Myth & Reality: General Stanley McChrystal

[0] Welcome to the second episode of season two of the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.

[1] My name is Michaela Peterson, and I've been working with my dad for the last year.

[2] We've decided to do this podcast as a joint project because we thought it might be something fun and meaningful to do together.

[3] For this episode, we're presenting dad's discussion with General Stanley McChrystal on leadership.

[4] They talked in some detail about McChrystal's new book, Leaders, Myths, and Reality.

[5] Why did you want to talk to General McChrystal?

[6] Well, there were a variety of reasons.

[7] I mean, first of all, he's an impressive person.

[8] He's done a lot of things in his life.

[9] You don't get to be a four -star general without putting a tremendous amount of time and energy and skill into it.

[10] And so it's always interesting to talk to people whose skill domain, knowledge domain, is way outside mine.

[11] And then I was also interested in his take on leadership because leadership is something I'm interested in as a psychologist.

[12] And the leadership literature is an absolute.

[13] mess.

[14] We don't really know how to define it.

[15] There's all sorts of different kinds of leadership.

[16] We know that intelligence has something to do with it and conscientiousness often because leaders need to be reliable.

[17] But there's all sorts of other personality traits that seem to be associated with leadership that are relevant in different situations.

[18] So it doesn't look like there is any such thing necessarily as generic leadership.

[19] Extroversion?

[20] No, not necessarily.

[21] I mean, because you can have a visionary leader who's very high in openness, who's not particularly extroverted.

[22] You know, and then it would depend on who they had around them, you know, to help them communicate their message.

[23] They need some extroverts around.

[24] Well, the extroverts is good to communicate.

[25] Yeah.

[26] But there's lots of different styles and types of leadership.

[27] And so I was interested to find out what he had to say about that and also about his personal experience, molding young men in the military.

[28] And his ideas about what might be done to help young people mature today.

[29] And so we discussed all of that.

[30] That was all very interesting.

[31] When we come back, Dad's conversation with General Stanley McChrystal.

[32] Dad is going to be debating Slava Zhijek, April 19th at 7 .30 p .m. EST.

[33] in Toronto.

[34] Tickets sold out at the Sony Center incredibly fast, so we're offering a live stream for the first time.

[35] Hopefully it'll go well.

[36] We figured people who weren't in Toronto would want a chance to see the debate, plus a lot of Zijek's fans are European, obviously.

[37] The debate's called Happiness, Marxism versus Capitalism, and should be extremely interesting.

[38] Tickets will be sold at Jordan B. Peterson .com starting April 1st.

[39] Sign up on his blog for his mailing list at Jordanb peterson .com and you'll be notified when tickets are available.

[40] Hi everyone.

[41] I'm pleased today, very pleased to have the opportunity, the privilege, to speak with General Stanley McChrystal.

[42] General McChrystal retired in July 2010 as a four -star general.

[43] After over 34 years of service in the U .S. Army, his final assignment was as the commander of NATO's International Security Assistance Force and all U .S. forces in Afghanistan.

[44] He had previously served as the director of the Joint Staff and almost five years in command of the Joint Special Operations Command.

[45] Since 2010, he has taught courses in international relations at Yale University as a senior fellow of the University's Jackson Institute for Global Affairs.

[46] He's the best -selling author of his most recent book, Leaders, Myth, and Reality.

[47] And today we're going to talk about, well, the book and about leadership in general.

[48] We're going to talk about the development of young people and what's necessary to help young people make the difficult transition from, let's say, unstructured adolescence into responsible maturity.

[49] We're going to talk about the geopolitical landscape that faces the U .S. and the West over the next 10 years, something approximating.

[50] And we're also going to talk about General McChrystal's future plans and ambitions.

[51] And so welcome to the YouTube channel and the podcast.

[52] It's a, as I said, it's a real privilege to be able to talk to you.

[53] It's my honor.

[54] Thank you.

[55] So let's start by talking about your newest book, Leaders, Myth, and Reality.

[56] And that's published by Sentinel, an imprint of Penguin Random House.

[57] When did it come out?

[58] It came out in late October 2018.

[59] And how has it been received?

[60] It's being received very well.

[61] It's a pretty deep book, so people have sort of got to put their arms around it before they understand it, but it's been very successful.

[62] Now, you profiled a number of leaders in that book, I believe 13.

[63] Is that correct?

[64] That's correct.

[65] We used the model that Plutarch had used for parallel lives, where he did the Greeks and Romans.

[66] We didn't do 48 like he did.

[67] We picked 13 people, a pretty diverse group.

[68] group.

[69] We had Margaret Thatcher, the UK Prime Minister, Martin Luther, the Protestant Reformation, Harriet Tubman.

[70] We tried to get a different group so that people thought about leadership not in a political or military or single sense.

[71] So, okay, well, let's start.

[72] I mean, I'm relatively familiar with the psychological research on leadership, which I think is generally quite a mess.

[73] And I think the reason for that is that it isn't obvious that leadership is a homogenous category.

[74] There's many different ways of leading, but I would also say that there's probably some commonalities.

[75] Like, it seems to me, for example, that one of the primary attributes of a leader who's worth his or her salt, let's say, is the ability to instill and also deserve trust among the people that they work with.

[76] But I'd be interested in what you've derived from your, well, from all your experience, including the experience of writing this book.

[77] What do you, what do you to say about leadership?

[78] What have you learned?

[79] I think the biggest thing we learned is that for most of our lives, when I had been taught it by people, when I had the chance to practice it and try to learn it myself, is that we really didn't understand the essence of leadership.

[80] We had simplified it.

[81] And in the book, the way we outlined that is we'd simplified it through these mythologies.

[82] We thought of leaders as a checklist of traits or behaviors that they do.

[83] And that's that there's a generically good leader model.

[84] Or the idea of that the leader is the person, the man or woman who come and is responsible for success or failure in the organization.

[85] And finally, that we as followers or participants, you might say, that we demand our leaders to be effective and successful.

[86] And all three of those are absolute myths.

[87] What we found is leadership is intentionally contextual.

[88] There's no such thing as a generically good leader.

[89] You pick a person up who's very successful in Corporation H and put them somewhere else.

[90] their chances of being successful are actually much lower than if someone inside the organization's promoted.

[91] We found that leaders are not the reason organizations succeed or fail in many cases.

[92] And we also, we as followers, we elect, select, follow, support leaders who often cases serially fail or take us in the wrong place because leadership is actually our conclusion.

[93] It's not a thing that the leader possesses that they direct on followers.

[94] and solve problems, it's almost like an emergent property from the interaction between leaders, followers, and the always unique contextual factors of the moment.

[95] And so it's this very complex interaction that we try to simplify because we try to get our minds around it.

[96] Well, it seemed to me, tell me what you think about this, is the people that I've seen operate as effective leaders in different contexts.

[97] The first thing that characterizes them is that they tend to do a tremendous amount of work to try to understand the organization that they're in fact leading and from the bottom up.

[98] So they tend to know the organization inside out and backwards.

[99] And then they do a tremendous amount of listening and aggregating, you know, because if you go into an organization and you discuss the structure and the challenges of the organization with the people who are actually in the trenches, especially near the board, bottom, I would say, they'll tell you how the organization works and then you can aggregate and synthesize and reflect back.

[100] And that seems to be associated with your idea of that reciprocal relationship between the leadership and the people who are hypothetically following.

[101] That's exactly right.

[102] We found out that leaders who think they have figured it out and then they get put on a new program and they try to run that play again almost always end up with frustration.

[103] And it's really what you described, I would also use the word humility.

[104] because you come in and you don't think you have a solution.

[105] Instead, what you do is you listen, you show some empathy to understand why people do what they do, because then you can divine the right kind of leadership for that situation because it's always different.

