Jocko Podcast - 306: Don't Let Your Mind Get Stuck. Be Ready to Adjust to New Information. On The Psychology of Military Incompetence Pt.4

Episode Date: November 3, 2021

0:00:00 - Opening0:02:53 - On The Psychology of Military Incompetence.2:32:18 - How to stay on THE PATH2:55:20 - Closing gratitude.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

This is Jocko podcast number 306 with Echo Charles and me Jocka Willink. Good evening, Echo. Good evening. And also joining us again tonight, Dave Burke. Good evening, Dave. Good evening. So I said this book was going to take a while. I actually said that to you a year ago that when we do this book, it's going to take a while.

But we are going to continue our review of the book on the psychology of military incompetence, which we started on podcast 303, 303, 304, 304, 3. 305, here we are on 306, and there's gonna be more. So if you haven't listened to 303, 304, 305, go back, listen to those. And if you have listened to those, then what you heard on those was basically the setup. It was the setup. It was the background information that we have been, that we need to get into the actual theories of how psychology plays a role in military incompetence. And with that, let's get back to the book.

So this part of the book, this part of the book, is called part two. And this is where we're no longer covering historical incidents or battles. Although the reason I had to read him all was because he does refer back to him quite a bit. And I will say as I went through the, as I was kind of navigating how to do this, I'm not going back as much as he is. So when he goes back, I might not cover every single one. He goes back a little bit more. But so this part of the book is what's what he's actually trying to figure out. How does psychology play a role in incompetence? So here we go.

Chapter 13, is there a case to answer? He says that now that we've completed a survey of survey covering 100 years of military mishaps, what conclusions can be drawn regarding the incidents of military incompetence? There are a number of possible answers. Firstly, it could be argued that so-called incompetence at high levels of command is really a figment of the imagination of vindictive, inaccurate, or untruthful. historians. So that's one conclusion. A second conclusion might be what seems to have been military incompetence was really due to other non-military factors such as governmental stinginess,

vagaries of the weather, and sheer bad luck. A third conclusion might be that since every military action is an uncontrolled experiment in the sense that it can never be known what would have been the outcome had decisions been different, there remains an almost unimaginable possibility that things might have been worse, that what was done did represent the least disastrous of possible courses open. So there are some different reasons why you could say, well, you know, it's not really military incompetence. It's just that historians are jerks.

It's just that there's factors that no one can control. And that actually these decisions that were made were good, but, you know, it's just a bad situation. So these are the best things that could happen. His response to that is no one would deny there's more to a grain of truth in all these propositions. Cool. Facts do get distorted in the telling. Disasters are indeed more newsworthy than successes.

Writers undoubtedly do enjoy painting the worst possible picture of their particular bet noirs. Many generals have had to contend with ineptitude, unformed interference and the stinginess of their political masters. And of course, things could have been worse. there are counter arguments however because they are surrogate father figures people are only too ready and anxious to love their admirals and generals particularly in a time of war we see that a lot right like if someone was in the military then they must be awesome and in recent years that's gotten I would say even more prolific. If someone's a vet, then anything they say has some merit and value.

And then you figure if they're a vet, whatever they say has merit and value, if they were an admiral or they were in a general, then they must just be awesome. They just must be speaking the truth, which we know not to be true. I'm going to fast forward a little bit. Under the circumstances, this book takes the view that certain sorts of incompetence have been an enduring feature of the military scene and that amongst the millions of officers and men who have fought heroically and efficiently, often under the most trying conditions, there have marched a small but influential number whose ability has fallen far short of that required by the positions

which they held. So again, he likes to point this out from time to time, and this is one of those times that this isn't about every military officer. And I'm not making this about every military officer. I worked for awesome military officers. Dave. Yeah. At every level, there are great military officers. Every level, every service, there's great military officers. But it is interesting.

He says a small but influential number. So these are people that are totally inept at being military leaders. And yet they end up in really powerful positions. He says two questions then occur. Is there any common pattern to this incompetence? And if there is, whence does it, rise as a first step towards answering these questions let us try and summarize the data contained in the foregoing chapters in brief then military incompetence involves one a serious wastage of human resources and failures to observe one of the first principles of war economy of force

this failure derives in part from an inability to make war swiftly it also derives from certain attitudes of mind, which we shall consider presently. So that's the number one thing that's showing that someone's an inept leader is when they have massive wastage of human life. Number two, a fundamental conservatism and clinging to outworn tradition, an inability to profit from past experience, owing in part to a refusal to admit past mistakes. Gee, do we even have to go any deeper on that one? Or is everyone just immediately understanding what's going on with that?

If you can't admit your past mistakes, if you can't take ownership of your mistakes, you don't make any improvement. It also involves a failure to use or tendency to misuse available technology. This one's a massive profit from past experience. Failure to profit from past experience. You don't learn anything. Number three, a tendency to reject.

or ignore information which is unpalatable or which conflicts with preconceptions. Number four, a tendency to underestimate the enemy and overestimate the capabilities of one's own side. Indecisiveness. Number five, indecisiveness and a tendency to abdicate from the role of decision maker. Number six, an obstinate persistence in a given task despite strong, contrary, and Evidence. Obstant persistence in a given task.

That's when you are. This is a, I don't know if you guys have anything like this, Dave, but when you're parachuting, one of the ways that people die when parachuting is they have a problem with their main parachute. And they just keep trying to fix that problem. Yeah. They get target fixation and they just,

they just. And they never go to the reserve. They never go to the reserve. Yeah. Can that happen in the cockpit? Yeah, absolutely. And I'm, maybe a slightly different version of that is you can have a system that is a, you know, it's a critical

system that you need, but it wouldn't be the difference between returning home safely and not, but you'll spend so much time trying to resolve the problem that system is causing, that it can lead you to focusing on that so much that you stop paying attention to other things and it'll lead you to a mishap, when even though it could be a real problem, it should never lead you down the path of crashing or losing the airplane. and what you really need to do is, it ignores probably the wrong word, but if you can't solve this,

move on to something else and get the airplane back safely and people will devote 100% of their attention to that all the way to the point that they crashed an airplane as a result of it when it would not have caused a crash. It's kind of crazy. And that human element of the fixation,

I think is the word you use, the fixation on that. You know, and I was just talking about this at the muster, we are genetically programmed to fixate. Yes. Because if you're a caveman, and you can't concentrate on the tiger that's, you know, prowling up on you and you're distracted

by other things, then you're going to die, right? So we're programmed to focus on what's right in front of us. That's why people so often lose strategic vision and they can't detach and they don't see what else has happened on. That's why you get flanked. That's why you keep trying to fix your parachute until you hit the dirt or why you concentrate on some instrument panel until you run out of fuel or you run into a mountain. Exactly.

What's the term when someone hits a mountain with no, like no breaks or whatever? Yeah. We call it C-fit, controlled flight into terrain, which means you're fully in control of the aircraft as you do it, as you hit that mountain. Because you are so fixated on something else, you know, it's not like, hey, I'm tumbling out of the sky. I'm trying to save this airplane. I hit the ground. It's like, hey, I'm flying perfectly normal flying. I'm fixated on or focusing on something that's a problem,

but I'm going to fully controlled level flight into the ground or into the mountain. That is totally avoidable had it not been for that fixation. How common is that? As far as mishaps go, it's common. It's not uncommon. Well, the first time I remember hearing that was when Kobe Bryant's helicopter crashed. And I think that was because they couldn't see, right? They couldn't see, but there was nothing wrong with the helicopter at all.

They were just flying and he obviously there, I think they were in fog and so got disoriented and just flew just full speed, no factor into the mountain. Yeah. And like the worst versions of that is, they're all terrible is I'm going to dive like I'm in a 45 degree dive. I'm diving down towards the target, which is what you're supposed to do. You're going to get it out to do and you're going to dive down towards a target to help refine. We're going to drop the bomb and I'm going to focus on the display that make sure that my targeting, my. targeting my reticle, the aiming point is exactly where I want. And a little adjustment to keep,

I'll keep adjusting that targeting point to be exactly where I want it. And I'll go through my minimum altitudes and I will fly straight into the ground all the while, just focusing on that targeting point. And I'll never try to pull up. I'll never try to recover. I'll ignore warnings that say your altitude's getting low and pilots will fly directly into the ground working on something else and a perfectly safe effect of flying. No problems at all.

That is literally the exact same thing. It happens to guy skydiving. It's a little bit different because with the guy skydiving, they're trying to fix a problem. Usually, I suppose there are some cases. You know, this is why, again, referring back to the muster, I was talking about the leadership loop and the main bullet at the bottom, both for the Oudaloupe and the leadership loop is you can't get stuck.

You can't get stuck focused on one thing. And when you do get focused on one thing, there's just, there's just, the rest of the world doesn't stop. Right? Yeah. Whenever you're focused in one thing in life, the rest of the world doesn't stop. The rest of the world's going to keep going. If you don't look around, it's going to be a problem.

And that's what this number is. Number six, an obstinate persistence in a given task despite strong contrary evidence. That was number six. Number seven, a failure to exploit a situation gained and a tendency to, quote, pull punches rather than push home and attack. number eight of failure to make adequate reconnaissance number nine a predilection for frontal assaults often against the enemy's strongest point and again even once again at the muster I'm trying to explain to people because you know there's people that want to they just want to hear you say look someone's caused some problem you just got to go direct that's what everybody

wants to hear and it makes so much so much. much intuitive sense to think, you know what? I don't like Dave's plan. I just need to go tell him, Dave, I don't like your plan. And it's just so obvious that when I say Dave, I don't like your plan. Immediately, Dave is defensive. By the way, once you get defensive, you're not listening to anything else I say. Now we're not making any progress. So even though it seems like it's the most efficient thing to do, it's not. The most efficient thing to do is say, hey, Dave, I'm looking at your plan. Can you expand on a couple of these points? Because I don't think I understand. And now his defenses are down.

We're having a real conversation. My mind is actually open. It's not just a little Fugazi. It's real. And we're having a real conversation. We can make progress. But the predilection for the frontal assault, both on the battlefield and in a conversation with another human being, is bad. And it leads to failure.

Number 10. A belief in brute force rather than the clever ruse. So there you go. The jiu-jitsu people just cheers. A failure to make use of surprise or deception. Jiu-Jitsu people just cheered again. This is the kind of thing. When I say that Jiu-Jitsu affected my brain, these are the kind of things.

Those three right there. Frontal assault's bad. That's Jiu-Jitsu. Believe in clever ruse instead of brute force. That's Jiu-Jitsu. Make use of surprise and deception. that's jujitsu I had a buddy I start he trained jih Tzu I trained jih Tzu but he was very he was sort of not training a lot and this was early 90s he trained you know some you know and I was like

in my first month of training jiu jitsu all the time with fabio Santos and one day and this is my buddy jim I said I I told him I came back after like a month of training I said I said Hey man, here's the deal. I just learned this. You can't do one move. One move by itself doesn't work because it's too easy to defend. You got to set people up. That's what this whole thing is.

It's like a trick. It's a big trick. And about three days later, he and I were rolling. And he freaking was sinking in a choke, sinking in a choke, sinking in a choke. Sinking in a choke. And I was like, dude, this guy is not going to be able to choke me. I know exactly. Boom!

You unlocked me. And I was like, whole, and he, he 100%. He got it. He was like, dude, that's what you just told me. And I was like, oh, my God. So, and he, you know, he got me because of that thing right there. He listened to me. And this guy ended up, we ended up working together a lot.

And actually, just an awesome guy. But anyways, he used that thing and set it up. That little surprise. Number one, it was a surprise. Number two, it was a ruse. And number three, it wasn't brute force. It was technique. Number 12, an undue readiness to find scapegoats for military setbacks. Oh, this is to use Jason Gardner's term, blame thrower. These are the people that get out of the, the blame thrower. And the opposite of extreme ownership, right? I'm just going to find who I'm going to blame. A suppression, number 13, a suppression or distortion of news from the front

usually rationalized as necessary for morale or security. Oh, you know what? That is a really nice way of saying. A suppression or distortion of news from the front usually rationalized as necessary for morale or security. What we're saying here is lying to the troops Lying to the troops and then number 14 This one's a little strange a belief in mystical forces

Fate bad luck etc So there's your there's your list of 14 things that military incompetence involves That's from all those historical features those are sort of the common themes here Fast forward a little bit on logical if not humanitarian grounds the maintenance of an efficient force should be the first Consideration of a military commander other qualities of generalship will avail him nothing if he has no one left to do the fighting So he's focusing on that first one saying you should keep people alive And this is something that you know sometimes people will ask us Well you got the mission and you got the men which one's more important and it's very easy for me to answer that question

the people come first. Because if you don't have people, you can't do any more missions. So, yes, the mission is absolutely a top priority, but it's not the top priority. You've got to take care of your people. Continuing on here, excessive loss of life and high casualty figures would therefore seem like a likely indicator of military incompetence. Known cases of what seem to be purely administrative incompetence, as for example, in what John Lacken's, John Laughan has described as the imbecile Waltren expedition of 1809.

Though the purpose of this expedition was to attack Antwerp, the troops were in fact kept in waiting for eight weeks on unhealthy Wacherin Island in Zeeland. In the event, and owing to the procrastination of the military commander, Lord Chatham, and the naval commander, Sir Richard Straykin, 7,000 men died 14,000 had their health permanently ruined and thousands more became ill mostly from malaria Only 217 were killed in action So just in case you didn't catch that 7,000 died from disease and

Just a disaster from an administrative perspective, but only 217 were killed in action While dying men were given no attention and little to eat as laughing remarks sick men were expendable Fast forward a little bit the second class of manpower wastage is that involving casualties from enemy action as a result of the incompetent planning of senior military commanders The men who perished in the attack on Fort Ruyah in the Indian mutiny the thousands of casualties from the Germans use of gas in 1915 The 13,000 who went into captivity following the siege of cut and the 138,000 casualties of Singapore, the 8,500 Americans who died in the Ardennes offense of 1944

and the 17,000 British American and Polish who were killed, wounded or reported missing at RM, R&M fall into this category. So he's got these, I should have broken this out earlier. He's going through the three different types or the different types of how you waste people's lives. The first one is just administrative. The second one is bad planning and then the third one is the third and most costly type of manpower wastage is that resulting from a deliberate policy of attrition adopted by commanders who regarded soldiers as wholly expendable

generals for whom the conservation of human life rank lower than in importance than various other criteria which were governing their actions. This is when your plan is, oh, a lot of people are going to die. Fast forward a little bit. He says, in all this, we are anticipating a theory of military incompetence rather different from that held by proponents of the so-called bloody fool theory. Perhaps we are being too complicated. Perhaps intellectual deficit could explain the data. Let us then, before considering the other factors contributing to military incompetence,

first examine this older and more favored hypothesis. And so what he's saying here is there's a lot of people that just say, oh, they people make mistakes and they make mistakes because they're dumb. They're just dumb. dumb military leaders. And that's why they make these mistakes. They're just stupid. And, well, he's going to talk about the fact that, yeah, you can account for some of that.

But a lot of times you have very intelligent leaders making really stupid decisions. And obviously his hypothesis is that's because of their psychological nature. So here we go into chapter 14, the intellectual ability of senior military commanders. T.E. Lawrence Lawrence of Arabia said, I feel a fundamental crippling in curiousness about our officers. Too much body and too little head. So obviously he's a military guy and he was very, very smart. But he's just saying, look, I see a lot of people that ain't too bright. Too much body, too little head.

What grounds are there then for the most popular explanation of military incompetent stupidity? There's a suggestion that the armed forces do not attract the best brains. A call-up survey in the United States put the status of army officers below that of professors, physicians, clergymen, and schoolteachers. As Morris Genowitz remarks, a liberal ideology holds that since war is essentially destructive, the best minds are attracted to more positive endeavors. It's like one of those statements you go. Well, you know, if you're making that statement, if you're a really smart person, Are you thinking, hey, what do I want to do? Do I want to go out and build the next great energy platform?

Or do I want to go out and kill a bunch of people? You'd think, oh, well, maybe the people that are a little bit smarter are going to lean towards building the next great energy platform. That's the statement anyways. What was the thing with the atomic bomb where, like, the technology was like made for something or the idea was like the technology was made for something, but then you got another group of people who were like, oh, that's cool technology.

Let's use it for this automatically. You know, like for bad stuff. That's what we always think, right? A lot of the time where it's like, oh, that's good technology. Yeah. Who's going to weapon? Like someone's going to weaponize it. You know, it's like that's the fear.

