Making Sense with Sam Harris - #195 — Social Cohesion is Everything

Episode Date: April 6, 2020

Sam Harris speaks with General Stanley McChrystal and Chris Fussell about the Covid-19 pandemic. They discuss the nature of the ongoing crisis, the threat of a breakdown in social order, the problem of misinformation, the prospects of a nationwide lockdown, the trade off between personal freedom and safety, the threat of tyranny, the concerns about the global supply chain, concerns about the price of oil, safeguarding the 2020 Presidential election, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Okay, well, been locked down for about a month here, a little over a month on my side. This is an increasingly surreal experience. Anyway, I hope you're all staying reasonably sane and healthy. I just want to express my gratitude for all of you who can't actually lock down because you're serving some essential function in society. Healthcare workers, frontline responders, those of you who are working in the supply chain, delivering packages and food, working in markets and pharmacies. We're all incredibly

lucky to have you and totally dependent on you. So thank you for what you're doing. This episode of the podcast is yet another PSA. I think I've had four or five of those in a row, so you will not hit a paywall here. Anything on the pandemic, we're putting out in its entirety. But just to remind you, if you care about getting all of my podcast content, the only way to actually do that is to subscribe at samharris.org. And also apologies for the sound in this episode. It's been my general practice of late to bring people into studios and record them professionally. The pandemic has made that impossible. We've been sending people microphones so they can record from home, but we can't control all the variables in their

environment and how all that works out. So you'll hear some strange acoustics for one of our speakers today. You'll get used to it. It's by no means terrible. I actually had a podcast recorded a few days before this that we can't release because the audio was that bad. One can never be entirely sure what one's going to get under these conditions. But today's episode is perfectly fine, albeit not perfect. Okay. Today I'm speaking with General Stanley McChrystal and his colleague Chris Fussell. General McChrystal retired from the U.S. Army as a four-star general, after more than 34 years of service.

And his last assignment was as the commander of all American and coalition forces in Afghanistan. He has written several books, one of which is a memoir titled My Share of the Task, which was a New York Times bestseller. He's also a senior fellow at Yale University's Jackson Institute for Global Affairs, and he's the founder of the McChrystal Group Leadership Institute. And his colleague on today's episode is Chris Fussell. Chris is a partner at the McChrystal Group, and he's the co-author with Stan of Team of Teams, which was also a New York Times bestseller. Chris was a commissioned naval officer, and he spent 15 years in the Navy SEALs

in various points around the globe. He also served as the aide-de-camp to General McChrystal during his final year commanding the Joint Special Operations Task Force fighting al-Qaeda. Chris is also on the board of directors of the Navy SEAL Foundation, and he's a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. And he also teaches at the Jackson Institute at Yale University. And in this podcast, we focus on the COVID-19 pandemic. We discuss our initial mistakes in responding to it, the nature of the ongoing crisis, the threat of a breakdown in social order, the problem of misinformation, the consequences of dishonesty from the government, the prospects of a nationwide lockdown, the trade-off between personal freedom and safety, the possible threat of tyranny, concerns about the global supply chain and the price of oil

going too low, the safeguarding of the 2020 presidential election, and other topics. So, without further delay, I bring you Stan McChrystal and Chris Fussell. I am here with General Stan McChrystal and Chris Fussell. Guys, thanks for joining me. Thanks for having us. So Stan, I will drop the general for our conversation, but obviously it's a great pleasure to get you on here, given your expertise, and you don't need much of an introduction. I will have given you one in my opening remarks, but perhaps both of you can summarize your experience here that seems

relevant to the conversation we're about to have. Sure. I'll start, and Chris and I shared a lot of it. I spent a career in the military, but really starting in 2003, when I took command of Joint Special Operations Command, America's counterterrorist forces, we were mostly focused in Iraq, but actually spread across the entire Mideast against Al-Qaeda and eventually against Al-Qaeda in Iraq, which emerged starting in 2003. And what happened was we were a purpose-built counterterrorist force for precision, almost elegantly precise operations, but not on a very high tempo. Then we ran into this new entity, Al-Qaeda Interact, that was amorphous, viral-like

entity that was opportunistic. It was wickedly fast. It learned constantly, adapted to the conditions everywhere it was. And it was really lethal. And for about two years, they were defeating us. No matter what we did, they were just a different threat that we weren't ready for. So what we did is in the middle of the fight, we transformed the organization, ready for. So what we did is in the middle of the fight, we transformed the organization, not as much organizationally as culturally. We moved to a distributed operation where we operated from 76 different bases simultaneously. We had to synchronize ourselves every 24 hours because that was the pace of the war. We had to change the mindset of how operations were conceived and approved. We had to push approval way down close to people, close to the action.

And yet we all had to stay collaborative so that we had a common picture, a common shared consciousness of what was happening. It feels an awful lot like what is happening with COVID-19 right now. And so my background really, that's the time when my beliefs on leadership started to shift pretty dramatically. And then in 2010, when I retired, we founded the McChrystal Group on the hypothesis that our experience was not really unique to war or counterterrorism. It was to the age of complexity and speed, which has changed the environment we operate in. And Sam, I joined the military, the Navy in the late 90s, went straight into the SEAL teams and spent about a little over 15 years there in that community. And in 2003,

went through the selection to become part of the counterterrorism task force that Stan McChrystal would oversee for about five years during really the peak years of transforming that organization from top down and linear into distributed network model. And so for a few years, got to see it on the front edge, you know, forces on the ground, outposts around the world, around the fight, then spent a year on Stan's staff as his aide to camp, sort of like a chief of staff you'd find in the civilian world, around the fight. Then spent a year on Stan's staff as his aide to camp, sort of like a chief of staff you'd find in the civilian world, and got to see that from the strategic level, watching how really a global enterprise had transformed the way it communicated decentralized decisions. I'd been on the receiving end of that, but then got to see it from behind

