With Jocko Willink： The Catastrophe of the Utopian Soviet State (FUXcg9GWIIM)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=FUXcg9GWIIM

This is Jocko podcast number 155 with me, Jocko willing. On the island, the dead were piling up. In the mission report, the head of the convoy wrote at 2pm. On May 20, I went to the island of Nazino with commander teps cough. There was a terrible scramble, people crowding and fighting around the bags of flour. Dead bodies everywhere, a hundred or more, and lots of people crawling about and crying, give us bread, boss, it’s been two days since we’ve been given anything to eat. They’re trying to make us die of hunger and the cold. They told us that people had begun eating the dead bodies. That they were cooking human flesh. The scene on the island was dreadful, appalling. On May 21 alone, the three health officers counted 70 additional dead bodies. In five cases, they emphasized the liver, the heart, the lungs, and fleshy part of bodies had been cut off. On one of the bodies, the head had been torn off along with the male genital organs and part of the skin. These mutilations constitute strong evidence of cannibalistic acts. In addition, they suggest the existence of serious psychopathologies. On the same day, May 21, the deportees themselves brought us three individuals who had been caught with blood on their hands and holding human livers. Our examination of these three individuals did not reveal any extreme emaciation. And there’s an elderly local peasant woman who reported the things we saw. People were dying everywhere. They were killing each other. There was a guard named Kostya Venikov, a young fellow. He was courting a pretty girl who had been sent there. He protected her. One day he had to be away for a while. And he told one of his comrades, take care of her. But with all the people, the comrade couldn’t do much. People caught the girl, tied her to a tree, cut off her breasts, her muscles, everything they could eat. They were hungry. They had to eat. When Kostya came back, she was still alive. He tried to save her, but she had lost too much blood. She died. That was the kind of thing that happened. When you went along the island, you saw flesh wrapped in rags. Human flesh that had been cut and hung in the trees. a book called Cannibal Island by Nicholas Wirth, who’s written books about communism, I think is most famous as the Black Book of Communism. Cannibal Island specifically breaks down one of the small individual nightmares of the Soviet gulags. The nightmare was not small. And it certainly was not specific. It was widespread and it was broad. And it was almost incomprehensible. And very little about it would be known or not for one man. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who not only survived the gulags, but lived on to write incredibly detailed and very well researched books about the gulags. Some of them were fictionalized, like A Day in the Life of Ivan Dinesovich and For the Good of the Cause, but most comprehensively in his three volume tome, The Gulag Archipelago. And this series is a massive series. And it’s been cut down to an abridged version that was actually approved by the author himself. And the abridged version has just been re-released in Europe with a forward by a man that I think repopularized that book. A man that is here today to discuss that book and among other things, I’m sure a man that I needed to give an introduction to the first time he was on this podcast, but now who needs no introduction whatsoever. A man by the name of Dr. Jordan B. Peterson. Jordan, thank you for coming back on. How’s it rough beginning, Jocko? Jesus. Yeah. I remember when I started listening to you, you would say something along the lines of that we are quite capable of creating hell for ourselves as human beings. And that clearly that situation, I don’t know. I mean, that’s hell. Yeah. Close enough. Yeah. And it’s created by us. It’s created by us, which I think is obviously horrific. And the Gulag Archipelago. You talked about that book a lot. And one of the things that, and that book hits you hard, obviously. For me, there’s a book called About Face by Colonel David Hackworth. I’m from a different world, I guess, than you in many ways. The book that hit me hardest in my life was that book, About Face. And it’s one of those things that when I read it, I started putting it together. It’s like things started to fit. And I remember that. And I was wondering, I guess from my perspective, at what point did you read The Gulag Archipelago? At what point did you start to say, OK, there’s something really, really important here for me to try and understand? Well I read it back in the 1980s, early. I would say I’d read some Solzhenitsyn before that. I read The Day in the Life of Ivan Dnisevich when I was about 13 or 14. And then I read The Gulag Archipelago in my early 20s when I was reading a lot of psychological material too, when I started reading Jung and Freud and the great clinicians. And I was reading a fair bit about what had happened in Nazi Germany at the same time. And also Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. And Solzhenitsyn’s book is in some ways like an elaborated extension of Frankl. Frankl of course described what happened to him in the Nazi concentration camps. It’s a relatively short book and it’s a great book. But Solzhenitsyn’s book is much broader and I would say deeper. And the thing that affected me most particularly was the psychological take on the totalitarian states. I had been studying political science up to that point and the political scientists and the economists who I would say were under the sway of Marxist thinking, although not nearly to the degree that they are now, were convinced that the reason that people engaged in conflict was basically a consequence of argumentation over resources. It was basically an economic argument. And I never bought that. It never made sense to me. I mean obviously there are circumstances where that’s true but it didn’t seem to be fundamentally the case. Like tribal warfare isn’t precisely about resources. Maybe it’s about territory or maybe it’s about identity but it never seemed to me to be simply about resources. Partly because, well, a resource is something that people value but it isn’t obvious why people value what they value and so it doesn’t solve the fundamental problem. Anyways when I was reading Frankl and Solzhenitsyn I started to more deeply understand the relationship between the individual and the atrocity. And that’s what I found most interesting was that Frankl’s claim and Solzhenitsyn’s claim as well that it was the moral corruption of the citizenry that allowed the totalitarian catastrophes to occur and that that in some sense was the responsibility of every individual in the system who looked the other way or who participated actively. I mean even in the Gulag camps themselves they were almost all run by the prisoners. There wasn’t enough administrative manpower to run the prison system without the cooperation so to speak of the prisoners. So it is a surreal sort of hell where you imprison yourself and Solzhenitsyn’s fundamental claim and this was true for Frankl as well and also for Vaclav Havel who eventually became president of Czechoslovakia or at least of the Czech Republic. I don’t remember which. They believed that it was the individual proclivity to accept lies that fostered the ability of tyrants to destroy the state and then well and that also led to complicitness with regards to all the absolute atrocities that were occurring in both the Nazi state and in the Soviet state. And I think that’s true. When I read like I read Solzhenitsyn’s books and a lot of the books I read about Nazi Germany too not as a victim and not as a hero but as a perpetrator you know which I think it’s really important it’s something that’s really important to do when you read history is that it’s easy to cast yourself as a victim. It’s easy to cast yourself as the person who would have been heroic in the circumstance but it’s also unbelievably useful to understand that there’s a good chance had you been in those situations that you wouldn’t have been on the side of the good guys. You know and that’s a terrible it’s really a terrible realization but it’s it’s necessary realization again just going back to this idea of what you get out of reading because people ask me now because I read books all the time on my podcast and what you just said it struck me as something that’s people have told me I read that book before but I didn’t really get out of it what you got out of it and when I heard you read it I was saying wow how did I I need to go reread this book and I think one of the key things is you looked at these books as you were not the victim but the perpetrator one thing that when I read books I know I read a lot of books mostly about war for me I always think about the I don’t always see myself as the person that goes and heroically storms the beaches and survives every you know in a war book there’s these people that get mentioned for a half a paragraph or for two sentences and that sometimes they don’t even have a name because you know you’re the battalion commander storming the beach at Normandy you don’t you’re not going to name every single person but for some reason and maybe it’s just my experiences of being in combat when I read about that two sentences of that guy that that gets shot that gets killed that gets blown up I completely understand and relate to that person like I don’t just see it as me being the guy that is always winning and always doing okay and always surviving I feel and relate to those guys that didn’t and part of that is just because of my friends that I lost in combat like those guys that they’re they’re people and I think that key thing of of reading it and going man every single person like when you read about these you’re talking about millions of people that were tortured died murdered every one of those people the key word is people every one of those people is a person and to your point every single one of those executioners every single one of those murderers is also a person you know there’s a great book called ordinary men oh yeah we’ve reviewed that on this podcast right right and so you know it’s it’s it’s one of the greatest books written about what happened in the second world war I think on the end on the atrocity end because the author does such a lovely job of well it’s a strange way of putting it in this context but you know it’s about this police battalion that was moved into poland after the germans went through and and occupied the country and they were there to establish order like police do but also to participate in the mopping up let’s say that was part and parcel of the war and you know these were ordinary policemen middle class guys most of whom had been educated and socialized before the nazi propaganda machine really got rolling so they weren’t like hitler youth types they were ordinary men and they were brought and they had a commander who had made an explicit case that if they weren’t able to tolerate the conditions in poland that they could go home so there was no top-down order that you had to do this or else and then they were you know first of all they started rounding up while mostly jewish people men between 18 and 65 and then you know they started to participate in the entire atrocious mess and they were they ended up many of them taking naked pregnant women out into fields and shooting them in the back of the head and what the author does is outline how that happens to you you know one step at a time and so it’s a really horrifying book and it’s a brilliant book because there’s no attempt to make the perpetrators like some creatures that aren’t human like just pure psychopaths and of course in in in in situation like nazi germany and and in the horrors of the communist states there was no shortage of places for psychopaths to prevail but that’s not really the issue the issue is well how does an ordinary person come to participate in a global horror let’s say and what does that mean about being an ordinary person and then the next question is well what does it mean about how you should conduct your life and one of the things that i mean i think what happened to me when i read all this material in the 80s was that i became convinced that there wasn’t anything more important to do in the aftermath of what had happened in the 20th century than to try to build people who were responsible enough as truth-telling courageous responsible citizens so that the probability would increase that if they were in a position to make a terrible choice that they would make the right one and i would say this lecture tour that i’m doing which is now extended over more than a hundred cities is an extension of the same thing well i think it’s the same thing that you’re trying to do with your book like we were just looking at your mickey and the dragons book right and you’re trying to lay out a psychological pathway that guides people towards responsibility and courage and truth and all of that and that is the bulwark against tyranny and it’s actually the it’s actually at the individual level and we kind of know that like we know that in the west i think that’s part of the core ethos of well certainly that of the english common law system certainly of of the american way of looking at the world is that each citizen is the bulwark against tyranny and that’s actually true it’s and and that’s a terrible thing to to think through because it means that you are responsible for the integrity or lack thereof of your state and it’s it’s on you you know and and there’s something great about that because it means that your existence actually matters to you and to your family and and to the broader community in a really major way in a way that’s much more significant than you might think and that the your proclivity to abdicate your moral responsibility echoes way farther than you might consider especially under some circumstances you know in solzhenitsyn one of the things that’s so amazing about the gulag archipelago is his stories not only of the absolute bloody catastrophe of the soviet state and his incredibly astute documentation of the role that