This is Jocko podcast number 155 with me Jocko Willington
On the island
The dead were piling up
In the mission report the head of the convoy wrote
At 2 pm. On May 20th. I went to the island of Nazino with commander Tsepkov
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 21st 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 the 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 21st, 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 Costilla
Viniq off 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 caught off her breasts her muscles everything they could eat
They were hungry
They had to eat when costia 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
And that right there is from a book called cannibal Island by Nicolas Werth
Who's written books about communism I think his most famous is the black book of communism and
cannibal Island specifically breaks down
one of the small
individual nightmares of the Soviet gulags
But the nightmare
Was not small
And it certainly was not specific. It was a 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 two books about the gulags. Some of them were fictionalized
Like a day in the life of Ivan Denisovich
and
for the for the good of the cause, but most comprehensively in his three-volume tome The Gulag Archipelago and
This series is 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 foreword by a man that I think
Repopulated a 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 does it rough beginning chuckle Jesus
Yeah, I
Remember when I started listening to you?
You would say something along the lines of that
you know, 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 that's that's hell. Yeah, and
Close enough
Yeah, and it's it's it's created by us. It's created by us, which I think is
Obviously horrific and the Gulag Archipelago
You know you talked about that book a lot and and one of the things that on that book hits you hard, obviously
For me, there's a book called about face by by colonel. David hackworth. I'm from a different
World, I guess that you in many ways
The book that hit me hardest in my life was was that book?
about face and it's it's one of those things that
when I read it, I started putting it together as 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. And at what point did you start to say?
Okay, 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 ley de Dave day in the life of Ivan Denisovich 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 Victor Frankel's met man's search for meaning and
Solzhenitsyn's book is in some ways like an elaborated extension of Frankle, Frankle
Of course described what happened to him in the Nazi concentration camps and it's a relatively short book and it's a great book
but Solzhenitsyn's book is it's it's much broader and and I would say deeper and
the thing that affected me
Most particularly was the psychological take on the on the totalitarian states, you know
I had been studying political science up to that point and
The political science 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, you know, it's 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
It's 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 Frankel 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
Frankel'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 the prisoners
So it is it is a surreal sort of hell where?
You imprison yourself and Solzhenitsyn's fundamental claim and this was true for Frankel 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
you know, 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 complicitous with regards to all the absolute atrocities that were occurring in both the Nazi state in the 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 - 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 how cuz 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 said I was saying wow
How did 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 the peep. I don't know we 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 for up for a half a paragraph or for two sentences and
They 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 you're not gonna 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 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 and I think that
Key thing of of reading it and going man every single person like when you read about these girl
You're talking about millions of people that were tortured died murdered
Every one of those people key word is people every one of those people is a person
and
to your point
every single one of those
executioner's every single one of those murderers is
Also a person, you know, there's a great book called
Ordinary men. Oh, yeah. We we 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 of on the atrocity end
because
the author does such a lovely job of while 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. They weren't like Hitler Youth types
Mm-hmm. 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 a 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
then 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
My key in 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 in debts actually at the individual level and we kind of know that
Like we we know that in the West I think that's part of the core ethos of well
Certainly the of the English common law system certainly 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 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
Echo's 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 that's something you also get out of Victor. Frankel's book man's search for meaning you know on it
and so
The the Gulag Archipelago is a story about horror in some sense, but it's more a story of the triumph
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 seventeen hundred page scream of outrage
Did he 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 the young leader
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 as 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 a platoon is forty guys? Oh, yeah
Yeah
and he's got someone in there like that 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 wasn't one out of every thousand you have to act as a leader as if in your platoon
You've got one of those guys. That's the way you need to well you look and there's another book
Mmm called The Rape of Nanking 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
1% isn't unreasonable. It could be higher than that. I mean it there's gradations. Right? Right. Yeah, there's probably a group of 40 people
there's gonna be one guy in there whose
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 know, you've already gotten you've already got a group. That's ok 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 Nanking 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 Emil I massacre and and that was so when I was talking 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. Mmm
Who knows about the meal I mascar and and you know
All of a sudden it got quiet because if you know anything about the meal I'm asked her
It was a normal group of guys. It was a normal
Group of guys there's a normal company of American soldiers and you know what? They've been through some stress. Mmm
They've been through you know, they'd had their friends killed and it was in Vietnam
there was no one really to react against or to
Take your aggression out on because the enemy you couldn't see him. 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 Calley who was the platoon leader who?
