All right, Leadership Lessons from the Great Books podcast, episode
number 171 with with John Hill,
aka Small Mountain Covering War
by Sebastian Younger in 3,
2, 1.
Hello, my name is Hasan Sorrells, and this is
the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books podcast,
episode number 171.
This is going to be kind of a long intro, so bear with me.
In the study of conflict, whether between people, between people
and institutions, or between institutions themselves, there is
an observation that applies to those types of conflicts
from the economist Thomas Sowell, whose book
A Conflict of Ideological Origins of Political Struggles we
will be covering next season in February on this
show, and this
quote applies to our book today.
There are no solutions. There are only trade
offs. And then
there is this from that hoary old book that lies at the bottom of Western
culture that we don't often talk about out loud.
And I quote, for which of you, desiring to build a tower,
does not first sit down and count the cost? Whether he has enough to complete
it? Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to
finish, all who see it begin to mock him, saying, this man
began to build and was not able to finish? Or what king
going out to encounter another king in war will not sit
down first and deliberate whether he is able with 10,000 to meet him who has
comes against him with 20,000? And if not,
while the other is yet a great way off, he sends a delegation and
asks for terms of peace.
Luke 14:28 32 ESV
the challenge of trade offs the challenge of counting the cost of those trade
offs and then being willing to explain the trade offs to people who might disagree
or who might like to have their own costs included in the conversation
is one of the most difficult challenges endemic to the Western way of war
making. None of the countries who have sprung
out of the Western tradition has been quote, unquote, good at this part.
Going back into the history of the west and this lack of
being skillful at measuring the trade offs inherent in waging war
has reached its apotheosis in the form,
as is usual, of the United States making
war. We forget in our postmodern time,
and I think to our peril, that we have never been fully united in the
pursuit of war because we disagree fundamentally about the trade offs in
blood, Treasure, time, and here's a big
one, the will to commit to what the enemy
won't. But
when the moment of battle arrives, as it did at the siege of Vienna in
1683 by the Ottoman Empire, and as it would in
the Korengal Valley in 2007. The
militaries of the west tend to commit all of their
forces to an inflection point and leave
the dealing with the trade offs and the arguments for
later today on
this episode of the podcast, we will explore what happens after. The arguments about trade
offs and the counting of costs have been, for better or worse, put
aside. Now the will to
commit will be enjoined right at the tip of the spear
with Battle Company, 2nd Battalion, 503rd
Infantry, 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team
in 2007 and documented by the embedded journalist
Sebastian Younger in his excellent
reportage war,
which you can see on the video today.
Leaders. Who among you, even in business,
are willing to count the cost and willing to live
with the consequences of that cost?
And today we will be joined by our co host rejoining us on episode
number 161 this summer and feeling a little spicy today.
We were talking a little bit before we hit record, so he's going to bring
some of that spiciness to our conversation, I suspect.
And in episode 161 we discussed Robert Heinlein,
Stranger in a Strange Land. You should go back and listen to that episode too.
My friend and the friend of the show, John Hill, AKA
Small Mountain. How you doing today, John?
And I'm. I was getting a little spicy before we hit the record
button. Um, this is an interesting
book. Like, there's a lot into this and yeah, we're going
to dig into it, but I'm not going to jump ahead. I'm very excited to
dig into this and hear your perspective on it and kind of talk about my
thinking on it and go from there. Absolutely,
absolutely. This book was,
you'll, you'll, you'll hear. So by the time you hear this
episode. Right. The introductory episode will be, will be out where
I talked a little bit about the background of the book, talked about the background
of Sebastian Younger as an embedded journalist and reporter
of Vanity Fair and an author who had written the book the
Perfect Storm before this. And that sort of was his ticket
into, into the Korengal Valley and into
being embedded with the, the 2nd Battalion and,
and their efforts at Opera Strepo or
Op Restrepo as well as other places in
the Korengal Valley. And we're going to talk a little bit about the Corgon Valley
today. But I would encourage you to go back and listen to that intro episode.
I would also encourage you to go back and listen to the shorts episode, I
believe it's number 200, where we talk about
or where I address this idea, which is addressed in the back end
of the book in the section called Love.
The really complicated relationship that young men have with
combat, particularly when we ask them to go do it,
and then we demand that they come back and put that all down
in favor of the lives that we live here without,
in my opinion, a requisite understanding. And even Younger
says this in the book. An understanding of why combat
works particularly for young men. We
don't really want to think about that because it's just too. It's too
ugly. It's too ugly. But I
think we, and I agree with Younger, I. I think we have to face that
ugliness if we ever really actually
want to have peace on Earth.
That's really hard. It's a really hard way to get from there to here.
But that's kind of starting at the end. I would encourage you to go back
and listen to that shorts episode, listen to the introductory episode. Today on the
show, I'm going to delve into John's insights
from the book. I'm going to share my own, as usual, because it's copyrighted material.
I'm not going to be reading directly from the book. I respect not only the
copyright, But I respect Mr. Unger's work too much to do that.
And I respect the. The men of.
Of the 173rd Battalion and of 2nd Platoon. And so I'm not going
to do that to them. Instead, what I'm going to do
is I'm going to ask John to start us off with. And he was very
excited to read this book. When I initially sort of sent him the list, just
a little bit behind the scenes, sent him the list of books that we're going
to be reading this year on the podcast. He said, dude, I want to do
that one. And I knew it was going to be tough. And we're
doing it on Coming in on the Back End, or we're covering this book Coming
in on the Back End of World War I by John Keegan. And there's
a lot of parallels between the way Keegan reports
on World War I and the ways in which World
War I has been framed from a soldier's perspective, which Keegan does critique
in his book because he's framing it as a historian, not a
combatant, and definitely not an embedded person.
All the way a hundred years later to what we are doing in the
Korengal Valley and the ways in which things have shifted over the course of a
century is kind of amazing. But what's even More
amazing are the things that have remained the same.
So with that framing and setup, I
would remind you that the book is divided into three parts.
We're going to probably talk about each part, but first part is fear. The
second part is killing. And then the third part, as I said previously,
is love. John, you went through
this book. Tell us your thoughts about Sebastian
Younger's book on war.
So a little bit of backstory here. I
am prior service. I joined the army reserves in
2001, in May of 2001. That's an important
part of this thing because I joined largely just for some college money
and for all the wrong reasons to join the military. But we were in
peacetime. Didn't really matter. You know,
the recruiters made it sound. It was like it was going to be awesome, right?
I was going to get really great training. I was gonna be able to come
back. I was gonna be able to get a really cool job, and no big
deal. Let's just go do this thing. So I joined,
and me and. Me and a buddy joined together, and his younger brother
had already joined. And so I kind of got to see this
person who had gone through basic training and was still very
optimistic about the army, right. And being in the
military. And I didn't have anything going on. Right. I dropped out of college.
At this point, I'm working full time. You know, I had all the credit cards
that everybody got around that time, and, you know, starting to feel that pressure of
it, didn't know what to do. And so kind
of found my way there and
put a lot of distance, I think, between myself whenever I was
going through that and this person that I am now. Right. I see a lot
of value in some of the stuff that I've had to go through. A of
lot of what the military taught me had a long period of kind of being
not really excited about any of that stuff. I didn't want to talk about it
a whole lot. But now I kind of see where it's helped
me. Like, I do not think I would be capable of running my own business
or being a sales professional or doing any of the things that I do now
without my time in the military. But all that to be said,
I never deployed. I never really had to go out
and do the things that are talked about in this book. And so
when I'm talking about this and I'm sharing my opinion, I just wanted to be
clear that I am speaking from a place who. Who has been through the training
but has not actually been in that environment. But I have a lot of friends
who have and have come back different and
to the point you're talking about before,
not the same, completely different. So
this book was. Wasn't fascinating because like
reading through it, I don't know that I've ever read anything
that made it more like real.
Like I was instantly like teleported back to being in
Georgia before 911 when it was just an exercise, and after
911 when it was no longer just an exercise and we're on, you
know, 24 hour alert and things like that. I've never,
like, I had to put it down a couple of times and like, take some
breaks and walk away from it and stuff like that because it was just like
very, very well written. Like there's this,
there's this vibe that like is. And you can see it in the
book if you're really paying attention to it and stuff like that. And if you're
not familiar with it, it just feels like bravado.
But there's this weight to it that if you've been around
it and you've seen the output of it and stuff like that, to where it's
not just bravado, like it's, it's. It's this very
weird version of like hope kind of thing and stuff like that.
And it's, it's mixed up and labeled oddly and put into weird
conventions, you know, and there's a lot in the book about like, you know, the
needling and the, you know, the crap giving and the, the
hazing and all of this stuff. And like it's, I
mean, it's so well written, right? Like, if you've never been
through it, this is probably one of the, one of the most interesting
points of view on it, right? Because it's all there
and even down to when you're leaving, you're going to give
the new guys crap because they're not prepared, but they think that they are, but
you're going to go humble. Like that is. That is so just in
it, you know, and the, the cool part
of they know that that's what's required
in that space, right? Like, you know, when they're talking about how
their uniforms are completely destroyed and everything because they're doing these things and stuff
like that, and it becomes a mark of distinction. Like when you're out and you're
that far out and stuff, it is. There are like, the rules are lesser, you
know, and then when you come back and you're, you know, herded together again,
it's kind of like, you know, I, I've seen that frustration
so many times when talking with people who are frustrated by the rules when
they come back, you know, and, and it's just, I've never read
anything that like, put me back in that spot as deeply as this book did.
And I'm, I'm. It was, yeah, it was a
lot. It was a lot for sure.
Buddy of mine who's been on the show, I don't feel bad about using his
name, R.J. st. John. He came on a couple years
ago and talked with us about the book about Face,
which is, which is another great, another great memoir
written from the perspective of a guy who,
the author who, who served in Korea. Right. And then proceeded to serve
in Vietnam and then just, you know, left the military, the American
military, and retired to, to Australia, began to critique the American
military's approach in, in Vietnam and then
was, you know, cast off, basically.
Colonel David Hackworth. Right. I didn't know about that.
Like, like I know about, I know about Hackworth and about,
about Face, largely because of, you know, Jocko's podcast and following him
for a while. I didn't, I didn't realize that he got kind of like
excommunicated for some of these ideas. That's fascinating.
He became peacenick or what they called Peacenick back in the day.
Today we would just call him a reasonable guy,
but the thing he was fighting uphill against was
all of the residue From World War II that
was the thing he was fighting against. And we don't, we don't appreciate.
No, I'll frame it this way. I think people who have a non
historical perspective on the world and on the, on America
don't appreciate just how powerful military service
was from World War II and the ripples that went out from that in
literally every facet of American life.
And so by the time you get to Vietnam
and Hackworth's looking at the decay of the American
military command structure, he doesn't really
understand it. And so for him, the only solution, at least this is what
I was able to glean, was to critique
the system and then eventually leave the system.
Yeah. Because there was no way around it in
that particular environment that he was in. I think it's because of
the work of guys like Hackworth. I think it's because of the
writing of folks like that and yes, the journalists who came
after and who critiqued Vietnam that we are able to
wind up with this book right here. Oh, I think so.
And I want to. So I was mentioning my buddy RJ I want to bring
this up because he, he saw the picture that I posted
on Facebook, on our Facebook page about getting into the
book and he texted me, he said this, that book, Younger, that book
by Younger War. I've read it, actually I read it in
Afghanistan and I couldn't put it down as finally I had found a
civilian who understood and could put into words what I could not.
When I came home, I had, I'm not going to say her name. I
had this person and her mother read it. And while this person
understood, her mom didn't and lots of people I've
recommended that book to Just Do Not Understand. It's an
excellent book and a good view into the grunt world from a non
grunt perspective. Yeah.
Close quote. There's, there's this
status that goes along with it, right? And they talk about how they
know about it, right? Like I went to Benning, which is where like the home
of the infantry is. But my, my, my job is not to be an infantry
person, right? So I went through like the regular standard boot camp.
But it was wild because since I'm at Benning and it's the home of the
infantry and that's like their big thing and they're very, you know, we were
always hearing about how we weren't, we weren't there for the,
for the good stuff, the 11 Bravo. And like, I mean it was always
just kind of being dangled, like the pride of that, right? And
it has to be there, it must be there, you know, and
this is a, I hate, I hate when people take
war propaganda into sales leadership. It really, really bothers me, but it happens
all the time. But you know, if you
don't make it a big thing, something
you can be proud of or whatever, people are just going to do the minimum,
right? And so right now there's a, there's a whole fleet of
sales professionals called like SDRs and BDRs, right? And they, they do
early stage work, right? They're setting appointments, they're, they're triaging, they're
clarifying the information and stuff. They don't even get to close any deals. And in
that mode, when you're just being told, well, you're just a setter, you're just a
setter, you're not going to, you're not like they're doing it the, the bad way,
right? Because everyone just wants to be out of that role, which means no one
is going to really be in that role and do it well and like lead
the Pathfinder and document the journey and do these things. And so
it's, it's this very stark comparison. Right. Because being.