the utopian political and philosophical assumptions of marxism played in creating the system right it wasn’t an aberration it was a direct logical consequence of that collectivist viewpoint and to document all that but also to tell endless stories about people who were able at least to some degree to not become corrupted even under unbelievably horrific conditions you know and and that’s something you also get out of victor frankl’s book man search for meaning you know and it and so the gulag archipelago is a story about horror in some sense but it’s more a story of the triumph of the fundamental triumph of the human spirit and perhaps no more perhaps most evident in the case of solzhenitsyn himself because he memorized this book in some sense while he was in the camps and then wrote it under extreme duress afterwards and it’s an immense undertaking and it’s unbelievably emotionally intense the entire book it’s like one you know 1700 page scream of outrage you just can hardly believe that someone can write at that white hot intensity for such a long period of time and you know his book had an unbelievable global impact i think it sold 30 million copies and it definitely for at least a reasonable period of time made it completely untenable for utopian resentful utopian intellectuals to ethically justify their radical leftist collectivism it just blew the slats out from underneath any ethical credibility that communism that that remained of the communist doctrine by the 1970s and that that’s a hell of a thing for someone to manage on their own it’s a pretty big task so while you were going through that i was thinking myself so i was talking to i still talk to military folks and i was talking to some military leaders young leaders so like platoon level and company level leaders so these are guys that are in charge of you know 40 guys or maybe 150 guys and and you know you can have some real ethical problems and and one of the things that i said to this group was i said hey in your in your platoon you’ve got a murderer in your platoon you’ve got someone in your platoon that is a sadist and they were kind of looking at me suspect you know a little bit like oh come on now come on what are you talking about how big is the platoon platoon is 40 guys oh yeah yeah yeah and so you got someone in there and i was i was actually gonna ask you how accurate i was and then i was gonna actually say that no matter what you say how accurate is even if it was even if it was one out of every thousand you have to act as a leader as if in your platoon you’ve got one of those guys or two of those guys that’s the way you need to look and there’s another book called the rape of nan king we’ve covered that yeah well so one of the things that was really horrifying about that book is so imagine that there’s maybe let’s say that there’s one in a hundred just for the sake of argument that’s really got cruel and psychopathic traits what do you think professionally what do you think that number is oh i think i think one percent isn’t unreasonable it could be higher than that i mean there’s gradations right yeah there’s probably a group of 40 people there’s going to be one guy in there who’s proclivity in that direction is sufficiently strong so that you better keep an eye on them that’s for sure and this is a group of people that joined the military right so they’re already you’ve already gotten you’ve already got a group that’s okay with with theoretically having to kill other people right so this is probably you know so if it’s 100 that’s likely an underestimate so i think your estimate is perfectly reasonable and it might be conservative what happened in nan king was that the most sadistic people became the targets of imitation and emulation and that’s when things really get out of hand yeah right so and that’s the same thing with the milai massacre and that was so so when i was talking to this group and i’m getting and i said to him i said you’re looking at me like right now like i’m like i don’t know what i’m talking about like i’m crazy who knows about the milai massacre and and you know all of a sudden it got quiet because if you know anything about the milai massacre it was a normal group of guys it was a normal group of guys it was a normal company of american soldiers and you know what they’d been through some stress they’d been through you know they they’d had their friends killed and it was in vietnam there was no one really to react against or to to take your aggression out on because the enemy you couldn’t see them they would hide and it was but then they turned and they snapped and the same thing you had the leader a guy named lieutenant cali who was the platoon leader who you know i’d love for you to do a psychological profile maybe he’s one of these guys it was kind of like it was totally insecure about everything and so he got those shoulder boards on which is the way which is the way sultan ishkin describes his his experience as being a platoon leader and what it did to him and he goes through that this book it’s fantastic to hear when he talks about what he did he he was looking back saying oh i did this and i did listen to this little rampage of things that how he acted as a commander i i ate the food the good food right in front of my guys when they weren’t getting i was getting the good food and he took advantage of all the little all the little comforts that you got being an officer yeah well what yeah well he was trying in the in the whole book and especially in that section which i think is in volume two which is i think is the greatest of the three volumes especially the last half of it which is just absolutely it’s it’s genius level writing unbelievably compelling and brilliant and yeah i mean he he said that when he was in the camps that one of the things that he did especially once he started to identify people that he truly admired was to go over his life with a fine tooth comb and try to try to remember everything that he did wrong by his own estimation and then try to set it right in some manner and so there was a that’s a repentance and then a redemption right there’s there’s a real there’s a real fundamental like a medieval christian undertone to all of that but it what one of the things that’s quite interesting is that when you talk about issues that are this serious you’re almost inevitably in a situation where you’re going to find yourself compelled to use some kind of quasi religious language because you end up discussing good and evil and and issues of redemption and issues of repentance and issues of conscience and and sin and all of that there isn’t language that’s deep enough to get at it otherwise and what solzhenitsyn did was scour his conscience and try to put himself together partly because he was shamed he was ashamed of himself in the face of these extraordinarily extraordinary people who seem to be able to keep their moral compass under circumstances where no one should ever assume that they would keep their moral compass because certainly like i said when i was reading this the gulag and other books like that i never assumed that if i was in those situations that i would have been one of the people who kept their head and were able to withstand the temptation to become a trustee for example and to take things the easy way and to lord it over the other prisoners and to and to adopt that position of authority you know it’s like it’s like a head slave among slaves but you know you could say well better to be the head slave than to be the bottom slave and well that’s true in some sense with regards to creature comfort but as solzhenitsyn point out points out it might be a little bit hard on your soul and that actually turns out to be something of of crucial not only crucial importance psychologically but crucial importance sociologically and politically because if you sacrifice that then you warp the structure around you which is exactly what happened in in the establishment of these camps you know and the soviet union was just one big lie what was their old joke they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work it’s like the the whole the whole book and the whole soviet union when you when you read about it now it seems like it’s it it seems like a bad joke it seems like a bad movie you could move with just the way the way that stalin would do something and and the way that that order would come down it seems like one of those cheesy um you know comedic movies about these decisions that they’re making and yeah it’s surreal it’s it’s completely it’s it’s completely insane you know at one point he’s talking about the there was a a new penalty for what they call it clipping corn or or yeah they’re basically a 12 year old kid would be starving and go into a field at night and and clip a cure of a corn an ear of corn yeah that happened in the ukraine during the dekulakization right it was against the law to go out after the fields were were harvested it was against the law to go out and pick grain off the ground to feed your family right and the prison sentence was like a tenor which is their little word for 10 years so you’re gonna get you you steal a piece of corn or you pick up corn off the ground and you’re getting 10 years yeah you can’t comprehend that that is very hard to comprehend that yeah worked yeah and they were they you know he does in the earlier parts of the book when he starts going through the trials that they were doing on people yeah it’s completely crazy yeah it’s kangaroo kaffka yeah well that’s why i hate to see the kangaroo courts emerging all over all over the west you know and and and with the university sort of at the forefront of that so we’re building these alternative court systems constantly that don’t follow standard legal procedure and it’s really we’re messing with things that that we shouldn’t be messing with and yeah the whole i mean there are there are accounts i believe it’s in the gulag of of of applause after a stalinist speech right where people would stand up and applaud and and they and they’d applaud until until literally the old people were falling over because if you were the first person to stop applauding then you were well it was off to the camps with you no he absolutely outlines it so that that sounds so crazy to say and he outlines a specific thing that happened it’s that right there these no one will stop applauding because they’re afraid they’re going to get ratted out by their by everyone else yeah well and by the people who are in fact watching and i mean you know what by by the end by by the by the collapse of east germany one third of the people were in for informers for the state and so if you had a family of six people two of your family members were direct government informers you know and it’s it’s so it’s it’s creepy in some sense it’s a very weak word to use in this situation but when i was at new york university talking to jonathan height about i don’t know it was about a few months ago he just wrote that book called the coddling of the american mind you know and he took me into one of the men’s washrooms there and there’s a poster on the wall asking students to turn each other in for instances of bias or offensive speech and they have a whole bureaucracy that’s designed to do nothing else but adjudicate these instances of biased speech and these posters are up on the walls as if this is something to be proud of you know and the same thing is happening now in scotland with the scottish police are doing exactly the same thing they’re asking citizens to turn each other in for for hate crimes you know and the problem with that is the fundamental problem with that and the the unsolvable problem is well who defines hate and and and where’s where’s the line drawn it’s like well anything that upsets me that you say is hate that and then it’s worse than that it’s like what happens is the people who define hate end up being those who are looking to take offense so they can find someone they can define as a victimizer so that they can persecute them morally and justify that inner sadism and those are the people who end up defining the laws and then they mask this with the morality saying well we’re doing this to make our society a safe place it’s absolutely it’s it’s absolutely dreadful and to see that happening in the uk was just it’s just awful because i mean you know the uk is a center a center a center point of of the idea of free speech i mean a lot of america obviously a lot of american ideals america is a great center of free speech but i mean it’s a variation on the english system so to see that happening in the uk is just it’s awful and to see the police doing this and being you know encouraged by the politicians and and and and to see this put forward as some sort of moral action it’s just well it’s it’s an echo of this kind of catastrophe that that we’re discussing so i think about that sometimes and i also have a tendency to look at things and not not be too worried about them like hey come on yeah what’s really gonna happen right and that’s yeah that’s actually part of my personality part of that comes from my old job where hey i can’t worry about these little things oh there’s some little problem going on over there that’s that’s not going to be that’s not going to affect us it’s not gonna and you got to pay attention a little bit make sure it doesn’t get out of hand but that thing about speech and you just mentioned the uh the the kulak is that how is that what i say kulaks yeah yeah they were the ukrainian they were the ukrainian farmers who were good at farming when i read this part um it got me worried about my own personal lackadaisical attitude towards things that i think oh that’s not a big deal let me let me read this little section about the about the escalation of the word kulak yeah and and where it started and where it ended up yeah that’s good that’s so here we go um in russian a kulak is a miserly dishonest rural trader who grows rich not by his own labor but through someone else’s in every locality even before the revolution such kulaks could be numbered on one’s fingers and the revolution totally destroyed their basis of activity subsequently after 1917 by a transfer of meaning the name kulak began to be applied to all those who