Jocko Podcast - 155: Jordan Peterson and Jocko VS Evil. Cannibal Island. The Gulag.

Episode Date: December 12, 2018

0:00:00 - Opening: Cannibal Island, by Nicolas Werth 0:07:32 - Dr. Jordan B. Peterson and Jocko VS. Evil 1:36:35 - Support: How to Stay on the Path 1:57:09 - Closing Gratitude.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

This is Jocko podcast number 155. With me, Jocco Willink. On the island, the dead were piling up. In the mission report, the head of the convoy wrote, At 2 p.m., on May 20th, I went to the island of Nazino with Commander Tepskoff. There was a terrible scramble. People crowding and fighting around the bag. 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 a hauling. 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 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 name costia vanikov 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. Right there is from a book called Cannibal Island by Nicholas Worth, who's written books about communism, I think, is most famous as the 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 widespread and it was broad and it was almost incomprehensible and very little about it would be known or not for one man Alexander Soltchenitsyn who not only survived the gulags but lived on to write

incredibly detailed and very well researched books about the gulags some of them were fictionalized like a day in the life of Ivan Denisovich and for the good of the cause but most

comprehensively in his three-volume, the Gulag Archipelago. And this series is a massive series, and it's been cut down to an abridged version that was actually approved by the author himself. And the abridged version has just been re-released in Europe with a forward by a man that I think re-popularized that book, a man that is here today to discuss that book. among other things, I'm sure a man that I needed to give an introduction to the first time he was on this podcast, but now who needs no introduction whatsoever? A man by the name of Dr. Jordan B. Peterson.

Jordan, thank you for coming back on. How's a rough beginning, Jockel? 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 hell. Yeah. And close enough.

Yeah. And 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 one of the things that, and that book hits you hard, obviously. For me, there's a book called About Face by Colonel David Hackworth. I'm from a different world, I guess, than you in many ways.

The book that hit me hardest in my life was that book about Face. And it's one of those things that when I read it, I started putting it together. It was 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 Day in the Life of Ivan Dinovich 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 Frankl's man's search for meaning and Solzhenzen's book is in some ways like an elaborated extension of Frankl. Frankl, of course, described what happened to him in the Nazi concentration camps and it's a relatively short book and it's a great book. But Solzhenitsen's book is it's much broader and I would say deeper.

and the thing that affected me most particularly was the psychological take on the totalitarian states. You know, I had been studying political science up to that point, and the political scientists and the economists who I would say were under the sway of Marxist thinking, although not nearly to the degree that they are now, were convinced that the reason that people engaged in conflict was basically a consequence of argumentation over resources. It was basically an economic argument. And I never bought that.

It never made sense to me. I mean, obviously, there are circumstances where that's true, but it didn't seem to be fundamentally the case. Like tribal warfare isn't precisely about resources. Maybe it's about territory or maybe it's about identity, but it never seemed to me to be simply about resources. Partly because, well, a resource is something that people value, but it isn't obvious why people value what they value. And so it doesn't solve the fundamental problem.

Anyways, when I was reading 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 Frankl's claim and Solzhenitsyn's claim as well, that it was the moral, corruption of the citizenry that allowed the totalitarian catastrophes to occur and that that in some sense was the responsibility of every individual in the system who looked the other way or who participated actively. I mean, even in the Gulegg camps themselves, they were almost all run by the prisoners. There wasn't enough administrative manpower to run the prison system without the cooperation, so to speak, of the prisoners. So it is a surreal sort of hell where you imprison yourself. And so's Nitzin's fundamental claim. And this was true for Frankl as well, and also

for Vaclav, 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 complicitness with regards to all the absolute atrocities that were occurring in both the Nazi state and in the Soviet state and I think that's true when I read like I read Solzhenitsyn's books and a lot of the books I read about Nazi Germany too not as a victim and not as a hero but as a perpetrator, you know, which I think it's really important, it's something that's really important to do when you read history, is that it's easy to cast yourself as a victim. It's easy to cast yourself

as the person who would have been heroic in the circumstance, but it's also unbelievably useful to understand that there's a good chance had you been in those situations that you wouldn't have been on the side of the good guys, you know, and that's a terrible, it's really a terrible realization, but it's necessary realization. Again, just going back to this idea of what you get out of reading, because people ask me now because I read books all the time on my podcast, and what you just said, it struck me as something that's, people have told me, I read that book before,

but I didn't really get out of it what you got out of it. And when I heard you read it, I was saying, wow, how did I, 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 people, I don't always see myself as the person that goes and heroically storms the beaches and survives.

Every, you know, in a war book, there's these people that get mentioned for a, for, for, for half a paragraph or for two sentences. And sometimes they don't even have a name because you're the battalion commander, storming the beach at Normandy. You're not going to name every single person. But for some reason, and maybe it's just my experiences of being in combat,

when I read about that two sentences of that guy that gets shot, that gets killed, that gets blown up, I completely understand and relate to that person. Like I don't just see it as, me being the guy that is always winning and always doing okay and always surviving. I feel and relate to those guys that didn't. And part of that is just because of my friends that I lost in combat, like those guys, they're people.

And I think that key thing of reading it and going, man, every single person, like when you read about these, you're talking about millions of people that were tortured, died, murdered. Every one of those people, the keyword is people, every one of those people is a person. And to your point, every single one of those executioners, every single one of those murderers is also a person. You know, there's a great book called Ordinary Men. Oh, yeah, we reviewed that on this podcast. Right, right. And so, you know, 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 well it's a strange way of putting it in this context but you know it's about this police battalion that was moved into Poland after the germans went through and 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 um middle class guys most of whom had been educated and socialized before the Nazi. Propaganda machine really got rolling, so they weren't like Hitler youth types. They were ordinary men, and they were brought.

And they had a commander who had made an explicit case that if they weren't able to tolerate the conditions in Poland, that they could go home. So there was no top-down order that you had to do this or else. And then they were, you know, first of all, they started rounding up while mostly Jewish people, men between 18 and 65. And then, you know, they started to participate in the entire atrocious mess. And they were, they ended up, many of them taking naked, pregnant women out into fields and shooting them in the back of the head. And what the author does is outline how that happens to you, you know, one step at a time. And so it's a really horrifying book. And it's a brilliant book because there's no attempt.

to make the perpetrators like some creatures that aren't human, like just pure psychopaths. And of course, in a situation like Nazi Germany and in the horrors of the communist states, there was no shortage of places for psychopaths to prevail. But that's not really the issue. The issue is, well, how does an ordinary person come to participate in a global horror, let's say, and what does that mean about being an ordinary person? And then the next question is, well, what does it mean about how you should conduct your life? And one of the things that, I mean, I think what happened to me when I read all this material in the 80s

was that I became convinced that there wasn't anything more important to do in the aftermath of what had happened in the 20th century than to try to build people who were responsible enough as truth-telling, courageous, responsible citizens, so that the probability would increase that if they were in a position to make a terrible choice, that they would make the right one. And I would say this lecture tour that I'm doing, which is now extended over more than 100 cities, is an extension of the same thing. Well, I think it's the same thing that you're trying to do with your book.

Like we were just looking at your Mikey and the Dragons book, right? And you're trying to lay out a psychological pathway that, guides people towards responsibility and courage and truth and all of that. And that is the bulwark against tyranny. And it's actually at the individual level. And we kind of know that. We know that in the West. I think that's part of the core ethos of, well, certainly 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. 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 on you.

