this is jocko podcast number 306 with echo charles and me jocko willing good evening echo good evening and also joining us again tonight dave burke good evening dave good evening so uh i said this book was going to take a while i actually said that to you a year ago that when we do this book it’s going to take a while but we are going to continue our review of the book on the psychology of military incompetence which we started on podcast 303 303 304 305 here we are on 306 and there’s gonna be more so if you haven’t listened to three or three three or four three or five go back listen to those and if you have less than those then what you heard on those was basically the setup it was the setup it was the background information that we have been that we need to get into the actual theories of how psychology plays a role in military incompetence and with that let’s let’s get back to the book so this this this part of the book is called part two and this is where we’re no longer covering historical incidents or battles although the reason i had to read them all was because he does refer back to him quite a bit and i will say as i went through the as i was kind of navigating how to do this i’m not going back as much as he is so when he goes back i might not cover every single one he goes back a little bit more but so this part of the book is what’s what he’s actually trying to figure out how does how does psychology play a role in incompetence so here we go chapter 13 is there a case to answer he says that now that we have completed a survey of survey covering 100 years of military mishaps what conclusions can be drawn regarding the incidence of military incompetence there are a number of possible answers firstly it could be argued that so-called incompetence and high levels of command is really a figment of the imagination of vindictive inaccurate or untruthful historians so that’s one conclusion a second conclusion might be what seems to have been military incompetence was really due to other non-military factors such as governmental stinginess vagaries of the weather and sheer bad luck a third conclusion might be that since every military action is an uncontrolled experiment in the sense that it can never be known what would have been the outcome had been had decisions been different there remains an almost unimaginable possibility that things might have been worse that what was done did represent the least disastrous of possible courses open so there are some different reasons why you could say well you know it’s not really military incompetence it’s just that historians are jerks it’s just that there’s factors that no one can control and that actually these decisions that were made were good but you know it’s just a bad situation so these are the best things that could happen his response to that is no one would deny there’s more to grain of truth and all these propositions cool facts do get distorted and the telling disasters are indeed more newsworthy than successes writers undoubtedly do enjoy painting the worst possible picture of their particular bet noirs many generals have had to contend with ineptitude uninformed interference and the stinginess of their political masters and of course things could have been worse there are counter arguments however because they are surrogate father figures people are only too ready and anxious to love their admirals and generals particularly in a time of war we see that a lot right like if someone was in the military then they must be awesome and in recent years that’s gotten i would say even more prolific if someone’s a vet then anything they say has some merit and value and then you figure if they’re a vet whatever they say has merit and value if they were an admiral or they were a general then they must just be awesome they just must be speaking the truth which we know not to be true i’m gonna fast forward a little bit under the circumstances this book takes the view that certain sorts of incompetence have been an enduring feature of the military scene and that amongst the millions of officers and men who have fought heroically and efficiently often under the most trying conditions there have marched a small but influential number whose ability has fallen far short of that required by the positions which they held so again he likes to point this out from time to time and this is one of those times that this isn’t about every military officer and i’m not making this about every military officer i worked for awesome military officers dave yeah at every level there are great military officers every level every service there’s great military officers but it is interesting he says a small but influential number so these are people that are totally inept at being military leaders and yet they end up in really powerful positions he says two questions that then occur is there any common pattern to this incompetence and if there is whence does it arise as a first step towards answering these questions let us try and summarize the data contained in the foregoing chapters in brief then military incompetence involves [Music] one a serious wastage of human resources and failures to observe one of the first principles of war economy of force [Music] this failure derives in part from an inability to make war swiftly it also derives from certain attitudes of mind which we shall consider presently so that’s the number one thing that’s showing that someone’s an inept leader is when they have massive wastage of human life number two a fundamental conservatism and clinging to outworn tradition an inability to profit from past experience owing in part to a refusal to admit past mistakes g do we even have to go any deeper on that one or is everyone just immediately understanding what’s going on with that if you can’t admit your past mistakes if you can’t take ownership of your mistakes you don’t make any improvement it also involves a failure to use or tendency to misuse available technology this one’s a massive profit from past experience failure to profit from past experience you don’t learn anything number three a tendency to reject or ignore information which is unpalatable or which conflicts with preconceptions number four a tendency to underestimate the enemy and overestimate the capabilities of one’s own side indecisiveness number five indecisiveness and a tendency to abdicate from the role of decision maker number six an obstinate persistence in a given task despite strong contrary evidence obstinate persistence in a given task that’s when you are this is uh i don’t know if you guys have anything like this dave but when you’re parachuting what one of the ways that people die when parachuting is they have a problem with their main parachute and they just keep trying to fix that problem and they get target fixation and they just they just and they never go to the reserve they never go to the reserve yeah can that happen in the cockpit yeah absolutely and maybe a slightly different different version of that is you can have a system that is a you know it’s a critical system that you need but it wouldn’t be the difference between returning home safely and not but you’ll you’ll spend so much time trying to resolve the problem that system is causing that it can lead you to focusing on that so much that you stop paying attention to other things and it’ll lead you to a mishap when even though it could be a pro a real problem it should never lead you down the path of of crashing or losing the airplane and what you really need to do is ignores probably the wrong word but if you can’t solve this move move on to something else and get the airplane back safely and they’ll spit people will devote 100 of their attention to that all the way to the point that they crashed the airplane as a result of it when it would not have caused a crash it’s kind of crazy and that human element of the fixation i think is the word you use the fixation on that you know i was just talking about this at the muster we are genetically programmed to to fixate yes because if you’re a caveman and you can’t concentrate on the tiger that’s you know prowling up on you and you’re distracted by other things then you’re gonna die right so we’re programmed to focus on what’s right in front of us that’s why people so often lose strategic vision and they can’t detach and they don’t see what else is happening that’s that’s why you get flanked that’s why you keep trying to fix your parachute until you hit the dirt or while you concentrate on some instrument panel until you run out of fuel or you run into a mountain exactly what’s the term when someone hits a mountain with no like no brakes or whatever yeah we call it sea fit controlled flight into terrain which means you’re fully in control of the aircraft as you do it as you hit that mountain because you are so fixated on something else you know it’s not like hey i’m tumbling out of the sky i’m trying to save this airplane i hit the ground it’s like hey i’m flying perfectly normal flying i might be i’m i’m fixated on or focusing on something that’s a problem but i’m going to fully control level flight into the ground or into the mountain that is totally avoidable had it not been for that fixation it’s as far as mishaps go it’s common it’s not uncommon well the the first time i i remember hearing that was when kobe bryant’s helicopter crashed and i think that was because they couldn’t see right they they couldn’t see but there was nothing wrong with the helicopter all they were just flying and he obviously i think they were in a fog and so got disoriented and just flew just full speed no factor into the into the mountain yeah and like the worst versions of that is um they’re all terrible is i’m i’m in a dive like i’m going to do a 45 degree dive i’m diving down towards the target which is what you’re supposed to do you’re going to get into it outside and you’re going to dive down towards the target to help uh refine where you’re going to drop the bomb and i’m going to focus on the display that makes sure that my targeting my reticle the the aiming point is exactly where i wanted a little adjustment to keep i’ll keep adjusting that targeting point to be exact where i want it and i’ll go through my minimum altitudes and i will fly straight into the ground all the while just focusing on that targeting point and i’ll never try to pull up i’ll never try to recover i’ll ignore warnings that say your altitude’s getting low and pilots will fly directly into the ground working on something else and a perfectly safe effective flying area with no problems at all that is literally the exact same thing that happens a guy skydiving well it’s a little bit different because with the guys skydiving they’re trying to fix a problem usually i’m so i suppose there are some cases you know this is why again referring back to the monster i was talking about the the leadership loop and yeah the the main bullet at the bottom both for the ooda loop and the leadership loop is you can’t get stuck you can’t get stuck focused on one thing and when you do get focused on one thing there’s just there’s just there’s the rest of the world doesn’t stop right whenever you’re focused in one thing in life the rest of the world doesn’t stop the rest of the world’s going to keep going if you don’t look around it’s going to be a problem and that’s what this number is number six an obstinate persistence in a given task despite strong contrary evidence that was number six number seven a failure to exploit a situation gained and a tendency to quote pull punches rather than push home an attack number eight a failure to make adequate reconnaissance number nine a predilection for frontal assaults often against the enemy’s strongest point and again even once again at the muster i’m trying to explain to people because you know there’s people that wanna that they just wanna hear you say look someone’s called some problem just gotta go direct that’s what everybody wants to hear and it makes so much intuitive sense to think you know what i don’t like dave’s plan i just need to go tell him dave i don’t like your plan and it’s just so obvious that when i say dave i don’t like your plan immediately dave is defensive you by the way once you get defensive you’re not listening to anything else i say and now we’re not making any progress so even though it seems like it’s the most efficient thing to do it’s not the most efficient thing to do is say hey dave i’m looking at your plan can you expand on a couple of these points because i don’t think i understand them and now his defenses are down we’re having a real conversation my mind is actually open it’s not just a little fugazi it’s real and we’re having a real conversation we can make progress but the predilection for the frontal assault both on the battlefield and in a conversation with another human being is bad and it leads to failure number 10 a belief in brute force rather than the clever ruse so there you go the jujitsu people just cheered a failure to make use of surprise or deception jiu-jitsu people just cured again this is the kind of thing when i say that jiu-jitsu affected my brain these are the kind of things those three right there frontal assault’s bad that’s jiu-jitsu uh believe in clever ruse instead of brute force that’s jiu-jitsu make use of surprise and deception that’s jiu-jitsu i had a buddy i started he trained you to do i tried jiu jitsu but he was very he was sort of um not training a lot and this was early 90s he trained you know some you know and i was like in my first month of training jiu jitsu all the time with fabio santos and one day this is my buddy jim i said i i told him i came back after like a month of training and i said hey man here’s the deal i just i just learned this you can’t do one move a one move by itself doesn’t work because it’s too easy to defend you gotta set people up that’s what this whole thing is it’s like a trick it’s a big trick and about three days later he and i were rolling and he freaking was sinking in a choke sinking in a choke sinking in a choke and i was like dude this guy is not gonna be able to choke me i know exactly boom the arm locked me and i was like oh and he he 100 he got it he was like dude that’s what you just told me and i was like oh my god so and he you know i he got me because of that thing right there he listened to me and this guy ended up we ended up working together a lot and actually just an awesome guy but anyways he used that thing set it up that little that little surprise number one it was a surprise number two it was a ruse and number three it wasn’t brute force it was technique yeah number 12 an undue readiness to find scapegoats for military setbacks oh this is to use jason gardner’s uh term blame thrower these are the people that get out the blame thrower ugh and the opposite of extreme ownership right i’m just gonna find who i’m gonna blame a suppression number 13 a suppression or distortion of news from the front usually rationalized as necessary for morale or security oh you know what that is a really nice way of saying a suppression or destruction of news from the front usually rationalized as necessary for morale or security what we’re saying here is lying to the troops lying to the troops and then number 14 this one’s a little strange a belief in mystical forces fate bad luck etc so there’s your there’s your list of 14 things that military incompetence involves that’s from all those historical features those are sort of the common themes here fast forward a little bit on logical if not humanitarian grounds the maintenance of an efficient force should be the first consideration of a military commander other qualities of generalship will avail him nothing if he has no one left to do the fighting so he’s focusing on that first one saying you should keep people alive and this is something that um you know sometimes people will ask us well you got the mission and you got the men which one’s more important and it’s very easy for me to answer that question the people come first because if you don’t have people you can’t do any more missions so yes the mission is absolute a top priority but it’s not the top priority you got to take care of your people continuing on here excessive loss of life and high casualty figures would therefore seem like a likely indicator of military incompetence known cases of what seem to be purely administrative incompetence as for example in what john laffin has described as the imbecile waltrin expedition of 1809 though the purpose of this expedition was to attack antwerp the troops were in fact kept in waiting for eight weeks on unhealthy watcherin island in zealand in the event and owing to the procrastination of the military commander lord chatham and the naval commander sir richard strakin 7 000 men died 14 000 had their health permanently ruined and thousands more became ill mostly from malaria only 217 were killed in action so i just in case you didn’t catch that 7 000 died from disease and um just a disaster from an administrative perspective but only 217 were killed in action while the while men were while dying men were given no attention and little to eat as laughing remarks sick men were expendable fast forward a little bit the second class of manpower wastage is that involving casualties from enemy action as a result of the incompetent planning of senior military commanders the men who perished in the attack on fort ruya in the indian mutiny the thousands of casualties from the germans use of gas in 1915 the 13 000 who went into captivity following the siege of cut and 138 000 casualties of singapore the 8 500 americans who died in the our dens offense of 1944 and the 17 000 british american and polish who were killed wounded or reported missing at rm rnm fall into this category so he’s got these i should have broken this out earlier he’s going through the the three different types or the different types of how you waste people’s lives the first one is just administrative the second one is bad planning and then the third one is the third and most costly type of manpower wastage is that resulting from a deliberate policy of attrition adopted by commanders who regarded soldiers as wholly expendable generals for whom the conservation of human life ranked lower than in importance than various other criteria which were governing their actions this is when your plan is oh a lot of people are going to die fast forward a little bit says in all this we are anticipating a theory of military incompetence rather different from that held by proponents of the so-called bloody fool theory perhaps we are being too complicated perhaps intellectual deficit could explain the data let us then before considering the other factors contributing to military incompetence first examine this older and more favored hypothesis and so what he’s saying here is there’s a lot of people that just say oh they people make mistakes and they make mistakes because they’re dumb they’re just dumb dumb military leaders and that’s why they make these mistakes they’re just stupid and well he’s gonna talk about the fact that yeah you can account for some of that but a lot of times you have very intelligent leaders making really stupid decisions and obviously his hypothesis is that’s because of their psychological nature so here we go in chapter 14 the intellectual ability of senior military commanders um te lawrence lawrence of arabia said i feel a fundamental crippling in curious and curiousness about our officers too much body and too little head so obviously he’s a military guy and he was very very smart but he’s just saying look i see a lot of people that aren’t ain’t too bright too much body too little head what grounds are there then for the most popular explanation of military incompetent stupidity there’s there’s a suggestion that the arms force armed forces do not attract the best brains a call up survey in the survey in the united states put the status of army officers below that of professors physicians clergymen and school teachers as morris janowitz remarks a liberal ideology holds that since war is essentially destructive the best minds are attracted to more positive endeavors um it’s like one of those statements you go well you know if you’re making that statement you would if you’re a really smart person are you thinking hey what do i want to do do i want to go out and build the the next great energy platform oh do i want to go out and kill a bunch of people you’d think oh well maybe the people that are a little bit smarter are going to lean towards building the next great energy platform mm-hmm that’s the that’s the statement anyways yeah what was the thing with the like the atomic bomb where like the technology was like made for something or the or the idea was like the technology was made for something but then you got another group of people who are like oh that’s cool technology let’s use it for this automatically you know like for bad stuff that’s what we always think right a lot of the time where it’s like oh that’s good technology yeah who’s going to weapon like someone’s going to weaponize it you know it’s like that’s the fear like you put you and me in a