Like you put you and me in a room and they're like, hey, we've created this thing that can create a massive amount of energy and you're thinking, cool, we can power the world. And I'm thinking, cool, we can blow up our enemies. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that could be. Somebody's got to think that way. Yeah.

It says here in training for generalship, it seems that intellectual ability has not always counted for very much. Even Hague, the educated soldier, became commander-in-chief of the British Army in the First World War, despite a poor academic record. This Dowerland Scott, this Dower Lowland Scott described by Duff Cooper as the dunce of the family and by Lord George as utterly stupid. So you are getting some dumb people here. Fast forward a little. Certainly a brilliant performance in military schools is no guarantee of subsequent ability. General Colley,

whose secession of defeats culminated in 1881 and his own demise at Mujahabah Hill had the distinction of passing out of Snaff College with the highest marks on record. The irrelevance of early scholarship to subsequent generalship also finds support in Napoleon and Wellington, both of whom achieved very low grades at school.

And in more recent times, the early academic brilliance of Lieutenant General Percival evidently availed him little at Singapore. So he's given all these other examples, right? You got Percival who led that total disaster in Singapore, who was academically brilliant. Napoleon and Wellington, who were great generals, who were junk at school. And another guy, General Colley, who was a disaster on the battlefield and yet had the highest marks on record. So the statement is like, hey, you could be really smart and do well. You could be really smart and do horrible. You could be moderately smart and do well.

You could be moderately smart and do horrible. So I think the statement here is like, well, it's not intellect is only part of it. Right? Intellect is only part of it. What about fighter pilots? I mean, look, so in the SEAL teams for a while, they were recruiting these really, really smart. Ivy League, you know, Harvard, Yale, there was all this whole crew of officers that were coming in. They were clearly highly intellectual, smart people.

And they stopped recruiting those people so heavily. And the reason they stopped recruiting those people so heavily was two reasons. One was they would do their one platoon or two patoons and get out and go to business school or whatever. And two was they weren't that good. Yeah. There was no correlation to someone that was really, smart to someone that was a really good leader on the battlefield. Yeah, I think it's the same.

I really do. I don't think the personality profile, you know, or even just the motivational profile of, of a lot of people in the military is all that different. Certainly when I think about seals and pilots and as often as you and I kind of contrasts those two types of people, there's a ton of similarity there. And, you know, the different services and aviation have different sets of requirements. and, you know, I think the Marine Corps has the lowest, I guess, standard of academic excellence in terms of what you studied and how well you did. I mean, the old joke in the Marine Corps was, you know, if you got a 2.0 in underwater basket weaving, you could be a pilot, you know, is the joke.

And, you know, what they were saying really was, hey, you know, we don't really care what you studied. Now, you got to have a college degree, and I think that does demonstrate some willingness and ability. and I'm not sure which is more important to get through a long-term project that, hey, I'm going to dedicate four years to getting this degree. That demonstrates, hey, you've got some planning, you've got some interest,

you've got some intellect, something that's going to reveal that you have something that's going to be hard to do, you're going to be willing to do that. You're getting a 4.0 in aerodynamics versus a 2.0 in Pollyci, we don't really care. That was kind of the Marine Corps' general approach, a little bit different for the other services.

But I was kind of laughing and kind of thinking about this thing from a larger standpoint of these great military leaders that maybe didn't have the best records academically. I mean, the two thoughts that I had is the academics in the military aren't that hard. They're not that hard. You know what I mean? Like you don't need to be a genius to get perfect scores on your tests. And I think the ones that don't do that well academically that are that still really do well, there's probably a piece in that. they're thinking like, this is dumb. There's a waste of my time.

What's the minimum grade requirement? Cool, I'm going to get that. And that actually reveals some level of intelligence. I'm not going to waste my time and all this stuff that I don't really want to be doing, but I'm not going to fail either. So for you to sort of explain, there's some really good leaders that didn't do so hot, and then there's some guys that just were absolutely brilliant on paper that were terrible. That is not a stretch for me at all to picture that in aviation or anywhere in the notes.

I'm like, I think I know who those guys are. Yeah, and really, in anything, anything. There's no, I'm trying to think of a job where the full, where the primary thing is only intelligence, only intelligence. I'm sure there's some laboratory somewhere or some computer programming thing where basically the smartest person is the person that we want in that job. Yeah. But as soon as that person is in charge of people, anyone else, or as soon as there's some level of creativity or problem solving, because there's so, you just, what you want is a person that composite has a bunch of different skills.

I mean, you would think for being a pilot, there's got to be, you know, that, that like the spatial, like when I took the officer candidate test and you've got to do the spatial recognition where how far away is this or is this aircraft or is this bird coming to you or going away from you. You've got to tell from looking at it. Hey, obviously someone could be really, really smart and suck at that test. Right. Not to mention eyesight, not to mention reaction time, like all those different things. And then it's the same thing with leadership. You can have someone that's super articulate. There's really articulate people that aren't really that smart.

I mean, I served with some people like that. They're really articulate. They can put a word together. What do people call them? You know, that's a skill set that like a salesperson. There's really good salespeople. They're not the smartest people in the world, but they're incredible at their incredible conversationalists.

Yeah. Right. But you wouldn't want to put them into a situation where they've got to stand up and talk in front of people if they don't have that skill. So just because someone is smart, that's only like one quarter of the of the of the math we got to do here. Totally. And when you're thinking about it from a leadership standpoint and the recognition that that leadership requires a whole bunch of different things, not just being smart and taking a time. test or being good at communicating. It's the recognition that it requires so many different things.

None of these profiles that he just revealed are a big shock to me. I'm like, yep, yep, yep, those all make sense. Seals, pilots, everyone in between. And yeah, in aviation, is there a couple things that might incline you down that path? Like, if you can naturally get a sense, if they show you a diagram of an airplane, descending, turning, and slow, and then you have to match it up that some people's brains maybe, oh, I can't see that as well as somebody else. Yeah, I can see that.

And that's going to account for a small part of it that might be good to know. But that by itself is, it's going to have almost no influence in the long-term success of this person in his career in the military that I could identify relatively early on of what the spatial orientation of an airplane was in relation to the ground. Do you want that? Yeah, that's a good idea. I don't want someone who gets confused by that. You don't want someone that's totally lost. Right. I mean, even on that test, all you have to do is pass it.

Right. That's all you have to do. And then, you know, if you and I were in the same thing and I was a little bit worse, I would study it more or I figured out more. Or I just, after whatever, two months of looking at that stuff, we're the same. Yes. Because I figured out how to figure it out. Yeah. That's right.

Check. Fast forward a little bit. Fortunately, there are some who have seen the threat to originality and intelligent thinking. The Duke of Edinburgh felt it necessary to say, finally, as you grow older, Try not to be afraid of new ideas. New or original ideas can be bad as well as good. But whereas an intelligent man with an open mind can demolish a bad idea by reasoned argument, those who allow their brains to atrophy,

resort to meaningless catchphrases, to derision, and finally to anger in the face of anything new. This is Prince Philip. Duke of Edinburgh recently died. I don't know if you saw his funeral, but if you have any, any warm place in your heart for the Brits, which I certainly do. They, they, his, his hearse was a land rover, a military land rover that he had had some hand in designing. It was some sort of special transport and that's what they, that's what they, uh, carried his body in. But here he is, this is a, this is just an incredible thing to think about.

And it's an incredible thing to be on watch for. You know, I said at the muster, I said, aim this book at yourself. And then I said, aim these things at yourself. When you hear stuff like this, when I hear stuff like this, I aim it at myself. Don't be afraid of new ideas. And this is what an intelligent man with an open mind can demolish a bad idea by reasoned argument. And what I like about that is, I always say to myself, Dave, if you come to me with a plan

or you come to me with an idea and I can't convince you that your plan isn't good or that there's a hole in it, there's a problem. Then there's something going on here. Maybe it's my ego. Maybe it's my emotions. Maybe I just don't like you. But if I can't explain to you why your plan isn't good. And the only thing I can finally say is, you know what?

We're doing it my way. The only way I can overcome you is by, you know, well, a catchphrase, which would be like, we've always done it this way. Or we need to stick with the plan, right? Those are just catchphrases, and that's what I'm going to say. Or I just say, well, you know, Dave's always got his own freaking. Dave's always on his own freaking program. Like, I can ridicule you or I can just get mad.

That's what we see. Yeah, that third level, too. I forgot what the middle one was when he talked about the meaningless catchphrase, and then the third one, like, resorting to anger. Yeah. You know, it's basically just degrees of your ego of just being out of control. Yeah. Because the first one's like, I'm just going to try to be dismissive of you by a catchphrase of

Jocko talks to me about an idea and I say something like, you know, you know, here comes the new guy with a bread idea, you know, like, just trying to kind of push you off. And then if you persist and we kind of get to the second level and I've got some other response that isn't working. The end, all I've got left is I get mad at you. And if I outrank you, like the military, this whole military experiment, then I automatically win. I automatically win because I'll just shut you up because I'm now mad and I'm just going to resort to what I got is, hey, why don't you just go back to your desk and let me let me do some, let me, let me, let me, let me, let me, let me, Let me lead for a little while here since I'm in charge. And then you just kind of walk away and that's the end of it.

What you want to do is you want to be the Jeff Glover of ideas. So Jeff Glover will go out on the mat with you. And he will let you put him in any position because he doesn't care. He knows Jiu-Jitsu and he can get out of it. And if he doesn't get out of it, he's so, if you tap him out, he's like, oh, yeah, that was good. Way to finish. Because, you know, you started with the rear naked choke and you were able to finish it,

Jocko, good job, you know. Like, he doesn't care. His ego is not involved at all. and he doesn't care. And most of the time, by the way, he gets out because he knows the truth. So that's why I try and be when someone confronts me with an idea, I'm stoked. Oh, you seem to got me off balance. Awesome.

Either I can recover myself because I have good information or a better perspective and we can discuss it logically and I can say, oh yeah, and I can point it out to you. Or you caught me off balance because I'm wrong. And I had a hole in my game and it didn't make any sense. So I'm actually happy about that. Open your mind. Fast forward to lit. This inbreeding of the uneducated, however, was resisted by the later Massey committee,

who, depressed by what they found, considered that, one, the general education of cadets should be continued. Two, few young officers showed any capacity for command. This was an assessment of what they were doing. Three, there was too much drill, too much rigid discipline, and too much cramming for marks. Number four, the instructors were mediocre and selected for prowess at games and smartness rather than for their knowledge of the subject they had to teach or their qualifications as teachers. Much the same, and again, this was an assessment, sorry, I skipped it, but this was an assessment that got done of how they were training the military, the army officers.

And it says much the same picture has been painted of Britannia, forerunner of the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth, again, the emphasis was on blind obedience, sport and ceremonial, with scant regard to intellectual pursuits and little pride in knowing one's job. You know what's funny? As soon as you say something,

like there's too much drill, as soon as you say, you know, if you're, maybe you're thinking, hey, man, we're spending a lot of time just doing this like stupid drill stuff. There's someone that's like, oh, you don't understand the discipline.

The people, And that's what this whole, actually that's what this whole book is about. This whole book is about the people that when you threaten the norm and you threaten the hierarchy, you threaten the things that provide them with their security, which is rigid discipline. When you threaten those things, they get mad and they attack. Yeah, they get mad. You started this whole part and you used a word and I think you pulled it from the book twice and then I think you said it once and I wrote it down was all this is a feature of,

of the system. Like all of this is a feature. And he, I think he was using it initially in this part of, and if I'm, I'm just trying to paraphrase from what you said was, hey, listen, you know, the bell curve has kind of exists everywhere, but there is something a little unique about those that sort of make it to this level of senior leadership.

We're talking about generals and admirals or, you know, lords or whatever, but there's something a little different about the ones that make it up to that level and how it isn't quite just the same bell curve everybody else where you got some smart people, some middle of the road folks, maybe some other folks. And what I've been trying to think in my mind about what that is is kind of what you described is what's unique about those people, those people have figured out how to navigate the system,

this thing that we're all living in because when you join the military, I don't know how smart you are or dumb you. I don't care who or what you are, what rank, what service, or where you came from. At the beginning, you're just trying to figure out how the system works. And if you figure I go, oh, this class that I'm in that Jock was in charge of, at the end, I get my choice of assignment strictly based on my GPA. Oh, okay. Guess what a lot of folks are going to do that figure that out. I'm going to get, I'm just going to worry about the, the great, oh,

Jocko's got this thing for drill. It's this thing. Cool. And so when you say, hey, we're going to go drill and be like, yeah, let's go do some more drill. Or, hey, Dave, you got some free time. What do you want to do? I think, hey, boss, you know what we should do? We should go drill.

And all of a sudden, I kind of start maneuvering my way through the system to appeal to what I know is what you want. And I kind of wrote down some of the words of things that are appealing. Brute force is appealing. It sounds cool. You know what doesn't sound cool? Deception. Like, I'm going to take an indirect approach. That doesn't sound cool.

Caring about people doesn't sound cool. Being nice, doesn't sound cool. Being an intellectual for the military. No, that doesn't, you know, blowing things up sounds cool. Being an intellectual doesn't. And if I can figure out early on what is going to appeal to you, whoever my bosses or that school is or the intent is. Or the system.

And that's what you're right now. This is about the Belker is different at the top because they figured out how to navigate the system, what the system wants. And what the system wants is whoever's in charge, that thing that appeals to them, which is things like, what would you rather have? Someone who, um, a pragmatic thinker is. who's willing to give up on its plan and go in a different direction or someone who never gives up.

You know, how many times are we to talk about the direct approach and not forget the idea that that sounds appealing? It sounds right. I'm just going to come at him and tell him the truth. I suppose I'm going to play the long game. I'm going to think strategically. I'm going to keep my ego in check. I'm going to consider that I might be wrong.

And I'm going to move slowly in this direction. until we come to the logical conclusion, or I'm just gonna attack this target and run it over. And the ones that figure out the system and have it navigate that, it makes sense that at the top, they actually is a different bell curve of people than those of us at the beginning,

who actually some of us don't figure out to navigate that system. Yeah, yeah, and well, I don't know if I necessarily fully agree with you, because I think that the system, the system, but you're going to, agree with me I say this anyways but look at that that system there's people that

that learn how to figure out the system because they lack the ability to actually transit through the system on their own merit right so that's one group of people there's another group of people that travel transit through the system and promote through the system because they're good and as we mentioned at the beginning this you and I both worked for incredible officers at all levels incredible senior enlisted at all levels and some of those the people that were awesome, they made it through the system. The system worked. They didn't have to play a game. They didn't have to manipulate. They did what they knew they should do and they

went up through the system and they were great. But there's another group of people. That's a group of people you're talking about that they don't have the capability, but they figure out, you know what? Admiral McGuire, we were talking one day and he said, he said, you know, I think he had gone over to see some, the seals secure or the bud students secure from hell week and he came back i didn't go with him for whatever reason he came back he says you know it if hell week hell week won't proves one thing like you're you're you're you're pretty tough you know because he sees these guys after six days of freaking you know being awake and doing physical stuff he goes yeah proves one thing you're pretty tough and i actually said back to him i said you know there's a group of people that also go go

through hell week and make it through hell week and what it proves is that that they figured out how to get through it. Because there's things you can do in Hell Week. And it's actually a little different now. When I went through Hell Week, you just, if you didn't carry the head, if you didn't put your head under the freaking boat, I know this doesn't sound like that big of a deal,

but you carry these freaking boats on your head for a week straight. And guys permanently lose some guys, not all guys. Some guys permanently lose their hair on the top of their head because it gets so that freaking boat, It was just grinding on it. And it hurts, hurt your neck, hurt your head.

You have freaking scabs on the top of your head, whatever. But there's some guys that figure out how to, now you can't just take your head off the boat. But you also, you know, maybe you don't quite put as much into it. There's guys that figure out, you know, when you're carrying the boat at a low ready, which is just carrying at your side, which, again, doesn't seem like a big deal until they fill it with sand and water. And also it's, you know, half your back. So you can kind of slack off a little bit. And so there's guys that figure out where to come in on a run

where they're going to get the least amount of attention. They figure out where to be in the chow hall line where no one's going to pay any attention to them. They figure out how to get through. And I would say Hell Week is probably a pretty small amount of those people. But you certainly would see a couple guys and you'd go, man, how does he look fresh right now? Well rested.