in any way hired workers even if it was only even if it was only when they were temporarily short of working hands in their own families but and that doesn’t stop there the inflation of this scathingly term of this scathing term kulak proceeded relentlessly and by 1930 all strong peasants in general were being so called all peasants strong in management strong in work or even strong merely in convictions the term kulak was used to smash the strength of the peasantry and i gotta i gotta go a little bit further because hell of a thing for the workers party to do a crazy yeah they went further though beyond this in every village there were people who in one way or another had personally gotten in the way of the local activists this was the perfect time to settle accounts with them of jealousy envy and insult these are the people you were just talking about a new word was needed for these new victims as a class and it was born by this time it had no social or economic content whatsoever but it had a marvelous sound pod kulak chnick and that meant a person aiding the kulaks in other words i consider you an accomplice of the enemy yeah and that’s all it took yeah well one one of the things i tried to outline in my forward to the abridged version was i was thinking about this idea of oddly enough about intersectionality which is a like social justice idea you know that the social justice idea is that we’re best defined by our collective identity and that the proper narrative in relationship to our collective identity is one of victim victimizer which is a replay of the old marxist doctrine of bourgeoisie and proletariat it’s just in its new guise i mean and that new guise developed at least in part in response to the gulag archipelago because the old proletariat bourgeoisie distinction became morally untenable so it just went underground and underwent this transformation the intersectional theorists point out that your status as a victimizer or a victim is actually the intersection of your multiple identities and so and that’s actually the achilles heel of the collectivist notion and we can get into why that is but there’s a horror that goes along with that that people that’s that’s not obvious that i think contributed to exactly why the russian revolution went so horribly wrong and that is that so imagine that i could characterize you along five or six different dimensions of group identity it’s pretty easy you know while you’re male you’re male of a certain age you’re male of a certain age and economic class you’re you have a certain sexual orientation you have a certain ethnicity you have a certain race that’s six groups right there and we could continue you know your parents had a certain socioeconomic class and so did your grandparents and and then your ethnic group had a certain privilege or lack thereof and you’re attractive or you’re not attractive and you’re intelligent or you’re not intelligent there’s temperamental variability like there’s all sorts of ways of characterizing you according to your group okay now we might say that if we were compassionate people that we would take one of those group identities or more and look at where you’re dispossessed and victimized okay and we’re going to find some dimension along which you’re less privileged than some people like maybe you come from a working-class background despite the fact that you’re like a straight male and so you can be a victim on that dimension and so and that’s kind of that’s at least in part an element of intersectional theory right and that maybe your your your oppression is the product of of your multiple victim-like identities but that can easily be reversed because it’s absolutely the case that i can take any person and i can do a multi-dimensional analysis of their group identities and i can find at least one dimension along which they’re the perpetrator not the victim they’re the victimizer not the victim and as soon as i can identify a dimension along which they’re a victimizer then that justifies their persecution and so one of the things that you saw happening in the russian revolution and it’s very much akin to what you just described was that the the the borders of who who was validly accused of being a victimizer essentially expanded to include everyone and and that’s actually right in it’s in a perverse sense it’s right because if you position yourself properly in in the historical flow then you should see yourself as a perpetrator and a victim equally well it’s not the right way to see yourself at all but if you’re going to play that game you’re going to be on both sides of it and then that issue is and this is related to your idea about you know in your platoon you’ve got one person who’s sadistic it’s like okay well let’s even assume that at the beginning of the russian revolution that the vast majority of the people who were motivated by communism were actually compassionate with regards to the dispossessed peasantry now i don’t believe that but we could say that that was even a significant minority well the question is did you just say on it what was your what was your hypothetical percentage well well let’s say well let’s say it’s 20 percent or let’s even say it’s 50 percent of people who are genuinely motivated by compassion for the dispossessed but then there’s another minority maybe we could even say it was only 10 to begin with who weren’t motivated by that at all they were motivated by the jealousy and the spite and the and the and the resentment that Solzhenitsyn describes and they were the ones who are after those to be persecuted and the thing is they got the upper hand really rapidly and it might be because the carnivorous types the predatory types are much more dangerous and powerful than the compassionate types like they’ll take them out instantly we’re we’re we’re willing to step up and smash someone as opposed to the people that are saying oh we just want to help yes exactly well and there’s someone i actually cited a guy named i think his name was walter latsis in the forward who who wrote a wrote in a journal called red terror that if you were interrogating an enemy of the state you didn’t bother with niceties like their individual guilt that was a bourgeoisie conceit and that’s that’s a really important thing to keep in mind what you wanted to do is to do a class-based analysis and find out well are they a member of let’s say the kulak or the affiliates of the kulaks which is a lovely way of expanding your list of potential victims and then you you execute accordingly and that would mean well the person that you’re interrogating right or the class member that you’re interrogating and then their children and perhaps also their grandchildren and latsis himself was eventually executed by the stalinist somebody wrote to me after i wrote the forward and told me that that was his eventual fate and i thought well talk about standing on a chair and putting the noose around your own neck and kicking it out from underneath you it’s like you know he basically he murdered himself fundamentally and and you know you could say in some sense that was the story of the soviet union to to a tremendous degree yeah there’s there’s one part going back to the the ever-expanding people that need to be destroyed there’s a point in in the book where he starts he’s saying hey look there’s insects stalin’s describe or maybe it was lennon was describing these certain people as insects that need to be destroyed and then he just that that just starts off with hey people that are rabble rousers yeah they’re insects and and then it just expands and expands and then it’s got priests and then it’s got engineers oh yeah and and physicians and everyone in records yeah wreck wreckers that’s the word that they use or that he uses in the book for for basically saboteurs yeah and that expands beyond comprehension yeah because that every single problem that there is is the fault of some person out there that sabotage and and they they do this show trial and he talks about in the book for i think that i think the phrase that he uses or that they use at the russia that the soviets used was organizers of the famine meaning like oh yeah you’re starving and these people over here they’re the reason you’re these are the people that organize the famine they’re the they’re the wreckers of production of food and you bet you bet well it was either that you know you imagine that you you you adopt a world view and that world view enables you to at least in principle organize yourself with other people and to provide you with a certain amount of psychological stability and then things go dreadfully wrong and then you have a choice which is to reevaluate your world view which is of course what solzhenitsyn does in the gulag archipelago in a very deep ways reorganize his entire world view or you can look for reasons why you’re right and and these things are happening and solzhenitsyn talks a lot in the gulag archipelago about see he had a moral conundrum when he was in prison and he started his moral awakening let’s say and he was trying to figure out how to treat other people who were imprisoned he had a real moral conundrum when a committed communist was dragged into the gulag system which happened all the time he said those people were in particularly dire straits because not only had they been subject to the entire tyrannical weight of the deceitful state but it was at the hands of their own comrades and friends and then the the the committed communists would enter the gulag and they would still be in their morally superior phase right that that their incarceration was a mistake and that things would be set right and that there was nothing wrong with the system and they would attempt to justify it and solzhenitsyn was never sure how to react to these people ethically because on the one hand well they were you know devastated because now they were political prisoners and maybe they got a 20-year sentence and they were in terrible you know stripped of their family and just ruined but on the other hand they were still avid supporters of the very fist that had crushed them and so his eventual conclusion was that until they broke and repented they they weren’t to be allied with they were still essentially on the side of the well of the perpetrator and it seems to me that that’s right that’s that’s unrepentant sin let’s say and it isn’t until you what would you say until you take responsibility for your own complicitness in your in your unfair interrogation that you get to join the ranks of of of valuable and suffering humanity again and so so yeah it’s that the the extension of the persecution is really something that’s horrifying to see how who constituted a victimizer the ranks of who constituted victimizer just grew and grew and grew and grew one of the most shocking groups of people that ended up in the gulags were the damn soviet soldiers that had just got back oh yeah that’s just abscess you just can’t that’s the sort of thing you can’t make up yeah you can’t make that up including sultan itchian who who was like in close combat with the enemy and he wrote a letter to one of his buddies and said yeah this doesn’t seem like to be a great decision by stalin yeah and next thing you know he’s he’s in yeah in prison yeah well the stalin stalin decided that yeah this is something that you you can’t you can’t believe this well it is there is this like it’s like you know if there’s something satanic at the bottom of this you know mythologically speaking there’s also something that’s like a cosmic it’s like cosmic black humor it’s like the the sign on oswalt’s that said work will set you free you know that’s a joke right it’s a it’s a terrible terrible dark joke and so much of this has the element of of exactly that kind of surreal i hate to say humor but it’s it’s right i mean stalin decided that the okay so the soviet prisoners of war were not covered by the geneva convention for the treatment of prisoners of war because stalin refused to sign that agreement so like if you were an allied prisoner of the germans it wasn’t like you were having a great time of it like food was in short supply and you were treated pretty brutally but the soviets were kept separately and they were doing so badly that the allies used to throw food packets over the fence when that was an option so the soviet prisoners of war were treated absolutely dreadfully and and that and stalin didn’t care about that and then when they were released and went back to the soviet union his dictum was that because they had been exposed to the capitalist west or even the nazi west for that matter that they had now been intolerably corrupted on ideological grounds and had to be put in the prison camps so that was the that was your destiny as you know i mean first of all you were a frontline russian soldier which was just brutal beyond belief their army was completely unprepared for hitler’s invasion because stalin trusted hitler in in his strange way and so they were completely unprepared and of course then fighting in the soviet union with its winters i mean you just you just can’t imagine what that must have been like and then to be thrown in a prisoner of war camp at the bottom of the rung and then to be brought back to your country and then to be imprisoned as a traitor because as a class you’d been exposed to the wrong ideology it’s like you just it’s it’s it’s unimaginably vile and surreal at the same time and it you shake your head for me well it’s such a shock to read the gulag archipelago you just can’t it’s it’s like it is it’s like dante’s inferno it’s like a trip into hell yeah and i guess you’re that’s what i was trying to say when we started this conversation i was trying to say that it’s like you’re watching this like like you said it’s like a bad comedy movie and you’d think well that’s that’d be really that you’d think you know when you take a comedy one of the things one of the ways you can make people laugh is to take something ordinary and maybe make it much more extreme and the more extreme you make it the more funny it becomes that’s what like happened here you’re looking at this thing going hey oh yeah they seem to be trying to make this funny because who in could ever conceive that you could take your