room [Music] and they’re like hey we’ve we’ve created this thing that can create a massive amount of energy and you’re you’re thinking cool we can power the world and i’m thinking cool we can blow up our enemies yeah exactly right yeah that could be somebody’s got to think that way yeah um it says here in training for general trip it seems that intellectual ability has not always counted for very much even hague the educated soldier became commander-in-chief of the british army in the first world war despite a poor academic record this dowerlin scott this dour lowland scott described by duff cooper as the dunce of the family and by lord george as utterly stupid so you are getting some dumb people here um fast forward a little certainly a brilliant performance in military schools is no guarantee of subsequent ability general kali whose secession of defeats culminated in 1881 in his own demise at mujaba hill had the distinction of passing out of staff college with the highest marks on record the irrelevance of early scholarship to subsequent generalship also finds support in napoleon and wellington both of whom achieved very low grades at school and in more recent times the early academic brilliance of lieutenant general percival evidently availed him little at singapore so he’s given all these other examples right you got percival who led that total disaster in singapore who was uh academically brilliant napoleon and wellington who were great generals who were junk at school and another guy general cauley who is a disaster on the battlefield and yet had the highest marks on record so the statement is like hey you could be really smart and do well you could be really smart and do horrible you could be moderately smart and do well you could be moderately smart and do horrible so i think the statement here is like well it’s not intellect is only part of it right intellect is only part of it what about um fighter pilots i mean look so in the seal teams for a while they were recruiting these really really smart ivy league you know harvard yale there’s all this whole crew of officers that were coming in they were clearly highly intellectual smart people and they stopped recruiting those people so heavily and the reason they stopped recruiting those people so heavily was two reasons one was they would do their one platoon or two platoons and get out and go to business school or whatever and two was they weren’t that good yeah there was no there was no correlation to someone that was really smart to someone that was a really good leader on the battlefield yeah i i think it’s the same i really do i i don’t think i don’t think the personality profile you know or even just the motivational profile of of a lot of people in the military is all that different certainly when i think about seals and pilots and as often as you and i kind of contrast those two types of people there’s a ton of similarity there and you know the different services in aviation have different sets of of requirements and you know i think the marine corps has the the lowest i guess standard of academic excellence uh in terms like what you studied and how well you did i mean the old joke in the marine corps was you know if you got a 2 0 and underwater basket weaving you could be a pilot you know is the joke and you know what they were saying really was hey you know we don’t really care what you studied now you gotta have a college degree and i think that does demonstrate some willingness and ability and i’m not sure which is more important to get through a long-term project that hey i’m going to dedicate four years to getting this degree that demonstrates hey you’ve got some planning you’ve got some interest you’ve got some intellect something that’s going to reveal that you’re you are have something that’s gonna be hard to do you’re gonna be willing to do that you’re getting a 4 0 you know in uh you know aerodynamics versus a 2 0 in poli-sci we don’t really care yeah that was kind of the marine corps general approach a little bit different for the other services but i was kind of laughing and kind of thinking about this thing from a larger standpoint of these great military leaders that maybe didn’t have the best records academically i mean the two thoughts that i had is the academics in the military aren’t that hard they’re not that hard you know what i mean like you don’t need to be a genius to get perfect scores on your tests um and i think the ones that don’t do that well academically that are that still really do well there’s probably a piece in there they’re thinking like this is dumb this is a waste of my time what’s the what’s the minimum grade requirement yeah cool i’m gonna get that and there that actually reveals some level of intelligence i’m not gonna waste my time in all this stuff that i don’t really want to be doing but i’m not gonna fail either so for for you to sort of explain there’s some really good leaders that didn’t do so hot and then there’s some guys that just were absolutely brilliant on paper that were terrible that is not a stretch for me at all to picture that in in aviation or anywhere in the middle term like i think i know who those guys are yeah and really in anything anything there’s no there i’m trying to think of a job where the full the where where the the the primary thing is only intelligence only intelligence i’m sure there’s some laboratory somewhere or some computer programming thing where basically the smartest person is the person that we want in that job but as soon as that person is in charge of people anyone else or as soon as there’s some level of creativity or problem solving because there’s you just you what you want is a person that the composite has a bunch of different skills i mean you would think for being a pilot uh there’s got to be you know that that like the spatial like when i took the officer candidate test and you’ve got to do the spatial recognition where how far away is this or is this aircraft or is this bird coming to you or going away from you got to tell from looking at it hey obviously someone could be really really smart and suck at that test right not to mention eyesight not to mention reaction time like all those different things and then it’s the same thing with leadership you can have someone that’s super articulate there’s there’s really articulate people that aren’t really that smart i mean i served with some people like that they’re really articulate they can put a word word together what do people call them when eel you know that’s a skill set that like a salesperson there’s really good sales people they’re not the smartest people in the world but they’re incredible at they’re incredible conversationalists yeah right but you wouldn’t want to put them into a situation where they’ve got to stand up and talk in front of people if they don’t have that skill so just because someone is smart that’s only like one quarter of the of the of the math we got to do here totally and when you’re thinking about it from a leadership standpoint and the recognition that that leadership requires a whole bunch of different things not just being smart and taking a test or being good at communicating it’s the recognition that it requires so many different things none of these these profiles that he just revealed are a big shock to me i’m like yep yep yep those all make sense seals pilots everyone between and yeah in aviation is there a couple things that might incline you down that path like if you can naturally get a sense if they show you a diagram of an airplane descending turning and slow and then you have to match it up that some people’s brains may be oh i can’t i can’t see that as well as somebody else yeah i could see that and that’s gonna account for a small part of it that might be good to know but that by itself is it’s gonna it’s gonna have almost no influence in the long-term success of this person in his career in the military that i could identify relatively early on of what the spatial orientation of an airplane was in relation to the ground do you want that yeah that’s a good idea i don’t want someone who gets confused about you you don’t want someone that’s totally lost right i mean even on that test all you have to do is pass it right oh that’s all you have to do and then you know if you and i were in the same thing and i was a little bit worse i would study it more or i figured out more or i just after whatever two months of looking at that stuff we’re the same yes because i figured out how to figure it out yeah that’s right check um fast forward a little bit fortunately there are some who have seen the threat to originality and intelligent thinking the duke of edinburgh felt it necessary to say finally as you grow older try not to be afraid of new ideas new or original ideas can be bad as well as good but whereas an intelligent man with an open mind can demolish a bad idea by reasoned argument those who allow their brains to atrophy report resort to meaningless catchphrases to derision and finally to anger in the face of anything new this is um you know this is prince philip duke of edinburgh recently died i don’t know if you saw his funeral but if you have any um any warm place in your heart for the brits which i certainly do they they his his hearse was a land rover a military land rover that he had had some hand in designing it was some sort of special transport and that’s what they that’s what they uh carried his body in but here he is this is a this is just an incredible thing to think about and it’s an incredible thing to be on watch for you know i said at the muster i said aim this book at yourself and i said aim these things to yourself when you hear stuff like this when i hear stuff like this i aim it at myself don’t be afraid of new ideas and this is what an intelligent man with an open mind can demolish a bad idea by reasoned argument and and what i like about that is i always say to myself dave if you come to me with a plan or you come to me with an idea and i can’t convince you that your plan isn’t good or that there’s a hole in it there’s a problem then there’s there’s something going on here maybe it’s my ego maybe it’s my emotions maybe i just don’t like you but if i can’t explain to you why your plan isn’t good and the only thing i can finally say is you know what we’re doing it my way the only way i can overcome you is by you know um well a catchphrase which would be like we’ve we always done it this way or we need to stick with the plan right those are just catch phrases and that’s what i’m gonna say or i just say we know dave’s always got his own freaking dave’s always on his own freaking program like i can i can ridicule you or i can just get mad that’s what we see yeah that third level too i forgot what the middle one was when he talked about the meaningless catchphrase and then the third one like resorting to anger yeah you know it’s basically just degrees of your ego of just being out of control because the first one’s like i’m just going to kind of be dismissive of you by a catchphrase of jacob talks to me about an idea and i say something like uh you know you know here comes the new guy with a bread idea you know like just trying to kind of push you off and then if you persist and we kind of get to the second level and i’ve got some other response that isn’t working at the end all i’ve got left is i get mad at you and if i outrank you like the military this whole military experiment then i automatically win i automatically win because i’ll just shut you up because i’m now mad and i’m just going to resort to what i got is hey uh why don’t you just go back to your desk and let me let me do some let me let me lead for a little while here since i’m in charge yeah and then you just kind of walk away and that’s the end of it what you want to do is you want to be the jeff glover of ideas so jeff glover will go out on the mat with you and you he will let you put him in any position because he doesn’t care he knows jiu-jitsu and he can get out of it and if he doesn’t get out of it he’s so if you tap him out he’s like oh yeah that was a good way to finish because because you know you started with the rear naked choke and you were able to finish it jocko good job you know like he doesn’t care he’s his ego is not involved at all and he doesn’t care and most of the time by the way he gets out because he knows the truth so that’s why i try and be when someone confronts me with an idea i’m stoked oh you you seem to got me off balance awesome either i can recover myself because i have good information or a better perspective and we can discuss it logically and i can say oh yeah and i can point it out to you or you caught me off balance because i’m wrong and i had a hole in my game and it didn’t make any sense so i’m actually happy about that open your mind uh fast forward a little this inbreeding of the uneducated however was resisted by by the later massey committee who depressed by what they found considered that one the general education of cadets should be continued too few young officers showed any capacity for command this was an assessment of what they were doing three there was too much drill too much rigid discipline and too much cramming for marks number four the instructors were mediocre and selected for prowess at games and smartness rather than for their knowledge of the subject they had to teach or their qualifications as teachers much the same and again this was an assessment sorry i skipped it but this was an assessment that got done of how they were training the military the army officers and and it says much the same picture has been painted of britannia forerunner of the royal naval college at dartmouth dartmouth again the emphasis was on blind obedience sport and ceremonial with scant regard to intellectual pursuits and little pride in knowing one’s job [Laughter] you know what’s funny as soon as you say something like there’s too much drill as soon as you say you know if you’re maybe you’re thinking hey man we’re spending a lot of time just doing this like stupid drill stuff there’s someone that’s like oh you don’t understand the disc but the people and that’s what this whole actually that’s what this whole book is about this whole book is about the people that when you threaten the the the norm and you threaten the hierarchy you threaten the things that provide them with their security which is rigid discipline when you threaten those things they get mad and they attack yeah they get mad you started this whole part and you used a word and i think you pulled it from the book twice and then i think you said it once and i wrote it down was all this is a feature of the system like all this is a feature and he i think he was using it initially in this part of and if i’m just trying to paraphrase what you said was hey listen you know the bell curve has kind of exists everywhere but there is something a little unique about those that sort of make it to this level of senior leadership we’re talking about generals and admirals or you know lords or whatever but there’s something a little different about the ones that make it up to that level and how it isn’t quite just the same bell curve of everybody else where you’ve got some smart people some you know middle of the road folks maybe some other folks and what i’ve been trying to think in my mind about what that is is kind of what you described is what’s unique about those people those people have figured out how to navigate the system this thing that we’re all living in because when you join the military i don’t know how smart you are or dumb or i don’t care who or what you are what rank what service or where you came from at the beginning you you’re just trying to figure out how the system works and if you figure out go oh this class that i mean that jack was in charge of at the end i get my choice of assignment strictly based on my gpa oh okay guess guess what a lot of folks are going to do that figure that out i’m going to get i’m just going to worry about the great oh jocko’s got this thing for drill it’s this thing cool and so when you say hey we’re going to go drill yeah let let’s go do some more drill or hey dave you got some free time what do you want to do i i think hey boss you know what we should do we should go drill and all of a sudden i kind of start maneuvering my way through the system to appeal to what i know is what you want and i kind of wrote down some of the words of of things that are are appealing brute force is appealing it’s appealing it sounds cool you know what doesn’t sound cool deception like i’m gonna i’m gonna take an indirect approach well that that doesn’t sound cool um caring about people doesn’t sound cool being nice doesn’t sound cool being an intellectual for the military no that you know blowing things up sounds cool being an intellectual doesn’t and if i can figure out early on what is going to appeal to you whoever my bosses or that school is or or the intent is or the system and that’s our system this is about the bell curve is different at the top because they figured out how to navigate the system what the system wants and what the system wants is whoever’s in charge that thing that appeals to them which is things like whatever what would you rather have someone who who um a pragmatic thinker who’s willing to to um give up on its plan and go in a different direction or someone who never gives up you know like how many times we talk are we to talk about the direct approach and not forget the idea that that that sounds appealing it sounds right i’m just gonna come at him and tell him the truth i suppose i i’m gonna play the long game i’m gonna think strategically i’m gonna keep my ego in check i’m gonna consider that i might be wrong and i’m gonna uh move slowly in this direction until we come to the logical conclusion or i’m just gonna attack this target and run it over and the ones that figure out the system and have it navigate that it makes sense that at the top there actually is a different bell curve of people than those of us at the beginning who actually some of us don’t figure out how to navigate that system yeah yeah and well i don’t know if i necessarily fully agree with you um because i think that the system the system but you’re going to agree with me i say this anyways but look at that that system there’s people that that learn how to figure out the system because they lack the ability to actually transit through the system on their own merit right so that’s one group of people there’s another group of people that travel transit through the system and promote through the system because they’re good and as we mentioned at the beginning of this you and i both work for incredible officers at all levels incredible senior enlisted at all levels and some of those the people that were awesome they made it through the system the system worked they didn’t have to they didn’t have to play a game they’d have to manipulate they they did what they knew they should do and they went up through the system and they were great but there’s another group of people that’s a group of people you’re talking about that they don’t have the capability but they figure out you know what admiral mcguire we were talking one day and he said he said you know we i think he he had gone over to see some the seals secure or the bud students secure from hell week and he came back i didn’t go with him for whatever reason he came back he says you know if hell week one proves one thing like you’re you’re you’re pretty tough you know because he sees these guys after six days of freaking you know being awake and doing physical stuff he goes yeah proves one thing you’re pretty tough and i actually said back to him i said you know there’s a group of people that also go go through hell week and make it through whole week and what it proves is that they figured out how to how to get through because there’s things you can do in hell week and oh it’s it’s actually a little different now when i went through hell week you you just if you didn’t carry the head if you didn’t put your head under the freaking boat i know this doesn’t sound like that big of a deal but you carry these freaking boats on your head for a week straight and guys permanently lose some guys not all guys some guys permanently lose their hair on the top of their head because it gets so that freaking boat is just grinding on it and and it’s it hurts hurts your neck hurts your head you have freaking scabs on the top of your head whatever but there’s some guys that figure out how to now you can’t just take your head off the boat but you also you know maybe you don’t quite put as much into it there’s guys that figure out you you know when you’re carrying the boat at a low ready which is just carrying at your side which again doesn’t seem like a big deal until they fill it with sand and water and also it’s you know half your back and so so you can kind of slack off a little bit and so there’s guys that figure out where to come in on a run where they’re going to get the least amount of attention they figure out where to be in the chow hall line where no one’s going to pay any attention to them they figure out how to