What Moves You Will Move the World | Jocko Willink | EP 420

Hello everyone! I'm pleased to announce my new tour for 2024, beginning in early February and running through June. Tammy and I, along with an assortment of special guests, are going to visit 51 cities in the US. You can find out more information about this on my website, jordanbpeterson.com, as well as access all relevant ticketing information. I'm going to use the tour to walk through some of the ideas I've been working on in my forthcoming book, "We Who Wrestle with God," out November 2024. I'm looking forward to this; I'm thrilled to be able to do it again, and I'll be pleased to see all of you again soon. Bye-bye!

I never liked giving orders. I never had to say, "Hey everyone, here's what we're doing; we're doing this." I never had to say that. The caveat is, we're in a gunfight, and you know I need you to take your element over that, and even then it's a strong suggestion. I might say, "Jordan, take that building over there." You might look back at me and say, "Negative." The reason you're saying that to me is because there's something that you see that I don't see. So the idea of barking orders, that idea that the military or any organization can be run through authoritarian dictatorship—you can make it work for a little while, but it's not a long-term solution, and that's what we've got to watch out for.

Hello everybody! I have Jocko Willink here with me today. Most of you watching and listening will know who Jocko is: he's a former Navy SEAL, has a very broad social media following, is a talented author of children's books, and an entrepreneur. We've spoken a number of times in the past, and that's always gone really well. The conclusions that he's drawn, as a consequence of his vast experience in the military and on the entrepreneurship front, dovetail very well with what I've learned as a consequence of working as a clinician and a professor and in the entrepreneurial space over all these decades.

We talked about leadership and ethics—and I would say about invitational leadership, ethics—and fleshed out a landscape of description about leadership that makes it not so much a matter of top-down command and order, but of bottom-up formulation of shared vision and shared goals, supplemented by continual communication. We also talked a lot about the pleasure of mentorship, which is a form of fatherhood, I would say, and the fact that people, men particularly in relation to fatherhood, have a vested interest and instinctual tilt towards developing the best in other people. And that's a much better way of viewing the manner in which proper hierarchies are structured than one that relies on the assumption that people are fundamentally motivated by power.

You know, maybe the best of us is motivated by the opportunity to serve the best in other people. I really think that that's a possibility, and I would say that's also a hallmark of Jocko's style and message.

Well, Mr. Willink, let's start by talking about your tour. So when were you on tour?

A: A few months ago I went on tour; this was the second tour that I did. The first one I did was right at the beginning of COVID, right before COVID. In fact, I may have been the super spreader of COVID!

J: Oh yeah, probably, because I did San Francisco, New York, LA, DC—I was in all the places where eventually COVID spread really quickly. And I had been to all of them.

A: Who knows? You helped us get over it quicker!

J: That's how I would look at it. You're welcome! Yeah, yeah, yeah. So this one was a few years later, and I just did five or six cities this time. What was nice was, the one that was in Chicago, we brought a crew in and we filmed it, and we're going to release it.

A: So when is that coming out?

J: I'm not sure yet; I'm not sure that all the editing and everything isn't done yet, but we'll put it out there.

A: So why do you think people—and what do people tell you—why do people come and see you? What is it that you're providing to people, do you think?

J: I think people want to come see me and want to connect with me in real life because they've listened to my podcast a lot. So I think that has a lot to do with it. And then I think people, you know, I'm just up there sort of sharing experiences that I've had, and I try and do the best I can in presenting the lessons that I've learned. One of the biggest lessons I was talking about on this tour was, it's going to be okay. I think that especially when people go through traumatic situations, obviously, I deal with veterans a lot, law enforcement, and the whole PTSD that people have been going through and talking about for the last—I guess since the wars have been on, last 20 years. A lot of times someone would go through a traumatic experience and they'd have bad feelings about it, they'd have regrets about it, they'd have things that they wish they would have done differently. And one of the main themes I was telling people during this tour was, that's totally normal, and it's okay. It's okay to think, I lost some friends, and sometimes I feel sad about it.

J: Well, yeah, of course, like that's normal, that's fine. In fact, if you weren't sad about it, there may be something wrong because I think that people have been told for a while that, oh, if you're feeling sad, there's something wrong with you. When I actually don't think there's anything wrong with when you feel sad. You feel sad; yeah, you lost friends, you're going to feel sad. Oh, you were in combat, you had to do some horrible things, you did some things that you regret—there's nothing wrong with that. People make mistakes; things don't turn out the way that they wanted them to. We made decisions and there was a bad result at the end of that decision, and instead of thinking, oh, I'm a terrible person, no, it's like you made a mistake, and that's okay. And you've got to move on.

A: Yeah, well that's a tricky part, I think, with regards to say post-traumatic stress disorder or regret. Because it's one thing if you're sad because you've lost people; it's another thing if you're blaming yourself because you believe—and maybe with some cause—that you've made a mistake. Often, people don't know what to do about the fact that they've made a mistake, so maybe we could talk about that a little bit, because some of the people who are watching and listening will have made mistakes, and some of them are hanging themselves out to dry because of it, right? I mean, especially if you make mistakes that have had fairly dramatic consequences.

A: And this ties in, I would say, also to the motif of forgiveness because there's not a difference between forgiving other people and forgiving yourself. You can't just do that by saying that you're going to do it.

J: So what I've observed clinically, and I think this works philosophically as well, is that what you want to do to set things right, which is to atone, is to lay out what you've done that you think was wrong, provide yourself with the best possible defense. So you know, there's a reason in our legal system that we start with the presumption of innocence, which is a miracle because like tyrannies start with the presumption of guilt. The reason they do that is because everyone's done something wrong, and if you dig around enough in anyone's life, you'll find a reason that they're culpable, a reason to put them away. The fact that we presume innocence is a complete bloody miracle, and I can't figure out how we ever managed to get that right.

J: But you got to do that with yourself. So imagine you're taking yourself to task because you did some things wrong. It's like, okay, list them out in your imagination or write it down, but then you've got to defend yourself as thoroughly as you possibly can, which doesn't mean you're trying to get yourself off the hook; it means that you're trying not to take yourself apart more than is necessary. And then you might ask, well, if I've done something terrible, maybe what's necessary is that I commit suicide—that's like I pay the ultimate price for my sins.
And people will do that when they're depressed, and that's not right, because actually what you want to do to atone is to set yourself back on the right track.

J: So the precondition for forgiving yourself is, first of all, to sort out whether or not you're accusing yourself too viciously—like a tyrant. But then, let's assume that there's some leftover evidence, compelling evidence that you did do something wrong. Okay, now you have to figure out what you did wrong, and you have to figure out what you would have done differently and what you will do differently in the future. My sense is—and I think this works out psychologically—is that if you can set yourself up so that you've learned from the mistake you made, so you wouldn't repeat it, then you get to go on with your life. And I think that's also what you do with people around you. You know, I mean, you might want to forgive someone maybe who hurt you when you were young, for example, because you don't want to carry that burden around. You know, it's been 20 years; you're still mad about it. It's like, well, you got tortured, plus you're still angry about it, so that's not good for you.

