Jocko Podcast
Hosted by Jocko Willink
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This is the Jaco Unravelling Podcast, episode eight, with Daryl Cooper and me, Jocko Willink.
And it kinda seems like the original intent of this podcast couldn't be any more relevant than it is. Right now, as it certainly seems as if things are unraveling. And if you watch the news, or you watch social media, it certainly seems that America is divided. And you get, you hear this a lot, "America's divided more than ever", which is a pretty bold statement to make, considering especially that we fought an actual civil war and killed hundreds of thousands of ourselves here.
But that's what the news is portraying, and obviously there is some truth to it. And then at the same time,
there's still people that are, there's still people that are carrying on with their lives. And
that might seem callous,
but it's also the way it is. People have jobs, people have families, people have bills to pay, they're trying to make things work. So there are people that are, you know, living,
trying to live their normal lives. But that being said, you can absolutely see this division. And this division that we see obviously is based somewhat on the perspectives of the world
that people have. Perspectives that they have of themselves, perspectives that they have of others.
And that perspective driven often in many ways by the story that they are living in. The story that they, the stories that they receive, the stories that they tell. You know, that news that you watch is telling you a story. The, the media that you follow tells you a story.
And
where that places you, where all those stories place you is an interesting dynamic. And you can look at it in depth and I know that our brains are
they're, they're kind of set up to build a story and to place ourselves into a story. So we can understand the world in some context that we pretty much create. We create this context for ourself. We create this story
that we live in. And I know you've got some, you want, we want to talk about some of that and some of the,
some of the ways that our minds develop these stories and how we place ourselves in these stories. Some pretty interesting things that unfold psychologically, physiologically that make us understand the world in a certain way.
At the deepest level too. You know, that's the thing that I found so interesting about, I dug out this old study.
I think it was from the seventies, it was the last time that they allowed these split brain studies, they called them. Sometime after that, they decided they were a little unethical, but they were very, you know, very enlightening when they, they were doing them. And the way these things basically worked is for people who had condition of serious epilepsy, they'd have debilitating seizures that were very dangerous for them. They'd fall down or, you know, they couldn't drive a car or whatever, limited in many ways. They would cut this big bundle of nerves that goes from one side of the brain to the other called the corpus callosum that would, that's the big nerve center that allows the two halves of your brain to communicate with one another. And they would sever that so that you'd have your epileptic seizure on the right side of your brain. It would only affect the left side of your body or vice versa, and you could get through it.
Some enterprising psychologists said, "Hey, this is an opportunity to kind of verify some theories we've had about how the brain works, how different sides of the brain interpret information and the way that they handle different motor functions on the body and so forth." And the one that I dug out and read again, as we were thinking about this episode, that was so interesting, had to do with the way that our minds take in information, select and take in information and then construct that into a story that we use to go forward and sort of take action in the world. The way this experiment was conducted was, they had somebody sit down and they would show them two pictures.
With each picture, they would only look at it with one of their eyes, right? Now, each of your eyes is governed by one side of your brain, and they're crossed up. So, the left eye is governed by the right brain, the right eye is governed by the left brain, the whole body's like that. And so, they would show the right side of the brain, a picture of, you know, they'd cover up the right eye and show you with the left eye, the right side of the brain, a picture of a snow scene. And they would show the left side of the brain, a picture of a chicken claw. Now, since the corpus callosum is cut, those two sides of the brain are aware of those two scenes completely independently from one another, right? And so, then they would place on the table before them, eight cards.
Four of them that correspond to the snow picture, four of them that correspond to the chicken picture. And one of those is supposed to be the one that actually corresponds, right? There's four options, and they select which one corresponds for each picture. Now, the interesting thing was, the left side of the brain is the side that handles all verbal communication, right? Anytime you need to form a thought and verbalize it, it's got to mobilize the left side of your brain to do it. The right side is going to be completely useless for that. And so when they asked the person to select the card that corresponded with the snow, the picture that they had seen first, which was the snow scene, they were able to use their finger to point to a snow shovel, because they can point using their right
side of their brain, that's all good, right? But then they said, okay, can you explain to us why you selected that shovel, that snow shovel? Well, now they're engaging the left side of the brain. The left side of the brain has no, does not know that the snow picture exists, literally. And so it said, the person says, without skipping a beat, oh, it was because you need a, chickens live in chicken coops and you need a shovel to shovel out like the waste and stuff in a chicken coop, because the left side of the brain had seen the chicken image. And the remarkable thing about it was the ease and automaticness with which the brain just constructed that explanation for why they had done that, which was completely false, right?
They selected that because the side of the brain that pointed to that, to that card had seen the snow scene, that was why the left side didn't know, they had to verbalize it, and it just, with a level of certainty that was apodictic to the person, right? It was reality to them, literally reality. And that's happening at like such a deep perceptual level, all the time. When you think about what it means to live in a story, that's not really, we don't think of our lives that way very often on a conscious level, right? But what does it mean to, what is a story? It's something with a beginning, a middle, and an end. A story could be one or two sentences long, it could be a whole novel, right?
And people, when they're functioning well, I think, are living probably many stories. Some of them are independent, some of them intersect, and they're basically things that tell you, this is where I've come from, that led to where I am right now, and those things are going to shape where I expect to be in the future, and that's how I'm going to make choices in my life. That's how I'm going to sort of, even at a deep level, again, like, it's gonna, it's gonna select the things that I perceive in the world, and then take on board and integrate into that story as I move forward. And we're doing this all the time in a way that builds our reality at a, at an absolutely fundamental and base level, right? And
I think that you see like I I've experienced this in my own life. I remember when we were doing the Jocko podcast and we were talking, I was telling you about my military experience. How I had this moment where, you know, I was a problem child. For those of you haven't listened to that episode, I was a problem child for the first half of my military career, real pain in the neck. And I literally flipped the script overnight, right? And you would think on some level, how is it, how is it possible to take like a whole, a whole lifetime or many years at least of habitual behaviors? And kind of switched that up. I mean, when I say overnight, I mean, I went to bed and I woke up the next morning and I was a different person in a million different fundamental ways.
And it was because somebody had sort of had yanked me forcibly out of the story that I was living, right? Which was where I was, you know, sort of a persecuted victim of these people in my chain of command and so forth. And he had, he had with with a couple of sentences in our conversation, he's my LPO at the time, had managed to invalidate that story. He had, he had managed to make that story no longer plausible, that I was not responsible for my own situation and those things. He just had, he managed to do that. And when that happened, I needed a new story to inhabit. And it was one where, you know, I was more responsible for my own, for my own circumstances. And I woke up the next morning
with that story and I went forward and actually lived that out. And, and that was powerful enough to overcome again, years of habitual ways of relating to my leaders, of relating to other people and just a million different behaviors that you would think would require practice almost to rewire those things. And it didn't. But that's the power of a story.
