Jocko Podcast - The Unravelling 9: What's Your Story, pt. 2

Episode Date: September 18, 2020

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This is the Jocko Unravelling Podcast, episode nine with Daryl Cooper and me, Jocko Willink. So last time we were talking about the stories that we tell ourselves and then how we get stories in groups and those start to expand and those start to unify people together. And it seems that we have an instinct towards some level of those. stories unifying us to a point to where we start to drift into just straight tribalism. And then we actually use those stories and change those stories as a tool to strengthen our tribes even more. And I know you had some interesting stories slash myths that kind of represent that very well throughout history we've seen this.

It's tapping into a basic, a basic way that our mind structures reality for us, right? I mean, if you think about how you teach the youngest children something, if you need to teach them something, you need to teach them to tie their shoes, right? How are you going to do that? Through imitation, you're going to show them, do what I do, right? That's the same thing that like chimpanzees, how they teach their children things. As they get a little bit older, what's the next,

way that you're going to teach them stuff. Probably maybe by like five, six, seven years old. You're going to start teaching them basic things about like what a good person behaves like. Whatever, you're going to do it through stories. That's like the next level up. It's like later on, like down the road, you can start talking about kind of concepts, right? You can start teaching them, teaching somebody things in terms of, you know, instead of telling you a story about Prince Charming and this is how a man should treat a woman, you're going to learn through this story and internalize that. Maybe later on we can say this is the essence of love and how love operates and blah, blah, blah. But stories, narrative is how we structure reality and understand things in a very, very profound way.

Yeah. I've written a bunch of books. The two of the leadership books that I've written, actually all three of the leadership books that I've written are heavily based on stories, stories from combat and then stories from the civilian sector. and obviously people get the feedback I get all the time. And we have the principles written in there in extreme ownership and the economy leadership. We write the principle clearly in there. Hey, this is called cover and move.

This is what it means. But people never say, oh, thanks for spelling out the principle for me. They say, oh, love the way you guys told the story and then I could see it. So, yeah, this is not just something that we do for kids. I mean, it sticks with us. Yeah, it sticks with us forever. And it's such a great way to get your point across. It's a much more powerful way to do you.

And for certain things, it's the only way, right? I mean, there's certain, just like you're not going to tell somebody break down into philosophical concepts how to tie your shoes. You just got to show them and tell them I do it. There's certain things that you just have to use a story. Like, it's the only thing that's really going to serve that purpose. And elucidating the principles, what you're really doing there is saying, okay, you know all those stories.

This one I just told you in the book, yeah, but all those other ones that you've always heard. And there's that thing that the leaders are doing. There's something in this is what it is, right? And so you're drawing out that commonality in those stories by stating the principles. You know, it's interesting when you said these, you actually brought it up perfectly in my mind when you said these stories that we tell ourselves can be unifying and then that same story can become like a divisive type of tribalism, right?

and it reminded me of this book called, it's a book about the Rwandan genocide by a guy named Philip Gorevich who also wrote a really powerful book on Abu Ghraib actually. It's very, very, you know, Eric Weinstein actually knows that guy. I believe he's married to a friend of their family and if it were at all possible I think it would be a great guy for you to talk to.

Certainly possible. He's just incredibly morally sensitive writer, just a very, very interesting guy. Anyway, and so in this book about the Rwandan genocide. What's it called? We wish to inform you that tomorrow will be killed with our families. I have that one. I haven't done it yet. Man, I did machete season. It was kind of like, all right, there's one, there's one more. Maybe it's that one. Life, no, life laid bear probably is which thing. It's by the same guy who wrote machete season. Yeah, but he interviews the victims. It's brutal. Yeah. It's as brutal as you think, yeah. And so in this book, we wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be

killed with our families, goes through, and it's just this harrowing book, as you can imagine. And at the end of it, he relates to this story that took place as the genocide was winding down, I believe, in this girls' school in Rwanda. Some of the Antara Hamway militias were still running around. The rebels had come back and were pushing back against them, but this was still ongoing. And a bunch of them came into this girls' school and were trying to figure out who were the Tutsi so we can kill them all. And they were telling them, you know,

Hutu girls on one side, Tutsi girls to the others, and on the other side, and these are girls, these are grade school girls. They refused to separate themselves out from the Tutsi girls so that they could know who they were.

And one of the girls said that there are no Hutu or Tutsi here. There are only Rwandans here. And a lot of them died. They killed all of them rather than kill none of them. And eventually somebody came and broke it up, but a lot of them died. And so if you think of that, like, whoa, okay, that's something that in a lot of contexts

we're told is a dirty word. That's nationalism, right? I mean, that's what it is. Nationalism in the United States is what got Irish people and Italian people and German people to say, oh, Germany's attacking people in Europe. We've got to get together and go over there and stop them, right? The very, very unifying thing. That same force is what got Germany to start the fight in the first place.

Right? And so identity is a very interesting thing because you go up above the blood level and everything after the blood level is a story. That's what it is, right? And you need a story to keep it together. You look at a place like United States. We need a story more than anybody. You know, you go to a play, you go to Poland. And yeah, obviously like in a country that big, you know, the blood relationship is. maybe somewhat loose, but they're all Polish people, right? There's a shared ethnicity there that they can kind of shape their identity around. In the United States, we got a story or we got nothing. You know, we got nothing if we don't have a story. You got to find something that is going to bring together old school wasps who came here on the Mayflower, people who fought on both sides of the Civil War,

people who got here from the third world as refugees 10 years ago, people who were formerly enslaved as a matter of policy by this country and were legally excluded and oppressed up until officially, up until just very, very recently a few decades ago, we got to come up with a way, with a story to get all those people to buy in to the level that we had German Americans joining up the army and volunteering to go fight in Germany to the to the extent that we had Japanese Americans while we were interning their cousins on the West Coast signing up and volunteering to go over to Europe and fight in what became as far as I know the most decorated unit in the Second World War right and if you got a story that's what you can make happen right

you can put everybody on the same page and make something like that happen I think that where we're at right now is we've got a crisis with our story, right? We've got people spinning off into different, radically different and in many ways opposed narratives about the country they're living in and the society and the people around them. Doesn't it seem, though, that the power of the American story of, you know, rugged individualism and coming over here and building and creating things and you can make it. What about the power of that story? That's a good story.

I think it worked very well for a long time. And I think that people, especially young people right now, are struggling with it. We talked about this a little bit in the previous episode. But I mean, if you are, you know, just to reiterate very, very quickly, if you're a millennial, you know, you got out of high school and the country was it. war. 9-11 happened. The country was at war. You got out of college and before you got your feet on the ground, the financial crisis happened. It took several years for that to recover. Depending on what industry you were going into, it didn't really recover. Maybe now you're getting into your mid-30s or so.