Being an sdr, being an appointment setter, being a BDR can sometimes be a thankless
job because you don't get the glory of closing the deals or getting it across
the finish line or anything else like this. And if it's positioned as well,
just do this for a little bit and then we'll get you promoted and then
you're going to do the cool work, then you get to do the, the big
bucks and stuff. It's why everyone has
hates that role and it's why people can't keep people in that role because they're
not packaging it in a way that makes people excited to do it.
Right. Whereas infantry, for as much as that job sucks,
most of those people are incredibly bought into the value and
the value of the effort that they do. Yeah, I, One of
the things that really struck me, particularly in the first part of,
of the book. And it. Struck me
all the way down to my bones, so I've known the kinds
of folks that go into the military.
This was a surprise for me. I, I did not know
this. And it was. I, I was delighted that they put this
into the book, honestly, because, because people do not know about this if they
have not served or not spent time around armed services folks. Right.
And it's, it's, it kind of reminded me in a certain way of
the folks that I see at. And this is my first mention of it, and
I'll mention it more this episode. I always do once or twice or four times
an episode. It reminds me of the folks that I've been going through Jiu Jitsu
with right now on the Jiu Jitsu journey. It is this ragtag
collection of miscreants and criminals
and people with a criminal mindset who aren't quite criminals
and people who just want the thrill and accountants
and lawyers and doctors like we were
just talking about. And we're all united in this sort
of brotherhood. And they
were united in this. And they talk about this a lot. In love, united in
this brotherhood. And to your point, there's hazing,
there's nonsense, there's crap talking. Like
every time I go to Jiu Jitsu, I'm getting crap talked. It's fine. And I'm
dishing out as much as. I'm taking it fine. Because, you
know, my mom didn't raise no punk. So there you go. That's how that goes.
Don't, don't get confused with the flat
Midwestern sounding voice. Don't get confused. Don't, don't
confuse that. But you sound like you're going through boot
camp like right now, right? A little bit. Well, you
know, here's the thing. I would never compare what I'm doing in jiu jitsu with
boot camp. I would never compare. Thank God. Like, like it's not
even. No, please. Number one, I'm in my mid-40s. My knees don't work
that well. Let's be really real here.
But the, the, it is the closest
thing a non combatant, non grunt can get to something
that's like, almost like that. And even still you're not close.
Right? And it's. And what fascinated
me in the first part of the book in Fear was
the psychology of these guys, the
mentality of these young men.
Typically when we think about soldiers, we do, we think of a rootless,
typically our time. Rootless, to
your point about your experience, rootless, non college going
guy who might have some violent tendencies. And we
don't understand that. And so we want to channel that as a society and culture
into something that's beneficial. And I looked at the statistics. Less
than 1% of the available male population in the United States serves.
Really? Yep. I looked up the statistics. It's like 0.08%.
I did not know it was that low. That's interesting because the biggest
lesson that the Pentagon learned from the end of the Vietnam War,
at the end of the Vietnam War was get rid of conscription.
This is why anytime anybody in Congress on either side of the
aisle talks about going back to the draft, the
Pentagon shuts that down immediately. Oh, yeah, don't,
don't even talk about it. Shut up. Right.
But what this does on the other end of that
idea, which we don't appreciate this. Remember I talked about the World War II veterans,
right. What this does is it flattens
society in the face of a warrior ethos. And now
the society doesn't understand how to deal with that warrior when they come back.
So the case in point for sure is o', Byrne, right. In
the book, his, his journey. Right. So you know this
guy, Brendan o', Byrne, right. He led his men, what I, in what
I would consider an exemplary fashion in a
horrible place and made command
decisions that
a 22 year old shouldn't have to make.
But he understood what the game was and he
understood how to do the thing. I even, I even as a, as part of
me reading this book, I went out and bought Restrepo, which was
the movie that was made from the
photographer Tim Harrigan, or I'm not saying his name, last name
correctly, I don't think. But the photographer that was along with Sebastian
Younger, who took photographs and video. Right. Of their experience and it turned into a
movie called Restrepo. And then there's another movie called Korengal, which I'm probably going to
get to. And I watched that movie as part of reading this book and normally
I don't do that. Normally I don't cross over the book with the film. But
this was one of those things like reading Shakespeare where you've got to like hear
it and see it, because seeing the words on the page, to your point,
doesn't quite have the same impact as it does when you actually watch the videos
of it. That's a fascinating thing because. Because like, I was watching
this or sorry, I was reading this and I was seeing about the Restrepo stuff
and the other document and I was. And I want all the context. I'll go
watch all this stuff, right? And then got a little real and I was like,
right. And so I still want to watch it, but I think I need a
little bit of time.
That's a fascinating thing, right? Because like, if you've not gone through anything like
that, I would imagine, I would imagine your
feeling at the end of that book is completely different than my feeling at the
end of that book. Oh, right, yeah, I, Yeah, I mean I,
I had to thumb back through it again on, on the. Well, so
we're recording this on a Monday. I had to go back through it on a,
on a, on the Sunday beforehand. And I just sat on my front porch and
just sat with. Was just one of those books I just sat with like, like
at the end of John Keegan's book, like World War I, I just sat with
it because
again, as a non grunt, right, As a person
who might have more orientation towards that mindset
than most other folks that I know, but never actually did the thing, never actually
pulled the trigger to go down the road for a
whole variety of reasons
as a person who, who has lived a life surrounded by these kinds
of people. And I'm talking about a lot of it like
they, and, and I'm the first male in my family to not serve in the
military. I broke the generational like going back, right?
And so there was a lot of pressure not to serve
necessarily, but a lot of pressure to do something if you're not going to do
that. Oh, so then it's like, well, you don't have to go,
but you better be a doctor. You better be something.
It's. It's almost like it's the. I'm going to use an analogy here. This
is going to be terrible. But it's my platform, so I can use terrible analogies
if I want. Absolutely. That's the whole point of building a platform. Exactly. It's the
African American version of the Asian tiger bomb.
Oh, yeah. It's that kind of
pressure, right? So, like, my uncles on my father's side all
served. My uncles on my. On my mother's side
served. My grandfather on my father's side served.
Like, it goes. You know, it's just there, right? We were the
opposite, actually. Okay, okay. So, like, my
parents are both hippies. And, like, whenever I told my mom I was thinking
about it, she's like, are you sure? What's. His
name's. What's his name? Who was in here? What was one of the soldiers. They
were describing him, the one who's like, mom wouldn't
let me have guns. She was also a hippie. Mm. Yeah. And
he was like, now I'm here doing this thing here. They like. I.
I believe he was. He was interviewed in. In Restrepo. And then they
cut to him, like, firing the 50 cal or it might have been the saw.
I can't remember right now. And, you know, it's.
It's.
I don't. I don't know what to do with any of it other than to
say reality plays out in weird ways.
And let's not layer. Let's not layer stuff on top of it. Let's not try
to make it more complicated or subtle or gray area
than just reality works out in weird ways. And follow the bouncing ball.
Well, and that's. That to me, goes back to how you open the show. It's
about the trade offs, right? And there's a.
As you were talking about this, I was having this flashback of
being in basic training, right, very early on, and
drill sergeants were yelling at us about not being decisive, not making decisions, not
just moving forward with intent and everything. And he goes, ah, that's right. You
guys are. You guys are privates. Like, we're not even soldiers yet. We're privates, right?
And it's derogatory, and you know it. Right? So going through this whole
thing. And he goes, oh, that's right. That's right. You guys haven't been to school
yet. You guys are, you know, too dumb to make decisions. And I was like,
I'm sorry, what? And. And he was like, start pushing so I'm down now.
I'm pushing now. And we have this conversation about how there's a school that the
military sends you to when you get to a certain rank, and it's all about
how to make decisions. And I thought this was the dumbest thing I'd ever heard,
right? So while I'm doing push ups, I'm like, hey, drill Sergeant, this seems a
little silly. Like, really. And he goes,
well, private, here, if you make
the wrong decision, people die. And here, sometimes, even if
you make the right decision, people will die. And there's a lot
of times where time does not actually show you which solution
has less risk and less death. And you have to be able to make command
decisions in the heat of that moment. And, like, I can. I couldn't
even do push ups anymore. I'm hearing this, and the weight with which he's
talking about it is just like, coming through, right? Because I'm
20 years old and I'm one of the older guys in the. In the thing.
Everyone else is like 18 or doing split ops. They're like on summer break between,
you know, junior and senior year of high school and everything.
And I'm like one of the older guard at 20 years old. And this idea
that, like, it was kind of like, okay, what have I really gotten myself
into? You know, but it was still fine because we're not at war. It's
okay. We're not at war. It's okay. This is just the reserves, right? And,
you know, talk about the hazing and like, the kind of hierarchical nature of it.
You know, there were airborne guys on our base, right? And
the hero worship, right? The Red Beret and. And all these
things, right? And being a reservist going through, like,
Benny, oh my God, man, like,
just hazed. And you know, only thing worse than being reservists of being a
National Guard or a nasty girl, like, it, like, there. There's
no way to show up and not take it in some way, shape or form,
which is just kind of like an interesting aspect to it. But that idea of
everything has a trade off, right? And this is one of my very unpopular
conversations that I got to have with people now, including my wife sometimes, and she
does not like this, that choices, everything is a
choice, right? And everything has trade offs. You know, as a founder, if
you're not doing your stuff, that's a choice. If you're choosing to
procrastinate, if you're choosing to not figure it out, if you're choosing to go by
tech as opposed to understanding how this stuff works. Because you think the tech is
going to save you. You're making choices and there's going to be output of those
choices. Not only that, something else that Sebastian
makes an excellent point about in. In War,
in the back. In the back of the book, the back end of. Of Love,
he talks about how, yes, there are trade offs
and at. No, the. The tension
when you're in. As they used to say back in the day, pardon my French,
but they used to say back in the day, in the shit, when you're in
it versus when you're back home and the dial is turned down.
Yep. Everything that is out
there. This was the best explanation I ever saw for the psychology of this
or I've ever read for the psychology of this. Everything out there can kill
you. Everything is consequential whether you tie your
shoes or don't tie your shoes, whether you wash
or don't wash, whether you are carrying the appropriate
amount of water or not. Like, he. He told the story of a guy who
peed off the side of the. Believe it was off the side of the bunk
and the pee was like. Everybody could smell the pee. And the commanding officer went
back to that guy and said, listen, you're not drinking enough water. It's
110 degrees out here. We're sweating ammonia.
Drink water. Why would you be yelling at you about drinking water? Well,
because if you die on patrol or if you
pass out, a repeat stroke on patrol, now we have to carry your behind
up the mountain and back down the mountain to make sure you don't get shot
by the enemy. Drink water. Every decision
has monumental consequences. And then we come back to your
point about using war metaphors in business and war propaganda and sales and
leadership. You come back to the civilian
world and people are behaving. And I could see this in my veterans
that I know. I could see their frustration with civilians. This is the
best way I had it articulated. Civilians behave as if no
decisions are consequential. 100%. 100.
And I could see where that would drive them crazy and where that is the
biggest disjuncture. It's not the PTSD, really.
It's more the disjuncture on going from a place where
if you don't tie your shoelaces it can get you killed to,
well, I'm just not going to walk the dogs today because I don't feel like
it. Yeah. And the dogs will be fine.
And how do you make those two. How do you make the zipper close on
both of those ideas and you can't. No one has a good
psychological. Yeah. Way.
Matter of fact, I think Younger is probably the first writer to ever sort of
really articulate this correctly. Beautiful
job talking. I. What I love
and. Oh, man. Okay.
I love how he talks about how he carried it back
himself, that he was struggling with it. Right. I finished
the book and then I was doing a little bit of research on o'
Brien a little bit, and turns out that he writes now and
was reading some of his stuff and then I read an article about a flashback
he had because people were on him and it put him back
into that mode. And when you tighten the spring,
by. The way, the guy Money who told him he wasn't going to buy his
book, I freaking loved that. I laughed so hard.
Anyway, sorry, go ahead. When you put that. When you. When
you take a steel bar and you wind it into a spring, right. So that
way it'll push, it'll be. It'll compress, it'll do these things and everything else like
that. Like, we don't unwind that spring. No. In any way,
shape or form. Right? No. And a friend of mine is serving a double life
sentence because that spring was not unwound. And it just led to
a truly unfortunate incident. And he was trying to get help, but the line was
super long and so made some decisions and you know, he will
never be out because of that.