frontline soldiers who were captured and in misery and when they return home instead of treating them like heroes instead you put them back into a prison worse one even you can’t even you can’t even that’s just that’s no no you can’t make this stuff up can’t make it up no did you see i believe the movie was the death of stalin did i did not see it that’s worth seeing because it’s it’s very interesting because one of the things about that movie is that it captures that surreal element because it’s a black comedy you know and and there are comical things happening in the movie in that terrible dark way constantly at the same time that in the background genuinely terrible things are happening so it’s that horrible it’s that it’s it’s got that horrible satirical flavor that runs through books like the gulag archipelago where you think well there’s just no this is so absurd that there’s no possible way it could have occurred and yet that’s not only did it happen there was like a contest to top the absurdity you know to to to consider the engineers for example wreckers is well these people were building the soviet system to the degree that it was built and then to turn around and accuse exactly those people of being the ones who destroy and undermine it it’s it’s part of i really think that what’s what underlies this whatever this is and i think this is what manifests itself in the worst of the leftist collectivism is a real hatred for anything that smacks of competence at all like i i tried to imagine those russian villages because i come from a small town a small northern town too so i kind of i tried to imagine so imagine that you’re in an isolated village and it’s a peasant village and the peasants weren’t freed that long ago right they were basically serfs until until about the the middle of the second half of the 19th century and so they had been emancipated and then some of those people who were emancipated got a little bit of land and started to have a life you know started to be successful peasants and they were also the people that grew the bulk of the crops because what you see happening in any productive domain is that a small percentage of people do almost all the productive work so there’s a small percentage of productive farmers who grew all the crops right and then there’s all sorts of farmers who were only farmers by name and they weren’t successful at all so you have and then there was a certain relationship between being productive as a farmer and developing some wealth maybe you had a house and maybe you could hire a person or two you know and which you’d think would be actually be a good thing especially if you’re also growing food okay so you imagine you you get a village and now there’s a bit of a socioeconomic pyramid and there’s some people that are doing well and they’re really and they’re and it isn’t the crooked people that are really annoying the people who like the genuine coolax let’s say that that small percentage of psychopathic types who are basically profiting criminally off the efforts of others those aren’t so annoying those people because they’re rich but they don’t deserve it and so they don’t stand towards you as a moral ideal that shames you but the really annoying people are the ones who are doing well and deserve it especially if you’re someone who’s doing nothing and is bitter okay so now so there’s the village and you’ve got your people who are doing all right and then you’ve got a huge straddle of people who aren’t upset about the people who are doing well they might even admire them and be happy that they’re around because they’re making the community thrive and growing some food then you have this little this little strata at the bottom of people who are near-do-wells and on the more psychopathic end of things and they’re bitter and resentful and and waiting for their bloody opportunity and then the communist intellectuals come into town and say you know those people that are doing well they actually everything they’ve got is ill gotten and they they stole it and they stole it from you from you like and look at how badly you’re doing and the reason you’re doing badly is because these these people who are lording it over you and who have all this creature comfort they they took that from you it’s yours by right and so then all that resentment and jealousy and hatred and rage alcohol fueled as you might well imagine has this moral reason to go with pitchforks and and in a mob and surround those houses and to strip them of everything they have and to rape the women and to kill the occupants or to ship them off to the middle of siberia when they where they froze to death because there were no or died of dysentery or or or whatever other plague managed to you know weave its way through these camps and so you have the you have the intellectuals providing the moral rationale for the worst ethical actors in these small villages doing the worst possible things under the guise of compassion right and that’s part of that victim victimizer narrative it’s just and you know like you can imagine that you can imagine a dark night you can imagine the winter you can imagine the alcohol you can imagine the rage that fuels these people who are drinking too much in the pubs that have been sitting there for the last 20 years like what would you say eating up their own souls with resentment and bitterness and then someone comes in and says you’re the true victim here and here’s the people that you can go after and then like if you play that on your imagination you get some real sense of exactly what sort of horror that would produce you know you think about the rape for example or or just the theft or but but it’s the rape that you can really think about as as as absolute revenge for all that bitter resentment all fueled by the fact that you know you’d sat there for the last 20 years being completely goddamn useless and bitter and and and and angry and and and and fantasizing about the day that would come where you’d have your opportunity god and then the whole country and that was the whole country oh it’s just unbelievable yeah and i think uh he he spells that out very clearly and he says it’s you know what he’s saying you know i’m saying that you got a psychopath in your platoon he’s saying that psychopath all that psychopath needs to flip is is the is someone to tell him that that’s the right thing to do and that’s exactly what happened what you said that’s it those guys that were slightly psychopathic yeah and then it becomes okay i’m the i’m the head psychopath and you’re in my village and you’re let’s say you’re one of those people that are in the middle well whose side are you going to be on i’m a psychopath if you if you’re not on my side i’m going to kill you next yeah so you go well no i’m on your side too yeah and that’s yeah well and it doesn’t take look it’s not like it takes much pressure on people to have them fold i mean one of the things you see you see happening right now in our culture is that’s happening to people all the time with these twitter wars you know someone will say something they’ll express an opinion and then they’ll get mobbed by and but only abstractly right it’s not like there’s pitchfork wielding mobs at their house and i’m not making light of it it’s no it’s no pleasant thing to be mobbed on twitter but that’s that’s an abstraction compared to these people showing up at your house you know and and what will happen is that people will go through an abject apology you know and they’ll say well i really didn’t mean it and now i understand what my privilege is and i see how what i said could have been very hurtful to people and you know they they wander through that entire apology and fold almost instantly and and that’s under almost almost no pressure compared to what real pressure is and real pressure is when the wolves are actually at your door rather than just barking off in the distance but people will fold just when they’re barking in the distance so there’s one lawyer that he talks about in here it’s the same thing as the story that you described i forget the guy’s name but this guy was like the premier prosecuting lawyer for for the soviet government and he just rips people apart over and over again and as you read about what happens to him sure enough he’s one of the guys that ended up on the on the defensive and yeah being executed yeah like yeah well it’s like these people they built they built a place of butchery and then threw themselves into it you know that’s and and you see social nets and documents this very carefully i mean stalin killed all the people who who were foremost actors in the russian revolution right so i mean everyone was fed into the great grinding machine so and and stalin himself i mean it looked to me like see he got himself into something approximating a positive feedback loop which is a very dangerous thing to have happen and i think solzhenitsyn does a lovely job of detailing this as well so it’s like imagine that i have a fair amount of contempt for people to begin with and then i find that people are i’m not a trusting person and i find that i i’m very paranoid about the fact that people are lying to me and then i develop a certain amount of power and a reputation well then people really do start lying to me all the time in every gesture you know because every time they come near me they’re absolutely terrified and they’re going to tell me anything that i want to hear and of course then all that does is validate my view of how pathetic and contemptible everyone is and so and the more that view gets validated the more i think that it’s okay to destroy people because look at how pathetic and contemptible they are how they always lie and all that means is that they lie even more and so this whole thing just spirals out of control and you know stalin basically started out as a as the brutal enforcement henchmen for henchmen for lenin right the the killer for hire and not like lenin was above that sort of thing himself but but he trained stalin and and then stalin’s proclivity to be murderous just kept expanding without limit right first of all it was individuals and then it was groups and then it was nations and then well by the end of his life well what was it the the plot to destroy the entire world to to to to to to initiate the third world war to wipe out europe to maybe destroy everything and and like there’s no limit there was no limit to that you know and there’s some evidence that that’s perhaps why he was killed you know because stalin himself even went too far for the horrible for the horrible um what semi the the corrupted compadres that he had he had arranged around himself he went too far even for them and and thank god for that you know but yeah it’s it’s it’s absolute i mean the thing that that the gulag archipelago gulag archipelago did for me and this was also in keeping as a consequence also of reading jung at the same time but but it was certainly the gulag in in large part that did it i would say that in some sense it scared me straight i thought i see the the consequences of unethical behavior deceit the willingness to to turn a blind eye so even sins of omission rather than sins of commission just to turn a blind eye the consequences of that are so absolutely dreadful that it’s not acceptable and i think that’s the right lesson from the 20th century it’s that you you you you you have a much more important moral role to play in keeping things straight than you want to believe you know people think well my life is basically meaningless it’s like well that’s quite terrifying it’s like yeah it’s kind of terrifying but it means you don’t have any responsibility so there’s a big advantage to thinking that you know now if nothing you do matters then nothing you do matters and so you can do whatever you want and and that’s horrifying in a nihilistic sort of way but there’s another kind of horror that’s more associated i think with the horror of hellfire that was characteristic of the medieval christian view is which is something like and if you strip it of its metaphysics it’s something like no you don’t get it the things you do actually do the things you do or don’t do they actually do matter and they tilt the world towards you know something approximating good let’s say or towards something that very closely approximates hell and that’s actually on you it’s literally your fault it’s literally your responsibility it’s like man that’s a terrifying that’s a terrifying idea but i can’t see how you can read this literature without coming to that conclusion like it wasn’t one that i wanted to leap to you know it’s like it’s it’s it’s sort of the ultimate in horrifying conclusions that that everybody who participated in this system was at fault for all of it you know and dostoevsky made the same sorts of claims in in the last part of the 19th century i mean he was a very weird mystical sort of person you know and he he made claims or some of his characters did but on his behalf that you know not only are you responsible for everything you do but in some sense you’re responsible for everything that everyone else does too and you think well obviously there’s a way in which that isn’t true you know it’s delusional in some sense but there’s another way in which it actually is true you know and so well i i wrote a book called extreme ownership and it’s it’s very interesting so all this is a whole um thought here so you know when i read the book about face which is not about leadership it’s not a leadership book it’s a it’s a book about a guy that was in the leadership position but he doesn’t say here’s how you lead here’s what you do here it’s a book about his experience and what i took away from it especially because i was in leadership positions in in the military in combat situations that i started seeing all these leadership things that he did and there’s all this crossover because for instance and so for me the crossover was well i i started learning about tactics when i was a young kid because i was in the militaries and the seal teams and you had to learn about how to fire and maneuver like that’s what you do and then so you start learning about leadership and then i started training a lot of jiu-jitsu and so so those things kind of all