Jocko Podcast
Hosted by Jocko Willink
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This is the Jaco Unravelling Podcast, episode nine, with Daryl Cooper and me, Jocko Willink. So, last time, we were talking about the stories that we tell ourselves, and then how we get stories in groups, and those start to expand, and those start to unify people together.
And it seems like we have an instinct towards some level of those stories unifying us to a point to where we start to drift into just straight tribalism.
And then, we actually use those stories and change those stories as a tool to strengthen our tribes even more.
And I know you had some, some interesting stories slash myths that, that, that kind of represent that very well. Throughout history, we've seen this.
It's, it's, it's tapping into a basic, a basic way that our mind structures reality for us, right? I mean, if you think about how you teach the youngest children something, if you need to teach them something, you need to teach them to tie their shoes, right? How are you gonna do that? Through imitation. You're gonna show them, "Do what I do." Right? And that's the same thing that like chimpanzees, how they teach their children things. As they get a little bit older, what's the next way that you're gonna teach them stuff? Probably maybe by like five, six, seven years old, you're gonna start teaching them basic things about like what a good person behaves like, whatever. You're gonna do it through stories. Right? That's like the next level up. It's like, later on, like down the road, you can start talking about kind of concepts, right?
You can start teaching them, teaching somebody things in terms of, you know, instead of telling you a story about Prince Charming, and this is how a man should treat a woman, you're going to learn through this story and internalize that. Maybe later on, we can say, "This is the essence of love, and how love operates, and blah, blah, blah." But, but stories, narrative, is how we, is how we structure reality and understand things in a very, very profound way.
Yeah. I've written a bunch of books. The, two of the leadership books that I've written, actually, all three of the leadership books that I've written are heavily based on stories. Stories from combat, and then stories from, you know, the civilian sector. And, and obviously people get the feedback I get all the time and we have the principles written in there in Extreme Ownership and the Economy of Leadership. We write the principle clearly in there. Hey, this is called cover and move. This is what it means. But people never say, oh, thanks for spelling out the principle for me. They, they say, oh, love the way you guys told the story and then I could see it. So yeah, this is not just something that we do for kids. I mean.
Well, it sticks with us.
Yeah, it sticks with us forever and it's such a great way to, to get your point across. It's a much more powerful way to do it.
And for certain things, it's the only way, right? I mean, there's certain, just like, you're not going to tell somebody, break down into philosophical concepts, how to tie your shoes. You just got to show them and tell them how to do it. There's certain things that you just have to use a story. Like, it's, it's the only thing that's really going to serve that purpose. And elucidating the principles, what you're really doing there is saying, okay, you know, all those stories, this one I just told you in the book, yeah, but all those other ones that you've always heard. And there's that, there's that thing that the leaders are doing. There's something in, this is what it is, right? So you're drawing out that commonality in those stories by stating the principles.
You know, it's interesting when you said, these, you, you actually brought it up perfectly in my mind when you said, these stories that we tell ourselves can be unifying and then that same story can become like a divisive type of tribalism, right? And it reminded me of this, this book, um, called, it's a book about the Rwandan genocide by a guy named Philip Gorievich, who also wrote a really powerful book on Abu Ghraib, actually. It's very, very, you know, Eric Weinstein actually knows that guy. I believe he's married to a friend of their family. And if it were at all possible, I think that would be a great guy for you to talk to.
Certainly possible.
He's just incredibly morally sensitive writer, just a very, very interesting guy. Um, anyway, and so in this book about the Rwandan genocide.
What's it called?
Uh, we wish to inform you that tomorrow we'll be killed with our families.
I have that one. I haven't done it yet. Um, man, I, I did Machete Season. It was kind of like, all right. There's one, there's one more. Maybe it's that one.
Life, no, Life Laid Bare probably is what you think. It's by the same guy who wrote.
Yeah, but he interviews the victims.
It's brutal. It's, it's as brutal as you think, yeah.
And so, in this book, we wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families. Goes through, and it's just this harrowing book, as you can imagine. And at the end of it, he relates this story that took place as the genocide was winding down, I believe, in this girls' school in Rwanda. Some of the Antara Hamway militias were still running around. The rebels had come back and were pushing back against them, but this was still ongoing. And a bunch of them came into this girls' school and were trying to figure out who were the Tutsi so we can kill them all. And they were telling them, you know, Hutu girls on one side, Tutsi girls to the others, and on the other side, and these are girls, these
are grade school girls. They refused to separate themselves out from the Tutsi girls and so that they could know who they were. And one of the girls said that there are no Hutu or Tutsi here, there are only Rwandans here. And a lot of them died. They all, they killed all of them rather than kill none of them. And eventually, somebody came and broke it up, but a lot of them died. And so if you think of that like, whoa, okay, that's something that in a lot of contexts we're told is a dirty word. That's nationalism, right? I mean, that's what it is. Nationalism in the United States is what got Irish people and Italian people and German people to say, oh, Germany's attacking people in Europe, we
gotta get together and go over there and stop them, right? Very, very unifying thing.
That same force is what got Germany to start the fight in the first place, right? And so, identity is a very interesting thing because you go up above the blood level and everything after the blood level is a story. That's what it is, right? And you need a story to keep it together. You look at a place like the United States, we need a story more than anybody. You know, you go to a play, you go to Poland, and yeah, obviously, like in a, in a country that big, you know, the blood relationship is maybe somewhat loose, but they're all Polish people, right? There's a shared ethnicity there that they can kind of shape their identity around. In the United States, we got a story or we got nothing.
You know, we got nothing if we don't have a story. You gotta find something that is going to bring together
old school WASPs who came here on the Mayflower,
people who fought on both sides of the Civil War, people who got here from the Third World as refugees ten years ago, people who were formerly enslaved as a matter of policy by this country and were legally, you know, excluded and oppressed up until like officially up until just very, very recently, a few decades ago. We gotta come up with a way, with a story, to get all those people to buy in to the level that we had German Americans joining up the army and volunteering to go fight in Germany. To the, to the extent that we had Japanese Americans while we were interning their cousins on the West Coast, signing up and volunteering
to go over to Europe and fight in what became, as far as I know, the most decorated unit in the Second World War.
Mm-hmm.
Right? And if you got a story, that's what you can make happen. Right? You can put everybody on the same page and make something like that happen. I think that where we're at right now is we've got a crisis with our story. Right? We've got people spinning off into different, into very radically different and in many ways opposed
narratives about the country they're living in and the society and the people around them.
Doesn't it, doesn't it seem though that the, the power of the American story of, you know, rugged individualism and coming over here and building and creating things and you can make it. What about the power of that story? That's, that's a good story.