get through and and i would say hell week is probably a pretty small amount of those people but you certainly would see a couple guys and you’d go man how does he look fresh right now well-rested some guys you look oh that guy’s fresh because he’s a badass some guys you’d be thinking how’s that dude look fresh right now what just happened so yeah in any system there’s gonna be a way to maneuver and manipulate through the system where if you don’t have the chops to actually get it done you can still get through it and yeah obviously i do agree with that and i think that’s why there is a little bit more of a contrast at the top than there might be elsewhere when you’re looking at the types the different types of people and the contrast to his point usually doesn’t reveal itself until you get to this and he illustrates all these catastrophic things and you’re looking back you’re thinking how could someone be in that position do the things that they’re doing and that’s really i think what you’re describing is there’s two different types of people that can get to that place now the ones that are doing it like you said on their merits they still have to be doing a good job you can’t not know how to maneuver in the system and be terrible at what you’re doing but you can find your way to kind of maneuver up that ladder maneuver inside of that system and and be in that category of people that sometimes will all go oh well he’s he’s a general he must be awesome well this is how this person got there but you you won’t see that it won’t be revealed as to what this person is until it’s in he’s in one of those situations and i think that contrast that he’s alluding to is like it’s a little bit different there is more stark because at the at the very beginning none of us have figured either of those things out yet we’re still figuring out hey what do we need to do and how does the system work and you should blend the two i want to i want to work inside the system i don’t want to buck against the system and be so resistant to the system that the system gets rid of me yeah well i was about to say what about those leaders that are incredible leaders they’re dynamic they have these great personalities they have good tactical sense but they can’t play the game at all i can’t play the game at all right and now they didn’t never get promoted and they have no influence yep that’s right i mean tommy hackworth didn’t play hackword played the freaking game for a long time he played the game like massively massively and he loved it he wasn’t even playing the game he was in the game he was the he was the freaking player and he’s an example of a guy that he he played the system he got those jobs he did those things but he also was highly skilled as a leader yes and there’s plenty of people that would have done and there’s plenty of people that did the exact same thing as hackworth minus the leadership capability yeah there was a hard job what would you call it hard fill billet right yeah in the seal teams we had the same thing you got a hard fill billet somewhere after you do your hard fill billet they literally will give you any job you want well cool hey i’m not going to promote it on that but jump on that hard fill billet get done with that they send you overseas unaccompanied for two years boom and you come back now there’s some guys that do that because they’re freaking good team players and they’re you know what i don’t someone else have to do this you know what my my kids just left for college i’m gonna be i don’t have anything to worry about for two years boom i’m gonna go take this hard-filled billet take one for the team there’s some people that do it for that reason totally there’s some people do it because they’re going i can get promoted next after this so get my check in the box and that piece when you talk about the leadership all i’m thinking is he actually cares about the people yeah he actually cares about the people around him and so that maneuver to gain the influence is is is by design to be able to help people yeah because he knows there’s peace there’s features in the system he’s got to protect them from yes it’s it’s all about the intent yes and although you can smell intent the system has a much harder time smelling intense the system has a much harder time smelling intent look they look at dave burke and they look at jocko and they both win overseas took a hard fill billet jocko was doing it because he wanted to get promoted dave was doing it because he had uh you know his kids had just left for for a college and so he felt like it was a good time and he could take the strain off of someone else that might have kids still at home yeah what do they see on the paper they don’t see any of that i can’t see it they can’t see that intent they can’t see it if they knew us they could smell it yeah but they don’t get close enough on the promotion board some people around you know people around you know for sure uh fast forward a little bit general robert e lee admitted that the greatest mistake of my life was taking a military education and general stillwell said it is common knowledge that an army officer has a one-track mind that he is personally interested in stirring up wars so that he can get a promotion and be decorated and that he has an extraordinarily limited education with no appreciation to the finer things in life that’s a pretty a heavy statement again are there some guys like that absolutely that’s not the majority for sure fast forward a little bit more the saddest feature of anti-intellectualism is that it often reflects an actual suppression of the intellectual activity rather than any lack of ability this is suggested by the rapidity with which so many military men rush into print as soon as they have retired let’s talk about people writing books evidently there was something waiting to get out unfortunately as liddell hart points out a lifetime of having to curb the expression of original thought culminates so often in there being nothing left to express so this is talking about i mean this guy is writing this book in 1976 so he’s talking about guys in world war one world war ii as soon as they get out of the military they write these books a guy like b h lodell hart he writes books because he had all this stuff pen up and he also got out early because he had so much stuff pen out pen up inside of his head this guy’s saying a lot of times by the time they get out there’s no freaking creative thought left there’s no new ideas left research on the relationship between mental activity and cerebral blood blood flow adds to point that the old belief that the brain like muscle atrophies from prolonged disuse but perhaps this touches upon the real cause of military incompetence age since traditionally promotion is dependent upon seniority commanders generals and above have tended to be old and since thinking memory intelligence and special senses all deteriorate with age then maybe bad generals are just old generals again he’s making an argument well maybe these guys are just old maybe that’s our problem another contribution to the incompetence tied up with age was the unhelpful tendency to sack forcibly retire or otherwise curtail the promotion of those young officers who unwisely failed to conceal their their lights beneath bushels of conformity so real quick on the getting old part this is something that i was i and i think i talked about it on on the academy i heard that interview with kasparov the chess player and the interviewer acts actually i think it was lex friedman lex asked him maybe it was lex i think lex asked him not in a direct way but basically could you beat magnus carlson who’s right now like this phenom and kasparov said no and of the part of the part of the answer which is what i talked about on the academy was part of the reason is because um magnus has got to see everything that kasparov does and study him it’s like jiu jitsu guys now they’re like you know you got to you it took you seven years to figure out the 50 50 position i i got to learn that in 20 minutes on youtube right so i can start building off that immediately and that’s the same thing with kasparov is that is that magnus carlsen has seen all of his moves and everyone else’s moves and studied him in books so he’s already building off of taller platform but also kasparov said i think kasparov was like 55 60 something like this maybe a little bit older he’s like yeah well i’m older now yeah and that brain ain’t working as good so that which really surprised me because i didn’t understand that i thought hey you get older you get smarter and once you reach a certain point now you’re heading in the other direction so that’s what he’s bringing up he’s saying hey could that be part of it um he says such was the case of major general jfc fuller on december 13th 1933 fuller one of the most intellectually gifted men ever to serve in the british army was placed on the retired list this waste of talent resulted from the prejudice aroused by his fully borne out prophecies and the fact that he had dared to criticize those less gifted than him now let’s think about that we could be mad at the military for kicking him out but guess what he didn’t do play the game he didn’t play the game he’s also criticizing people who’s probably telling him that they’re dumb yeah yeah he didn’t play the game properly so if he would have played the game a little bit and not been a prophet as bhlelhart said instead been a leader maybe he could have slowly got some senior officer to understand it make it his id and all of a sudden his ideas are getting pushed forward by the seniority instead he gets put on the freaking retired list yeah and this this thing that you’ve you’ve mentioned in the past probably isn’t exactly a fit here but that idea of hey if you’re so smart why aren’t you winning you know like what a freaking great quote just yeah just this idea of of if if you’re as smart as you think you are why can’t you figure out how to maneuver through this this labyrinth of chaos yeah you know which by the way if you’re so smart how hard how hard could it be you haven’t figured this out yet right you haven’t figured this out yet that question which i originally asked myself when i was like an e4 in the seal teams when i wasn’t getting promoted and other guys were was hey wait a second if you’re so smart freaking their rambo why aren’t you getting pro why aren’t you winning what’s wrong with you yeah you idiot but that’s one of my favorite questions to ask people hey because they’ll be telling me this and this and this and this and this complaint this other complaint and how this is messed up and the other thing’s messed up and it’s like if you’re so smart if you’re so freaking smart why haven’t you just maneuvered through the system yeah what’s wrong with you and by the way um fuller like they were gonna bring him back in and they offered him something and the other guys pro i mean he’s just like made up made it too hard on himself man smartest what did they say what did you say one of the most intellectually gifted men ever to serve in the british army but he wasn’t quite winning was he because he got freaking put on the retired list and look maybe there was some situation where they were asking him to do you know hey we don’t want to see another people like but even if that happens what do you do you say okay cool how can i rephrase this how can i adjust my message what people can i make allies if you’re so freaking smart then go in um fast forward yet another way in which age determines incompetence is through the voluntary resignation of intelligent young officers according to janowitz a study of us army lieutenant suggests that the brighter ones resign as soon as they have completed their obligate obligatory service while those less well-equipped remain mm-hmm that’s again is that all across the board absolutely not and there’s freaking incredible officers that are smarter than any civilian out there that stay in the military and they do 20 30 40 years for sure and there’s also some guys that are going you know i got my paycheck coming in every two weeks kind of regardless of what i do mama stick it out and there’s a little joke in the military too that that at each level you you move up that’s that there’s some some truth to it which is hey you got promoted yeah all the good guys got out yeah that’s why i got promoted you know hey hey dave you made major yeah all the best captains left so the wrinkler had no choice so the joke about that is you know there’s some truth absolutely some truth of well i’m glad these two guys bailed because i would have been competing with them and i don’t know if i would have made the cut if they stuck around yeah but they’re left with me so i’m gonna i’m gonna get that promotion yep there’s absolutely some level of truth to that someone that looks around the military you know one of the one of the things that made me uh one of the one of the things that had a little bit of a influence on my decision to retire was it’s a communist environment right it’s a communist environment you you’re getting the same promotion rate i mean what did you get advanced early a couple of times no no early promotions in the marine corps everything’s on time so so that that that’s that’s true yeah is right so it doesn’t matter what you do so you were you were an f-18 pilot you were top gunners are you all these things and how how much faster do you advance than someone that was uh you know running whatever freaking supply depot in the middle of nowhere how much earlier did you get advanced zero days zero days zero days so i got advanced early one time which is which was like i only know of one other person i only know of one person that got promoted early twice there’s probably more but one of the i know one other person that got advanced early he got advanced early twice and that’s delta charlie by the way yeah delta charlie talk about playing the game dc he was maneuvered um and awesome but so so i’m looking around and look was i the best guy absolutely not but i looked around some guys i said wait a second of all the stuff i’ve done i’ve been going on back-to-back deployments doing whatever i can do doing a good job in combat doing a good job just doing just doing a good job right look i wasn’t the best but i wasn’t doing bad but then i’d look at some other knucklehead that was actually doing bad who had a bad reputation you know some knucklehead that you know wasn’t even in the game and guess what he’s getting promoted oh i got promoted one year ahead of that way and by the way a bunch of other great guys that i knew are getting promoted the same time as him i was like man that is freaking not right it wasn’t as much of a meritocracy as it should have been and that bummed me out it bummed me out because i was looking at probably another seven years before i would have been in charge of something again which is a long time to be waiting to get in charge what are you chuckling that over there charles no every time you said uh that bummed me out for some reason that’s always been funny to me yeah yeah it did though they bummed me out bumped out sorry about the thing does things not bum you out they do but that expression is funny especially when you say it check uh it’s a little bit of a communist system it’s a little bit of a socialist system where if you stay in and you check the boxes whether you check those boxes with freaking big giant checks or you check them with a little nick mark it doesn’t matter you checked it you’re good you’re good uh notwithstanding these considerations ages far from being a complete explanation of military incompetence four there have been plenty of old generals and some remarkably inept young ones or sorry there’s been plenty of able old generals and some remarkably inept young ones so he’s saying look even though old people might have a harder time there’s been freaking incredible generals that were super old and there’s been young generals that were idiots so that argument doesn’t really hold as vax noted the generals of 80 generals who were sick of body and even in mind have won important victories so there you go age you can’t put all this stuff on age but let us look at another aspect of what appears to be in intellectual incompetence the urge to pontificate in accordance with the principle that nature abhors a vacuum ignorance tends to evoke pontification in those that wish to conceal their lack of knowledge or for whom ignorance of the facts means that they feel free to express strongly held beliefs of a contrary nature this is an interesting one and it really if you uh you ever seen a movie the sixth sense i know you have echo you seen it dave i have and you know when you get to the end you look back and you see all the things so obvious this one right here when i read this i was like oh man this is good you look back at your career and you think of all these people that like to pontificate and you think i knew that guy was an idiot well he wouldn’t shut up right wouldn’t shut up wait what is pontificate it’s talking talking carrying on and talking especially about things that you don’t really know too much about it’s also not a compliment like if somebody like hey what’s like working with the jocko i’m like he likes to pontificate a lot that’s not it that’s not me saying he’s a big thinker it’s me like he likes to hear himself talk he wastes a lot of time thinking out loud and it’s all at the end you look back like that was a complete waste of time so it’s not a good thing i’d say uh maybe you the expression hot air right oh that guy’s filled with a lot of hot air this is a nice way of saying okay that guy’s filled with a lot of oh it’s not even a nice way of saying it as david pointed out you don’t say someone hey joco did a great job pontificating at them at the monster you wouldn’t say that there’s usually some timing associated with it too that he wants to chime in like we need to go step out and he’s like hey and he wants to start talking and yeah and we’re forced to sit here and listen to him and it’s not just what he’s saying it’s also the time at which he’s saying it you’re just thinking dude okay i guess we’re gonna sit here and listen and talk yeah okay i i always thought it was like kind of thinking and talking but in a good way i thought it was like hey let’s get to the bottom list let’s explore it you know but maybe okay i get it now um so with quantification in a calling where the accuracy of communication may be a matter of life or death the predispo position to pontificate is a dangerous liability by the way we have something called the second law of combat leadership it’s simple the subtitle that is simple clear concise communication so pontification is the opposite of that oddly enough unfortunately such a predis disposition will be the strong be will be strongest in those like headmasters judges prison governors and senior military commanders who for too long have been in a position to lord over their fellow men unfortunately such a predisposition will also be strong as an authoritarian organizations where the preservation of apparent omni omniscience by those above may be deemed more important than the truth so this is that senior leader that basically no one will tell them to be quiet and you know what’s even worse than that people sit there with a big smile on their face nodding their heads because you know oh jack was talking oh yes boss that sounds great plus please tell us more it’s all a lie they’re really thinking shut up dude that’s what’s going on yeah and some of those people are going oh if i ever get to that this is how i’m going to get to that spot i’m going to do that i’m going to follow like that’s what i do that’s that’s how the system rewards me right how how i can navigate in a system is i can do the same thing it’s going to be awesome i can’t wait till i’m enjoying people have to listen to listen to me i can’t wait i i know this uh because we sit here and talk for hours at a time as our freaking job not only here but an echelon front that’s our actual job is to talk to people i mean at essentia actually our job a lot is to listen as well but um you you know people might get the impression that oh you know jacob like at the muster when i’m um guess what i’m on stage i’m talking that’s what we’re doing um come to an echelon front meeting you know see who’s talking like see how much i’m talking right it’s come to uh task in a bruiser meeting see how much i’m talking come to a seal team 7 echo platoon meeting when i was a team commander am i the one that’s talking the whole time absolutely not so although we talk a lot here this is not the norm [Music] uh but the important thing about pontification is that though an intellectual exercise its origins are emotional closely allied to pontification and no less hazardous is cognitive dissonance now it just just just to talk about dissonance just the word um it means technically what it means is an inharmonious sound that’s technically what it means it’s it’s sounds that don’t match together so like if you play piano there’s certain there’s certain keys of the piano you can hit at the same time and