Some guys you look, oh, that guy's fresh because he's a badass. Some guys you'd be thinking, how does that dude look fresh right now? What just happened? So, yeah, in any system, there's going to be a way to maneuver and manipulate through the system where if you don't have the chops to actually get it done, you can still get through it. And yeah, obviously I do agree with that. And I think that's why there is a little bit more of a contrast at the top than there might be elsewhere. when you're looking at the types,

the different types of people. And the contrast to his point usually doesn't reveal itself until you get to this. And he illustrates all these catastrophic things. And you're looking back and you're thinking, how could someone be in that position do the things that they're doing?

And that's really, I think, what you're describing is there's two different types of people that can get to that place. Now, the ones that are doing it, like you said, on their merits, they still have to be doing a good job. You can't not know how to maneuver in the system and be terrible at what you're doing.

doing. But you can find your way to kind of maneuver up that ladder, maneuver inside of that system and be in that category of people that sometimes will all go, oh, well, he's a general, he must be awesome. Well, this is how this person got there, but you, you won't see that. It won't be revealed as to what this person is until he's in one of those situations. And I think that contrast that he's alluding to is like, it's a little bit different there is more stark Because at the very beginning, none of us have figured either of those things out yet. We're still figuring out, hey, what do we need to do? And how does the system work?

And you should blend the two. I want to work inside the system. I don't want to buck against the system and be so resistant to the system that the system gets rid of me. Yeah, well, I was about to say, what about those leaders that are incredible leaders? They're dynamic. They have these great personalities. They have good tactical sense. But they can't play the game at all.

They can't play the game at all. Right. And now they never get promoted. And they have no influence. That's right. I mean, tell me Hackworth didn't play that. Hackworth played the freaking game for a long time. He played the game like massively, massively.

And he loved it. He wasn't even playing the game. He was in the game. He was the freaking player. And he's an example of a guy that he played the system. He got those jobs. He did those things. But he also was highly skilled as a leader.

And there's plenty of people that would have done. And there's plenty of people that did the exact same thing as Hackworth, minus the leadership capability. Yeah. There was a hard job. What would you call it? Hard fill billet, right? Yeah.

In the steel teams, we had the same thing. You get a hard fill billet somewhere. After you do your hard fill billet, they literally will give you any job you want. Well, cool. Hey, I'm not going to promote it on that, but I'm going to jump on that hard fill billet.

Get done with that. They send you overseas unaccompanied for two years. Boom. And you come back. Now, there's some guys that do that because they're freaking good team players. You know what? I don't want someone else to have to do this. You know what?

My kids just left for college. I'm going to be, I don't have anything to worry about for two years. Boom, I'm going to go, take this hard fill bill it, take one for the team. There's some people that do it for that reason. Totally. There's some people do it because they're going, I can get promoted next after this. Get my check in the block. And that piece, when you talk about the leadership, all I'm thinking is he actually cares about the people.

Yeah. He actually cares about the people around him. And so that maneuver to gain the influence is by design to be able to help. People yeah because he knows there's pieces there's features in the system he's got to protect them from yes It's it's all about the intent yes and although You can smell intent the system has a much harder time smelling intent The system has a much harder time smelling intent look they look at Dave Burke and they look at jocco and they both went overseas took a hard fill billet Jock was doing it because he wanted to get promoted Dave was doing it because he had

You know his kids had just left for for a college and And so he felt like it was a good time and he could take the strain off of someone else that might have kids still at home. Yeah. What do they see on the paper? They don't see any of that. They can't see that. They can't see it. Maybe if they knew us, they could smell it.

Yeah. But they don't get close enough on the promotion board. Some people around you know. People around you know for sure. Yeah. Fast forward a little bit. General Robert E. Lee admitted that the greatest mistake of my life was taking a military education. And General Stillwell said, it is common knowledge that an army army army army.

officer has a one-track mind that he is personally interested in stirring up wars so that he can get a promotion and be decorated and that he has an extraordinarily limited education with no appreciation to the finer things in life that's a heavy statement again are there some guys like that absolutely that's not the majority for sure fast forward a little bit more the saddest feature of anti-intellectualism is that it often reflects an actual suppression of the intellectual activity rather than any lack of ability. This is suggested by the rapidity with which so many military men rush into print as soon as they have retired.

This is talking about people writing books. Evidently, there was something waiting to get out. Unfortunately, as Liddell Hart points out, a lifetime of having to curb the expression of original thought culminates so often in there being nothing left to express. So this is talking about, I mean, this guy is writing this book in 1976. So he's talking about guys in World War I, World War II. As soon as they get out of the military, they write these books. A guy like B.H. Liddell Hart, he writes books because he had all this stuff pan up.

And he also got out early because he had so much stuff pen out, pen up inside of his head. This guy's saying a lot of times by that time they get out, there's no freaking creative thought left. There's no new ideas left. Research on the relationship between mental activity and cerebral blood flow. to point that the old belief that the brain like muscle atrophies from prolonged disuse but perhaps this touches upon the real cause of military incompetence age since traditionally promotion is depended upon seniority commanders generals and above have tended to be old and since thinking memory intelligence and special senses

all deteriorate with age then maybe bad generals are just old generals again he's making an argument well maybe these guys are just old maybe that's our problem another contribution to the incompetence tied up with age was the unhelpful tendency to sack forcibly retire or otherwise curtail the promotion of those young officers who unwisely failed to conceal their their lights beneath bushels of conformity so real quick on the getting old part this is something that I was and I think I talked about it on on the academy I heard that interview with Kasparov, the chess player, and the interviewer, actually, I think it was Lex Friedman. Lex asked him, maybe it was Lex.

I think Lex asked him, not in a direct way, but basically could you beat Magnus Carlson, who's right now like this phenom? And Kasparov said no. And part of the answer, which is what I talked about on the academy, was part of the reason is because, Magnus has got to see everything that Kasparov did and study him. It's like a jih Tzu guys now. They're like, you know, you got to, it took you seven years to figure out the 50-50 position. I got to learn that in 20 minutes on YouTube, right? So I can start building off that immediately.

And that's the same thing with Kasparov is that Magnus Carlson has seen all of his moves and everyone else's moves and studied him in books. So he's already building off of a taller platform. But also Kasparov said, I think Kasparov was like 55, 60, something like this. Maybe he'd mean a little bit older. He's like, yeah, well, I'm older now. And that brain ain't working as good. So that, which really surprised me because I didn't understand that.

I thought, hey, you get older, you get smarter. And once you reach a certain point, now you're heading in the other direction. So that's what he's bringing up. And he's saying, hey, could that be part of it? He says, such was the case of major general JFC fault. On December 13th, 1933, Fuller, one of the most intellectually gifted men ever to serve in the British Army was placed on the retired list. This waste of talent resulted from the prejudice aroused by his fully borne out prophecies and the fact that he had dared to criticize those less gifted than him. Now, let's think about that.

We could be mad at the military for kicking him out, but guess what he didn't do? Play the game. He didn't play the game. He's also criticizing people who's probably telling him that they're dumb. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, he didn't play the game properly. So if he would have played the game a little bit and not been a profit, as B.H.

Liddell Hart said, instead had been a leader. Maybe he could have slowly got some senior officer to understand and make it his idea. And all of a sudden, his ideas are getting pushed forward by the seniority. Instead, he gets put on the freaking retired list. Yeah. And this thing that you've mentioned in the past, probably isn't exactly a fit here, but that idea of, hey, if you're so smart, why aren't you winning? You know, like. What a freaking great quote.

Just, yeah, just this idea of, of if you're as smart as you think you are, why can't you figure how to maneuver through this, this labyrinth of chaos that's, you know. Which, by the way, if you're so smart, how hard can it be? How hard it be? Exactly. You haven't figured this out yet. Right. You haven't figured this out yet. That question, which I originally asked myself when I was like an E4 in the SEAL teams,

when I wasn't getting promoted and other guys were, was, hey, wait a second, if you're so smart freaking their Rambo, why aren't you getting promoted? Why aren't you winning? What's wrong with you? Yeah. You idiot. But that's one of my favorite questions to ask people, hey, because they'll be telling me this and this and this and this complaint

and this other complaint and how this is messed up and the other thing's messed up. And it's like, if you were so smart, if you're so freaking smart, why haven't you just maneuvered through the system? Yeah. What's wrong with you? And by the way, Fuller, like they were going to bring him back in and they offered him something and the other guys. I mean, he's just like made it too hard on himself, man.

Smartest, what did they say? One of the most intellectually gifted men ever to serve in the British Army. But he wasn't quite winning, was he? Because he got freaking put on the retired list. And look, maybe there was some situation where they were asking him to do, you know, hey, we don't want to see another people like, but even if that happens, what do you do? You say, okay, cool, how can I rephrase this? How can I adjust my message?

What people can I make allies? If you're so freaking smart, then go win. Fast forward, yet another way in which age determines incompetence is through the voluntary resignation of intelligent young officers. According to Janowitz, a study of U.S. Army lie lieutenants suggest that the brighter ones resign as soon as they have completed their obligatory service while those less well equipped remain. Again, is that all across the board? Absolutely not. And there's freaking incredible officers that are smarter than any civilian out there that stay in the military and they do 20, 30, 40 years for sure. And there's also some guys that are going, you know, I got my paycheck coming in every two weeks, kind of regardless of what I do, mama stick it out.

And there's a little joke in the military too, that at each level you move up that's that there's some truth to it, which is, hey, you got promoted. Yeah, all the good guys got out. Yeah. That's why I got promoted, you know. Hey, Dave, you made major. Yeah, all the best captains left. So the Minko had no choice. So the joke about that is, you know.

There's some truth in that. There's absolutely some truth of, well, I'm glad these two guys bailed because I would have been competing with them. And I don't know if I would have made the cut if they stuck around. Yeah. But they're left with me. So I'm going to get that promotion. Yep.

There's absolutely some level of truth to that. Someone that looks around the military. You know, one of the things that made me, one of the things that had a little bit of a influence on my decision to retire was it's a communist environment right it's a communist environment you you're getting the same promotion rate I mean what did you get advanced early a couple times no no early promotions than ring core so so that that that says sure yeah that there is right so it doesn't matter what you do so So you were, you were an F-18 pilot, you were top gun, you started, you were all these things,

and how much faster do you advance than someone that was, you know, running whatever, freaking supply depot in the middle of nowhere? How much earlier did you get advanced? Zero days. Zero days. Zero days. So I got advanced early one time, which is, which was like, I only know of one other person. I only know of one person that got promoted early twice.

There's probably more, but I know one of the person that got advanced early. He got advanced early twice. And that's Delta Charlie, by the way. Yeah, Delta Charlie. Talk about playing the game. D.C. He was maneuvered. And awesome.

But so, so I'm looking around and look, was I the best guy? Absolutely not. But I looked around. Some guys I said, wait a second. Of all the stuff I've done, I've been going on back-to-back deployments, doing whatever I can do, doing a good job in combat, doing a good job, just doing a good job, right? Look, I wasn't the best, but I wasn't doing bad.

But then I'd look at some other knucklehead that was actually doing bad, who had a bad reputation, some knucklehead that wasn't even in the game. And guess what? He's getting promoted. Oh, I got promoted one year ahead of that way. And by the way, a bunch of other great guys

that I knew are getting promoted the same time as him. I was like, man, that is freaking not right. It wasn't as much of a meritocracy as it should have been, and that bummed me out. It bummed me out. Because I was looking at probably another seven years before I would have been in charge of something again, which is a long time to be waiting to get in charge.

What are you chuckling that out over there, with Charles? No, every time you say that bummed me out for some reason that's always been funny to me. Yeah. Yeah, it did, though. It bummed me out. Bummed out. Sorry, bro.

Dang. This thing's not bummed you out? They do, but that expression is funny. especially when you say it. Check. It's a little bit of a communist system. It's a little bit of a socialist system where if you stay in and you check the boxes,

whether you check those boxes with freaking big, giant checks or you check them with a little nickmark, it doesn't matter. You checked it, you're good, you're good. Notwithstanding these considerations, age is far from being a complete explanation of military incompetence for, There have been plenty of old generals and some remarkably inept young ones. Or sorry, there's been plenty of able old generals and some remarkably inept young ones.

So he's saying, look, even though old people might have a harder time, there's been freaking incredible generals that were super old. And there's been young generals that were idiots. So that argument doesn't really hold. As Vax noted, the generals of 80, generals who were sick of body and even in mind have won important victories. So there you go. age, you can't put all this stuff on age. But let us look at another aspect of what appears to be in intellectual incompetence, the urge to pontificate.

In accordance with the principle that nature abhors a vacuum, ignorance tends to evoke pontification in those that wish to conceal their lack of knowledge or for whom ignorance of the facts means that they feel free to express strongly held beliefs of a contrary nature. This is an interesting one. And it really, if you, you ever seen a movie The Sixth Sense? I know you have echo.

You seen it, Dave? I have. And, you know, when you get to the end, you look back and you see all the things so obvious. This one right here, when I read this, I was like, oh, man, this is good. You look back at your career and you think of all these people

that like to pontificate. And you think, I knew that guy was an idiot. Wouldn't shut up, right? Wouldn't shut up. Wait, what does pontificate? It's talking. Oh, talking. It's carrying on,

and talking, especially things that you don't really know too much. about it's also not a compliment like if somebody like hey what's like working with jaco and I'm like he likes to pontificate a lot that's not it that's not me saying he's a big thinker it's me like the dude likes to hear himself talk he was a lot of time thinking out loud and it's all at the end you look back like that was a complete waste of time so it's not a good thing I'd say maybe you the expression hot air right oh that guy's filled a lot of hot air this is a nice way of saying that guy's filled with a lot of it oh it's not even a nice way of saying as

dame just pointed out you don't say someone hey jaco did a great job pontificating at the muster. You wouldn't say that. There's usually some timing associated with it too. He wants to chime in. Like, we need to go step out. And he's like, hey. And he wants to start talking.

And we're forced to sit here and listen to him. And it's not just what he's saying. It's also the time of which he's saying. And you're just thinking, dude. Okay. I guess we're going to sit here and listen to him talk. Yeah, okay. I always thought it was like kind of thinking and talking.

But in a good way. I thought it was like, hey, let's get to the bottom list. Let's explore it, you know? but maybe okay I get it now so with pontification in a calling where the accuracy of communication may be a matter of life or death the predisposition to pontificate is a dangerous liability by the way we have something called the second law of combat leadership it's simple the subtitle that is simple clear concise communication so pontification is the opposite of that oddly enough Unfortunately, such a predisposition will be strongest in those like headmasters, judges, prison governors, and senior military commanders who for too long have been in a position to lord over their fellow men.

Unfortunately, such a predisposition will also be strongest in authoritarian organizations where the preservation of apparent omniscience by those above may be deemed more. important than the truth. So this is that senior leader that basically no one will tell them to be quiet. And you know it's even worse than that? People sit there with a big smile in their face nodding their heads because you know

oh, jock was talking, oh yes boss, that sounds great, boss, please tell us more. It's all a lie. They're really thinking, shut up, dude. That's what's going on. Yeah. And some of those people are going, oh, If I ever get to that, this is how I'm going to get to that spot. I'm going to do that. I'm going to follow like, that's what I do.

That's how the system rewards me or I can, how I can navigate in that system is, I can do the same thing. It's going to be awesome. I can't wait. People have to listen to me. I can't wait. I know this, because we sit here and talk for hours at a time as our freaking job, not only here, but at Eschlam Front, that's our actual job is to talk to people.

I mean, at Eschlam Front, actually our job a lot is to listen as well. well, but, you know, people might get the impression that, oh, you know, Djok, like at the muster when I'm, guess what, I'm on stage, I'm talking. That's what we're doing. Come to an echelon front meeting, you know, see who's talking. Like, see how much I'm talking, right? It's come to a task unit bruiser meeting. See how much I'm talking.

Come to a SEAL Team 7 echo platoon meeting when I was a platoon commander. Am I the one that's talking the whole time? Absolutely not. So although we talk a lot here, this is not the norm. But the important thing about pontification is that though an intellectual exercise, its origins are emotional. Closely allied to pontification and no less hazardous is cognitive dissidence. Now, just to talk about dissonance, just the word. It means technically what it means is an inharmonious sound.

That's technically what it means. It's sounds that don't match together. So like if you play piano, there's certain keys of the piano, you can hit at the same time and you go, right? Guitar, you can hit certain strings and certainly doesn't sound right. That's because they don't match because they're incongruent.

They're in disagreement. Those noises are in disagreement. So cognitive dissidents means that you have things in your head that don't agree. There's things in your head that don't agree. And it's what people do and how people handle things in their head that don't agree. This is the important part.

