even works beyond that.

00:43:41.920 Human beings have staked their existence on the high investment reproductive strategy.

00:43:47.080 And so to the degree that we're biologically prepared to be fathers, there's an instinct

00:43:55.480 for mentoring.

00:43:56.540 And I think that what you're describing is the broader scale manifestation of exactly that.

00:44:02.480 Now you tied these things together.

00:44:03.920 You know, you said you discovered when you were young that helping other people develop

00:44:08.540 was a great intrinsic pleasure.

00:44:12.120 And you said maybe the most rewarding of the intrinsic pleasures.

00:44:16.400 And I really do believe that's true.

00:44:17.860 It's quite stunning to realize that.

00:44:20.300 My graduate supervisor was a very great guy.

00:44:22.500 He's still alive.

00:44:23.300 Robert Peel.

00:44:24.000 And Bob was a really good professor.

00:44:27.860 And he got a lot of joy from lecturing.

00:44:29.820 He was a really good researcher, a good administrator.

00:44:32.160 Like Bob had it all going.

00:44:33.680 And still, the thing he felt that he took most pleasure in across the entire expanse of

00:44:39.760 his career was helping his graduate students in particular develop their careers.

00:44:44.540 He was very generous at that.

00:44:46.040 And of course, it paid back to him immensely.

00:44:49.180 Because it turns out, if you share ideas, you generate more ideas because the ideas get

00:44:55.980 rewarded.

00:44:56.660 And if you help other people develop their career, they tend to, you know, it reflects

00:45:00.600 very positively on you.

00:45:03.020 There's a saying in the SEAL teams, if you take care of your gear, your gear will take

00:45:06.680 care of you.

00:45:07.240 Meaning, if you take care of your parachute and you prepare it and you pack it correctly,

00:45:11.420 when you pull your ripcord, it will open.

00:45:13.360 Or your dive gear, when you're underwater, if you've prepared it and you've maintained

00:45:16.700 it correctly, you can breathe underwater, which are really good things.

00:45:19.540 And you don't die.

00:45:20.500 And you don't die.

00:45:23.180 Well, the twist that I put on that was, if you take care of your people, your people

00:45:27.260 will take care of you.

00:45:28.060 Yeah, yeah.

00:45:28.400 And that's absolutely true, even in what you're just talking about with Bob.

00:45:31.580 Yeah.

00:45:31.760 Because Bob invested in you.

00:45:33.320 Yeah, it's an investment strategy.

00:45:33.680 He took care of you.

00:45:34.760 Yeah.

00:45:34.920 And look, could we, again, could we play the Jordan game on this thing where maybe he

00:45:39.780 was just doing that knowing that in the long run, you know, all those favors were

00:45:44.760 going to come back and he was going to get taken care of, that'd be a really long-term

00:45:48.220 strategy.

00:45:48.800 And it'd be a kind of a gut check to put up with all these miserable graduate students

00:45:53.480 this whole time, where you were just kind of putting chips on the table, hoping that

00:45:57.240 these investments would pay off.

00:45:58.500 I also think, too, that at some point, you have to flip the definition.

00:46:04.620 If your strategy is short-term gratification, that's one thing.

00:46:07.660 But if your strategy is long-term mutual reinforcement and development, even if you can see that

00:46:16.820 that's a benefit to you, if you're the sort of person that was only doing that because

00:46:21.020 it was a benefit to you, you'd revert to the short-term immediately.

00:46:25.060 And so at some point, you can't be, if it's a long-enough-term investment strategy, there's

00:46:29.660 no being cynical about it anymore.

00:46:31.100 Because the details of the strategy obviate the necessity for the cynicism.

00:46:37.240 So I've been writing about the Gospels and there's Christ, one of Christ's, what would

00:46:44.140 you say, commandments is to lay up treasures in heaven that do not rust, that moths cannot

00:46:50.440 destroy and robbers cannot steal and rust cannot devour.

00:46:56.540 Treasures in heaven.

00:46:57.620 And so I've been trying to parcel, parse through exactly what that means.

00:47:02.880 So it means to live in the light of eternity, first of all.

00:47:06.760 So it means to view everything you do in the moment as extending, as if it extended infinitely

00:47:16.620 throughout time.

00:47:18.100 So Kant, the philosopher Kant, had this categorical imperative.

00:47:22.700 You want to, don't do anything that you wouldn't want people to do if it,

00:47:27.620 if it was distributed widely.

00:47:30.280 The biblical, especially in the Gospels, you see this, but it's more sophisticated.

00:47:34.820 It's like everything you do should be the sort of thing that would work if everyone did it

00:47:38.640 over the longest possible time with the most number of situations simultaneously addressed.

00:47:44.840 So this notion of laying up treasure in heaven where it doesn't rust and where it can't be

00:47:49.520 stolen, it really looks to me like it refers to something like reputation.

00:47:53.900 Because you might say, well, where is the safest place to store your wealth?

00:47:59.520 And the answer to that is, it's not in money.

00:48:03.240 Because money can inflate, for example, and it can be stolen.

00:48:06.540 There's all sorts of ways you can lose it.

00:48:08.160 The safest place to store your wealth is in your reputation.

00:48:15.280 And the most effective way of developing your reputation is to be of the most service you

00:48:20.960 can possibly be to other people.

00:48:23.220 You know, and so when we're on tour with Tammy and I are on tour, we're thinking, well,

00:48:26.120 this is a pretty good deal.

00:48:27.060 You know, we put this effort into it, but it's returned thousands of fold, right?

00:48:32.580 Because now you have people who are so happy with what you've done that they're thrilled

00:48:36.120 to have you around.

00:48:37.140 And so that's a pretty damn good deal.

00:48:39.960 And so it's this perverse uniting of selfish, selflessness with, what would you say?

00:48:50.000 With genuine reward.

00:48:51.640 Yeah, the luck that it just so happens that if you take care of other people and you sacrifice

00:48:57.200 for them and you invest in them, it just so happens, it'll come back to you.

00:49:01.760 Yeah, it just so happens that it is the best possible strategy that you could undertake.

00:49:06.720 Yeah, yeah.

00:49:07.280 And I think there's no doubt about that.

00:49:09.960 And I also really wonder, you know, what the limit to that is, because

00:49:14.160 it's obviously the case that, so here's another, you tell me what you think about this.

00:49:23.560 Here's another form of fundamental reward.

00:49:25.720 If you've gone out of your way for someone, let's say, so you've made sacrifices for them,

00:49:31.120 and then you see that that really helped them, and they let you know that that really helped

00:49:36.580 them, that's a really, that's a moving moment, you know?

00:49:39.640 And I'm sure you've encountered that many times where people will come up to you, say,

00:49:43.220 during the lectures or the tours, and they'll say, here's something you said because of something

00:49:47.000 you learned, and here's how it helped me.

00:49:48.580 And you think, like, that strikes a very deep chord.

00:49:51.740 And that is one of the things that, well, for us anyways, for Tammy and I, that's certainly

00:49:56.160 one of the things that makes the tour worthwhile.

00:49:58.180 But it does speak to that depth of motivation in mentorship.

00:50:01.800 And this is a very effective, this is something very useful to know in the culture war that

00:50:10.180 we're engaged in, because the accusation of the radical metamarxist types on the left is that

00:50:16.740 there's no other motivation than power, right?

00:50:20.560 No matter what anybody says, it's all about power, and power is the ability to compel and

00:50:25.440 use force.

00:50:26.600 But this strategy, this isn't a power strategy, right?

00:50:30.240 This is a distribution of power strategy.

00:50:33.000 It's like you're genuinely acting in the other person's best interest.

00:50:36.220 And if that's also allied with an instinct that makes that deeply meaningful, and that's

00:50:41.740 the instinct of fatherhood, as far as I'm concerned, it just makes a complete bloody mockery of

00:50:45.860 the claim that the only fundamental human motivation is power.

00:50:49.700 Yeah.

00:50:50.180 And going back to a leadership perspective, what I actually want as a leader is you, I don't

00:50:59.780 have to do anything.

00:51:00.900 Yeah, right.

00:51:01.500 Because you've stepped up, and now you're running everything, and I can look up and out and move

00:51:05.240 on, that's number one.

00:51:06.780 And number two, and I'd be interested in your opinion on this, I tell people all the

00:51:11.100 time that intent has a smell.

00:51:13.700 Intent has a smell.

00:51:14.500 So if your intent is actually to take advantage of me and get things from me, and you're taking

00:51:20.540 advantage of my mentorship, and you're eventually going to, that intent will have a smell.

00:51:24.940 And sometimes it's hard.

00:51:26.580 Sometimes you meet someone, and you go, man, that seems a little bit off.

00:51:29.700 This person seems a little bit off.

00:51:30.980 But I'm not really sure about this person.

00:51:33.780 Yeah.

00:51:33.880 And I think, in my mind, that's their intent.

00:51:36.720 It's seeping through.

00:51:37.600 You can smell it.

00:51:38.760 And you've got to watch out for that.

00:51:40.260 And I always have to remind people that there are terrible people out there.

00:51:44.960 There are snakes that I will invest in you, and invest in you, and invest in you.

00:51:48.900 And what you'll do at the end of that is you'll take it and run away with it.

00:51:52.680 Turn it against you either.

00:51:52.960 Or turn it against me.

00:51:53.820 You bet.

00:51:54.220 And if, I would say this, that is an absolute possibility.

00:51:58.200 It can absolutely happen.

00:51:59.800 But if you invest in 10 people, nine of them are going to give back to you, and you'll be

00:52:06.960 in a better place.

00:52:07.680 Yeah.

00:52:07.880 One person will try and run away, and they'll eventually, unfortunately for them, they'll

00:52:11.880 dig themselves a hole.

00:52:12.820 Yeah.

00:52:13.600 They can't get out.

00:52:14.560 Well, we also know that, too.

00:52:15.940 So psychopaths take advantage of other people.

00:52:20.240 They use power.

00:52:20.960 And so, for someone who's truly psychopathic, you're nothing but a set of opportunities for

00:52:25.720 short-term gain.

00:52:26.940 But the problem with being a psychopath is that they have the same attitude towards themselves.

00:52:31.640 So they'll sacrifice, well, relationships, obviously, which is the future to a large degree.

00:52:37.660 They'll sacrifice their own future to take advantage in the moment.

00:52:41.120 And the consequence of that is they don't, it's not a strategy designed for success.

00:52:45.540 You know, you hear all this, that there's all these psychopaths in positions of power

00:52:49.280 and authority.

00:52:50.260 It's like, most of the time, like, the real hardcore psychopaths are very, very likely

00:52:56.260 to end up in prison.

00:52:57.420 But even the ones who fool some of the people some of the time, or even all of the people

00:53:02.020 some of the time, the chickens come home to roost.

00:53:04.860 It is not an effective strategy.

00:53:07.120 You know, and this has even been documented among chimpanzees.

00:53:09.900 So now and then, in chimpanzee troops, you get a leader who's a leader, a dominant male,

00:53:16.080 who's risen to the top because of force, fundamentally.

00:53:21.180 But those troops are not very functional, and his leadership is very unstable.

00:53:28.840 And as I mentioned earlier, he's very likely to meet a dreadful end.