I'd love for you to do a psychological profile. Maybe you he's one of these guys. It was kind of like
It was it totally insecure about everything right? And so he got those shoulder boards on which is the way the way sultanate
Yeah, right, right his his experience beautiful tune leader
Yeah
And what it did to him and he goes through that this boy
Fantastic to hear when he talks about what he did. He know he was looking back saying
Oh, I did this and I didn't listen to this little rampage of things that he how he acted as a commander
Yeah
I ate the food the good food right in front of my guys when they weren't good in for I was getting the good food
And he took advantage of all the little all the little comforts that you got being in 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 vol ii which 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 right income
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 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 seemed 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 we're 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
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 in the 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 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 joy, it seems like a bad movie
You couldn't move with just the way the way that
Stalin would do something and in the way that that order were coming out 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 completely insane
You know at one point he's talking about the there was a new penalty for when they call it clipping corn or or yeah
They're basically a twelve-year-old kid would be starving and go into a field. Yeah and clip a cure of a corn an ear of corn
Yeah that happened in the Ukraine during the decolonization, 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 tenner which is there a little word for ten 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 ten years. Yeah, you can't comprehend
That that is very hard to machine that yeah work. Yeah, and they were
They you know, he'd in the earlier parts of the book when he start going through the trials that they were doing on people. Yeah
it's
Completely crazy I can grind Kalka. 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 I
Mean we're messing with things that that we shouldn't be messing with and yeah the whole that I mean there are there are accounts
I believe it's in the gulag of
Applause after ass tell in a 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 know
He absolutely outlines it. So that's 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 him because they're afraid they're gonna get ratted out
you know, I there but by everyone else, yeah, well been manned by the people who are in fact watching and I mean
you know what by the end 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 and it's a very weak word to use in this situation
But okay when I was at New York University talking to Jonathan hight 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 where 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 that 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 while
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 centre Assent the center point 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 let not be too worried about it. Like hey, come on. Yeah, what's really good?
Yeah
right
And that's yeah that's actually part of my personality and 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 over there
That's that's not gonna be that's not gonna fact 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 and you just mentioned the the kulak that sorry still lacks. Yeah. Yeah
They were the Ukrainian. They were the Ukrainian farmers who were good at farming when I
Read this part it got me worried about my own personal laksa days ago attitude
Towards things that I think all 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
We're dead. Yeah, that's good. So here we go
In Russian a Kulak is a miserly
dishonest rural trader who grows rich not by his own labour, but through someone else's
In
Every locality even before the Revolution such cruel acts 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 owned Eve, 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 cuckoo lock
proceeded relentlessly and by 1930 all
strong peasants in general who were being so-called all peasants
strong and 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 ain't 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 kulaks, Nick 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 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 uh, 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 bourgeois z and proletariat. It's just in its new guys
I mean and that new guys 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 and while your mail your mail of a certain age your mail of a certain age and economic class
Your 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 socio-economic 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 and there's templeman
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 your dispossessed and victimized
Okay
And we're gonna 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 may be your your your
oppression is the product 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 add
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
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 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 gonna play that game you're gonna 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? Mmm-hmm. What was your what was your
Hypothetical percentage. Well, well, let's say well
let's say it's 20% or let's even say it's 50% 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 and the resentment that
Solzhenitsyn describes and they were the ones who were after those to be persecuted
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 willing to step up and smash someone. Yes, most of 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 Lots us in the foreword
Who who wrote 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 burrs huazi
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 Stellan as somebody wrote to me
after I wrote the foreword 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 it to a tremendous degree. Yeah, there's one part going back to the the ever-expanding
people that need to be destroyed
There's a point in the book where he starts he's saying. Hey, look there's insects Stalin's just described or maybe was Lenin was describing these
Certain people as insects. You don't 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 it's got priests and then it's got engineers
Oh, yeah and physicians and physicians everyone in wreckers. Yeah records
That's that's the word that they use there that he uses in the book for first basically saboteurs
Yeah, and that expands beyond comprehension
Yeah, because at every scene problem that there is is the fault of some person out there that sabotage
Yeah, 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 Russian that the Soviets used was
Organizers of the famine huh meaning like oh, yeah, you're starving and these people over here
They're the reason you're these are the people that organized the famine
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 worldview and
that worldview
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 worldview
which is of course what Solzhenitsyn does in the Gulag Archipelago in a very deep ways reorganize his entire worldview 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 there 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 there 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
Wall of the perpetrator and it seems to me that that that's right. That's that's unrepentant. Sin. Let's say and it isn't until you
What what would you say until you take responsibility for your own complicit?
