Jocko Podcast - 307: Don't Love Your Chains, Even if They're Made of Gold. On The Psychology of Military Incompetence Pt.5

Episode Date: November 10, 2021

0:00:00 - Opening0:06:51 - On the Psychology of Military Incompetence.2:12:06 - Final thoughts.2:18:47 - How to stay on THE PATH.2:37:51 - Closing Gratitude.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

This is Jocko podcast number 307 with Echo Charles and me Jocker Willing. Good evening. Echo. Also joining us again tonight is Dave Burke. Good evening, Dave. Good evening. I gave everyone fair warning that this book was going to take a while. We are going to continue the review of on the Psychology of Military and Competence,

which we started on podcast 303, 304, 305, 306. Now we're on 307. So if you haven't listened to those, go back and do so. If you listen to those, you probably realized that, which I realized I haven't pointed out yet. I hope it's obvious, even though the context of these books is military. It doesn't just apply to the military. It applies to everyone in every leadership situation, which is why we can learn so much from these insights with that. Let's get, well, let's get back to the book.

Yes, as they like to say, on the Psychology of Military incompetence by Dr. Norman F. Dixon also World War II vet wounded in action legit guy a little bit too crazy on the Psychology stuff sometimes especially nowadays the psychology some of the psychology Freud's been debunked Freud was a cocaine addict Freud was Freud was was what's it prescribing cocaine for like every problem that you had You know you say I'm not feeling very well cocaine. Oh you know I'm sick to my stomach cocaine I'm not getting along with my wife, cocaine. This guy was doing cocaine and prescribing cocaine. And apparently he lied about a bunch of stuff too.

He would say that he cured people that never got cured. Or he would say that they were cured, but they were really just cocaine addicts. So there is some stuff. And I don't know. I never was a big psychology guy until we had Jordan Peterson on this podcast. That was kind of the first time I said, oh, I guess. it that's where I realize these guys are brain mechanics that understand there's a problem they look at it they go yep we've seen this before yep I know this pattern

oh you're scared of this thing or you don't get along with these types of people or whatever they say yep we've seen that before here's how we can actually fix it I prior to that thought psychology was what's the right word kind of you know gobbledy gook is that the right word yeah what did you just say woo woo Yeah, a little bit of woo-woo stuff, a little bit. Like, hey, how could these guys, what are they going to do? Whisper in your ear. You know, I thought it was that kind of thing.

I didn't realize that they had methodologies and that they made sense. What about hypnosis or whatever? I don't really understand hypnosis too much. I've never been hypnotized. I've never even been to one of those shows where people get hypnotized and they act like a monkey or whatever. Yeah, yeah. Have you been to one of those? Yeah.

Do you believe it? I believe that hypnosis can work on some people. In fact, I think that that's the jam. Yeah, yeah. But the show that I went to, I went to two of them that I remember, and I remember thinking, this hypnotist isn't that good, either not that good or the person, the subject, or whatever, was just sort of going along. Not because they were in on some scam, but more than that. They were just down for the cause.

Down for the cause. Exactly right. They didn't want to make everything look dumb and stuff. So they just did it. Have you ever seen anyone get hypnotized, Dave? No. Have you ever been hypnotized? No.

Well, there's little tests they can do these. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I saw that on Rogan. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I saw that reason. Rolling your eyes back or something. Like that. Who's that guy?

So that's kind, I sort of, you know how you kind of looked at it? Not really 100% sure. That's kind of how I looked at psychology before. Before Jordan came on and I was, I understood. And what was weird was how he was explaining exposure therapy, which is exactly what's in the way of your kid. And I said, oh, this stuff can make sense. Got it.

But of course, there's some weird stuff. There's still weird stuff in psychology. And they're doing weird stuff right now in the psychological world the way they're coming out with all kinds of weird things. Did you study psychology? No. Or did you take any psychology? I'm sure I took something. Actually, I'm not sure I did.

But I don't remember. If I did, I don't remember it other than maybe whatever you learn in high school. Maybe that's what made me think it was a woo-woo-woo. That's the term you used. And what did I say? Gobble-die, gobbledy. Some advanced term. The psychologist out there, I apologize, it's not gobbledy gook and it's not woo-woo.

It's legit. It's mind mechanics. Okay, you ever heard of Pavlov's dog? Yes. Okay, so just that alone? So that's legit. Yeah, like just that don't think about it. Like, freaking, you just associate a bell with food and it's like your body responds, like your behavior, like stuff that you typically don't control just responds in that way.

It's like, oh, okay, so you just think about how deep that goes. Yep. And then people who understand that and can navigate and guide and kind of influence in that way. Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. And so here's the deal. In this book, I didn't want to just start trying to play psychological historian and going back. But there's definitely some things I read.

I was like, okay, bro. Hey, Dr. Nixon, I respect you. But I'm not going to. It's too much, right? It's too much. A lot of that Freudian stuff is too much. It's weird. Not just weird.

It's not that it's just weird. If it's weird, but it's backed up, then cool. There's some weird stuff going on in your head. But when you read something, you go, that seems kind of weird. And then you find out that it's all debunked anyways. And that was the deal with Freud. Freud, like I said on the last podcast, a broken clock is right twice a day. Well, that's the same thing with Freud.

He was right about some stuff. The biggest thing being that you do have underlying. psychological thoughts, subliminal thoughts, or subconscious thoughts, not subliminal, subconscious thoughts that would drive your decision, making you act a certain way. So if you got whatever, your parents treated you a certain way, you're gonna tend to wave, you know,

if your parents built distrust in you, you might not trust people as much. If they wanted you to win all the time, you might, and that could go two ways, right? You could be like, oh, I'm gonna win, or I don't give a shit. Yeah. Right? So it's weird, how you're gonna

to turn out. But the what is, you can't predict how the person is going to turn out, but you can say it has to do with the fact that every time little Johnny didn't win first place, his dad was beating him. He either grows up and is winning or he just doesn't care anymore. He's not competing at all. Right. He's not even competing.

But those are underlying, there's an underlying cause. Now what Freud did was he brought it all down to like how you were potty trained and just, no, bro. It's not just that. So that being said, there are underlying things, and this guy ends up profiling all these different people. So here we go. We're going to get into this. This section is called Character and Honor.

It opens up with a great quote. Why should a man be in love with his fetters, though of gold? So you are chained. And you're in love with those chains, but you shouldn't be. Even if they're made of gold, you shouldn't be in love with them. And another one, moderation in war is imbecility. Interesting. Going to the book here.

In the context of militarism, the forces of conscious and of character manifest themselves in various guises, in medieval notions of chivalry, in codes of honor such as the duel and in the belief that officers must of necessity be gentlemen. as Carl Demeter showed has shown in his history of the German officer corps these notions of honor and chivalry brought about and were themselves reinforced by a care to select officer material from the aristocracy and rural landowners a state of affairs reflected in the contrast of snobbiness exclusiveness sense of honor and lack of intellectual ability which obtained between the officer corps corps drawn from the aristocratic junker families of the great Prussia estates of Prussia and those more bourgeois elements from the industrialized southwest of Germany. So these old military officers came from rich folk. And he said there's a difference between some of the rich folk that were in the city and some of the rich folk that were big landowners and they had a little bit different behavior. Not going to spend too much time on that, but I'm going to fast forward a little bit. A code of honor is a set of rules for behavior. The rules are observed because to break them provokes the distressing emotions of guilt or shame.

Whereas guilt is a product of knowing that one is transgressed and therefore might be found out, shame results from actually being found out. In military circles, traditionally, the greater crime. It is usually assumed that military codes of honor serve to reduce fear. This may well be so. Their primary object, however, is to combat. bat not so much fear as the sort of behavior to which fear might otherwise give rise. In other words, they are designed to ensure that threatening situations are met by fight

rather than flight. They do this by making the social consequences of fight, the social consequences of flight rather more unpleasant than the physical consequences of fight. That's freaking radical, right? Like I would rather, and you hear team guys say this all the time, I'd rather just freaking die than be a sissy. 100%. I've heard of that. As a matter of fact, BTF Tony said that on this podcast.

He was scared shitless of heights, and he's on some 80-story building in Hong Kong or Singapore or something, and he's got to repel off of it, and he's totally thinking he's going to die. And he's like, well, I would rather die than be a sissy up here. So their rules work.

Whereas the latter might lead to physical pain, mutilation, and death, the former eventuates with far greater certainty in personal guilt and public shame. What I'm thinking about this is, I'm sitting here to think like, who fought, who said it to the way? You know what we need to do is we need to create a code of honors so that we can make sure that people don't run away. That would be some really meticulous, like preemptive ideas. I'm thinking that there's a tribal nature to this stuff. Like we are instinctively programmed that if you run, you're not looking out for your clan and you suck and we don't like you. I think there's an instinct to that,

not just a code that's written by modern man, but I think there's like a code that's instilled in us by being an animal. That seems like the case for sure Maybe the code is just to like Take that in an extreme Situation Direction And animals have it too

Like a pack of hyenas Go after a lion or whatever They go after animals that can definitely kill a couple of them But they'd rather be the one that gets killed Then be the one that runs away And they know that if they can't run it away They're not going to survive as a species So they got to get it on

Oh yeah Man I watched some hyenas the other day Discovery Channel More like YouTube Freaking Red Zone Like hey I'm nine videos deep or whatever But dude this zebra was getting eaten by hyenas And first of all

The hyenas were savage Hyenas are my favorite land animal by the way That's interesting Yeah But the zebra was stoic He was having his legs eaten And he looked the look on his face was He was watching an afternoon movie

Yeah I seen that too I wonder if there's like thing that triggers on a prey animal that like because you see that a lot it's not like you don't see well i don't know if i've ever seen any zebra sit or prey animal like screaming and stuff oh no i have you have yeah i always see like the deer just sort of stoic like no there's there's there's ones where those things are just screaming and not handling it yeah i think there's stoic zebras and there's unsteads that's what i think uh he's got a little indent here little section When a soldier in action sees his life in immediate danger,

even the bravest will be seized by a moment of fear. Biologically speaking, fear is a natural reflex sensation of the instinct of self-preservation, which dwells within every man, heroes included. Again, what's a little bit interesting about that is like Dean Ladd being on this podcast, going into Tarawa.

Hey, Dean, were you scared? He's like, no. That was going to happen to someone else. So maybe even the hyenas think it's going to happen to someone else. That paw ain't going to hit me I'm not going to catch a freaking K9 tooth to the jugular on this one If victory is to be won

The elementary physical sensation Must somehow be artificially suppressed Overcompensated by a contrary reflex Of the psychic and moral kind Converted into action Bro I'm a little bit in disagreement here Because I've seen guys that you're just like Well this guy doesn't care

He doesn't think he can die Whatever walking across the street, running across the street, totally going against. I don't think there's enough time to think, hmm, I want to go drag that guy out of the street, but it looks really dangerous, but I want to prove myself.

No, they're like, hey, I'm going to go get that guy because he's hurt. What do you think, Dave? Yeah, I mean, I'm thinking about all this, like even the need to write this stuff down. All this stuff pragmatically makes sense, but I've observed people do things in environments, that sort of defies some of the things that are being said.

So at a bare minimum, there's definitely exceptions to this idea that all men have this thing. And if they don't all have it, some of them go through whatever that process is in light speed. You know, if it's still happening and I can't see it, it's happening so quickly that they're just on doing things. I have seen people do things that are dumb and be like,

hey, bro, you need to put your head down. I mean, I from a basic self-preservation like sniper fire is a good example we would take sniper fire pretty regularly and I've seen guys get so frustrated and so fed up and I saw a platoon commander once behaved just like incorrectly walking around on the rooftop like no this isn't moving past the fear this is some other disconnect there I know that's not exactly what you're talking about but I've seen people behave like that oh no I was I was on a rooftop one time and we started taking

fire and there's some army dudes I was up there with like a couple army dudes and we started taking a little bit of fire and it was you know ching ching whatever and I'm just standing there and the guys kind of got down and I was just being you know mr. badass right hey whatever no factor I'm colonel kilgore and then all of a sudden like another like three rounds ripped really close over head I hit the deck son I hit the deck I wasn't so cool more. So my self-preservation was kind of kicked in. Yeah, yeah. Those ones are, those ones are close.

Yes. Your threshold is kind of more further down the line. And that's different. There's a threshold and you see people have different thresholds. And maybe the threshold either doesn't exist or it's so narrow. There's no real gap there that you can observe. But to say the way he said it, I agree with you. Like, I've seen people do things like, that's not what I've seen.

No, it doesn't happen all the time, but you see it for sure. Next, the negative content of this counter-reflex is the feeling of shame. If it says you don't stand fast now but run away, the others will laugh at you and despise you. Again, that's a lot of thought to be having in the moment of truth. That's a lot of, I mean, I've done some stuff that was dumb or whatever. I've done some stuff which like, hey, should I be doing this right now? Maybe not, but I don't even thinking about that. I wasn't thinking like, oh, I don't want to look bad.

I was like, hey, they're going to go, whatever, cross this street, going to go up this, whatever. A soldier must therefore be provided unless nature has done. You know, it's another good example is Mike Thornton. You know, Mike Thornton's just hucking in grenade fights with people. He's shot, people are shot. There's people all around him. And I asked him when he was on the podcast. Like, well, you know, were you thinking you might get shot?

He's like, no. No. He said, no, I didn't have time to think about that. I was going to save my friend. Next question. He was almost embarrassed that I asked that question. He was like, dude, what is wrong with you? A soldier must therefore be provided unless nature has done the job already.

Oh, so he's got a little caveat. So there's a possibility that nature just made you brave with a set of automatic inhibitions that will save him in the moment of danger from a collapse of his own morale. Discipline, of course, can hold him steady from without. But his one moral defense against internal weakness is the sense of honor to arouse this sense in the ordinary soldier cultivated and above all, inspire it by his own example, is the officer's highest duty.

And to fulfill that duty, he must himself have a sense of honor that is well developed, active and finely tuned. Yeah. That's a lot of pre-conceived thought. Like the Marine Corps, back in, what,

what, we coming up on the what anniversary of the Marine Corps? 1775 minus 20, 22. Yeah. A couple hundred and a half, whatever, 250-something years of, and in the Marine Corps said, you know what we need to do? We need to create a code of honor so that Marines, they won't run away.

I can't see that happening. No. And I'm just thinking of the basic fundamental training I've been through as an officer in the Marine Corps. I don't remember any of that. I remember being given the code of conduct. And there is unquestionably from day one, you don't want to look bad in front of your peers.

I know that feeling of getting to like, Officer Candid School in the basic school and flight school and like I don't want to look bad. I understand that feeling But there was a lot of words there to describe a situation that almost implies that you're gonna have some sort of cognitive process to go Hmm let me do a quick cost benefit here of running away to save my life or you know what my peers will think of me down the road if I do that I can't connect with that right like three months into the basic school you're like you know what if anything happens I'm not gonna run yeah Jack, to the extent that a code of honor is reflexive in the sense used by Demeter, it is so inflexible, thereby leading on occasions to behavior that is so irrational as to burger on the absurd. That makes sense.

