Transcription
I went to the University of San Diego.
You went to the University of San Diego. What did you take there?
I was an English major.
All right. So, you finished college and then what happened?
You're not going to ask me why I was an English major.
Why were you an English major?
I thought when he hears English major, he's going to say, "Wait a second. Here you are, this guy talking about machine guns and blowing things up. What in God's name are you going to go study English for?"
I have to say that that thought did pass through my mind. Okay. Uh, why was I an English major? I was an English major because, believe it or not, when you're in the SEAL teams, and especially when you're in in the officer position, you have to write and read all the time. So, when one of your troops does something and they deserve some kind of recognition for that, you have to write them an award. And if the award is written well, there's a much better chance that it'll actually that be given to the person that you're writing it for. You have to write evaluations for your troops. And the evaluations that you write is how your troops are judged so that they can be promoted. On top of that, if you want to go do a mission, you have to write a concept of operations, which is a document which is five, six, seven, eight pages long that you send up the chain of command that then they scour through and see if they're going to approve your mission or not.
You know, that's so insanely important. You know, I mean, one of the things I did a talk at Harvard four years ago and I pointed out two things to the students in the audience. One was that a tremendous amount of civilization and effort had gone into producing the institution that they were now part of and that everyone who was part of that institution was hoping that they would come there and learn everything they possibly could that was relevant and important and that they would be the best possible people they could be and they would go out in the world and do as much good as they possibly could. That was the essential mission of the enterprise and that was really the case and also that learning to write in particular was going to make them more powerful than they could imagine. And number of students came up to me afterwards and said I really wish someone would have said that to us when we first came here. And it's the writing part of that. I I kind of got obsessed with that when I was working as a professor and I'm working on a piece of software right now to help which will launch soon um to help people write because what I observed in my own career and it's so interest the parallelism is so interesting but not surprising is that nothing can stop you if you can write and it's for the reasons you just laid out. It's like when you write, you make a case for something, whatever it happens to be. And if you make the best case, well, then you win and you get whatever it is that you're aiming at. And so, you know, you said maybe that's why I didn't ask you why you went into English. I I guess that might have been the reason is that the utility of learning to write is so self-evident to me that it it could pass by without question. But it's also interesting to think about how it fits into this this broader well let's say at least partially military/strategic way of looking at things. You know, you you you describe the intense relationship between marshalling your arguments properly, getting everything in order on the page and making strategic progress truly in the military sense that those things are tied together very very precisely. And it's obviously your ability to communicate as well. That's that's well look what it's done. You have your podcast, you have your YouTube channel, you have your books which many of which you self-published. So that ability to communicate is it's I just can't understand why it's not presented especially not entirely but especially to adventurous well let's say young men we could say young people you're adventurous you want to make a mark is you bloody well better learn how to write because if you learn how to write well then you can think and you can communicate your thoughts. So, not only are you deadly strategically, you become extremely convincing and then you can go and do anything you want and no one will stop you. And that's never told to people. And I I I I don't really understand why. You know, you hear the pen is mightier than the sword, which is just a cliche unless it's fleshed out. But the reason you laid out the reasons perfectly.
Yeah.
You have to communicate what happened as well as having it had had it happen.
Right? So you you you already connected the dots, but obviously not only am I having to write and present my argument, I'm also having orders being issued to me which are written. You I'm sure you've heard the term rules of engagement. Well, rules of engagement is a 12page document that is in a bunch of legal ease. And I've got to translate that document to my troops, some of whom, you know, barely graduated high school. And so I've got to be able to do that. So I've got to be able to read and then write and be able to then communicate and and and talk to the team and brief them in a manner that they can actually understand what it is I'm talking about and what it is our mission is and why we're doing this mission. So that was why I decided to study English when I when I went to college and believe
So that was a conscious decision.
Absolutely. It was a conscious
And and with that end in mind that it was So tell tell me exactly what the decision was with regards to studying English. But did you know that because it's not, as you pointed out, it's not self-evidently the most practical of pursuits and not necessarily what you'd expect someone with a military orientation to pursue.
Right. Here's the here's the thought process. I want to be a good SEAL. The good SEALs that I see can communicate, they can write, and they can read. That's what I need to learn how to do. I need to learn how to do that better so that I can persuade my chain of command that we need to do this mission or we need this piece of gear or this guy over here needs to get an award or he needs to get promoted. All those things are done by being able to write and communicate properly.
Okay. So, so let's say you take the example of a seal who's got it all but this literacy. Okay. So what what happens to him compared to someone who has all those skills?
Well, if he can't if he can't write well and he's in charge of six guys and one of those guys works hard or does something that deserves to be recognized, this is the responsibility of that leader to write that person an award.
Okay? So he can't reward his he can't reward his his good workers, his good soldiers. You can give him a pat on the back, but a pat on the back isn't going to get him promoted. An award is actually worth some points towards your promotion. And the people that are on that board that are giving that reward,
They're never going to meet that leader and they're definitely not going to meet that guy. There's no there's no bias. It's based on this piece of paper that you hand in. You hand in this piece of paper, they read the piece of paper and they say award approved or award not approved.