And it didn't have to be that way, but there was no. There
was no offloading of that tension in a meaningful way. And
so. Yeah, it's tough. Very tough. Well, and, and, and
so we think it's the trauma, right? I mean, Younger addresses this in the book
too. But violence, I think of the movie Heat,
right? The action is the juice, right. The
violence is the thing that young men want. That's why I opened up the
podcast with that, with that point. We, as a post
modern culture where we
have attempted in very meaningful ways to
erase violence at multiple levels, or at
least put it on the back burner enough to where we see it as an
aberration, not merely human nature
anymore. This is why everyone's shocked with murder statistics.
This is why everybody's shocked. Every time there's a murder statistic, everyone is surprised and
blown away. Everybody's shocked when we see.
Now, unfortunately, murders or
assassinations happen and then are publicized on social
media. And the reason why we're
shocked is not only because the vast majority of the available
male population doesn't serve in the military, thus doesn't See,
no, not only does it serve in the military, but doesn't experience combat because
combat has even reduced over the course of time. Okay.
So because of those two factors, we are shocked by violent death.
And we can say that's a good thing. We can say that that's a good
progression of society and culture. Yeah.
And yet to your point about trade offs, there's a trade off there. So
we exchanged being anti violent all
the way down to the lowest level for the
ability to focus violence,
as John Keegan made his point in World in the, in the first World War,
to focus violence at an inflection point very quickly,
very narrowly, particularly in America, we're really good at this.
And then get in and get out. Right. And then not waste a whole lot
of time. We don't like to waste a whole lot of time, partially. That's culturally,
we're Americans, we don't like to waste a lot of time. It bores us. We
lose interest just as a civilian population. But
when we ask people to do that, the thing we haven't taken into
consideration is back to my point about the psychology of these men.
What type of person do we want to go do that?
Because what's coming up in the next 20 years, and you and I have talked
about the next 20 years on the show before, what's coming up in the next
20 years is I would say probably 50%, maybe even
60 to 70% mechanized warfare between
drones and cyber AI
and God only knows what else that will come out
of human beings. Fertile imaginations.
We are going to reduce the number of human bodies you need in
an inflection point to an insanely low number
in the history of warfare. Now that will happen not only
in America, but also in Europe, in places that are
technologically advanced, in China, places that are technologically advanced. But the
knock on effect will be to places that are not technologically advanced because
they always ape us and try to copy what we do
in order to fight their own wars. And so over the next 20 years,
I suspect the casualties in warfare,
they won't go to zero, but they're going to be very low.
And yet we still won't ask the question, to your point about the
metaphor, about the steel bar, we know what it takes to tighten that steel bar
up, but I think we'll, I think we will still lack
curiosity, which is a shame to me, about what it takes to
unbend that bar. But we're still going to bend bars
because wars are still going to happen and
combat is still going to happen. And that's. I don't know.
And I don't know, maybe that's a thing, but maybe like 500 years from now,
long after you and I are dead and this podcast is gone from the Internet,
maybe 500 years from now, we'll get there. Maybe we will
get to world peace, but it's gonna take a while.
I know. I don't know. I don't know. Things to where
I put a lot of work over the past handful of years and being more
optimistic and being more of a positive person, because I am by nature kind of
cynical, kind of skeptical, especially after some of the stuff that I've been through and
what. What I've seen. And I work in sales, right? So.
I don't. There's something about youth,
right? And ego and
things like that. And, you know, reading this book
is really fascinating because whenever I was going through my time in the military, I
was kind of. And I had the same thing in sales, right?
I was trying to follow someone else's playbook, right? And I mean, it's a military,
so that's kind of what. What happens, right? But I was just thinking, okay, well,
if I just keep. If I just keep trying harder, if I just keep trying
harder, if I just keep, okay, eventually I'm not gonna have any of these concerns
that I have now, right? That was not true at all,
you know, because what I realized is, and I could not appreciate this
then, but hanging out with some of the people that I've met training martial
arts as well. Some people are just
meant for violence, right? Like
Clint, who was Marine,
served over there, deployed, was kind of doing some of the same stuff around.
Around, like, jocko stuff whenever he's talking about it in his book. But he
was Special Forces, Marines, and
never on my most angry day do I have the
capacity for violence that he.
Just. Because he. He go into that mode, right? Like, he's not a
sociopath or anything else like that. He's a super kind dude when he
wants to be, right? Thoughtful guy, great person, love
hanging out with him and stuff like that. But his. I mean,
his capacity for that is significantly more than mine, right?
And so going through that and you're bumping up against those people who are
built for that stuff, you know? And, you know, sweetheart, John was
not especially during that time, right? I hadn't learned how to be myself. I was,
you know, very unconfident and hadn't gone through anything
yet. So it was kind of this. Well, that's who I'm Supposed to be. That's.
I'm supposed to be. And then whenever I wasn't, it was just like a failure
on my part, you know? And then whenever I get into sales and I'm. And
I'm experiencing kind of the same thing, it's, like, frustrating, but I'm a little bit
older. And then, thankfully, I found coaching that was able to walk me out of
that jaded hole that I was about to walk down. I'm trying to
turn myself into something I didn't need to be to do the job, you know,
so it's there, you know. But hearing o' Brien
just talk about how he approaches
the world, like, yeah, yeah, I've.
I've met people like you. And, and while. While I've trained and I've
done a lot of training, and I think I can handle myself and everything else
like this. There's never.
There's never excitement about that prospect. There's never any kind of glee. There's never
like. It's just like, this is. This is the last line, right? This is what
it takes for me to go home. Some people, that's their first response. I'm
just not that guy. Right. And so for as long as there's going to be
those people, and I think. I think there's always going to be those people around
youth and around big ego. I think it's always
going to get in the way. Well, and
he talks also about, in the book Reaction Times, particularly between men
and women. You know, he talks about
the research around, particularly the psychology coming out of World War II, about
what basically creates a bond or team among disparate
elements of people. He also talks
about, or younger, writes about in this book, the
nature of. And this is sort of a Minority Report idea that I want to
go down the road a little bit with you here. The nature of
the enemy and the nature of
the Taliban. And
because he's unable to be embedded with them, he doesn't get a full
view. But he tries to be fair at least as much as he possibly can.
And, you know, the reality of
fighting wars in places that are.
And I love this line when he was describing the Korengal Valley. I have it
in my script here. Too remote to conquer, too poor to intimidate, and
too autonomous to buy off. Kind of put me in mind of
what my buddy, one of my buddies I brought invited on the show. He
comes on and talks about the Declaration of Independence in the Constitution every year. De
Rolo Nixon, he and I were kind of going back and forth A
little bit about sort of how people think around
freedom. Right. And one of the, one of the
points he made because we kind of. I don't know how we got on Afghanistan
in the conversation, but he made the point about the country of Afghanistan. He said,
he described it as the global version of Appalachia in the United States.
Right. A place where the internal
cousin fighting has been going on for
since time out of mind even the evening. I
mean the Chinese wouldn't go into that place. The Indians don't mess with them.
The Russians and the, and the British both had problems
and the Americans, for all of our 20 years of
going in and meddling ignominiously left in
2021. And I'm not going to discuss that at all. I don't want
to get on that. That, that kind of irritates me. I'm not going to get
on any of that for a whole variety of reasons. But we
spent 20 irritates you as fascinating label though. It does. It irritates me because I
don't. Was all for now.
I, I am not happy
with what we did as a great power. Even if we don't
want to be a great power, we're still perceived by others as a great
power. Even if internally we reject that and internally we do. We don't like that
language. That's why I wrote in my, in my script here
we're not supposed to. I think there's a, I think there's a contingent of people
who. Okay, sure there's a. There's a political contingent of people
that like the Lindsey Graham types. Sure. There's a political contingency
of people. The Victoria Newlands, you know, in both
administrations by the way. Doesn't really matter who. Who are. Who are there. Right. I
think this is a uniparty idea. I'm not talking about those people.
I'm talking about people like you and I. Like you and I aren't interested in
being part of an empire. And the reason why we're not interested in being part
of an empire are many and multifaceted. And that's part
of what I was saying in the intro about the arguments over trade offs.
That's where we have arguments over trade offs is okay,
we're going to give up our blood, our treasure, our time, our young men
to this in exchange for what
exactly. Yeah, what exactly are we
getting in exchange? And it's the politicians fault, not the generals
and not the civilians. It's the politician's fault for not
sufficiently explaining that to us and updating us every
single step of the way. And by the way, I don't mean updating us
in a Senate subcommittee that no one sees on C Span.
Yeah, I'm talking about updating us in political campaigns
and pass the propaganda and the rhetoric. I'm talking about updating us
through like say what you want about Ted Cruz, he's got a podcast.
Use a podcast. Like frickin go and do it. You know,
open the door. Right. But don't,
don't tell me that we're going to do the blood and the treasure
exchange. And then because you
know we are impatient,
you're going to do a pull out or
withdrawal in a manner
not befitting of the image or the
avatar you have put forth.
Because other people in the global neighborhood are watching.
It's not like we're doing this behind the scenes or
underwater or in the dark. Other people are
watching and they're taking our measure. They really are. They're taking our measure. Just like,
just like in. If I'm, if I'm,
I'll use a case of point. If I'm behaving badly at the American
Airlines ticket counter in front of my kids
because my tickets to where I'm supposed to go
or my luggage to where I'm supposed to go, if I'm behaving
badly, who sees that and learns from that?
My kids. I have a responsibility
to those people greater than can possibly be
fathomed, just as everybody else does who has kids to
make sure that I'm role modeling the correct behavior.
Great powers also have the same responsibility, but we
don't act like it and we don't want it. We just want to
come in and do our stuff and then leave. Okay, okay,
I'm with you. And that's where my objection comes in. And then there's a bunch
of things that spiral out from all of that. And so I get. It's too
complicated for me to get into here. Yeah, we're gonna, I can't, I can't
wait until we're not recording because I can't wait to get in the backside of
this conversation. I'm very fascinated. But we'll put it down for now. I've spent a
lot of time thinking about this. This is not just something that, like I came
to yesterday, heard a lot of time thinking about this. Very
intentional, which is why I want to talk to you about it. Oh yeah. And
then you like see the thing as it actually went down and you're just like,
I'm just like, no, that's not. Other people are looking.
So, you know, as I was saying.
He, he goes, I want to talk about the Afghanis. I want to talk about
them. Because the enemy gets a vote. Right? Okay, this is an idea from. Yes,
Jocko, but from other places, right? The enemy gets a vote.
You know, the, the Taliban recruited forces out of Pakistan.
And the reason why the Americans were in the Coral Valley, a place the
Soviets didn't even go into, like, they got to the mouth of the valley and
they were like, no, we're not going in there. The British didn't even look at
it. Even people in Afghanistan were wondering why the Americans
were going in. So like when the global version of
Appalachia says, don't go in there with those people, you should
probably listen to them. And of course, we're
Americans and we're arrogant and we know better
and we are beyond history. We, we've canceled history, haven't you heard?
And so we're going to go into the Cor Valley. And to our credit, to
our credit, arrogance and a lack of historical knowledge will take
you far. They'll take you right to Op Restrepo.
That's where they'll take you. They'll take you to
Firebase Phoenix. Right? And we did
successfully, we cannot take away this away from us. We did
successfully set up military bases and operations inside of that that
disrupted other operations that were happening further down the valley. So from a
strategic perspective, the strategy was correct,
the tactics left something to be
desired. But when you get past the
politics and the patriotism and the religion, which Unger makes an excellent
point of this, you begin to realize that the 14
year olds that are shooting at you with AK47s
are shooting at you because you're there in their backyard.
And the guys realized this, by the way, they weren't ignorant to this. They were
not. Yeah. And so it's a weird
combination of, I'm saying that all of that to make my much larger point here.
It's a weird combination of understanding the enemy gets a vote, but
also understanding like there's an incident that occurs in the back end of the book
killing where an elder, it might have been an elder, but a
villager is basically caught by the American. Not caught,
but like he's tracked by the Americans and it turns out that his son, who's
14, got shot in the leg by a, by an M4.
And at first they thought it was an AK47 bullet, but it turns out that
it was an M4 bullet. Right, which means it definitely came from an American's gun
at some point. Right. And the doctor was like, no, we need to.
The doctor for the American patrol that followed the villager back to the
village goes, oh, no, no, we. Did you take this kid? And we need to
go wrap up the kid and we need to go. And the villager
whose son it was who got shot, didn't want to go.
Vilger was like, no, I don't want to go. Because he knew that the
Taliban was floating around. He knew that all these guys were floating around.
Right. And the Americans like, shut up. Let's
go. We gotta save this kid's leg. Let's go. We gotta go. Now.
That's the weird dichotomy that other countries don't understand
about us. Yeah. That's the weird thing. Past patriotism
and politics and religion and all of that. That's the thing that's not
understandable because every other soldier from
every other empire in the history of the world would have
shot that kid, shot the villager,
cleared out the village, and moved right the heck along.