I think it worked very well for a long time. And I think that people, especially young people right now are struggling with it. You know, we talked about this a little bit in the previous episode, but I mean, if you're, you know, just to reiterate very, very quickly, if you're a millennial... You know, you got out of high school and the country was at war, nine eleven happened, the country was at war. You got out of college and before you got your feet on the ground, the financial crisis happened. It took several years for that to recover. Depending on what industry you were going into, it didn't really recover. Maybe now you're getting into your
mid thirties or so, you're thinking about buying a house and having some kids finally. And, you know, we get shut down because of COVID. It's been a lot of instability. And people are told that they're going to be moving around a lot, changing jobs a lot and so forth throughout the course of their lives, just to, you know, to be able to make it. And people look forward and they don't, they can't really plan that well past a year or two years, or let alone 10 or 30 or 40 years. And so that idea, I mean, they'll tell you outright right now, economists will tell you that millennials are the first generation in American history that is on track to have a lower standard of living than their parents. And if you
want to talk about inequality, generational inequality isn't something that, isn't something that, you know, it's not a way that we typically frame it. But I think that's something that's very powerful. I think people can deal with the fact that I live in a, you know, two-bedroom house and somebody out there lives in a mansion. Most people can actually deal with that. I don't know if that is as damaging to people's sort of idea of their country or themselves. There's a lot of people necessarily make that out to be. But if somebody is starting to look at their future and realizing that they're never going to live in as nice of a house as they grew up in, and that their kids are going to grow up with less than they had when they grew up, that's something you notice. That's something that you feel
on a very deep and visceral level, I think. And
Why is that?
You know, it's a good ques- I've been thinking a lot about this lately.
So where are you, is this your, are these your thoughts? Did you read about this?
No, I mean, the economic reality, you know, I've been reading about, but the effect of it is something that I've been really kind of puzzling over lately and trying to figure out. And, you know, I'm kind of the opposite of it. I grew up in the gutter, so, you know, it was, it didn't take a lot to take a few steps up from that.
But I think that, you know, if somebody's parents right now are in their 70s, and you're 35 or pushing 40 or something, and it's starting to become clear to you, and knowing that it's kind of becoming clear to your parents that, you know, they're getting older and you still really don't have it together, your life still isn't that stable. Knowing that your kids are gonna, you know, they go to grandma and grandpa's house, and it's nice, and that you're not gonna have that house, most likely. Or at least, people feel that way. You know, there's paths to it, but the, you know, the, there's a level of instability, though, that makes it very difficult for people to look down the road and expect it, and to plan for it and predict it. In other words, to construct a story around it,
where I'm doing, I did this, and I'm doing that, and it's gonna lead to this. People have a lot of trouble with that right now. And so, you know, this idea that, you know, this is America, you can just go out and build a life and do whatever you want, I mean, one way or another, this current young generation is on track to take a step backwards. And I think that part of what we're seeing is the fallout from that. I mean, I think that like, you know, if you think of, one of the reasons people are so politically engaged right now is that we're told, this is America, right? We're told that that is actually something that you can exercise some control over, is the political system. That's what's great about our system. It's our system. It's the people's system.
And so people say, "Okay, I'm gonna get involved politically." But of course, what they see is nothing. You know, you don't have any influence, obviously. You're one out of 100.
I beat this guy on Twitter.
Yeah, you're one out of 140 million voters and it's just now, on one hand, it's a great thing. Our system is designed to resist radical, rapid change, right? You mentioned in the last episode, all the people out there who were just freaking out because Donald Trump is president. What's going to happen? And the answer is that the US government is a vast bureaucracy and almost nothing is going to happen.
I was thinking about that after we recorded that later, I was thinking, I know for a fact, there's people that are going to hear me say that. And their blood is going to start to boil. And, and I want to let you know, if that was you, that when you heard me say Hillary Clinton wouldn't have been the end of the world. And Donald Trump wasn't the end of the world. If that made your blood start to boil, you're the person I'm talking about. You actually are. If you said, you see, I, I knew it. I knew Jaco was a, he doesn't understand. You know, I, if that was you, you're the person I'm talking to.
And in a way, it's a good thing, right? In a way though, you know, we also talked about how people are so emotionally invested in politics. Like that's the narrative they're kind of engaged with and playing out and invested in. And yet they can't help out over time, but notice that the emoti- like relative to the inputs that they're providing to this, to this thing. The outputs are, are not very responsive to, to, to it, right? And so, and part of, and so it's a good thing that our system resists this radical change. People elect the wrong guy or whatever it is. But on the other hand, people put this massive amount of emotional investment into it. And then notice that, yeah, things actually don't change that much relative to the investment that I'm putting in.
Yeah, go work that hard on a business somewhere. Go work that hard on your job. You can actually see some ROI. You'll see some legit ROI.
I mean, you know, the reality is 99% of the government, I'm telling you this as somebody who worked for a long time for the DOD, you can elect, you can have the most, you know, contested emotional election that is just people are crying in the streets with happiness or rage or sadness or whatever it is, and 99% of the government will just feel little ripples from that. That's it, right? Because most, 99% of the government is a big bureaucracy. It employs millions and millions of people. If you count the contractors and everything else, it's tens of millions of people. And I don't care who you are, you can elect anybody you want. And now, on the other hand, what we see with somebody like Trump or Bernie Sanders and so forth is, because, you know, we have this idea that like, well, no, that's
not how it works. Is I elect somebody, we elect somebody, and then things change in accordance with our wishes, right? That's just not practical with a vast bureaucracy like that. So we're elect, we're starting to latch on to people who come and say, well, I'll, trust me, I'll be the guy. I don't care what the obstacles are. I'll go in there and smash everything out of the way, and I will just get this stuff done. And now, Trump goes in. If you, it's funny, because there's people out there who are saying, oh, you're wrong about that, Jaco, because Trump's come in and, look, he's destroyed everything. But then there's people who supported Trump who are like, we haven't gotten anything out of this. We elected this guy thinking he was gonna be a bull in a china shop, and he's been stymied all the way. We haven't gotten anything out of it. There's no wall, there's
no nothing, right? And so they feel like totally the opposite, right? And, you know, and so what you worry about, though-
There you go. Case in point, dude. Case in point.
And so what you worry about, though, is next time, they say, you see, you tried Trump, and they just stymied him again, but trust me, they're not gonna stymie me. And who's that guy? Is that gonna be the guy who says, look, I'm gonna, I'm gonna break some things, and I just need you guys to have my back when I do it, because there's no other way to get things done. You saw how, you saw it with Trump, or you saw it with whoever on the other side. And so you start to elect increasingly assertive people who are promising things that really can't be done without breaking the institutions. You know, that's how you maybe get down, uh, down a road that you don't want to go down necessarily.
So the thing, the fact that we don't have a common sort of accepted story, and I hate to use this word, but I'm gonna use it because that's what I hear people say all the time, the narrative, right? That there's, there's multiple different narratives out there. Why is it that we are so confused about what our story is here? Why isn't there, you know, and, and, and one of the things that we've talked about offline was, was like the civil war, right? The civil war was obviously a bloodbath, um, and
the, the fact of the matter is, you know, this is a, this, this could and should be a huge point of pride for America that we fought this war, ended slavery.
