Hello, my name is Jesan Sorrells and
this is the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books podcast,
episode number 173.
During this month or during these last few episodes
of the show, we have been discussing the nature of warfare and
war making and even the type of people who, who we ask to go
out and make war. The
psychological differences between men and women are numerous
in this space and in our current era in the west.
Various militaries, various quote unquote, first world
militaries, such as the ones in the United States, Great Britain and Canada
most notably, are having trouble meeting their recruitment
goals of getting young men to
volunteer for military service.
Many elite commentators, floating ideas into the culture that
eventually may become public policy and then become law, have
postulated in Canada, Great Britain and the United States
that a potential pool of
soldiers who could be conscripted for service into frontline combat
in places like, I don't know, the Ukraine
might, a pool might exist among
young women.
This idea follows on from the current
cultural milieu where men and women are
believed wholeheartedly to be indistinguishable,
where women can do, quote, unquote, anything that a man can do, only better,
and where too many young women, and
quite frankly, young men, have seen too many Marvel movies,
which drives me absolutely crazy.
The last 40 years of pursuing educational equity has produced college and university
environments where 60% of undergraduates are now female.
And it has led as a knock on effect to a marital
environment. I just saw this recently where women now initiate,
70% of all divorces. You
can go check that stat out yourself as well
into this cultural reality. At least in the United States and Western Europe,
the idea that women should serve in frontline combat roles doesn't
seem so illogical.
And yet many men,
particularly young men in most parts of the world where terrorism,
warfare and violence are the rule of the day, are still the ones that
commit the most violence and die violently.
Men still form the backbone of modern militaries and even glorified
pre modern militias like the Taliban, isis, and even
the young men who died in droves in the Gaza Strip for the last
couple of years. Men, particularly young
men, still do the fighting, and men still do the dying outside of the
egalitarian Western societies the majority of my
listeners currently inhabit. And the reality of that
fact can be observed throughout history. And so such
a reality begs the question, what is the mindset of
young men who throughout history have wanted to attack forward positions with
zeal, knowing that the likelihood of death was high?
This is a question that was asked in Sebastian
Younger's book on war, which we covered just last
episode, if we can't answer this question as a
culture, and Younger made this point as well, and if men and women are
really interchangeable and if egalitarianism is really the rule of the
day, then why not let women serve in front, in the front lines of combat
against all historical and cultural
trends? The reason we're going in this
direction today, the reason I'm asking this question,
is because the book that we are covering, this theme
of young men pursuing glory
and honor and trying to become warriors
in order to achieve status is a theme that leaped from the
pages of this book and it's also a
theme that leaped out to me. But we didn't have a chance to talk about
it in a similar book that we
covered in episode number 157 where we talked
about the writing of Ernie
Lapointe. Today on this episode
of the podcast, we will be introducing and discussing the nature,
I think, of warrior young men, their
warrior mindsets, their fundamental inability to listen to
wise old men who were once warriors,
and what this all means for leaders in our
rampantly egalitarian time. From
the volume the Earth
Is all that Lasts, Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull
and the Last Stand of the Great Sioux Nation by Mark
Lee Gardner.
Leaders, when leading young men and being responsible for channeling
their enormous energies, walking a fine line is
the only kind of walk to which you are going to want
to commit. And
joining me today, as is our want,
is my good friend and co host on the show,
Tom Libby. How you doing this afternoon? Tom, how you
doing today? I was doing
fantastic until about five minutes before we hit the record button. They had,
you know, personal catastrophe, but not anything serious, folks. Not
like a, you know, a life threatening thing. But it was just, it was a
funny thing that Hasan and I got a chance to laugh about for a couple
minutes before we hit the record button. But otherwise, yes, I am, I
am doing fine and dandy H. Thank you very much for asking. Hey, you're, you're
welcome. You're welcome. And, and, and his personal catastrophe.
Catastrophe. I'm laughing about it. I'm laughing at his
pain as, as. We often do to each
other. As we often do to each other or Kevin Hart might might inone does
actually kind of tie into. I made the point before we hit record does kind
of tie into what we are talking about here today.
And we covered, we introduced
the Earth is All that Lasts by Mark Lee Gardner in our
previous episode, episode number 172I would recommend going back and listening to
that before you listen to this episode today. But today
we are going to be, as usual as we do with copyrighted
material, we're not going to be reading directly from the book or we might like
read. There's one chap, one piece of one chapter, some observations that I think I'll
directly read. But the vast majority of the book, we're going to
summarize the themes in the content and of course, we're going to bat about this
idea of, of young men and combat
and counting coup and taking scalps
and all of the kinds of things that are talked about in, in this
book. Now, Tom
has not read the book, but Tom has deep familiarity with the subject matter
surrounding the book and the subject matter of the book, which
is the nature of the tribal
wars that occurred between, quite frankly,
the native tribes of not only the upper Midwest
and the Midwest in between the 1860s and the
1880s, between them and the, the
United States Cavalry, most notoriously,
of course, in the Battle of Little Bighorn
where General George Armstrong Custer died
ignobly. By the way, I just read that in, read about that in the
book this weekend. And I gotta say,
Tom, reading that from a strategic perspective and a
tactical perspective versus just purely a cultural one, the
thing that jumped out to me about that battle was,
yes, the arrogance of Custer and all of that.
But we just, we just came off of reading a book about World War I.
We just read John Keegan. So there were arrogant generals. Arrogance is not
a thing just for, for Armstrong Custer. Like, that's, that's just kind of what you,
kind of what you get. It was, the thing that jumped out to
me was just how committed
he was to a bad deal once it had
gotten like you could have retreated at any time,
but he kept not retreating.
And so it's like he threw good money after bad. And you see this all
the time in business. You see this all the time in leadership. People see this
in marriage. I mentioned the, the women initiating
70% of all divorces, which can be
interpreted as a case of women no longer being willing to throw good money after
bad and willing to cut their losses. It is one
interpretation. I'm not saying it's the interpretation, I'm saying it's one. But in general,
you do see people who fall into this sunk cost fallacy.
And a sunk cost fallacy basically states, well, I'm already
in this thing. I might as well keep going and get to the end.
And the problem with that is just like Custer at Little
Bighorn, you can lose everything,
including the lives of other people, if you. If you don't know
when to retreat. And he. And that's the biggest thing that jumped out to me
was just, just how little Custer understood about
exactly the negotiation that he was in.
And I'm not asking you to comment on that. I'm merely saying that that was
the observation that I had there. No, it's a good observation
though, because if you. And if you go before, even
before Little Big Horn happened, like
days and weeks before that, Custer was warned
about this through from superior officers and saying,
don't take certain things for granted. Don't do this, don't do that. And he did
it anyway because to your point about the arrogance, it's. And
then he ultimately sacrificed the entire seventh Calvary. Right? Like so.
Correct. It's. And. And again, to. I think
that. And in modern times, we see it every
day in the form of startup founders that lean into some ideal that
they have without actual factual data to
support it, and they just continue down a path. They go through their entire life
savings and they're only to realize the idea wasn't good enough or
didn't work or whatever. Like, we still have the same pro. Like
we still see the same things today that we did in
1876 when the battle of Little Big Horn
happened. So. Yeah, yeah. And I mean, this is a.
And what we cover on any. What we cover on this podcast. I've been saying
this a lot as we've been talking about war with the First World War with,
with John Keegan covering war by Sebastian
Younger, about the. The battles of the 2nd
Battalion, um, in the Coral Valley in Afghanistan,
um, in 2007 and 2008, um,
or this book talking about the, you know, the tribal wars in the 18.
The late 1860s, 1870s into the 1880s in, in the
United States, what you see is this
remarkable ability to engage in sunk costs
consistently across all time, which tells me that this is a
human problem. Not.
Not one that is. Not one that is. What do you call it,
bracketed by any particular time or climb or has anything to do with how
particular people think in a particular kind of way. This is. This is a human
problem. And I don't know why human beings do this. I don't know if it's
just the hope that things will get better or
to your point about arrogance, the absolute arrogance and not being able to listen
to good advice or I don't know. I
don't know which one it is, or maybe it's a weird combination of all those
things together that leads to the
nonsense and the kinds of disasters that happen to. And the disaster that
happened to the 7th Cavalry or, you know, can happen to
an entrepreneur who puts all of their money in, you know, Beanie
Babies or something.
And I'm not saying to be. I mean, sure, your Beanie Baby in your basement
is probably fine. I don't know. But don't, don't bend on it.
It's. It's 20, 25. I maybe answer something
else. I do agree with you though. It is definitely a
human problem because it's not to your point about whether it's. There's
no bracket in time. There's also no technology that has
come about to make us get off of this wagon either.
So if there's not, if you can't point
to a singular time, singular type of event,
or a singular technology that gets us on or off this wagon,
then it has to be like it's. If all like it,
Occam's Razor says the simple answer is the right one. Right. So.
So yeah, if all else fails, it has to be us.
Well, and, and the thing is, technology is
like caffeine. It allows us to do stupid things faster and better.
Yeah, right. And we're going to do the same thing with the LLMs. Like, this
is already beginning to happen. You know, you were already starting to see it.
And, and whatever comes after the
LLMs, if it's robotics or whatever. And now in
warfare, you know, we have this vision and I
talked about this a little bit with world. With our. When we talked about John
Keegan's book because of the nature of technological achievement. You and I talked about that
during World War I and sort of how that combined with sort of
pre technological thinking that was still
based in the idea of a mass amount of troops at a certain
inflection point. Right. By the way, you also saw this
in, in the wars that are documented in, in this book.
And the Earth is all that lasts. But
now we have an idea. And you could see the shift
in the book War by Sebastian Younger, where we only
lost 50 guys in the Korengal Valley in two years.
Any military in the history of the world would take that. Any
military in the history of the world would take those kinds of losses. And yet
we still retreated from the Korigal Valley, a place that not
even people who are native to Afghanistan would go into.
We went into and we only lost 50 guys. And we still
retreated because of
political and cultural reasons. But let's put that aside, the reason we
only lost 50 guys, even though 150
Taliban at a swoop would die in a battle, is
because of superior technology and training. It just
is. It just is. We're just. You
would read about, you know, guys breaking down a 50 cal in the
middle of a firefight while the barrel was still hot,
reassemble the sucker and keep going.