Or you want to do a mission and you send that up the chain of command and it's the same thing. It gets to a certain point where they're just looking at it and reading and trying to decipher this pile of junk that you've put together. And by the way, if I'm in charge and Jordan sends me a concept of operations that doesn't make any sense, why would I possibly let you go out and execute an operation that I can't even understand what it is you're trying to do? So, it has a huge impact. It has a huge impact.
Okay. Well, I'm dwelling on this because it's it's upsetting to me. I would say that young people in particular aren't stringently instructed that the ability to that literacy makes them powerful in every way they can possibly imagine except the absolutely immediate. And so it's just sad to me that it's not sold in that manner. You want to be weak, stay illiterate. You want to be strong. It's like put yourself together physically. Fair enough, man. Get brave and street smart, but then you could add some literacy to that and you're unstoppable machine. So, I concur 100%. And you know, you said being literate makes you powerful. And throughout recent history, if we're trying to oppress someone, what we don't want them to be able to do is read or write or or articulate themselves.
Right? Well, we haven't even talked about reading. You know, we just talked about writing and and fair enough. So, but obviously you studied English, so you also read. And so, what's the advantage to that as far as you're concerned practically speaking?
Well, um, obviously there are so many lessons that you can pull out of books and you you can get to a point where nothing really surprises you because you've at least seen some indication of what can unfold through reading. So again, for me, it's very much focused on combat and war, but there's there's lessons that you learn and you say, "Oh, I I I've seen that before." There there's a book. It's there's a book called About Face, which I think that the last time you and I talked, you were I think you were writing the forward for for the Gulag. And I was about to write the forward to I don't know if that's your favorite book, but I I was lucky enough to be able to write the forward for my favorite book, which was re-released because I was talking about it all the time. And the book is called about the book is called About Face
And it's it's about a guy that was in the Korean War and then he was in the Vietnam War and his name is Colonel David Hackworth.
But I would read that book when I was on deployment. I would read open up that book anywhere and I would read two pages or three pages before I'd go to bed if I was in my bed that night. And and there were so many lessons that correlated to what I was actually going through. And a real obvious example was when he was in Vietnam. He's working with the South Vietnamese soldiers and therefore by proxy the South Vietnamese government. And guess what? They're all corrupt and they're not motivated and they don't have the right gear. And here we are in Iraq and we're working with Iraqi soldiers and therefore by proxy we're working with the Iraqi government and guess what? They're all corrupt and they're they're they're not well equipped. And how do you how did he deal with it? How do we deal with it? So there's an example of when you read, you can learn and you don't have to you don't have to go through the school of hard knocks. You don't have to get punched in the face repeatedly with things that turn out to be situations that other people have absolutely gone through. And the amount of the amount of the the the the level of capability increases so much by seeing something one single time. Well, if I see something one time, I I'm I'm infinitely better than if I'd never seen it before. So, if if it's like those, you know, those little puzzles, they give you a little puzzle, some kind of a mind bender, right? The mind benders only work on you one time. The riddle only works on you one time. Then you go, I know the answer to that. That's the answer. You know, you never get fooled by that again. So, just knowing just seeing it one time, you're infinitely better. So when you read enough, you're capturing all these lessons. And and you know what? It's I gotta say this. It's not just reading. It's not just reading. And and I learned this because as I started doing my podcast, and many of my podcasts are just me reading books, I I realized how to read more intently, even more intently than I did when I was going to college. and I was going to be, you know, writing a paper about a book and so I'd read it in a certain way. But you, even that reading was a little bit detached, a little bit detached cuz you're looking for a theme or you're looking for character development or or what have you. But when you read to learn about human nature and life, you you you detach less and you kind of put yourself in there and you experience it a little bit closer. And then when you take a step back, you go, "Oh, yeah. I I know what he was thinking right there because I was right there with him." And so there's a certain attitude, you kind of have to put yourself into the work and and really read it with that kind of uh intensity, if for lack of a better word.
Is it is it possible for a human being to read intensely? I guess because that's what I try and do. I get
Well, that's no different than than than acting intensely or playing intensely. Of course, you want to put the book on. You want to become that person. That can rattle you up, man. Especially if the person is thinking all sorts of things that you've never thought. I mean, I love reading for that reason. I could pick my peers, too, which I really loved. It's like, well, you know, I have these people around me, but then there's these people who who've lived before me and in different places, and I can set them up on my shelf. I can enter into their world, and I can benefit from everything they've thought. saturate myself with that person. It's and it's very disruptive especially if the person that you're reading has a mind that's more powerful and more well-developed than your own. I mean, Friedick Niches spun me around for about three years and I was reading Jung at the same time intensely and the same thing, you know, it it was very disruptive but unbelievably useful, unbelievably useful to try on other people like that and you get the benefit of their entire life distilled into their into their book. You know, it it's 30 years of work. I I read this one book called the neurosychology of anxiety which is a it's a great scientific work. I think it's the greatest neurosychological work of the last 50 years. It's very hard book. I think it has 1,800 references something like that. And this guy Jeffrey Gray, he actually read all those references and he understood them. And so it took me six months to read the book. But I got an entire education out of it. I got to experience in 6 months what it took him 30 years to learn. Like what a gift that is. It's it's it's unbelievable.