There are sometimes where people have done stuff that doesn't make sense. It doesn't make sense what they're doing. Like, it's heroic, but it doesn't make sense, and it's not even good. The following example illustrates the juxtaposition of bull and honor. The year was 1755. General Braddock set out with his two regiments, the 44th and the 48th and 600 Irregulars on a March to Fort Ducasine. About nine miles from it, he was ambushed by Indians, led by French officers.

The result was disastrous. The men in their scarlet uniforms and white spatterdashes marching in columns were the sort of target ambush forces dream of. The aim you can imagine this. Here comes the literal blue. British red coats. Here they come, marching in columns, and they get ambushed by the French and the Indians. Helpless because they could not see their enemies, some of the British troops broke for cover and fired from behind trees. Okay, cool. This appalled Braddock and his officers.

They considered skulking behind trees, both undisciplined and unsoldierly, so they drove the tommies back into columns where, of course, they were. were butchered. The whole episode was glaring proof that neither leaders nor the system under which they operated were worthy of the troops they used. But that's like crazy, right? That's crazy. So unthinkable was it that there's another example. So unthinkable was it that Japanese soldiers would ever surrender to the enemy that they were not instructed as to how they should comport themselves as they did. As a consequence, Japanese POWs were relatively fruitful source of information for allied interrogators I never thought about that because I've always heard that when the Japanese got captured they would like spill their guts but I never thought about why it's because they

never got any training they're just like oh you will you'll just die no one's going to surrender oh actually we're going to surrender we're going to spill our guts um fast forward a little bit talking about this snob situation snobs such a good word a snob is one who is impressed by and therefore tries to identify with those who are higher up in the socioeconomic scale while straining to Disassociate himself from those lower down by these lights such everyday affections as name-dropping and paying society magazines to publish photographs of oneself or one's nearest family are obvious Examples of snobbishness Name-dropping we know echo's big on that one well

I get these What are they called chain emails? No not a chain even like an automatic email Yeah, yeah Spam email It'll say congratulations Jocco Willink you have been named as CEO of the year or as Entrepreneur of the Year or of Entrepreneur of the Decade and we you know congratulations this is an incredible thing and we would want to send you the full magazine that you will be published in along with a plaque recognizing your incredible achievements as a business

leader and the cost is only one thousand three $39. And so it's kind of funny, right? But then you got to remember, man, I've been to some people's offices where they got some plaques on the walls and now I know where they come from. Now I know where they come from. As a general rule, snobbish behavior betokens some underlying feeling of inferiority.

It is a common characteristic of the social climber of the individual with low self-esteem of the person who feels threatened or persecuted because of some real or imagined inadequacy. So when you deal with someone that's a snob, they actually are feeling inferior. That there is an underlying pathology to the condition seems fairly obvious for two reasons. Firstly, those who are emotionally secure are rarely snobbish. Isn't that a nice thing to know and understand? If you're emotionally secure, you're not going to be a snob.

Secondly, the behavior is itself irrational, compulsive, and self-defeating. after all, even the most hardened snob must know that other people are adept at seeing through his affections. So you're going to act that way. You know, you know people. Because I explain this all the time to clients. And at the muster, I usually have to spend some time on this. Everyone can see what you're thinking. Your intent has a smell.

It's so obvious. And you know it. And deep down, you know it. Sometimes it's shocking, though, because I don't think people do know it. I think I agree with that. No, I mean, to hit what he's, I think that's what he's saying, right? Oh, he's saying that unless I'm hearing you incorrectly, he's saying that deep down you, you know that behavior is observed by other people.

And to me, that, that's what makes the behavior crazy is the willingness to, to have that thought and go, no, no, I can get away with this. I can, I can do this differently. I can see it in him, super obvious. But when I do this, it's not going to come across as snobbish. Yeah. That's the part for me. It was like, that's crazy to think that you can pull it off.

That is, that is crazy. And I see that all the time. All the time. People think they're so smart. I think no one's noticing these little maneuvers. They're making it so obvious. Yeah, so I remember when we went in on a little, we were talking about it a lot for some reason. And so I thought about it.

And I don't think it's the kind where they think, oh, I'm getting away with it. I don't think that's the thought. I think the thought is like, they're paying attention to what they're saying and all this stuff, but in their mind, instead of, oh, I look snobby and dumb or whatever that I'm doing this name dropping and all that, they don't think that. They think, oh, when I name drop, these people are going to think that I'm as cool as I'm trying to be. Like, it's going to work, you know? But to Dave's point, they see someone else name drop and they go, freaking echoes over there trying to name drop. Oh, yeah.

It's like, but there's little hints of that, like, way of backwards thinking where it applies to everyone. else and not me, right? Like, yeah. I'm super paranoid about that shit. And that's a good quality because then it, you know, look, it's a old joke where people like give great relationship advice, right? They think they give such good relationship advice, but everyone's like, you don't have any good relationships, you know, that kind, you know, right?

So it's kind of everywhere where we think that it applies to everyone else and doesn't apply to me. Yeah. Or it applies to me and no one else or whatever. And that's what they're saying. Same thing. It's like, oh. This I can I can name drop yes and it's pretty effective exactly right so cool

Yeah, but they see someone else do it. They're thinking yeah or even the snobby people I know some snobs Unfortunately and I get the same impression kind of like right because snobs especially when they're behaving in a snobby way It looks dumb like it's kind of embarrassing especially if you know the person and like them even a little bit It's kind of embarrassing like you wish they wouldn't for their sake act like that but you can tell they think like oh my gosh these people must be so impressed with my standards You know my high standards Speaking of just Random emails

I get these I get invites to podcasts Yeah hell yeah And the podcast invite will say You know recently had this person It's just a little name dropping stuff And I think to myself Bro what are you doing Tell me about you know

What your podcast is about It's they don't even play around They're just like have this person This person this person this person This person this person Yeah, yeah. You think, man. Yeah, they think it works.

There's a little game, too. There's a little status, you know? Yeah. They can get you on, then they can get this person on. Then they're listing you at every freaking chance they got that. Yeah, man. Oh, yeah. Zone.

Back to the book, there is nothing, for example, quite so transparent as name dropping or displaying invitations. He must know at some level of this behavior provokes at best amusement, at worst, ridicule, contempt or even dislike, but he is nonetheless powerless to curb his snobbishness. Something drives him on. I like that. I like the way it takes like you have to drive through it. But why should the military be snobbish? Firstly, because traditionally, top levels of the military hierarchy were occupied by the rich and highly born. The notions of socioeconomic and military status came, it just became completely related.

And then it goes on to say, officers are also stressed from within to know that they have wedded their lives to essentially destructive ends, that they should, that they shoulder great responsibilities, that they may be called upon to carry out tasks far beyond their capabilities, and that the price of failure is enormous, is quite sufficient to initiate feelings of uneasiness. Even notions of retirement are fraught with stress. The knowledge that most ex-officers have little value on the civilian labor market, that their lot is of total obscurity, of genteel poverty,

that only the very best and very worst of full generals and above are likely to achieve immortality, and that none of them will ever again command the absolute obedience to which they have grown accustomed that can hardly be described as reassuring. That's kind of crazy, right? You're in the military, you're an officer, you get out, people are looking, you think you're still the man. Ain't happening.

To the factors underlying the self-protective and compensating aspects of snobbishness must be added what is perhaps the most important one of all, pre-existing doubts of the self. Since, as we noted earlier, there is much in militarism to attract those with doubts about their masculinity and intellectual capacity, it would not be surprising to find that a number of men with problems over self-esteem will be discovered at all levels of the military hierarchy.

So why do we have a bunch of snobs? Well, because they're insecure about who they are. One piece of corroborative evidence for these views comes from yet another characteristic of many military organizations. their notorious sensitivity to criticism people don't like to be criticized fast forward a a little bit in talking of criticism it might seem that we are making a great deal of fuss about nothing after all nobody likes criticism and as far and as for complaints against military historians it is only natural indeed laudable that some show loyalty to one's group because he had gone on to a little thing about how

some military historians don't say anything bad about leaders from the military. But he said, you know, he said, that's understandable because they kind of have a little bit of hero worship going on. But he goes on to say, there are some special features of the phenomenon in some military men, which deserve attention. In the first place,

their sensitivity seems out of all proportion to that of other public figures. In terms of fame or notoriety, well-known generals or admirals are on the level with film stars, politicians, and even newsworthy academics. Hence, one would expect that they might come to accept the possibility of negative publicity as part of the game, a small price to pay for the perks which they otherwise enjoy. This they seem unable to do. In fact, there is a distinctly paranoid element in the way some senior commanders have reacted

to even the faintest breadth of criticism, to the vaguest and most tactful suspicion of a raised eyebrow or cleared throat almost as if they were being held personally responsible for everything that might go wrong and by the way you should be held for accountable for a lot of irony There's a lot of irony in that one so you get these people that are insecure and they You know they end up being snobs He closes out this section saying in touching upon this delicate matter. We must not lose sight of this of its significance and relevance in the present context whatever else it may be, sensitivity to criticism is a measure of insecurity. That's so important to remember.

You look like so insecure when you get offended by criticism. It implies a weak ego, which in turn, by way of compensation, manifests itself in particular character traits, one of which is snobbishness. Whether this ego weakness is due to some early shock to self-esteem or fear of the breakthrough of unacceptable impulses or some combination of the two influences. The individual so afflicted develops certain defenses which help to minimize his painful feelings. This finds support in yet another feature of military organizations. Their cult of anti-effeminacy.

Hmm. Going into our next chapter, anti-effeminacy. We don't want to be feminine. We want to be masculine. It says there's a quote in here from General Chaffy. Let war cease altogether and a nation will become effeminate. We just need war. He goes here saying,

When discussing the various anxieties which militarism serves to reduce, brief mention was made of the fears which some men entertain about their masculinity. Thus, it was pointed out that, though primarily concerned with combating the dread of disorder and dissolution, certain satorial aspects of bullshit, might also help to reassure those with problems in this area. So what he's saying there is, look, they, they, you impose discipline because you're anti-feminist. And we're not anti-feminine.

Yeah, not anti-feminist, anti-feminist, feminine. Yeah. Or feminacy, a feminacy. And, and that some of these, you know, wearing, you know, imposing your will on people means you're, You're you know you're not like Feminine

Right Are we getting into kind of the weird zone of this book a little bit He says in putting together the jigsaw of military incompetence Therefore we now we can now take up a piece One piece which clearly has great relevance to the topic The striking aversion towards a feminacy which characterizes some military organizations and this despite the fact that the Female is usually regarded as quote more deadly than the male. Okay, so I had to I don't know this was written in 1976 obviously this is a a topic that might be addressed differently today, but what I did want to do

What I did look up is I said okay. What is it what is a feminine characteristic? And what is a masculine characteristic? Characteristic generally speaking now. Okay, I'll just gonna read him first Masculine this is coming from some website about psychology, right? masculine strong controlled focused powerful centered purpose driven loves the challenge and competition single task oriented problem solver wants freedom and release makes big things small forgets needs admiration and appreciation wants to be needed and respected there the the masculine intimacy killer is being criticized controlled or shut out so those the masculine

Here's the feminine characteristics. Free, flowing, open, radiant. Radiant. Wild, destructive, emotion-driven. Seeks and gives love, nurturer. Multitasker, diffused awareness. Wants to gather, talk, vent. Makes small things big.

Remembers. Needs reassurance and attention. wants trust, connection, and praise, the intimacy killer is feeling unseen, unsafe,

or misunderstood. Now, clearly, these things, every human has both these things in a spectrum. And you could call,

you didn't, I think what makes them challenging to talk about in this day and age is they put man and woman on them. What they should have done

is said, you know, just black and white, right? To, two, yeah, yeah,

oh, Ying and Yang would have been perfect, right? So you got the Ying personality. You got the Yang personality. Here's how they are not necessarily men and women, because let's face it. We know a lot of women that are strong, controlled, and focused. We know a lot of men that are free, flowing open radiate, right? So these, but I think they're generally speaking, psychologically here's some characteristics.

So that's where we're at. Dave, are you concerned yet? Is this the freaking podcast that gets us banned finally? I don't know. No, I'm concerned at the depth. that this guy is going into to explain what I think is gonna be a series of behaviors that we're gonna discuss that are really deep.

Yes. It's interesting because what he's saying is and what he says is that the military can shut out these feminine characteristics and that's not good. Good. That's what he's about to say. Yeah. That one of the negative characteristics

of a militaristic organization is it doesn't have enough of the feminine characteristics. For instance, free and open mind, right? Those are bad if you don't have those those you're in a bad bad situation. So he goes on to say evidence of this aversion is of necessity circumstantial it embraces such a phenomenon so here's some things that kind of show maybe this this anti-effeminant role that you have in the military one of the importance attached to such outward signs of sexual

role identification as hair length since the insistence on short back and sides seems correlated with those periods in history when sexual differentiation was linked to hair length we can dismiss excuses of neatness and hygiene as rationalizations field marshal lord wolsey stated the true case when he said it is very difficult to make an englishman at any time look like a soldier he is fond of his longish hair. Hair is the glory of a woman, but the shame of a man. So what he's saying is, listen, it's not about hygiene. It's not about convenience, which, by the way, I totally disagree with this.

I think having short hair is totally convenient, low maintenance, hygienic, neat, right? That's why I have the hair that I have. When my hair gets longer than three quarters of an inch, which it hasn't been for a long time, I can't stand it. I don't think, dang, I kind of look like a woman.

I need to shave my head right now. Not even in the ballpark. So, dude, I think he's stretching here. I think he's doing a stretch. In fact, the other thing is, how do you make,

how do you bring uniformity to a person's hair? You cut it off. Otherwise, you know, you have some dude with long red hair, You got some other dude with curly hair. You got another dude with no hair. You know, you got all these different hairstyles.

And all of a sudden, we look different. We're not trying to look different. And you know how like when people, girls and guys, by the way, they have like longer hair and it starts to go in front of their face and they like whip it back right with their head?

That's a functionality thing. I get it, but it looks pretty feminine. Okay. What about when you see a fighter, a professional fighter in the ultimate fighting championship? and he has to adjust his hair while he's fighting, by the way. Same gig, man.

Right? Same gig. It doesn't make them any less of a fighter. Yeah. I guess technically right. You got to do one more step for efficiency or whatever, I guess. But, you know, isn't that a sexual thing when girls do that, like flip their hair? That's like a, that's like a mating thing, right?

