The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - Myth & Reality： General Stanley McChrystal

00:00:00.960 Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.

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00:00:57.420 Welcome to the second episode of Season 2 of the Jordan B. Peterson Podcast.

00:01:03.580 My name is Michaela Peterson, and I've been working with my dad for the last year.

00:01:07.360 We've decided to do this podcast as a joint project because we thought it might be something fun and meaningful to do together.

00:01:13.120 For this episode, we're presenting Dad's discussion with General Stanley McChrystal on leadership.

00:01:18.320 They talked in some detail about McChrystal's new book, Leaders, Myths, and Reality.

00:01:23.360 Why did you want to talk to General McChrystal?

00:01:25.360 Well, there are a variety of reasons. I mean, first of all, he's an impressive person.

00:01:30.520 He's done a lot of things in his life. You don't get to be a four-star general without putting a tremendous amount of time and energy and skill into it.

00:01:37.780 And so, it's always interesting to talk to people whose skill domain, knowledge domain, is way outside mine.

00:01:44.600 And then I was also interested in his take on leadership because leadership is something I'm interested in as a psychologist.

00:01:50.900 And the leadership literature is an absolute mess. We don't really know how to define it.

00:01:55.360 There's all sorts of different kinds of leadership.

00:01:57.480 We know that intelligence has something to do with it and conscientiousness often because leaders need to be reliable.

00:02:03.160 But there's all sorts of other personality traits that seem to be associated with leadership that are relevant in different situations.

00:02:09.160 So, it doesn't look like there is any such thing necessarily as generic leadership.

00:02:14.520 Extroversion?

00:02:15.000 No, not necessarily. I mean, because you can have a visionary leader who's very high in openness, who's not particularly extroverted.

00:02:22.700 You know, and then it would depend on who they had around them, you know, to help them communicate their message.

00:02:26.940 They need some extroverts around them.

00:02:28.100 Well, extroverts are good to communicate.

00:02:30.280 Yeah.

00:02:30.620 But there's lots of different styles and types of leadership.

00:02:34.540 And so, I was interested to find out what he had to say about that and also about his personal experience molding young men in the military.

00:02:42.060 And his ideas about what might be done to help young people mature today.

00:02:47.760 And so, we discussed all of that.

00:02:49.780 And that was all very interesting.

00:02:51.280 When we come back, Dad's conversation with General Stanley McChrystal.

00:02:59.140 Dad is going to be debating Slavoj Žižek, April 19th at 7.30pm EST in Toronto.

00:03:05.620 Tickets sold out at the Sony Centre incredibly fast, so we're offering a live stream for the first time.

00:03:10.960 Hopefully, it'll go well.

00:03:12.140 We figured people who weren't in Toronto would want a chance to see the debate.

00:03:15.380 Plus, a lot of Žižek's fans are European, obviously.

00:03:18.200 The debate's called Happiness, Marxism vs. Capitalism and should be extremely interesting.

00:03:24.340 Tickets will be sold at JordanBPeterson.com starting April 1st.

00:03:28.320 Sign up on his blog for his mailing list at JordanBPeterson.com and you'll be notified when tickets are available.

00:03:37.200 Hi, everyone.

00:03:38.560 I'm pleased today, very pleased to have the opportunity, the privilege to speak with General Stanley McChrystal.

00:03:46.480 General McChrystal retired in July 2010 as a four-star general.

00:03:52.660 After over 34 years of service in the U.S. Army, his final assignment was as the commander of NATO's International Security Assistance Force and all U.S. forces in Afghanistan.

00:04:02.940 He had previously served as the director of the Joint Staff and almost five years in command of the Joint Special Operations Command.

00:04:10.800 Since 2010, he has taught courses in international relations at Yale University as a senior fellow of the university's Jackson Institute for Global Affairs.

00:04:19.880 He's the best-selling author of his most recent book, Leaders, Myth and Reality.

00:04:26.780 And today we're going to talk about, well, the book and about leadership in general.

00:04:30.640 We're going to talk about the development of young people and what's necessary to help young people make the difficult transition from, let's say, unstructured adolescence into responsible maturity.

00:04:43.400 We're going to talk about the geopolitical landscape that faces the U.S. and the West over the next 10 years, something approximating that.

00:04:50.380 And we're also going to talk about General McChrystal's future plans and ambitions.

00:04:55.340 And so, welcome to the YouTube channel and the podcast.

00:05:00.420 It's, as I said, it's a real privilege to be able to talk to you.

00:05:03.980 It's my honor. Thank you.

00:05:05.800 So, let's start by talking about your newest book, Leaders, Myth and Reality.

00:05:11.780 And that's published by Sentinel, an imprint of Penguin Random House.

00:05:15.940 When did it come out?

00:05:17.380 It came out in late October 2018.

00:05:20.900 And how's it being received?

00:05:22.960 It's being received very well.

00:05:24.720 It's a pretty deep book.

00:05:28.120 So, people have sort of got to put their arms around it before they understand it.

00:05:31.740 But it's been very successful.

00:05:33.560 Now, you profiled a number of leaders in that book.

00:05:36.100 I believe 13.

00:05:37.320 Is that correct?

00:05:38.820 That's correct.

00:05:39.620 We used the model that Plutarch had used for parallel lives where he did the Greeks and Romans.

00:05:45.080 We didn't do 48 like he did.

00:05:46.920 We picked 13 people, a pretty diverse group.

00:05:50.140 We had Margaret Thatcher, the U.K. Prime Minister, Martin Luther, the Protestant Reformation, Harriet Tubman.

00:05:57.220 And we tried to get a different group so that people thought about leadership not in a political or military or single sense.

00:06:04.520 So, okay.

00:06:06.480 Well, let's start.

00:06:07.520 I mean, I'm relatively familiar with the psychological research on leadership, which I think is generally quite a mess.

00:06:14.300 And I think the reason for that is that it isn't obvious that leadership is a homogenous category.

00:06:21.420 There's many different ways of leading.

00:06:23.780 But I would also say that there's probably some commonalities.

00:06:27.100 Like, it seems to me, for example, that one of the primary attributes of a leader who's worth his or her salt, let's say, is the ability to instill and also deserve trust among the people that they work with.

00:06:40.360 But I'd be interested in what you've derived from your, well, from all your experience, including the experience of writing this book.

00:06:47.740 What do you have to say about leadership?

00:06:50.200 What have you learned?

00:06:50.780 I think the biggest thing we learned is that for most of our lives, when I had been taught it by people, when I had the chance to practice it and try to learn it myself, is that we really didn't understand the essence of leadership.

00:07:03.300 We had simplified it.

00:07:05.040 And in the book, the way we outlined that is we'd simplified it through these mythologies.

00:07:09.660 We thought of leaders as a checklist of traits or behaviors that they do.

00:07:14.640 And that's that there's a generically good leader model or the idea that the leader is the person, the man or woman who come in and is responsible for success or failure in the organization.

00:07:25.040 And finally, that we as followers or participants, you might say, that we demand our leaders to be effective and successful.

00:07:32.600 And all three of those are absolute myths.

00:07:35.480 What we found is leadership is intensely contextual.

00:07:39.000 There's no such thing as a generically good leader.

00:07:41.620 You pick a person up who's very successful in Corporation H and put them somewhere else.

00:07:46.520 Their chances of being successful are actually much lower than if someone inside the organization is promoted.

00:07:52.000 We found that leaders are not the reason organizations succeed or fail in many cases.

00:07:58.560 And we also, we as followers, we elect, select, follow, support leaders who often cases serially fail or take us in the wrong place.

00:08:08.420 It's because leadership is actually our conclusion.

00:08:12.140 It's not a thing that the leader possesses that they direct on followers and solve problems.

00:08:17.740 It's almost like an emergent property from the interaction between leaders, followers, and the always unique contextual factors of the moment.

00:08:27.760 And so it's this very complex interaction that we try to simplify because we try to get our minds around it.

00:08:34.600 Well, it seemed to me, tell me what you think about this.

00:08:38.040 As the people that I've seen operate as effective leaders in different contexts, the first thing that characterizes them is that they tend to do a tremendous amount of work to try to understand the organization that they're in fact leading and from the bottom up.

00:08:52.300 So they tend to know the organization inside out and backwards.

00:08:57.400 And then they do a tremendous amount of listening and aggregating, you know, because if you go into an organization and you discuss the structure and the challenges of the organization with the people who are actually in the trenches, especially near the bottom, I would say, they'll tell you how the organization works.

00:09:17.420 And then you can aggregate and synthesize and reflect back.

00:09:21.260 And that seems to be associated with your idea of that reciprocal relationship between the leadership and the people who are hypothetically following.

00:09:29.420 That's exactly right.

00:09:30.700 We found out that leaders who think they have figured it out and then they get put on a new program and they try to run that play again almost always end up with frustration.

00:09:39.200 And it's really what you described.

00:09:42.260 I would also use the word humility because you come in and you don't think you have a solution.

00:09:47.240 Instead, what you do is you listen, you show some empathy to understand why people do what they do, because then you can divine the right kind of leadership for that situation because it's always different.

00:09:59.700 You know, there's a there's a research showing what makes a physician an effective diagnostician.

00:10:06.400 And one of the markers is the number of words that the patient speaks compared to the number of words the physician speaks in the first 15 minutes of their interaction.