And we don't. We didn't do that. And that's just one time. That's just one
time. And so. And by the way, the American patrol knew that they were
patching up this kid who was probably going to go pick up an AK47 from
behind a rock somewhere and start shooting at them 10 minutes from now. These are
some of the lessons we learned, by the way, in Vietnam.
These are some of the hard lessons we learned in Vietnam, I think. Yeah. Like,
that part was. I piled in a lot there on you. Yeah, yeah. I mean,
all of that stuff because, you
know, so a couple days after 9, 11, it might have been the
next day. Honestly, this is a bit of a haze for me because I'm
just going. Going to, like, army version of college. Right. For people who
don't listen. Right. You go to a school, it's called ait. It's where you learn
how to do your job. And, you know, mine was 17 weeks. Right. So. But
it's largely just a bunch of experiments and you do a little army stuff, but
most of the time you're just in a classroom, like, learning, right? Yeah. You still
have to run and do PT and everything else like that. And so I'm like,
okay, cool. Like, I'm. I'm enjoying this new version of the military that's
more like learning and educational. I'm learning cool stuff. I'm learning, like, you know,
really cool stuff. And it's not just, like, how hard can I push my body,
you know, the nerdom runs pretty deep, I guess. And
so I remember being. And it's called the day room.
And the day room is like the common area, right? And there was big screen
tv and you know, we're in there, we're watching, you know, Fox News or,
or, you know, something at the time. And everyone was like, yeah,
let's just go turn it into a parking lot. Let's go turn it into a
parking lot. And it was wild. Cause like, I'm this, I'm this small
kid from Texas, you know, Like, I never really spent any time out of the
state. And now I'm here in Georgia with people from New
York, people from D.C. people from these areas that have had these things.
And, and it's this weird duality of like, God, I get
it. I get why you're so frustrated. I do. But like,
that is, that's the road we can't go down. That makes us
know better than them, right? Like, that's what they
did. We, you know, and you want to talk about
instantly being the unpopular guy in the crowd,
I decided to say something about this. And man, the rest of the 17 weeks
is pretty brutal right after that because, you know, now I'm.
Now I'm not bought in. Now I'm the problem child and stuff like that.
So the, that, that mob mentality, right,
is also, I think, easier at youth, right? And so kind of going back to
that idea of there's a reason why we send young people to go do these
things and stuff like that, because they're easy to control, it's easy to manipulate. And
also they've not seen a whole lot of the world. Some of these people do.
And because it's not forced, right? Everyone who doesn't want to go now doesn't
have to go. So there's no. Everyone is there, right? For
whatever reasons that they're there. And I remember getting there and
first day, we're marching around and they start making us in cadence about
how, you know, thieves and people who are about to go to jail and stuff
like this were only here because a judge told them, you can join or you
can go to. Like, I'm. I'm the whitest white
bread kid ever from Fort Worth, Texas, marching around
thinking that I'm here doing this like, really cool, like,
thing. And, you know, then we're singing this cadence. I'm like, ah, well, that's
just kind of like a weird thing. And then like a day later, company commander
comes in and he asked the question, okay, how many of y' all are here
because you decided to join the circus and everyone kind of like looks around a
little bit. Oh, hold on a second. I forgot. How many of y' all are
here because the judge told you if you didn't come do this, you're going to
jail. And, dude, the number of hands was astounding.
Like, just in my company, right? Company of 30 guys. The number of
hands was, Was baffling to me,
who was here for what I thought were good, genuine
reasons. Let me ask you a question, because Younger
was. One of the points he makes in the book is, you know, he
carried a 60 pound rucksack and he carried his own water
and eventually him and Tim the cameraman eventually carried
ammunition. And there's a whole sequence in the book and
the front end of love about journalists and weapons and war
and ethical considerations and all of this,
which I find to be interesting because a lot of journalists served in World War
II. But, okay, maybe that's far enough away that we don't. We don't think about,
like, the nature of that anymore. I think you hit it nail on the head
that Vietnam changed everything. Right. And the. Yeah. The
overarching, assumed nobility of military service
was just forever tarnished. Like. Right. Like there is no going
back. So I think now the distinction's got to be bigger. Right.
Because I think, I think Unger hits it spot on. If, if it came back
and he was. And he was known to have, like, picked up a weapon or
done something like this, he would have no credibility in the circles that he wants
status in. Right, right. And you. And we keep circling back,
and I want to circle back to this idea of status too. Sure. Because I
think this is, this is hugely important. But one
of the points he makes to your point about, you know, looking back
on this now 20 years plus, like looking back on these
experiences through the lens or through the window maybe of this book.
Younger makes the point that he was in his 40s, he was 20
years older than all these boys, and he knew,
you know, that him not keeping up would be
consequential and would, Would, would maybe
potentially set these young men, I shouldn't say
boys, young men up for death in a way that was
unnecessary when there were so many other ways of death that were coming
that they had signed up for. Right, yeah. And so, you know,
part of the uniform thing was. Yeah, exactly. Real. Was very, very
real. Right, exactly. And then he sort of like let go of his pride and
was like, well, not pride, but More like, I would
say, was journalistic ego. But I think it might be too simplistic.
You know, I think he just got real with the situation with himself.
Well, I think in some of those situations it's easy to think that, like. Well,
because you're just a bystander, it's not really going to be that big of a
thing. Right. And you know, there's some stigma around this. Right. Because, you
know, we've all seen examples of the embedded reporter or the
reporter who's like following the beat and they're all way off to the side and
nothing really gets dirty and you're fighting to be taken. Like, I mean, it's a
very pretty well known trope, right. As far as like culture and movies
and stuff like this. So the.
I, I mean, there is a little bit of ego, but I also think it's
around the idea of like, he's very aware that he can
die and more than that, the trade off of what
happens whenever he decides that he can't do this because of
his role or his part. Like, you're creating risk,
you're adding to risk, you're making the trade offs potentially bigger.
Right. And I, I thought that that was a very
cool component of him kind of like talking about it and kind of getting to
it. And then he goes and asks for it. Right. Which I, you know.
Yeah, probably should. Well, and I wonder how his perspective has
changed on the book now that he's. He's 20 years past the writing of it
almost. Yeah. And in a different stage of life. Because a man
at 20 is not this. It's just not. It's just you're not
the same man as you at. At 40 and you're going to be a totally
different man at 60. And if God blesses you or whoever to live.
God or genetics blesses you to live that long, you'll be a totally different man
at 80. Okay. And so
looking back on your experience, this is a question that I wanted to ask you.
20 years out now, could John
of 20 years
with your brain now, going back to that situation, which.
I know, I know, I know, but going back to that situation
with that, what would your reaction be to that, Drill
sergeant? Right. Or to that 17 weeks
of like, what would you say to John on that 17 weeks? Because now you
have the benefit of. You've lived that next 20 years, you know
how the game ends, Right. He doesn't. He has no clue.
Yeah, he has no idea. It's funny because I get to do this a
little bit occasionally now, right, because it has been so long and I've
networked a lot and I put myself out there and I talk about the fact
that I served and everything. I'll have parents, like, people that I've trained
with, people that I've worked with, sold with, networked with and stuff. And they're like,
hey, will you come talk to my kid? And it's
always an enlightening moment, right? Because
the first handful of times that I did that, or people would ask and I'm
like, you know, you know, you don't want me talking to them. And they're in,
in because I'm making a bunch of assumptions, right? And now it's
okay, what are you, what are you hoping I'm going to talk about with
them? You know, and this is always a very fascinating thing because people will
know I want you to talk them out of it or I want you to
talk them into it. It's like, that's not my job and it's not really
your job, right? So you should know that if, if
you want me to talk to whoever in your life is thinking about this thing,
I'm going to talk about the only good reason to go. And it's for you
have a burning desire to go serve your country. That's the only good reason. Everything
else is going to be
infuriatingly fragile later on, right?
College, money, the muscles, the uniform, the, you know, flying
above your station after the war, all these other things and stuff, these are, all,
these are all remarkably hollow in the moment when you're being asked to go
do, to go take a hill, to go live in a valley that no
one else wants to live in and no one even, even cares about,
you know, so, you know,
I don't need to be in the room is what it is, what it really
needs to be, you know, because I
don't, I don't regret my military service at all. Like, I don't, as I said
at the beginning of this thing, I don't know who I would be if I,
if I hadn't gone through it. But it definitely wouldn't be this person who, who
does these things, right? Chooses to do all these hard things that I do
in the, in the form of, you know, like my own training, my own development,
my, the business that I choose to run and everything. So I,
I, I respect a lot of it. And so I'll, I'll do
the thing occasionally, right? If you went back, would you, would you tell yourself to
go do it again? Like,
I I would have had to have
given myself another lane to explore. And I can't think of another one that gets
me to the same point of distinction. Right. The same. The
same path of certainty. Right. Because at
this stage, I'm a pacifist. You know, you and I have talked about martial arts
training and, you know, if. If someone has been listening to all these episodes that
I've guessed it on. I've got 16 years of martial arts training, and, you
know, I don't ever want to be in a fight with anybody on the street.
I don't want to be in that moment ever again. It's for me, it's a
way for me to exercise my brain and to, you know, keep pushing
myself for the sake of myself. It's not because I'm
fearful or anything else like this,
but
I don't want to do it. But I know that I'm capable
if the situation comes up and I can't think of another path
that I could have walked down to where I would have that same comfort in
my. In my normal daily actions in my. Now,
let's also call into a couple of things that are also kind of important to
talk about. I'm a tall white guy, right. A lot of people aren't really
messing with me, right. In the grand scheme of things, if I was 5, 9,
I probably would have had to put a lot of these ideas to the test
a lot more rigorously than I've had to. So, like, I do. I do
get, you know, some grace here around this stuff. But, like, you know,
there's also how you carry yourself, right? I don't carry myself like that right
there for a while. I tried for a little bit, and then I would be
uncomfortable whenever people would, like, kind of. And then finally I was like, oh, I
should just not be that person anymore. Not wear it, not paint it
on myself. The way that it was weird. I kind of felt like I
was supposed to, right. And talk about that winding of the
spring. Right. You know, for anyone who's listening to this, one of the things
that I talk about with people is that the sales is a beautiful job
for people that are coming out of the military. Right. Because what happens the way
that I talk about it with people is you're in sixth gear all the time,
and then you come home and everyone's in second. Right.
And you're used to being in sixth. Right. And sales is a really, really,
really beautiful role and transition period for,
you know, service people that are coming out of this thing because you're allowed to
be performance driven in a really, really big way, right? One of
the hardest things about coming out of the military is like, you're supposed to be
awesome, you're supposed to be pushing. You're supposed to be looking for performance
into your point. Like, I came back, I'm waiting tables, right? Everyone just, like,
wants to make a hundred bucks so they can go blow it on shots, you
know, later on after we're done for the night and everything. And it was just
like this weird, like, flywheel. Like, I couldn't, like, grab
at anything, you know? So sales is a
beautiful job because how hard you want to work has a direct impact on
how much you want to make. And that's a beautiful thing here. They want that.
Sometimes when you show up and you're a little too driven, you become
problematic, which is kind of crazy. But sales you're
allowed to be in. Entrepreneurship is another really great way to. To
transition and to put yourself out there and to be really driven and do it
on your own terms. But that pacing thing is very interesting. You're not
going to find a lot of places that have that same kind of pace with
that same kind of go be the best you can be. Don't just, like,
man the box, right? Don't just be here for no reason. Put. Put
your full effort into this. Put your focus into. Be the best version of this
you can be. So I tell everybody, I hope people hear
this and come seek me out. If you are in the military, you're transitioning out
of the military, and you think you want to be in a sales role or
you're looking for a role you think is going to put some of these ideas
that you've been working on into play, please come talk to me. I
will coach you for free until you get a job in sales, if that's
a thing that you want to go do. I offer this to people. I don't
market around it because I'm not trying to be that guy. But I do think
that sales is one of those really great opportunities for people to transition out
and still bring a lot of what was making them great before. It's
got to shift a little bit, of course, but it's a really great race. So
if you're looking for a sales role, if you're not sure if you want to
re up or if you're thinking about these things, I have group practice labs. You
can come, you can sit, you can learn, and you can get a job. And
then from there, if you want to continue Training, we'll talk about it. But if,
if anyone in the military is thinking about this and they're like, what do I
do with this energy? I can help you and would love to help you if
that's something that you're interested in. That is a.
This incredible offer. And I would recommend that anybody take advantage of that.
Anybody who was coming out of the military, particularly anybody who's coming out of combat
or is. Is sort of like some of the care
characters, some of the guys were, you know, trying to figure out what they were
going to do next and how to not fall back into, as we've already, you
know, talked about on this episode, how to not fall back into problems,
right? How to not fall back into bad behavior and
traumatic engagement. How to not fall back into drinking or substance
abuse or just trying to calm the demons in their head,
you know, that is a great tool.
And you know what? Whether you're
good at it or not, you will
gain something at the end. 100.