You know, and there's something great about that because it means that your existence actually matters to you and to your family and to the broader community in a really major way, in a way that's much more significant than you might think, and that your proclivity to abdicate your moral responsibility echoes way farther than you might consider, especially under some circumstances. You know, in Solzhenitsyn, one of the things that's so amazing about the Gulag Archipelago is his stories not only of the absolute bloody catastrophe

of the Soviet state, and his incredibly astute documentation of the rule, 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 Frankl's book, Man's Search for Meaning, you know, and so the Gulaig archipelago is a story about horror in some sense,

but it's more a story of the triumph, of the fundamental triumph of the human spirit, and perhaps no more, perhaps most evident in the case of Solzhenitsin 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 1,700-page scream of outrage. You just can hardly believe that someone can write at that white-hot intensity

for such a long period of time. And, you know, his book had an unbelievable global impact. I think it sold 30 million copies. And it definitely, for at least a reasonable period of time, made it completely untenable for utopian resentful utopian intellectuals to ethically justify their radical leftist collectivism. It just blew the slats out from underneath any ethical credibility that communism, that remained of the communist doctrine by the 1970s. And 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 of myself, so I was talking to, I still talked to military folks and I was talking to some military leaders, young leaders, so like platoon level and company level leaders. So these are guys that are in charge of, you know, 40 guys or maybe 150 guys. And, you know, you can have some real ethical problems. And one of the things that I said to this group was I said, hey, in your platoon, you've got a murderer in your platoon. You've got someone in your platoon that is a sadist. And they were kind of looking at me, suspect, you know, a little bit like, oh, come on now. Come on. What are you talking about? How big is the platoon? A platoon is 40 guys. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so,

someone in there like that. And I was, I was actually going to ask. you how accurate I was and then I was going to actually say that no matter what you say how accurate is even if it was even if it was one out of every thousand you have to act as a leader as if in your platoon you've got one of those guys or two of those guys that's a way you need to act well you look in in there's another book called the rape of Nanking we've covered that one here too 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, there's gradations, right? Right, right. In a group of 40 people, there's going to be one guy in there whose proclivity in that direction is sufficiently strong so that you better keep an eye on him. That's for sure. And this is a group of people that joined the military. Right. Right. So they're already, you know, you've already gotten, you've already got a group that's okay with with theoretically having to kill other people. So this is probably, you know, so if it's one and a hundred, it's probably pretty accurate. That's likely an underestimate.

So I think your estimate is perfectly reasonable and it might be conservative. What happened in Nan King was that the most sadistic people became the targets of imitation and emulation. And that's when things really get out of hand. Yeah. Right. And that's the same thing with the Mili massacre. And that was so when I was talking to this group and I said to him, I said, you're looking at me like right now, like I'm, like I don't know I'm talking about like I'm crazy.

Who knows about the Mila Masker? And, and you know, all of a sudden it got quiet. Because if you know anything about the Mili Masker, it was a normal group of guys. It was a normal group of guys.

It was a normal company of American soldiers. And you know what? They'd been through some stress. They'd been through, you know, they'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 them. They would hide and it was. But then they turned and they snapped And the same thing, you had the leader, a guy named Lieutenant Callie, who was the platoon leader, who, you know, I'd love for you to do a psychological profile. I mean, he's one of these guys that was kind of like, it's totally insecure about everything. And so he got those shoulder boards on, which is the way Solternernerner-Nitchin describes his experience as being a platoon leader. And what it did to him, and he goes through that, this book.

It's fantastic to hear when he talks about what he did. He was looking back saying, oh, I did this and I did. He was going through this little rampage of things that he, how he acted as a commander. I ate the food, the good food right in front of my guys. When they weren't good food, I was getting the good food. And he took advantage of all the little comforts that you got being an officer. Yeah, well, yeah, well, he was trying in the whole book, and especially in that section, which I think is in volume two, which I think is the greatest of the three volumes,

especially the last half of it, which is just absolutely, it's genius level writing, unbelievably compelling and brilliant. And yeah, I mean, 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 remember everything that he did wrong by his own estimation,

and then try to set it right in some manner. And so that's a repentance and then a redemption, right? There's a real fundamental, like a medieval Christian undertone to all of that. But 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 repeal. and issues of conscience 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 extraordinary people who seem to be able to keep their moral compass under circumstances where no one should ever assume that they would keep their moral compass. because certainly, like I said, when I was reading the Gulaig and other books like that, I never assumed that if I was in those situations that I would have been one of the people who kept their head and were able to withstand the temptation to become a trustee, for example, and to take things the easy way and to lord it over the other prisoners and to adopt that position of authority.

You know, 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 head slave than to be the, the bottom slave. And well, that's true in some sense with regards to creature comfort. But as Solzhenitsin 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 the establishment of these camps. You know, and the Soviet Union was just one big lie.

What was their old joke? They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work. It's like... The whole book and the whole Soviet Union, when you read about it now, it seems like it seems like a bad joke. It seems like a bad movie. You could just the way that Stalin would do something and the way that that order would come down,

it seems like one of those cheesy, 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 what they call it clipping corn or or yeah they're basically a 12 year old kid would be starving and go into a field at night and clip a cure a corn an ear of corn yeah that happened in the ukraine during the deculacization right it was against the law to go out after the fields were were harvested it was against the law to go out and and pick grain off the ground to feed your family.

Right. And the prison sentence was like a tenor, which is their little word for 10 years. So you're going to get, you steal a piece of corn or you pick up corn off the ground. And you're getting 10 years. Yeah. You can't comprehend that that's the way this nation.

Yeah. Worked. Yeah. And they were, they, you know, he does in the earlier parts of the book, when he starts going through the trials that they were doing on people.

Yeah. it's completely crazy. It's kangaroo court. Well, that's why I hate to see the kangaroo courts emerging all over the west, you know, and with the university sort of at the forefront of that. So we're building these alternative court systems constantly that don't follow standard legal procedure. And it's really, we're messing with things that we shouldn't be messing with.

And yeah, the whole, I mean, there are accounts, I believe it's in the gulag of applause. after a Stalinist speech, right, where people would stand up and applaud and they'd applaud until literally the old people were falling over because if you were the first person to stop applauding, then you were, well, it was off to the camps with you. No, he absolutely outlines. So that sounds so crazy to say. And he outlines a specific thing that happened.

It's that right there. No one will stop applauding because they're afraid they're going to get ratted out by their, by everyone else. Yeah, well, and by the people who are in fact watching. And I mean, you know, by the collapse of East Germany, one third of the people were 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 so, it's creepy in some sense,

it's a very weak word to use in this situation. But when I was at New York University talking to Jonathan Haidt about, I don't know, it was about a few months ago. He just wrote that book called The Codling of the American Mind, you know. And he took me into one of the men's washrooms there, and there was 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. 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 hate crimes, you know, and the problem with that is the fundamental problem with that, and the unsolvable problem is, well, who defines hate?

And where's the line drawn? It's like, well, anything that upsets me that you say is hate. 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, well, we're doing this to make our society a safe place. It's absolutely dreadful. And to see that happening in the UK was just, it's just.

awful because I mean you know the UK is a center a center point of of the idea of free speech. I mean a lot of America obviously a lot of American ideals. America is a great center of free speech but I mean it's a variation on the English system. So to see that happening in the UK is just it's awful and to see the police doing this and being you know encouraged by the politicians and and and to see this put forward as some sort of moral action. It's just well, it's an echo of this kind of catastrophe that we're discussing. So I think about that sometimes. And I also have a tendency to look at things and not be too worried about them.

Like, hey, come on. What's really going to happen, right? And that's actually part of my personality. Part of that comes from my old job where, hey, I can't worry about these little things. Oh, there's some little problem going on over there. That's not going to be that's not going to affect us. It's not going to and you got to pay attention a little bit. Make sure it doesn't get out of hand.

But that thing about the speech and you just mentioned the, the, the Kulak. Is that how I said? Kulaks. 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 lackadaisical attitude towards things that I think, oh, that's not a big of a deal. Let me read this little section about the, about the escalation of the,

of the word Kulak. And where it started and where it ended up. 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 labor, but through someone

else's. In every locality even before the revolution, such Kulaks could be numbered on one's fingers. And the revolution totally destroyed their basis of activity. Subsequently, after 19, by a transfer of meaning. The name Kulak began to be applied to all those who in any way hired workers, even if it was only,

even if it was only when they were temporarily short of working hands in their own families. But, and that doesn't stop there. The inflation of this scathingly term, or this scathing term, Kulak proceeded relentlessly. And by 1930, all strong peasants in general were being so called. All peasants strong in management, strong in work, or even strong merely in convictions. The term Kulak was used to smash the strength of the peasantry. And I got to go a little bit further because hell of the thing for the workers party to do, eh? 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 Kulakchnik. And that meant a person aiding the Kulaks. In other words, I consider you an accomplice of the enemy. 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 a like social justice idea. You know, that the social justice idea is that we're best defined by our collective identity and that the proper narrative in relationship to our collective identity. and that the proper narrative in relationship to our collective identity is one of victim victimizer, which is a replay of the old Marxist doctrine of bourgeoisie and proletariat.

It's just in its new guise. I mean, and that new 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 not obvious, that I think contributed to exactly why the Russian Revolution went so horribly wrong. And that is that, so imagine that I could characterize you along five or six different dimensions of group identity. It's pretty easy. You know, well, you're male, you're male of a certain age, your male of a certain age and economic class. You have a certain sexual orientation.