00:10:16.700 And the more words the patient speaks, the higher the diagnostic accuracy of the physician.

00:10:21.700 And I really like that idea of humility.

00:10:23.700 You know, you you have to walk into a complex situation knowing that you don't know anything, including what the problems are.

00:10:30.220 And then if you have the possibility of listening, if you have the opportunity to listen, then and people trust you, that which is a real crucial issue and something that's maybe central to leadership, that people will actually tell you what the problems are and what's actually going on.

00:10:44.280 And that seems to be a prerequisite for for solving them.

00:10:47.420 Right. You actually have to know what the problems are.

00:10:50.640 I think that's exactly right.

00:10:52.220 When I took over in Afghanistan in 2009, I'd been in Afghanistan a lot before, but now I was in charge.

00:10:58.500 And the first thing I did was this listening tour.

00:11:01.000 And it was essential because you have to start with the assumption that they are rational actors, that they do things a certain way for a reason.

00:11:09.560 When you see it from afar, you say they're corrupt or they're this or that.

00:11:13.000 When you get up close, if you were in their shoes, the reality is you probably would do it very similar to the way they do.

00:11:20.240 And so it's a certain amount of just showing respect to go and listen and understand, OK, why are we doing it this way?

00:11:27.120 There may be a better way and you may be able to help.

00:11:29.900 But if you walk in with a bag of solutions, I think they're almost always wrong.

00:11:33.500 And as you say, it's hard to build trust.

00:11:35.680 Yeah. Well, the problem with walking in with a bag of solutions is that you have the steering wheel, but it's not connected to any of the mechanism.

00:11:42.600 That's exactly right.

00:11:43.620 You know, you can have, I tell young people I work with now, having the right answer in the room is no longer the secret.

00:11:51.600 You can get the right answer often on the Internet.

00:11:54.400 But the reality is it's getting the people in the room to accept the right answer and implement it.

00:12:00.000 Yeah. So, OK, so that's the next thing that seems absolutely crucial is that.

00:12:03.440 So if you if you listen and gather information that enables you to lay out the problem set and then to start to formulate possible solutions, then the next issue is to create, what would you say, formulate those solutions in a manner that encourages and motivates people to be on board with them instead of resisting them at the multiple levels of the organization.

00:12:26.440 Because that's a big problem, too. I've seen this many times in organizations where the leaders will command a particular direction and then the implementation of that is resisted at every single hierarchical strata of the organization.

00:12:40.640 And what you get is the appearance of compliance with none of the reality.

00:12:46.140 That's exactly right. I founded special operating forces.

00:12:48.760 You had big, experienced personalities, and I found it would be better to say, we have this problem.

00:12:55.040 How would you solve it? And if they were anywhere close to what I thought was a workable solution, I would accept their solution because it was theirs.

00:13:04.800 They owned it. They would then implement it with a completely different level than if I had told them, here's exactly what I want you to do, this, this, this.

00:13:12.040 And the reality is often they had a much better sense of it than I did.

00:13:15.160 Yeah, well, there's a psychological truism there, too.

00:13:18.000 Like, if you're a clinician, one of the things that clinicians have learned over the last hundred years is that the probability that a client will follow your advice is quite low.

00:13:29.660 But the probability that they will follow their own advice if they formulate it themselves is quite high.

00:13:35.780 And so partly what you're doing is encouraging and enticing people into formulating a problem statement and then also determining how it is that they would go about implementing the solution.

00:13:48.680 I think that's right. And that sense of ownership, responsibility is so key.

00:13:51.940 Yeah, okay. And that's another thing is that and that's a matter of delegation is that if someone comes up with a solution to a problem themselves and then they implement it themselves, then they also have all of the psychological and practical advantages of having done the problem formulation and the solution, right?

00:14:11.880 Then they get to, you said ownership, they get to identify with the success and the failure of that particular enterprise.

00:14:18.400 And that, what would you say? I hate to use the word empowers because I think that word has been badly corrupted, but it's not a bad choice of words to characterize that situation.

00:14:30.740 That's right. I describe it to people sometimes. I said, if you go to your boss and you say, boss, we can do A or B, and the boss says, do A, do it this way, you go out.

00:14:40.000 And then if A doesn't work, you tend to go home that night and tell your spouse, well, boss had a bad day, just made a bad call.

00:14:44.920 Yeah, right. But if the boss looks at you and says, use your best judgment, then tell me what you did, you go out to your team and you say, we really got to get this right.

00:14:52.960 Yeah, well, it also develops your team across time. The more you can delegate that responsibility down.

00:14:58.160 I mean, one of the, I think, useful rules of thumb for managerial types is that when you go into an organization, you should strive to make yourself redundant because you should be able to distribute everything that you're,

00:15:10.620 and I don't mean to offload it or to avoid the responsibility, but if you're running the organization properly, then you should be putting people in place who can do everything that it is that you hypothetically need to do.

00:15:24.200 That also means that if you disappear suddenly, if you leave, then the organization can keep moving forward without you seamlessly.

00:15:33.080 That's exactly right. Someone once said, the most effective leaders, the group tends to say at the end, we did it all ourselves.

00:15:39.360 Right, right, right, right. Well, then they can step away. So, okay, so let's walk through the book a little bit.

00:15:45.880 You talked about all 13 people. Why did you pick them and what did you learn and what do you reveal about each of them?

00:15:55.000 We don't have to go through all 13, but...

00:15:56.560 Sure. We did six genres, we called them. One was zealots, and we picked Maximilien de Robespierre of the French Revolution and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who I fought for Maqaeda in Iraq.

00:16:09.000 We picked geniuses, Albert Einstein, Leonard Bernstein. We picked power brokers. We were going to use politicians, but we used Boss Tweed and Margaret Thatcher.

00:16:18.960 We used reformers, Martin Luther of the Protestant Reformation and Dr. Martin Luther King.

00:16:23.980 And what we were trying to do was get diversity in sex, gender, nationality, and whatnot so that we would get a wider thought process on this.

00:16:33.740 We didn't want to follow sort of a type. People expect a military person to write about military people.

00:16:39.020 We have 13, because obviously six pairs doesn't equal 13, because General Robert E. Lee had been my hero growing up.

00:16:47.980 I'd gone to Washington Lee High School. I grew up near his home.

00:16:50.980 So he had been the example of the perfect leader in my youth.

00:16:55.960 And then as I got older, and after Charlottesville particularly, in the spring of 2017, you know, I did a lot of thinking about it.

00:17:03.960 And the reality is, I came to the conclusion I had to write about Robert E. Lee because he'd been so important to me.

00:17:10.540 But I now had this conflicted relationship with him.

00:17:13.960 In many ways, he was the near perfect exemplar of leadership.

00:17:18.340 But in a very fundamental way, the fact that he betrayed his country, and he did it for the cause of slavery, you can't overlook.

00:17:27.460 And so I tried to take that one on, because for me, it was a complex personal thing.

00:17:33.580 And I came to the conclusion, I still admire so much about him.

00:17:37.180 But I now don't think of him as a mythological hero.

00:17:41.360 I think of him as a human being, just like you or I, flawed.

00:17:47.720 But if you can look at each of these leaders that way, get them off their pedestal, but yet don't automatically put them in a ditch and say they're valueless.

00:17:56.540 That's because Abu Musab Azarkawi, who my force killed, and I was happy we did, I'll be honest, I admired his leadership skills.

00:18:04.960 So what about them?

00:18:05.980 What was it about him that you felt was compelling?

00:18:09.400 Well, he came up in a tough background from an industrial town in Jordan, very little education.

00:18:17.540 He went and became a jihadist in Afghanistan when that was popular.

00:18:22.920 And then he got thrown in prison back in Jordan for five years.

00:18:25.480 And during that period, what he did was he became really pious, really disciplined, really focused.

00:18:31.840 And he didn't have the advantages other people do, but he found if he was more committed than other people, if he was more fanatical about the cause, that people would follow him.

00:18:42.500 And so his zealotry became sort of this white, hot, burning flame that people were attracted to.

00:18:49.180 But he was genuine.

00:18:50.140 And so when he came into Iraq and we fought against him for two and a half years, here's a guy who was charismatic.

00:18:57.200 He was completely focused on his cause.

00:18:59.440 I disagreed with his cause.

00:19:01.120 But the reality is maybe in his position, I would have believed it as well.

00:19:04.920 And who's to say I'm right and he's wrong?

00:19:06.460 And his ability to motivate people and to live the values that he decided to adopt is pretty impressive.

00:19:15.640 And the frightening part about it was many of the people who followed him didn't share his level of fanaticism.

00:19:22.780 But because he was so overtly confident, because he was so overtly committed, because he was willing to walk the walk, people followed him anyway.

00:19:33.680 And that really says a lot more about us as followers than it does about him as a leader.

00:19:38.620 Well, it also indicates part of the nonverbal element of deciding who constitutes a competent leader.

00:19:46.060 Like, we definitely associate confidence and the ability to keep negative emotion under control with the ability to lead.

00:19:54.360 Because we're looking for people who have a direction.

00:19:56.580 That's the first thing, because we need a direction.

00:19:58.220 But then we're also looking for people who can maintain control over anxiety in particular, because that indicates that they're stable in their orientation in the world.

00:20:10.300 And that's attractive.