Because with any situation that you have, there's going to be different sides to every argument. There's going to be different sides. If we're going to go attack a target, part of your brain should be saying like, okay, this looks like something we can get done. Part of it is saying, okay, looks like there's a rot of risks as well. You've got two different things in your head,

two different incongruent. Fongruent thoughts in your head. They're not the same. So cognitive dissidence means I have two things in my head that don't match. How do you handle it? That's the question. How do you handle it? This uncomfortable mental state arises when a person possesses knowledge or beliefs

which conflict with a decision he has made. So that's going even one step further. I've made a decision and now I'm getting some different information. The following hypothetical situation should make the matter plain. A heavy smoker experiences dissonance because the knowledge that he smokes is inconsistent with the knowledge that smoking causes cancer. Since he finds it impossible to give up cigarettes, he tries to reduce dissidents by concentrating on justifications for smoking and ignoring evidence for its risks.

He may tell himself that the revenue from tobacco helps the government, that it keeps his weight down and that it is a manly sociable habit. At the same time, he may well refrain from reading the latest report on the relationship between smoking and lung cancer. If on the other hand, he cannot avoid being confronted by tiresome statistics, he may well strive to reduce dissonance by telling himself and others that the correlation between smoking and cancer could just as well be taken to signify that people who are going to get cancer anyway tend to smoke in order to ward off the disease.

so you're just telling yourself lies to try and even out that disagreement in your own head since it was first propounded by festinger in 1957 dissonance theory has given rise to a large number of empirical studies through the though the precise nature of the underlying psychological processes is far from clear there are certain conclusions which could have serious implications for military decision making. They may be summarized by saying that, quote, once the decision has been made and the person is committed to a given course of action, the psychological situation changes decisively.

There is less emphasis on objectivity and there is more partiality and bias in the way in which the person views and evaluates the alternatives, end quote. In other words, decision making may well be followed by a person. period of mental activity that could be described as at the very least somewhat one-sided. Yeah. Dude, I would, like I got halfway into that sentence and you were just shaking your head because you know you've seen this happen. Totally.

And he, you know, he, you did that list earlier. And the one that I was coming back to as you're talking about and the hard part about is you can, you can, I know what he's going to say before he's even saying. And now you know what's coming when he's describing this is here's the plan. Jocco's down in the front, sends me a report. Go, hey boss, things are a mess. Things are a mess down here and I'm like, no, they're not. They're not that bad.

They're not that bad. We're fine. We're just going to keep doing this. You're like, hey, listen, it's gotten much worse. And rationalization, all those words. But the willingness to just ignore the truth because it is inconvenient with the conclusion I've already drawn and how quickly I can go. You know what? His feedback is, you know, it's based on what he's seeing.

It's not really, he doesn't know what's going on. It doesn't have the big picture. So we're just going to keep going. Plus, Jacques was kind of emotional. Yeah. Plus, he's,

you know, it just started. He doesn't have that much combat experience. He's getting shot at. Yeah, sure, he's freaking out. But this is,

he doesn't see what I'm trying to do over here. I mean, you just rationalize that shit all day long. All day. All day. You know the, here's another thing you were talking about, like, who do you, like, what is it?

What is the, the cool military leader? What do we think of? Here's one. Would you say, I want to promote this guy who has a lot of self-doubt? Right? We're not,

promoting that guy. But what's interesting is I am so filled with self-doubt that when I come up with a plan and Dave Burke sends a report back from the front line is like, hey, Jock, we got heavy reasons. I'm like, okay, I must have been wrong. I'm missing something. Does this mean I'm not going to freaking push forward? No, it doesn't mean that, but it means I'm actually doing the opposite of this, trying to balance out the dissidents. I'm paying more attention because I think I might be wrong. the irony in that in that truth. The irony is that is how you've described you having a reputation of being so decisive in your time of the teams was based on that that belief that you could be wrong, which is why you've made these incremental decisions.

It didn't overcomit to the end was actually driven by what you just described as you know, you, the term self-doubt doesn't have like this positive, you know, connotation. But it's like, oh, hey, I bet you there's a bunch of things I don't know. So you know what I shouldn't do? Over commit. Which was based on you having a reputation of being decisive, which people can equate to the opposite of self-doubt. I'm so secure in my decision-making process that I know the outcome, and this is the course that we're going on.

It's exactly the opposite of what you're doing, which is the incremental piece and go, hey, I got some feedback. Yeah, boss, here's some feedback. This blew up in our face. We ran into a brick wall. Three vehicles are down and we can't keep going. And you're going to go, oh, we need to do something different right now,

as opposed to, hey, just keep going. We're sticking to the plan. And that's true not only on the battlefield, but it's also true in a conversation be with another human being. It's also true when I say, hey, Dave, what's your plan with this client? Or here's how I think we should approach this client.

I'm not saying this is how we should approach the client. I'm like, hey, I got an idea of what we could do with this client. What do you think? It's having a freaking open mind. It's what it is. And the minute, you know, I said that a while ago, like our mind, people's minds, they're, they're either opening or closing. And we can have some control over that. You can control whether you leave your mind open or whether you let your mind close.

At least I think. Well, let me rephrase that. I think people have the ability to control whether they open their mind, but they don't have as much control over. If you're not conscious about it, your mind just close up. And oftentimes we're looking our cognitive bias is to just close that mind. I don't want to hear what Dave has to say. So I think what we have to do is you have to form a habit of trying to keep your mind open, prying it open. And I had to, okay, this is going back to the muster, you know, went back to that old conversation.

How often do I have to admit that I'm wrong? And, you know, I ask the entire crowd at their muster. How often do you think I have to admit that I'm wrong? And everyone thinks I'm humble and they go all the time, yeah, probably 10 times a day you admit that I'm wrong. And I'm like, no, almost never. I almost never admit that I'm wrong. Why do I almost never admit that I'm wrong? because I never go into a conversation telling everyone that I'm right or even thinking that I'm right.

So therefore, I don't go in the conversation saying, Dave, we need to do this with the client. And then Dave goes, well, actually, I talk to the client. Here's what's going on. Here's what they actually need. And I have to go, damn it, I was wrong. No, inside I say, hey, Dave, here's what I'm thinking? What do you think? Yeah.

That's one example of 100 conversations that I have where I could go in there and try and be right. But instead, I go in there with an open mind instead of a closed mind. It's so counterintuitive to think the connection between never being wrong or rarely having to admit that you're wrong isn't because you're right all the time. It's because you never entrench yourself in a position. And, you know, the saying could be could be said for why you and I, whatever the better word is for argue for disagree. Like how often you and Doc would disagree on a plan? It's like, well, almost never. Like, oh, you must be perfectly.

on a lot on everything. No, I just, I haven't predetermined the next 37 steps that we're going to do. Neither is he. And we'll move and I'll do it his way sometimes. We'll do it. My will get somebody else's input. And none of us are committed to an outcome. And the reason why we're disagree, we don't disagree on what we should do is that neither one of us come in with the conclusion of what we should do. And how counterintuitive that is is the idea that the more committed you are, the less you will, the less you'll admit that you're wrong. And, The exact opposite is true is the reason I have to admit that I'm wrong very often is because I don't walk in thinking that I'm right. Yeah. And actually you and I are very committed to an outcome. We're committed to having the best possible outcome we can have with nothing to do with which outcome or which course. How we get there is like, oh, this is the best possible outcome. Dave came up with a way to make this the best outcome possible outcome. That sounds awesome.

I'm in. We'll do that all day long. Yeah. Fast forward a little bit. By the way, you get the book. I haven't said that yet today. So we're skipping all kinds of stuff, but there's so much information in this book.

Those commanders with weak egos, with overstrong needs for approval, and the most closed minds will be the very ones least able to tolerate the nagging doubts of cognitive dissidents. In other words, it will be the least rational, who are the most likely to reduce dissidents by ignoring,

unpalatable intelligence. So the person who, the person who can't tolerate those doubts will just shut him out, which is a horrible thing. Fast forward a little bit. No better example is this an afforded by Townsend's occupational cuts since the advance up the Tigris was totally unjustified by the facts of which he was fully aware. His dissonance, when disaster struck must have been extreme and to a man of his egotistical nature demanding of instant resolution. So again, in the face of much contrary evidence,

he withdrew into cut. The wiser and possible course of retreating to Basra would have been a greater admission of the lack of justification for his previous decision. By the same token, once inside cut, nothing would budge him because to break out, even to assist those who had been sent to release him, would have emphasized his lack of justification for being there in the first place. In short, an inability to admit one has been in the wrong will be greater, the more wrong one has been. And the more wrong one has been, the more bizarre will be the subsequent attempts to justify the unjustifiable. This is when people, this is when you're looking at people and they just seem like they're

freaking crazy. We can now see the relationship between pontification and cognitive dissidents. Pontification is one of the ways in which people try to resolve their dissidents. or sorry, dissonance. But there is another aspect of decision-making, no less hazardous. It's riskiness. Research has shown that people vary in the degree to which they adjust the riskiness of their decisions

to the realities of the external situations. Individuals who become anxious under conditions of stress or who are prone to be defensive and deny anything that threatens their self-esteem tend to be bad at judging whether the risks they take or the caution they display are justified by the possible outcomes of their decisions. For example, they might well adopt the same degree of caution whether placing a small bet, getting married, or starting a nuclear war.

There is a sad irony about this state of affairs, for it means that those people who are most sensitive to the success or failure of a decision will be the very ones who make the biggest mistakes. Conversely, less anxious individuals will act more rationally because they are able to devote greater attention to the realities with which they are confronted. So when you got people that are nervous about decision making, they're nervous about failing. They're nervous about, oh, I better wait. this. It's like what you see happen in sports, right? Basketball teams up by 10, 12 points,

they're doing good. They go up by 20 points. They start hitting three pointers. There's no pressure anymore. They're just like letting it fly. That's when they do their best. So someone that can go into a situation and say, yep, there's some risks here, but I'm not worried if I look stupid, whatever, I'm doing the best I can. Cool. And then you look at the rational situation. If you're And they're like, oh my God, I'm going to look like such an idiot if I don't get this right. This is going to be horrible. Guess where your focus is. It's not on the reality of the situation.

It's not on rationalizing a good decision. It's just focused on how bad you're going to look if you screw it up. So you make a bad decision. Yeah. So you're more likely to screw it up. It's crazy. One psychologist has said, under stress, men are more likely to act irrationally, to strike out blindly or even to freeze into stupid immobility.

That's what stress does to people. I've seen it. You know, when you see that, I've seen it in, like, acute cases where someone's stressed out in combat, and they kind of lock up, and you've got to kind of shake them out of it. I've also seen it on, if you look at it broadly over a full deployment, and you see people that you, that are usually pretty solid, and they start either getting angry, they start lashing out,

they start making dumb decisions, you're like, hmm, this stress is getting to you, man. That's what's going on. You got to back them off. awful little bit but why should anxious and defensive individuals those who are those who have the most to lose act more irrationally than those less afflicted afflicted by neurosis two reasons have been advanced the first has been well stated by Deutsch some guy I don't know who it is didn't look it up sorry nervousness the need to respond quickly because of the fear one will

lose either the desire or ability to respond enhances the likelihood that a response will be triggered off by an insufficient stimulus and thus makes for instability. You know, it's a freaking good example of that. Someone, you put someone in like a shooter situation with simunition and you're like, all right, go in the house. If they've never done it before and they're super nervous, they're freaking shooting the first person that they see whether or hold a weapon or not, right?

They're going to be quick to respond with fear because they're nervous. And the more you train them to that, the better they'll, get the second reason why a proportion of of people will make irrational decisions whose riskiness is unrelated to reality is because being neurotic they will strive to maintain an image of themselves as either quote bold and daring and quote or quote as careful and judicious decision makers and quote and the urge to sustain their particular conceit will take precedence over the need to behave realistically. So luckily for me, like you were talking Dave about me making small decisions,

luckily I figured that out because I like being a person that's known as decisive, but luckily I figured out I could look and appear and be decisive by making small decisions. So I didn't have to try and figure out everything at once, which is what I recommend to people do. He closes out this chapter saying since decision making is by definition a cognitive process, then obviously the oldest theory is in one sense of truism. But it by no means follows that the simple hypothesis of low intelligence fits the bill. Again, this whole chapter is about intelligence, so he's saying, listen, decision making is about how fast you can think and your cognitive capability, but it doesn't cover everything.

On the contrary, by looking further into the nature of decision-making process, we are compelled to entertain another rather different possibility, namely that the appellate. Intellectual failings of some military commanders are due not to lack of intelligence, but to their feelings. Cognitive dissonance, pontification, denial, risk-taking, and anti-intellectualism are all, in reality, more concerned with emotion than with intelligence, which, I mean, it's another thing we say at the muster. Who here has made a great decision when they were super,

emotional. No one raises their hand. That's why we teach people to detach from their emotions so that you can make good decisions. Do you detach 100%? No, but you need to detach so that they're not driving your decision-making process. The susceptibility to cognitive dissonance, the tendency to pontificate and the inability to adjust the riskiness of decisions to the real situation are a product of such neurotic disabilities as extreme anxiety under stress, low self-esteem, nervousness, the need for approval and general defensiveness. These, it seems, over and above his level of intelligence are the factors which interfere with what a man decides to do in a given situation.

I think he made a pretty good case for that. Not about how smart you are. Smart plays some role. I mean, obviously if you're an idiot, you can make a bunch of bad decisions. But that's not the major number. in this equation. Most people are making bad decisions based on their emotions, based on their feelings, based on their psychology.

And this whole thing ties into Dave, this is what you were getting at earlier. You got about a whole chapter here talking about what you, what you started, the road you started to go down. This chapter is called military organizations. And it says military organizations make for military incompetence in two ways directly by forcing their members to act in a fashion that is not always conducive

to military success and indirectly by attracting selecting and promoting a minority of people with particular defects of intellect and personality. So this is what you were talking about. How the system will set up to promote, and this is going one step further. You talked about how the system can promote people, they can figure out how their way to get through it. It also can attract people like this. People that are looking for a system that they can figure out how to get through. The root cause of all this is that since men are not by nature all that well equipped for aggression on a grand scale,

They have had to develop a complex of rules, conventions, and ways of thinking, which in the course of time, ossify into outmoded tradition, curious ritual, inappropriate dogma, and that bane of some military organizations irrelevant bullshit, which we had a conversation on here about chicken shit, chicken shit and bullshit. I think chicken shit is the term that's used nowadays. He's using the term bullshit. And he actually, throughout this calls it bull. I think I'm going to call it bullshit most of the time. He calls it bullshit here. But this idea of bullshit, chicken shit stuff that you're polishing your belt buckle, you're polishing your boots, you're doing all these things. These things in the military, they either called chicken shit or bullshit.

But those things are a huge part of some military organizations. And as we're going to find, there's some reasons for it, but there's also when it gets out of hand. Fast forward a little bit. Broadly speaking, human activities may be regarded as falling into one or the other of two main groups, those which are directly instinctual and those which are not so we all got some things that we instinctively want to do into the first which involves what have been succinctly described as the three Fs feeding fighting and reproduction fall such robust pastimes as pugilism professional pie eating prostitution and soldiering so look we got these three Fs feeding fighting and reproduction

And from that, we get things like boxing. We get things like professional pie eating and chefs and restaurants. We also get prostitution. We also get soldiering. Those are all kind of, you can marry those up from where those came from. Into the second group fall all those other vocations, which, though sometimes subserving the basic drives, do not have as their end product, the original consumatory response. besides this most important difference, the instinctual vocations have three other characteristics which differentiate them from those in the second category.

They may involve unlearned patterns of behavior, are motivated by crude, if powerful, emotions, fear, lust, and rage, and are designed to culminate in an unlearned response of a distinctly physical kind. So those are the three Fs, right? They're you got powerful emotions tied to them fear, lust, and rage. And they, where they get you is something physical. You're eating, you're fighting, or you're reproducing. He goes into prostitution a little bit.

Prostitution is easy because the transformation of an unlearned drive into a money-making career is more a matter of realizing a potential than seriously modifying nature. And he goes into this thing about this guy who interviewed prostitutes and this one prostitute said, I'd been working in a factory for five years before I realized I was sitting on a fortune all the time. I kind of had to throw that quote in there. It goes on down the same path, talking about a professional soldier. The original purpose of introspecies aggression is not destruction but distribution. So why do people fight?