There was a massive amount of blacks freed, free slaves that went and fought for the Union. You know, they, they have a, should have a massive point of pride of participating in that war, you know? Seven thousand commissioned officers were black, almost a hundred and eighty thousand enlisted black. That's a massive percentage. That's, that's like a 10% of the, of the, of the people that were serving.
When they were one or two percent of the northern population.
When they were one or two percent. So we're talking massive volunteers had a huge impact. Twenty thousand more in there were sailors.
They, I think the number sixteen Medal of Honors awarded to blacks that fought for freedom.
They had a much higher casualty rate. You know, you talked about like the Japanese that were, were fighting in World War Two and how they, they were just excessively heroic. And it's the same thing with, with the black soldiers that fought in the civil war. They were about twice as likely to be killed. I mean, we're, we're talking, you know, heroic efforts.
But you don't hear about that for some reason. For some reason, we can't unify behind a story and be proud of what happened. And, and, and to me,
Is that, you know, is that a concerted effort? Right? Are there, you know, is that a concerted effort to, to, to, to squash that? And we don't want people to have pride in that because all of a sudden you're proud of America. If you're proud of America, then you're supporting the system. If you're supporting the system, then you're not, you're not where we want you to be.
Concerted, I don't know, but I do think it's a natural outcome from the way we engage with mass democracy, right? Which is, if you look at something that's really happened since the 1960s,
we've had this rolling, kind of, this rolling revolution where
various groups that previously were not very politically engaged, right? Previous to the 1960s, black people either were, you know, physically prevented from voting in the South or just were not that engaged in the North. They just didn't vote very much. Since the 1960s, they've become politicized and they vote more. Great, that's good.
Next, before the 1970s, polls showed that women tended to vote the way their husbands voted. Now there's a large divergence there. Women have become more politicized by the feminist movement and have become self-consciously political as women, right? Not just necessarily as American citizens, but as women who are now politicized in voting. And over time, that has taken place, it took place after the Stonewall riots with the LGBT community and more and more increasingly like, you know, increasingly small and sometimes obscure groups that become politicized and involved in such a way that they tend to vote as a block.
And now, you know, and our politics is sort of, for better or worse, since the 1960s, has kind of become set up in such a way that all of those groups tend to form a coalition that votes one way. And then you have, you know, the non-those groups that are increasingly polarized on the other side. And the...
It's a tough nut to crack, right? Because if you think about it, like 90% of African Americans vote Democrat, right? There are other groups that have similar numbers in that direction. If, all of a sudden, there was this mass sort of movement where people came and said, "You know, I'm not voting in a given direction because of my identity. I'm just, I'm gonna vote based on what I think about tax rates, or what I think about foreign policy, or whatever." It would take a complete rearranging of our entire political alignment, right? I mean, the Democratic Party would have to find an entirely new program to operate with.
And so, there is an incentive to make sure that people are oriented toward the society in a particular way, right? If African Americans, as a group, started feeling patriotic about their role in the Civil War, and America's kind of historical role, you know, the historical process that we kind of faced a problem that no other country in the world really ever had to face, right? We had this mass population of slaves that we inherited from before we were a country, before the Declaration of Independence, or anything like that. And then, as time went on, people started to realize, "This is not something that we can be doing anymore."
And we fought a bloody war to get, well, you know, the outcome of which was to get rid of that institution. And then, you know, these weren't people that we had, you know, taken from a specific homeland and enslaved, and now you're free and you can go back to your homeland finally. Like, that ship had sailed. And so, it's like, "These are Americans, and we've got this population that was formerly enslaved in a way that was absolutely brutal, right? Chautauqua slavery, the way it worked over here." And now, we have to work them into the society in such a way where, you know, I mean, after, well, you know, where they were gonna be neighbors in the same communities with people
who had formerly enslaved them. And if not the specific people, with the people who had done it, right? And, I mean, that's an unbelievably complicated and difficult historical problem, and we haven't solved it yet completely, obviously. I think that, you know...
If somebody could, and again, we're talking about stories, right? Somebody needs to come up with a story that makes everybody feel like they're a part of that. And, you know, the fact that, you know, when you mentioned, um, when you told me, I've read books about the Civil War, and I'm sure it was in there somewhere, but you were the one that actually told me so that I, so that it stuck in my mind, the black participation in the Civil War. Like, I had no idea they were so overrepresented in the Union Army. Um, I mean, 10% is, it's hard to really, it's hard to wrap your mind around that in a way, because they were 1 to 2% of the population in the North, but half of those were women. So you're really talking about 0.5 to 1% of the population of the North, and they were 10% of the Union Army at one point.
You know, that is something that should be front and center in our national myth in a way, right? Because that, that problem, I mean, the people who call slavery our original sin, um, maybe there are certain issues with that phrasing, but in a lot of ways it is. I mean, in the sense that it's the thing that we have been grappling with and have not figured out up to this day that is going to determine whether or not this project works, you know? And that, because now it doesn't just involve African Americans, it's coalescing to something larger, where the, you've got the person of color term, where, you know, other groups have kind of been lumped into this way of seeing things. You know, it was white, black before, now it's white, person of color now.
And we're either going to solve that problem and come up with a story that can, can give everybody a positive role to play in this thing, or we're not. And that's going to decide whether we stand or fall.
Yeah, it's, it's, it's scary to me that you have to use the term, we have to come up with a story, as if we have to create it from thin air, when, when you, when you, when you look at the story, which I just kind of rattled off some of, which is, you had, you know, uh, white people and black people from the North fighting for freedom, like, that's, that's the story, man. That's the story.
Yeah.
And, and look, okay, okay, then, then we also have to accept, I guess that's not the story. The story is, then you have other forms of oppression that happen. But we continue to, to move forward as, as a country to try and bring equality. And it seems like that story's powerful enough that you could overcome the, the...
The story of, hey, it's us against them. It's this group against that group. It's, it's the other people against these people. It seems like there's enough, there's a unifying story that exists. It's just that it's being, it's being drowned out by, by different parts of the stories. And I mean, look.
You know, that's what happens. You know, when you go into combat, you go into combat, you go into, you go into a firefight with 10 guys and those 10 guys are gonna come back with different stories of what happened. And they might've been, you know, I, I have this experience with some of my friends where we experienced the exact same thing. Like we were three feet apart. His, his perception of what happened is very different from mine. And, you know, there's no, we, we don't even like disagree on it. It's just, you know, on the, on the one, we were talking about left brain, right brain. And it's just like, they just don't literally know. You're right, playing when you cut that, that part of your brain that joins the two halves together. You're, and you just saw something with red eyes. It's like that. You just literally don't.
They just, the stories just don't match. And I'm not mad at you. You saw something totally different than me. You remember something totally different than me. So I get it. That's, that you can focus on one part of a story. But, you know, that goes to interpreting books, you know, I was an English major in college, right? And you could interpret these books, you could focus on something that you and I could read the same book and you could write a thousand words about that book and not have one overlap on the Venn diagram of my assessment of the book. Right? That, that happens.