[106] There's a research showing what makes a physician an effective diagnostician.

[107] And one of the markers is the number of words that the patient speaks compared to the number of words the physician speaks in the physician.

[108] first 15 minutes of their interaction.

[109] And the more words the patient speaks, the higher the diagnostic accuracy of the physician.

[110] And I really like that idea of humility.

[111] You know, you have to walk into a complex situation knowing that you don't know anything, including what the problems are.

[112] And then if you have the possibility of listening, if you have the opportunity to listen, then, and people trust you, that which is a real crucial issue and something that's maybe central to leadership, then people will actually tell you what the problems are and what's actually going on.

[113] and that seems to be a prerequisite for solving them, right?

[114] You actually have to know what the problems are.

[115] I think that's exactly right.

[116] When I took over in Afghanistan in 2009, I'd been in Afghanistan a lot before, but now I was in charge, and the first thing I did was this listening tour, and it was essential because you have to start with the assumption that they are rational actors, that they do things a certain way for a reason.

[117] When you see it from afar, you say they're corrupt or they're this or that.

[118] When you get up close, if you were in their shoes, the reality is you probably would do it very similar to the way they do.

[119] And so it's a certain amount of just showing respect to go and listen and understand, okay, why are we doing it this way?

[120] There may be a better way and you may be able to help.

[121] But if you walk in with a bag of solutions, I think they're almost always wrong.

[122] And as you say, it's hard to build trust.

[123] Yeah, well, the problem with walking in with a bag of solutions is that you have the steering wheel, but it's not connected to any of the mechanism.

[124] That's exactly right.

[125] You know, you can have, I tell young people I work with now, having the right answer in the room is no longer the secret.

[126] You can get the right answer often on the Internet.

[127] But the reality is it's getting the people in the room to accept the right answer and implement it.

[128] Yeah, so, okay, so that's the next thing that seems absolutely crucial, is that so if you listen and gather information that enables you to lay out the point, problem set and then to start to formulate possible solutions, then the next issue is to create, what would you say, formulate those solutions in a manner that encourages and motivates people to be on board with them instead of resisting them at the multiple levels of the organization.

[129] Because that's a big problem too.

[130] I've seen this many times in organizations where the leaders will command a particular direction.

[131] And then the implementation of that is resisted at every single hierarchical strata of the organization.

[132] And what you get is the appearance of compliance with none of the reality.

[133] That's exactly right.

[134] I founded special operating forces.

[135] You had big experienced personalities.

[136] And I found it would be better to say, we have this problem.

[137] How would you solve it?

[138] And if they were anywhere close to what I thought was a workable solution, I would accept their solution because it was theirs.

[139] They owned it.

[140] They would then implement it with a completely different level than if I had told them, here's exactly what I want you to do, this, this, this.

[141] And the reality is often they had a much better sense of it than I did.

[142] Yeah, well, there's a psychological truism there too.

[143] Like if you're a clinician, one of the things that clinicians have learned over the last hundred years is that the probability that a client will follow your advice is quite low.

[144] But the probability that they will follow their own advice if they formulate it themselves is quite high.

[145] And so partly what you're doing is encouraging and enticing people into formulating a problem statement and then also determining how it is that they would go about implementing the solution.

[146] I think that's right.

[147] That sense of ownership, responsibility is so key.

[148] Yeah, okay, and that's another thing, and that's a matter of delegation, is that if someone comes up with a solution to a problem themselves, and then they implemented themselves, then they also have all of the cycle.

[149] and practical advantages of having done the problem formulation and the solution, right?

[150] Then they get to, you said ownership, they get to identify with the success and the failure of that particular enterprise.

[151] And that, what would you say?

[152] I hate to use the word empowers because I think that word has been badly corrupted, but it's not a bad choice of words to characterize that situation.

[153] That's right.

[154] I describe it to people sometimes that said, if you go to your boss and you say, boss, we can do A or B, and the boss says, do A, do it this way.

[155] You go out, and then if A doesn't work, you tend to go home that night and tell your spouse, well, boss had a bad day, just made a bad call.

[156] Yeah, right.

[157] But if the boss looks at you and says, use your best judgment, then tell me what you did, you go out to your team and you say, we really got to get this right.

[158] Yeah, well, it also develops your team across time.

[159] The more you can delegate that responsibility down.

[160] I mean, one of the, I think, useful rules of thumb for managerial types is that when you go into an organization, you should strive to make yourself redundant because you should be able to distribute everything and I don't mean to offload it or to avoid the responsibility but if you're running the organization properly then you should be putting people in place who can do everything that it is that you hypothetically need to do.

[161] That also means that if you disappear suddenly, if you leave, then the organization can keep moving forward without you seamlessly.

[162] That's exactly right.

[163] But someone once said the most effective leaders, the group tends to say at the end, we did it all ourselves.

[164] Right, right, right, right.

[165] Well, then they can step away.

[166] So, okay, so let's walk through the book a little bit.

[167] You talked about all 13 people.

[168] Why did you pick them and what did you learn and what do you reveal about each of them?

[169] We don't have to go through all 13.

[170] Sure.

[171] We did six genres, we called them.

[172] One was zealots and we picked Maximilian.

[173] Robespierre of the French Revolution and Abu Mousal -Bazarkawi, who I fought from Achaida in Iraq.

[174] We picked geniuses, Albert Einstein, Leonard Bernstein.

[175] We picked power brokers.

[176] We were going to use politicians, but we used boss tweet and Margaret Thatcher.

[177] We used reformers, Martin Luther of the Protestant Reformation and Dr. Martin Luther King.

[178] And what we were trying to do was get diversity in sex, gender, nationality, and whatnot so that we would get a wider thought process on this.

[179] We didn't want to follow sort of a type.

[180] People expect a military person to write about military people.

[181] We have 13 because obviously six pairs doesn't equal 13 because General Robert E. Lee had been my hero growing up.

[182] I'd gone to Washington Lee High School.

[183] I grew up near his home.

[184] So he had been the example of the perfect leader in my youth.

[185] And then as I got older and after Charlottesville particularly in the spring of 2017, You know, I did a lot of thinking about it, and the reality is I came to the conclusion I had to write about Robert E. Lee because he'd been so important to me, but I now had this conflicted relationship with him.

[186] In many ways, he was the near perfect exemplar of leadership, but in a very fundamental way, the fact that he betrayed his country and he did it for the cause of slavery, you can't overlook.

[187] And so I tried to take that one on because for me it was a complex personal thing and I came to the conclusion I still admire so much about him but I now don't think of him as a mythological hero I think of him as a human being just like you or I flawed but if you can look at each of these leaders that way get them off their pedestal but yet don't automatically put them in a ditch and say they're valueless because Abu Moussabazarkawi, who my force killed, and I was happy we did, I'll be honest, I admired his leadership skills.

[188] So what about them?

[189] What was it about him that you felt was compelling?

[190] Well, he came up in a tough background from an industrial town in Jordan, very little education.

[191] He went and became a jihadist in Afghanistan when that was popular.

[192] And then he got thrown in prison back in Jordan for five years and during that period what he did was he became really pious really disciplined really focused and he didn't have the advantages other people do but he found if he was more committed than other people if he was more fanatical about the cause that people would follow him and so his zealotry became sort of this white hot burning flame that people were attracted to but he was genuine and so when he came into a rock and we fought against him for two and a half years Here's a guy who was charismatic.

[193] He was completely focused on his cause.

[194] I disagreed with his cause.

[195] But the reality is, maybe in his position, I would have believed it as well.

[196] And who's to say I'm right and he's wrong?

[197] And his ability to motivate people and to live the values that he decided to adopt is pretty impressive.

[198] And the frightening part about it was many of the people who followed him didn't share his level of fanaticism.