You know, it's, it's interesting as you were talking about this. So one of the warnings that I wrote about this in Leadership Strategy and Tactics is, you know, you've got some problems going on in your company. And people start talking, you get these rumors, right? And all those rumors are is ways for people to tell the story and explain what's happening. Oh, you know, hey, we're shutting down a couple of our branches in another state. Oh, we're in financial trouble. Oh, yeah, there's a, they're gonna build that story and it's not gonna be good. And the way that you overcome that is you tell people the truth about what's happening. You tell them the real story. And that's, that's the fact that we can create these things.
And, and trust me, I've shown up at companies before where that, that rumor has become the reality. And it, then it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy where that's exactly what, and it's sort of like the experience that you, you had in life. You know, you started to fulfill the prophecy of everyone's against me. Um, they just want me to get in trouble. Well, guess what? Now you get in trouble. And then when you get in trouble, it's their fault that you got in trouble. So you're, you're not gonna change anything that you do and you continue down this downward spiral. And luckily for you, someone snapped you out of that story. I think that's probably a pretty rare thing that that can happen. And most people continue to deny this, this new story.
It makes me think of the, the traditional martial arts in the, in the nineties when the, when jujitsu came to America. And you had these guys that had trained for 20, 25, 30 years in whatever you name it. You know, traditional martial art. And all of a sudden someone saying, ah, that stuff, that's not gonna work. It's not gonna work, you know? Here, here, wrestle me or fight me. And they're getting taken down and they're getting choked by somebody that's been training jujitsu for six months. And some people did not accept that reality.
It's only because I can't use my touch of death.
It's only because I can't use my touch of death. If this was real, I would have done this. If this was real, I would have done that. If we were in a, if we were in a, in a self-defense situation, there was multiple attackers and you were on the ground. You would, there's a million different little excuses that you can bring up to maintain your track on the story that you wanna believe in. So not only is it like the story you've been told, but then there's also the story that you wanna believe.
It goes even deeper than that. Like when you said that, I hadn't thought about it this way before, but I thought about those guys, and I know everybody makes fun of these guys, but to me, it's something that's really fascinating, is those, you've seen the videos online of the martial art, quote unquote, where they don't touch the guy, right? They just kind of poof and the guys go running and fall on the ground, right? And there was one of those grandmasters of it, or whatever, who accepted a challenge from like an MMA fighter. And I don't know if you've seen the video, have you seen the video?
Oh, yeah.
Okay.
Yeah, yeah.
And so they square off and the guy says, "Go." And the MMA fighter just walks up and punches this guy in the nose. And this guy has an absolutely incredible reaction. He's like, he looks at the blood on his nose and he's, he can't believe that he got hit. He couldn't believe that he got hit. And so, you know, and he, like, so he's got his students there, this is on video. I mean, this is everything. He's got a school that's his, his, his means of income. And so he accepted this challenge. The guy thought it was gonna work, right? And why would he, why would he like not think that? Or why would he think that? You have to imagine, the only way that I've been able to kind of figure on this, right? Is that maybe one day back in the, back in the day when he started this, you know, he learned it from somebody else. And maybe he went in kind of skeptical, because if you
don't go in kind of skeptical, I don't, I don't know what mindset you have. But then he looks around and he sees these other students and like, for sure it's working. And maybe it starts off as like, "I don't want to be the asshole." So when he just does the poof thing to me, I'm gonna kind of go on the ground too, or whatever. And maybe you do it enough and it starts to become automatic and maybe, maybe it starts to work. So, or feel like it's working on you. And then later on, you have students coming in.
That is, I like the fact that you're reaching, trying to figure out how you could possibly explain this. And like, I can't even agree with your explanation. I have no, I have no alternative for you, because this isn't like one case, right?
Right.
You go to McDojo Life on Instagram, and they just post a video every day of somebody getting knocked down by the poof, or someone, a whole chain of 25 people that the grandmaster stands at the front and, you know, doesn't even make contact with anyone, and they all fall down tumbling to the ground. It's crazy.
But for him to accept that challenge and to act as surprised and shocked as he did that he got hit. I mean, he had to have avenged like by that moment, got into a place where he believed this, right? And so, and, and the thing is like, maybe he's been teaching this for 30 years. And whatever doubts he may have had originally, for the last 30 years, he has had hundreds of students come through here. And sure enough, he does this and they go flying, right?
I guess if I'm trying to come up with a rationalization for this, I would think that the guy couldn't have walked in there as a skeptic. I would think it's somebody that reads, you know, hey, this is what happens. And then is able to convince, you know, I'm a, I'm a charismatic person and I, I, I study these ancient texts. You know, supposedly, and then I, I tell you, hey, Daryl, you know, this is what's going to happen. You're going to feel, do you feel this energy? And I eventually kind of hypnotize slash brainwash you into going, you know, when I go poof, you fall down. And all of a sudden I do it and it actually works. And now I start to believe in it and now all of a sudden I, I figure out good ways to brainwash people and convince people that this is going to happen. And I get more, more people that show up in the school that, that are not skeptical.
Right. Cause I mean, if you're going to that school, you're probably already self-selecting a little bit.
Yeah. So, so we're not getting that.
Like, we're not going to that school.
We're not going to that school. If we do, it's not for the same reason.
I, I ran into this like, way I answer a lot of the questions in, uh, people who ask me stuff about the Jim Jones podcast. Like, how could people possibly believe that he was doing these healings or whatever? And I tell them like, the first thing you have to understand is that they were responding to a flyer that said, master healer, like at this address, like doing these things. And so already those are the people that are showing up.
There's a hundred and 50 people that saw that flyer and said, ah, what a scam. And there's two people that said, maybe this is it.
Yeah. And so tying that back to what you, where I was going with this originally is you were talking about like how hard it can be to convince people of an alternative story, right? And how people will make excuses in order to hold up the story that they've been telling themselves. But that sometimes it's even deeper than that because they'll just look at you and say, no, no, no, you don't understand. And it's because when they're in a particular mode. If they are like creating problems for themselves or causing other people to come down on them in a way that they believe is persecutory, to them, that's just reality. It's just reality. And if they, if you try to tell them, you know, you're bringing a lot of this on yourself with the way you're approaching things, they'll just look at you with absolute sincerity and say, you don't understand like what I've actually
seen. And, you know, and the extreme case of that is trying to convince like a paranoid schizophrenic that the CIA is not after him. That's the story he's living. And for the last couple of years, every time he goes outside, he sees people kind of looking at him a little bit. And every time, you know, people look at all of us, but he sees it, he says, I knew it.
They're tracking me.