fit together and it’s very strange how those things started to weave together in my head that oh if on the battlefield if you want to attack the enemy you don’t do it head on you you flank them you distract them and then you flank them you come in from the other side in jiu-jitsu if you want to submit your opponent you you don’t just grab their arm no you start to choke them and while they’re defending the choke then you get their arm and as a leader if you want somebody to do something you just don’t bark that order at them you flank them and you let them understand why it’s happening and and you know when i started this podcast that i do i i would i started off by saying in the beginning i’d say yeah it’s a podcast about leadership viewed through the lens of war and atrocity and the more i did it it didn’t take me very long where i was saying well it’s it’s actually a podcast about human nature really is what it’s actually about because the better you understand human beings the better you’ll be able to do as a leader because you’ll understand what’s happening with those dynamics which i guess is now leading me into some sort of psychology which is kind of where you ended up with of of you read this book and you said you were studying political science when you read this book and then you said oh you looked at the psychology of it and an example that you just brought up and this is just what you learn when you read and when you understand history and when you understand the way people think stalin surrounded himself with people that would say yes to him and anybody that didn’t say yes to him he killed them and i’ll say this again i’ll talk to military he also killed you if you said yes yeah the uh i’ll talk to military for sure but also any business leader we we talk to business leaders all the time and you don’t want people you don’t want your subordinates or your superiors when you tell them what to do to just nod their head and say yes you don’t want that now the the the immediate thought especially for a military guy they think they’re nothing would make my job easier than if i bark and order at you jordan you work for me you’re a private and i’m a captain and i bark and order you you just shut up and go do it that seems like the best thing in the world it’s absolutely not true because there’s things that you know on the front lines that i don’t know and if i really want to be a good leader i want you to push back on me and say hey boss we don’t want to do that here’s what’s going on let me tell you the situation and instead of and you want to be able to do that you want to be able to teach your subordinates to do that without being insubordinate right because then it’s not a power play it’s that your your interests are aligned our interests are aligned and i actually when i talk to the support it’s because i talk to subordinates too yeah and i say listen when you say something to your boss you don’t say why the hell are we doing that boss you actually have to be very tactful yes exactly hey hey boss um i want to make sure i’m executing this exactly how you want it can you explain to me why we’re doing this so i can really really make it happen out there in the field and that’s a key thing so so these ideas of of you know psychology i guess now is and i i hate to use that word but because i was just calling it human nature but these ideas they all kind of come together and so now you’re talking about ownership right extreme ownership and this idea that hey i’m responsible for everything and so here’s what i’ll get from a leader they’ll say well whether it’s a business leader or it’s very easy to use a military leader so i’ll get a platoon commander my machine gunner shot in the wrong direction how can that be my fault because my machine gunner shot in the wrong direction i’m not i’m not holding his weapon i’m not pulling his trigger how can that possibly be my fault that’s not my fault wrong who’s in charge of that machine gunner who’s in charge of making sure he understands what his fields of fire are who’s in charge of making sure he understands when and where he’s allowed to shoot you are you’re the boss this is absolutely your fault had another interesting example of the weather the weather’s bad we couldn’t execute our mission that’s why we failed because we couldn’t launch our helicopters yeah it’s not my fault yeah that’s a hard one to argue against yeah except for the fact that if you’re a good leader you’ll say hey here’s our plan we’re going to use these helicopters and here’s our contingency plan right if there’s bad weather yeah if you don’t take that ownership of what’s going on if you don’t take responsibility for it you’re not going to change it you’re not going to fix it and that means you’re never going to get any better you’re not going to win right but the minute you as and this and obviously this applies to you know people to purple and you know you tell people to take responsibility i don’t tell them take ownership of what’s going on in your world it’s this it’s the same thing but at the end well it’s also it’s also seems to me to be the case and i think that this is part of the ethic that’s embedded in in it’s deeply embedded in christianity with the idea that the idea that the ultimate sacrifice that you can offer to the world is the sacrifice of yourself it’s like well imagine that you have to sacrifice something to set the world right while you do obviously because you have to give up things now in order to make things better in the future so the sacrificial idea is a very deep one then the question might be well well if you’re going to sacrifice something is it going to be someone else or is it going to be you and and i really think that’s the fundamental question and the right answer to that is that it’s going to be you it’s your fault right you take that on or at least you take on that responsibility and it is it’s a weird thing weirdly difficult to distinguish fault and responsibility like i think responsibility is the better way of thinking about it but it’s tied in with the idea of fault if it doesn’t go right if it isn’t going right it’s because you’re not good enough now that can be crushing there is a problem with that like and you see sometimes people who develop like psychotic depression and they um they they suffer from a delusional condition in some sense that the entire moral catastrophe of the world is literally their fault and that’s not there’s an element of that that’s that’s not productive although there’s a truth in it as well you know and and it’s hard to it’s hard to find the balance so that you can take on that responsibility without it simultaneously being a crushing weight because there’s a lot of things in the world that are really not good and if they’re your fault well that’s rather hard on you i mean one of the things that the catholic church does to help people with that is that it gives them the opportunity to sort of wash their sins off themselves right you can go to church and you can say well look here’s a bunch of ways that i’ve been being not who i could be and the church authorities say well you know that’s not good and you should straighten up and all of that and fly right but human beings are fellable and you’re fellable and and and we can’t just crush you because of your insufficiency so we’ll wash the slate clean and you can go out there and try again and and it’s very hard to get the balance between those things right so that you can take the responsibility on without being crushed by it but but it’s still the case that it seems to me that it’s either your fault or it’s someone else’s and as soon as it’s someone else’s then you better be careful because that idea that it’s someone else’s is definitely going to appeal to the worst in you that’s definitely going to happen and if you don’t see that then you’re naive or willfully blind and and all that is going to do all that’s all that that is going to do is make the situation worse yeah especially because if it’s not my fault and it’s your fault and i can’t control you what do i do about it i sit there and just suffer the consequences of the situation as opposed to okay here’s what’s going on i’m going to take responsibility ownership for it i’m going to change it make it happen you talked about turning a blind eye and earlier you talked about turning a blind eye to the truth to a situation and i know there’s a point in this book where he talks about the he’s got a buddy that says amnesty is coming right amnesty is coming let’s just keep our mouth shut let’s do what we’re told to do and we’ll get you know we’ll get out amy’s coming and you know solzhenitsyn says he’s saying okay yeah and then he says to himself wait a minute if i’m not if i’m not living in order to live then is it worth it and this is a question that i get asked a lot because people get themselves into situations where they’ve lost some kind of control whether it’s they’re in a crappy job or they’ve got a bad boss yeah or whatever maybe they’re in a bad relationship yeah maybe their families met but they’re they’re in a situation and they and they don’t know what to do and part of them i think anticipates the answer from me to be listen hey listen if you’re not if you’re not living in order to live then that’s wrong but what i actually tell them universally almost and there’s a couple situations where it goes outside this but you it’s like uh what i tell them is what you need to do right now is you need to play the game you need to play the game to get the situation to a point where you can act right so if you’re you got a bad boss right yeah oh okay you got a bad boss i want to tell this guy to go screw himself yeah yeah hey guess what i’m gonna do when my boss tells me something to do that doesn’t make much sense you know what i’m gonna do i’m gonna do it and i’m gonna do it well and what am i doing i’m building that relationship with him he’s starting to trust me and he’s gonna tell me to do something else now these things are massive catastrophes it’s like he’s telling me to do something maybe there’s a better way to do it you don’t want to do it that way and i’m gonna play that game and i’m gonna build up that relationship now when eventually he tells me to do something that is totally stupid or it’s gonna cost you know lives or money then when i say hey boss that’s not a great way to do it i think i know a better way couldn’t we try something else he actually will listen to me so i’m gonna play the game a little bit and i’ll tell you my gut instinct if now i guess it’s it’s easy to look from the outside and say hey if i was in this prison camp my gut instinct is like okay joc or you know you’ve been through these kind of things before play the game you’re gonna play the game which is horrifying because part of playing that game to the fullest extent here or in a nazi prison camp would be coming a capo right oh you’re playing the game yeah yeah you’re playing the game yeah so and that’s really the outline the things that i said that are outlying i always make the caveat that if you’re getting asked to do something that’s immoral illegal or unethical then you actually have a duty to say no i’m not going to do that no that’s that’s the line which you know which you reach that line in the sand with uh bill c-16 which is hey i’m not going to do this but the idea that sometimes you got to play the game and sometimes even from you when you just said to me you know you said well you know sometimes you it’s not right to turn a blind eye on things and it’s like sometimes you have to if you want to get yourself to a position like my my seems to me that you’re making a distinction between discipline and strategy like and and and and like impulsive moral responding you know like let’s say that you are in a situation where you have a boss who’s intolerable and maybe what you’d like to do you know the resentment has built up over five years and you’d like to go in there and and yell at him and tell him everything you think and you think well that’s the truth it’s like well it’s actually it’s not a very sophisticated truth because you’re doing a shallow and impulsive analysis of the situation like it would have been the case that you’ve already compromised yourself in 500 ways and i’ll get back to the playing the game issue because you do have to discipline yourself too and and you have to discipline yourself to some degree by allowing yourself to do arbitrary things that are part of the system right that’s a necessary part of discipline and discriminating that from compliance with unethical activity is very difficult so that’s a hard situation but let’s say you’re you’re you’re going to counsel someone who has an intolerable boss and they come in and they’re right at the end of their tether because maybe that’s why they come for counseling they say i really want to tell that son of a bitch what i think of him and you think well wait a second here okay first of all you’ve already eradicated from the list of reasonable possibilities that decision by failing to say small things that you could have said all the way along and it’s not like you can just all of a sudden blurt all of that out now and that wipes the slate clean and that constitutes truth it’s too unsophisticated so let’s think okay so what is it that you want well i don’t want this job anymore it’s like okay now let’s actually have a strategy about this then you don’t want this job anymore can you get another job well i don’t think so well so you can’t just quit well no i can’t because then i don’t have any money and my family depends on the job it’s like okay so you can’t just stop this that’s not a viable solution you go out of the frying pan into the fire or you know you sack you you substitute one set of unethical actions for another set of unethical actions that are even worse that’s not helpful all right so let’s start thinking about what exactly it is that you want it’s like well maybe i want a better job i want to work for someone who’s more reasonable okay so what’s stopping you well i don’t have my cv in order my resume isn’t up to date well why is that well i haven’t done it for five years and i don’t like doing it well why is that well because i’m kind of embarrassed about it because it