You have a certain ethnicity. You have a certain race. That's six groups right there. And we could continue. You know, your parents had a certain socioeconomic class, and so did your grandparents. And 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 temperamental variability. Like there's all sorts of ways of characterizing you according to your group. Okay, now we might say that if we were compassionate people, that we would take one of those group identities or more and look at where you're dispossessed and victimized. Okay, and we're going to find some dimension along which you're less privileged than some people. Like maybe you come from a working class background despite the fact that you're like a straight male. And so you can be a victim on that dimension.

And so, and that's kind of, that's at least in part. an element of intersectional theory, right? And that maybe your 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 a multidimensional 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 borders of who was validly accused of being a victimizer essentially expanded to include everyone. And that's actually right. In a perverse sense, it's right. because if you position yourself properly in the historical flow, then you should see yourself as a perpetrator and a victim equally. Well, it's not the right way to see yourself at all, but if you're going to play that game, you're going to be on both sides of it. And then that issue is, and this is related to your idea about, you know,

in your platoon, you've got one person who's sadistic. It's like, okay, well, let's even assume that at the beginning of the Russian Revolution that the vast majority of the people who were motivated by communist, 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. What percentage did you just say on it? What was your hypothetical percentage? 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 resentment that Solzhenitsyn describes. And they were the ones who were after those to be persecuted. And the thing is, they got the upper hand really rapidly. And it might be because the carnivorous types,

the predatory types, are much more dangerous and powerful than the compassionate types. Like they'll take them out instantly. We're willing to step up and smash someone, as opposed to the people that are saying, oh, we just want to help. Yes, exactly. Well, and there's someone I actually cited a guy named, I think his name was Walter Latsis in the forward who wrote in a journal called Red Terror, that if you were interrogating an enemy of the state, you didn't bother with niceties like their individual guilt. That was a bourgeoisie conceit. And that's 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 affiliation. of the Kulax, which is a lovely way of expanding your list of potential victims, and then you

execute accordingly. And that would mean, well, the person that you're interrogating, right, or the class member that you're interrogating, and then their children and perhaps also their grandchildren. And Latsis himself was eventually executed by the Stalinist. Somebody wrote to me after I wrote the forward and told me that that was his eventual fate. And I thought, well, talk about standing on a chair and putting the noose around your own neck and kicking it out from underneath you. It's like, you know, he basically, he murdered himself fundamentally. And, you know, you could say in some sense that was the story of the Soviet Union to a tremendous degree. Yeah, there's one part going back to 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 described, or maybe it was Lenin was describing these certain people as insects that need to be destroyed. And then he just, he just, he's just, you know, he's just, he's saying, he's, That just starts off with, hey, people that are rabble rousers, their insects. And then it just expands and expands. And then it's got priests. And then it's got engineers. Oh, yeah.

And physicians. And physicians. Oh, yes. Everyone. Reckers. Yeah. Reckers. That's the word that they use, or that he uses in the book for basically saboteurs.

Yeah. And that expands beyond comprehension. Yeah. Because every single problem that there is is the fault of some person out there that sabotaging and and they they do this show trial and he talks about it in the book for i think i think the phrase that he uses or that they use that the russia that the soviets used was organizers of the famine uh-huh meaning like oh yeah you're starving and these people over here they're the people that organize the famine they're the they're the records of production of food

you bet you bet you bet well it was either that you know you imagine that 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 way, reorganize his entire worldview. Or you can look for reasons why you're right 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 committed communists would enter the Gulaig, and they would still be in their morally superior phase, right? 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 Solzhenitsin was never sure how to react to these people ethically, because on the one hand, well, they were devastated because now they were political prisoners,

and maybe they got a 20-year sentence, and they were in terrible, you know, stripped of their family and just ruined. But on the other hand, they were still avid supporters of the very fist that had crushed them. And so his eventual conclusion was that until they broke and repented, they weren't to be allied with. They were still essentially on the side of the, well, of the perpetrator. And it seems to me that that's right. That's unrepentant sin, let's say.

And it isn't until you, what would you say? Until you take responsibility for your own complicitness in your, in your unfair interrogation, that you get to join the ranks of valuable in suffering humanity again. And so, yeah, it's, the extension of the persecution is really something that's horrifying, to see how, who constituted a victimized, or the ranks of who constituted the victimizer just grew and grew and grew and grew.

One of the most shocking groups of people that ended up in the gulags were the damn Soviet soldiers that had just got back from fighting the Nazis. That's the sort of thing you can't make up. Yeah, you can't make that up, including Solzhenitsin 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 prison. Yeah, well, the Stalin, Stalin decided that yeah, this is something that 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 Auschwitz that said, work will set you free. You know, that's a joke, right? It's a, It's a terrible, terrible, dark joke. And so much of this has the element of exactly that kind of surreal. I hate to say humor, but it's right. I mean, Stalin decided that the, okay, so the Soviet prisoners of war were not covered by the Geneva Convention for the treatment of prisoners of war, because Stalin refused to sign that agreement. So, like, if you were an allied prisoner of the Germans, it wasn't like you were having a great time of it.

Like food was in short supply, and you were treated pretty brutally. But the Soviets were kept separately, and they were doing so badly that the Allies used to throw food packets over the fence when that was an option. So the Soviet prisoners of war were treated absolutely dreadfully. And Stalin didn't care about that. And then when they were released and went back to the Soviet Union, his dictum was that because they had been exposed to the capitalist West, or even the Nazi West, for that matter, that they had now been intolerably corrupted on ideological grounds

and had to be put in the prison camps. So that was 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 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 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, it's unimaginably vile and surreal at the same time. And it, it, you shake your head. For me, well, it's such a shock to read the Gulag Archipelago.

You just can't, it's, it's like, it is, it's like Dante's Inferno. It's like a trip into hell. Yeah, and I guess you're, that's what I was trying to say when we, 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'd be really, 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. And the more extreme you make it, the more funny it becomes. That's what like happened here. You're looking at this thing going, hey,

oh, yeah, they seem to be trying to make this funny because who in could ever conceive that you could take your frontline soldiers who were captured and in misery. And when they return home, instead of treating them like heroes, instead you put them back into a prison. Worse one even. You can't even, you can't even, that's just, that's, no, no, you can't make this stuff up. You can't make it up. No. Did you see, I believe the movie was the death of Stalin?

I did not see it. That's worth seeing because 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 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 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 part of, I really think that 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 tried to imagine those Russian villages because I come from a small town, a small northern town too. So I kind of, I tried to imagine. So imagine that you're in an isolated village and it's a peasant village. And the peasants weren't freed that long ago, right? They were basically serfs until about the middle of the second half of the 19th century.

And so they had been emancipated. And then some of those people who were emancipated got a little bit of land and started to have a life, you know, started to be successful peasants. And they were also the people that grew the bulk of the crops because what you see happening in any productive domain is that a small percentage of people do almost all the productive work. So there's a small percentage of productive farmers who grew all the crops. Right.

And then there's all sorts of farmers who were only farmers by name and they weren't successful at all. So you have, and then there was a certain relationship between being productive as a farmer and developing some wealth. Maybe you had a house and maybe you could hire a person or two. you know, which you'd think would actually be a good thing, especially if you're also growing food. Okay, so you imagine you get a village, and now there's a bit of a socioeconomic pyramid, and there's some people that are doing well, and it isn't the crooked people that are really annoying.

The people who, like the genuine Kulax, let's say, that small percentage of psychopathic types who are basically profiting criminally off the efforts of others. Those aren't so annoying those people, because they're rich, but they don't deserve, it. And so they don't stand towards you as a moral ideal that shames you. But the really annoying people are the ones who are doing well and deserve it, especially if you're someone who's doing nothing and is bitter. Okay, so now, so there's the village and you've got your people who are doing all right. And then you've got a huge 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 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 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 people who are lording it over you and who have all this creature comfort, 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 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 where they froze to death because there were no, or died of dysentery or whatever other.

plague managed to, you know, weave its way through these camps. And so you have the intellectuals providing the moral rationale for the worst ethical actors in these small villages doing the worst possible things under the guise of compassion. Right. And that's part of that victim, victimizer narrative. It's just, and you know, like, you can imagine that. You can imagine a dark night. You can imagine the winter.