J: But to forgive someone so that you can heal a relationship means that they have to confess what they did, they have to assess why it was wrong, they have to come up with an alternative way of behaving, and then they have to swear, you know, by all that's holy, so to speak, that they're not going to do that again in the future. And then I think—you know, you might say that the devil in your mind that's still accusing you might say, well, what you did is so terrible that you should never be let off the hook. And I would say to that is that if that's the criteria that you use for judgment, then everyone's doomed because everyone makes mistakes in their lives. I would say probably everybody makes unforgivable mistakes, and so if we're going to take ourselves apart about that permanently, then we're all ruined.

A: Yeah, I was pretty lucky growing up in the military that I would get to see guys, and I was probably 26 years old when I moved into like an instructor role in the SEAL Teams. And you'd see these young leaders, and they would go out on some training mission, and they would mess things up. They're going to make mistakes. And you know, you always get this talk about, well, you made the best decision you could with the information that you had at the time. And it kind of sounds like a cop out, in a way, but yeah, it's actually not a cop out at all. You made the best decision that you can with the information that you have at the time—like what more can a human being do than make the best decision they can with the information that they had at the time?

J: And when you get more information or when the results come as they may, yeah, that decision that you made might not have been a good decision; it might have been a bad decision. But number one, there's nothing you can do to change it—it already happened; you made the decision. And then I would always look at the guys and say, what was their intent behind this decision that they made? Like, why did they do that? Because if we can decipher that and their intent was they wanted to make a good move to get their guys out of a bad situation, what more could I want from a leader than to make a decision that's doing their best with the information that they had at the time to maneuver out of a bad scenario to take care of their guys? There's nothing more I could hope for.

J: So as long as I think you peel back the onion and you kind of review what happened, you say, oh, yeah, I made the decision at this time. Of course, if I had this other information, I'd change it, but I did what I did; the result was not what I wanted; it's not what I intended. Here we are. And now you can either beat yourself up or you can say, here's some lessons I've learned from it. And you know, the first book that I wrote was called "Extreme Ownership." The opening chapter of that was a fratricide that took place where I was the guy in charge, where one of my SEALs killed a friendly Iraqi soldier in a terrible situation. And of course, you know, we could go back in hindsight's 20/20, and I could have done this and I should have done this and I should have done something else, and I didn't, and that's on me.

A: And so I think, you know, that initial part—if we're going to talk about forgiveness, the first part of that is taking ownership to say, "Yep, this was my call, this was my decision; this is the move that I made; that's me; it's not anybody else; it's me." Because the minute you start saying, "Well, this person did that," and "This person, you know, the enemy did this, we didn't expect that," the minute you start casting blame on other people, now you're—you know, I think you're lying to yourself, and I think that's going to cause more problems. So saying, "Yes, this was the decision I made; this is the information I had at the time; it ended up being a bad decision; here was my intent behind it, and I've got to move forward."

A: If you want to—you know, I always talk about—you want to learn, but you don't want to dwell. If you dwell on the past, if you dwell on the mistakes you made—like you said, everybody is just doomed.

J: Well, so the tricky issue there, I think, is that people who are taking themselves apart, they're often conscientious people. And so, well, they'll say—they'll think—they'll assume that taking ownership in your terms means raking yourself over the coals, and the crucial thing to establish there is like, well, yeah, you have to rake yourself over the coals until you learn, but no more than that because after that it's counterproductive. What you're trying to foster is improvement.

J: Now, and then in terms of making a case for your innocence, that's where analysis of ignorance is useful. You know, you said—well, and it's a question of conscience. Did you make the best use of the information that you had available at the time? And one answer is, well, yes, but I had sparse information. And then you have to ask yourself, well, could you have been more informed if your eyes would have been more open?

J: That's a willful blindness issue. But it's definitely worthwhile to—when you're making a case to defend yourself—to see how much of the sequence of events that resulted in the unfortunate conclusion was attributable to situation. There's a classic mistake in thinking that people make called the fundamental attribution error. So imagine that you're driving along on the road and somebody cuts you off, and you say, well, that son of a—it's like—and then, you know, you find two blocks later that you're in the same situation in terms of the positioning of the automobiles and you cut someone else off.

J: It's harder to do a situational analysis than to do a personal attribution, and so people will default to a personal attribution, that son of a—or whatever, and that can turn around to bite you because it's difficult when you're retroactively assessing something you've done to take into account all the situational factors. But that is definitely something you do if you're mounting a defense for yourself, and that's part of that presumption of innocence. So we could say if you're trying to get yourself out of something like post-traumatic stress disorder, we would say, well, how would you make the case for yourself if you began with the presumption of innocence and that there were situational factors? Make the strongest possible case.

J: So you do that. Now, if there's some residual issues that you have to contend with, like the fact that you were willfully blind or you know, maybe you weren't protecting your back, and maybe you were going for the promotion because you're more ambitious than you should be—that speaks to intent; but you shouldn't convict yourself until all the arguments that are in favor of your innocence have exhausted themselves.

J: Right, and it is—that is the way that our legal system is set up, and there's a good reason for that too. And then knowing also that atonement is possible and forgiveness appropriate when you've learned your lesson, you know, and that's also very useful when you're disciplining children. So, for example, when my kids were young, and I used to have them sit on the steps when they were, you know, acting like barbarians—I should clarify that you discipline your children when they're acting in a way that isn't appropriate for their age in accordance with universal human judgment. So you should discipline your children when they're disgracing themselves, and the reason you should do that isn't because they're bad kids or because it reflects badly on you or because you're angry, but because if they continue to act that way, other people aren't going to want to have them around, and that's not good for your kids.

J: So you discipline them. So I say to my son, for example, "Go sit on the steps till you can act like a civilized human being" or whatever terminology is appropriate when he's young. And the rule was, well, as soon as you get yourself under control, problem solved. Well, it's the same with past sins, so to speak: if you failed to hit the target properly but you figured out why and now you know how you would chart your course differently in the future—done! You know, and it’s also the case that even most negative emotion that you experience in relation to past memories only emerges because there’s a hole in your adaptive structure.

J: So imagine at some point in the past you fell in a pit, and you don’t know how you got there. Well, that emotion is going to remain hot and dangerous until you figure out why you fell in, and the reason that your conscience keeps torturing you about that is because, well, you fell into a hole and you don’t know why. And so maybe you’ll fall into another one, and so you shouldn’t be that comfortable. But if you can figure out why and you can re-evaluate your aim or your course so that that isn’t going to happen in the future—well, even psychologically your own conscience will let you off the hook if you’ve reconfigured your pathway.