Little thing after little thing after little thing confirms, you know, the presuppositions that he already has. And after years, he has a mountain of evidence to support his theory of what's going on. And it can be extremely hard. I mean, again, like, you know, why didn't it work the first time, you know, earlier in my Navy career, when somebody said, you're actually bringing this on yourself, you know, it just didn't work at that time. Like, I had to have the right guy say the magic words in the right way to really, you know, snap me out of it. And it was a blessing. I mean, we talked about it in that, in that interview already. But I mean, to say that that guy like helped my Navy career is not nearly enough. I mean, he, he matured me 10 years.
Yeah.
A hundred percent, a hundred percent.
So the other thing that happens with this is, um, is like with, especially right now, social media, right? The, the algorithms that run social media, when you, they, they reflect what you already like. So they're biased in your direction anyway. So it's like when you're saying the paranoid guy walks out and he sees someone look at him and it confirms what they thought. Well, when you go on to social media, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, whatever, what you're getting fed is what you already believe. And so it only exacerbates the situation and silos you even more.
It's taking something that our mind already does at a deep, automatic level. And, I mean, you've, a lot of people have heard, I know you have seen that experiment that they do where people are passing around a basketball and the guy in the gorilla outfit. So the people are asked, count how many times the basketball gets passed, or how many people, how many times each person touches the basketball, whatever. They get their attention on the basketball.
Some minor task.
Yes, and they're told that the purpose is to see if you can track the basketball that well, or whatever, so people are really focused on it. And then this guy in a gorilla costume walks right onto the middle of the action. He's not poking his head in from the side of the frame or anything. He's right in the middle of it and like hanging out for a minute, stands around it, then just walks on through. And it's something like 60 or 70% of the people do not notice the giant dude in the gorilla outfit like walking in the middle of the people passing the basketball. They literally don't see it. And when you take that, you know, and why is that? It's because they're just, that's not what they're expecting. Their mind is, you know, you look around like any given room. This room I'm in with you right now has a billion different details in it. There's cameras, there's equipment, there's all of these things
that my mind could be paying attention to. And there's people with disorders out there that can't really control and focus that well. Like where the various minor details around the room, or various sounds of other people having a conversation, come into their mind with as much urgency and priority as the thing that they ought to be focusing on, and it can be overwhelming.
And so what our minds are really, really good at is saying, what is relevant to me right now? This is what's relevant to me. Therefore, this is where all of my perception is going to be, is going to be focused. And it literally, I mean, on a literal, fundamental perceptual level, filters everything else out. And it does that with, you know, again, not just in the immediate moment with your, with, like, the task at hand. We do the same thing with the stories that we're playing out, right? What is my, what, you know, where did I come from? How did that lead to where I am now? And how does that shape what I'm expecting and planning and trying to do in the future? And then you go out and you look for, your mind reaches out and kind of looks for, looks for,
tools to sort of pursue those things, right? It goes out into the world and notices those things that are relevant to the task you set before yourself. And so then you take that natural functioning of the mind and that selectivity of the mind and you add on to it the way that you just talked about algorithms and social media and stuff working. I mean, where it's taking something that already does, you know, our minds are already built for confirmation bias in an extreme way. And then it just makes sure that like, you don't have to select anything out. You just literally don't see anything you don't expect or want to see. And, you know, that's how people end up living in completely different worlds. I mean, one of the things they talk about with schizophrenics
is how people who are schizophrenics, very early on, they tend to be very isolated for, you know, pretty obvious reasons. You're gonna have trouble maybe functioning in the world. And when you go out and try to function among, among people who aren't, who aren't ill, it's difficult experience, right? And so you don't, you withdraw and you get more and more withdrawn from the rest of the world. So that most of your experience is inner experience. It's taking place like in your mind and not as a function of going out to the world and getting feedback from the world, right? And pretty soon, your world and the real world start to diverge from one another. And after a while, you can get way, way, way
off into the weeds. And we kind of have, not a schi-, not schizophrenic, it's just an example, but a version of that process taking place where different groups of people and individuals are running off into these, into these cordoned off lanes that have almost no communication between them and living in almost completely different worlds. And all of them, just like you're trying to convince somebody, hey, your story is a little bit, you know, you need to rethink that. None of these people in these different silos are having any success talking to each other and saying, you know, see my perspective.
Yeah, they're, it's almost like mutually unintelligible languages that they're speaking. And that, that's, so one of the big focuses I have when I talk about leadership is, and lately I've been going more and more into, more and more down this road of the power of the, the most underrated tool in leadership is to listen to other people, listen to what they have to say. And it's, it's to the point where if you ask, you know, a 10-year-old, and I was talking to a guy about this today, if you, if you ask a 10-year-old, you know, what is a leader? They're, they're thinking it's the guy that stands up and says, hey, here's what we're doing. We're going forward. He's the guy that's getting up on the podium or whatever. When reality is, if you truly understand leadership, you know that that is part of what a leader does.
But a good leader, their priority is to listen to what other people have to say and understand. And, and then there's this whole thing that devolves from there, which is just, just respect. And, and if I listen to you, let me, let me, let me start in a different spot. If you're talking and I cut you off, that's kind of universally seen as a, as, as being disrespectful. By the same, by the same notion, if you're talking and I'm listening to you, that is actually showing you respect. And therefore we start to develop a relationship and we start to trust each other because I'm showing you respect. And then when I talk, you listen and that's a respectful relationship.
And now we can communicate and we can, we can forge a unified idea based on our, both of our mutual input. And it can be a really positive thing, but it starts with listening to the other person. That's how I'm showing you respect. Well, right now it's just cutting each other off. You know, immediately you start to say one thing that I don't agree with, I'm jumping on you. I don't let you finish your point. Not only am I not letting you finish your point. I'm disrespecting you, which is moving us in opposite directions. And now we can't even communicate with each other. And the classic example, I mean, go watch, you know, the, the four minute segment on the news channel of the, the right wing and the left wing. And they just sit there and cut each other off. You don't understand anybody, anything that anybody says.
And then that segment's over. It's three minutes long. It's four minutes long. And zero progress was made. Maybe, maybe someone got a zinger on the other one. And then the conservatives take that and run with it, or the liberals take that and run with it. But no progress was made. No real discussion was had. And that's the environment that we're in. That's the environment that we're living in. We're not talking to each other. We're not listening to each other. We're cutting each other off. And all we're doing is reinforces that these stories that we tell ourselves, that everyone around us is agreeing with. And these stories become so locked in that they're just unchangeable. They're just unchangeable. You can't change these stories.
Yeah. And then rather than. Looking at the mode of communication and realizing that that's the problem. You can't talk to the other side. People on both sides, on every side, decide that it's that the other side won't listen. And so if they're not going to listen, then we've got to take it to the next level. Because if, you know, if there's no dialogue, then what's left? Right? If we can't talk politically, and that's what politics is, especially in democracy, right? It's a pressure release valve so that we can find compromises and, you know, work out political differences in a way that doesn't resort to the way the rest of the world has settled political differences for all of human history, right?