I was just thinking of Clay Greta watching that dude fight. And just like, bro, how do you see? And he's constantly messing with his hair. And it didn't seem to affect him all that much. That's true. And his hair was so freaking wild. It was almost like a target. Disruptor. Yeah, like he's seen his hair would be moving around same thing with big ass beards like how does that not throw off your punch to someone's chin when they've got a beard a big beard that's a problem

I don't know if this is true, but I distinctly remember being told and I I don't even know who told me but Your hair the one of the reasons they talked about your hair being shorter is they don't want somebody to be able to use your hair as a as a as a way to manipulate your head during hand-to-hand combat You don't want to grab your head and you know so I don't remember that being like in a regulation as the explanation But being told hey if the guy can grab your hair and pull your head because your hair's too long You're wrong. That's to put you at this advantage. You can't do that So 100% my I've always my rule was this my rule of me But I will say I kind of talk to my son about this however Maybe I'm wrong didn't didn't really tell my daughters this I said hey if your hair is long enough for someone to grab

Then that's a problem you don't want to have hair that's like long enough for someone to grab. I told that to my son. I didn't, I might have told to my daughters, but I didn't enforce it. Right? So I guess I'm whatever, uh, uh, what is that? Sexist.

Yeah. No, you're not sexist, but you know, yeah, what is it when you treat someone different, right? You discriminate a little bit. Yeah,

well, whatever. Although I've told all I told all my daughter's like, hey, I can take care of this problem. We can shave that head. I always offer my daughter's haircuts. they've never said yes.

Yeah. I say it as a joke. Like, I don't know if I'd want to shave my daughter's head, but I told my son the same thing. I was like, yeah, you do want it short. Yeah. So when you get in a fight or whatever, they can't grab your head or your hair like that. Oh, that makes sense. That's what is double standard.

Double standard. I had the double standard. It's true. The double. Although I didn't. I gave them the option. Yeah, but you didn't enforce it though. Wait, did you enforce it with your son though?

No, but I mean, it kind of makes sense. Amen. So as far as your role and your level of enforcement. It was the same way how they behave that's different they got different in life. I get it You know but hey man no discrimination I kind of thought I might get my middle when my middle daughter was wrestling You know and going into some freaking savagery yeah they don't I thought I'm wrestling no yeah or they do no they don't but still let's face it's a principal let's face it You roll it you're you're a female wrestler and you roll in with the shit it's kind of like thug rose right? Yeah yeah, yeah, are we're not looking at thug rose thinking hell yeah we are we're looking at thug rose thinking hell yeah

even her opponent Yeah, she shaved her head. Yeah, yeah. She didn't have her head shaved the first time. But, you know, my daughter would get the corn road braids, like the real tight braids. That's kind of a war mode, too. It is. You can't grab those, by the way.

Yeah, I mean, in the back. Yeah, well, if you have some kind of a ponytail sticking out the back, but for some reason, my daughter didn't really have that. They were just tight. Interesting. Well, done. Well, isn't it the same for beard, though, like a big beard? Totally. Like, you can grab the beard.

And I'm like, brah. Yeah. It's the exact same thing. Yeah. I look at someone with the big beard, I think, hmm, handle on. You must be super, super double extra confident to think that someone's not going to freaking get a wrist wrap on that bad boy and slam your head in the pavement.

Well, I feel like the beard is in a less opportune position, I guess. Technically, still very useful. Yeah. Very useful. But, you know, on the top of the head, that's like, I'd say there's like a good level or two more control. Yeah. It's very shocking when I see guys with falling. here again you must have a lot of confidence that someone's not going to grab you and

that's one of my favorite takedowns on the battlefield just grab a handful of hair and slam people down it works good bro watch the girl fights on youtube well if you have the time bro that's that's gonna be the default at some point they're just gonna grab hair and it's like they kind of nullify both attacks when they're both grabbing hair so it's man it's like proof you know in the field yeah field proven combat scenario drunk chicks scrapping it out on YouTube it's totally true it's totally true okay this is a rough topic traditional taboos on certain topics and pastimes thus we find captain foley commander of britannian naval training establishment for officer cadets at dartmouth forbidding piano playing because he considered it effeminate so these the

kind of dudes are weird right this dude's got issues you know and he's going hard against piano because he's got some weird stuff going on. Yeah, right? Another one, a deeply rooted prejudice toward women who try to adopt traditional male roles. See that. Finally, an equation between

defensive behavior and effeminacy. So if you're on defense, that means you're being effeminate. The feeling that it is sissy to wear ear protectors or build head covers has undoubtedly caused much

unnecessary destruction of the human body it is not an unreasonable hypothesis to suggest that its most glaring and costly illustration occurred in connection with the issue of convoys in the first world war hundreds of thousands of tons of merchant shipping was lost through the Navy's refusal to adopt the convoy system when Lloyd George eventually forced convoys upon an unwilling admiralty losses fell significantly. So their idea was, hey, I'm in charge of my ship. I'm not going to go with a pack.

I'm not weak. I'm not going in a convoy. That's weak. I'm a man and I'm going to take this thing solo. And they were losing ships all the time. Finally someone said, hey, bro, you guys got to stick together. Yeah. The lesson was plain for all to see.

But in the years between the wars, the same irrational dislike of mothering a flock of ships prevented the development of an efficient escort system. So the Brits, the Brits started taking losses in World War I, World War II. Same freaking bad move. Then America entered the war and unbelievably in the face of overwhelming evidence insisted on trying to defeat U-Boats without the use of convoys. Same thing.

This is World War II. We already know that you should stick together. Between December 1941 and the following March, American losses of merchant shipping grew to the staggering monthly total of 500,000 tons. Eventually, the price of aggressive masculinity embodied in the so-called patrol and hunting operations of isolated warships proved too costly and convoys were instituted between Boston and Halifax. Losses on this route promptly dropped to zero. But south of Boston's ship still sailed independently until June of.

the number of ships sunk reached an all-time record of 700,000 tons in a single month. They still didn't do it. It's considered weak. It's considered feminine. Yeah. That's, okay, hindsight 2020.

I get it. But when you kind of think of the big picture, it makes more sense than it might appear at first. Because remember back in the day when seat belts weren't, what do you call legal? Like, or it was legal still to not wear your seat belt, right? And then there's like,

and then there's a little. transition period where it's like yeah if you don't wear your seatbelt it's kind of like ah like you're being what are you scared like kind of weak or whatever same thing with the kids and the helmets like oh yeah you're just writing in the cul-de-sac right now bread the helmet is that even necessary or you see the kids with the elbow pads you know it's kind of like okay cool you're safe but come on let's say that's kind of weak you know and but let's the truth is bro if if you care about like the safety or whether it be efficiency safety uh not dying like all these things brother helmet's gonna make a lot of sense right after a while you're gonna

kind of realize that then it's like okay what's more cool now living or not wearing that helmet yeah yeah that's a that's a that's a that's a that's a so i see i see what you're saying so it took these guys a little while to get over the state of mind like hey we kind of look like a sissy yeah yeah exactly because of we're going in a convoy yeah i don't need nobody holding my hand yeah you know i got this Yeah. Go ahead. Did any of your dudes not want to wear I-Pro? Remember I-Pro, those clear...

In what situations? In Robadi. Going out and literally going out on a mission. Yeah, me. And I'll tell you why. It had nothing to do with... If, depending on how much movement was taking place... Sweaty that fog up.

Just get sweaty and fog. I sweat a lot and they would be not, they wouldn't be functional for me. That's, that is a... Yep. That's a legitimate reason to do it to... Plus, do I look. like a sissy. Yeah.

I'm just kidding. No, that if you could wear I pro, you should, if you can, you should. Yeah. And I only ask that

because I remember that being a like long conversation with folks, not just on my team, but all the people who were with about not wearing iPro out on missions, not the fogging and the sweating

notwithstanding, which I fully understandable and there was different ways, different ones to do it and dudes didn't want to do it because they don't like the way it looked. Really? Well,

all you had to do is authorize me to wear freaking sunglasses. and then all of a sudden you can't get them to take them off. It's weird, though, because I always wear sunglasses. Always, always wear sunglasses, but I'd never wore sunglasses in the field, ever. And I don't know. They seem like just in the way.

Plus, they would fog up, they would get sweaty. Yeah. Is there anything in, I guess in the battlefield, it might be more black and white, but like in training or something like that where it's like maybe something optional or something that people don't want to wear or do that's, For safety reasons, but it's like, it's not cool. Or it's like, C.C. Or whatever.

There's a ton of things. In aviation, gloves are always a big one. Gloves, yeah, yeah. Dudes didn't want to wear gloves. And then they'd always show like these videos of like post-ejection trauma to your hands or fingers getting literally, they'd call it getting de-gloved when your skin would come off your hand and leave the bone behind. That had pictures of guys exiting the cockpit on injections and stuff or getting burned. things like that.

But flight gloves would stop you from getting de-gloved? Yes. So if you have like a ring or you're climbing up or something like that and you didn't have something covering that that could get caught, there's a famous picture. Any aviator listening to this will know exactly what I'm talking about. There's a famous picture in like the Gazette or whatever, a magazine of a dude's hand on the table like this who's wearing his wedding ring. And his hands there, this whole thing has gone all that's errors is the remaining piece of bone

left on his hand, you know, trying to get people to wear gloves. People didn't want to wear gloves. Did you wear a wedding ring? Yes. Under your gloves? Yes. Did you always wear gloves? Yes, I was a glove wear.

And then why would you not want to wear gloves? The complaint was like, oh, it's the tactile. Like I want to press the buttons and turn the knobs and it's harder to feel and like, can you cut the fingertips out? Yes. Did you do that? No. Just full on.

I just wore gloves. Now, what would eventually happen is like you'd wear through them and sometimes the fingers would actually you probably even seen in the videos I'm like moving my things up and down and the gloves are kind of frayed and whatnot but it was just to your point it was a conversation that I was found odd to be quite honest the reason I wore gloves

is like the first day of light school the guy was like you will wear your gloves I'm like okay Roger that I'm not here to like I'm not here to like tell you I don't like the way it feels I didn't even think about it and put my gloves on and strapped them on and that was the end of that I never found my own style

like you know I don't like this was it in my head. I didn't care or think about those things. And you got used to it. Totally. And once you get used to it, it doesn't really matter. There's no factor. Right.

Yeah, it's no factor at all. But there are people that these are conversations. And I think to the point is like those conversations about I'm not wearing this for the functionality versus I don't like the way it looks. Those are two totally different things. You tell me it gets fogged up. I can't see sweat. I remember sweat beads running down the glass.

I'm like, these is are gone immediately. Versus as I look in the mirror, I'm all kated up about to go. I don't like the way I look. I'm not, I'm not having those conversations. conversations in my mind about how I look when I'm doing this. Yeah, well, the fact of knowing you can get your freaking shrapnel in your eyes, you know, little chunks of brass in your eyes, little chunks of crap in your eyes like, that sucks. Especially Dave Burke, who has a hundred percent plan of going back to flying an airplane with this whole ground situation is over. I'm preserving my eyes, dude. Eyes are number one protected. So he goes on to this section here where he, he's, He starts to use this term butch. And it's not, it's just basically saying like, I guess we'd say like hypermanly,

like a manly man. He uses this term butch. He says, by selecting and promoting on the basis of such butch criteria as size, strength, physical courage, and prowess at games, the armed forces tend to ignore other attributes, which really may be of even greater importance to a senior commander, intelligence, high educational level, resistance of breakdown under stress, and substantial reserves of moral courage. Well, clearly this goes down where we're just picking kind of the toughest dude to be in

charge instead of the smartest dude. Not that the smartest dude is necessarily the right one either, because we see smart people that are really dumb. There is, of course, a counterargument, namely that generals should be heroic leaders, which would necessitate them having at least some of the aforemen. mentioned butch traits. Shear physical size, the possession of decorations for bravery, and a fine, Rugger record would, according to this argument, confer invaluable leadership qualities

upon top military commanders. Unhappily, this theory does not stand up. And by Rugger, he means a rugby player. Being good at Rugger in no way ensures the best qualities of military leadership. So-called masculine attributes count for very little in comparison with personality and knowing one's job. The most cursory glance at military history suggests that many of the really great military and naval commanders, Napoleon, Nelson Wolfe, for instance, were men of brain and character, not of huge bodies with dazzling records in the field of sport. Of generalship, Montgomery says,

the science and art of command involves an intimate knowledge of human nature. A commander must think two stages ahead. He speaks glowingly of the physically frail wolf and Nelson, describing the latter as a brilliant seaman and most original intelligent and courageous fighter. In the same vein, he comments on the flexibility and brilliant intellect of Napoleon, but nowhere does the field marshal talk about the advantages of fine physique, hairy masculinity, and a reputation for long-distance running polo or boxing. So these manly traits, butch traits, according to this book, might not be the most important thing.

In fact, he's indicating that they are not the most important thing. We are concerned to relate and explain two indisputable phenomenon. So-called peaceful generals who in times of stress reveal themselves as passive, dependent, and indecisive, and the anti-effeminacy ethos of some military organizations. to handle these facts the following points were made. Some men, for reasons rooted in early family situation, have serious doubts about their sexual adequacy

and or physical strength and size. Such men may deal with their feelings of inferiority by adopting a compensatory style of life in which they strive for reassurance in some suitably symbolic role. The prevailing ethos of many military organizations provides this reassurance. Hence, a percentage of men will seek acceptance by the armed forces simply because

such acceptance is a warranty of their masculinity. Once in, their continuing and underlying feat of a fear of effeminacy produces that well-known pattern of behavior which we have termed butch. But this behavior is itself highly valued in the armed forces. Hence, the individual not only profits, by, but also contributes to the anti-effeminacy of his parent organization. It is in his interest to do so. And last, the significance of all this for military incompetence is that

Butch characteristics are not perhaps the most important criteria for top-level leadership. So he's talking about, and when I was thinking about this, you definitely see some people like this where you can see that they're in the military to try. maybe compensate for some fears in their own head. And I think it's real obvious. Just like we talk the obviousness of someone that's a snob, someone that's a name dropper. Because let's face it,

there's some guys in the military that are 100% badass military dudes. And like, that's just how they are. This idea that you get some people that are countering their innate, feminine traits by just trying to act super tough. You see some of those guys? I don't think it's very widespread. You certainly see some of them, but it's not that common.

When you see it, it's very obvious that that's what you're dealing with. They're usually over the top with their behavior. But then I think the most important thing that he's saying is that in the military, sometimes that you start to focus on that. And we don't want someone that's going to raise their hand and have an open mind to stuff

or going to, I mean, think about some of these feminists, feminist traits that are good. Multitasker, right? Wants to talk, communicate, remembers things. Free, flowing, and open, right? Emotion driven. We talk all the time about the fact that we don't want people to make emotional

decisions, but you don't want someone that doesn't have any emotion because that's how you end up with a commander that's just sending people to do their death. So to, well, that's why we wrote the dichotomy of leadership. All these masculine and feminine traits, you need them both. And you need to have balance. You need to have balance in the individuals. And then you need to have balance in a unit. You're going to need some people in your platoon that just are killers.