00:53:33.300 And so that's another problem with the claim that power is the only true motivation is that

00:53:38.780 if you, first of all, as you said, only about, it's actually about one in 20 people who use

00:53:44.860 it reliably as their fundamental motivation.

00:53:46.920 So the rate of psychopathy, narcissism, et cetera, it starts to reach clinical proportions in about

00:53:53.640 one person in 20.

00:53:55.680 So 19 out of 20 people that you help will respond in kind.

00:53:59.520 That's a good investment.

00:54:00.240 It is a good, it is a great investment.

00:54:02.600 That's right.

00:54:03.040 That's right.

00:54:03.460 Usually not that hard to figure out.

00:54:05.320 I mean, it might take a little bit of time before you realize, oh, this person's definitely

00:54:09.200 looking out for themselves more than anybody else, so that's going to be a problem.

00:54:12.600 And you said that has a smell.

00:54:14.500 So one of the things I've been working out with this character, Jonathan Pajot, is, so

00:54:19.040 there's these, there's an ancient idea, imagine there's a pyramid of values, okay, and there's

00:54:25.880 a pinnacle value.

00:54:27.300 And in the Egyptian formulations, the pinnacle value was Horus, the eye, which is the capacity

00:54:32.780 to pay attention, which I really like.

00:54:34.360 It's like, everything should be subordinated to your capacity to actually pay attention,

00:54:40.260 to watch, okay?

00:54:41.700 But you could think about that ability to watch as the thing that's at the top, or you

00:54:46.540 could think about it as something that operates at every, is at the top and operates at every

00:54:51.040 level.

00:54:51.660 So the idea would be that if you pick a principle to guide yourself by, maybe it's the principle

00:54:58.240 of self, of short-term self-promotion.

00:55:00.920 That's going to be your guiding star, but it's going to leak out in absolutely everything

00:55:05.920 you do.

00:55:06.520 Every, every word you say, every gesture you manifest is going to speak of that.

00:55:12.800 And people are pretty good at decoding nonverbal behavior.

00:55:16.880 And that smell is associated with that pattern of short-term selfish gratification.

00:55:25.860 And you're right, with repeated interactions, there's something off, eh?

00:55:31.520 You can tell, and other people can tell too, which is another reason why that psychopathic

00:55:35.860 pattern of adaptation doesn't work socially, and it doesn't even work for the person that's

00:55:42.580 applying it.

00:55:43.420 It's perverse, eh?

00:55:44.440 Because an active psychopath might be better off than someone who's so paralyzed by depression

00:55:50.480 and anxiety that they can't move, right?

00:55:53.300 Because like a psychopathic attitude that's self-serving can take you out into the world.

00:55:58.560 And it's also unfortunately the case that it can, if psychopathic men who are narcissistic

00:56:04.940 have a reasonably good track record at fooling women, because psychopaths mimic competence,

00:56:11.540 and they do that by having false confidence.

00:56:15.220 And women use confidence as a marker for competence, but you can game confidence.

00:56:21.000 And that's what psychopaths and narcissists do.

00:56:23.500 You know, they think they know, they actually believe that they know more than they know,

00:56:27.960 partly because they have such a dim view of everyone else.

00:56:30.140 And that can give them a glitz and an aura of confidence that, and what you see in the

00:56:35.560 clinical literature is that works particularly well with the younger the woman, the more effective

00:56:39.780 that is, because they're just not very, they're not experienced.

00:56:43.920 They can't tell the Gastons from the, you know, from the, exactly.

00:56:48.020 Gaston's a perfect example of that.

00:56:49.900 And I always try and explain that to people, that one of the worst situations you can be

00:56:56.340 in is when you think that the little moves that you're making, no one can see them.

00:57:01.680 And it's so obvious to everybody else.

00:57:03.420 Everybody else that's watching can see exactly what you're doing.

00:57:06.060 You think, oh, they can't see the maneuvers that I'm making to take care of myself.

00:57:09.780 No, they see, everybody sees, and it ends up destroying you.

00:57:13.140 So that idea of like what you talked about, imposing my will on other people, you can

00:57:18.720 get away with that for a little while.

00:57:20.020 If I'm the boss and I can fire you or I can give you punitive measures because you didn't

00:57:23.980 follow my orders, that'll work for a little while.

00:57:26.640 But it's not a long-term solution.

00:57:28.320 And eventually you're going to have a mutiny on your hands and you're probably going to

00:57:31.320 end up, they actually had a name for it in the Vietnam War, right?

00:57:34.900 We would frag you.

00:57:35.820 You're my officer.

00:57:36.580 You're imposing your will on me.

00:57:38.080 You're not listening to what we have to say?

00:57:39.460 Cool.

00:57:39.680 We're going to frag you.

00:57:40.360 We're going to get into a gunfight at night.

00:57:41.580 You're going to get shot by one of us.

00:57:43.220 They had a name for it.

00:57:44.340 Yeah.

00:57:44.800 That's like the chimps you're talking about.

00:57:47.140 It goes across the board to all of us primates that are out there.

00:57:50.640 Well, so you can see how deep that goes because, again, the postmodern neo-Marxist claim is that

00:57:57.780 human hierarchies are predicated on power, right?

00:58:01.200 And I already defined powers, the willingness and ability to use force and compulsion.

00:58:05.940 It's not ability.

00:58:07.040 Forget that.

00:58:07.700 That's not power.

00:58:09.780 Ability is the ability to get things done.

00:58:12.580 Power is the willingness and ability to use force.

00:58:15.860 You say, well, you can organize hierarchies around force.

00:58:19.600 That's what a totalitarian state is.

00:58:21.840 But your point is dead relevant.

00:58:23.900 It's like, well, that works fine, except when it doesn't work.

00:58:27.540 And then it doesn't work at all.

00:58:28.960 And I don't believe at all that the functional hierarchies that men organize, if they're predicated

00:58:36.740 on...

00:58:37.400 See, Piaget, Jean Piaget, the developmental psychologist, delved into this too.

00:58:41.040 He said there's another problem with a hierarchy that's built on power.

00:58:44.360 So let's say we've got an organization here that's top-down command.

00:58:48.560 It's like, you do what I say, or there's going to be trouble, right?

00:58:51.740 And there's another organization beside it.

00:58:54.360 And that is more, here's the vision.

00:58:58.700 I'm going to aggregate a bunch of people who are on board with that, right?

00:59:02.140 So they're doing it voluntarily.

00:59:03.620 Now, those are the sort of people to whom you can distribute the kind of responsibility

00:59:08.320 that you described earlier.

00:59:09.860 So you want people around you that don't need you around, right?

00:59:13.820 As you build an organization.

00:59:15.160 And you might say, well, I don't want to cede all that control.

00:59:17.840 That means you're power mad.

00:59:19.120 But the advantage to you is if you build those people underneath you who are competent in

00:59:24.380 their own realm, you can keep moving your ambition higher and higher because you build

00:59:28.900 this platform beneath you that's composed of competent people.

00:59:32.100 And all that happens is your expanse of opportunity increases.

00:59:35.360 Okay, so Piaget's observation was this.

00:59:38.580 There's costs to the power-oriented hierarchy.

00:59:42.920 The cost is you demoralize the participants because they're not chasing something they

00:59:49.160 value except under duress.

00:59:51.300 And you have to discipline, you have to monitor and discipline them constantly.

00:59:55.480 And that's a cost.

00:59:56.440 So if you put system A power-based and system B voluntary-based, right, vision-based, let's

01:00:03.820 say, in a head-to-head competition, the voluntary organization will always eventually stomp the

01:00:09.800 power-based.

01:00:10.680 And I think that's exactly right.

01:00:12.920 Yeah.

01:00:14.200 You know, when you go to these live events and you get asked questions and I got asked

01:00:18.620 a question and it just kind of led to a whole thought process.

01:00:22.520 But somebody, you know, asked me, well, how do I get people to listen to me?

01:00:26.780 You know, I'm in a leadership position.

01:00:28.480 How do I get people to listen to me?

01:00:30.860 And I said, if you want people to listen to you, you need to listen to them.

01:00:36.640 It's the opposite of what people think, you know?

01:00:38.660 You bet.

01:00:39.160 It's not talk louder if I want you to listen to me.

01:00:41.640 If I want you to listen to me, I need to listen to you.

01:00:45.000 And that kind of opened up this whole idea for me.

01:00:48.380 There's a whole category of these things, right?

01:00:50.280 If I want you to respect me, what do I have to do?

01:00:53.240 I have to treat you with respect.

01:00:54.320 Yeah.

01:00:55.100 If I want to have influence over you, what do I have to do?

01:00:59.020 I actually have to allow you to influence me.

01:01:01.840 I have to open my mind up and allow you to influence me.

01:01:04.320 If I just stick with my own ideas, you close your mind as well.

01:01:07.940 If I have a closed mind, you're going to close my mind.

01:01:10.340 If I want you to care about me, what do I have to do?

01:01:14.060 I have to care about you.

01:01:15.420 And by the way, in my opinion, these are the components of a relationship.

01:01:20.280 Yes, yes, definitely.

01:01:21.220 If we listen to each other, if we don't listen to each other, we don't have a relationship.

01:01:24.800 If we don't respect each other, we don't have a relationship.

01:01:26.920 If we're not influenced by each other, we don't have a relationship.

01:01:30.340 So if we don't care about each other, obviously, we don't have a relationship.

01:01:33.520 So when you want to build a relationship, what do you have to do?

01:01:36.240 You have to listen to the other person.

01:01:37.420 And by the way, this applies to your employees.

01:01:39.580 It applies to your kids.

01:01:41.060 It applies to your spouse.

01:01:42.820 It applies to everyone.

01:01:43.580 If you want them to listen to you, you have to listen to them.

01:01:47.480 And you can't just, you know, I'll stop talking as I prepare my counter for what you're saying

01:01:52.680 right now.

01:01:53.080 It's like, I'm literally going to listen to what you have to say and try and open up my

01:01:56.720 mind and open up my perspective so that I understand your world as well as I possibly

01:02:01.100 can.

01:02:01.580 I'm going to integrate that into what my thoughts are.

01:02:04.080 And we're going to come to an understanding.

01:02:05.940 We're going to move forward with a better solution.

01:02:07.560 This is why when I was in the military, I never like gave orders.

01:02:14.000 I never had to say, hey, everyone, here's what we're doing.

01:02:16.280 We're doing this.

01:02:16.920 I never had to say that.

01:02:18.440 Never had to say that.

01:02:19.600 Oh, the caveat is we're in a gunfight and, you know, I need you to take your element over

01:02:24.720 that building.

01:02:25.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:02:25.440 And even then, even then, it's a strong suggestion because I might say, Jordan, take that building

01:02:30.340 over there.

01:02:31.140 You might look back at me and say, negative.

01:02:34.960 I don't say, hey, shut up, you insubordinate bastard.

01:02:37.560 Right, right.

01:02:38.140 No, the reason you're saying that to me is because there's something that you see that

01:02:43.000 I don't see.

01:02:43.820 Because that's the other thing, trust, right?

01:02:45.600 Yeah.

01:02:45.880 How do I get you to trust me?

01:02:47.240 I have to put trust in you.