J: And so—and you do that, well partly by not taking yourself apart to any great degree.

A: All right, so you said that one of the things that people—you think that people—you said there were two reasons you thought that people were maybe coming to see you live is they've been watching your podcast and they actually wanted to make more personal contact. Do you do meet-and-greets and that sort of thing at the end of the—

J: I do it the whole time! Like as soon as people start coming in, I just hang out with them, and then get up on stage and do the show, and then hang out. The staff at the place will say, "How long are you going to meet with people?" and I say, "Until everyone's met with me that wanted me that wants."

A: Oh yeah? And do you do that formally or informally?

J: Informally. Informally. See, at the end of my lectures, we have a formal meet-and-greet, and people line up, and there's a bunch of reasons for doing that. There's a ticket increment that's associated with that, so there's a financial reason, and that makes the tour more rewarding. But it's also because there's so many people that want to do that; formalizing it made it much more efficient, you know? Because everybody gets—it's not very much time; it's only about 15 seconds, probably something like that. But the parameters are pretty nicely defined, and we can—what would we say?—we can provide more people with what they want doing that. And so I really enjoy that, actually.

A: I know. You know, 15 seconds isn’t very long, but it’s not nothing. And if you’re awake, you can have a bit of an interaction with someone that isn’t only surface. And that’s also a really interesting challenge, you know, to be able to do that rapidly and efficiently in a way that’s satisfying for everybody who’s involved.

J: Yeah, well, the weird thing is, is people come up to me and they say, “I feel like I know you!”

A: Yeah, right!

J: And I say, “You do!”

A: Yeah, yeah.

J: Like you listen to the podcast; there’s hundreds and hundreds of hours of me talking about all this different stuff, and if you listen to all that, you do know!

A: Yeah, right! And then I kind of know you too because we’ve had these shared experiences of going through all these topics together, and so I kind of know you too.

A: And so you do have like a legitimate connection with people and they can come up and just tell you whatever it is they’re going to tell you, and they can ask me a question in 14 seconds and I’ll give them an answer in 32 seconds, and we’re good, and they’re high-fiving, bro-hugging, and we’re moving on.

J: So, well that’s a lot of contextual information. Absolutely! I feel exactly the same way, you know? And like you said, the idea that the people who are coming have—yeah, they know you—that’s not a falsehood. Unless you’re being false in your podcast, and I know that you’re not false in your podcast, so they actually do know you.

A: Yeah, I really enjoy going. I really enjoy going to—

J: How long do you talk?

A: Two, two and a half hours, something like that.

J: Oh yeah? Oh yeah.

A: So quite a while. Okay. And I’ll do some Q&A in there as well. There’ll be some Q&A.

J: Roll the dice with the Q&A; you never know what you’re going to get!

A: We use Slido.

J: I don’t use that.

A: Well, it’s this technology that—so everybody on the screen in the theaters, there’s a code, and everybody can enter the code into their phone, and it brings them to the Slido site, and then they can ask a question. But more importantly, they can upvote the questions, and so that’s very helpful because there’s a—so I talk for 90 minutes, about an hour, 90 minutes, something like that. And then Tammy aggregates the questions from Slido, and she asks me the questions. And because everybody can vote, it gives us a chance to sample the audience, and it keeps the—it’s a good way of organizing it as well, too, because the problem with taking live questions is that people don't know how to handle the mic and so no one can hear them, and then the audience starts talking, and then you get people who are just grandstanding who don’t really have a question. So Slido has worked extremely well for us for handling that.

A: I guess the only thing I would—can you then call that person out and have them come up?

J: Well, we—you could, but I haven't done that. That's not a bad idea; we haven't done that. Sometimes when you don’t get the context around the question, you need more context to give a good answer.

A: Yeah, definitely.

J: So if you can’t do that—yeah, well, you can solve that problem to some degree by selecting questions in the list of questions that don’t require the additional context. And I guess I solve that sometimes too by providing, you know, what might be a more generally applicable answer than something that would be specific to the person.

A: There’s something kind of awesome though about just someone stepping up to the mic and you don’t know what you’re going to get!

J: Fair enough, and it’s—I enjoy that. It’s like the no tightrope, no net tightrope walking!

A: Right! Well, and well, that’s also what I like about the lectures because I don’t lecture from notes. I mean, I prepare beforehand, and I have a question or two in mind that I’m trying to answer, but I never use notes. And I think part of the reason that the live lectures are compelling to people is because they are without a net; they are tightrope situations.

A: One of the things I really like about speaking spontaneously like that is if there’s a question at hand or two questions, they’re questions that I seriously want to investigate. And so I’m trying to investigate them in a new way as I go, and if you do it right, you can bring the whole thing to a conclusion that’s like a punchline, right? And that’s really fun to see if you can orchestrate that in real time.

J: That works on podcasts too!

A: What’s your batting average on getting—if you did a hundred shows, how many times do you land like right where you wanted to land and you walk off the stage triumphant with a grand slam in the ninth inning?

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J: Healthier! Again, I think I was less consistent when I was touring in 2018 because I put a lot of balls in the air, and it’s like, you’re going to see a complex movie, you know? Now and then you go to a movie and there are fifty things going on, and it’s like an hour and a half in and you think, is he going to manage it? Is he going to tie it all together? Sometimes it’s like it comes together, and it’s like, yep, that was a great movie! And sometimes just some fool thing that happens and leaves everything hanging. In 2018, more frequently, I would get a lot of things going and then maybe only tie them three-quarters together. But in the last couple of years, the talks, they almost always cohere. I mean, sometimes you nail it, right? And so those are particularly exciting times, but batting average is pretty high now.

A: So you and I were talking about being rock stars; you know, both of us probably would have been much better off if we’ve been rock-and-roll stars! So what I do at my talks is I make a setlist, right? Like, you know, the old days when I would go to shows, to rock-and-roll shows, they make a setlist, and if you could steal that thing or get a hold of it at the end of the concert, you had something pretty cool, right? The setlist thing. So that’s what I do: I make a setlist. I’ll just have, like, different topics that I’m going to talk about, and there’ll be some kind of thread, but I—yeah, if you plan it out too much, it doesn’t have the spontaneity that feels that good.

J: Yeah, definitely! And then when you just roll with it and you’ve got your topics and they’re kind of out there and I’m going to go talk about these things, and I’m going to try and pull it off at the end, and we’ll see where it goes!

A: Yeah, well, it’s a lot more exciting to do that because you don’t know where it’s going to go, you know? That’s the wind bloweth where it listeth, right? You have to follow that thread, and it also enables you to really pay attention to the audience because one of the things you’re doing when you’re lecturing—when you’re speaking to an audience—it’s not lecturing. That’s the thing; it’s different than lecturing because it’s not a set, as you said; it’s not what you have: it isn’t set a priority.