00:20:11.300 If you don't have time to do a detailed analysis of their ethos, the nonverbal cues of confidence and direction are a decent pointer to someone who's competent, even though they're not infallible pointers.

00:20:25.860 That's exactly right.

00:20:27.120 In combat, what you find is young leaders, young lieutenants, young sergeants.

00:20:31.360 The first thing that happens when the first round fires is all the young soldiers look to you.

00:20:36.000 They look to see how you're going to react, because they want to know how they should react.

00:20:39.720 You know, young children do the same thing with their mothers.

00:20:42.980 So if, for example, if a baby, a young child, three years old or so, is in a room, let's say, with their mother, and a mouse runs across the room, and they've never seen the mouse,

00:20:51.840 the first thing they'll do is they'll look at the mouse, because it attracts their attention, and then they'll look at their mother.

00:20:56.800 And they read off her face what the mouse means.

00:21:00.720 And if she's up on the chair screaming, then, of course, the child is going to be terrified.

00:21:04.660 So they call that referencing.

00:21:06.540 And so it's very interesting to see that replicated on the battlefield.

00:21:10.080 Right?

00:21:10.300 So it's an instant search for a model for emulation.

00:21:14.480 Exactly.

00:21:15.860 Mm-hmm.

00:21:16.420 Okay.

00:21:16.820 So what other people that you wrote about really struck you in a particular way that's interesting to talk about?

00:21:24.460 Well, very interesting.

00:21:25.620 Harriet Tubman was unlikely.

00:21:27.220 She was a middle-aged African-American slave who escaped.

00:21:30.740 And she's not educated, but she goes back in the decade before the Civil War, back into the slave-controlled part of the South to bring out about 80 other slaves to freedom.

00:21:42.580 She does it 13 times, any time during which, if she'd been captured, she would have been either executed or re-enslaved.

00:21:49.840 And we have a tough time in our frame of reference understanding just what that would have meant.

00:21:54.880 And she became this leader not because she was well-educated or she was powerful.

00:22:00.980 She never had a position, but she became a moral leader.

00:22:04.520 And so as a consequence of that, she was powerful for the abolition and then after the Civil War for pushing rights to include female rights.

00:22:12.480 But everything else about her wouldn't have fallen into the sort of standard leadership.

00:22:17.940 If you'd had a leadership course and put her in there, she wouldn't have jumped out.

00:22:21.080 Now, the person that came out as the best leader, and people ask me this question, I admired Abu Musabah Zarqawi, although I didn't, you know, admire his values, was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

00:22:33.300 And it was funny because I grew up, my family's from the South, and my mother was very, very liberal and focused on the Civil Rights Movement.

00:22:40.160 But the thing that's interesting about him is I'd grown up admiring Dr. King for his beliefs, for his cause.

00:22:48.840 But in reality, if you were trying to start a company now and you needed a CEO of the 13 people we profiled, Dr. King is the guy.

00:22:57.500 He was adaptable. He was humble. He constantly changed his tactics.

00:23:02.220 He stayed focused on the overall goal.

00:23:04.640 But one week he would compromise on the march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma.

00:23:09.900 The next week he would get himself put in jail to push something.

00:23:14.280 That flexibility, that ability to pull together this disparate group that was the Civil Rights Movement,

00:23:20.140 actually is the most impressive leadership performance of any of the 13 people we profiled.

00:23:26.240 Okay, so what do you think gave him that ability?

00:23:29.000 Like, he was obviously, it seems, operating under a set of principles, let's say.

00:23:36.280 But, and he could be inflexible in some situations and flexible in the others.

00:23:40.760 Like, is there a goal, a transcendent goal, for example, that you think that was driving him,

00:23:49.060 that he had well articulated and formulated?

00:23:51.920 What kept him integrated and flexible at the same time?

00:23:55.240 Yeah, that's a great question.

00:23:56.860 I think it starts, and we're going to talk about this later, was how he was developed.

00:24:00.660 He grew up the son of a preacher.

00:24:02.880 He had a good education.

00:24:04.120 He got a PhD, and at 26 years old, he is the pastor of a church in Montgomery, Alabama,

00:24:09.500 when the bus boycott starts, and he's put in charge.

00:24:12.400 So at a very young age, he starts with a good set of values from his family, a good, solid education.

00:24:19.720 The letter from a Birmingham jail written later is this extraordinary performance where he pulls from all the education he had.

00:24:27.320 So he had a foundation that gave him confidence in his beliefs.

00:24:31.780 He knew that the direction they were going was ultimately right, and from his other studies, he believed could make progress, could succeed.

00:24:39.820 And how did he conceive of that direction?

00:24:42.840 You said he had his PhD, so he was educated.

00:24:46.700 He was obviously pursuing a set of principles that were deeply associated with the civil rights movement.

00:24:52.860 And I suppose that's manifested to some degree in his speech, his dream speech.

00:24:58.960 I think so.

00:25:00.480 Yeah, I think a couple of things.

00:25:02.100 I think he starts with a child in the South, grew up in Atlanta.

00:25:05.060 So he starts with that, but then as he interacts with other civil rights leaders who have been involved in the movement much longer than he has,

00:25:13.000 they've got the scars to prove it.

00:25:15.000 They've also got the political infighting that sort of limits their ability.

00:25:19.240 He steps in younger without that sort of tarnish on him.

00:25:23.960 He can step above that.

00:25:25.500 He takes a leadership role where he points at the far position on the ridgeline.

00:25:30.780 He says, that's where we must go.

00:25:32.340 We must use nonviolence to do that.

00:25:34.620 We must try to unify our cause.

00:25:37.840 And so I think that combination of very solid mooring to values, and I think the education helped in that,

00:25:44.880 a good family, but then also this idea that he would interact and listen to people.

00:25:51.100 He was constantly adjusting based upon what other civil rights leaders were pushing and pulling on.

00:25:57.520 So I think he had a tremendous amount of mental adaptability without ever giving away the objective.

00:26:07.900 Okay.

00:26:08.080 So one of the things that I thought through recently, I spent a fair bit of time studying the Sermon on the Mount,

00:26:14.960 and it's sort of relevant to Luther King because, of course, of his Christian faith.

00:26:19.760 So I think it's a relevant segue.

00:26:21.420 Anyway, the advice, maybe you could call it leadership advice, from the Sermon on the Mount is to keep your eye on the prize, right?

00:26:29.840 So the first injunction is to love God with all your heart and all your soul.

00:26:35.760 And so that's to lift your eyes up above the horizon and to focus on some transcendent goal, right?

00:26:42.220 To maintain a relationship with what you regard as of the highest value or divine.

00:26:48.480 And so that's the first thing, is to set your sights properly.

00:26:51.240 And then the next thing is to concentrate on the day, right?

00:26:54.520 Because the troubles of the day are sufficient.

00:26:56.880 It's, it's, and, but what that does is gives you two, it, it, it, it, it orients you in two ways.

00:27:03.160 It gives you real direction, but it also allows you to concentrate on what's right in front of you

00:27:08.880 and perhaps to make the course corrections that are necessary that are associated with, with moment-to-moment transformation.

00:27:15.840 And it's, it's interesting that that particular sermon uses the day as the proper unit of measure, right?

00:27:21.820 It's, it's, well, I know where I'm going,

00:27:23.840 but I, now I have to figure out how I'm going to implement that in the here and now

00:27:27.240 and make whatever course corrections are necessary.

00:27:31.160 You know, it, it's interesting.

00:27:33.020 Um, I teach a piece by Admiral James Stockdale in my course at Yale,

00:27:38.280 and it is The World of Epictetus.

00:27:40.760 And what he does is he describes his time in the Hanoi Hilton

00:27:43.360 and he describes different prisoners and how they responded to the inhumane treatment, the torture.

00:27:48.740 And the, the issue of a day is because they had to go through that experience

00:27:53.280 literally one day at a time, they could go and they could be tortured and they would be broken.

00:27:58.600 When you are tortured, you will break, you will talk.

00:28:01.340 And then what happens is you lose your self-respect because you think that, okay, I'm not worthy

00:28:07.200 because I didn't do name, rank, and serial number.

00:28:09.240 And, but what he found was by being connected to strong values, the eye on the prize,

00:28:16.520 and his prize was loyalty to his nation, loyalty to his faith, loyalty to himself.

00:28:23.120 He kept his eye on that.

00:28:24.560 And every day he would almost, you could call it, recharge his batteries.

00:28:28.560 Return to that.

00:28:29.600 That's right.

00:28:30.100 I've got to go back and keep an eye on it.

00:28:32.000 And it won't always be easy.

00:28:33.740 And I think Dr. King did that.

00:28:35.720 And I think that leaders who are leading or taking themselves through a very difficult journey,

00:28:41.020 it's keeping that because there are disappointments, there are failures, there are frustrations along the way.

00:28:47.480 Okay.

00:28:47.840 So that's interesting.

00:28:48.860 So I hadn't thought about it quite that way before.

00:28:51.640 So you're going to have trouble as you implement your plans and there's going to be failures and disappointments.

00:28:57.860 And there's also going to be like moral and personal failings on your part, right?

00:29:02.420 And you talked about breaking under torture, which is, of course, exactly what you'd expect.

00:29:07.700 And so your sense is that one of the advantages to being associated with these higher order principles

00:29:15.440 is that you can draw on them as a source of strength.