01:02:48.280 Yeah.

01:02:48.720 So the idea of barking orders and that idea that the military or any organization can be

01:02:54.080 run through authoritarian dictatorship, look, you can make it work for a little while,

01:03:00.480 but it's not a long-term solution.

01:03:01.820 And that's what we've got to watch out for.

01:03:04.120 Yeah, well, one of the things I've read in relationship to military history, and this

01:03:08.900 is particularly true with regards to the U.S., is that part of the reason that the U.S.

01:03:13.380 military has been such a formidable force is that a fair bit of responsibility is devolved

01:03:21.500 down the ranks, is that people are expected to use their decision-making power as appropriate

01:03:33.480 with the maximal amount of allowable freedom at their level of authority.

01:03:39.460 And you can imagine why that's much better, because it's the same thing, it's the free

01:03:45.040 market equivalent in the military.

01:03:47.780 If there's a thousand people, and some of them are troops that are on the front line,

01:03:53.120 some of those people on the front line are going to have much more accurate information

01:03:57.540 than the people who are aggregating information at a distance, both temporally and spatially.

01:04:03.340 So you want to open yourself up to being informed by people who have skin in the game and have

01:04:12.260 their eyes open in the immediate circumstance.

01:04:15.200 I've seen this with great political leaders, like the great political leaders that I've met

01:04:19.240 are very, very good at listening.

01:04:22.280 And partly what they do, even when they're campaigning, so I met this guy, Preston Manning,

01:04:26.640 he started a political party in Canada, and out of nothing, now he came from a political

01:04:32.120 family, so he had some connections, but he basically produced a political party in Canada

01:04:36.380 from ground zero, and they became the official opposition, right?

01:04:41.140 And then it eventually merged with the current Conservative Party.

01:04:43.820 So it was a Western party and a populist party, populist.

01:04:48.720 But I asked him at one point, well, how the hell do you do that?

01:04:52.800 Because that's really hard.

01:04:53.740 And he said he went from arena to arena across Western Canada, and he'd give his stump speech.

01:05:00.080 But what he really liked were the questions and the answers, the Q&As, because people

01:05:04.020 would tell him what their problems were.

01:05:07.280 So you can imagine if you're a political leader and you go talk to a thousand people, and all

01:05:11.900 thousand people tell you their problems because you listen, well, now you've got the questions

01:05:17.460 right.

01:05:18.080 Because one of the things that's really impossible to figure out if you're a leader is like, well,

01:05:23.100 what problem are we trying to solve here?

01:05:25.880 What direction should we be going in?

01:05:29.680 And it's a lot easier to lead people in a direction that they want to go.

01:05:36.660 And so if you listen to people, now Jimmy Carr told me the same thing about him preparing

01:05:41.040 his comedy routines before he goes on tour.

01:05:43.740 So comedians do this generally, and they all know this, although Carr was very good at elucidating

01:05:48.060 it, you go to 50 small clubs, you try out your idiot material, you know, 90% of it falls

01:05:55.940 flat, but 10% of it makes people laugh.

01:05:58.460 Well, if you're listening, you can tell when they laugh, and you just put a check by that

01:06:02.620 joke.

01:06:03.060 And after you've done 30 shows, and you now have two hours of material that makes people

01:06:08.560 laugh, even if you're not that damn funny to begin with, if you pay enough attention to

01:06:13.360 what the audience responds to, you can aggregate the material and you can go on the road.

01:06:16.920 And that's really, as far as I can tell, that really is the essence of leadership per se.

01:06:21.820 It's certainly the essence of political leadership.

01:06:23.660 Yeah.

01:06:23.880 Well, this is the fourth law of combat leadership that I used to teach in the SEAL teams that

01:06:27.580 now I teach to corporations and companies and teams, decentralized command.

01:06:32.300 That's everything you just said, decentralized command.

01:06:34.220 I want my subordinate leadership to be leaders.

01:06:37.660 Yeah.

01:06:37.960 I want them to understand where we're going, and I don't really care how they get there.

01:06:42.120 And I can put some parameters on them.

01:06:43.780 Hey, you can't do this, you can't do that.

01:06:45.460 But everything else inside that box, you can do.

01:06:48.260 Make decisions, go make things happen.

01:06:49.660 That's decentralized command.

01:06:50.620 And yeah, that's why we have a great military.

01:06:53.820 And when we get away from that is when we start having problems.

01:06:57.340 That's why you hear about the Vietnam War.

01:06:58.660 What was happening during the Vietnam War?

01:07:00.180 Well, you had Johnson back in D.C. making decisions about what targets we were going to

01:07:04.940 hit in Vietnam.

01:07:06.160 That's the way to run a war.

01:07:07.400 And that's why you have problems in those situations.

01:07:09.700 So definitely decentralized command as a leadership system, it's really vastly superior to any

01:07:19.000 other system.

01:07:19.480 And that's why that group that pulls ahead.

01:07:21.940 And the other thing that you talk about, that group that's based on values and based

01:07:26.220 on really, to me, relationships.

01:07:28.040 Yeah.

01:07:28.260 It's the same thing, right?

01:07:28.900 If I have a team and we all get along and we all can talk to each other, we trust each

01:07:34.860 other, we care about each other.

01:07:36.160 You put that team against a team that has a bunch of animosity and they don't trust each

01:07:40.240 other.

01:07:40.400 Yeah.

01:07:40.580 The team that has good relationships is going to annihilate the team that doesn't.

01:07:44.300 And we see this over and over again in the business world.

01:07:47.180 We saw it in the SEAL platoons.

01:07:48.380 In fact, this is funny.

01:07:49.840 In a SEAL platoon, so I was running the advanced training for the SEALs where you're getting

01:07:54.280 SEAL platoons ready.

01:07:55.460 They've already gone through all the basic training.

01:07:57.920 You've got experienced SEALs, some new SEALs, but experienced SEALs and some newer SEALs,

01:08:02.220 but they're getting ready to go on deployment.

01:08:04.900 And it's a very strenuous, arduous training cycle.

01:08:10.140 And you're pretty much training them some collective skills, but then you're putting

01:08:13.920 them in mission scenarios where they're going to go out and do simulated combat missions.

01:08:19.280 And if you would see a fracture between guys in the platoon, you'd watch it.

01:08:28.120 You'd pay attention.

01:08:29.440 And if it started to get worse, the platoon was going to fall apart.

01:08:33.100 Like the platoons that occasionally would fail a block of training, they'd fail land

01:08:37.540 warfare, they'd fail urban combat, or they'd fail close quarters combat.

01:08:41.320 The reason they would fail was because they had fissures in the platoon that would break

01:08:46.520 them apart.

01:08:47.160 Well, how would those fissures develop?

01:08:49.620 Ego.

01:08:51.040 Okay.

01:08:51.580 So they're developing around people who are playing power games.

01:08:54.260 Yep.

01:08:54.520 So you're the platoon chief.

01:08:56.500 So in a SEAL platoon, the platoon chief's probably been in for 12 to 15 years.

01:09:00.860 He's got a lot of tactical experience.

01:09:02.700 And then you've got the platoon commander, who's an officer.

01:09:06.200 He probably has four or five years.

01:09:08.000 He's a little less tactically experienced.

01:09:11.240 But he's the guy that's overall in charge, right?

01:09:13.620 He's the guy that actually is the head of the platoon.

01:09:18.180 So a good platoon chief is going to offer suggestions, and a good platoon officer is

01:09:23.720 going to go, yep, chief, that makes sense.

01:09:25.480 Yeah, yeah.

01:09:26.020 That's a beautiful thing.

01:09:27.140 And everyone can kind of see that the platoon chief is sort of running the platoon with the

01:09:32.680 permission of, for lack of a better word, the permission of the platoon commander.

01:09:36.500 Yeah.

01:09:36.600 Well, occasionally you get a platoon commander that wants everyone to know that he's the

01:09:40.100 one that's making the decisions.

01:09:41.620 Yeah.

01:09:42.200 And he starts, well, we're not going to do it that way.

01:09:44.080 And right there, you've got friction.

01:09:44.940 Or it can be the other way around.

01:09:46.120 It can be the platoon chief that wants everyone to know that, hey, we're going to do it my

01:09:49.760 way.

01:09:50.160 And the platoon commander doesn't want to do that because he's an idiot.

01:09:52.480 And you just end up with this explosion.

01:09:54.180 Well, that's that narcissism, eh?

01:09:55.700 Oh, it is 100%.

01:09:56.420 That idea that you want to be the one that people know did it.

01:10:01.040 Yes.

01:10:01.280 Right?

01:10:01.520 That's a big problem, right?

01:10:02.980 Because then you're doing it because you want to be known.

01:10:05.380 Yep.

01:10:05.500 Right.

01:10:06.080 And that's a false form of prestige, right?

01:10:09.200 And the narcissistic types are always after the false forms of prestige.

01:10:12.560 Like real prestige comes when people know that you're good at delivering something they want

01:10:17.160 to have delivered, right?

01:10:18.920 And that's, well, that's the equivalent of real ability.

01:10:22.120 And so there's something else that's, I think we can tie together what we talked about

01:10:27.220 to begin with.

01:10:28.060 So here's how kids develop friendships.

01:10:31.240 So two kids will start interacting with each other on the playground, right?

01:10:37.700 Say they're like four years old, a boy and a girl, and the boy proposes some possible

01:10:43.420 play topics.

01:10:44.400 So that could be a game or it could be like a drama.

01:10:47.940 So kids will pretend.

01:10:49.380 So maybe the boy will say, do you want to play house?

01:10:55.020 Okay.

01:10:55.260 Now he doesn't say to the girl, you have to play house because then if she does play,

01:11:01.160 it's not going to be any fun.

01:11:02.180 Plus she isn't going to play and she's going to be looking for an escape or some other kid

01:11:05.840 to play with like instantly.

01:11:07.000 So it has to be an invitation, right?

01:11:09.540 And then they have to jointly negotiate the roles, you know, because if you're playing

01:11:14.480 house, you could play husband and wife, or you could play, you know, husband and daughter,

01:11:19.160 or there's all sorts of different roles, or you could play two sons, or one of you could

01:11:22.540 be the cat.

01:11:23.220 Like there's a lot of roles that can be taken.

01:11:25.840 And the next rule is both kids have to agree on the roles and they have to want to play.

01:11:31.440 And play is particularly interesting in this regard because if it's, if there's any element

01:11:35.460 of compulsion, if there's, or fear, the fun stops.

01:11:40.700 It's a very delicate motivational state play because any other motivational state will take

01:11:46.180 it out.

01:11:46.840 So you have to do it exactly right to get the spirit of play going.

01:11:50.560 So if the boy does this well, then he'll play this game with the girl and it'll be fun

01:11:55.540 for both of them.

01:11:57.020 And then, so then you imagine there's a fairly tight set of constraints that are operating

01:12:01.500 to make that game fun for both, volunteerism being one of them.

01:12:04.600 They have to pick the roles, they have to share their aim, they have to agree on what

01:12:09.040 the game is going to be, they have to agree on the principles, so then they can play the

01:12:12.860 game.

01:12:13.120 And now they're experimenting with communicating with one another within that framework.