You're thinking about buying a house and having some kids finally and, you know, we get shut down because of COVID. It's been a lot of instability. And people are, told that they're going to be moving around a lot, changing jobs a lot and so forth throughout the course of their lives just to be able to make it. And people look forward and they can't really plan that well past a year or two years, or let alone 10 or 30 or 40 years. And so that idea, I mean, they'll tell you outright right now. Economists will tell you that millennials are the first generation in American history that is on track to have a lower standard of living than their parents. And if you want to talk about inequality, generational inequality isn't something that

isn't something that, you know, it's not a way that we typically frame it. But I think that's something that's very powerful. I think people can deal with the fact that I live in a, you know, two-bedroom house and somebody out there lives in a mansion. Most people can actually deal with that. I don't know if that is as damaging to people's sort of idea of their country or themselves as a lot of people necessarily make that out to be. But if somebody is, starting to look at their future and realizing that they're never going to live in as nice of a house as they grew up in and that their kids are going to grow up with less than they had when they grew up um that's something you notice that's something that you feel on a very deep

and visceral level i think and um why is that you know it's a good question i've been thinking a lot about this lately well so where are you is this your is it are these your thoughts did you read about this no i I mean, the economic reality, you know, I've been reading about, but the effect of it is something that I've been really kind of puzzling over lately and trying to figure out. And, you know, I'm kind of the opposite of it. I grew up in the gutter. So, you know, it didn't take a lot to take a few steps up from that. But I think that, you know, if somebody's parents right now are in their 70s and you're 35 or pushing 40 or something, and it's starting to become clear.

to you and knowing that it's kind of becoming clear to your parents that, you know, they're getting older and you still really don't have it together. Your life still isn't that stable, knowing that your kids are going to, you know, they go to grandma and grandpa's house and it's nice and that you're not going to have that house most likely. Or at least people feel that way. You know, there's paths to it. But, you know, there's a level of instability, though, that makes it very difficult for people to look down the road and expect it and to plan for and predict it. In other words, to construct a story around it, where

I'm doing, I did this and I'm doing that and it's going to lead to this. People have a lot of trouble with that right now. And so this idea that this is America, you can just go out and build a life and do whatever you want. I mean, one way or another,

this current young generation is on track to take a step backwards. And I think that part of what we're seeing is the fallout from that. I mean, I think that, like, you know, if you think of one of the reasons people are so politically engaged right now is that we're told, this is America, right? We're told that that is actually something that you can exercise some control over is the political system. That's what's great about our system. It's our system. It's our system.

It's our system. And so people say, okay, I'm going to get involved politically. But, of course, what do they see is nothing. You know, you don't have any influence, obviously. You're one out of a hundred. I beat this guy on Twitter. Yeah, you're one out of 140 million voters. And it's just now, on one hand, it's a great thing.

Our system is designed to resist radical rapid change, right? You mentioned in the last episode all the people out there who were just freaking out because Donald Trump is president, what's going to happen? And the answer is that the U.S. government is a vast bureaucracy and almost nothing is going to happen. I was thinking about that after we recorded that later. I was thinking, I know for a fact, there's people that. are going to hear me say that, and their blood is going to start to boil. And I want to let you know if that was you, that when you heard me say Hillary Clinton wouldn't have been the end of the world and Donald Trump wasn't the end of the world, if that made your blood

start to boil, you're the person I'm talking about. You actually are. If you said, you see, I knew it. I knew jocco was him. He doesn't understand. If that was you, you're the person I'm talking to. And in a way, it's a good thing, right? In a way, though, you know, we also talked about how people are so emotionally invested in politics.

Like, that's the narrative they're kind of engaged with and playing out and invested in. And yet they can't help out over time, but notice that the, like, relative to the inputs that they're providing to this thing, the outputs are not very responsive to it, right? And so it's a good thing that our system resists this radical change. If you elect the wrong guy or whatever it is. But on the other hand, people put this massive amount of emotional investment into it and then notice that, yeah, things actually don't change that much relative to the investment that I'm putting in. You know, go work that hard on a business somewhere. Go work that hard on your job.

You can actually see some ROI. You'll see some legit ROI. Yes. I mean, you know, the reality is 99% of the government. I'm telling you this is somebody who worked for a long time for the the DOD, you can elect, you can have the most, you know, contested emotional election that is just people are crying in the streets with happiness or rage or sadness or whatever it is. And 99% of the government will just feel little ripples from that.

That's it, right? Because most 99% of the government is a big bureaucracy. It employs millions and millions of people. And if you count the contractors, anything else is tens of millions of people. And I don't care who you are. You can elect anybody you want. And now, on the other hand, what we see with somebody like Trump or Bernie Sanders and so forth is because, you know, we have this idea that like, well, no, that's not how it works. As I elect somebody, we elect somebody, and then things change in accordance with our wishes, right?

That's just not practical with a vast bureaucracy like that. So we're starting to latch on to people who come and say, well, trust me, I'll be the guy. I don't care what the obstacles are. I'll go in there and smash everything out of the way, and I will just get this stuff done. And now Trump goes in. It's funny because there's people out there who are saying, oh, you're wrong about that jaco because Trump's come in and look, he's destroyed everything. But then there's people who supported Trump who are like,

we haven't gotten anything out of this. We elected this guy thinking he was going to be a bull in a China shop, and he's been stymied all the way. We haven't gotten anything out. There's no wall. There's no nothing, right? And so they feel like totally the opposite, right? And, you know, and so what you worry about, though.

There you go. Case and point, dude. Case and point. And so what you worry about, though, is next time they say, you see, you tried Trump, and they just stymied him again, but trust me, they're not going to stymie me. And who's that guy? Is that going to be the guy who says, look, I'm going to break some things, and I just need you guys to have my back when I do it, because there's no other way to get things done. You saw it with Trump or you saw it with whoever on the other side.

And so you start to elect increasingly assertive people who are promising things that really can't be done without breaking the institutions. You know, that's how you maybe get down, down a road that you don't want to go down necessarily. So the thing, the fact that we don't have a common sort of accepted story, and I hate to use this word, but I'm going to use it because that's what you hear people say all the time, the narrative, right? Yeah. That there's, there's multiple different narratives out there. Why is it that we are so confused about what our story is here? Why isn't there?

