What Moves You Will Move the World ｜ Jocko Willink ｜ EP 420 (knbRQWcICRE)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=knbRQWcICRE

Hello everyone. I’m pleased to announce my new tour for 2024. Beginning in early February and running through June, Tammy and I and an assortment of special guests are going to visit 51 cities in the U.S. You can find out more information about this on my website jordanbpeterson.com as well as accessing all relevant ticketing information. I’m going to use the tour to walk through some of the ideas I’ve been working on. My forthcoming book out November 2024, We Who Wrestle with God. I’m looking forward to this. I’m thrilled to be able to do it again and I’ll be pleased to see all of you again soon. Bye-bye. I never like gave orders. I never had to say hey everyone here’s what we’re doing we’re doing this. I never had to say that. The caveat is we’re in a gunfight and you know I need you to take your element over that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And even then it’s a strong suggestion because I might say Jordan take that building over there. You might look back at me and say negative. The reason you’re saying that to me is because there’s something that you see that I don’t see. So the idea of barking orders and that idea that the military or any organization can be run through authoritarian dictatorship. Look, you can make it work for a little while but it’s not a long-term solution and that’s what we’ve got to watch out for. Hello everybody. I have Jocko Willink here with me today. Most of you watching and listening will know who Jocko is. He’s ex-Navy SEAL, very broad social media following, talented author of children’s books, an entrepreneur. We’ve spoken a number of times in the past and that’s always gone really well. The conclusions that he’s drawn as a consequence of his vast experience in the military and on the entrepreneurship front dovetail very well with what I’ve learned as a consequence of working as a clinician and a professor and in the entrepreneurial space over all these decades. We talked about leadership and ethics and I would say about invitational leadership and ethics and and fleshed out a landscape of description about leadership that makes it not so much a matter of top-down command and order but of bottom-up formulation of shared vision and shared goals supplemented by continual communication. And we also talked a lot about the pleasure of mentorship which is a form of fatherhood I would say and the fact that people, men particularly in relationship to fatherhood have a vested interest and instinctual tilt towards developing the best in other people and that that’s a much better way of viewing the manner in which proper hierarchies are structured than one that relies on the assumption that people are fundamentally motivated by power. Maybe the best of us is motivated by the opportunity to serve the best in other people and I really think that that’s a possibility and I would say that’s also a hallmark of Jocko’s style and message. Well Mr. Willink, let’s start by talking about your tour. So when were you on tour? A few months ago I went on tour. This was the second tour that I did and the first one I did was right at the beginning of COVID, right before COVID. In fact I may have been the super spreader of COVID. Oh yeah probably. Because I did San Francisco, New York, LA, DC. I was like in all the places where eventually COVID spread really quickly and I had been to all of them and who knows. You helped us get over it quicker. That’s how I would look at it. You’re welcome. Yeah yeah yeah. So this one was a few years later and I just did five or six cities this time and what was nice was we, the one that was in Chicago, we brought a crew in and we filmed it and we’re going to release it. So when is that coming out? I’m not sure yet. I’m not sure that all the editing and everything isn’t done yet but we’ll put it out there. So why do you think people and what do people tell you? Why do people come and see you? What is it that you’re providing to people do you think? I think people want to come see me and want to connect with me in real life because they’ve listened to my podcast a lot. Yeah. So I think that has a lot to do with it and then I think people, you know I’m just up there sort of sharing experiences that I’ve had and I try and do the best I can in presenting the lessons that I’ve learned and really one of the biggest lessons that I was talking about on this tour was it’s going to be okay and I think that especially when people go through traumatic situations obviously I deal with veterans a lot, law enforcement and the whole PTSD that people have been going through and talking about for the last, well I guess since the wars have been on last 20 years and a lot of times someone would go through traumatic experience and they’d have bad feelings about her. They’d have regrets about it. They’d have things that they wish they would have done differently and one of the main themes I was telling people during this tour was that’s totally normal and it’s okay. It’s okay to think oh I lost some friends and sometimes I feel sad about it. Well yeah of course. Like that’s normal. That’s fine. In fact if you weren’t sad about it there may be something wrong because I think that people have been told for a while that oh if you’re feeling sad there’s something wrong with you when I actually don’t think there’s anything wrong with when you feel sad. You feel sad? Yeah you lost friends. You’re going to feel sad. Oh you were in combat. You had to do some horrible things. You did some things that you regret. There’s nothing wrong with that. People make mistakes. People, things don’t turn out the way that they wanted them to. We made decisions and there was a bad result at the end of that decision and instead of thinking oh I’m a terrible person, no it’s like you made a mistake and that’s okay and you got to move on. Yeah well that’s a, that’s the tricky part I think with regards to say post-traumatic stress disorder or regret. You know because it’s one thing if you’re sad because you’ve lost people. It’s another thing if you’re blaming yourself because you believe and maybe with some cause that you’ve made a mistake and often people don’t know what to do about the fact that they’ve made a mistake. So maybe we could talk about that a little bit because some of the people who are watching and listening will have made mistakes and some of them are hanging themselves out to dry because of it. I mean especially if you make mistakes that have had fairly dramatic consequences. So and this ties in I would say also to the motif of forgiveness because there’s not much difference between forgiving other people and forgiving yourself and you can’t just do that by saying that you’re going to do it. So what I’ve observed clinically and I think this works philosophically as well is that what you want to do to set things right which is to atone is to lay out what you’ve done that you think was wrong. Provide yourself with the best possible defense. So you know there’s a reason in our legal system that we start with the presumption of innocence which is a miracle because like tyrannies start with the presumption of guilt and the reason they do that is because everyone’s done something wrong and if you dig around enough in anyone’s life you’ll find a reason that they’re culpable, a reason to put them away and so the fact that we presume innocence is a complete bloody miracle and I can’t figure out how we ever managed to get that right but you’ve got to do that with yourself. So imagine you’re taking yourself to task because you did some things wrong. It’s like okay list them out in your imagination or write it down but then you’ve got to defend yourself as thoroughly as you possibly can which doesn’t mean you’re trying to get yourself off the hook. It means that you’re trying not to take yourself apart more than is necessary and then you might ask well if I’ve done something terrible maybe what’s necessary is that I commit suicide, is that like I pay the ultimate price for my sins and people will do that when they’re depressed and that’s not right because actually what you want to do to atone is to set yourself back on the right track. So the precondition for forgiving yourself is first of all to sort out whether or not you’re accusing yourself too viciously like a tyrant but then let’s assume that there’s some leftover evidence, compelling evidence that you did do something wrong. Okay now you have to figure out what you did wrong and you have to figure out what you would have done differently and what you will do differently in the future and then my sense is and I think this works out psychologically is that if you can set yourself up so that you’ve learned from the mistake you made so you wouldn’t repeat it then you get to go on with your life and I think that’s also what you do with people around you. You know I mean you might want to forgive someone maybe who hurt you when you were young for example because you don’t want to carry that burden around you know it’s like it’s been 20 years you’re still mad about it’s like well you got tortured plus you’re still angry about it so that’s not good for you but to forgive someone so that you can heal a relationship means that they have to confess what they did they have to assess why it was wrong they have to come up with an alternative way of behaving and then they have to swear you know by all that’s holy so to speak that they’re not going to do that again in the future and then I think and you know you might say that the devil in your mind that’s still accusing you might say well what you did is so terrible that you should never be let off the hook and I would say that is that if that’s the criteria that you use for judgment then everyone’s doomed because everyone makes mistakes in their lives and I would say probably everybody makes unforgivable mistakes and so if we’re going to take ourselves apart about that permanently then we’re all ruined. Yeah I was pretty lucky growing up in the military that I would get to see guys and I was probably 26 years old and I moved into like an instructor role in the SEAL teams and so you’d see these young leaders and they’d go out on some training mission and they would they were going to mess things up they’re going to make mistakes and you know you always get this talk about well you made the best decision you could with the information that you had at the time and it kind of sounds like a cop-out in a way but yeah it’s actually not a cop-out at all you make the best decision that you can with the information that you have at the time like what more can a human being do the best decision they can with the information that they had at the time and when you get more information or when the results come as they may yeah that decision that you made might not have been a good decision it might have been a bad decision but there’s number number one there’s nothing you can do to change it like it already happened you made the decision and then I would always look at the guys and say what was their intent behind this decision that they made look why did they do that because if we can decipher that and their intent was they wanted to make a good move to get their guys out of a bad situation what what more could I want from a leader than to make a decision that’s doing their best with the information that they had at the time to maneuver out of a bad scenario to take care of their guys there’s nothing more I could hope for so as long as I think you peel back the onion and you kind of review what happened you say oh yeah I made the decision at this time of course if I had this other information I change it but I did what I did the result was not what I wanted it’s not what I intended here we are and now you can either beat yourself up or you can say here’s some lessons I’ve learned from it and you know this the first book that I wrote was called Extreme Ownership the opening chapter that was a fratricide that took place where I was the guy in charge where one of my friendly one of my seals killed a friendly Iraqi soldier in a terrible situation and of course you know we could go back and hindsight’s 20-20 and I could have done this and I should have done this and I should have done something else and I didn’t and that’s on me and so I think you know that initial part if we’re going to talk about forgiveness the first part of that is taking ownership say yep this was my call this was my decision this is the move that I made that’s me it’s not anybody else it’s me because the minute you start saying well this person did that and this person’s you know the enemy did this we didn’t expect that the minute you start casting blame on other people now you’re I think you’re I think you’re lying to yourself and I think that’s going to cause more problems so saying yes this was a decision I made this is the information I had at the time it ended up being a bad decision here was my intent behind it and I’ve got to move forward if you want to you know I always talk about you want to learn but you don’t want to dwell if you dwell on the past if you dwell on the mistakes you made like you said everybody is just doomed well so the tricky issue there I think is that people who are taking themselves apart they’re often conscientious people and so well they’ll say they’ll think they’ll assume that taking ownership in your terms means raking yourself over the coals and the crucial thing to establish there is is like well yeah you have to rake yourself over the coals until you learn but no more than that because after that it’s counterproductive is what you’re trying to foster is improvement right now and then in terms of making a case for your for your innocence that’s where analysis of ignorance is useful you know you said well and it’s a question of conscience did you make the best use of the information that you had available at the time and one answer is well yes but I had sparse information and then you have to ask yourself well could have you been more informed if your eyes would have been more open that’s a willful blindness issue but it’s definitely worthwhile to when you’re making a case to defend yourself to see how much of the the sequence of events that resulted in the unfortunate conclusion was attributable to situation there’s our there’s a classic mistake in in thinking that people make called the fundamental attribution error so imagine that you’re driving along on the road and somebody cuts you off and you say well that’s