Leading at Massive Scale with co-host Devin Nash and guest General Christopher Hughes

Fix it. All right. So reintroduce yourselves. Let's go first. Chris. you heard my question they couldn't hear any answer to it i am very curious you're a retired u.s army general i looked up today because it's confusing to me why is it a lieutenant is lower in rank than a major But a lieutenant general is higher in rank than a major general. Can you make any sense of that for us as a part of your introduction?

okay so yeah thanks the first thing out of the box i'm going to say no i got a clue but uh yeah that that's always that's well i'm sure there's a very reason uh articulated and written response to that question somewhere because everything we do is in a book somewhere uh but i didn't pay that much attention to it it wasn't a life-saving issue so i didn't pay any attention to it but

Yes, I am a retired Major General, which is two stars, which is the easiest way to say it. And I've been retired now for just a little over three years and been out. uh in the civilian sector trying to understand how all these uh different aspects of our business world work uh now that i'm on this side of the fence and uh yes we are generals for life unless we screw it up, because we're still subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Military officers are by law to be apolitical.

We're supposed to continue to be that way in our old age in retirement. And we can really get into that one if you wanted to. And let's see, what else did you ask me? You asked me. Well, introduce yourself at this point. Give us a little short bio. Okay, short bio. Military brat. My dad was in the Air Force. He got out after Vietnam, went to school, became a doctor.

Ended up in a small town in Iowa. Lived here for about four years and went to college. I'm supporting my alma mater, so free advertising for a small school in Northwest Missouri State University. I was living in the parking lot in my 1972 Gremlin, and I met an ROTC instructor who happened to pass by and asked me what I was doing. I explained to him that I couldn't afford a dorm room, so I was sleeping in my car.

And he decided to take him under his wing, joined ROTC, got a two-year scholarship, finished school, went off and joined the Army and been around the world. 92 nations, six combat tours. Married, my college sweetheart, have three children. One went to Africa, saved the world. She's in D.C. now working for a large company. My boys both joined the Army. Both got out as one as a major, one as a captain. They, too, have traveled the world in Afghanistan and Macedonia and other places.

And I've retired in Iowa. And Ethan and I met through one of the companies that we both support. How sad, Ethan, is that? That's fantastic. And I think I would just add to that for context for people who didn't read maybe the preamble of the stream. that in the last part of his career, in his last post, Chris not only was responsible for Fort Knox, which is 49,000 soldiers under his command,

but also is responsible for all education, recruitment and education of U.S. Army officers. And that included both the high school and the college ROTC programs.

uh 36 000 college cadets under contract um at almost a thousand schools many hundreds of thousands of high school students considering armed armed forces as their future and he also i believe is responsible i may have this part wrong for the curriculum at the u.s war college is that right I was the vice chancellor slash provost of the Army University, which has all of the 114 schools in the Army under one accreditation.

umbrella. The only one that's not is the War College. Ah, okay. So I had it back. War College is a separate standalone accreditation because it is a master's program. So all the undergraduate programs. a different kind of master's program i had and then phd programs all belong to me got it and so the the two things that uh i thought would be most interesting to hear about from chris is

Number one, for those who are still pursuing their education, the potential to use the military as a path to that education. I thought we could talk about that. And then my real interest, in addition to that. is leading at massive scale. So when I had my corporate career at Amazon, I led a team of up to 800. Devin has run his own company, a team, I think, of about 35, if I recall correctly.

CLG was 100 and 150. Yeah. Okay. Bigger than 110 ish. 110. Nothing compared to the numbers. Yeah. But neither of us has even begun to touch the. 100,000 people or whatever the hell. The global scale. And so we'd love ultimately to hear more about that as well as lifelong education. of a general officer. But let me give Devin just a chance here to introduce himself. A lot of people here know him, and Devin has things he'd love to talk about as well. You know what the craziest thing about this is?

I went skydiving with the Golden Knights three days ago. And the Golden Knights are a division of competitive and performance for the U.S. Army.

uh they're one of our uh us army seattle recruiting is one of our clients at my agency novo and so i i just like this is kind of surreal because i'm just coming from that event which was unreal like i mean just like uh meeting some of the the discipline and the uh the the risk taking and the the sheer just like balls that those guys have it was it was awesome it was an epic trip uh i got thrown out of an airplane

by the army and it was amazing. So there's, are there not females on the golden Knights team now? Uh, not, not of the team that I met there, uh, there were on support staff. Okay. Just checking.

yeah yeah um but uh regardless it really is an honor to meet you my father served as a captain in the army um and uh i've been involved with them all my life in defense uh uh as a he was a defense contractor after that and um whole thing so um i got my start in god i haven't entered myself in so long i don't even know what i do man like uh hi i'm devon nash i guess i'm an entertainer slash like a person who

covers things that I think are interesting. I also run an agency called Novo, which is one of the top three agencies representing Twitch. and uh well we aor for twitch and amazon canada um and we manage influencers across twitch and youtube uh as well as other platforms increasingly uh before that i was in esports running a company called counter logic gaming

which at the time was one of the top esports teams in America, number two, I think. You wouldn't believe it now, but they were. We sold that company to Madison Square Garden. And before that, I worked for a team called Team Dignitas. And I've also just kind of run a brand, which I've kind of put aside for a little while right now because I'm having some spiritual conflicts with Twitch. But that's outside of the scope of this show. And that's me. That's it.

Hey, Devin, I just got to ask, you don't have a sibling named Kevin, do you? No, the wrestler? Keith? Yeah, I just want to see if you catch the reference on that.

i caught kevin kevin nash is a wrestler right yeah but keith what about keith no i don't know that one okay maybe one of your viewers might catch on that one it'll give away my my nerd stripe yeah so that's uh that's me um yeah it's just really cool to be here i mean i i've never i i've i've always been impressed by like the the sheer like I mean, it was just like, it came out right away when I jumped on this call. Chris immediately...

was like, why do you do what you do? What is your intent? What is your outcome with this? Why do you exist to do this? And I was like, what? I don't know if that's the army that I see a lot of those qualities in.

uh leaders in the in the military that just like ask you some like hardcore question then you kind of get put on the spot and have to sort of show the metal of it or if that's a trait of people that find themselves in the army or if it's a trait of army people i don't know but it's it's really cool to see it's a good question yeah you know when you uh when you spend a lot of time in the army as you grow in the leadership roles

and you know this when you're young too, but not as well, that somebody can take a test on ethics or they can take a test on... you know, sexual assault, sexual harassment, things of that nature. And they do very well on the test. But when somebody's not watching or when somebody is watching and pressure is applied.

You may get an A on the test, but you may get an F in life. Yeah. And so one of the things we eventually evolved to as a senior officer is to do exactly that, which is put somebody immediately under some sort of. you know, a little academic pressure in just a conversation and see how they respond. Interesting. And you can make a very quick assessment of somebody. Now, of course, it's biased.

until you continue in the discussion but it gives you a starting point of where you think this person might be in their personal and professional development okay i'm gonna do it back to you then please Why do you think that you stood out and other people didn't? You're a two-star general in the military and you had hundreds of thousands of people that could have gotten that position. Why was it you? I think personally because of a growth mindset.

which I didn't know that's what it was, but I, being a military brat like you, raised by parents, where failure was expected, but it was expected to be a learning tool. And so if you didn't try and fail, then you were kicked to the side. So, you know, I'm going to go to college, but my parents aren't paying for it. And I can barely afford enough money for tuition.

But I'm not going to borrow money because I didn't even know how at the time. So I'm living in my car and I'm working in a grocery store on the weekends and carrying, you know, unloading trucks and things of that nature because that's how you put yourself through school, right?

you know so that's how it starts it starts with you know personal responsibility and holding yourself accountable for your own actions that's what i was blessed when i was a young person to be taught by my family whether it was intentional or not that's just kind of what they ingrained in me i i feel like when i meet say like an army ranger or the people on the golden knights right people that are selected at a very high level to do something exceptional

uh out of thousands and thousands of applicants and and just grueling processes the thing that i try to understand and and that i first try to understand when i meet someone like you is why are you different and and i imagine a lot of people have the mindset of personal accountability and go into something with a kind of quote a growth mindset, but don't achieve the unbelievable things that someone like you has done.

and and i i really want to nail down like what makes you yeah different well my kids would agree with you but yeah well you know it's it's it's hard because you know it snapshots along the way along the journey a person is a very different person on that journey and so it's you know most of what makes up who i am today are the most difficult and challenging things not the simple things and so when i see young men and women that's why because i've trained

thousands and thousands of young men and women and junior leaders and watch them evolve and grow what you learn is is that not everyone understands that doing what is right is hard, okay? And if you're going to live a lifestyle where you believe that what you're going to try to always do is the right thing, assuming you know what the right thing is, you have to understand it's going to be hard.

for you to do it personally. But if you're leading people, you also got to understand it's going to be unpopular. And so you have to find ways to be able to articulate that to young women and how you teach that over time is difficult. So you can't look at somebody, not just me, but anybody who's had the privilege of the experiences that I've had and say, how did you get to be that way?