You know, and, and one of the things that we've talked about offline, was like the Civil War, right? The Civil War was obviously a bloodbath. And the fact of the matter is, you know, this is a, this could and should be a huge point of pride for America that we fought this war, ended slavery. there was a massive amount of blacks freed free slaves that went and fought for the union um you know they they have they have a should have a massive point of pride of participating in that war you know 7,000 commissioned officers were black almost 180,000 enlisted black that's a massive percentage. That's like a 10% of the of the of the people that were serving when they

were one or two percent of the northern population when they were one or two percent so we're talking massive volunteers had a huge impact 20,000 more in the were sailors they I think the number 16 Medal of Honors awarded two blacks that fought for freedom they had a much higher count You know, you talked about like the Japanese that were fighting in World War II and how they, they were just excessively heroic. And it's the same thing with the black soldiers that fought in the Civil War. They were about twice as likely to be killed. I mean, we're talking, you know, heroic efforts.

But you don't hear about that for some reason. For some reason, we can't unify behind a story and be proud. of what happened and and and and to me is that you know is that a concerted effort right are there you know is that a concerted effort to to to to squash that and we don't want people to have pride that because all and all of a sudden you're proud of America if you're proud of America then you're supporting the system if you're supporting the system then you're not you're not where we want you to be concerted I don't know but I do think it's a natural outcome from the way

we engage with mass democracy, right? Which is, if you look at something that's really happened since the 1960s, we've had this rolling kind of this rolling revolution where various groups that previously were not very politically engaged, right? Previous to the 1960s, black people either were physically prevented from voting in the South or just were not that engaged in the North. They just didn't vote very much. Since the 1960s, they've become politicized and they vote more. Great. That's good. Next, before the 1970s, polls showed that women tended to vote the way their husbands voted. Now there's a large divergence

there. Women have become more politicized by the feminist movement and have become self-consciously political as women, right? Not just necessarily as American citizens. but as women who are now politicized in voting. And over time, that has taken place. It took place after the Stonewall riots with the LGBT community and more and more increasingly, like, you know, increasingly small and sometimes obscure groups that become politicized and involved in such a way that they tend to vote as a block.

And now, you know, in our politics, is sort of, for better or worse, since the 1960s, has kind of become set up in such a way that all of those groups tend to form a coalition that votes one way, and then you have, you know, the non-those groups that are increasingly polarized on the other side. And the, it's a tough nut to crack, right? Because if you think about it, like 90% of African-Americans vote Democrat, right? There are other groups that have to be a tough nut to crack, right? there are other groups that have similar numbers in that direction. If all of a sudden there was this mass sort of movement where people came and said,

you know, I'm not voting in a given direction because of my identity. I just, I'm going to vote based on what I think about tax rates or what I think about foreign policy or whatever. It would take a complete rearranging of our entire political alignment, right? I mean, the Democratic Party would have to find an entirely new program to operate with. And so there is an incentive to make sure that people are oriented toward the society in a particular way, right? If African Americans as a group started feeling patriotic about their role in the Civil War and America's kind of historical role, you know, historical process that we kind of faced a problem that no other country in the world really ever had to face, right?

We had this mass population of slaves that we inherited from before we were a country before the Declaration of Independence or anything like that. And then as time went on, people started to realize this is not something that we can be doing anymore. And we fought a bloody war to get, well, you know, the outcome of which was to get rid of that institution. And then, you know, these weren't people that we had, you know, taken from a specific homeland and enslaved, and now you're free and you can go back to your homeland finally. Like, that ship had sailed. And so it's like, these are Americans. And we've got this population

that was formerly enslaved in a way that was absolutely brutal, right? You should tell slavery the way it worked over here. And now we have to work them into the society in such a way where, you know, I mean, after, well, you know, where there were going to be neighbors in the same communities with people who had formerly enslaved them. And if not, the specific people with the people who had done it, right? And, I mean, that's an unbelievably complicated and difficult historical problem and we haven't solved it yet completely, obviously. I think that, you know, if somebody could, and again, we're talking about stories, right? somebody needs to come up with a story that makes everybody feel like they're a part of that. And the fact that when you mentioned, when you told me, I've read books about the Civil War,

and I'm sure it was in there somewhere, but you were the one that actually told me so that it stuck in my mind, the black participation in the Civil War. Like I had no idea they were so overrepresented in the Union Army. I mean, 10% is, it's hard to really, it's hard to wrap your mind around that way because they were one to two percent of the population in the north, but half of those were women. So you're really talking about 0.5 to 1 percent of the population of the north, and they were 10 percent of the Union Army at one point. You know, that is something that should be front and center in our national myth in a way, right? Because that problem, I mean, the people who call slavery are original

sin, maybe there are certain issues with that phrasing, but in a lot of ways it is. I mean, in the sense that it's the thing that we have been grappling with and have not figured out up to this day that is going to determine whether or not this project works, you know, and now because now it doesn't just involve African Americans. It's coalesced into something larger where you've got the person of color term, where, you know, other groups have kind of been lumped into this way of seeing things. You know, it was white black before. Now it's white person of color now.

And we're either going to solve that problem and come up with a story that can give everybody a positive role to play in this thing or we're not. And that's going to decide whether we stand or fall. Yeah, it's, it's scary to me that you have to use the term. We have to come up with a story as if we have to create it from thin air. When you, when you look at the story, which I just kind of rattled off some of, which is you had, you know, white people and black people from the north fighting for freedom. Like, that's the story, man. That's the story.

Yeah. And look, okay, okay, then we also have to accept. I guess that's not the story. The story is then you have other forms of oppression that happened. But we continue to move forward as a country to try and bring equality. And it seems like that story is powerful enough that you could overcome the story of, hey, it's us against them. It's this group against that group. It's the other people against these people.

It seems like there's enough, there's a unifying story that exists. It's just that it's being, it's being drowned out by, by different parts of the stories. And I mean, look, you know, that's what happens. You know, when you go into combat, you go into a firefight with 10 guys,

and those 10 guys are going to come back with different stories of what happened. And they might have been, you know, I have this experience. with some of my friends where we experienced the exact same thing. Like we were three feet apart. His perception of what happened is very different from mine. And, you know, there's no, we don't even like disagree on it.

It's just, you know, on the one we were talking about left brain, right brain, and it's just like it, they just don't literally know. You know, your right plane, when you cut that part of your brain that joins the two halves together, and you just saw something the right eyes. It's like that. You just literally don't, the stories just don't match. And I'm not mad at you. You saw something totally different than me.