I had, I read a, um, a write-up on Blood Meridian one time that interpreted it as a condemnation of America's gun culture.
Exactly. So, yeah, it's, it's, to me, it's, it's scary that.
That we don't, that we don't find this unifying story that we, and, and really, I guess this is maybe Pollyanna attitude, but why don't we look at the positive sides of the story?
Well, I think that's what we're maybe gonna be trying to do here a little bit, right? I mean, not to whitewash or mythologize anything, but, you know, a story is not,
you have facts, we can talk about facts, right? But then a story is something that takes those facts and makes them into something that emotionally resonates with people. And so it's the responsibility of the people who are the culture makers, right? So why hasn't that story really gotten out there? Well, the people who have control of the organs of culture, right? Hollywood and various media apparatus and stuff, that's just not the story they're telling. And that's why, that's why that story doesn't prevail. It's a great story, but we need people out there who are, who are gonna tell it in a compelling way. Because it's gotta be compelling, right? I mean, if you think about, they, they ran into this issue in the 1960s. Where in the early 60s, you've got the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King.
It's, it's passionate, it's focused on the South, ending Jim Crow in the South, right? And it's just, it's this, this magnetic leader who is preaching nonviolence from a Christian standpoint, inspired by Gandhi, in the face of his house being bombed and his life being threatened all the time. And like all of these things happening and his, his supporters being beaten and attacked and so forth. And keeping them in the mindset of nonviolence, right? Now, if I was 20 years old and black in Birmingham or Chicago or whatever in 1965,
Martin Luther King carries a lot of weight, so I'm gonna, he says nonviolence, Roger that, it's nonviolence. But as you get into 66 and 67 and then 68, when he gets killed, that becomes a lot, lot tougher, you know? And part of it is because back then, they didn't know that was gonna work. Like, that's one thing you gotta remember, like, you know, we know that like, there were major reforms as a result of Martin Luther King's work and everything. They didn't know if that was actually gonna work back then. So when they got attacked by the police, like, it just looked like repression and you could lose this thing. Uh, but the other part of it is just that... You know, people are people and being a part of a revolution is a lot more interesting and a little bit sexier than being a part of a reform movement, you know?
If you were, if I was 20 years old in 1967 or 1968 and black and living in Detroit, and you came up and said, "Hey, you know, we're, we're starting a little group that's gonna pass out flyers and try to get petitions to, you know, get the city government to change this housing policy." Or another dude comes up and says, "You wanna join the Black Panthers or the Black Liberation Army? Because guess what? I got a story to tell you." That's gonna be a, that's gonna be a pretty easy and fast choice on my part, you know, I think, at that point. And, because why? They had a great story to tell, you know? These are, you know, the African-American story in particular. It's, it's really difficult because, yes, there was a civil war and there was a lot of, there was this heroism that ended with the, you know, the ending of slavery as an
institution. Um, but everybody knows, you know, things did not improve a great amount right after that, right? In some ways, for a lot of people, they got worse because, you know, some slaves at least had, by that point, like, there was a level of, as brutal as it was, like, there was some level of paternalism that existed where people, you were their property, they felt a certain amount of responsibility to take care of you and so forth. It's not a justification, it sounds so terrible to even say it that way, but it, but it existed to a degree. And all of a sudden now, you're, you're just an employee and I don't care about you at all. In fact, you're just a sharecropper and I could replace you immediately. Like, we look back in the early days of, of migration to America, they note how indentured
servants were a lot of times treated much worse than people slaves were treated because they only had them for seven years, they didn't really care what happened. And so after the civil war, you've got people, black people in the South, often working for the same people that previously owned them, because those are still the people that owned the property. And all they know how to do is agricultural and household work, because that's what they had experience doing. They weren't allowed to learn to read or anything most of the time. And so they go back and get jobs working for those same people, often under sharecropper conditions, which were, you know, exploitative to say the least, because it's not like they had legal recourse if they got cheated by their sharecropping boss or anything like that. And as time went on, they had this idea in their head, this dream, right, that
there was another place that was better, where there was no Jim Crow and things were better. And that was in the north, right? If you look at all the old Negro spirituals and stuff, the whole theme is deliverance and, you know, there's a place out there, a promised land that's better and we're going to be led to it and so forth. Moses, you know, lead our people out of Egypt. And so the First World War happens, a lot of men are overseas, there's a big, you know, production's ramped up, there's a big labor shortage, we need people. And they start inducing African Americans to leave the South and come up to the northern cities, Chicago and New York and Philly at first, and eventually by the Second World War out to California and so forth. And they get to these places and it's not paradise, right? It's not the promised land. There's official restrictions, housing restrictions
and so forth, but also it's just they find out that these people really don't want you there either. You know, a lot of times, they were, most of the time, all the time, really, they were moving into neighborhoods that were occupied, but it's not like they were moving into the nicest neighborhoods in New York or Chicago. They were moving into neighborhoods they could afford and that would take them. And these were often neighborhoods that had, that were inhabited by recent immigrants from Europe, right? So recent Lithuanians or Poles or whatever. And these people had just come, you know, from Europe themselves, maybe a generation before, had just kind of got set up in their first neighborhood where they first bought a house. And now there's people flooding in, six million people over the course of a few decades, coming from the rural South into the northern and western
cities. And they're not welcome there either. It's not comfortable, it's not good. Very quickly, the white people leave for the suburbs, take all the economic capital with them, and now the black people are in these inner cities. They own nothing, right? They're working for people again, who, as employees, that can more or less exploit them to a large degree, simply because even if they had recourse to the legal system, they don't really know how to use it. I mean, it's just, this is all very, very new to them because they had no access to it in the South. And by the 1960s and the 1970s, these inner-city ghettos and cities all over the country are a complete and total disaster. I mean, there's this article I share around with people.
In the New York Times from January in 1973, it's a four-part series they did on the South Bronx. And it's probably a little bit later than when you run, or earlier rather than when you run around New York, but it's the same kind of idea. And at the time, it was Puerto Rican and black, right? And it's a nightmare. It's a complete and total nightmare, you know, in that part of the city. And this was common, like in parts all over the world, or all over the country. And, you know, you've got your legal rights now, you know, there's no official restrictions, there's no Jim Crow. Go out and enjoy your life. It's like, well, yeah, I guess, right? Technically, technically, just go out and enjoy your life and build a business. But that is something that's very, very hard to sell.
And now they don't have that sort of hope for the promised land. That's gone now. That story is now expired because they're in the promised land, right? They're already there. And so they needed something else. Ideally, it would have been join the American dream, right? Jump in and get into the flow with everybody else, but in official and unofficial ways, that was blocked off to them. And, you know, they joined it right at the time where it was 1970, 71, when wages, median wages in the United States, after going up for 150 years, tipped over and have been going, you know, they've been stagnant or going down depending on the industry ever since. That's right at the moment that they were allowed legally to get involved with the American economy is when things kind of leveled out, competition became fiercer.