has holes in it and it shows where i’m lackadaisical and where i’m not prepared it’s like okay how many things are there like that well there’s a bunch of things and they’re all associated with how i’ve procrastinated in the past it’s like okay what are we going to do to rectify that so i’ll say to people why don’t you update your cv that that’s what we’ll do first because if you’re going to look for a different job i’m not saying you’re going to look for a different job but if you’re going to look for a different job you’re not going to unless your cv is updated so why don’t you go not going to unless you can get a good recommendation from this boss that’s a tyrant and so that’s right there’s you gotta play the game there’s 10 strategic actions that you’re going to have to take in order to make yourself able to move laterally or up and the truth is isn’t going in and yelling at your boss and telling him everything you think about him the truth is trying to figure out the very very difficult process of how you put yourself in a better position and that that like one of the things that’s quite fun about this lecture tour is the letters that i receive or the stories that people tell me about switching jobs because they do realize that they’re and i often talk to people about consulting their resentment resentment’s a really useful emotion like it’s really dangerous it’s one of the most dangerous psychological states i believe but it’s unbelievably useful because resentment usually only means one of two things it either means quit whining and and take it on because you’re immature or it means you’re allowing yourself to be taken advantage of and you have something to say or do and so you want to sort out the first part and find out if you’re just being immature and you can think that through and you can talk to people um but and then but if it’s the second it’s like no you’ve compromised yourself in a variety of ways and you have to figure out how to get out of that and if you’re resentful that’s evidence that you have in fact done that okay so now the issue would be well how can you set your life up so that you can be without that resentment and so that’s when you start to develop a strategy for you know and it there’s actually an adventure in this too i mean i’ve had a number of clients who have been in jobs that they didn’t like at all and you know they were tyrannized by someone for example and they were also working below their hypothetical level and we’d put together a plan it’s like okay you’re going to make three times as much money in in five years that’s the plan but like that’s not going to be simple so you there’s education you got to educate yourself maybe formally because you’ve got holes you got to fix up your resume you’ve got to you’ve got to overcome your fear of being interviewed you have to start sending out like 50 resumes a week on a regular basis and be prepared for a 99 rejection rate you you’re going to look for a different job it’s probably going to take six months to a year and almost all of that is going to be rejection and you’ve got to steal yourself from for that and prepare and maybe this is going to be a three-year process it’s no trivial thing but you know it’s almost inevitably i can’t remember a single example where the consequence of that very careful detailed strategic thinking wasn’t a massively substantive improvement in socioeconomic positioning and a great movement towards a an improving trajectory and and and there’s advantages even along the way because even before that happens the fact that you’re taking genuine steps to put yourself in a better situation immediately starts to reduce your resentment even if it isn’t having positive consequences to begin with but you have to be realistic about it it’s like look it’s going to be hard to update your cv because you’re embarrassed about it and you should be right it’s no wonder you’re embarrassed about it and then well of course you don’t want to go be interviewed because you’re not very good at it and and there’s holes in your story and and you’re and you can be made nervous easily and you’re not a very good advocate for yourself so there’s a lot of improvement that needs to be done there and and then you have to withstand the the the the punishment of being constantly rejected when you apply for jobs because the baseline rejection rate you know for the for the typical job applicant is like 99 it’s like the rejection rate for everything is this going to work no but if you do it a hundred times it might work once that’s all you need that’s exactly it you you only need that once and so the truth there isn’t to yell at your boss the truth there is to get your life together yeah um play the game you got to play the game sometimes to to get a strategic win to me and that’s and another interesting thing here is as i say you don’t want to surround yourself with yes men when you’re in a leadership position you also don’t want to be your own personal yes man that just thinks you’re great and agrees with everything that you’re doing and and won’t tell yourself the hard truth you know you can’t lie to yourself everything every little one of those things that you just listed off are the kind of things that people just lie to themselves and say ah you know what well you don’t really need that that person didn’t learn anything in that in that course why should i go to it that you know it’s like if you don’t tell yourself the truth about what your situation is it’s going to be problematic just like if you don’t have people on your team above you or below you in the chain of command that tell you the truth that’s going to be problematic as well which is something which is something that’s easier um so the playing the game thing so are you thinking about that as a consequence of necessary discipline you know like because because they’re because it seems to be you’re making two cases at the same time right one is that you should obviously not undertake unethical actions but then by the same token and and you have to subordinate yourself to the realities of the situation and and i think that that’s psychologically true because you’re always in a situation where if you’re in an organization there’s kind of an arbitrary and tyrannical aspect to it because it’s never working perfectly and then and then there’s the the positive aspect to it too and so whenever you’re doing a job it could be that you’re you’re called upon to do things that well what would you say that are a necessary part of the operation of the machinery i guess that would be particularly true in military situations and and let me give you well just a broad example right um you know my personality and my reputation is that you know when i was in the military it’s like oh it’s jaco he’s not gonna you know he’s if if someone tells him to do something he doesn’t want to do he’s just gonna you know say screw you yeah we’re not doing we’re doing it my way you know um i got the knock but that was kind of the impression people would get from me if they didn’t know me from the outside they’d think oh this guy’s a knuckle-draggers he’s just gonna go forward he’s just gonna make things happen and he’s not gonna listen to anyone else that was the impression from the outside the reality is a you you can’t do that and and b the reality is what my actions i’d have you know a young lieutenant would come to me and say hey you know my boss is to tell me to do this this and this and what they’d think i was gonna say is like bro you don’t do that you stand up you tell him screw you that doesn’t make any sense and they’d be they’d get this look in their eyes of surprise yeah when i say oh your boss wants you to do that do it do it well play the game that’s what i’m telling them to do is play the game because these things are meaningless it’s some you know something is pathetic is like oh you got to fill out a form a certain way it’s like hey shut up and play the game even my so is that a matter of picking your battles it’s it certainly is a matter of picking your battles and you as that’s part of strategy right like everything can’t be the war exactly and it’s exactly what it is but you know a good example and we wrote about it in in dichotomy of leadership which is you know my friend my guy that worked for me laif babin we were getting told to do all this paperwork you gotta you gotta fill out these forms you gotta you gotta have a serialized inventory of everything it’s got to be signed off this many days we need to know the the qualifications of each and every person and when their qualifications come up due and all these just ridiculous paperwork and laif came to me and with with the other platoon commander guy named seth they came to me and said oh man this is bullshit why do we got to do all this paperwork we’re we’re here training for war we’re getting ready for war why we got to do this and you know laif will tell you his expectation was that i was going to be like you’re right i’m going to go to the commanding officer and tell him screw this we’re not doing this stuff this is crap we’re trying to prepare because we were in training getting ready to deploy to iraq this is crap we’re not doing this and i looked at him and said oh we’re doing all this paperwork and not only are we going to do this paperwork we’re going to do it better than anyone else and we’re going to turn it in before it’s even due and you know both him and seth were kind of taking it back then the fact that i wasn’t standing up and saying we’re not doing this crap and then i explained to him here’s what we’re doing we’re building a relationship with my commanding officer with our commanding officer we’re going to do these little things for him we’re going to play the game because at some point two things are going to happen number one we want to build trust with my boss i want my boss to look at me and when he tells me to do fill out paperwork he knows it’s going to be filled out if he wants me to take down a building he knows it’s going to get taken out if he wants me to execute a larger mission i’ll go and get it done where if i can’t fill out paperwork correctly how can you trust me to go on a real operation and have guys lives at risk so the idea is like hey we’re gonna play the game and i think sometimes people start to hear me they start to listen to me and their first instinct is jocko wouldn’t put up with this shit yeah and that’s why these you know they’ll hit me up the same thing they’ll write me an email they’ll write me a letter and say here’s the situation i’m in i’m whether it’s a boss whether it’s a military it’s any of them whether it’s their wife like like my wife expects me not to train jiu-jitsu something as stupid as that like my wife won’t let me train it’s driving me crazy it’s really starting to bother me but why why won’t she well what’s the problem hey have you taken her out for dinner you know i mean like play the damn game a little bit so that you can win strategically and it’s the same thing i think with your with the 12 rules we’re like hey tell the truth or at least don’t lie it’s like i get it but there’s a dichotomy in that statement and that is if you run around telling the absolute truth to everyone it’s going to be like that jim carrey movie where he can’t say anything that’s not 100 true and he’s you know a girl woman says good morning and he says you look fat you know it’s like one of those like that’s not good and so you gotta learn to play the game and and i guess again going back to this book it’s like that’s a tough call to make in these situations how much do you play the game and there’s an an ethical line that you could cross at some point if i become a capo hey you just you played the game and you went too far with it and just like in a leadership situation if i if you’re my boss and i’m just kissing your ass and doing whatever you said my guys lose respect for me yeah my team will lose respect for me if you tell me to do something completely stupid and i say hey guys that’s what the boss says we’re doing it my guys will lose respect for me and i won’t be i won’t be able to execute missions the way i should if when the pushback is proper i say hey hey boss yeah that doesn’t make any sense we shouldn’t do that and i go to the guys and say listen i told i talked to him we’re gonna see what he says but trust me if we have to do this we’ll we’ll figure out a way to make it work because if you’re just the guy that’s totally on board if you’re a brown noser right your p your guys will lose respect for you 100 they will they’ll lose respect for you if you don’t play the game at all and you push back on everything that your boss says you’re gonna you’re not gonna get fired yeah that’s another ethical situation like if my if you’re my boss and you tell me to do something that’s i don’t believe in or it’s like a bad plan and i may i draw the line in the sand and say screw you jordan we’re not doing it you can fire me you’re like okay fine you fire me you get some yes man to come in he takes my guys out on the mission and gets them all killed he didn’t mitigate the risk properly it’s better for me ethically to say hey look jordan i don’t agree with this plan i really wish we could do it another way is there any way i could flex on it you say nope you’re doing it this way it is better for me in many situations to say okay i got it well that’s a good indication of the complexity of the truth i mean one of the rules of thumb that i think is worth abiding by and i guess this is something that makes me somewhat conservative in some ways is that you should do what everyone else does unless there’s a very good reason not to and and i think that’s i think that’s the same idea that you’re putting forward which is that if you if you do fight back against everything then you’re just a rebel without a cause right in you and you discredit yourself entirely and if you accept everything well then you’re not even there and so there’s some judicious analysis of the situation that helps you understand when the time for action is right and most of the time what you’re doing in life is you’re doing what other people do and that’s going along with the game that’s part of being socialized but there’s going to be times when the right