And, you know, these are institutions that have to be protected, right? Because it's the only thing that stands between us and the abyss. And, you know, it's not a good thing, especially in an environment where so many people now have, we talk about like what story are you living out? Partly maybe because everybody's got the phone in their pocket now, so they're plugged into the media all the time. Partly because just over time, more and more of a portion of the population's become politicized and kind of involved. But politics has really become like the story that you're kind of engaged with on the most
emotional level at least for a lot of people.
Well, yeah, every news story that comes out is almost immediately, or just plain immediately viewed through a lens of some political, some political side.
Right? Every single story that comes out. Like, you wouldn't have thought that the whole COVID thing, you know, for a little while, it was, hey, okay, there's, I was actually saying, hey, this is going to be kind of a unifying thing because we've got a universally bad thing happening.
You fool.
Yeah, I know, I'm an idiot. Yeah, universally, there's a bad thing happening that's hurting people of, you know, of any background, you know, just, it can kill people. So we don't want that. We're all against that, like, out of the gate. Okay. I thought, you know, okay, well, we'll at least unify against this common enemy, right? Somehow I'm wrong. Somehow I'm wrong. And it's just escalated into here's what one camp believes, here's what the other camp believes. And by the way, there's, there's no, you go to those group, those parties and there's no, there's no common ground whatsoever.
Yeah, it's crazy.
I mean, I think part of me almost wonders if it's because if you take away,
if you take away the, the enemy toward the political enemy right now, a lot of people, they don't really have, uh, they don't have a whole lot else going for them in, at the moment, you know, like, um, you know, like I said, there's, I mean, we'll just take this, like this is a, um, probably a whole other separate episode in a way, but just as a lead in, um, you know, what the, the, the American dream is kind of one of our big stories, right? That's the story that everybody's kind of living out, even if, whether you've immigrated to the country, whether you were born here, whatever, this is a place where you can come and go out and through your own sweat, kind of make your way in the world and improve on your parents' lifestyle for your own children and so on and so forth. And there's a lot of people, say, under 40 right now, who, uh, have not had a lot of
stability economically up in, you know, in their lives at this point. If you're a millennial, you probably got out of college, uh, just in time for the financial crisis to happen. Um, you finally got back on your feet around 2020 and now the whole economy shut down again. I mean, it's been, it's been, it's been a wild ride and not to mention the fact that, you know, our country's been at war your entire adulthood. Something that's crazy to me when I go out and, uh, visit military people and their 17 year olds sometimes there and realizing that they were not alive when nine 11 happened. And, you know, people who are about to approach 18 year olds who were gonna vote in their first election this year, they weren't alive when nine 11 happened. They don't remember starting the Iraq war.
By the time they sort of woke up as kids who were losing their milk teeth, you know, Democrats were already calling Bush a Nazi and then a couple of years later, Republicans were saying, where's Obama's birth certificate? And it has been a wild ride their whole lives, you know? And economic ups and downs and just chaos. And, um, you know, so you have a lot of these people who the idea that like, you know, my sort of life story is I'm gonna go out and I'm gonna go to college, I'm gonna get a job and have a family and I'm gonna... Take a step forward from, you know, where my parents' standard of living was and improve that for my kids and like step one, step two, step three. That's just does not seem, I mean, it is possible to do that, but, you know, a lot of people
due to the instability, you know, of their lives and as they see it, like kind of our future, especially with all the political chaos, we don't know what things are going to look like next year, let alone 10 or 20 years from now. That whole story is just not, it just, it doesn't grip people right now. And so they need something else to get involved with and for a whole lot of people, that's been politics, right? It's been the thing that they put, if you look at the amount of emotional energy that people put into who's going to get elected president here in November, relative to the amount of energy that, I mean, I knew people, this sounds so ridiculous, I swear to God it's true, I knew people who, who had funeral, a funeral of somebody that they were close
to, that I knew them and I, and I talked to them and, you know, in, in, in 2015, 2014, sometime in there, and they sure, they showed more negative emotion when Donald Trump got elected in 2016 than they did when those things happened. And, you know, people are just, and that's not even like a criticism, it's just, people are just very emotionally invested in politics. This is the most important thing in their lives in a very real way, if you judge it by emotional, you know, intensity. And, you know, I don't think that's a healthy place for people to be, especially, I mean, politics is something that, you know, traditionally was not handled by very many people and the people who it was handled by were kind of a select group who went into it on purpose.
And even then, you know, politics tends to drag people toward paranoia because there are people working against you and stuff. There's a lot, you gotta, you gotta have a certain amount of emotional and psychological stability to be engaged with politics all the time and not have it kind of drag you off into deep waters. And right now, you've got everybody with a phone in their pocket, just like, just engaged with politics all the time, like it's, you know, like it was religion back in the 18th century or something like that. And, you know, you gotta worry about that.
I, I, I sometimes look at, I think Twitter is where I see most, in fact, I know Twitter. People that, you know, they, they got hooked into some common, you know, tweet thread. And next thing you know, they're just going insane on each other. Insane. People they didn't, don't know. People that, people that just have no idea who they're talking to. And, and all of a sudden, they're just making these accusations and these, these far-fetched, you know, uh, statements about this side or that side. Yeah, I'm thinking, man, what are you doing? What, what, what, what do you do for a living? What do you do for a living that this is what you're sitting here doing? I mean, this took you, you know,
one, one post was at, you know, 320 and then 325 and then you follow that thing down and then they're coming back later and they're, they're, they're spending so much time doing this. And you wonder, what, what are they doing and where, why are they investing their emotional anguish into this? When? Ah, and I don't know, um, you can tell me if you think I'm wrong, or this is an answer, I, I did, I did a Reddit AMA. And there was, you know, I announced, hey, I'm going to do a Reddit AMA, blah, blah, blah. So I'm going to go on there and answer questions. And I went on there and, you know, almost right away, there was a guy that had, had like a pre-staged question
that had five full paragraphs. It was a long, and it, you know, and this was during the Russia collusion thing and this, and, and he laid everything out. And the premise of the, the premise of the question was, you know, when am I going to, you know, write an article about Donald Trump and his Russian collusion and, and, and this administration, et cetera, et cetera. And, um, you know, I, I, I got to it and I'm just thinking, man, this, this guy is just completely passionate about asking me this question. And I answered the question and I just said, America is stronger than one man.