When has any military been able to do that in the history of the world?
That's just better technology and better training. Now I'm
curious. In the future, as we move more into drones
and cyber warfare,
I think we will lose fewer people in war,
but those inflection points are
probably going to have more impact.
And I wonder if human decision making is going
to have to change because it's easy to. It's
easy to engage in sunk cost. This is the last thing I'll say about this.
So we can jump into the book. But it's easy to engage in sunk cost
when it's just a drone. It's just a 30 million dollar drone. It's okay. We've
got like 10 more in the back and Raytheon will spin us up like 40
more before the end of the day. Like it's fine.
Yeah. If the, if the mindset changes, if there's no loss of life.
Right. Or, or if the loss of life is so minimal that it
almost seems like. And I don't want to minimize war. I really don't.
And it almost seems like a video game. Yeah.
You know, and that gets back to, of course, my initial point that I opened
up with, which we could talk about more, but my initial point that I opened
up with, which is why not women in frontline combat, then.
I'll let you think about that. Let's go into, let's go into the
book a little bit. So when you open up, the Earth is all that
lasts. By the way, this book is highly researched.
The appendix alone and the notes. I
think I said this in the intro. The appendix alone
and the notes. And the level of interviewing that
Gardner did is almost 200 pages. Just by
itself, it is ridiculous the amount of work that he put in. He even talked
to Earn Lapointe about, about
Sitting Bull and I think about, probably also about Crazy
Horse. But he did his, he did Garner did his research, you know,
and he's, he's reporting, I think, reporting accurately and
writing accurately. Although you can tell me if I'm wrong on this, Tom. You have
much more knowledge of this than I do. I think he's reporting accurately
at Least as best he can directly from source material about what
has actually happened, what actually happened during these, during these battles.
You can even see it in the writing of, of the book.
I feel, I feel like you took a very journalistic approach to this, where a
journalist would go and, you know, to your point about, he, like,
he found resources. He found resources that validated
resources. It wasn't just like, I went to a museum and I
read a couple of, you know, plaques on the wall in,
you know, in this museum. He read the plaques on the wall in the museum,
took it as fact, but then found where the museum got that information.
Like, he did this several times in multiple layers.
The one thing that, that, the only thing that, that that stands
out to me that is difficult for me is,
I mean, he, as it seems very matter of fact
and it seems very like again, very well
researched, but it's hard to capture
the feel of a people not being part of those people.
Right? So when he, when he talks to Ernie lapointe, he can get Ernie
Lapointe's vantage point of how those
wars impacted him three generations, four generations later,
and how it still impacts him today. But he himself cannot write that
from a standpoint of experience. He has to write it from a
standpoint of research. That's the only thing about this book that I think
kind of leaves anything to be desired, that that's the only part. So if
you're looking at it from a purely educational standpoint, sure, it
checks the boxes. It does. It checks the like it does the
ones and zeros. But it's very difficult to get the emotional,
the emotional part of writing from him on the, from the
people's perspective. I would agree with that. It does come off like the reportage
that Sebastian Younger did in his book War that we also covered.
It does. It strikes less of a historical tone like
Keegan did with the First World War.
And so it's, it's.
Without being there, how are you going to get that
emotion, you know, without being there with the Seventh Calvary or without being there with
the Lakota, how are you going to get that kind of emotion? Right? Even by
the way, people like Lapointe and I would even. I wouldn't knock
the point, but I would say even. I would even turn that critique on the
point. I would say, well, as I sometimes will
say during, during the books that we cover during Black History Month, sometimes, particularly from
Malcolm X or the writings of Martin Luther King Jr.
I was born after all, that was over. Like,
there's no emotional Connection for me in that kind of way, right. To the, to
the ideas that those writers are writing about. So without being there,
I don't know how you, I don't know how any of the parties
get to get to sort of
the, the emotional heart of the matter of
these events. It's, I, I
totally understand and agree with what you're saying and I get that it's not
necessarily the emotional value of the
actual event at hand,
but there's intrinsic value that, that escalates through generations
after the fact that Ernie Lapoint could potentially feel. Right.
Things that, things that happened because like that, that's that
whole. The ripple effect. Right. So things that happened that day
still impact him today. Whether we want to feel that or not
is not it. But it does. We know it does. We know what generational trauma
looks like. And, and you know, we,
we've had conversations about how generational trauma
impacts several other ethnicities and not just native, but,
you know, the Irish from the Potato famine, the, you know, black history
over the course of slavery, et cetera, et cetera. Because you could say the same
thing. Black people today are, they've never, like their grandparents
never experienced slavery, but that does not mean that the slavery does not
impact them today. They still have emotional scars,
whether they think it or not. And some of them want to move past it.
And I totally agree with that. And again, same thing for us. Like certain things
that happen, we, we've. You, you try to find a way to move past it
because if you don't and you start to dwell on those things, you drive yourself
crazy. You, you'll drive yourself absolute bonkers by trying to
rationalize it or fix it. There's no way to fix the past. You can't go
back and fix it. But we tend to try. Like try to, we
try to course. We try to. We try to course correct so hard that we
create other problems that weren't really related to
et cetera, et cetera. Right. So it's like, so I, it's not that early. Ernie
Lapointe needed to be at Little Big Horn for it to impact him.
But that's what I'm getting at with Mark Lee Gardner here. He has neither
attachment, whether it be at the event or ripple
effects down the line of generational trauma that happens after the fact. He's
purely looking at it from a research and article
driven kind of mentality. He's an encyclopedia
opic kind of writing this, which again, I'm not suggesting
it's a bad thing because to me Sometimes that's better because you get to. It's
like, like the. What is it? What is the. The TV series
Dragnet? Just the facts, ma'. Am. Oh, just the facts, man. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Don't
tell. Don't tell me a story. Tell me just the facts. Which this does really
well. And it's very. It's so well researched that you do get
really factual information based on it. So again, from that
perspective, it's great. All I was saying is that. That
this particular time
frame in our country does have some emotional impact that lasted
generations beyond it. And he. He can't capture that. There's no way
for him to. Yeah, well, he. I would say he.
He makes a bit of an attempt,
when you're looking at the structure of the book, he makes a bit of an
attempt in looking at the interviews that Sitting
Bull gave later about what had happened
during that time. Also looking at an inter.
Not the interviews, but looking at the. The writings and the letters of
people who were there at the time, including Indians who
were taken prisoner of prisoners, as
prisoners, but also whites, for lack of a better
term, who were taken prisoner by the Lakota
or the Hunkpapa or various other tribes. Right. The
Cheyenne, the Comanche. Trying to get those. Those
perspectives. He also, interestingly enough, in the structure of this book,
and I thought this, this also jumped out to me. He.
I don't want to say cherry picked because he's building an argument here,
so he's going to pick the things that fit his argument, which is fine with
me. He pulls from
newspaper writings and editorials of the day and
lets those perspectives
sort of speak for themselves. Right. So
when he quotes from, you know, a newspaper in Montana
that is funded probably
by people from back east who want to see, you know,
something happen in Montana or folks in
Colorado, particularly, you know, the settlers who went
to Colorado, who massively despised
the Indian tribes in Colorado because they thought that somehow they were
stopping them from getting gold, which of course was non. Existent, but let's just leave
that aside for just a second. Or the Black Hills,
like everything that happened with the Black Hills and that whole, entire.
That whole, entire area and the perceptions of folks
that looked at the Black Hills in one way
and then of course, the native tribes who looked at it in a totally, completely
different way and the way that that was publicized, I think he gets to somewhat
of that emotional tenor by. By quoting directly from those people.
You do get some of that. And I think that's probably to your point,
as close as you're going to get to kind of
the kind of a on the ground perspective, I
guess. And here's the other piece. And
we always have to keep this in mind when we're reading books that are written
about historical events. The further and further away we get from the
thing, and we've seen this in a lot of books that we've covered on this
show that have been historical books. The further and further away you get
away from the thing. Yes. The more disconnected you become from it
emotionally. And that's not to say the trauma doesn't exist, but the more
disconnected you become from it relationally and emotionally, but also
the more
resources and information is available. Weirdly enough. Scarcity
of it. Yeah, yeah. So,
you know, I often think I try to transpose my brain sometimes,
you know, when I'm, you know, awake at night, I will
transpose my brain a thousand years forward and wonder what the
hell kind of books are people going to write about all of us. Because everything
that could possibly fall out of our mouths is
now published on the Internet. Yeah. And will be preserved a
thousand years from now. What is going. What. Oh, my
God. Oh my God. The Mark Lee Gardner a thousand years from now. I do
the opposite. I, I sit and think. I do not want to know what they're.
I, I have no faith. I have no faith in us whatsoever that it's going
to come out all right. No, I think, I think that. I think the people
a thousand years from now will be perpetually
fascinated. Like there are volumes and volumes and volumes of books written about the
Roman Empire because you're perpetually fascinated with those people. Because the average
person had no voice in the Roman Empire. We don't know what the
average person who is bringing in a cartoon full of like,
donkeys or sheep or whatever to trade in Rome at 3 o' clock
in the morning. We have no idea what that person thought. Because the vast majority
of people throughout the history of the world, up until about 10 minutes ago
were illiterate. They were unable even to write their own names.
Well, with the explosion of literacy, the explosion of now
information technology, back to the point about technology, a thousand years from now,
people will know more about us now, what judgments they will make
about us.
That's what I'm saying. I don't want to know. I don't want to know.
And I think they will be endlessly fascinated and they will not be able to
figure us out even with all available data. They'll be like, I still don't understand
these people. Which should be Fascinating.
That's. That should be fascinating. All right, back to the book.
So we open up. The Earth is all that lasts. And you start off with.
And I really liked this, this, that he sort of begins,
or Gardner begins with this idea
of the
Lakota idea of not wanting
a young man to live, to be an old man, to die young on
the battlefield. Right. That. That's the way a Lakota dies. So I
want to, I want to talk a little bit about that because that sort of
creates the thread that goes through this entire book. It's
this idea of young men who are
seeking warrior status, who have a lot
of energy,
And there's only one spot they have to put it.