the scenes, got deeply interested in the network methodology that is, again, so pertinent today as well. Went on to study that in grad school, went back to my SEAL command for a few more years. And then in 2012, came here to be partnered with Stan ever since that time. Nice, nice. Well, so there are many ways we could have this conversation. So your expertise with respect to distributed organizations and the resilience that one has to build in by organizing in new ways, that obviously has a, there's a positive side to that. I mean, you're learning

from having bumped up against terrorist organizations, but all of this is relevant for how businesses now need to proceed under these new and highly disruptive conditions. So we can talk about what people can do and should do in the business community to make themselves more resilient, but I want us to focus on the ways in which our fairly inept response thus far to the pandemic, in particular in the United States, could, I don't know if you share that judgment, I would love to get your take on just how you think our response has gone so far. But however well or ineptly we respond, there are downside risks to, I mean, virus aside, an economic collapse that we all need to be mindful of. And in particular, I'm concerned about social cohesion. And again, this could

be a generic conversation for some future pandemic, right? Let's say this is a COVID-19 is a dress rehearsal for something much worse. I want to get a sense from you guys about what you're thinking about and watching for and worrying about and the kinds of advice you would be giving to the government and to businesses and to individuals in light of the possible knock-on effects of what is on one level an epidemiological problem and on another, you know, a quickly growing and economic one. Absolutely. And Sam, what I'll do is I'll start and frame up what I think the situation has evolved to and then pass it to Chris, because he and I have spent a lot of time talking about the social cohesion part. If we think about the threat right now, this amorphous,

If we think about the threat right now, this amorphous, viral, frightening threat of a pandemic mixed with literally a shutdown or a seizing up of the world's economy on a short-term basis has us frightened by something we can't touch or feel, but we know is deadly. And it also has us terrified because our economic well-being, our security of our future is in doubt. If we look at the United States, as the pandemic started to appear first in China and then little places elsewhere, our first response was not to be as candid with the American people as we should have been. And I think several things came out of that. By not laying out the situation very clearly, like a leader at the beginning of a war might do, we created misperceptions about the level of threat and the level of activity that would be needed to defeat this.

Maybe that was to make people feel better in the moment. But the reality is what it did was it caused a lot of organizations to be slower to respond than they needed to be. As we did that, and we reacted slowly, we started to suddenly see the effects of the virus on the United States, which of course accelerated the economic shutdown. And then what we've been doing since is largely fighting this as 50 separate state battles, as though each state and really each municipality is on their own to fight this virus. But the very nature of an opportunistic threat like this is that you must be united. If you want to win a war, the way you do it is you break your enemy into pieces and then you defeat them in detail.

If you want to lose a war, you do the opposite. You get divided up and then each organization is trying to defend itself and they can't. So what we've done is we've set up a mindset in the United States that says, to a degree, every man and woman for themselves. And I break that to the state or municipal level. When they lack the confidence, the expertise, the resources to do that, then suddenly you see society under pressure, but it's not linked arms. Let me pass to Chris because that pressure can produce some frightening effects. Yeah. Maybe starting at a pretty high level of what we've seen in other parts of the world that we may think we're far away from. But in reality, this is part of our sort of human DNA, the tribalism, sort of local focus that can kick in as we start to lose those things that we take for granted that do keep us cohesive enough so that you don't separate as a society. There's a thing called the social cohesion curve that I'm a big believer in. It's just a simple sort of X, Y axis that says you have everywhere.

If a country is not in civil war, it's crossed some level to maintain sort of daily peace around society. cross some level to maintain sort of daily peace around society. Some of that you get for free based on the sort of the homogeneity and the similarities inside that. So think like Norway, for example, would be pretty high just on the natural level of cohesion. And then you have to cover the difference with sort of rule of law and order. And sometimes if that natural order is pretty low, like we found in a place like Iraq, for example, from the outside pre-2003, it looks like, okay, this is a relatively stable place. The natural cohesion was much lower than we would have assumed. And Saddam Hussein and the Ba'athist

had covered the gap with all sorts of massive suppression, behind the scenes violence, some of which we knew about, but some of which we didn't, right? And so when that gets removed, and the Baathists get removed, then suddenly that gap is wide open. And that tribalism kicks in very quickly. And, you know, in a matter of months, society decayed into civil war, and then it comes Al Qaeda and throws a grenade in the middle of it, right? So that, and we've seen that other places in Afghanistan when the Taliban came in and separated the society through very violent methodology, obviously, but turned what, you know, just 15 years prior had been a vacation Mecca post-Soviet and warlord situation where the violence was untenable. The Taliban then separates people down to the lowest and isolated level. And it'll be generations if that's ever able to recover to the Afghanistan once new. Balkanization in the 90s, et cetera, et cetera. So we've seen examples of this. We have to be, and to Stan's point, as things get separated down to the state and local level, that will further

decay potentially down into socioeconomic lines, some of which you're already seeing to start to trickle up in the news, whether it's between healthcare, food shortages, those sorts of things. There's a real potential under the surface that we can fractionalize. I think we're a far distance from the levels of violence we've seen in other places. But the social repair in an already very polarized society could take much longer than we imagine it would if we don't get aggressive right now as leaders at every level to keep those communities, states, etc., tied together under some common banner. Right. So I think many people listening to this conversation will find it, frankly, alarming that I'm even inclined to talk to two military guys, however well-qualified,

and view the current situation through that lens. To talk about the possibility of a breakdown in social order is to paint an unnecessarily scary picture. And there's just something inflammatory about even entertaining this possibility. But I think one lesson to draw from this experience is, you know, if you haven't thought about how quickly the world can change, and once it changes, there's this kind of ratcheting effect where you, it seems to move in one direction and it's very hard to get it to move back to where you came from. You're not drawing the obvious lesson. Most of humanity at this point is now told to stay home and various places are enforcing that recommendation with greater or lesser heavy-handedness. And it really