son of a bitch it’s like and then you know you find two blocks later that you’re in the same situation in terms of the positioning of the automobiles and you cut someone else off and it’s harder to do a situational analysis than to do a personal attribution and so people will default to a personal attribution that son of a bitch and that can turn around to bite you because it’s difficult when you’re retroactively assessing something you’ve done to to take into account all the situational factors but that is definitely something you do if you’re mounting a defense for yourself and that’s part of that presumption of innocence so we could say if you’re trying to get yourself out of something like post-traumatic stress disorder we would say well how would you make the case for yourself if you began with the presumption of innocence and that there were situational factors make the strongest possible case so you do that now if there’s some residual issues that you have to contend with like the fact that you were willfully blind or you know maybe you weren’t protecting your men maybe you were going for the promotion because you’re more ambitious than you should be like that that that speaks to intent but you shouldn’t convict yourself until all the arguments that are in favor of your innocence have exhausted themselves right and it is that is the way that our legal system is set up and there’s a good reason for that too and then knowing also that atonement is possible and forgiveness appropriate when you’ve learned your lesson you know and that’s also very useful when you’re disciplining children so for example when my kids were young and I used to have them sit on the steps when they were you know acting like barbarians I should clarify that you discipline your children when they’re acting in a way that isn’t appropriate for their age in accordance with universal human judgment so you should discipline your children when they’re disgracing themselves and the reason you should do that isn’t because they’re bad kids or because it reflects badly on you or because you’re angry but because if they continue to act that way other people aren’t going to want to have them around and that’s not good for your kids so you discipline them so I say to my son for example go sit on the steps till you can act like a civilized human being or whatever terminology is appropriate when he’s young and the rule was well as soon as you get yourself under control problem solved well it’s the same with past sins so to speak as if you failed to hit the target properly but you figured out why and now you know how you would chart your course differently in the future done you know and it’s also the case that even most negative emotion that you experience in relationship to past memories only emerges because there’s a hole in your adaptive structure so imagine at some point in the past you fell in a pit and you don’t know how you got there well that emotion is going to remain hot and dangerous until you figure out why you fell in and the reason that your conscience keeps torturing you about that is because well you fell into a hole and you don’t know why and so maybe you’ll fall into another one and so you shouldn’t be that comfortable but if you can figure out why and you can re-evaluate your aim or your course so that that isn’t going to happen in the future well even psychologically your own conscience will let you off the hook if you’ve reconfigured your pathway and so and you do that well partly by not taking yourself apart to any great degree all right so you said that one of the things that people you think that people you said there were two reasons you thought that people were maybe coming to see you live is they they’ve been watching your podcast and they actually wanted to make more personal contact do you do meet and greets and that sort of thing at the end of the of the i do it the whole time like as soon as people start coming in i just hang out with them and and then get up on stage and do the show and then hang out and the the staff at the place will say how long are you going to meet with people and i say until everyone’s met with me that wanted me that wants me oh yeah and do you do that is that do you do that formally or do you do that informally informally informally see at the end of my lectures we have a formal meet and greet and people line up and there’s a bunch of reasons for doing that there’s a ticket increment that’s associated with that so there’s a financial reason that makes the tour more rewarding but it’s also because there’s so many people that want to do that formalizing it made it much more efficient you know because everybody gets it’s not very much time it’s only about 15 seconds probably something like that but the parameters are pretty nicely defined and we can we can what would we say we can provide more people with what they want doing that and so i really enjoy that actually i and you know 15 seconds is very long but it’s not nothing and if you’re awake you can have a bit of an interaction with someone that isn’t only surface and that’s also an really interesting challenge you know to be able to do that rapidly and efficiently in a way that’s satisfying for everybody who’s involved yeah well the weird thing is is people come up to me and they say i feel like i know you yeah right and and i say you do yeah yeah like you listen to the podcast there’s hundreds and hundreds of hours of me talking about all this different stuff and if you listen all that you do know yeah right and then i kind of know you too because we’ve had these shared experiences yeah going through all these topics together and so i kind of know you too yeah so you do have like a legitimate connection with people and that’s they can come up and just tell you whatever it is they’re going to tell you and they can ask me a question in 14 seconds and i’ll give an answer in 32 seconds and we’re good and they’re high-fiving and bro hug and we’re moving on yeah yeah yeah well that’s a lot of contextual information yeah absolutely i feel exactly the same way you know and like you said the the idea that the people who are coming have that they know you that’s that’s not a falsehood unless you’re being false in your podcast and i know that you’re not false in your podcast so they actually do they actually do know you yeah i really i really enjoy going i really enjoy going to her how long do you talk two two and a half hours something oh yeah oh yeah so so quite a while okay and i’ll do some q a in there as well there’ll be some q and a roll the dice with the q and a yeah i don’t know what you’re gonna get we use slido i don’t use that well it’s this technology that so everybody on the screens in the theaters there’s a code and everybody can enter the code into their phone and it brings them to the slido site and then they can ask a question but more importantly they can upvote the questions and so that’s very helpful because so i i talk for 90 minutes about hour 90 minutes something like that and then tammy aggregates the questions from slido and she asks me the questions and because everybody can vote it gives us a chance to sample the audience and it keeps the it’s a good way of organizing it as well too because the problem with taking live questions is that people don’t know how to handle the mic and so no one can hear them and then the audience starts talking and then you get people who are just grandstanding or don’t really have a question and slido has worked extremely well for us for handling that i guess the only thing i would can you then call that person out and have them come up and have them you could but stand on it well we you could i haven’t done that that’s not a bad idea we haven’t done that sometimes when you don’t get the context around the question you need more context yeah yeah definitely give a good answer yeah definitely you can’t do that yeah well you can solve that problem to some degree by selecting questions in the list of questions that don’t require the additional context and i guess i solve that sometimes too by providing you know what might be a more generally applicable answer than something that would be specific to the person there’s something kind of awesome though about just someone stepping up to the mic and you don’t know what you’re going to get fair enough and it’s i enjoy that it’s like the no tightrope no net tightrope yeah right well and well that’s also what i like about the lectures you know because i don’t lecture from notes i mean i prepare beforehand and i have a question or two in mind that i’m trying to answer but i never use notes and i think part of the reason that the live lectures are compelling to people is because they are they are without a net they are tightrope situations and one of the things i really like about speaking spontaneously like that is if there’s a question at hand or two questions they’re questions that i seriously want to investigate so i’m trying to investigate them in a new way as i go and if you do it right you can you can bring the whole thing to a conclusion that’s like a punch line right and that’s really fun to see if you can orchestrate that in real time that works on podcasts too and you what’s your batting average on getting you know if you do if you did 100 shows how many times do you land like right where you wanted to land and you walk off the stage triumphant with a grand slam in the ninth inning we’re experiencing a lot of global instability as we plunge into primary season how are you protecting your family in the midst of all this chaos the fact is there is one asset that has withstood famine wars and political and economic upheaval dating back to biblical times and that’s gold it’s not too late to diversify an old ira or 401k into gold and birch gold group can help you with that birch gold can help you create a well thought out and balanced investment strategy they’ll help you convert an existing ira or 401k into an ira in gold without paying a penny out of pocket diversify into gold today just text jordan to 9 8 9 8 9 8 for a free info kit with an a plus rating with the better business bureau countless five star reviews and thousands of happy customers i encourage you to check out birch gold today text jordan to 9 8 9 8 9 8 claim your free info kit and protect your savings with gold that’s jordan to 9 8 9 8 9 8 well i would say especially because i’ve been because i’m healthier again i think it was i was less consistent when i was touring in 2018 because i’ll put a lot of balls in the air and it’s like you’re going to see a complex movie you know now and then you go to a movie and there’s 50 things going on and it’s like an hour and a half in and you think is he going to manage it is he going to tie it all together and sometimes it’s like it comes together it’s like dead that was a great movie and sometimes there’s some fool thing that happens that leaves everything hanging in 2018 more frequently i would get a lot of things going and then maybe only tie them three quarters together but in the last couple of years the talks they almost always cohere i mean sometimes you nail it right and so those are those are particularly exciting times but batting average is pretty high now so you and i were talking about being rock stars you know both of us probably would have been much better off if we’d been rock and roll stars so what i do at my talks is i i make a set list right like you know the the old days when i would go to shows to rock and roll shows yeah a set list if you could steal that thing or get a hold of it at the end of concert you had something pretty cool right this set list thing so that’s what i do i make a set list i’ll just have like different topics that i’m going to talk about and they’ll there’ll be some kind of thread but i’m yeah if you don’t if you plan it out too much it doesn’t have the spontaneity that it that that feels that good yeah definitely then when you just roll with it and you got your topics and they’re kind of out there and i’m going to talk about these things and i’m gonna try and pull it off at the end and yeah we’ll see where it goes yeah yeah well it’s a lot more exciting to do that because you don’t know where it’s going to go you know that’s the wind bloweth blowing where it listeth right you have to follow that thread and it also enables you to really pay attention to the audience because one of the things you’re doing when you’re lecturing when you’re speaking to an audience it’s not lecturing that’s the thing it’s different than lecturing because it’s not a set as you said it’s not what you have isn’t set a priority when you’re communicating with a crowd you have to watch to see what’s landing and that’s partly what you’re doing there is you’re putting yourself in tune with the spirit of the crowd because everybody comes there and it’s a particular time and it’s a particular night and there’s particular things going on in the broader political realm and so everybody’s charged in a certain way and some topics are going to land more heavily that night than others and if you really watch the audience members and you listen for when you get silence you can feel when you’ve got the words matched to the expectation of the audience properly and then you can track that thread and you can’t do that if you prepare too in too much detail to begin with so you use topics so i use questions like i’ve questions in my head but then i i also have topics that i can use they’re like greatest hits i suppose in some ways right so that’s that set list idea i was about to ask you about greatest hits because you got to yeah some of that crowd probably wants to hear just the jordan yeah definitely they want to hear you go off about some lobsters right well i talked to douglas murray about that too because we’ve done some events together which has been very fun but you know one of the things douglas pointed out more explicitly was that if you have a base of viewers and listeners they have a certain set of expectations they want to hear something new but not but kind of optimally new they want you to return to themes that they’ve become familiar with partly because that’s a good place for them to understand it’s like and it is i think akin to going to see a concert you want to hear some new material from your band but you want to hear some of the things that you’ve come to know and love now why do you want that live exactly well i think because it gives the audience that opportunity to participate in real time with the unfolding of something that’s ordered and classic and new at the same