We would need a three-day show just to list the number of people who have made me this way and who have shaped me this way, whether they were symmetrical mentors or asymmetrical mentors or people I just hated. All of them shaped who I was. And trust me, the asymmetrical and symmetrical mentors were small numbers. The people I hated was a very big number. Some of those people that you hate when you're younger suddenly fall into one of those mentorship boxes. Because you go, oh, I was the jerk.

Not them. They were trying to teach me something without telling me what the answer was. You know, we had an old fable in the Army called the Brown Door. And I'll tell you about the Brown Door sometime if you want. But it's... how to get through the brown door and if somebody opens it for you then you learn nothing somebody lets you run into it five or six times until you finally figure out how to open it

then you actually are a better person at the end of the process. But it's a hard process and you have to grow from the experience. So yeah, don't look at somebody snapshot in time and say, wow, that's pretty incredible. There was a whole lot of failure that led to what credibility you might perceive that I have.

For sure. I just think they're so the people that will be watching this will be on a certain flashpoint in that journey. Right. So they'll be looking for something that's like a staircase up. that can help them stand out in their respective organizations.

uh and that's the that's the i guess more of the outcome and intent of that question i understand that the span of it is impossible to clarify in the amount of time we have for sure yeah well i think the one thing that i would take from them is the is mentorship whether it's symmetrical or asymmetrical. And what I mean by that is if it's in your chosen profession and you're in my chosen profession, Devin, and you're my mentor, that makes perfect sense. It's a very symmetrical.

uh person who thinks similar to me but has more experience and and more time under their belt same thing but it's the person who's 15 degrees outside of your normal who's asymmetrical And so, you know, I had all kinds of asymmetrical mentors when I was growing up because I want diversity of mentorship, just like I want diversity of thinking in my organization.

I was involved in Black fraternities and sororities when I grew up in college. Years later, I worked with the Divine Nine to help me recruit African Americans into the United States Army through college programs who had no idea that it was an option. to use ROTC, to find someone like me sleeping in a parking lot or find someone like me who's from a community that knows nothing about the military and go, what? They'll pay for my college.

What? I get an $80,000 a year job when I get out. What? You know, I didn't know that. And how would you know that? Just like there's other options that are out there that people don't know about because they're living within the symmetry of the mentors. that are in their town their home their church their synagogue whatever it is because they haven't gotten somebody outside of that norm to say have you ever considered this bizarre 15 degree off normal thing

And when you find that and you start to branch out on these different kinds of mentoring opportunities that give you other options, then your chosen profession is enhanced exponentially. That's what I would offer. So you're saying that you would encourage people to find mentors not within a comfort zone, but to significant degrees outside of what they might be used to in order to introduce new ideas that might complement their existing work.

Yeah, above and beyond the normal mentors. And I think what's hard, what you don't realize when you're younger is mentors are not assigned to you. You got to go find them. You got to ask them. OK, if they're really a mentor, somebody says, hey, I'm your boss. I'm not your mentor. Then I'd be a little concerned about your boss. If somebody is somewhere else in your organization.

And you see them doing incredible stuff at big open meetings, or you see them on Twitch doing something, or you, you know, like you guys doing this stuff for no particular reason other than you want to improve people's lives that you don't know. and you ain't getting anything out of it other than satisfaction of paying ahead, as Ethan said, find that person in the organization. Send them an email and say, I'd like to have coffee with you sometime. And then sit down with them.

confirm your beliefs that that's a person you want to emulate and say, I know you're an engineer and I'm in accounting or, you know, you're, you're a data scientist and I'm a, I'm an operations chief or I'm an HR person. but i like the way you operate and i'd like i'd like to see if we could become you know mentor mentee and a real good one will say yeah i'll be your mentor if you mentor me as well because i don't understand what that data science crap is about

You know, it's because it's a two way learning bridge. I've got about 800 formal online and probably two thirds of them were not in the military. Wow. I love the idea of asymmetrical mentorship like that because a lot of times one of the big... problems with younger people is they're like i'm afraid to approach mentors because i have nothing of value to offer but if you think about it asymmetrically and and they uh and you bring a skill set that they're unfamiliar with to the relationship

um via your expertise then it becomes more transactional much easier for people to actually initiate a relationship that's super cool i never thought about that well please for your audience don't assume that the person you want to approach is not going to be interested okay um a lot of them are sitting there wishing somebody would ask and they don't it's true because if they're good then they're never gonna they're never gonna offer themselves

they're just going to be available and if you approach them and show the intestinal fortitude to do so that's a part of why they would say yeah i'm going to take this kid on uh this young person on and i'm going to tell him stuff that nobody else is going to tell you know the army the most valuable job for developing officer in the army is to be an aide to camp to a general officer

Now, a lot of people go, oh, that's such a suck up thing. You're going to go run around with the hottie toddies and, you know, ride around in Lear jets and blah, blah, blah. And what ends up happening is they spend, well, we do fly around in jets. But it's because we're going from meeting, meeting, meeting, meeting, meeting, meeting, and we're circumventing the earth in three days. So, you know, if you want to maximize the use of that brain that can make decisions, make billion dollar decisions.

You need it where it needs to be on time and sort of rested and making sure it's making the right decision, which could save lives. So when you've got a young person with you for a year who tools with you and gets to go to a meeting. be bored out of their mind, and they get in the van all the way back and go, hey, General Hughes, I don't understand what that means. He goes, well, let me explain it to you. And you give them executive level insight.

into the bigger picture of how things operate and then you only keep them for a year and then you release them back into the wild to do whatever it is they do and you get another one and when they go out there they're out there suddenly have a view of the world from the top down Yeah. And it completely changes their perspective. Oh my God. It just changes them. It makes them, I mean, it's accelerating their development, you know, at such a rate.

that those those young men and women not because they worked for the general but because they learned from the general uh operated at a different level get promoted a hell of a lot faster And I think one thing you've touched on that's interesting that I tell the audience oftentimes is a mentorship doesn't have to be forever. If you approach a busy person, a great approach is not only to ask them to be, you can ask them.

You appear to have this skill that I would like to gain. Would you have a couple of meetings with me?

to help me learn that and then that may or may not develop into an ongoing mentorship but it's easier to get a yes if the person doesn't feel you're asking for a lifetime commitment right um and that that can be a huge bridge to making that where you're not making such a huge request necessarily of a busy person because some busy people are very generous with their time and some are not and you can approach the ones who are not by having a

Two things, a specific ask and a time-bounded ask. Because... One of the harder things, and I'm sure this is true for you as well, Chris, is if someone just comes to you and says, will you be my mentor? It's kind of wide open. I don't know. Am I a good match for you? What do you want to be mentored on?

But if they come specifically and say, for example, the topic I brought up, how do you learn to lead at massive scale where you're very many levels removed from line of sight and potentially global?

then that you can evaluate well i don't know can i teach that or not do i feel i know that topic um and so that that gives mentors a lot more to go on because mentors newsflash for the audience Just because someone has had an impressive career or great business success does not mean that they necessarily feel qualified to mentor on a given topic.

and they're not you they don't want to fail they're willing to fail but they don't want to fail needlessly and waste your time or theirs so giving them that scope really helps yeah I also think, Ethan, like that story, when Chris was talking about perspective, like the perspective that gets, it's interesting. I have a lot of thoughts here because when Chris brought that up.

that like his number one was mentorship. I then thought back through my career and was like, that's right. The thing that really made me make like leaps and bounds of success was like, attaching myself to

both people that are within my industry and people outside of it that I think would make me think differently. When I got into marketing, I was always doing things in like weird digital media spaces and like reading about like different kinds of advertising that I had nothing to do with, but I later incorporated those.

into my career years later. And I think about what you said about perspective. Ethan has a story about, uh, Ethan, you know, that story about the shadow people that the shadow Jeff. Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's, that's, I think really relevant here. Yeah, so it's the same as the aid to come. At Amazon, Jeff Bezos and now Andy Jassy, who's the CEO, and all of what's called the S team, the senior executive.

crew at Amazon, the top now almost 20 vice presidents, they each have what's called a shadow. And that person, their real title, their formal title is technical advisor. But each person has one, what you would call aid to come, who attaches themselves to them for 12 to 18 months, goes to every meeting they go to, and hears everything they hear, sees everything they see.