'no sin, you're in your unfair interrogation that you get to join the ranks of of
Valuable and suffering humanity again, and so
Yeah, it's that the the extension of the persecution is really something that's horrifying to see
how
Who constituted the victimizer the ranks of who constituted victimizer just grew and grew and grew or one of the most shocking groups of?
People that ended up in the gulags were the damned
Soviet soldiers then it just got back. Oh, yeah
That's the thing you can't make up you can't make that up a giving Solzhenitsyn 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 and prison. Yeah
Well, the stellen stellen decided that yeah, this is something that you 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 auswitch that said work will set you free, you know, and that's a joke, right?
it's a whole 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 castellan
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 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 now and Stellan 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 is shake your head for me
Well, it's such a shock to read the Gulag Archipelago it 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
Yeah, and I guess your 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 way you'd think you know when you take a comedy
well
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 in 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 the 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 that movie was the death of Stalin. Did you I did not
Oh, yeah
but 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 that 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 nineteenth 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?
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 is a certain relationship between being productive as a farmer and developing some wealth
They'll maybe you had a house and maybe you could hire a person or two, you know
And which you think would be actually be a good thing, especially if you were also growing food
Okay
So you imagine you you get a village and now there's a bit of a socio-economic?
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
Though people who like the genuine cool acts. Let's say that that small percentage of psychopathic types. Who were 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 strata 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 are 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're where they froze to death because there were
No or died of dysentery 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 an engineering like you could 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 pub's 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 us as
absolute revenge for all that bitter resentment all fueled by the fact that you know,
you'd sat there for the last twenty 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 was just unbelievable. Yeah, and I think
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 them that that's the right thing you 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 on 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 you're gonna be on I'm a psychopath if you if you're not on my side, I'm gonna kill you next
Yeah, so you go, huh? No, I'm on your side - yeah, and that's well. It doesn't tailor kits 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 cultures 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 yeah, 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 then 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 is the same thing as the DES story the new scribe
I forget the guys name, but this guy was like the premier
prosecuting lawyer
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 that ended up on the on the defensive and yeah being executed
Yeah, like yeah, I see style they built they built
a place of butchery and then threw themselves into it, you know, that's and now 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'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 gonna 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 henchman for henchman 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 plot to destroy the entire world 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
What semi?
The corrupted
compadres that he had he'd arranged around himself he went too far even for them and
thank God for that, you know, but yeah, it's it's it's
Absolutely. 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 young at the same time
But but it was certainly the GU like in in large part that did it I would say that in some sense it scared me
Straight I thought oh, 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
Then 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 Anna 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 I 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 as it sits it's sort of the ultimate in horrifying conclusions that that everybody who
Participated in this system was at fault for all of it in and Dostoevsky made the same sorts of claims in 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 inner soul. Also all this is a whole
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
Started learning about tactics when I was a young kid because I was in the military 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 jujitsu
And 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 jujitsu
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 started off by saying in the beginning I'd say that'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 when I was in waltz
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 of just kind of where you ended up with 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's 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
She also killed you if you said yes
Yeah, the UH I'll talk to military for sure but also any business leader 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 fought especially for a military guy
they think they're
Nothing would make my job easier
Then if I bark an order at you Jordan you work from you're a private and nama captain and I bark an order
You know, you just shut up and go do it and 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 men 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 subordinates cuz I talked to subordinates - yeah
And I say listen, would you say something to your boss? You don't say why the hell are we doing that because
You actually have to be very tacky. Yes. Yes exactly. Hey. 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, you know, and that's a key thing. So so these ideas of
You know psychology I guess now is I
Hate to use that word, but because I was just calling a 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 and so here's what I'm getting from a leader. Hmm
They'll say well whether it's a business leader or or it's 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?