time yeah and and you it’s it’s live it’s real yeah so it’s not going to be an exact replication of what they heard before yeah there’s going to be some nuance you’re going to take that solo that guitar solo somewhere a little bit different every time and they’re going to get to see that yeah well they can also people can also evaluate them too if it’s the real thing you know like and i think it’s especially true for the kinds of podcasts that you and i do which have this kind of motivational and psychological element to them is people really want to know it’s like you know am i selling my soul to the devil here or is this person who they claim to be you know this is one of the things i’ve always been impressed with about people like joe rogan for example is like rogan is just exactly who he presents himself to be like there’s there’s no and i’ve seen the all i’ve seen the all the other side of that often at political events you know go to political events i know the person who’s involved possibly many of the political figures that i’ve seen perform have a political face they’re not the same on stage they have an act a political act you know and they’re different people off stage often smarter people interestingly enough and i think more interesting people but rogan doesn’t have any of that and i think when people are looking for motivational direction and and and and and delving into personal philosophy they want to bloody well make sure that the people that they’re listening to are credible and that’s something you can assess more particularly in a live situation especially when you’re watching people interact on their feet right because they don’t have that scaffold vivek ramaswamy told me he wouldn’t use a teleprompter during the he swore he wouldn’t use a teleprompter during the campaign partly because he wanted to avoid exactly that and i think this is one of trump’s real strengths too is that trump might make mistakes when he speaks but they’re his mistakes you know and people are willing to cut him a lot of slack because they’re his mistakes you know and there’s a courage about that too because there is the possibility that you’ll go you know spectacularly wrong to say something stupid or fail yeah so you talked about you talked about intent when people are analyzing their motivations for their past conduct for better or worse when what’s your intent in the tour and do you how do you orient your intent before you go on stage so interestingly i had a woman that works for me and she’s the co-op one of my company’s great incredibly impressive woman named jamie and she was at one of these live events and i got asked during the during the q a someone said hey why are you doing yeah yeah you know and and she who hears me speak all the time she told me afterwards she said when i got asked that question she wanted to hear what i was going to say because she never really thought about like why did you do that because she kind of knows my life situation my financial situation where i’m at in the world she kind of knows and she never really thought to ask me like why are you on tour right now why you do this why don’t you aren’t just relaxing sitting by the what to do whenever it is you want to do yeah and she waited for my answer and and my answer was to try and help people out yeah that’s it i mean at this juncture so why do you okay so let’s delve into that a little bit there’s two things you brought up there that i think are particularly interesting one is the automatic assumption on the part of people who might be asking the question why that if everyone had their druthers they would be sitting on a beach relaxing and like people ask me i was home visiting my parents recently and my mother said to me don’t you ever relax because i was you know i was working while i was there on all sorts of things and i said to her i you know i don’t know i’m not that interested in relaxing like i don’t even to some degree i don’t even know what that means like if i’m tired well i’ll sit down you know and and maybe i’ll watch a stupid comedy or something because that’s all that’s left of me you know i think tami and i watched legally blonde the other night and that was about right because i’d been writing all day you know and it was stupidly funny yeah right and so fine but as a goal like my goal is not to relax like that’s not that’s i think my goal is to have as an adventurous a time as i can possibly manage i’ve been writing about the book of abraham in this new book i’m writing and abraham the conception of god in the book of abraham is that god is the voice that calls you to adventure and that the the most the most devout path is the path with the highest adventure yeah i really like that i really like that because you know your life is not going to be justified by satisfaction or satiation that’s for infants there’s going to be plenty of pain and so there’s no escape from pain and so you might say well if you can’t be satisfied and there’s no escape for pain from pain then there’s no hope but if if the point is the adventure well that’s just not true then then then the adventure can justify the pain and the lack of satiation so you said back to the adventure a tour is an adventure but you said that your prime motivation is to help people okay so let’s let’s dig into that a bit we could get skeptical about it’s like people might say like the the post-modernist types the neo-marxist types would say well that’s just your cover for like your dominance your your power striving you’ve made lots of money you’re famous people know who you are it’s like and if because that’s not enough for you you have to add this overlay so yeah and by the way i’m just doing this to help people right so that’s the very cynical attitude but you can you can understand that that’s a justifiable criticism and if you were narcissistic it would also be a genuine criticism so why do you think it is that you find why do you think your claim that you’re helping people is justified and if it’s justified why do you think that you find helping people intrinsically rewarding going back to my career in the military i i think this is where i initially learned this because as you’re coming up in the military you know you’re you’re you’re going up in the ranks and you’re getting moved into more positions of responsibility and you’re going out and conducting operations and all those things that you do inside the military in your career and what i found more than anything else was where i got gratification what felt like i actually did something good was when i’d see a guy that i had worked with that i had mentored that i had trained when i’d see them step up and excel yeah be able to achieve things be able to accomplish things yeah that was more gratifying than me doing it myself and so i think that i i started to notice that that that’s what really when did you notice that how old were you probably 29 30 something along those so i was i was in a leadership position i started to have people working you know that that were my direct reports but i realized oh i can i can really help this person like they don’t know what to do yeah right and and inside the military inside the seal teams it’s like there’s a mission that you’re going to do and there’s a certain way to conduct that mission and this person that had only been doing this job for three years might not know that and i knew it there’s not too many things that you know yeah well you go i can i can show you how to do this yeah and instead of just saying hey i’m better than you i’m smarter than you i can show you how to do this you can follow my lead instead of having that attitude it’s an attitude like hey you’re going to be just as capable as i am at some point i can help you more even yeah this is that’s the goal is to make them more and this is something that comes from jiu-jitsu as well in jiu-jitsu if you and i train jiu-jitsu and we’ve both been training the same amount of time sure it’ll come down to like who’s bigger and stronger but i realized hey there’s always someone that’s going to has been training longer than me and they’re going to be able to beat me that doesn’t make them a better human being than me it just means that they’ve been training longer for me and that applies to just about everything right so if the the skill of being a seal and planning a mission oh i might be better at you better than you right now but over time i should be able to train you and you should be able to like you said get better than i am and so i felt that that left the biggest mark yeah on my on my soul of being able to help people out and then when i got out of the military and i started kind of teaching the same leadership principles that i had learned and then i started getting that same feedback and then with writing kids books like that was a whole new level when you have a kid that comes up and says hey i did my first pull up or i i got an a on my my math test or i learned all my times tables and the parents have tears in their eyes saying thank you there’s nothing better than that okay so so you know so i think that’s actually true i do think there’s nothing better than that and so i’ve been trying to take that apart because that’s a relatively radical claim so you can imagine you can imagine the attractions of hedonism and so everybody has their base desires and i would say base for a variety of reasons they’re you know lust anger those are good examples they want what they want right bloody well now and there’s some gratification to be had in obtaining that now the problem with right now is it’s sort of to hell with other people and to hell with the future and so maybe that’s not an optimized path this is why hedonism per se is a dysfunctional orientation it reduces everything to the moment and then it reduces everything to the whim inside the individual so there’s no future there’s no time and there’s no other people okay power there’s another example it’s like well i could go for power i could compel and force other people to do what i want for my gratification obviously regardless of what they want why shouldn’t i do that if i couldn’t do it you know and cultures like ancient rome cultures that are predicated on the notion that might makes right they’re predicated on the idea that well if you can do it you should and that the fact that you can and would makes you better like by definition if i can force someone to do what i want them to do and they can’t resist then why shouldn’t i just be contemptuous of them and i think the answer to that is well backfires it’s like you can enforce your will on people for a while but even among chimpanzees the probability that the moment you turn your back or show any weakness that you’re going to get torn into pieces is extremely high so so hedonism power those are sort of alternative motivational states well this one this this pleasure in helping other people develop i think well why shouldn’t we think that that’s just your cover story and i think the reason for that is well here’s one reason human beings are pair bonding creatures and our children are dependent longer than the offspring of any organisms so there’s two pathways to reproduction there’s two patterns of natural world reproduction there’s the mosquito pathway these have technical names can’t remember one is k i can’t remember the technical names mosquitoes on the one end human beings on the other so the mosquito strategy is a million offspring and if 999 thousand of them die as long as one survives or two you’ve done your job no investment past sex right and there are human beings who have that strategy as well no investment past sex right the alternative is immense investment maybe multi-generational investment that’s parenting grandparenting great-grandparenting maybe the establishment of a pattern that even works beyond that human beings have staked their existence on the high investment reproductive strategy and so to the degree that we’re biologically prepared to be fathers there’s an instinct for mentoring and i think that what you’re describing is the broader scale manifestation of exactly that now you tied these things together you know you said you discovered when you were young that helping other people develop was a great intrinsic pleasure and you said maybe the most rewarding of the intrinsic pleasures and i i really do believe that’s true it’s quite stunning to to realize that my graduate supervisor was a very great guy he’s still alive robert peale and bob was a really good professor and he got a lot of joy from lecturing he was a really good researcher a good administrator like bob had it all going and still the thing he felt that he took most pleasure in across the entire expanse of his career was helping his graduate students in particular develop their careers he was very generous at that of course it paid back to him immensely because it turns out if you share ideas you generate more ideas because the ideas get rewarded and if you help other people develop their career they tend to you know it reflects very positively on you there’s a saying in the seal teams if you take care of your gear your gear will take care of you meaning if you take care of your parachute and you prepare it you pack it correctly when you pull your rip cord it will open or your dive gear when you’re underwater if you prepared it you’ve maintained it correctly you can breathe underwater which are really good things and you don’t die yeah and you don’t die yeah starting a business can be tough especially knowing how to run your online storefront thanks to shopify it’s easier than ever shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business from the launch your online shop stage all the way to the did we just hit a million orders stage shopify is there to help you grow our marketing team uses shopify every day to sell our merchandise and we love how easy it is to add more items ship products and track conversions shopify helps you turn browsers into buyers with the internet’s best converting checkout up to 36 better compared to other leading commerce platforms no matter how big you want to grow shopify gives you everything you need to take control and take your business to the next level sign up for a one dollar per month trial period at shopify.com slash jbp go to shopify.com slash jbp now to grow your business no matter what stage you’re at that’s shopify.com slash jbp well i the twist that i put on that was if you take care of your people your people will take care of you yeah and that’s absolutely true even what you’re just talking about with bob