A: When you’re communicating with a crowd, you have to watch to see what’s landing, and that’s partly what you’re doing there is you’re putting yourself in tune with the spirit of the crowd, because everybody comes there and it’s a particular time and it’s a particular night, and there are particular things going on in the broader political realm. And so everybody’s charged in a certain way and some topics are going to land more heavily that night than others, and if you really watch the audience members and you listen for when you get silence, you can feel when you’ve got the words matched to the expectation of the audience properly, and then you can track that thread, and you can’t do that if you prepare too much—in too much detail to begin with.

J: So you use topics; so I use questions like I have questions in my head, but then I also have topics that I can use; they’re like greatest hits, I suppose in some ways, right?

A: So that's that setlist idea. I was about to ask you about greatest hits because you got to—some of that crowd probably wants to hear just the Jordan Peterson routine. They want to hear you go off about some lobsters!

J: Well, I talked to Douglas Murray about that too, because we've done some events together, which has been very fun. But you know, one of the things Douglas pointed out more explicitly was that if you have a base of viewers and listeners, they have a certain set of expectations. They want to hear something new, but kind of optimally new. They want you to return to themes that they’ve become familiar with, partly because that’s a good place for them to understand it.

J: It is, I think akin to going to see a concert: you want to hear some new material from your band, but you want to hear some of the things that you’ve come to know and love.

A: Now why do you want that live? Exactly!

J: Well, I think because it gives the audience that opportunity to participate in real time with the unfolding of something that’s ordered and classic and new at the same time.

A: Yeah, and it’s live; it’s real! So it’s not going to be an exact replication of what they heard before. There’s going to be some nuance; you’re going to take that guitar solo somewhere a little bit different every time, and they’re going to get to see that.

J: Well, they can also—people can also evaluate then too if it’s the real thing; you know, like—and I think it’s especially true for the kinds of podcasts that you and I do, which have this kind of motivational and psychological element to them—is people really want to know it’s like, you know, am I selling my soul to the devil here or is this person who they claim to be?

J: You know, this is one of the things I’ve always been impressed with about people like Joe Rogan, for example, is like Rogan is just exactly who he presents himself to be. There's no—and I've seen the—all I've seen, the other side of that often at political events. You know, go to political events; I know the person who's involved. Possibly many of the political figures that I've seen perform have a political face; they’re not the same on stage. They have an act, a political act, you know, and they’re different people off stage—often smarter people, interestingly enough, and I think more interesting people.

J: But Rogan doesn’t have any of that, and I think when people are looking for motivation, direction, and delving into personal philosophy, they want a bloody well make sure that the people that they’re listening to are credible, and that’s something you can assess more particularly in a live situation, especially when you’re watching people interact on their feet, right? Because they don’t have that scaffold.

A: VC Ras Swami told me he wouldn’t use a teleprompter during the—he swore he wouldn’t use a teleprompter during the campaign partly because he wanted to avoid exactly that. And I think this is one of Trump’s real strengths too is that Trump might make mistakes when he speaks, but they’re his mistakes, you know, and people are willing to cut him a lot of slack because they’re his mistakes.

J: And there’s a courage about that too because there’s the possibility that you’ll go spectacularly wrong, say something stupid, or fail.

A: So you talked about intent—when people are analyzing their motivations for their past conduct, for better or worse, what’s your intent in the tour, and do you—how do you orient your intent before you go on stage, hm?

J: So, interestingly, I had a woman that works for me, and she’s the CEO of one of my companies—great, incredibly impressive woman named Jamie—and she was at one of these live events, and I got asked during the Q&A. Someone said, “Hey, why are you doing this?” And she, who has heard me speak all the time, she told me afterwards, she said when I got asked that question, she wanted to hear what I was going to say because she never really thought about it. Like, why does he do that? Because she kind of knows my life situation, my financial situation, where I’m at in the world; she kind of knows, and she never really thought to ask me, “Like, why are you on tour right now? Why aren’t you just relaxing, sitting by the water, doing whatever it is you want to do?”

J: And she waited for my answer, and my answer was to try and help people out. That’s it! I mean, at this juncture—so why do—okay, so let’s delve into that a little bit. There are two things you brought up there that I think are particularly interesting. One is the automatic assumption on the part of people who might be asking the question why, that if everyone had their druthers, they would be sitting on a beach relaxing.

A: Like, people ask me—I was home visiting my parents recently, and my mother said to me, “Don’t you ever relax?” because I was, you know, I was working while I was there on all sorts of things. And I said to her, “I don’t know, I’m not that interested in relaxing!” Like, I don’t even—to some degree, I don’t even know what that means. Like, if I’m tired, well, I’ll sit down, you know? And maybe I’ll watch a stupid comedy or something because that’s all that’s left of me, you know?

J: Think Tammy and I watched “Legally Blonde” the other night, and that was about right because I’d been writing all day, you know, and it was stupidly funny! Yeah, right! And so, fine! But as a goal, like my goal is not to relax; like that’s not—I think my goal is to have as adventurous a time as I could possibly manage.

A: I’ve been writing about the Book of Abraham in this new book I’m writing and Abraham—the conception of God in the Book of Abraham is that God is the voice that calls you to adventure. And that the most—a devout path is the path with the highest adventure.

J: Yeah, I really like that! I really like that because, you know, your life is not going to be justified by satisfaction or satiation; that’s for infants. There’s going to be plenty of pain. And so there’s no escape from pain. And so you might say, well, if you can’t be satisfied and there’s no escape from pain, then there’s no hope. But if the point is the adventure, well that’s just not true—then the adventure can justify the pain and the lack of satiation.

J: So you said back to the adventure—your tour is an adventure—but you said that your prime motivation is to help people. Okay, so let’s dig into that a bit. We could get skeptical about it; it’s like people might say, like the postmodernist types, the neo-Marxist types would say, well, that’s just your cover for like your dominance, your power striving. You’ve made lots of money; you’re famous; people know who you are. It’s like—because that’s not enough for you, you have to add this overlay: “Oh, yeah, and by the way, I’m just doing this to help people.”

A: Right? So that’s the very cynical attitude, but you can understand that that’s a justifiable criticism. And if you were narcissistic, it would also be a genuine criticism. So why do you think it is that you find—why do you think your claim that you’re helping people is justified? And if it’s justified, why do you think that you find helping people intrinsically rewarding?

J: Going back to my career in the military, I think this is where I initially learned this because as you’re coming up in the military, you know, you’re going up in the ranks, and you’re getting moved into more positions of responsibility, and you’re going out and conducting operations and all those things that you do inside the military in your career. And what I found more than anything else was where I got gratification, what felt like I actually did something good, was when I’d see a guy that I had worked with, that I had mentored, that I had trained—when I’d see them step up and excel and be able to achieve things and be able to accomplish things—that was more gratifying than me doing it myself.