But if you have a whole platoon filled with killers, that's going to be a problem. And you need to have some people in your platoon that are very empathetic. But if you have a whole platoon of empathetic people, you're not going to be able to get any missions done. So you need a balance of these feminine, feminine and masculine. traits you need to have the proper balance of ying and yang yes sure so where does toxic masculinity fit it fit into all the or is this just talking about toxic max but but since it was written back in you know yeah before the term before the term the toxic masculinity I wrote an article about this one time toxic masculinity is when you take any of the mass considered traditional masculine traits

and you take them to an extreme and then you end up with someone that's quote toxic masculine So here's the thing when I wrote that article I wrote about because they were saying you know being competitive is a toxic masculine trait. No it's not it's a good trait to have being strong That's a masculine trait is it toxic? No Do what's another one? Being purpose driven that's a masculine trait according to this list is that a bad thing if you take it to an extreme where you've got someone that's they just want to win and then smash people yeah that's bad if you want someone that's wants to be just so strong and powerful that they'll just step on other people that's bad so if you take any of these things to an extreme they're a problem and what i ended up

saying in that article there's these these are good characteristics for for a person to have including my three daughters i want my daughters to be assertive i want them to be strong i want them to be competitive. What, you don't want your daughters to be like that? No, of course. You want your sons to be like that too. Do you want any of your kids to go too far in those directions? No,

absolutely not. So the toxic masculinity, I think, is when you start taking any of these characteristics to the extreme, it becomes a problem. Does that answer your question? Yeah, I'm wondering just if this is essentially like what he's talking about before it was actually like a phrase. Yeah. And I think if you get an organization.

where they've gone too far in one direction. It's a problem. Yeah. Now listen, we got just people out of just following orders, just ultra obedient, because that's what the masculine thing is we just want to, we want to obey and be part of the team. Okay, cool.

Yeah. Not good. Chapter 20, leaders of men. How can the ability to lead depend on the ability to follow? You might as well say that the ability to float depends on the ability to sink. That's an interesting quote, which I don't agree with. The ability to lead. You don't necessarily know sorry in order to follow you don't necessarily doesn't know doesn't mean necessarily you're going to be a good leader

But if you're going to be a good leader you better know how to follow as well So that quote right there which is from the Peter principle don't agree with it Whatever its other causes military incompetence implies a failure in leadership and this is hardly surprising of psychological problems which beset military officers few exceed and severe those associated with leadership in this respect they are required to fulfill incompatible roles they're expected to show initiative yet remain hemmed in by regulations they must be aggressive yet never insupportinent they must be assiduous in caring for their men yet maintain an enormous social distance they must know everything about everything yet never appear intellectual finally

as we saw in the last chapter they may well have been selected for attributes almost totally unrelated to the task they are expected to perform so That's an entire list of dichotomies of leadership, right? Discussions of leadership is so often overloaded with vague but emotive ideas that one is hard to put the nail to nail the concept down. So now he's trying to come up with a definition for leadership. To cut through the panoply of such quasi-moral and unexceptionable associations as patriotism. Play up and play the game never asking your men do something you wouldn't do for yourself not giving up the square jaw frank eyes of steadfast gaze these are all like these sort of leadership things if you'll if you'll be a man recipe so he's given all these kind of traditional

quotes about leadership and then he gives his the simple truth that leadership is no more than exercising such an influence upon others that they tend to act in concert towards achieving a goal which they might not have achieved so readily had they been left to their own devices. Fair enough. Is that an epic definition of leadership? Not really. But it's a decent one. The ingredients which bring about this favorable state of affairs are many and varied.

The most superficial level, at the most superficial level, they are believed to include such factors as voice, stature and appearance, impression of omniscience, trustworthiness, sincerity, and bravery at a deeper and rather more important level leadership depends on a proper understanding of the needs and opinions of those one hopes to lead and the context in which leadership occurs so that's a

great definition well not so much a definition but it's a great point hey your voice your stature your trustworthiness your sincerity your bravery those things are all important but guess what's even more important understanding the needs and opinions of the people you're leading That's what he's saying right there. So he nails that part, straight up. In short, there's nothing mysterious, romantic, or necessarily laudable about leadership in military organizations. Leaders are appointed rather than emergent. That is to say, the needs of the individual soldier play almost no role in deciding the sort of leader he gets.

Secondly, the military leader possesses constitutional power of a magnitude which surpasses that of leaders in most other human beings. in groups. If he cannot pull his followers by force of character, he can at least push them by force of law. I don't really bind to that too much. That's like, you know, because in the civilian world, oh, you don't want to do what I'm telling you, cool, I'm going to fire you, which you can do. Just like in the military, you can say, shut up and do it. I told you to do because I, you know, I have the backing of the constitution behind me. Neither one of those are good leadership. And they won't pan out for very long. The third and related feature of military leadership is that essentially is essentially autocratic and operates in what modern theorists call a wheel net

rather than an all-channel communication net. In other words, the flow of essential information is to and fro between the leader and his subordinates rather than between all members of the group. Not very surprisingly, the wheel net, though no doubt gratifying to autocratic leaders, produces more errors, slower solutions to problems, and reduce gratification to the group than does the more democratic all-channel net. That's interesting.

You want to participate with your whole group. I think that's how I operate. It doesn't really matter who comes with an idea. We're good with it. Let's share it. In light of these considerations, it is perhaps strange that leadership and the British armed forces should have been

as effective as it has. So he's like saying it's amazing that the British military was so effective because they freaking operate on these principles that suck. Since a salient feature of all, and by the way, you want to know why? The soldiers. The soldiers

get the job done. Since a salient feature of all the campaign so far considered has been a remarkable absence of the mutinous tendencies and a quite astonishing degree of tolerance, fortitude, and bravery shown by the common soldier, we have to ask, was this despite

or because of their leaders? to go ahead and say despite in many cases. Yeah. I saw this with many, many platoons over the years. You could have bad leadership, but if you have a few pipe hitters in there, they will make things happen. And that platoon will be successful,

even with bad leadership, despite the leadership they'll be successful. The first point of note is the distinction that has to be drawn between two roles of a leader, task specialist and social specialist. A task specialist's, a leader's prime concern, as a task specialist, a leader's prime concern is to achieve the group's goal in the case of the military defeating the enemy. For such a role, being likable is rather less important trait than that of being more active, more intelligent, and better informed than his followers. In his capacity as a social specialist, however, a leader's main function is to preserve good personal relations with the group.

and within the group, thereby maintaining morale as to keep the group in being. In the military, Maloo, the function of a successful social specialist would prevent mutiny and reduce such symptoms as low morale, absenteeanism, desertion, sickness, and crime. Not very surprisingly, the most important attribute of such a leader is that he should be liked. efficiency and task ability are of rather secondary importance. So this is something, I think I wrote leadership strategy and tactics. What is a leader trying to do? Build relationships in that team.

Not just between yourself, but between the whole team. That's what we're trying to do. That's what we're here for. And that task thing kind of works itself out. If you're doing a good job building those relationships, that task thing's going to kind of handle itself. I'm just having such a hard time. He's using so many words.

And what I'm actually trying to do is get my head wrapped around like 1970s, England. That's what I'm trying to do. Because it's like, hey, how about I take those 12 pages and just write balance? You know what I mean? And yeah, even inside that, just like you, and I think the order in which you said it is the right thing is if he called it like democratic. We all feel part of it. Does everybody think I care about you? If my people think I care about them, they're going to get on board of the plan.

And if I'm an autocrat and I tell people what to do and they have to do what they say, no matter what, they're going to struggle with the plan. And if you go with that first one, they'll do even harder things that are more challenging, more life-threatening and less likely to be successful on paper or at least it to their own risk than if they don't think that I care about them. They'll be less likely to do hard things like combat. And then inside that, the little subtle point,

and I'm glad you said it because I had the exact same thought is, even when that leadership doesn't reveal itself, which it clearly has not, there's another layer of leadership inside there. You could call it your NCOs, whatever the term that you want to use those pipe hitters inside the organization, they're still going to make it happen.

Yeah, and just to make sure everyone understands when you want your team to think you care about them, how do you make that happen? You have to care about them. And I shouldn't say, I should use a different word when they believe that. Not when they think that, like I'm trying to convince them of that.

When they come to believe that and go, oh, yeah. This guy cares about it. He really does. That's, that is a, that's a better way to describe, and that's really what you're saying. Not that I manipulate them to thinking that. It's when they recognize it for themselves and they see that and they believe that. Says here, it has been shown that whereas low-stressed groups operating in situations that are devoid of painful uncertainties do best under democratic leadership,

organizations like the military in times of war that are subject to stressing ambiguities actually prefer. Autocratic leadership. In other words, the feelings of dependency induced by stress successfully neutralize a person's normal adversity toward the autocratic leader. While a man like Townsend would not be likely to survive for very long in a modern civilian firm, his autocratic mean was lovingly accepted by men whose lives were hanging by a threat. The reason that he points all this out is that these guys, some of these guys like Townsend, they still listen to him. They obeyed him. And what's interesting about this is he's making a huge generalization of organizations like the military in times of war are subject to stressing ambiguity's prefer autocratic leadership.

Let me tell you where the subtlety here is. 97%, 98%, 99% of the time. even in a war, we want democratic leadership. And there is a moment in time where there's confusion, where there's chaos, where there's mayhem, where everyone is looking at the leader to make a call. That happens in the military. It happens in business too. I mean, when Eschalon Front hit COVID, right?

Hey, we heard a bunch of ideas and then I became a little bit autocratic. It's like, hey, here's what we're doing. Boom. And everyone was stoked going, hell yeah, that's what we're doing. They were. and the thread that's inside both of those. And I think why autocratic behavior when you're the recipient of that,

why you're willing to be treated like that or directed, if I have already made the connection of my mind that the thing that you're making me do, that you're directing me to do, is designed to help me, keep me alive when that thread hangs in the, or the life hangs in the balance,

whatever the word he just used there. If I make that connection and go, he's telling me to do this and I know why he's telling me this, that I'll follow orders all day on. It doesn't even bother me. It doesn't bother me told what to do to be mandated anything from my boss.

If I go, oh, I see what's happening here. I'm going to go execute. Now, if you spend your whole career being an autocrat and just telling me what to do, dude, I got news for you. Even when you actually need in those rare 2, 3% occasions, you need to do that. You can have a very, very hard time

getting your people to follow you. Yeah. This is a point that I made deeply in leadership strategy and tactics when I talk about leadership in effect. in the leadership vacuum. And I mean, I went into some specifics in there, like letting that vacuum exist for just a second longer,

just to make sure everyone feels it. I would make sure I'd wait an extra half a second or one second before I said anything to make sure everyone knew, oh, damn, we don't know what we're doing right now. And they are waiting to be led. They are waiting for that autocratic leader to step and say, everyone lock it up, we're moving to that building. And they are so on board for that.

If you make that call a little too early, you get resistant. Some people are, how do you know what? No, you got to let it. You got to let it just let it be there for a moment. Let everyone see, oh, it's a vacuum. I don't know what to do. And then boom. And if you wait too long, well, then other people are chirping in with their ideas.

You can get some confusion. So you've got to time that very well. But it's unfortunate that he says he kind of blankets the whole thing because it's not true. It's not a blanket statement. even in war, people want to have more say as what's happening. He's also doing one thing that I don't agree with either is he's drawing some contrast between this military leader and that military leader's inability to be successful in the private sector because the military responds of these type of behaviors and the private sector doesn't.

Well, when he's talking about that, he's talking about the fact that if you have an authoritarian leader in the civilian, it's going to be less successful. Here's a point that I made the other day, which you actually, No, I agree with you. You're right. That doesn't make sense. Here's why, and he doesn't point us out in this book, I pointed this out the other day.

In the military, bad leaders can get promoted. Easier than bad leaders can get promoted in the civilian sector. Why is that? Because in the military, you're going to be in charge. How long are you in charge of your squadron for? Two years. And that's what a military leader gets. Yep.

So you get two years. And by the time the enlisted guys figure out this guy, has a jackass. It takes some sick months to confirm that. And then it's like, okay, well, now we're starting to work up. We're actually doing it. Well, hey, he'll be gone. Forget about it.

And that guy, Dave Burke gets promoted because he did his job. He did it correctly. No one said anything. Boom. Whereas civilian world? Like, you're in charge that whatever division for years. And everybody knows it. That's another thing.

Military, oh, you, oh, you did one, you know, one command deployment here in Virginia. Then you're going to San Diego. Then you're going to Bahrain. Then you're just traveling around and you can get away with it. So that's one of the reasons I think why the military can produce some bad leaders. Yes. And they can get promoted. As long as that comment you made is understood that this success in the private sector,

comparison of the success in the military sector, your point is the bad leaders might stick around. They're not good leaders by virtue of the military environment. They're bad leaders that are being, that are sticking around because, The military has a mechanism that sort of allows for it. But just, I just, I don't like the thought that there's a distinction that military leader, good military leadership is different from other types of leadership. That's 100% accurate. Yeah.

Fast forward a little bit. But even given the right circumstances, an autocratic mean is no bar to being liked. We still need some more positive reasons for this extraordinary popularity of, otherwise incompetent commanders. So he talks about the fact that, like, why do you still like? Why did these guys like Townsend, who got a bunch of his men killed? Why did they still like him? Why did they still follow him?

One of the reasons he talks about is successful leadership attended to occur if followers had been indulged by their leaders. That makes sense, right? Oh, if you would actually take care of your guys, they would be more likely to follow you. Well, that makes sense. That actually makes sense. That's a good reason.

A situation in which the motivational, as opposed to the intellectual aspects of leadership, may lead to military disasters, where obedience evoked by hero worship, blunt's reason, and moral sensitivity to such an extent that the group may embark on a behavior which is little short of suicidal. Again, he's trying to figure out why in some situations do people that are idiots still get followed. There is, however, one further aspect of these more nebulous qualities of leadership, which has played a not inconsiderable part in the story of military incompetence.

It concerns the position which an individual occupies on two related continuum, those of boldness to caution and impulsiveness to indecision. Over the years of military incompetence has resulted more from a dearth of boldness than from a lack of caution. and more from a pall of indecision than an excess of impulsivity. So he's saying that most of the problems that occur, they don't occur because action is taken to impulsive action. They actually happen for the other reason, don't want to do anything.

That's why the term default aggressive exists. Because if you don't do anything, chances are it's going to be bad. Your default mode should be to make something happen. Real quick, not to interrupt. So autocratic, what exactly is that? It's close to authoritarian, but it's weird. He uses the term autocratic. It's like, hey, I'm in charge, I'm in control.

It's one person in control, charge and in control. But he differentiates between autocratic meaning, like, listen, hey, I'm the guy in charge. I'm going to tell us where to go. And authoritarian, which is very strong-handed form of autocratic rule. Okay. He doesn't necessarily, he gives autocratic a little bit of negativity, but he's also like, hey, you're in a platoon, that's the platoon commander. It's autocratic.

What he says we're going to do. That is the reality of the situation. The better reality is a democratic. 97% of the time, 3% of the time, autocratic. 3% of the time, hey, I'm in charge. This is what we're going to make happen right now. We've got to make this happen now. Boom.