yeah because bob yeah investment strategy he took care of you yeah and and look could we again could we play the the the jordan game on this thing where maybe he was just doing that knowing that in the long run you know all those all those favors were to come back and yeah get take care of that’d be a really long-term strategy and it’d be a kind of a gut check to put up with all these miserable graduate students this whole time where you’re just kind of putting chips on the table hoping that these investments would pay off i also think too that at some point you have to flip the definition if your strategy is short-term gratification that’s one thing but if your strategy is long-term mutual reinforcement development even if you can see that that’s a benefit to you if you’re the sort of person that was only doing that because it was a benefit to you you’d revert to the short term immediately and so at some point you can’t be if it’s a long enough term investment strategy there’s no being cynical about it anymore because the the the details of the strategy of the necessity for the for the cynicism so i’ve been writing about the gospels and there’s there’s a christ one of christ’s what would you say commandments is to lay up treasures in heaven that do not rust where that moths cannot destroy and nor nor and robbers cannot steal and rust cannot devour treasures in heaven and so i’ve been trying to parcel parse through exactly what that means so it means to live in the light of eternity first of all so it means to view everything you do in the moment as extending as if it extended infinitely throughout time so it’s so can’t the philosopher can’t have this categorical imperative you want to don’t do anything that you wouldn’t want people to do if it if it was distributed widely the biblical especially in the gospels you see this but it’s it’s more sophisticated it’s like everything you do should be the sort of thing that would work if everyone did it over the longest possible time with the most number of situations simultaneously addressed so this notion of laying up treasure in heaven where it doesn’t rust and where it can’t be stolen it really looks to me like it refers to something like reputation because you might say well where is the safest place to store your wealth and the answer to that is it’s not in money because money can inflate for example and it can be stolen there’s all sorts of ways you can lose it the safest place to store your wealth is in your reputation and the most effective way of developing your reputation is to be of the most service you can possibly be to other people you know and so when we’re on tour with tammy and our tour we’re thinking well this is pretty good deal you know we put this effort into it but it’s returned thousands of fold right because now you have people who are so happy with what you’ve done that they’re thrilled to have you around and so that’s a pretty damn good deal and so it’s it’s it’s this perverse uniting of selfish selflessness with what would you say with genuine reward yeah the luck that it just so happens that if you take care of other people and you sacrifice for them and you invest in them it just so happens it’ll come back to you yeah it just so happens that it is the best possible strategy that you could undertake yeah yeah and i think there’s i think there’s no doubt about that and i i also really wonder you know what the limit to that is because it’s obviously the case that so so here’s another you tell me what you think about this here’s another form of fundamental reward if you’ve gone out of your way for someone let’s say so you’ve made sacrifices for them and then you see that that really helped them and they let you know that that really helped them that’s a really that’s a moving moment you know and i’m sure you’ve encountered that many times where people will come up to you say during the lectures of the tours and they’ll say here’s something you said because of something you learned and here’s how it helped me and you think like that strikes a very deep chord and that is one of the things that well for us anyways for tammy and i that’s certainly one of the things that makes the tour worthwhile but it does speak to that depth of motivation in mentorship and this is a very effective this is something very useful to know in the culture war that we’re engaged in because the accusation of the radical metamarsis types on the left is that there’s no other motivation than power right no matter what anybody says it’s all about power and power is the ability to compel and use force but this strategy this isn’t a power strategy right this is a distribution of power strategy it’s like you’re genuinely acting in the other person’s best interest yeah and if that’s also also allied with an instinct that makes that deeply meaningful and that’s the instinct of fatherhood as far as i’m concerned it just makes a complete bloody mockery of the claim that the only fundamental human motivation is power yep and and going back to a leadership perspective yeah what i actually want as a leader is you i don’t have to do anything because yeah right you’ve stepped up and now you’re running everything and i i can look up and out and move on yeah that’s number one and number two and i’d be interested in your opinion on this i tell people all the time that intent has a smell intent has a smell so if you if your intent is actually to take advantage of me and you know get things from me and you’re taking advantage of my mentorship you’re eventually gonna that intent will have a smell and sometimes it’s hard sometimes you meet someone and you go that man that seems a little bit off yeah this person seems a little bit off i’m not really sure about this person and that i think in my in my mind that’s their intent it’s seeping through you can smell it and if you you got to watch out for that and i always have to remind people that there are there are terrible people out there there are there are snakes that i will invest in you and invest in you and invest in you and what you’ll do at the end of that is you’ll take it and and turn away with it or turn it against me you bet and if i would say this that that is an absolute possibility can absolutely happen but if you invest in 10 people nine of them are going to give back to you and you’ll be in a better place yeah one person will try and run away and they’ll eventually unfortunately for them they’ll dig themselves a hole yeah well they can’t get well we also know that too so so psychopaths take advantage of other people they use power and so for someone who’s truly psychopathic you’re nothing but a set of opportunities for short-term gain but the problem with being a psychopath is that they have the same attitude towards themselves so they’ll sacrifice well relationships obviously which is the future to a large degree they’ll sacrifice their own future to take advantage in the moment and the consequence of that is they don’t it’s not a strategy designed for success you know you hear all this that there’s all these psychopaths in positions of power and authority it’s like most of the time like the the real hardcore psychopaths are very very likely to end up in prison but even the ones who fool some of the people some of the time or even all of the people some of the time the chickens come home to roost it is not an effective strategy you know and this has even been documented among chimpanzees so now and then in chimpanzee troops you get a leader who’s a leader a dominant male who’s risen to the top because of force fundamentally but those troops are not very functional and his leadership is very unstable and as i mentioned earlier he’s very likely to meet a dreadful end and so that’s another problem with the the claim that power is the only true motivation is that if you first of all as you said only about it’s actually about one in 20 people who use it reliably as their fundamental motivation so the rate of psychopathy narcissism etc it starts to reach clinical proportions in about one person in 20 so 19 out of 20 people that you help will respond in kind that’s a good investment it is a good it is a great investment that’s right that’s right usually not that hard to figure out i mean it might take a little bit of time before you realize oh this person’s definitely looking out for themselves yeah more than anybody else that’s going to be you said that has a smell so one of the things i’ve been working out with this character jonathan pageau is so there’s these there’s an ancient idea imagine there’s a pyramid of values okay and there’s a pinnacle value and in the egyptian formulations the pinnacle value was horus the eye which is the capacity to pay attention which i really like it’s like everything should be subordinated to your capacity to actually pay attention to watch but you can think about that ability to watch as the thing that’s at the top or you could think about it as something that operates at every is at the top and operates at every level so the idea would be that if you pick a principle to guide yourself by maybe it’s the principle of self of short-term self-promotion that’s going to be your guiding star but it’s going to leak out in absolutely everything you do every every word you say every gesture you manifest is going to speak of that and people are pretty good at decoding non-verbal behavior and that smell is associated with that pattern of short-term selfish gratification and you’re right with repeated interactions there’s something off a you can tell and other people can tell too which is another reason why that psychopathic pattern of of adaptation doesn’t work socially and it doesn’t even work for the person that’s applying it it’s perverse because an active psychopath might be better off than someone who’s so paralyzed by depression and anxiety that they they can’t move right because like a psychopathic attitude that’s self-serving can take you out into the world and it’s also unfortunately the case that it can if psychopathic men who are narcissistic have a reasonably good track record at fooling women because psychopaths mimic competence and they do that by having false confidence and women use confidence as a marker for competence but you can game confidence and that’s what psychopaths and narcissists do you know they think they know they actually believe that they know more than they know partly because they have such a dim view of everyone else and that can give them a glitz and a and an aura of confidence that and what you see in the clinical literature is that works particularly well with the younger the woman the more effective that is because they’re just not very they’re not experienced they can’t tell the gastons from the you know from the exactly gaston is a perfect example of that and i always try and explain that to people that the one of the worst situations you can be in is when you think that the little moves that you’re making no one can see them and it’s so obvious everybody else everybody else is watching can see exactly what you’re doing you think oh they can’t they can’t see the maneuvers that i’m making to take care of myself no they see everybody sees and it ends up destroying you so that that idea of like what you talked about imposing my will on other people you get away with that for a little while if i’m the boss and i can fire you or give you punitive measures because you didn’t follow my orders that’ll work for a little while but it’s not a long-term solution and eventually you’re going to have a mutiny on your hands and you’re probably going to end up they actually had a name for it in the vietnam war right we would frag you you’re my officer you’re imposing my your will on me you’re not listening to what we have to say cool we’re going to frag you we’re going to get into a gunfight at night you’re going to get shot by one of us right they had a name for it yeah that’s like the chimps you’re talking about it goes across the board to all of us primates that are out there well so so you can see how deep that goes because again the post-modern neo-marxist claim is that human hierarchies are predicated on power right and i already defined powers the willingness and ability to use force and compulsion it’s not ability forget that that’s not power ability is the ability to get things done power is the willingness and and ability to use force okay you say well you can organize hierarchies around force that’s what a totalitarian state is but but your point is dead relevant it’s like well that works fine except when it doesn’t work and then it doesn’t work at all and i don’t believe at all that the the functional hierarchies that men organize they’re if they’re predicated on see piaget jean piaget the developmental psychologist delved into this too he said there’s another problem with a hierarchy that’s built on power so let’s say we’ve got an organization here that’s top down command it’s like you do what i say or there’s going to be trouble right and there’s another organization beside it and that is more here’s the vision i’m going to aggregate a bunch of people who are on board with that right so they’re doing it voluntarily now those are the sort of people to whom you can distribute the kind of responsibility that you described earlier so you want people around you that don’t need you around right as you build an organization and you might say well i don’t want to cede all that control that means your power mad but the advantage to you is if you build those people underneath you who are competent in their own realm you can keep moving your ambition higher and higher because you build this platform beneath you that’s composed of competent people and all that happens is your expanse of opportunity increases okay so piaget’s observation was this there’s costs to the power oriented hierarchy the cost is you demoralize the participants because they’re not chasing something they value except under duress and you have to discipline you have to monitor and discipline them constantly and that’s a cost so if you put system a power-based and system b voluntary based right vision based let’s say in a head-to-head competition the voluntary organization will always eventually stomp the power based and i think that’s exactly right you know when you go to these live events and you get asked questions and and i got asked a question and it just kind of led to a whole thought process but somebody you know asked me well how do how do i get people to listen to me you know i’m in a leadership position how do i get people to listen to me and i said