[199] but because he was so overtly confident, because he was so overtly committed, because he was willing to walk the walk, people followed him anyway.

[200] And that really says a lot more about us as followers than it does about him as a leader.

[201] Well, it also indicates part of the nonverbal element of deciding who constitutes a competent leader.

[202] Like we definitely associate confidence and the ability to keep negative emotion under control with the ability to lead because we're looking for people who have a direction.

[203] That's the first thing because we need a direction.

[204] But then we're also looking for people who can maintain control over anxiety in particular because that indicates that they're stable in their orientation in the world.

[205] And that's attractive.

[206] If you don't have time to do a detailed analysis of their ethos, the nonverbal cues of confidence and direction are a decent pointer to someone who's competent even though they're not infallible pointers.

[207] That's exactly right.

[208] In combat, what you find is young leaders, young lieutenants, young sergeants, the first thing that happens when the first round fires is all the young soldiers look to you.

[209] They look to see how you're going to react because they want to know how they should react.

[210] You know, young children do the same thing with their mothers.

[211] So if, for example, if a baby, a young child, three years older so is in a room, let's say, with their mother and a mouse runs across the room and they've never seen the mouse.

[212] thing they'll do is they'll look at the mouse because it attracts their attention and then they'll look at their mother and they read off her face what the mouse means and if she's up on the chair screaming then of course the child is going to be terrified so they call that referencing and so it's very interesting to see that replicated on the battlefield right so it's an instant search for a model for emulation exactly okay so what other people that you wrote about really struck you in in a particular way that that's interesting to talk about.

[213] Well, very interesting.

[214] Harriet Tubman was unlikely.

[215] She was a middle -aged African -American slave who escaped.

[216] And she's not educated, but she goes back in the decade before the Civil War, back into the slave control part of the South to bring out about 80 other slaves to freedom.

[217] She does it 13 times.

[218] Any time during which if she'd been captured, she would have been either executed or re -enslave.

[219] And we have a tough time in our friends.

[220] And we have a tough time of reference, understanding just what that would have meant.

[221] And she became this leader, not because she was well -educated or she was powerful, she never had a position, but she became a moral leader.

[222] And so as a consequence of that, she was powerful for the abolition, and then after the Civil War for pushing rights to include female rights.

[223] But she, everything else about her wouldn't have fallen into the sort of standard leadership.

[224] If you'd had a leadership course and put her in there, she wouldn't have jumped out.

[225] The person that came out as the best leader, and people asked me this question, I admired Abu Moussaba, Akawi, although I didn't admire his values, was Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. And it was funny because I grew up, my family's from the South, and my mother was very, very liberal and focused on the civil rights movement.

[226] But the thing that's interesting about him is I'd grown up admiring Dr. King for his beliefs, for his cause.

[227] But in reality, if you were trying to start a company now and you needed a CEO of the 13 people we profile, Dr. King is the guy.

[228] He was adaptable.

[229] He was humble.

[230] He constantly changed his tactics.

[231] He stayed focused on the overall goal.

[232] But one week he would compromise on the march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge and Selma.

[233] The next week he would get himself put in jail to push something.

[234] That flexibility, that ability to pull together this disparate group.

[235] that was the civil rights movement actually is the most impressive leadership performance of any of the 13 people we profiled.

[236] Okay, so what do you think gave him that ability?

[237] He was obviously, it seems, operating under a set of principles, let's say, and he could be inflexible in some situations and flexible in the others.

[238] Like, is there a goal, a transcendent goal, for example, that you think that was, driving him that he had well articulated and formulated?

[239] What kept him integrated and flexible at the same time?

[240] Yeah, that's a great question.

[241] I think it starts, and we're going to talk about this later, was how he was developed.

[242] He grew up the son of a preacher.

[243] He had a good education.

[244] He got a PhD, and at 26 years old, he is the pastor of a church in Montgomery, Alabama, when the bus boycott starts, and he's put in charge.

[245] So to very young age, he starts with a good set of values from his family, a good solid education.

[246] The letter from a Birmingham jail written later is this extraordinary performance where he pulls from all the education he had.

[247] She had a foundation that gave him confident in his beliefs.

[248] He knew that the direction they were going was ultimately right.

[249] And from his other studies, he believed, could make progress, could succeed.

[250] And how did he conceive of that direction?

[251] Like you said he had his PhD, so he was educated.

[252] He was obviously pursuing a set of principles that were deeply associated with the civil rights movement.

[253] And I suppose that's manifested to some degree in his speech, his dream speech.

[254] I think so.

[255] Yeah, I think a couple of things.

[256] I think he starts with a child of the South, grew up in Atlanta.

[257] So he starts with that, but then as he interacts with other civil rights leaders who had been involved in the movement much longer than he has, they've got the scars to prove it.

[258] They've also got the political infighting that sort of limits their ability.

[259] He steps in younger without that sort of tarnish on him.

[260] He can step above that.

[261] He takes a leadership role where he points at the far position on the ridgeline.

[262] He says that's where we must go.

[263] We must use nonviolence to do that.

[264] We must try to unify our cause.

[265] And so I think that combination of very solid mooring to values, and I think the education helped in that.

[266] A good family, but then also this idea that he would interact and listen to people.

[267] He was constantly adjusting based upon what other civil rights leaders were pushing and pulling and on.

[268] So I think he had a tremendous about of mental adaptability without ever giving away the objective.

[269] Okay, so one of the things that I thought through recently, I spent a fair bit of time studying the sermon on the Mount and it's sort of relevant to Luther King because of course of his Christian faith so I think it's a relevant segue the advice maybe you could call it leadership advice from the sermon on the Mount is to keep your eye on the prize right so the first the first injunction is to love God with all your heart and all your soul and so that's to lift your eyes up above the horizon and to focus on some transcendent goal right, to maintain a relationship with what you regard as of the highest value or divine.

[270] And so that's the first thing, is to set your sights properly.

[271] And then the next thing is to concentrate on the day, right, because the troubles of the day are sufficient.

[272] But what that does is it gives you two, it orientes you in two ways.

[273] It gives you real direction, but it also allows you to concentrate on what's right in front of you and perhaps to make the course corrections that are necessary that are associated with moment -to -moment transformation.

[274] And it's interesting that that particular sermon uses the day as the proper unit of measure, right?

[275] It's, well, I know where I'm going, but now I have to figure out how I'm going to implement that in the here and now and make whatever course corrections are necessary.

[276] You know, it's interesting.

[277] I teach a piece by Admiral James Stockdale in my course at Yale, and it is the world of Ipectetus.

[278] And what he does is he describes his time in the Hanoi Hilton, and he describes different prisoners and how they responded to the inhumane treatment, the torture.

[279] And the issue of a day is because they had to go through that experience literally one day at a time.

[280] They could go and they could be tortured and they would be broken.

[281] When you are tortured, you will break, you will talk.

[282] And then what happens is you lose your self -respect because you think that, okay, I'm not worthy because I didn't do name, rank, and serial number.

[283] But what he found was by being connected to strong values, the eye on the prize, and his prize was loyalty to his nation, loyalty to his faith, loyalty to himself.

[284] He kept his eye on that, and every day he would almost, you could call it, recharge his batteries.

[285] Return to that.

[286] That's right.

[287] I've got to go back and keep an eye on it, and it won't always be easy.

[288] And I think Dr. King did that.

[289] And I think that leaders who are leading or taking themselves to a very difficult journey, it's keeping that because there are disappointments, there were failures, there are frustrations along the way.

[290] Okay, so that's interesting.

[291] So I hadn't thought about it quite that way before.

[292] So you're going to have trouble as you implement your plans and there's going to be failures and disappointments.

[293] And there's also going to be like moral and personal failings on your part, right?