Yeah, isn't like, because kind of kind of you think, I remember, okay, you know how you have entrepreneurs and then you have like employee types, right? Yes. And then like certain personalities go along with each one, like way better, right? For sure. Because some people with face like they just tell me where to be, what time and tell me what to do, man. Oh, and they'll go and they'll do it. They'll get the job done super good, you know, within their little, within their job description, scope, you know?

And then some people, they go crazy with that kind of stuff. And then they just rather like think and go out, color outside the lines and all this. stuff you know so it's like so the autocratic is kind of maybe for people who are yeah like that right but here's the thing there's everyone has a spectrum right and there's gonna be times where if you're working for me echo there's gonna be times you like dude why is this guy bossing me around and there'd be other times you'd be waiting for me to tell you what to even you yeah as a one human can have you can you can transit across that spectrum and what I'm saying is when there's a lot

of pressure on and there's mayhem going on Most people are going to want somebody to tell them to what to do. I shouldn't say most. Many, many people are going to say, dude, you need to tell me what to do right now because there's bad stuff going on. Remember in that scene and saving Private Ryan right at the beginning, right, that crazy part?

Yep. And then he kind of loses his hearing or something like that. He just kind of like snaps to and this guy's in front of the state. What do we do now, sir? That's a classic example. Yeah, it's kind of like that. That's a classic example of, hey,

Those guys are looking to be led at that moment and it took a lot to get them to that point, but there they are. So that's a good one. One of the obvious explanations for the failure of motivational aspects of leadership is in all these instances related to the advanced age of the individuals concerned. Old men are more cautious than young men and less able to make quick decisions than those whose arteries have not begun to harden. I've cut out a lot of the joke. This guy is a funny guy, I will say. There are other more fundamental and pervasive reasons for these failures in leadership, which can be ascribed to the general psychopathology of military organizations.

Their common denominator is anxiety. It is a feature of armed services that the penalty for error is very much more substantial than the reward for success. That is so important to remember for your organization. the penalty for error is way harder than the reward you get when you do something good. That's absolutely true in the military. So what kind of people do you end up with? Right.

Whereas the naval officer who, through an error of judgment on the part of his subordinates, puts his ship aground, will almost certainly be court-martialed and stands a fair chance of being heavily punished. The reward for taking a bold action which pays off, maybe no more than a mention in a dispatch or some decoration with little or no effect upon promotional aspects. The net result of this bias towards negative reinforcement will be that fear of failure rather than hope of success tends to be the dominant motive force in decision making and the higher rank, the stronger this motive. There's farther to fall. That is a good thing to remember with your kids, right? With your kids. You don't want your kids operating out of fear of making a mistake. You want your kids operating all in the hope of being successful.

Finally, mentioned must be made of a thesis. put forward by Simon Raven, which may bode ill for the future. It concerns the role of false premises in the training of officers, false premises that have their origin in a simple and obvious fact that an expectation of superiority in a leader by those who led will increase the tendency to follow him. This was kind of strange. For years, it was the case that since they were drawn from a socioeconomic class

that was vastly inferior to that of the officers, the rank and file took for granted that their officers knew more than they did and were in a very real sense born to lead, i.e. were born into that class, which traditionally the core of officers was drawn. That's the way it used to be. You kind of were a whatever, a peasant, and you had this lord that was your officer,

and you're like, hey, dude, this dude's supposed to be in charge, so I'm kind of going to listen to him. Since the last word, this has changed. Officers are no longer recruited exclusively from the upper classes. Comparatively, few are landed from gentry or aristocratic families, and many have not even attended a public school, which a public school in England is. private school by the same token the rank and file are better educated and more

sophisticated than their forbearers so the troops are more educated at first blush this would seem all to the good giving promise of a dem democratization of in the profession of arms a trend which would one day place on it on par with most most other vocations in civilized society unfortunately according to raven Smith Simon Ravens thesis something quite other is happening confronted with the necessity of recruiting its officers from a section of society that would have been unthinkable in years gone by. The military has made what it regards as the best of a bad job by insisting that since

officers must still be gentlemen where no natural gulf exists between those who lead and those who follow, this must be artificially inculcated by training. So this is a little bit hard to follow, but I'm going to just give a little detail here. So you used to have these people that were lords or whatever. And so the troops were freaking peasants. And they're like, cool, this guy's a lord. I should probably be listening to him. He's a gentleman.

He purports himself as a leader. Cool. I'm going to tend to follow him. Then all of a sudden they started recruiting officers from wherever. And now they had to say, wait a second, they still need to be gentlemen. So we're going to inculcate this difference into them. We're going to make them into a higher class. What is it inculcate?

like sort of put that seed into them. We're going to turn them into that. We're going to plant this in them. As far as just an idea or like really like, okay, we're going to inculcate these people. We're going to train them to be that? Or are we just going to plant that seed in everyone's head

so it seems like that? Well, yeah. So what he says is artificially inculcated. So he's like, we're going to fake this. We're going to try and make these people seem as if they're of a higher class, which is like that right there.

We should already be thinking, uh-oh, right? Uh-oh. The following excerpts from Raven's article should make the matter plane. We start with a glimpse of life at the Royal Military Academy and later at the School of Infantry at Warminster in the 1950s. According to Raven, the products of this training regimen may be as bizarre as those depicted in the four character studies, which conclude this section. Here we go. Saluting at Sandhurst is tremendous. If you walk round Sandhurst looking remotely as if you might be an officer, you will receive an incessant barrage of compliments.

The muddy boy in P.T. shorts will stop running square his shoulders and snap his eyes in your direction like knives. The elegant young gentleman in the brown Trillby will lift it from his head with a controlled jerk to replace it in the exact number of seconds later at precisely the same angle. Boys in uniform with sticks, swords, rifles, or submachine guns will perform a volume of intricate movements alone or as a body, especially for your benefit. So they're trying to make people think they're, you know, elevated. To the detached observer, these quaint antics may seem ludicrous, boring, or even faintly embarrassing. However, there will be others so emotionally incapable of distinguishing between compliments paid to the abstractions of rank and commission and those paid to themselves as people that they will actually enjoy these gesticulations. This is where the trouble starts, homie. This is when you are going to, you know,

you're going to OCS or wherever, you're getting trained, and you start thinking you're damn right. You're saluting me. You are saluting me. But such enjoyment of these mandatory conventions based upon a highly motivated, if understandable, misinterpretation of their meaning, may, like the effects of even the most transparent flattery,

provoke wholly unrealistic feelings of self. importance oh and you know what's kind of weird it is kind of weird in the military one of the big distinctions you get caught his officers get called sir right yes so think about that you're an officer you get called sir it doesn't matter if you're 21 years old and you just graduated from OCS or you just graduated from the Academy you're getting called sir so there's some people that go man you know what's really awkward to be called sir when I'm actually 22 years old and this guy's 38 years old

That's kind of weird, but I get it's the military convention. That's a great attitude to have. Yeah. And you know what? There is a level of respect, even when a seasoned, non-commissioned officer, a platoon chief calls a young officer, sir, and he does it in a respectful way. And there's a known, it doesn't need to be said. It's like, hey, I'm giving you your props. Right.

It's good. That's the way the rank structure works. And it is like this just beautiful relationship. Yeah. But then there's some people that go, yeah, you're damn right, you call me, sir. Yeah. Yeah, it's like the, like, okay, like the season guy calling the new guy, sir, whatever. If he's an officer, that's almost like it's respect for the whole institution.

Yes, 100%. Yeah. It's respect for the whole thing. And a good young officer goes, man, man, it's a little bit uncomfortable. That's kind of the deal here. I get it. And so there's also, there's also enlisted guys that go through that phase of like, the hell I'm not calling this guy sir that's freaking ridiculous they'll call I'll call you

lieutenant I'm not calling you sir sir's for my grandfather so again they go through that phase young enlisted guys will go through that phase of like I'm not calling this guy sir other significant features of the sandhurst may lu in according to ravenor the perfect system wherein cadets of higher rank are required to discipline and report upon those of lower status the Blunting drill square upon which three apparent essentials for a career of violence unthinking obedience and exquisite capacity for keeping in step and a proper concern for the minutia of dress are instilled for hour upon hour until fatigue and sweat hang over the masked cadets like Brimstone over Sodom and Finally the total loss of privacy and lack of leisure for the following of idiosyncratic interest and pastimes taken together the features of the Royal Military Academy are done designed to quote build character and imbue future officers with values proper to their calling.

Any gaps which Sandhurst might leave in a total program for the inculcation of an officer-like quality are admirably filled up, says Raven, by the quasi-moral imperatives of war minister. These cluster around the concepts of guts, enthusiasm, humor, sociability, and responsibility traits which every officer should show. So they got done with Sandhurst, which is like their military college now there are their their their advanced school this place warminster and whatever they didn't get it whatever didn't whatever gaps there are they're gonna go even harder at warminster while much of the training was inevitably designed to promote physical fitness there was nevertheless a strong held belief that an officer whether fit or

not should always have so much in the way of pride or guts that he would never admit to physical inadequacy until he dropped dead or unconscious this belief a very significant one was both mythical was mystical both in nature and intensity now we're kind of chuckling about that that's kind of a badass thing though right it's kind of a badass thing hey you are not going to give up you're not going to stand down doesn't matter you're ready or not you put on that rucksack you're going to finish this day of march that's what's happening this was interesting another warm minister virtue was a peculiar brand of humor this was not the ability to see oneself and see one's activities in a detached and ironical spirit that would

have been fatal. Humor meant being cheerful in the face of unpleasant circumstances, rallying the men's spirits by laughing with them over some slapstick incident, submitting like a good sport to an unjust punishment given to oneself by the adjutant and laughing about it afterwards in the mess. This conception of humor and obvious branch of guts was in fact discreetly designed to counteract or totally extinguish any tendencies towards an objective or intellectual humor that might contain tingees of satire or cynicism for such a thing would have been detrimental to another highly prized virtue that of enthusiasm. So this little brand of humor comes out where there's nothing directed with negativity

up the chain of command. It's all just funny. And I don't, I think that's actually, again, maybe I'm this the brainwash dude here, but I think that the guts part is cool. I think that the dark humor, twisted humor thing is kind of cool too because there's nothing better than getting in shitty situations and being able to laugh about it. I think that's cool.

I guess maybe if you take it both these things to this far extreme where we're not protesting anything because we're just gonna laugh at it or we're not gonna ever stop because we're just gonna keep going even if it's gonna be harmful to us or our troops, then it turns bad, I guess.

And he's got this word enthusiasm. Enthusiasm, I can hardly trust myself to speak it seemed to mean a sort of blind uncritical application to any task, however silly or futile, that the neurosis or panic of superior might have suddenly thrust upon us. Since one of the points of enthusiasm that you started doing whatever it was straight away and without wasting time on question, enthusiasm could involve a frantic expense of time and energy on some trifling project wastefully because uncritically undertaken, abandoned halfway as irrationally was, it was as it was commenced.

This, of course, was just what great soldiers of the past wished to avoid when they deplored the indiscriminate use of zeal. Why zeal condemned alike by Klaus Fitz and Wellington should now once again be thought desirable. It is interesting to speculate. So this idea of enthusiasm, also known as zeal, is like, hey, I'm just on board for whatever you tell me to do. And I guess that that's another thing. Is it a beautiful thing in many cases? Yes, it is. But if you're getting told to charge a machine gun nest and you go roger that with enthusiasm and zeal and you get all your guys killed

That's not what we want that shouldn't be what we want Maybe in World War one that's what we quote wanted But we shouldn't want that you should want pushback Loyalty meant there's another term loyalty loyalty meant that you were acquired in the name of the queen and honor of the regiment to conceal any impatience or amusement you might feel when the demands of your enthusiasm became operatic farcical or just plain impossible of fulfillment loyalty in fact was the conception is often blatantly used to blackmail you into silence when you were faced with incompetence and justice or sheer folly of a superior officer that was kind of funny this is just loyalty dude was your loyalty bro he wants me to do this and doesn't

make you sense bro you need to be more loyal right sociability was also highly esteemed at Warminster this like loyalty could mean many good things such as hospitality and the desire to please in social intercourse but it also implied an unquestioning deference to the convenience and opinions of once military superiors so you're just gonna get on board with what everyone else is saying and you can see what we're doing we're creating robots we're not creating thinking people and this is bad courage under fire a sort of distilled essence of guts could not exactly be taught so it had to be taken for

granted and all of us who were tacitly and grimly assumed to possess it Hence, we can pass to a very much boosted commodity initiative. So now we finally go, okay, cool, we want to see initiative. Unfortunately, in the peacetime conditions, even for the most part in wartime ones, communications are now so good and opportunities for genuinely individual action so rare, that initiative tends to become a highly contrived thing artificially fostered to impress superiors. The sort of person who was praised at Warminster for initiative generally turned out to be a meddlesome bully of the type who reports to his best friend or to his house master for immoral behavior,

thereby himself becoming head prefect in his friend's place. There you go. So this section, he gives a bunch of examples of various types of these officers and how they turned out. It seems, fast forward a little bit, it seems that all remained of his training in the mind of each recipient was the faulty syllogism. Officers should be gentlemen. I am an officer, therefore I am a gentleman. After this, he seemed to behave neither as an officer nor as a gentleman in generally any accepted sense of these terms.

And Raven says this, once an officer is established in his own view as a member of a superior and order-giving class, he never loses this sense. This is where things turn into a nightmare, right? So an officer is established in his own view. As a member of a superior and order giving class, he never loses this sense, but he can and often does lose all awareness of the moral basis of this superiority and all the qualities which constitute this basis. So he forgets why he's in this position. He forgets that he was just like placed here. He starts to believe his own bullshit and the bullshit that's been fed to him, that people run around calling him sir and saluting him.

he just becomes superior as it were in vacuo which means in a vacuum he's in a vacuum he's in a vacuum he's just superior he becomes a gentleman when this happens one gets that product so typical of the british the amateur english officer highly trained professional and professionally and morally he has forgotten his professional his professional his professional techniques and slothed off in his sense of moral obligation, but he retained an unassailable sense of his own superiority and absolute right to give orders. My note next to that was nightmare.

That's a nightmare. To forget how you ended up in this position, to forget that you don't know everything, to just get told that you're an officer and you're superior, and you start to believe that. This is a nightmare. leadership. Nowadays things are different. The social distance between officers and men more often than not contrived rather than rooted in their ancestry. For officers of humble origins, this might

well be expected to produce sizable problems of adjustment. The first jolt to their social reinforcement standard will be of one of descriptive discrepancy. What's interesting about this is there's no guarantee. Like I knew officers that came silver spoon all day long and they were just down to earth good people. And I also knew Silver Spoon officers that thought that they deserved. They thought that they were superior. I also knew some guys from lower class that scrambled through and scraped through and became officers and they were awesome and they never forgot where they came from.