if you want people to listen to you you need to listen to them it’s the opposite of what people think you know it’s not talk louder if i want you to listen to me if i want if i want you to listen to me i need to listen to you and that kind of opened up this whole idea for me there’s a whole there’s a whole category of these things right if i want you to respect me what do i have to do i have to treat you with respect yeah if i want to have influence over you what do i have to do i actually have to allow you to influence me i have to open my mind up and allow you to influence me if i just stick with my own ideas you’re you’re you close your mind as well if i have a closed mind you’re going to close my mind if i want you to care about me what do i have to do i have to care about you and by the way in my opinion these are the components of a relationship yes yes definitely if we listen to each other we have if we don’t listen to each other we don’t have a relationship yeah if we don’t respect each other we don’t have a relationship if we’re not influenced by each other we don’t have a relationship so if we don’t care about each other obviously we don’t have a relationship so when you want to build a relationship what do you have to do you have to listen to the other person by the way this applies to your employees it applies to your kids it applies to your your spouse it applies to everyone if you want them to listen to you you have to listen to them and you can’t just you know i’ll stop talking as i prepare my counter for what you’re saying right now it’s like i’m literally going to listen to what you have to say and try and open up my mind and open up my perspective so that i understand your world as as well as i possibly can i’m going to integrate that into what my thoughts are and we’re going to come to an understanding we’re going to move forward with a better solution this is why when i was in the military i i never like gave orders i never had to say hey everyone here’s what we’re doing we’re doing this i never had to say that never had to say that oh the caveat is we’re in a gunfight and you know i need you to take your element over that and even then even then it’s a strong suggestion because i might say jordan take that building over there you might look back at me and say negative i don’t say hey shut up you insubordinate bastard you know the reason you’re saying that to me is because there’s something that you see that i don’t see because that’s the other thing trust right yeah how do i get you to trust me i have to put trust in you yeah so the idea of barking orders and that that idea that the military or any organization can be run through authoritarian dictatorship look you can make it work for a little while but it’s not a long-term solution and that’s what that’s what we’ve got to watch out for yeah well one of the things i’ve read in relationship to military history and this is particularly true with regards to the u.s is that part of the reason that the u.s military has been such a formidable force is that a fair bit of responsibility is devolved down the ranks is that people are expected to use their decision-making power as appropriate with the maximum amount of allowable freedom at their level of authority and you can imagine why that’s much better because it’s the same thing it’s the it’s the free market equivalent in the military if there’s a thousand people and some of them are troops that are on the front line some of those people on the front line are going to have much more accurate information than the people who are aggregating information at a distance both temporally and spatially so you want to you want to open yourself up to being informed by people who have skin in the game and have their eyes open in the immediate circumstance i’ve seen this with great political leaders like the great political leaders that i’ve met are very very good at listening and partly what they do even when they’re campaigning so i met this guy preston manning he started a political party in canada and out of nothing now he came from a political family so he had some connections but he basically produced a political party in canada from ground zero and they became the official opposition right and then it eventually merged with the current conservative party so it was a western party and a populist party populist but i asked him at one point well how the hell you do that because that’s really hard and he said he went from arena to arena across western canada and he’d give his stump speech but what he really liked were the questions and the answers the q and a’s because people would tell him what their problems were so you can imagine if you’re a political leader and you go talk to a thousand people and all thousand people tell you their problems because you listen well now you’ve got the questions right because one of the things that’s really impossible to figure out if you’re a leader is like well what problem are we trying to solve here what direction should we be going in and it’s a lot easier to lead people in a direction that they want to go and so if you listen to people now jimmy car told me the same thing about him preparing his comedy routines before he goes on tour so and comedians do this generally and they all know this although car was very good at elucidating it you go to 50 small clubs you try out your idiot material you know 90 percent of it falls flat but 10 percent of it makes people laugh well if you’re listening you can tell when they laugh and you just put a check by that joke and after you’ve done 30 shows and you now have two hours of material that makes people laugh even if you’re not that damn funny to begin with if you pay enough attention to what the audience responds to you can aggregate the material you can go on the road and that’s really as far as i can tell that really is the essence of leadership per se it’s certainly the essence of political leadership yeah well this is the fourth law of combat leadership that i used to teach in the seal teams that now i teach to corporations and companies and teams decentralized command that’s everything you just said decentralized command i want my subordinate leadership to be leaders yeah i want them to understand where we’re going and i don’t really care how they get there and i can put some parameters on them hey you can’t do this you can’t do that but everything else inside that box you can do make decisions go make things happen that’s decentralized command and yeah that’s why we have a great military and when we get away from that is when we start having problems that’s why you hear about the vietnam war what was happening during the vietnam war well you had johnson back in dc making decisions about what targets we were going to hit in vietnam that’s the way to run a war and that’s why you have problems in those situations so definitely decentralized command as as a leadership system it’s really vastly superior to any other system and that’s why that that group that pulls ahead and the other thing that you talk about that group that’s based on values and based on really to me relationships yeah it’s the same thing right if i have a team and we all get along and we all can talk to each other we trust each other we care about each other you put that team against a team that has a bunch of animosity and they don’t trust each other yeah the team that has good relationships is going to annihilate the team that doesn’t and we see this over and over again in the business world we saw it in the seal platoons in fact this is funny in a silk too so i was running the advanced training for the seals where you’re getting seal platoons ready they’ve already gone through all the basic training you’ve got experienced seals some new seals but experienced seals and some newer seals but they’re getting ready to go on deployment and it’s a very strenuous arduous training cycle and you’re pretty much training them some collective skills but then you’re putting them in mission scenarios where they’re going to go out and do simulated combat missions and as soon if you would see a fracture between guys in the platoon you’d watch it you’d pay attention and if it started to get worse the platoon was going to fall apart like the platoons that occasionally would fail a block of training they fail land warfare they’d fail urban combat or they’d fail close quarters combat the reason they would fail was because they had fissures in the platoon that would break them apart well how would those fissures develop ego okay so are they’re developing around people who are playing power games yep so you’re the platoon chief so in a seal platoon the platoon chief’s probably been in for 12 to 15 years he’s got a lot of tactical experience and then you’ve got the platoon commander who’s an officer he probably has four or five years he’s a little less tactically experienced but he’s the guy that’s overall in charge right he’s the guy that actually is the the head of the platoon so a good platoon chief is going to offer suggestions and a good platoon officer is going to go yep chief that makes sense yeah yeah that’s a beautiful thing and everyone can kind of see that the platoon chief is sort of running the platoon with the with the permission of for lack of a better word the permission of the platoon commander yeah well occasionally you get a platoon commander that wants everyone to know that he’s the one that’s making the decisions yeah and he starts a woman we’re not going to do it that way and right there you got friction or it can be the other way around it can be the platoon chief that wants everyone to know that hey we’re going to do it my way and the platoon commander doesn’t want to do that because he’s an idiot and you just end up with this explosion that’s that narcissism that that idea that you want to be the one that people know did it right that’s a big problem right because then you’re doing it because you want to be known right and that’s a false form of prestige right and the narcissistic types are always after the false forms of prestige like real prestige comes when people know that you’re good at delivering something they want to have delivered right that’s and that’s the well that’s the equivalent of real ability and so there’s there’s there’s something else that’s i think we can tie together what we talked about to begin with so here’s how kids develop friendships so two kids will start interacting with each other on the playground right say they’re like four years old a boy and a girl and the boy proposes some possible play topics so that could be a game or it could be like a drama so kids will pretend so maybe the boy will say um do you want to play house okay now he doesn’t say to the girl you have to play house because then if she does play it’s not going to be any fun plus she isn’t going to play and she’s going to be looking for an escape or some other kid to play with like instantly so it has to be an invitation right and then they have to jointly negotiate the rules you know because if you’re playing house you could play husband and wife or you could play you know husband and daughter or there’s all sorts of different roles or you could play two sons or one of you could be the cat like there’s a lot of roles that can be taken and the next rule is both kids have to agree on the rules and they have to want to play and play is particularly interesting in this regard because if it’s if there’s any element of compulsion if there’s or fear the the fun stops it’s a very delicate motivational state play because any other motivational state will take it out so you have to do it exactly right to get the spirit of play going so if the boy does this well then he’ll play this game with the girl and it’ll be fun for both of them and then so then you imagine there’s a fairly tight set of constraints that are operating to make that game fun for both volunteerism being one of them they have to pick their roles they have to share their aim they have to agree on what the game is going to be they have to agree on the principles so then they can play the game and now they’re experimenting with communicating with one another within the game and they’re trying to make it work and they’re trying to communicate with one another within that framework okay now if that goes well they’ll end and they’ll say well that was fun and they’ll say you know would you like to play again okay so now what you’re having is a sequence of games right and a friend is someone that a sequence of games can be played with a variety of different games and that’s a relationship so now imagine that constraints on how you have to play a game to make the game fun you have to have a goal you have to try to make the goal you have to compete because you want to do a good job maybe you want to do a better job than the person you’re playing with and you have to cooperate because you have to stay within the confines of the game okay so that’s pretty tight set of constraints now imagine that across a set of games the constraints are even tighter because now you have to be able to do that flexibly in a bunch of different situations with a bunch of different games with the same person and they have to want to continue it okay that’s a friendship now imagine that there’s a pattern of behavior that makes that an attitude that makes that more possible okay that’s an ethical attitude and there’s nothing morally relativistic about that you can see that right because they’re imagine that you have a friend and it’s it’s fun to play chess with them and it’s fun to play basketball right well there’s not a lot of commonality between those two games but there’s a commonality of attitude that can be brought to bear across those games and that’s the principle that’s antithetical to power and i think that what you’re doing when you’re mentoring people is you’re teaching them how to play that game that long-term iterative game and the pleasure in that you imagine it’s an instinct the people who are best at that have the children who thrived because they taught their children how to play games that everybody wanted to play so that they were always being called upon to play and so that was a radically effective reproductive strategy effective enough to become an instinct and an instinct that’s so powerful that it makes itself manifest as that pleasure in mentoring that you described yeah and that thing you when you mention about these people you want to interact with even when you’re a little kid it’s trust listen respect influence and care right if if you and i are