You know, they're not going to become agrarian
walking behind a, a cow or, or,
or a donkey. I
think that. And I've asked this question on the show before, and I will
revisit this a little bit later on, but could the
native tribes in the upper Midwest and in the Midwest
have lived as they lived traditionally
if the wars hadn't happened, could that way
of life have continued down through the 20th century
and increasingly. I think the answer is. The tragic answer is
no. I think industrialization would have gotten those folks if not the.
If the US Calvary hadn't gotten them. Industrialization would have gotten them
industrialization and commercialization. So those are like two twin
hammer blows that really hit those folks in
those areas. If you want a reference point to
support your hypothesis. Yeah. Think of, think of the New
England area in the, you know, 200 years
earlier. Right. So the mid-1600s come.
Comes along where, you know, King Philip's War
in 1675, basically,
King Philip was trying really, really hard to get all of the New
England tribes on the same page and fight and fight with him against
the English, you know, Puritan kind of
establishment. And after that war, we don't have to
talk about the whole thing, but just, just quickly
summarize. After that war, realizing the natives were not going to win
the, the war against the Puritans, a lot of the
Abenaki people in the northern part of Massachusetts and
southern Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine basically just left.
They were like, so you had three choices. Assimilate,
assimilate, or die. No, two choices, assimilate or die. You either became
part of the cog or you died. And. And rather than do
that, they left. So that was the third choice. Assimilate, die, or leave. So they
all went to the St. Lawrence River Valley area up in Canada.
I'm getting to my point here. Now. Comes the American revolution,
sorry, the industrial revolution where you know, all
of these factories are being built and we're looking for population in order to,
to get these factories up, up and running. And this is in the mid
18, mid 1800s, so almost 200 years later. And a bunch of those
native people just came down naturally to work in the factories.
So there's a lot an influx of native people came back from Canada because
to your point about the, their quote unquote way of life, it
was faltering then and it was. They already started seeing it getting chewed up
and spit out. So they were looking at what's next and they just decided to
come back down and work in the factories. Now they came under the guise of
we're French Canadian and we weren't native because I
mean they didn't want their kids taken from them. And we don't have to get
into all that about the boarding schools, etc. Etc. But
if they passed for Canadian or whatever, French
Canadian, that's what they came back to and started
specifying as. And then there was all this hush hush about have
a native in your family lineage and whatever. But you just didn't talk about that
in public because again, you didn't, you knew what was happening to
natives across the country in the west there. So you just didn't.
Again, to your point, to, to at least give you a glimmer of your
thought process might have been right because we saw
that in the eastern part of the country with the industrial revolution.
So whether, whether it happened in the late 1800s, early 1900s,
maybe it, maybe it lasted until World War II or
the, the depression, but eventually I do agree with you
that some sort of technological advancement would have caught up and
they would have either paid attention to it, noticed it or wanted part of it.
Right. So yeah, even if they were to able to extend it, let's
say, let's, let's give them the, the hugest benefit of the doubt. Let's say they
extended it a hundred years. So from 1860 to
1960. If you think about all those civil rights movements that
happened and all that, I don't think they would have been able to stay isolated.
Yeah, yeah. And that's the thing. Natural. There would have been a natural progression to
modernize and especially based on what they were seeing
like happening in their, they're, let's say for what it
was if, if the U. S. Cavalry didn't go in there, their
neighbors. Right. So their neighbors would have been having all this
stuff impacting them and Even if they became friends and allies with the United
States government, that would have created a completely different ball of
wax that they. That I don't think they would have been ready for. So
again, as much as I would love to think that everything would have been
copacetic in our native ways would have been fine, I'm not so sure about
that. And I think history did give us some insights as to how that would
have happened. Yeah, well. And you see this in.
So the Lakota versus the Pawnee. Right. So
here's something that also, I think Gardner does a really good job in.
In. In pointing out.
It wasn't just the white immigrants coming across
the country from the east looking for gold or
mining or prospecting or
as part of the cavalry or surveying for
railroads, which is the industrialization piece. It wasn't
just that. That was a thing,
don't get me wrong. And
because you can have a multiple different things inside of this dynamic,
you had the Lakota versus
seemingly everyone else. It wasn't until,
like close to the end that
they all kind of got the religion, and I
use that term small r loosely, the
belief that maybe it might be a good idea
for us to stop scrolling, screwing each other
over. And maybe we have a common. I
mean, by the time they got to that point, by the way, you know, Red.
To paraphrase from Red Cloud and you know, people
sitting. Both sitting, but like Crazy Horse disrespected Red Cloud, I think
tremendously. But Red Cloud,
he kind of could see the future. And he wasn't wrong. He said,
you know, the white people are going to keep coming anyway. What are we doing?
We got. And by the way, you saw this in some of their negotiations around
the Black Hills. So the anti Treaty or not the anti Tree. Sorry, the pro
Treaty tribes who were negotiating around the Black
Hills. It was kind of amazing to me. The chiefs selling. Selling price around
the Black Hills steadily increased over the course of the
negotiations until it finally reached $70 million.
I thought that was brilliant. I put a star next to that and I was
like, this is. This
is. I mean, this is the way of the future. If industrialization,
let's take the cavalry out of it. If they're going to. If the. If. If
the movement of peoples is going to continue west.
And maybe this is me being an old man and not wanting to like, I.
I don't need to count coup anymore. I'm not that. I don't need to go
off and have a war and fight. I'm not. I'm not driven by any of
those things, like young men are driven.
$70 million. I can set up some intergenerational
stuff with that money. Right. And I'm not saying that they would have gotten that
out of the Grant Administration, the President Grant administration. I think that that
was probably outrageous. But they were on to something.
I think that Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse both missed.
The US Government may not have had that kind of money at that point anyway.
Yeah. $70 million was the entire federal government at that point. Point. Like,
we didn't have a $3 trillion budget the way we do today. I mean,
or $38 trillion in debt. Like, we, we were still tied to the gold
standard and like, come on, that's the reason for the gold rushes and things like
that. But I think, I think I do. I think that
Red Cloud and Spotted Tail and all those. All those, Those
chiefs were. I think they were
onto something. I also think, I mean,
again, this is. This is really hard to be judgmental about
today because. Right. Yeah. Because, you know, and again,
you saw, you saw this. We. We
talk about this on this podcast, Tayson, a thousand times about how history just
continues to repeat itself over and over. I just gave you an example about King
Philip's war that, that happened in the early, you know, in the mid-1600s.
It happened again in the 1700s with Tecumseh and, and him trying to
go up and down the. The Mississippi, trying to collect as many tribal
affiliations that he could in order to stop that westward
movement up into the Mississippi, never mind after and beyond the Mississippi,
and he failed. It just, it was.
And by the way, the. There's always an underlying thing here
about. And, And I didn't live at that time, and we
certainly can't talk to Sitting Bull and Red Cloud here, but there was
a disconnect between, between them because of
what. What Sitting Bull and, and, and people like Crazy
Horse would have viewed as greed on his part. Right. Like, you're
signing these treaties and you're. All you're concerned about is your small.
Try your small village of people, and you're not worried about the rest of
the Lakota, Right? So whether it's Hung Papa Titan
or, or Aglala, whatever, like there's all, all these bands of sue.
And Red Cloud was worried about his people, so he's signing. To your point,
whether he was, whether, Whether he foresaw the future or not,
I don't think that was as important to him at the moment as it was
self preservation and thinking. Because think about it as the
Westward came. They hit Red Cloud first. Yep.
So all that he had already encountered, all that death and
destruction and all that stuff. So he was already a
beaten man by the time the. The cavalry and the US Calvary got
out to face Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull. So they.
They're into your point. If they were looking at it from the
right perspective, they could have been looking back at their future, so to speak.
And they didn't want to admit that, or certainly didn't want to want to.
And nor did they feel the need to admit it after. After a Little
Bighorn. Well, well. And this is the thing. So this
is why, by the way. I know that
Little Bighorn was the. Probably the most famous. But Rosebud was just as
important of a battle to them, and they won that battle. So it's,
it's, you know, again, it's. There's a lot of moving parts
here. I know. And there's a lot of psyche and, and, you know,
bravado and again, some arrogance
on. But
to your point, with technological advancement, I think that there's. And
by the way, there's. There are some historians that will give you a
single point of reflection in that, in that
time frame that literally changed the course of history and that was the invention of
the howitzer. Oh, yeah. Right. So, like, you can say a lot of
things about. But if it. Had it not been for the invention of the
Holitzer, the. These things might have played out differently.
Well, in the lack of interest. No.
How can I frame it? Because
we live after World War II
and. Hell, because we live in a world where
I can see a
death like the death of. I'm gonna name
two. I can see the death of George Floyd or the death of Charlie Kirk
live on my phone literally the instant
that it happens or. Or minutes after, or
minutes after literally, as opposed to even when we were kids,
a day later, because the news, you know, the news cycle was
longer because it took time to research this, find out what happened, etc. Etc.
Interview people. Exactly. You can have that. That instant.
Like how many phones were available at the time.
Exactly. And so I think we confuse this. This is the arrogance of the
current era. We take our arrogance in the current
era and we look at
the nature of interactions between people in
the past where, yes, in their time, they thought
communication was instant and fast.
And in comparison to where communication went, it was slow. Slow and
ponderous. Okay. If Tecumseh had had a cell
phone, like, you
know, let's run that experiment. Right. Or if,
If Sitting Bull had had the Internet, which, by the way, by the way,
Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse,
the Lakota, the sue in general,
as part of their attempts to keep the white
settlers out, took down the telegraph polls,
which is kind of interesting to me because, number one, I never
heard of that detail before, but number two, it
showed.
Both a fundamental understanding but also fundamental misunderstanding of exactly what
was happening. Both. Both things occurring at exactly the same time.
And so we look at this, and this goes to. But just my point,
we look at it from our era and we go, well, if I had been.
No, no, no, no, no, no. If you'd been there, you probably would have done
exactly what those people did, because you would have only had access to those resources
then. And this in the. Exactly. And that data.
And the data, the key data that the American, that
the tribal peoples
west of Texas, north and west of Texas missed totally
and completely was the Civil War. That was the biggest piece of data
they missed. And that was the opportunity to catch the
Americans napping. And they didn't even.