[294] And you talked about breaking under torture, which is, of course, exactly what you'd expect and so your sense was that that one of the, or your sense is that one of the advantages to being associated with these higher order principles is that you can draw on them as a source of strength.

[295] It's a well to which you can return, which is a good psychological trope.

[296] So, so maybe that's a good segue into the other, the next thing I wanted to talk to you about.

[297] We'll return to your book as well, but it seems to me that there's somewhat of a crisis of maturity, let's say, among young people today.

[298] And I'm not blaming them for this.

[299] I think it's a consequence of technological transformation and immense cultural confusion.

[300] But I'd like to talk to you about what you've seen as necessary to help immature young people mature and become responsible citizens and what all that means.

[301] Like why that's advantageous, why it's necessary and how it can be done.

[302] and why we're not doing a particularly good job of it, as far as I can tell.

[303] Yeah, I feel very strongly about this.

[304] So thanks for bringing it up.

[305] I think if we talk about advantages, if we look at you or I and we get to a certain point in life, we can get feeling superior.

[306] We say, well, we've been successful because we worked hard or whatever.

[307] We started on third base and thought we hit a triple.

[308] And we did because I had two parents that I admired who loved me, And they put structure.

[309] I was one of six kids.

[310] And there was structure.

[311] And I didn't like all of it at the time.

[312] But the reality is they didn't talk about values.

[313] They demonstrated values.

[314] They forced us to live within a certain left and right limit, we would call it.

[315] And maybe at the time, I wouldn't have just on my own come up with that.

[316] But they did that.

[317] The education I received also gave me a pretty solid set of foundation stones that I could stand on.

[318] I think what has happened is we've weakened those.

[319] We've weakened the family in America.

[320] We've weakened some of the things we ask or demand young people to do or give them the opportunity to be a part of certain structured things that I think help.

[321] You know, it was funny.

[322] I entered the Army in the 1970s.

[323] They came out of West Point.

[324] The Army was still struggling after post -Vietnam.

[325] And some of the best senior sergeants, non -commission officers I ever worked with, sergeant's major, had come from these.

[326] really terrible backgrounds.

[327] I mean, single family or no parents and missed no opportunity, but they'd come into the army and the army had put in front of them a set of values, pretty admirable values.

[328] And they'd looked at that and they'd said, okay, I accept that.

[329] And they embraced them.

[330] And in some ways, they embraced them better than the officer corps came out of colleges who was a little more nuanced and thought through.

[331] These guys and gals just literally said, okay that's right that's wrong and when you were serving with them it was it was amazing sometimes we'd be hand wringing over what we should do and one of these people would look at you and go hey there's a right and wrong here what are we talking about and they were always right and so when it comes back i think we owe young people the experience we learn i think we learn through experience we don't learn through civics class on government works we don't we learn through things we do.

[332] And so if we can give young people the opportunity to be part of a team where they've got to subordinate some of their uniqueness, they've got to sometimes shut up and row because that's how society, all of us have to spend part of our time doing that.

[333] They have to respect other people.

[334] They have to live by a set of values that gives everybody else their opportunity to succeed as well.

[335] Then I think what you do is you create an opportunity.

[336] for them to learn, I call it citizenship, but learn the way to fit in that gives them a much greater opportunity to be successful.

[337] Yeah, okay, so that's, see, that, that's real interesting to me because one of the things I learned when I was reading Friedrich Nietzsche in particular, is he was a great critic of Christianity, but also a great admirer of the Catholic Church.

[338] And one of the things he said about Catholicism was that over the centuries of its unfolding, that it required all of its practitioners to adopt a particular disciplined ethos and to explain the world within the confines of a single coherent system and then also to act that out.

[339] And so Nietzsche was very interested in the development of, let's call it, full individuality.

[340] But he also knew that the pathway to individuality was through the rigors of a disciplinary structure.

[341] And I think this is something our society hasn't discussed.

[342] well, because it's useful for us as people who believe in individual sovereignty to concentrate on individual uniqueness, but it's naive of us to fail to understand that part of that unique individuality is developed as a consequence of subordination to some disciplinary structure, right?

[343] Before you can become full -fledged, you have to become something, and it might be something narrow, right?

[344] You have to pick a path of some sort of commitment.

[345] to it, whatever that path is.

[346] And I've been telling young people, especially in my lectures, that if they're lost, they need to commit to something, even if they don't know what that optimal something should be.

[347] And they have to lose themselves in it to some degree.

[348] And that seems to go against that individualist ethos, but it's actually a precursor to it.

[349] You know, you say that, and it strikes a personal cord with me. I entered the army at age 17, and I still fold my underwear and my drawers, even though there's probably no great reason for that.

[350] But many of the things they taught me gave me a personal discipline that kept me remembering who I am.

[351] And when I left the service, there was a fair amount of notoriety about the Rolling Stone article and whatnot.

[352] It was a personal failure.

[353] But what I had was I had a sense of who I was.

[354] And I kept doing many of the things that I had done before because it reassured me that some of the things, the good habits that I had, some of the good values I believed in, I don't suddenly throw those away because they help define me. The cause I'm involved with now is the Service Year Alliance, and that's a movement to give every young American a year of civilian national service experience paid.

[355] And so it's not limited to upper middle class families who can support their child with a gap year.

[356] But it's to give people a year at health care, education, conservation, whatever they want to do as part of a team, hopefully working with people not from their zip code, and they've got to subordinate themselves to a bigger cause.

[357] They may not love what they're doing, but I would argue that a decade or two decades later, they'll go, yeah, that was good for me. That's that opportunity to be engaged in a disciplinary process.

[358] Yes, sir.

[359] And, you know, we tend to think of disciplinary processes is only composed of limitations.

[360] And so as antithetical to an optimal freedom, but it is much more appropriate to consider them as preconditions to the kind of self -mastery that enables you to have some freedom.

[361] Okay, so that sounds like a variant of the Peace Corps idea to some degree.

[362] And so where is that plan in terms of implementation?

[363] Yeah.

[364] The Peace Corps is part of it.

[365] It's a subset of it.

[366] And AmeriCorps, City, Year, all the different things you probably to teach for America.

[367] They're all part of this.

[368] And the idea is the Service Year Alliance, we're now pushing to get legislation to increase the Serve America Act, which went in in 1997.

[369] So there are programs in the United States for about 200 ,000 young people a year now, not counting the military.

[370] But we have 4 million young people in every cohort.

[371] So the reality is we've got to expand this so that every young person possible gets that opportunity.

[372] to do a year of that experience before college or if they're not going college before they go.

[373] You know, we've had some good political support.

[374] Our strongest political supporter, John McCain, unfortunately passed last year.

[375] We are working the hill.

[376] It's a non -political cause.

[377] So we're trying to work both sides and let people come together in consensus.

[378] But people have been distracted, so we've still got a lot of work.

[379] But you say it's at the point already where it's being implemented, it is being implemented.

[380] for about 200 ,000 young people a year?

[381] Yes, yes, sir.

[382] And they vote at three times the rate of people who don't have a year of service later in their lives.

[383] Oh, yeah, so that's, okay.

[384] So how do young people go about applying for this now and finding out about it?

[385] The easiest way is to get on the Service Year Alliance website.

[386] Cisco Corporation paid for and created a great platform so young people and their parents can go on.

[387] They can literally shop for the kind of experience that would be good for them.

[388] they can connect with people who are doing or have done that experience.

[389] Parents can get comfortable that their young person will be safe and whatnot.

[390] And so we can match opportunities with desires.

[391] Okay, so one of the things I should do is get the URL for that so that I can put it in the video description so that people have a quick link.

[392] I would love to send that to you.

[393] Yeah, well, if you can send me, whatever URLs would be useful to put in the video description to allow people to further investigate the sorts of things that we're talking about.