And they were competing with people who had more experience and access to the economy in many ways. It was right in 1965 when we changed the immigration laws to, you know, from 24 to 65, we had very, very little immigration. We changed that in 1965. And by 1970, we're importing masses of people to come do what? Low wage, low-skill work that might have been the entry point for those African-Americans. Well, now they've got massive competition coming in from south of the border. And so for those people, like to tell them... You know, hey, it's the American dream. You can just go out and build your life and do whatever you want. A lot of people have, there's a, there's a black middle class out there right now, and it's happened.
But for the people who have, have not gotten to that point, you know, there's another part of it too, which is that, you know, what if, I mean, just think about this, like really the, the black sort of, the African American kind of American dream that we've kind of, it's so crude to put it this way, but it's the way we've talked about it over the last like few decades is like, you, is that you can get out of the ghetto, right? That's good. You're like, oh, this, look at this person. They started in the ghetto and then they, they did good in school and then they were able to go to college and now look, they, they're out of the ghetto and they live in this other place. Well, okay. I mean, that's good. That's great. Obviously, that's great.
But that is one person who was intelligent and capable and motivated and driven, who is no longer in that community. It's like we come in every generation and we just look, okay, you're, you're cool to get out and we can take you and put you in college and da, da, da, da, da. And every generation you come and shave off, you know, some of the people who maybe actually had some parents that looked after them and people who got, you know, who were able to keep it together through high school without catching a criminal charge for something, whatever. And we shave those people off and send them off into the suburbs. And the people who are left there, you know, they're left without community leaders, they're left without social capital and it becomes very, I mean, it's, it's, it's very,
they look around and yes, there, there are opportunities, if you know how to use them, if people like I, you probably too, you know, a lot of people in the military who came from circumstances like that and they joined the military and they got out in the world and they said, oh, there's a whole other world out here and now they're just owning a house in the suburbs and they're just whatever. But when you're in that place, and I've talked to a lot of, I knew tons of these guys who came from those circumstances. And they said that like, when they got out, when they joined the Navy or got out into the world, it was just, you know, it was a, there's a whole world out there that was hard for them even to imagine really existed, because when you're in those circumstances, there's, there's kids in South LA who live 15 minutes, 15 miles from the beach,
who have never been to the ocean. I mean, a lot of people. And when you think about that, And kind of just extrapolate that out to like how limited you know their world is in a lot of ways. It's something that's extremely difficult to sort of climb out of and see. You know, when somebody comes telling you a story about how you can become an astronaut. It's like, you know, yes, you can. You actually can. You know, you really can. But man, you know, that's a tough one. It's a tough one, you know? And then when somebody comes and says, well, I got a story to tell you too. Everything that's going wrong in your life is because somebody out there is victimizing you. I know who they are. I can tell you who they are. And you can come be a part of a movement that's going to treat you like brothers and give you
a sense of pride in yourself, which you know, something like the Black Panthers was extremely good at. And, uh, and, and you want to talk about a story to tell, we're going to fight this beast and take you down. And it's like, well, okay.
Yeah, there's something that when you mentioned earlier, you know, as a 20 year old you, and I think you can just put that basically you take 20 year old male human, I can only, I can only speak from the male perspective because I am one. But there's a, there's a streak, right? We got the aggressive streak. We got the, the, the, the tendency towards action, towards violence is what I want to say. You know, you got a tendency towards violence, you know? The 20, 18, 17 year old boys get into fights. That's what
we do. We're drawn to it. We're drawn to it. We're drawn to that. Or I shouldn't say all, but many young males are drawn to that flame, right? Like moths to a flame. We're drawn to it. And then you get the idea of, and, and I do think this is part of the American story, which is kind of, kind of, as I was thinking through this whole common thread of what, what is the, what is the story that is a common American story? And one of the common American, one, one unifying thread is rebellion, right? That's, that's what we are. We were founded by rebellion. And not only that, I mean, you know, the underdog
culture, right? People root for the underdog. Star Wars is the story of the rebels against the empire. And the good guys are the rebels. And there's something romantic, there's something, um, there's something powerful about that. It's David versus Goliath. We like that. We like that in America. So like you said, when, when you're offered to join a group, the group that, that says, hey, we're not just gonna, we're not just gonna oppose the system. We're gonna fight the system. We're
gonna, we're gonna rebel against this. That becomes, that becomes a very powerful story.
Especially since World War II, the empire's us. You know, I mean, we don't have to call it that if we don't want to, but as far as like, who's the big daddy in the world right now that's calling the shots? And that if you don't like the way the world is, like, you know, who's got the most influence over it? Well, that's us. And so, you know, and that is, you know, kind of when things change. I mean, I talked about in one of my recent Mortar Made podcast, how in the 1960s, um, in the early 60s, when the civil rights movement first got going, there were a few white Americans who were involved. And almost all of them were Jewish, right? And I said that, you know, if you really think about it, you don't have
to think hard about why that would have been, right? This is in 1961, 62. Um, you've got people, you know, the big thing, the most recent thing that happens, World War II, right? That's the founding myth of our current age in a way. In 1960 was right there. And we went over there and we defeated the fascists and we came back victorious or whatever. And everybody was telling that story. Uh, but if you were a Jewish American, you were hearing that story, but you were hearing another story too. Um, everybody was kind of hearing it, but you were hearing it, you know, a little bit more on a more personal level so that in 1960, when the Greensboro sit-ins happened, in 1961, when the Freedom Rides happened, and now by 1960, you got 50 million households with televisions and this is showing
up on screen for the first time. And you see Bull Connor with German shepherds, just to make it all perfectly complete, you know, uh, snapping at, you know, Martin Luther King and his people and his marchers in suits and ties terrified of these dogs and being sprayed with water cannons. And a lot of those Jewish Americans didn't just say, um, you know, like, this is not who we are. Like, this is not America. We should not be doing this and this should be reformed. They said, oh. I know exactly what this is, right? And so they jumped in first and they jumped in with both feet. And a lot of these Jewish Americans, young people, I'm talking about people who were in Ivy League schools, were taking time off from that to go down and get the hell kicked out of them
by some of these mobs, get put in hospitals and then have to evacuate the hospital because the mob invaded the hospital to go after these people. And most of the time, this is not the kind of thing people, you know, were ignorant of back then, they knew these people were Jews and they gave them a little extra, you know, on top of that. And so these people are incredibly courageous, like going down and doing this. And throughout the 1960s, you saw this trend. And so you think about that in terms of a story that you're playing out, right? Yeah, we're fighting oppression. Yes, we're sort of, you know, maybe trying to push for reforms in the country. But those, there was a reason, the reason that they were the first ones on the front lines down there is because they had a very, very powerful story that they were playing out.