seems to me fairly obvious that if our response to the economic emergency isn't really effective, we run a risk of many things going haywire that, again, this is standing completely aside from the very obvious stressor of the epidemic, which could break our healthcare system and make this parallel theme of tragedy. Just what is beginning to happen economically poses a threat of a breakdown in social order. So I just want to frame this discussion by saying that I'm not expecting a breakdown in social order, but it would seem irresponsible to not have experts of your sort at least talk us through the kinds of things we should be looking for, responding to, preempting in advance. I'll give you one example. So like in Los Angeles, it was just just a message sent to,

it's almost like broken windows policing run in reverse. It's just a bad message of social distrust sent to all of society. But when you start to see things like that, I see a kind of unraveling beginning, which we should want to figure out how to arrest. And, you know, there are other rumors that, I don't know if this is official, but I have this on fairly good authority, that police departments are policing quite differently now because they don't want to be up close and personal with people when they don't have to. They don't want to be putting people into jails where this contagion could be exploding. The courts, they're not impaneling juries. Our justice system is grinding to a halt as well. And therefore, there are crimes that are not being

prosecuted and crimes that are not being even responded to at the level of policing. So, I mean, this is the kind of thing that, again, is moving in the wrong direction when you're talking about social order. So I just wanted to put that out to both of you. And I think it's only responsible for leaders at every level to recognize what is similar about a current problem or crisis and what's different. And there are variables here that we've never dealt with. We've certainly seen natural disaster, Hurricane Sandy type stuff. That's when the gritty nature of our society comes out. But the variable that's different there is, and we all love seeing this, right? Neighbors support neighbors. They come out, they rebuild a house, they go to the hospital and

volunteer their time, et cetera. We can't do that in this situation. It only makes the problem worse if you try to play to your strongest side of your nature and help one another out. So we have to separate and that adds fuel potentially to the fire that you're talking about. And I think one of the things in a good way, you know, like I like to say, society is the thing you don't notice. It lives in the background if you live in a good society, right? But if you've been to places where that was the truth, and then very quickly, it's not the truth. My first experience with this was pre-2001, spending time in Croatia, training with units there and got to be good friends with a Croatian, their special operations units, an officer there who had been married to a Serbian

woman. They still were. And when the war started, they had 12 hours to make a decision. Were they going to go back to her village or were they going to stay in Croatia? They decided to stay in Croatia. And he told me this whole story as we got to know each other. His unit went back and fought in the village where his wife was from. And his children's grandparents had lived there. And that had happened in a matter of 18, 24 months and lasted a generation. you know, 18, 24 months and lasted a generation, right? And that was a level of intermarrying,

common language, common culture that would have seemed absolutely seamless to an outsider. And so, yeah, you have to think through how, you can fight it, you can get ahead of it, but leaders have to be very deliberate about how are we going to hold these social ties during together, together when we're, when we have to be physically apart. social ties during together, together when we have to be physically apart. Yeah, I just want to echo the point you made about how bizarre and unnatural this problem is. I mean, this is not at all like any other sort of natural disaster, because keeping people apart is the first and only remedy at this moment. And as the antithesis of all of the ethical and political silver linings societies can tend to find when everyone has to respond to a crisis, it really is almost engineered for a bad outcome. So how do you think we should be

So how do you think we should be messaging around this? Because one of the things that is especially insidious about the current crisis is there's a political overlay to everything, or at least people have to burn a lot of fuel trying to fight themselves free of it. And so the messaging around this being a problem is, you know, balkanized with respect to politics. You know, there are many people who, for the longest time, seemed to think this was all a hoax, this media-driven narrative designed to harm the president's re-election prospects. And many people seem to have recovered from that, but certainly not everybody. And I don't know how much time you guys spend on social media, but I'm encountering, you know, Pizzagate-level conspiracy

theories around basic terrestrial facts of epidemiology, and it's pretty weird out there in the information space. We can take any piece of this you want, but just in terms of what is being communicated, how it's being communicated, how we get on the same page with respect to this now two crises, again, COVID and the economy. What are your thoughts there? Let me start first with the idea of what keeps people believing and operating according to the rules of a society. And I think it's based on confidence. You know, the value of money is based on the confidence that someone else will accept that money for what you need. The reason many people follow laws is because they believe there's

a law and order system, that it's in their interest to follow laws because other people will then as well. Once you start to have a dearth of information, if we did a thought experiment and we said COVID-19 was approaching and suddenly all digital communications were cut off, television, phones, everything, suddenly people would fill their heads with whatever the idea of the potential threat is. We already see hoarding. We see increased sales of firearms recently during this. And those are glimmers of people losing confidence that the system is going to work. So now if you say, well, we haven't lost all communications, but our communications have become corrupted. They've been corrupted by politics and they've been corrupted by dishonesty as well.

People just putting absolute disinformation out. And so people start to discount the truth. They start to act in a way that says, I'm not confident that society is going to work in the way that it was advertised and that I experienced before. society is going to work in the way that it was advertised and that I experienced before. And so now I've got to draw into my tribal group, whether it's my family or religion or race or whatever it is, draw together, which causes society to atomize more. You see that whenever a society is under huge pressure. Again, we saw it in Iraq. You see it during riots where people sort of go to the place they feel safest. But a modern society can't function that way very long because our systems are built on things having to connect, deliveries having to be made for supply

chain, for food, the delivery of services. I think it's a more fragile apparatus, infrastructure than we sometimes think it is. And that's why I think the importance of really clear, accurate information to build people's confidence. It may not be the story that they want. It may be paint a pretty challenging picture, but the accuracy is essential because people make decisions based upon their perceptions. And people will, again, they'll, as we'd say, they'll go high right and sort of drift out of where common sense should take them. And that really threatens society.

thing I've worried about, frankly, ever since Trump became president, because whatever you may, you know, one may like or not like about him, I think it is uncontroversial to say that his relationship to the truth, to a truly fact-based discussion about anything, is about as precarious as we have ever seen in not just politics, really just anywhere in public life. I'm sure there are still people out there who will not admit that the president lies to an unnatural degree, but it's objectively true to say that he does, right? That's not a partisan statement.