And America is stronger than one woman because if Hillary Clinton had been elected, the world would not have imploded. If Donald, when Donald Trump got elected, I mean, the, the people that were just absolutely horrified about Donald Trump, that he's going to ruin the economy, he's going to ruin this, everything's going to be, it's going to be the apocalypse. Look, look, maybe things aren't going great right now. Obviously, we got COVID, we got, we got issues, but it's not the apocalypse. And there was people predicting the apocalypse and there was people predicting the apocalypse on, on Hillary Clinton as well, right? It was both sides. This is the end of the world. And so my point is, America's
a big, giant bureaucratic ship that is moving at 12 knots in the open ocean. And if you think someone's going to stick an oar in the water and move that ship in a dramatic way, you're wrong. And even, and the President of the United States, he might have more than an oar, but he doesn't have a lot more than an oar i- in many respects. Now, could there be some catastrophic event, something, yeah, I guess so. But there's been plenty of time for that. It hasn't happened. I guess what I'm saying is if you're investing this much time in what's going to happen with,
with this one individual in the executive branch that's going to get elected, when, look, Donald Trump, let's just say he's a radical conservative, or whatever level of conservative that he is. How much change can he actually impart? And is it, is the change that he makes permanent? So you're taking all this time and emotion of your life and investing it into
stopping this guy or stopping this woman, which is what I saw before, you know, the last election. People going crazy. If Hillary Clinton gets elected, it's the end of the world. If Donald Trump gets elected, it's the end of the world. It's not going to be the end of the world. What's the end of the world is when you get, go psycho and you invest all your time and effort into and emotion into being spun up about.
A story.
And you can't be in a good mood having dinner with your wife and your kids because
Because of a story.
Because of a story that you're repeating, a story that you're hearing, a story that's bouncing around in your own echo chamber, a story that you refuse to listen to any other angles on.
Yeah. And I think, um, I think that one of the reasons people are resorting to it is because they don't feel like they have any better ones that they're involved with right now, you know? Um, I think that, I mean, we have like, you know, you can call it a crisis of meaning if you want to, whatever it is, but uh, as the, the, the grip that religions had on people has faded at over time and as, uh, you know, changes in our society and our economy have created a, a situation where young people are told today, um, you know, that
the jobs of tomorrow are gonna, you know, are, are going to value the ability to learn rather than like knowing very deeply like one skill like it was in the old days, right? You're not gonna work 40 years at Ford Motor Company and then get that retirement. You're gonna change not just jobs, but careers many times over the course of your life. So being able to learn and adapt is placed at a premium. And this will be put on the cover of Fast Company or something. And the people who read Fast Company are like, oh yeah, cool. Like, you know, I'm, I can do that. I went to college and whatever, like they're the type of people maybe who are self-selected to resonate with that message. But if you think about what the actual effects of something like that might be, right?
People are growing up with the idea that like, I'm gonna change careers possibly six or seven times over the course of my life. If I start working at 20 and I stop working at 65 or 70, that's like more than every decade, like every six or seven years, I'm gonna be changing jobs. And the people I know are gonna be changing jobs and so forth. Um, that means moving to different towns. It means having a certain level of unpredictability in my life. That's gonna make it very hard for me to decide to buy a house or put down roots in a community or have children or really get invested in relationships with people because every time I do, they have to move or I have to move and so forth. And people kind of become Transience by necessity.
And and isolated by necessity.
Very isolated and that, you know, th- those are the, those are the things that used to provide us all of the actual, the, the stories that we would get involved with and go and, and go play out, right? And, you know, I saw an article today, um, in Vox, I think it was, that was citing a study that just came out, a, a Polish study or whatever, that, uh, it said 22% of millennials, that's people aged 22 to 38 in, in their poll, said that they have zero friends. That's one of the one in five of these people have zero friends. And then you put on top of that, I know a lot of people who might have some friends, but they don't see them outside of work. Work is where they see other people.
And right now, most of these people are locked at home, either on telework or on furlough or whatever it is. And, uh, you know, so you, you, there's just, uh, there are a lot of people out there.
Well, so what was the purpose of this article?
Um, you know, it was, uh, it was, it was just showing you the study that, you know, that came, that came out or the polls that came out. Um, it didn't go too deeply into, uh, what the effects of that might be, but I think we can, we can sort of, you know, we, we know what the effects of that are. Um, we know what it's, I mean, like, you know, for somebody to have zero friends is, I, I think for P, I mean, I tend to, I tend to isolate myself. I'm an introvert, you know, very, very much an introvert by nature. Like my friends that I do have are the ones that have to pull me out of my books to come do something or whatever. And I'm just, I'm naturally, I'm naturally shy. Um, to the point where I used to have trouble even just a few years ago, like I would be in a grocery store and I couldn't find the soap or whatever.
And rather than ask the 17-year-old grocery worker guy right there, who's, he's still in high school or whatever, instead of going up and saying like, hey, man, you know, can you tell me where the soap is? I would get kind of like nervous about it and just be like. And I would just go without the soap, right? Like, that's, that's how severe like my social anxiety would get sometimes. I'm very introverted and shy by nature. And like for me, jujitsu was the savior for that. When I got into jujitsu and found people that, you know, on a natural level, I kind of jived with. But even then, I had to make myself do it and introduce myself and get to know people and then be like, "Hey, I'm gonna get the fight over at my house this weekend, like you guys want to." I had to really make myself do it because it was not natural.
And once people get out of the environment of school, or if you were in the military or something, and you're just thirty years old, thirty-five years old, living out in the world, and your friends all had to move from college and you don't keep in touch anymore. To go out proactively and make new friends is an extremely difficult thing for a lot of people to do. And it, it really does take positive action to make it happen. But the thing that I did notice was when I would do it, a hundred percent of the time, people responded extremely enthusiastically because a lot of other people are in the same boat, you know?
Yeah, you know what's, I'm sitting here thinking about how these things tie together. Um, and I'm thinking about somebody that has zero friends and if you, and, and how, you know, you're not part of a community then. And so then what do you do? What are you looking for? Well, you're looking for some kind of a community. And where do you find that? Well, you find that on Twitter. And you find that on Twitter by taking a side with this side or that side. And next thing you know, you look up and you've got a lot of, air quote, friends. You know, you've got a lot of people that you go back and forth with and you, you know, just like a, just like back in the day when I was a kid and we had, you know, the, the fights with the other kids. Like, well, cool, we got our gang. We unify behind our, you know, our team.
And there, there's the other team over there. And that brings us together. We get some kind of a common enemy.
For somebody with no friends, to put up a tweet and have a bunch of people like it or retweet it, I mean, I don't, I'm not making fun of. The response they have to that, I mean, that's a serious, you know, on a very deep level. We're very social creatures, right? We're, we are very trained to say that like, if nobody likes you and nobody cares about you and you don't have anybody that like really looks to you for anything, then you're useless. Like, I mean, we're that social, you know? And so on a very deep level, like, we feel useless and we feel terrible if we're in a situation like that. And so for somebody like that, then, to have a bunch of people like their tweet or share their Facebook post, that's a powerful, powerful drug.