You remember something totally different than me. So I get it that you can focus on one part of a story. But, you know, that goes to interpreting books. You know, I was an English major in college, right? And you could interpret these books. You could focus on something that you and I could read the same book. and you could write a thousand words about that book and not have one overlap on the Venn diagram

of my assessment of the book, right? That happens. I read a write up on Blood Meridian one time that interpreted it as a condemnation of America's gun culture. Exactly. So, yeah, to me, it's scary that we don't find this unifying story that we, and really, I guess this is maybe Pollyanna attitude, but why don't we look at the positive

sides of the story? Well, I think that's what we're maybe going to be trying to do here a little bit, right? I mean, not to whitewash and mythologize anything, but, you know, a story is not, you have facts. We can talk about facts, right? But then a story is something that takes those facts and makes them into something that that emotionally resonates with people. And so it's the responsibility of the people who are the culture makers, right?

So why hasn't that story really gotten out there? Well, the people who have control of the organs of culture, right? Hollywood and various media apparatus and stuff, that's just not the story they're telling. And that's why that story doesn't prevail. It's a great story, but we need people out there who are going to tell it in a compelling way. Because it's got to be compelling, right? I mean, if you think about, they ran into this issue in the 19th. 1960s, where in the early 60s, you've got the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King,

it's passionate, it's focused on the South, ending Jim Crow in the South, right? And it's just, it's this magnetic leader who is preaching nonviolence from a Christian standpoint and inspired by Gandhi in the face of his house being bombed and his life being threatened all the time and like all of these things happening and his his supporters being beaten and attacked and so forth and keeping them in the mindset of nonviolence right now if i was 20 years old and black in birmingham or chicago or whatever in 1965 martin luther king carries a lot of weight so i'm gonna he says nonviolence roger that's nonviolence but as you get into 66 and 67 and then 68 when he gets killed, that becomes a lot, lot tougher, you know? And part of it is because back then,

they didn't know if that was going to work. Like, that's one thing we got to remember. Like, you know, we know that, like, there were major reforms as a result of Martin Luther King's work and everything. They didn't know if that was actually going to work back then. So when they got attacked by the police, like it just looked like repression that you could lose this thing. But the other part of it is just that, you know, people are people. And being a part of a revolution is a lot more interesting and a little bit sexier than being part of a reform movement. You know, if you were, if I was 20 years old in 1967 or 1968 and black and living in Detroit, and you came up and said, hey, you know, we're starting a little group that's going

to pass out flyers and try to get petitions to, you know, get the city government to change this housing policy. Or another dude comes up and says, you want to join the Black Panthers or the Black Liberation Army? Because guess what? I got a story to tell you. That's going to be a pretty easy and fast choice on my part, I think, at that point. And because why, they had a great story to tell. You know, the African-American story in particular, it's really difficult because, yes, there was a civil war, and there was this heroism that ended with the ending of slavery as an institution. But everybody knows, you know, things did not improve a great amount right after that, right?

in some ways for a lot of people they got worse because, you know, some slaves at least had, by that point, like there was a level of as brutal as it was, like there was some level of paternalism that existed where people, you were their property, they felt a certain amount of responsibility to take care of you and so forth. It's not a justification. It sounds so terrible to even say it that way, but it existed to a degree. And all of a sudden now, you're just an employee and I don't care about you at all. In fact, you're just a sharecropper and I could replace you immediately. We look back in the early days. of migration to America, they note how indentured servants were a lot of times treated much worse than people's slaves were treated because they only had them for seven years. They didn't really care what happened. And so after the Civil War, you've got people, black people in the South, often working for the same people that previously owned them because those are still the people that own the property. And all they know how to do is agricultural and household work because that's what they had experience doing. They weren't allowed to learn to read or anything most of the time. And so they go back and get jobs working for those same people. often under sharecropper conditions, which were, you know, exploitative to say the least,

because it's not like they had legal recourse if they got cheated by their sharecropping boss or anything like that. And as time went on, they had this idea in their head, this dream, right? That there was another place that was better where there was no Jim Crow and things were better. And that was in the north, right? If you look at all the old Negro spirituals and stuff, the whole theme is deliverance. And, you know, there's a place out there, a promised land that's better. and we're going to be led to it and so forth. Moses, you know, lead our people out of Egypt.

And so the First World War happens. A lot of men are overseas. There's a big, you know, productions ramped up. There's a big labor shortage. We need people. And they start getting, they start inducing African Americans to leave the South and come up to the northern city. Chicago and New York and Philly at first. And eventually by the Second World War out to California and so forth.

And they get to these places and it's not paradise, right? It's not the promised land. There's official restrictions, housing restrictions, and so forth, but also it's just they find out if these people really don't want you there either. You know, a lot of the times they were most of the time, all the time, really, they were moving into neighborhoods that were occupied by it's not like they were moving into the nicest neighborhoods in New York or Chicago. They were moving into neighborhoods they could afford and that would take them. And these were often neighborhoods that had, that were inhabited by recent immigrants from Europe, right? So recent Lithuanians or Poles or whatever. And these people had just come, you know, from Europe themselves, maybe a generation before, had just kind of got set up in their first neighborhood where they first bought a house.

And now there's people flooding in, six million people over the course of a few decades coming from the rural south into the northern and western cities. And they're not welcome there either. It's not comfortable. It's not good. Very quickly, the white people leave for the suburbs, take all the economic capital with them. And now the black people are in these inner cities. they own nothing, right? They're working for people again

who as employees that can more or less exploit them to a large degree simply because even if they had recourse to the legal system, they don't really know how to use it. I mean, this is all very, very new to them because they had no access to it in the South. And by the 1960s and the 1970s,

these inner city ghettos and cities all over the country are a complete and total disaster. I mean, there's this article I share, around with people in the New York Times from January in 1973. It's a four-part series they did on the South Bronx. And it's probably a little bit later than when you run earlier rather than when you run around New York. But it's the same kind of idea. And at the time, it was Puerto Rican and Black, right? And it's a nightmare. It's a complete and total nightmare, you know, in that part of the city. And this was common, like in parts all over the world or all over the country.

and you've got your legal rights now. You know, there's no official restrictions. There's no Jim Crow. Go out and enjoy your life. It's like, well, yeah, I guess, right? Technically, just go out and enjoy your life and build a business, but that is something that's very, very hard to sell. And now they don't have that sort of hope for the promised land.