You can imagine the alcohol. You can imagine the rage that fuels these people who are drinking too much. much in the pubs that have been sitting there for the last 20 years, like, what would you say, eating up their own souls with resentment and bitterness. And then someone comes in and says, you're the true victim here, and here's the people that you can go after. And then, like, if you play that on your imagination, you get some real sense of exactly what sort of horror that would produce. You know, you think about the rape, for example, or just the theft, but it's the rape that you can really think about as absolute revenge for all that bitter resentment,

all fueled by the fact that, you know, you'd sat there for the last 20 years being completely goddamn useless and bitter and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and fantasizing about the day that would come where you'd have your opportunity. God. And then the whole country. And that was the whole country. Oh, it's just unbelievable. Yeah.

And I think 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 the, is someone to tell them that that's the right thing to do. And that's exactly what happened. What you said, that's it. Oh, yeah. Those guys that were slightly psychopathic. Yeah.

And then it becomes, okay, I'm the head psychopath and you're in my village. Yeah. And you're, let's say you're one of those people that are in. the middle, well, whose side are you going to be on? I'm a psychopath. If you, if you're not on my side, I'm going to kill you next. Yeah. So you go, well, no, I'm on your side too. Yeah. And that's how it expands and definitely. Well, and it doesn't take, look, it's not like it takes much pressure on people to have them fold. I mean, one of the things you see, you see happening right now in our culture is that's happening to people all the time with these Twitter wars. You know,

someone will say something. They'll express an opinion. And then they'll get mobbed by, 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 pleasant thing to be mobbed on Twitter. But that's an abstraction compared to these people showing up at your house, you know. And what'll happen is that people will go through an abject apology, you know, and they'll say, well, I really didn't mean it. And now I understand what my privilege is.

And I see how what I said could have been very hurtful to people. And, you know, they wander through that. entire apology and fold almost instantly. And that's under almost, almost no pressure compared to what real pressure is. And real pressure is when the wolves are actually at your door rather than just barking off in the distance. But people will fold just when they're barking in the distance. So there's one lawyer that he talks about in here. It's the same thing as the story that you described. I forget the guy's name, but this guy was like the premier prosecuting lawyer for the Soviet government and he just rips people apart over and over again.

And as you read about what happens to him, sure enough, he's one of the guys that ended up on the on the defensive and being executed. Yeah. Like it's like these people, they built, they built a place of butchery and then threw themselves into it, you know, that's, and you see sources 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 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 going to tell me anything that I want to hear. And of course, then all that does is validate my view of how pathetic and contemptible everyone is. And so, and the more that view gets validated, the more I think that it's okay to destroy people because look at how pathetic and contemptible they are, how they always lie. And all that means is that they lie even more. And so this whole thing just spirals out of control.

And, you know, Stalin basically started out as the brutal enforcement henchmen for Lenin, right, the killer for hire. And not like Lenin was above that sort of thing himself. But he trained Stalin. And then Stalin's proclivity to, 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 initiate the Third World War, to wipe out Europe, to maybe destroy everything. 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 compadries that he had arranged around himself.

He went too far even for them. And thank God for that, you know. But yeah, it's absolute, I mean, the thing that the Gulag Archipelago did for me, and this was also in keeping, as a consequence also, reading Jung at the same time, but it was certainly the Gulaig in large part that did it. I would say that in some sense it scared me straight.

I thought, I see the consequences of unethical behavior, deceit, the willingness 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 have a much more important moral role to play in keeping things straight than you want to believe. You know, people think, well, my life is basically meaningless. It's like, well, that's quite terrifying. It's like, yeah, it's kind of terrifying, but it means you don't have any responsibility.

So there's a big advantage to thinking that. You know, if nothing you do matters, then nothing you do matters. And so you can do whatever you want. And that's horrifying in a nihilistic sort of way, but there's another kind of horror that's more associated, I think, with the horror of hellfire that was characteristic of the medieval Christian view is which is something like, and if you strip it of its metaphysics, it's something like, no, you don't get it. The things you do actually do, the things you do or don't do, they actually do matter. And they tilt the world towards, you know, something approximating good, let's say, or towards something that very closely approximates hell. actually on you. It's literally your fault. It's literally your responsibility. It's like, man, that's a terrifying idea, but I can't see how you can read this literature without coming to that conclusion. Like it wasn't one that I wanted to leap to, you know, it's like it's it's sort of the ultimate in horrifying conclusions that that everybody who participated in this system was at

fault for all of it. You know, and Dostoevsky made the same sorts of claims in, in in the last part of the 19th century, I mean, he was a very weird, mystical sort of person, you know, and 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 wrote a book called Extreme Ownership. And it's very, so 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 book about a guy that was in a 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 flank them. You distract them and then you flank them. You come in from the other side. In Jiu-Jitsu, if you want to submit your opponent,

you 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, you know, when I started this podcast that I do,

I started off by saying, in the beginning, I'd say, yeah, it's a problem. podcast about leadership viewed through the lens of war and atrocity. And the more I did it, and it didn't take me very long where I was saying, well, it's actually a podcast about human nature, really is what it's actually about, because the better you understand human beings, the better you'll be able to do as a leader because you'll understand what's happening with those dynamics, which I guess is now leading me into some sort of psychology, which is kind of where you ended up with, of you read this book. And you said you were studying political

science when you read this book. And then you said, oh, you looked at the psychology of it. And an example that you just brought up, and this is just what you learn when you read and when you understand history and when you understand the way people think, Stalin surrounded himself with people that would say yes to him. And anybody that didn't say yes to him, he killed them. And I'll say this, again, I'll talk to military. Of course, you also killed you if you said, yes. Yeah. I'll talk to military for sure, but also any business leader. We talk to business leaders all 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 immediate thought, especially for a military guy, they think nothing would make my job easier than if I bark and order at you, Jordan, you work from you're a private and I'm a captain and I bark and order you, you just shut up and go do it. That seems like the best thing in the world. It's absolutely not true because there's things that you know on the front lines that I don't know. And if I really want to be a good leader, I want you to push back on me and say, hey, boss, we don't want to do that. Here's what's going on. Let me tell you the situation. And 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 interests are aligned. Our interests are aligned. And I actually, when I talk to the subordinates, because I talk to subordinates too. And I say, listen, when you say something to your boss. You don't say, why the hell are we doing that boss? You actually have to be very tackling. Yeah, yes, exactly. Hey, hey, boss, I want to make sure I'm executing this exactly how you want to. Can you explain to me why we're doing this so I can really, really make it happen out there in the field? Yeah. And that's a key thing. So, so these ideas of, of, you know, psychology, I guess now is, I hate to use that word, but because I was just calling it human nature, but these ideas they all kind of come together. And so now you're talking about ownership, right? Extreme

ownership and this idea that, hey, I'm responsible for everything. And so here's what I'll get from a leader. They'll say, well, whether it's a business leader or it's, it's very easy to use a military leader. So I'll get a platoon commander. My machine gunner shot in the wrong direction. How can that be my fault? Because my machine gun are shot in the wrong direction. I'm not, I'm not holding his weapon. I'm not pulling his trigger from. How can that possibly? 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 understands what his fields of fire are? Who's in charge of making sure he understands when and where he's allowed to shoot? You are. You're the boss. This is absolutely

your fault. Another interesting example of the weather. The weather's bad. We couldn't execute our mission. That's why we failed because we couldn't launch our helicopters. Yeah. It's not my fault. Yeah. That's a hard one to argue against you. Except for the fact that if you're a good leader, you'll say, hey, here's our plan. We're going to use these helicopters, and here's our contingency plan. If there's bad weather. If you don't take that ownership of what's going on,

if you don't take responsibility for it, you're not going to change it. You're not going to fix it. And that means you're never going to get any better. You're not going to win, right? But the minute you as, and obviously, this applies to, you know, people to purple. And, you know, you tell people to take responsibility.

I don't, you know, tell them take ownership, but what's going on in your world. It's the same thing. but at the individual level. 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, 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. Well, 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, if you're going to 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 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. And you see sometimes people who develop like psychotic depression, and they suffer from a delusional condition in some sense that the entire moral catastrophe of the world is literally their fault. And that's not, there's an element of that that's not productive, although there's a truth in it as well. And it's hard to find the balance so that you could,

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 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

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 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 all that is going to do, all that's, all that that is going to do is make the situation worse.