Mm-hm because my machine gunner shot in the wrong - I'm not I'm not holding his weight and I'm not pulling his truck
How can that possibly be my fault? That's not my fault
wrong
Who's in charge of that machine gun who's in charge of making sure he what is fields of fire?
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 it
another interesting example of the weather
The weather is bad. We couldn't execute our mission. That's why we failed because we couldn't launch our helicopter. 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 gonna use these helicopters and here's our contingency
Yeah, right if there's bad weather, you know
If you don't take that ownership of what's going on, if you don't take responsibility for it, you're not gonna change it
you're not gonna fix it and
That means you're never getting any better. You're not gonna win, right but the minute us end this and obviously
This applies to you know people to purple in you and you know, you tell people to take responsibility
I've you know, tell them take ownership, but what's going on in your world?
it's this it's the same thing, but at the end well
It's also it 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 gonna sacrifice something
is it going to be someone else or is it going to be you 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, 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
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 there's an element of that that's that's not productive. 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 fallible and you're fallible 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. It's gonna 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 it just suffer the consequences of the situation as opposed to okay, here's what's going on
I'm gonna take responsibility and ownership for it. I'm gonna change it you 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 mouths shut. Let's do what we're told to do and we'll get, you know, we'll get out and coming and
you know Solzhenitsyn says
He's an 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? Mmm-hmm. 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
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 than you, 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 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 you okay. You got a bye 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. It 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 up to do something else. Now these things aren't
Massive Qatar's catastrophes. It's like he's telling me to do something. Maybe there's a better way to do it
You don't know how to do it that way. Mmm-hmm
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 no 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, Jacque would you know you've been through these kind of things before play the game? You're gonna play the game
Which is horrifying
Mm-hmm, because part of playing that game to the fullest extent here or in a Nazi prison camp would become in a capital. Yeah
Oh, you're playing the game. Yeah. Yeah, you're playing the game
Yeah, so and that's really the outlying that 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 gonna do that
No, that's the that's the line which you know, which you reach that line in the sand with Bill c16
But which is hey, I'm not going to do this
but the idea that
sometimes
You got to play the game and yeah, well, that's even from you when you just said to me 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 well, it 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 them and tell them 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 as shallow and the impulsive
analysis of this 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 to 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 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 that's not a viable solution you go out of the frying pan into the fire or
You know, you suck 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. Ok. 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 then it shows where I'm
Lackadaisical and where I'm not prepared it's like ok. How many things are there like that?
Well, there's a bunch of things and they're all associated with how I procrastinated in the past. It's like ok
What are we going to do to rectify that so I'll say to people why don't you update your CV?
That's what we'll do first. Because if you're going to look for a different job, I'm not saying you're gonna look for a different job
But if you're going to look for a different job
You're not going to unless your CV s updated one is not going to unless you can get a good recommendation from this boss
That's a Terran and so that's right. There's you gotta play. There's Tanis strategic
actions that you're gonna 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 them everything you think about them
the truth is
trying to figure out the very very
Difficult process of how you put yourself in a better position and that out 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 there and I often talk to people about
Consulting their resentment
Resentments are 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
And but in that 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 that 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 and it there's actually an adventure in this tool
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 terrorized 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 gonna make three times as much money in in five years
That's the plan but like that's not gonna 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
You 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
massively substantive improvement in
socio-economic 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's like look it's gonna be hard to update your CV because you're embarrassed
About it, and you should be. Alright. 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 there's holes in your story
And and your 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 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 percent. It's like the rejection rate for everything is this gonna 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 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
Play the game. You gotta 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 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 yeah, you know what? Well you
Don't really need that that person didn't learn anything and 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 your what your situation is
It's gonna 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 gonna be problematic as well
Which is something here, which is something that's easier
So the playing the game thing. So are you thinking about that as a consequence of necessary discipline?
you know like because they're weak 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
What would you say that are a necessary part of the operation of the machinery?