thing to do is to break a rule and to do it very carefully and so and there’s a there’s a there’s a there’s a scene i think this is a new testament scene but it might be in some of the apocryphal right apocryphal writings i don’t remember so christ is walking down the road on the sabbath and there’s uh there’s a ditch by the road and it’s very hot and in the ditch there’s a hole and in the hole there’s a sheep and so the sheep is stuck in the hole and this guy shepherd is trying to get the sheep out of the hole and christ walks by and he says um if you don’t understand what you’re doing you’re a transgressor of the law and you’re cursed but if you do understand what you’re doing then you’re blessed so it’s it’s a perfect example of that because it’s it’s like if you’re okay now here’s your situation you’re a shepherd and you’re supposed to be taking care of that sheep right but it’s the sabbath day so you’re not supposed to be working now if you have decided you’ve thought this through you think it’s the sabbath day this is something that everybody needs because everybody needs to take a rest and this is a rule i shouldn’t break because everybody needs to take a rest or or things degenerate and i understand that and i have a lot of respect for it but i think that in this situation it’s still morally appropriate for me to break that rule in a slight way and get this poor sheep out of this hole then well christ’s judgment was well then you’re exactly on the right track but if you’re doing it carelessly and stupidly you’re breaking that rule then you’re a transgressor of the law and you’re cursed and i think that’s exactly at the essence of what you’re describing it’s like you play by the rules but then there’s a meta rule which is now and then you break the rules and you do that very very carefully because when you break the rules you’re breaking the rules and the rules are what keep peace they they’re what keep peace and order and so you break them only in the service of a higher peace and order and so that seems to be and i think that’s you see this in in well the sorts of stories that are influencing even the things that you’re writing like in the harry potter series for example harry’s friends and compatriots are quite disciplined hermione in particular because she’s an absolute master of her craft but they still break rules when it’s necessary only when it’s necessary and that’s what makes them more than the people who are just breaking rules all the time the villains so to speak and also makes them more than the people that are just being good by being conformist so you need that that touch of rebelliousness but it’s got to be a flavoring and not the whole diet absolutely i’ve actually talked about that on this podcast before there’s people in the military that they are like meta rule followers these are people that have been following rules their whole lives and they’ve got perfect grades and they have the team all these things and they’re going to make really good solid leaders like they’re going to be great leaders but then there’s this like one group above them they have that same thing but they also have that little bit of rebellion that they’ll say you know what we’re not doing that it doesn’t make any sense and that is really a an important factor to have but you know that’s one of the reasons i like this guy colonel david hackworth this guy was the ultimate rule follower for his whole career at the end in vietnam he did an interview and said if we keep fighting this way we’re not going to win this war and they drove him out of the army but that’s what that’s the thing that because all along the way there was other times where he’d do that you know his guys weren’t getting taken care of he’d break a rule and bring him beer or he’d do you know he’d do that along the way not not so far outside the bonds that it would jeopardize his career because if he would do that then you’re not in charge of these guys anymore now you’re not going to have any impact so let’s not get fired right right let’s let’s not get stupidly fired right that’s not an improvement exactly well that’s uh awesome uh i guess we i know you gotta go so i can’t think that we could get to a better little crust of the or little capstone of the conversation than right there uh thanks for coming on again hey my pleasure man and i’m glad we got a chance to talk about this book this is a book that everybody should read and and you you i ordered the i ordered a copy of yours with the ford yeah from europe yeah you can’t buy it from amazon here you have to buy it from amazon so it’ll be here when will it be well i don’t know we’re still negotiating the rights because the rights holders differ in north america and so that’s the issue at the moment so so i worked with an english publisher penguin in in the uk that that put out the i think it’s vantage books if i remember correctly i should just check and make sure that that’s exactly right harper perennial modern classics that’s not that’s not the british one that’s so that’s not the british one i think it is the british one hasn’t gotten to my house yeah yeah and so yeah it has to be ordered it has to be ordered through amazon uk and we’re we’re working on a couple of things maybe to also maybe get the audio rights to the abridged version because i’d like to read it nice and that would be good so that people could listen to it and so because it’s it’s an absolutely necessary book yeah and it’s written actually what’s i like because it’s written very conversational i mean he’s cracking jokes in there and he’s making it’s a brilliant piece of literature as well as i mean it’s a very readable book although it’s unbelievably harsh and and demanding and and draining to read but it’s it’s brilliantly written it’s an unbelievably engrossing read in the most horrible possible way but and and it is the case that it’s written at this white hot pace you know it’s like talking to someone who’s righteously not self-righteously angry but righteously angry for for well for for for dozens of hours and you just can’t believe the levels of outrage that are that are being that are being so incredibly well expressed and so effectively expressed and and and again i i think it’s also worth emphasizing the fact that you know Solzhenitsyn’s real contribution in many ways was to lay the catastrophe at the feet of the doctrine and not to say no this is this wasn’t an aberration because of stalin or you know lennon being the great leader and then stalin being the monster because lennon was plenty monster himself and stalin was the logical conclusion to lennon not not an aberration but to say that no the horrors of what happened in the soviet union were were implicit in the collectivist system utopian system that gave rise to the philosophy to begin with and that that’s also an explanation why the same catastrophes occurred wherever the soviet system was applied everywhere else in the world it’s something we really need to know i mean we fought a whole cold war over that we put damn near put the world to the torch because of this and the idea that these ideas are the fact that these ideas are creeping back is really um it’s unbearable as far as i’m concerned so well hopefully people reading this book and the the re-release of this book with your forward will prevent that from happening well at least it hopefully it will be a a drop in a bucket that many other people can put drops into as well and so i’m hoping i mean i think the book has sold 15 000 copies since the beginning of november which is pretty good for the reissue of an old classic but like it it it’s required reading for an informed citizen of the 21st century it’s not optional you need to know this material you’re not you’re not you don’t understand your position in society as an individual or a citizen without knowing this material so it’s like not knowing about what happened in nazi germany it’s not acceptable to not know so read the book thanks for coming really good to see you again man absolutely yeah you bet appreciate it and with that jordan peterson has departed the recording studio and if you noticed that echo charles was not present during the recording with jordan peterson but through the miracle of technology and recording echo has now joined us for the support portion of this podcast so good evening echo good evening all right so if people listen to this podcast which we appreciate and you want to support this podcast and support yourself there are ways to do that echo can fill you in sure so first way is when you’re doing jujitsu because we’re all doing jujitsu yes it might sound a little bit repetitive but to me when you do just you’re going to be doing it every single day every single week at least even if you’re doing the two times a week three times i get it either way you’re going to need a gi and a rash guard so there is no question which kind of you get you get an origin g straight up made in america i watched one of their videos yesterday and it’s kind of an older one too but it made me like love origin even more because it’s like you’ll see you know the people that make them and all the ladies there and then pete like he has like longer hair and stuff like that it’s like oh man this is kind of more the beginnings of origin you know anyway i thought it was good nonetheless again made in america quality stuff for jujitsu it’s not like a blank gi they get from over wherever some other place and then slap an embroidered patch on it let’s say that no this is made for jujitsu in america yeah everything made in america from where where we grow the material is grown in america woven in america woven in maine as a matter of fact custom woven by origin we we weave it up there and make the best gis in the world also got some other stuff for you know you got t-shirts you can get sweatshirts and also coming in 2019 jeans yeah origin denim origin denim yeah i just call them jeans though yeah yeah i dig it that starts to like i don’t know move towards a fashion thing what if you say denim denim well i feel oh yeah i don’t feel that material yeah i feel like it’s like origin denim they make it you know yeah and then yeah they make origin jeans for sure but what if they make like a jean jacket like a denim jacket no that’d be true but it’ll be a jean jacket that’s true i dig it cool either way yeah that’s and i don’t get excited for jeans in general in life oh don’t yeah like you know you see it on tv i don’t know jc panney has a sale you know black friday or whatever and you know some jeans i don’t get excited you probably i’m assuming you don’t either maybe do i don’t know but when pete posts little like videos of the close you know close up of the buttons the jeans come on bro that’s that’s kind of exciting i’m just saying either way yeah either way the also we have supplements too affirmative origin labs which is expanding yes yeah yeah we bought another building up there but yeah so they’re making we are making supplements joint warfare krill oil super krill oil by the way discipline the trifecta yeah yeah the my my wife she went on a trip didn’t take joint warfare with her yeah she’s there for three four days her knee starts bothering her it bothers her the rest of the trip she comes home she goes back on joint warfare for three four days knee’s fine again yeah same same this is that’s just crazy yeah that’s just the reality of it so joint warfare good for your joints krill oil also good for your joints and good for your good for your whole life system is that a thing life system life yes okay well yeah it’s good for that too discipline when you need that focus and also discipline go yeah which is my pre cognitive enhancement tool go to go to yeah yeah it’s funny the krill i had the same situation too by the way krill oil and joint warfare didn’t bring it by the way in hawaii which is the reason why it didn’t appear on this episode of the podcast in hawaii so my father-in-law came i told him the story about how he’d always talk about krill oil and he’s just sort of looking at me like whatever and um you know he used to tell me oh yeah krill oil is good good for you all this stuff and he said not listen because you know he’s more of like a health dude you know he’s not and then when you started talking about it like literally the day you start talking about it start taking it and he was like he didn’t care it kind of went right over his head and he was like oh so did you feel the the difference you know like that’s what he was concerned about what do you mean care that’s nice also on top of that is you got milk which is which is milk basically that’s what it is it’s uh it has protein in it you mix it with milk i gotta make that statement if you mix it with or you can mix it with almond milk you can mix it with coconut milk you can mix it with regular cow milk sure if you mix it with water it’s not i’m not jumping up and down about it until it’s the most delicious thing in the world if you mix it with milk whole milk especially i will tell you it’s a it’s a it’s a dessert straight up it’s a dessert that you will make you stronger if so you know like hot cocoa you ever make hot oh yeah okay so i’m a fan that you can put in water right do you put in water and milk that is not hot cocoa to me okay i know what you’re talking about you get the little the little packet that you’re supposed to mix with water it’s got the little crappy marshmallows in it yeah that’s not that’s a non-starter for me yeah so that’s kind of the point there yeah it’s sort of the you know along the same lines where it’s like cool do it it’s okay you can do it yep and and there’s probably many many many people who do that and i’m not mad at them but you put the milk that stuff you know that’s the good one that’s my opinion and by the way you can have you can have hot chocolate mulk yeah it’s good it’s it’s right up there especially the warrior kid one yeah the so you got mint chocolate peanut butter chocolate vanilla gorilla and the darkness and then there’s the the warrior kid mulk which has a little bit less protein in it unless you double up on your scoops like i do for the strawberry because the strawberry is ridiculously good so give that a shot and by the way all these things are available at origin