Yeah, especially because if it's not my fault and it's your fault and I can't control you, what do I do about it? I sit there and just suffer the consequences of the situation as opposed to, okay, here's what's going on. I'm going to take responsibility and ownership for it. I'm going to change it and make it happen. You talked about turning a blind eye and earlier you talked about turning a blind eye to the truth to a situation. And I know there's a point in this book where he talks about the, he's got a buddy that says amnesty is coming. Right amnesty is coming

Let's just keep our mouth shut Let's do what we're told to do And we'll get you know we'll get out amnesty is coming And you know Solzhenitsin says He's saying okay yeah and then he says to himself Wait a minute If I'm not If I'm not living

In order to live Then is it worth it? And this is a question that I get asked a lot Because people get themselves into situations where they've lost some kind of control, whether it's there in a crappy job or they've got a bad boss or whatever. Maybe they're in a bad relationship.

Maybe their families, but they're in a situation 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, that's wrong. But what I actually tell them, universally almost, and there's a couple situations where it goes outside this,

but 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, okay, you got a bad boss. I want to tell this guy to go screw himself. Yeah, yeah.

Hey, guess what I'm going to do? When my boss tells me something to do that doesn't make much sense, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to do it. And I'm going to do it well. And what am I doing? I'm building that relationship with him. He's starting to trust me. And he's going to tell me to do something else.

Now, these things aren't massive catastrophes. It's like he's telling me to do something. Maybe there's a better way to do it. You don't know what I'm going to do it that way. And I'm going to play that game and I'm going to build up that relationship. Now, when eventually he tells me to do something that is totally stupid or it's going to cost, you know, lives or money. Then when I say, hey, boss, that's not a great way to do it.

I think I know a better way. Couldn't we try something else? He actually will listen to me. So I'm going to play the game a little bit. And I'll tell you, my gut instinct, if now, I guess it's easy to look from the outside and say, hey, if I was in this prison camp, my gut instinct is like, okay, Jocker, you know, you've been through these kind of things before. Play the game.

You're going to play the game, which is horrifying. Because part of playing that game to the fullest extent here or in the Nazi prison camp would be coming a capo. Oh, you're playing the game. Yeah. You're playing the game. And that's really the outlying, the things that I said that are outlying, I always make the caveat that if you're getting asked to do something that's immoral, illegal, or unethical, then you actually have a duty to say, no, I'm not going to do that.

No, that's the line, which, you know, which you reach that line in the sand with Bill C-16, which is, hey, I'm not going to do this. but the idea that sometimes you got to play the game and sometimes even from you when you just said to me you 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 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 yell at him and tell him everything you think. And you think, well, that's the truth. It's like, well, it's actually, it's not a very sophisticated truth because you're doing a shallow and impulsive analysis of the situation. Like, it would have been the case that you've already compromised yourself in 500 ways. And I'll get back to the playing the game issue because you do have to discipline yourself too. And you have to discipline yourself to some degree by allowing yourself to do arbitrary things that are part of the system, right? That's a necessary part of discipline. And discriminating that from compliance with

unethical activity is very difficult. So that's a hard situation. But let's say, you're 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. that out now and that wipes the slate clean and that constitutes truth. It's too unsophisticated. So let's think, okay, so what is it that you want? Well, I don't want this job anymore. It's like, okay, now let's actually have a strategy about this then. You don't want this job anymore. Can you get another job? Well, I don't think so. Well, so you can't just quit. Well, no, I can't, because then I don't have any money and my family depends on the job. It's like, okay, so you can't just stop this. That's not a viable solution. You go out of the frying pan into the fire. Or, you know, you substitute one set of unethical actions for another set of unethical actions that are even

worse. That's not helpful. All right. So let's start thinking about what exactly it is that you want. It's like, well, maybe I want a better job. I want to work for someone who's more reasonable. Okay, so what's stopping you? Well, I don't have my CV in order. My resume isn't up to date. Well, why is that? Well, I haven't done it for five years and I don't like doing it. Well, why is that? Well, because I'm kind of embarrassed about it because it has holes in it and it shows where I'm lackadaisical and where I'm not prepared. It's like, okay, how many things are there like that? Well, there's a bunch of things and they're all associated with how I procrastinated in the past. It's like, okay, what are we going to do to rectify that? So I'll say to people, why don't you

update your CV? That's what we'll do first. Because if you're going to look for a different job, I'm not saying you're going to look for a different job. But if you're going to look for a different job. You're not going to unless your CV's updated. So why don't you go. Not going to unless you can get a good recommendation from this boss that's a tyrant. And so you've got to play the game. There's 10 strategic actions that you're going to have to take in order to make yourself able to move laterally or up. And the truth is isn't going in and yelling at your boss and telling 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,

One of the things that's quite fun about this lecture tour is the letters that I receive or the stories that people tell me about switching jobs because they do realize that they're, and I often talk to people about consulting their resentment. 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 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. 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, that. Okay, so now the issue would be, well, how can you set your life up so that you can be without that resentment? And so that's when you start to develop a strategy for, you know, and there's

actually an adventure in this too. I mean, I've had a number of clients who have been in jobs that they didn't like it all. And, you know, they were tyrannized by someone, for example, and they were also working below their hypothetical level. And we'd put together a plan. It's like, okay, you're going to make three times as much money in five years. That's the plan. But, Like, that's not going to be simple. So there's education. You've got to educate yourself, maybe formally, because you've got to holes. You've got to fix up your resume.

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're going to look for a different job. It's probably going to take six months to a year, and almost all of that is going to be rejection. And you've got to steal yourself for that and prepare. And maybe this is going to be a three-year-reference. process. It's no trivial thing, but it's almost inevitably can't remember a single example

where the consequence of that very careful, detailed, strategic thinking wasn't a massively substantive improvement in socioeconomic positioning and a great movement towards an improving trajectory. And there's advantages even along the way because even before that happens, the fact that you're taking genuine steps to put yourself in a better situation, immediately starts to reduce your resentment, even if it isn't having positive consequences to begin with. But you have to be realistic about it. It's like, look, it's going to be hard to update your CV

because you're embarrassed about it and you should be. 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 you're, and you can be made nervous easily and you're not a very good advocate for yourself. So there's a lot of improvement that needs to be done there.

And then you have to withstand the punishment of being constantly rejected when you apply for jobs, because the baseline rejection rate, you know, for the typical job applicant is like 99%. It's like the rejection rate for everything. Is this going to work? No. But if you do it 100 times, it might work once. And that's all you need. That's exactly it.

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 got to play the game sometimes 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 man when you're in a leadership position. You also don't want to be your own personal yes man that just thinks you're great and agrees with everything that you're doing and 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, of things that people just lie to themselves and say, ah, you know what, well, you don't really need that. That person didn't learn anything in that course. Why should I go to it? You know, it's like if you don't tell yourself the truth about what your situation is, it's going to be problematic. Just like if you don't have people on your team above you or below you in the chain of command that tell you the truth, that's going to be problematic as well, which is something

which is something that's easier said. So the playing the game thing. So are you thinking, are you thinking about that as a consequence of necessary discipline? You know, like, 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 you have to subordinate yourself to the realities of the situation. 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 there's the positive aspect to it too.

And so whenever you're doing a job, it could be that you're called upon to do things that, well, what would you say, that are a necessary part of the operation of the machinery. I guess that would be particularly true in military situations. Yeah, and let me give me these. 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. He's not going to, you know, he's, if someone tells him to do something he doesn't want to do, he's just going to say, screw you. Yeah. We're not doing it. We're doing it my way. You know, I got the knuck. But that was kind of the impression people would get from me. If they didn't know me from the outside, they'd think, oh, this guy's a knuckle dragger.

He's just going to go forward. He's just going to make things happen and he's not going to listen to anyone else. That was the impression from the outside. The reality is, A, you can't do that. And B, the reality is. what my actions, I'd have, you know, a young lieutenant would come to me and say, hey, you know, my boss is tell me to do this, this, and this. And what they'd think I was going to say is like, bro, you don't do that.

You stand up and you tell them, screw you, that doesn't make any sense. And they'd be, they'd get this look in their eyes of surprise. Yeah. When I'd say, oh, your boss wants you do that, do it. Do it well. Play the game. That's what I'm telling them to do is play the game because these things are meaningless. It's some, you know, it's something as pathetic as like, oh, you've got to fill out a form a certain way.