you uh right guitar you can hit certain strings and certainly doesn’t sound right that’s because they don’t match because they’re incongruent they’re in disagreement those noises are in disagreement so cognitive dissonance means that you have things in your head that don’t agree there’s things in your head that don’t agree and it’s what people do and how people handle things in their head that don’t agree this is the important part because with any situation that you have there’s gonna be different sides to every argument there’s gonna be different sides there’s gonna be if we’re gonna go attack a target part of your brain should be saying like okay this looks like something we can get done part of it is saying okay this looks like there’s a lot of risks as well you’ve got two different things in your head two different incongruent congruent thoughts in your head they’re not the same so so cognitive dissonance means i have two things in my head that don’t match how do you handle it that’s the question how do you handle it uh this uncomfortable mental state arises when a person possesses knowledge or beliefs which conflict with a decision he has made so that’s going even one step further i’ve made a decision and now i’m getting some different information the falling hypothetical situation should make the matter plain a heavy smoker experiences dissonance because the knowledge that he smokes is inconsistent with the knowledge that smoking causes cancer since he finds it impossible to give up cigarettes he tries to reduce dissonance by concentrating on justifications for smoking and ignoring evidence for its risks he may tell himself that the revenue from tobacco helps the government that it keeps his weight down and that it is a manly sociable habit at the same time he may well refrain from reading the latest report on the relationship between smoking and lung cancer if on the other hand he cannot avoid being confronted by tiresome statistics he may well strive to reduce dissonance by telling himself and others that the correlation between smoking and cancer could just as well be taken to signify that people who are going to get cancer anyway tend to smoke in order to ward off the disease so you’re just telling yourself lies to trying to try and even out that disagreement in your own head since it was first propounded by festinger in 1957 dissonance theory has given rise to a large number of empirical studies through the though the precise nature of the underlying psychological processes is far from clear there are certain conclusions which could have serious implications for military decision making they may be summarized by saying that quote once the decision has been made and the person is committed to a given course of action the psychological situation changes decisively there is less emphasis on objectivity and there is more partiality and bias in the way in which the person views and evaluates the alternatives end quote in other words decision making may well be followed by a period of mental activity that could be described as at the very least somewhat one-sided yeah dude you i was like i got halfway into that sentence and you were just shaking your head because you know you’ve seen this happen totally and he you know he you did that list earlier and i the one that was coming back to as you’re talking about in the hard part about it is you can you can i know what he’s going to say before he’s even saying it now you know what’s coming when he’s describing this says here’s the plan jack goes down in the front sends me a report go hey boss things are mes things are a mess down here and i’m like no they’re not they’re not that bad they’re not that bad we’re fine we need to we’re just going to keep doing this you’re like hey listen it’s got much worse and rationalization all those words but the the the willingness to just ignore the truth because it is inconvenient with the conclusion i’ve already drawn and how quickly i can go you know what his feedback is you know it’s based on what he’s seen it’s not really he doesn’t know what’s going on it doesn’t have a big picture so we’re going to keep you plus jacques was kind of emotional yeah plus he’s he’s you know it just started he doesn’t have that much combat experience he’s getting shot at yeah he’s freaking out but this is he doesn’t see what i’m trying to i mean you just rationalize that all day all day all day um you know the here’s another thing you were talking about uh like who do you like what is it what is the the cool military leader what do we think of here’s one uh would you say i want to promote this guy who has a lot of self-doubt right are you we’re not promoting that guy but what’s interesting is i am so filled with self-doubt that when i come up with a plan and dave burke sends a report back from the front line he’s like hey jocko we got heavy resistance i’m like okay i must have been wrong i’m missing something does this mean i’m not going to freaking push forward no it doesn’t mean that but it means i’m i’m actually doing the opposite of this this trying to balance out the dissonance i’m paying more attention because i think i might be wrong the irony in that in that truth the irony is is how you’ve described you having a reputation of being so decisive in the your time in the teams was based on that that belief that you could be wrong which is why you’ve made these incremental decisions that didn’t over commit to the end was actually driven by what you just described as you know you the the term self-doubt doesn’t have like this positive you know connotation but it’s like oh hey i bet you there’s a bunch of things i don’t know so you know what i shouldn’t do over commit which was based on you having a reputation of being decisive which people can equate to um the opposite of self-doubt i’m so secure in my my decision-making process that i know the outcome and this is the course that we’re going on it’s exactly the opposite of what you’re doing which is the incremental piece and go ahead got some feedback yeah boss here’s some feedback this was a this blew up on our face we ran into a brick wall uh three vehicles are down and we can’t keep keep going and you’re gonna go oh we need to do something different right now as opposed to hey just keep going we’re we’re sticking to the plan yeah and that’s true not only on the battlefield but it’s also true in a conversation be with another human being it’s also true when i say hey dave you know what’s your plan with this client or or here’s how i think we should approach this client i’m not saying this is how we should approach the client i’m like hey i got an idea of what we could do with this client what do you think it’s having a freaking open mind is what it is and the minute you know i’ve i said that a while ago like our mod people’s minds they’re they’re either opening or closing and we can have some control over that you can control whether you leave your mind open or whether you let your mind close at least i think but let me let me rephrase that i think people have the ability to control whether they open their mind but they don’t have as much control over if you’re not conscious about your mind just close up and oftentimes we’re looking our cognitive bias is to just close that mind i don’t want to hear what dave has to say so i think what we have to do is you have to form a habit of trying to keep your mind open prying it open and i had to keep this going back to the mustard you know i went back to that old conversation how often do i have to admit that i’m wrong yeah and you know i asked the entire crowd at their muster how often do you think i have to admit that i’m wrong and everyone thinks i’m humble and they go all the time yeah probably 10 times a day you admit that i’m wrong and i’m like no almost never i almost never admit that i’m wrong why do i almost never admit that i’m wrong because i never go into a conversation telling everyone that i’m right or even thinking that i’m right yeah so therefore i don’t go in the in the conversation saying dave we need to do this with the client and then dave goes well actually i talk to the client here’s what’s going on here’s what they actually need and i have to go damn it i was wrong no one said i say hey dave here’s what i’m thinking what do you think yeah that’s one example of a hundred conversations that i have where i could go in there and try and be right but instead i go in there with an open mind instead of a closed mind it’s so counter-intuitive to think the connection between never being wrong or never having to or rarely having to admit that you’re wrong isn’t because you’re right all the time it’s because you never entrench yourself in a position and you know the saying could be could be said for why you and i uh whatever the better word is for argue for disagree like how often do you and jacob disagree on on a plan it’s like well almost never like oh you must be perfectly aligned on everything no i just i haven’t predetermined the next 37 steps that we’re going to do neither is he and we’ll move and i’ll do it his way sometimes we’ll do it my will get somebody else’s input and none of us are committed to an outcome and the reason why we’re disa we don’t disagree on what we should do is that neither one of us come in with the conclusion of what we should do and how counterintuitive that is is is the idea that the more committed you are the less you will um the less you’ll admit that you’re wrong and the exact opposite is true is the reason i have to admit that i’m wrong very often because i don’t walk in thinking that i’m right yeah and actually you and i are very committed to an outcome who are committed to having the best possible outcome we can have with nothing to do with which outcome right or which course how we get there it’s like oh this is the best possible outcome dave came up with a way to make this the best outcome outcome that sounds awesome i’m in we’ll do that all day long yeah uh fast forward a little bit by the way you get the book i haven’t said that yet today so we’re skipping all kinds of stuff but there’s so much information this book those commanders with weak egos with over strong needs for approval and the most closed minds will be the very ones least able to tolerate the nagging doubts of cognitive dissonance in other words it will be the it will be the least rational who are the most likely to reduce dissonance by ignoring unpalatable intelligence so the person who the the person who can’t tolerate those doubts will just shut them out which is a horrible thing uh fast forward a little bit no better example is this an afforded by townsend’s occupational cuts since the advance up the tigris was totally unjustified by the facts of which he was fully aware his dissonance when disaster struck must have been extreme and to a man of his egotistical nature depend demanding of instant resolution so again in the face of much contrary evidence he withdrew into cut the wiser and possible course of retreating to basra would have been a greater admission of the lack of justification for his previous decision by the same token once inside cut nothing would budge him because to break out even to assist those who had been sent to release him would have emphasized his lack of justification for being there in the first place in short an inability to admit one has been in the wrong will be greater the more wrong one has been and the more wrong one has been the more bizarre will be the subsequent attempts to justify the unjustifiable this is when people this is when you’re looking at people they just seem like they’re freaking crazy we can now see the relationship between pontification and cognitive dissonance pontification is one of the ways in which people try to resolve their dissidence or sorry dissonance but there is another aspect of decision making no less hazardous it is it’s riskiness research has shown that people vary in the degree to which they adjust the riskiness of their decisions to the realities of the external situations individuals who become anxious under conditions of stress or who are prone to be defensive and deny anything that threatens their self self-esteem tend to be bad at judging whether the risks they take or the caution they display are justified by the possible outcomes of their decisions for example they might well adopt the same degree of caution whether placing a small bet getting married or starting a nuclear war there is a sad irony about this state of affairs for it means that those people who are most sensitive to the success or failure of a decision will be the very ones who make the biggest mistakes conversely less anxious individuals will act more rationally because they are able to gr devote greater attention to the realities with which they are confronted so when you got people that are nervous about decision making they’re nervous about failing they’re nervous about oh i better win this it’s like what you see happen in sports right basketball teams up by 10 12 points they’re they’re doing good they go up by 20 points they start hitting three pointers there’s no pressure anymore they’re just like letting it fly that’s when they do their best so someone that can go into a situation and say yep there’s some risks here but i’m not worried if i look stupid whatever i’m doing the best i can cool and then you look at the rational situation if you’re like oh my god i’m gonna look like such an idiot if i don’t get this right this is gonna be horrible guess where your focus is it’s not on the realities of the situation it’s not on rationale rationalizing a good decision it’s just focused on how bad you’re going to look if you screw it up so you make a bad decision yeah so you’re more likely to screw it up that’s crazy one psychologist has said under stress men are more likely to act irrationally to strike out blindly or even to freeze into stupid immobility that’s what stress does to people i’ve seen it you know when you see that i’ve seen it in like acute cases where someone’s stressed out in combat and they kind of lock up and you got to kind of shake them out of it i’ve also seen it on you if you look at it broadly over a full deployment and you see people that you that are usually pretty solid and they start either getting angry they start lashing out they start making dumb decisions you’re like this stress is getting to you man that’s what’s going on you got to back them off a little bit but why should an anxious and defensive individuals those who are those who have the most to lose act more irrationally than those less afflicted afflicted by neurosis two reasons have been advanced the first has been well stated by deutsch some guy i don’t know who it is didn’t look it up sorry nervousness the need to respond quickly because of the fear one will lose either the desire or ability to respond enhances the likelihood that a response will be triggered off by an insufficient stimulus and thus makes for instability you know it’s a freaking um good example of that uh someone you put someone in like a a shooter situation with simunition and you’re like all right go in the house if they’ve never done it before and they’re super nervous they’re freaking shooting the first person that they see whether they hold the weapon or not right they’re gonna be quick to respond with fear because they’re nervous and the more you train them to that the better they’ll get the second reason why a proportion of of people will make irrational decisions whose riskiness is unrelated to reality is because being neurotic they will strive to maintain an image of themselves as either quote bold and daring end quote or quote as careful and judicious decision makers end quote and the urge to sustain their particular conceit will take precedence over the need to behave realistically so luckily for me like you were talking dave about me making small decisions luckily i figured that out because i like being a person that’s known as decisive but luckily i figured out i could look and appear and be decisive by making small decisions so i didn’t have to try and figure everything out everything at once which is what i recommend people do he closes out this chapter saying since mil since decision making is by definition a cognitive process then obviously the oldest theory is is in one sense a truism but it but it by no means follows that the simple hypothesis of low intelligence fits the bill again this whole chapter is about intelligence so he’s saying listen decision making is about how fast you can think and your cognitive capability but it doesn’t cover everything on the contrary by looking further into the nature of decision making process we are compelled to entertain another rather different possibility namely that the apparent intellectual failings of some military commanders are due not to lack of intelligence but to their feelings cognitive dissonance pontification denial risk-taking and anti-intellectual intellectualism are all in reality more concerned with emotion than with intelligence which i i mean that well it’s not another another thing we say at the mustard who here has made a great decision when they were super emotional no one raises their hand that’s why we teach people to detach from their emotions so that you can make good decisions do you detach 100 no but you need to detach so they’re not driving your decision-making process the susceptibility to cognitive dissonance dissonance the tendency to pontificate and the inability to adjust the riskiness of decisions to the real situation are a product of such neurotic disabilities as extreme anxiety under stress low self-esteem nervousness the need for approval and general defensiveness these it seems over and above his level of intelligence are the factors which interfere with what a man decides to do given in a given situation i think he made a pretty good case for that not about how smart you are smart plays some role i mean obviously if you’re an idiot you can make a bunch of bad decisions but that’s not the that’s not the major number in this equation most people are making bad decisions based on their emotions based on their feelings based on their psychology and this whole thing ties into dave this is what you were getting at earlier you got about a whole chapter here talking about what you what you started the road you started to go down this chapter is called military organizations and it says military organizations make for military incompetence in two ways directly by forcing their members to act in a fashion that is not always conducive to military success and indirectly by attracting selecting and promoting a minority of people with particular defects of intellect and personality so this is what you were talking about yeah how the system will set up to promote and this is going one step further you talked about how the system can promote people they can figure out how their way to get through it it also can attract people like this yeah people that are looking for a system that they can figure out how to get through the root cause of all this is that since men are not by nature all that well equipped for aggression on a grand scale they have had to develop a complex of rules conventions and ways of thinking which in the course of time ossify into outmoded tradition curious ritual inappropriate dogma and that bane of some military organizations irrelevant which we had a conversation on here about chicken chicken and i think chicken is the term that’s used nowadays he’s using the term and he actually throughout this calls it bull i think i’m gonna call it most the time he calls it here but this idea of chicken stuff that you’re polishing your belt buckle you’re polishing your boots you’re doing all these things these things in the military either called chicken or but those things are a huge part of some military organizations and as we’re going to find there’s some reasons for it but there’s also when it gets out of hand uh fast forward a little bit broadly speaking human activities may be regarded as falling into one or the other of two main groups those which are directly instinctual and those which are not so we all got some things that we instinctively want to do into the first which involves what have been succinctly described as the three f’s feeding fighting and reproduction fall such robust pastimes as pugilism professional pie eating prostitution and soldiering so look we got these three f’s feeding fighting and reproduction and from that we get things like boxing we get things like professional pie eating and chefs and restaurants we also get prostitution we also get soldiering those are all kind of you can marry those up from where those came from in the second group fall all those other vocations which though sometimes subservient the basic drives do not have as their end product the original cons consumatory response besides this most important difference the instinctional the instinctual vocations have three other characteristics which differentiate them from those in the second category they may involve unlearned patterns of behavior are motivated by crude if powerful emotions fear lust and rage and are designed