00:29:18.660 It's a well to which you can return, which is a good psychological trope.

00:29:23.300 So maybe that's a good segue into the next thing I wanted to talk to you about.

00:29:27.580 We'll return to your book as well.

00:29:29.900 But it seems to me that there's somewhat of a crisis of maturity, let's say, among young people today.

00:29:39.920 And I'm not blaming them for this.

00:29:42.500 I think it's a consequence of technological transformation and immense cultural confusion.

00:29:47.200 But I'd like to talk to you about what you've seen as necessary to help immature young people mature and become responsible citizens

00:30:01.580 and what all that means, like why that's advantageous, why it's necessary and how it can be done

00:30:06.980 and why we're not doing a particularly good job of it, as far as I can tell.

00:30:10.700 Yeah, I feel very strongly about this, so thanks for bringing it up.

00:30:17.040 I think if we talk about advantages, if we look at you or I and we get to a certain point in life,

00:30:22.260 we can get feeling superior.

00:30:23.880 We say, well, we've been successful because we worked hard or whatever.

00:30:27.840 We started on third base and thought we hit a triple.

00:30:30.880 And we did because I had two parents that I admired who loved me, and they put structure.

00:30:35.980 I was one of six kids, and there was structure.

00:30:38.440 And I didn't like all of it at the time, but the reality is they didn't talk about values.

00:30:43.900 They demonstrated values.

00:30:45.760 They forced us to live within a certain left and right limit, we would call it.

00:30:50.960 And maybe at the time I wouldn't have just on my own come up with that, but they did that.

00:30:57.160 The education I received also gave me a pretty solid set of foundation stones that I could stand on.

00:31:04.940 I think what has happened is we've weakened those.

00:31:07.920 We've weakened the family in America.

00:31:09.860 We've weakened some of the things we ask or demand young people to do or give them the opportunity to be a part of certain structured things that I think help.

00:31:20.020 You know, it was funny.

00:31:21.700 I entered the Army in the 1970s.

00:31:24.220 They came out of West Point.

00:31:25.120 The Army was still struggling after post-Vietnam.

00:31:27.380 And some of the best senior sergeants, non-commissioned officers I ever worked with, sergeants, major, had come from these really terrible backgrounds.

00:31:37.240 I mean, single family or no parents and no opportunity.

00:31:41.580 But they'd come into the Army, and the Army had put in front of them a set of values, pretty admirable values.

00:31:47.640 And they'd looked at that, and they'd said, okay, I accept that.

00:31:52.180 And they embraced them.

00:31:53.420 And in some ways, they embraced them better than the officer corps came out of colleges who was a little more nuanced and thought through.

00:31:59.820 These guys and gals just literally said, okay, that's right, that's wrong.

00:32:04.320 And when you were serving with them, it was amazing.

00:32:07.320 Sometimes we'd be hand-wringing over what we should do.

00:32:09.980 And one of these people would look at you and go, hey, there's a right and wrong here.

00:32:13.720 What are we talking about?

00:32:14.720 And they were always right.

00:32:17.020 And so when it comes back, I think we owe young people the experience.

00:32:23.520 We learn.

00:32:24.080 I think we learn through experience.

00:32:25.540 We don't learn through civics class or government works.

00:32:27.920 We learn through things we do.

00:32:31.440 And so if we can give young people the opportunity to be part of a team where they've got to subordinate some of their uniqueness,

00:32:38.540 they've got to sometimes shut up and row because that's how society, all of us have got to spend part of our time doing that.

00:32:45.540 They have to respect other people.

00:32:47.640 They have to live by a set of values that gives everybody else their opportunity to succeed as well.

00:32:56.440 And then I think what you do is you create an opportunity for them to learn.

00:33:00.460 I call it citizenship, but learn the way to fit in that gives them a much greater opportunity to be successful.

00:33:07.620 See, that's real interesting to me because one of the things I learned when I was reading Friedrich Nietzsche in particular is he was a great critic of Christianity,

00:33:20.200 but also a great admirer of the Catholic Church.

00:33:23.080 And one of the things he said about Catholicism was that over the centuries of its unfolding that it required all of its practitioners to adopt a particular disciplined ethos and to explain the world within the confines of a single coherent system and then also to act that out.

00:33:40.740 And so Nietzsche was very interested in the development of, let's call it, full individuality.

00:33:47.320 But he also knew that the pathway to individuality was through the rigors of a disciplinary structure.

00:33:56.280 And I think this is something our society hasn't discussed well because it's useful for us as people who believe in individual sovereignty to concentrate on individual uniqueness.

00:34:08.380 But it's naive of us to fail to understand that part of that unique individuality is developed as a consequence of subordination to some disciplinary structure, right?

00:34:20.480 Before you can become full-fledged, you have to become something.

00:34:24.960 And it might be something narrow, right?

00:34:26.840 You have to pick a path of some sort and commit to it, whatever that path is.

00:34:30.980 And I've been telling young people, especially in my lectures, that if they're lost, they need to commit to something even if they don't know what that optimal something should be.

00:34:42.240 And they have to lose themselves in it to some degree.

00:34:45.180 And that seems to go against that individualist ethos, but it's actually a precursor to it.

00:34:50.900 You know, you say that and it strikes a personal chord with me.

00:34:54.000 I entered the Army at age 17, and I still fold my underwear in my drawers, even though there's probably no great reason for that.

00:35:01.800 But many of the things they taught me gave me a personal discipline that kept me remembering who I am.

00:35:09.220 And when I left the service, there was a fair amount of, you know, notoriety about the Rolling Stone article and whatnot.

00:35:14.340 It was a personal failure.

00:35:16.040 But what I had was I had a sense of who I was.

00:35:19.020 And I kept doing many of the things that I had done before because it reassured me that some of the good habits that I had, some of the good values I believed in, I don't suddenly throw those away because they helped define me.

00:35:33.460 The cause I'm involved with now is the Service Year Alliance, and that's a movement to give every young American a year of civilian national service experience paid.

00:35:42.940 And so it's not limited to upper middle class families who can support, you know, their child with a gap year.

00:35:48.020 But it's to give people a year at health care, education, conservation, whatever they want to do as part of a team, hopefully working with people not from their zip code.

00:35:57.260 And they've got to subordinate themselves to a bigger cause.

00:36:01.260 They may not love what they're doing, but I would argue that a decade or two decades later, they'll go, yeah, that was good for me.

00:36:09.040 That's that opportunity to be engaged in a disciplinary process.

00:36:13.420 Yes, sir.

00:36:13.860 And, you know, we tend to think of disciplinary processes as only composed of limitations, and so as antithetical to an optimal freedom.

00:36:23.940 But it is much more appropriate to consider them as preconditions to the kind of self-mastery that enables you to have some freedom.

00:36:31.220 Okay, so that sounds like a variant of the Peace Corps idea to some degree.

00:36:34.860 And so where is that plan in terms of implementation?

00:36:38.760 Yeah, the Peace Corps is part of it.

00:36:42.140 It's a subset of it.

00:36:43.220 And AmeriCorps, City Year, all the different things you probably teach for America, they're all part of this.

00:36:48.220 And the idea is the Service Year Alliance, we are now pushing to get legislation to increase the Serve America Act, which went in in 1997.

00:36:57.180 So there are programs in the United States for about 200,000 young people a year now, not counting the military.

00:37:04.500 But we have 4 million young people in every cohort.

00:37:09.120 So the reality is we've got to expand this so that every young person possible gets that opportunity to do a year of that experience before college or if they're not going to college before they go.

00:37:20.100 You know, we've had some good political support.

00:37:23.360 Our strongest political supporter, John McCain, unfortunately passed last year.

00:37:28.620 We are working the Hill.

00:37:30.400 It's a non-political cause.

00:37:34.300 So we're trying to work both sides and let people come together in consensus.

00:37:37.980 But people have been distracted, so we've still got a lot of work to do.

00:37:41.920 Right, but you say it's at the point already where it is being implemented for about 200,000 young people a year?

00:37:48.200 Yes, yes, sir.

00:37:49.200 And they vote at three times the rate of people who don't have a year of service later in their lives.

00:37:54.520 Oh, yeah.

00:37:54.860 So that's okay.

00:37:55.820 So how do young people go about applying for this now and finding out about it?

00:38:01.580 The easiest way is to get on the Service Year Alliance website.

00:38:05.700 Cisco Corporation paid for and created a great platform so young people and their parents can go on.

00:38:12.140 They can literally shop for the kind of experience that would be good for them.

00:38:15.300 They can connect with people who are doing or have done that experience.

00:38:19.200 Parents can get comfortable that their young person will be safe and whatnot.

00:38:24.100 And so we can match opportunities with desires.

00:38:27.620 Okay, so one of the things I should do is get the URL for that so that I can put it in the video description so that people have a quick link.

00:38:34.100 I would love to send that to you.

00:38:35.420 Yeah, well, if you can send me whatever URLs would be useful to put in the video description to allow people to further investigate the sorts of things that we're talking about.

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00:41:28.660 So, you know, we've been working on this program, and maybe this is a discussion we could have offline, but I'll bring it up quickly.

00:41:39.300 I have this program called Future Authoring that helps people, young people, but people of any age really, develop a vision for the future, and then to derive an implementable plan for that.