It's like, hey, shut up and play the game. Even my... So is that a matter of picking your battles? It certainly is a matter of picking your battles. Because that's part of strategy, right? Like, everything can't be the war. Exactly. And it's exactly what it is.

But, you know, a good example, and we wrote about it in dichotomy of leadership, which is, you know, my friend, my guy that worked for me, Leif Babin, we were getting told to do all this paperwork. You've got to fill out these forms. You've got to have a serialized inventory of everything. It's got to be signed off this many days. We need to know the qualifications of each and every person and when their qualifications come up due

and all these just ridiculous paperwork. And Leif came to me and with the other platoon commander, a guy named Seth, they came to me and said, oh man, this is bullshit. Why do we got to do all this paperwork? We're here training for war. We're getting ready for war. Why are we got to do this?

And, you know, Laif will tell you his expectation was that I was going to be like, you're right. I'm going to go to the commanding officer and tell him screw this. We're not doing this stuff. This is crap. We're trying to prepare because we were in training getting ready to deploy to Iraq. This is crap.

We're not doing this. And I looked at him and said, oh, we're doing all of this paperwork. And not only we're going to do this paperwork, we're going to do it better than anyone else. And we're going to turn it in before it's even due. And, you know, both him and Seth were kind of taken aback, the fact that I wasn't standing up and saying, we're not doing this. A wrap. And then I explained to him, here's what. we're doing. We're building a relationship with my commanding officer, with our commanding officer.

We're going to do these little things for him. We're going to play the game because at some point, two things are going to happen. Number one, we want to build trust with my boss. I want my boss to look at me and when he tells me to fill out paperwork, he knows it's going to be filled out. If he wants me to take down a building, he knows it's going to get taken out. If he wants me to execute a larger mission, I'll go and get it done. If I can't fill out paperwork correctly, how can he trust me to go on a real operation and have guys' lives at risk. So the idea is like, hey, we're going to play the game. And I think sometimes people start to hear me,

they start to listen to me, and their first instinct is Jocko wouldn't put up with this shit. And that's why 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, whether it's a boss, whether it's a military, it's any of them, whether it's their wife.

Like, like, my wife. wife expects me not to train Jiu-Jitsu is 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 why won't she well what's the problem hey have you taken her out for dinner you know what I mean like play the damn

game a little bit so that you can win strategically and it's the same thing I think with your with the 12 rules we're like hey tell the truth or at least don't lie it's like I get it but there's a dichotomy in that statement and that is if you run around telling the absolute truth to everyone it's going to

be like that Jim Carrey movie where he can't say anything that's not 100% true and he's you know a girl woman says good morning and he says you look fat you know it's like one of those like that's not good and so you got to 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 you just you played the game and you went too far with it and Just like in a leadership situation, if you're my boss and I'm just kissing your ass and do one or whatever you said,

my guys lose respect for me. Yeah. My team will lose respect for me. If you tell me to do something completely stupid and I say, hey, guys, that's what the boss says. We're doing it. My guys will lose respect for me and I won't be, I won't be able to execute missions the way I should. If when the pushback is proper, I say, hey, hey, boss, 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 going to see what. he says but trust me if we have to do this will we'll figure out a way to make it work because if you're just the guy that's totally on board if you're a brown noser right your p your guys will lose respect for you 100% they will they'll lose respect for you if you don't play the game at all and you push back on everything that your boss says you're gonna you're not you're gonna get fired yeah that's another ethical situation like if my boss if you're my boss and you tell me to do something that's I

don't believe in or it's like a bad plan and I may I draw the line in the sand and say, screw you, Jordan, we're not doing it. You can fire me. You're like, okay, fine. You fire me. You get some yes man to come in. He takes my guys out on the mission and gets them all killed. He didn't mitigate the risk properly. It's better for me ethically to say, hey, look, Jordan, I don't agree with this plan. I really wish we could do it another way.

Is there any way I could flex on it? You say, nope, you're doing it this way. It is better for me in many situations to say, okay, I got it. Well, that's a good indication of the complexity of the truth. I mean, one of the rules of thumb that I think is worth abiding by, and I guess this is something that makes me somewhat conservative in some ways, is that you should do what everyone else does unless there's a very good reason not to. And I think that's the same idea that you're putting forward,

which is that if you do fight back against everything, then you're just a rebel without a cause, right? 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, there's a, there's a, there's a, there's a, there's a, I think this is a New Testament scene, but it might be in some of the, apocryphal writings. I don't remember. So Christ is walking down the road on the Sabbath. And 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 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 a perfect example of that, because it's like if you're, okay, now here's your situation, you're a shepherd, and you're supposed to be taken 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 that,

and I have a lot of respect for it, but I think that in this situation, it's still morally appropriate for me to break that rule in this slight way and get this poor sheep out of this hole, then, well, Christ's judgment was, well, then you're exactly on the right track. But if you're doing it carelessly and stupidly,

you're breaking that rule, then you're a transgressor of the law and you're cursed. And I think that's exactly at the essence of what you're describing. It's like you play by the rules, but then there's a meta rule, which is now and then you, break the rules. And you do that very, very carefully because when you break the rules, you're

breaking the rules. And the rules are what keep peace. They're what keep peace in order. And so you break them only in the service of a higher peace in order. And so that seems to be, and I think that's, you see this in, well, the sorts of stories that are influencing even the things that you're writing. Like in the Harry Potter series, for example, Harry's friends and compatriots are quite disciplined, Hermione in particular, because she's an absolute master of her craft, but they still break rules when it's necessary, only when it's necessary. And that's what makes them more than the people who are just breaking rules all the time, the villains, so to speak, and also makes them more than the people that are just being good by being conformist.

So you need that touch of rebelliousness, but it's got to be a flavoring and not the whole diet. Absolutely. I've actually talked about that on this podcast before. There's people in the military that they are like meta rule followers. These are people that have been following rules their whole lives. And they've got perfect grades and they're the team camp. They're all these things. And they're going to make really good, solid leaders. Like they're going to be great leaders. But then there's this like one group above them. 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. But you know, that's one of the reasons I like this guy, Colonel David Hackworth. This guy was the ultimate rule follower for his whole career. At the end, in Vietnam, he did an interview and said, if we keep fighting this way, we're not going to win this war. And they drove him out of the army. But that's the thing that because all along the way, there was other times where he'd do that.

You know, his guys weren't getting taken care. If he'd break a rule and bring him beer or he'd do it. You know, he'd do that along the way. Not so far outside the bonds that it would jeopardize his career. Because if he would do that, then you're not in charge of these guys anymore. Now you're not going to have any impact anymore. So let's not get fired. Right, right.

Let's not get stupidly fired. Right. That's not an improvement. Exactly. Well, that's 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, or 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 you, I ordered the, I ordered a copy of yours with a Ford from Europe. Yep. You can't buy it from Amazon here. Not yet.

From Amazon. Oh, so it'll be here. When will it be here? Well, I don't know. We're still negotiating the rights, because the rights holders, differ in North America. And so that's the issue at the moment. So I worked with an English publisher, Penguin in the UK that put out the, I think it's Vantage Books. If I remember correctly, I should just check and make sure that that's exactly right. Harper perennial modern classics.

That's not, that's not the British one. Oh, that's not the British one. I think it is. The British one hasn't gotten to my house. Yeah. Yeah. And so, yeah, it has to be ordered, it has to be ordered through Amazon, UK. And we're working on a couple of things, maybe to also, maybe get the audio rights to the abridged version because I'd like to read it. Nice. And that would be good so that people could listen to it. And so because it's an absolutely necessary book. Yeah.

And it's written actually what's, I like it because it's written very conversational. I mean, he's cracking jokes in there and he's making, it's a brilliant piece of literature as well as, I mean, it's a very readable book, although it's unbelievably harsh and demanding and draining and draining to read.

But it's brilliantly written. It's an unbelievably engrossing read in the most horrible possible way. And it is the case that it's written at this white-hot pace. It's like talking to someone who's righteously, not self-righteously angry, but righteously angry for dozens of hours. And you just can't believe the levels of outrage that are being so incredibly well expressed and so effectively expressed.

And again, I think it's also. 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 wasn't an aberration because of Stalin or, you know, Lenin being the great leader and then Stalin being the monster, because Lenin was plenty monster himself. And Stalin was the logical conclusion to Lenin, not an aberration. But to say that, no, the horrors of what happened in the Soviet Union 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 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 reading this book and the the re-release of this book with your forward will prevent that from happening in the future. Well, at least it hopefully it will be a drop in a bucket that many other people can put drops into as well. And so I'm hoping. I mean, I think the book has sold 15,000 copies since the beginning of November, which is pretty good for the reissue of an old classic. But like it, it's required reading for an informed citizen of the 21st century. It's not optional. You need to know this material.