And I also knew officers that had come up through the ranks and they were turds. Laif points out that the best officer that, went through his junior officer training was a prior enlisted officer and the worst officer that went through his junior officer training was a prior enlisted officer which is crazy to think yeah that's crazy to think I think that I agree with that your your description those four categories whatever you want to call them same thing seeing the exact same thing and I'm trying to remember the way you were describing it is I remember I guess I don't remember like the first time it happened but there's like a ceremony.

Do you have a first salute ceremony? Yep. And I remember that being an incredibly uncomfortable experience for me. Like, man, this is weird. The guy who I did it was a good friend of mine who was enlisted Marine. He had fought in Desert Storm. He was a known, well-known guy. And just by virtue of accomplishing the criteria to make me an officer, like, from one moment to the next, he saluted me.

Yeah. And I think I was just lucky to have that sense. I'm like, man, this is weird, you know. But also I think you described it well, like the reverence for the institution. Like, this is how the institution is designed. And if you have that reverence for it, he didn't feel demeaned and I didn't feel superior.

And yet, that's the way it's supposed to be. Yeah, and yet how easily, like, oh, I could get used to this. You know, how quickly people fall into that trap of all over that trap. And it's not the institution that bestowed this on me. Yeah, I deserve this. Yes. Yeah, I mean, and this, again, we're talking about the military specifically, but you can apply this anywhere. You can apply this anywhere.

Oh, well, I went to this college. I went through this program. I got my MBA from here or there. And all of a sudden, it's like, oh, did I tell you that? Did I mention where I went to college? You know, it's like, yeah, that's cool, man. Appreciate it. That's awesome.

Yeah, but when you say it, nobody noticed. says here. There's a note about this Ravens assessment. So somebody kind of read that big assessment of Sandhurst. And this guy says, I read Simon Ravens paper with great interest. When you ask for my comments, you must bear in mind that in 1898, when I was gazetted, I joined a totally different type of army from that of today. It was an aristocratic army feudal in the sense that it was grounded on leadership and fellowship in which, with few exceptions, the leaders were the sons of gentlemen.

And more frequently than not, the eldest sons, the most privileged sons. When I went to Sandhurst, we were not taught to behave like gentlemen because it never occurred to anyone that we should behave otherwise. We were taught a lot of obsolete tactics in every army of that day did a tremendous lot of useless drill but never heard a word about responsibility, loyalty, guts, etc. Because so I suppose these were held to be the natural prerequisites of gentlemen. So this is back in the day when it's like, hey man, you better act like this. You're upholding the family name. The men, the followers of that period were a rough lot, simple, tough, illiterate, largely

recruited from down and outs, men who had a lot, men who had gotten a lot of trouble, vagamonds, and a sprinkling of the sons and grandsons of NCOs and private soldiers, military families, who generally became NCOs. There were therefore two distinct classes, really casts by birth. On the whole, the men looked up to their officers, whether they were efficient or inefficient and the officers did not look down on their men. Why should they? So he was saying, like, this was just kind of the way it was back then.

The idea of an officer imposing on his will on his men never entered his head because one class was so superior and the other so inferior that it was unnecessary to do this. There wasn't even any opposing ideas to what you were saying. The superior could not lose cast should he play or mix with his men. I remember this is a good story. I remember on my first tour as an orderly officer on the QMS. Was late for the QMS meaning the quartermaster so one of the sailors was late for meat issue and I thought he had risked it because I was a novice So I put him under arrest when this was reported to the adjutant He took me aside and said strictly speaking you were right but actually speaking you were an ass

So don't do it again and I didn't so he like punished this guy trying to prove that he was period said hey bro. What are you doing you you technically you could do that but that's That's not the way you treat your people. Of the present day democratic army, I know next to nothing. Like the old aristocratic one, it must have its good points and is probably more efficient. But to me, it is a folly to try and mix the two. A gentleman is born and not made. It is probably true that it takes three generations to fashion one. And so it would appear from Mr. Raven's experiences if you try and make them synthetically,

you get neither an aristocrat or a democracy. One sees this everywhere today among the rich, the poor on the roads and in the factories. I repeated again, gentlemen are not turned out like sausages. They are men of ingrained honor of principle and of decent behavior. And some of the finest I have met in my long life have belonged to the humblest classes. Because this cast rather than class is becoming extinct. In my humble opinion, one of the great factors at the bottom of the present world turmoil. And that's from JFC Fuller.

And he's another guy that was sort of in league with Liddell Hart, lots of great ideas, fought in North Africa, fought in South Africa, fought in World War I. The Nazis took a bunch of his ideas and ran with him, by the way, even though he's a Brit. So it's just a different, I wanted to read that part because it's just a different world. It's just a different situation. and they sort of had this pre-existing system that was in place. Now, what kind of makes me disturbed about this is, you know, he's basically talking about how great the gentlemen were of the day, but these were the gentlemen that freaking

acted like idiots leading their troops to be killed. So there wasn't so much honor and principle as he's talking about. Closing out this section, he says, from a general study of leadership, it seems, There is much in military organizations to invite incompetence officers are selected for the wrong reasons Required to fulfill in incompatible roles and expected to function adequately in a communication system of dubious efficiency At higher levels of command, they are protected from adverse criticism by their invisibility And by the plain fact that in times of stress even the poorest leaders like drunken fathers and rabbits feet are clung to with pathetic if Misplaced dependency

Yeah, the invisibility part. He mentioned that And was talking about the fact that A lot of these senior leaders, they just no one would see them. You wouldn't see them on the front lines So they weren't getting any criticism because they weren't around to be criticized Military achievement besides providing legitimate outlets for aggression The gratification of obsessive tendencies and reassurances about virility armies and navies also cater for another basic human motive the need to achieve. They do this in several ways. They embody related hierarchies

of rank, money, and class. So there's another thing that you can get by joining the military. If you're a person that's driven to succeed, you can go in the military and you can get like a formatted way to move up the chain of command. Second, they accentuate the challenge of promotional ladder by making certain upward movements very difficult indeed. Third, the ethos of the armed forces is such that such as to make advancement laudable and highly rewarding generals have every advantage bar that of age over those lower down on the ladder they are richer safer and more comfortable their chances of collecting honors orders and knighthoods are imminently greater than those of more junior ranks finally even the most modest thirst for achievement is encouraged by

training and convention the taboo on juniors speaking to senior seniors in officer training establishments, saluting and being saluted, orders of March rules as to say, as who says, sir, to whom all serve to emphasize the horizontal stratifications of military organizations besides adding luster to each new level gained. So that's what the military sets up. This really nice place where you can kind of, you see what the game is. And if you know how to play the game, you're going to get, you're going to get satisfaction. Unfortunately, there are aspects of military career, which are all.

unlikely to attract people with high achievement motivation. And he says this. At first sight, these arguments would seem to suggest that the possibility of promotion in a military organization would attract those with a potential for achievement. Go-getters, entrepreneurs, innovators,

and men with energy and drive. In short, people who would make first-class military commanders, right? So you think, oh, cool, this is like a hierarchy set up. That makes sense. I'm down. I want to go in there because I'm an entrepreneur. I'm a go-getter. Sometimes it does, in the case of Wellington, Montgomery,

Rommel and Zukov, men with, inordinately strong needs for achievement. All those guys wanted to do well. Unfortunately, however, there are aspects of a military career which are unlikely to attract people with high achievement motivation. The fact that traditionally promotion depends upon seniority, class, wealth, conformity, and obedience may well leave them rather cold. Neither means nor the ends are sufficiently attractive.

So when you get a guy like Wellington, like Rommel, they look and say, okay, how do I need to get promoted? Oh, I've got to conform. I've got to be a yes man. So all their entrepreneurial spirit is thrown out the window. They're being forced to comply in order to get promoted. So it doesn't really seem as attractive as they thought it originally was going to be. Moreover, military types, military has never smiled upon entrepreneurs and innovators,

the cut and thrust of private enterprise, cleverness, and even working too hard, have not been deemed good form. There is, however, another class of person for whom the military, might well be an attractive proposition. These are people who achievement motivation is pathological in origin. The crucial difference between the two sorts of achievement, the healthy and the pathological, may be summarized by saying that whereas the first is buoyed up by hopes of success, the second is driven by fear of failure. You got one person that wants to do a good job and one person that's just scared to fail.

Whereas the former achieves out of a quest of excellence. in his job, the latter achieves by any means available, not necessarily because of any sincere devotion to the work, but because of the status, social promotion, or social approval, and reduction of doubts about the self that such achievement brings. Applying these distinctions to the military would seem that senior commanders fall into two groups. And I think this is actually pretty accurate. Those primarily concerned with improving their professional ability and those primarily concerned with self-betterment. Fast forward a little bit.

Research suggests that these two sorts of achievement motivation go along with certain other personality traits. Thus need achievement, motivation towards professional excellence is accompanied by greater occupational and intellectual competence. So this is a person that's wanting to get promoted for the right reasons. Greater occupational and intellectual competence. That's what he wants. A better memory for uncompleted tasks.

Therefore a predisposition to finish something once at the gun a preference when choosing working partners for successful strangers rather than unsuccessful friends That's one's just the crappy leaders always surround themselves with their crappy unsuccessful friends A greater readiness to volunteer for psychological experiments Greater activity in the institution or community of which they are a member So this is I think it's just important to remember that there's some people that are out there for themselves And there's some people that are out there to try and do a good job. He says, compare Lawrence. And this is Lawrence of Arabia.

Compare Lawrence, roughing it with his tiny Arab force on the 800-mile trek across the desert to west, to rest Akaba from the Turks with Townsend, comfortably esconsed in his villa on the sea of Marmara, while his captured troops died in their thousands from exposure, malnutrition, and brutality. The contrast in both cases is between the cells. imposed asceticism of high achievement motivation and the self-indulgence of one concerned with professional excellence less concerned with professional excellence than with personal advantage. Pretty good stark difference between those two. How is it that some of the criteria for promotion to military organizations are evidently such as to favor people with a pathological degree of achievement motivation? This is scary.

the person that might have a tendency to get promoted is the one that's looking out for themselves in some cases in the military again it's important to say this isn't like the entire military but certainly i certainly saw people in the military that were 100% looking out for themselves and they got promoted yeah that does happen yeah there's no doubt about it it it happens less than you would think a lot of times that transparency that these idiots would have looking out for themselves and trying to make those maneuvers everyone would see it and they'd be like no you're not getting promoted but it did happen there are grounds for thinking that incompetent commanders tend to be those whom the need to avoid failure exceeds the urge to succeed according to j w

Atkinson and n t feather such people tend to eschew activities which they may show up in a poor light and unless forced to do so refrain from taking on any skilled task where there are any doubts about the outcome so people that are just concerned about themselves they'll only go into jobs where they know they're gonna win that's what they're trying to do they're just they're they're only doing jobs of things that they know they're gonna do know that you're gonna win at here in lies a special dilemma though they need to achieve it is the very nature of trying which exposes them to that which they fear most failure they are like people who try to climb mountains out of an underlying fear of heights

It would not be surprising to find that such people are attracted to and prosper in the armed services. For if one plays it carefully in the military, in contrast to the world of commerce, offers achievement without tears. Stick to the rulebook. Do nothing valid explicit approval from the next higher up. Always conform. Never offend your superiors. And you will float serenely if a trifle slowly upward, a blimp in both senses of the word. That's the reality.

You can't you there you can do that you can join the military and you can just kind of keep your nose clean Stay low profile don't take any additional risks Conform and you will get promoted over time in many cases Marine Corps is tighter though. I think I'd like to think that I mean you're described what you're describing I can I'm He's right yeah and I've seen it and not not right on a blanket statement no no no but it certainly happens yes. Yeah, no correct and and and and You're right in saying like, that's part of the system is you have, you might show up with this altruism of how it works. And the wrong people get promoted sometimes. Now, it's not a lot of those people.

It's actually a small number, like you said. But it happens enough that you will see it. You're not going to go a career and go, oh, I never saw that. Every single time it was the right person and the right reasons. No, throughout my career, there was examples that I can reflect back on. It's a small number, but the system doesn't work perfectly. And I think the thing I was thinking about, and this is military, I think in general, there are enough jobs in the, military that have been done enough times that the template is there that you go, I can take those

set of orders and like, man, it's really low risk. You know, I'm going to cookie cutter job that's been done and take the template, Jocco's going to hand off to me. Here's the, you know, here's the script, follow the script, low profile, low risk. You're going to look good in the end and you're going to get promoted. There are those jobs out there. I was lucky in my career to have jobs that either had never been done before or. really that it wasn't a lot of history behind them.

So, you know, I'm remembering a couple times, like, when I was in command of an organization where, you know, I was being told, hey, if this fails, it's going to destroy the whole thing. Like, oh, that's okay. That's awesome. I think I've told the story before. I'm far enough away from it out that I can tell it if I haven't before. But when I took over the first F-35 squadron, the Marine Corps's F-35 program was on probation. Like, they were contemplating canceling the F-35 for the Marine Corps, the B variant, which was the Marine

Cor variant and the Marine Corps had already long since committed to that was the only platform there was no plan B there was no alternative to that so if we were gonna lose the F-35 B the Marine Corps was gonna lose tack air and as soon as I took command and you know I stood up I told you there's a guy there before no airplanes but when I took command the airplane started to arrive right when I got there the common out of the Marine Corps came down spent like an hour with me they met him at the squadron was he and a sergeant major and me and my sergeant major and he goes hey I hate to tell you this but you can't crash an airplane.

Oh. Like, wow, that's... Roger that. Roger that. You know what I mean? Like, if you crash an airplane, we're going to lose the program, Marine Corps is going to lose that care.

And so you're talking about the balance of, the risk of losing is a lot, you know, the balance set between the benefit of winning. I'm like, oh, I'll just, you know, margin benefit of winning, but like there's zero risk. Or, you know, the flip side is, hey, if I go two years as a squawgeon commander,

everything goes great, I'm going to get a firm handshake and a congratulations and life's going to go on. But nobody's going to credit me for doing anything remarkable because the system is the program is just moving along where it needs to go. But if I screwed up, you know, that downside risk. And I understand the the aversion to that. Like, hey, what'd you rather have? A guaranteed win with, you know, a guaranteed marginal win with no chance of losing or high risk of failure.

But this is a once in a lifetime thing that we need the right person with the right time to go through that. A lot of people are averse to that. Yep. Well, and this is the other scary thing about. that is so you're the squadron commander you get told don't crash any birds well how about we fly a little less yes it's interesting you said that because in the exact same weekend the deputy common off aviation the head aviator in the Marine Corps said your number one job is to fly as much as humanly possible day Roger that okay and listen

there's a part of it too that any you have to understand that's like there is nothing that I could do personally short of shutting down the squadron To guarantee they would encourage them. There's nothing I can do that. So There's a part of that like if you can just let that go is recognize my best chance of me being successful is to micromanage none of this Yeah, as opposed to try to micromanage all of it. Yeah, and that's such a good point because Okay, we can either fly as little as humanly possible, which means everyone's paranoid. No one really knows how to do their job really like all right. We're gonna fly these things. We're gonna be awesome at it and that's the right call obviously not everyone would make that decision. No, and even then, there's still,

even the right call doesn't guarantee the outcome. You can do everything right and you know what? Yeah, you have a mishap on me, those aircraft. Yes. Yeah. Things break. Yeah. Things break in mid-flight. Yep. That happens. They do, especially brand new airplanes.