00:41:51.820 And so the idea is for them, first of all, to decide what the values that they wish to serve are, and we talk to them about thinking about their family and about their community and about their employment choices and their education and their self-care mentally and physically and their productive use of time outside of work.

00:42:09.680 And then ask people to contemplate what their life could be like three to five years down the road in the future, so that they build themselves a vision of who they could be and what their life could be.

00:42:19.360 Then we have them write the reverse, which is, well, what would your life be like if you let everything disintegrate around you because your bad habits took up, took the upper hand?

00:42:28.200 And then we have them write out an implementable plan, and we've got good data from three different educational institutes and fairly high numbers showing that just spending even as little as an hour on that increases the probability that kids will stay in university by 35%.

00:42:45.600 And so it'd be interesting to think about, it might be interesting to have a conversation about how that might be integrated with this youth development program, because people need to take the time to articulate out something like a vision for their life.

00:43:01.240 Exactly. And they need to believe it's attainable.

00:43:03.700 Yes. Or they might even just have to believe that even failing in the service of a noble goal constitutes a form of success that's much more desirable than merely doing nothing and staying nihilistic.

00:43:19.540 That's right. I had my course at Yale one year, write their obituary.

00:43:23.420 Uh-huh.

00:43:24.000 And they're 20 to 30 years old, and I said, write your obituary, be honest, but also be ambitious.

00:43:30.820 Right. And so how did they respond to that?

00:43:32.820 Yeah. They were pretty ambitious, but it was interesting, because then we said, walk back, okay, here's what you wanted to have done.

00:43:40.280 Are you on the road to doing that? What's it going to demand from you? Are you willing to make the trade-offs or whatever, depending upon what they were trying to do?

00:43:46.620 Yes, exactly.

00:43:48.080 It was thoughtful.

00:43:48.960 Yeah, yeah. Well, that's the same sort of thing that we thought about this in some sense as a modified business plan, right?

00:43:54.660 Because there's also evidence, for example, that this is a really interesting line of research.

00:43:59.140 There's evidence, and it's very relevant to leadership.

00:44:01.440 So imagine that you had two cohorts of people within your organizational structure, and you wanted to increase their productivity and job satisfaction.

00:44:12.980 And let's say you had three.

00:44:15.740 One cohort, you just left to their own devices.

00:44:18.320 The second cohort, you asked to formulate a vision for how they were going to be better employees and to write that down.

00:44:24.980 And the third cohort, you said, no, formulate a vision and plan for how you would have a richer and more engaging and productive life.

00:44:35.900 So make a life plan.

00:44:37.520 And then you set those cohorts head-to-head and look at productivity over a one-year period.

00:44:42.720 What you find is, and the studies now have, the cumulative studies are of more than 25,000 people.

00:44:49.240 You get a 10% productivity increment in the group that you have developed a personal vision and no improvement whatsoever in the group that only specifies corporate goals.

00:44:59.220 You know, it makes so much sense.

00:45:01.980 And the young people I work with today, they spend more time talking about the sort of whole life idea.

00:45:08.560 And so the idea that they can put all those pieces together and be intentional about it, that's the term I try to use.

00:45:14.540 You're going to get where you try to go, where you're going to get close to there.

00:45:17.460 But if you don't try to get somewhere, it's going to be luck.

00:45:20.600 Yeah, well, the probability that you're going to hit a target that you don't specify or aim at is extremely low.

00:45:28.620 And, you know, the funny thing, too, is it's not just a target.

00:45:31.860 It's like sending an anti-missile missile upwards because the target moves.

00:45:36.220 That's the thing.

00:45:37.000 You know, you think, well, what should I do with my life?

00:45:38.860 And the answer is, well, I don't exactly know because it's so complicated and it changes.

00:45:43.080 It's like, yeah, but that doesn't mean you can sit on your laurels.

00:45:46.040 What it means is that you should aim at something and move forward.

00:45:49.200 And as you move forward, you can adjust your aim.

00:45:52.020 And as you move forward, you learn what you need to adjust your aim.

00:45:55.900 So it doesn't really matter if your initial plan is 100 percent accurate.

00:46:00.160 It's not going to be.

00:46:01.340 But you need that vision.

00:46:03.740 And so I love that.

00:46:04.680 That's one of the great things that we found in the book.

00:46:06.820 We profiled Coco Chanel and she was an orphan at a young age in rural France.

00:46:11.920 And she comes up and she's opportunistic, but she's always looking forward.

00:46:16.540 She's looking for opportunities.

00:46:17.760 She's acting on that.

00:46:18.520 There was no there was no set path for her life.

00:46:21.900 There was no predictability that she would be successful.

00:46:25.120 But she was constantly adapting to what happened and being pretty aggressively opportunistic.

00:46:31.160 Yeah.

00:46:31.400 So that's that interesting paradox of both having a vision and being able to move and being able to dance on your feet when necessary.

00:46:38.440 You need to be allied with the proper higher order principles, which is, you know, that's what the civics classes and humanities in the universities were supposed to help instill in people was that ability to develop an affinity with large scale principles.

00:46:53.900 And then the same thing with religious education, which is, which is, which is, I suppose, one of the things that was motivating for for Luther King because he was educated, but also had his has had his feet well planted on a firm religious foundation.

00:47:10.460 So without that, it's very difficult for people to have the moral fortitude to move forward.

00:47:16.920 We also found that reinforcements, very important, certain things like the Catholic Church or like the military where every day you do certain things.

00:47:26.020 In the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955 to 56, you had 382 days when the African-American population of Montgomery, Alabama is trying to force integration of public transportation.

00:47:39.440 And to do that, they boycott the buses, which meant that every day African-Americans had to walk to work or carpool.

00:47:47.140 So every day they had to take an act that reaffirmed their commitment to the boycott.

00:47:53.080 And it wasn't just once a month. Oh, yeah, I still support it.

00:47:56.260 You had to do it every day. And what they found is psychologically that strengthened their commitment to it.

00:48:01.300 Yeah, right. Well, that's that's a continual process of of of evident sacrifices.

00:48:05.940 Right. You need to make sacrifices in order to move ahead.

00:48:08.940 And that does, in fact, foster your commitment, because if something's worth doing, it means it's worth giving up other things for.

00:48:17.260 Which is really it's almost like the definition of worth doing. Right.

00:48:20.080 Because you can't do everything at the same time.

00:48:22.020 And so that that's that's part of the development of the sacrificial motif that emerges so early in human in what in human interactions with with with with well with divinity or with higher order purpose.

00:48:35.720 You have to make the right sacrifices.

00:48:38.340 And if the end is worth attaining, if the end is worth pursuing, then the sacrifices are worth making.

00:48:44.100 And there's there's a nobility that goes along with making that sacrifice, too, and a discipline.

00:48:48.520 And now now you've seen young people inducted into the armed forces over a very long period of time.

00:48:54.800 And what characterological transformations for better or worse do you see as attendant upon that process?

00:49:03.320 And what and of that, what's necessary?

00:49:06.440 Because having kids do this year of services, it's kind of got that it's got a bit of a military feel to it.

00:49:13.040 Right. You pull them out of their families.

00:49:15.220 You put them in a in a foreign situation or in a strange situation for them.

00:49:19.800 There's a disciplinary routine that's associated with it.

00:49:22.440 What have you observed as the consequence of that personally and among the people that you've observed?

00:49:30.420 Sure. Let me start at a point down and I'll back it to it.

00:49:33.760 When a soldier is wounded on the battlefield and they were evacuated to a first aid station and then up to the chain, as soon as they're able, the first thing they ask about is their comrades.

00:49:45.780 How are their comrades doing?

00:49:47.180 And they desperately want to be back with their comrades, even though they're wounded, because what's happened is they formed this family atmosphere, this commitment, this sense of I'm a member of this team.

00:49:59.880 And that membership is very, very important to them.

00:50:02.900 And as they get further away and one of the reasons why wounded veterans have a tough time is they come back.

00:50:07.760 And although we're nice to them in the U.S., we've broken the umbilical cord with their family.

00:50:12.440 And unless they've got a strong family base back in the U.S., which takes them.

00:50:17.220 And even then it can be challenging.

00:50:19.120 And so what the military does is when you first come in, they call it soldierization.

00:50:23.420 They cut your hair.

00:50:24.340 They change your clothes.

00:50:25.280 They make you go by a rank and a name.

00:50:27.880 They change a lot of overt behaviors because they know that you force behavioral change and attitudinal change comes after that.

00:50:35.680 You start to believe cognitive dissonance kicks in.

00:50:38.040 And so you start to think of yourself as a soldier.

00:50:41.480 And as you start to think of yourself as a soldier or a Marine or whatever, you start to adopt those values.

00:50:47.900 You start to say, well, soldiers don't do this or soldiers do do this.

00:50:52.620 I don't put my hands in my pockets.

00:50:54.180 I don't, you know, whatever it is.

00:50:56.100 And you start to identify with those behaviors and values and they become very, very important to you.

00:51:02.080 And so what the military is able to do is pull you into that.

00:51:07.120 Now, they've got to show a purpose to it.

00:51:09.140 I mean, at the very beginning, they, you know, people go, well, why do I have to have my hair cut?

00:51:12.900 The military's got to show a purpose to it.

00:51:15.460 But as they do and the purposes of discipline and cleanliness and all the different kinds of things become evident, then people begin to believe in them and they begin to self-identify with those values.