J: And so I think that I started to notice that—that’s what really—when did you notice that?

A: How old were you?

J: Probably 29, 30—something along those lines. So I was in a leadership position; I started to have people working, you know, that were my direct reports. But I realized, oh, I can really help this person! Like, they don’t know what to do, right? And inside the military, inside the SEAL Teams it’s like there’s a mission that you’re going to do, and there’s a certain way to conduct that mission. And this person that has been doing this job for three years might not know that, and I knew it.

J: And there’s not too many things that you know really well, you go, I can show you how to do this. And instead of just saying, “Hey, I’m better than you. I’m smarter than you; I can show you how to do this.” You can follow my lead—instead of having that attitude, it’s an attitude of like, hey, you’re going to be just as capable as I am at some point; I can help you along the way, more even.

A: Yeah, that’s the goal: to make them more. And this is something that comes from Jiu-Jitsu as well. In Jiu-Jitsu, if you and I train Jiu-Jitsu and we’ve both been training the same amount of time, sure, it’ll come down to like who’s bigger and stronger. But I realize, hey, there’s always someone that’s been training longer than me, and they’re going to be able to beat me. That doesn’t make them a better human being than me; it just means that they’ve been training longer than I have.

A: And that applies to just about everything, right? So if the skill of being a SEAL and planning a mission, oh, I might be better than you, better than you right now, but over time, I should be able to train you, and you should be able to, like you said, get better than I am. And so I felt that that left the biggest mark on my soul—being able to help people out.

A: And then when I got out of the military and I started kind of teaching the same leadership principles that I had learned, and then I started getting that same feedback, and then with writing kids’ books, like that was a whole new level when you have a kid that comes up and says, “Hey, I did my first pull-up!” or “I got an A on my math test!” or “I learned all my time tables,” and the parents like have tears in their eyes saying “Thank you!” There’s nothing better than that!

J: So okay, so, you know, I think that’s actually true. I do think there’s nothing better than that. And so I’d be—I’ve been trying to take that apart because that’s a relatively radical claim. So you could imagine the attractions of hedonism, and so everybody has their base desires—and I would say base for a variety of reasons— they want what they want, right? Bloody well now, and there’s some gratification to be had in obtaining that now.

J: The problem with right now is it’s sort of to hell with other people and to hell with the future. And so maybe that’s not an optimized path. This is why hedonism per se is a dysfunctional orientation; it reduces everything to the moment, and then it reduces everything to the whim inside the individual.

J: So power—there’s another example. It’s like, well, I could go for power; I could compel and force other people to do what I want for my gratification, obviously, regardless of what they want. Why shouldn’t I do it if I could do it? You know?

J: Cultures like ancient Rome, cultures that are predicated on the notion that might makes right, they’re predicated on the idea that, well, if you can do it, you should. And the fact that you can and would makes you better, like by definition. If I can force someone to do what I want them to do and they can’t resist, then why shouldn’t I just be contemptuous of them?

J: And I think the answer to that is—or backfires. It’s like, you can enforce your will on people for a while, but even among chimpanzees, the probability that the moment you turn your back or show any weakness that you’re going to get torn into pieces is extremely high.

A: Yeah, yeah. Well, so hedonism, power—those are sort of alternative motivational states. Well, this one—this pleasure in helping other people develop, I think, well, why shouldn’t we think that that’s just your cover story?

J: I think the reason for that is, well, here’s one reason: human beings are pair-bonding creatures, and our children are dependent longer than the offspring of any organisms. So there are two pathways to reproduction; there are two patterns of natural-world reproduction. There’s the mosquito pathway—these have technical names, can’t remember—one is K, I can’t remember the technical names. Mosquitoes on the one end, human beings on the other.

J: So the mosquito strategy is a million offspring, and if 999,000 of them die, as long as one survives or two, you’ve done your job—no investment past sex, right? And there are human beings who have that strategy as well; no investment past sex—right? The alternative is immense investment; maybe multi-generational investment—that’s parenting, grandparenting, great-grandparenting; maybe the establishment of a pattern that even works beyond that.

J: Human beings have staked their existence on the high-investment reproductive strategy, and so to the degree that we’re biologically prepared to be fathers, there’s an instinct for mentoring. And I think that what you’re describing is the broader-scale manifestation of exactly that.

J: Now you tied these things together; you know, you said you discovered when you were young that helping other people develop was a great intrinsic pleasure, and you said maybe the most rewarding of the intrinsic pleasures. And I really do believe that’s true; it’s quite stunning to realize that my graduate supervisor was a very great guy—he’s still alive, Robert Peale, and Bob was a really good professor. He got a lot of joy from lecturing; he was a really good researcher, a good administrator—like Bob had it all going.

J: Still, the thing he felt that he took most pleasure in across the entire expanse of his career was helping his graduate students in particular develop their careers. He was very generous at that, and of course, it paid back to him immensely because it turns out if you share ideas, you generate more ideas because the ideas get rewarded. If you help other people develop their career, they tend to—you know, it reflects very positively on you.

J: There’s a saying in the SEAL Teams: if you take care of your gear, your gear will take care of you. Meaning if you take care of your parachute and you prepare it, you pack it correctly, when you pull your ripcord, it will open. Or your dive gear when you’re underwater, if you’ve prepared it and you’ve maintained it correctly, you can breathe underwater.

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J: Well, I—the twist that I put on that was, if you take care of your people, your people will take care of you, and that’s absolutely true. Even what you’re just talking about with Bob because Bob invested; he took care of you, and look. Could we again—could we play the Jordan game on this thing where maybe he was just doing that knowing that in the long run, you know, all those favors were going to come back? That’d be a really long-term strategy, and it’d be kind of a gut check to put up with all these miserable graduate students this whole time where you’re just kind of putting chips on the table hoping that these investments would pay off.

A: That’s true.

J: But I also think, too, that at some point you have to flip the definition; if your strategy is short-term gratification, that’s one thing, but if your strategy is long-term mutual reinforcement and development— even if you can see that that’s of benefit to you, if you’re the sort of person that was only doing that because it was of benefit to you, you’d revert to the short term immediately, right?

J: And so at some point, you can’t be—if it’s a long enough-term investment strategy, there’s no being cynical about it anymore because the details of the strategy obviate the necessity for the cynicism. So I’ve been writing about the gospels, and there’s a—Christ—one of Christ’s commandments is to lay up treasures in heaven that do not rust, where the moths cannot destroy and robbers cannot steal, and rust cannot devour treasures in heaven. And so I’ve been trying to parse through exactly what that means.