That's gone now. That story is now expired because they're in the promise land, right? They're already there. And so they needed something else. ideally it would have been join the American dream, right? Jump in and get into the flow with everybody else but in official and unofficial ways

that was blocked off to them and they joined it right at the time where it was 1970, 71 when wages, median wages in the United States after going up for 150 years tipped over and have been going they've been stagnant or going down

depending on the industry ever since. That's right at the moment that they were allowed legally to get involved with the American economy is when things kind of leveled out, competition became fiercer. And they were competing with people who had more experience and access to the economy in many ways. It was right in 1965 when we changed the immigration laws to, you know, from 24 to 65, we had very, very little immigration. We changed that in

1965 and by 1970, we're importing masses of people to come do what? Low wage, low skill work that might have been the entry point for those African Americans. Well, now they've got massive competition coming in from south of the border. And so for those people like to tell them, you know, hey, it's the American dream. You can just go out and build your life and do whatever you want. A lot of people have. There's a black middle class out there right now, and it's happened, but for the people who have not gotten to that point, you know, it is another part of it too, which is that, you know, what if, I mean, just think about this. Like really the black sort of, the African American kind of American dream that we've kind of,

It's so crude to put it this way, but it's the way we've talked about it over the last few decades. It's like you can get out of the ghetto, right? That's good. You're like, oh, this, look at this person. They started in the ghetto and then they did good in school and then they were able to go to college and now, look, they're out of the ghetto and they live in this other place. Well, okay, I mean, that's good. That's great. Obviously, that's great. But that is one person who was intelligent and capable and motivated and driven who is no longer in that community. And it's like we come in every generation and we just look, okay, you're cool to get out, and we can take you and put you in college and da-da-da-da-da.

And every generation you come and shave off some of the people who maybe actually had some parents that looked after them and people who got, who were able to keep it together through high school without catching a criminal charge for something, whatever. And we shave those people off and send them off into the suburbs. And the people who are left there, you know, are they left without community leaders?

They're left without social capital, and it becomes very, I mean, it's very, they look around. And yes, there are opportunities if you know how to use them. If people, like I, you probably too, you know a lot of people in the military who came from circumstances like that, and they joined the military, and they got out in the world and they said, oh, there's a whole other world out here. And now they're just own house in the suburbs and they're just whatever. But when you're in that place, and I've talked to a lot of, I knew tons of these guys who came from those circumstances.

And they said that like when they got out in, when they joined the Navy or got out into the world, it was just, you know, it was a whole, there's a whole world out there that was hard for them even to imagine really existed. Because when you're in those circumstances, there's kids in South L.A. who live 15 minutes, 15 miles from the beach who have never been to the ocean. I mean, a lot of people. And when you think about that and kind of just extrapolate that out to like how limited, you know, their world is in a lot of ways, it's something. it's extremely difficult to sort of climb out of and see, you know, when somebody comes telling you a story about how you can become an astronaut, it's like, you know, yes, you can. You actually can. You know, you really can. But man, you know, that's a tough one. It's a tough one. You know, and then when somebody comes and says, well, I got a story I tell you, too, everything that's going wrong in

your life is because somebody out there is victimizing you. I know who they are. I can tell you who they are and you can come be a part of a movement that's going to treat you like brothers and give you a sense of pride in yourself which you know something like the black panthers was extremely good at and uh and and and you want to talk about a story to tell we're going to fight this beast and take it down and it's like well okay yeah there's something that when you mentioned earlier you know as a 20 year old you and i think you can just put that basically you take 20 year old human I can only speak from the male perspective because I am one but there's a there's a streak right we got the aggressive streak we got the the the the the tendency

towards action towards violence is what I want to say you know you got a tendency towards violence you know the 2018 17 year old boys get into fights that's what we do we're drawn to it we're drawn to it we're drawn to it we're drawn to that, or I shouldn't say all, but many young males are drawn to that flame, right? Like moths to a flame were drawn to it. And then you get the idea of, and I do think this is part of the American story, which is kind of, as I was thinking through this whole common thread of what is the story that is a common American story and one of the common American one unifying thread is.

Rebellion, right? That's what we are. We were founded by rebellion and not only that, you know the underdog culture, right? People root for the underdog Star Wars is the story of the rebels against the empire and the good guys are the rebels and There's something romantic. There's something there's something powerful about that. It's David versus Goliath. We like that. We like that in America. So like you said, when you're offered to join a group,

the group that says, hey, we're not just going to oppose the system. We're going to fight the system. We're going to rebel against this. that becomes a very powerful story. Especially since World War II, the empire's us. I mean, we don't have to call it that if we don't want to, but as far as like, who's the big daddy in the world right now that's calling the shots and that if you don't like the way the world is,

like, you know, who's got the most influence over it? Well, that's us. And so, you know, and that is kind of when things change. I mean, I talked about in one of my recent Mortimer-made podcasts, how in the 1960s, In the early 60s, when the civil rights movement first got going, there were a few white Americans who were involved. And almost all of them were Jewish, right?

And I said that, you know, if you really think about it, you don't have to think hard about why that would have been, right? This is in 1961, 62. You've got people, you know, the big thing, the most recent thing that happened, World War II, right? That's the founding myth of our current age in a way. In 1960, it was right there. and we went over there and we defeated the fascists and we came back victorious or whatever

and everybody was telling that story. But if you were a Jewish American, you were hearing that story, but you were hearing another story too. Everybody was kind of hearing it, but you were hearing it, you know, a little bit more on a more personal level so that in 1960, when the Greensboro sit-ins happen, in 1961, when the freedom rides happened, and now by 1960 you got 50 million households with televisions, and this is showing up on screen for the first time. and you see Bull Connor with German shepherds

just to make it all perfectly complete, you know, snapping at, you know, Martin Luther King and his people in his marchers in suits and ties, terrified of these dogs and being sprayed with water cannons. And a lot of those Jewish Americans didn't just say, you know, like this is not who we are,

like this is not America. We should not be doing this and this should be reformed. They said, oh, I know exactly what this is, right? And so they jumped in first and they jumped in with both feet. And a lot of these Jewish Americans, young people, I'm talking about people who were in Ivy League schools, were taking time off from that to go down and get the hell kicked out of them by some of these mobs, get put in hospitals,

and then have to evacuate the hospital because the mob invaded the hospital to go after these people. And most of the time, this is not the kind of thing people, you know, were ignorant of back then. They knew these people were Jews. And they gave them a little extra, you know, on top of that. And so these people are incredibly courageous, like going down and doing this. And throughout the 1960s, you saw this trend.