Like, you know, there's, there's no downside to, to this offer at all. So please
take advantage of this. If you're listening, if you're on the, if
you're on a similar path of me and my excellent friend Hassan here,
you probably see that there is a lot of overlap between
good leadership and selling with intention because they're exactly
the same thing, right? And
going back to the hazing for just a second, you know, where they talk about
jumping in the new, the new guys, right? And
it's, it's. There's this weird thing of like, it kind
of ruins you for leadership outside of the military, right? Because it's like,
I know you've been here. I know you can do everything I can do, and
I know you're better at it or else you wouldn't be here, right? And then
you come out to the civilian sector and you see people that are in management
roles and they can't tell you anything other than like, we'll just do more.
Well, if, if your only response is more, you're not qualified to be on the
spot, Right? But
it's hard to, it's hard to realize that. And being a young person
and not, not knowing how
to navigate that conversation when I'm talking to someone who sounds like
they're three days out of managerial school
and they want to tell me to just keep dialing and trying harder and that
I don't want it enough and ever, and it's like, dude, I, I, like,
there have been times to where I'm just like, oh, God. It's so, like, I.
I have to remind myself I cannot be that guy
here, right? Because, like, if you have a problem in the middle, you go talk
about it, right? Sometimes it leads to a desktop, sometimes it leads to a transfer
and stuff like this. But, like, you know, if. If I thought someone was
full of, I'm gonna go tell them, right? And so that led to a lot
of uncomfortable conversations because I'm like, I don't think you know what you're talking about.
Well, John, now we gotta have a. An HR conversation and
stuff. And I'm like, am I wrong? Because if I'm wrong, then like, sure. But
if I'm right and you just got offended, like, that's not my problem. You should
be good enough to lead. It's interesting that you brought about. Brought this
up, being good enough to lead and if I'm wrong, being offended. Because this is
a good segue into something else that I wanted to talk about. Another theme from
the book which also struck me. So
I'll tell a story here to kind of unite the two ideas. So
I heard it probably anecdotal tale about the
American troops who were deployed in Bosnia in
the mid-90s during their civil war between the
Serbs and the Croats and the Serbs and the Croats and the
Bosnians, all who visually look the same,
but divide up among Muslims and Christians. And it was a religious
war in the middle of Europe, which hadn't happened in, like, 100
years up to that point.
Well, the American troops were going in under NATO, right? And so the American
troops all had, you know, the NATO blue pith helmets on, right?
But what. What befuddled the Serbs and the
Croats and the Bosnians alike was that
they would roll up on a squad or they'd roll up on a patrol
of Americans or a patrol or a squad of Americans would roll up on them,
and there'd be an Asian, there'd be a Mexican,
and there'd be a white guy. And they weren't all shooting each other. They weren't
all having problems. Now, this is an anecdotal story, right?
And you run across this idea in War by
Sebastian Unger, where Tiggily
Jones and Bobby, like,
I've had that kind of relationship with, quite frankly, white. A white guy. I have
had that kind of relationship. But not a lot.
Exactly, exactly. So, you know, you had to hold on to them when you. When
you got them. You don't let that sucker go easily. But.
But one of the defining characteristics
of America is that and we do not appreciate it very much
until we go other places where it is not the defining characteristic.
Yeah, the defining characteristic of America is our, for lack of a better
term, multiculturalism. And our
ability to break
down along visual lines and to divide
up society among visual lines, good, bad, ugly, and indifferent.
And then to, of course, beat the snot out of each other verbally,
sometimes metaphorically, sometimes psychologically, and then all the way at the end,
sometimes even physically, over those differences.
And yet when we go someplace and the
Taliban sees us show up, or the Bosnians and the Serbs
see us show up, or Vietnamese see us show up,
or the Koreans or even the Germans, even the Germans back in
World War II thought we would all fall apart because to Hitler's term,
we were. We were a mongrel people. That's how he described the
Americans even back then. And as Americans,
we see that. I see this in the. Saw, this in the book is early
descriptions of. Of the. Of the. The folks in combat, the guys in the
squad, the guys on patrol, when. And
I told my wife this because I was having to be reading the book a
little bit while I was on our anniversary trip.
I look, it was reading it, and I just started laughing because
we're literally Americans everywhere where we show up. And the most
American thing is to be, quite frankly, a Benetton ad,
not to put too fine a point on it. Benetton? What is that? Yeah, you
deal with a brand with, like, all the multicultural people in it all the time.
America's a walking Benetton ad. And then we're just going to shoot you
and go home. And every single one of
those people in that ad, that is the American army
that's showing up have the capability, particularly in war.
This is. This is most. I mean, this was it. Like, every single one of
those guys could jump on a saw. Every single one of those guys could jump
on a.50 cal. Every single one of those guys is going to have each other's
back. It was a massive brotherhood. And, yeah, when
we get back to the outpost or when we get back to
behind the enemy lines at the fire base, yeah, we're going to crack each other
in the mouth just because we're Americans. That's what we do. But the second we
step out of that fire base, all that goes
away. And it's not religion that's uniting us as it was in the
Serbian and Bosnian war or, or, or. Or causing us to
diverge as it does in other parts of the world. And this is where
we also get Back to status. Class is also not the
thing separating us. I mean, one of the major problems in World War
I was the class differences between the generals and. And
the combat troops and then the class differences between
the folks who were the commanders and the generals. Because World War I
was, for better or worse, a very European
war where the entire European aristocracy kind of
fell apart in order to make space for the modern world. And
that was why, you know, 10 million people died and 10 million troops died in
that war. And it took a lot of death to break that aristocracy
and to break that aristocratic thinking that we look at
as foreign and we don't understand. I mean, we think of it in terms of
like, you know, the prince. Yeah. Entitlement
or divine will. Prince Harry and Meghan. I think of Prince
Harry and Meghan Markle. I go way, way low rent on that. Right.
And I'm like, who are you people? Why do I care about you? You have.
You produce nothing. Go away from me. I don't know what you do.
And yet in other parts of the world that are
still running parliamentary systems with an aristocratic
kings and princes and kind of overlay on top of
that, that stuff means a lot.
And we don't understand what any of that
means. And so the things that mean something to us mean very little
to people in other parts of the world. Like, one of the notorious things about
Islam is Islam accepts everybody, regardless of how they look.
They don't care because it's about the Israel. It's about. Can you
conform to what the book says? And if you can, well,
great. You could be from the Philippines, you could be from Bangladesh, you could be
from India, you could be from Saudi Arabia,
whatever. And when jihad gets declared, as was
declared in Afghanistan, we're going to funnel troops through,
and they're going to be multicultural for sure, but
they're all going to pray five times a day and they're all going to be
engaged in Jihad. And this is something I don't
think. I think we struggle
because. And you and I have talked about this on the show, we're
struggling, I think we've struggled for the last 20 years to figure out what unites
us as a country anymore. Because patriotism doesn't
unite us, and love of country doesn't unite us, and religion doesn't
unite us. Even economic situations and circumstances don't unite
us. So what binds us together? What is the thing? And
the book gives an interesting example of what may bind us
together, which is brotherhood. That's really
interesting, but I don't Know that you could scale that up as a
substitute across. Across a multifaceted culture
on a third of a continent like us, man. What we
got here? Okay,
this is a fascinating take to hear from you a little bit, because it really
kind of shows to me where some
of my thinking, like, comes from, right? Because
the thing you're calling brotherhood, I just call community, right? And
you hit it on the. On the head earlier about talking about training jiu
jitsu, and, man, that was my kung fu community. Like,
my. My. My kung fu sifu is a special operations
guy, right? And so when I come home from the military and I'm looking
for something, right? Yeah,
I. I'm like, I always wanted to be a Ninja Turtle. It was always this
thing, and my parents were like, no, you'll shoot your eye out. But, yeah, you
know, we don't have insurance because we're hippies, so, like, don't do anything too dangerous
is really what it was, right? And so I. I went and I
looked at some martial arts before the military, and that. That. That
brush Persona of, you know, this, of the sensei always kind of ran me
off. Like. Like, we got to be this, you know, but after the military and
realizing, like, hey, there's just a lot of people who are just like that by
natural or by nature, I was like, oh, okay, cool. Maybe these
are the people I want to be learning how to do violence, you know? Okay.
So I come home, and I'm in this weird state of, like,
looking for that. That space to really
be driven and to do what I want to do and be performance driven
and. But still, not for. Not for just the
sake of it, but for something cool, something interesting, something
meaningful. And I went to all these schools, man. I went to an
aikido school. I went to Travis Luder's school way back in the day
whenever it was like an H E B area, right? Wow. Okay.
Way back, like, 2002, I go
into Travis Luder school, and I was like, I don't. I don't really want to
do jiu jitsu, right? And, you know, because I'm like, I'm 6 4.
That's a long way to fall. I don't want to have to go down to
the ground every time I fight. And, like, I'm going around,
I'm looking for it. And then in a casual conversation,
someone was like, have you. Have you called the kung fu guy? I'm like, there's
no kung fu in Fort Worth. And he goes, yeah, he teaches you how to
fight with A cane. And I was like hell yeah, let's go. Right? Because
it was this, it was like kind of like mystical in pursuit
of something else. Right. Like I like that. And big huge fan of kung fu
movies and Jackie Chan and all this stuff by that time. So it was like
violence, but it was like violence for good. Kind of elevated.
Exactly right. Yeah. It wasn't like like three guys
just deciding to be at the piss out of each other like in a backyard
and stuff like that. You know, this was a school and there's stuff there. And
so I look up the website, it talks about being prior service and everything. So
I pick up the phone, I call him and he answers the phone. Now I
was surprised at the time because I didn't realize how most small kung
fu martial arts schools, how small they actually are. And it's usually kind of a
one man show. And so I'm like okay, I go and I,
it's oh man, you can't ask for
a better landing for someone who is getting out of the military is looking for
because there's curriculum, there's standards, there's
hierarchy. Like you don't go to the red sashes in my school
and be like hey, you don't know anything. You're going to get worked. Right? And
they're also doing all the teaching and everything. And so it, that was
my community, that was my space to go and do these things. Now
a lot of times what happens is it gets too far, right? And that's where
the culty kind of stuff starts to show up a little bit. And we see
a lot of this with like entrepreneurial, you know, communities and stuff like this, like
the guru and all this other stuff and everything. But
it was, it was exactly what I was hoping for and looking
for, right. It was drilling and training and really glad
that I found it because it was it
like while the military showed me a bunch of stuff and is super impactful
for here like that 15 years of going to kung fu for
20 hours a week and training with other people and putting myself to the test
and everything is, is just as much of a reason why I'm here doing these
things because like I had, it was like, it was like I had a bunch
of tools that I didn't know how to use afterward in, in
kung fu and martial arts like showed me how to apply these things in a
way that was helpful in this setting. But it took a while.
So to me that's, that's community and you can find it anywhere, right?
Like you can Find it politically, you can find it spiritually. Right. And the
coolest thing I think about the Internet is like you're.
You're only the nerd because you've not found your pocket of people that are taking
whatever you take as seriously as you are. And why would
you enable that? Right. There's Reddit, there's communities, there's all this stuff online and
everything. So if anything, go find your people as opposed
to trying to nerd out on something that doesn't really get you that excited.
Well, and this is also, you know, the decline in sort of a business and
economic sense, the decline of mass. So, you know,
mass has been, well, you know, mass entertainment, mass movements, mass
media, mass journalism, mass sales, mass
business. Good. Honestly. Right, right, right. Don't get me wrong. Like, one
of the things that the Internet did when it got turned on in 1989, and
we didn't foresee that happening, was it was
going to like poop through a goose, destroy all
these mass organizations and mass institutions. And the
institutions and organizations that. Going to hang on because there
will be people who will push back on me and say, well, what about Amazon
or NBC News or the church or whatever. Okay, sure,
you can name all those mass institutions, but the reality is
they've all been eroded and impacted by the Internet. And you're a fool if you
don't see it. Absolutely. And then the institutions that were
built on top of the Internet are built on fundamentally different
assumptions. And the fundamentally different assumptions are not
ones around mass. They're ones around
different areas. Like preference. Not
only that, but preference. Expectation.
Yeah, Assumption. Here's another one. Talk about community.
Community. So those are other
assumptions that don't play well
with the assumptions of mass. Right. Or they
play differently with the assumptions of mass. So as a
side note, you know, while I'm reading this book and I'm. I watched Restrepo,
I've also been geeking out on Alfred Hitchcock Presents
every night on Amazon Prime. Okay, so I'm on like season.
I bounce around in seasons because. Whatever. But
it's a great show because it shows. It
demonstrates two things that I think we
not. I think I know that we have. That have eroded over the course of
time and that we lament. But it also shows the undercurrent of all of them
too, because it was Alfred Hitchcock. So he did it really well because it's good
writing. The two things. Well, the two of many things that it
demonstrates is, number one, the conformity of the. Of the late. The mid
to late 50s and 60s. Oh, God. Conformity. But
conformity at a social level so that all these other things could happen
underneath. Right? Which is part of what we are
missing. And we're trying to put that into community now because
over the course of time, the conformity to social level has completely eroded.