I guess that would be particularly true in military situation. Yes and let me give you well, just a broad example, right?
you know my personality and
my reputation is
That you know when I was in the military, it's like oh, it's Jocko
hey, he's not gonna you know, he's if someone tells him to do something 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 nut butt
And that was kind of the impression people would get from me if they didn't know me from the outside
They think oh this guy's a knuckle dragger. He's gonna go forward
He's gonna make things happen and he's not gonna listen anyone else. That was the impression from the outside
The reality is a you you can't do that and and be the reality is
What my actions right I'd have, you know a young lieutenant would come to me and say hey, you know
My bosses do tell me to do this this and this and what they think I was gonna say is like, bro
You don't do that right end up
You tell him screw you that doesn't make any sense and maybe they get this look in their eyes of surprise
Yeah when I'd say, oh your boss wants you to do that do it do it. Well play the game
That's what I'm telling to do is play the game because these things are meaningless
It's something you know is something is patheticness like oh you got to fill out a form a certain way
It's like hey, shut up and play the game. Look even Maya
So is that a Madol matter of picking your battles?
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 a
exactly and
It's exactly what it is, but you know a good example and we wrote about it in in
Dichotomy leadership, which is, you know, my friend my guy that worked for me Lafe babban. We were getting told to do all this paperwork
You gotta you gotta fill out these forms. You've gotta you gotta have a serialized inventory of everything
It's gotta 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 Lafe came to me
And with with the other platoon commander guy named Seth that came to me and said ah 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 life will tell you his and
Expectation was that I was gonna be like you're right
I'm gonna 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 of this paperwork and not only were you gonna do this paperwork?
we're gonna do it better than anyone else and we're gonna turn it in before it's even do
You know, we both him and Seth were kind of taken aback
then the fact that I wasn't standing up and saying we're not doing this crap and
Then I explained him. Here's what we're doing. We're building a relationship with my commanding officer with our commanding officer
We're gonna do these little things for him
We're gonna play the game because at some point two things are gonna 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 to fill out paperwork
He knows gonna be filled out if he wants me to take down a building
He knows it's gonna get taken out if he wants me to execute up a larger mission. I'll go and get it done
We're built if I can't fill out paperwork correctly
How can you trust me to go on and 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 Jaco wouldn't put up with them 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 on
Whether it's a boss, whether it's a military, it's any of them whether it's their wife like like my wife
It's me not to change it to 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 won't she well, what's the problem? Hey, have you taken her out for dinner?
You 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 were 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 that everyone it's gonna be like that Jim Carrey movie where he can't say anything that's not 100% true and
You know Gert woman says good morning, and he says you look fat, you know, it's like one of those like very 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 ethical line that you could cross at some point if I become a capo
Hey, hmm, you just you played the game and you went too far with it and just like in a leadership situation
If Ike if you're my boss, and I'm just kissing your ass and do wonder every to 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?
You're Pete 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 DEATH achill situation
Like if my mom 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 get some all killed
He didn't mitigate the risk properly it 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. Oh, I got it
an 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 too rebel without a cause right and 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
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 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 it's a perfect example of that a 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 things degenerate and
I understand 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 this slight way and get this poor sheep out of this hole then
While 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'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 campaig treats 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 rebellious nut. It's got to be a flavoring and not the whole diet. Absolutely. I've actually talked about that on this podcast before
the there's people in the military that they are like
Meta rule-followers. These are people that have been following rules or whole lives. Yeah, they've got
perfect grades and they were the team can do all these things and
They're gonna make really good solid leaders like they're gonna be great leaders
Yep, but then there's this like one group above them
Yeah 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 an important
Factor to have yeah, 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 gonna win this war
Mm-hmm, and they drove him out of the army. Mhm, but
That's that's the thing that because all along the way there was other times where he do that, you know
His guys weren't getting taken care of. He'd break a rule and bring him beer or he do, you know?