And, um, you know, I almost, you know, a lot of people have, have wondered today if part of the issue that we have, if you look at the way paranoia develops as a, as a, as a syndrome, right? Psychologically and people who have it on a, on a pathological, pathological level, experience paranoia. It happens typically because people who are, um, people are having trouble, they're either isolated from the world in such a way or are awkward, whatever it is, people are feeding energy into the world and they're not seeing anything back. The things that they're trying to make happen are not happening. Things are going wrong, right?
And they need an explanation for why this is happening. And, um, you know, maybe the explanation is that you're, you're not very important or that, you know, just things that might psychologically be difficult to, uh, to integrate. Well, if you're intent on changing a system that is very, very resistant to change as a giant political system is going to be, it's very easy to resort to paranoid explanations for that, conspiratorial explanations for that. I mean, politics is something that encourages paranoia and conspiracy theorizing in a way, right? And, um, I think that if you are a black American, to stay with the theme,
And you are, you see the Martin Luther King movement, you see the black power movement, you see all these things happening. And yet, the problem is no longer that there are Jim Crow laws, or that there's slavery. The problem is just that for millions and millions of people, life sucks and they feel trapped by it and they don't see a way out and nothing they do seems to change that. Right? And that if I'm a smart, smart person who's highly motivated and my mom kind of raised me right or whatever, and yeah, maybe I can get to college or go join the military and I could totally get out of this place and I'm gonna do that or whatever, but I know that I'm leaving behind a whole lot of people who are not going to have that experience.
And, um, so maybe that's not good enough for me, that I can escape this and leave behind the people I grew up with and, you know, and, um, and those people are, you know, they're, they're gonna look for a way, when, when the political system itself is built to resist radical change, which again is not a bad thing, really, right? You don't want wild swings in your national politics all the time. You know, yes, we're in NATO, no, we're not, yes, we're, you don't want that, right? And yet, when there's something that feels extremely urgent to people, when they feel trapped, and there's nothing worse than feeling trapped. I mean, anybody who's ever had money problems knows that it hits you on a very, very deep and primal level, right?
Because that thing is in there screaming at you that you're going to starve, right? That thing that is out there telling, trying to spur you to action, you need to go hunt, you need to go gather berries because there's no resources, you have to go do it, do it, do it. But, you know, in a modern economy, you don't go hunt or gather berries, you have to kind of go out and interact with the bureaucracy in a way, or something like that. And so there's no immediate action to take, and so that feeling just manifests as this vague, dull anxiety that is the background noise to your entire life. And, you know, for, so, so that, there's this urgency. To change things for people and they don't see a way to do it because again it's not set up to have like one person or a group of people go be able to go out and just radically change things.
Well, and you feel ignored. You feel like the system's ignoring you. And if you go out with a group of people on the street and tear down a statue or throw a brick through a window.
Whether or not that actually is going to change anything or whether you think it's really going to, they're not going to ignore you anymore. And you know, that's a, that's an extremely, you want to talk about primal things like, you know, that's something that's extremely deep in us as well. You know, the Greeks wrote about Thumos all the time. It was that need for, you know, not just ambition, recognition or status recognition, but you know, it's that thing that does not like being ignored.
So I, I want to talk a little bit about, or I want to ask you. The propensity for movements to be absorbed. And I've got two kind of opposing options here or opposing takes on this. The one is, you know, does the, does the nonviolent, uh, does the nonviolent movement get overrun? Maybe absorbed is not the right word there, but it does get, does it get absorbed by the violent movement? Because the very nature of the two movements, this one is violent.
And if you're not going to be violent and that, that means I'm going to, I'm going to dominate you and you're going to, you're going to either be, you're going to be get absorbed into my movement.
And then, and I think you talked about this on, on martyr made, is the propensity for America to absorb these radical movements. And take the radicalism out of them and turn them into a mainstream.
Very less, very, to mitigate the impact a lot by just absorbing these movements where they become cool.
And once they're cool, it's sort of like, okay, well, okay, I guess that movement isn't cool anymore. Once it becomes mainstream, all of a sudden it's not cool anymore and it loses steam.
So, first part, do you think that the nonviolent movements get absorbed by the violent ones? And we're kind of seeing it on TV right now, right? I mean, everyone says there's, hey, look, there's peaceful protesters, and there are, we know it, but we're not seeing them on the news. We're seeing Molotov cocktails on the news, right? That's what we're seeing. So, the peaceful protesters out there trying to raise their voice and point out some oppression and some problematic policing, that's great, but we're not really seeing them right now. They are being absorbed by the people that are gonna huck bricks. Is that historically the norm?
Yes, yeah, absolutely. I mean, when you, when you, this, I mean, one of the reasons that Martin Luther King should be the fifth face on Mount Rushmore, right? I mean, I look at him as that level of American figure, right? And most people kind of do, I mean, and that's good. He's not underrated, obviously, he's appropriately rated, but I still think most people don't understand how absolutely revolutionary and in the face of all human instinct and everything, his steady call until the day he died for nonviolence was. I mean, it was, you know, I mean, just time and time again, from the early, from the,
you know, he wrote an essay in 1958 after a bomb got thrown at his house with his wife and his baby on it, in the house, got thrown on the front porch, and when it banged, didn't blow up yet, when it first banged, it blew up a few seconds later, his wife ran to the back of the house rather than going to see what the banging was, and if she didn't, if she went to investigate, she might have been killed. And so he gets back and there's a group of people around his house who are heated and they are ready to rock and roll, right? Of course they are. This is, I mean, this is their leader, this is his wife who's almost killed, and he is out there. Calming them down and saying, this is not, this is not what we're doing. And not just from a tactical standpoint, but this is just not what we're gonna do.
Incredible, I mean, just, he could have started a revolution if he wanted to. All right, that guy, I mean, that was what J. Edgar Hoover was worried about, right? He said, we're worried, what's the thing we're trying to shut down with COINTELPRO, whatever? It's the emergence of a black Messiah. A guy who could call a general strike and tell all black people in America, "Walk out of your jobs tomorrow and paralyze these cities." He could have done that. He had that kind of clout. And he didn't. And he did the opposite in the face of escalating violence from people who opposed him that would have given him any excuse to do it. That anybody who wasn't coming from maybe the religious and ideological place he was would have given into, right? I mean, Malcolm X called him a chump for a reason. And a lot, and that resonated with a lot of people, especially after Martin Luther King was killed.
And so, yeah, it's absolutely the historical norm that people want to meet force with force. It's the most natural thing in the world. I mean, I was reading a guy, I was reading a, an interview with, an interview with a member of the PKK one time, the Kurds up in Syria. After, um, he was an anonymous guy, but anonymous Kurd in the PKK, or maybe just supported him, but it was after they had done a terrorist attack in Turkey that killed some Turks, and it was, that had come after the Turks had attacked the Kurds a few times. It had some things happen there, and they were asking him like, "What is it you hope to accomplish by doing this?" He killed a bunch of civilians, a bunch of Turkish civilians. And he said, you know, "Look, as an organization, sometimes our people just need to see that we can hit back."