Why do animals fight? Because you got a freaking kid, stay away from you a little bit. You can't get too close to me, not too close to my resources, not too close to my woman. Like, you need to get your own activities going. This is my A.O. This is my area of operations. In lower forms of life, the instinct of aggression is controlled by a language of signs and countersign so that everyone remains spread out with a minimum amount of bloodshed.

Moreover, those animals best equipped to do each other and injury are also those with the most effective controls against so doing. A dog, tactless enough to encroach upon a rival's territory, may become involved in a noisy scuffle, but has only to drop his tail, roll over, and urinate to terminate the attack upon his person. Right. So that's what animals do. And even, you know, going out elk hunting. The elk, they fight hard. And occasionally they do kill each other. But most of the time, they just, hey, man, like, I'm dominant.

You go away. And the guy's like, cool. So that's the way it's supposed to be. you're supposed to be able to sort of surrender, back up, give some space, and that makes sense. So that's the difference. The point that he's trying to bear here is, hey, a prostitute, she's still doing something that just makes sense on an instinctual level, right? Whereas humans, with war, things all of a sudden aren't so instinctual anymore.

Because now, look, if it was in caveman days and you came into my territory, I'd probably beat you up and you'd run away. And I'm not going to waste any energy trying to go catch you. I don't care. You just stay away from me. Well, when we get to war now, it's a lot different. So he goes into that a little bit. Humans, they have made up for a lack of natural weapons by acquiring some far more deadly artificial ones, right? We don't have horns on our head.

We don't have big teeth where we can rip each other apart. Sure, we can choke each other. If we have Jiu-Jitsu, we don't have these things, so we make other weapons, right? Clubs, spears, knives, guns, missiles. Yet other difficulties, and this is where you're going to take everything we just talked about, and now we're going to take it into this military context. And this is something that I have talked about before. I've talked about the difference of decentralized command.

and when you have centralized command. And the fact that when decentralized command started to come to fruition is when you didn't have conscripts anymore. You didn't have, you had people that you could say, all right, here's what we're trying to make happen. Go make it happen. You don't have to say, this is what you need to go, go do, go do it. And if you don't do it, I'm going to shoot you.

That's a different type of discipline. It's imposed discipline versus unit discipline. versus unit discipline. So we're going to get into that a little bit here. Yet other difficulties have been posed by the sheer size of human warring groups. With the transition from small parties of hostile tribesmen to large mercenary armies came problems of motivation and control.

Right? So if it was just the five of us and our clan and we were just event, I didn't need to motivate Echo to do his job. If he didn't do his job, we were all going to get overrun and we're all going to die. So there was no real reason for me to have to impose discipline on you. We just had it. We just, we knew that we had to fight together.

We knew if we got overrun, they were going to come and take our food and take our women, and that was game over for us. So there wasn't any real need to, quote, motivate you. But things are bigger now. Since the history of warfare is largely that of many who, through poverty or the press gang, were forced to take up arms for a cause, which few could even comprehend, the evoking and direction of aggression called for special measures.

So once we have an army where Echo doesn't really quite sure why the hell, he knew when it was our cave, our little area, and we were defending our tribe, he understood that. But once he's like, all of a sudden, he's in a foreign country, and I'm giving him a musket, and I'm saying, okay, dude, we're going to fight. He's kind of thinking, wait a second, I don't even live anywhere near here.

So now we need to come up with some special measures to get Echo to direct his aggression towards the enemy. How do we do that? These included devices to ensure group cohesion, to incite hostility, to enforce obedience, and to suppress mutiny. Because once again, I take Echo on a ship, give him a sword and be like, okay, dude, we're going to go over and fight these people you've never seen before. They're not close to your family. They're not close to your area of operations. And not only do I need to get you to hate them, I need to make sure you don't freaking just turn that sword on me and cut my head off. Because it doesn't make any sense, right?

It doesn't make any sense to echo Charles, who's got his tribe. It doesn't make any sense for you to go to some other place and fight. So how are we going to make that happen? Well, we got to make group cohesion. We got to incite hostility against the enemy. We got to enforce obedience and make sure we don't have a mutiny. They also included means whereby the intentions of leaders could be. translated into a concerted action by followers in short it called for two other

components of militarism firstly a system of rewards and punishment of rank medals battle emblems and prize money that's what someone to dangle in front of you carrot of confidential reports court-martials and the lash there's the stick don't do what to tell you the court-martial you I'm gonna whip you whatever and secondly A system of orders and over learned drills whereby complex patterns of behavior could be set in motion by the briefest of instructions. So I'm actually going to train you. I like how Echo Charles has become my soldier today.

Right. You like that? I'm going to train you. So I got to end up with a pattern of behavior that becomes instilled in you. No less important for a theory of military incompetence is the means whereby militarism is administered and it's continuity insured. Originally, so now we're going to get into this, originally since combat was largely a matter of brute force, we must suppose that the strongest came to the top. In fighting, as in prostitution, vital statistics gained the day, a sort of natural selection according to

the criteria that were essentially physical. But in the course of time, the growing number of personnel involved and improvements in technique required some revision of earlier criteria. A distinction became necessary between organizers and the organized between the brains and the brawn. So now, just the fact that Echo's the biggest, strongest guy, it doesn't necessarily mean that's going to make the difference in the battle because we got a bunch of people. And if I can organize more people against, or if the enemy organizes five people just to fight Echo, Echo is going down. So I need to get some people to support Echo.

Now we got a freaking army. To this end, civil government might have been expected to construct Army. in which the dichotomies in which such dichotomies obtained. One might have expected that officers would have been chosen for their brains and the hierarchy of command based upon merit and professional expertise. So echo you and I, we're on the same tribe. We form an army. We take all the big guys and we're putting you guys in the front lines.

That makes sense, right? Because you're the ones that are going to crush the enemy. We're also going to take our smartest dude and be like, hey, you're really good at organizing people. You've got a loud voice. You come up with good plans. Cool. Dave, you're going to run this battalion over here.

And Dave's like, cool, got it. That's the way we should do it. Dave proved himself, he's smart, right? So that's what we're doing. That's what we think we're doing. That's what makes sense to do. Right? That clearly makes sense.

However, for example, in Britain, civil government did nothing of the kind. By methods of purchase and nomination, the control of the army was given over to men who, with nothing to gain from revolution. would remain the loyal, apolitical supporters of the existing regime. Professional ability, energy, and dedication of the job counted for little. So that's not how they selected.

They didn't say, hey, who's better at decision making? You know, echo, you know what? You're going to be front lines. Dave, you know, you got those quick thoughts. We're putting you in command. What the British do? No. You know what they said?

Who's going to be loyal? Who can pay the most? We'll put you in command. By the way, so check this out. How does that, how does that, how does that work? Dave, you have money to buy a commission. What do you think of the system? What do you think of it?

Yeah, I like this system. You like the system. And you want to, importantly, you want to maintain the system. Yes, absolutely. Echo, you kind of broke, right? Yeah. You don't, you don't really like the system because you haven't been able to succeed in it.

You probably want to change the system. So you know what? I'm not putting you in charge. I'm going to put the guy in charge that's succeeded in the system that wants the status quo. He wants to protect. He's going to fight and he's going to use you to fight to protect what he's already got. Status and money. That's the dynamic.

That's what he means when he says, men who with nothing to gain from revolution would remain loyal. Dave's going to remain loyal. He can pay for this. Yeah. The reason he can pay for this is because he's done all right in the system. How do I benefit from a revolution here? Yeah. I don't want that at all.

No, not at all. So you're willing to, so once I give you a position and I give you authority. Yeah. You can actually use your authority now to maintain the status quo, which is what you want. And by the way, you can also impose your status quo because if you guys go take over another chunk of land, guess who's going to get it? Not Echo.

He fought for it, but Dave's going to get it. And maybe we'll give Dave, let me give Echo a little sliver of, you know, Maybe you get some little bit of gold in your little bit of booty for you, but Dave's going to get the land So we'll keep you a little bit happy, but Dave wants us to succeed and Dave's willing to sacrifice a bunch of you A bunch of echoes for this situation Fast for a little bit the essential nature of militarism should now be clear we see it is an ever-increasing web of rules Restrictions and constraints presided over by an elite one of whose motives was to preserve the status quo.

Exactly what I just said. How do I keep echo in line? Here's the rules. Here's your uniform. Here's what you got to do. If you step out of line, guess what's going to happen? You're getting the lash. You're getting punished.

You're getting no pay. You're getting bread and water. So that's what we set up. But this incompetence is augmented by another factor, namely the characteristics of some of those attracted to the military. Let us examine this hypothesis by modern standards and viewed from the outside the nature of militarism may not seem very attractive, including as it does, a number of attributes which are positively repellent to those who value freedom, egalitarianism, and creative as opposed to destructive ends. So if you think about what the military is, hey, you're going to go, you're going to follow orders, you're going to have to dress the way you get told to dress. You're going to have to cut your hair the way you'd get told to cut your hair.

You're going to wake up when they tell you to wake up. You're going to bed when they tell you to go to bed. Like, if you're a person that values personal freedom, why are you going in there? Why is that happening? If you want to create things in the world, why are you going to the military? You're going to the military to destroy things. There was a guy, Seal Team One, he was a Vietnam guy. And he said, I joined the, he said, when he left Seal Team One, he said, I joined the Navy in 19, whatever it was.

I joined the Navy in 1968 so I could kill people from my country. I was like, yes. But right? That's attracting a certain type of person, not someone that wants to create, someone that wants to destroy. He said, why then do people join the army? And are there some characteristics of the military

which have a positively magnetic attraction for those whose subsequent performance may be deemed incompetent? So who are we bringing in here? He makes a comparison to Alcoholics Anonymous. He says, Alcoholic Anonymous can attract people. An individual with particular problems of a psychological kind may be expected to gravitate towards a group which he recognizes not only as containing fellow sufferers, but also as having developed effective ways of dealing with special needs of its members.

The therapeutic gain from such behavior during the Second World, World War has been noted by Robert Holt. He wrote, it was a common clinical observation during the war that military service was an unusually good environment for men who lacked inner controls. The combination of absolute security, a strong institutional parent substitute on whom one could lean unobtrusively and socially approved outlets for aggression provided a form of social control that allowed impulses to be expressed in acceptable ways. By the way, when you join the SEAL teams, you're joining the SEAL team so you can kill

people. Or at a very minimum, you're joining the SEAL teams knowing that you may have to kill people. If you're going to join the SEAL teams, you're going to go all through that, all that, there's got to be some actual, in my opinion, desire to kill people. That's what you want to do, right? Dave, you didn't go into Marine Corps thinking, hey, I'd like to fly a jet. No, you want to fly a jet, right?

That's what you want to do. This is an acceptable way that you can go fly a jet. Did you want to get in a dog fight? Yes. And what's the outcome of a dog fight? Either win or you lose. And what happens to the loser? Yeah.

The loser dies. The loser dies. So here all these military people are signing up for their aggression to be expressed in an acceptable way. Yeah. Surrounded by people who see it the same way. Yeah. Well, that's the thing. You look at Alcoholics Anonymous and like, well, these other

people deal with. And you look at the military, you're like, well, I kind of want to. Yeah. That sounds like a cool way to go. I also understand why you feel the way you do, why you think the way you do. And that scene that he's set with that, you can, it's so easy to see that connection. So easy to see that connection. Yeah. He says, even a troop of baboons contrives a

of dominance hierarchy where in each male knows its place. It's kind of like the military. It's very nice. Getting there. And you can see when some people in the military, when they're that baboon that gets their spot in the hierarchy and they want to flex it on everybody, oh, you can see those people all day long.

And again, is this everyone in the military? Absolutely not. It's absolutely not. No, but there's a piece of that formalization of that hierarchy. And in the military, I'm sure it's the same way with you, that there is still an unspoken, hierarchy. There's a pecking order that isn't written down.

You know, there's a roster that we don't write on the board and go, okay, you know, jocco's one, echoes two, Dave's three. It doesn't say that, but everybody kind of knows. Oh, yeah, there's definitely, and if it's not pure, there's at least some groups, some catty, like a couple guys here, couple guys here. And everybody knows it. And, but the system can offset that a little bit by creating, well, it utilizes that, that, that deliberate hierarchy,

which means like maybe Dave's like seven kind of sucks. But I do whatever I can do a maneuver and I actually I get promoted or I get a task or I get actually some deliberate hierarchical authority. Right.

And now I can kind of like now you're number one. You can impose that. Yes. Yes. Because hey, hey, we all know where I was but that was unwritten but I'm in charge now. Yeah.

And then the psychology of that power which sort of fixes the problem with the unspoken hierarchy. And the things aren't that, you know, in that, you know, those babboons don't have a chart. They just know. And there's nothing that number seven's going to do to go, well, I got a formal piece over here that sort of allows me to impose my will on you. And, I mean, I've been writing things down self-esteem ego, the 20 different versions of that word that he's used so far in this book, which all comes down to the insecurity,

all those different words that he's using. The military delivers some authority for the, the people that have that, that is kind of undeniable in the system. And again, not everybody, just like you said, this is not everybody, but it is there. It is there. There's nothing worse than when somebody who thinks they should be in charge actually gets in charge. Those people are the worst. The people that sit there and think, you're just, they're just fuming. They're thinking, I should be wrong. I can do such a much better. And that's what their thoughts are.

And when they actually get put in charge, they're a freaking disaster. They're a nightmare. Oh, they become the head baboon. At a human level, armies resemble the authoritarian family group. Just as the ethos of an upper class Victorian family totally forbade any show of aggression by the child toward its parents, but encouraged organized aggression towards contemporaries in such school.

pursuits as boxing and sanctioned bullying so in the army the slightest hint of insubordination i.e. aggression directed towards the superior is severely punished while aggression towards the enemy is encouraged and rewarded got to set that up got to keep it under control from a psychological point of view therefore militarism strives to maintain that paradoxical state of affairs where feeling angry may well be totally split off from aggression one in which a soldier is required to suppress his aggression towards his superiors whom he may loathe while venting it upon a hypothetical enemy towards whom he will may well entertain no hostile feelings this the classic example of this unorthodox behavior occurred on christmas day 1914 when british and german troops joined together

for convivialities in no man's land. This guy's vocabulary is very impressive, by the way. Needless to say, these reprehensible flickerings of humanity were quickly stamped out by the generals on both sides. We all know what happened. The Germans and the Brits were like, we're not fighting anymore. It went and played soccer. And the general's like, no, you will bomb them.

Yeah, Roger that. It is just because the business of a soldier is destruction and violence that need to take general precautions against disorder becomes so pressing. Because you really, you got a bunch of freaking, you're training people to be aggressive. And you've got to somehow make sure they don't point that aggression at you. The aspects in question may be subsumed under the general, if faintly impolite heading of bullshit. So important is this curious phenomenon that it deserves a section to itself. So now we have a chapter that's called bullshit, which I,

already mentioned this is the little stupid things that you're doing so this is covered in this next section this next chapter which is entitled bullshit chicken shit whatever according to Eric Partridge the word was coined by Australian soldiers in 1916 coming from a country whose armed forces have always been relatively free of from this element of militarism they were evidently so struck by the excessive spit and polish of the British army that they felt moved to give it a label. Going a little further back, it is possible that the expression

has its origin in a bull, the false hairpiece worn by women between 1690 and 1770. This would be consistent with the fact that modern dictionaries define bull as, quote, a ludicrous jest, a self-contradictory statement to cheat, empty talk,

absurd fussiness over dress, end quote. Whatever it's, etymological significance, such definitions certainly capture the military nature of bull, one of the most astonishing, apparently irrational, and yet significant aspects of militarism, one which connotes an attitude of mind, a pattern of behavior as and an end product, as implied by the old jingle, quote, if it moves, salute it. If it doesn't move, pick it up. If you can't pick it up, paint it, end quote.

The phenomenon involves ritualistic observance of the dominance, submission, relationships of the military hierarchy, extreme orderliness, and a preoccupation with outward appearances. This is what we call chicken shit. This is why the term painting rocks comes from the Marine Corps, right? I think so. I mean, I've heard that term a thousand times. I can't say that I know for sure, but I think that's right. I can definitely say I have seen way more white painted rocks on.