It didn't even. It didn't even hit them. Like, they're like, I don't. I don't
know, something's going on. The white people are killed. I don't know. They're not bothering
us. We can go shoot buffalo. Which is fine, by the way. Maybe, maybe that's
what you needed to do. But I also think it was a. It was an
instance of they didn't have the information
because the technology wasn't there. And I'm not even sure they
would have known what to do with it once they, once they got it. Our
statement in the beginning of this episode of this podcast that we're
recording right now, we talked about the technology.
Probably doesn't matter. And again, I'll give you another example of why
you are right to say that and why right now we're
like, the way that you're saying this, like you're talking about technology and
accumulating data that might have been helpful. I don't think so. And let
me explain why. So again, go back to the early
1800s and the divide and conquer of the Cherokee people. The
Cherokee. And by the way, if any of our listeners here at Cherokee, I'm going
to super paraphrase this, so don't vilify me for I.
Trust me, we don't have enough time to go through the entire rigmarole of how
the Cherokee, how the Cherokee government was dismantled by the US
Government through contract negotiations and, and then just v. Just
pushed right out they, they basically did a divide and conquer. It was. To your
point, Hsan had nothing to do with technology. It was purely simple human
interaction. And they realized how to manipulate humans. They took the
Cherokee, they took the Cherokee land
and, and, and government divided it into four and said, we're going
to give. You know, these four people are the only. They essentially said, you're,
we're going to treat you like a real government, but because we're treating you like
a real government, you speak now for all of your people, you speak for all
your people, you speak, etc. Etc. And three out of the
four people decided to sign off, sign off on the removal act,
like they said it was okay to remove them from their land. And again, for
those of you who are listening, if you happen to be Cherokee descent, I know
that I'm butchering this a little bit. I just. We don't have time to go
into all the details. Yeah, but, but the, the reality of it is. Go now
fast forward to what we were just talking about with these, the, this particular
scenario. The manipulation of people
is going to be far greater, far, far more
powerful than any technology they could have ever implemented.
Yes. So. Yes. So again, I, I said a second ago
that the howitzer changed everything, and I still stand by that. But what
it changed was the whole divide and conquer of the tribal
affiliations that started to become one. They, people saw that,
they got scared. They said, I have, I have to save my people,
so we're gonna go sign our own treaties. They started basically
dismantling that, that union that, that started to form with
those tribes. It was, it was still human to human problems
that created the, the, the defeat. But
that advent of that technology scared the absolute bejesus out of
people. Yeah, well, and,
and let me, let me bring up another point which is not in my notes,
but it, it, it's okay because this is what happens when I have a conversation
with Tom. I think about things that are in my notes.
There is something about, and
I'm going to approach this from the other end of the telescope. So normally
I would say.
The power of.
European. No, let me
frame it this way. I'll frame a different kind of way. The 1500 years that
the Europeans had of beating the brakes off of each other
about religion, about economics and about
politics. The conclusions
that came out of that. Beating the brakes off of each other on that
one continent for 1500 years with, by the way,
almost no external pushing
on that. Right. The Chinese didn't come across the silk, didn't come
down the Silk Road and invade Europe. The closest the
Muslims ever got was at the siege of Vienna in
1683. And I mean, the Ottoman
Empire basically got stalled at the gates of Europe with the
siege of Vienna in 1683, which was a miracle, by the way.
A miracle that from the European perspective. This is what I mean
by miracle. A miracle from the European perspective that if the Ottomans had been
successful, our total entire world history would have been completely. Would have
been completely different, would have looked completely different. But the only reason that the
Europeans were able to form that miracle, and to your
point about the Cherokees being broken up into these four
federation pieces, the only reason
the European tribes at the sea at the siege of Vienna in
1683 were actually able to get their crap together was because they united under
one king. That's the only reason.
But it took 1500 years from the decline of. The decline
of the fall of the Roman empire to that point
for them to be able to put down their tribalism
long enough to unite for literally five minutes,
by the way, and then go right back to beating the brakes off of each
other for another 200 years. Yeah, yeah.
So normally I would approach this point from that perspective,
but I'm going to approach this point, that point, the same point, but from the
minority or the minority report perspective.
When. And you see this when the
results of European warfare and
war making land on other peoples in other
continents who do not. Did not
wind up at the same conclusions after going through that kind of
human to human interaction, like in Africa,
in Asia, in South America and in
North America, those
peoples look at the European way of engagement
as foreign. And I don't think we appreciate that
enough, nearly enough as historians. I don't think historians make this point at all because
it's a counterpoint and a minority report point, and it has nothing to do
with guilt or supremacy. I'm not talking about the supremacy of
quote, unquote white people. I'm not talking about the supremacy of quote, unquote
European thinking. I am merely saying that when the
results of that thinking show up to other places in the world that have adopted
other thinking, it is foreign to those other places. And
we see that in this book.
Red Cloud, even though he could
negotiate the way in which the white
settlers thought about him was still foreign to him.
Yeah. Sitting Bull didn't even bother trying to get into
their psychology until much later, after all the fighting
was done. And Crazy Horse,
I'm gonna say something right here. God bless that man. That dude was a warrior
from the, from the jump, right? Like he.
And, and just like a warrior, there's a whole incident that's, that's,
that's put it, that, that's talked about in the book where he basically took
somebody else's wife, the tribe that
he shouldn't have. And it wound up, it wound up being a giant mess.
And I thought you were gonna talk about, I thought you were gonna talk about
the battle. Was it muddy river or.
Oh, yeah, or was it muddy river, Greasy grass. Greasy grass where he
takes, he puts his shirt on and he basically runs his horse right
in front of everybody firing guns at him. I mean, this guy.
And they all missed. Every one of them missed. So I mean,
everybody else is like, yeah, he's invincible. We're gonna follow.
He's like, I'm invincible. Let me prove it. I'm gonna go run my horse in
front of all these guns. And I'm not. And he did. How would it,
how did that happen? Like, I still look at this today and I'm going,
I think I would, I think I would have thought that guy was a God
if that, if that happened today. And somebody in, in the middle of a war
said, don't worry, I'll stand on that hill and I won't get hit. And they
just stood up on the hill as everybody was firing guns at them. And they're
like, see, they can't hit me. I'd have been like, effort. I'm beyond.
I'm. Hey. He just said f around and find out in one. I'm going
with that guy. Like, how did he.
It's crazy to me that he was able to do stuff like that. But. And
then, of course, like you said, he doesn't know what. We know today, and we
know today that those guns are not exactly, are not exactly accurate. I
mean, I mean, These are not 30 odd sixes with
scopes on the front. No, no, they can hit a. They could hit a deer
at like, you know, 500 yards or whatever. These guns.
We know these guns are not exactly accurate. We know that today. They didn't know
that. They didn't know that. No. And that was, and that was the best
accuracy. I mean, give me a break. Like, come on. Like,
to your point earlier, we, we made this point earlier in another book that we
covered another episode. You know, you could fire arrows as fast as they could load
the breach loaders or faster. The Sharps carving.
I mean, I fired a Sharps before. Number one. Those guns are heavy.
People underestimate just how much they weigh. Good Lord. But then number two,
to your point about accuracy,
kind of not the best, but that's because we live in a time
when you have much more accurate weapons. Things have
improved. I was actually just breaking down some of my pistols the other day and
cleaning them. And yes, ladies and gentlemen, I
do own pistols, along with several other pieces of armament in my house, and
you can also ask me about that later. But I was breaking it down and
cleaning them and putting everything back together, and I was kind of.
I'm always amazed at weapons technology. I am
always amazed at weapons technology because the. The difference in
accuracy between, you know, the.45 that my grandfather
carried in World War II versus
the.45 that we've got now is. I mean, they're
fundamentally the same weapon, but the accuracy is just
better. The materials technology is just better. Even.
Even the rounds are just better. Like, it's just
insane. And so when
you have a guy like Crazy Horse,
who, by the way, his actual name I love this is his horse is
crazy, not Crazy Horse. His horse is crazy. I love that
when you have a guy like that,
That guy is less concerned from a mindset perspective
about what's going on in the enemy's mind. He doesn't care about
that. He only cares about what he's going to do to the enemy.
That's all he cares about. And by the way, you saw that in the whole
incident with the woman and all of that and going
back and forth, like, he wasn't worried about what that dude was gonna do. He
was just like, yeah, I don't know. This woman's coming over here. This woman's gonna
hear. We're gonna hang out. Okay,
somebody. And. And if I had been advising him,
I would have whispered in his ear, listen,
listen. His horse is crazy. Listen.
The enemy gets a vote. Just keep that in
mind. The enemy gets a vote.
Yeah, but. But. But. That's the end of the but would have
been the whole thing after that. But you have to. So I. I'll bring.
I'll bring this back to modern days. Right? Like in business sense.
Right. So. And. And by the way, as a. As a sales and marketing
consultant, I kind of have the same mentality as Crazy
Horse to my clients sometimes. Sometimes. Because
what do you care what they're doing? Like, why. Why do you get.
Like, what if you are in direct competition with another
company that is in the next town over? I'm just using an
example. But let's say I'm a plumber, and I'm. And I have a Plumber
down the street. If you do what you
do well enough and you. And you market yourself the right
way, the right people are going to find you and you're going to do business.
What do you care what he's doing? Like, so the whole keeping up
with the Joneses thing is not a thing for me in advising
people in marketing. Right? Like, so, meaning, like, if that guy's doing all kinds of
Google Ads and YouTube ads and all this other stuff and he's doing
$3 million in revenue and he's spending money over
money over money to get that 3 million, and you're not
spending that kind of money, but you're still doing 3 million because you're finding the
right people, people at the right time under the right circumstances, then what do you
care what he's doing? Like, why do you care? And then, like, to your point,
like, the enemy gets a vote. Not in my scenario. That guy doesn't get a
vote in what happens and what we do. That guy doesn't get a vote on
how we proceed, our business model, or how we proceed with our business
marketing, etc. Etc. He doesn't get a vote. He doesn't have to take up any
of your mind space. And I think
that that's some of those things that, like, I take from the
difference between leadership styles between Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull.
Crazy Horse, Crazy Horse's leadership style was,
I will do whatever it takes to prove to you that I am
worthy of you following me. And if that means jumping into the
fire, then I'll jump into the fire. If that means running into the. If you
want me to be first in battle, I'll be first in battle. Whereas Sitting
Bull was more in the lines of, here's my philosophy.