going to play the game together but you’re just imposing your rules on me i’m not going to like it or you don’t listen to any of the input that i want to give i’m not gonna i’m not gonna play with you anymore yeah right i can see that you don’t care that i’m the one that keeps falling down on the ground every time we do this part of the game you don’t care about me i’m this isn’t gonna last for a little yeah and in order for us to build relationship you got to give this stuff you gotta give that trust you got to listen to what other people have to say what about uh also psychological reactants have you ever heard of this no so what i guess it’s some uh some instinct that human beings have that when we get told to do something there’s some level of we don’t really want to do what we’ve been told to do and and that’s especially true for disagreeable people by the way and men are more likely to be disagreeable yeah well if you’re agreeable you’re more likely to cooperate if someone suggests or even demands and the advantage to that is well you’re more cooperative but the disadvantage is the psychopaths and the narcissist can have their way with you and this is being very well modeled like you can produce say fictional worlds that are only composed of cooperators and they do extremely well but if you drop one malevolent actor they take everything if they if all the people can do is cooperate they take everything that’s what a cult consists of yes something along something like that that’s right that’s right you’ve got all these people who are cooperating in one you know one shark in the middle so the this is why so in beauty and the beast the beauty falls for the trainable monster right she doesn’t want the narcissist and she doesn’t want the weak men those are like the dwarfs in snow white which is why you can’t get rid of the bloody dwarfs by the way it’s like you know the typical beautiful young woman is surrounded by dwarfs right and so she’s not interested in them and so then you might say well who’s the prince and then you could say well one sort of prince is gaston and another sort of prince apparently in the beauty and beast motif is the trainable monster and you might say well why do you want the monster and the answer is well someone’s got to keep the psychopaths at bay right right and trainable so you want someone who has the capacity to say no but who can be enticed and invited into a relationship like a mentoring relationship and one of provision cooperation right so it’s a very tight line for women to negotiate right because if they find a man who’s got no capacity for monstrosity whatsoever and a monster comes along he’s done but if they pick a guy who’s too monstrous then he can’t cooperate and he’s not going to you know be cooperative with her and the children so that women have a very very small small eye hole in the needle to thread yeah and the reason i make much of beauty and the beast by the way i do think that’s the fundamental female myth and part of the reason i think that this is very comical i think so you ought to be the google boys you ought to meet my wife and see who she married yeah right right right well so the comprehensible story so the google boys a long while ago got together and analyzed female pornography use online billions of data points and they identified the core female pornographic narrative and women use verbal pornography not visual pornography right so you can see this and it’s like an erotic harlequin romance it’s always the same thing there’s five cardinal male figures surgeon pirate billionaire werewolf and vampire those are common protagonists and the theme fundamentally is that this male is attractive to many other males and is dangerous but can be enticed into a relationship across time by the right woman it’s the beauty and the beast motif and that’s the core motif for the vast preponderance of female pornography like the narrative theme is being identified it’s exactly what is in 50 shades of gray right right right as i those those when the when the toxic masculinity started being talked about a lot i got asked a bunch about these things yeah and what what i answered that question with a lot was well if you take any characteristic or any trait of a human and you take it to an extreme of course it’s gonna yeah right it doesn’t really matter what even something like being generous like yeah you know if someone is generous they they’re so generous they give everything away they get taken advantage of yeah so any trait if you take it to an extreme it’ll become a negative and i’d that be you know with the traditionally feminine traits and the traditionally masculine traits it’s the same thing oh it’s to say it’s bad to be aggressive or assertive well yeah can you be too aggressive and too assertive and now you don’t listen to anybody else you just go running around slapping people like yes that’s terrible but the other end of the spectrum is now you’re just kind of complying to the whims of whoever’s in around yeah yeah it’s an equally bad scenario so what you want to be as a human being is be balanced and and yeah you got to have some capacity to be a bit of a monster when you need to be but you’ve got to be able to contain that and discipline that and you’ll end up in a pretty good spot and that that goes with with just about every characteristic that that a human being can have well you see this you see this very clearly in analysis of personality trait distribution so you can imagine that there’s advantages being extroverted but there’s disadvantages impulsivity and there are pathologies mania like mania is a pathology of extroversion impulsivity as well because one of the things that positive emotion does and and extroverts are higher in positive emotion you think well you can’t have too much of that it’s like yes you can mania is too much positive emotion and so is impulsivity because positive emotion makes you much more likely to act precipitously in the present because your nervous system is saying well everything’s good right now make hay while the sun shines and so if you have a pronounced proclivity for positive emotion it’ll manifest itself in impulsivity right and so there as you pointed out there there so you might say well it seems cosmically unjust that talents are distributed inequitably but if you understand that there are no talents without a corresponding cost then the situation becomes much more complex this is even true of intelligence like i think there isn’t anything that you could be granted by the genetic lottery that will make more of a difference in your life than raw iq and a huge part of that is biologically determined far more than people would ever want to admit and it’s really quite shocking but the biggest traditionally the the most unforgivable and deadly sin has been associated with the intellect because the intellect is so powerful that it can fall in love with itself and then you get the luciferian intellect essentially you get the sin of pride you get arrogance until and intellectual arrogance is probably the worst kind and so sure it’s great to be smart but the downside is yeah well you fall in love with your own intelligence boy and you’re going to be in some sort of trouble because i don’t care how smart you are you’re not smart enough and that is not the only virtue and then you said something else interesting too you know you talked about this balance and so the classical conception of god is something like the sum of bonham right the sum of all that’s good but i think that’s in some way a misapprehension that it’s more like the harmonious balance of all that is good right rather than the sum per se you know and so you could imagine that a person who’s maximally admirable has the capacity to bring to bear whatever temperamental trait is most appropriate in that situation right so they’ve got an array of tools to choose from which is why becoming skilled is so useful you increase your tool what your while you increase your the toolbox that you have at hand but then that virtue itself seems something like the harmonious balance of potentially competing virtues maybe virtue itself is the game that virtuous traits play it’s something like that and then so you can’t reduce it to any one thing you can’t say well the most aggressive guy is the best or the most intelligent guy or the most cooperative guy or the best looking guy or any of that it’s not reducible to a single dimension no matter what the dimension is but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t something that all the virtues point to and i do think too that that pleasure that makes itself manifest in mentoring is probably an index of the virtues being balanced properly right because if you’re in a mentoring relationship with someone and you’re really attempting to operate let’s say not only in their best interest but in the best interest of all the people they could serve so well like when i was training graduate students you know part of what i’m thinking is well if this person is now under my supervision they’re going to become a professor well they’re going to develop a research enterprise and god only knows where that’ll go like that can be very influential and they’re going to train they’re going to have a pretty direct influence on at least thousands of people and so you can imagine that you’re trying to work in that person’s best interest but you’re trying to work in the best interests of that person in so far as that person is going to be willing to serve the best interests of all the people that they’re going to serve yep right right and that’s something that you’re going to have to develop the feel for right with these individual human beings because they’re all a little bit different so there might be one individual that you have to be a little bit more aggressive to get them to step up and there might be another individual that you have to back off a little bit i’ve talked about leadership and saying that you get these tools right and it’s like woodworking so woodworking you’ve got to learn how to operate the tools on wood right the saw and the drill and and and the chisel you got to learn how to work those tools but then you got to remember that there’s different types of wood and you’ve got pine which is very soft and you’ve got ipe which is very hard and then you’ve got to learn how to work those tools on those pieces of wood and then with human beings as a leader you’ve got to remember that each piece of wood is different each piece of pine yeah this one has a knot and this one has a different bend to it so you’ve got to really pay attention to balancing out these various tools that you have because if you go too hard on a piece of pine you’ll destroy it if you don’t go hard enough with a piece of ipe you won’t make any impact yeah so yeah what you’re talking about very true and this is what makes leadership and just human interaction so difficult because everyone is a little bit different everyone is unique yeah and you still have the same tools it’s not something that i can’t train you say well you know every piece of wood is different so therefore you just can’t it’s just unmanageable no here’s the tools and you got to learn the art of working on the hardwood versus softwood and it’s the same thing with leadership like i can’t give you the oh here’s the answer 100 of the time with all human beings you do this no actually here’s the range of tools that you can utilize in those types of situations from a leadership perspective and you’ve got to figure out how much pressure to apply what angle you’re going to use and it’s going to be a little bit different and that’s why it takes experience and it takes time but unfortunately sometimes people think that leadership is just something that you’re born with yeah or it’s a set of rules or yeah yeah it’s like this is what you’re born with and you have these capabilities and oh did you see that guy give that speech and tell him what to do man he was awesome yeah i could never do that well no actually you can do that and you can learn to become more articulate you can learn how to have a better command presence are you going to have the same command presence that that charming and charismatic individual had maybe not maybe you can’t get there but you can definitely improve and you can definitely get better and then you can bring someone on your team that has a huge amount of charisma and maybe when it’s time to get up and and and shock the troops into action you let that guy step up because he’s better than you so that’s well you see that in the story of moses which is a classic leadership story moses isn’t verbal and he tells god that when god comes along and says like well you’re you’re going to stand up against tyranny and you’re going to lead the slaves out of captivity which is what people are always doing in their life if they have any sense moses first objection is well you know the the tradition has it that he had a speech impediment or something like that like it’s actually quite a severe impediment so he has aaron who’s his communicator right and so you know you pointed to something there people often assume that leadership means charismatic speaking for example well the kind of public communication leadership that you and i are doing depends on that but that’s by no means the only way of being an effective leader i would i would say it’s probably much more akin to what we’ve been talking about in terms of play it’s like a good leader is someone that who can continue to create games and present them to people that they want to play and there’s lots of ways of doing that you can do that and be quiet be quiet like i had a i had a client a lawyer he ran a big law firm in toronto i worked with lawyers like that for quite a while and they were sent to this little organization i was part of the value proposition to the law firms was you send me your best people and we’ll work to make them 15 more productive which for those people meant a lot right but we worked for them not you and so then what we were doing with each of these people was radically different it really depended on the person and one of the guys that really struck me he’s very very quiet and all he did in his office all he did was go around and listen to people and actually listen and so he could get wind of interpersonal conflicts of the sort you were describing you know the power game conflicts just before they were developing right people would tell him what was wrong and because he was listening he could fix the things that were wrong with just like a tap and a nudge