[394] Absolutely.

[395] So, you know, we've been working on this program, and maybe this is a discussion we could have offline, but I'll bring it up quickly.

[396] I have this program called future authoring that helps people, young people, but people of any age really develop a vision for the future, and then to derive an implementable plan for that.

[397] And so the idea is for them, first of all, to decide what the values that they wish to serve are.

[398] And we talk to them about thinking about their family and about their community and about their employment.

[399] choices and their education and their self -care mentally and physically and their productive use of time outside of work and then ask people to contemplate what their life could be like three to five years down the road in the future so that they build themselves a vision of who they could be and what their life could be then we have them write the reverse which is well what would your life be like if you let everything disintegrate around you because your bad habits took up took the upper hand and then we have them write out an implementable plan And we've got good data from three different educational institutes and fairly high numbers showing that just spending even as little as an hour on that increases the probability that kids will stay in university by 35%.

[400] And so it'd be interesting to think about, it might be interesting to have a conversation about how that might be integrated with this youth development program.

[401] Because people need to take the time to articulate out something like a vision for their life.

[402] Exactly.

[403] And they need to believe it's attainable.

[404] Yes.

[405] Or they might even just have to believe that even failing in the service of a noble goal constitutes a form of success that's much more disdainable.

[406] desirable than merely doing nothing and staying nihilistic.

[407] That's right.

[408] I had my course at Yale one year, write their obituary.

[409] Uh -huh.

[410] And they're 20 to 30 years old, and I said, write your obituary, be honest, but also be ambitious.

[411] Right.

[412] And so how did they respond to that?

[413] They were pretty ambitious, but it was interesting because then we said, walk back, okay, here's what you wanted to have done.

[414] Are you on the road to do in that?

[415] What's it going to demand for you?

[416] Are you willing to make the tradeoffs or whatever, depending on the point?

[417] on what they were trying to do.

[418] Yes, exactly.

[419] It was thoughtful.

[420] Yeah, yeah.

[421] Well, that's the same sort of thing that we thought about this in some sense as a modified business plan, right?

[422] Because there's also evidence, for example, that this is a really interesting line of research.

[423] There's evidence, and it's very relevant to leadership.

[424] So imagine that you had two cohorts of people within your organizational structure, and you wanted to increase their productivity and job satisfaction.

[425] And one, let's say you had three.

[426] One cohort, you just left to their own devices.

[427] The second cohort, you asked to formulate a vision for how they were going to be better employees and to write that down.

[428] And the third cohort, you said, no, formulate a vision and plan for how you would have a more, a richer and more engaging and productive life.

[429] So make a life plan.

[430] And then you set those cohorts head to head and look at productivity over a one -year period.

[431] what you find is, and the studies now have, the cumulative studies are of more than 25 ,000 people.

[432] You get a 10 % productivity increment in the group that you have developed a personal vision and no improvement whatsoever in the group that only specifies corporate goals.

[433] You know, it makes so much sense.

[434] And the young people I work with today, they spend more time talking about the sort of whole life idea.

[435] And so the idea that they can put all those pieces together and be intentional about it, That's the term I try to use with them.

[436] You're going to get where you try to go where you're going to get close to there.

[437] But if you don't try to get somewhere, it's going to be luck.

[438] Yeah, well, the probability that you're going to hit a target that you don't specify or aim at is extremely low.

[439] And, you know, the funny thing, too, is it's not just a target.

[440] It's like a, it's like sending an anti -missile missile missile upwards because the target moves.

[441] That's the thing.

[442] You know, you think, well, what should I do with my life?

[443] And the answer is, well, I don't exactly know because it's so complicated and it changes.

[444] it's like yeah but that doesn't mean you can sit on your laurels what it means is that you should aim at something and move forward and as you move forward you can adjust your aim and as you move forward you learn what you need to adjust your aim so it doesn't really matter if your initial plan is 100 % accurate it's not going to be but you need that vision and so yeah I love that that's one of the great things that we found in the book for we we profiled Coco Chanel and she was an orphan at a young age in rural France And she comes up and she's opportunistic, but she's always looking forward.

[445] She's looking for opportunities.

[446] She's acting on that.

[447] There was no set path for her life.

[448] There was no predictability that she would be successful.

[449] But she was constantly adapting to what happened and being pretty aggressively opportunistic.

[450] Yeah.

[451] So that's that interesting paradox of both having a vision and being able to move and being able to dance on your feet when necessary.

[452] You need to be allied with the proper higher order principles.

[453] which is, you know, that's what the civics classes and humanities in the universities were supposed to help instill in people, was that ability to develop an affinity with large -scale principles.

[454] And the same thing with religious education, for that matter, which is, I suppose, one of the things that was motivating for Luther King, because he was educated but also had his feet well planted on a firm religious foundation.

[455] so without that it's very difficult for people to have the moral fortitude to move forward we also found that reinforcement's very important certain things like the catholic church or like the military where every day you do certain things in the montgomery bus boycott of 1955 to 56 you had 382 days when the african -american population of montgomery alabama is trying to force integration of public transportation and to do that they boycott the buses, which meant that every day African -Americans had to walk to work or a carpool.

[456] So every day they had to take an act that reaffirmed their commitment to the boycott.

[457] And it wasn't just once a month, oh, yeah, I still support it.

[458] You had to do it every day.

[459] And what they found is psychologically that strengthened their commitment to it.

[460] Yeah, right.

[461] Well, that's a continual process of evident sacrifices, right?

[462] You need to make sacrifices in order to move ahead.

[463] and that does in fact foster your commitment because if something's worth doing it means it's worth giving up other things for which is really it's almost like the definition of worth doing right because you can't do everything at the same time and so that that's that's part of the development of the sacrificial motif that emerges so early in human in what in human interactions with with with well with divinity or with higher order purpose you have to make the right sacrifices and And if the end is worth attaining, if the end is worth pursuing, then the sacrifices are worth making.

[464] And there's a nobility that goes along with making that sacrifice, too, and a discipline.

[465] Now, you've seen young people inducted into the armed forces over a very long period of time.

[466] And what characterological transformations for better or worse do you see as attendant upon that process?

[467] And of that, what's necessary?

[468] Because having kids do this year of services, it's kind of got that, it's got a bit of a military feel to it, right?

[469] You pull them out of their families, you put them in a foreign situation or in a strange situation for them.

[470] There's a disciplinary routine that's associated with it.

[471] What have you observed as the consequence of that personally and among the people that you've observed?

[472] Sure.

[473] Let me start at a point down and I'll back it to it.

[474] When a soldier's wounded on the battlefield and they were evacuated to a first aid station and then up to the chain, as soon as they're able, the first thing they ask about is their comrades.

[475] How are their comrades doing?

[476] And they desperately want to be back with their comrades, even though they're wounded.

[477] Because what's happened is they formed this family atmosphere, this commitment, this sense of, I'm a member of this team.

[478] And that membership is very, very important to them.

[479] And as they get further away, and one of the reasons why wounded veterans have a tough time is they come back and although we're nice to them in the U .S., we've broken the umbilical cord with their family.

[480] And unless they've got a strong family base back in the U .S., which takes them, and even then it can be challenging.

[481] And so what the military does is when you first come in, they call it soldierization, they cut your hair, they change your clothes, they make you go by a rank in a name.

[482] they change a lot of overt behaviors because they know that you force behavioral change and attitudinal change comes after that.

[483] You start to believe cognitive dissonance kicks in.

[484] And so you start to think of yourself as a soldier.

[485] And as you start to think of yourself as a soldier or a Marine or whatever, you start to adopt those values.

[486] You start to say, well, soldiers don't do this.

[487] Or soldiers do do this.

[488] I don't put my hands in my pockets.