You talk about your parents being hippies. They were part of that process. My mother
was part of the civil rights movement. She was part of that process. Yeah. Okay.
So that. That he wrote it away. Okay, cool.
A question I always ask at the end of this podcast. What are we building?
Because you can't just erode, you can't just deconstruct. You have to build something
else, because human beings are builders. That's what we are. That's what we like to
do. Deconstruction works for a little while, but you have
to replace it with something else. So that show
shows the level of conformity and sort of the other things that were going on
underneath it. But it also shows, interestingly enough, the
power of community out of that conformity and the safety,
or the appearance of safety anyway.
That's the important distinction with a difference there that
seemed to emanate from that conformity and what we're
missing now, and I think what's causing us a lot of psychic angst in
this country is the safety part.
And this is why we're searching for it in a whole lot of different places,
in brotherhood and community, on Reddit,
and. And I don't think it's a bad thing. I think this is a human.
This is a human thing. Human beings want, because this is how our
amygdalas are set up, right? We want to eat, we want to reproduce, so we
want to be safe. No amount of social jiggering
or even biological jiggering is going to get rid of
that, at least not for a long time.
Man. So I had a. I had a really great teacher in
sixth grade. This man made me want to be a teacher all the way up
until junior year of high school. And my friend Kevin said, you know, they don't
make any money, right? And I was like, oh, I better go find something else
to do. But his name is Rob Krueger.
Very, very, very cool person. And
he was telling us this. He's talking about being
like an older kid in like, late 70s, right?
Because this was in. This is probably 90,
91, right? And so he's talking about
walking around and wear. And seeing people wearing shirts that say, kill a commie
for mommy. Right? And the group think of, like, the anti
communism Kind of push and everything else like this, right? And
you know,
to me, to me, I see a big overlap
between that kind of like, group think and what
it kind of just does to someone if you're not already aligned for that stuff,
right? And how it wears on you, right? Just like being the only guy
who's, who's in an. Who's in a, you know, company
full of people that want to go off and bomb everybody, and I'm the only
person who doesn't want to go do so. Right. You know, I mean, the, you
know, when you're the odd man out, you know, it. Right. Pretty hard to argue
about. And so the thing that I think is really cool is
the ability to
be yourself, right? Like,
because, because I see a lot of overlap with like, gay people, right? People who
are gay. Right. People who are trans. Right? And so imagine never
feeling comfortable with that stuff, right? But just constantly being pushed and
told and pushed and told. You're wrong, you're an idiot. You're wrong. You're an idiot.
You're wrong. See how no one else has these problems because no one is talking
about them because there is no community, because it's not surface level, right?
So imagine dealing with 50 people and they're all telling you. Them telling
you that you're wrong, right? Like, imagine
because we, you know, we still have people that go through this,
right? In different ways, shapes or forms. I want to go be an entrepreneur. No,
you don't. Just go get a job and just play it safe, right? And then
we're told these things. It's really hard to continue to have
individual opinion when everyone is telling you that. That it's
wrong and that it's stupid and you should just change and stuff like this, right?
And so now in the military, this is really helpful because you're there for a
purpose, right? And I remember the first time I got in
trouble because I was doing something that I didn't know I wasn't supposed to be
doing, but everyone else knew they were supposed to be doing at the this way.
And the drill sergeant got in my face and I'll never forget this moment. He
goes, he goes, why are you still trying to be an individual?
Why can't you just do what everyone else here is doing? John, are we going
to have to kick you out on, like, a failure to conform? And I was
like, what? Like it was bad to be individualistic in the
military. Like, it's a, it's a problem, right? So I mean,
imagine being, you know,
gay and you don't happen to have any community around you
who's gay, Right. And you're just being told that, no, it's not
true. You're just experimenting, you know, blah, blah, all these things, right? Or being trans
or, you know, let's just say that you're a pacifist, right? Or
let's say you're, you know, kind of progressive and a very conservative town. Like,
it's really hard to have the opposite opinion. Right? So
I love that people, oh, well, maybe I
should go check online as opposed to just being bottle fed by this
immediate group of people around me who might mean well,
but might ultimately be shutting down access to the person
I'm, I could be, I should be, I want to be like, I
don't, I don't want that for anybody. So I think it, well, yes,
I, I, I appreciate how you said you
feel safe, but imagine having to pick up
an identity that only has 10% of
something you care about because no one is diving any deeper
to like, be like, oh, you could be just this
group over here without being, without picking up the bigger mantle.
Well, what I'm saying is that.
And. I see your, I see the, I see the opposite point.
And I would say to that, I think the opposite point, if not
by virtue of the Internet, at least by virtue of the last 20 years,
has made its cause very well. I
think we are in a space in comparison
to the other spaces
in the last 80 years that existed. I think we are at a
highly individualistic space. I think we are. Now
we're okay. If we're at a highly individualistic space where our identity is
around, say a sexual identity or racial
identity or even weirdly enough, a
religious identity, we're not okay.
Or the culture of America is not okay. If
we're at a highly individualistic space where we're
individualistic about our money or about how much money we
make or about how much property we have
or about how much work we do that produces something. So, for instance,
we're okay with a person being an individual
around their racial identity. I'll use the one that I see the most
often. Right. But it's interesting to me. Here's
the dichotomy that as a person
begins to become more wealthy, while their racial identity may say
the same, now all of a sudden we have demands as they conform to a
group structure around their wealth
and the conforming, such as, okay, so the conforming to a group structure around
their wealth would be, well, you should give money
to xyz, nonprofit or ABC activist platform.
I don't get to be an individual and determine what monies I want to give
where. Instead, I'm going to have pressure put on me by the
overarching racial group to go in
this particular direction. Because while these people supported you
when you were nobody, the group supported you when
you were nobody, and now you're somebody. So you have to. This is how it's
typically couched. Give back. And that,
to me, is the dirty underside of the conformity argument,
but from the opposite direction. So I'm okay to be an individual
if I'm going against the dominant group on my racial identity, but the
second I get money as an individual, now I
must return those funds back to the dominant group
or even to the minority group that I came out of in order to raise
other members of that group up. I'm not allowed to be an individual on that.
I'm just not. There's all kinds of social controls around that.
And so I think we have to be intellectually
honest and say that this
idea of conformity versus security
and the individual versus the group. Right. Is
one that I think
just like what motivates young men to combat is one I don't think we're ever
going to resolve. It's going to be the continuing dynamic tension. Yeah, it's going to
be the continuing dynamic tension for police for as long as there's human
beings. And I think that the line between
those two things
runs through the human heart, as Alexander Solzhenitsyn would say about the line of
tyranny. Right.
And I don't think there's a way to make. Other
than maybe in smaller and smaller communities, this is maybe the only way I see
it working. You know, I don't think there's a way to unite people
around that. So. And. And I'm using race as an
example because that's the one that I'm most familiar with, because that's where I get
the most pushback. Right. There's presumptions about what I should do
with my money because of how I look or where I came from. And
by the way, I'm not the only one to rap. Oh, I'm not one. I'm
not the only one to, like, talk about this. Kanye west rapped about it all
the time. Right. Maybe I should have forgotten where. I should have forgotten where I
came from. Right. Well, I'm not forgetting where I came from. Where I
came from was conformist in a particular way that, quite frankly, I didn't want to
go There, that's what I've forgotten. It's that I've
decided to rise as an individual out of that conformist thing and of that
conformist thing, out of that conformity. And now you're going to pull me back into
that conformity like a crab in the bucket. And you're going to claim
that whatever the dominant majority is doing is somehow not
confident. Correct. And yet if I
hadn't played the dominant majority's game to a certain degree of
success as an individual because nobody else was helping me,
well, how are we going to square that circle? And by the way, I don't
think there is a good way to square that circle. I think, I think it.
I think it works out differently. The line runs through every
human heart, and every human being has to work this out differently and has to
make decisions. I think the Internet has allowed people to see
what the decisions are that people make more clearly and
then to unite in community, in smaller and smaller groups, further
and further out on the long tail. And this is part of that decline
of mass thing that's happened. But I don't know how
far out the long tail goes. I guess we'll find out with the LLMs. I
guess we'll find out how far out the long tail goes. That's going to be
fascinating and interesting. And I have. I have a question mark at the end of
that because I don't know what the answer is.
Where, where I get a little sideways with these conversations. And I'm trying to be
better about this idea, right? Because with what you
just told me is you're not ever going to make anybody all, all happy,
which is just life. You know what I'm saying? Like, maybe,
maybe it's my maybe. And maybe it's my tragic view of, of human experience.
And I'll. I'll chalk it up to that. Maybe it's that I have a tragic
view of human experience, and maybe that's just me, and that's just my bad
mileage, my bad road, and I got to deal with that. You know, I'm not
asking you to adopt that road. Well, like the, the thing
where I keep getting, like, stuck is.
Oh, man. Okay, we're gonna get spicy.
Social media has given way to promise. We promise to people.
Social media has given way too many people access to people being loud
without the ability to be clear.
Okay. In the way that all the algorithms. I would agree with that
is you're not benefited by talking at depth
and making sure that you're spelling everything else that you can't be misinterpreted. The stuff
that gets the most mileage is the stuff to where two very polarized, different people
can find something to argue about. And here's the thing. Are they even
arguing about the same things half the time? No, not at all. But most
people can have a civil debate. Most people can't stand up to critical
feedback of like, hey, have you gone and researched any of these things? Are you
just watching the news all day? Well, I'm watching the news all day. Okay. And
that makes you feel like you're really informed just by watching the news,
right. Where you're, where you are the product. Like, and
like, that's not to say that people, like, should avoid the news. I avoid the
news because I just can't deal with it anymore because I don't know what is
actually worth caring about at this stage. Right. Because it just feels like everyone just
wants my focus and attention. So none of you get it. I'm. I'm going to
go go over here and do my own stuff, but I'm taking my ball. I'm
going home a little bit, you know, kind of like, I can't, I can't
impact any of this. And I don't think, I don't really believe anybody who has
a vested interest in my eyeballs being on your page to give me the truth.
So let me go do. I'm going to go read three articles from very
different sources and I'm going to try to figure out the main line through it
kind of thing is how I kind of go about it. Yeah,
but most people should not be debating on social
media. Most people, you should have to have a license, which is a
pretty hot topic debate. But if you have, if you have a
loud horn, right, and you were in the mall
and you went around saying fire, there'd be consequences for your actions.
Right? There's a bomb and hot topic. Right. There would be consequences. You'd
have people all over you. Rightfully so. Okay. But you can get on social media
to say whatever you want. And like, there are, there are strategists that are
specifically hired to make it more polarizing and all of these things and stuff like
that. So it's tough, right? It's,
it's. The problem is a lack of
vocabulary in my, in my opinion. And then a lack
of having to sit in front of people and say these
things versus being able to hide behind the keyboard and
then, you know, doing that 50,000 times and there's never been any
consequences for those things. And now you're just going around heavy handed feeling justified,
like, like everything must be right because no one's ever
been able to convince you that you've been wrong. But you avoid all of
those conversations because they're, they're the dumb ones. Right. And it's just, it
just. I mean, how could we not end up here?
Isn't this still the part of the trade offs, though that we were talking about
earlier? I mean, I think so. Right?
Like, yes, I do think it's a trade off, but like in
ultimately, please, please hear me out. I love
that I don't just get my information from the
local paper and that's the only access that I have to it because that would
be way worse. Right. I'm very well aware of that. Right. Talk about trade offs.
Right? Yeah. So I'm never going to push too hard for like
censorship online because I want the ability to talk about
the things that I want to talk about even when they're unpopular. So I must
give other people space to talk about the things that I think are stupid or
unpopular because I want my ability to go do these things. Right.
But when you start thinking of like, well, I'm right and everyone else is wrong,
that's where you lose the thread. Right. And if someone else believes something
differently than you, well, then they just must be the idiot. They're not allowed to
be intelligent and think differently than you because you're not on the level of understanding
just how deep all of these decisions and chains and things like that go.
Just, oh, well, you're an idiot because that helps me sleep at night. I don't
have to question anything super deeply because you're dumb. Right.
It just becomes the easiest off ramp. Right? Oh, you're a child. I
don't have to listen to you. Well, you know, like, this is why
I, I have a shirt. It's my favorite shirt.
Don't argue with within with. Don't argue with idiots on the Internet.
Favorite shirt. Had to buy it. It doesn't even
really fit me because, like, I washed it one time and it shrank up too
big, but it still hangs up in my closet. And there are certain days when
I'm going through my shirts, I'm like, what am I gonna wear today? And I
get to that shirt and I was like, thank you for the reminder. Right.