Marine Corps bases than any other base yes right so does that mean they means that if they'll take rocks and paint them white and like all and it's like bullshit like I bet you Kay dog's painted some rock Kate dog you painted some rocks before Kate dog not as a boy's painted some rocks bro he's painting some rocks so in in the military manifestations of bull range from such minor apparent absurdities as the polishing of the backs of cap badges so what that means echo is you're polishing that's never going to be seen but someone's going to inspect it it can't be seen but you're going to do it the blancoing of trees for a forthcoming general

general's inspection I'd look up blancoing because I didn't know what it was so Blanco was a like a powdered paint that they used to issue so you could camouflage things but eventually of course took it to the extreme and now we want all the trees to be the same color so we're gonna mix this powdered paint which is a military thing and we're going to paint the trees. So they're all going to be whatever, gray. That's the kind of, that's some chicken shit stuff going on right there. Besides its emphasis on appearance and its constraining aspects of bullshit also involves a compulsive concern with cleanliness.

In this respect alone, it may achieve impressive levels of irrationality to make, to make it white webbing equipment might be boiled almost to the point of destruction while the blankets that one sleeps, that the owner sleeps in, stay on, washed for weeks. There are, of course, good arguments for bullshit. So here's some reasons why it exists, some of the positive reasons. It ensures a level of ordiness, orderliness, cleanliness, discipline, personal pride, obedience, and morale, which, so it seems, could not be reached any other means, i.e. by reasoned, as opposed to compulsive behavior. By the same token, it achieves a level of uniformity that makes for solid area and group cohesiveness. So there's some good reasons for it. However, the case against it is also strong. It is time wasting, Excruciatingly boring for all those with more than the most mediocre intellect and a poor substitute for thought

Since it aims to govern behavior by a set of rules and defines a rigid program for different occasions It cannot meet the unanticipated event. So you're getting trained not to think you went do did you go to OCS? Yeah Okay, when I went to Navy OCS. The belt buckles that we got we had to polish the coating off there's a coding that comes on the belt buckles Echo Charles that keeps it shiny no matter what like you can it's gonna keep shiny you actually polish that off yeah so that it can get eroded so that you have to polish it more that's some chicken shit some bullshit right there homes we had um anadized and non-anadized anadize is the permanent thing that like is always brass or shiny yeah you are not a lot of you have anodized gear.

So all of your stuff, your belt buckles, everything, none of it could be anodized. That was reserved for like some other people. And so you had to buy the unanodized and then shine it to make it look like it was. Yes. Good use of time. Wait, we had to manually unanodized.

The freaking belt buckles. A next level. You could see it slowly coming off. You'd be sitting there with a cotton swab and just hours. See, even echo is confused by this. That's kind of nonsense. It's total nonsense. It's called brasso.

Oh, brasso. Yeah, you definitely use brasso. That's what got it off. Right. Like any compulsive symptom, bullshit, and its cousins, ritual, dogma, and superstition have put themselves so far beyond reason, thought that they can, that they create resistance to change and the acceptance of new ideas. Take military drill. This starts as a skill adapted to a reality situation, right? We used to have to do close order drill for combat.

It develops into a rigid pattern of behavior by. becoming automatic takes the load off of memory so you drill that and we still do this today you do you don't call it military drill but when you're doing immediate action drills with your weapon you're learning how to wrap tack and bang you're learning how to solve problems without having to think about them takes the load off the memory once learned it is it is directed by processes of which we are scarcely conscious and which leave the limited channel capacity of conscious experience mercifully free to deal with other more pressing events that's why you can reload your weapon without having to think about it and that way you can figure out where I'm going to maneuver my element to us next that's

drill that's good it is drill in such a sense which ensures that most motorists let off the handbrake before engaging the clutch and that most speakers construct their sentences according to the rules of language right we don't have to think about that military drill started in this way the devices which could eventually weld together a group of uneducated peasants into a single corporate machine that did what it was told this was all good except for one thing ritualization implying the tendency to transform means to an end thus the battle drill of one error becomes the ceremonial drill of another what started as a functionally useful maneuver becomes a highly stereotyped pattern of movements on the barrack square in itself this may no be bad this may be no bad thing so this is where these things come from

that's where they came from when you see the people doing the close order drill like the marine Core silent drill team, it used to have a purpose. And it's not a bad thing necessarily. Ceremonial. Ceremonial can be pleasing to the eye, an adeline for taxpayers, and even on occasions a device for raising charitable funds. Dude, you're talking about the Blue Angels. 100%.

I mean, yeah. And I mean that in like you described in a good way. Right, right. It's a good way. And it's based on at one point, hey, we're going to fly together. My wingman's going to be a, you know, whatever. very close to me. Yep.

But now we're going to take, what is there seven of them flying? Six? Now we're going to take six aircraft. We're three inches from each other and it's taken to the extreme. And it has some benefits.

Going to recruit people. It's going to be the taxpayers can see that we've got something and we can raise money. So it's a positive thing. But unfortunately, ceremonial drill like other forms of bullshit, is addictive.

And by being so usurps the time and energy which should be devoted to other more adaptive pastimes it then becomes a substitute for doing something else as when the conservative element in the brigade of guards resisted the adopting of new battle drill because it would interfere with their existing ceremonial procedures. So now we're starting to say, hey, we can't do that because that's not how we do our ceremonial stuff. Fast forward a little bit. As a factor in fighting efficiency, Bull has also been unhelpful in the Navy. If we assume that one of the main purposes of a Navy is to defeat the enemy, and that is, in the past anyway, achieved by shellfire, it might be supposed that much time would have been spent on practicing gunnery.

But in the British Navy, in the years before the First World War, ship commanders were actively discouraged from gunnery practice because the smoke might mark the paintwork and soil the gleaming decks. The price for this was paid at Jutland. Did you when did you came in the Marine Corps in what? 1994 Commission 94. Commission 94 did you start your camis? Yeah. I got into the era of starch. I started before we we obviously don't do that anymore.

I go back in the memory banks. Yes. Yes. Totally. We starched our freaking camis in the SEAL teams for almost my entire career. You had a pair of starched camis. Yes. And I remember when the Marine Corps at one point they stopped starching

I was like, they are so freaking squared away. Yes. And I remember that time. I mean, you had your set of starched inspection ready camis, and when you brought them in, they would ask you the level of starch that you want. Yes. And you'd say galactic.

Yeah, galactic. I don't want to be able to move. I want this to be body armor. I had starch camis that would stop a freaking 7, six, two by 39. I forgot about that when you said it, because we went away from it, you know, sort of pre-war. Right.

It was pre-war. Yeah, so I was fortunate enough. That's even more impressive. I could see him doing it after September 11th, maybe two years later, be like, all right, we got to freaking stop these. No, you actually did it before the war started, which shows you somebody, this is why we know we have some good officers out there. Right.

Because somebody looked in and said, wait, why am I seeing this freaking Lance Corporal over here this starch set of camis? And not to like overdo it on this, but that piece you said is actually really important. And using that example is a good example, because the new camis the Marine Corps got not only were they not starch, they were designed to be washed and not even ironed. Yep.

which was somebody going, hey, ironing your camis is dumb. And it takes a long time. And we're going down the path and we're going to start measuring Marines based on how well they iron their camis, which is a skill that I don't care about. Yes. And so it wasn't just no more starches. You could take them out of the wash and slap them out and put them on. And they weren't wrinkled.

They didn't look like crap. And it is an example of what you just described. It was like there are actually some good people going, this is stupid. This is chicken shit. And we're not doing this. Yes, that is outstanding. Awesome. Somebody that needs to be a chicken shit review board.

If I was benevolent dictator of America, I would have a chicken shit review board for each branch of the service. And then I'd have a chief chicken shit review board officer who would be like a Mustang freaking UDT guy from NOM. Also, when I came in, the Marine Corps, there was no name tags. Were you in that era? I was. Yeah. So you were just, you were just staff sergeant. What was your name?

My name is Staff Sergeant. You can just call me Staff Sergeant. That was freaking outstanding. That was pretty cool. Fast forward a little bit. Now that we've touched upon some of the more obvious manifestations of the phenomenon, let us examine its deeper causes and relevance to the central thesis of this book. Okay, so where's this check and check come from?

For a start, it seems to be a natural product of authoritarian hierarchical structure organizations. Secondly, though it's outward and visible signs are manifold, they have three common denominators the first is constraint we're trying to constrain people the second is deception which sounds a little bit weird and the third is substitution for thought the deception part is like oh we can have you doing this instead of doing something else the constraint is we're going to control you in the substitution for thought is we don't want you thinking fast forward a little bit here perhaps the single most important feature of bull is its capacity to allay anxiety so and oh i'm just going to get into it at a conscious rational level

orderliness cleanliness punctuality and discipline clearly make for efficiency the knowledge that one belongs to an organization which puts a premium on these laudable traits that one's rifle will fire and there is a key for the bully beef tin obviously makes for confidence so these are really positive things about about this level of discipline. At a conscious rational level, therefore, even those aspects of bull, which reflect the grossest exaggeration of these traits, must seem like steps in the right direction. This confidence, of course, may be displaced, that a commander insists upon meticulous attention to detail down to the last shining button is no guarantee that his

strategic thinking is anything other than pure rile. Indeed, he could well be unwittingly substituting a lesser for a more important area of generalship. That's the substituting part. Look, as we were saying earlier, Dave, I might not be the sharpest tool in the shed, but if I can polish this belt buckle and I can put on this uniform and I can get my platoon to do all that correctly, I'm going to look good. Nevertheless, there are good grounds for believing that those situations in which bullshit flourishes are ones in which it reduces anxiety because orderliness is fairly vital to survival. Again, the imposed uniformity, which is part and parcel of the bullshit, obviously makes

for group cohesiveness and that we're all in it together feeling which combats fear. We must suppose, too, that the heightened conformity, which it imposes will, like other forms of perceived conformity encourage people through a diffusion of responsibility to perform acts which they might otherwise avoid. So we've built a team and we've used this to build a team, which is okay. I have a common bond with people that went through OCS that we sat around in policies. It's a real thing. Yet another useful feature of bullshit and so it has been said is its role as a distractor and

time filler according to this theory a mind preoccupied with buttons and toe caps has little room for gloomy forebodings. The point is well made by A.B. Campbell when writing of naval customs, quote, it is the guiding principle of naval service that the ship's company should be constantly employed, and this is the reason, apart from the necessity for scrupulous cleanliness, why there is so much scrubbing of decks and polishing of bright work. This is making people have dumb shit to do, because we want the troops to be, troops to be busy. In the same context, this writer compares naval and civilian routine. There's a reason I read this whole section. It is safe to say that there are many jobs, many short job routine routines which destroy initiative. This also applies to many factory workers, but is not so in the Navy.

A routine job builds up a bluejacket's character as to why, end quote, as to why the naval and civilian characters should require such dramatically different treatments. Campbell refers to the moments of danger which occur for the former but not the later. ladder. This begs, of course, several questions. So he's saying, this writer is saying that in the Navy, all this bullshit work builds character. But in the civilian world, they don't need it. They don't need it. And it hurts their initiative. The reason that it's okay is because in the Navy, you've got to face all these threats, danger. And he says it confuses loss of initiative and blind obedience with the building of character and makes the unwarranted assumption that naval ratings face greater danger than many civilians, including merchant seamen, steeple jacks, racing motorists,

mountain climbers, single-handed yachtmen, coal miners, matadors, not one of whom has to fortify his character by polishing grass or scrubbing wood. It would perhaps be truer to say that since the imposing of bull upon troops serves to reduce initiative, it will thereby increase. the feeling of dependency which they have toward their superiors this in turn will increase their obedience and loyalty so we're getting a little brainwashing going on you do what I tell you to do you do it over and over again you become dependent on me telling you what to do and that's what I want I don't want to have any initiative I don't want you thinking for yourself I just want you doing what I tell you to do

that's why when I am a tyrannical leader or author authoritarian leader I'm super concerned about your freaking buttons. Finally, at a conscious, rational level, there are aspects of bull which may well help combat social anxieties in military men. Gorgeous uniforms, martial music, prancing horses, and even being saluted are obviously balm to tender egos. And by promoting soldierly pride, do much to offset the hostility and ridicule to which the military are from time to dime subjected to by those in other walks of life. but there's another less obvious reason for bull namely that it serves to reduce deeper seated feelings of anxiety which may well have their origins in events unrelated to here and now of which

the subject remains blissfully unaware and this is where he starts getting a little psychological it's a psychological reference there that we have things in our subconscious that make us ask a certain way and one of the things he's saying is people that people that like things to be super orderly super or orderly, they don't like change, they don't like when bad things happen, they don't like when things that you can't control.

They don't like those things. And we're going to get to this, but what kind of person do you want in the military? Someone that can't handle change and unexpected things, this is the wrong person. So if you're a person that looks at the military and goes, damn, I want a uniform,

I can just wear what they tell me to wear, I can polish it, and nothing changes, and that's what I want. That's great. On the parade field, it sucks in combat. The most extreme examples of this phenomenon occur in obsessive, compulsive, of neurosis, a condition which the patient feels compelled to follow a pattern of ritualistic

thoughts and acts, that these often include such bizarre symptoms as compulsive handwashing. This is OCD, a preoccupation with timing and counting, recurrent ruminative ideas, stereotyped verbal utterings, and always standing with one toes absolutely in line, has obvious significance for more military versions of the malaise. You remember a while ago was talking about the degrees of insane, right? Everyone's insane because everyone's reality is a little bit different. Well, everyone has different degrees of how OCD they are. And everyone has some level.

Maybe some people are not, you know, 0.01, but you've got a spectrum. And the case here is that if you look at the military and you see people that are all uniform and you see that everything's clean, you look at that as a type of environment I might want to go into because I'm kind of like that. And that's how you end up with people in this zone. What do you got? I wrote it down. I was like, this guy is such good.

I here, he called it balm to the tender ego. Like, it's such a great, it's such great medicine for that. Like, oh, buttons are shiny. Yes. Boots are lined up on the line perfectly. Height order. Everything is how I want it. And that, that is such good medicine for me, you know, for my tendencies where they came from.

And just like you said is, and I made the reference of the Blue Angels from a, from a, they're literally called the flight demonstration team. But if you had the mindset that this is a reflection of combat, if this is a reflection of the challenges you're going to face in the real world, I mean, the disconnect there seems like it'd be so obvious. But all those stories that he's telling in the first three sections that we did of this with those people going, oh, my, we close order drill, we have the best close order drill platoon. we're going to be the best platoon in combat. Dude. Yeah. It's the, I wish that the disconnect was talking about something else,

but the end state of all this is real people die at the end of all these stories, which is the worst part about it. And then the ultimate manifestation of that is, is World War I of like, we're going to get online, just like we did on the parade deck. We're literally going to get in a line and move in a line.

It's crazy. I guess insane maybe is a better word. Yeah. Um, yeah, speaking of the degrees of which your OCD, he says, uh, such symptoms are not, of course, confined to the chronic sick. So you don't necessarily have to have some big issue. Milder forms may well occur in normal population during times of stress. Beed counting, foot tapping and the mouthing of dogma, like the compulsion to make things clean and tidy during periods of menstruation, well-known palliatives for the stressed psyche. So this is something that you can see people do. And when they're stressed, they'll say the Lord's Prayer or whatever, except for Rose, thug Rose. Remember when she fought for the first time against that Chinese girl, what's her name? If you know it.

And the, oh no, it was against Johanna. It was against Johanna. And so Johanna, Dave was like just on a tear, destroying everyone. And she had this super hostile, aggressive attitude just, you know, getting people's faces. that she'd been crushing people and she fought thug rose and they squared off and the face off and Johanna's getting all crazy

making their mean face and everything and thug rose is just straight normal face just saying the Lord's prayer freaky look thug rose um he says

let us not beat around the bush at the risk of offending those with delicate susceptibilities or those or who themselves have problems in these areas. It must be said that they involve four matters of primary importance in every human life, sex, elimination, eating, and death. These are things that cause us concern. The greatest anxieties concern death and unconstrained disorder.

Since the two are inexorably related, a defense against one is a defense against the other. Also, this is perhaps the crux of the origins of bullshit. So we're afraid to die. death is a form of disorder, so we want to get everything in order. Let us approach this from another standpoint. Whatever its particular form of bullshit results in a state of affairs, which is opposed to what many people would regard as a primary source of delight, the natural diversity of nature.

Towards such diversity, it is implacably hostile. It is no exaggeration to say that this aspect of militarism is dedicated to the ironing out of different is the efficiency with which it destroys variety and poses uniformity is matched only by its demand for conformity. So we are going against nature when you're making everything the same. And nature's death is part of nature. This is against uniqueness. Uniqueness has market value. Not for nothing does current advertising for the, quote, best car in the world make only one specific claim that no two roles Royces are alike.