I'm. I, I have a philosophical way of thinking of things. If you agree
with that philosophy, then you should fight my fight for me. Right?
Like, I don't need to be on the front line because we agree in the
same. We, we believe in the same things. And because the,
because you want to support that belief system, then you're gonna,
you're a young man. You're gonna fight my fight for me, and I don't need
to fight it because we share the same philosophy.
Yeah, it was a philosophical difference in leadership stuff styles, but
both of them were very effective. Right. And you needed both of them. And this
is, this is the core point, I think, of the book, and it is the
core point of what we're talking about today in order to lead young men into
battle. In order to harness the energies of young men. I want to talk a
little bit about this in our next section here. But in order to, in order
to harness the energies of young men, you need both of those.
You need the, it's, it's a, it's a hammer and tongs. Right.
Impact. And, and if you don't have both of those. And
I, and I wrote in my notes, I mean, to your point about Sitting Bull,
he was much more inclined to be measured in thought.
He consulted with Wakatanka and he was
slow to act. But here's the but about City Bowl. This
is why I'm probably, I'm probably more City Bull than
I am Crazy Horse. But once that action was initiated,
like, he was all in. He was like, okay, we're in for penny, in for
a pound, Longshanks, let's go. Let's go all the way to the Bitter end, whatever
that end will be. And it's fine. Right? And so you do.
I got a sense in reading this book and
in the reporting, and I love how you framed it, the reporting of, the journalistic
reporting of Mark Lee Gardner on this book. I got the sense that
Sitting Bull understood he was in a tragic story. And he
sort of was not fade
accompli, but he was sort of, and I don't say comfortable
either. He was.
Okay with letting it play out the way it was going to play out because
he knew what the clearing at the end of the path had to be.
And that is that. That doesn't make
Sitting Bull tragic. Like, we tend to look at that through our lens where we
want people to be heroic and we want the winner to, like,
have the victory and screw over the enemy. And
like I mentioned Marvel movies earlier, say some quip and then like,
flip off of the back of the helicarrier or some damn
nonsense that never happens in real life.
What happens in real life is you make a
decision. And we, I talked about
this in World War I. I talked about this in war with by Sebastian
Younger. But you make a decision and then you have to live with the
consequences all the way to the end of whatever those consequences are.
And don't get me wrong, we need crazy horses. For sure. We need those
guys. Because I don't think Sitting
Bull not. I don't think Sitting Bull couldn't have done the whole,
like, rallying moral cry that Crazy Horse did. He
couldn't. He couldn't have done that. He won, that guy. But he
was the guy that could do what Crazy Horse couldn't, which is Walk
that path all the way to its logical end. Even if that logical end
meant his own death, which it did. And I think, I think he knew that.
I don't think he was ignorant to that.
Today's military structure, I mean we basically still have that right. The
generals that, the generals that lead from behind that are more thought
process, thought provoking and, and they absolutely think
beyond the battlefield and what happens when this war is over.
How do I engage, how do I, how do I look that.
That other general in the eye after this war is over
with honor and dignity and respect and
whereas if you think about Crazy Horse essentially like a lieutenant.
Right. Like a lieutenant is on the battlefield with the troops and he's gonna
rally the guys from a energy standpoint, not necessarily
from a philosophical standpoint. I think we have the same kind
of structure today. We just. You just call them different things. Like. Right. It's
like. Yeah, because again even like as like
advisors and you know, Sitting Bull had gall and like there was
other, there's other people that, that were like the in between
of, of Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, almost like a melding of the two where
Gaul would be perfectly okay jumping to battle. But he wanted to understand first and
make sure that he had Sitting Bull's best interest in mind. So we
have colonels and captains or whatever. Like, like I think we still have all that
structure as we just call them. We have the more organized now. Yeah,
like there's more, it's just more. There's more like
literal structure to it versus having this open ended kind
of. All right, we're like Crazy Horse is crazy. We're just going to let him
go do his thing, but we're going to pick up the slack on the back
end whenever whatever that happens in that battle. We know that we're going to have
to have some sort of communication and kind of sit down
with what like so it was looser
and, but, and, and I know I'm kind of categorizing it
the, the way that we would modern militaries, but yeah, I mean, let's
face it, that's how it worked. Like. Well, I mean, and
well in the ruthlessness of. Hierarchies is everywhere in human society.
It's everywhere every time. It's one of those, again, one of those human things.
Hierarchies are ruthless. And whether your hierarchy
is loose or your hierarchy is tight, whether
your hierarchy is informalized or whether it is formalized, it doesn't
matter. Hierarchies are part of reality. And
in our Time I opened up with talking about the
egalitarianism, which is this idea that. That men
and women are interchangeable.
In the. In the. In the case of warfare. Right.
Historically speaking, men and women have not been interchangeable. And
by the way, male hierarchies and female hierarchies are different.
They are fundamentally different. And if you want
to execute a war successfully, you
have to know what kind of hierarchy you are
in and what kind of hierarchy you are commanding.
And that's just it. You just have to know, and you have
to respect that hierarchy and not try to violate it or
reshape it because of some
ideological position that doesn't match. That's fine in a time of peace.
It's fine to hold all the ideological positions that you want to hold in a
time of peace. That's fine. But when it comes to the point, the inflection point,
such as it were, where we're actually going to get down to this now, we
got to move past ideology. We have to move into. We have to move into
something else. Case in point. This is the section from the book that I want
to read. So this is from the Earth is All that Lasts. This is
a chapter on the invasion of Good Horse Grass country.
And this was a quote from Fanny Kelly.
And. And Fanny Kelly was a
captive of the. Of the Lakotas,
and she was.
She had been captured by the Oglalas near Fort Laramie on July
12 and was traded to a Hunkpapa
named Brings Plenty. And she was with
the. She was with the. The Hunkpapa
for. For quite some time. And she.
She actually wrote to. She was used as an interpreter between
the. The Hunkpapa and the white settlers
who were leading a wagon train into, um. Into the. Into
the. Into territory that basically they didn't. They didn't belong in, quite frankly.
And. And so she tried to
manipulate the negotiations because, of course, you know,
she. She. The. The. The native tribes thought that she was. She was going
to engage in good faith. She was not trying to engage in good faith. She
was trying to get the heck away from them and get back. To get back
to her family. And.
And it wound up being a Pyrrhic victory for the Hunkpapas
because they prevented the emigrant train from preventing.
From penetrating farther into Lakota lands. They had made them go home,
but at an incredible loss of life. Right. And Kelly
later on was.
Wrote a book on her experiences, and Gardner references this book, which I
find to be very interesting, by the way, book on her
experiences As a Sioux captive and, and he
says this, although with the Ogalas along, although with the
Oglalas and then the HunkPapas for only five months, she witnessed nearly
everything that touched their daily lives. She even learned some of the Lakota language.
And she did come to understand what drove them beyond the
basic need to survive. And this is the quote here that gets to what I
want to talk about today. This is the core of it. The youth are very
fond of war. They have no other ambition and pants for the
glory of battle, longing for the notes of the war song that they may rush
in and win the feathers of a brave. They listen to the stories of the
old men as they recall the stirring scenes of their youth or sing their war
songs which form only a boasting recapitulation of their
daring and bravery. They yearn for the glory of war,
which is the only path to distinction. Close
quote. Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse would
not disagree.
Paths to distinction for young men
historically have been limited. A woman becomes
a woman when she first menstrates because now she can have babies
and create life. That's when a woman becomes a woman. But for a man
to become a man. Tom knows this and I
know this. Yeah, it's a different thing. That's a long
process. And in our modern society we've sort
of pooh poohed that and we're now entering and I'm seeing a lot of
elite commentators and people smarter than me talking about the male crisis
now. And occasionally this will pop up once every few
years. But now it seems to have like sharpened to a point
because in a post industrial society where manufacturing is not
a thing, less than 5% of people are farmers
in any sort of fashion. Most farming is done by industrial,
large industrial outfits now where
military service is less than 1% of the available male population in the
United States and where the vast majority of
men are going to be shuffled into, for good or ill, white
collar jobs where the opportunities
for glory.
There aren't a whole lot of opportunities for glory. When you're sending an email,
there just aren't. There's no way to make that sex. Isn't that where.
Isn't that what we've replaced sports with? Like,
isn't there. Aren't sports supposed to take over some of that?
Sports are, but we forget. So you. Let's, let's have an honest talk
about men for just a minute. Tom,
you played sports and I played sports. Now I didn't
play sports until I was into my 20s because as a Teenager.
I was not going to be keel hauled into
something that I didn't care about. I just wasn't.
The, the, the line of rebellion had already been established by
that point. And I just wasn't going to do anything that I didn't, I didn't
want to do. And so I did not play sports
when I got involved in martial arts towards the end of my high school years.
And that kept on going into my 20s. But I didn't start really playing an
organized sport of any kind until I was in my 20s. And
when I was in college. You played football, you coached football.
I presume that started fairly young for you because most people do when
they do football. Nothing wrong with that. And
we all knew, you and I both knew guys who
wouldn't catch a ball if you paid them, they just
wouldn't do it. They're not interested.
And so while I appreciate that sports does exist as an
outlet, I mean, I've got my own both. All my kids have done sports in
one form or another. All my kids did sports in one form or another.
I think we've entered this weird sort of post modern, post
industrial landscape where the choices are so broad that
if young men don't want to do it, their parents aren't pushing them to do
it. Now the ones who are being pushed obviously are the ones we see who
do it. But.
I'm shocking my shoulders, by the way, on the video. Folks like you can't see
that because this is. Just listen to the audio on the audio.
But like, what do you do for all those. How do, here's, here's a big
question and it is a question of our time. How do you channel the energies
of young men so that they can get distinctions if the vast majority of them,
if the paths to distinction are
not what they used to be? How do you do that? Because that
is the penultimate question of our time. And that was something that really jumped out
to me in this book was the path to distinction for warrior young men
like the young men here, the Lakota young men. I could have
picked up those young men and put them in the Coringal Valley in Afghanistan and
they would have done exactly the same thing. Yeah,
I could have given them a 50 cal or I could have given them,
I, I could have put them on the boats in Normandy.