And I've always viewed this as just a horrific liability because if we have someone who will lie reflexively, even when it doesn't serve his interests, he will contradict himself in a way that certainly doesn't make him look good, and there's no apparent advantage. And he does it just relentlessly and with a velocity that we've never seen before. And it's sort of good fun when there's nothing at stake and the Dow is hitting 30,000 and we're not in a war

and everyone in Trump's base can just laugh that he's winding up the libtards. But now we really need leadership and we really need to be able to trust the information we're getting from the White House. And, you know, honestly, it just seems like something that cannot be corrected for, apart from the experts with their own reputations to maintain, however difficult that project is, messaging around him, you know, whether they're standing within six feet of him or not.

messaging around him, whether they're standing within six feet of him or not, there's no way that Trump becomes someone who can actually be trusted not to shade the truth. I know you guys have a somewhat taboo for you to strike what seems to be a hard political note one way or the other, but I'm just wondering what your sense is of that and what to do in light of that. Because to my eye, and at least 60% of the country's eye, this is a man who will lie about anything all the time for reasons far less grave than the kinds of reasons he's confronting now. So how do we reboot from there? I think there's two ways to tackle that. Even trying to say, you know, this thing, as it turns into a political conversation, it only exacerbates some of the problems that run against logic, right? People just saying, well, I'm on this side,

therefore I believe or don't believe in epidemiologists, right? Yeah, yeah. Let me just respond to that concern, just to try to close the door to there, because it really is not a political point I'm making. I mean, I would never say this about someone like Mitt Romney, right? This is not an anti-Republican point. And it's just not political to point out that someone is not speaking factually and is either ignorant of certain facts or consciously misrepresenting them. And you just, you can catch Trump doing that so often that, I mean, you can set your watch by it. And again, that's just not, I don't view that as a partisan statement, although it will be heard as a partisan statement by the president's defenders. I hear you making it, as you often do, a sound argument about the importance of verifiable truth. And that's more important now than ever. One of the things, there's two thoughts that that teases up. One is, at what level would this be fought? And I'll turn that over to Stan, because this is exactly what he had to do inside of our

force to fight a distributed problem, right? Governors and mayors and local leaders are now our new frontline, you know, colonels. The other, though, is the interplay between these types of systems. And this is one that, Stan, I've been staring at this problem for 20 years. And so it's just painfully obvious when you see it happening, the way that a traditional top down system works. And if you have a very sort of corner office bureaucratic leader who always wants to receive information and walk out and share it as his or her own, which is not uncommon in big enterprise, government, military, et cetera, that tendency trickles down very quickly, and the whole system will snap into that sort of behavior. And it's the exact opposite of what you need to do when you're fighting a network spread. Networks and traditional bureaucracies or hierarchies, their governing dynamics are

fundamentally opposite, right? One only cares about how quick can I grow? And I'm going to find new opportunity wherever it exists. That's how Al-Qaeda spread. And that's how this is spreading, obviously. Different problems, but the variables that allow them to do that in a interconnected world are very similar. And so if you are a leader, like if Stan McChrystal had rolled into the joint counterterrorism community and said, I want to know everything, and then I'll tell you what to do next, we would have done every

single thing we did correctly, and we would have gotten praise for it, and we would have been orders of magnitude too slow to keep up with the problem. We'd have fought a bunch of localized fights, all looked good in our own little world. And the problem would have spread multiple times faster than we could keep up with it. And the real problem is if you had a caustic leader sitting on top of the system like that, he could have said, well, all the other things happening aren't my problem because everything I say to do gets done right. So my units are great. This is everybody else's problem. Because everything I say to do gets done right. So my units are great.

This is everybody else's problem. So at every level, these two stack up against each other in opposite and very dangerous ways. Leaders in this sort of situation need to quickly create the copper wire for connectivity, get ground truth, because that's where the truth sits, up and through the system, and then be the ultimate network connector and say, I don't know the answers. This is changing too fast, but I bet the mayor in this city has some good insights. What does she know? What can we learn from it?

And how quickly can others be informed by that? So I just want to be the network conduit, and I will never be able to walk out on stage and look like the brilliant know-it-all like I could have in a traditional hierarchical model. And that's a hard behavior for leaders to shift towards. So that's one, there's not a solution there that's highlighting the problem of the balance in those personalities. I think the thing that I had hoped for 20 years ago was that the Wikipedia effect would bring truth out. And so I really sort of had a Pollyanna view that said, if you get enough sources in, unfettered from providing ground truth, that the truth would win out because it's the truth. That has not proven correct so far. And so one of the dangerous parts about this is because that's not proven true, if you look at our political environment, people discount everybody. I had a pretty

intelligent friend of mine the other day say that he was not happy with what the president said, but he thought that all politicians lie, so what the president says doesn't matter. Right. And we've discounted it, and then there's the idea that all news media is flawed. And so we've discounted all sources of information that we used to be reliant on. It really does matter how you respond to an error, right? So like, you know, when the New York Times makes a mistake, you know, if they doubled down on it every time it. And so insofar as they're reliable channels of information and unreliable ones, it really does often come down to what any organization or any individual does when it becomes clear that they made a mistake. But one of the things that's so toxic about our information ecosystem right now is that because

everyone can essentially silo themselves without even knowing they're doing it, but everyone can create enough of an echo chamber based on the kinds of news they like to hear, it just seems that many people become unreachable, right? There's always a conspiratorial rejoinder to a fact that is impossible to assimilate within your cherished conspiracy theory or worldview. And people can just stay stuck there. And then you're dealing with people for whom the sky is the limit based on allegations of the most insane intent behind any... I'm talking to people, not publicly at the moment, but

privately, but people who have immense social media platforms who think that the problem is all made up, that COVID-19 is not even as bad as the flu, and that all the noise we're hearing from hospitals and governors is just an attempt to get more money out of the federal government that is perhaps married to some kind of social panic. And there's literally no there there. We're going to wake up and realize that basically only 75-year-olds died from COVID-19, and most of them were going to die anyway from other conditions. I'm talking about people who have millions of followers on Twitter, and they're messaging this kind of contrarian attitude with respect to this that is incredibly harmful. And one irony here is that this has hit the blue counties first, i.e. the big cities.