And so you think about that in terms of a story that you're playing out, right? Yeah, we're fighting oppression. Yes, we're sort of, you know, maybe trying to push for reforms in the country. But those, there was a reason, the reason that they were the first ones on the front lines down there is because they had a very, very powerful story that they were playing out. And, you know, I almost, you know, a lot of people have, have, have wondered today if part of the issue that we have, if you look at the way paranoia develops as a, as a syndrome, right, psychologically, and people who have it on a pathological level,

experience paranoia, it happens typically because people who are, people are having trouble, they're either isolated from the world in such a way or are awkward, whatever it is, people are feeding energy into the world and they're not seeing anything back. The things that they're trying to make happen are not happening, things are going wrong, right? And they need an explanation for why this is happening. And, you know, maybe the explanation is that you're not very important or that, you know, just things that might psychologically be difficult to integrate. well, if you're intent on changing a system that is very, very resistant to change as a giant political system is going to be,

it's very easy to resort to paranoid explanations for that, conspiratorial explanations for that. I mean, politics is something that encourages paranoia in conspiracy theorizing in a way, right? And I think that if you are a black American to stay with the theme, and you see the Martin Luther King movement, you see the black power movement, you see all these things happening, and yet the problem is no longer that there are Jim Crow laws or that there's slavery.

The problem is just that for millions and millions of people, life sucks and they feel trapped by it, and they don't see a way out, and nothing they do seems to change that. And that if I'm a smart person who's highly motivated and my mom kind of raised me right or whatever. And yeah, maybe I can get to college or go join the military. And I could totally get out of this place.

And I'm going to do that or whatever. But I know that I'm leaving behind a whole lot of people who are not going to have that experience. And so maybe that's not good enough for me that I can escape this and leave behind the people I grew up with. And those people are, you know, they're going to look for a way when the political system itself is built to resist radical change, which again is not a bad thing, really, right? You don't want wild swings in your national politics all the time. You know, yes, we're in NATO.

No, we're not. Yes, you don't want that, right? And yet, when there's something that feels extremely urgent to people, when they feel trapped and there's nothing worse than feeling trapped, I mean, anybody who's ever had money problems knows that it hits you on a very, very deep and primal level, right? because that thing is in there screaming at you that you're going to starve, right? That thing that is out there telling, trying to spur you to action, you need to go hunt, you need to go gather berries because there's no resources.

You have to go do it, do it, do it. But, you know, in a modern economy, you don't go hunt or gather berries. You have to kind of go out and interact with the bureaucracy in a way or something like that. And so there's no immediate action to take. And so that feeling just manifests as this vague, dull anxiety that is the background noise to your entire life. And, you know, so there's this urgency to change things for people, and they don't see a way to do it, because, again, it's not set up to have, like, one person or a group of people go, be able to go out and just radically change things. Well, and you feel ignored, you feel like the system's ignoring you, and if you go out with a group of people on the street and tear down a statue or throw a brick through a window, whether or not that actually is going to change anything or whether you think it's really going to, They're not going to ignore you anymore.

And, you know, that's an extremely, you want to talk about primal things. Like, you know, that's something that's extremely deep in us as well. You know, the Greeks wrote about Thumos all the time. It was that need for, you know, not just ambition recognition or status recognition, but, you know, it's that thing that does not like being ignored. So I want to talk a little bit about, or I want to ask you, the propensity for movements to be absorbed. And I've got two kind of opposing options here

or opposing takes on this. The one is, you know, does the nonviolent, does the nonviolent movement get overrun? Maybe absorbed, it's not the right word there, but does it get absorbed by the violent movement because the very nature of the two movements, this one is violent. And if you're not going to be violent, and that means I'm going to dominate you. And you're going to get absorbed into my movement.

And then, and I think you talked about this on Martyr Maid, is the propensity for America to absorb these radical movements and take the radicalism out of them and turn them into a mainstream very less, very, very, to mitigate the impact a lot by just absorbing these movements where they become cool. And once they're cool, it's sort of like, okay, well, okay, I guess that movement isn't cool anymore.

Once it becomes mainstream, all of a sudden it's not cool anymore and it loses steam. So first part, do you think that the nonviolent movements get absorbed by the violent ones, and we're kind of seeing it on TV right now, right? I mean, everyone says there's, hey, look, there's peaceful protesters, and there are, we know it,

but we're not seeing them on the news. We're seeing Molotov cocktails on the news, right? That's what we're seeing. So the peaceful protesters out there trying to raise their voice and point out some oppression and some problematic policing, that's great, but we're not really seeing them right now. They are being absorbed by the people

that are going to huck bricks. Is that historically the norm? Yes. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, when you, when you, this, I mean, one of the reasons that Martin Luther King should be the fifth face on Mount Rushmore, right? I mean, I look at him as that level of American figure, right?

And most people kind of do, I mean, and that's good. He's not, he's not underrated, obviously. He's appropriately rated. But I still think most people don't understand. how absolutely revolutionary. And in the face of all human instinct and everything, his steady call until the day he died for nonviolence was. I mean, it was, you know, I mean, just time and time again.

From the early, from the, you know, he wrote an essay in 1958 after a bomb got thrown at his house with his wife and his baby on it in the house, got thrown on the front porch. and when it banged, didn't blow up yet. When it first banged, it blew up a few seconds later. His wife ran to the back of the house rather than going to see what the banging was. And if she didn't, if she went to investigate, she might have been killed. And so he gets back and there's a group of people around his house who are heated and they are ready to rock and roll, right? Of course they are.

This is, I mean, this is their leader. This is his wife who's almost killed. And he is out there calming them down and saying this is not what we're doing and not just from a tactical standpoint. but this is just not what we're going to do. Incredible, I mean, just he could have started a revolution if he wanted to. All right, that guy, I mean, that was what Jay Edgar Hoover was worried about, right? He said, we're worried, what's the thing we're trying to shut down with Cointel Pro, whatever? It's the emergence of a black Messiah, right?

A guy who could call a general strike and tell all black people in America, walk out of your jobs tomorrow and paralyze these cities. He could have done that. He had that kind of clout. And he didn't. And he did the opposite in the face of escalating. violence from people who opposed him that would have given him any excuse to do it, that anybody who wasn't coming from maybe the religious and ideological place he was would have given

into, right? I mean, Malcolm X called him a chump for a reason. And that resonated with a lot of people, especially after Martin Luther King was killed. And so, yeah, it's absolutely the historical norm that people want to meet force with force. It's the most natural thing in the world. I mean, I was reading a guy, I was reading an interview with. an interview with a member of the PKK one time, the Kurds up in Syria, after he was anonymous guy, but anonymous Kurd in the PKK,

or maybe just supported him, but it was after they had done a terrorist attack in Turkey that killed some Turks. And it was that had come after the Turks had attacked the Kurds a few times and had some things happen there. And they were asking him, like, what is it you hope to accomplish by doing it? They killed a bunch of civilians, a bunch of Turkish civilians. And he said, you know, look, as an organization, sometimes our people just need to see that we can hit back, right?