to culminate in an unlearned response of a distinctly physical kind so those are the three f’s right there you got powerful emotions tied to them fear lust and rage and they where they get you is something physical you’re eating you’re fighting or you’re reproducing um he goes into prostitution a little bit prostitution is easy because the transformation of an unlearned drive into a money-making career is more a matter of realizing a potential than seriously modifying nature and then he goes into this thing about this guy who interviewed prostitutes and this one prostitute said i’d been working in a factory for five years before i realized i was sitting on a fortune all the time i kind of had to throw that quote in there it goes on down the same path talking about a professional soldier the original purpose of intra-species aggression is not destruction but distribution so why do why do people fight why do animals fight because we got you gotta freaking stay away from me a little bit you can’t get too close to me not too close to my resources not too close to my woman like you need to get your own activities going this is my ao this is my area of operations in lower forms of life the instinct of aggression is controlled by a language of signs and counter signs so that everyone remains spread out with a minimum amount of bloodshed moreover those animals best equipped to do each other and injury are also those with the most effective controls against so doing a dog tackles enough to encroach upon a rival’s territory may become involved in a noisy scuffle but has only to drop his tail roll over and urinate to terminate the attack upon his person right so that’s what animals do and even you know going out elk hunting the elk they fight hard and occasionally they do kill each other but most of the time they just hey man like i’m dominant you go away and the guy’s like cool so that’s the way it’s supposed to be you’re supposed to be able to sort of surrender back up give some space and hey that makes sense so that’s the difference i the point that he’s trying to bait bear here is hey a prostitute she’s still doing something that just makes sense on an instinctual level right whereas humans with war things all of a sudden aren’t so instinctual anymore because now look if it was in caveman days and you came into my territory i’d probably beat you up and you’d run away and i’m not going to waste any energy for trying to go catch you i don’t care you just stay away from me well when we get to war now it’s a lot different so he goes into that a little bit humans they have made up for a lack of natural weapons by acquiring some far more deadly artificial ones right we don’t have horns on our head we don’t have big teeth where we can rip each other apart sure we can choke each other if we have jiu-jitsu we don’t like but we don’t have these things so we make other weapons right clubs spears knives guns missiles um yet other difficulties and this is where this is where you’re gonna take everything we just talked about and now we’re gonna take it into this military context and this is something that i have talked about before i’ve talked about the difference of decentralized command and when you have centralized command and the fact that when decentralized command started to come to fruition is when you didn’t have conscripts anymore you didn’t have you had people that you could say all right here’s what we’re trying to make happen go make it happen you have to say this is what you need to go to go do go do it and if you don’t do it i’m going to shoot you that’s a different type of discipline it’s imposed discipline versus unit discipline so we’re going to get into that a little bit here yet other difficulties have been posed by the sheer size of human warring groups with the transition from small parties of hostile tribesmen to large mercenary armies came problems of motivation and control right so if you if it was just the the five of us and our clan and we were just defending i didn’t need to motivate echo to do his job if he didn’t do his job we were all gonna get overrun and we’re all gonna die so there was no real reason for me to have to impose discipline on you we just had it we just we knew that we had to fight together we knew if we got overrun they were going to come and take our food and take our women and that was game over for us so there wasn’t any real need to to quote motivate you but things are bigger now since the history of warfare is largely that of many who though through poverty or the press gang were forced to take up arms for a cause which few could even comprehend the evoking and direction of aggression called for special measures so once we have an army where echo doesn’t really quite sure why the hell he knew when it was our cave our little area and we were defending our our tribe he understood that but once he’s like all of a sudden he’s in a foreign country and i’m giving him a uh uh a musket and i’m saying okay dude we’re gonna fight he’s kind of thinking wait a second i don’t even live anywhere near here so now we need to come up with some special measures to get echo to direct his aggression towards the enemy how do we do that these included devices to ensure group cohesion to incite hostility to enforce obedience and to suppress mutiny because once again i put i take echo on a ship give them a sword and be like okay dude we’re gonna go and fight these people you’ve never seen before they’re not close to your family they’re not close to your area of operations and not only do i need to get you to hate them i need to make sure you don’t freaking just turn that sword on me and cut my head off because it doesn’t make any sense right it doesn’t make any sense to echo charles who’s got his tribe it doesn’t make any sense for you to go to some other place and fight so how are we going to make that happen well we got to make group cohesion we got to incite hostility against the enemy we got to enforce obedience and make sure we don’t have a mutiny they also included means whereby the intentions of leaders could be translated into a concerted action by followers in short it called for two other components of militarism firstly a system of rewards and punishment of rank medals battle emblems and prize money that’s what’s i’m going to dangle in front of you carrot of confidential reports court martials and the lash there’s the stick don’t do what i tell you the court martial you i’m going to whip you whatever and secondly a system of orders and over learned learned drills whereby complex patterns of behavior could be set in motion by the briefest of instructions so i’m actually going to train you i like how echo charles become my soldier today right you like that uh i’m going to train you so i got to end up with a pattern of behavior that becomes instilled in you no less important for a theory of military incompetence is the means whereby militarism is administered and its continuity insured originally so now we’re going to get into this originally since combat was largely a matter of brute force we must suppose that the strongest came to the top in fighting as in prostitution vital statistics gained the day a sort of natural selection according to the criteria that were essentially physical but in the course of time the growing number of personnel involved and improvements in technique required some revision of earlier criteria a distinction became necessary between organizers and the organized between the brains and the brawn so now just the fact that echo’s the biggest strongest guy it doesn’t necessarily mean that’s going to make the difference in the battle because we got a bunch of people and if i can organize more people against or if the enemy organizes five people just to fight echo echo’s going down so i need to get some people to support echo now we got a freaking army to this end civil government might have been expected to construct armies in which the dichotomies in which such dichotomies obtained one might have expected that officers would have been chosen for their brains and the hierarchy of command based upon merit and professional expertise so echo you and i we’re on the same tribe we form an army we take all the big guys and we’re putting you guys in the front lines that makes sense right because you’re the you’re the ones that are going to crush the enemy we’re also going to take our smartest dude and be like hey you’re really good at organizing people you’ve got a loud voice you come up with good plans cool dave you’re going to run this battalion over here and dave’s like cool got it that’s the way we should do it dave’s proved himself he’s smart right so that’s what we’re doing that’s what we think we’re doing that’s what makes sense to do right that clearly makes sense however for example in britain civil government did nothing of the kind by methods of purchase and nomination the control of the army was given over to men who with nothing to gain from revolution would remain the loyal apolitical supporters of the existing regime professional ability energy and dedication of the job counted for little so that’s not how they selected they didn’t say hey who’s better at decision making you know echo you know what you’re gonna be front lines dave we you know you got you got those quick thoughts we’re putting you in in command what the british do no you know what they said who’s gonna be loyal who can pay the most will put you in command by the way so check this out how does that how does that how does that work dave you have money to buy a commission what do you think of the system what do you think of it yeah i like this you like the system yeah and you want to importantly you want to maintain the system yes absolutely echo you’re kind of broke [Music] right yeah you don’t you don’t really like the system because you haven’t been able to succeed and you probably want to change the system so you know what i’m not putting you in charge i’m going to put the guy in charge that succeeded in the system that wants the status quo he wants to protect he’s going to fight and he’s going to use you to fight to protect what he’s already got status and money that’s the dynamic we that’s what he that’s what he means when he says uh men who with nothing to gain from revolution would remain loyal dave’s going to remain loyal he can pay for this yeah the reason he can pay for this because he’s done all right in the system how do i benefit from a revolution here yeah i don’t want that at all no not at all so you’re willing to so once i give you a position and i give you authority yeah you can actually use your authority now to maintain the status quo which is what you want and by the way you can also impose your status quo because if you guys go take over another chunk of land guess who’s going to get it not echo he fought for it but dave’s gonna get it maybe we’ll give dave let me give echo a little sliver of you know maybe get some a little bit of a little bit of gold in your a little bit of booty for you but dave’s gonna get the land so we’ll keep you a little bit happy but dave wants us to succeed and dave’s willing to sacrifice a bunch of you a bunch of echoes for this situation um fast forward a little bit the essential nature of militarism should now be clear we see it as an ever increasing web of rules restrictions and constraints presided over by an elite one of whose motives was to preserve the status quo exactly what i just said how do i keep echo in line here’s the rules here’s your uniform here’s what you got to do if you step out of line guess what’s going to happen you’re getting you’re getting the lash you’re getting punished you’re getting no pay you’re getting bread and water so that’s what we set up but this incompetence is augmented by another factor namely the characteristics of some of those attracted to millet to the military let us examine this hypothesis by modern standards and viewed from the outside the nature of militarism may not seem very attractive including as it does a number of attributes which are positively repellent to those who value freedom egalitarianism and and creative as opposed to destructive ends so so if you think about what the military is hey you’re gonna go you’re gonna follow orders you’re gonna have to dress the way you get told to dress you’re gonna have to cut your hair the way you’d get told to cut your hair you have to wake up when they tell you to wake up you’re going to go to bed when they tell you to go to bed like if you’re a person that values personal freedom why are you going in there why is that happening if you want to create things in in the world why are you going in the military you go in the military to destroy things there was a guy a seal team one he was a vietnam guy and he said i joined he said when he left seal team one he said i joined the navy in 19 whatever it was i joined the navy in 1968 so i could kill people from my country i was like yes but right that’s that that’s attracting a certain person type of person not someone that wants to create someone that wants to destroy uh he said why then do people join the army and are there some characteristics of the military which have a positively magnetic attraction for those whose subsequent performance may be deemed incompetent so who are we bringing in here he makes a a comparison to alcoholics anonymous he says alcoholic anomalous anonymous can attract people an individual with particular problems of a psychological kind may be expected to gravitate towards a group which he recognizes not only as containing fellow sufferers but also as having developed effective ways of dealing with special needs of its members the therapeutic gain from such behavior during the second world war has been noted by robert holt he wrote it was a common clinical observation during the war that military service was an unusually good environment for men who lacked inner controls the combination of absolute security a strong institutional parent substitute on whom one could lean unobtrusively and socially approved outlets for aggression provided a form of social control that allowed impulses to be expressed in acceptable ways by the way when you join the seal teams you’re joining the seal team so you can kill people or at a very minimum you’re joining the seal teams knowing that you may have to kill people if you’re going to join the seal teams you’re going to go all through that all that there’s got to be some actual in my opinion desire to kill people that’s what you want to do right dave you didn’t go in the marine corps thinking uh hey i’d like to fly a jet no you want to fly a jet right that’s what you want to do this is an acceptable way that you can go fly a jet did you want to get in a dog fight yes and what’s the outcome of a dog fight either win or you lose and what happens to the loser yeah the loser dies loser dies the loser dies so here all these military people are signing up for their aggression to be expressed in an acceptable way yeah surrounded by surrounded by people who see it the same way yeah well that’s the thing you look at alcoholics like well you know these other these other people deal with it and you look at the military like i kind of wanna yeah that sounds like a cool way to go i also understand why you feel the way you do why you think the way you do and and that scene that he set with that you can see it’s so easy to see that connection so easy to see that connection yeah uh he says even a troop of baboons contrives a rigid dominance hierarchy wherein each male knows its place it’s kind of like the military it’s very nice get in there and you can see when some people in the military when they when they’re that baboon that gets their spot in the hierarchy and they want to flex it on everybody oh you can see those people all day long and again is this everyone in the military absolutely not it’s absolutely not no but there’s a piece of that formalization of that hierarchy and in the military i’m sure it’s the same way with you that there is still an unspoken hierarchy there is a there’s a a pecking order that isn’t written down you know there’s a roster that we don’t write on the board and go okay you know jocko’s one echoes two dave’s three it doesn’t say that but everybody kind of knows definitely and and if it’s not pure there’s at least some group some caddy like a couple guys here a couple guys here and everybody knows it and but the system can offset that a little bit by creating well it utilizes that that um deliberate hierarchy which means like maybe maybe dave’s like seven kind of sucks but i do whatever i can do a maneuver and i’d actually i get promoted or i get a task or i get actually some deliberate hierarchical authority right and now i can kind of like now you can exactly my revenge yes because i hey hey we all know where i was but that was unwritten but i’m in charge now yeah and then the psychology of that power which sort of fixes the problem with the unspoken hierarchy and the things that you know in that you know those baboons don’t have a chart they just know and there’s nothing that number seven is going to do to go well i got a formal piece over here that sort of allows me to impose my will on you and i mean i’ve been writing things on self-esteem ego the 20 different versions of that word that he’s used so far in this book which all comes down to the insecurity all those different words that he’s using the military delivers some authority for the people that have that that is kind of undeniable in this system and again not everybody just like you said this is not everybody but it is there it is there there’s there’s nothing worse than when somebody who thinks they should be in charge actually gets in charge those people are the worst the people that sit there and think they’re just they’re just fuming they’re thinking i should be wrong i could do such a much better job and that’s what their thoughts are and when they actually get put in charge they’re a freaking disaster they’re a nightmare [Laughter] oh that they become the head baboon as at a human level armies resemble the authoritarian family group just as the ethos of an upper class victorian family totally forbade any show of aggression by the child toward its parents but encouraged organized aggression towards contemporaries in such school pursuits as boxing and sanctioned bullying so in the army the slightest hint of insubordination i e aggression directed towards the superior is severely punished while aggression towards the enemy is encouraged and rewarded gotta set that up gotta keep it under control from a psychological point of view therefore militarism strives to maintain that paradoxical state of affairs where feeling angry may well be totally split off from aggression one in which a soldier is required to suppress his aggression towards his superiors whom he may loathe while venting it upon a hypothetical enemy towards whom he will may well entertain no hostile feelings [Laughter] this the classic example of this unorthodox behavior occurred on christmas day 1914 when british and german troops joined together for um convivialities in no man’s land this guy’s vocabulary is very impressive by the way needless to say these reprehensible flickerings of humanity were quickly stamped out by the generals on both sides and we all we all know what happened the germans and the brits were like we’re not fighting anymore we went played but we played soccer and then the generals like no you will bomb them yeah roger that it is just because the business of a soldier is destruction and violence that need to take general precautions against disorder becomes so pressing because you really you got a bunch of freaking your you’re training people to be aggressive and you’ve got to somehow make sure they don’t point that aggression at you the aspects in question may be subsumed under the general if faintly imp impolite heading of so important is this curious phenomenon that it deserves a section to itself so now we have a chapter that’s called which i already mentioned this is the little stupid things that you’re doing so this is covered in this next section this next chapter which is entitled chicken whatever um according to eric partridge the word was coined by australian soldiers in 1916 coming from a country whose armed forces have always been relatively free of from this element of militarism they were evidently so struck by the excessive spit and polish of the british army that they felt moved to give it a label going a little further back it is possible that the expression has its origin in a bull the false hair piece worn by women between 1690 and 1770 this would be consistent with the fact that modern dictionaries define bull as quote a ludicrous jest a self-contradictory statement to cheat empty talk absurd fussiness over dress end quote whatever its etymological significance such definitions certainly capture the military nature of bull one of the most astonishing apparently irrational and yet significant aspects of militarism one which connotes an attitude of mind a pattern of behavior as and an end product as implied by the old jingle quote if it moves salute it