And so it's only now beginning to make itself known in rural America and throughout the South. And we're just at the beginning of this thing, both epidemiologically and economically. Where do you think this goes once the difference between New York City and every other place in the country is no longer so stark? You know, as you're talking, there's some parallels to the tribal viewpoints that we experienced in previous life with the Al-Qaeda fight that I think may start to manifest here. And there's a glimmer of hope here as well. One of the things we found, again, back to this interplay of traditional systems and networks that really have no emotion, they just want to get big fast. One of the ways that'll play out is we'll pat ourselves on the back for seeing our numbers go down in New York,

which is the end product of people literally putting their lives on the line and working around the clock. That's a good story. COVID doesn't care. It's just going to leave that very hard access point and go somewhere else. It'll drift into these other communities as you're laying out. So that's not up to us. When we went into that fight, we all showed up with our organizational biases, which are similar in some ways to these political lines, geographic lines, et cetera, that are going to be a challenge here. So this started inside the military units. I came from the SEAL teams. And I had grown up in a culture that said, we don't get along with this army unit

or that unit over there, et cetera, et cetera. And you don't know better. You just grow up believing that to be the truth. And it's based on sort of cultural lore. And they thought the same thing in reverse, right? So as we got distributed, one of the first things that McChrystal did was we're going to send you out closest to the fight. And we got in these small pockets next to each other. When the bullets are flying, those old sort of

cultural biases go out the window pretty quickly, right? So you figure out a way to become a cohesive team on the ground. There were certainly some forcing functions and that was not a flick of the switch. Once that started to take hold inside these very, very alpha military units, and you know those personalities, Sam, you spend time around that part of the military, know those personalities, Sam, you spend time around that part of the military, then it was able to expand out into civilian organizations as well. So we had a collective bias against intelligence organizations or against diplomatic organizations, et cetera, et cetera. And as these members of those different tribes clustered in small groups close to the fight, we used to call it the Star Wars bar, right? You walked in and it was all different colored aliens, but we were locked in one localized fight, which made it very serious.

And traditional tribal norms could be overcome by sort of a common bond on solving your local issue. Then when those networks were tied together into a bigger system, you started to get ground truth, right? And you got a clear picture across these boundaries that had an interagency feel to them because there's local groups that said, look, we're all on the same page. Here's why we're interpreting this. And then you connect that around the world. And the leaders were given an honest picture of what was happening inside this network threat. And of course, that goes back to the previous discussion. It was dependent on leaders that were willing to put in place a network methodology that allowed and, in fact, forced the sort of truth to power sort of paradigm that everybody likes

to talk about, but is very, very hard to put in place. They created a system very deliberately where those closest to the fight had a daily platform where they could talk about what was happening. And at a certain point, no one could deny that truth. The problem's bigger here, it's shrinking here. We need helicopters over here. We need predator assets to go to the north. And those were decisions that were coming up from the ground based on that interagency, cross-tribal boundary, realistic picture. We can do the same thing here. It's those local leaders creating a networked connection model between mayors, hospital systems, first responder,

governors even, so that they can become the ground eye view and truth. If they're given the platform, that can become a very, very powerful tool, but that will take intentionality. And all of us will default to my down and in view, just like I would have in the SEAL teams. I wasn't going to suddenly say, I'm going to forego all of my SEAL team tribal norms, walk across the street and try to become buddies with this army ranger over here. Because my tribe would have said, what the heck are you doing? We had leadership on top of this that said, this is the only way we win. And I'm going to put forcing functions in place and make you all get along.

And I believe, there was no book written about this beforehand, I believe that will make us as interconnected as this al-Qaeda threat. And the same thing, I think, can hold true here. What do you think the prospects are that we'll have a national lockdown? I think it's inevitable. I think it'll be late to need. But at a certain point, what we've seen so far is instead of being ahead of the problem, we are responding as a nation to sort of the facts being right in front of us and having to do it. And so I think a national lockdown comes pretty soon. I'm not sure how much it will have cost us to be this late,

but I believe it's significant. And this opens the door to another strand of concerns, which is the ways in which arguably a necessary response to a biological and economic emergency can be viewed as the aggregation of power and even the looming threat of tyranny, right? So we'll have a government that, by definition, will have more and more power, both overt, which is, in this case, imposing a lockdown, and, you know, how it's imposed, the details there will matter, but also just we're seeing really a hunger for increased surveillance, right? We want to be able to track the spread of this thing? We want to be able to track the spread of this thing. We want to be able to track the efficacy of social distancing. Most people will have seen the video of all those cell phones leaving the beach in Fort Lauderdale and spreading out

throughout the country. And these are now digital surveillance tools that the government will have more and more access to. And on some level, we have a scared population that will be eager to give away its privacy and some amount of freedom with both hands if it could possibly do some good here. And again, this is more of a ratcheting effect where, you know, you keep turning the wheel in one direction, and it becomes, or one could fear that it becomes very difficult to turn it back and to reset. So how do you think about the threat of tyranny, or the perceived threat of tyranny, as we enact a more comprehensive response to the problem? Yeah. Sam, I'm not as worried about it as some people are. If you go back in our history, we've always imposed measures we had to, whether it's passports to get in and out of the nation, whether it is TSA to protect airlines from terrorism, whether it's things we do policing-wise just to make sure that people are safe on the streets. I think every nation,