They would have done exactly the same thing. I could have put them
in, in, in French
Indochina at, you know, Dien Bien Phu.
Right. Or, and in the, in the, the,
what do you call it? The Idrang Valley. During Vietnam
I could have put them in, in, in, in, in
Korea. They were literally. It's the exact same kind
of dude. They're looking for dist. Extinction. And the only way they
know how to do this is through
fighting war and counting coup and scalping and
getting involved. And the way that he describes the battles is just kind of amazing.
That part to me was exhilarating. Like they're getting up after it. Like you've got
these cavalry boys and they were boys, like 15 to 22 year old
boys battling with these, with these tribal
warriors who are also probably their exact same age. And they're getting
after it. They're looking for distinction. They're not out there by accident.
The question of our time is what do we do with our
young men now? Because they have the same energies. That hasn't gone
anywhere. I was just about to say
that's where I think I may differ with you a little bit.
I'm not sure they have the same energies. I'm not
100% convinced. I think we do. I
think, I think it's, it's, it has started from such a
young age going like, think about parents today.
And, and by the way, you might even
not purposefully done it, but think about.
Because I know you have some kids with some drastic age differences. Oh
yeah, Think of, think of both of those two kids when they were a year
or two years old, were. Did you interact with them
differently? The answer is yes, right? Like whether
you meant to or not. Because, because I
think there's, there is.
A. There'S a
feeling about it, I guess like from our generation looking
at, at these kids being born today and these young
males, to your point. And we're trying to
equalize everything so much that it's
not just about, it's not simply, it's not simply just about
lifting girls, little girls up into thinking they can be whatever they want
and do whatever they want. Which by the way, I totally agree with. I think
if whatever they want to do in their life, go for it. I have no
problem with a woman having ambitions of whatever.
But it's not simply that. It's. We're also taking
young boys and saying slow you roll there, buddy.
Like so we're trying to suppress some of that from such a young age
that by the time they get to teenagers, I don't think they have that
fight in them, to be honest. I see a lot of teenagers today,
male teenagers did.
I mean it's hard to, it's really hard to explain because
they also, they don't go through the same trials and tribulations that we went through
either, like you growing up or me growing up in the neighborhood that I
did. I, I don't know if. I don't know if my kids
would have even survived that, never mind younger than them. Because
were, Were you bullied as a kid? Oh, yeah. Damn
skippy you were. Oh yeah, for sure. Did you, did you figure out how to
deal with that bully on your own terms? You did? Yes.
Did that bullying you become best friends? Maybe, maybe not. Sometimes yes,
sometimes no. Some. Because sometimes once you figure out the bully isn't really
what he thinks he is, now you have to figure out, do you actually like
him as a person? Like, that's different. Right? So, yeah, but like, but we had
to deal with all that. I'm sorry, but like 5 year olds today getting
bullied, their parents step in so fast and they try to figure that out for
them. I, I just think that there's. I don't know if they have the fight
in them. I. You're saying that you think the fight's there, they just don't know
what to do with it. I'm saying I don't know the fight's still there,
that the fight's not there anymore. That's what I'm concerned. And maybe my perception is,
is colored because what are we, an
hour, we're an hour in on our conversation or 15 minutes in.
So now it's time to bring up Jiu Jitsu.
But like, maybe, maybe my perception is colored because
I do see young men in
the Jiu Jitsu classes that I coach. I do see young men
when I coach soccer or other sports.
Now I will say this. The majority of young
women in those places has increased in the
years that I've been an adult. And the number of young men
in those places has decreased as I have become.
Right. So I will say that to your point about the energies.
Well, think of this for a second. Hold on one second. Hey, son, just to
add fuel to that fire, take a sport like football like you talked
about. I played football. We had no qualms whatsoever about
running at each other full speed and smacking the crap out of each other. Right.
For sure now, but now they're like they are. They're
basically trying to replace full contact split football
with flag football until they hit high school.
Like there's a lot, there's a lot of movement. Saying that that type of physical
activity at that age disrupts the mind. It has a
lot of detrimental effect into the maturity of the brain. There's a
lot of, they're doing a lot of studies of saying like combat sports, whether it's
football or martial arts, there's a direct link between those
sports and a decline of cognitive thought processes later in life.
So again, whether I agree with it or not is not that the, not the
statement here, but I'm just saying to your point, with the decrease in, in men
in those sport, you're seeing, you're also seeing a decrease in full
contact football, full contact rugby, full contact,
all these things. Like you're seeing a decrease in it because
my, my son, my son who by the way is 26 and I'm going to
quote him here, so again, don't vilify me. These are not
my words. My son basically calls it the wussification of the,
of America. Like he basically says that we're basically
wussifying all of our, all of our, all of the male
testosterone driven, male ego, male. All the stuff that you're talking
about that these Lakota warriors had. We're basically trying
to, we're purposefully trying to remove it from the equation.
Okay, So I think that, that, I think that that has a, I think that
that is a, that is going to be to our detriment long
term maybe because as
I said in the opening, in other
parts of the world,
reorganized military parts of the world
where we keep going, not we keep. Where we have recently
decided that we're going to reduce the level of adventuring
that we do in those spaces.
The people who are still there, the
people who are still doing the killing
are to a person,
men,
and they're not old men. So one of the
things that if you look back in history, the Greeks and the Romans
did really well, which I think we don't do well in our society.
They did really did conscription really well. And the Greeks and
the Romans, like Socrates. Okay, Socrates. No,
Plato. Plato. It was Plato. Was it Plato? It was
Aristotle. It was Plato. It was one of those, one of the big three philosophers.
I think it was Plato. All y' all could correct me later on, but he
actually served in a Greek hoplite. So the
hoplite was basically the Greek version of infantry. It was,
it was the Greek version of these tribal
warriors. It was the Greek version of the 7th Cavalry. He
served in that all the way into his 40s, 50s and
60s. So from the age of 15 or
whenever you first got into a hoplite, I think it's probably younger than that, but
let's say 15 all the way almost to death. He
served the Roman Empire the way Rome worked. At
least at the height of its, of the Republic. And then in the transition to
the Empire, the way Rome worked was you had to serve as a
soldier for 20 years in the Roman Empire before you could be booted
out. And you would get land and a wife. They would give you those two
things and tell you, go away, right? This is the whole, like subplot of
Gladiator, right? Like this is the whole thing he's trying to get back to, right?
But it's true. I mean, there's, there's historical truth to this, right? And those guys
would literally serve for 20 years in the Roman
army in going around conquering people and
getting their butts kicked too, like by the Germans and the Gauls and everybody else,
right? Actually, I just said the same thing twice. But like
they went off and made trouble, right, In a whole bunch of different places, right?
Spain, Germany, France, everywhere. Right.
And as the empire expanded, the thing fell apart when you
began inviting people who weren't exactly on
the same ideological front framework as the Romans to fight the
wars. Because to the point now that we have, Roman
men declined and were unwilling to go into the Roman
army.
Fast forward 2500 years to now,
and I think there is cause for concern and I'm
going to use a big public example, case in point,
just to anchor this in our time. Europe has a war
on its border between Russia and the Ukraine, right?
And one of the things that the EU keeps agitating for,
Zelensky actually brought this up. The Prime Minister of the Ukraine brought this up. Oh,
gosh, probably nine months ago, he ran over to
England after being summarily booted from the White House.
A significantly less cordial
interaction than he had been used to previously from Joe Biden or
somebody in Joe Biden's administration. He went back to England and
he met with Kara Starmer, who's the UK Prime Minister.
And what came out of that meeting was
the idea, Zielinski floated this idea, that the modern
European Union, who has even fewer
young men that have participated in war than we do,
should have its own European army that
could go, could be deployed into the Ukraine to fight the Russians.
Zelensky proposed this and he floated this idea. And
as most ideas are floated with politicians or public policymakers, he
floated it as a test just to see what the public would say. And of
course there was round rejection from all corners of the Internet and then it disappeared.
My question about that was, which European young man
are you going to get to Fight for Europe. Because
the only people you could potentially staff that army with
are the Muslim immigrants
who are coming over to places like London
and Berlin and Barcelona and
Paris. They seem to be very
energized. They seem to have a lot of young male energy. They
seem to be really interested in fighting and they seem to be
motivated to fight for something. Now, of course, this couldn't possibly
work out terribly for you the way it worked out for the Romans and to.
Prove their worth to a new country. That's the other part of it too that
they, that I think is, well. And even there I would question their loyalties to
the new country. But sure, let's throw that in as well, because maybe,
maybe this won't be like the Ostrogoths and the Roman
Empire. Maybe this won't work out that way.
Except maybe it will. No, but there, there's,
but there's a, there's a pathway to citizenship there. As, as is in the
United States. You have people immigrating here. They serve in our military and it's a
path to, it's a path to citizenship.
Right? And the people who serve in the military in the
United States as a pathway to citizenship already fundamentally
believe, like the Mexicans already fundamentally
believe if you talk to them, that North America was theirs
anyway. We're just all, we're just, we're just.
Historically this is what la raza is, the race, right? They just take the extreme
version of this idea. We're just sewing back what was already
ours. So for them it's like whatever.
Also you have people who serve in the military as a path
to citizenship who, because our military is all
volunteer and not conscription based. Okay? Not draft based.
Because of that. Those young men are self
selecting into that thing. Right? What the
European Union was talking about and what was floated with Zelensky was
a conscription force. Because no one is, not no one, when
very, very, very, very few, like a
microscopic percentage of European young
men from any of those countries are self selecting into any, even
the nation state militaries. Very few young men are self
selecting in self selection hasn't worked. So they're going to have to call a
draft. They're going to have to do conscription and guess who they're going to conscript.
Okay? I say all that to say this.
God forbid we have to fight a nation state war
against another country. I don't want to pick on Russia because that's too easy and
I want to pick on China because that's even easier, but God forbid we
have to fight A nation state war against someone. India. Let's just pick them.
The only country in the entire world that has never once declared war against
another country. Country, sure. I'm gonna pick on India.
All right. For this thought. For this thought experiment.
Yeah. We're talking fantasy world. Go ahead. We are talking fantasy world. We're not talking
about the world we live in. We're talking about another world, an alternate universe.