J: So it means to live in the light of eternity, first of all. So it means to view everything you do in the moment as extending—as if it extended infinitely throughout time. So it’s—so Kant, the philosopher Kant, had this categorical imperative: don’t do anything that you wouldn’t want people to do if it was distributed widely. The biblical—especially in the gospels—you see this, but it’s more sophisticated. It’s like everything you do should be the sort of thing that would work if everyone did it over the longest possible time with the most number of situations simultaneously addressed.

J: So this notion of laying up treasure in heaven where it doesn’t rust and where it can’t be stolen really looks to me like it refers to something like reputation. Because you might say, well, where is the safest place to store your wealth? And the answer to that is, it’s not in money, because money can inflate for example and it can be stolen; there’s all sorts of ways you can lose it. The safest place to store your wealth is in your reputation, and the most effective way of developing your reputation is to be of the most service you can possibly be to other people.

J: You know, and so when we’re on tour, when Tammy and I are on tour, we’re thinking, well, this is a pretty good deal; you know, we put this effort into it, but it’s returned thousands of fold, right? Because now you have people who are so happy with what you’ve done that they’re thrilled to have you around. And so that’s a pretty damn good deal, and so it’s this perverse uniting of selfish selflessness with—what would you say—with genuine reward.

J: Yeah, the luck that it just so happens that if you take care of other people and you sacrifice for them and you invest in them, it just so happens it’ll come back to you.

A: Yeah, it just so happens that it is the best possible strategy that you could undertake.

J: Yeah, and I think there’s no doubt about that, and I also really wonder, you know, what the limit to that is because it’s obviously the case that—so here’s another—you tell me what you think about this. Here’s another form of fundamental reward. If you’ve gone out of your way for someone, let’s say, so you made sacrifices for them and then you see that that really helped them and they let you know that that really helped them—that’s a really—that's a moving moment, you know? And I’m sure you’ve encountered that many times where people will come up to you, say during the lectures or the tours, and they’ll say, here’s something you said because of something you learned, and here’s how it helped me. And you think, like, that strikes a very deep chord, and that is one of the things that—well, for us anyways, for Tammy and I, that’s certainly one of the things that makes the tour worthwhile.

J: But it does speak to that depth of motivation in mentorship, and this is a very effective—this is something very useful to know in the culture war that we’re engaged in because the accusation of the radical metam-Marxist types on the left is that there’s no other motivation than power, right? No matter what anybody says, it’s all about power, and power is the ability to compel and use force. But this strategy—this isn’t the power strategy, right?

A: This is a distribution of power strategy. It’s like you’re genuinely acting in the other person’s best interest.

J: Yeah, well that’s also allied with an instinct that makes that deeply meaningful, and that’s the instinct of fatherhood, as far as I’m concerned. It just makes a complete bloody mockery of the claim that the only fundamental human motivation is power, and going back to a leadership perspective, yeah, what I actually want as a leader is you; I don’t have to do anything because you’ve stepped up and now you’re running everything, and I can look up and out and move on.

A: That’s number one. And number two, and I’d be interested in your opinion on this. I tell people all the time that intent has a smell; intent has a smell. So if your intent is actually to take advantage of me and, you know, get things from me, and you’re taking advantage of my mentorship, and you’re eventually going to—that intent will have a smell.

A: Sometimes it’s hard; sometimes you meet someone and you go, man, that seems a little bit off; this person seems a little bit off; I’m not really sure about this person. And I think in my mind that’s their intent; it’s seeping through; you can smell it. And if you—you got to watch out for that.

A: I always have to remind people that there are terrible people out there; there are snakes that I will invest in you, and invest in you, and invest in you, and what you’ll do at the end of that is you’ll take it and—or turn it against me.

J: You bet! And if I would say this— that is an absolute possibility. It can absolutely happen, but if you invest in ten people, nine of them are going to give back to you, and you’ll be in a better place. One person will try and run away, and they’ll eventually—unfortunately for them—they’ll dig themselves a hole they can’t get out.

A: We also know that too. So psychopaths take advantage of other people; they use power. And so for someone who’s truly psychopathic, you’re nothing but a set of opportunities for short-term gain. But the problem with being a psychopath is that they have the same attitude towards themselves, so they’ll sacrifice relationships, obviously, which is the future to a large degree; they’ll sacrifice their own future to take advantage in the moment, and the consequence of that is they don’t— it’s not a strategy designed for success. You know, you hear all this that there are all these psychopaths in positions of power and authority; it’s like most of the time, like the real hardcore psychopaths are very, very likely to end up in prison.

J: But even the ones who fool some of the people, some of the time—or even all of the people, some of the time—the chickens come home to roost. It is not an effective strategy, you know, and this has even been documented among chimpanzees. So now and then, in chimpanzee troops, you get a leader who’s a dominant male who’s risen to the top because of force, fundamentally, and those troops are not very functional, and his leadership is very unstable.

A: And as I mentioned earlier, he’s very likely to meet a dreadful end.

J: And so that’s another problem with the claim that power is the only true motivation: is that, if you—first of all, as you said, it’s only about one in twenty people who use it reliably as their fundamental motivation. So the rate of psychopathy, narcissism, etc., it starts to reach clinical proportions in about one person in twenty. So nineteen out of twenty people that you help will respond in kind—that’s a good investment!

A: It is a good investment!

J: It’s a great investment. That’s right! That’s right! Usually, it’s not that hard to figure out. I mean, it might take a little bit of time before you realize, oh, this person’s definitely looking out for themselves more than anybody else; that’s going to be—and you said that has a smell. So one of the things I’ve been working out with this character Jonathan Pajeau is—so there’s these—there’s an ancient idea: imagine there’s a pyramid of values, okay? And there’s a pinnacle value, and in the Egyptian formulations the pinnacle value was Horus, the eye, which is the capacity to pay attention, which I really like.

J: It’s like everything should be subordinated to your capacity to actually pay attention to what you’re doing. But you could think about that ability to watch as the thing that’s at the top or you could think about it as something that operates at every level.

J: So the idea would be that if you pick a principle to guide yourself by, maybe it’s the principle of short-term self-promotion—that’s going to be your guiding star, but it’s going to leak out in absolutely everything you do. Every word you say, every gesture you manifest is going to speak of that. And people are pretty good at decoding non-verbal behavior, and that smell is associated with that pattern of short-term selfish gratification. And you’re right, with repeated interactions, there’s something off; you can tell, and other people can tell too, which is another reason why that psychopathic pattern of adaptation doesn’t work socially.

J: And it doesn’t even work for the person that’s applying it. It’s perverse because an active psychopath might be better off than someone who’s so paralyzed by depression and anxiety that they can’t move, right? Because like a psychopathic attitude—that’s self-serving—can take you out into the world, and it’s also, unfortunately, the case that it can—if psychopathic men who are narcissistic have a reasonably good track record at fooling women because psychopaths mimic competence, and they do that by having false confidence, and women use confidence as a marker for competence.