[489] I don't, you know, whatever it is.

[490] and you start to identify with those behaviors and values and they become very, very important to you.

[491] And so what the military is able to do is pull you into that.

[492] Now, they've got to show a purpose to it.

[493] I mean, at the very beginning, people go, well, why do I have to have my hair cut?

[494] The military's got to show a purpose to it.

[495] But as they do, and the purposes of discipline and cleanliness and all the different kinds of things become evident, then people begin to believe in them and they begin to self -revelling.

[496] identify with those values.

[497] One of the hardest things for someone leaving the military is to stop self -identifying as a soldier.

[498] You know, you say, well, who are you?

[499] I'm a soldier.

[500] And that's comforting.

[501] It's reaffirming.

[502] And so, and it's, it's not just what people think of you.

[503] It's how you think of yourself.

[504] And so.

[505] Yeah, so you have it, well, you have an identity that's personal.

[506] And then you share that with people that you've gone through difficult and demanding experiences with.

[507] And so it broadens, it develops you as an individual, but broadens out your commitment past you to those who are immediately around you and then at a more abstract level to the military structure and then the political structure itself.

[508] So it means your ensconced, your identity is ensconced in multiple levels at the same time.

[509] And that's very reassuring and also very purposeful.

[510] I mean, people absolutely need this, you know.

[511] I've been thinking that part of the problem that we have with regards to purposeless right now is it's partly a consequence of over -emphasis on the individual and partly a consequence, I would say, of lack of discipline because the optimized individual is working in a way that's useful for him or her, but also for their family and for their community all simultaneously.

[512] And so you can build in the idea of social obligation and citizenship into the idea of optimal individuality.

[513] And I don't think that we've articulated that particularly well with our concentration on atomized individuality.

[514] I think we've actually made it much, much worse than it should be because we focus on the rights of the citizen, for example, but we don't really talk about the responsibilities.

[515] Yes, yes, that's exactly.

[516] You know, I'll tell you something that's really interesting.

[517] So I've gone and talked at about 115 cities over the last year to about 250 ,000 people.

[518] And every time, every single time I talk about the relationship between responsibility and meaning, as opposed to the relationship between rights and meaning, because we've had lots of conversation about rights.

[519] Every time I talk about the relationship between responsibility and meaning, the audiences fall dead silent.

[520] Because that's something that we haven't articulated well over the last 50 years.

[521] and I think young people in particular are really dying on the vine because of it.

[522] Because most of the meaning that you're going to get in your life is a consequence of taking on responsibility.

[523] You take a great sense of self -worth.

[524] When someone says, thank you for serving, thank you for doing something selfless, whatever it is for society, there's this tremendous sense of reinforcement for the person.

[525] So we don't do it just for the good for society.

[526] We do it because it makes us feel better.

[527] And young people who never get that opportunity, they never get thanked for what they do because they've never been asked to do anything.

[528] Well, and I think it's very difficult to see yourself as useful to yourself if you don't see yourself as first as useful to other people.

[529] Because that's the validation of that sense of utility and worth.

[530] Yeah, and that's when we start getting into metrics like money or other things, which are sort of false metrics of success.

[531] Okay, so let's ask another question here.

[532] So, all right.

[533] So you're working hard on this, what did you call it again?

[534] I'm sorry, it's a service year alliance.

[535] Service year alliance, okay, and hopefully that's going to be a bipartisan push.

[536] And it's something that's akin in some sense to a short apprenticeship.

[537] And you're hoping to expand that so that that's available to young people in general.

[538] To every young person in America, we'd like to have that realistic opportunity to do a year of pay.

[539] service.

[540] What do you see as the challenges associated with expanding that?

[541] Because a year isn't very long either, right?

[542] It's something that has to be set up really quickly for people and they have to be pushed into it or put into it and get off the ground very rapidly.

[543] So what are the challenges that stand in your way with regards to developing and expanding this program?

[544] the programs that have been good so far peace corps city year america teach for america have all learned through experience they've got to have a training program at the beginning they've got to have a very structured system to make sure that the quality of what people do is of value because if you put people out there and it's waste of time right so they've learned that you can't just throw something together and then call young people forward and do that even if you were to have funding so that's sort of step one, you've got to create the opportunities in a disciplined way.

[545] I think a common experience at the beginning of three or four weeks for every young person to go through some kind of thing before they go out to their specific service would be very valuable.

[546] And I think they'd all talk about it later in life.

[547] Remember when we went to Kansas and we all went through this orientation training, they'd laugh about it.

[548] Right, a collective experience.

[549] But that's logistics.

[550] That's right.

[551] That would be a challenge.

[552] The biggest thing that's surprising is the demand among young people for this program is huge.

[553] In fact, it's about 10 times greater than the number of opportunities we have.

[554] The holdup is our generation, my generation.

[555] For some reason, we either won't fund it, we won't work on it because my generation, to be honest, that a good percentage of us didn't serve, a smaller percentage did.

[556] So at the dinner table, they don't talk about when they served in the Peace Corps, when they did this.

[557] I mean, some families do, but it's not common.

[558] And the professional military is actually weakened a little bit because it tends to be a smaller group so we don't have that tradition where my uncle my aunt my grandfather grandmother all did that and so we've got to help bring it back well so it's really interesting that you've got 10 times the applicants because that's that that implies an applicant pool of about two million which is already about half the population that you are hoping to serve i don't think we will have a bit of problem with applicants because I think that will even go up as at the lunch table if they start talking about where are you going to serve or as employers say where did you do your year of national service when you apply and if you've got this dead silence or if a young person is running for Congress gets up on a stage and says I should be and someone says well where did you serve and if there's dead silence then other ambitious young people are going to go up I got to think about that And that may be, you know, whatever it takes.

[559] So, okay, so what's the evidence that programs like Peace Corps, for example, or teach for America?

[560] What's the evidence that those programs are actually having their desired impact?

[561] Because, like, one of the rules for social science investigators is, if they're canny and intelligent, is never assume that your stupid intervention is going to have the positive results that you assume, right?

[562] Or that you are hoping for.

[563] You have to measure that.

[564] So when you look at people who've gone through the Peace Corps or Teach for America or similar programs, what's the evidence that the programs are actually producing the results that are hopeful?

[565] Yeah, it's a great question.

[566] And the first thing is we do a lot of studies on this, but you have to understand what it is you're trying to get out of it.

[567] If you say Teach for America is to make education in America better right now, there's an argument that says, no, bringing people in for two years of teaching, isn't professional teachers, so they're not as good.

[568] I would disagree, but there's an argument.

[569] If you say conservation, building trails, or health care, we can hire people to do it, and it's cheaper.

[570] I would argue that's not what we're looking for.

[571] What we're looking for in this program is alumni.

[572] We're looking for people who come out of the Peace Corps or out of the Teach for America experience.

[573] Teach for America alumni tend to go into education at an extraordinary rate.

[574] As you know, getting into Teach for America is harder than getting into Yale University, you know, in terms of, it's a small program.

[575] It's very elite.

[576] And that's not a bad thing, but it means not many people are getting the opportunity to do it.

[577] And yet that's not a cohort that would automatically be involved in education later in life.

[578] And yet they are.

[579] That experience seems to bring them to it.

[580] I mentioned earlier in our discussion that people who have done a year of service vote at three times the rate of people who have not.

[581] They volunteer at higher rate.

[582] So it's the real measure, and getting the right metric for this as hard is, how do you measure better citizens?

[583] Yeah, well, you put your finger on something of absolutely crucial importance there, is that if you're going to do an outcome study, you have to make sure you get your metrics right, and that's a deadly difficult thing, because the question is, well, what is it that you're trying to produce?

[584] And, you know, what's implied in the way that you formulated your answers is that you're trying to produce citizens.