01:12:17.340 Okay, now if that goes well, they'll end and they'll say, well, that was fun.

01:12:21.760 And they'll say, you know, would you like to play again?

01:12:25.420 Okay, so now what you're having is a sequence of games, right?

01:12:29.000 And a friend is someone that a sequence of games can be played with, a variety of different

01:12:35.280 games, and that's a relationship.

01:12:36.820 So now imagine that, you know, there are pretty tight constraints on how you have to play a

01:12:41.840 game to make the game fun.

01:12:44.220 You have to have a goal.

01:12:46.240 You have to try to make the goal.

01:12:48.540 You have to compete because you want to do a good job.

01:12:51.580 Maybe you want to do a better job than the person you're playing with.

01:12:54.280 And you have to cooperate because you have to stay within the confines of the game.

01:12:58.420 Okay, so that's a pretty tight set of constraints.

01:13:00.340 Now imagine that across a set of games, the constraints are even tighter because now you

01:13:06.160 have to be able to do that flexibly in a bunch of different situations with a bunch of different

01:13:10.480 games with the same person, and they have to want to continue it.

01:13:14.000 Okay, that's a friendship.

01:13:16.180 Now imagine that there's a pattern of behavior that makes that, an attitude that makes that

01:13:20.260 more possible.

01:13:20.960 Okay, that's an ethical attitude, and there's nothing morally relativistic about that.

01:13:25.940 You can see that, right?

01:13:26.900 Because imagine that you have a friend, and it's fun to play chess with them, and it's

01:13:31.920 fun to play basketball, right?

01:13:33.620 Well, there's not a lot of commonality between those two games, but there's a commonality

01:13:37.480 of attitude that can be brought to bear across those games.

01:13:40.860 And that's the principle that's antithetical to power.

01:13:45.260 And I think that what you're doing when you're mentoring people is you're teaching them how

01:13:48.600 to play that game, that long-term iterative game.

01:13:52.200 And the pleasure in that, imagine it's an instinct.

01:13:55.680 The people who are best at that have the children who thrived, because they taught their children

01:14:01.060 how to play games that everybody wanted to play, so that they were always being called

01:14:04.740 upon to play.

01:14:05.960 And so that was a radically effective, reproductive strategy.

01:14:10.380 Effective enough to become an instinct, and an instinct that's so powerful that it makes

01:14:14.580 itself manifest as that pleasure in mentoring that you described.

01:14:17.800 Yeah, and that thing you, when you mention about these people you want to interact with,

01:14:22.000 even when you're a little kid, it's trust, listen, respect, influence, and care, right?

01:14:25.520 If you and I are going to play the game together, but you're just imposing your rules on me,

01:14:29.920 I'm not going to like it.

01:14:30.900 Or you don't listen to any of the input that I want to give, I'm not going to play with

01:14:33.880 you anymore.

01:14:34.100 Yeah, right.

01:14:34.480 If I can see that you don't care, that I'm the one that keeps falling down on the ground

01:14:36.960 every time we do this part of the game, you don't care about me, this isn't going

01:14:40.560 to last very long.

01:14:41.040 Yeah.

01:14:41.520 And in order for us to build a relationship, you've got to give this stuff.

01:14:45.240 You've got to give that trust.

01:14:46.340 You've got to listen to what other people have to say.

01:14:48.360 What about also psychological reactance?

01:14:51.900 Have you ever heard of this?

01:14:52.860 No.

01:14:53.320 So I guess it's some instinct that human beings have that when we get told to do something,

01:14:59.900 there's some level of we don't really want to do what we've been told to do.

01:15:02.620 Mm-hmm.

01:15:03.260 Mm-hmm.

01:15:04.080 That's especially true for disagreeable people, by the way, and men are more likely to be disagreeable.

01:15:08.700 Yeah, well, if you're agreeable, you're more likely to cooperate if someone suggests or

01:15:15.640 even demands.

01:15:17.100 And the advantage to that is, well, you're more cooperative.

01:15:20.340 But the disadvantage is the psychopaths and the narcissists can have their way with you.

01:15:24.520 And this has been very well modeled.

01:15:26.180 Like, you can produce, say, fictional worlds that are only composed of cooperators, and they

01:15:32.740 do extremely well.

01:15:33.700 But if you drop one malevolent actor, they take everything.

01:15:38.000 Mm-hmm.

01:15:38.540 If all the people can do is cooperate, they take everything.

01:15:42.360 So that's what a cult consists of, I assume.

01:15:43.900 Yes.

01:15:44.240 Something along.

01:15:44.780 Something like that.

01:15:45.540 That's right.

01:15:45.980 That's right.

01:15:46.400 You've got all these people who are cooperating and one shark in the middle.

01:15:50.420 So this is why...

01:15:53.940 So in Beauty and the Beast, the beauty falls for the trainable monster.

01:15:59.400 Right?

01:15:59.540 She doesn't want the narcissist, and she doesn't want the weak men.

01:16:02.360 Those are like the dwarves in Snow White, which is why you can't get rid of the bloody

01:16:05.800 dwarves, by the way.

01:16:06.800 It's like, you know, the typical beautiful young woman is surrounded by dwarves.

01:16:12.020 Right?

01:16:12.520 And so she's not interested in them.

01:16:14.520 And so then you might say, well, who's the prince?

01:16:16.320 And then you could say, well, one sort of prince is Gaston.

01:16:19.880 And another sort of prince, apparently in the Beauty and the Beast motif, is the trainable

01:16:24.480 monster.

01:16:25.360 And you might say, well, why do you want the monster?

01:16:27.420 And the answer is, well, someone's got to keep the psychopaths at bay.

01:16:31.260 Right?

01:16:31.800 Right.

01:16:32.200 And trainable.

01:16:32.920 So you want someone who has the capacity to say no, but who can be enticed and invited

01:16:39.060 into a relationship, like a mentoring relationship and one of provision and cooperation.

01:16:43.740 Right?

01:16:43.860 So it's a very tight line for women to negotiate, right?

01:16:46.100 Because if they find a man who's got no capacity for monstrosity whatsoever, and a monster

01:16:51.680 comes along, he's done.

01:16:53.220 But if they pick a guy who's too monstrous, then he can't cooperate.

01:16:56.260 And he's not going to, you know, be cooperative with her and the children.

01:16:59.400 So that women have a very, very small, small eye hole in the needle to thread.

01:17:06.340 And the reason I make much of Beauty and the Beast, by the way, I do think that's the

01:17:10.680 fundamental female myth.

01:17:13.100 And part of the reason I think that, this is very comical, I think.

01:17:16.660 So the Google boys...

01:17:18.680 You ought to meet my wife and see who she married.

01:17:20.420 I'll tell you that.

01:17:20.880 Yeah, right, right, right.

01:17:21.760 Well, so the comprehensible story.

01:17:23.780 So the Google boys, a long while ago, got together and analyzed female pornography use

01:17:29.840 online.

01:17:30.780 Billions of data points.

01:17:31.880 And they identified the core female pornographic narrative.

01:17:36.900 And women use verbal pornography, not visual pornography.

01:17:40.580 Right?

01:17:40.780 So you can see this, and it's like an erotic harlequin romance.

01:17:44.460 It's always the same thing.

01:17:45.500 There's five cardinal male figures.

01:17:48.020 Surgeon, pirate, billionaire, werewolf, and vampire.

01:17:54.480 Those are common protagonists.

01:17:58.460 And the theme fundamentally is that this male is attractive to many other males and is dangerous,

01:18:07.020 but can be enticed into a relationship across time by the right woman.

01:18:11.220 It's the Beauty and the Beast motif.

01:18:12.980 And that's the core motif for the vast preponderance of female pornography.

01:18:18.980 Like the narrative theme is being identified.

01:18:20.680 It's exactly what is in Fifty Shades of Grey.

01:18:25.180 Right, right, right.

01:18:26.740 As I, those, those, when the toxic masculinity started being talked about a lot, and I got

01:18:32.920 asked a bunch about these things.

01:18:34.460 Yeah.

01:18:34.700 And what I answered that question with a lot was, well, if you take any characteristic or

01:18:40.960 any trait of a human and you take it to an extreme, of course it's going to turn out.

01:18:44.260 Yeah, right.

01:18:44.580 It doesn't really matter what, even something like being generous.

01:18:47.520 Like, you know, if someone is generous, they're so generous, they give everything away and

01:18:52.560 they get taken advantage of.

01:18:53.440 So any trait, if you take it to an extreme, it'll become a negative.

01:18:58.040 And that'd be, you know, with the traditionally feminine traits and the traditionally masculine

01:19:01.780 traits, it's the same thing.

01:19:02.940 Oh, it's, to say it's bad to be aggressive or assertive, well, yeah, can you be too aggressive

01:19:10.060 and too assertive and now you don't listen to anybody else?

01:19:11.680 You just go running around slapping people?

01:19:13.580 Like, yes, that's terrible.

01:19:14.940 But the other end of the spectrum is now you're just kind of complying to the whims of whoever's

01:19:21.260 around and you're, it's an equally bad scenario.

01:19:24.660 So what you want to be as a human being is, is be balanced and, and yeah, you've got to

01:19:28.460 have some capacity to be a bit of a monster when you need to be, but you've got to be

01:19:31.380 able to contain that and discipline that and you'll end up in a pretty good spot.

01:19:35.440 And that, that goes with, with just about every characteristic that, that a human being

01:19:39.180 can have.

01:19:39.820 Well, you see this, you see this very clearly in analysis of personality trait distribution.

01:19:47.240 So you can imagine that there's advantages being extroverted.

01:19:51.260 But there's disadvantages, impulsivity and there are pathologies, mania, like mania is

01:19:56.900 a pathology of extroversion, impulsivity as well, because one of the things that positive

01:20:00.920 emotion does and, and extroverts are higher in positive emotion.

01:20:04.900 You think, well, you can't have too much of that.

01:20:06.460 It's like, yes, you can.

01:20:07.560 Mania is too much positive emotion.

01:20:09.580 And so is impulsivity because positive emotion makes you much more likely to act precipitously

01:20:14.640 in the present because your nervous system is saying, well, everything's good right

01:20:18.180 now.

01:20:18.480 Make hay while the sun shines.

01:20:20.180 And so if you have a pronounced proclivity for positive emotion, it'll manifest itself

01:20:24.660 in impulsivity, right?

01:20:26.080 And so there, as you pointed out there, there, so you might say, well, it seems cosmically

01:20:31.640 unjust that talents are distributed inequitably.

01:20:35.620 But if you understand that there are no talents without a corresponding cost, then the situation

01:20:41.440 becomes much more complex.

01:20:42.760 This is even true of intelligence.

01:20:45.540 Like, I think there isn't anything that you could be granted by the genetic lottery that

01:20:49.960 will make more of a difference in your life than raw IQ.

01:20:53.040 And a huge part of that is biologically determined, far more than people would ever want to admit.

01:20:58.880 And it's really quite shocking.

01:21:01.140 But the biggest, traditionally, the most unforgivable and deadly sin has been associated with the

01:21:09.720 intellect because the intellect is so powerful that it can fall in love with itself.

01:21:13.760 And then you get the Luciferian intellect, essentially.