Yeah
He'd do that along the way not not
So far outside the bounds that it would jeopardize his career because if he would do that
Then you're not in charge of these guys anymore. Yeah now you're not gonna have any impact. Yeah, so let's not get fired
Right, right. Let's not get stupidly fired. Right? That's not an improvement
Exactly. Well, that's a
awesome
I guess we I know you got to go so I can't think that we could get to a better little crust of the
Little capstone of the conversation than right there
Thanks for coming on again. Hey, my pleasure, man. 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 a Ford yet from Europe. Yep
You can't buy it from Amazon here, you know yet from Amazon
So it'll be here when will it but I don't know
We're still negotiating the rights cuz the rights holders differ in North America
And so that's the issue at the moment sofa
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 is not that's not the British one. Oh, that's no that's not the
British one hasn't gotten to my house. Yeah. I'm so shit. Yeah, it has to be ordered
It has to be ordered through Amazon UK and we're working on a couple of things maybe two 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 I like because it's written very conversation
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 and demanding and and draining to read but it's it's brilliantly written
It's an unbelievably
Engrossing read and in the most horrible possible way but and and it is the case
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 four four ball
Four four four 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 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, Lenin being the great leader and then Stellan being the monster because Lenin was plenty monster himself
And Stalin was the logical conclusion to Lenin 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 it's unbearable as far as I'm concerned, so
Hopefully people read in this book and the the re-release of this book with your ford will prevent that from happening
In the
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 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
Read the book thanks for coming good. Really. Good. See again, man. Absolutely. Yeah be better appreciate it
and with that
Jordan Pederson 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 Neil portion of this podcast
So good evening echo. Good evening
alright, 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 it sure
So first way is when you're doing jiu-jitsu because we're all doing jiu-jitsu. Yes, it might sound a little bit repetitive. But to me
When you do just gonna be doing it every single day
Every single week at least even if you're doing the two times a week treat I get it either way
You're gonna need a key and a rash guard. So
There is no question. Which kind of gear you get you get an orange in game straight up made in America. I
Watched one of their videos
yesterday
And it's kind of a older one too, but it made me like love origins 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 as I
Called man that's kind of one of the beginnings of origin, you know. Anyway, I thought it was good. Unless again made in America
quality stuff for jiu-jitsu
It's not like a blankie they get from over wherever
some other place and then slap a
Embroidered patch on it. No say that. No, this is made for jiu-jitsu in America
Yeah
Everything made in America from where where we grow the materialist grown in America woven in America
Woven in Maine as a matter of fact custom woven by origin
We weave it up there and make the best keys 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
Denim origin denim. Yeah, I just call them jeans though. Yeah
Yeah, I dig yet that starts to like I don't know move towards a fashion thing. What if you see dent in denim?
well, I feel oh, yeah, I
Guess I'll just steal 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, I'd be true, but it'll be a jean jacket. That's true. Yeah, I dig it cool either way
Yeah, that's - and I don't get excited for jeans in general in life. Oh, no
Yeah, like you know, you see it on TV. I don't know
JCPenney has a sale, you know black fryer whatever and you know, some jeans I don't get excited
do you prime assuming you don't either maybe do I don't know but when people's little like
videos of the clothes, you know close-up of the buttons
The jeans come on grab that's that's kinda exciting. I'm just saying either way. Yeah, either way the
Also, we have supplements to affirmative origin labs, which is expanding. Yes Lee. Yeah. Yeah, we bought another building up there
But yes, so they're making we are making supplements joint warfare. Krill oil super krill oil, by the way
Discipline. Mmm the try
Effect. Oh, yeah. Yeah the my wife
Went on the trip
Didn't take join warfare with her. Yeah
She's there for 3-4 days her knee starts bothering her it bothers her the rest of the trip. She comes home
She goes back on joint warfare for 3-4 days. Nice fight again. Yeah. See let me that's just that's a scream
Yeah, that's just a reality of it. So join 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
three
Cognitive
enhancement
Tool go to go to here. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, the it's funny the krill
I had the same situation too by the way oil and joint Warford didn't bring it
yeah, by the way in Hawaii, which is the reason why I didn't
appear on this episode of the podcast, you know why 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 cuz you know
He's more of like little health, dude
And then when you started talking about it, like literally the day you start talking I start taking it
And he was like he didn't care. It kind of went right over his head and I was like, oh
So did you feel the difference?