Right? They're getting abused, they're getting hit, and sometimes we just have to show them that if they hurt you, we will hurt them back. Maybe we can't hurt them as much or whatever, but they're not gonna get away with this. And I, yes, I mean, yes, as an organization, in some ways, you have that responsibility. When the state of Israel was first founded, Ben-Gur- David Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister, he, you know, he, he said that we have to show these people. A lot of these people were Holocaust survivors who now were coming into Israel. They'd just been through the Holocaust, and they're coming into Israel, they're surrounded by enemies. He's like, "We have to show these people." That if anybody tries to hurt them, that we will hurt them back. And we have to, in order for our own credibility, but also just for their, you know, emotional kind
of feeling of safety in the world right now, like, we have to show them that they are, they're, they have strong people leading them who can push back at the people who are after them. And, I mean, it's the most natural thing in the world. You know, that is absolutely the baseline. Martin Luther King was a revolutionary. I mean, he was a, he's a, he's a figure in whatever, like, you know, he, he maybe had some issues in his personal life with women or something, like, whatever. Everybody's got issues in their personal life. Um, you know, the, his, his, his, I mean, he was, he was a religious figure in a lot of ways, like, a saint-like religious figure in, in his theosis among that. And so, yeah, he, because he was going against all history and all human, all human instinct, you know?
I mean, you can probably speak on it as well. I mean, just as far as how, you know, when you were in Iraq, you've got people over there who, um, maybe they're not violent, but they don't necessarily like the American occupation, especially after a lot of years, or maybe they or people they've known have had bad interactions with American soldiers or something. Um, and there's movements over there that maybe they're nonviolent movements that are trying to, you know, that, that aren't necessarily down with the occupation or something. But, you know, how do those things bleed over and how do they get infect, you know, infected when the things that they're calling for aren't happening and so on and so forth? Like, you know, I think it's a universal problem.
Yeah. And then, and then what's really interesting about it is, you know, you talked about the 5% on either side, the extremists who, who, who are able to influence people towards violence. That's what they influence them towards. And that's why you need somebody with the, with the charismatic level of Martin Luther King or, or Gandhi that is, that has like this strategic vision. Because to me, more than anything else,
The strategic vision to understand how this plays out over time is the hardest thing. To not want to do the tactical win, to not want to say, all right, we're going to walk out, or we're going to do strikes, or we're going to do these things that are going to make us feel good tonight. Or even, you know, even a tactical victory where people will realize you can't, you know, we stick together, all those things, all those tactical victories that you could have, to put all those aside and say, nope, I am going, we are going to do this strategically. Here's the long-term goal. It's going to take a long time. We are going to suffer.
And we are going to suffer one-sided. So we are going to suffer while our opposition does not. They do not suffer. We're going to endure that because strategically, this is how we win. So from a, from a long-term planning perspective, that to me is the, is the most incredible thing. And, you know, it's, I guess we didn't get to see how it played out because, you know,
Martin Luther King was assassinated. And, you know, even when he was assassinated, I mean, he had enough momentum in that movement that it did, I mean, that could have devolved into, into complete and utter mayhem.
It did for a while.
But it had enough, he had enough momentum to not, that it was controllable on some level. Right? On some level, it was controllable. I mean, we're not, we didn't go into a full-blown insurgency. Right? Which we could have.
Yeah, I mean, well, we took extraordinary, and often illegal law enforcement measures to subvert that for sure.
Yeah. And, and that's, you know, when, when you were starting to talk about J. Edgar Hoover and, and some of the stuff that happened, you know, to, to, to, to cause the frictions inside some of these movements that were more rebellious and more proactively violent, you know, those are incredible stories. And, and like you said, illegal stories. And yeah, you should check out, you talk about those in great detail in, in Martyr Made.
But going on to this part two of my question, or it wasn't really part two of the question. It's just that, that concept that despite this violent, nonviolent, despite whatever movement you're making, America's tendency to take these radical movements and put them into the mall, basically, put them into the mall.
You know, one of my favorite examples was Bobby Seale, who was one of the two founders of the Black Panther movement. I mean, he's a militant guy. This is a guy who took a group of Black Panthers when Ronald Reagan was, who was not their friend, was the governor of California. You know, these guys would go out with guns and patrol their neighborhoods and look for cops who had stopped African Americans and get out of their car with loaded weapons, not pointing them or anything, but showing them, holding them, and just start to read this, tell the citizen what his rights are and, you know, tell the cop to behave himself. I mean, you can, that's a, that's a, that's a crazy thing to do, right? And so these guys are doing that. He got told, Bobby Seale was told when he tried to recruit
some guys from an actual, another radical group he was involved with, tried to recruit them to start up the Black Panthers with them. They told him he was suicidal. He takes a group of guys armed, loaded weapons into the California State Legislature House because the California State Government tried to institute some gun control measures. This is actually where gun control really got started, was in the 60s. They wanted the Black, it was against the Black Panthers. And so to protest that, he took a bunch of armed Black Panthers and invaded the legislature room with loaded weapons, right? So this is a guy who's, you know, he's, he's, he's down, right? This guy's down to roll. And,
you know, by the 19, I think by 75, 74, 75, he's selling a barbecue sauce called Burn Baby Burn, which was like a Panther, you know, slogan when like a building would be burning in a riot, they'd say burn, chant Burn Baby Burn. And he's selling a barbecue sauce, you know, that's like kind of based on the Black Panthers. And by that point, like the Panthers had been reduced to a consumer product, you know? And our system, you know, we have a way of digesting dissent in a way that... You know, we take it in, it doesn't matter how radical it is. I mean, the Black Panthers were doing that crazy stuff. They were killing police officers. I mean, the Black Liberation Army split off from the Black Panthers. They killed dozens of cops.
Uh, not in shootouts. I mean, they were just assassinating these people. And, uh, within just a few years, you know, it was totally safe and totally neutralized. Just something you could wear a T-shirt for and it wasn't even radical anymore. You know, it was just a fashion choice. And our society has a way of doing that, which is, again, it's one of those things where it's like, it's very, it, it's in a way, great for the stability of our society, right? Just like our system is kind of built to resist wild swings and radical change. We can digest dissent, you know, very well. Uh, but on the other hand, for the people that are very, very, very invested in changing something,
it can lead to frustration and paranoia and conspiracy theorizing as well as, I mean, what, excuse me, one of the reasons that groups like the Weathermen and the Black Panthers resorted to tactics that were so in your face is they were basically saying like, you're not gonna co-opt us. You're, no, that's not gonna happen, right? Like, we're gonna make damn sure that that is not possible. How? By killing these cops, by bombing these places, whatever. You're not gonna reduce us to like a TV show, but it's exactly what happened. Because even that wasn't enough.