J: But you can gain confidence, and that’s what psychopaths and narcissists do. You know, they think they know; they actually believe that they know more than they know. Partly because they have such a dim view of everyone else, and that can give them a glitz and an aura of confidence, and what you see in the clinical literature is that works particularly well with the younger the woman, the more effective that is because they’re just not very— they’re not experienced; they can’t tell the gastons from the, you know, from the—exactly. Gaston is a perfect example of that.

A: And I always try to explain that to people—that one of the worst situations you can be in is when you think that the little moves that you’re making, no one can see them, and it’s so obvious. Everybody else, everybody that’s watching can see exactly what you’re doing. You think, oh, they can’t; they can’t see the maneuvers that I’m making to take care of myself? No, they see! Everybody sees! And it ends up destroying you.

J: So that idea of like what you talked about imposing my will on other people—you get away with that for a little while. If I’m the boss and I can fire you, or I can give you punitive measures because you didn’t follow my orders, that’ll work for a little while, but it’s not a long-term solution.

J: And eventually, you’re going to have a mutiny on your hands; you’re probably going to end up—they actually had a name for it in the Vietnam War, right? We would frag you! You’re my officer; you’re imposing your will on me; you’re not listening to what we have to say. Cool, we’re going to frag you; we’re going to get into a gunfight at night; you’re going to get shot by one of us!

A: They had a name for it!

J: Yeah, that’s like the chimps you’re talking about—that goes across the board to all of us primates out there! Well, so, you can see how deep that goes because again, the postmodern neo-Marxist claim is that human hierarchies are predicated on power, right? And I already defined power as the willingness and ability to use force and compulsion; it’s not ability—forget that—that’s not power.

J: Ability is the ability to get things done; power is the willingness and ability to use force. Okay, you say, well, you can organize hierarchies around force; that’s what a totalitarian state is. But your point is dead relevant; it’s like, well, that works fine except when it doesn’t work. And then it doesn’t work at all. And I don’t believe at all that the functional hierarchies that men organize—they’re if they’re predicated on—see PJ Jean, the developmental psychologist delved into this too. He said there’s another problem with a hierarchy that’s built on power.

J: So let’s say we’ve got an organization here that’s top-down command; it’s like, you do what I say or there’s going to be trouble. Right? And there’s another organization beside it, and that is more—here’s the vision; I’m going to aggregate a bunch of people who are on board with that, right? So they’re doing it voluntarily.

J: Now those are the sort of people to whom you can distribute the kind of responsibility that you described earlier. So you want people around you that don’t need you around, right? As you build an organization, and you might say, well, I don’t want to seed all that control; that means you’re power mad.

J: But the advantage to you is if you build those people underneath you who are competent in their own realm, you can keep moving your ambition higher and higher because you build this platform beneath you that’s composed of competent people, and all that happens is your expansive opportunity increases. Okay?

J: So PJ’s observation was this: there are costs to the power-oriented hierarchy. The cost is you demoralize the participants because they’re not chasing something they value except under duress, and you have to discipline—all the time—to hope to monitor them and discipline them constantly—and that’s a cost. So if you put system A (power-based) and system B (voluntary-based) right (Vision-based, let’s say) in a head-to-head competition, the voluntary organization will always eventually stomp the power-based, and I think that’s exactly right.

A: I, you know, when you go to these live events and you get asked questions—and I got asked a question, and it just kind of led to a whole thought process—but somebody, you know, asked me, well, how do I get people to listen to me? You know, I’m in a leadership position; how do I get people to listen to me? And I said, if you want people to listen to you, you need to listen to them. It’s the opposite of what people think. You know, it’s not talk louder. If I want you to listen to me, if I want—I want you to listen to me, I need to listen to you.

A: And that kind of opened up this whole idea for me. There’s a whole category of these things, right? If I want people to respect me, what do I have to do? I have to treat you with respect.

J: Yeah!

A: If I want to have influence over you, what do I have to do? I actually have to allow you to influence me. I have to open my mind up and allow you to influence me. If I just stick with my own ideas, you’re—you close your mind as well if I have a closed mind.

A: You’re gonna close my mind. If I want you to care about me, what do I have to do? I have to care about you. And by the way, in my opinion, these are the components of a relationship, right?

J: Definitely!

A: If we listen to each other, we have—if we don’t listen to each other, we don’t have a relationship!

J: Mhm!

A: If we don’t respect each other, we don’t have a relationship. If we’re not influenced by each other, we don’t have a relationship. So if we don’t care about each other, obviously we don’t have a relationship. So when you want to build a relationship, what do you have to do? You have to listen to the other person.

A: By the way, this applies to your employees; it applies to your kids; it applies to your spouse; it applies to everyone. If you want them to listen to you, you have to listen to them, and you can’t just—you know, I’ll stop talking as I prepare my counter for what you’re saying right now. It’s like I’m literally going to listen to what you have to say and try and open up my mind and open up my perspective so that I understand your world as well as I possibly can.

A: I’m going to integrate that into what my thoughts are, and we’re going to come to an understanding; we’re going to move forward with a better solution!

J: This is why when I was in the military, I never liked giving orders. I never had to say, “Hey, everyone, here’s what we’re doing; we’re doing this!” I never had to say that!

J: No, the caveat is, we’re in a gunfight, and you know, I need you to take your element over that. And even then, even then it’s a strong suggestion because I might say, “Jordan, take that building over there.” You might look back at me and say, “Negative.” I don’t say, “Hey, shut up, you insubordinate bastard!” No! The reason you’re saying that to me is because there’s something that you see that I don’t see—that’s the other thing! Trust! Right?

J: How do I get you to trust me? I have to put trust in you.

A: So the idea of barking orders—and that that idea that the military or any organization can be run through authoritarian dictatorship—look, you can make it work for a little while, but it’s not a long-term solution, and that’s what we’ve got to watch out for.

A: Well, one of the things I’ve read in relationship to military history—and this is particularly true with regards to the US—is that part of the reason that the US military has been such a formidable force is that a fair bit of responsibility is devolved down the ranks. It’s that people are expected to use their decision-making power as appropriate with the maximal amount of allowable freedom at their level of authority.

A: You can imagine why that’s much better because it’s the same thing—it’s the—it’s the free market equivalent in the military. If there’s a thousand people and some of them are troops that are on the front line, some of those people on the front line are going to have much more accurate information than the people who are aggregating information at a distance, both temporally and spatially.

A: So you want to open yourself up to being informed by people who have skin in the game and have their eyes open in the immediate circumstance. I’ve seen this with great political leaders. Like the great political leaders that I’ve met are very, very good at listening, and partly what they do even when they’re campaigning. So I met this guy Preston Manning—he started a political party in Canada out of nothing, now he came from a political family, so he had some connections—but he basically produced a political party in Canada from ground zero, and they became the official opposition, right? And then it eventually merged with the current Conservative Party. So it was a Western party and a populist party.