00:51:27.720 One of the hardest things for someone leaving the military is to stop self-identifying as a soldier.

00:51:36.000 You know, you say, well, who are you?

00:51:37.160 I'm a soldier.

00:51:37.940 And that's comforting.

00:51:39.940 It's reaffirming.

00:51:43.100 And so, and it's not just what people think of you.

00:51:46.340 It's how you think of yourself.

00:51:47.540 Yeah, so you have it.

00:51:49.980 Well, you have an identity that's personal and then you share that with people that you've gone through difficult and demanding experiences with.

00:51:57.460 And so it broadens, it develops you as an individual, but broadens out your commitment past you to those who are immediately around you and then at a more abstract level to the military structure and then the political structure itself.

00:52:12.240 So it means you're ensconced, your identity is ensconced in multiple levels at the same time.

00:52:17.980 And that's very reassuring and also very purposeful.

00:52:20.620 I mean, people absolutely need this.

00:52:22.220 You know, I've been thinking that part of the problem that we have with regards to purposeless right now is it's partly a consequence of overemphasis on the individual and partly a consequence, I would say, of lack of discipline.

00:52:38.340 Because the optimized individual is working in a way that's useful for him or her, but also for their family and for their community all simultaneously.

00:52:47.900 And so you can build in the idea of social obligation and citizenship into the idea of optimal individuality.

00:52:56.220 And I don't think that we've articulated that particularly well with our concentration on atomized individuality.

00:53:03.560 I think we've actually made it much, much worse than it should be because we focus on the rights of the citizen, for example, but we don't really talk about the responsibilities.

00:53:12.740 Yes, yes, that's exactly it.

00:53:14.280 You know, I'll tell you something that's really interesting.

00:53:16.220 So I've gone and talked at about 115 cities over the last year to about 250,000 people.

00:53:23.220 And every time, every single time I talk about the relationship between responsibility and meaning, as opposed to the relationship between rights and meaning, because we've had lots of conversation about rights.

00:53:36.840 Every time I talk about the relationship between responsibility and meaning, the audiences fall dead silent.

00:53:43.200 Because that's something that we haven't articulated well over the last 50 years.

00:53:48.740 And I think young people in particular are really dying on the vine because of it.

00:53:52.960 Because most of the meaning that you're going to get in your life is a consequence of taking on responsibility.

00:53:57.880 You take a great sense of self-worth.

00:54:01.980 When someone says, thank you for serving, thank you for doing something selfless, whatever it is for society, there's this tremendous sense of reinforcement for the person.

00:54:12.020 So we don't do it just for the good for society.

00:54:14.840 We do it because it makes us feel better.

00:54:16.940 And young people who never get that opportunity, they never get thanked for what they do because they've never been asked to do anything.

00:54:22.800 Well, and I think it's very difficult to see yourself as useful to yourself if you don't see yourself as first as useful to other people.

00:54:31.120 Because that's the validation of that sense of utility and worth.

00:54:34.820 Yeah.

00:54:35.060 And that's when we start getting into metrics like money or other things, which are sort of false metrics of success.

00:54:40.820 Okay, so let's ask another question here.

00:54:45.100 So, all right.

00:54:45.760 So you're working hard on this.

00:54:48.120 What did you call it again?

00:54:49.940 I'm sorry.

00:54:50.800 It's a service year alliance.

00:54:52.280 Service year alliance.

00:54:53.500 Okay.

00:54:53.820 And hopefully that's going to be a bipartisan push.

00:54:57.220 Yes, sir.

00:54:57.540 And it's something that's akin in some sense to a short apprenticeship.

00:55:02.080 And you're hoping to expand that so that that's available to young people in general.

00:55:05.840 To every young person in America, we'd like to have that realistic opportunity to do a year of paid service.

00:55:11.680 What do you see as the challenges associated with expanding that?

00:55:16.700 Because a year isn't very long either, right?

00:55:18.800 It's something that has to be set up really quickly for people.

00:55:21.480 And they have to be pushed into it or put into it and get off the ground very rapidly.

00:55:27.680 So what are the challenges that stand in your way with regards to developing and expanding this program?

00:55:35.840 The programs that have been good so far, Peace Corps, City Year, AmeriCorps, Teach for America, have all learned through experience.

00:55:44.640 They've got to have a training program at the beginning.

00:55:47.160 They've got to have a very structured system to make sure that the quality of what people do is of value.

00:55:52.960 Because if you put people out there and it's a waste of time.

00:55:55.560 Right.

00:55:55.820 So they've learned that you can't just throw something together and then call young people forward and do that, even if you were to have funding.

00:56:01.680 So that's sort of step one.

00:56:04.040 You've got to create the opportunities in a disciplined way.

00:56:07.600 I think a common experience at the beginning of three or four weeks for every young person to go through some kind of thing before they go out to their specific service would be very valuable.

00:56:17.480 And I think they'd all talk about it later in life.

00:56:19.560 Remember when we went to Kansas and we all went through this orientation training?

00:56:23.920 They'd laugh about it.

00:56:25.200 Right.

00:56:25.360 A collective experience.

00:56:26.480 But that's logistics.

00:56:27.640 That's right.

00:56:28.200 That would be a challenge.

00:56:29.620 The biggest thing that's surprising is the demand among young people for this program is huge.

00:56:35.800 In fact, it's about 10 times greater than the number of opportunities we have.

00:56:40.720 The holdup is our generation, my generation.

00:56:44.120 For some reason, we either won't fund it, we won't work on it.

00:56:48.320 Because my generation, to be honest, a good percentage of us didn't serve.

00:56:52.800 A smaller percentage did.

00:56:54.480 So at the dinner table, they don't talk about when they served in the Peace Corps, when they did this.

00:57:00.060 I mean, some families do, but it's not common.

00:57:02.960 And the professional military is actually weakened a little bit because it tends to be a smaller group.

00:57:09.260 So we don't have that tradition where my uncle, my aunt, my grandfather, grandmother all did that.

00:57:14.180 And so we've got to help bring it back.

00:57:16.840 So it's really interesting that you've got 10 times the applicants because that implies an applicant pool of about 2 million,

00:57:23.860 which is already about half the population that you are hoping to serve.

00:57:27.880 I don't think we will have a bit of problem with applicants because I think that will even go up as at the lunch table if they start talking about where are you going to serve.

00:57:36.360 Or as employers say, where did you do your year of national service when you apply?

00:57:41.760 And if you've got this dead silence, or if a young person is running for Congress, gets up on a stage and says, I should be, and someone says, well, where did you serve?

00:57:51.240 And if there's dead silence, then other ambitious young people are going to go up.

00:57:55.740 I've got to think about that.

00:57:57.560 And that may be, you know, whatever it takes.

00:57:59.940 So what's the evidence that programs like Peace Corps, for example, or Teach for America, what's the evidence that those programs are all actually having their desired impact?

00:58:11.460 Because like one of the rules for social science investigators is, if they're canny and intelligent, is never assume that your stupid intervention is going to have the positive results that you assume, right?

00:58:23.460 Or that you are hoping for.

00:58:25.320 You have to measure that.

00:58:26.460 And so when you look at people who've gone through the Peace Corps or Teach for America or similar programs, what's the evidence that the programs are actually producing the results that are hopeful?

00:58:36.800 Yeah, it's a great question.

00:58:37.720 And the first thing is, we do a lot of studies on this, but you have to understand what it is you're trying to get out of it.

00:58:43.340 If you say Teach for America is to make education in America better right now, there's an argument that says, no, bringing people in for two years of teaching isn't professional teachers.

00:58:54.220 So they're not as good.

00:58:55.500 I would disagree, but there's an argument.

00:58:58.420 If you say conservation, building trails or health care, we can hire people to do it and it's cheaper.

00:59:05.580 I would argue that's not what we're looking for.

00:59:08.500 What we're looking for in this program is alumni.

00:59:11.500 We're looking for people who come out of the Peace Corps or out of the Teach for America experience.

00:59:17.140 Teach for America alumni tend to go into education at an extraordinary rate.

00:59:23.800 As you know, getting into Teach for America is harder than getting into Yale University, you know, in terms of it's a small program.

00:59:31.640 It's very elite.

00:59:33.560 And that's not a bad thing, but it means not many people are getting the opportunity to do it.

00:59:37.540 And yet that's not a cohort that would automatically be involved in education later in life.

00:59:42.540 And yet they are.

00:59:43.760 That experience seems to bring them to it.

00:59:46.500 I mentioned earlier in our discussion that people who have done a year of service vote at three times the rate of people who have not.

00:59:53.920 They volunteer at higher rates.

00:59:55.480 So it's the real measure and getting the right metric for this is hard is how do you measure better citizens?

01:00:02.780 Yeah, well, that's you put your finger on something of absolutely crucial importance there is that if you're going to do an outcome study, you have to make sure you get your metrics right.

01:00:10.260 And that's a deadly difficult thing because the question is, well, what is it that you're trying to produce?

01:00:15.000 And, you know, what's implied in the way that you formulated your answers is that you're trying to produce citizens.

01:00:22.720 Exactly.

01:00:23.700 Yeah.

01:00:24.020 And, you know, it's so interesting because generally the way that we construe people in our society now isn't as citizens, but as something approximating consumers.