How's that marry up with, with, you know, being an introvert, right? So you're a very, you know, human beings are social animals. And people ask me if I'm an introvert or an extrovert, I say yes. Because I'm, I'm telling you right now, I will, I will sit alone all day. I don't care, it doesn't affect me in one bit. I don't mind being alone at all and I don't mind being around a bunch of people, whatever. It just doesn't matter to me, I'm just sort of doing, I just sort of accept the scenario that I'm in. But for like, when you're talking about, you're an introvert, right? And at the same time, you know that human beings are social creatures. And what happens when you, how does the, the animal instinct to be a social creature, does, how does that not override your kind of social anxiety about reaching out and talking to other people?
Oh, man, you know, that's actually great. My, probably my favorite novel, I've read it probably 20 times, cause it's so short, is Notes from the Underground by Dostoevsky. And he, this is, it's like, that's one of the main themes, right? Where every time he tries to go out and make friends, he's socially awkward because, you know, he's, he's introverted and narcissistic and so he goes out, and so he doesn't do it very often. And when he, so when he does go and try, it's a disaster. It's, it's a hilarious book, there's a lot of insight into it. But, um, so I think people, they do try sometimes, but they're not practiced at it. And, uh, you know, they, it's, they feel, I mean, that's the thing too, is like, it's terrifying. If you're not, you know, that guy, if you're not used to it, if you don't, for somebody who doesn't have any friends, you don't go out and talk to people on a regular basis, you're not kicking it with the boys or whatever,
to just go up and... Have a basic conversation with somebody you don't know, or to approach if you're a shy guy who is gonna approach like a female, ask her for a date. It's absolutely terrifying because you have this inner fear that, you know, the same thing that drove you to be an introvert in the first place, you know, that's this thing that's telling you this is gonna be a disaster and humiliating, and it's going to go infinitely worse than just staying at home, or whatever it is, and it's just, it's very powerful. I got to the point like years ago where, it was just what you said, like I kind of looked at it almost rationally, and just realized that this is just something I've gotta change, and I'm gonna go out and take the steps, the positive steps to go out and do it.
And jujitsu made it a lot easier, you know, I don't know if it would've been so easy without that particular environment, because you're already in a place where you're rolling around with dudes and like practicing things, and when, you know, they tap you out, they show you, "Oh, check it out, man, you know, this is what I did," or if you tap them, so there's already like that kind of very, very, very tight environment that made it easier for me, and maybe people that I jive with on a personality level. A lot of people don't have something like that, and I recommend to people, they go find one, because it's important. I mean, you can get isolated, especially now, right, where you have access to social media, and so you have this outlet for it, that is, it's not real, but it can serve,
it'll give your brain some of those doggy treats that socializing with people would have, you know, normally given you. And so maybe back in the day before we had those things, people would've been more driven to just, "I gotta go do something," but now it's a lot easier to not do that.
Now, how about, there's a couple of the things that I know you and I talked about before we hit record. One of them, you know, when you were going through sort of your social roles, and how your social role impacts the story that you're telling yourself.
Sure. Yeah, I mean... If you think of somebody who, well, in a way, like a social role is a story, right? Like, if you're a soldier, if you're a cop, if you are a father or a mother or something like that, these are stories, right? This is a role and a story that you're inhabiting.
Yeah, and what's scary about those things is when that social role becomes your story. And you know, you see this a lot with guys that get out of the military and what they did in the military, that was their story.
And all of a sudden, that story's gone. You know, the day you retire, the day you get out, you don't have a story anymore. And that's not a good thing.
You see it with people who get divorced, you know? They get hit with a divorce and one minute, they were a dad and a husband and they had the responsibility of providing for this family or whatever. And now, all of a sudden, that's done and they gotta start from scratch. And the idea of starting a new story from scratch in your 40s or whatever, at any point, really, but I mean, that's a, that's, it's a, you know, you gotta attack that. I mean, that's not something that's gonna fix itself. That's not something that is just gonna come up and be handed to you. I mean, and it's not gonna be comfortable because you're not gonna be prepared for something like that. I mean, you really have to attack it. And it's very hard for a lot of people.
I mean, you know, if you look at, you know, the rates of suicide right now, the rates of opium abuse, the rates of alcohol abuse, like, all of these things are through the roof, not just recently because of COVID or the financial situation or whatever. This has been going on since at least the early 2000s. You've had these skyrocketing rates, mostly with young people, people under 40. But, you know, you see something like that. We're kind of treating it as like a, you know, we say we've got an interdict fentanyl coming in from China or whatever. It's like, yeah, okay, Roger that. But, you know, what's going on that we have a forty percent increase in suicides in the
last, you know, since, since two thousand and five? What's going on that like we have two million people in the country abusing opioids? Uh, what's going on with, uh, you know, forty percent of the population being classified as drinking too heavily, right? Um, not, not full alcoholics, although there's fifteen million alcoholics, right? And then you take all the other people, maybe they're not doing pills or getting drunk every night, but they're just zoning out and watching porn and screwing around on Twitter and playing video games and some other way of numbing themselves out and pushing out the rest of the world, right? Then you're talking about a massive number of people. And I, I don't think that we're treating that with anywhere near the seriousness, you
know, cause what is, what is, what is going on when people do that? People who have another purpose, they don't go do that every night, you know?
So that's the, that's the social role thing is we're here, we're a police officer, we're a school teacher, we're a, you know, a VP of this financial group, we're a, you know, a construction worker that's out pouring concrete and all those things come with a nice little story. That's, that, that's kind of, kind of, kind of positive, right? We're doing something good. We like those things. What, what else is it about the social role that kind of, kind of dictates our story?
Well.
Or what do we pull away from?
Well, so coming back to what we began the episode talking about, the way we perceive, the things we perceive in the world and the way that we apprehend it, um, has to do with the stories we're living out and those roles are stories, right? And so, um, like, let's say you're a police officer and you're going out there, um, that, that cop maybe, I don't, I don't know, maybe this isn't true, I'm not a cop, but maybe when they're not on duty and they're walking around, they probably. They probably observe the street differently than they do when they're in uniform and they're walking their beat, right? Maybe not, maybe it becomes automatic, but you know, the, the idea that if you think of yourself as a police officer, you're going to relate to the world
and to other people in a certain way, right? And it's gonna, it's gonna be shaped indelibly by that role that you're playing. And people, and you know, maybe you come home and you're not a cop anymore, you're a dad, now you're in a different place. And a lot of people, they see you out at work and they see you at home and they're like, I can't believe you're the same guy. Like, you know, a lot of people, if you, you know, if you, if you get promoted and now you're hanging out with somebody who used to be your boss, you know, on an equal level, you realize this is a completely different person than you thought it was, right? Because we really do inhabit those roles and they shape, you're not just acting. It's not, that's the thing is, you know, I learned this when I, I rose up into leadership levels when I was in the, in the Navy myself, is you're not just putting on
an act, like, oh, I'm in leadership mode now and I'm gonna, it's that when you're in that role, you're perceiving things different and you're really like acting out a different, you know, acting out that role. But sometimes you get so wrapped up in those roles and the way that you think that they're supposed to be, that they, they take over, they take over your, the actual human perception and you have just your one, you're, you're a person in a role clashing with another person in a role, right? I am a police officer who is here to enforce order and I am a young African-American male who has, you know, been like, like, like everybody else, put upon by police officers, you know, my whole
life. And it's not just this interaction between these two people. Now, when you do that, there's a whole history behind it. It goes all the way back to the Civil War in 1619 and both of you are kind of like interacting on that level. Instead of just the level of these two human beings who are, you know, coming into contact in this given way, that's how, that's how deeply we can inhabit these things. And, you know, I mean, on one level, on one level, it's okay, right? If you think about like what a, any successful country, any successful organization or anything like that has got to have a story. We say, what do we, what do we say? We say, people are on the same page, right? That's a reference to that, talking about a story there, they're on the same page.