And the whole idea is to give them that larger exposure. And actually, I'm working with one of those people now who is in the role of technical advisor to one of the senior vice presidents at Amazon. and it's fascinating what sort of access she has what sort of visibility she has um and of course how much it accelerates a career because among other things

and this would be true in the army as well, that person comes out of that position at least knowing all the other leaders that the leader knows. They now have that. speed dial right that that contact list so they can reach out to leaders they otherwise wouldn't have access to and say well you remember uh you know i was general hughes aide de camp

Or I was Jeff Bezos shadow two years ago and I want to know blah, blah, blah. And they have that connection. So it's enormous career accelerant through network building. Which can be good and bad. So make sure it understands that. How is it bad? I have some thoughts, but you tell me. Well, when you suddenly have, when you are exposed to the senior team and you are in that position for the wrong reasons.

it becomes very raw and obvious to the senior people in that organization. So if you're there for the wrong reasons, if you're there for very selfish reasons, I mean, everybody's selfish. You're trying to learn, you're trying to develop, you're trying to grasp things at a greater level. But if you come across, at least in the culture that I come from, you're not living our values and you're there not just your fellow soldiers and your...

your nation, you know, your peers, and you're there all about yourself, you become exposed very quickly to the senior team. So when decisions are being made four years from now and your name pops up, they'll go, hmm. I absolutely saw that at Amazon. It would be rude to name names, but of people who served as Jeff Bezos' shadow, some of them moved very quickly.

to extremely high positions and and some of them moved at a more modest pace to more modest destinations and and i'm sure there was no accident in that right But again, it's the risk associated with having a growth mindset. You got to take the risk. And so very talented people will never expose themselves to that potentiality. Others will. and expose themselves for being what they really are. But the sweet spot is to do it for all the right reasons.

I'd like to codify that a little bit more because there's a perception, especially amongst people that are aspiring to leadership positions, that people who are self-absorbed are able to get ahead. Particularly, there's a reputation among C-level executives that people that are narcissistic or self-absorbed and think about themselves will generally get ahead further. I'd like to get your perspective on how many people you've seen become leaders.

Do you find that to be true or do you define that people that are in like a more team oriented mindset or self-sacrifice oriented mindset then end up getting ahead? Like, how does that parse for you? Unfortunately, I think my experience is what you're. what you would think the stereotype is interesting um now you know my exposure remember my exposure is from the army as a culture

The joint community of all the services is another culture. The federal government is another culture. And then having worked very closely with Central American, South American cultures. and Middle Eastern cultures and Far East cultures. And so having different cultures across the board in different capacities, whether you're trying to talk a governor of a province in Afghanistan to do the right thing.

or if you're trying to get a president in another country to do something, or if you're trying to operate within the Pentagon to get the services to collaborate on something, you do see a majority that appear. to be thinking about their next job, which is a promotion, as opposed to focusing on the here and now. And have a tendency to...

say things like, I don't know how many times I had this said to me, Chris, three beats two or two beats one. And that means two stars beats one star. So thank you for your input, but I win. And those were always interesting comments to me because that was a little bit of the culture that I don't care for. But what I'm saying is, although that is, I think, my personal opinion.

It's all my personal opinion in all the cultures I've been in. There is a preponderance of that where it's, even though they say they're selfless, there is a selfish tone. to how they're seeing things. Now, they may not be a narcissist, but they're definitely not a selfless person that's doing it for the organization. That's why I like Simon Sinek's TED Talks and things Simon Sinek has written.

start with why yes simon said it and all the things that he's done which is organizations don't exist for the leader the leader exists for the organization And that goes counter to everything that the U.S. system teaches us is, you know, it's about the power, it's about the position, it's about the money, it's about the perks.

You know, it's not about serving those who are making the company successful. And so when I do executive coaching, you know, people look at me funny when I say, look, I always meet with the executive first and I say, if this is who you are.

And I don't have anything to do with this because you and I are going to be in conflict when we bring the team in to try to gel the team together. Because quite frankly, you and your team only exist for the company. Okay. If the company wasn't here, we wouldn't need you. OK, so don't don't think the other way around. So let's let's let's get over our egos and let's figure out how do we gel better as a team. And the great example Simon said it gives. Have you ever heard a story about.

the lion in the village. Have you guys ever heard this story? No, I don't think so. He talks about us as humans and our DNA. When somebody says leader, our DNA that goes back, you know. When we walked out of the water, whatever your belief is, our creation in our DNA, when we think leader, we think of a village, 150 people, which is how we became.

We weren't the fastest. We weren't the strongest. We have no idea if we were the smartest. We may have killed them. We don't know. But in the evolving of us becoming the senior entity on earth that makes the decisions. at least for humankind, we got together as groups. We formed communities, and that's what gave us power.

So within that community, we had people who built huts, people who built fires, people who wanted for stuff, people who planted stuff, people who weaved baskets. And then we had a leader. And back in those days, it was the biggest. roughest meanest person we could who carry the biggest glove. And we have no problem giving that person the best hut while they sat on a rock and sharpened their knife.

We gave them the best mate because we wanted three more just like it in case this one gets killed. We fed them food. We did everything. We took care of this leader because we knew when a threat would approach the village like a lion. That person would pick up the stick, pick up the spear and run to danger and fight to the death to protect the rest of us while we hid behind the huts. That's what we expected our leaders to do in our DNA.

Flash forward, here we are today, and we watch a company that's being threatened by finances or bankruptcy. And what happens is the big guy, the leader, starts grabbing all those little guys hiding behind the hut. And throws us at the lion. And so the lion eats as many as it can. And it's satisfied. And then it leaves. And then it turns to us and goes, how's that for protection, guys?

In other words, we've sacrificed our employees. You know, we sacrifice them for the bottom line. And then I get my golden parachute and I continue to run this business. And so we have this warped belief. that's counterintuitive to our own dna of what a leader actually is and that's what's hard it's hard to push against that in the way we've been raised in this country my personal opinion

What I want to – this is so cool because what I want to parse on this is really relevant to everybody listening to this on this platform, right? Many, many, many people that are the number one – job in america right now that people want to become is some form of influencer like a creator on youtube or twitch It's wild, right? He's telling the truth, by the way. I don't know if you're exposed to that, Chris, but if you survey young people today, their number one desired career is YouTuber.

and and and so let's take a he's cracking up what what i want i want to know why that's so funny just from his perspective i'm sorry that's cool i like like They do, though. Yeah, they want to become influencers. And the thing is, the average example of a top influencer, especially on Twitch, is degenerate, wakes up at 4 p.m. uh makes a ton of money in their underwear playing video games doing nothing with their wife like like um yells at people toxic creates drama it's it's the exact same um

Like thing that you see where you said like in your experience a lot of the leaders that you've ran into have that sort of Self-serving mindset. So now here's the the trouble right? Um, we need to convince people like Simon Sinek is trying to do that being selfless being part of a team being a person who throws yourself at danger is is the thing to do. But we have all of these examples of these incredibly successful people being the biggest dicks possible and succeeding.

What do we do about it? How can I in confidence convince somebody that building an empire based on good is something valuable when all they see are examples of the contrary? Yeah. Ethan, are you going to jump in on that one? Wow. I could try and bridge and buy you time anyway. No, no, no. I don't want you to buy me time. I'll jump in. What do we do about it?

I think there have always been people even going back, you know, maybe not to the village level, but even there who were the entertainers and, and who. You know, it actually. OK, I'm not a perfect anthropologist or whatever, but I don't think the biggest guy with a club ran the village for very long. He actually found himself sitting at the right hand of some chief who was good at feeding him red meat, but was slicker politically. And so I do think...

You know, those leaders still had to have some of the villages interest at heart. But I think they're very quickly became a world where where people with different skills also were in leadership. Now the people who are totally self-centered, I think that only exists because we have a society that is rich enough to afford them. In other words...