the society makes a trade-off between certain personal freedoms and then what's needed to keep the society from destroying itself. I think the technology has been growing, so it just makes it easier to have surveillance cameras or cell phone tracking or any number of these things. And I think society will make decisions. It will, like it has with the use of mobile devices, many of us have traded off a lot of our security for convenience. And I think people will be only too happy to trade off some of their convenience for security from a pandemic or other threats. So I don't think it'll be as bad as we think. In fact, I think the population will sign up for it pretty easily. I think we'll have to keep watching it because the problem is it tends to get ahead of us

now. The technology, what we can do with cell phones, what we can do with tracking is more than the average person appreciates. So they will have given up more of their personal privacy than they know. And so we do need to watch that. If you watch what not just is being done by governments, but what's being done by marketers, what's being done by political campaigns, there's an extraordinary ability to target voters or customers or whatever using data that most of us don't really think about when we log into a website or use our cell phone. I would build on that just a little bit,

Sam. We had a conversation before this all hit with a few folks in your world just around the idea that this concept of being unknown is really a unique, on the grand scope of history, my sense of individual autonomy and people not knowing what I'm up to is maybe going to be just this brief, cute little moment of 100 years or so. Because if you think about, you know, in a tribal culture, obviously, everybody knows everybody. That's how you survive. Even going back just to my grandparents' generation, growing up in small town, everyone was in your business all the time. It's only in recent history that you've been able to move away,

being from a middle-class community. You could go to school, you could get a job in a city where no one knows you, and you can create a sense of autonomy and independence, and you can choose how known you are to that local community. Technology has already usurped that, right? And this may be the wake-up call that says, no, to Stan's point, collectively, we're going to trade off that sense of autonomy for collective protection, like we've done throughout the

vast 99.9% of our history. And I think this will be, as all on the backside of this, all the data that will be collected, the arguments will be quite sound to be able to trace this sort of thing. And to your earlier point, I know you've discussed this with others on your show, this probably is the warmup, right? Anyone that knows this space far better than we do will say, yeah, this is round one. This is the easy warning for what could happen down the road. And so those things could couple together and we will learn out of this probably, hey, the only one of the ways we have to position ourselves to be ready for this when it's a 40% kill rate and an easier transfer

methodology is to sacrifice some of these liberties, right? The knock-on effects of that, it's a long conversation, but we're going to be having this conversation pretty quickly. Yeah. That's one thing to be hoped for, if it's possible to learn these lessons so clearly that we could have a kind of turnkey solution to the next pandemic, because it really does seem like this isn't the last time we're going to be faced with something for which we have zero immunity. And as you say, it could be much worse. And a national or global shelter-in-place order could be responded to with real alacrity and something like finesse if we just knew how we unrolled it. Everyone understood the need for it, and we know how to stall our economy and then to restart it. And we know how much money to pump in or what percentage of GDP to pump in. And it just seems like there's a machine, the workings of which we're understanding more and more, and now we're stress testing it. But again,

the leadership has been such, and the public debate about, in many cases, undebatable facts, has been such that it's not yet inspiring much confidence that we're learning the lessons in a way that'll be indelible. Yeah, but it's an interesting thing to consider. So the guns of August's argument in the military, we're always fighting the last thing because it was so hard, you learn the wrong lessons for the next war. There wasn't an easier Al-Qaeda that was fought before this generation, right? And it learns and it grows, et cetera. If there is a bigger thing on the backside of this that could come in 10 years, sometime in our lifetime, or certainly probably

waves of this current one. One of the things we are trying to talk very directly with leaders across all different parts of industry and government, et cetera, is everybody gets a pass right now because we're all trying to figure this out. We need to move faster. No one gets a pass in the fall. No one gets a pass in the spring. And certainly as a society, we don't get another pass on this once we figure this one out, exactly like you're saying, what are the things we have to have in our routine to be able to go in and out of this if it happens again in five years or if it happens again in the fall? And so a lot of leaders, understandably, or organizations are thinking, how do I get through this quarter? That's fine. We've got to baseline ourselves. But how do I create the

organization of the future that's going to be able to survive through these things or the nation of the future that can deal with this sort of pandemic when it's even worse? And it could be orders of magnitude worse. How do you guys think about the tension between what is rational for individuals or even individual businesses to do versus what is collectively beneficial. I mean, there are zero-sum or apparent zero-sum trade-offs here. I mean, take something like, you know, whether to buy PPE, right, you know, the hoarding of masks or anything else, the hoarding of food, being early to stock up and, you know, how much to stock up when if there's a run on the market or a run on the bank or a run on anything, you get this breakdown of the system and supply chain,

and in many cases, a breakdown of confidence in our institutions and norms. And obviously, there are kind of tipping points there where those tensions can be resolved up until the point and then you've got people boarding up their windows and trying to sell thousands of bottles of Purell out of public storage and then being vilified online for it. How do you think about those tradeoffs between the individual and the group? I think it's when you lose confidence that society is going to work in your favor and our collective favor, that law and order, that supply chains are going to work, then you start to have a case where people or small groups are incentivized to do what's best for them because the good of the society no longer applies to them. I don't think it would take very much to see that behavior kick up more than we have. We've seen some hoarding and things. We've seen a couple of communities that I read