if it doesn’t move pick it up if you can’t pick it up paint it end quote the phenomenon involves ritualistic observance of the dominance submission relate relationships of the military hierarchy extreme orderliness and a preoccupation with outward appearances this is what we call chicken this is why uh the term painting rocks comes from the marine corps right i think so i mean i’ve heard that term a thousand times i can’t say that i know for sure but i think that’s right i i can i can definitely say i have seen way more white painted rocks on marine corps bases than any other base yes right so what does that mean they means that if they’ll take rocks and paint them white and black oh and it’s like like that just painting some rocks okay don’t get painted some rocks before it’s not instead boys painted some rocks bro he’s painted some rocks so uh in in the military manifestations of bull range from such minor apparent absurdities as the polishing of the backs of cap badges so what that means echo is you’re polishing something that’s never going to be seen but someone’s going to inspect it it can’t be seen but you’re going to do it the blancoing of trees for a forthcoming general generals inspection i’d look up bloncoin because i didn’t know what it was so blanco was a like a powdered paint that they used to issue so you could camouflage things but eventually of course took it to the extreme and now we want all the trees to be the same color so we’re gonna mix this powdered paint which is a military thing and we’re going to paint the trees so they’re all going to be whatever gray that’s the kind of that’s some chicken stuff going on right there uh besides its emphasis on appearance and it’s constraining aspects of also involves a compulsive concern with cleanliness in this respect alone it may achieve impressive levels of irrationality to make to make it white webbing equipment might be boiled almost to the point of destruction while the blankets that one sleeps that the owner sleeps in stay unwashed for weeks there are of course good arguments for so here’s some reasons why it exists some of the positive reasons it ensures a level of ordinance orderliness cleanliness discipline personal pride obedience and morale which so it seems could not be reached in any other means i e by reasoned as opposed to compulsive behavior by the same token it achieves a level of uniformity that makes for a solid area and group cohesiveness so there’s some good reasons for it however the case against it is also strong it is time wasting excruciatingly boring for all those with more than the most mediocre intellect and a poor substitute for thought since it aims to govern behavior by a set of rules and defines a rigid program for different occasions it cannot meet the unanticipated event so you’re getting trained not to think you went do did you go to ocs yeah okay when i went to navy ocs the belt buckles that we got we had to polish the coating off there’s a coating that comes on the belt buckles echo charles that keeps it shiny no matter what like you can it’s going to keep shiny you actually polish that off yeah so that it can get uh eroded so that you have to polish it more that’s some chicken some right there homes we had um anodized and non-anodized anodized is the permanent thing that like is always brass or shiny yeah you are not a lot of you have anodized gear so all of your stuff your belt buckles everything none of it could be anodized that was reserved for like some other people and so you had to by the unanodized and then shine it to make it look like it was yes good use of time wait we had to manually unanimous right the freaking belt buckles the next level it’s you could see it slowly coming off you’d be sitting there with a cotton swab in just for hours see even echo is confused by this that’s kind of nonsense it’s total sunsets it’s called brass oh brasso yeah you definitely use brasso yeah that’s what got it off right ah like any compulsive symptom and its cousins ritual dogma and superstition have put themselves so far beyond reason thought that they can that they create resistance to change and the acceptance of new ideas take military drill this starts as a skill adapted to a reality situation right we used to have to do close order drill for combat it develops into a rigid pattern of behavior by becoming automatic takes the load off of memory so you drill that and we still do this today you do you don’t call it military drill but when you’re doing immediate action drills with your weapon you’re learning how to wrap tack and bang you’re learning how to solve problems without having to think about them takes the load off the memory once learned it is it is directed by processes of which we are scarcely conscious and which leave the limited channel capacity of conscious experience mercifully free to deal with other more pressing events that’s why you can reload your weapon without having to think about it and that way you can figure out where i’m going to maneuver my element to less next that’s drill that’s good it is drilled in such a sense which ensures that most motorists let off the handbrake before engaging the clutch and that most speakers construct their sentences according to the rules of language right we don’t have to think about that military drills started in this way the devices which could eventually weld together a group of uneducated peasants into a single corporate machine that did what it was told this was all good except for one thing ritualization implying the tendency to transform means to an ends thus the battle drill of one error becomes the ceremonial drill of another what started out as a functionally useful maneuver becomes a highly stereotyped pattern of movements on the barrick square in itself this may no be bad this may be no bad thing so this is where these things come from that’s where they came from when you see the people doing the close order drill like the marine corps silent drill team it used to have a purpose and it’s not a bad thing necessarily ceremonial ceremonial can be pleasing to the eye and anodyne for taxpayers and even on occasions a device for raising charitable funds dude you’re talking about the blue angels being 100 yeah yeah and and i mean that in like he’s described in a good way right right yeah it’s a good way it’s and it’s based on at one point hey we’re going to fly together my wingman’s going to be a you know whatever very close to me yep but now we’re going to take what is there seven of them at flying six six now we’re gonna take six aircraft we’ll be three inches from each other and it’s taken to the extreme and it has some benefits it could kind of recruit people it’s going to be the taxpayers can see that we’ve got something and we can raise money so it’s a positive thing but unfortunately ceremonial drill like other forms of is addictive and by being so usurps the time and energy which should be devoted to other more adaptive pastimes it then becomes a substitute for doing something else as when the conservative element in the brigade of guards resisted the adopting of new battle drill because it would interfere with their existing ceremonial procedures so now we’re starting to say hey we can’t do that because that’s not how we do our ceremonial stuff fast forward a little bit as a factor in fighting efficiency bull has also been unhelpful in the navy if we were if we assume that one of the main purposes of a navy is to defeat the enemy and that is in the past anyway achieved by shell fire it might be supposed that much time would have been spent on practicing gunnery but in the british navy in the years before the first world war ship commanders were actively discouraged from gunnery practice because the smoke might mark the paintwork and soil the gleaming decks the price for this was paid at jutland hey did you when did you came in the marine corps in what 1994 commission 94 yeah commission 94 did you start your camis oh yeah i got into the era of starch okay i started before we we obviously don’t do that anymore i had to go back in the memory banks yes yes totally we started our freaking cameo totally in the seal teams for almost my entire career you will you had a pair of stars yes and i remember when the marine corps at one point they stopped starting i was like they are so freaking squared away yes and i remember that time i mean you had your set of starched inspection ready games and when you brought them in they would ask you the level of starch that you wanted yes and you’d say galactic [Laughter] i don’t want to be able to move i want this to be body armor yes i had starch camis that would stop a freaking 762 by 39 about that when you said it because we went away from it you know sort of pre-pre-war right was pre-war so i was unfortunate that’s even more impressive yes i could see him doing it after september 11th maybe two years later be like all right we gotta freaking stop these no you actually did it before the war started which shows you somebody this is why we know we have some good officers out there right because somebody looked and said wait why am i seeing this freaking lance corporal over here this starch set of camis and not to like overdo it on this but that piece you said is actually really important and using that example is a good example because the new cameras the marine corps got not only were they not starch they were designed to be washed and not even ironed which was somebody going hey ironing your camis is dumb and it takes a long time and we’re going down the path if we’re going to start measuring marines based on how well they iron their cammies which is a skill that i don’t care about yes and so it wasn’t just no more starches you could take them out of the wash and flat you know you know slap them out and put them on and they weren’t wrinkled they didn’t look like crap and it is an example of what you just described was like they’re actually some good people going this is stupid this is chicken and we’re not doing this yes that is outstanding awesome somebody that needs to be a chicken review board if i was benevolent dictator of america i would have a chicken review board for each branch of the service and then i’d have a chief chicken review board officer who would be like a mustang freaking udt guy from nom also when i came in the marine corps there was no name tags did you do were you in that air i was yeah so you were just you were just staff sergeant what what was your name my name is staff sergeant you can just call me staff sergeant that was that was freaking outstanding that was pretty cool um fast forward a little bit now that we’ve touched upon some of the more obvious manifestations of the phenomenon let us examine its deeper causes and relevance to the central thesis of this book okay so why where does this change come from for a start it seems to be a natural product of authoritarian hierarchical struck organizations secondly though it’s outward and visible signs are manifold they have three common denominators the first is constraint we’re trying to constrain people the second is deception which sounds a little bit weird and the third is substitution for thought the deception part is like oh we can have you doing this instead of doing something else the constraint is we’re going to control you and the substitution for thought is we don’t want you thinking fast forward a little bit here perhaps the single most important feature of bull is its capacity to allay anxiety so and i’m just going to get into it at a conscious rational level orderliness cleanliness punctuality and discipline clearly make for efficiency the knowledge that one belongs to an organization which puts a premium on these laudable traits that one’s rifle will fire and there is a key for the bully beef tin obviously makes for confidence so these are really positive things about about this level of discipline at a conscious rational level therefore even those aspects of bowl which reflect the grossest exaggeration of these traits must seem like steps in the right direction this confidence of course may be may be displaced that a commander insists upon meticulous attention to detail down to the last shining button is no guarantee that his strategical thinking is anything other than pure aisle indeed he could well be unwittingly substituting a lesser for a more important area of generalship that’s the substituting part look as we were saying earlier dave i might not be the sharpest tool in the shed but if i can polish this belt buckle and i can put on this uniform and i can get my platoon to do all that correctly i’m gonna look good nevertheless there are good grounds for believing that those situations in which flourishes are ones in which it reduces anxiety because orderliness is fairly vital to survival again the imposed uniformity which is part and parcel of the obviously makes for group cohesiveness and that we’re all in it together feeling which combats fear we must suppose too that the height and conformity which it imposes will like other forms of perceived conformity encourage people through a diffusion of responsibility to perform acts which they might otherwise avoid so we’ve built a team and we’ve used this to build a team which is okay i have a common bond with people that went through ocs that we sat around in policies it’s a real thing yet another useful feature of and so it has been said is its role as a distractor and time filler according to this theory a mind preoccupied with buttons and toe caps has little room for gloomy forebodings the point is well made by a b campbell when writing of naval customs quote it is the guiding principle of naval service that the ship’s company should be constantly employed and this is the reason apart from the necessity for scrupulous cleanliness why there is so much scrubbing of decks and polishing of bright work this is making people have dumb to do because we want the groups to be troops to be busy in the same context this writer compares naval and civilian routine there’s a reason i read this whole section it is safe to say that there are many jobs many shore job routine routines which destroy initiative this also applies to many factory workers but is not so in the navy a routine job builds up a blue jacket’s character as to why the end quote as to why the naval and civilian characters should require such dramatically different treatments campbell refers to the moments of danger which occur for the former but not the later ladder this begs of course several questions so he’s saying this this writer is saying that in the navy all this work builds character building but for in the civilian world um they don’t need it they don’t need it and it hurts their initiative the reason that it’s okay is because in the navy you’ve got to face all these threats danger and he says it confuses loss of initiative and blind obedience with the building of character and makes the unwarranted assumption that naval ratings face greater danger than many civilians including merchant seamen steeple jacks racing motorists mountain climbers single-handed yacht-men coal miners matadors not one of whom has to fortify his character by polishing grass or scrubbing wood it would perhaps be truer to say that since the imposing of bull upon troops serves to reduce initiative it will thereby increase the feeling of dependency which they have toward their superiors this in turn will increase their obedience and loyalty so we’re getting a little brainwashing going on you do what i tell you to do you do it over and over again you become dependent on me telling you what to do and that’s what i want i don’t want to have any initiative i don’t want you thinking for yourself i just want you doing what i tell you to do that’s why when i am a tyrannical leader or author authoritarian leader i’m super concerned about your freaking buttons finally at a conscious rational level there are aspects of bull which may well help combat social anxieties in military men gorgeous uniforms martial music prancing horses and even being saluted are obviously bomb to tender egos and by promoting soldierly pride do much to offset the hostility and ridicule to which the military are from time to time subjected to by those in other walks of life but there is another less obvious reason for bull namely that it serves to reduce deeper seated feelings of anxiety which may well have their origins in events unrelated to here and now of which the subject remains blissfully unaware that’s where he starts getting a little psychological it’s a psychological reference there that we have things in our subconscious that make us laugh a certain way and one of the things he’s saying is people that people that like things to be super orderly super or orderly they don’t like change they don’t like when bad things happen they don’t like when things that they can’t control they don’t like those things and we’re gonna get to this but what kind of person you want in the military someone that can handle change and unexpected things this is the wrong person so if you’re a person that looks in the military and goes damn i want a uniform i can just wear what they tell me to wear i can polish it and nothing changes and that’s what i want that’s great on the parade field it sucks in combat the most extreme examples of this phenomenon occur in obsessive compulsive neurosis a condition which the patient feels compelled to follow a pattern of ritualistic thoughts and acts that these often include such bizarre symptoms as compulsive hand washing this is ocd a preoccupation with timing and counting recurrent ruminative ideas stereotyped verbal utterings and always standing with one toes absolutely in line has obvious significance for more military versions of the malaise you remember a while ago talking about the degrees of insane right everyone’s everyone’s insane because everyone’s reality is a little bit different well everyone has different degrees of how ocd they are and everyone has some level maybe some people are not you know 01 but you got a spectrum and the the case here is that if you look at the military and you see people that are all uniform and you see that everything’s clean you look at that as a type of environment i might want to go into because i’m kind of like that and that’s how you end up with people in this zone what do you got i just i wrote it down i was like this guy is such a good right he called it bomb to the tender ego like it’s such a great it’s such great medicine for that like oh buttons are shiny yes boots are lined up on the line perfectly height order everything is how i want it and that that is such good medicine for me you know for my tendencies where they came from and then just like you said is and i made the reference of the blue angels from a from a they’re literally called the flight demonstration team but if you have the mindset that this is a reflection of combat if this is a reflection of the challenges you’re going to face in the real world i mean the disconnect there cb seems like it’d be so obvious but all those stories that he’s telling in the first three sections we did to this there’s people going oh i might we close order we have the best closer drill platoon we’re going to be the best platoon in combat dude yeah it’s that i wish that this the disconnect was talking about something else but the end state of all this is real people die at the end of all these stories which is the worst part about it and then and then the ultimate manifestation of that is is world war one of like we’re gonna get online just like we did on the parade deck we’re literally gonna get in the line and move in in a line it’s crazy i guess insane maybe it’s a better word yeah um yeah speaking of the degrees of which you’re ocd he says such symptoms are not of course confined to the chronic sick so you don’t necessarily have to have some big issue milder forms may well occur in normal population during times of stress bead counting foot tapping and the mouthing of dogma like the compulsion to make things clean and tidy during periods of menstruation well-known palliatives for the stressed psyche so this is something that you see people doing when they’re stressed they’ll say the lord’s prayer or whatever except for rose thug rose sure remember when she fought for the first time against that chinese girl what’s her name if you know it and the oh no it was against johanna it was just against johanna and so johanna dave was like just on a tear destroying everyone and she had this super hostile aggressive attitude just you know getting people’s faces and she’d been crushing people and she fought thug rose and they squared off in the face off and and johanna’s getting all crazy making the mean face and everything and thug rosie just just straight normal face just saying the lord’s prayer freaky look thug rose um he says uh let us not beat around the bush at the risk of offending those with delicate susceptibilities or though or who themselves have problems in these areas it must be said that they involve four matters of primary importance in every human life sex elimination eating and death these are things that cause us concern