The reason we can have the YouTube influencers and we can give them our money or give them our attention and time is because we're no longer starving to death. We're no longer afraid for houses or safety. we have the free time and free money to support essentially pure entertainers. And I think while influencers are great, if... you got into a harsh world where people were more in survival mode there would be fewer influencers well yeah the problem is like it's fine to have it

and like the guy waving his dick at traffic but we put a crown on his head and say hey run the town in the case of something like Twitch where it's like a person has 40,000 viewers that's a stadium full of people and they're actually listening to this person's political societal leadership views yeah okay so you have a great point which is we're amplifying voices of people who don't provide anything but entertainment value

and valuing those people for their leadership expertise. We're valuing them for places where they have no experience. So this is the question of celebrities, right? So if a sports figure speaks out on politics or an actor or actress speaks out on human rights or... they're not the biggest expert on that topic, right? And so we see this, you know, I try to avoid politics on my stream, but when you see people without expertise speaking about topics with strong opinions.

And they have a megaphone that does have some danger, right? Whether it's vaccines or health or COVID or global warming or etc. You know, we overshadow educated.

expertise with um popularity and i do think that's a problem and i wonder i wonder if the real issue is society has not yet evolved you know the internet is relatively new the world of influence is relatively new i wonder how fat there is a question can the human brain now keep up with learning to filter out these noisy voices because if you go back to the village villages did always have a village crank who

wandered around and ranted and shouted and had his opinions and uh you know and sort of they moved him into a hut on the edge of the village and they ignored him right but we haven't figured out how to do that with i won't i don't want to draw the wrath of any influencers it's not worth the trouble but of of certain parties unnamed you know uh i I guess the point is more like to Chris, like how do we, um, back to that initial quandary of leadership is like,

We are all here exposing the values of this team-oriented mindset, this growth-oriented mindset. And yet we see the contrary. So how do we inspire leaders to that end or deal with this problem? Ethan said there's the political elder chief that's in there. That's the one guy who hasn't been eaten by the lion. He's probably about 30 back then, if he was the oldest guy in the village.

And he's probably seen five of those leaders that have been killed by the lion. And he's figured out how to stay out of harm's way. So he's got enough knowledge. See, I think that's the difference. You know, we have a lot of information. We have a lot of ability to look at knowledge and draw some conclusions. But influencers, and I'm not an expert on them, but from the ones that I have seen.

They put out a lot of information. They put out a lot of personal knowledge, which is based on personal experience, which is limited by their own life in terms of where they're at. But you don't see a lot of wisdom. And wisdom is something that you cannot Google. You cannot study your way into wisdom. You have to live your way into wisdom, my personal opinion.

And so that boy, I'd love to unwrap that, but please continue. Well, let me give you some examples of where wisdom comes from. Wisdom is I'll give you. Let me give you two scenarios. So an invasion of Iraq in 2003, whether you believe it or not, is irrelevant. What happened was we attacked a country that had a social dictatorship.

and was a Muslim country that was separated by two sects of the Islamic faith, the Sunnis and the Shia, where the minority, the Sunnis, were in charge of the country. If you've studied Islam... You'll find that for a very simplistic way to look at it, it is a religion that allows for governance. As opposed to the United States, which is founded on a very different framework, which is a government.

that allows for religion so you've got religion line for government government line for religion so you already have a a dynamic that's very very different social dictatorship okay middle eastern country 4,000 years old, reconstructed city of Babylon from the Bible and from the Torah. And you're at the Mesopotamia, which was the center of the universe for the world at some points.

OK, so we very young and ignorant country invade this country. 11 months into that invasion, numbers are summoned back to the U.S. Capitol. And we're berated because we have not ratified a constitution designed on our foundation of government that allows for religion.

And we can't figure out why there's an insurgency after disbanding their military. And we couldn't figure out why their military expected us to pay them for fighting us for two months for backpack. Because it was a social welfare state under the guise of a... dictator but the ignorance of us back here is you guys been there for 11 freaking months for christ's sake what's taking so long where's the signed contracts when is democracy going to break out

can you guys not get off your ass and get this shit go and my simple response is you do realize it took us 11 years to do that and rhode island never signed the damn constitution in the first place okay out of the 13 after the revolutionary war and it took us quite a while to get to where we're at but we're still a baby compared to this country that's over 4 000 years of recorded history who in the hell are we

to say that we are screwed up okay so there's one example second example is i watched i watched hundreds of men and women elected to U.S. Congress. And I would ask all of those out there watching this, if you voted, wonderful. If you didn't vote, wonderful. I don't care. But do any of you think to ask them before they ran for office in the global economy?

and arguably the largest economy in that world, if that person at Walmart who handed you their pamphlet said, vote for me, did you ever think to ask them if they actually had a passport? Have they ever actually stepped one foot? This story he's about to tell blows my mind. He told me this a couple weeks ago. Please go ahead. We don't even think that that's an important attribute for somebody to become a member of Congress. Or even the presidency. Or any officials.

What I think you should explain, Chris, is you were responsible for getting new members of Congress their passports. And as they came in, you asked them who had a passport. Well, the easiest way to get an official passport is to have a regular blue... tourist passport. And so when you ask for them, at least three had thought they might need one, so got one after being elected.

three already had them before being elected, and the rest of them, and I'm not going to give you the number because somebody from Congress will call me tonight after this call, but the vast majority never possessed a passport. People never physically stepped one foot outside this country. Now, granted, when I was there, it was before we had to have a passport to go to Mexico and Canada. So some of them had been there.

The idea that you put somebody in office to look at this country and shape its bills and its policies and have any ability to say things here are not going well.

have clearly never been to other countries where survival is a daily activity, as you articulate. And that's the point of all this, is that we live in a nation where when we have big screen TVs and we've got... internet, we've got air conditioning, we've got heat, we've got clean water, we've got toiletry in our side of our house, most of us have some sort of conveyance to get from point A to point B, and we have food on the table, we don't consider ourselves successful.

unless we have all the additional things. And so in a normal nation's development, once a nation hits surplus, Okay, once it hits surplus, it suddenly has the ability to have the arts. If a country hasn't hit surplus in its development, it has basic needs, Maslow's, food, water, shelter, safety, security. Once it hits surplus, then you start having museums and orchestras and television and entertainment and things where excess can start to buy. I don't know where a country has to be.

when it has the levels of extreme that we have, where a few years ago I was appalled by watching two young people argue who had a better birthday party. And the other one would win because they got a Bentley instead of a Porsche. That's when you have to ask yourself the question, how far is this pendulum going to swing before we realize how screwed up we might be because we don't know what we don't know.

So I just tried to clarify on that former story because that seemed unbelievable to me. It was your experience that the majority of people elected to the U.S. Congress did not travel outside of the country. And I can specifically tell you it was the House of Representatives because that's where I worked, not the Senate. I don't know what the Senate's numbers were, but it was a vast majority, did not possess a passport.

when they came to my office to apply for a formal one holy but but you know but in their defense it was never a criteria yeah that we as the people who are electing them would would demand it yeah yeah but then again what do we demand and even more importantly what profession in this country can you be a professional at without having gone to some sort of training to be that individual

nothing of consequence pretty much right like but you can join the you can join the federal government through the electoral process with yeah and that yeah you know there's only five things you got to be an American certain age, but there's, there's no educational requirements. There's no training. There's no school you go to learn how to be a politician. Okay. Which is a really hard job.

For Christ's sake, I mean, you've got to know the 1974 act and such and such. You've got to know what Goldwater Nichols is. You've got to know by the time an Army officer gets up there to serve or a Naval officer or an Air Force officer. We've had years and years and years of history and training and education to get there just to understand that old, you know, how a bill becomes a law, you know.

And people who run for Congress, 99.9% of the time, it's because they want to fix something or they want it to be done better. They want to represent people. They go there for the most. Honorable reasons for the most part. But it's the ignorance of understanding what it is you've got to do when you get there is the part that's most frustrating for me. If you go into it eyes wide open.

That's different. And there are people who do that. But for the most part, people really think I'll go up there and I'm going to change something and then I'm going to go back home. And you can't get squat done in two years. I don't care who you are. What qualities do you think... I asked you originally one of the first questions, like, what made...

you stand out and what made leaders stand out. I think you provided a really good answer, which is asymmetrical and symmetrical mentorship and then people with that growth mindset. I want to ask you to the tune of like what you've seen from leaders.

uh in these circles and kind of along the lines what we're talking about what qualities did you see lacking in those people that held them back and and and thinking in terms of like the audience that we have today, right, being aspiring young people trying to avoid those pitfalls. Because I think we don't talk about that enough. What are the things that you saw go wrong that maybe set them back or caused a lot of damage, really difficult problems, things like that? Well, we're not...