You're not, you're not, you don't understand your position in society as an individual or a citizen without knowing this material. So it's like not knowing about what happened in Nazi Germany. It's not acceptable to not know. So. Read the book. Thanks for coming, Jordan. Really good to see you again, man. Absolutely.

Yeah, you bet. Appreciate it. And with that, Jordan Peterson has deep. parted the recording studio and if you noticed that Echo Charles was not present during the recording with Jordan Peterson but through the miracle of technology and recording Echo has now joined us for the support portion of this podcast so good evening echo good evening All right. So if people listen to this podcast, which we appreciate,

and you want to support this podcast and support yourself, there are ways to do that. Echo can fill you in. Sure. So first way is when you're doing jujitsu because we're all doing jiu jitsu. Yes, it might sound a little bit repetitive. But to me, when you do jih Tis, you're going to be doing it every single day, every single week, at least even if you're doing the two times.

a week three times I get it either way you're gonna need a ghee and a rash guard so there is no question which kind of ghee you get you get an origin key straight out made in America I watched one of their videos yesterday and it's kind of an older one too but it made me like love origin even more because it's like you'll see you know the people that make them and all the ladies there and then Pete like he has like longer hair and stuff like that It's like, oh, man, this is kind of more the beginnings of origin. You know, anyway, I thought it was good. Unless, again, made in America, quality stuff for jujitsu.

It's not like a blank ghee they get from over wherever some other place and then slap a embroidered patch on it. I don't say that. No. This is made for jihitsu in America. Yeah, everything made in America from where we grow, the material is grown in America, woven in America. Wovean in Maine, as a matter of fact, custom woven by origin. We weave it up there and make the best geese 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, jeans. Denim. Origin denim. Yeah. I just call them jeans, though. Yeah. Yeah, I dig it.

That starts to like, I don't know, move towards a fashion thing. What if you say denim? Denim. Well, I feel, yeah, I dig it. I don't feel that. Yeah, I feel like it's like origin denim. They make it, you know. Yeah.

And then, yeah, they make origin jeans for sure. But what if they make like a jean jacket, like a denim jacket? No, that'd be true. But it still be a jean jacket. That's true. I dig it. Cool. Either way, yeah, that's, and I don't get excited for jeans in general in life.

Oh, right? Yeah, like, you know, you see it on TV. I don't know. J.C. Panny has a sale. You know, Blackfrey or whatever. And, you know, some jeans, I don't get excited. I'm assuming you don't either. Maybe you do.

I don't know. But when Pete posts little, like, videos of the close, you know, close up of the buttons, the jeans. Come on, bro. That's, that's kind of exciting. I'm just saying. Either way. Yeah. Either way.

The, also we have supplements, too. Affirmative. Origin Labs. Which is expanding. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

We bought another building up there. But yeah, so they're making We are making supplements Joint warfare, krill oil, super krill oil, by the way Discipline The trifecta Yeah, yeah My wife

Went on a trip Didn't take joint warfare with her Yeah She's there for three, four days Her knee starts bothering her It bothers her the rest of the trip She comes home, she goes back on joint warfare for three, four days Knee's fine again

Yeah, same. Same exact thing. That's just crazy. Yeah. That's just the reality of it. So joint warfare, good for your joints. Crel oil, also good for your joints and good for your whole life system. Is that a thing?

Life system. Yes. Okay. Well, yeah, it's good for that too. Discipline when you need that focus. And also discipline go. Yeah. Which is my pre-cognitive enhancement tool.

Go-to. Go-to. Yeah. Check. Yeah. It's funny that krill. I had the same situation, too, by the way. Crill oil and joint warfare didn't bring it.

By the way, in Hawaii, which is the reason why I didn't appear on this episode of the podcast in Hawaii. So my father-in-law came. I told him the story about how he'd always talk about krill oil. And he's just sort of looking at me like whatever. And, you know, he used to tell me, oh, yeah, cruel oil is good. Good for you, all this stuff. And he said, not listen because, you know, he's more of like a health dude. You know, he's not.

And then when you start. talking about it like literally the day you start talking about it start taking it and he was like he didn't care it kind of went right over his head and he was like oh so did you feel the difference you know like that's what he was concerned about I mean care I was like all respect also on top of that is you got milk which is which is which is milk basically that's what it is it's it has protein in it you mix it with milk I got to make that statement if you mix it with or you can mix it with all almond milk, you can mix it with coconut milk, you can mix it with regular cow milk.

Sure. If you mix it with water, it's not, I'm not jumping up and down about it and tell 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 a, it's a dessert straight up. It's a dessert that you will make you stronger. If, so you know, like hot cocoa, you ever make hot? Oh, yeah.

Okay. So, I'm a fan. That you can put in water, right? Do you put in water and milk? That is not hot cocoa to me Okay, I know what you're talking about You get the little packet That you're supposed to mix with water

It's got the little crappy marshmallows in it Yeah, that's a non-starter for me Yeah, so that's kind of the point there It's sort of along the same lines Where it's like, cool, do it And cool, you can do it, you can do it, yep And there's probably many, many people who do that And I'm not mad at them

But you put the milk, that stuff That's the good one That's my opinion And by the way, you can't have You can't have hot chocolate mulk is a thing for sure it's good

it's right up there especially the warrior kid one yeah the so you got mint chocolate peanut butter chocolate vanilla gorilla and the darkness and then there's the 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 dot com and that's that's the state of Maine yeah yeah not just main

like the main spot even though it is a main spot but check cool also yeah also if you want to represent you know get a discipline equals freedom shirt or a rash guard you know get after it anyway you want to represent the path go to jocco 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 want to represent while on the path, jocco store.com. Good spot.

Also, jaco white tea. So these claims of deadlifting 8,000 pounds. I haven't deadlifted in a while. So I was like, you know what? I'm going to, I'm going to test it. The cans, right? Tea, drink a straight up deadlifted 8,000 pounds. Just like that.

Just like that. No more. No, you don't need it. You know, it's real. Well, the warm up is drinking some jocco white tea. Yeah, that is the one. Then you're warmed up and you're good. 8,000 pound deadlift.

Yeah, that's the only product in the world in any capacity that guarantees 100% 8,000 pound deadlift minimum. Yeah. 100%. But yeah, so yeah, you get them what? In the dry tea bags, if that's your thing, when you seep them. Seep. That's the word right? Steep.

Steep. Steep. Steep. Okay. Boom, if you like that gig, hot, cold, whatever,

and then the cans, which I recommend. I recommend the cans. Actually, I don't know if I'd recommend it, but I prefer the can. I like them both, depending on the scenario.

Sure. Boom, there you go. Also subscribe to the podcast on iTunes and Stitcher and Google Play, wherever you listen to podcasts. There's a lot of new ones out there.

There's all. Apps. Yeah, for podcasts. And there's a lot of podcasts out there you can listen to, a bunch of them. Yeah.

And one of them that you can also listen to in addition to this one, if you want, you can check out the Warrior Kid podcast. That's basically directed at kids, but I'll tell you that Uncle Jake has lessons for everyone in that podcast. And also we got the YouTube channel,

the YouTube channel where you can watch this podcast in its full length, and you can see what people look like if you don't know what Jordan B. Peterson looks like. If you don't know what Echo Charles look like, or if you don't know what I look like, you can watch the the YouTube channel and you can see all of us if you never heard if you've never seen echo before but you've only heard him he probably doesn't look like what you think

he looks like yeah allegedly and I don't know if that's good or bad I don't know if that's a backhanded compliment or a backhanded like derogatory statement about you yeah your voice probably both yeah a little bit of both yeah but but we'll suffice it to say that he's not what you expect when you see him in reality And he also makes videos that are enhanced by imagery and music. Yeah, sure, exactly. And those are on there too. So you can check those out.

You can subscribe to that YouTube channel. Also, we got the psychological warfare album and that has tracks on it of, well, there are of me telling you pragmatically why you should or should not do something like skip a workout. you should not skip a workout. Eat donuts, you should not eat donuts. So just some little things like that. You can check that out, psychological warfare. Echo claims that it has 100% effectiveness.