main.com and that’s that’s the state of main yeah yeah not just main like the main spot even though it is a main spot but check cool also yeah also if you want to represent you know get a discipline equals freedom shirt or a rash guard you know get after it anyway you want to represent the path go to jocostore.com that’s where you can get all this stuff uh hoodies you know hey christmas is coming up let’s face it there’s no avoiding it it’s coming up you know so you want to grab something that’s a good place to grab something some new stuff on there too but yeah if you want to represent while on the path jocostore.com good spot also jocowite tea so these claims of deadlifting 8000 pounds i haven’t deadlifted in a while so i was like you know what i’m gonna i’m gonna test it the cans right tea drink a straight up deadlift deadlifted 8000 pounds just like that just like that no warm up even no you don’t need it you know it’s real well the warm up is drinking some jocowite yeah that is the one you’re warmed up and you’re good 8000 pound deadlift yeah that’s this is the only product in the world in any capacity that guarantees 100 8000 pound deadlift minimum yeah yeah 100 but yeah so yeah you get them what in the dry tea bags if that’s your thing when you see see that’s the word right yeah yeah steep steep okay boom if you like that gig uh hot cold whatever and then the cans which i recommend i recommend they can actually i don’t know if i’d recommend it but i prefer they can i like them both yeah depending on the scenario i mean boom there you go also subscribe to the podcast on itunes and stitcher and google play wherever you listen to podcasts there’s a lot of new ones out there there’s no apps yeah for different ones and there’s a lot of podcasts out there yeah you can listen to a bunch of them yeah yeah and one of them that you can also listen to in addition to this one if you want you can check out the warrior kid podcast that’s basically directed at kids but um i’ll tell you that uncle jake has lessons for everyone in that podcast and also we got the youtube channel the youtube channel where you can watch this podcast in its full length and you can see what people look like if you don’t know what jordan b peterson looks like if you don’t know what echo charles looked like or if you don’t know what i look like you can watch the the youtube channel and you can see all of us if you never heard if you’ve never seen echo before but you’ve only heard him he probably doesn’t look like what you think he looks like yeah allegedly and i don’t know if that’s good or bad i don’t know if that’s a backhanded compliment or a backhanded derogatory statement about you about your voice probably both yeah a little bit of both yeah but well suffice it to say that he’s not what you expect when you see him in reality and he also makes videos that are enhanced by imagery and music yeah sure exactly and those are on there too so you can check those out you can subscribe to that youtube channel also we got the psychological warfare album and that has tracks on it of well they’re of me telling you pragmatically why you should or should not do something like skip a workout you should not skip a workout eat donuts you should not eat donuts so just some little things like that you can check that out psychological warfare echo claims that it has 100 effectiveness yeah it does 100 should you go to the gym yes you should and if you listen to the track you will go to the gym it’s 100 effective and actually i mean a lot of claims being made about effectiveness on this yeah scenario right well hey it’s if it’s real it’s real you know this double blind placebo tested well you know single blind maybe okay i don’t even know what that means but it does sound official and it is official when okay and i kind of tried to psychologically analyze psychological warfare like why does it work every single time and here’s part of it even you you know like when you get hypnotized i’m not saying you’re we should have i should have asked i should have asked jordan this question yeah since you’d agree with this i think okay i think well maybe next time we’re gonna echoes bro theory on this so you know like um being hypnotized for example yeah you i’ve never been hypnotized yeah me neither so well but then again it looks real when something happens have you ever said volunteered to know okay me neither same thing so hypnotism from what i understand is you have to like be what do you call like suggestible open to it yeah open to it yeah so if you’re a um suggestible person that’s like you have a certain kind of mind and then on top of that even more consciously you have to volunteer to be hypnotized a guy i mean i’m sure there’s methods that you can sort of hypnotize someone without them knowing it or something but usually i shouldn’t even say i’m sure but oh yeah that’s right so i would be surprised if you can hypnotize someone and they don’t know it nonetheless usually the hypnotic sequence goes through hey you volunteer like consciously yeah sure i’ll be hypnotized and you sit there and you’re sure come to tan and you’re closing your eyes and breathing anyway so you consciously volunteer to be hypnotized so you’re open to being hypnotized and then blah blah so psychological warfare is like hey you recognize okay i have this weakness i’m about to skip this workout right now you’re basically saying hey i need a help i need you know i need a little spot volunteering for help volunteering yeah it’s not like i’m like sitting in my room it’s not completely against your will exactly right you’re not just busting in the door you know and saying hey don’t skip the workout meanwhile in your mind you already committed to skipping the way it’s different you’re like you’re not committed to skipping the workout you just like are running the risk of skipping the workout you know that weakness just creeps in and you’re like hey i see you weakness you’re creeping in right now i’m gonna get i’m basically i’m gonna tell jaco that you’re in here and he’s gonna you know make you leave and you play the track or whatever you have it on your phone right because you had you have all your playlists on your phone anyway you just play the psychological warfare one and you won’t skip the workout see i’m saying because you don’t want to skip the workout no one wants to skip the workout no one’s thinking tomorrow i can’t wait to skip this workout like it’s not like that you know so it’s you come in and you just give that little nudge that’s why it works so good it’s true it’s absolutely true i like it nonetheless psychological warfare it’s very effective 100 also while you’re working out and if you’re bored with your squats on the bench get some kettlebells from on it in my opinion on it.com slash jaco good stuff on there jump rope battle ropes kettlebells clubs be careful with the clubs so i was watching a video of a guy doing this club routine i was like dang he did it it took a lot of coordination like i’m looking at it and he had like the 40 i think like a big one yeah i can’t even imagine trying to do anything coordinated yeah with the 40 yes because i only have the 20 yeah and yes and they come off real a lot more heavy than they look like when you grab them i mean at the end of the day if it’s 20 pounds it’s 20 pounds there’s no there’s no getting past that physically but when you pick it up it’s like it’s like you know when you pick up your friend yeah you know or your kid freaking and they weigh 70 pounds it’s like i pick up 70 pounds with one hand it’s no problem when it’s a dumbbell try pick up your kid when they’re 70 with one hand can’t do it it’s hard nonetheless that’s how these clubs are anyway so watch out for those anyway go to on it.com slash jockely can get some really cool stuff on there really cool awesome hey we got some books as well first off mikey and the dragons i know jordan and i talked about it a little bit today and it was actually sold out for a little bit it is now back in stock and have many many many thousands and thousands of copies that are inbound that are being printed so if you want mikey and the dragons go to amazon and order it there’s a little video on there if you want to know what it’s about that echo put together and it’s a it’s it’s a solid video from what i understand the like kids like to watch the video oh yeah like it’s like a little mini short it’s super fast yeah what a minute or something it’s two minutes even in even my kids so we’re on on i watched the video yeah it’s kind of fun you first send it to me i watched it like 14 times yeah because there’s a lot of elements in it yeah a lot of things going on yeah to my son it’s like a micro cartoon kind of no it’s like a micro movie yeah like i don’t know why well it’s a cartoon because there’s illustrations yeah but yeah it’s fun we put on the tv when i was in hawaii you know you have the smart tv in there you can put youtube on there you put on there i put on the tv and my kids are all jumping up and down mikey and the dragon you know it’s two minutes long yeah no i you know jordan and i were talking about it and you know obviously it’s about facing your dragons and there’s obviously a metaphor there and it’s a there’s real true pragmatic simple to understand lessons of how to stand up and confront the world and confront your fears that little kids will clearly and easily understand and it’ll leave an impact on anybody that reads it so mikey and the dragons you can get that book on top of that if you got uh kids you can also get them though the way of the warrior kid which is another book about a young kid who’s going through the problems that normal kids have and luckily his uncle jake who was a seal in the seal teams shows up for the summer and helps him overcome those problems and then that series carries on in another book called mark’s mission you can pick those two books up and give them to whatever kids you those those books when you read those books you’ll wish you had that book when you were a kid i know i absolutely wish i had that book when when i was a kid and i wish i had that book when my kids were kids yeah because it teaches them what it is they need to know period that’s it uh the discipline equals freedom field manual that book that’s how you that’s how you it’s just a field manual of how to be on the path of discipline that’s what it is look the path of discipline is not easy and there’s no field manual for it oh wait there is now but there didn’t used to be there didn’t used to be look i know discipline will help me how do i get discipline where does discipline come from this none of that information was assembled anywhere i made a field manual for it it’s called the discipline equals freedom field manual it’s not it’s it’s not like any other book you’ve ever seen or read period it’s not but it’s very popular it’s great if you want there’s another thing christmas is coming this is a christmas scenario right this is a christmas scenario give this book to somebody that needs help or needs to stay on the path or get on the path this book will be extremely beneficial to them or people that are on the path getting after it this will keep them there so that’s the field manual if you want the audio version of that it is not on audible it’s on itunes and amazon music and google play as an mp3 also the first book i wrote with my brother laif babin it’s called extreme ownership that is a book taking the leadership lessons that we learned on the battlefield and translating them to your business and to your life and then the follow-up to that book is the dichotomy of leadership which takes those lessons that we learned in combat and goes granular in teaching you how to balance the various dichotomies that you experience as a leader so both and all those books are available on amazon and wherever else you might buy books also we got ashland front which is uh my leadership consultancy we solve problems through leadership that’s what we do and we work with companies all over the country and internationally if you want us to come and align the leadership at your company for victory then go to ashlandfront.com the we are do we have a leadership conference called the muster and we’ve done six musters we are doing three in 2019 we’re doing one in chicago in the spring we’re doing one in denver in the fall and we’re doing sydney australia in december so if you want to come to one of those events all the events that we’ve done have sold out all of them these are all absolutely going to sell sell out so if you want to come go to extreme ownership.com and register and as quick as you can and then lastly we have ef overwatch we are connecting special operations veterans and combat aviation veterans that are looking for work that are proven leaders that are experienced leaders and we’re connecting them with companies out there in the civilian sector that need leaders so if you want to come at that from either side whether you’re a vet or whether you’re a company go to ef overwatch.com to get in the game and if you have any more questions for us or answers for us we are available on the interwebs on twitter and on instagram and on the face bookie echo is at echo charles and i am at jacob willink and i started out this podcast today pretty heavy pretty rough and i think it’s important to remember something that i always refer back to and that is that evil does exist in the world it’s out there and with that i’d like to thank all the military personnel throughout the globe that stand up to evil in the world and thanks to police and law enforcement and firefighters and paramedics and emts and correctional officers and border patrol and all the first responders that stand up and face evil here at home and to everyone else out there if things are tough and i know they get tough life is hard but there’s still reason to be thankful be thankful you’re not in a gulag be thankful that you’re not being tortured be thankful that you have food to eat be thankful you have a bed to sleep on and then do your best to watch out for those little seeds of evil that are planted around you and planted in you and keep those seeds of evil in check by going out into the world and doing good and until next time this is echo and jaco out