We're not talking about Congress anymore. We're just talking about Congress. Just in general, yeah. I'm already in trouble. I can feel it. No, no, no. Not going political at all. We're going to steer back. And I'm not being political because I can go to many organizations. In that particular case, what I'm asking people to understand is, until you've been to 92 nations, until you've been where you've seen the worst of humanity,

which I will tell you if you haven't been outside this country, it's predominantly out there, and no offense to other nations, but the world out there is difficult. The world here is pretty nice. In fact, I would argue it's exceptional. And I'm very, very lucky to be an American. And I would never go through one day and argue about anything and say that we are bad. You know, we have problems, but we don't have the same kinds of problems other people have.

And so if you're going to represent us and say, this needs to be tweaked and this needs to be done, good God, please go out there and look at the rest of the world and then look back at us.

and then come back and be a valuable player in the national level. That's what I'm saying. I'm just asking people to do that. Now, pitfalls of things that I've seen people... uh in positions of power and leadership um remember those aren't always the same thing there's a lot of people who are in positions of authority and we say

Authority and leadership is the same thing, and that is not true. There are tons and tons and tons of people who are in charge, and they have the authority, and they're at the head of their organization. But are they leaders? And I think that's a distinction that has to always be made. And if you have an organization that has a lot of people in charge, it has a lot of VPs and somebody in charge, but there's no leader in that mix.

then I think the company will suffer. I think more importantly, the people that work in that company will suffer working in such an organization. If you're lucky, the leader is also the authoritarian. So that person can make change and make sure things are operating within the company. The other kind of company you see is somebody who there's a leader, but they may not be the person in the top position of authority, but they are a leader.

that is keeping the team together, that is synthesizing what's coming down from the authority and from the leader's perspective, building the trust and cooperation and teamwork within the organization. I'm from that camp. I'm from that camp where, you know, informal leaders at all echelons, formal or informal, are critical to an organization's existence because somebody has to translate things into

People understanding, if people understand that people are empowered, if people are trusted, then the organization can operate. May not be optimal, but it goes well. People in authority positions. who I see fail are people in authority positions who actually think they're a leader and are devoid of those leadership qualities and leadership qualities that I believe.

There are is, you know, somebody's got to be loyal up and down. Somebody's got to have a duty to the organization. There's got to be respect within the organization amongst everybody. Okay. They've got to be selfless. They've got to understand that their actions are only for the good of the company and the people in that company. They've got to have integrity. They've got to have personal courage. Now, that just happens to be the values of the United States Army.

And the acronym is leadership, LDR ship. Okay. And when I see an organization has got a leader like that, what I see is an optimized organization because that leader is selfless enough. That they're trainable. And they're also the one who always starts a sentence off with, what do you guys think? Before they say, this is what I think. And they don't say I a lot. They say we. Okay. And so.

When people in organizations that are working for an authoritarian who's simply the person who's in the position where they can make decisions, don't mistake that person as a leader. Okay? Make them earn it. So, Chris, you've... kind of hit on a good pivot by running down the US Army leadership criteria. Say a few words for people, Devin and I have a global audience. Whether someone is in the U.S. or in another nation, potentially Europe or Canada or elsewhere in the world.

How should they think about the possibility of an armed forces career? In other words, if they're considering how to get college paid for. or what they could get from serving a few years in the military before going into industry. Obviously, you served for a very long time and have now gone into the private sector. But say a little bit about the ROTC program and similar, the value of military service.

worldwide from your perspective um well you know when i had cadet command with ethan was talking about earlier the 986 programs i had at the universities um i had I had pretty good relationships with most of the university presidents. Now, obviously, two years is not enough time to get to know them all, but I got to know some pretty key ones.

And I think one of the presidents said something to me that was really profound. He said, hey, I need some more of these ROTC guys and gals on my campus. Okay. He said, why? He said, well, they're like. They're the president of Student Senate. They're the president of the fraternity and sorority.

They're the people who are running all the resident advisors in the high rises and the resident dorms. They are on this club, this club, this club. They're on this team, this team, this team. So they seem to dominate. most of the leadership positions on this campus. And I said, well, it's because their extracurricular activities and their electives are ROTC leadership courses.

They're learning critical thinking. They're learning decision making. They're learning emotional and critical, emotional intelligence, social intelligence. And not only are they getting those things in the classroom. About once or twice a month, we take them out on the weekend and we put them in the woods and we teach them that stuff firsthand when it's hot and rainy and sweaty and nasty outside. And so we put them in that crucible.

to say, yeah, you got an A in class, but you got an F in the field, okay? Because you may have read your homework, but you sure as heck didn't institutionalize or you didn't internalize the ethics that were associated with that test. because out here you lied to me twice and he saw you i saw you and we're confronting you so we teach them at a young age things that are happening in the classroom and in real life experiences while they're in rotc

on campus that other students don't get that. That's not something that's available to them. You can take ROTC classes 100 series, 200 series. Because we want you to see if it's interesting to you. So you get to repel off a building or do other, you know. So that's.

If I can interject, there's two important points there. The first one you made is you can try out ROTC if you're in the U.S. and at one of these 980 plus colleges. You can actually go take the classes and see what it's about without necessarily committing to a military career. Absolutely.

Second thing is, just to comment, I have videos out there about how to consider becoming a manager and how to become a manager in a good way. And a manager is a step towards leadership. Now, management and leadership are different. But one of the key points I make in that is... for most of the world there is no formal leadership training curriculum and i always call out and i think it should be in my videos that there are two things that approximate business leadership training

One of them is kind of sort of an MBA, right? Masters in business administration touches on some of it. And the other one I always say is military leadership experience because it's one of the few places. where outside of your regular job as an individual contributor, whether you're a software engineer, a lawyer, a nurse, whatever, you can get leadership training and really in-depth.

One thing that people won't realize, but I'm sure Chris can expand upon, the Army is actually at the forefront of this, and there's a really interesting reason. If you look at the other branches of the armed services, they have machines that fight for them now it doesn't mean that pilots and sailors are not brave and aren't great leaders but in the end an air force uh sorry

An airplane or an aircraft carrier is a hell of an advantage in a fight that's a piece of metal and machinery. Whereas the Army, yes, they also have some very cool toys. But in the end, it's guys carrying guns, individuals. And that's why there's so much emphasis on leadership there because they can't fall back on, well, yes, but look at the size of my cannon in the same way. Go ahead.

Say more. No. And, you know, you have to, the leadership is necessary to teach a young person first to believe, second to trust. And to be able to ask them to do things that they would never consider doing on their own. You're asking somebody, you're asking an average person to become an exceptional person. And that transformation.

You know, a lot of times it's that old Indiana Jones, you know, the leap of faith. You got to put your hand on your heart. You got to step into the unknown. And you have to trust that this person is going to take you, is going to take you there and is going to protect you. is going to give you everything you need to be successful but in the end it comes down to you having to execute and so when you are up close and personal with young men and women in harm's way

That cannot be a moment in time where they are going to question your motives. You have to have absolute, transparent, vulnerable leadership for them to understand. that the best thing they can do is follow you, okay, in order to be successful, in order to survive. And so it's that crucible of the profession. that breeds leadership and accelerates that learning and that growth to a rate that's hard to describe to someone who hasn't been there. And so, you know,

Through ROTC programs, we had to build ROTC because our nation decided that in the early 1900s, specifically World War I, that we wanted to be a world leader. But we also wanted to be... grounded in our roots as a nation where we say in the constitution we have to maintain a navy and stand up an army in other words

the navy's got to be there all the time fully funded to control the sea lanes because we're a global economy and that's never a question but we have to stand up an army which implies stand it up stand it down stand it up stand it down Because our forefathers didn't want a standing army because that's where they had fled from. We're countries and aristocracies that had standing armies that oppressed them. So they didn't want that in our design.

And so you have a standing organization that is in a constant state of increase, decrease, which means it's in a constant state of training and educating and trying to continue to turn. and produce as many people as possible so world war one where we said we want to support the allies in europe the united states military academy at west pointe could only produce so many officers

So we went to schools that believed that military service bred leadership, and they still exist today. The Citadel. Go four years of Citadel, march around in uniform, get treated like you're in the Army. And guess what? Graduate and not have to go into the army. OK, it's just a military school where you pick up those skills. You can go to Virginia Military Institute. OK, you can go to.