They're getting abused, they're getting hit, and sometimes we just have to show them that if they hurt you, we will hurt them back. Maybe we can't hurt them as much or whatever, but they're not going to get away with this. And yes, I mean, as an organization, in some ways you have that responsibility when the state of Israel was first founded.

David Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister, he said that we have to show these people. people were Holocaust survivors who now were coming into Israel. They'd just been through the Holocaust and they're coming into Israel. They're surrounded by enemies. He's like, we have to show these people that if anybody tries to hurt them, that we will hurt them back. And we have to, in order for our own credibility, but also just for their emotional kind of feeling of safety in the world right now. We have to show them that they are, they're, they have strong people leading them who can push back at the people who are after them.

I mean, it's the most natural thing in the world. You know, that is absolutely the baseline. Martin Luther King was a revolutionary. I mean, he was a, he's a figure and whatever. Like, you know, he maybe had some issues in his personal life with women or something. Like, whatever. Everybody's got issues in their personal life. His, his, I mean, he was a religious figure in a lot of ways, like a saint-like religious figure in his stoicism on that.

And so, yeah, because he was going against all history and all human, all human instinct, you know. I mean, you can probably speak on it as well. I mean, just as far as how, you know, when you were in Iraq, you've got people over there who maybe they're not violent, but they don't necessarily like the American occupation, especially after a lot of years. Or maybe they or people they've known have had bad interactions with American soldiers or something. And there's movements over there that maybe they're nonviolent movements that are trying to,

you know, that aren't necessarily. down with the occupation or something. But, you know, how do those things bleed over and how do they get, in fact, you know, infected when the things that they're calling for aren't happening and so on and so forth? Like, you know, I think it's a universal problem. Yeah. And then, and then what's really interesting about it is, you know, you talked about the 5% on either side, the extremists who are able to influence people towards violence.

That's what they influence them towards. And that's why you need somebody with the, with the, charismatic level of Martin Luther King or Gandhi that has like this strategic vision. Because to me more than anything else, the strategic vision to understand how this plays out over time is the hardest thing. To not want to do the tactical win, to not want to say, all right, we're going to walk out or we're going to do strikes or we're going to do these things that are going to make us feel good tonight or or even even you know even a tactical victory where people will realize you can't

you know we stick to get all those things all those tactical victories that you could have to put all those aside and say nope I am going we are going to do this strategically here's the long term term goal it's going to take a long time we are going to suffer and we are going to suffer one-sided So we are going to suffer while our opposition does not. They do not suffer. We're going to endure that because strategically this is how we win. So from a long-term planning perspective, that to me is the most incredible thing. And, you know, I guess we didn't get to see how it played out because, you know,

Martin Luther King was assassinated. And, you know, even when he was assassinated, I mean, he had had enough momentum in that movement that it did. I mean, that could have devolved into complete and utter mayhem. Did for a while. But it had enough, he had enough momentum to not, that it was controllable on some level, right? On some level it was controllable. I mean, we're not, we didn't go into a full-blown insurgency, right, which we could have. Yeah, I mean, well, we took extraordinary and often illegal law enforcement measures to subvert that for sure.

Yeah, and that's, you know, when when you were starting to talk about Jay Edgar Hoover and some of the stuff that happened, you know, to, to cause the frictions inside some of these movements that were more rebellious and more proactively violent, you know, those are incredible stories. and like you said, illegal stories. And yeah, you should check out, you talk about those in great detail in martyr made. But going on to this part two of my question,

or it wasn't really part two of the question, it's just that concept that despite this violent, nonviolent, despite whatever movement you're making, America's tendency to take these radical movements and put them into the mall, basically, put him into the mall.

You know, one of my favorite examples was Bobby Seal, who was one of the two founders of the Black Panther movement. I mean, it's a militant guy. This is a guy who took a group of Black Panthers when Ronald Reagan was, who was not their friend, was the governor of California. You know, these guys would go out with guns and patrol their neighborhoods and look for cops who had stopped African Americans and get out of their car with a lot of. loaded weapons, not pointing them or anything, but showing them, holding them, and just start to

tell the citizen what his rights are and, you know, tell the cop to behave himself. I mean, you can, that's a, that's a, that's a, that's a crazy thing to do, right? And so these guys are doing that. He got told, Bobby Seal was told when he tried to recruit some guys from an actual, another radical group he was involved with, tried to recruit him to start up to Black Panthers with them. They told him he was suicidal. He takes a group of guys armed, loaded weapons, into the California State Legislature House because the California State Government tried to institute some gun control measures.

This is actually where gun control really got started was in the 60s. They wanted to black, it was against the Black Panthers. And so to protest that, he took a bunch of armed Black Panthers and invaded the legislature with loaded weapons, right? So this is a guy who's, you know, he's down, right? This guy's down to roll.

And, you know, by the 19, I think by 75, 74, 75, he's selling a barbecue sauce called Burn Baby Burn, which was like a Panther slogan when like a building would be burning in a riot. They'd say, chant Burn Baby Burn. And he's selling a barbecue sauce, you know, that's like kind of based on the Black Panthers. And by that point, like the Panthers had been reduced to a consumer product, you know. And our system, you know, we have a way of digesting dissent in a way that, you know, we take it in.

It doesn't matter how radical it is. the Black Panthers were doing that crazy stuff. They were killing police officers. I mean, the Black Liberation Army split off from the Black Panthers. They killed dozens of cops, not in shootouts. I mean, they were just assassinating these people. And within just a few years, you know, it was totally safe and totally neutralized, just something you could wear a T-shirt for, and it wasn't even radical anymore.