01:21:16.020 You get the sin of pride.

01:21:17.100 You get arrogance.

01:21:18.260 And intellectual arrogance is probably the worst kind.

01:21:21.100 And so, sure, it's great to be smart.

01:21:24.460 But the downside is, yeah, well, you fall in love with your own intelligence, boy, and

01:21:29.660 you're going to be in some sort of trouble because I don't care how smart you are.

01:21:32.880 You're not smart enough.

01:21:33.800 And that is not the only virtue.

01:21:35.840 And then you said something else interesting, too.

01:21:37.820 You know, you talked about this balance.

01:21:40.440 And so the classical conception of God is something like the sum of bottom, right?

01:21:47.160 The sum of all that's good.

01:21:48.600 But I think that's in some way a misapprehension, that it's more like the harmonious balance of

01:21:55.580 all that is good, right, rather than the sum per se, you know?

01:21:59.720 And so you could imagine that a person who's maximally admirable has the capacity to bring

01:22:08.060 to bear whatever temperamental trait is most appropriate in that situation, right?

01:22:12.680 So they've got an array of tools to choose from, which is why becoming skilled is so useful.

01:22:17.740 You increase your tool, well, you increase the toolbox that you have at hand.

01:22:24.520 But then that virtue itself seems something like the harmonious balance of potentially competing

01:22:33.500 virtues.

01:22:34.620 Maybe virtue itself is the game that virtuous traits play.

01:22:38.520 It's something like that.

01:22:40.000 And then so you can't reduce it to any one thing.

01:22:42.180 You can't say, well, the most aggressive guy is the best, or the most intelligent guy,

01:22:45.920 or the most cooperative guy, or the best looking guy, or any of that.

01:22:49.120 It's not reducible to a single dimension, no matter what the dimension is.

01:22:53.420 But that doesn't mean that there isn't something that all the virtues point to.

01:22:59.060 And I do think, too, that that pleasure that makes itself manifest in mentoring is probably

01:23:06.580 an index of the virtues being balanced properly, right?

01:23:12.240 Because if you're in a mentoring relationship with someone and you're really attempting to

01:23:15.980 operate, let's say, not only in their best interest, but in the best interest of all the

01:23:20.960 people they could serve.

01:23:22.120 So like when I was training graduate students, you know, part of what I'm thinking is, well,

01:23:27.080 if this person is now under my supervision and they're going to become a professor, well,

01:23:31.540 they're going to develop a research enterprise and God only knows where that'll go.

01:23:35.180 Like that can be very influential and they're going to train, they're going to have a pretty

01:23:38.880 direct influence on at least thousands of people.

01:23:42.860 And so you can imagine that you're trying to work in that person's best interest, but

01:23:50.780 you're trying to work in the best interests of that person insofar as that person is going

01:23:55.400 to be willing to serve the best interests of all the people that they're going to serve.

01:23:58.780 Yep.

01:23:59.140 Right, right.

01:23:59.700 And that's something that you're going to have to develop the feel for, right, with these

01:24:04.960 individual human beings because they're all a little bit different.

01:24:07.340 So there might be one individual that you have to be a little bit more aggressive to

01:24:11.320 get them to step up.

01:24:12.260 And there might be another individual that you have to back off a little bit.

01:24:15.140 I've talked about leadership and saying that you get these tools, right?

01:24:18.440 And it's like woodworking.

01:24:20.080 So woodworking, you've got to learn how to operate the tools on wood, right?

01:24:24.340 The saw and the drill and the chisel.

01:24:27.360 You got to learn how to work those tools.

01:24:29.540 But then you've got to remember that there's different types of wood.

01:24:31.860 You've got pine, which is very soft, and you've got ipe, which is very hard.

01:24:36.000 And then you've got to learn how to work those tools on those pieces of wood.

01:24:39.880 And then with human beings as a leader, you've got to remember that each piece of wood is

01:24:44.980 different.

01:24:45.580 Each piece of pine, this one has a knot and this one has a different bend to it.

01:24:50.420 So you've got to really pay attention to balancing out these various tools that you have, because

01:24:55.840 if you go too hard on a piece of pine, you'll destroy it.

01:24:58.560 If you don't go hard enough with a piece of ipe, you won't make any impact.

01:25:02.160 So yeah, what you're talking about, very true.

01:25:05.360 And this is what makes leadership and just human interaction so difficult, because everyone

01:25:10.020 is a little bit different.

01:25:10.920 Everyone is unique.

01:25:11.980 And you still have the same tools.

01:25:14.460 It's not something that I can't train you.

01:25:16.140 Say, well, every piece of wood is different, so therefore you just can't.

01:25:19.300 It's just unmanageable.

01:25:20.280 No, here's the tools, and you've got to learn the art of working on the hardwood versus

01:25:25.780 softwood.

01:25:26.660 And it's the same thing with leadership.

01:25:27.780 Like, I can't give you the, oh, here's the answer 100% of the time with all human beings,

01:25:32.680 you do this.

01:25:34.100 No, actually, here's the range of tools that you can utilize in those types of situations

01:25:39.980 from a leadership perspective, and you've got to figure out how much pressure to apply,

01:25:44.240 what angle you're going to use, and it's going to be a little bit different.

01:25:47.380 And that's why it takes experience, and it takes time.

01:25:50.000 But unfortunately, sometimes people think that leadership is just something that you're

01:25:54.800 born with.

01:25:55.320 Yeah, or it's a set of rules.

01:25:57.160 Yeah, or it's a set of rules.

01:25:58.260 Yeah, yeah.

01:25:58.740 It's like, this is what you're born with, and you have these capabilities.

01:26:01.480 And oh, did you see that guy give that speech and tell everyone what to do?

01:26:04.100 Man, he was awesome.

01:26:05.140 Yeah.

01:26:05.460 I could never do that.

01:26:06.660 Well, no, actually, you can do that.

01:26:08.360 And you can learn to become more articulate.

01:26:10.020 You can learn how to have a better command presence.

01:26:12.520 Are you going to have the same command presence that that charming and charismatic individual

01:26:17.980 had?

01:26:18.660 Maybe not.

01:26:19.480 Maybe you can't get there.

01:26:20.520 But you can definitely improve, and you can definitely get better.

01:26:23.000 And then you can bring someone on your team that has a huge amount of charisma.

01:26:27.800 And maybe when it's time to get up and shock the troops into action, you let that guy step

01:26:33.500 up because he's better than you.

01:26:34.440 Well, you see that in the story of Moses, which is a classic leadership story.

01:26:39.220 Moses isn't verbal.

01:26:41.420 And he tells God that when God comes along and says, like, well, you're going to stand

01:26:45.120 up against tyranny, and you're going to lead the slaves out of captivity, which is what

01:26:49.220 people are always doing in their life if they have any sense.

01:26:51.920 Moses' first objection is, well, you know, the tradition has it that he had a speech impediment

01:26:57.560 or something like that.

01:26:58.620 Like, it's actually quite a severe impediment.

01:27:00.380 So he has Aaron, who's his communicator, right?

01:27:04.920 And so, you know, you pointed to something there.

01:27:07.980 People often assume that leadership means charismatic speaking, for example.

01:27:13.060 Well, the kind of public communication leadership that you and I are doing depends on that.

01:27:18.840 But that's by no means the only way of being an effective leader.

01:27:22.460 I would say it's probably much more akin to what we've been talking about in terms of

01:27:26.400 play.

01:27:26.700 It's like a good leader is someone that who can continue to create games and present them

01:27:33.240 to people that they want to play.

01:27:34.940 And there's lots of ways of doing that.

01:27:36.400 You can do that and be quiet, be quiet.

01:27:37.960 Like, I had a client, a lawyer.

01:27:40.880 He ran a big law firm in Toronto.

01:27:43.600 I worked with lawyers like that for quite a while.

01:27:45.980 And they were sent to this little organization I was part of.

01:27:49.840 The value proposition to the law firms was, you send me your best people and we'll work

01:27:56.240 to make them 15% more productive, which for those people meant a lot, right?

01:28:00.860 But we work for them, not you.

01:28:03.200 And so then what we were doing with each of these people was radically different.

01:28:07.780 It really depended on the person.

01:28:09.200 And one of the guys that really struck me, he's very, very quiet.

01:28:13.040 And all he did in his office, all he did was go around and listen to people and actually

01:28:21.140 listen.

01:28:21.680 And so he could get wind of interpersonal conflicts of the sort you were describing,

01:28:27.020 you know, the power game conflicts just before they were developing, right?

01:28:32.060 People would tell him what was wrong.

01:28:34.240 And because he was listening, he could fix the things that were wrong with just like a

01:28:39.260 tap and a nudge, right?

01:28:40.640 Because he did it before they got out of control.

01:28:43.440 And it was really interesting to watch him operate because it really looked, even to him,

01:28:51.360 like he was doing very little as the manager of this law firm.

01:28:54.080 But what he was doing was exactly the right amount at exactly the right time.

01:28:58.000 And he was doing that because he was like, and his orientation was true.

01:29:00.940 He wanted the firm to function as well as it possibly could.

01:29:05.660 And that's genuinely what he wanted.

01:29:07.340 And he didn't care whether people, he didn't even care if he knew that what he was doing

01:29:14.140 was effective, much less what other.

01:29:16.020 So there's a gospel statement that's very mysterious.

01:29:18.900 You shouldn't let your right hand know what your left hand is doing.

01:29:21.600 It's like, well, what does that mean?

01:29:22.640 It means you shouldn't even be concerned about whether you give yourself credit for what

01:29:27.200 you've accomplished.

01:29:27.860 You know, now there's a boundary on that because credit where credit is due.

01:29:33.160 But if you're undertaking the task just so that you feel better about yourself in your

01:29:38.460 own eyes, you're contaminating the motivation.

01:29:41.660 The better motivation is this mentoring motivation.

01:29:44.520 And I think it really is.

01:29:45.700 It's a cause for optimism that that's such a deep source of meaning, you know, because

01:29:52.260 you know as well as I do that there are lots of young people, we'll talk about young men

01:29:57.960 for a moment, who feel lost.

01:29:59.560 Like, where am I going to find the meaning in my life?

01:30:02.300 And if you can let people know that one of the deepest possible sources of meaning that

01:30:06.560 you can tap that's more or less, it's unfathomable, right?

01:30:12.560 It never stops giving is the meaning that comes as a consequence of working on behalf

01:30:20.200 of the appropriate development of other people.

01:30:23.600 Yeah.

01:30:24.040 When people come to me and they say, well, I just don't, I don't, I don't know what to

01:30:27.320 do.

01:30:27.620 I don't know what my goals should be.

01:30:29.300 Yeah.

01:30:29.460 I'm just kind of lost.

01:30:30.560 I always tell them, go, go, go help other people.

01:30:32.640 Right.

01:30:33.040 Go help other people.

01:30:33.860 Right.

01:30:34.100 Like you'll find some direction.

01:30:35.720 I don't care if you go down to a soup kitchen or you go to a, a boys club where their kids

01:30:40.400 need mentoring or they need someone to teach them how to throw a baseball or whatever

01:30:43.240 the case may be, whatever you can do, you go and help people and, and you're going to,

01:30:47.120 you're going to find some direction really quickly when you realize that you're just a

01:30:50.600 little bit ahead of them in life and you can give them so much and that's going to be

01:30:54.780 very powerful.