Virginia Tech, you can go to Texas A&M and be an Aggie in the Corps of Cadets. There are still universities. Norwich is another one. There were universities that existed in 1900s that already had military ROTC curriculum. So the U.S. government, when we couldn't produce enough officers to go to Europe, said we can't do this if we're going to be a global power. So we got to stand up the reserve officer training program, which is what our ROTC is. And so we just took that curriculum.

proliferated it to thousands of schools. Now it used to be thousands. Now it's under a thousand. But we teach that at those schools. And again, because it's government taxpayer dollars that are doing this, the first two years you can take. And learn from it and grow from it as a part of your college education. Take it as an elective. You don't have to join. So that idea of military service and military training and military education.

has been you know embedded in our higher education for a long time and it expands into tracks but that's how we maintain the global power because we you know we had a very small army after world war one we completely gutted it then all of a sudden we had World War II. And if you didn't have ROTC in World War II, who knows where we may have ended up in that particular process.

ROTC exists out there, everybody calls it ROTC, doesn't really understand what it is, but it represents 76% of all the officers commissioned every year for your army, which needs 6,000 officers. to be in charge of young men and women every single year because the other ones either articulate out or they get promoted. So we need another whole crop.

So there's a constant crop being developed every single year. That's another, I have people in my... chat here there are some leaders who have recruiting challenges they need to hire for their teams and i've had to hire imagining needing to hire 6 000 managers a year And by the way, managers that you're then going to count on to go overseas and not do really bad things when they're alone in the desert or the jungle.

with the locals and a lot of guns because bad things do happen and i'm not going to dwell on that but it's a tiny tiny tiny percentage if you consider you're throwing 6 000 college kids out there a year And, you know, I make no excuse for any bad thing that's happened by our military or others, but it's actually remarkably rare that you see catastrophic bad judgment given how many people are being put in those positions. Yikes.

So one of the things that I think you brought up in that explanation about ROTC is one of the most interesting things about the Army to me is the just sheer amount of training and educating that the system has had to refine. in order to process thousands of people and make them capable, as Ethan just said. If you could, maybe highlight a couple of the things that you found valuable in that system.

um that maybe other people can take home with them um because like i'll speak for a lot of the audience what's that there this is these are all the schools and things you have to go through in the army as an officer oh geez like a lot yeah we're gonna talk about ongoing education in a minute that chart yeah but go ahead well i guess like the point of this is and i know i'm going to speak for a lot of people in chat um

I want to increase my self-discipline. I want to be a better person day over day. And a lot of times, like when I went out with the Golden Knights last week, I was inspired by their discipline, by their example. And I often find that some of the most... As a person, even though I was in a military family, outside of the military, except as a direct contractor, I found...

there's so much value in understanding the system of training, educating, and this wheel that turns to make these people more disappointed. How do we apply that to our own lives? Okay. Well, you know, having a shared value system is something that we really have to start with from the very, very beginning. And trying to explain to people, understand and comprehend that their actions are not there. They don't just influence you.

You have to assume that every action you take is going to influence the lives of others. And so unlike the business world, you know, if there's a robbery at 7-Eleven tonight. And it happens to be a soldier. It is a soldier robbed 7-Eleven tonight. And what are we going to do about it? Who are we going to hold accountable? Who's going to go to prison in the Army because Private Hughes robbed the 7-Eleven tonight?

Now, if a T-Mobile employee robs 7-Eleven tonight, it's Devin Nash robbed 7-Eleven tonight. Nobody cares that he works at T-Mobile. It's not even a part of the report. And the vice president of T-Mobile is not sitting there going, oh, crap. Did Devin get the sensitivity training? Did Devin get the humanitarian assistance training? Was Devin qualified with the weapon he held up the store with? When was the last time we did a counseling on him? Has he been in behavioral health?

They don't even know you got arrested, nor do they care. They just fire you. It's interesting, by the way, I will interject. That's not 100% true. And that if an Amazon driver steals a package or runs over somebody's cat. That is attributed now to Amazon, but it's an artifact of giant scale. But he did it while he was in his profession. He did it under the auspice of the organization. That's true. If one of our employees robs...

Rob, a 7-Eleven, not in uniform, nobody cares. You're right. So the standard of which we are held to is greater than any other standard. Okay? And so you have to take young men and women to understand the gravity of the fact that when you don your army uniform or your Superman suit or whatever you want to call it, when you don it, you are held to a different standard.

But what's most important is you're held to that standard, whether you're wearing it or not. You have the mantra now that you are, in fact, a serving soldier for the United States of America. And so. The moment that becomes a reality to a young man or woman who's on that initial journey, you know, the Marines do this very, very well with their crucible. You know, they don't get their globe and anchor until they have been through a tremendous amount of physical and mental.

training to get to the point where they now understand we're about to let you join something that's greater than yourself. We're allowing you to join something where you will always, there are no retired or former Marines. they're just marines okay you know this you're a brat so once you get that globe and anchor you are held and hold yourself to a much higher standard

And so the advantage of the military is, is that, you know, I can hold up a Ranger tab or I can hold up a long tab for special forces. I can hold up airborne wings. I can hold up the badge for the tomb of the unknown soldier. which you want to talk about the most highest standard of anybody held to in any of the services, tomb soldiers, they'll go in and they'll take it from you if you dishonor by any way. Okay. And so.

you're held to a standard of history and tradition that's important because, you know, it's really interesting when you tell young men and women, you know, what you got to realize is you're joining a team.

that is the first army in the history of recorded mankind recorded history the first army ever not to overthrow its government at least once during its existence And the reason is because we are free men and women, and we take an oath freely to defend the Constitution, an ideal, which is different.

than what other people do. You don't sign, you don't swear an oath to some sort of document when you join Amazon, okay? You don't have that kind of allegiance to the organization, I don't think. You might sign a contract.

Okay, but that's not the same thing as an oath to swear an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic. So at the very beginning of that world, you create that level of discipline, understand that your actions are no longer solely your own. Your actions reflect upon your unit, your army, but more importantly, your nation. That's why if you look at a soldier's uniform, okay, on over here, it says Chris Hughes on this shoulder.

It's the unit I'm in. So this is important, okay? But the unit's more important. But the U.S. Army over my heart's even more important. But what Trump saw is the American flag that's over here. And so this one, then this one, then this one, but never the expense of this one. And when they're done, they walk around, they go, holy shit, I'm a part of a big team. Okay. And going back to how we train people.

Guess how big our teams are? About 100 to 150 people. Sound familiar? Yeah. Because that's about the right size. That's the tribe. Managing small societies. That's where everybody knows who everybody is. Everybody knows what everybody's job is. But more importantly, they recognize the leader in the dark when they walk up. They recognize the leader's voice when they speak in the dark.

OK, and that's how we operate as an organization. So I want to I love this answer. I want to challenge it because what you said, I completely agree with, which is that this idea that. People get this standard.

um this this uh this this this feeling this this the sense this truth of joining something that's bigger than them and that there's a trial there's a series of gateways there's things that you have to do to get to that point to put on that uniform to be able to say this is this is that i'm part

of this and I'm held to a higher expectation. The truth is for the vast majority of people in this chat room and watching this show, none of them will be held to that expectation or any standard at all. And a problem with young people today. the problem with young people today, I think. And the reason why I asked you that question is...

I'm looking for some way to translate without that organizational structure to people desperate for self-discipline and desperate to try to overcome this massive feeling of inertia that society puts on them. What lessons can they learn from an organization that has created those standards successfully without joining it? Because we just have to accept statistically the vast majority of them won't, right? Okay, so it's pretty easy.

You can, I say it pretty easy. So it's a matter of routines and then holding yourself to those routines. Okay. Whatever those routines are, but for the army. the day does not start without physical fitness. You're there, you're fit, you're well-rested, you haven't been drinking until 3 o'clock in the morning, your ass is there at 5.30, standing tall.

And then at six o'clock, the flag flies. We play Reveille. We all salute. We sing our unit song and we begin our physical fitness. And we literally physically do our physical fitness. Now you'll see somebody like me. I'm 60 years old. Guess where I'm standing in the morning at six o'clock in the morning. I'm right over here. Okay. Yeah. I'm not saluting anything. Is there anything flying? My ass is still there.