You know, it was just a fashion choice. And our society has a way of doing that, which is, Again, it's one of those things where it's like it's very, it's in a way great for the stability of our society, right? Just like our system is kind of built to resist wild swings in radical change. We can digest dissent, you know, very well. But on the other hand, for the people that are very, very, very invested in changing something, it can lead to frustration and paranoia and conspiracy theorizing as well as, I mean, excuse me, one of the reasons that groups like the Weatherman and the Black Panthers resorts,

to tactics that were so in your face is they were basically saying like you're not going to co-op us you know that's not going to happen right like we're going to make damn sure that that is not possible how by killing these cops by bombing these places whatever you're not going to reduce us to like a tv show but it's exactly what happened because even that wasn't enough so what do you think what do you think it is about america i think part of it is what i said earlier we like the rebels right we like the rebels and so boom there you go hey those guys are really rebellious and it's funny i'm sitting here looking at your faces you're talking about bobby steel walking into the california legislator's later with you know a pack of guys with with weapons brandishing weapons and you get a big

smile on your face and so do i because you and i both know that that's kind of cool like hey that's that's that's just that's just that's just american right like hey you know yeah someone's doing something you don't want them to do, cool. Get your weapons and go make a stand, right? That just brings a smile to a man's face. And yes, I know that's wrong. I'm sorry. I'm telling you the reality of my thoughts. And so we have that tendency to look at the rebels and say, yep, I want to be part of that. But, you know, we kind of pull them back towards sanity. We pull them back towards the center. And how do we do that? Well, we put on a t-shirt and I'm not willing to die. for that t-shirt but hey you know I'm gonna wear a t-shirt because it looks cool and I want

everyone to know kind of I'm down I'm not gonna take a bullet but I'm down you know I'll buy a t-shirt it's cool and then the next thing you know these are you know they're being sold in malls and everything else I mean see the the same thing with the Shea Guevara t-shirts that people wear I mean that's the exact same thing right it's the exact same thing right I mean this was a revolutionary communist who was devoted to you know the destruction of the United States our allies if he could push it that far, right? And now it's like, you know, one of the things I always think about, you want to talk about something that's a good example of how power operates.

If you look at like the Nazis, they were, they would execute all their enemies, right? They would get rid of them. That seems on its face like a show of strength. That's not a show of strength. That's a show of paranoia, right? That's you don't feel secure or strong at all that you have to get rid of all your enemies, the communist societies. I thought about back during the Obama administration,

the guy who did that Gungham style song, you know what I'm talking about? Oh, yes. That guy... I had kids that were at the perfect age for Gengnum style at the time when it came out. So he made some comments that Fox News or whoever, you know, I don't even know what he said,

but it was like criticizing Iraq or something like that. There were anti-American comments, right? Something about American imperialism or whatever it was. the people who were mad at the Dixie Chicks were mad at him, right? And so what do we do? Did we send a hit team out like Stalin would have to take this guy out? No. We invited him to the White House and he put on a show for the president and his family.

That's what power looks like, right? When you can just... That's what real power looks like. You can invite the critic in and he can do a song and dance for you in your own house, and you can thank him and wave him off. Like, that's what power looks like. And, you know, yeah, that's in a way, maybe it's that we just, we've been secure in our power for a long time. And maybe if we didn't feel so secure in our power, we might have a different, well, I mean, it's an interesting question.

Because we say we love rebels, right? But right now, like, if you really had to say, like, who are rebels right now? Well, who are the people that are being banned from social media, right? We don't love them. But, I mean, those are really the rebels, right? We don't like them. Those are the bad rebels. But like there are groups of people out there that are being shut out of the conversation politically, right?

Racists and so forth. And like, we have like a certain. And I think for a long time in American history, those people were tolerated. The ACLU defended, you know, neo-Nazis or the KKK's right to March or whatever. They wouldn't do that now. wonder if that's indicative of the fact that we've become a little bit more paranoid on that count in this era, right? Where people are kind of, it exists less than ever before, but maybe because people were

so traumatized by the Trump election or whatever. I mean, people think there's Nazis under every rock right now. And we're dealing with them in a way people who even, even, I mean, there was a guy who works for SDG&E, I think, Hispanic guy in his 40s who was cracking his knuckles like this. in his car and in his truck. And somebody took a picture of it because apparently doing this is a white power sign now.

And he got fired from his job. And this is like a Hispanic guy. He got fired for that. And it's crazy. And it's craziness. And it's indicative of a certain level of paranoia regarding that, right? That's not somebody that you say,

oh, okay, cool guy, like, you know, invite you to the White House. You can do a little dance number for me. That's like we are actually afraid of this right now. At a time when, you know, I think objectively, it's probably at an all-time low. I mean, you know, I don't know.

Maybe it's ramped up a couple percent so that 2008 was a little bit less, but like it's pretty close to the all-time low, right? But we don't feel that way, or at least some people don't feel that way. Yeah, it's funny. You talk about the confidence that it takes. So one of the things that I talk about

from a leadership perspective is if I'm your boss and I come to you, you come to me with a plan, if I'm confident and you've got a halfway decent plan, let's roll with your plan. That's what we do. That's what I do as a leader. Hey, if you come to me, you're my subordinate,

you come to me with a plan and it's a halfway decent plan. I'm confident enough in my leadership, in my leadership position that I don't feel threatened at all by the fact that you're coming to me with a plan. And I think that's a great point, you know. Obama was so confident in his position that he could say, hey, oh, you want to criticize me? Cool. Come on into the White House and we'll talk and it's all good.

And right now, you know, the leader that lacks confidence when you come to me with a plan, I tell you, hey, I'm the boss. You don't come to me with plans. I tell you what to do. You be quiet. And that's what we're seeing right now. We're seeing a lot of people that maybe they don't trust, they don't feel the trust in their own position. They don't feel the confidence in their own position. They don't feel the confidence in in other people's ability to look at what's happening.

They don't feel confident in America to be able to say, oh, you know what, this is going to, you can, you can, you can, you can burn that flag, right? Hey, you can burn that flag. That's okay. You know, we, you got the freedom to do that. Okay. When we start freaking out about that, and look, obviously, I'm no supporter of burning the flag, but I'm not going to like try and fire you from your job. or whatever. I'm not going to attack you.

I'm not going to cancel you or whatever the term is. I'm confident that America's stronger and that freedom and individual freedom and that this nation is stronger than your little ideals. Your little ideals that you have, I believe that this country's ideals that was founded upon are strong enough that I'm okay with you doing that. It's okay. But there's people that are not feeling that way.

on both sides. And what do they do? They go on the attack. And with that, if you listen to this podcast right now on the Jocko podcast feed, eventually we should have it on its own feed because we're going to separate them so you can subscribe to this podcast.

If you want to listen to it, you can also check out the other podcasts that we have. Mine are Jocko podcast, the Warrior Kid podcast and Grounded and Daryl's podcast, which we referred back to a bunch today, is called Martyr Made. And you can support all these podcasts by getting some gear, getting some gear from jocco store.com or origin main.com. I also have a consulting company called echelonfront.com if you want to talk about leadership

inside your organization. And with that, thanks for listening to us as things. unravel. This is Jocko and Daryl. Out.