right because he did it before they got out of control and it was really interesting to watch him operate because it really looked even to him like he was doing very little as the manager of this law firm but what he was doing was exactly the right amount at exactly the right time and he was doing that because he was like in his orientation was true he wanted the firm to function as well as it possibly could and that’s genuinely what he wanted and he didn’t care whether people he didn’t even care if he knew that what he was doing was effective much less what other so there’s a gospel statement that’s very mysterious you shouldn’t let your right hand know what your left hand is doing it’s like well what does that mean it means you shouldn’t even be concerned about whether you give yourself credit for what you’ve accomplished you know now there’s a boundary on that because credit where credit is due but if you’re undertaking the task just so that you feel better about yourself in your own eyes you’re contaminating the motivation the better motivation is this mentoring motivation and i think it really is it’s a cause for optimism that that’s such a deep source of meaning you know because you know as well as i do that there are lots of young people we’ll talk about young men for a moment who feel lost like where am i going to find the meaning in my life and if you can let people know that one of the deepest possible sources of meaning that you can tap that’s more or less un it’s unfathomable right it never stops giving is the meaning that comes as a consequence of working on behalf of the appropriate development of other people yeah when people come to me and they say well i just don’t i don’t i don’t know what to do i don’t know what my goals should be yeah it’s kind of lost yeah i always don’t go go help other people right go help other people right like you’ll find some direction i don’t care if you go down to a soup kitchen or you go to a a boys club where the kids need mentoring or they need someone to teach them how to throw a baseball or whatever the case may be whatever you can do you go and help people and and you’re gonna you’re gonna find some direction really quickly yeah when you realize you’re just a little bit ahead of them in life yeah and you can give them so much and and that’s going to be very powerful yeah well so one of the things that psychologists discovered although not nearly enough has been made of this is so imagine we’ve we’ve we’ve discovered the basic dimensions of human temperament extroversion positive emotion neuroticism negative emotion agreeableness so that’s like say aggression versus cooperation something like that with the the attendant problems on both ends conscientiousness dutifulness orderliness industriousness and creativity those are the five all right so let’s look at neuroticism proclivity to feel negative emotion all the negative emotions clump together so they have a common core it’s probably something like stop and leave something like that right because if you’re threatened you should freeze or get the hell out of there so that’s the core reaction around which all the negative emotions are built and they all associate okay we’ve been able to do analysis of traits and attitudes that are tightly associated with negative emotion self-consciousness is indistinguishable from negative emotion which means like it’s indistinguishable in fact in one of the major personality trait measures called the neo-pir one of the early big five personality dimensions self-consciousness is a facet of negative emotion that’s how tight it is it’s the same thing so what it means is this is very germane to your point if you’re thinking about yourself you’re miserable those are the same thing and so then you might say well how do you get out of that and you can’t get out of that by not thinking about yourself that’s just going to backfire right so if you’re anxious and you go to a party and you think i’m not going to think about myself and that’s what you’re thinking about like you’re you’re dead i used to treat my socially anxious clients say go to a party and do everything you can to make other people feel comfortable so that i would explain to them what i just explained to you but i would say that doesn’t mean you can stop thinking about yourself it means you can start only thinking about what you can provide to other people and that was invariably an improvement on the strategy that they had been using but this this is so crucially important you know because we are so reciprocal as human beings that you are lost if you only serve your own whims it doesn’t work in the long run it alienates people it it produces a life that’s devoid of meaning it makes you anxious and isolated and it makes you self-conscious and miserable and so it is the case as we alluded to earlier that perversely enough the best possible thing that you can do for yourself all things considered over the longest possible run is to work as hard as you can on behalf of what’s best in other people yeah and and you and i talked about this the last time i forget when it was a couple years ago i think but i was talking or you asked me what makes a good seal like what makes a good seal and and i said well it’s doesn’t matter look you got to be a good shot of course you have to be in good physical all those things are important you got to be you got to be you got to have the skill set but far and away what makes a good seal is someone that puts the team before themselves that’s it that’s the thing and if you’re the if jordan if you’re the best shot you’re the fastest you’re the strongest but you have yourself above the team i don’t want you in my platoon and no one wants you in the platoon that’s the way it works so it’s interesting that psychologically if you’re focused on yourself it’s going to cause problems either the problem of egocentric arrogance or the problem of like paranoia or what would you just use to describe it i mean when someone’s just focused on self-consciousness self-consciousness yeah that’s the thing that when i see people that are self-conscious and i was like hey you know who notices that you have a zit on your cheek right now you no one else cares yeah no one else cares no one’s it doesn’t matter when you walk into a room and you feel like you don’t have the experience to be in a leadership position the person that’s thinking that is you it doesn’t really matter now if you go in and try and overcompensate by for that by saying listen i just graduated from college and i really know how to execute this stuff you’re going to get crushed yeah because you’re trying to make up for the fact that you actually don’t know what you’re doing and no one everyone knows you don’t you just got here so we know you don’t know what you’re doing but we don’t really care about it so we don’t see no we just care if you think you know what you’re doing more than you actually know then it’s a problem yeah then that’s definitely a problem and that whole thing about the authoritarian mindset and i did this series of podcasts about this book called the psychology of military incompetence and and they have these authoritarian people and when they look at the military they think oh they’re they’re like yeah you get that in the police too yep you get in the police you get it law enforcement you get these people that have that authoritarian mindset they see what it looks like from the outside and they think oh this is going to be awesome this is where i belong yeah and so they go and everyone’s going to wear a uniform they’re gonna have to call me sir they’re gonna have to obey what i say it’s like a dream for them yeah and in non-combat situations in non-combat situations those people can perform pretty well because we’re on the parade field i need everyone in the same uniform i’m going to inspect your barracks rooms i’m going to make sure that you follow my orders as soon as they’re given that’s like a beautiful place for that authoritarian mindset is a non-combat situation but you put those people in combat and now all of a sudden there there’s literally no rules anymore there’s right right very small number of rules and now you have to deal with you know jordan who listened to me when we were on the parade field but now he’s scared to death that he’s going to die and he’s not listening to me anymore now what do i do how do i and he has reason to be scared he has reason to be scared so you would see and i got to see this a lot inside the military the people that had the authoritarian mindset the closed mindset they had real problems when you put them into combat situations where there’s mayhem and chaos and they can no longer control it and they freak out because of that it’s a real well yeah well like you said the i don’t think there’s a better definition of chaos than than warfare like obviously that’s a place where the rules are suspended so then the question would be well what’s the best possible mindset to bring to bear on a situation where the rules have been suspended right you can certainly see the distribution of responsibility and an appeal to volunteerism is going to be of great utility under those not least so you don’t get shot in the back by your own men yeah yeah and then the creativity aspect right because all of a sudden there’s no rules and or there’s a very limited amount of rules yeah and if we’ve got to find out a different way to execute these missions that’s going to make more sense in this particular environment that we’re in that no book and no training has prepared us for you know i got asked a little while ago about well you know if we were going to war with china and i was leading you know my troops into combat what would i be thinking about and and i said the thing i would be focused on the same thing i’m always focused on especially going into a combat situation and that is keeping an open mind because i don’t know what’s going to happen the enemy doesn’t know what’s going to happen i don’t know exactly how my troops are going to react i don’t even know how i’m going to react and if i get fixed a fixed mindset where i’m saying this is what we’re going to do and this is how it’s going to be as soon as that combat starts that that you can throw that thing out the window and now if i have a closed mind i fall apart if i have an open mind i look around and say okay i see some adaptations we can make right now here’s what we need to do here’s some adjustments we can make and that’s what when i ran training that was the purpose of my training was to open people’s minds was to put them in situations where if they stuck with a fixed mindset and they didn’t open their mind and they didn’t see other perspectives they were going to fall apart they’re going to so that other perspective so that’s got to be allied with that willingness to incorporate information from the bottom up because you’re going to get so that’s where the diversity claims of the radical left have some utility is like well in in any open-ended situation you want a genuine diversity of viewpoints because this situation is shifting and the more options you have in front of you up to some limited degree because you know time to process all those options also matters you don’t want a uniform uniformity of opinion because you’re going to run into this problem that you just described here’s a good example the iraqi military right it’s it’s basically a caste system you have the officers at top and then you had a bunch of you know almost almost slave labor a little bit yeah yeah and the officers would skim money off the paychecks of the soldiers right that’s how they operated right and there’s a loyalty building exercise for you not the best loyalty building exercise at all and so so so the rule is don’t rip off armed subordinates what’s that for a rule here’s the thing that’s interesting so our chain of command found out that this was happening and there was a lot of pressure throughout the u.s military like we’ve got to stop this these soldiers are getting ripped off this is terrible we need to prosecute the officers that are skimming money from the paychecks so i went and talked to like brought my interpreter and we’d go talk to these soldiers yeah yeah yeah and you say like hey is it true that your boss is skimming money off your paycheck like ready to write it down and let yeah they go well of course he’s the boss of course he’s going to take some of the money i mean that’s sort of what we you know that’s totally normal they weren’t they weren’t they weren’t angry about it they were just like oh yeah well he’s the boss he’s going to take some money and then when i get promoted i’ll be able to take money that’s the way their system functions uh-huh uh-huh and it was see i jumped to the wrong conclusion that investment that was my conclusion too because i was a young enlisted guy if my officer would have been stealing my money i would have been totally against it but that was a very normal thing and so we i kind of try to back off and say like this is the way their culture is that’s the way their culture is it’s different than ours it’s unacceptable were there parameters of skimming yeah there are there’s parameters of skimming right so you could take some percent yes yes and it’s the same thing with the iraqis we’d say hey you know we’re going on a on an operation tonight we’ve got an operation tonight can you bring 30 guys tonight to conduct this operation and they would tell you 100 percent of the time yeah yeah yep and they’d show up with nine or they show up with six or they jump with 48 and because it’s in shalom right god willing we’ll have 30 people if that’s the way it’s supposed to be that’s the way it’ll be and instead of us going a this isn’t the way we do it we’re to say okay well how do they operate what do they think like how can we incorporate their perspective on things into our culture and how can we merge these cultures together so that we can communicate with them in an effective way so we go okay cool how many people do you think you can bring tonight and they’re going to give you a better answer than if you say can you bring this many it’s a little nuance in the way that you interact with them right but if you have that might have even been a politeness norm because their their response to you might have been well the polite thing is to tell the person who’s asking what they want to hear right and that is different than saying well how many people do you think you could bring totally different yeah yeah so if i had a fixed mindset and a closed mind it would have been saying