about basically say, we don't want any outsiders coming in. I could see three weeks from now, small towns with checkpoints outside the towns, with people with shotguns saying no strangers can come through these checkpoints into our town. And from their standpoint, it would look like very rational behavior. From anything six months, if we went back six months and we predicted this kind of thing, we'd say it was sort of a post-apocalyptic zombie land behavior. But I can see that happening and people justifying to themselves that in that particular case, it works. The problem is the more those things happen, the more it speeds up the deterioration of society. The more you break things apart, the less this globalized system we've created works. And a lot of people aren't fully appreciating

the fact that there are so many things that are not built, not only in their neighborhood, but not in their country that they rely on every day that suddenly you say, no, wait a minute, it's in our interest for the global structure to be healthy and to work. And in fact, it could be to our demise if it doesn't. So I think that we need to spend time educating people on that, because if you have a simplistic view, you take simple actions. Yeah. One of the things that I've heard Stan say quite frequently over the last few weeks is to leaders who, not just industry leaders, but any leaders that sit on top of these

networks that keep society together, it's time to activate the network. How do I think about that? And the obvious ones, I'm a mayor of a town, I'm a governor, et cetera, city manager. But there are all these super nodes inside community networks that we take for granted because they're just in the background, right? My school principal, my church leader, my community group leadership, et cetera. That localized space, those leaders, they can be a real part of the solution, but it's a new sort of challenge for them. So I'm sure this is happening

everywhere across the country, but the school system will say, okay, we're at home for the rest of the year. We're going to hand out school packets three times a week. We're going to do Skype calls. So it turns into the kids involved through digital platforms with their teacher. But those principals sit on top of these, especially in a place like DC or other larger cities, very diverse adult communities. And we see each other in passing at the school. Our kids are on the playground together, et cetera. There's a social cohesion that comes from that that could be gone for six, 12 months. We don't know yet how long. And when we couple it with the problems that

could be on the backside of this, I live in the middle of DC. My kid goes to a school with other kids who I know are, know their parents because we spend time after school together. Some of those kids live in food deserts on the other side of the city. When there are shortages that are impacting those communities and the tethers between the adult population have been separated because we're so isolated, then you add in one more risky variable to how society can start to unwind in a very unfavorable way. So who are those local leaders? It might seem unnatural for a principal to step in and say, you know what? Every two weeks, I'm going to do a Skype call with all the parents in my school because

I want them to hear from each other. I want those ties to stay in place. That's never been part of their job description. But those are those invisible networks that we have to find ways to keep strong because we don't know how long this is going to last. Yeah. What are your expectations there on the time front? How long are you preparing yourself for it to last?

Yeah, we've talked a fair amount about it. I think we're going to see the effects of COVID-19 directly, meaning waves of it, into 2021, probably into the spring of 2021. I think that as society gets a little more prepared for it each time, that each one will be a little bit less impactful on us, we'll be better at doing certain things. But I think that the requirement to separate is probably likely again in the fall and maybe again in the winter or early spring, which is going to affect the economy. So I think if we think in that kind of a time horizon, we need to think about solutions that are not everybody cocooned in their home for two weeks,

and then we emerge and it's all well. I think we're going to have to make organizations work, the distributed work environment for not just a few, but for most organizations're going to have to make organizations work, you know, the distributed work environment for not just a few, but for most organizations are going to have to work. We're going to have to figure out how we take care of those people who have to be out physically doing it, not just first responders, but people in the supply chain and things like that. We're going to have to think through those because there's not an alternative. We have got to keep those fundamental wheels of society turning. And I can remember from the Al-Qaeda fight, the last time I had a finish line in my head

was when we were chasing Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq, who was the first really well-known leader of AQI. Al-Qaeda 2.0, he was sort of innovative, et cetera. And we all, and I can remember having these conversations. I happened to be forward deployed during that time window. And we knew we were close. And the thinking was, this will be the finish line. When we get him, this war will start to wind down.

And we get him, this war will start to wind down. And we got him. And within two, three days, everybody realized, oh, wait a second, that wasn't a finish line. There is no finish line in this thing. This is a new type of threat. Have you met Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi? Right. And because you realize this is an ideology that exists in networks, and it will just continue to thrive. So our challenge then was, A, it was a wake-up call, but B, how do we redesign ourselves? And of course, this is what our leadership had been saying to us for a while. We were just a little thick-headed, at least I was. How do we redesign ourselves to be able to survive through this much longer, unending,

generational, infinite war that a network wants to fight? And if you take it with a rigid, we're going to be done by X date, then you're only setting yourself up for frustration and probably failure. What lesson do you draw around our dependency on a global supply chain here? Because many people were frankly astonished at how thin our supply was on many fronts. I think that the PPE issue has been the most galling for people. I mean, just the idea that we could so quickly run out of masks and that many of them need to be produced in China and China having the same problem. And then when you overlay the prospect of being in conflict with a country like China. And you recognize that most

of our medication is coming either in whole or in part is coming from China and India. It's just, you know, one person drew the analogy of outsourcing our ammunition to China, knowing full well that we could one day be in a shooting war with them, but we're expecting them to supply us with bullets. What lesson do you draw about what we actually need to take in-house for emergencies of this kind? Yeah, I think that one thing is the interdependencies between countries are grossly misunderstood because, as you say, we may say, okay, we're going to make all of our weapons here, all of our ammunition here, all of our key things. But then you find that key basic materials or components of those are required. And like we found in our medical supply chain, we have interdependencies. This came from

a focus on trying to be as efficient as possible, to reduce our costs as much as possible. And if you go to the doctrine of free trade, it makes sense. People should do that part of economic activity for which they are best suited. But it does create this mutual dependency that we are dependent upon the supply chain there, and they are dependent upon us for many things. Therefore, you've got to decide whether that's acceptable, whether they are a reliable enough partner, both politically, medically, militarily, for us to do that. And that's a consciousness that I think America has lacked for quite a while. I think we just don't have a sense for just how many things we don't either make or the raw materials we don't produce. Yeah, it seems like there should just be a comprehensive inventory of

everything we wish we had in the current circumstance and didn't, and then figure out why that was the case. And also just figure out what the government can only do effectively. It just seems like the free market incentives for many of these things are just never going to be there. And so recognizing that an ability to produce an antiviral that, if all goes well, only a tiny percentage of us need to use once in our lives, the market doesn't incentivize investing billions of dollars in that. But clearly, that's the kind of thing we need in these circumstances. I don't know if you have thoughts about the division of labor between government and private industry there. Yeah. If you go to just medical capability, Governor Cuomo gave a great sort of primer on this the other day. And he described, we have a privatized hospital system. And all of those hospitals can't afford to keep beds that they don't need. So they very carefully calculate what they need.