You know, like that's what he was concerned about
Also on top of that you got Moke
which is
Which is mulk basically that's what it is. It's a it has protein in it. You mix it with milk
I got a man I to make that statement if you mix it with well
You can mix it with almond milk. You can mix it with coconut milk. You can mix it with regular cow milk
If you mix it with water
it's not I'm
not jumping up and down about it and telling you it's the most delicious thing in the world if you mix it with milk whole
Milk, especially I will tell you it's 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. Oh, yeah. Okay, so I'm a fan that you can put in water
Right. What do you put in water in milk? Mmm. That is not hot cocoa to me. Okay
I know what you're talking about. You eat 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 this a non-starter for me. Yeah, so that's kind of the point there
Yeah, it's sorta that you know along the same lines where it said cool do it and it's okay you can do it
Yep, and in there's probably many many many people who do that and I'm not mad at them
But you put the milk that stuff
Is my thing and by the way, you can't have you can't have hot chocolate milk? Yeah
It's er, it's right up there special work Edelen. Yeah, the sir got mint chocolate peanut butter chocolate vanilla, gorilla and the darkness and
Then there's the the warrior kid milk, 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 calm and that's
That's the state of Maine. Yeah
Yeah, not just Maine like the main spot even though it is the main spot check cool
So, yeah, also if you want to represent, you know get a discipline equals freedom shirt or a rash guard
You know get after it any way you want to represent the path
Go to Jacko's store.com
That's where you can get all this stuff 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're gonna represent while on the path jaw closed or calm good stuff. Also, Chaka white tea
so these claims of
Deadlifting 8,000 pounds. I haven't dead lifted in a while
so I was like
You know what?
I'm gonna dump in a test it
Cans right and he drink it straight up deadly deadlift at 8,000 pounds just like that just like that
No warmup even know you don't need it. You know, it's really the warm-up is drinking some chocolate. Yeah
When you're warmed up and you're good 8000 pound deadlift
Yeah, that's you know, this is the only product in the world in any capacity that guarantees 100%
8000 pound deadlift minimum. Yeah
But yeah, so yeah you get them one in the dry eBags if that's your thing when you see Paul C, that's the word
Yeah, yeah, he's deep Steve. Okay, boom if you like that gig, huh?
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 I like them both. Yeah, depending on the scenario Emira. Boom. There you go
Also subscribe to the podcast on iTunes and stitcher and Google Play wherever you listen to podcast
There's a lot of new ones out there. There's no apps. Yeah
And there's a lot of podcasts out there. Yeah and listen to a bunch of them. Yeah
Yeah, and one of them 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 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 Eko Charles look like or if you don't know what
I look like you can watch 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
And I don't know if that's good or bad enough. That's a backhanded compliment or a backhanded like derogatory statement about you. Yeah your voice
Yeah, a little bit of both
yeah, but but will will 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
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
Should you go to the gym? Yes, you should and if you listen to the track, you will go to the gym
Yes, 100% effective. And actually, I mean a lot of claims being made about effectiveness on this. Yes an Arial right now
Hey, it's if it's real it's real, you know this mmm double-blind
Placebo tested. Yeah, well, you know single-blind maybe okay. No that means but
And it is official
When okay, and I kind of tried to psychologically and I'll 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
Yes, and you'd agree with this I think okay. I think that
goes bro fear
So, you know like being hypnotized for example, yeah you I've never been hypnotized. Yeah me neither
So what but then again, it's real what happens - so have you ever said a volunteer did not get that?