A: But I asked him at one point, “Well, how the hell do you do that?” because that’s really hard. And he said, he went from arena to arena across western Canada, and he’d give his stump speech, but what he really liked were the questions and the answers—the Q&As—because people would tell him what their problems were.

A: So you can imagine if you’re a political leader and you go talk to a thousand people, and all thousand people tell you their problems because you listen? Well, now you’ve got the questions, right? Because one of the things that’s really impossible to figure out if you’re a leader is, like, well, what problem are we trying to solve here? What direction should we be going in? And it’s a lot easier to lead people in a direction that they want to go, and so if you listen to people, now Jimmy Carr told me the same thing about him preparing his comedy routines before he goes on tour.

A: And comedians do this generally, and they all know this. Although Carr was very good at elucidating it, you go to fifty small clubs, you try out your idiot material, you know? Ninety percent of it falls flat, but ten percent of it makes people laugh!

A: Well, if you’re listening, you can tell when they laugh, and you just put a check by that joke. And after you’ve done thirty shows, and you now have two hours of material that makes people laugh, even if you’re not that damn funny to begin with, if you pay enough attention to what the audience responds to, you can aggregate the material, and you do go on the road.

A: And that’s really, as far as I can tell, that really is the essence of leadership per se. It’s certainly the essence of political leadership.

J: Yeah, well, this is the fourth law of combat leadership that I used to teach in the SEAL Teams—that now I teach to corporations and companies and teams: decentralized command. It’s everything you just said—decentralized command! I want my subordinate leadership to be leaders!

J: I want them to understand where we’re going, and I don’t really care how they get there. And I can put some parameters on them—hey, you can’t do this; you can’t do that—but everything else, inside that box, you can do! Make decisions; go make things happen! That’s decentralized command!

A: And yeah, that’s why we have a great military! And when we get away from that, is when we start having problems. That’s why you hear about the Vietnam War; what was happening during the Vietnam War? Well, you had Johnson back in D.C. making decisions about what targets we were going to hit in Vietnam—that’s no way to run a war!

J: And that’s why you have problems in those situations; so definitely decentralized command as a leadership system is just vastly superior to any other system. And that’s why that group that pulls ahead. And the other thing that you talk about—that group that’s based on values and based on really—to me—relationships, it’s the same thing, right?

J: If I have a team and we all get along and we all can talk to each other, we trust each other, we care about each other, you put that team against a team that has a bunch of animosity and they don’t trust each other—the team that has good relationships is going to annihilate. We see this over and over again in the world; we saw it in Iraq.

A: In fact, this is funny—in Iraq! So I was running the advanced training for the SEALs where you’re getting SEAL platoons ready. They’ve already gone through all the basic training; you’ve got experienced SEALs, some new SEALs—but experienced SEALs—and some newer SEALs, but they’re getting ready to go on deployment, and it’s a very strenuous, arduous training cycle.

A: And you’re pretty much training them on some collective skills, but then you’re putting them in mission scenarios where they’re going to go out and do simulated combat missions, and as soon as you would see a fracture between guys in the platoon, you’d watch it; you’d pay attention. And if it started to get worse, the platoon was going to fall apart, like the platoon that occasionally would fail a block of training; they’d fail land warfare; they’d fail urban combat; or they’d fail close-quarters combat. The reason they would fail was because they had fissures in the platoon that would break them apart.

A: Well how would those fissures develop?

J: Ego!

A: Okay! So, are they developing around people who are playing power games?

J: So you’re the platoon chief. In a SEAL platoon, the platoon chief’s probably been in for 12 to 15 years, he’s got a lot of tactical experience, and then you’ve got the platoon commander, who’s an officer. He probably has four or five years; he’s a little less tactically experienced, but he’s the guy that’s overall in charge; right? He’s the guy that actually is the head of the platoon. So a good platoon chief is going to offer suggestions, and a good platoon officer is going to go, “Yep, chief, that makes sense!”

A: Yeah, yeah, yeah! That’s a beautiful thing!

J: And everyone can kind of see that the platoon chief is sort of running the platoon with the permission of—for lack of a better word—the permission of the platoon commander. Well, occasionally you get a platoon commander that wants everyone to know that he’s the one that’s making the decisions, and he starts to—“We’re not going to do it that way.” And right there, you’ve got friction!

J: Or it can be the other way around; it can be the platoon chief that wants everyone to know that, “Hey, we’re going to do it my way,” and the platoon commander doesn’t want to do it that way, because he’s an idiot! And you just end up with this explosion! Well, that’s that narcissism—that idea that you want to be the one that people know did it! Yes!

J: Right? That’s a big problem, right? Because then you’re doing it because you want to be known, right? And that’s a false form of prestige.

A: Right!

J: And the narcissistic types are always after the false forms of prestige, like real prestige comes when people know that you’re good at delivering something they want to have delivered, right? That’s—the—well, that’s the equivalent of real ability.

J: And so there’s something else that’s, I think, we can tie together what we talked about to begin with. So here’s how kids develop friendships. So two kids will start interacting with each other on the playground, right? Say they’re like four years old—a boy and a girl—and the boy proposes some possible play topics. So that could be a game or it could be like a drama, so kids will pretend!

J: So maybe the boy will say, “Do you want to play house?” Okay. Now, he doesn’t say to the girl, “You have to play house!” because then if she does play, it’s not going to be any fun. Plus, she isn’t going to play, and she’s going to be looking for an escape or some other kid to play with—like, instantly. So it has to be an invitation!

J: Right? And then they have to jointly negotiate the role, you know? Because if you’re playing house, you could play husband and wife, or you could play, you know, husband and daughter, or there are all sorts of different roles, or you could play two sons, or one of you could be the cat—like, there’s a lot of roles that can be taken. And the next rule is: both kids have to agree on the rules, and they have to want to play.

J: And play is particularly interesting in this regard because if there’s any element of compulsion—if there’s fear—the fun stops. It’s a very delicate motivational state, play. Because any other motivational state will take it out. So you have to do it exactly right to get the spirit of play going.

A: So if the boy does this well, then he'll play this game with the girl, and it’ll be fun for both of them. And then you imagine there’s a fairly tight set of constraints that are operating to make that game fun for both; volunteerism being one of them— they have to pick their roles; they have to share their aim; they have to agree on what the game is going to be; they have to agree on the principles so then they can play the game—and now they’re experimenting with communicating with one another within that framework.

A: Okay, now if that goes well, they’ll end up—and they’ll say, well, that was fun! And they’ll say, you know, would you like to play again?

A: Okay, so now what you’re having is a sequence of games, right? And a friend is someone that a sequence of games can be played with—a variety of different games. And that’s a relationship!

A: So