And so we don't have excess capacity. The military has to have a certain amount of excess capacity, like you see with the hospital ships and then field hospitals that they can put up. But they have to be prepared for conflict and sudden casualties. But the rest of our system just isn't built that way. conflict and sudden casualties. But the rest of our system just isn't built that way. And so when we suddenly want to have this surge capability, we don't have it. I think that's a national decision. The nation has to decide how much surge capability do we want to maintain, either keeping mothballs or we'd have to subsidize hospitals to keep it ready.

subsidize hospitals to keep it ready. Yeah. And obviously, all the other emergencies and potential emergencies that the world can throw at us have not been canceled just because all of our attention is on this one. How do you see the risks we're running on other fronts? Yeah. I think we've been running this risk for a few years here in the United States, for sure, in our sort of echo chambers, preoccupation, which is fast news cycle, et cetera, and at strategic costs, right? And we've seen examples of that with Russia and other actors that had done some pretty sophisticated stuff over the last three, four years. This is, back to our earlier discussion, one of the new variables here that could be proven wrong here, but certainly not

in my lifetime, has there ever been a single story that the whole world's talking about? This is literally the only thing any outlet is talking about anywhere in the world right now. There may be an exception out there, but it's just blanketed, right? And so those sophisticated actors, all the way down to violent groups that most folks have never heard of. They know when they have a smoke cover. Right. And I am sure that this is being taken advantage of by really bad actors all over the world, not just nation state players, but localized problems where, you know, in countries that we would normally pay attention to and be able to put pressure on and use diplomatic leverage, et cetera, et cetera, that they know that their actions won't break through. No one will care. And if it doesn't get into the media cycle, they can get away with whatever they want. That could be violence. That could be, you know, whatever their intent is. And so it will take us, a lot of that will never be unwound, but I'm

willing to bet that some of the stories that will come out of what happened during this blanket coverage will be, there'll be some heartbreaking stories in there and some strategic ground that we will have a real challenge ahead of us to make up. So everything from the strategic level all the way down to the local. Sam, I would add there's some destabilizing factors that are likely to be second and third order effects. The one that jumps out most is the price of oil. We were already moving away from oil into renewables, which I think was a good thing. But many economies in the world, to include ours to a degree, are based on a stable price of oil much higher than it is right now. And I think there's every chance that the price of oil could drop down below $20 a barrel. If it goes there, then many nations aren't economically

viable anymore. And so their entire economic model is upended. And so you almost have to have instability follow from that. Throw on top of that less mature medical systems and they get hit with COVID-19. So you have this combination of factors that produces instability, which whenever you have instability, nowadays in the world, you can export it, whether you're trying to export it or not. So I think that's just a couple of examples of things that could easily happen in the pretty near future. So I know you guys are running out of time over there, so I'll bring it into the end zone here. Do you have any special concerns about the election in November? Because just on its face, asking everyone to turn up and vote in person seems epidemiologically unwise, and it would be very easy to see in the paranoid fantasies of his detractors a concern that Trump could just decide it's not safe to hold an election. I don't know what the constitutionality of that would be, but how haywire could the presidential election go if COVID is still surging on all fronts at that point? Yeah, I think first an election is critical, I think, for lots of

reasons, but particularly in the United States right now, a presidential election is critical. I also think that it's entirely within the capacity for us to go without having to go physically to polling booths. I think we've got the ability to transition to vote by mail where necessary, but vote digitally otherwise. There would be growing pains in it, but I think we could have already started making that transition. I think we also could take a great step forward toward decreasing voter suppression that way. There are lots of things I think that technology could help us do. This could be the forcing function for us to take it on. I'm worried that we can do it fast enough for November.

But I think we need to make that effort. We talk about social unrest or social cohesion. I think if this election is not conducted, then I think that will be an additional pressure for part of the population with a sense that they have been disenfranchised. Yeah, it's just the concern about a hacking of a digital election is so excruciating at the moment. And the crisis of legitimacy that would follow if there was any doubt as to whether or not the result was really the real result. It's hard to see how we get away from paper on some level. Well, I don't think that it could be executed flawlessly and still undermined in the echo chamber.

Which is the real it's it's part and and still undermined in the echo chamber, which is the real, it's part and parcel of the core of the problem. But I would say it's sort of the DNA of growing up in the world that we did fighting these complex fights. You're always sort of manically nervous about the second ridge line out. And it makes me nervous that we're not talking at the national level about what this will look like in the fall. There needs to be a plan in place that we're considering and debating right now. Assume the worst in the fall and don't try to solve it in October, right? We need to get ahead of this right now and start warning the American people and prepping for it.

Well, I want to thank you both for the work you have been doing for many years and the work you'll continue to do. It's been great to get your expertise here on the podcast. Is there any place you would point people if they want to follow your work and understand what you're doing with businesses and give us the relevant websites and social media handles? Sure. All of our stuff is hung on our corporate website, mccrystalgroup.com, or Team of Teams is the first book we wrote together a few years back. That's a great primer on sort of theory of the case that what we experienced overseas, and then a quick search away, they can find Stan and myself on social media platforms.

Great. Stan, Chris, thank you so much for your time. Sam, thank you for having us. Thanks, Sam.