This is, this is compounded because you can't have hard opinions about
anything without some person being like, well, if you thought about. Yeah, thought about
it. Right. Like, at least I have. Right. Before I Before I
post content, talking about sales and entrepreneurship and being a founder.
Yeah. I'm thinking about how you're going to hear it and where, like Joe
Schmo idiot who's never done any of this, is going to be like, you're not
right. How. Let me just go ahead and weave it in
so everyone can know I'm right unless they're trying to see me
as wrong, you know, so there is this weird thing. And
every time I talk about a thing, especially as a sales coach, you know, this
one time back in like 1873, I followed, followed up with one
person for 5,000 days in a row. And then, you know what happened, John?
They bought. And it's like, okay, cool, I'm glad you have an anecdote.
Is that how you want to keep getting it done? You know, like,
you can't have too hard of an opinion with this thing. But. But
by that same token, if you are out here in some sort of space, whether
leadership or being a founder or anything, you must be comfortable putting your
ideas into play and going and defending them, because you will have trolls. And if
you let them stop you from putting yourself out there, you know,
you get to go back to work for someone else.
I think we are at a.
We're at a moment of,
I think, several things. So we're at a moment of
inflection. Right. People call it a vibe
shift. Okay, Maybe I think it's more like a
moment of inflection or an inflection point in the culture.
And I put this in my notes. 20 years on, from 9 11,
24 years on from 9 11, get ready to be 25. Which is just
insane to me. At a certain level,
I'm not quite sure that if a 911 style event
occurred now that we would have the same response.
I mean, I think all the first responders that are, like, trying so hard to
get seen and taken care of after they, you know, put forth so much, and
now they've kind of gotten screwed. I mean, not really a whole lot of pattern
and precedent for wanting to be super excited to go, you know, really commit to,
like, driving the country forward. Because all, like, if you're paying any
attention, all those people that are putting forth the most effort
are the people who don't get taken care of on the backside of it. Right,
Exactly. Why, like, you almost have to
be delusional at this point. I would think to be like, you know
what? They're gonna take care of me. I just. Right. You know, and
I hate that I have that opinion, I really, really don't like it. But
I, I mean we read these books for a reason. We,
you know, like it's there and it happens too often
for I think anybody who's reasonable and really concerned about it to be like, you
know what, they're going to take care of me. Well, and even if we had
like, and, and you know,
we're doing this podcast, you know,
four years after Covid. Right. Yeah.
Another wet blanket on, you know, any kind of
right. Rotary is ignat. Right. So
on the one hand I, I would like to,
I would like to say that because of our collective in this
country, and I'm not talking, again, not talking about the politicians or the generals, they're
a minority on this one. I'm talking about because of the
collective. Disinterest is probably
a hard word, but maybe that's the most accurate one.
Disinterest on the part of the electorate in
not necessarily supporting the people on the back end.
I think disinterest on responding in
the same way as we did previously. I think there's immense disinterest in
that. If a 911 event was. Were to happen, I think there's just immense disinterest.
Yeah. The question then becomes,
and this is a truly apocalyptic question, but
is the question that follows from the logic, how
many 911 events, how close together
would have to happen in order to move the American
public out of their disinterest into a different space? And by the way, I'm
not asking this question because I want it to happen.
I'm asking the question because if the line of
911 is way back there in the rear view mirror and
the line of COVID is way back there in the rear view mirror, then
how much horrible, much more horrible will the next
line have to be
to shake us out of our disinterest and our apathy and our
impatience with outcomes? And I think we've been asking a
variation of this question since World War II. And we. And
the line has gone further and further and further and further and further out.
And I think that.
Back to that idea of being a role model in a neighborhood. I think other
countries pay attention to that. They pay very close attention
for a whole variety of reasons, by the way, some that are self serving
and some that are venal for their own interests
and others that are like, we wouldn't. If
you don't, if you don't think I'm correct, we wouldn't have had all of the
blathering over Russian
interference in elections if we didn't think Russia was paying attention,
whether you, whoever candidate you think it's benefiting, it doesn't matter to me.
We wouldn't have all that blathering if we didn't think Russia was paying attention.
We just like, we don't blather about.
No one's blathering about, no one's blathering about South African election interference.
No one. Okay, yeah, no one. No one. Because like
topic think South Africa is paying attention. Right? And the reason, and the
reason why I'm saying that is the reason why I'm saying this. Among the, the
smart people, you know, those people that are not the electorate,
right? But who think they know what the electorate wants by virtue of
having won a vote from the electorate, they think they know that that gives them
an idea of what they think the electorate wants for those people.
I don't think they have an answer to the question. And this is the part
that scares me even more. They don't have an answer to the question of what
would be the thing, where is the line to move the American
public. And you see this, by the way, notoriously and political
acts that are happening now in this country and I'm not talking
about the big popular ones that everybody can see. Like right now we're currently
in the midst of like a 30 day government shutdown
and I can't, I don't know, there's no one in my circle
or the circles that I go to in my limited expansion on the Internet
that are even remotely talking about any of this. Oh
yeah, everyone else is the bad guy, right? But that's the first rule of
rhetoric. But that is. Right, it was just the first rule of rhetoric. Exactly. Yeah,
yeah, it was funny because like, you know, one of the lines
that I learned early on is like, was like marketing, right? You know, because like
I, you know, started, started to really get into selling and then I started to
like look at marketing and everything and then it was like, just make someone else
the bad guy, you know, so cold calls are the devil. You
don't want to be a salesperson. You want to be in marketing, right? So when
you can demonize something else, right? And people are like, oh,
I don't want to be like that, then, then it creates a
thing, right? And we see this, right? Remember the Titans, when Denzel Washington is like
the, like he is the centering focus, he becomes the bad
guy. So then everyone else does this thing. Same thing with Miracle with Kurt Russell,
right? Is it is such a well known thing and People play their parts. Like,
I, I honestly thought that my, that my, that my
company commander, my captain, he wouldn't, he would not approve
of how these drill sergeants were treating us and talking to us. He was, he.
I was wrong. I was way wrong. You were way wrong. Couldn't have been
more wrong, honestly. Right. So. But
it, it's human nature. Right? Right. Someone else is.
It's not your fault. Right. And humans
love to not have to take ownership for their,
you know, their deficiencies. Right. So, you know, and we see this, like,
and you see this because we see it even in, like, martial arts training. Well,
I can't do that. I got bad knees. Why are you here? How bad? Why
are you here then? Yeah. How about. Are those knees? If you're here and training
all these times, but you can't do a pistol squat, you're not strong enough, You've
not developed yourself to the place to where you can do that move. Stop trying
to play the victim. You're just not enough.
Now accept that and then go fix it. Right.
But stop making it out to be that you're put upon and you're limited
because a lot of times you're not really right. It's just. You've not decided to
face the music. You've not decided to go look at yourself and your personality and
why some things are easier for you to believe and do, and some things are
harder for you to believe and do, and that goes back to awareness. But if
you're not aware yet, and most people 18 years old aren't
super aware. Right. So it's just kind of like, well, hey, you can let someone
not let you go to college. Absolutely not. Right. So come on, you
know, and like, be all you can be. Like, these are. I mean,
they're. They're very well known rhetoric things.
Right. They're. They're so well used
in the form of indoctrination and
persuasion and, you know, things like this. So
the, the more ceremony we have
around the community, the deeper that community goes. Right.
The military's got a lot of deep ceremony. So does martial arts. Yeah.
Well, here's one other thought as we wrap up, as we close, as we turn
the corner around on this episode,
another thought that sort of bounced around in my head from reading
this book.
When we went to Afghanistan, we were fighting
Taliban. We were also fighting uphill
against village elders. Some of the more interesting
interactions, particularly you could see this in Restrepo in the movie, but in,
in the book that were documented were between o' Brien
and the village elders and I always wondered, like, and then
when I got to see it in the movie, I was like, oh, that's how
that went down. Like the village elders who literally were like
wizened elders in a way that we don't appreciate age, we just don't
like. Going back to that story about the, the boy who was shot by the
M4 or had the M4 bullet in his, in his leg
at the Americans took one of the points that Younger makes in the book when
he relates that that story is that he thought that that 60 year old man
could out walk the Americans all over those mountains.
And we talk a lot about man strength or men do at a certain
age. We talk about just old man strength, right? Which, which,
which by the way, in jiu jitsu, I'm accused of having old man strength. I'm
just like, no, I just know where to grab you. Like I've just been alive
long enough to know where to grab you. That's all I'm really, once again, hey,
it's not my fault. Like you must have something that I don't, you know, and
then you know what you're like, now we have an age limit, right?
If you're over 40, you got to go to the old man's class because you
can't be bringing, you can't be bringing old man strength down to these 20 year
old white belt or blue belts who are tournament champions in training and
stuff like this. It's not fair. So you have this old man strength, you know,
let alone a decade of training in another martial art, you know, like, you know,
let's not talk about that at all. You know, I, I, I, I cover all
of it by saying, listen, I'm a frail old man. Go
easy on me. You're just gaming
everybody. My, I mean, my instructor doesn't
buy, he just laughs. He just keeps right on going. He doesn't buy any of
it. And there's a few of them in there. It only really works on white
belts, honestly, who just don't know. But like by the time they get there, the
blue belts all laugh at me. They're like, whatever, shut up, shut up.
It works on, it works on everyone who's looking for a reason to discount you.
It is, it does, it does, it does work on them. That's true. Well,
you know, I'm like Al Pacino in the Devil's Advocate. Never see him coming. Always
take the subway. Just, they never see you coming that way. But
my point is, the village elders and o' Brien.
And again, you saw it in the movie. It was that weird collision of American
youth that was puffed up with authority
and then these village elders who literally liked it with a cow. The cow
is the best. Oh my God, that was the best. Go read the book if
you want to know about the cow. That was hilarious. And living in, living in
Texas, you know, being. I started laughing. I knew
exactly what had happened. Yeah, but beautiful moment of that,
which I not thought about until you talked about it. I mean, imagine if you're
not from the south, right? Like, I mean, made sense
to me too. I've lived here my whole life. But you know, if you're from
Chicago. You'Re like, what the hell? It doesn't. Why, why
do you even care? Why do you even care? But then, but then Younger uses
the line, I love it on the, on he goes, you know, the, the
commander, whoever was o' Brien's commander, made an Old Testament style decision.
And I was like, that's genius.
Brilliant. That. Yes, you're exactly right. The weight of the
cow. And like, honestly, this is, this is
awesome. Because, man, okay, short
detour we talked about in Strangers during a Strange Land about how if the language
doesn't have a label for it, the convention probably doesn't exist, right?
And so what? And I, I have to teach salespeople
and founders to do this, right? Put it into their conventions. Because since
we're trying to get something out of these people in the form of revenue or
relationship or something else like this, you know, it's the least we can do, right?
So if they're talking about, you know, MRR
monthly recurring revenue, and you're trying to back everything up to like times 12 for
like annual RR recurring revenue, why are you making it harder
for them to be on the same page with you? Right? It doesn't make any
sense. Right? And using of jargon when you're talking to people who
don't understand the jargon is the same thing, right?
But if that's what's supposed to happen, right? Because
here's the thing. If, like imagine talking to someone
who died 15 years ago about the ease of creating
white papers using AI right now, there's no way they would be
able to really conceptualize the lift that that provides. Endless
slop that it's creating all over the place, but that's a whole other conversation. So
like in that mode, how much can I talk to you about? Like,
how much can I take your opinion? Right? I can take your concerns, I can
take your theories and Everything else like this. But I got to talk about this
with people, because founders will often get stuck
because they're taking advice from everyone. Right? Their mom, their, like, nephew
who's in college. Right. Their sister's baby cousin who. Who's just in high
school. Like, sorry, Like, I can't
take advice from you if. If you're not on the level. Like, my mom loves
me. She has a copy of my book. I'm not going to be like, hey,
what's keeping you from reading it? Why would I do that to myself? Right.
Like, it just open. It's not for her. She wants it for the reasons that
she does, and that's okay. But the same thing is just
all the way through, like, the whole thing. So while we should
have respect for. For. For elders. Right. And you know,
I love the whole. Now that I'm older, I love the. They put on their
pants one leg at a time. I used to hate that whenever I was younger.
Right. You know, when I didn't have patience for folksy wisdom.
But it's like, they're just a human. So now, and this is super
helpful for me as my development as a salesperson of, like,
you're good at what you do, right? I'm good at what I do.
Okay. But I'm not putting myself down here just because you've done
three things that were really great over here in these things. No. If we're having
a conversation, it's called equal business. Stature is how. Is how. How it
was taught to me. And so by that same token, I don't put people into
lanes to where they can feel like. Like they should be giving me advice
that I'm not going to listen to anyway. Right? Yeah, well, and.