Because I'm disciplined because that one simple thing is saying, I'm going to get up in the morning or if I'm going to get up in the middle of the night, I don't care when you get up, but go do physical fitness. some sort of physical fitness everything about it is good there's nothing about it that's bad okay so we've got something that's nothing but pure good put it on your list of shit to do

If the next thing is to meditate, if the next thing is to take a walk, whatever it is, it doesn't have to be physical. Figure out what are the three or four things that you believe based upon where you're at in your life. input from your mentors, write it down and say, I'm going to do these three things and I am not going to deviate from it unless there's something exceptional that requires me to do so. If you can just do that through your own motivation.

assuming that those three things are going to make you a better person, then you will begin the journey of self-discipline. Now, in the Army, we have to take young men and women who have never been taught that for the most part. and force them to do it yeah okay it's kind of like you know i told you not to put a bean in your ear and what did you do you went back to your room you picked up a bean you stared at for a little while ago i wonder why not and you shove it in your ear

And then the moisture in your ear makes it swell. And now you're having a brain aneurysm. We got to dig the bean out of your ear. We don't, you don't need to do that. But what you got to do is you got to figure out what are the three or four things you need to do and then stick to them.

And follow through. And in the end, six months from now, because, you know, you're not going to see any difference tomorrow, the next day or the next day. Six months from now, a year from now, you'll go, wow, I feel better. I'm sleeping better. I'm better at work. And basically all I do is walk for 10 minutes in the morning, 10 minutes in the evening, and do 100 jumping jacks. Whatever those three things are, stick to them. But we don't have the ability to do that.

unless somebody points it out to us. And when they do, you go, yeah, I should do that. But over here you go, but I'm never going to do that. Unless you actually, truly, honestly want to. learn discipline short of joining the army so it really it's all here do you really want to do it or not and if there is i would say pick three things and i dare you

to just do them on a routine basis for six months. At the end of six months, you go, it's horse shit. I'm not going to do it anymore. Then don't. Or if you find something better, switch them. But the thing is, is if you're never going to be able to do something on a routine basis other than wake up at noon and, you know, lounge around and take a nap at one, do some gaming at three.

because you have to be there because that's when your partner's there and and then spend the rest of the day not knowing what you're going to do then you're never going to be disciplined if that's your goal if your goal is not to be disciplined then keep doing what you're doing

Your call. I just wanted real quick. Sorry. Oh, yeah. Go ahead. I absolutely want to answer. Thank you so much. Yeah, that's insanely valuable to everybody here. And chat was reflecting that. The 300 people watching here were all about that. So, no, and I want to go a little further. Both Devin and I very much like a book, and we've recommended a book to our audiences, Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin, which I assume I see you nodding, so you're familiar with the book.

Sure. I am curious. We have recommended the extreme ownership as one lens to think about how to lead and how to. take responsibility for your actions. Is there anything you would add to amplify or nuance from your perspective, given that you're familiar with the book? Wow. Okay. I'm looking at my books. I think there's the old adage, know yourself and know the other person. And in the relationship, you will probably be successful.

know yourself and not know the other person, you might be okay 50% of the time. Not know yourself, not know the other person, you are doomed to failure. Now, Sun Tzu said it another way. He said, know yourself and know your enemy. And a thousand battles, you'll see no peril. Know yourself, not the enemy. You're going to lose the battle 50% of the time. Don't know yourself. Don't know your enemy. You're going to fail every single time. So in addition to what I remember from that book.

is self-awareness, understanding yourself, okay? Emotional intelligence, if you would. Understanding what your real feelings are and being able to understand how to control them. So I consider that a subset of discipline. Yes. Okay. And so as you can imagine in the profession I was in, when all hell's breaking loose and there's.

really really really really bad things happening the last thing the leader can do is go oh my god you know you can't be that guy in aliens like you know game over man let's go home Somebody's got to step up and say, yeah, this sucks, but it ain't as bad as what I've seen before, and here's what we're going to do. More importantly, young men and women who don't know themselves very well, and they fail.

And they've been taught to fail and they have a fixed mindset because our society says you can't fail, get themselves in a bind. What they got to understand is, is that someone like me is going to walk up and go. You didn't fail. That's kind of funny. And here's 57 ways to solve that. Okay. Because it's about understanding yourself. So I would, I would add, read some a little bit, just anything on emotional intelligence.

understand something about yourself, what makes you tick. Okay. And then you might have a 50% good life. If you want to be really smart, understand social intelligence and look at other people and find out, you know, Devin and I might have a 20-minute conversation. Now, I don't have this problem with Devin right now because he proved to me at the beginning of the show when I asked him a social intelligence question, which was, why do you do what you do? He answered it very well.

So, so I like it. Okay. But other people I talk to, they go, Oh, I just do this shit because I'm important. I want to influence people and make a lot of money. You know what? I would immediately think what an asshole. Okay. Now. that's not a great social intelligence thing for me to say. It's because I don't really know him yet. So I'm going to go a couple layers deep and then go, oh, his personality is like this. He didn't mean it that way.

He's not really an asshole. I just didn't know him well enough. That's when you become the winner because you know yourself enough that, yeah, I think he's an asshole in my first meeting, but if I dig in a little bit deeper, I find out actually he's a pretty good guy. He's just not very socially aware of what he does when he speaks out loud. And then we can now have a great relationship. Long answer, Ethan, emotional intelligence. That's what I would have. And I love that answer because.

I don't, you know. Extreme ownership in Jocko's book simply doesn't address that one way or another. So it's a complementary skill. And I will, while Chris is obviously looking for books on his shelf, I will say how I got to know. chris is working together with him on emotional intelligence

and teaching that to the company we both advise and trying to raise the emotional intelligence. We work with a company just to give you a context that people enjoy. It has a set of leaders from all over the world.

It's got a... a dev team in the ukraine led by a young gentleman who's ukrainian the head of data science and many of her team members are chinese some of them are watching right now actually the head of their design group is moldavian of russian extraction uh the head of their uh product team

um is indian by descent i think he may be u.s born and on and on and on it's not just about where people are from you have all these different cultures together and trying to talk to each other work do work together and coming from extremely different contexts because the context if you grew up and went to school and were raised as a in china and the context if you grew up and went to school and were raised in ukraine your basic assumptions of life and what it means to be led and to follow are

different and uh so we're we're um trying to bring them through um you held up two books chris people want here want to know

One of them was Emotional Leadership 2.0. Emotional Intelligence 2.0 and Strength Finder were the two? Strength Finder is 2.0 by Tom Raff. The important thing about that one... is it talks about longitudinal studies in reference to good leaders in the business community and one of the conclusions is drawn is there were no commonalities there were there was no secret formula for

characteristics attributes and values and hard and soft skills ivy league schools there was no correlation where you say if you have this this and this and this you would be good the only commonality they could find was self-awareness So the leaders who had the most self-awareness were the ones who were the most successful. Daniel Goleman does a number of books on emotional intelligence. These are good as well.

they kind of say the same thing you see which one they got tabbed um but they kind of say the same thing but goldman has a small pamphlet i've given so many away i don't think i haven't anymore but it's called leadership and the power of emotional intelligence. And it's like literally sit down, read. Can I say while you're on the toilet? It's like a toilet read. It's so quick, but.

What I like about that one is he talks about the six leadership styles. And what he tries to explain to young leaders is, you know, there isn't a single style that you should have. If you're a good leader, you learn all six styles, you use all six styles. like a golfer uses a whole bag of golf clubs. You know, you just can't play, you know, Augusta with a seven iron and hope you win. You got to have a putter and a driver and a couple other clubs to get through a successful golf game.

Same as truth leadership, you know, because there's sometimes there is a requisite level of theatrics that's associated with what you're doing in order to get young men and women over a very difficult period of time. and or to create a sense of urgency like in cotter's change model when your company is failing and you continue to do the same over and over and over again think somehow the american

person that's buying your product is going to buy more because you keep trying to make the same shit over and over again. But nobody wants a push button phone anymore, dumbass. So you got to use Kotter's change modeling and create a sense of urgency to get people over themselves. to get to the next level and so all these different aspects is about why leaders can't just be dynamic or very smart you don't have to be dynamic to be a leader some are dynamic some are really super smart

Some are very vulnerable. Okay. But it was one thing you got to all have is you got to be competent. You better know your profession. Sweet. So. The other quick question, you held up a chart of the incredibly complicated schooling process. Some people were wondering, is that public? Like, is that available online somewhere?