So there's, we're devaluing uniqueness. But Bull inverts these values. It worships homogeneity and frowns on deviance, whether it's toecaps, buttons, or dressing by the left, hair length, kit inspection, or marching feet. The quintessence of perfection resides in conformity to a regulation pattern. This conformity is the product of constraint. It seems that since Bull is primarily concerned with substituting pattern for randomness,

It evidently reduces anxiety by the reduction of uncertainty. So there's a whole idea psychologically that we just want to make things more certain, less random. How do we do that? Well, we just make everything the same. If I'm a person that has anxiety and fear of the unknown, what am I going to do? I'm going to start trying to make everything the same. That's cool if you're on the parade field. That type of personality is actually awesome if you're on the parade field.

That type of personality that doesn't want anything to be shocking is a nightmare on the battlefield. Anyone who doubts these soothing effects of bull has only to consider two other situations of frightening uncertainty, marriage and death. Few who have played even a minor role in these events would deny the emotional support that comes from the time-honored ritual of weddings and funerals. I never thought that before. There's a reason you got to do this this way. Here it is. Let's face it, if you didn't set that day on the wedding, if you didn't set that day and have a bunch of people invited

and there wasn't a thing going on, you probably get 50% less weddings because people are freaking out, right? They're like, I'm not going through with this. Two overlapping theories can be invoked. The argument is simple, living organisms are complex patterns which persist for a time within the essential disorder from which they came and to which they will with equal uncertainty return.

So you live. You're nothing. and then these random freaking biological components fall into a pattern for a certain period of time, and then they all break apart in your dead. Which is a really bizarre way of him saying what I just said. I think he gets an F on simplicity of that one. Whether it is a single cell, the integrated systems of the total organism or the external social order, there exist regulators, controls, and constraints whose function it is to preserve the pattern

to keep this from that to maintain purity and separateness. This holds as true for biological process as it does for the construction of an urban sewage system. You have to put controls around things. Indeed, life can be construed as a fight for orderliness in the course of which much behavior, both voluntary and involuntary, both external and internal, is directed to this end. Laws and rules of hygiene, prophylaxis, antibodies, rejection mechanisms, adrenaline secretion, and New Year's resolutions are just some of the devices which aim to stem the perpetual drift toward disorder.

So that's what life is. You have to stay in order to stay alive. And you work out to keep everything in order. You try and eat right to keep everything in order. You make New Year's resolutions to try and keep everything in order. You clean your teeth to try and keep everything in order. It's a fight. It's a fight to keep things in order.

It is, of course, a losing battle. As Oscar Wilde said, good intentions are useless attempts to meddle with the laws of nature. Bull bullshit represents an extreme manifestation of a general and necessary propensity on the part of living systems to resist randomness. This would account for the fact that the satorial. aspects of the syndrome are concerned with removing dirt, with maintaining separateness, with keeping green, green and white, white, with preserving the status quo, keeping hair short, brass shining, rifles clean, and with maintaining uniformity by written order, shouted commands, and other behavioral constraints.

But like waking consciousness in contrast to the dream and normality in contrast to psychosis, bullshit makes its effect by constraint upon the creativity. have thought he just said all that other stuff that I just said for that I'm sorry it took a little longer I should have to skip a little bit more but all that stuff of trying to maintain order is negatively impacting creativity that's what it's doing and the more you focus on that stuff the less creative you're gonna be bullshit may be regarded as an organization's response to the threat of its disintegration right so if you're in the military and you don't keep order there's

actually a threat of your organization falling apart in the military this threat has two sources the external enemy and the aggressive impulses of its own members in either case the greater the threat the greater the constraints which means when you had conscripts that you were trying to get to fight you had to freaking tighten those people up you had to you had to keep it super rigid you get into special operations that's probably the least rigid because everyone volunteered three or four times to get to that point where now, hey, I want to be here. So there's much less constraints.

So that's where we're at. Now, at this point, Dixon, who wrote this book, goes into a bit of, he goes down some Freud activities here, Sigmund Freud, which is, if you don't know anything about Freud, Freud was a cocaine addict, I mean, if you say at least, he was kind of a liar. and a bit of a quack. He basically spewed out all kinds of crazy theories. And a majority of them, I don't know if I'm out of the line saying this,

but I'm pretty sure, I don't think I am, a majority of them were wrong. A majority of them were just bat shit crazy, like just weird theories that he thought up. But so, and I would tell you that Dixon, well, this is again, He wrote this in 1976. This hadn't progressed.

People didn't have as much knowledge. Freud had more, people hadn't understood how what a freaking disaster Freud was. But Freud did, just like a broken clock is right twice a day, Freud did come up with some concepts that are still used. And one of them is just that we have a subconscious. Now, what Freud thought was that our subconscious was basically built before the age of five based on your erogenous zones and all this weird stuff right and that you you just weird just weird stuff uh but you do have a subconscious and it does drive things it's not based on the way you

are potty trained which a lot of this Freud stuff is based on weird um i think that dude had some issues it's some serious issues you know i need to get darrell cooper on we need to do a freaking freud breakdown with darrell cooper and see what's up but the bottom line is this guy's a an addict he's a bit of a quack but some of his some of his theories were correct and then on top of that regardless of where people develop their personality we all know that people have personalities and and you know like one of those personalities is comes to the word comes directly from Freud which is like an anal retentive personality what we all know that type of personality it's a type of personality does it develop from where someone was how someone is potty trained no

Actually, that's not where it develops from. It develops from a whole bunch of different things and a bunch of different people from different backgrounds can end up with that type of personality. So he was wrong about where these things came from, but there are certain personalities that people have and some of these things are reflected. We have to deal with.

And is someone that's anal retentive going to be more apt to look at the military and think to themselves, that looks like my kind of scene? Absolutely. Is someone that's listening to rock and roll and their bed's not made and their, they got crap on their floor? Is that the type of person that's like, I'd really like to join the military? It's not, right?

It's not. Echo Charles, you weren't like, oh, man, you know what? I'm kind of cruising over here. I'm kind of getting up around the crack of 10.30 in the morning. Maybe the military's my route, right? That's funny. You said that because I remember back when my friends were joining the military. And, you know, military is always an option kind of floating.

around when you're young or whatever the one thing that stood out to me was like having to wake up at a certain time It's weird. Yeah I check So you got so he starts focusing on this type of personality I'm gonna fast forward through some of the Freudian Weirdo crap that he talks about a little bit he doesn't go he's only a few pages, but he says It does not need Any vast stretch of the imagination to see more than a passing similarity between these obsessive traits and the practice

of bullshit, but Bull also has a two-pronged purpose to combat dirt and prevent illegitimate outbursts of aggression, aggression that is, towards the superiors, and potentially dangerous towards parent figures, right? So that's one of the reason we impose these things is to keep people in check. At this stage, in the argument, it is necessary to issue a caution. We are not saying that military organizations are hotbeds of obsessional neurosis, nor that those given to bullshit are necessarily manifesting compulsive symptoms. On the contrary, all that we have tried to show is that the anxiety-reducing, aggression-controlling, and tenacious nature of bullshit comes at least partly explicable. So you can get it. You can kind of reason with it. And it's not

all bad and hey I was freaking very I mean I was very into you got to look squared away my boots were always highly polished my uniform was always starched even my freaking cammy uniform that's the way I was I you know task unit bruiser if you here's an interesting dichotomy once you left our base our little compound over there which was originally called shark base and then called camp camp mark Lee if you won off that base you were in a squared away uniform when you were on base I didn't give a shit what you wore you could wear freaking whatever flip flops and a pair of surf shorts I did not care so I wasn't like if you you know I wasn't a militant I wasn't obsessive about it but I understood the value of it in certain

situations um research has shown not only that psychological arousal is decreased by ritual but also that under threatening conditions normal individuals like compulsive behave like compulsive neurotics is when you see people freaking out a little bit And they start doing weird, you know, start focusing on some little thing because they're freaking out about what's going on around them. Since military organizations represent par excellence outlets for and consequently defenses against aggression and disorder, they will tend to attract people who have some difficulty in reconciling these conflicting needs, people who overvalue aggression, order, and obedience, no doubt. This conclusion is supported by the finding that patients suffering from obsessing, Neurosis show improvement during military service. So if you got a little bit of that activity in your brain

You're probably gonna do pretty good then he's got this whole flowchart set up Get the book so you can see it, but you got combat and combat causes a bunch of Anxiety death disorder social disapproval fear of being called a coward fear of your own aggressive impulses that's what combat inflicts on you So how do you deal with that? How do you deal with that? How? How do you deal with that? Well, one way to deal with it is bullshit, like chicken shit. Hey, polish your boots, dogma, ritual, codes of honor. So we put these codes in place to sort of defend against all this anxiety.

What does that result in? Rigidity, conformity, traditionalism, over obedience, aversion to progress. And that all those things attract people with personal anxieties about dirt, aggression, Mis obedience right that's where it gets you and what does that do increases military incompetence Which by the way then increases the combat scenarios that you're in which is a freaking nightmare If the if if if the other thing it does is it Attracts these people Attracts these people that have you know that are they care about appearance promotional prospects

Disapprove approval of those higher in their military hierarchy, they're scared of that. So this is just this horrible cycle that we end up in, where the anxiety creates this freaking bullshit and this ritual and rigidity and conformity and those things actually create you to perform worse in combat, which means all those things get worse and you end up in a horrible cycle.

As opposed to someone that's like, hey, now's not the time for that. We got to go fight. You can actually break out of this cycle. Dude, it's so hard to listen to him, explain this. Even just something as simple as the word dirt. Like, the idea that, and he did it well, like, you get dirt in a rifle, can't you shoot your rifle? That's a problem.

So we need to be able to respond to dirt, but the response of, oh, I want people that don't want dirt. So I'm going to create a scenario by which it repels the dirt. It doesn't allow the dirt into my system is actually not what you want. If you want something, goes, yeah, it's going to get dirty here. And we're not going to react to the dirt by, creating a system that doesn't let the dirt in. We're actually going to create a system when things get dirty.

Like, no worries. We can deal with that. Not by repelling the dirt, but by accepting the fact that it's going to get dirty. And we're going to clean and deal with those things. But just the way he paints that picture of that cycle of the psychology of, do you want someone who doesn't like dirt or someone who does like it to be able to deal with it? And the irony that's inside that is what it attracts is the person that can't handle It, which is the thing that's going to get you killed.

Yes. God, it's hard to listen to. It is. Just to use these words again. So there's a dichotomy of leadership, right? And everything has to be balanced. Right. And yet, when you think of these words, you think of a military stereotype, rigidity, conformity,

traditionalism, obedience. Those are military characteristics. And they are good. They are good. You've got to be, you've got to have some level of rigidity. You've got to want to conform with what's happening. You've got to be into those traditions. You've got to be obedient.

Those are totally awesome military qualities. And you also got to be able to buck all of those qualities in order to survive and in order to truly excel. So even these characteristics that he's talking about, you can see that anyone that has those is going to be attracted to the military in some level. or I'd say most people that have some of those characteristics are going to be attracted to the military. The problem comes when you have a lot of people like that attracted.

And even bigger problem comes is when people are getting promoted based on those things and they're not getting promoted based on creativity. They're not getting promoted based on not being a yes man. They're not getting promoted based on new ideas. None of that is happening. You're getting, oh, you're more obedient. so you're going to get promoted. Hey, if you are going into combat,

do you want to work for someone that has been promoted for 19 years because they've been obedient and rigid and conformed? Hell no. Hell no. And inside the reaction to the dichotomy you just described is the less balanced you are with that reaction. The more extreme your reaction is the worst things are going to be.

And if the system reinforces it and the person goes in that direction, that the inability to react to the dichotomy by being balanced is... Yeah. Look, do we want someone that, you know, will never conform? No, you don't want someone that's never going to conform. Do we want someone that just can't obey? No, we don't want anyone like that.

We're not saying that. But, man, you don't want to go to the extreme or it's going to suck. Yes. All right. One last thing before we close this section out. He says, in other words, this is basically what you and I were just saying, Dave. In other words, those very... characteristics which are demanded by war, the ability to tolerate uncertainty, spontaneity

of thought and action, having an open mind to the receipt of novel and perhaps threatening information, are the antithesis of those possessed by people attracted to the controls and orderliness of militarism. That's exactly what you and I were just saying. And that statement is important to remember. It's important to remember, you know, that the best qualities for good performance in war and therefore good performance in business and life are the ones that we talk about here all the time.

What he just mentioned, the ability to tolerate uncertainty, spontaneity of thought and action, having an open mind, open to new ideas, even threatening ideas. having an open mind to threatening ideas. You know how many discussions I've had where I won in the initial conversation in the first four sentences because when Dave came to me and said, I think we should do this a different way. And I said, oh, sounds like you've fought this through. What do you want to do?

Do you how many times I've just had an immediate victory? Immediate victory? And by a victory, I mean, all of a sudden, Dave's not coming on the offense. He's opening his mind. We're going to be able to come to a positive net outcome because when he came to me with, I don't like the way we're doing this and instead of me saying,

that's because you don't understand what's happening and all of a sudden we're arguing. And then I say, oh, really, please tell me what you think we should do. It's so easy. Well, how critical is it that you just, when you define the winning is getting the right outcome, not winning the argument?

I won because I want the outcome to be right. Yeah, I won because we figured out the best way to do this. And it wasn't Dave's way and it wasn't my way either. We actually compromised and figured out the best way to make this happen. Right. Freaking ridiculous. Those are the qualities we should want. Those are the qualities we should strive for so we can be better leaders and better people.

We'll continue this book next time. For now, Echo, speaking of getting better. you got Neum ways that we can get better? Yeah. Speaking of which, Dave, I know you've got some stuff to do. I do. Why don't you kick on out of here, man? Right on.

And with that, Dave Burke had to go, obviously, busy. And, well, nonetheless, we're here. We are trying to get better. So what do you got? Echo Charles. Well, I could go into the whole intelligence thing, but in the sake of saving time, let's just think of the smart thing to do on this path that we're on to improve ourselves.

We're working out, we're reading. So through these workouts and trying to improve ourselves physically and mentally, we might need some help, some supplementation that provides benefits. Do we all need help? Maybe, maybe not. I'm going to say, I haven't met people that didn't need. Okay. they might not need it help, but who does not voluntarily accept some beneficial things in their lives?

Hey, we're all going to benefit from benefits. So one of those benefits that we can have is from a new energy drink that we have. Jocko, discipline, go healthy, not unhealthy. So usual legacy energy drinks, they're unhealthy. They provide a good front-end benefit, but they're not healthy, back-end detriment. this one healthy and tastes good and gives you energy all upside you know what else provides like a front side kind of up feel good moment like like the legacy energy drinks hmm crystal methine sure i'm just saying yes you're the legacy energy drinks think about what they do they get they make

you feel good for a very short period of time and then they kill you yeah which is what what a traditional legacy crap energy drink is going to do. Make you feel good for a little bit. And then over time, you die. Yep, it's true. Whereas miraculously, miraculously, we have made something that gives you all the upside of an energy drink,

meaning you will feel energized. But later, you won't be coming down with, multiple diseases caused by this thing that you put into your body. In fact, the opposite is true. You will be more healthy when you get done drinking one of these than you were before you drink it. Think about that.

There's no one else that's going to say that because they can't. Because they didn't go to the degree that we went to to make sure we were making something good for you. Yeah. Yeah, man. Yeah, it's one of those no-brainers for sure. And it tastes good.

A bunch of different flavors. mango's the best, my opinion not Jock's opinion, but an opinion is one of these things that, you know. My, okay, my favorite is Jocco Palmer, which is like the it's like an Arnold Palmer.

I would not, I don't, I love it. I love it. And it's number probably like five or six of the rankings, the sales rankings. Oh, right, like the favorites. I don't know why people don't love it so much. Because Arnold Palmer is popular. You can go, let me put you this way,

you can go to a restaurant tonight and you can order an Arnold Palmer because people drink Arnold Palmer's and it's a normal flavor for people to want. Wait, but is that a... Can you go to a restaurant tonight and get mango drink? The answer is no. Yeah, probably not. So why is that? Why is mango,

which it is more popular than Jocko Palmer? Well, it depends. So, wait, is Arnold Palmer an alcoholic drink? No. It's half iced tea, half lemonade. It's straight up. Yeah, I guess. I mean, I don't know. I mean, it seems, I have no idea. Here's the thing.