And. And you saw that with o', Byrne, right? Like, he's trying to
navigate this. And then you've got these elders and
these villagers who. And this is sort of my
larger point here, who have.
They've been knowing the battles that have been going on between them
going back at least 500 generations.
Yep. Yeah. And 500 is probably exaggerating. 50 generations. At least
50 generations. They've got that recorded. Right. Particularly in those
mountains with those people. And we're going in.
And it's not that we're. Although we are. We're going in
and disrupting their lives. And the thing
that's interesting to me is that ever since World War II, where the
idea of civilians as targets
in war started,
we haven't yet ground down to our logical end of this.
But we're Getting closer to the logical end of it. And
the logical end of civilians being seen
as part of the infrastructure of
warfare is I think, the other dynamic that's going to
shift warfare in the next 20 years. Because, see, here's the thing. So
collateral damage is no longer going to be, like, explained away the way that it
often is. Now, not only that, but I think that
collateral damage will be justified.
Oh, so any collateral. So the rhetoric. So
the rhetoric is we don't have to kill as many people. We don't have to
kill as many people. Look how great our technology is. Oh, my God. We killed
all these people. They must have really been bad. Okay, I can see
that playing. I mean, there's, there's, there's. You see this, you see a
variation of this proto argument beginning
in Israel with, with the Gaza war
that either just wrapped up or is. They're still trying to wrap
it up. You're also seeing a variation of this in, in
the Ukraine, Russian war. I mean, when the Russians. This is something
that nobody knows or very few people know because it was very lightly reported on
when the Russians were paratruding, parachuting. Russian troops
were parachuting into the Kiev airport. Kiev
civilians were shooting them out of the air.
Right? What does that make a Kuyev civilian then who could pick up an
AK47 and just shoot a Russian paratrooper out of the air? What does that make
that civilian? Now, now that civilian's a combatant. Now, the rules
of war have shifted. And while it's
interesting to talk about the
philosophy of this at a material
level, I think it's really, really important for us to understand
that warfare will have much more integration in the future with civilian
structures. Not just
paratroopers parachuting into an airport to take over a
spot, but also. And this is why the data
centers. Yeah, the cyber warfare, the data centers.
I mean, think about how much of our lives going back to this idea of
conform, conformity and mass are now being gradually
through the trillions of dollars being spent on LLM development.
Yes, it's a bubble. Yes, it will burst. Yes, it will be nasty. You heard
it here first. I've been through four of these bubbles already. It will
burst. It's fine. And then we'll all somehow
survive whatever, but it will
burst like a bunch of people are going to go broke, Right? And
when that happens, there'll be a lot of collateral H damage.
But, but one of those things is
one of those offshoots of those ideas is if we're building data centers in
remote places like you can use it a bomb.
Right. Like Abilene, Texas. It's not hardened. Or
ol. Kansas. That's not hardened. Or.
Well, not Jackson Hole. Jackson Hole is hardened. But like
any. Any name, any rural place in America where, by the way, these data centers
are going in. Yes. Providing jobs. Yes. Providing.
Yes. Sucking up natural resources. Yes. Doing all these kinds of things
that happen when you put a big, you know, piece of machinery, you know,
in the middle of a population that hasn't had a whole lot of growth in
the last, like, I don't know, 60 years because everything got offshore to
other places and now we're trying to reshore that for a whole variety of
geopolitical reasons that are way beyond what we could get into right now.
Yeah, but it is happening. Like they're building a chip manufacturing.
They're building a chip manufacturer in. In North Carolina. I think it's North
Carolina right now that's going to employ like 50,000 people.
It's going to be a great thing. But it's going to take 10 years to
build. Well, I think they're trying to build.
A friend of mine is trying to move into the space and I think he
was talking about either maybe Little Elm, which is a
suburb up here, where. Where we are. They're building a huge, huge one
out there. Right. And they're popping up everywhere, you know, so. Right. So what
happens when those become. Become nodes
along a path to disrupting an enemy's
infrastructure so you can make war on them better? Well, that
means that at that facility in Little Elm, and I'm not putting anything on that
at all. I don't want anything to happen. I want to be very clear.
I am not wishing for that. And
warfare has shifted. Yeah,
it's shifting right in front of our eyes right now. Overseas,
it is merely minutes before it will show up at a country near you.
Oh, man. Like. And we're. When we're not psychologically prepared for
that in America, we're just not. And you know how I know we're not? Because
I just saw it in war, I just saw it in this book that we're
not psychologically prepared for it. We can't even like scroll on
Facebook without, you know, taking the wrong point
from someone else's conversation and then, you know, belittling it down, the
name calling and stuff like that. We're definitely not ready for, you know, anything
like that. But, you know, I.
And by the way, we're going to try to do that as a country to
other countries. As well. It's going to be 100%. Yeah. It's going to be a
tit for tat thing going back, right? Like, True
Lies, right when True Lies came out, right? And I remember watching
it, and I think I was 13 or 14 when that
movie came out. I think it was like 93, 94. I forget the exact year,
but I'm 13, 14 years old. And I remember just being like,
man, we really hate these guys with, like, the red. With the red head
coverings, you know what I'm saying? Because, like, I'm just old enough to. Where I'm
starting to see, like, they're always the bad guy. Like, they're always made out to
be the bad guy. It becomes this very easy thing and stuff like this. And,
you know, I'm like, okay, well, that's. Well, that's kind of. And
now I'm like, okay, you know, if we're. If we're putting that into
all of our cultural things, you know,
there's. There's. There's gonna be a whole lot more room to hate those guys just
easily, right? We're indoctrinating around it and stuff like that, depending
upon what you're watching and stuff. Stuff. And so, like, that was a very weird
thing to kind of, I think, realize that, like, 13 or 14 years old. And
because it was like, it's like, I'm supposed to hate these people, right?
The same thing with. I forget the name of the movie, but it had Annette
Benning, it had Bruce Willis, maybe the
Siege, you know, I'm talking about. And there's like, martial
law, and it ends up being.
Let me look this up. Kind of situation.
But it came out, like, around that same time, and I was like,
man, like, these people must have done some really bad
things to us, you know, and stuff like that, because it. Because it just felt
like it was everywhere. It felt like I couldn't watch an action movie without
them trying to make, like, someone in the Middle Eastern area, right?
It was the siege. You're right. It was the siege. Congratulations. 1998.
Congratulations. Thank you. I'm. I'm really good at movie trivia. Like, don't.
Don't invite me to trivia night. It's. It's brutal.
So I think. I don't know, I think. I think
culture is used to soften people up for certain things, but I also think
it's used to deliver. Media
in particular, is used to deliver messages very subtly,
by the way. Messages that are all over the map. I. Because you'll have two
different media deliver two different messages. Like. Like the propagandists can't get
their story straight. Like, if you
like anyone who's like, you know what? Editing. Who cares about editing?
Like, if you're walking around thinking that you are being manipulated so
hard because you can take the same interview and edit it 17 different way.
Like, and my daughter is kind of at this thing now
to where, like, I'm trying to, like, teach her how to be. Slow down, make
sure it's real, you know, and one of the things that I've been showing her
is, like, I love the YouTube clips to where they'll take a movie that's like
a horror movie and they'll re edit it to make it a comedy or vice
versa. Because I love showing that to her. Because then I'm like,
this might be why you hate that person, because someone just
decided to make them out to be. To look like this, and they might not
actually be who they are, you know, And I mean,
we're. A lot of people are deep in the throes
of malicious editors currently.
Yeah, well. And, you know, a lot of this goes back to
what. Oh, God. C.S. lewis talked about this in his book
Mere Christianity, which we'll cover on the podcast in December. But he has a
great line in that book where he talks about how
he doesn't tie to propaganda, but this is what he means.
How, in essence,
the meaning of a word is lost. When we focus more about what
the feeling of the meaning of the word is or the feeling of the
word itself, we lose the actual core of that
meaning. And, you know, to me,
that's. That's at the root of what a propagandist does. At the root
of it. A propagandist is about. Is. Is focused on
one. The answer to one question. And the question is,
who owns the dictionary? Who owns not only the
definitions of the meanings and the definitions of the words, but who
gets to decide it by whose authority. So here's
my most spicy take going into that mode. Right. Oh,
we're rounding the corner. Your last spicy take. Go ahead.
Well, I don't really know that I've. Gotten all that spicy so far. I felt
like I've kind of. Kind of held it in the back box a little bit.
But we're not going to anymore. If you go and you are confused,
I think about who's pushing, like, you know, a good
message versus who's not, who has the
depth versus who's choosing to keep the depth away from it. Right.
Categories, labels. Definitions and stuff like this. Right?
Because it's just as easy to, to realize like, oh, hey, you
know what, the reason why we argue about politics is because we
have different values. And that's okay because we have different paths. Right. That this
requires a little bit of patience, a little bit of knowledge and a little bit
of ability. Because it's just easier to be like, you know, what are you, a
dumb snowflake? What are you, dumb snowflake? Like, there's
no attempt to hear the other person out and say, and it happens
the other way as well. Like, so I'm not just saying it only happens this
one way, but when you're not willing to give anyone else the benefit of the
doubt, like, what are we even doing?
You know, so it's depth. Are you, are you, are you taking
it deeper? And is it okay for them to feel how they feel because there's
a room there, there's a, there's a, there's a map to how they got there.
Or is everyone dumb if they don't believe what you believe?
Yeah. And anyone who's pushing that idea is in my
opinion, or a tyrant pushing ri. Or
rhetoric. Right, Rhetoric. Everyone else who's like, hey,
they don't know enough. They don't know these things. And so that's why they feel
like anyone who's pushing depth and education probably on the right side,
at least in my personal opinion. Anyone who's trying to keep it shallow so that
way they can name call and then everyone picks up these name calling labels
is rhetoric. Yeah. Yeah. Well,
we seek to avoid rhetoric on this show,
which is why John returns. And thanks for having me on, dude. Like,
I, I, I really appreciated all the books that we've done. I
really appreciated you letting me bring you Stranger, Stranger in a strange land.
This was an important read for me and so I appreciate it. Absolutely. Thank you.
You're welcome. Any final
thoughts on war? What can we take from.
I'll frame it this way. I've been framing my, my outlying question or my outgoing
question this way lately. What can
we take from a book like this? A book like War by Sebastian
Younger and apply to
building forward. Right, Because I'm tired of, I'm weary of
deconstructing. I'm way more interested in building,
I'm way more interested in building the next thing
versus deconstructing the old thing to find out all the problems. Because we know what
all the problems are. We, we do know we've had
20, some would say even 40 or 50 years of
just masticating. That's chewing for you folks out there
over have to be very. You should not be posting on social media.
There you go. That's right. Over what the problems are. And
arguing, to John's point, social media just being the latest
tool arguing to shut people up or to
elevate our own egos. And neither one of those things are building.
So what can we take from war that can help us build
the next institution, the next community, the
next business? What can we take from war?
I think the thing that I take away the most from
from war. And this shows up all the time for me and my
conversations because whenever I talk with people about hiring, right?
And they start talking about salespeople and they all start saying this
line, John, I want someone who has urgency,
right? And urgency is an important quality,
okay? But what happens is, at least in my
conversations, right? People struggle in conversations not because they're
bad at sales, but because they're bad at having conversations. They've not done
them enough. They're. And so they start thinking of, I need something
just more than me, right? And
I think that this book shows very clearly
what that end label or in level of
more can be. It becomes
dogged determination. It becomes the inability
to relax after the fact, right?
Becomes lasting impact of things. And so
first of all, if you're in business and you're trying to whip people into
rabid intensity by making it war, like I have a problem with you and we
can talk about it, please send me a dm. I will show you a better
way to coach and lead and manage your salespeople. Because
these people have been honed for this one environment
specifically to the point to where they're problematic even
with the people that are. That are not as far forward as they are, right?
And so when you start thinking about just rabid intensity and
sales savages and urgency and everything else like this, or
you're telling yourself that you need to be more because you're a founder or you're
a leader and you just think you got to be more. You got to be
more. You got to be more like this thing or whatever, you can take it
too far to the place to where you are the cultist,
you are the. You're just as problematic as anybody
can be because you've lost the ability to have
a discerning point of view.
And I. And that's problematic, right? You got to know those
trade offs favorite book for anybody around this
topic that's not around war, but go read Annie Duke's book
about quitting, because quitting is notoriously shown or seen and
portrayed as, like, absolute failure. But, God, if we're going to lose everything to
go win this hill, is that does that even make sense? No, it does not.
Right. Losing your sanity because you're, you're on some founder's path, and
you're the only person who gets it. It's not worth your sanity. It's not worth
your relationships. It's not worth anything else like this. Don't get so dogged that, like,
people who should be able to kind of point you in the right direction
can't be heard.
That's a good way to end. And so I want to thank you for
listening to the Leadership Lessons from the Great Book podcast. I want to thank
John for joining us today. And with that, well,
we're out.