And so as a country, you want to have certain things where, there are certain things that, regardless of our differences, we're all trying to do, right? And we want you to inhabit the roles on a deep level that you're involved with to, you know, to, to ensure that you're, you're fulfilling your responsibilities well. But, a society has to offer people roles that allow them to live out their lives in a meaningful way. I mean, that's really, in a lot of ways, the point of a society. Like, if a society can't do that, then it's going to be torn apart by those same people down to the studs very, very, very quickly, right? People can go out and, you know, we were hunter-gatherers figuring out how to feed ourselves and reproduce
for a long, long, long time before we ever had societies and civilizations. Societies and civilizations, you know, these things, uh, we've got to offer people, um, things to do, uh, stories to live out, right? Things that are going to give them structure and meaning in their lives. It's going to make the sacrifices of living in a system like this where we actually ask a lot of people, worth it, you know? And right now, I think we've got a little bit of a crisis in that mode. People are either living out completely different stories, have nothing to do with each other, or are in conflict with each other, um, or they just don't feel like they have any meaningful options to, to latch on to and put their energy into.
I, my guys would come to my house, you know, back in the day when I was in the Dames. And they would always say, man, you don't swear. Cause I would, I would not swear when I was in front of my kids ever. Like just when I get home and obviously, you know, being in a SEAL platoon or whatever, it's, you know, your two thirds of your sentences are, are swear words. And it's, I never thought of the fact that, you know, I was, I, and like you said, I wasn't being a different person. I'm the exact same person. This one swears, this one does not swear. And, and those are two different roles.
This one is a platoon commander or instructor or a task unit commander or a whatever. And this one's a dad. And, and there you go. There's two different roles and just this minor little change. And, and yeah, so that's that. And then the other thing that, you know, when we start building stories that people can latch into, latch on to, and the story is set up in opposition to someone else's story. That's not a good way to, to kick off that book.
Yeah. And especially because, you know, coming back into the beginning, uh, those stories are what structure sort of the things that we're looking for and the things that we notice and, and the way we interpret that information. Right? If you are, um, you, you notice everything that your enemy does wrong. And that goes into the memory bank and builds onto that big edifice of, of contempt that you have for them. And it adds on to that, you know, that just like the, the schizophrenic has a billion examples to prove to you that the CIA has been after him for years. You know, a racist has a billion examples to support exactly why he feels the way he does. You know, somebody who just is at the point of America needs to be torn down because it's an oppressive state.
They have a billion examples to prove that to you.
I was, I was working with a client the other day and they were showing me an email that had been sent by someone that they were not a fan of. And, you know, it was like, look, look at this email, you know, just really hostile. And I forget exactly what the email said, but it was something along the lines of, You know, hey, I've been busy. Um, I didn't get a chance to get around to that. Um, I'll try and get to it later. Something like that.
But the way they read it was been busy. You know, it'd be like if I sent you a text and said, hey, man, been busy, or if they said been busy, didn't get a chance to look at what you sent. I'll try and look at it later. That's one way to read it. The other one way to read it is been busy. Meaning I'm too busy for your bullshit, right? Been busy. I'll try and look later, right? This is just, you could receive that in the most negative possible way. You can interpret that in the most negative possible way.
Somebody point out one time how, uh, some people are like this where if you, if they ask you a question on text and you say no, but you do like capital N, lowercase o, period. They're like, that seems kinda harsh, doesn't it?
Yeah, I'm a violator of that because I, I send texts with, with proper punctuation. The, the, talk about interpretation. Um, the interpretations and this is something else that you, you've talked to me about the Milgram experiment. And, and the interpretation of that. Or let's say the misinterpretation.
It goes with the roles too, yeah. Um, so the Milgram experiment for everybody else who doesn't know, uh, was done back in the sixties at a time when people were, the context is people were trying to figure out how could something like Nazi Germany happen, right? We have, one guy couldn't do this. Took a lot of people, right, to do these things. They were trying to figure out the structure, the power structure of a system that would get ostensibly regular, middle-class people to go be concentration camp guards or whatever. And so the Milgram experiment was, uh, they would bring somebody in and tell them that we're gonna run an experiment, uh, to see how people learn through negative, uh, physical feedback, basically. And so you're gonna help us out. We're gonna ask somebody on the other side of this screen some questions.
And if they get a question wrong, then you're gonna press a button that will give them a light shock and we'll ramp those shocks up as we go. And the person on the other side of the screen, they're the ones that we're experimenting on. We wanna see how they respond to these shocks. Well, the actual experiment was seeing how far would this person go? Just zapping the hell out of this person on the other side of the screen. The other person on the other side of the screen was an actor. They weren't real shocks, but by the end of it, they're getting 400 something volts and screaming and begging you to stop, please, and then they stop responding altogether and the person's still zap, zap, zap, zap, zap. And so the experiment in something like 60 or 70% of the people who did it, they just zapped them all the way on up to the top, right? Just zapping the hell out of them.
So people, the interpretation at the time was if there is a person who seems to be in the role of authority, like the guy in the lab coat telling you, you must zap him again, then people will slip into this sort of subservient role and mindlessly obey no matter what. Since then, people have looked back on that experience, you know, and that interpretation really fit with kind of how people were thinking about things at the time, right? It was a very neat explanation for what it was they were actually trying to figure out.
Which in the interpretation is, hey, if there's someone in authority that's telling you to do something, you'll kind of get on board with it. Human beings will just kind of get on board with it.
Yes. And so people in more recent years have looked back on that experiment and realized that maybe that's one way to understand it, but there's a lot of reasons to think that not only is that not the only way, it's probably actually wrong. So what they did was, you know, it was an experiment, so everything had to be very controlled. So you didn't just have the guy who was supposed to be the doctor telling you whatever he wanted to tell you in order to get you to zap him. He would have actual lines he would use on you, right? Please administer the shock. You must administer the shock. The experiment requires that you administer the shock. And then finally, the last one was like some higher level of harshness, right? Like you better do this, or you have no choice. That's what it was.