01:00:31.760 That's the most common adjective, you know, consumer confidence or what is the consumer thinking now or how is the consumer responding to the latest economic news?

01:00:40.720 And it's it's a terrible replacement for the idea of citizen because a citizen is a foundation is the foundation of the state and someone who's bearing responsibility for the state rather than someone who's merely living off the benefits of the state.

01:00:56.920 That's it.

01:00:57.480 I mean, if you think the state is just a covenant between a bunch of people to be a state, to be a nation, whatever.

01:01:04.180 And the responsibilities of mutual security or raising barns or volunteer fire departments, which used to be so critical, have weakened a bit as we professionalized a lot of things.

01:01:17.560 And I think that if people feel that that responsibility, I sometimes talk about marriage.

01:01:23.620 I'm not an expert in marriage.

01:01:24.700 I've been married all of once for 42 years.

01:01:27.340 But if you go back to the age of out on the frontier, a man and a woman get married and they have a family, they need each other.

01:01:36.820 You know, every relationship goes up and down.

01:01:39.240 You know, you go through periods when you're deeply in love and periods when you're irritated.

01:01:43.240 But if there's a sinew that binds you, it's a combined responsibility for the children of the farm.

01:01:48.180 You can't survive alone.

01:01:49.480 I think that helps keep you focused during more difficult periods.

01:01:56.380 Yeah, well, that covenant idea is exactly right, I think, is that, you know, I was talking to a divinity professor at Cambridge University and we were talking about, and this is sort of relevant, I suppose, to the discussion of Martin Luther King too.

01:02:09.240 We were talking about the Exodus narrative, which, of course, was used as a, what would you call it, a metaphorical restatement of the problem of the slaves in the United States.

01:02:23.920 And so the Exodus narrative is often read as escape from tyranny into freedom, something like that.

01:02:30.600 But it's not, hey, it's escape from involuntary covenant, that's the tyranny, into something approximating a voluntary covenant, which is what's arranged with Yahweh in the desert.

01:02:42.120 So there's no chaos and directionlessness, or that's portrayed as the desert.

01:02:47.240 And the solution to that is to enter into a new covenant.

01:02:49.820 And that covenant is something like a long-term promise, and that's also what you see in marriage.

01:02:55.300 And the advantage to that is that it, the disadvantage is that it constrains you, right?

01:03:00.100 And so that's why people think about this as burdensome duty.

01:03:04.260 But the advantage is that it gives you direction and shelters you from excess uncertainty and doubt.

01:03:12.080 And the commitment that goes along with marriage is something that should be regarded as aspirational.

01:03:20.460 It's right, look, we know this is going to be difficult, and we know that this is limiting your possibilities, like limiting your possibilities of mate choice down to one person.

01:03:28.820 But you commit yourself to it, and in that commitment and that adoption of that covenantal arrangement, that's where you find the meaning that's associated with responsibility.

01:03:38.640 And we're not doing a good job of communicating those ideas.

01:03:43.640 No, because we tend to think too much of responsibility as only limiting, as you put it.

01:03:49.880 We had a, when I was in the ranger regiment, we had this creed, six standard creed, and one line says,

01:03:56.160 I'll never leave a fallen comrade to fall into the hands of the enemy.

01:03:58.900 And every day we recited this creed, and every ranger is promising, no matter what it costs them, i.e. to go out in a bullet strip street to pick up a fallen comrade, even the cost of their life, they're going to do it.

01:04:13.000 And you think about the power of that.

01:04:14.680 I'm going to give up my life for someone without worrying about it, without thinking, I'm just going to do it.

01:04:19.440 And then you turn it around and you say, every day, 22 other rangers are making a commitment to do that for me.

01:04:27.980 And then you go, wow, the power of that.

01:04:30.680 I've got 2,200 people who have promised to do that for me.

01:04:34.600 Now the value of that shared responsibility becomes pretty important.

01:04:40.480 You know, when I've talked to conservatives, you know, about what they have to offer to young people, and it's, in my life at least, it's the first time I've really seen a situation where conservatives have something to sell to young people that's sellable.

01:04:55.220 And I really do think it is the issue.

01:04:57.320 It is the idea of responsibility.

01:04:58.840 And it's also that that's where young people, all people, discover their possibility and their capability is by taking on a heavy load.

01:05:10.220 The heavier, the better, insofar as you can manage it, because that's what forces self-revelation.

01:05:16.880 It's not navel-gazing and it's not looking inside in a contemplative manner, although that sort of thing can be useful.

01:05:23.160 It's trying to pick up something heavy and worthwhile and seeing how you can manage that and stagger forth under the load.

01:05:31.240 That's how you discover who you are.

01:05:33.000 And that's worth discovering because there's a lot more to you than you think.

01:05:37.080 Yeah, I used to have a technique that I just sort of stumbled upon when I was leading people.

01:05:42.460 You'd be in a room and you'd look at somebody and they'd be a tough task and you'd say, Jordan, can you handle that?

01:05:49.480 And then you don't even really wait for their response to just say, I know you got it.

01:05:53.660 I got it.

01:05:54.460 Even if they don't think they got it and they go, holy smoke, the confidence you've shown in them and you didn't do 20 questions.

01:06:01.700 Can you do this?

01:06:02.400 Are you sure?

01:06:02.960 You just go, I trust you.

01:06:04.320 Do it.

01:06:05.020 It's amazing the effect it has on them.

01:06:07.780 Yeah, there's faith in that, right?

01:06:10.680 I have faith that you can pull through to do this.

01:06:13.260 It's like extending your hand in trust.

01:06:15.620 So, you know, if you're a young, really young person, you trust people because you're naive and then you get burned and you get betrayed and you get cynical and you think, well, I shouldn't trust people.

01:06:26.040 But that's no good because then you can't trust people and you can't work with them.

01:06:29.420 And so then maybe you go beyond that cynicism and you start to extend trust as a as a manifestation of courage.

01:06:36.740 It's like I'm going to interact with you.

01:06:38.940 I'm going to give you an opportunity or responsibility and I'm going to trust that the best in you is going to respond to that.

01:06:46.120 And then that's an invitation for that part of the person to come forward.

01:06:49.580 It's really works like and then and I do think that that's a key element of leadership is to take the risk of manifesting that trust.

01:06:58.560 Absolutely.

01:06:59.200 It takes a little courage, but it is the most important thing, I think.

01:07:02.580 Yeah, well, it seems that way because it calls forth if there's some best to be called forth from a person, that's the right way to do it.

01:07:11.560 Yeah, there usually is.

01:07:12.480 There are a few people who test the hypothesis.

01:07:14.420 Yeah.

01:07:14.700 But for the most part, there is.

01:07:17.100 Yeah, that's right.

01:07:18.380 So that's right.

01:07:19.480 In the bulk, in the vast majority of situations, there isn't a more effective there isn't a more effective process.

01:07:25.820 OK, so what what needs to be done strategically in your estimation in order for people to get behind the the youth service programs that you're attempting to to foster?

01:07:40.980 Yeah, I think we need some high profile people talking about it in just the way our conversation has been.

01:07:47.500 The idea that citizenship in America is sacred.

01:07:50.220 It defines the success or failure of any state, whether the citizens live up to it and the sense of responsibility to that.

01:07:57.160 And it's going to take people with profile to do that because young people, again, they look to to people with more experience and how they should react to that.

01:08:04.860 We also need to build in reinforcements for that.

01:08:07.200 If people do years of service, they should get preferential admission to universities or to jobs.

01:08:13.100 There should be education benefits for that.

01:08:15.020 Right. So that should be an accreditation. That should be part of the process of recognized accreditation for competence and service.

01:08:21.680 Yeah. And then recognition. We we thank veterans for their service.

01:08:25.380 We ought to thank everyone who does some kind of service and do it pretty publicly.

01:08:29.860 You know, do it in a way that, hey, board the airplane first.

01:08:33.440 You know, when you're waiting at the gate, those people who are doing national service, you get on first.

01:08:37.500 Right. So you get some you get some status along with your responsibility, which isn't the same as having privilege.

01:08:43.440 That's right. Exactly. That's right. It's a deserved reward. And that's how you segregate it from unearned privilege.

01:08:49.800 You ever see how somebody responds who never gets that kind of status, never gets that kind of recognition? They beam.

01:08:57.260 Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Definitely. Well, that's a fundamental human motivation.

01:09:01.380 And I do think it's also the fundamental human motivation is to respond extraordinarily positively to the granting of status when it's it feels like you've earned it.

01:09:13.220 Right. Though all those things have to be there because otherwise it's false and and and makes you cynical.

01:09:18.460 And that's why when when President Obama a few years ago said we'd like to make community college free for everybody, my wife and I are watching TV and she finished the sentence.

01:09:27.100 She says, as soon as you finish your year of service, because when you've done something right, right, right.

01:09:33.320 Then you feel like you deserve it. Then it's. Yeah.

01:09:36.420 Otherwise, you're likely to throw it away, too, just because because you feel like you don't deserve it. Right.

01:09:41.140 It's a it's a moral burden to gain a gift that you haven't deserved.

01:09:44.960 That's right. Yeah. So. OK, so look, we're running up on 10 o'clock and there was a couple more questions I wanted to ask you.

01:09:51.540 So we should decide if we want to continue. How much longer do you want to keep talking to me or how much longer can you?