Where are we, where are we going to find the energies if the energies of
the young men don't exist? Where are we going to find the energies?
You're going to tell me that young women are going to do it?
I mean, you don't know. Hey, son, come on, stop. You don't know. Maybe.
I am too old and I've lived too long in the world to be fooled.
Yeah. And I'm not. And I'm not making. I want to be very clear. I'm
not making a right wing argument or left wing argument. This is not about wings.
This is not about politics. This is just a reality of a situation.
Right. And if we did pick an actual nation state actor who might
actually make trouble like China,
they got a 200 million man army and it's men, it
ain't women. And they've got men who were. They've got young men who
would be more than willing to cross over that big lake
and show up at the door of San Francisco or LA or San
Diego, knocking on the door, saying,
we're here from Beijing, we're here to help.
I don't doubt they've got 200 million of them.
Yeah, I doubt highly we have a hundred thousand who would
be willing. Actually, I doubt highly that we have 2 million young men who would
be willing to go on defense. That's my thing. If the energies
are where you say they are, this is really the thing that's happening. Now, I'm
not really convinced that that's the thing that's happening. But if, if we are
convinced of that, okay, who's going to
staff the military? Who's gonna. How do. Well, also
think. I, I also wonder. I shouldn't say. I think, I also wonder
if there's something to be said about, about, you
know, as you were talking about earlier, you know, modern warfare
just being different. You do you need, do you need 2 million
men to stand up and create a line and fight, inform,
or do you need a thousand of them that can operate three drones
at a time and, and you know, just be willing to sit in a bunker
somewhere in Texas and, and fly planes around the world. I mean,
it's. It's different today than it is, than it has been. But to your
point, I still think there needs to be somebody willing
to do that. But I. I don't know if the numbers are required
anymore. I. I don't know if that's the. But. But
I guess it goes back to it. So then how do you prove your worth
to yourself and to your community, to your
significant other, to whatever? And I also think.
I think that's all changing. It's changing on a daily basis.
I mean, it's really. Like I said, it's really hard to prove your worth. I
was actually just watching a clip of the movie Office Space before I walked in
here. Like, a buddy of mine was like.
Yeah, I love that movie. I love that movie. Love that movie so much. Love
that. I absolutely love that movie. But.
But, like, that movie was. Was probably the. The beginning of the
culturalization, the acknowledgment at a cultural
level that the energies of
young men are moving in a different direction. Or.
Or maybe you're being suppressed. And by the way, I'll go into. I'll go into
another one. So testosterone rates among young
men are down. They are not where they used to be.
Fertility rates are down in America.
And I don't care what
biology you ideologically want
to hang your hat on, you still do
need a male and a female to make a baby,
and that's down, right? The rates of people
hooking up, it isn't like it was when we were in our teens
and twenties. That's all in the toilet. You also have
dopaminergic tools
that provide the same sort of psychological
and biological kick, but without all the
risk. Video games, porn, social media,
only fans, whatever, right? Like, all these things are out here in the world.
And so when it comes to the question of what do we do with young
men, or how do we channel young men's energies, I don't think anybody has a
good answer to that, because I think this is a real problem.
And I will say this. The
Sioux understood what to do. They understood what to do with the energies of their
young men. They got it. They knew exactly what to do. Because, by the way,
it had worked for. Name your number of multiple millennia here,
right? It worked for a millennial. Why not?
I. I think that we lose something
in our postmodern era when we just say, oh, well, those folks were just. And
by the way, not just the folks in the native tribes, we also look at
people in the 7th Cavalry as being savages, too, quite frankly, we do. We use
the same term. We would say, oh, those people were savages and they wasted their
human potential. Right? I mean, like,
the people that Custer was leading, those
weren't kids. I mean, or they were kids, basically. Like, they were the flower
of the youth of the. Particularly coming off the Civil War where,
you know, what was it, 250,000?
Officially? 300,000, something like that.
People. I shouldn't say people. 3,000 men,
huh. Had been died or wounded, right? So there wasn't that. There wasn't that
many dudes to go around. And Custer was taking dudes and
the 7th Cavalry was taking dudes, and Phil Sheridan and all those
guys were taking guys. And they were saying, hey, here's an
opportunity to prove your worth. Let's go kill some. Let's
go kill some Native peoples. And the native peoples were more than.
The young men in those tribes were more than willing to accommodate them.
And City Bull really didn't have to, like, do that much.
It's one thing to talk about Crazy Horse, but Sitting Bull really didn't have to
do that much to convince them because they were already. They were already there.
Okay, I think we still don't know what to do about young men. And I'm
going to keep. I got sons. I gotta. I gotta. I gotta figure this out,
because I. My daughters are gonna be fine. In the world that we
are building, my daughters will be fine. They will be fine. I agree.
I just watch my daughter navigate through the world, and I agree with you. I'm
like, she'll be fine. She's the one I worry about the least, honestly. Right?
And. And by the way, she will be fine. Not only your daughter and my
daughters, not only will they be fine because of how the world has been
restructured for them so that they can navigate through it without really
having to have too much friction, but they will be fine because if all
else fails, they can always fall back on their
biology. If all else fails.
If all else fails for young men, they can't
fall back on their biology. Not in the world that we've built. And I
don't know what to do about that.
Anyway, back to the book Jesus.
Round the corner. We're not solving this world problem no. We're
not solving this problem today no. Listen, if I had my druthers, we flag
football wouldn't even be a thing. Okay, Let me just say it that way.
I'd rather have. I'd rather smash heads and have a concussion or two in my
childhood than not have experienced that. I think. Think about,
like. Like, you don't
know how to. Like, could you imagine the first time you ever had your bell
rung? You're being in your mid-20s, not understanding what's going on or how do it.
No. Like, if you get your bell rung in your early teens, by the way,
your brain recoups a lot faster in the early teens, too. So having a
concussion at 12 or 13 or whatever is not the
worst thing in the world that could ever happen to. To a person. So but
like. But once you have one and you understand what it is, you understand how
to act, you understand what to do with it, how to. Like, now you have
one in your 20s, 10 years later, you're like, oh, okay, this is familiar. I
know what I'm doing. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean. I mean, even the fact
that I didn't. Even the fact that I didn't play organized
sports, you know, in my teenage years, as I've just gone on about.
And some people will interpret that defensively, but they can go to hell.
So even with that,
like, the amount, as I told somebody else in a different kind
of context, the only thing I really enjoyed between the ages of 12 and, like,
18 was fighting. That was my sport. That's what I
enjoyed. I enjoyed mixing it up and getting in people's faces.
And I was a skinny warrior. Like,
I'm gonna go in there and we're gonna. We're gonna do the thing. And the
last actual, like, physical altercation I had
with someone who was going to do violence to me was probably when I was
in my late 20s. And so it's been a bit.
It's been a minute. But guess what?
I haven't forgotten the memory of all of those experiences.
Right there is a. And
it's interesting. So I hear a lot
of people talk. No, a lot of people will comment online and to me
in public, that
I'll frame it as a question. They'll ask me this question, why are you doing
Jiu Jitsu if you'll never use it?
And then they'll follow that up with, well, that jiu jitsu stuff wouldn't work on
me. And I'm just like,
the second you say that, that tells me everyone
own you. I own you. I own you even without doing anything.
That's number one. But number two, that tells me you've never
actually had your bell rub. That tells me that you're part of that generation
that hasn't didn't play the sports, didn't
get knocked down didn't have a whole lot of friction.
If you did, it was as. As Mark the comedian Mark Mirren would say,
finky pain, psychological pain.
But psychological pain, thinky pain and physical pain are different.
They're not. They're not the same thing. And so what we miss is
the. Is the linkage in people's brains, which can only come from taking.
They got a punch to the mouth. Sometimes we're missing giving
that opportunity to people. So you say something like that to a person like me
who's had those two things connect together in my head
and I just sort of look at you and I just go,
you have a good day. And I just walk. I have. I have to stop
talking to you. I have to put you on a back burner.
And by the way, I've had women tell me, oh, well,
you know, I could take you. I'm like, ma', am,
ma', am, ma'. Am. Just.
I'm a man. I got testosterone and man strength,
and I've been hit by another grown man before. You don't. You don't have it.
You just don't. Like, you think you do because you've been watching too many Marvel
movies, as I said before, but you don't have this.
It's a different thing. And
I think too many folks in our society
because we've reduced that, to your point about flag football and
contact sports and all of that, we've reduced people's
opportunities to get real with reality, the physical hardness
of reality. I do agree with you about that. And I don't know what we
do about that. I don't know. I don't know where the clearing at the end
of the path. I'm gonna be all sitting bull on this. I don't know what
the clearing at the end of the path is on this, you
know, and I'm. I'm actually kind of afraid of what the clearing at the end
of the path might be. I, you know, I don't think it's gonna look good.
That's my script, folks. Back to the book.
Back to the Earth is all the last. We're going to round the corner here.
So. Mark Lee Garner, by the way, I would recommend getting this book.
It's great. It's well researched, as we've talked about. Plenty of notes.
It goes into every last. Oh, well,
not every last piece, but the entire last half. The
back half of Sitting Bullet crazy versus, you know, engagement in life.
And probably the most important parts
of the book are towards the end, after the wars are
over. And this is where you get the difference between
young men who are warriors seeking hierarchy and status, and old
men who have to come in and make the peace.
And if not make the peace, at the very minimum, shake hands with the enemy
who, who got a vote whether we wanted them to or not.
And, and it struck me
that what happened with, or
the ways in which the native tribes
dealt with the US government and were dealt with by the US government
put me in mind of the line from Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T.E. lawrence
talking about the difference between old men and young men. And he said this, and
I quote, talking about, by the way, the old men at the end of
World War I, who sent the young men to die in the trenches. I've used
this quote before, but I want to use it again here. And I quote,
we lived many lives in those whirling campaigns, never sparing
ourselves. Pause for just a minute. I think the same could be said about those
young men in those tribal wars. Back to the
quote. Yet when we, when we achieved and the
new world dawned, the old men came out again and took our
victory to remake in the likeness of the former world. They
knew youth could win but had not
learned to keep and was pitiably weak
against age. We stammered that we had
worked for a new heaven and a new earth, and they thanked us
kindly and made their peace.