the greatest anxieties concern death and unconstrained disorder since the two are inextricably related a defense against one is a defense against the other also this is perhaps the crux of the origins of so we’re afraid to die death is a form of disorder so we want to get everything in order let us approach this from another standpoint whenever whatever its particular form of results in a state of affairs which is opposed to what many people would regard as a primary source of delight the natural diversity of nature towards such diversity it’s in it is imp implacably hostile it is no exaggeration to say that this uh this aspect of militarism is dedicated to the ironing out of differences the efficiency with which it destroys variety imposes uniformity is matched only by its demand for conformity so we are going against nature when you’re making everything the same and nature’s death is part of nature uh this is against uniqueness uniqueness as market value not for nothing does current advertising for the quote best car in the world make only one specific claim that no two rolls royces are alike so there’s we’re devaluing uniqueness but bull inverts these values it worships homogeneity and frowns on deviance whether it’s toe caps buttons or dressing by the left hair length kit inspection or marching feet the quintessence the quintessence of perfection resides in conformity to a regulation pattern this conformity is the product of constraint it seems that since bowl is primarily concerned with substituting pattern for ramen randomness it evidently reduces anxiety by the reduction of uncertainty so there’s a whole idea psychologically that we just want to make things more certain less random how do we do that well we just make everything the same if i’m a person that is has anxiety and fear of the unknown what am i going to do let’s start trying to make everything the same that’s cool if you’re on the parade field that type of personality is actually awesome if you’re on the parade field that type of personality that doesn’t want anything to be shocking is a nightmare on the battlefield anyone who doubts these soothing effects of bull has only to consider two other situations of frightening uncertainty marriage and death few who have played even a minor role in these events would deny the emotional support that comes from the time-honored ritual of weddings and funerals i never thought of that before there’s a reason you got to do this this way here it is let’s face it if you didn’t set that day on the wedding if you didn’t set that day and have a bunch of people invited and there wasn’t a thing going on you probably get 50 less weddings because people are freaking out right they’re like i’m not going through with this um two overlapping theories can be invoked the argument is simple living organisms are complex patterns which persist for a time within the essential disorder from which they came into which they will with a with equal uncertainty return so you live you’re nothing and then these random freaking biological components fall into a pattern for a certain period of time and then they ball break apart and you’re dead which is a really bizarre way of him saying what i just said i think he gets an f on simplicity on that one whether it is a single cell the integrated systems of the total organism or the external social order there exists regulators controls and constraints whose function it is to preserve the pattern to keep it from keep to keep this from that to maintain purity and separateness this holds as true for biological process as it does for the construction of an urban sewage system you have to put controls around things indeed life can be construed as a fight for orderliness in the course of which much behavior both voluntary and involuntary both external and internal is directed to this end the laws and rules of hygiene prophylaxis antibio antibodies rejection mechanisms adrenaline secretion and new year’s resolutions are just some of the devices which aim to stem their perpetual drift toward disorder so that’s what life is you have to stay in order to stay alive and you do like you work out to keep everything in order you try and eat right to keep everything in order you make new year’s resolutions to try and keep everything in order you you clean your teeth to try and keep everything in order it’s a fight it’s a fight to keep things in order it is of course a losing battle as oscar wilde said good intentions are useless attempts to meddle with the laws of nature uh bull represents an extreme manifestation of a general unnecessary propensity on the part of living systems to resist randomness this would account for the fact that the satorial aspects of the syndrome are concerned with removing dirt with maintaining separateness with keeping green green and white white with preserving the status quo keeping hair short brass shiny rifles clean and with maintaining uniformity by written orders shouted commands and other behavioral constraints but like waking consciousness in contrast to the dream and normality in contrast to psychosis makes its effect by constraint upon the creativity of thought he just said all that other stuff that i just said for that i’m sorry it took a little longer i should have should have skipped a little bit more but all that stuff of trying to maintain order is negatively impacting creativity that’s what it’s doing and the more you focus on that stuff the less creative you’re going to be may be regarded as an organization’s response to the threat of its disintegration right so if you’re in the military and you don’t keep order there’s actually a threat of your organization falling apart in the military this threat has two sources the external enemy and the aggressive impulses of its own members in either case the greater the threat the greater the constraints which means when you add conscripts that you were trying to get to fight you had to freaking tighten those people up you had to you had to keep it super rigid you get into special operations that’s probably the least rigid because everyone volunteered three or four times to get to that point where now hey i want to be here so there’s much less constraints so that’s where we’re at now at this point dixon who wrote this book uh goes into a bitter he goes he goes down some freud activities here sigmund freud which is um if you don’t know anything about freud freud was a cocaine addict i need to say at least uh he was kind of a liar and a bit of a quack um he basically spewed out all kinds of crazy theories and and and a majority of them i don’t know if i’m out of line saying this but i’m pretty sure i don’t think i am a majority of them were wrong a majority of them were just bat crazy like just weird theories that he thought up but so and i would tell you that dixon well this is again he wrote this in 1976 this hadn’t progressed people didn’t have as much knowledge freud had more people hadn’t understood how what a freaking disaster freud was but he but freud did just like a broken clock is right twice a day freud did come up with some concepts that are that are still used and one of them is just that we have a subconscious now what freud thought was that our subconscious was was uh basically built before the age of five based on your erogenous zones and all this weird stuff right and that you it’s just weird just weird stuff uh but you do have a subconscious and it does drive things it’s not based on the way you were potty trained which a lot of this freud stuff is based on weird um i think that dude had some issues i mean some serious issues you know i need to get daryl cooper on we need to do a freaking freud breakdown with daryl cooper and see what’s up but the bottom line is this guy’s a cocaine addict he’s a a bit of a quack um but some of his some of his theories were correct and then on top of that regardless of where people develop their personality we all know that people have personalities and you know like one of those personalities is comes direct the word comes directly from freud which is like an anal retentive personality we all know that type of personality it’s a type of personality does it develop from where someone was how someone was potty trained no actually that’s not where it develops from it develops from a whole bunch of different things and a bunch of different people from a different different backgrounds can end up with that type of personality so he was wrong about where these things came from but there are certain personalities that people have um and some of these things are reflected we have to deal with and is someone that’s anal retentive going to be more apt to look at the military and think to themselves that looks like my kind of scene absolutely is someone that’s listening to rock and roll and their beds not made and their their root they got a crap on their floor is that the per type person that’s like i’d really like to join the military it’s not right it’s not echo charles you weren’t like oh man you know what i’m kind of cruising over here i’m kind of getting up around the crack of 10 30 in the morning maybe the military’s my route right that’s funny he said that because i remember back when my friends were joining the military and you know military is always an option for kind of floating around when you’re young or whatever the one thing that stood out to me was like having to wake up at a certain time it’s weird yeah god check uh so you got so he starts focusing on this type of personality um i’m gonna fast forward through some of the freudian weirdo crap that he talks about a little bit he doesn’t go he’s it’s only a few pages but he says um it does not need any vast stretch of the imagination to see more than a passing similarity between these obsessive traits and the practice of but bull also has a two-pronged purpose to combat dirt and prevent illegitimate outbursts of aggression aggression that is towards the superiors um and potentially dangerous towards parent figures right so that’s what that’s one of the reason we impose these things is to keep people in check at this stage in the argument it is necessary to issue a caution we are not saying that military organizations are hotbeds of obsessional neurosis nor that those given to are necessarily manifesting compulsive symptoms on the contrary all that we have tried to show is that the anxiety reducing aggression controlling and tenacious nature of comes at least partly explicable so you can you can get it you can kind of reason with it and it’s not all bad and hey i was freaking very i mean i was very into you got to look squared away my boots were always highly polished my uniform was always starched even my freaking cami uniform that’s the way i was i you know what’s asking a bruiser if you here here’s an interesting dichotomy once you left our base our little compound over there which was originally called shark base and then called camp camp mark lee if you want off that base you were in a square away uniform when you were on that base i didn’t give a what you wore you could wear a freaking whatever flip-flops and a pair of surf shorts i did not care so i wasn’t like if you you know i wasn’t a militant i wasn’t obsessive about it but i understood the value of it in certain situations um research has shown not only that psychological arousal is decreased by ritual but also that under threatening conditions normal individuals like compulsive behave like compulsive neurotics this is when you see people freaking out a little bit and they start doing weird you know um start focusing on some little thing because they’re freaking out about what’s going on around them since military organizations represent par excellence outlets for and consequently defenses against aggression and disorder they will tend to attract people who have some difficulty in reconciling these conflicting needs people who overvalue aggression order and obedience no doubt this conclusion is supported by the finding that patients suffering from obsessional neurosis show improvement during military service so if you’ve got a little bit of that activity in your brain you’re probably going to do pretty good then he’s got this whole flow chart set up get the book so you can see it but you got combat and combat causes a bunch of uh anxiety death disorder social disapproval fear of being called a coward fear of your own aggressive impulses that’s what combat inflicts on you so how do you deal with that how do you deal with that well one way to deal with it is like chicken like polish your boots dogma ritual codes of honor so we put these codes in place to sort of defend against all this anxiety what does that result in rigidity conformity traditionalism over obedience aversion to progress and that all those things attract people with personal anxieties about dirt aggression disobedience right that’s where it gets you and what does that do increases military incompetence which by the way then increases the combat scenarios that you’re in which is a freaking nightmare if the if if the other thing it does is it attracts these people attracts these people that have you know that are they care about appearance promotional prospects disapprove approval of those uh higher in their military hierarchy they’re scared of that so this is just this this horrible cycle that we end up in where the anxiety creates this this freaking and this ritual and rigidity and conformity and those things actually create you to perform worse in combat which means all those things get worse and you end up in a horrible cycle as opposed to someone that’s like hey now’s not the time for that we gotta go fight we that you can actually break out of this cycle dude it’s so hard to listen to him explain this even just something as simple as the word dirt like the idea that and he did it well like you get dirt in your rifle can you shoot your rifle that’s the problem so we need to be able to respond to dirt but the response of oh i want people that don’t want dirt so i’m going to create a scenario by which it repels the dirt it doesn’t allow the dirt into my system it’s actually not what you want you want somebody goes yeah it’s going to get dirty here and and we’re not going to react to the dirt by creating a system that doesn’t let the dirt in we’re actually going to create a system when things get dirty like no voice we can we can we can deal with that not by repelling the dirt but by accepting the fact that it’s going to get dirty and we’re going to clean and deal with those things but just the way he paints that picture of that that cycle of the psychology of do you want someone who doesn’t like dirt or someone who does like it to be able to deal with it and the irony that’s inside that is what it attracts is the person that can’t handle it which is the thing that’s going to get you killed yes god it’s hard to listen to it is just just to use these words again so there’s a there’s a dichotomy of leadership right and everything has to be balanced right and yet when you think of these words you think of a military stereotype rigidity conformity traditionalism obedience those are military characteristics and they are good right they are good you’ve got to be you’ve got to have some level of rigidity you’ve got to want to conform with what’s happening you’ve got to be into those traditions you’ve got to be obedient those are those are totally awesome military qualities and you also got to be able to buck all of those qualities in order to survive yeah in order to truly excel so even these these these characteristics that he’s talking about you can see that anyone that has those is going to be attracted to the military in some level or let’s say most people that have some of those characteristics are going to be attracted to the military what the problem comes when you have a lot of people like that attracted an even bigger problem comes is when people are getting promoted based on those things and they’re not getting promoted based on creativity they’re not getting promoted based on uh not being a yes man they’re not getting promoted based on new ideas that’s not none of that is happening you’re getting oh you’re more obedient so you’re going to get promoted hey if you are going into combat do you want to work for someone that has been promoted for 19 years because they’ve been obedient and rigid and conformed hell no hell no and inside the reaction to the dichotomy you just described is the less balanced you are with that reaction the more extreme your reaction is the worse things are going to be and if the system reinforces it and the person goes in that direction that the inability to react to the dichotomy by being balanced is yeah look do we want someone that um you know will never conform no you don’t want someone that’s never going to perform do we want someone that just can’t obey no we don’t want anyone like that we’re not saying that but man you don’t want to go to the extreme or it’s going to suck all right one last thing before we close this section out um he says in other words this is basically what you and i were just saying dave in other words those very characteristics which are demanded by war the ability to tolerate uncertainty spontaneity of thought and action having an open mind to the receipt of novel and perhaps threatening information are the antithesis of those possessed by people attracted to the controls and orderliness of militarism that’s exactly what you and i were just saying and um that statement is important to remember it’s important to remember you know that the best qualities for good performance in war and therefore good performance in business and life are the ones that we talk about here all the time what he just mentioned the ability to tolerate uncertainty spontaneity of thought and action having an open mind open to new ideas even threatening ideas having an open mind to threatening ideas you know how many discussions i’ve had where i won in the initial conversation in the first four sentences because when dave came to me and said i think we should do this a different way and i said oh sounds like you’ve thought this through what do you want to do do you how many times i’ve just had a immediate victory immediate victory and by victory i mean all of a sudden dave’s not coming on the offense he’s opening his mind we’re going to be able to come to a positive net outcome because when he came to me with i don’t like the way we’re doing this and instead of me saying that’s because you don’t understand what’s happening and all of a sudden we’re arguing instead i say oh really please please tell me what you think we should do oh it’s so easy well how critical is it that you just when you define the winning is getting the out the right outcome not winning the argument i won because i want the outcome to be right yeah i won because we figured out the best way to do this and it wasn’t dave’s way and it wasn’t my way either we actually compromised and figured out the best way to make this happen right freaking ridiculous those are the qualities we should want those are qualities we should strive for so we can be better leaders and better people we’ll continue this book next time for now echo speak of getting speaking of getting better yes you got the um ways that we can get better yeah speaking of which dave i know you got some stuff to do i do why don’t you kick on out of here man right on and with that dave burke had to go obviously busy and well nonetheless we’re here we are trying to get better so what do you got echo charles uh well i could go into the whole intelligence thing but in the sake of saving time let’s just think of the smart thing to do on this path that we’re on to improve ourselves we’re working out we’re reading um so through these workouts and trying to improve ourselves physically and mentally we might need some help some supplementation that provides benefits do we all need help maybe maybe not i’m gonna say i haven’t met people that didn’t need okay they might not have needed help but who does not voluntarily accept some beneficial benefits hey we’re all going to benefit from benefits so one of those benefits that we can have is from a new energy drink that we have choco discipline go healthy not unhealthy so usual legacy energy drinks they’re unhealthy they provide a good front-end benefit but they’re not healthy back in detriment this one healthy and tastes good and gives you energy all upside you know what else provides like a front side kind of up feel good moment like like the legacy energy drinks crystal methane sure i’m just saying yes the legacy energy drinks think about what they do they get they make you feel good for a very short period of time and then they kill you yeah which is what a traditional legacy crap energy drink is going to do make you feel good for a little bit and then over time you die yep it’s true whereas miraculously miraculously we have made something that gives you all the upside of an energy drink meaning you will feel energized but later you won’t be coming down with ver multiple diseases caused by this thing that you put into your body in fact the opposite is true you will be more