[585] Exactly.

[586] Yeah, and, you know, it's so interesting because generally the way that we construe people in our society now isn't as citizens, but as something approximating consumers.

[587] That's the most common adjective, you know, consumer confidence, or what is the consumer thinking now, or how is the consumer responding to the latest economic news?

[588] and it's a terrible replacement for the idea of citizen.

[589] Because a citizen is the foundation of the state and someone who's bearing responsibility for the state rather than someone who's merely living off the benefits of the state.

[590] That's it.

[591] I mean, if you think the state is just a covenant between a bunch of people to be a state, to be a nation, whatever, and the responsibilities of mutual security or raising barns or volunteer fire departments, departments, which used to be so critical, have weakened a bit as we've professionalized a lot of things.

[592] And I think that if people feel that responsibility, I sometimes talk about marriage.

[593] I'm not an expert in marriage.

[594] I've been married all of once for 42 years.

[595] But if you go back to the age of out on the frontier, a man and a woman get married and they have a family, they need each other.

[596] You know, every relationship goes up and down.

[597] You know, you go through periods when you're deeply in love and periods when you're irritated.

[598] But if there's a sine you that binds you, it's a combined responsibility for the children or the farm.

[599] You can't survive alone.

[600] I think that helps keep you focused during more difficult periods.

[601] Yeah, well, that covenant idea is exactly right, I think, is that, you know, I was talking to a divinity professor at Cambridge University and we were talking about, This is sort of relevant, I suppose, to the discussion of Martin Luther King, too.

[602] We're talking about the Exodus narrative, which of course was used as a, what would you call it, a metaphorical restatement of the problem of the slaves in the United States.

[603] And so the Exodus narrative is often read as escape from tyranny into freedom, something like that.

[604] But it's not, hey, it's escape from involuntary covenant.

[605] that's the tyranny, into something approximating a voluntary covenant, which is what's arranged with Yahweh in the desert.

[606] So there's no chaos and directionlessness, or that's portrayed as the desert.

[607] And the solution to that is to enter into a new covenant.

[608] And that covenant is something like a long -term promise.

[609] And that's also what you see in marriage.

[610] And the advantage to that is that the disadvantage is that it constrains you, right?

[611] And so that's why people think about this as burdensome duty.

[612] but the advantage is that it gives you direction and shelters you from excess uncertainty and doubt.

[613] And the commitment that goes along with marriage is something that should be regarded as aspirational.

[614] It's right, look, we know this is going to be difficult and we know that this is limiting your possibilities, like limiting your possibilities of mate choice down to one person.

[615] But you commit yourself to it And in that commitment and that adoption of that covenantal arrangement, that's where you find the meaning that's associated with responsibility.

[616] We're not doing a good job of communicating those ideas.

[617] No, because we tend to think too much of responsibility as only limiting as you put it.

[618] When I was in the Ranger Regiment, we had this creed, sixth standard creed, and one line says, I'll never even fall in common or I had to fall into the hands of the enemy.

[619] and every day we recited this creed and every ranger is promising no matter what it costs them, i .e. to go out in a bullet -strap street to pick up a fallen comrade, even the cost in their life, they're going to do it.

[620] And you think about the power of that.

[621] I'm going to give up my life for someone without worrying about it, without thinking around, I'm just going to do it.

[622] And then you turn it around and you say every day, 22 other rangers are making a commitment to do that for me. And then you go, wow, the power of that.

[623] I got 2 ,200 people who have promised to do that for me. Now the value of that shared responsibility becomes pretty important.

[624] You know, when I've talked to conservatives, you know, about what they have to offer to young people.

[625] And it's, in my life, at least, it's the first time I've really seen a situation where conservatives have something to sell to young people that's sellable.

[626] And I really do think it is the issue.

[627] It is the idea of responsibility and it's also that that's where young people did that's where young people all people discover their possibility and their capability is by taking on a heavy load the heavier the better insofar as you could manage it because that's what forces self -revelation it's not it's not navel gazing and it's not looking inside in a contemplative manner although that sort of thing can be useful it's trying to pick up something heavy and worthwhile and seeing how you can manage that and stagger forth under the load.

[628] That's how you discover who you are.

[629] And that's worth discovering because there's a lot more to you than you think.

[630] Yeah, I used to have a technique that I just sort of stumbled upon when I was leading people.

[631] You'd be in a room and you'd look at somebody and they'd be a tough task and you'd say, Jordan, can you handle that?

[632] And then you don't even really wait for their response.

[633] You'd just say, I know you got it.

[634] I got it.

[635] Even if they don't think they got it.

[636] And they go, holy smoke, the confidence you've shown in them and you didn't do 20 questions, can you do this?

[637] Are you sure?

[638] You just go, I trust you.

[639] Do it.

[640] It's amazing the effect it has on them.

[641] Yeah, that is some, there's faith in that, right?

[642] I have faith that you can pull through to do this.

[643] It's like extending your hand in trust.

[644] So, you know, if you're a young, really young person, you trust people because you're naive.

[645] And then you get burned and you get betrayed and you get cynical and you think, well, I shouldn't trust people, but that's no good, because then you can't trust people and you can't work with them.

[646] And so then maybe you go beyond that cynicism and you start to extend trust as a manifestation of courage.

[647] It's like, I'm going to interact with you.

[648] I'm going to give you an opportunity or responsibility.

[649] And I'm going to trust that the best in you is going to respond to that.

[650] And then that's an invitation for that part of the person to come forward.

[651] And it really works.

[652] And I do think that that's a key element of leadership is to take the risk of manifesting that trust.

[653] Absolutely.

[654] It takes a little courage, but it is the most important thing, I think.

[655] Yeah, well, it seems that way because it calls forth, if there's some best to be called forth from a person, that's the right way to do it.

[656] Yeah, there usually is.

[657] There are a few people who test the hypothesis, but for the most part, there is.

[658] Yeah, that's right.

[659] So that's right.

[660] In the bulk, in the vast majority of situations, there is.

[661] isn't a more effective, there isn't a more effective process.

[662] Okay, so what needs to be done strategically in your estimation in order for people to get behind the youth service programs that you're attempting to, to foster?

[663] Yeah, I think we need some high -profile people talking about it in just the way our conversation has been.

[664] The idea that citizenship in America is sacred.

[665] It defines the success or failure of any state, whether the citizens live up to it, and the sense of responsibility to that.

[666] And it's going to take people with profile to do that, because young people, again, they look to people with more experience and how they should react to that.

[667] We also need to build in reinforcements for that.

[668] If people do years of service, they should get preferential admission to universities or to jobs.

[669] There should be education benefits for that.

[670] Right.

[671] So that should be part of the process of recognized accreditation for competence and service.

[672] Yeah, and then recognition.

[673] We thank veterans for their service.

[674] We ought to thank everyone who does some kind of service and do it pretty publicly.

[675] You know, do it in a way that, hey, board the airplane first.

[676] You know, when you're waiting at the gate, those people who are doing national service, you get on first.

[677] Right.

[678] So you get some status along with your responsibility, which isn't the same as having privilege.

[679] That's right.

[680] Exactly.

[681] That's right.

[682] It's a deserved reward.

[683] And that's how you segregate it from unearned.

[684] privilege.

[685] You ever see how somebody responds who never gets that kind of status, never gets that kind of recognition?

[686] They beam.

[687] Right.

[688] Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely.

[689] Well, that's a fundamental human motivation.

[690] And I do think it's also the fundamental human motivation is to respond extraordinarily positively to the granting of status when it feels like you've earned it.

[691] Right.