01:30:55.800 Yeah.

01:30:55.900 Well, so one of the things that psychologists discovered, although not nearly enough has

01:31:01.440 been made of this is so imagine we've, we've, we've discovered the basic dimensions of human

01:31:08.860 temperament, extroversion, positive emotion, neuroticism, negative emotion, agreeableness.

01:31:13.920 So that's like say aggression versus cooperation, something like that with the, the attendant

01:31:18.780 problems on both ends, conscientiousness, dutifulness, orderliness, industriousness, and creativity.

01:31:24.440 Those are the five.

01:31:26.320 All right.

01:31:26.800 So let's look at neuroticism, proclivity to feel negative emotion.

01:31:31.640 All the negative emotions clump together.

01:31:34.080 So they have a common core.

01:31:35.560 It's probably something like stop and leave something like that, right?

01:31:40.380 Because if you're threatened, you should freeze or get the hell out of there.

01:31:43.280 So that's the core reaction around which all the negative emotions are built and they all

01:31:48.920 associate.

01:31:49.440 Okay.

01:31:51.000 We've been able to do analysis of traits and attitudes that are tightly associated with

01:31:59.080 negative emotion.

01:32:01.360 Self-consciousness is indistinguishable from negative emotion, which means like it's indistinguishable.

01:32:08.280 In fact, in one of the major personality trait measures called the Neo-PIR, one of the early

01:32:15.020 big five personality dimensions, self-consciousness is a facet of negative emotion.

01:32:22.220 That's how tight it is.

01:32:23.180 It's the same thing.

01:32:24.400 So what it means is, and this is very germane to your point, if you're thinking about yourself,

01:32:30.500 you're miserable.

01:32:32.520 Those are the same thing.

01:32:33.860 And so then you might say, well, how do you get out of that?

01:32:36.300 And you can't get out of that by not thinking about yourself.

01:32:39.480 That's just going to backfire, right?

01:32:41.080 So if you're anxious and you go to a party and you think, I'm not going to think about

01:32:44.320 myself and that's all you're thinking about, like you're dead.

01:32:47.940 I used to treat my socially anxious clients, say, go to a party and do everything you can

01:32:52.760 to make other people feel comfortable.

01:32:55.200 So I would explain to them what I just explained to you, but I would say that doesn't mean you

01:33:00.780 can stop thinking about yourself.

01:33:02.500 It means you can start only thinking about what you can provide to other people.

01:33:07.620 And that was invariably an improvement on the strategy that they had been using.

01:33:13.000 But this is so crucially important, you know, because we are so reciprocal as human beings

01:33:18.020 that you are lost if you only serve your own wimps.

01:33:22.740 It doesn't work in the long run.

01:33:24.420 It alienates people.

01:33:26.300 It produces a life that's devoid of meaning.

01:33:29.240 It makes you anxious and isolated and it makes you self-conscious and miserable.

01:33:35.820 And so it is the case, as we alluded to earlier, that perversely enough, the best possible thing

01:33:41.080 that you can do for yourself, all things considered over the longest possible run,

01:33:45.680 is to work as hard as you can on behalf of what's best in other people.

01:33:49.420 Yeah.

01:33:49.700 And you and I talked about this the last time, I forget, it was a couple of years ago,

01:33:52.980 I think, but I was talking, or you asked me what makes a good seal.

01:33:57.320 Like, what makes a good seal?

01:33:59.240 And I said, well, it doesn't matter.

01:34:02.400 Look, you got to be a good shot, of course.

01:34:04.320 You got to be in good physical.

01:34:05.200 All those things are important.

01:34:06.560 You got to have the skill set.

01:34:09.220 But far and away, what makes a good seal is someone that puts the team before themselves.

01:34:14.000 That's it.

01:34:14.680 That's the thing.

01:34:15.800 And if you're the, Jordan, if you're the best shot, you're the fastest, you're the strongest,

01:34:20.140 but you have yourself above the team, I don't want you in my platoon.

01:34:24.280 And no one wants you in the platoon.

01:34:25.840 That's the way it works.

01:34:26.760 So it's interesting that psychologically, if you're focused on yourself, it's going

01:34:33.020 to cause problems.

01:34:34.300 Either the problem of egocentric arrogance or the problem of paranoia, or what did you

01:34:42.060 just use to describe it?

01:34:42.960 I mean, when someone's just focused on themselves.

01:34:44.740 Self-consciousness.

01:34:45.220 Self-consciousness.

01:34:45.820 Yeah.

01:34:46.080 That's the thing.

01:34:46.760 When I see people that are self-conscious, I was like, hey, you know who notices that you

01:34:51.140 have a zit on your cheek right now?

01:34:53.460 You.

01:34:54.000 No one else cares.

01:34:54.740 Yeah.

01:34:54.920 No one else cares.

01:34:55.820 No one's, it doesn't matter.

01:34:57.400 When you walk into a room and you feel like you don't have the experience to be in a leadership

01:35:01.180 position, the person that's thinking that is you.

01:35:03.140 It doesn't really matter.

01:35:04.300 Now, if you go in and try and overcompensate for that by saying, listen, I just graduated

01:35:09.140 from college and I really know how to execute this stuff, you're going to get crushed.

01:35:13.260 Yeah.

01:35:13.780 Because you're trying to make up for the fact that you actually don't know what you're doing.

01:35:17.480 And no one, everyone knows you don't.

01:35:19.200 You just got here.

01:35:20.400 So we know you don't know what you're doing, but we don't really care about us.

01:35:23.300 We don't see it as negative.

01:35:23.700 No, we just care if you think you know what you're doing more than you actually know.

01:35:27.280 Then it's a problem.

01:35:28.060 Yeah.

01:35:28.220 Then that's definitely a problem.

01:35:29.620 And that whole thing about the authoritarian mindset and I did this series of podcasts

01:35:37.600 about this book called The Psychology of Military Incompetence and they have these authoritarian

01:35:44.540 people and when they look at the military, they think, oh, they're like, oh, yeah.

01:35:50.300 Yeah, you get that in the police too.

01:35:51.520 Yep.

01:35:51.800 You get it in the police.

01:35:52.560 You get it in law enforcement.

01:35:53.580 You get these people that have that authoritarian mindset.

01:35:56.040 They see what it looks like from the outside and they think, oh, this is going to be awesome.

01:36:00.500 This is where I belong.

01:36:01.380 Yeah.

01:36:01.760 And so they go in.

01:36:02.600 Everyone's going to wear a uniform.

01:36:03.840 They're going to have to call me, sir.

01:36:05.220 Yeah.

01:36:05.380 They're going to have to obey what I say.

01:36:06.780 It's like a dream for them.

01:36:08.660 Yeah.

01:36:09.180 And in non-combat situations, those people can perform pretty well because we're on the

01:36:16.020 parade field.

01:36:16.700 I need everyone in the same uniform.

01:36:18.420 I'm going to inspect your barracks rooms.

01:36:20.420 I'm going to make sure that you follow my orders as soon as they're given.

01:36:23.340 That's like a beautiful place for that authoritarian mindset is a non-combat situation.

01:36:29.400 But you put those people in combat and now all of a sudden there's literally no rules

01:36:34.600 anymore.

01:36:35.060 There's a very small number of rules.

01:36:36.880 And now you have to deal with, you know, Jordan who listened to me when we were on the

01:36:39.740 parade field, but now he's scared to death that he's going to die and he's not listening

01:36:43.640 to me anymore.

01:36:44.420 Now, what do I do?

01:36:45.460 How do I do that?

01:36:46.140 And he has reason to be scared.

01:36:46.960 He has reason to be scared.

01:36:48.180 So you would see, and I got to see this a lot inside the military, that people that had

01:36:51.900 the authoritarian mindset, the closed mindset, they had real problems when you put them

01:36:57.880 into combat situations where there's mayhem and chaos and they can no longer control it

01:37:02.840 and they freak out because of that.

01:37:05.020 It's a real problem.

01:37:06.180 Well, yeah.

01:37:06.660 Well, like you said, I don't think there's a better definition of chaos than warfare.

01:37:12.780 Like, obviously that's a place where the rules are suspended.

01:37:15.300 So then the question would be, well, what's the best possible mindset to bring to bear

01:37:20.420 on a situation where the rules have been suspended, right?

01:37:23.740 You can certainly see that distribution of responsibility and an appeal to voluntarism

01:37:30.240 is going to be of great utility under those, not least so you don't get shot in the back

01:37:34.960 by your own men.

01:37:36.100 Yeah.

01:37:36.400 Yeah.

01:37:37.040 And then the creativity aspect, right?

01:37:39.400 Because all of a sudden there's no rules and, or there's a very limited amount of rules.

01:37:44.720 And if we've got to find out a different way to execute these missions, that's going

01:37:47.660 to make more sense in this particular environment that we're in, that no book and no training

01:37:51.980 has prepared us for.

01:37:53.060 You know, I got asked a little while ago about, well, you know, if we were going to war with

01:37:56.140 China and I was leading, you know, my troops into combat, what would I be thinking about?

01:38:04.100 And, and I said, the thing I would be focused on, the same thing I'm always focused on,

01:38:08.940 especially going into a combat situation.

01:38:10.680 And that is keeping an open mind because I don't know what's going to happen.

01:38:17.800 The enemy doesn't know what's going to happen.

01:38:19.740 I don't know exactly how my troops are going to react.

01:38:23.520 I don't even know how I'm going to react.

01:38:26.220 And if I get fixed, a fixed mindset where I'm saying, this is what we're going to do

01:38:30.200 and this is how it's going to be.

01:38:31.160 As soon as that combat starts that you can throw that thing out the window.

01:38:35.340 And now if I have a closed mind, I fall apart.

01:38:37.440 If I have an open mind, I look around and say, okay, I see some adaptations we can make

01:38:40.700 right now.

01:38:41.220 Here's what we need to do.

01:38:42.160 Here's some adjustments we can make.

01:38:43.780 And that's what, when I ran training, that was the purpose of my training was to open

01:38:48.200 people's minds, was to put them in situations where if they stuck with a fixed mindset and

01:38:54.180 they didn't open their mind and they didn't see other perspectives, they were going to

01:38:56.540 fall apart.

01:38:57.040 They're going to get started.

01:38:57.220 So that other perspective, so that's got to be allied with that willingness to incorporate

01:39:02.980 information from the bottom up because you're going to get, so that's where the diversity

01:39:07.300 claims of the radical left have some utility.

01:39:09.560 It's like, well, in any open-ended situation, you want a genuine diversity of viewpoints

01:39:17.840 because the situation is shifting and the more options you have in front of you up to

01:39:25.820 some limited degree because, you know, time to process all those options also matters.

01:39:31.840 You don't want a uniformity of opinion because you're going to run into this problem that

01:39:37.320 you just described.

01:39:38.320 Here's a good example.

01:39:39.260 The Iraqi military, right?

01:39:41.820 It's basically a caste system.

01:39:43.660 You have the officers at top and then you had a bunch of, you know, almost, almost slave

01:39:49.340 labor a little bit.