They're still being designed while you're flying them. Those things happen. How many F-35s have crashed? Not a lot. So I believe, I have to go back and look. I think the first one crashed in my squadron like six months after I left. Yeah.

Got out of it. There's been a very small, it's been a very safe airplane. What does an F-35 cost? At the time, it was $130 million. Now it's probably 90. Oh, so they cut the price down a little bit. Well, those first ones are like, you know, they were literally the very first ones off the assembly land.

So that, as you know, like that mass production benefit hadn't kicked in yet. So each one was kind of like a unique article. Now, like, they're jamming them out. They're making a bunch of them. and it's more cost effective. I know these are crazy numbers, but at the time they were, they were expensive. 133 a copy.

I had 14. If you, when you fly in an F-35 and you're doing a vertical, how often did you a vertical take-off? Like a short take-off, like the Stoval, like the... Yeah, like a Harrier. Yeah, but not that often, sometimes. How much gas do you go through, taking one of those things off vertically?

The vertical flying bird. a ridiculous amount of gas. Do you just basically have to refuel as soon as you get up? It's not that bad, but it's a lot of gas. Yeah. The landings are more of a critical because you're on the clock. Like you come in, you gotta be relatively light. You can't land like a fully loaded airplane vertically because it's too heavy.

Oh, okay. So you gotta be like a certain limited amount of gas so the plane is light enough to hover. But then again, like you can't just, you know, sit there all day long because you don't have that much gas. It's nothing like the Harrier was. Those guys, it was sketchy, like really, really sketchy. But yeah, you're burning a lot of gas. A lot of gas. It was sketchy in a Harrier.

What made it more sketchy? Less powerful airplane, harder to fly, less margin for air. You needed less gas to be able to land and didn't have as much time, you know, just technology. I flew the Harrier simulator out at Yuma. Yeah. Dude, I crashed that thing literally 17 times in a row. My total flight time was nine seconds or something. If you got a NN F-35 right now in the simulator, I could over the shoulder,

you walk you through it, you landed. almost perfectly the first try. Well, that's like drones. Man, those first drones came out that were like little model airplanes. Guys were just crashing them everywhere and now a three-year-old can fly a drone. And that's no exaggeration.

Yeah. Technology. This thing says, on the same note, the net result would be a bimodal distribution of officers at every grade. So these two different types of officers, you end up with them at every grade. Those who take risks and get away with it,

the Montgomery's and Lawrence is of this of this world and those who have plotted up the hard but safe way the good old boys who never speak out a turn who make up intact and conformity what they lack in enterprise and initiative interesting contemplation of a nept commander suggests that they were of the latter genre in the first place they were renowned almost without exception for being hypersensitive to criticism so those people that are the The conformists, hypersensitive. Asked the question of physical bravery and no way detracts from the feats of courage

to note that the fear of being afraid, the fear of social disimproval for cowardice and most important, the personal shame attendant upon flinching in the face of danger could drive a man to perform acts of valor far beyond the normal call of duty. This is not to deny that bravery occurs for other reasons out of pure altruism

or patriotism, but merely that some individuals are so lacking in, That they will gladly exchange the fear of failure for their own physical destruction. That's kind of a weird thing to say in a very real sense military organizations recognize and trade upon this fact of human nature death rather than dishonor is no empty platitude but formulates an essential and ancient feature of military I'll tell you what's a I think it's a weird thing to say but I think what if you would expand a little bit more which he doesn't what's scary about that is when people are being brave with other people's lives.

That's what's jacked up. Look, if you're brave and you go and do something heroic, good on you. I don't care what your motivation was. I think Sam Harris always talks about the fact that you can't fake bravery, right? You run out in the street, there's no faking it, you did it, and that's that. It doesn't matter if you thought it, you did it because you were going to be ashamed or you did it because you were just hyper-motivated or whatever. It doesn't matter.

You can't fake it. You were brave. No, no, no question about it. But when you start being brave with other people's lives, that's a freaking disaster. And that's what these horrible leaders end up doing. It cannot be emphasized too strongly that this suggested relationship between valor and the need to prove oneself in no way to base his bravery. On the contrary, it takes the view that the best measure of courage is the fear that is overcome than these were the bravest of them all, first only by conquering rational fear that they could nullify fear of being afraid. So there you go.

The tragedy of this issue is that if military organizations select their senior commanders for their physical, as opposed to moral bravery, they not only might ignore other equally important attributes, but are bound to select a proportion of individuals whose underlying psychopathology is quite unfitted to positions of high command. In this way, they invite incompetence. So, just because someone's brave doesn't mean you want to put them in a leadership position. It doesn't say you don't want them there. And there is certainly a huge benefit to someone that's been in combat and knows what's happening, knows the understands the emotions and and the human nature that takes place on the front lines for sure. That's highly beneficial. Shouldn't be the only reason you select somebody though. The last trait of those who harbor a fear of failure concerns the selection of subordinates.

There are really two components to this process. The first concerns the way an individual sees himself in comparison with his competitors. And the second, the way he thinks others will see him in comparison with his contemporaries. In either case, he may well try to elevate his own self-estimation by choosing a low standard with which to make comparison. Hence the phenomenon of people who tend to shun the company of individuals more gifted and even choose workmates as selected or select as subordinates, people who may consider inferior to themselves. What a freaking disaster that is. So that's the person that wants to look good.

So hires a bunch of idiots. He talks a little bit about Hague. He talks about Hague being painfully aware of his limitations. Hague was the World War I commander of British troops and then tried to enter the one profession open to the dunce of the family, the army, only to find

that even nary failed to shine. He got put in his position. The reason he got promoted is because he got sort of a hookup from a family member. His elder sister Henrietta knew the Duke of Cambridge, hooked him up with his entry in his staff college. Then he was the aide to camp to the king. Dude, this guy's just making moves, making moves,

became respected for his conventional opinions. That's crazy, right? You become respected because you agree with everybody. That's a great point, King. That's a 100% right, king. He said things like cavalry will have a larger sphere of action in future wars Yeah Artillery only seems to be really effective against raw troops these are just idiotic statements

I thought of the tank He also had a he was also prone to a steady denigration of his competitors and the removal of the superior of superior commanders this guy was just a shit talker Haig Hague Hague's talent for finding fault with everybody but himself was particularly keen whenever results had resulted in military setback and he gives all these just crazy examples he put he blamed someone he's unfit to command a division

at this critical period of the operations in France and should only be employed at home by the way there's people that are working for him by the way Ralson is unsatisfactory loyalty to his subordinates but he has many other valuable qualities He's trying to get rid of somebody. He's like, he has valuable qualities, but he's overly loyalty to his troops. It seems impossible to discuss the military problems with an unreasoning brain of his kind. The fact is that Sir John seems incapable of realizing the nature of the fighting that has been going on and the difficulties of getting fresh troops and stores forward in adequate communication trenches.

Doug, on Saturday, October 9th, he made an impromptu report to, oh, this is on Saturday, October 4th, 9th, Haig, this guy. Makes this report up his chain of command about the his commander sir John French what happens eventually French gets fired who gets put in charge Haig hey God has wish reaching the pinnacle of the greatest army that the empire had ever put in the field In the past or was ever to amass in the future a body whose heroism and devotion was such that they could twice in two successive years Be ravaged in hopeless offensive who were in a single day to leave more men than any other army in the history of the world whom after 27 months of slaughter and exhaustion he was to leave so periously exposed that they were nearly annihilated just horrible and this section that we'll close out with for today says freedom of expression and cognitive

process unfettered by inhibitions were not looked upon with favor in military personnel so that's a horrible situation it seems then that in the case of achievement motivation as with obsessive tendency military organizations attract and then reinforce those very characteristics which will prove antithetical to competent military performance it's a again is that true in the military? Yes it is Is it true in the civilian or let me rephrase that I saw your look on your face Dave can it be true in the military? Yes, it can Can it attract people with these type of tendencies? Yes, it can can't can't Can it then provide opportunities for people to sort of get on board with the system? Yes, it can

Does the civilian sector do that as well? Hell yes it does happens in any leadership situation Where we take these things that we should be striving for like freedom of expression and unfettered cognitive processes meaning you should just be able to think and we crush them and you know I was thinking this We've been talking about the the the the EO leadership loop and included in that is the is the Uda loop right these ideas of Constantly running through your mind all these different aspects of leadership And the main list lesson that you and I are putting out this is what we just put out the muster the main lesson when you're running these loops is not to get stuck is not to get stuck is not to get stuck is to free your mind. And that's how I closed out the last podcast.

I said, free your mind. And I want to reiterate that. You have to keep your mind open. If your mind's always stuck, even it can be stuck by so many different things. It can be stuck by your ego, your insecurities, it can be stuck by your fear. It can be stuck by tradition.

It can be stuck by custom. It can be stuck by the restraints of the institution that you're in. If your mind is getting stuck like that, you have to be weary. You have to be afraid. of that because if you let your mind get stuck in that fixed position you're going to get flanked you're going to get overrun and you're going to get destroyed and if you're in a leadership position that is what's going to happen not just to you but to your troops so

keep an open mind echo Charles yes sir what do you got the that whole that part about like not taking risk fear of failure like that kind of stuff like for whatever reason it was making me think of like the jujitsu journey ascending with like getting belts and all this stuff so in the beginning yeah sure a little of mine specific but you can kind of see it where you know if you're focused on the belt you you tend to be more like fear of failure kind of approach to training and but if you're just like hey i'm in here to get better and learn and be humble take risk see what happens all this stuff compete and you know and the higher you get the better you'll become.

But if you start, let's say you get like, I don't know, purple belt I feel like is one of the benchmark belts, right? For sure. Kind of become, that's like jujitsu puberty right there, you know. So a lot of people, and it can vary from belt to belt for sure, but sometimes they'll be like, oh, well, I don't want to look bad as a purple belt. So I'm going to take less risk. I'm going to only train with guys who I know that I won't, you know,

do poorly against or whatever, you know, and you can kind of fall into that church. But then you get people who they don't they don't think about that kind of stuff like the belt that's just a byproduct of my journey and I don't even think about that those are the guys that just keep getting better and better Yeah. Yeah, I thought you're actually going to bring up just like the entrepreneurial spirit and you know we work with a lot of companies at Escalam front and the leaders that have taken risk and have broken outside the norm those are the leaders that they end up doing exceptionally well, right? If they manage it well like look, you can take big risk. I'm You can fail, right? That happens. That's why they're called risks. But if you want to look, can you play it safe? Yes, you can. And you can do that in the corporate world. Hey, you can, you can follow the rules and you can do you can and you can move up the chain. And that's fine. That's fine. If you want to excel, you're going to have to take some chances. You're going to have to take some risks. That's what you're going to have to do. And and then you do if you do utilize. sort of the standard sort of conformity to move up the chain what I will be I Okay, I get it but you know what don't suppress don't suppress risk from others don't don't Don't don't suppress entrepreneurial thinking from other people inside your organization

That's where I think we run into a real problem you know I kind of fall the rules and conformed And I got my promotion and then Dave comes along and he's a little bit more of a risk taker a little bit more entrepreneurial and this could be in the military this could be in the business sector and what do I do I outrank him I shut him down I partially shut him down because I don't want him I don't want him to I don't want him to outmaneuver me so I'm just going to shut down all of his ideas I'm I'm also going to shut him down because I don't want to take any risk so if you want to if you want to play that game for yourself and you don't want to take a bunch of risks and you just want to have a safe comfortable job that's okay that's not bad look if you work hard and and and you do a good

job inside your business organization that's great I actually like that I appreciate it but the minute you you have that attitude and you start to impose it on people around you need to check yourself you need to check yourself because you're shutting down minds your closing minds and you're really in the long term hurting your organization you ever come across the situation it feels like it feels like it's real common where you get two people they go into business together one guy's risk averse one guy's like freaking try

anything and they sort of start to balance each other out for sure and not to mention there's some jobs that are kind of more conducive for certain attitude types right the risky guys like out doing the sales pitch and the other guys back and balancing the books yeah yeah yeah so it is good to have business partners like that for sure yeah kind of reel

you in when you need it as long as they're not overbearing I guess right there you go there you go All right, well, we're trying to keep our minds open. We're trying to improve ourselves mentally, physically, you know, the whole nine yards. Echo, you got any suggestions? Yeah, we do. I do, we do. We all do, actually, and we know.

You want to go? No, I just want to make sure we're recording. Oh, Jack. That was good. Thanks, Dave, by the way. So what do you got, Echo Charles? What do you got for us? Well, you know, we're all working out doing jiu-jitsu, I guess.

You know, hopefully. We should be. I'm just saying, you know, it's one of those things. It does to keep you on the path. We're reading, mental, physical, everything, right? We want to lead by example. I'll tell you that. We want to make good decisions.

I'll tell you that. So, all right, we're on this path. We're on this path. Good decisions. Physical capability. Mental capability, we'll say. In a nutshell, it's what it is. Yes.

And improvement. Yes. We want to take risk, but not too many risks. Check. We want to take risk, but not too big of risks. Okay. concur yeah so one thing you don't want to risk is your health tell you that right now bad thing to risk when did you write that little setup right there I just came up

just enough you speaking of mental acuity look at you look at that guy I well anyway you said all that stuff just to say we don't take too many risks with our health there you go it's true tying it is true if you don't have your health together man I'm just saying it's freaking impressive it's not the thing to take risk with the hell yeah in hell yeah Thanks for the support, Jocko. Okay, so we got energy drinks. That was mine. We got energy drinks, not old school energy drinks that do risk your health.

We have energy drinks that don't risk your health. That actually improved your health. Improve your health. No risk. Upside across the board. Across the board. No gambling here. Upside across the board.

Yes, sir. If I was to say, hey, this thing over here can make you feel good. Yeah. And you were like, okay, cool. And not only can it make you feel good, it can actually make you be more healthy. Yep. What would you say to that? I'd say cool.

That's, do you say cool? What if I had something else over here? I was like, this will also make you feel good for a little bit. And you said, okay, that sounds good. But then I said, after that, you're going to be addicted to it, and you're going to end up becoming a crystal methamphetamine addict and dying. Yes, that would be bad. That's downside.

Yes, sir. That's downside. So we like that little, we like that little hike that we got from the crystal meth that I gave you. Sure. But then the downside is like a disaster. Your teeth are falling out. You lost your job. There's all kinds of problems in the future.

That is true, yes. So I'm not going to sell you that. No. I'm not going to want you to take that. You're not going to recommend that. You're correct. But I've got something else over here. Yes, sir.