this is the military a platoon is 40 guys we you need to bring a platoon tonight if you don’t bring a platoon the world explodes right nothing’s going to work but the different the open-minded attitude is like oh they think a little bit differently than we do hey how many people can you bring and all of a sudden okay you can bring 12 okay then we’ll bring 18 and we’ll have 30 we’ll be able to get this thing done we’ll make it happen but when when we have a closed mind we don’t hear other people’s perspective it’s it’s actually insane there i’ve seen people we have intelligence come in information come in and just be like no that doesn’t just shut it off yeah as if it doesn’t exist yeah instead of saying oh well at a minimum where’d that information come from right well i might not agree with that information but we’ve got someone telling us that there’s a machine gun nest in this location no that’s impossible yeah i i’ve heard people say those people do that in their own marriages all the time it’s totally ridiculous so to put your ego in check and say oh that person might understand or this intelligence may come from a place something that i don’t understand or i don’t know about let me open my mind and at least ask some questions about it and we’re seeing this in in the political world right now right the divisiveness in the country is like oh i’m right you’re wrong therefore everything that you say i don’t listen to anything that you say and that’s the way it is and the end of conversation i don’t want to hear anything that you have to say which is a real problem instead of having conversations with people and trying to understand what your perspective is crazy as it may seem to me i still have to listen to what you have to say and trying to integrate that it’s especially true when you have to live i was on bill mars show at one point and it was me and a bunch of people who were at least under the current circumstances more liberal than me and they were going off on trump and the and the mega types and and i brought the conversation to a halt by asking them how that attitude essentially of contempt that they brought to bear on the situation was going to serve them given that that was 50 of the population and they’re going to have to live with them right and so this this arc thing that we’ve put together in london the alliance for responsible citizenship one of the rules that we’re attempting to implement we’re afraid that any enterprise that’s international visionary let’s say will have a proclivity to turn into something authoritarian and like no time flat you could make a cool movie about yeah well no kidding the arc goes wild well no kidding absolutely um we’re one of our principles is that any policy that you have to implement by manipulation or force is at minimum suboptimal right that you need voluntary buy-in and that that’s something like consent of the governed but i also think that it’s it’s it’s more just a council of wisdom because it’s a lot easier to lead people where they want to go and it’s really incumbent it’s kind of a definition of leadership you know is that you have to find out where people want to go and you should assume that maybe they have the reasons for the decisions that they made and then you can help them strategize about how that might be undertaken and what their respective roles might be as very useful as well to give not to give them not to give them something that’s important to do but to encourage them to take on something important to do and then to back the hell off so they they can do it right no better tool in leadership than giving people ownership of what they’re doing you know the the classic in the military is i don’t say hey jordan here’s the mission here’s the people i want you to take here’s the weapons i want you to use here’s the vehicles i want you to bring here’s how i want you to assault the building here’s the time i want you to hit the target here’s the time i want you to the rope or the route i want you to take to get back here and here’s what time i want you to to do the debrief so take ownership of that and go execute that doesn’t work yeah what we want to do in a decentralized organization you say hey jordan here’s the target you want to hit tonight right right yeah go figure out how you want to do it yeah yeah and if you’re a good leader then you turn to your team and you say hey guys here’s the target we got hit tonight how can we how do you think we should do this and all of a sudden you have ownership over this and how do you how do you how do you negotiate agreement on the original target well that’s the thing is if you say to me hey jonko why do you want to hit that target yeah i should be able to say well we found out that that’s the node that’s been making explosive devices that’s been hitting all of our bases here’s our prioritization rationale you say cool got it yeah occasionally and i can’t be afraid of this occasionally you say hey jonko why are we hitting that target and i say i’m not sure right that’s not good that’s not good at all in fact that’s that’s to me you know what let me go find out right definitely and also occasionally i might say we want to hit the target because we’ve been getting bombed and we don’t we want that to stop and this is the node that’s been making these explosives and you might say to me hey the the road that you want us to go down to hit this target has had roadside bombs on it every day and there’s no other entry in there i don’t think we should do this and then what should i say i should say oh i did not know that right and then it’s up the chain of command how can we find another way to prosecute this target and because i listen to you now when i come back and say hey actually we did some analysis we are going to get you some helicopters you’re not going to have to drive down the road here’s here’s the the new tools you have and you say great and so we move forward down the path not by me dictating to you and not by you protesting and calling me an idiot but by us having a relationship and working together to figure out the best solution to the problem you can never be afraid as a leader to to not know the answer to say like well i’m actually not sure about that let me find out people are scared of that people are scared of when when someone on their team raises their hand and says hey boss why are we doing this a lot of times their response is because i told you to yeah right we say that to our kids yeah this is a terrible answer even for your kids yeah even for your kids the the the answer should be well let me explain it to you and by the way clean your room why i’ve i’ve had this with a thousand parents why should i clean my room and there are some whys right you can say well you know if we have a fire and the firemen come in here and you got toys all over the floor you can trip and fall and it could be a real problem and your kid might buy that right they might buy that but they might be like low probability yeah low probability low probability i’m not cleaning the room yeah and occasionally if you don’t really have a good answer yeah okay well if you want your laundry done at a minimum you got to put your clothes in the hamper other than that you can leave the tonka toys yeah yeah and and you think well then you’re creating this undisciplined child no actually you’re giving your child the ability to learn from themselves three days later when they want to go to school and they can’t find their tonka truck it’s like where’s my tonka truck well it’s somewhere in your room where’d you put it yeah i don’t know so giving thinking that your kid is going to just uh devolve into this savage human being that’s can’t can’t uh undisciplined throughout their life is the wrong answer well you you you highlighted something there that’s also of extreme importance from the leadership perspective too which is the refusal to make rules to make unnecessary rules a good leadership what would you say set of principles is not too many rules but enforcement of the rules of the minimal set of rules that do exist and then you might say well how do you know what the appropriate rules are and one answer to that would be well if you don’t have a series of deep reasons for your rule and it boils down to because i said so that’s probably not a rule that you are in a position to to advance or or or assist upon right it’s you need it needs to be placed in a exactly as you said in the military situation here’s a target here’s the cost to attempting to hit that target which is not a trivial cost at all the right response on the part of the men is well why is that worth the cost and so they’re going to reflect that back to you unless you have enough reasons behind that strategy to eliminate their concerns at least compared to any other plan they might come up with their appropriate response in some ways is to not it’s certainly not going to be enthusiastic about the mission they’re certainly not going to think well this clearly needs to be done yep and there’s situations in vietnam war is a great time to talk about this because there are situations where i said jordan you got to go execute this yeah and you said why and i said well because it’s coming from higher ups yeah and you go okay boss got it yeah and you take your patrol 100 meters outside the wire you sit in the bushes for for six hours you come back and you say yeah boss we tried we didn’t we didn’t see anything out there right but you didn’t execute anything you’re right right right right right definitely definitely so understanding why you’re doing what you’re doing absolutely critical and yeah from a governmental perspective well those explanations also give people the option to think on their feet when they’re actually in the complex situation because if you provided them with five rationales for this target and then things go astray they still have those five rationales to build new targets of that’s right so that’s why they need to be informed yep and being able to admit when you’re wrong about something and being able to say you know i actually the last target we hit that you pushed back against and i told you just do it you were right and i was wrong we shouldn’t hit that target that’s okay and you don’t see this from politicians at all you’d never hear a politician say yeah you know what i was thinking at the time was wrong and here’s my adjustment and here’s what i want to do moving forward it was kind of ridiculous during covid the way those things just piled up oh yeah that’s for sure it was ridiculous yeah well that’s you know part of that i would say and maybe we should close with this part of that was likely the fact that there was a decision made very early on that it was okay to compel people by force as soon as as soon as i’ll tell you in it maybe this is a good closing this is cool there’s a scene in exodus i did this exodus seminar recently and we’re talking about leadership so this makes this is perfectly appropriate so moses is an archetypal leader right he’s leading people away from tyranny and away from their own slavery right and so when every leader does that when you’re trying to make people autonomous you’re trying to lead them away from their own slavery when you’re trying to help inform them that they shouldn’t be using power you’re trying to lead them away from tyranny okay so moses does a pretty damn good job of this and he’s got his people right to the edge of the promised land and this has taken 40 years right it’s taken his whole bloody life right and so they’re still in the desert they’re lost they’re wandering they’re still in the desert but the promised land is at hand and they’re out of water they’re out of water and so the Israelites start bitching and whining about this they come to moses and moses they say go talk to god because you’re in with him and god says ask these rocks to deliver water for your people and they’ll deliver water and so moses listens but then when he goes to the rocks he hits them with his staff he uses authority uses power twice bang bang right when he was told to ask and so the rocks deliver water and the Israelites are no longer parched but god punishes moses by telling him that he will now die before he enters the promised land and so it’s an extremely interesting twist it’s a very short part of the story but moses throughout his leadership career uses excessive force a number of times it’s his weakness and it’s despite the fact that he sacrifices for 40 years and is probably the most effective leader in the entire old testament corpus he’s stopped from attaining his highest goal because he relies on force right right i say constantly to lead with the minimum force required right right this is a course of term when you’re interacting with a potential prisoner you want to use the minimal force required to subdue them yeah and it’s the same thing as a leader of human beings you want to lead with the minimum force required yeah hopefully hopefully in an ideal world that’s nothing right my team knows what to do they know what the goal is and they can move there hey occasionally do you as a leader have to step in and say hey everyone we got to make a change this is where we’re going yes you occasionally have to do that you want that to be as rare as possible and what you really want is you want people stepping up and moving because they know the direction that we’re heading well that’s a great place to end and so thank you very much it’s always a pleasure talking to you always indeed we were going to cover a lot of topics today that we didn’t cover but i’m very happy that we covered the topics that we did cover for everybody who’s watching and listening most of you know this already but i’ll point it out anyways i’m going to continue talking to jocco for another half an hour on the dailywire plus side i think i’m going to talk to him about the political situation that surrounds us at the moment in relationship to leadership we’ll talk about biden we’ll talk about trump more from the psychological and philosophical perspective and so if you want to join us for that please do it’s i always think it’s useful at least in principle to throw some support behind the dailywire plus team they’re doing a good job on the free speech front as far as i’m concerned and so and they facilitate these conversations and that’s been very useful to me and hopefully to all of you as well so thank you jocco very good to see you again to everybody watching and listening thank you for your time and attention the dailywire plus people and the film crew here thanks for your help ciao