You have no choice, you will do this. And what they've, and so if it was true that people just respond obediently to figures of authority. You would expect that last one, the most authority expressed and harshness expressed, to be the one that would get the most response out of people. And as it turned out, that was the exact opposite. The one where he says, you know, please administer the shock. The experiment requires that you administer the shock and so forth. It went in inverse proportion to the level of direct harshness that the, uh, that the, the person playing the doctor used. And what the guys, uh, one guy, Steven Riker, another guy, Alex Haslam, uh, sociologists who have studied, um, identity, the function of identity in, uh, in our psychology and
our lives, um, very, very tightly, very, very interesting guys. Um, what they found is that the ones that encouraged the subject of the experiment to identify with the doctor as opposed to identifying with the other person over there, worked very, very well. You know, this is an experiment. We're in this together. Yes, he might be hurting him over there, but you and I are doing this for science or whatever. As soon as the doctor said, you have no choice, you will do this. All of a sudden, I'm kind of on the side of that guy over there. Like you have the doctor there who's imposing this kind of uncomfortable feeling on the two of us who are now in this together. A hundred percent of the people refused that prompt. And it was something like 70% of the people, and then 50, and then 30 responded to the
ones that were less harsh, that were more inviting. So you have that question of identity, right? That you have to bring into it because identity is a story too. And that's, people often don't think about it that way, but you, you say like, well, what is identity? That means who are we? Well, who are we is a story. Maybe we can talk about that later.
Yeah. And that's interesting from a leadership perspective, just that.
They have a book on leadership. It's excellent.
The fact that me telling you, you have no choice automatically like raises your rebellious, you know, vibes. And when I bark at you, hey, you need to get this done. You don't like that. No one likes that.
These guys have actually. Totally changed the way that Europe polices soccer hooligan, like soccer crowds now. Totally changed it. Like, and you would actually love to read about this stuff from a counterinsurgency perspective, because, you know, instead of what they found was like you'd have these hooligans in these places, that whole crowds would just destroy cities, right? And the traditional way of dealing with it was phalanx of riot police, you know, getting ready, blocking them off, you better not do anything because we're right here and so forth. But what the effect that that was having was taking a crowd of individuals who were there for many different reasons, some of them to cause problems, many of them kind of waiting to see what happens, a lot of them like, I hope nothing goes crazy, whatever, are being forced together into a collective
identity by the very fact of your united opposition against them, right? And so they just look around and be like, well, I guess we are in this together. And they've totally revolutionized the way that Europe actually polices these things now. And it's they, they send people into the crowd to interact with individuals, talk to people. And what they find now is, I mean, it's totally changed. Are they uniformed?
I think so. Yes, I think so. They are uniformed. And what they find is that the people in the crowd will tell you who the troublemakers are, they'll point you up, point you out to them. And, you know, it's not so much, they're not going in there and manipulating anybody. They're not going in there and like trying to hypnotize anybody. They're going in there and saying, I'm on you and I, it's you and me. It's not us and all of you, it's you and me, and then this guy and I, like, it's, you know, he, and so on an identity level, they're preventing that, that, that, the, the crowd from coalescing into a united mob. Right? And yeah, it's very profound. And I, those guys have, they helped me a lot in my, in my Israel Palestine podcast, actually, just understanding how social identities form up.
And, you know, it's something that, and maybe we can end on this, I know we're running a little long, but something I brought up in that situation, the Israeli Palestinian one. In the early days, the thing that ramped that up so much, you had most people on both sides who didn't want shit to go bad, who didn't want things to go bad. And But you had 5% on each side that was ready to rock and roll. And somehow, that 5% on each side always got to dictate the level that the game was going to be played at. And why is that? That's because, you know, somebody from this side goes and bombs one of your kids, and somebody from this side goes and bombs two of your parents in return.
And, you know, over time, the two sides just start to become radicalized on a deep level.
How much is it, you know, if I'm, if I'm got the 5%, and I'm not in that 5%, but when the 5% says, "They did this", and how much is it social pressure for me to, to say, "Well, you know, it could have been an accident"? You, what are you, one of them? Right? Like, how much of that is there?
Well, it's, it's very important that you do have that. Uh, or rather, that you have people that are willing to do that. I mean, I think that one of the issues we have, maybe in our politics right now, not to get, not to get partisan, because this kind of changes up from era to era. But in this particular moment, I think that the political right, for the most part,
pretty effectively sets the outer boundary on its own side. And says, "If you're beyond this, then you're not involved with what the rest of us are doing", right? If you're out there with a Nazi flag, or whatever. And people can talk about individual politicians or media figures maybe throwing dog whistles or something. But the fact that the dog whistles are necessary tells you that there are rules, right? The Republican Party booted out in Iowa Congressman in the 2018 election. He'd been serving for a long time. He didn't make any Nazi remarks or anything, but he just was kind of talking about sort of the European majority in America slipping and so on. And the Republican Party was like, "You're going down the wrong path. We're not tolerating that."
They funded a primary opponent against him. Been around for a long time, and they got rid of him. You know, that border is policed pretty strongly, especially on that particular issue. I think that the left, partly because of how the 60s are romanticized and kind of misunderstood, various, various reasons, has a little bit more trouble with that in this, in this era. You know, again, like, it changes kind of from time to time. In this era, you have, like, most people, obviously, like, on the left, people who are going to vote for Joe Biden in this election or something. They don't like seeing cities getting torn up, or they don't like violence. They have a little bit more trouble than the right does in finding the moral language to condemn it and to actually take a stand against it. Because it can be hard. I mean, when you've got people who are saying, you know, things
that you, on a fundamental level, agree with, while they throw a Molotov cocktail, it's it's tough to say, you know, I don't care what's coming out of your mouth, until you stop doing that, we're not on the same team. It can be very difficult, you know? And, uh, yeah, it's something that's gotta be figured out.
Yeah. Well, I think, uh, yeah, good place to end, and we can, we can dive into some of those things on the next one. But I think, you know, I think it's important for people to pay attention, to pay attention to the story that you're telling yourself. Pay attention to what story you're allowing yourself to be told. And paying attention and trying to make sure that you're not closing your mind to other versions or other aspects that are out there.
And with that, if you are listening to this podcast on the Jocko Podcast feed, we're gonna get its own feed up at some point, and we'll separate them. So subscribe to this podcast if you want to listen to it. You can also check out our other podcasts. Mine are the Jocko Podcast, the Warrior Kid Podcast, and the Grounded Podcast. Daryl's podcast is called Martyr Made. And you can support all of these podcasts by getting some gear from JacoStore.com or from OriginMaine.com. I also have a leadership consulting company
that you can find at EchelonFront.com. That's all we've got for tonight. Thanks for listening as things unravel. This is Jaco and Daryl, out.
Page updated October 26, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