It's going to give you that hype. Yes. With zero downside. All hype, zero downside. And this is... I will not find you at a, you know, a meth lab licking the floor. No.

Which is what I'm afraid of if I give you the other thing. That is an undesirable outcome. Yes, sir. So, yes. So when you're choosing energy drink, you're looking for energy drink, even if not even into energy drinks necessarily. And I understand if you're not. Because really, how could you be when you consider those drinks? Yes.

Yes. Now we've got a solution for that. Yeah. Straight up. All healthy energy drink. Completely good for you. Jock. Discipline.

Go. Yeah. By Jocco. It's a good one. Yeah. Taste good, too. Different flavors. So far, apparently, on paper.

The more popular one is orange. after burn it orange after burn it orange Dave Berg good deal Dave's signature flavor on paper it's good it makes sense you know like if you don't know

if you're not in the know you have an awesome selection you know that the orange is going to come through wouldn't you agree yes yeah I feel the same way I feel the same way but you want to take a little bit more risk

right maybe a higher up site maybe I don't know I don't know I'm just a person but hey, maybe though, you take a little bit more risk on a more exotic flavor like mango. Mango passion fruit to be specific. You might wind up with that bigger upside. I don't know.

That's up to you, but... That's according to echo Charles. Nonetheless, there are many different flavors you choose whichever one. All of them are all upside, no downside. So it doesn't matter technically at the end of the day what flavor you choose. That's for your own personal choice. So get some of that discipline go. We also got joint warfare, acrylic oil.

We got the discipline powders. We got some new, what do you call, hype? Well, they're not technically called hype. I think they're called pre-workout mixes, powders. So we've had the discipline powder for a while, just called discipline. And it didn't have much caffeine in it to be real specific. And people are like, hey, that's cool. We appreciate it.

But sometimes we want more of a kick. So we didn't go nuts. We didn't go 700 milligrams of caffeine. Yeah. Do you know the numbers? 95. 95 per scoop. Oh, okay.

Okay. Per scoop. Okay. So that's more moderate, I would say. Oh, yeah. It's moderate unless you have two scoops or three scoops. Right. Which is, because, okay, the classic pre-workout, if you go two scoops, that's too much, right?

It's too much. Yeah. But at the same time, if you don't want to get all nuts with it, you got to start meticulously putting only a little bit of power. You can't really bet, you know, so I dig it. So, yeah, that makes sense. Put if you need 300 milligrams of caffeine before one workout if that's what you need I'm not I'm not hey dig it man I dig it but you just have three scoops easy

Yeah I would say back off a little bit that's my personal generally speaking but here's the thing also do some abstinence days right? Yeah, yeah Like on the weekend you know whatever on month whatever some days be like yeah I'm not gonna have any at all Yeah any caffeine at all generally speaking I feel like that's a good move anyway to not go every single day Whatever like give yourself a break or whatever and that way you maximize the effects Anyway, that's what I'm talking about yes sir I think you're right about that but you've never really been that hard core it because let's face it a pre workout It gives you like a bigger pump yeah no I've pre workout really isn't my thing yeah the only unless you count Jiu jitsu has a workout which we've had this discussion lately that's not really a workout but like I would have discipline powder before going to the jiu jitsu right and I still will do that But as far as I'm concerned rolling in with a freaking pumping heart, I'm not really down for that.

Agreed. And that's technically, typically that's not why we take pre-workout too for workouts like jujitsu. Jiu-Jitsu, I consider Jiu-Jitsu workout. That's a hard workout. Actually, it's harder workout technically as far as output goes, most of the time, more than your average other workout training on the workout, obviously. But let's say, if you're going in, you're going to do eight sets at 12 with some bench And then maybe some tricev extensions, curls, this kind of thing.

You take a pre-workout, that's the jam right there. You're saying that's it, huh? So we made one of these for people like Echo Charles that wants to get it on. It's discipline go, powder. Yeah. Available now. In mango, by the way. Yeah, you get some mango, other flavors.

Mulk, if you need some protein, tastes like dessert. One of the best things that have ever been invented, I'm expecting probably. They have a noble prize for dessert. No, bro. Do they have a noble prize for protein shakes? Well, now, you know, not that I'm aware of. There should be one. Let's face it, there should be one.

Yes, and actually more than you know, really, because they, like, okay, you know, you heard of people making like mulksh pancakes and all this stuff. Okay, here's the jam. Keep this in mind. Do this. Mulk shake. Frozen banana, that whole jam,

the whole creaminess, thanks Tulsi all day. Right? So make that when the kids aren't looking. Then you buy those little popsicle, what do you call forms? You know the forms, right? Yeah. That you can make popsicles in and you make popsicles.

Then you tell the kids, hey, I have a surprise for you after dinner. You guys eat all your dinner all good, right? I have a surprise. Say, cool, they're all excited. You bust out that pop. It looks like one of those pudding pops. You see what I'm saying? So that's what you've been doing?

No, I'm going to do it. I didn't do it. Yeah. But if you're saying, that's a good idea. See what I'm saying? All right. That's the Mok, Nobel Prize ruining. Moke, Jockoco, white tea, by the way.

You can get the stuff you get the drinks at Wawa you can get the stuff at vitamin shop or you can get it from joccofuel.com if you subscribe to any of it you get free shipping which is a which is a total bonus. Oh yeah and you don't got to remember to take all that stuff. So it's all good. Also origin USA is American made stuff products goods jeans boots American made denim. Doesn't get much? You could just say American American American but it's sad. I don't know. It doesn't get much American. I'm American. But it's sad. that the American iconic jeans that you have aren't even made in America. Not you, but I mean us, we as a nation. A lot of people are out there wearing jeans they think are made in America. Yeah, they're not made in America.

They're packaged. Yeah, they might be packaged in America. But really, there's communists that are making your jeans. And then there's nothing against the people, but the government has those people enslaved. So we're not for that. We're against that. You know, I saw you repeat on the news the other day.

Oh, yeah, we're on the news. Yeah, we're out there. Yes, sir. Newsworthy story. Yeah, I think so, too. This is, this, we're bringing manufacturing back to America. You got to tell some of those guys to stop jamming up your name, bro. I just, maybe I should.

I don't know. They call me Jocko Wilnick. Will Nick. Will Nick. Will Nick. Will Nick. I don't know. I don't like that.

I feel like it. I don't like it either. I feel like I, do I take offense to it? Maybe, maybe not, but I feel like they're kind of pronouncing my name wrong. It's weird that you would do that. It says Will Inc. That's literally what it says. Yes.

How you reverse those numbers and reverse those letters and stuff. I don't know, but that's what happens. And I don't know. You start to wonder, have you have they not heard anyone else say your name ever? Yeah. It's strange. It is odd, right? Kind of strange.

But there you go. Either way, either way you look good. You were saying some great stuff. American, back to origin, USA. Yeah, everything is made in in, in, in, America. The seeds that are grown into the cotton, it goes into the loom to make the material, the denim

that makes the jeans. Oh, man, all here. Made in America. And since we are doing Jiu-Jitsu, you can get an American-made Jiu-Jitsu key. It's true. Very true. Also, yeah, a lot of cool stuff on there. OriginUSA.com. That's where you can get it. Also, Jocko has a store. It's called

Jocco Store. It's a good spot. Good spot. You want to represent on this path that we're all on. Discipline equals freedom. that that goes deep if you want to represent boom that's where you can get your shirts and hats t-shirts um hoodies

some rash guards on there some other cool stuff on there there's a jiu-jitsu section now apparently yes sir there is that's coming along knocko represents hard jiu-jitsu's life jih Tzu's life look good it looked good on them Jack Daniel Hill had one on too Jack Daniel they know yes

there's a Dean Lister shirt coming out too at some point yeah oh the the foot shirt Good foot shirt. Yeah, that's freaking legit. Also, we have what's called the shirt locker. It's a subscription service. You get a cool new shirt every month. Some good stuff coming out.

The Christmas shirt coming out. Oh. Oh, yeah, that's a legit shirt. You showed it to me. That's a freaking, that's a freaking legit shirt. Solid. That's a legit shirt. That's a legit shirt.

Can we say that or is it like that? What? Did you say it? What it is? It's just, it's a Christmas shirt and it has the Christmas Truth, 1914. Yep. We got the flags of the nations involved. It's freaking legit.

Representing. Yeah. Respect. Oh, yeah, big time. But yeah, so, yeah, the shirt locker. It's, like I said, subscription, you get a cool new shirt every month. A lot of good feedback on that one. And we're, and we actually tightened it up a lot, too.

Because we're, you know how it's, anyway, it can be complicated to provide that. So I feel like all the issue. There weren't huge issues, but it's real tightened up. It's a good, streamlined process now, so keep that in my. Jocco store.com. You can get this stuff. Subscribe to this podcast, too. Don't forget about Jocko unraveling with Daryl Cooper, the grounded podcast, a Warrior Kid podcast.

Also, we have jaco underground.com. And what that is is a little alternative world that we created, just in case this world goes sideways. We don't control these platforms that you're listening on right now. So if something were to go sideways, we might get banned for talking about masculine and feminine characteristics. I don't know. Could be. Some people are sensitive to that kind of thing.

Even though we're reading a book from 1976, it just doesn't matter these days. So if that should happen, we are in our own place. Cost $8.18 a month. If you can't afford that, email assistance at jocco underground.com. And we make another sort of tangential podcast to talk about stuff on that.

one as well life advice yeah a lot of free a life advice from jaco straight up yeah that's straight up uh we have a youtube channel on the ad assistant director and if you want to see quality assistant directing you can just go subscribe to that because you can sense how i make this special calls critical calls very influential you know it's that last you know like you're you're lifting and you get to you get to deadlift four ninety It takes a lot of work to get that last little bit, right? Sure. You're trying to cut your runtime down.

It takes a lot, you get to, you know, a certain spot, then it takes a lot of work to get that. It's really easy for you, because you get to a certain spot, and then I just roll in as the assistant director and just kind of go next level for you. Right, so like, like Muhammad Ali, right, when they'd be like, oh, how many sit-ups do you do? He's like, I don't know how many sit-ups they do,

because I only start counting when it starts to hurt, right? So I get all the easy sit-ups, and you roll in, when it hurts and bring us past the finish line. There you go. If you want to check that out, you can subscribe to my YouTube channel. Hell yeah. Also, psychological warfare is an album that we made back in the day for fundamental weaknesses,

that mental weaknesses that we may stumble onto before we do workouts, before we tric-eat on the diet, eat some stuff that we don't want to be eating. Nonetheless, these are moments of weakness that Jocko helps us through. I can just listen to that. He'll tell you why. You should just stay on the path.

Stay on the path. It's going to be better for you. Jocko tells you why. It's a good one. Also, if you want to hang some cool stuff on your wall, flipside canvas.com, Dakota Meyer. That's his company.

He's making cool graphic things to hang on your wall. Got a bunch of books. Final spin, Dave Burke. What do you got? It's coming out. It's out. It's out.

This is it. It's out. It's live. Finally. What do you think's going to, what do you think the reviews are going to say? What's your review? People know my review.

I think I've talked about it. My review is good. I think the mass review is going to be good. I have a personal interest in this one because this is one of the few times. You shared as to me, I think I might have been way up there in one of the first people to see this.

And I don't like, I don't take positions all that often. And my position was immediately like, this is going to be awesome. And my validation for that wasn't what I thought of it is I gave it to my wife and she read the whole thing straight through. and I'm like, bro, I think I said something

like really flippant, like trust me or like, I know words that I don't like to use. And I was like dug into me to like, bro, trust me. Something along those lines. So we're here at that moment of truth. I'm pretty sure now that's going to play up. I'll tell you, okay, so my, in my family, not only my immediate family, meaning my Willink,

but also my mother, father, sisters, there's not a lot of cheerleading happening. You're not getting a bunch of compliments. ever. In fact, it's the opposite. Like, we're going to look for the holes. We're going to look for the freaking, the issues, the problems, whatever. And that's what we're going to hone in on. So I gave this book to my oldest daughter. She was one of the first people to read it. And I gave her like a paper copy. Like I printed it out. Here you go. I said, hey, read this. I was actually just, I just said, hey, can you proof read this for me? You know, she's in college at the time. I said, hey, you know,

proofread. Find any whatever errors. So she's got a red pen out. And she reads it. And she gets done. And she comes walking out of the room because she was home at home, even though she was in college because of Miss Rona. She know everyone was shut down. So she was there.

And she comes walking out of her room. And she's like, I go, oh, you know, oh, you finished? And she's like, yeah. Just so nonchalant. Just so like whatever. Like so you're an idiot. And I said, how was it? she goes oh this fine like literally just shining me on and I go oh cool because I know what's

happening you know I know there's no way she's going to be like this was awesome I go oh well what you know what parts of it did you like or whatever and she starts describing one part of the book which I'm not going to mention and she starts to cry and I was like oh yeah you can't hide this now girl I got you I got you so yes uh Tell me what you think. Final spin. It's available right now. Order it.

Let me know what you think. Leadership strategy and tactics field manual. The code, the evaluation protocols, which I wrote with Dave Burke, Sarah Armstrong. Dispinkers Freedom Field Manual. Way of the Warrior Kid,

one, two, three, and four. Mike and the Dragons about faced by Hackworth, which I wrote the forward to extreme ownership and the dichotomy of leadership, which I wrote with my brother, Laif Babin. We also have a leadership consultancy. Called Eschelon Front. We solve problems through leadership.

Leadership is the solution. Whatever problems you're having, leadership is the solution. Go to Eshlamfront.com for details on that. And also we have an online training platform. We got a bunch of people starting to join that right now, which is, look, we have courses set up on there. We have daily drills you can do. And we have live sessions where I'm answering questions. The rest of the team is Dave's there, Laf's there.

We're answering questions. We're doing that three times a week. So go to Extreme Ownerships.com. if you want to get on board with that. And if you want to help service members active and retired, their families, gold star families, check out Mark Lee's mom.

Mark Lee's mom, incredible woman, and she's got a charity organization and it helps veterans and it helps service members and families of all sorts. 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 paraphrastic pronouncements,

or if you need more of Echoes, irrelevant inquiries, or you want any of Dave's ancillary additions, you can find us on the interwebs. On Twitter, on the gram, and on Facebook, Dave is at David R. Burke. Echoes at Equitrales, and I am at Jocka Willink, and to all the troops out there around the world. At all those forgotten barricades.

Thank you for holding the line to protect those of us here at home and to our police law enforcement firefighters paramedics EMTs dispatchers correctional officers border patrol secret service secret service and all first responders thank you for holding the line to keep us safe here on the home front and everyone else out there let me just remind you of that quote from Francis Bacon why should a man be in love with his fetters though of gold What's trapping you? What's controlling you?

What's controlling your thoughts, your ideas, your beliefs? What's controlling your mind? And the things that are controlling you, they might seem good. They might be made of gold. But they are enslaving you nonetheless. Do not let that happen. Cast off those mental madacles and think for, yourself and until next time this is Dave an echo and jaco out