Here's there's, we've been trying to figure that. I've been trying to figure that up. Part of the reason I think is because I called it Jocco Palmer, which is like an inside joke that only I got. I don't think people understand Jocko Palmer is kind of a joke about Arnold Palmer. Oh. And we didn't even spell it like Arnold Palmer. We abbreviate it so I don't get sued.

Oh. Yeah. Right? Yeah, maybe. Can't be jacking a dude's name and just putting it on your can. No, no. So we called it Jocko Palmer P-O-M-R and it. So we're probably going to put it.

We're going to make it more obvious as to what it is. Yeah. Because like I said, I'm not rolling into a restaurant tonight with my wife for dinner and ordering a mango drink of any kind. Right. But I am ordering Arnold Palmer possibly. Right. But I guess, and not to go too deep into it, what it, like, it's not like you're going to have a discipline go with dinner most of the time. See what I'm saying?

It's like they're just different contexts of when you do. So if I go to the store randomly, I need a snack. I might get one of those little mango smoothies. I'll be like, oh, dang, that's because mango tastes good. You see what I'm saying? Sure, that's like a... But this is a drink, bro. Yeah, I'm saying they're all drinks and they're all drinking.

One's a smoothie, ones are drink. Yeah. But, yeah, I guess no one really drinks mango juice on a regular basis. But there's no mangoes soda. Yeah, but there's smoothie. There's like ice cream. There's like frozen yogurt. There's like mango's a good flavor.

There's pistachio ice cream too, but I'm not getting a pistachio soda. But pistachios is a lot. It's a good flavor in general. And that's my whole point. It depends on the context and what you're experiencing the flavor. Is it what I'm saying? Hey, look, I like Jocco Palmer. I do.

I like Mango better, of course. But either way, it doesn't matter because each person's opinion is individualized to them. Doesn't matter. You could like Jaco Palmer literally level 10. Like it cannot get any better. It has no bearing on my opinion or what I like. Well, that's where I'm at level 10. And if you want to get some, get some.

Yep. So, yeah, again, different flavors. Get the one you want. Try them all. That's what I would say. Because the mango seems more risky because it's exotic. Orange, not so much. Seems insane.

True. So you might be like, oh, that's a safe one, you know. Yeah. But, hey, man, with great risks come great rewards, as a wise man once said. Possibly. Also, on this path, you want to look out after your joints and immunity, joint warfare, super cruel oil. vitamin D3

Cold War These are all immunity And joint protective Supplement Don't forget about the mulk Don't forget about the mulk Which is a dessert It's a dessert that is

Also good for you Again there's not too many desserts That you can eat You can relish the flavor And the texture And the whole thing From a From a

Like a taste perspective but there's more than that. The whole thing, the whole consumption, you can relish. And when you get done, you're stronger. You're better. The whole experience. The whole experience. Yeah.

It's not like when you go down the freaking, you go down to the local ice cream store and you order a mint chocolate chip milkshake. And they make it, right? And it's good. You get a good experience. We're not mad at that first part. And then when you get done, you know what just happened. Yeah. You poisoned yourself.

Yeah. That's what happened. You pay a bit of a purse. You're paying a big price. And you for sure can't do it again the next day and the next in the next day. Oh, you definitely can't do that. Don't do that. Yeah, don't do that.

Don't do that because there's something called type two diabetes, which you're working on. It's true. You're in route. Yeah. You're in route. Oh, yeah. If that's what we're doing with the, if that's what we're doing every day. It's true.

All kinds of heart disease. You got problems. Yeah. Don't do that. Yeah. So you kind of got to stay away from that one. Play this weird balancing like game. There's no reason to balance.

Right. You can go. You can get mulk. You can get done with your dinner. You have that sweet tooth, which is fine, normal. But you can follow that sweet tooth right to the moke container. And you're going to play any, you don't have to play any balancing game. You just go.

As much munk as you want. Straight up. You want five scoops of monk? Good. Going to be thick. Oh, it's going to be thick unless you add some more milk. Have you gone five scoops of milk? The most of that I've been on is three scoops of milk.

Yeah, three is my max. Five. Five would be thick. be you're going hard but you know if they're if you're up to you yeah get it call it you hit man get it five scoos what that's a hundred grams of protein yeah hundred something yeah you get all this stuff at jacofuel dot com if you want to get free shipping which look the reason this isn't a hey order now and get free shipping that's not what we're doing right here's what we're doing we're competing with one of the biggest companies in the world who offers you free shipping

Cool. They got a big log algorithm that's figuring this stuff out. And they got all this mass scale and all this thing's going on. They're trying to get your information. They're trying to get you into the zone where they can own you, which is understandable. Yeah. We get it. We want you to have an option to still get free shipping and not end with the Matrix.

Yeah, sure. So you go to jagofield.com. Stay out the Matrix. Oh, yeah. And if you subscribe to one of these items, which you should, because then you'll be able to get it. With free shipping. There you go. Joccofuel.com.

You can also get the, getting at the vitamin shop. You can get the drinks, the energy drinks at Wawa on the East Coast. We're working on some other convenience stores right now. Sorry, West Coast. The convenience terrain, a little bit rough.

A little bit rough, the way it's split up and what's where. So we're working it. But if you've got a vitamin shop near you, or where you are, live, work, whatever. Grab it from there. Oh, for sure.

Oh, good. 100% 100% there you go check it out it's good also jujitsu we're doing jujitsu to know jujitsu or to not know jujitsu which one is more beneficial we want to know jiu jutsu yes sir we do i don't i don't care if you know one day of jiu jitsu it's better than zero days of jiu jitsu anyway when you do jiu jitsu you're going to need a gee yep hey i can only train jiu jihitsu one day a week so i'm not going to train is not the answer yeah it's true the answer is i can only train jiu jih Tzu once a month So I'm doing it once a month. That's the answer.

You get the chance of train you do, trainages. That's what we're doing. It's true. So when you get your ghee, you get the best ghee that you possibly can. Made in America, by the way, an origin geese. Go to origin USA.com for these things. You can get rash guards on there as well. Some hoodie's on there.

Also from origin, USA, American-made denim jeans. I got my Delta 68 jeans. Yeah. My favorite jeans. Yeah. Of all time, by the way. Yeah. And FYI, Laf hit me up too because he got his, he got a pair of Delta 68's.

And we recut the Delta 68's probably like, I don't know, six months ago or something like that. And to provide more comfort. I dig it, yeah. So Delta 68's, the best, most comfortable things that you can put on your legs. And they look good too, by the way. So here, and, you know, maybe you care about this. We don't care about this. Maybe you don't.

But here's the thing. Factually, this is what happened. So put mine on. I had an event to go to called the muster. Might have heard of it. We wore the Delta 68 origin jeans to the muster. They're pretty new too. And I wear a white t-shirt.

My wife likes me in a white t-shirt. Don't ask why. It's just how it is. Let's just know that. These are all things I do not care about. Yes. But the underlying concept, the underlying concept, I think most of us, it has some value. So she was like, hey, you're looking really nice.

Boom. That's all you got to know, bro. Delta 68. Hey, functional, being in America, look good, you know, durable, all this stuff. Get these jeans and Echo Charles's wife will think you look good. No, she'll probably won't look at you at all. Hopefully I won't look at you. But she thinks I look good.

So maybe if you're married or have a girlfriend or boyfriend or whatever, they'll think you look good in them too. They look good. We got workwear coming out, by the way. If you don't know that, we got workwear coming out. So you, when you're out there on the construction site, you're out there as a lineman, you're out there on the farm. Whatever you're doing, you're working. We've got workware coming, which is made in America.

Yeah. But for real made in America. For real made in America. Every ounce of that thing, every rivet, every thread made in America. Even the thread itself made in America. We're making workwear for workers, for American workers made by American workers. workers. That's what we're doing. Yes, sir. Origin.USA.com.

Also, if you want to get a shirt or hat or hoodie that says discipline equals freedom, or you want to represent this path in any way, go to jocco store.com. That's where you can get this stuff. Some good stuff on there, some new stuff on there. Oh, that's a jiu-jitsu section. You know, where look, if you do jiu-jitsu, and you kind of want to represent the path and jujitsu kind of a hybrid representation scenario. You can do that now.

You know what's cool I noticed at the muster. We have a jiu jih Tzu night, the second night. We do jih Tijuana, introduction to jih Tutsu, and there's more people now, there used to be almost no one did jih Tudu. And now majority of people have done jiu-jitsu. So we're getting in the right direction. Yeah.

We want everyone to do jiu-jitsu. We could keep it a secret, right? Right, right. That's a kind of an ego thing, right? If I don't tell anyone about this, I'm just going to be the baddest man on the block. Just so much more superior. I'm so much more superior. That's a, that's a dorky-ass move.

Yeah, because actually, no, you know what? I don't think that's not qualified as a dorky. That's an ego move. Yeah. That's just pure ego. I'm not going to teach you anything. Yeah. I'm just going to keep this special thing, this superpower to myself.

Yeah. It's kind of surprising that the graces, I think the graces did it right because, I think that as they broke it out, then they started promoting it and teaching it and spreading the word. I think if they would have failed to do that, they would have been five years behind. It would have taken an extra five years for people to start kind of figuring it out on their own, just from videos and UFC and all those things. But it just would have been bad. They did the right thing.

When it was time to bring it out, they brought it out and started teaching it to people. Well, actually, kind of in a way, do you one better. Probably not even five years when you think about it because you just said they might figure it out because of videos in UFC or whatever. The whole existence of USC is because of Horri and Gracie. So they wouldn't have the UFC. UFC straight up wouldn't exist.

That's all it was, essentially, demonstration of how effective jujitsu is in a real fight. It's essentially what UFC won was. So, man, that wouldn't exist. No one would do it. It'd be probably relegated to little secret sex in like Brazil, little secret dojo's doing their secret art. Just rolling everybody up. So it's there.

It's there for everyone to get into. And if you want to get a T-shirt that talks, you know, represents. So is that you're on the jih T-Jitsu path? Hell yeah. For a droll store dog. Yeah. A bunch of stuff on there. We have a subscription situation as well called the shirt locker.

It's a new creative. I was at the muster. You might have heard of it. And every once in a while, well, let's face it, every day I was wearing a different shirt from the shirt locker. Every single shirt that I wore someone asked, hey, where did you get that shirt? Including people who weren't even there for the muster. Like, where did you get that shirt? The support SOG.

That was a good one. A lot of people asked about that one. It's a good one. Nonetheless, good shirts on there. So, yeah, you get a new shirt every month. Creative Designs, kind of new. new designs, creative, outside of the box designs,

but relative and very awesome. Good feedback on that one. Also, if you're going to subscribe to things, you might as well subscribe to this podcast right here, leave a review and all that stuff. Also, we have a couple other podcasts. We have Jocko unraveling with myself and D.C. We have the grounded podcast.

We have the Warrior Kid podcast. We have the Jocko Underground, jaco underground.com, where we have an alternate, universe where in the event of tyrannical activities in this country and no one knows what to do we'll be able to tell you what to do we'll be there we'll be on the underground jocco underground dot com we made it so we'd have an alternate platform in case something happens with this platform and because we did that it costs money to do that and if you want to support that it cost you

eight dollars and eighteen cents a month and in order to give you something back for that In the immediate we do another little podcast on there we talk about some we do some Q&A we talk about some alternate things So if you want to subscribe to that do it. We appreciate it all also if you can't afford it We understand things are tough out there right now if you can't afford that eight dollars and eighteen cents a month Just email assistance at jocco underground.com and we will take care of you and we also have a YouTube channel where we make videos I'm sort of the brains behind them and I'm sort of the person that thinks of the ideas and then

Echo is the technical guy that does the follows the mechanics of making them. Sure. If you want to subscribe to that. Yes, sir. You can do that. Oh yeah. That bothers you, bro. No, no, no, no. That totally bothers you. It's so bothers you. Actually, more than it bothers me, you're just really, really happy about it.

That's more the contrast, you know. Yeah, you take this video stuff, real serious. You know, it's just a thing. You know, it's just a thing. I didn't realize how much of a world the video thing is like there's so what do you mean i mean it's like uh it's its own little thing right its own little its own little ecosystem what that you're in oh like the industry or whatever circles yeah yeah it's there you kind of size each other up and so i don't know if i size people up but i don't know you size up their cameras oh yes i definitely size up their videos yeah i mean the

creative field like are you trying to act like you You don't, I might say something like, oh, yeah, I saw this video. It looked pretty cool. You're like, oh, I sent it to you. And you'll be like, you know, I don't know what their aspect ratio was, or whatever.

I'm like, okay, bro. The frame rate is all off on that one. Hey, look, you might be right. I don't know. If you want to check out Echo Charles's expert video production, then you can check out our YouTube channel. Sure. Jocko podcast.

Hey, Origin has a cool one, too, Origin USA. If you want to see what's going on up there, you can check that out. Also, psychological warfare, if you want to hear, no, no, not if you want to hear, if you're struggling to get past the moment of weakness and you need to hear someone with integrity, named Jocko, tell you why, hey, this moment of weakness is fleeting and it's insignificant. If you want to hear that in whatever way, psychological warfare, boom, get down, it's an album with tracks of him, helping you pass these moments. They suck. We all have them.

Don't forget about flipside canvas.com where Dakota Myers selling cool stuff to hang on your wall that's also made in America. Got a bunch of books, new book coming out called Final Spin. You better order it now if you want that first to dish. Look, that's what you got to do

to support. What's the publisher thinking? They're thinking, well, you know, Jocko, you're really not a novelist. You've written some, you've written some nonfiction, but you know, you're not really a novelist. I don't know. We shouldn't really make too many Well then the first reviews came in and they were like damn.

Oh yeah yeah yeah so anyways if you want to check that out if you want to order that first dish if you want to support the cause you want other people to get this message Check out final spin it's available now for pre-order to be it'll be to you In a week by the way it's coming out November 9th So check that out leadership strategy and tactics field manual the code the evaluations of protocol Discipline equals freedom field manual way the warrior kit one two three and four so many people at the muster came up and said thanks for writing that book Mike and the Dragon same thing if you got kids or you know kids get them get the freaking kids those books Get the get get the kids that you know actually one jih Tzu guy. He's a instructor in black belch

He said he just carries warrior the warrior kid in his back oh He meets a kid he's like here you go here you go can you imagine the impact that's gonna have if I would have got that book I would be I would be ruler of the world right now yeah and a benevolent ruler of the world be nice Sure. I wouldn't be a bully. No, no, no, no. You wouldn't. So get warrior kid for your kids, for all kids, about faced by Hackworth.

And then, of course, extreme ownership and the dichotomy of leadership that I wrote with my brother, Lafabin. Also, Eshlam Front, speaking of Lafabin, we have a leadership consultancy. We solve problems through leadership. No matter what's going on in your company, you think you got issues, you think you got problems, things are going wrong, things are going sideways. Guess what? Leadership is the solution. Go to Eshlamfront.com to see how we can help you solve your property. problems, whether it's us coming directly to you to consult, whether it's you coming to the

muster, whether it's our field training exercises, EF battlefield. We've got all kinds of things that we do to help you get through your situations, utilizing leadership. And that includes we have an online training program, an online leadership training program, Extreme Ownership Academy. This is where you can learn to lead. and you can stay ahead of the game, and you can practice, and you can rehearse,

and you can take courses, and you can come on live and ask me questions. You don't learn leadership in one day. It doesn't work. You need to constantly train, just like you go to the gym, just like you do Jiu-Jitsu, Extreme Ownership.com,

if you want to check that out, and if you want to help service members, active and retired service members, if you want to help the families, if you want to help Gold Star families, you can check out Mark Lee's mom, Mama Lee, she's got a charity organization. And if you want to donate or you want to get involved,

go to America's mighty warriors.org. And if you want more of my pea-brained pontifications, or you need more of Echo's ridiculous ramblings or Dave's enthusiastic extras, you can find us on the interwebs on Twitter, on the gram and on that face. Borky, boy. Dave is at David Arborak.

Echo is at Equitralz, and I am at Jocko Willinkin. Thanks to everyone out there worldwide in the military, standing the watch to keep us safe. Thank you. Also, thanks to our police and law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, border patrol, secret service, and all first responders. Thank you for standing the watch here on the home front to keep us safe. And to everyone else out there, keep an open mind. free your mind. Don't think you have to control everything because you can't. You're not going to be able to put everything in perfect order. That is not possible. Instead, be ready to shift, be ready

to change, be ready to adapt, be ready to adjust to new environments and new information. Don't let your mind get stuck. Don't let it get trapped. Instead, free your mind. Free your mind. Free your mind and until next time this is echo and jocco out