Yeah, it does. 100%. Should you go to the gym? Yes, you should. And if you listen to the track, you will go to the gym. It's 100% effective. And actually, I mean,

a lot of claims being made about effectiveness on this scenario right here. Hey, if it's real, it's real. You know, this double blind placebo tested. Well, you know, single blind. maybe. Okay. I don't even know what that means, but it does sound official.

And it is official when, okay, and I kind of, I tried to psychologically analyze psychological warfare. Like, why does it work every single time? And here's part of it. Even you, you know how like when you get hypnotized? I'm not saying you're, we should have, I should have asked, I should have asked Jordan this question. Yeah.

You'd agree with this, I think. Okay. Maybe next time we're going to ask them. Echoes bro theory on this. So, you know, like, being hypnotized, for example. Yeah. I've never been hypnotized. Yeah, me neither.

So, well, but then again, it looks real when so happens to some people. Have you ever said volunteered to be hypnotized? Okay, me neither. Same thing. So hypnotism, from what I understand, is you have to like be, what do you call like, suggestible, open to it. Yeah, open to it. Yeah.

So if you're a 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, to hypnotize someone without them knowing it or something, but usually, I shouldn't even say I'm sure, but. Oh, yeah, that's right. Psychological warfare. I wouldn't be surprised if you can hypnotize someone and they don't know it.

Nonetheless, usually the hypnotic sequence goes from, hey, you volunteer. Like consciously, yeah, sure, I'll be hypnotized and you sit there and you're sure, come to 10 and you're closing your eyes and breathing. Anyway, so you consciously volunteer to be hypnotized. So you're open to being hypnotized and then blah, blah, blah. So psychological warfare is like, hey, you recognize, okay, I have this weakness. I'm about to skip this workout right now. You're basically saying, hey, I need a help.

I need a little spot. You're volunteering for help. Volunteering, yeah. It's not like I'm like sitting in my room. It's not completely against your will. Exactly, right. You're not just busting in the door in saying, hey, don't skip the workout. Meanwhile, in your mind, you already committed to skipping the way.

It's different. You're like, you're not committed to skipping the workout. you just like are running the risk of skipping the workout you know that weakness just creeps in and you're like hey i see you weakness you're creeping in right now i'm gonna get i'm basically i'm gonna tell jocco that you're in here and he's gonna you know make you leave and you play the track or whatever you have it on your phone right because you have you have all your playlist on your phone anyway you just play the psychological warfare one and you won't skip the workout so i'm saying because you don't want to skip the workout no one wants to skip the workout no one's thinking

thinking tomorrow I can't wait to skip this workout. It's not like that. You know, so you come in and you just give that little nudge. That's why it works so good. It's true. It's absolutely true. I like it.

Nonetheless, psychological warfare is very effective, 100%. Also, while you're working out, and if you're bored with your squats, bench, get some kettlebells from Onet, in my opinion. Onet.com slash jocco. Good stuff on there. Jump rope, battle ropes,

kettlebells, clubs. Be careful with the clubs. I saw, I was watching a video of a guy doing this club routine. I was like,

dang, he took a lot of coordination. Like, I'm looking at it and he had like the 40, I think, like a big one, yeah.

I can't even imagine trying to do anything coordinated yeah, with the 40. Yes. Because I only have the 20. Yeah.

And, yeah, and they come off real, a lot more heavy than they look. Oh, yeah.

Like when you grab them. I mean, at the end of the day, if it's 20 pounds, it's 20 pounds. There's no, there's no getting past that physically. But when you pick it up, it's like, it's like, you know, when you pick up out your friend. Yeah. You know, or your kid. Freaking, and they weigh 70 pounds. It's like, shh, I pick out 70 pounds with one hand.

It's no problem when it's a dumbbell. Should I pick up your kid when they're 70 pounds with one hand? Can't do it. It's hard. Unless that's how these clubs are. Anyway, so watch out for those. Anyway, go to on it.com slash jockey. can get some really cool stuff on there.

Really cool. Awesome. A, we got some books as well. First off, Mikey and the Dragons. I know Jordan and I talked about it a little bit today. And it was actually sold out for a little bit. It is now back in stock and have many, many, many, many thousands and thousands of copies that are inbound, that are being printed. So if you want Mikey and the Dragons, go to Amazon and order it.

There's a little video on there if you want to know what it's about that Echo put together. and it's a solid video. From what I understand, the, like, kids like to watch the video. Oh, yeah. Like, it's like a little mini short. It's super fast. Yeah, it's two minutes.

It's two minutes. Even my kids, so we're on. I watched the video. Yeah, it's kind of fun. When you first send it to me, I watched it like 14 times. Oh, yeah, yeah. Because there's a lot of elements in it.

Yeah. A lot of things going on. Yeah. To my son. It's like a micro cartoon, kind of. No, it's like a micro movie. Yeah. I don't know why.

Well, it's a cartoon because there's illustrations. Yeah, illustrations, yeah. But yeah, it's fun. We put it on the TV when I was in Hawaii. You know, you have smart TV in there. You can put YouTube on there. Oh, you put it on there. I put on the TV and my kids are all jumping up at that mic in the dragon's way.

You know, it's two minutes long. Yeah. No, I, you know, Jordan and I were talking about it. And, you know, obviously it's about facing your dragons. And there's obviously a metaphor there. And it's a, there's real, true, pragmatic, simple to understand lessons of how to stand up and confront the world and confront your fears

that little kids will clearly and easily understand and it'll leave an impact on anybody that reads it. So Mikey and the Dragons, you can get that book. On top of that, if you got 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 in the seal teams, shows up for the summer and helps him overcome those problems. And then that series carries on in another book called Mark's Mission. You can pick those two books up and give them to whatever kids you, those books. When you read those books, you'll wish you had that book when you were a kid. I know I absolutely wish I had that book when 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 that's how you it's just a field manual of how to be on the path of discipline

that's what it is look the path of discipline is not easy and there's no field manual for it oh wait there is now but there didn't used to be there didn't used to be look I know discipline will help me

how do I get discipline where does discipline come from none of that information was assembled anywhere I made a field manual for it it's called the discipline equals freedom field manual

it's not it's 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. Do you see Christmas is coming? Christmas scenario, right?

This is a Christmas scenario. Give this book to somebody that needs help or needs to stay on the path or get on the path. This book will be extremely beneficial to them or people that are on the path getting after it. This will keep them there. So that's the field manual. If you want the audio version of that, it is not. on Audible, it's on iTunes and Amazon Music and Google Play as an MP3. Also, the first book I wrote

with my brother Laf Babin, it's called Extreme Ownership. That is a book taking the leadership lessons we learned on the battlefield and translating them to your business and to your life. And then the follow-up to that book is the dichotomy of leadership, which takes those lessons that we learned in combat and goes granular in teaching you how to balance the various dichotomies that you experience as a leader. So both and all those books are available on Amazon and wherever else you might buy books. Also we got Eschalon Front, which is my leadership consultancy. We solve problems through leadership.

That's what we do. 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 echelonfront.com. the we are due we have a leadership conference called the muster and we've done six musters we are doing three in 2019 we're doing one in chicago in the spring we're doing one in denver in the fall and we're doing sydney australia in december so if you want to come to one of those events all the events that we've done have sold out all of them these are all absolutely going to sell out so if you

want to come go to extreme ownership.com and register and as quick as you can. And then lastly, we have EF Overwatch. We are connecting special operations veterans and combat aviation veterans that are looking for work that are proven leaders, that are experienced leaders, and we're connecting them with companies out there in the civilian sector that need leaders. So if you want to come at that from either side, whether you're a vet or whether you're a company, go to eFoverwatch.com to get in the game. And if you have any more questions for us or answers for us, we are available on the interwebs on Twitter and on Instagram and on the face.

Booky. Echo is at Echo Charles and I am at Jocka Willink. And I started out this podcast today. pretty heavy, pretty rough. And I think it's important to remember something that I always refer back to, and that is that evil does exist in the world. It's out there. And with that, I'd like to thank all the military personnel throughout the globe that stand

up to evil in the world. And thanks to police and law enforcement and firefighters and paramedics and EMTs and correctional officers and Border Patrol and all the first respondent. 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 gulog 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 And then do your best to watch out for those little seeds of evil that are planted around you and planted in you.

And keep those seeds of evil in check by going out into the world and doing good. And until next time, this is Echo and Jocko out.