So what do you think, what do you think it is about America? I think part of it is what I said earlier. We like the rebels, right? We like the rebels. And so, boom, there you go. Hey, those guys are really rebellious. And it's funny, I'm sitting here looking at your face as you're talking about Bobby Steele walking into California legislature with, you know, a pack of guys with, with weapons, brandishing weapons. And you get a big smile on your face and so do I, because you and I both know that that's kinda cool. Like, hey, that's, that's, that's, that's just the, that's just American, right? Like, hey, you know, yeah, you, someone's doing something you don't want them to do? Cool. Get your weapons and go make a stand, right? That, that, that just brings a smile to a man's face.
And yes, I know that's wrong. I'm sorry. I'm telling you the reality of my thoughts. And so we have that tendency to look at, look at the rebels and say, yep, I'm, I wanna be part of that, but. You know, we kind of pull them back towards sanity. We towards pull them back towards the center. And how do we do that? Well, we put on a T-shirt and I'm not willing to die for that T-shirt. But hey, you know, I'm going to wear a T-shirt because it looks cool. And I want everyone to know kind of I'm down. I'm not going to take a bullet, but I'm down. You know, I'll buy a T-shirt. It's cool. And then the next thing you know, these are, you know, they're being sold in malls and everything else. I mean, you see that the same thing with the Che Guevara T-shirts that people wear. I mean, that's the exact same thing, right?
It was the exact same thing, right? I mean, this was a revolutionary communist who was devoted to, you know, the destruction of the United States and our allies if if he could push it that far, right? And now it's like, and one of the things I always think about, you want to talk about how something? It's a good example of how power operates.
If you look at like the Nazis, they were, they would execute all their enemies, right? They would get rid of them. That seems on its face like a show of strength. That's not a show of strength. That's a show of paranoia, right? That's you don't feel secure or strong at all. That you have to get rid of all your enemies, even the communist societies. I thought about, uh, back during the Obama administration, um, the guy who did that Gangnam Style song, you know what I'm talking about?
Oh, yes. I had kids that were at the perfect age for Gangnam Style at the time when it came out. Yes.
He made some comments that Fox News or whoever, you know, I don't even know what he said, but it was like criticizing Iraq or something like that. There were anti-American comments, right? Something about American imperialism or whatever it was. The, the, the people who were mad at the Dixie Chicks were mad at him, right? And, uh, and so what do we do? Did we send a hit team out like Stalin would have to take this guy out? No, we invited him to the White House and he put on a show for the president and his family. Now that's what power looks like, right? When you can just
That's what real power looks like.
Invite the critic in and he can do a song and dance for you in your own house. And you can thank him and wave him off. Like that's what power looks like. And, um, you know, in a, yeah, that's in a way, maybe it's that we just, we've been secure in our power for a long time.
And maybe if we didn't feel so secure in our power, we might have a different, well, I mean, it's an interesting question because we say we love rebels, right? But right now, like if you really had to say like, who are rebels right now? Well, who are the people that are being banned from social media, right? We don't love them, uh, but I mean, those are really the rebels, right? We don't like them, those are the bad rebels. But like, there are groups of people out there that are being shut out of the conversation politically, right? Racists and so forth and like, so we have like, we have like a certain, and, and I think for a long time in American history, those people were tolerated. Um, the ACLU defended, you know, neo Nazis or the KKK's right to march or whatever.
Um, they wouldn't do that now, and I wonder if that's indicative of the fact that we've become a little bit more paranoid on that count in this era, right? Where people are kind of, it exists less than ever before, but maybe because people were so traumatized by the Trump election or whatever. And people think there's Nazis under every rock right now. And we're dealing with them in a way, people who, events even, I mean, there was, it was a guy who worked for SDGNE, I think. Hispanic guy in his 40s, who was cracking his knuckles like this in his car and in his, in his truck, and somebody took a picture of it because apparently doing this is a white power sign now. And he got fired from his job, and this is like a Hispanic guy, he got fired for that.
That's crazy.
And it's craziness, and it's indicative of a certain level of paranoia regarding that, right? That's not somebody that you say, oh, okay, cool guy, like, you know, invite you to the White House, you can do a little dance number for me. That's like, we are actually afraid of this right now, at a time when, you know, I think objectively, it's probably at an all time low. I mean, you know, I don't know, maybe it's ramped up a couple percent so that 2008 was a little bit less, but like, it's pretty close to the all time low, right? But we don't feel that way, or at least some people don't feel that way.
Yeah, it's funny you talk about the, the confidence that it takes. So, one of the things that I talk about from a leadership perspective is, if, if I'm your boss and I come to, you come to me with a plan. If, if I'm confident and you've got a halfway decent plan, let's roll with your plan. That's what we do. That's what I do as a leader. Hey, if you got a, if you come to me, you're my subordinate. You come to me with a plan and it's a halfway decent plan. I'm confident enough in my leadership, in my leadership position that I don't feel threatened at all by the fact that you're coming to me with a plan. And, and I think that's a great point, you know, Obama was so confident in his position that he could say, hey, oh, you want to criticize me? Cool. Come, come on into the White House and we'll, we'll talk and it's all good.
And, and right now, you know, the, the leader that lacks confidence, when you come to me with a plan, I tell you, hey, I'm the boss. You don't come to me with plans. I tell you what to do. You be quiet. And that's what we're seeing right now. We're seeing a lot of people that maybe they don't trust, they don't feel the trust in their own position. They don't feel the confidence in their own position. They don't feel the confidence in, in other people's ability to look at what's happening. They don't feel confident in, in America to be able to say, oh, you know what? This is gonna, you, you can, you can, you can, uh, you can burn that flag, right?
Hey, you can burn that flag. That's okay. You know, we, you got the freedom to do that. Okay. When we start freaking out about that, and look, obviously I'm no supporter of burning the flag, but I'm not gonna like try and fire you from your job or whatever. I'm not gonna attack you. I'm not gonna cancel you or whatever the term is. I'm confident that America's stronger and that freedom and individual freedom and that this nation is stronger than your little ideals, your, your little ideals that you have. I believe that this country's ideals that was founded upon are strong enough that I'm okay with you doing that. It's okay.
But there's people that are not feeling that way on both sides.
And what do they do? They go on the attack.
And with that,
if you're listening to this podcast right now on the Jocko Podcast feed, eventually we'll, we should have it on its own feed because we're going to separate them. So you can subscribe to this podcast if you want to listen to it. You can also check out the other podcasts that we have. Mine are Jocko Podcast, The Warrior Kid Podcast, and Grounded, and Daryl's Podcast, which we referred back to a bunch today, is called Martyr Made. And you can support all these podcasts by getting some gear.
Getting some gear from JacoStore.com or OriginMaine.com. I also have a consulting company called EchelonFront.com if you want to talk about leadership inside your organization.
And with that, thanks for listening to us as things unravel. This is Jaco and Daryl. Out.
Page updated October 26, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