healthy when you get done drinking one of these than you were before you drink it think about that yeah there’s no one else that’s going to say that because they can’t because they didn’t go to the degree that we went to to make sure we were making something good for you yeah yeah man yeah it’s one of those no-brainers for sure and it tastes good a bunch of different flavors mangoes the best in my opinion not jacque’s opinion but an opinion is one of these things that you know my okay my favorite is jocko palmer which is like the it’s like an arnold palmer sure i i would not i don’t i love it i love it and it’s number probably like five or six of the rankings the sales rankings oh right like i don’t know why people don’t love it so much because arnold palmer is popular you can go let me put you this way you can go to a restaurant tonight and you can order an arnold palmer because people drink arnold palmer’s and it’s a normal flavor for people to want wait but is that if you go to a restaurant tonight and get mango drink the answer is no yeah probably not so why is that why is why is mango which it is more popular than jocko palmer well it depends so wait is arnold palmer an alcoholic drink no it’s half iced tea straight up yeah i guess i mean i don’t know i mean it seemed i i have no idea here’s the thing here’s there’s we’ve been trying to figure that i’ve been trying to figure that out part of the reason i think is because i called it jaco palmer which is like an inside joke that only i got i don’t think people understand jacquel palmer is kind of a joke about arnold palmer oh and we didn’t even spell it like arnold palmer we abbreviate it so i don’t get sued oh yeah right yeah baby can’t be jacking a dude’s name and just putting it on your can no no so we called it jackal palmer p-o-m-r and it so we’re probably gonna put it we’re gonna we’re gonna make it more obvious as to what it is yeah because like i said i’m not rolling into a restaurant tonight with my wife for dinner and ordering a mango drink of any kind right but i am ordering uh uh arnold palmer possibly right but i guess and not to go too deep into it what it like it’s not like you’re gonna have a discipline go with dinner most of the time see i’m saying it’s like they’re just different contexts of when you so if i go to the store randomly i need a snack i might get one of those little mango smoothies i’d be like oh dang that’s because mango tastes good you see i’m saying sure that’s like a this is a drink bro yeah i’m saying they’re all drinks and they’re all drunk drinking on the drink yeah but yeah i guess no one really drinks mango juice on a regular basis but there’s no mangoes you want soda yeah but there’s smoothie there’s like ice cream there’s like frozen yogurt there’s like mango is a good okay flavor there’s pistachio ice cream too but i’m not getting a pistachio soda but pistachio is a good flavor in general hey and that’s that’s my whole point it’s under it depends on the context and what you’re you’re experiencing the flavor i’m saying hey look i like choco palmer i do i like mango better of course but either way it doesn’t matter because each person’s opinion is individualized to them doesn’t matter you could like taco bomb or level literally level 10 like the it cannot get any better it has no bearing on my influence or my opinion on what i like well that’s where i’m at level 10 and if you want to get some get some yep so yeah the again different flavors get the one you want try them all that’s what i would say because the mango seems more risky because it’s exotic orange not so much seems to say true so you might be like oh that’s a safe one you know yeah but hey man with great risks come great rewards as a wise man once said possibly also on this path you want to look up after your joints and immunity joint warfare super krill oil vitamin d3 cold war these are all immunity and joint protective supplements don’t forget about the monk don’t forget about the mulk which is a dessert it’s a dessert that is also good for you again there’s not too many desserts that you can eat you can relish the flavor and the texture and the whole thing from a from a like a taste perspective but there’s more than that the whole thing the whole consumption you can relish and when you get done you’re stronger you’re better the whole experience the whole experience yeah it’s not like when you go down the freaking you go down to uh to the local ice cream store and you order a mint chocolate chip milkshake and they make it right and it’s good yeah get a good experience we’re not mad at that and then you get done you know what just happened yeah yeah you poisoned yourself yeah that’s what happened you pay a bit of a price you’re paying a big price and you for sure can’t do it again the next day and the next and the next day oh you definitely can’t do that don’t do that yeah don’t do don’t do that because there’s something called type 2 diabetes which you’re working on it’s true you’re in route yeah you’re in route oh yeah if that’s what we’re doing what’s the if that’s what we’re doing every day it’s true all kinds of heart disease you got problems yeah don’t do that yeah so you kind of got to stay away from that one play this weird balancing like game there’s no reason to balance right you have to you can go you can get mulk you can get done with your dinner you have that sweet tooth which is fine normal but you can follow that sweet tooth right to the mulk container and you’re gonna play any you don’t have to play any balancing game you just go yeah as much monk as you want much more straight up you want five scoops of milk good gonna be thick oh it’s gonna be thick unless you add some more milk are you going foot i’ve scooped some more the most out of your honest three scoops yeah three is my max five five would be guys you’re going hard but you know if they’re if you’re there bro up to you yeah get it you call it get it man get it five squeeze out that’s 100 grams of protein yeah 100 something yeah hey you get all this stuff at jackalfuel com and if you want to get free shipping which look the reason this isn’t uh hey order now and get free shipping that’s not what we’re doing here’s what we’re doing we’re competing with one of the biggest companies in the world who offers you free shipping cool they got a big log uh algorithm that’s figuring this stuff out and they got all this mass scale and all this things going on they’re trying to get your information they’re trying to get you into the zone where they can own you which is understandable yeah we get it we want you to have an option to still get free shipping and not enter the matrix yeah so you go to jugglefield com stay out the matrix oh yeah and and if you subscribe to one of these items which you should because then you’ll be able to get it with free shipping there you go jockofield com you can also get the getting at the vitamin shop you can get the drinks the energy drinks at wawa on the east coast we’re working on some other convenience stores right now sorry west coast that the convenience terrain a little bit rough a little bit rough the way it’s split up and what’s where so we’re working it but if you’ve got a vitamin shop near you or where you are live work whatever and grab it from there oh for sure all good 100 100 yeah there you go check it out yeah it’s good also jiu jitsu we’re doing jiu jitsu to know jiu jitsu or to not know jujitsu which one is more beneficial do we want to know jiu-jitsu yes sir we do i don’t i don’t care if you know one day of jiu-jitsu it’s better than zero days of jiu-jitsu anyway when you do jiu-jitsu you’re gonna need a ghee yep hey i can only train jiu-jitsu one day a week so i’m not gonna train is not the answer yeah it’s true the answer is i can only trained you to do once a month so i’m doing it once a month that’s the answer yes there it is you get the chance of training did you do training just that’s what we’re doing it’s true so when you get your ghee you get the best ghee that you possibly can made in america by the way in origin geek go to origin usa com for these things you get rash guards on there as well some hoodies on there also from origin usa american-made denim jeans i got my delta 68 jeans yeah my favorite jeans yeah of all time by the way yeah and fyi leaf hit me up too because he got his you got a pair of delta 68s and we re-cut the delta 68 it’s probably like i don’t know six months ago or something like that and to provide more comfort i dig it yeah so delta 68’s the best most comfortable things that you can put on your legs and they look good too by the way so here and you know maybe you care about this maybe you don’t but here’s the thing factually this is what happened so put mine on i had an event to go to called the muster might have heard of it wore the delta 68 origin genes to the muster they’re pretty new too and wear a white t-shirt my wife likes me and a white t-shirt don’t ask why it’s just how it is let’s just know that these are all things i do not care about yes but the concept the underlying concept i think most of us it has some value so she was like hey you’re looking really nice boom that’s all you got to know delta 68 hey functional made in america look good um you know durable all this stuff get these jeans and echo charles’s wife will think you look good no she’ll probably won’t look at you at all oh hopefully i won’t look at you but she thinks i look good so maybe if you’re married or have a girlfriend or boyfriend or whatever they’ll think you look good in them too they look good we got work wear coming out by the way if you don’t know that we got work work coming out so you when you’re out there on the construction site you’re out there as a lineman you’re out there being on the farm whatever you’re doing you’re working we have work we’re coming which is made in america yeah but for real me for real made in america every ounce of that thing every rivet every every thread made in america even the threat itself made in america we’re making work where for workers for american workers made by american workers that’s what we’re doing yes sir origin usa com also if you want to get a shirt or a hat or hoodie that says discipline equals freedom or you want to represent this path in any way go to jackostore com that’s where you can get this stuff some good stuff on there some new stuff on there oh jiu jitsu section you know um where look if you do jiu jitsu and you kind of want to represent the path and jiu jitsu kind of a hybrid representation scenario you can do that now you know what’s cool i noticed at the muster we have a jiu jitsu night the second night we do jiu jitsu introduction to jiu jitsu and there’s more people now there used to be almost no one did jiu-jitsu yeah and now majority of people have done jiu-jitsu so we’re getting in the right direction yeah we want everyone to do jiu-jitsu we could keep it a secret right right that’s a kind of an ego thing right if i don’t tell anyone about this yeah i’m just gonna be the baddest man on the block just so much more superior i’m so much more superior that’s a that’s a dork move it’s dorky yeah because actually no you know what i don’t think that’s that’s not called the door that’s an ego move yeah that’s just pure you go i’m gonna blame you i’m not gonna teach you anything yeah i’m i’m just gonna keep this special thing this super power to myself yeah it’s kind of surprising that the gracies i think the gracies did it right because i think that as they broke it out then they started promoting it and teaching it and spreading the word i think if they would have failed to do that they would have been five years behind it would have taken an extra five years for people to start kind of figuring out on their own just from videos and ufc and all those things but it just would have been bad they did the right thing when it was time to bring it out they brought it out and started teaching its people well actually i’ll kind of in a way do you want better probably not even five years when you think about it because you said because the because you just said they they they might figure it out because of videos in ufc or whatever the whole existence of usc is because of horizontal traces so they wouldn’t have had the ufc ufc straight up wouldn’t exist because that’s all it was essentially demonstration demonstration of how effective jiu-jitsu is in a real fight that’s essentially what ufc one was so bad that wouldn’t exist no one would do it it’d be probably relegated to little secret sex like brazil little secret dojos doing their secret art just rolling everything so it’s there it’s there for everyone to get into yep it’s not like that and if you want to get a t-shirt that talks you know representation shows that you’re on the jiu jitsu path oh yeah yeah bunch of stuff on there we have a subscription situation as well called the shirt locker there’s a new creative i was at the monster you might have heard of it um and every once well well let’s face it every day i was wearing a different shirt from the shirt locker every single shirt that i wore someone asked hey where did you get that shirt including people who weren’t even there for the muster like where’d you get that shirt the support sog that was a good one a lot of people asked about that one it’s a good one um nonetheless good shirts on there so yeah you get a new shirt every month creative designs kind of new new designs creative outside of the box designs but relative and very awesome good feedback on that one yeah also if you’re going to subscribe to things you might as well subscribe to this podcast right here leave a review and all that stuff also we have a couple other podcasts we have jocko unraveling with myself and daryl cooper dc we have the grounded podcast we have the warrior kid podcast we have the jocko underground jockowunderground com where we have an alternate universe where in the event of tyrannical activities in this country and no one knows what to do we’ll be able to tell you what to do we’ll be there we’ll be on the underground jock underground com we made it so we’d have an alternate platform in case something happens with this platform and because we did that it cost money to do that and if you want to support that it cost you eight eight dollars and eighteen cents a month and in order to give you something back for that in the immediate we do another little podcast on there we talk about some we do some q a we talk about some alternate things so if you want to subscribe to that do it we appreciate it also if you can’t afford it we understand things are tough out there right now if you can’t afford that eight dollars and eighteen cents a month just email assistance jocko underground com and we will take care of you and we also have a youtube channel where we make videos um i’m sort of the brains behind them and i’m sort of the person that thinks of the ideas and then echo is the technical guy that does the follows the mechanics of making them sure if you want to subscribe to that yes sir you can do that oh yeah that bothers you bro no no no no it so bothers you yeah actually more than it bothers me you’re just really really happy about it that’s more than the contrast you know yeah you take this video stuff really not bro you know it’s just it’s just a thing you know it’s just a thing i didn’t realize how much of a world the video thing is like there’s some what do you mean i mean it’s like uh it has its own little thing right its own little its own little ecosystem what you’re in oh like the industry or whatever the circles yeah whatever yeah yeah there you kind of size each other up and so i don’t know if i size people up but i don’t know you size up their cameras oh yes i definitely say yeah you size up their videos yeah i mean they create a field like are you trying to act like you you you don’t i’ll be i might say something like oh yeah i saw this video it looked pretty cool you’re like oh i sent it to you and you’ll be like um you know i don’t know what their aspect ratio was or whatever i’m like okay bro frame rate is all off uh hey look you might be right i don’t know if you want to check out echo charles’s expert video production then you can check out our youtube channel sure jacko podcast hey origin has a cool one too origin usa if you want to see what’s going on up there you can check that out also psychological warfare if you want to hear no no not if you want to hear if you’re struggling to get past the moment of weakness and you need to hear someone with integrity named jocko tell you why hey this moment of weakness is fleeting and it’s insignificant if you want to hear that in whatever way psychological warfare oh get down it’s an album the tracks of him helping you pass these moments you suck we all have them don’t forget about flipsidecanvas com where dakota meyer is selling cool stuff to hang on your wall that’s also made in america got a bunch of books new book coming out called final spin you better order it now if you want that first to dish look that’s what you got to do to support there’s what’s the publisher thinking they’re thinking well you know jacob you’re really not a novelist you’ve written some you’ve written some non-fiction but you know you’re not really a novelist i don’t know we we shouldn’t really make too many of these well then the first reviews came in and they were like damn good yeah so anyways if you want to check that out if you want to order that first dish if you want to support the cause you want other people to get this message check out final spin it’s available now for pre-order it’ll be it’ll be to you uh in a week by the way it’s coming out november 9th so check that out leadership strategy and tactics field manual the code the evaluations of protocol this one equals freedom field manual way the warrior get one two three four so many people at the muster came up and said thanks for running that book miking the dragon same thing if you’ve got kids or you know kids get them get the freaking kids those books get to get get the kids that you know actually one jiu jitsu guy he’s uh instructor black belch he said he just carries the warrior kid in his back yeah he meets a kid he’s like here you go here you go can you imagine the impact that’s gonna have if i would have got that book i would be i would be ruler of the world right now yeah and a benevolent ruler of the world be nice sure i wouldn’t be a bully i’d be a warrior kid so get warrior kid for your kids for all kids about face by hackworth and then of course extreme ownership and the dicardium dichotomy of leadership that i wrote with my brother life babin also echelon front speaking of late fab and we have a leadership consultancy we solve problems through leadership no matter what’s going on in your company you think you got issues you think you got problems things are going wrong things are going sideways guess what leadership is the solution go to echelonfront com to see how we can help you solve your problems whether it’s us coming directly to you to consult whether it’s you coming to the muster whether it’s our field training exercises ef battlefield we’ve got all kinds of things that we do to help you get through your situations utilizing leadership and that includes we have an online training program an online leadership training program extreme ownership academy this is where you can learn to lead and you can stay ahead of the game and you can practice and you can rehearse and you can take courses and you can come on live and ask me questions you don’t learn leadership in one day it doesn’t work you need to constantly train just like you go to the gym just like you do jiu jitsu extreme ownership com if you want to check that out and if you want to help service members active and retired service members if you want to help the families if you want to help gold star families you can check out mark lee’s mom mama lee she’s got a charity organization and if you want to donate or you want to get involved go to americasmightywarriors org and if you want more of my p-brained pontifications or you need more of echo’s ridiculous ramblings or dave’s enthusiastic extras you can find us on the interwebs on twitter on the gram and on that face dave is that david r burke echo zadek with charles and i am at jacqueline willing and thanks to everyone out there worldwide in the military standing the watch to keep us safe thank you also thanks to our police and law enforcement firefighters paramedics emts dispatchers correctional officers border patrol secret service and all first responders thank you for standing the watch here on the home front to keep us safe and to everyone else out there keep an open mind free your mind don’t think you have to control everything because you can’t you’re not going to be able to put everything in perfect order that is not possible instead be ready to shift be ready to change be ready to adapt be ready to adjust to new environments and new information don’t let your mind get stuck don’t let it get trapped instead free your mind free your mind and until next time this is echo and jocko out
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