01:39:50.360 Yeah, yeah.

01:39:50.760 And the officers would skim money off the paychecks of the soldiers.

01:39:56.360 Right.

01:39:56.740 That's how they operated.

01:39:57.780 Right.

01:39:58.500 And-

01:39:59.080 There's a loyalty building exercise for you.

01:40:01.140 Not the best loyalty building exercise at all.

01:40:03.580 And so-

01:40:04.260 So the rule is don't rip off armed subordinates?

01:40:08.820 How's that for a rule?

01:40:09.860 Here's the thing that's interesting.

01:40:11.400 So our chain of command found out that this was happening and there was a lot of pressure

01:40:17.940 throughout the U.S. military, like, we've got to stop this.

01:40:21.320 These soldiers are getting ripped off.

01:40:22.940 This is terrible.

01:40:23.840 We need to prosecute the officers that are skimming money from the paychecks.

01:40:29.100 So I went and talked to, like, brought my interpreter and we'd go talk to these soldiers.

01:40:33.440 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:40:34.240 And you say, like, hey, is it true that your boss is skimming money off your paycheck?

01:40:39.240 Like, ready to write it down and let-

01:40:41.060 Yeah.

01:40:41.200 And they go, well, of course.

01:40:43.240 He's the boss.

01:40:44.560 Of course he's going to take some of the money.

01:40:45.640 I mean, that's sort of what we, you know, that's totally normal.

01:40:49.100 They weren't, they weren't, they weren't angry about it.

01:40:52.220 They were just like, oh, yeah, well, he's the boss.

01:40:54.100 He's going to take some money.

01:40:54.900 And then when I get promoted, I'll be able to take money.

01:40:56.680 That's the way their system functions.

01:40:58.720 Uh-huh, uh-huh.

01:40:59.440 And it was-

01:40:59.920 See, I jumped to the wrong conclusion.

01:41:01.680 Yeah.

01:41:01.960 That investment, that was my conclusion, too, because I was a young enlisted guy.

01:41:05.700 And if my officer would have been skimming my money, I would have been totally against

01:41:08.360 it.

01:41:08.560 But that was a very normal thing.

01:41:10.380 And so we, I kind of try to back off and say, like, this is the way their culture is.

01:41:16.660 That's the way their culture is.

01:41:17.640 It's different than ours.

01:41:18.600 It's unacceptable.

01:41:19.260 Were there parameters of skimming?

01:41:21.440 Yeah, there are.

01:41:22.320 There's parameters of skimming.

01:41:23.580 Right.

01:41:23.960 So you could take some percent.

01:41:25.580 Yes, yes.

01:41:26.360 And it's the same thing with the Iraqis.

01:41:29.220 We'd say, hey, you know, we're going on an operation tonight.

01:41:32.300 We've got an operation tonight.

01:41:33.500 Can you bring 30 guys tonight to conduct this operation?

01:41:36.780 And they would tell you 100% of the time, yeah.

01:41:39.880 Yeah.

01:41:40.280 Yep.

01:41:40.920 And they'd show up with nine, or they'd show up with six, or they'd show up with 48.

01:41:44.640 And because it's in Shala, right?

01:41:46.340 It's God willing, we'll have 30 people.

01:41:47.840 If that's the way it's supposed to be, that's the way it'll be.

01:41:49.980 And instead of us going, hey, this isn't the way we do it, we had to say, okay, well,

01:41:55.000 how do they operate?

01:41:55.860 What do they think like?

01:41:57.040 How can we incorporate their perspective on things into our culture?

01:42:01.620 And how can we merge these cultures together so that we can communicate with them in an

01:42:06.480 effective way?

01:42:07.140 So we go, okay, cool.

01:42:08.840 How many people do you think you can bring tonight?

01:42:10.780 And they're going to give you a better answer than if you say, can you bring this many?

01:42:14.740 It's a little nuance in the way that you interact with them.

01:42:19.300 Right.

01:42:19.700 But if you have-

01:42:20.080 Well, that might've even been a politeness norm, eh?

01:42:22.160 Because their response to you might've been, well, the polite thing is to tell the person

01:42:26.360 who's asking what they want to hear.

01:42:27.940 Yep.

01:42:28.080 Right, and that is different than saying, well, how many people do you think you could

01:42:31.340 bring?

01:42:31.940 Totally different.

01:42:32.680 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:42:33.320 So if I had a fixed mindset and a closed mind, it would've been saying, this is the military,

01:42:38.540 a platoon is 40 guys, you need to bring a platoon tonight.

01:42:41.520 If you don't bring a platoon, the world explodes, right?

01:42:44.380 Nothing's going to work.

01:42:45.500 But the open-minded attitude is like, oh, they think a little bit differently than we do.

01:42:50.980 Hey, how many people can you bring?

01:42:52.800 And all of a sudden, okay, you can bring 12.

01:42:54.700 Okay, then we'll bring 18 and we'll have 30 and we'll be able to get this thing done.

01:42:57.440 We'll make it happen.

01:42:58.860 But when we have a closed mind, we don't hear other people's perspectives, it's actually

01:43:04.560 insane.

01:43:06.860 I've seen people, we have intelligence come in, information come in, and just be like,

01:43:11.960 no, that's, just shut it off.

01:43:14.280 Yeah.

01:43:14.600 As if it doesn't exist.

01:43:15.900 Yeah.

01:43:16.120 Instead of saying, oh, well, at a minimum, where'd that information come from, right?

01:43:20.220 I might not agree with that information, but we've got someone telling us that there's

01:43:24.020 a machine gun nest in this location.

01:43:27.240 No, that's impossible.

01:43:28.640 Yeah.

01:43:29.520 I've heard people say those kind of things.

01:43:31.120 People do that in their own marriages all the time.

01:43:33.000 Yeah, it's totally ridiculous.

01:43:34.400 So to put your ego in check and say, oh, that person might understand, or this intelligence

01:43:39.740 may come from a place, something that I don't understand or I don't know about.

01:43:42.740 Let me open my mind and at least ask some questions about it.

01:43:44.900 And we're seeing this in the political world right now, right?

01:43:47.840 The divisiveness in the country is like, oh, I'm right, you're wrong.

01:43:51.080 Therefore, everything that you say, I don't listen to anything that you say.

01:43:53.780 And that's the way it is.

01:43:54.980 And the end of conversation, I don't want to hear anything that you have to say, which

01:43:58.120 is a real problem.

01:43:59.180 Instead of having conversations with people and trying to understand what your perspective

01:44:03.400 is, crazy as it may seem to me, I still have to listen to what you have to say and

01:44:08.620 try and integrate that into it.

01:44:09.880 That's especially true when you have to live.

01:44:11.540 I was on Bill Maher's show at one point, and it was me and a bunch of people who were,

01:44:17.480 at least under the current circumstances, more liberal than me.

01:44:20.520 And they were going off on Trump and the megatypes.

01:44:23.500 And I brought the conversation to a halt by asking them how that attitude, essentially

01:44:32.180 of contempt that they brought to bear on the situation, was going to serve them, given

01:44:35.920 that that was 50% of the population and they're going to have to live with them, right?

01:44:40.380 And so this ARC thing that we've put together in London, the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship,

01:44:46.700 one of the rules that we're attempting to implement, we're afraid that any enterprise

01:44:54.700 that's international visionary, let's say, will have a proclivity to turn into something

01:45:00.660 authoritarian in like no time flat.

01:45:02.600 You could make a cool movie about that, right?

01:45:03.720 Yeah, well, no kidding.

01:45:04.640 The ARC goes wild.

01:45:06.040 Well, no kidding.

01:45:06.700 Absolutely.

01:45:07.160 One of our principles is that any policy that you have to implement by manipulation or force

01:45:14.840 is at minimum suboptimal, right?

01:45:18.040 That you need voluntary buy-in.

01:45:20.100 And that's something like consent of the governed.

01:45:22.040 But I also think that it's more just a counsel of wisdom because it's a lot easier to lead

01:45:28.840 people where they want to go.

01:45:31.800 And it's really incumbent, it's kind of a definition of leadership, you know, is that

01:45:35.260 you have to find out where people want to go.

01:45:42.600 And you should assume that maybe they have the reasons for the decisions that they made.

01:45:48.000 And then you can help them strategize about how that might be undertaken and what their

01:45:52.520 respective roles might be.

01:45:54.020 And it's very useful as well to give, not to give them something that's important to

01:45:58.500 do, but to encourage them to take on something important to do and then to back the hell off

01:46:04.860 so they can do it, right?

01:46:08.820 No better tool in leadership than giving people ownership of what they're doing.

01:46:13.000 You know, the classic in the military is I don't say, hey, Jordan, here's the mission.

01:46:17.960 Here's the people I want you to take.

01:46:19.800 Here's the weapons I want you to use.

01:46:21.260 Here's the vehicles I want you to bring.

01:46:22.760 Here's how I want you to assault the building.

01:46:24.340 Here's the time I want you to hit the target.

01:46:26.120 Here's the time I want you to, the route I want you to take to get back here.

01:46:29.700 And here's what time I want you to do the debrief.

01:46:32.500 So take ownership of that and go execute.

01:46:34.360 That doesn't work.

01:46:35.900 What we want to do in a decentralized organization is say, hey, Jordan, here's the target you

01:46:41.400 got to hit tonight.

01:46:41.840 Right, right, right.

01:46:42.760 Yep.

01:46:43.080 Go figure out how you want to do it.

01:46:44.120 Yep, yep.

01:46:44.900 And if you're a good leader, then you turn to your team and you say, hey, guys, here's the

01:46:49.000 target we got to hit tonight.

01:46:49.760 How can we do this?

01:46:50.480 How do you think we should do this?

01:46:51.320 And all of a sudden you have ownership over this.

01:46:54.460 And how do you negotiate agreement on the original target?

01:46:59.120 Well, that's the thing is, if you say to me, hey, Johnco, why do you want to hit that

01:47:03.780 target?

01:47:04.000 Yeah.

01:47:04.180 I should be able to say, well, we found out that that's the node that's been making

01:47:08.120 explosive devices that's been hitting all of our bases.

01:47:10.960 Here's our prioritization rationale.

01:47:13.020 You say, cool, got it.

01:47:14.080 Yeah.

01:47:14.600 Occasionally, and I can't be afraid of this.

01:47:16.220 Occasionally you say, hey, Johnco, why are we hitting that target?

01:47:18.120 And I say, I'm not sure.

01:47:20.900 Right.

01:47:21.280 That's not good.

01:47:22.060 That's not good at all.

01:47:22.800 In fact, that's to me.

01:47:24.540 You know what?

01:47:24.980 Let me go find out.

01:47:25.840 Right, definitely.

01:47:26.420 And also occasionally, I might say, we want to hit the target because we've been getting

01:47:31.040 bombed and we want that to stop.

01:47:34.080 And this is the node that's been making these explosives.

01:47:36.140 And you might say to me, hey, the road that you want us to go down and hit this target has

01:47:41.880 had roadside bombs on it every day and there's no other entry in there.

01:47:46.920 I don't think we should do this.

01:47:48.980 And then what should I say?

01:47:50.100 I should say, oh, I did not know that.