Okay me neither same thing. So hypnotism from what I understand is you have to like be what he call like successful
Open to it. Yeah open to it. Yeah, so if you're a
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
Even say I'm sure but oh, yeah, that's
Right, you can even there's Owen and then or not nonetheless
usually the hypnotic
Sequence goes through. Hey you volunteer like consciously. Yeah. Sure
I'll be hypnotizing you sit there and you're up to ten and you're closing your eyes and
Breathing anyway, so you consciously volunteered to be hypnotized
So you're open to being hypnotized and then blah blah blah. So psychological warfare. It's 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 nothing
You know, I need a little spark volunteering for help
Well in Tyrian, yeah, it's not like I'm like sitting in my rooms not completely against your will
Exactly, right you're not just busting in the door
You know insane. Hey don't skip the workout meanwhile in your mind. You already committed to keeping the way it's different
So you're like you're not committed to keeping the work out. You just like are running the risk of
Skipping the work, 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 Jocko that you're in here and
He's gonna you know make you leave and you play the track 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 but you won't skip to work out soon saying because you don't want to skip the
Workout in there. No one wants to skip the work on no one's thinking
Tomorrow I can't wait to skip this workout
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. Absolutely true. I like it
Psychological it's very effective hundred-percent. Also while you're working out and if you're bored with your
squats
bench
Get some kettlebells from on it in my opinion on it calm. /jo good stuff on there jump rope battle ropes
Kettlebells clubs may be careful with the clubs. Mmm
Kasia I was watching a video of a guy doing this Club routine
I was like dang heat it took a lot of coordination
Like I'm looking at it and I was like 40, I think like a big one
Yeah, I can't even imagine trying to do anything coordinated. Yeah with the 40. Yes, cuz I only have 220. Yeah, and
Yes, and they come off real a lot more heavy than they look
Oh, yeah, like when you grab them at the end of the day if it's 20 pounds 20 pounds
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 weight 70 pounds
It's like Shh, I pick up 70 pounds with one hand. It's no problem when it's a dumbbell
Try pick up your kid when there's 70 bucks with one hand can't do it. It's hard
Unless that's all these clubs are anyway, so watch out for those anyway
Go to on it, calm flash drop they can get some really cool stuff on there. Really cool
Awesome a we got some books as well first off miking 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 go put together and it's a it's a
Solid video from what? I understand the like kids like to watch the video. Oh you like it's like a little mini short
It's super fast
Is two minutes even in even my kids, so we're in I watched the video
if you are send it to me, I watched it like
14 times
Elements in it a lot of things going on. Yeah to my son
It's like a micro cartoon kinda. No, it's like a micro movie
Yeah, I don't know why. Well, it's a cartoon because there's the illustration illustration. Yeah, but yeah, it's fun
We put on the TV when I was in Hawaii, you know
You have a smart TV and there you can put YouTube on there
Oh you thought I put on the TV and my kids are all jumping over them like in this, 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 miking the dragons you can get that book on top of that if you got
Kids, you can also get them 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 and the SEAL Teams shows up for the summer and helps him overcome those problems
And then that series carries on another book called Mark's mission. You can pick those two books up and give me day
Whatever kids you those look those books when you read those books
You'll wish you had that book when you were kid
I know I
Absolutely. Wish I had that book 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
the discipline equals freedom Field Manual that book
That's how you do. That's how you is. 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 you speak look, I know someone will help me. How do I get discipline?
Where does discipline come from this none of that information was assembled anywhere? Hmm 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 Creek 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 that it is not inaudible
It's on iTunes and Amazon music and Google Play as an mp3
Also the first book I wrote with my brother Leif babban. It's called extreme ownership
But 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 or wherever else you might to buy books. Also. We got a salon 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 a salon front calm
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 so sell out
so if you want to come go to extreme ownership calm 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 comm 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
book e
echo is adequate Charles and I am at Jocko willing 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 plant it 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 Jocko