[692] All those things have to be there because otherwise it's false and and and and makes you cynical and that's why when when president obama a few years ago said we'd like to make community college free for everybody my wife and i watching tv and she finished the sentence she says as soon as you finish your year of service because when you've done something right right right then you feel like you deserve it then it's yeah otherwise you're likely to throw it away too just because because you feel like you don't deserve it right it's it's a moral burden to gain a gift that you haven't deserved that's right yeah so okay so look we're running up on 10 o 'clock and there was a couple more questions I wanted to ask you so we should decide if we want to continue how much longer do you want to keep talking to me or how much longer can you could we do 10 more minutes okay okay let's do that so yeah I I would like to ask you for your opinions about the fundamental this is a terrible topic for 10 minutes but when you look forward now five years into the future what do you see is the fundamental challenges that are going to be facing the U .S. and the West.

[693] What's your take on the geopolitical situation, broadly speaking?

[694] Where should we be awake?

[695] Yeah, I think we should be awake to the rise of authoritarianism.

[696] And what we saw a rise in the 1930s, and then we saw the Cold War, and we saw this belief that we were moving toward liberal democracy, and there was a lot of data that says we were.

[697] Now we're not.

[698] And if you look around the world, elections in various places, because not all dictators seize power, many are elected to power.

[699] We're seeing a real move to that.

[700] And I think there are lots of reasons for it.

[701] As societies get under pressure, people sort of banned tribally, sometimes it's nationalism, sometimes it's racial.

[702] Leaders populists grab that.

[703] And social media, which I thought, if you'd ask me this question 20 years, ago, I'd have said that the information technology would improve democracy.

[704] It would allow fresh air and light to get on things.

[705] It actually hasn't done that.

[706] It has allowed people to utilize them to create this rise of authoritarianism.

[707] And to me, that's very frightening, because authoritarian countries have a tendency to take zigs and zags.

[708] And of course, historically, they go to war much more than other people.

[709] So I think the nearest, term, the next decade and a half, maybe two decades, that's what we're going to have to worry about.

[710] And it's going to make the world more dangerous militarily.

[711] It's also going to pull at some of these things that we built for the global economy because the global economy is so connected now.

[712] We can't unconnected.

[713] And so that's going to create some strange dynamics.

[714] We're going to have this connected economies, but yet we're going to have the rise of these nations with people pulling in strange directions.

[715] We're going to have to figure out where we as a nation fit, where our values fit, what we are going to trumpet in the world, what we are going to represent the world.

[716] If we don't do that, I think we are going to run into real challenges.

[717] Yeah, well, you know, we can tangle this back into the discussion we already had, too, because it seems to me I've thought about authoritarian structures for a very long period of time, and it seems to me that the most effective defense against the rise of authoritarian structures is to make stronger and stronger individuals.

[718] And, you know, I think that's the great secret of the West, at least to some degree, is that our states have been powerful because they function well.

[719] But the reason that they're powerful is because we have done a good job of emphasizing the autonomy and sovereignty and responsibility and rights of the individuals.

[720] And I think the more that we can do that, which is why it's so interesting to me to hear about the youth development programs, for example, that you're championing, is the more responsible individuals we have in the world, not only in the West, that greater the possibility that we'll be able to resist authoritarian tendencies and also to resist them, let's say, sociopolitically and militarily as well.

[721] Because we'll be up for the challenge.

[722] That'd be the hope anyways.

[723] Well, as we know, Tocqueville wrote, you know, if you're not an educated populist electorate, then democracy's not going to work.

[724] Right, which is why you need to make citizens and not consumers.

[725] Exactly.

[726] Okay, okay.

[727] So, all right, so you're concerned about the rise of authoritarianism.

[728] And then what about your ambitions?

[729] What's on your purview for the next, let's say, three to five years?

[730] What do you want to do and what do you see happening with yourself?

[731] Yeah, I'm 64 -year -old.

[732] old.

[733] So what I do now is I have this organization we created McChrystal Group, got about 100 people now and we work with organizations to be better.

[734] I really like that.

[735] I like developing the young people in our organization.

[736] I like working with clients to make their organizations function better.

[737] That's sort of the personal level.

[738] On a broader level, I really want to get a national conversation on leadership started.

[739] I don't see myself, you know, going into elected office.

[740] or appointed office or anything like that.

[741] But I would like to foster a national conversation where people talk about like what we've just talked about.

[742] And people don't scream at each other, but people ask difficult questions of each other.

[743] And what am I doing?

[744] Leaders myth and reality was an attempt to start that.

[745] If we can foster that, then I think that that would be a contribution.

[746] I would take, I mean, part of this is selfish.

[747] I would take great pride from being part of force.

[748] that conversation.

[749] Okay, okay.

[750] Yeah, well, if there's anything that I could do to facilitate that, I'd be more than happy to participate because it's exactly aligned with what I think I'm doing with my lecture series and my books and so on.

[751] Oh, I know you are.

[752] And I do think it's of absolutely crucial importance to work on that sense of, well, reinstallation of community meaning and a re -instantiation of fundamental values.

[753] It's very important, and people are crying out for it in a mass manner.

[754] And so, all right, all right.

[755] So, all right, well, so your book is Leaders, Myth, and Reality.

[756] It's published by Sentinel.

[757] That's an offshoot of Penguin Random House, a subordinate company from Penguin Random House.

[758] You're going to send me the URL so that people can make, contact with the organizations that you've described.

[759] Is there anything that you would like to ask the viewers or listeners to do that would support you in your endeavor to move the youth citizenship programs forward?

[760] Yeah.

[761] Apart from becoming aware of them.

[762] That's the first one.

[763] I think this is going to have to be demand.

[764] We are going to have to first help create opportunities for this, but second, we're going to have to demand them.

[765] If teachers and schools aren't talking about this, if employers aren't asking people if they've done a year of service and giving value to that, if universities aren't giving credit for the fact that you've done this, because this is pretty important life experience you would bring to a university.

[766] And then finally, of our politicians, ask them, why don't we have this?

[767] Because our politicians will respond to what we ask for.

[768] Okay.

[769] You know, I think that's key.

[770] Right, right.

[771] And so, well, so that's a marketing case.

[772] campaign to some degree marketing and communication campaign so that's correct all right all right well look it was a great pleasure and privilege speaking with you and uh i'd encourage people who are watching and listening to pick up your book leaders myth and reality and to start what thinking about and participating in this conversation to start thinking about the sort of future that we want to craft collectively and individually so that we can do things properly over the next 10 years and keep things oriented in the manner that thoughtful and wise people might want them to be oriented.

[773] Thanks very much for agreeing to speak with me, and I hope we get a chance to talk again in the future.

[774] I look forward to it.

[775] I really appreciate you having me on, and I really enjoyed hearing your thoughts.

[776] Good to see you.

[777] Thank you, sir.

[778] Bye -bye.

[779] Take care.

[780] Consider picking up General McChrystal's book, Leaders, Myths in Reality, and Dad's Book, Twelve Rules for Life and Antidote to Chaos.

[781] These are both widely available for sale in text, e -book, and audiobook format wherever you buy books.

[782] Next week, we'll broadcast a 12 Rules for Life lecture I gave at the Keller Auditorium in Portland, Oregon on June 25, 2018.

[783] I tried to account for the sudden and surprising popularity of long -form intellectual broadcasts, discussing the 5 ,000 -plus people that came out in Vancouver to listen to Sam Harris and I, discussed science and values and religion and atheism, noting that the older communication technologies, TV, newspapers, radio, may have given us the impression that we're much less intelligent and attentively engaged than we actually are.

[784] I also discussed the role that biological temperament or personality plays in governing individual ability and interest, emphasizing the profound reality and extensive difference between people that such temperamental variability produces.

[785] Follow me on my YouTube channel, Jordan B. Peterson.

[786] on Twitter at Jordan B. Peterson, on Facebook at Dr. Jordan B. Peterson, and at Instagram at jordan