Yeah, yeah. Now, I didn't say the piece
was fair, nor did I say the piece was equitable. Let me be very clear.
It was neither fair nor equitable. It was.
Oppressive is probably the correct word. Not probably, it is the
correct word to use. And yet
this is the challenge. This is the difference between old men
and young men. And I guess my question here for Tom towards the
end is.
How do old men honor the sacrifices of young men when they have to
make peace with the enemy? How, how does that happen? I think Sitting Bull tried,
but I don't think he really
knew
a really. Darn good question because again, I, I, I,
I don't think, I don't think there's a
real satisfactory answer to that. I
mean, again, think about it from,
in this, in this framework
that we're talking about here. You
know, Sitting Bull lost a lot of brave warriors, lost
a lot of fighters, lost a lot of friends in these, in these wars.
And how do you honor them?
I think, I think in their minds at the time. And again, I'm not
suggesting that I know what they were thinking, but from,
from a retrospective position, it's,
I think they're thinking of in the sense of those warriors fought
to protect their people. If in
the end, Sitting Bull can protect his people through
negotiation, they still did not die in vain because the
people and the, the people are, are ultimately protected.
Right? So, yeah, again, I think, I think ultimately how
Sitting Bull can look at himself in the mirror and think that he
is still doing a good job as, as the, their leader,
as the leader of those, those people is the fact that the
Lakota are still here today. We can say
what we want about, about how many died and
useless deaths and all this other stuff about warfare and whatnot.
But if you think about the legacy behind Sitting Bull
in his, in, in his and his people,
since they're still here now, are they thriving?
You can say, you can argue that they're not. You can argue. And, and
for those of you who don't know, some of the reservations that our
native people are living on today, if they were not in the middle of the
United States, if you removed them and put them anywhere else in the world, they
would be considered Third World countries. You have these people
living in environments that would be considered Third World countries if
they lived, if they were anywhere else the planet. But because they sit in the
borders of the United States, they don't get classified that way. They also don't get
treated that way, so they don't get the help that they need. But the Pine
Ridge Reservation is an atrocity to human nature. I mean, I, I,
I, I, I, I try to be very careful how I
word this because I also do not want to disrespect my,
you know, my western westward cousins here.
In a sense that I don't think they necessarily want our help
either. I think they want to try to figure it out. So there's that. And
that goes back to the legacy of people like Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull
where they're going to fight, even, even if the fight is a little bit different.
They're going to fight today just as they fought 100 years ago
for the survival of their people and the protection of their
people. So I think, I think it's, it's a hard question to
answer, but I think ultimately, if you are a warrior in
1860, 1870, 1880, your,
your mental, your faculties are telling you that you are
fighting beyond the. I want
to, I want to position myself as. It has been
accomplished something. What drives that really is
protecting your people. Like you want you, you put yourself on the front line
so that, so that your people are able to, to live
the way they want to live. And I think the same rule applies today for
some of that. And I think that Sitting Bull was the. The bar
to be measured by in that respect. He
ultimately, he made so many sacrifices.
He refused to back down. He refused to give in. He. He
crossed the border into Canada for the same reasons. He dragged
hundreds of people that followed him across the border hundreds of
miles out of principle, came back out of the
same principle, out of negotiation of peace and. And trying to
protect his people. So I think. I think all that applies.
Right. Like, there's a lot of, you know, and I
think that's kind of the same. We talked about that. Like, as you look at
some of these wars and the young men fighting these wars and then the generals
sitting behind the desks. The generals are the ones negotiating the peace treaties on
the side over here because they don't want to lose any more of their young
men. I think
who backs down in that is not
relevant as to how the. The mentality of it is on both
sides. Whether you win or lose those battles, you're signing that treaty
to protect your men from themselves. Yeah, I think that's
kind of what Sitting Bull was, the mentality there. I'm going to protect my
warriors from themselves because they have the attitude of, I'm going to.
I. I'll fight till the death. I'll fight. It doesn't matter,
because I'm gonna. If my people are going to be in peril, it's not going
to be because of me. Right. Like, I'm. I'm
gonna. If. If my people are not going to be able to survive
and thrive, then I don't want to witness it, so I won't be alive to
do so. They're going to have to kill me in order to get that. To
get that done. So. And again. And Sitting Bull ultimately did.
Did give his life in the end for this. For this piece at,
you know, in 1890 at Wounded Knee, that, like, not at the battle of
Wounded Knee, but it was right prior, just. Just before that. It was basically the.
The catalyst to Wounded Knee, the. The. The death of Sitting Bull.
So I think he accomplished what he set out to accomplish
was, you know, he was going to give his life to make sure his people
were able to survive and. And move beyond
the. This. Where they were stuck, so to speak, in.
In that limbo state. Well, and,
I mean, we talked a little bit about this in the introduction episode.
Yes. This is a book about channeling the spirits of young men
into war, and
it matches up with everything else that we've been Reading about whether
those, those young men again, are in the Korengal Valley
or they are on the, in the, in the fields and in the trenches of
Europe in, in World War I, or
if they are in Korea or Vietnam or wherever. Right.
Can't remember who it was or what movie I saw it in, and it doesn't
really matter. But
somebody, some soldier once nihilistically and
existentially said, one day this war is going to be over.
And it's true. One day war will be
over. Not in all of human history. I don't think we're going to get to
the end of war before we get to the end of human history. Like,
quite frankly, from my perspective, Jesus has to come back before even that happens.
And that's, that's, that's my thought on that. We'll have
warfare until the end of time,
but the individual war. Right,
the war is going to end. One of the other books that we're going
to cover next couple of weeks is called, is
titled Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway. And it is his
semi autobiographical
story of his experiences as an
ambulance driver in World War I. And one of the things that
pops out in that. And I think he would have had a lot of
simpatico with the young
men of the Lakota and those young
Lakota warriors. And I think he would have also had a lot of Simpatico with
the 7th Cavalry is something that they all shared all the way up
and down the line, I think, was this idea
that at a certain point the warrior spirit is emptied out and the
war just has to be done. That's one of the things that comes through in
A Farewell to Arms. And he talks a lot with the other Italian soldiers
about how this war has to end because we're exhausted. Right.
And the point that the older men make, interestingly enough to
Hemingway, is that the old men don't
know how to end it. The old men don't know how to
end the war. And until the old men get exhausted, this war
isn't going to end because. Then they're not exerting the same amount of energy.
Exactly. And, and this is where I come to sort of my last
conclusion from this great book,
the Job of Older Leaders. And we don't like
talking about age because it's ageism and it feels like we're segregating people.
And the reality of age is the job of older leaders is
to engage with wisdom. The job of older leaders is to,
as Kenny Rogers said way back in that old song, the gambler no one to
hold them and no one to fold them. Yeah. No one to walk away and
no one to run. And if young people not
sound like it's about young men. If young people. If
youthful energy doesn't have that wisdom and will expend
itself. Older leaders have to know
when to stop that and cease
that and redirect the that. And it is a failure of leadership.
Like in World War I, the fan. The
massive failure of leadership like that war should have been over in two years.
Massive failure of leadership because the. The old men didn't know when to tell the
young men to stop. Hell, the old men didn't know when to stop themselves.
And that's a massive failure of leadership. And we just.
And to our point that we made earlier, with our new technologies,
we. The stopping points need to be sooner because we
can do so much more damage now with our new technologies. A young man
with a $20 million drone can kill more people than a Lakota
warrior could have ever dreamed of. And that's
just that. All the while looking at it like it's a
video game, like it's Call of Duty or something.
It's not because you're killing real people with real consequences.
But this is. This is the mindset that has to be channeled and the energies
that need to be bounded
by the wisdom of old age and experience.
We haven't really resolved anything today, as usual. No, no.
Never really resolved anything. We haven't gotten good conclusions to
any. Any questions. What do you think
leaders should take from the Earth is all that lasts? What should they take
if they read this book? Final thought. I think. I think I
alluded to it earlier. I think. I think there's. I think there's a
good. I think there's a good comparison to the
leadership styles between the two people, between Crazy Horse
and Sitting Bull. I think they're distinctly different. I don't think one
is more valuable than the other, but I
definitely think that there are things to be learned by the two different styles of
leadership. Again, we talked about Crazy Horse leading by example, being in the
forefront, being out in the front of the
battles. And today's leaders.
I don't know about you, but I've spent time in a lot of different industries.
I take the restaurant industry.
I care about it very deeply in my heart because I started there, and as
a restaurant manager and somebody who was running, you know, a
lot of people, I would have no hesitation whatsoever to roll up my sleeves and
wash dishes. And when my team saw that the general manager of the
restaurant was willing to wash dishes. They never questioned me. If I asked them to
go wash dishes, they would just go do it because they knew that I was
willing and able and capable and more than I would do it myself if
I could. If I didn't have this in front of me to do it, I
would do it sweeping the floors. There was no job in the restaurant industry that
was beneath me. And I think my team saw that and
responded as such, being like, if it's not beneath me, then why would it be
be beneath them? Any of them. So there's lead by example and again,
Sitting Bull led by philosophy. Right. So you believe in the same
thing I believe in. I'm not physically capable of doing. Let's
again say in the restaurant business, if I was beyond the, the point
where I could mop the, that floor or fix the oven or whatever it was,
and I asked somebody younger to me to do it, they would do it because
philosophically they know that I would do it if I could. Right. Like, so it's
like there, there's different styles of leadership in this book. And I
think if you know yourself well enough to know which one of those
styles you're going to lean into, I think you could learn something from both of
these two guys. I think you can absolutely learn something from the book that,
that would resonate with you. You just basically lean toward one
or the other. And I, I don't necessarily think it has to you. I
don't think you necessarily have to pick one or the other. I think you can.
I think there's ways to grow into different forms of leadership as
well. Maybe you start out as a leader like Crazy Horse
and you end up as a leader like Sitting Bull. I think to me that's
a natural progression. So I think, but I think knowing and
understanding the two different styles of leadership in there could absolutely help you
in your day to day life if you're, if you're, if you are in that
leadership role in your company, in your family, in your life or whatever.
I definitely think that you could learn from these two, these two
Lakota chiefs. Awesome.
Great final word. And so I will say with that,
well, we're out.