01:09:56.860 Could we do 10 more minutes? OK, OK, let's do that.

01:09:59.160 So, yeah, I would like to ask you for your opinions about the fundamental.

01:10:06.220 This is a terrible topic for 10 minutes. But when you look forward now, five years into the future,

01:10:12.820 what do you see as the fundamental challenges that are going to be facing the the the U.S. and the West?

01:10:20.480 What's your take on the geopolitical situation, broadly speaking? Where should we be awake?

01:10:26.840 Yeah, I think we should be awake to the rise of authoritarianism and what we saw arise in the 1930s.

01:10:34.900 And then we saw the Cold War and we saw this belief that we were moving toward liberal democracy.

01:10:40.620 And there was a lot of data that says we were. Now we're not.

01:10:45.260 And if you look around the world, elections in various places, because not all dictators seize power.

01:10:50.340 Many are elected to power. We're seeing a real move to that.

01:10:55.240 And I think there are lots of reasons for it. As societies get under pressure, people sort of band tribally.

01:11:02.120 Sometimes it's nationalism. Sometimes it's it's racial. Leaders, populists grab that.

01:11:09.780 And social media, which I thought if you'd asked me this question 20 years ago, I said that I'd have said that the information technology would improve democracy.

01:11:18.820 It would allow fresh air and and light to get on things. It actually hasn't done that.

01:11:24.320 It has allowed people to to utilize them to create this rise of authoritarianism.

01:11:31.700 And to me, that's very frightening because of very authoritarian countries have a tendency to take zigs and zags.

01:11:37.900 And of course, historically, they go to war much more than other people.

01:11:41.320 So I think the near term, the next decade and a half, maybe two decades, that's what we're going to have to worry about.

01:11:49.680 And it's going to make the world more dangerous militarily.

01:11:55.480 It's also going to pull at some of these things that we built for the global economy, because the global economy is so connected now we can't unconnect it.

01:12:04.000 And so that's going to create some strange dynamics.

01:12:08.520 We are going to have this connected economies, but yet we're going to have the rise of these nations with people pulling in strange directions.

01:12:17.380 We're going to have to figure out where we as a nation fit, where our values fit, how we what we are going to trumpet in the world, what we are going to represent the world.

01:12:27.840 If we don't do that, I think we are going to to run into real challenges.

01:12:31.940 Yeah, well, you know, we could tangle this back into the discussion we already had, too, because it seems to me I've thought about authoritarian structures for a very long period of time.

01:12:41.140 And it seems to me that the most effective defense against the rise of authoritarian structures is to make stronger and stronger individuals.

01:12:49.980 And, you know, I think that's the great secret of the West, at least to some degree, is that our states have been powerful because they function well.

01:12:56.360 But the reason that they're powerful is because we have done a good job of emphasizing the autonomy and sovereignty and responsibility and rights of the individuals.

01:13:06.060 And I think the more that we can do that, which is why it's so interesting to me to hear about the youth development programs, for example, that you're that you're championing.

01:13:15.280 Is the more responsible individuals we have in the world, not not only in the West, that greater the possibility that we'll be able to resist authoritarian tendencies and also to resist them, let's say, sociopolitically and militarily as well, because we'll be up for the challenge.

01:13:32.760 That'd be the hope anyways.

01:13:34.540 Well, as we know, Tocqueville wrote, you know, if you're not an educated populist electorate, then democracy is not going to work.

01:13:41.200 Right.

01:13:41.420 Which is why you need to make citizens and not consumers.

01:13:45.360 Exactly.

01:13:46.520 OK.

01:13:47.060 OK.

01:13:47.400 So.

01:13:47.820 All right.

01:13:48.160 So you're concerned about the rise of authoritarianism and and and then what what about your ambitions?

01:13:54.280 What what's what's in your what's on your purview for the next, let's say, three to five years?

01:13:59.320 What what do you want to do and what do you see happening with yourself?

01:14:03.000 Yeah, I'm 64 years old.

01:14:04.540 So what I do now is I have this this organization we created, McChrystal Group, got about 100 people now and we work with organizations to be better.

01:14:13.780 I really like that.

01:14:14.900 I I like developing the young people in our organization.

01:14:18.380 I like working with clients to make their organizations function better.

01:14:22.160 That's sort of the personal level on a broader level.

01:14:27.600 I really want to get a national conversation on leadership started.

01:14:31.340 I don't see myself, you know, going into elected office or appointed office or anything like that.

01:14:36.540 But but I would like to foster a national conversation where people talk about like what we just talked about.

01:14:42.780 And people don't scream at each other, but people ask difficult questions of each other.

01:14:49.020 And what am I doing?

01:14:50.700 Leaders, myth and reality was an attempt to start that.

01:14:54.760 If we can foster that, then I think that that would be a contribution I would take.

01:14:59.820 I mean, part of this is selfish.

01:15:01.040 I would take great pride from being part of forcing that conversation.

01:15:05.520 OK, OK.

01:15:06.960 Yeah, well, if there's anything that I could do to facilitate that, I'd be more than happy to participate.

01:15:11.320 Because it's it's it's exactly aligned with what I think I'm doing with my lecture series and my books and so on.

01:15:17.480 Oh, I know you are.

01:15:18.860 So so and I do think it's of absolutely crucial importance to to to to to work on that sense of.

01:15:27.920 Well, reinstallation of of of community meaning and and and a re instantiation of fundamental values.

01:15:37.000 It's it's very important and people are crying out for it in a in a in a in a mass manner.

01:15:42.880 And so. All right. All right.

01:15:45.300 So. All right.

01:15:46.200 Well, so your book is Leaders, Myth and Reality.

01:15:49.880 It's published by Sentinel.

01:15:51.060 That's a offshoot of Penguin Random House, a subordinate company from Penguin Random House.

01:15:57.340 You're going to send me your the URL so that people can can make contact with the organizations that you've described.

01:16:05.780 Is there anything that you would like to ask the viewers or listeners to do that would support you in your endeavor to move the the youth citizenship programs forward?

01:16:17.560 Yeah. Apart from becoming aware of them.

01:16:20.300 I that's the first one.

01:16:21.660 I think this is going to have to be demand.

01:16:23.760 We are going to have to first help create opportunities for this.

01:16:27.760 But second, we're going to have to demand them if teachers in schools aren't talking about this, if employers aren't asking people if they've done a year of service and giving value to that,

01:16:37.780 if universities aren't giving credit for the fact that you've done this, because this is pretty important life experience you would bring to a university.

01:16:46.820 And then finally, of our politicians, ask them, why don't we have this?

01:16:51.440 Because our politicians will respond to what we ask for.

01:16:54.540 OK. You know, I.

01:16:55.860 Yep. Yep. I think that's key.

01:16:57.160 Right. Right. And so. Well, so that's a marketing campaign to some degree, marketing and communication campaign.

01:17:03.400 So that's correct.

01:17:04.100 All right. All right. Well, look, it was a great pleasure and privilege speaking with you.

01:17:09.020 And I'd encourage people who are watching and listening to pick up your book, Leaders, Myth and Reality,

01:17:15.620 and to start what thinking about and participating in this conversation to start thinking about the sort of future that we want to craft collectively and individually,

01:17:24.820 so that we can do things properly over the next 10 years and keep things oriented in the manner that thoughtful and wise people might want them to be oriented.

01:17:35.740 Thanks very much for agreeing to speak with me, and I hope we get a chance to talk again in the future.

01:17:41.900 I look forward to it. I really appreciate you having me on, and I really enjoyed hearing your thoughts.

01:17:46.380 Good to see you.

01:17:47.000 Thank you, sir.

01:17:47.580 Bye-bye.

01:17:48.100 Take care.

01:17:48.520 Next week, we'll broadcast a 12 Rules for Life lecture.

01:18:05.640 I gave at the Keller Auditorium in Portland, Oregon, on June 25th, 2018.

01:18:11.600 I tried to account for the sudden and surprising popularity of long-form intellectual broadcasts,

01:18:17.480 discussing the 5,000-plus people that came out in Vancouver to listen to Sam Harris and I discuss science and values and religion and atheism,

01:18:26.460 noting that the older communication technologies, TV, newspapers, radio,

01:18:31.200 may have given us the impression that we're much less intelligent and attentively engaged than we actually are.

01:18:37.240 I also discussed the role that biological temperament or personality plays in governing individual ability and interest,

01:18:43.840 emphasizing the profound reality and extensive difference between people that such temperamental variability produces.

01:18:50.180 Follow me on my YouTube channel, Jordan B. Peterson, on Twitter, at Jordan B. Peterson,

01:18:58.100 on Facebook, at Dr. Jordan B. Peterson, and at Instagram, at jordan.b. Peterson.

01:19:05.720 Details on this show, access to my blog, information about my tour dates and other events,

01:19:12.460 and my list of recommended books can be found on my website, jordanbpeterson.com.

01:19:18.120 My online writing programs, designed to help people straighten out their pasts,

01:19:24.000 understand themselves in the present, and develop a sophisticated vision and strategy for the future,

01:19:29.740 can be found at selfauthoring.com.

01:19:32.960 That's selfauthoring.com.

01:19:35.980 From the Westwood One Podcast Network.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - March 31, 2019

Myth & Reality： General Stanley McChrystal

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