01:47:51.520 Right.

01:47:52.100 And then it's up the chain of command.

01:47:53.440 How can we find another way to prosecute this target?

01:47:55.860 Uh-huh.

01:47:56.580 And because I listen to you, now when I come back and say, hey, actually, we did some analysis.

01:48:02.240 We are going to get you some helicopters.

01:48:03.460 You're not going to have to drive down the road.

01:48:04.460 Here's the new tools you have.

01:48:06.920 And you say, great.

01:48:07.900 And so we move forward down the path, not by me dictating to you and not by you protesting

01:48:12.560 and calling me an idiot, but by us having a relationship and working together to figure

01:48:17.240 out the best solution to the problem.

01:48:18.520 Well, you can never be afraid as a leader to not know the answer, to say like, well,

01:48:24.220 I'm actually not sure about that.

01:48:25.220 Let me find out.

01:48:26.520 People are scared of that.

01:48:27.760 People are scared of when someone on their team raises their hand and says, hey, boss,

01:48:31.160 why are we doing this?

01:48:33.320 A lot of times their response is because I told you to.

01:48:35.600 Yeah, right.

01:48:36.020 We say that to our kids.

01:48:37.520 Yeah.

01:48:37.700 This is a terrible answer even for your kids.

01:48:39.320 Yeah.

01:48:39.580 Even for your kids.

01:48:41.180 The answer should be, well, let me explain it to you.

01:48:44.840 Yeah.

01:48:45.040 And by the way, clean your room.

01:48:46.820 Why?

01:48:47.140 I've had this with a thousand parents.

01:48:50.440 Why should I clean my room?

01:48:51.580 And there are some whys, right?

01:48:52.960 Yeah.

01:48:53.240 You can say, well, you know, if we have a fire and the firemen come in here and you've

01:48:57.540 got toys all over the floor, you could trip and fall and it could be a real problem.

01:48:59.940 And your kid might buy that, right?

01:49:01.920 They might buy that.

01:49:02.980 But they might be like, hmm.

01:49:04.680 Low probability.

01:49:05.640 Yeah.

01:49:05.840 Low probability.

01:49:06.420 Low probability.

01:49:07.660 I'm not cleaning the room.

01:49:08.660 Yeah.

01:49:08.820 And occasionally, if you don't really have a good answer.

01:49:11.820 Yeah.

01:49:13.000 Okay.

01:49:14.320 Well, if you want your laundry done, at a minimum, you've got to put your clothes in

01:49:17.460 the hamper.

01:49:18.020 Other than that, you can leave the Tonka toys all over the place.

01:49:20.380 And you think, well, then you're creating this undisciplined child.

01:49:23.740 No.

01:49:23.960 Actually, you're giving your child the ability to learn from themselves three days later when

01:49:28.860 they want to go to school and they can't find their Tonka truck.

01:49:31.320 It's like, where's my Tonka truck?

01:49:32.600 Well, it's somewhere in your room.

01:49:34.720 Where'd you put it?

01:49:35.460 Yeah.

01:49:35.860 I don't know.

01:49:37.160 So thinking that your kid is going to just devolve into this savage human being that's

01:49:44.460 undisciplined throughout their life is the wrong answer.

01:49:48.200 Well, you highlighted something there that's also of extreme importance from a leadership

01:49:54.040 perspective too, which is the refusal to make rules, to make unnecessary rules.

01:50:00.460 A good leadership, what would you say, set of principles is not too many rules, but enforcement

01:50:08.380 of the rules of the minimal set of rules that do exist.

01:50:11.360 And then you might say, well, how do you know what the appropriate rules are?

01:50:15.540 And one answer to that would be, well, if you don't have a series of deep reasons for

01:50:21.040 your rule, and it boils down to, because I said so, that's probably not a rule that you

01:50:27.140 are in a position to advance or assist upon, right?

01:50:33.860 It needs to be placed in exactly, as you said, in the military situation.

01:50:39.420 Here's a target.

01:50:41.000 Here's the cost to attempting to hit that target, which is not a trivial cost at all.

01:50:45.540 The right response on the part of the men is, well, why is that worth the cost?

01:50:49.760 And so they're going to reflect that back to you, unless you have enough reasons behind

01:50:54.460 that strategy to eliminate their concerns, at least compared to any other plan they might

01:51:02.100 come up with.

01:51:03.740 Their appropriate response in some ways is to not, they're certainly not going to be enthusiastic

01:51:07.840 about the mission.

01:51:08.640 They're certainly not going to think, well, this clearly needs to be done.

01:51:11.180 Yep.

01:51:11.840 And there's situations, and Vietnam War is a great time to talk about this, because there

01:51:17.020 are situations where I said, Jordan, you got to go execute this.

01:51:19.320 Yeah.

01:51:19.660 And you said, why?

01:51:20.900 And I said, well, because it's coming from higher ups.

01:51:22.740 Yeah.

01:51:23.160 And you go, okay, boss, got it.

01:51:24.580 Yeah.

01:51:24.840 And you take your patrol 100 meters outside the wire, you sit in the bushes for six hours,

01:51:31.340 you come back and you say, yeah, boss, we tried, we didn't see anything out there.

01:51:34.720 Right.

01:51:35.040 But you didn't execute anything you were supposed to execute.

01:51:37.120 Right, right, right, right, right, definitely, definitely.

01:51:40.180 So understanding why you're doing what you're doing, absolutely critical.

01:51:45.000 And yeah, from a governmental perspective.

01:51:47.840 Well, those explanations also give people the option to think on their feet when they're

01:51:52.820 actually in the complex situation.

01:51:54.380 Because if you provided them with five rationales for this target, and then things go astray,

01:51:59.940 they still have those five rationales to build new targets out of, right?

01:52:03.540 Yep.

01:52:03.980 So that's why they need to be informed.

01:52:05.880 Yep.

01:52:06.700 And being able to admit when you're wrong about something, and being able to say, you

01:52:10.440 know, I actually, the last target we hit that you pushed back against and I told you

01:52:14.160 just do it, you were right and I was wrong.

01:52:16.340 We shouldn't hit that target.

01:52:17.300 That's okay.

01:52:17.820 And you don't see this from politicians at all.

01:52:21.140 You never hear a politician say, yeah, you know, what I was thinking at the time was

01:52:24.440 wrong, and here's my adjustment, and here's what I want to do moving forward.

01:52:27.980 It was kind of ridiculous during COVID, the way those things just piled up.

01:52:31.860 Oh, yeah, that's for sure.

01:52:32.440 It was ridiculous.

01:52:33.540 Yeah, well, that's, you know, part of that, I would say, and maybe we should close with

01:52:37.580 this, part of that was likely the fact that there was a decision made very early on that

01:52:42.700 it was okay to compel people by force.

01:52:46.820 As soon as, as soon as, I'll tell you, maybe this is a good closing.

01:52:50.980 This is cool.

01:52:53.260 There's a scene in Exodus.

01:52:54.820 I did this Exodus seminar recently, and we're talking about leadership.

01:52:57.900 So this makes, this is perfectly appropriate.

01:53:00.900 So Moses is an archetypal leader, right?

01:53:02.940 He's leading people away from tyranny and away from their own slavery, right?

01:53:07.740 And so when every leader does that, when you're trying to make people autonomous, you're trying

01:53:11.720 to lead them away from their own slavery.

01:53:13.560 When you're trying to help inform them that they shouldn't be using power, you're trying

01:53:18.860 to lead them away from tyranny.

01:53:20.000 Okay, so Moses does a pretty damn good job of this, and he's got his people right to

01:53:25.460 the edge of the promised land, and this has taken 40 years, right?

01:53:28.060 It's taken his whole bloody life, right?

01:53:29.820 And so they're still in the desert.

01:53:32.000 They're lost.

01:53:32.780 They're wandering.

01:53:33.420 They're still in the desert, but the promised land is at hand, and they're out of water.

01:53:38.300 And so the Israelites start bitching and whining about this.

01:53:41.180 They come to Moses, and Moses, they say, go talk to God, because you're in with him.

01:53:45.020 And God says, ask these rocks to deliver water for your people, and they'll deliver water.

01:53:53.200 And so Moses listens, but then when he goes to the rocks, he hits them with his staff.

01:54:00.160 He uses authority, he uses power twice, bang, bang, right?

01:54:03.960 When he was told to ask.

01:54:07.280 And so the rocks deliver water, and the Israelites are no longer parched.

01:54:13.240 But God punishes Moses by telling him that he will now die before he enters the promised land.

01:54:21.220 And so it's an extremely interesting twist.

01:54:23.520 It's a very short part of the story, eh?

01:54:25.760 But Moses, throughout his leadership career, uses excessive force a number of times.

01:54:32.200 It's his weakness.

01:54:33.280 And it's, despite the fact that he sacrifices for 40 years, and is probably the most effective leader in the entire Old Testament corpus,

01:54:44.160 he's stopped from attaining his highest goal because he relies on force.

01:54:49.900 Right?

01:54:50.520 Yep.

01:54:50.940 Right.

01:54:51.520 I say constantly to lead with the minimum force required.

01:54:56.900 Right, right.

01:54:57.500 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.

01:55:04.380 Yep.

01:55:04.800 And it's the same thing as a leader of human beings.

01:55:07.380 You want to lead with the minimum force required.

01:55:09.400 Yep.

01:55:10.540 Hopefully, hopefully, in an ideal world, that's nothing.

01:55:15.000 Right.

01:55:15.380 My team knows what to do.

01:55:17.000 They know what the goal is.

01:55:18.000 Yep.

01:55:18.240 And they can move there.

01:55:19.060 Hey, occasionally, do you as a leader have to step in and say, hey, everyone, we got to make a change.

01:55:22.360 This is where we're going.

01:55:23.000 Yes, you occasionally have to do that.

01:55:24.060 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.

01:55:32.860 Well, that's a great place to end.

01:55:34.860 And so, thank you very much.

01:55:36.320 It's always a pleasure talking to you.

01:55:37.920 Always, indeed.

01:55:38.760 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.

01:55:45.860 For everybody who's watching and listening, most of you know this already, but I'll point it out anyways.

01:55:50.420 I'm going to continue talking to Jocko for another half an hour on the Daily Wire Plus side.

01:55:54.500 I think I'm going to talk to him about the political situation that surrounds us at the moment in relationship to leadership.

01:56:01.640 We'll talk about Biden.

01:56:02.720 We'll talk about Trump more from the psychological and philosophical perspective.

01:56:08.280 And so, if you want to join us for that, please do.

01:56:10.580 I always think it's useful, at least in principle, to throw some support behind the Daily Wire Plus team.

01:56:19.160 They're doing a good job on the free speech front, as far as I'm concerned, and they facilitate these conversations.

01:56:25.040 And that's been very useful to me, and hopefully to all of you as well.

01:56:27.680 So, thank you, Jocko.

01:56:29.060 Very good to see you again.

01:56:30.300 To everybody watching and listening, thank you for your time and attention.

01:56:33.420 The Daily Wire Plus people and the film crew here, thanks for your help.

01:56:36.660 Ciao.

01:56:40.580 Bye.

420. What Moves You Will Move the World ｜ Jocko Willink

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