There's probably no issue with me sending this to you so that they can take a look at it if they want. But essentially, if you can see it real close, this is the officer corps timeline. what i did was i made it a water chart a water pipe okay all the rotc all you know all this water comes in i can't get it backwards here comes into these cisterns and that's your first set of schooling

Then the water pipe you go through is the experience, and you see it's bigger here. Then there's your next school three years later, and the pipe is smaller because we're flushing people out of the system. And you go all the way down that pipeline all the way to kernel. You see, it's really small now because the attrition rate to get through that. But all those boxes are the different formal.

developmental things you have to do. So an army officer is in school for anywhere from eight to 10 months about every three years to the colonel. And then after that, as a general, I was in schools.

three or four a year for two weeks here one week there in fact you know my favorite one to tease google cloud about which is one of the clients i work with is i had to go live at google as an old dude in in in silicon valley for three weeks i don't know how they got anything done i was marveled the whole time they thought i was impressed but i quite frankly was

Yeah, I think about that constantly in the context of tech companies. I have no idea how anything gets done at all. It's amazing. Yeah, like I do the same thing. I do consulting for a lot of those companies. Yeah, it's unbelievable that they get it.

great naps and I think I gained 10 pounds eating peanut M&L yeah yeah five-star restaurants chefs ping-pong tables nap pods yeah you can anything but work at one of those places army's way of sending a star general there to get an asymmetric look at other ways to manage within the army if i were trying to talk to people i would have to convince them to stop doing this yeah you know there's a whole cafeteria full of people but nobody talking

Yeah. You know, it was the quietest cafeteria room in my life. It's unbelievable. Yeah. So, um, yeah well we talk a lot about ongoing education and lifelong training and i i've talked to people i've done a show on why you always need to be educating yourself and how to go about it but to think about the fact You're talking about Army officers spending, you said, eight months every three years. Is that right, approximately?

That's about right. Yeah. That's an insane amount of time. Yeah. That's, that's like crazy. That's one fifth. Yeah. Right. It's, it's, it's, yeah, but still it's eight months out of 36. It's like a fifth.

imagine you know that that would be equivalent to any of our workplaces professional workplaces wherever you're at spending one day a week educating you one day a week with formal planned education um and i mean there's nothing even remotely like that in any business whether for leaders or for non-leaders um You get like two weeks of orientation if that, and then, and then it's on the job training. Right. And, and so.

Yeah, there's an amazing difference there. One of the things that struck me when you were talking earlier about the university system and the potential for army leadership training. Obviously, our army education at some level can only go back to the foundation of the country. But formal military education has been something, I don't know, you might know.

When is like the first military academy in history? Do you happen to know? Oh, yeah. Academy in history. Well, I'm sure Sandhurst is right up there at the top of the English. Okay. I'm just wondering if there's something that's like Roman or, you know, that was formal. But I don't even know how old is Sandhurst, right? It would probably be 1500s or something. Yeah, it's up there. And I should know that.

But Sandhurst is dramatically different than what we do here. I mean, the American style of officership is a four-year college education. At some point, we said you got to have a four-year college education. And predominantly that was because of the settlement of the West. And when the academy was built, again, I'm not an academy graduate, so I don't know the exact year, but when the academy was built, it was predominantly an engineering school.

it was an engineering school until the the middle the end of the 19th century where they started having other degrees but It was because we needed leaders to go west and survey and build bridges and all the things that we needed to do as we moved as a nation to the west and to the south. And so the Academy was centered around that. And the beauty of that is, is that it was very successful at that, you know, and then you get to this, the civil war and you talk about.

you know how great it was to have everybody in uniform with the same educational design but then all of a sudden we fought ourselves and we go oh it's a really bad thing to have everybody with the same educational design because they all think alike. And so another big part of a few years later in the 1916, when we started, when we built ROTC, it was we need liberal arts. We need, again, the asymmetrical approach.

to leadership in the army and and leading large organizations but we're all still very uh wedded in the engineering aspects of logistics and moving large things and planning and synchronization of large organizations and ships, planes, trains, automobiles, all that stuff. We all still get that whether we're artists here or not, but also it's good to have somebody from Berkeley.

Berkeley's ROTC program and MIT's ROTC program and Boston University. And then here comes Northwest Missouri State University, you know. kid and you bring those together and you have a very diverse group of people in the way they think with the same foundational capability. I think the stereotype of military leadership is that it's about conformity.

But you would say that's, I think you would say that's not at all true, that it's in fact about flexibility. But maybe you can use better words than I have. the young gymnast right now who's just incredible. She has conformed to the basics of gymnastics. She has learned the basic fundamentals to the point where she can do it in her sleep.

She can fall out of bed and flip all the way to the bathroom and do whatever she's doing. Because of the conformity associated with the rogue discipline of doing something so many times becomes... second nature when you get to the point where something you've done from a rogue standpoint becomes second nature suddenly you develop the flexibility and agility to do things because you understand i got that covered

And I'm not worried about that, but I can do this and I can be more successful. Okay. The acne of skill in war is to win without a fight. You know, we train young men and women how to fight, but we also convince them that. You know, if you use that weapon system between your ears called gray matter, and you think of another way to solve the problem without fighting and retaining your resources and not putting your soldiers in harm's way and still accomplishing the mission.

I'd rather you do that. But if you're if you're not good enough, then shoot everything. OK, but that's not what we want. What we want is for you to win, not. to destroy everything in the process. But again, in our society, we don't reward that. Think about it. Have you ever heard of a Medal of Honor recipient? who saved the day because they found a way to win the battle without a fight. You know, there's hundreds of medal recipients. Read all of them.

Either some leader let down a soldier who had to do something extraordinary. Okay. Or there was a situation that was poorly planned, poorly executed. And yet again, we put some young American in harm's way. who had to do something extraordinary okay we never reward somebody for actually doing something so incredibly brilliant that they won the day without a fight now that is not to disparage one single

that has the Medal of Honor. I honor and respect every single one of them. And the tens of thousands who have been put up for it, who didn't get it, okay, because they're very, very elite. But we don't tend to reinforce the proper behavior in our society. We want the soldier who was in all of this crap and somehow died saving something.

or barely scraped out of it when all of his buddies didn't make it. My question always is, was who was held accountable for putting that young soldier in that position? So my motto had always been, how about we win without a fight? How about we get with the Ayatollah, who in this culture is the spokesperson for God, and ask him or her to give us a fatwa so all of their soldiers stop fighting us because God has ordered it. Is that more important than bombing something? Probably.

By the way, that's a story. I posted a link to your book in chat a few minutes ago. If you want to read the details of that story, that's something Chris actually did in Iraq, which was work with an Ayatollah in Iraq. to get him to issue a fatwa or a, I'm not sure how to describe a fatwa. It was just proclamation. And I wish you wouldn't have said it was in my book and it was me because now I sound like this selfish who's trying to get a medal. It just.

I'm just trying to let people know where to get the details because we don't have time for you to retell necessarily the whole story. And if I do it, if you do it, it's pompous. If I do it, it's me.

telling people about a cool thing i read i'll repost the link here in a second yeah i read his book but what a great end around right get get the religious leader in iraq to declare that no one should resist that people should support and cooperate with the us armed forces because they're here to help and by the way he didn't chris had no there was no force involved this was

working with a counterpart to elicit support this isn't you know uh so anyway you can read the story there's quite a number of remarkable things there um just with insight to time because devin and i could go on all day and all night we have so many things we'd love to talk to you about i think we agreed and and sort of advertise this as we talk a little bit about leading at massive scale

So one thing you've done that neither of us has done is lead tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people. Both Devin and I and many of our listeners, because they've listened to us before, have some insight into how we lead at the scale we know, which is small teams or hundreds. What changes? As you move into such very large scale leadership. And if he or I or one of the listeners wanted to grow into that, what would we still need to do?

I think when you transcend, when you start getting into larger organizations, there's a natural point where you suddenly, and this is where a good leader. suddenly is exposed is simply good and they've probably hit the end of where they should go it's also sometimes where a strategic leader who kind of sucked when they were at lower numbers

suddenly blossoms at the larger scale. And then there's the others who are very good with the smaller numbers who understand that transition into the greater numbers. So let's talk about that person. The key is, is figuring out when, you know, I said earlier, the leadership at the most ideal organization is when your soldiers recognize your voice in the dark. That is probably the last time that you were quote unquote, physically leading men and women in your organization. Okay.

When you hit a certain number of people or degree and scope of complexity within an organization, you transition from, in my opinion, from being a hands-on leader to an organizational leader. And when you do that, you have to give up a lot of what you loved about what got you there. And it's hard for leaders to make that transition. That's why a good one dies there because they can't give it up and they want to keep.

micromanaging things that are getting bigger and bigger and bigger and they become less and less and less effective and the organization becomes more and more screwed up because now you have a leader who's trying to do everything and micromanage that person cannot transcend into their great when they're younger suck when they're older or or more more um more people assigned to them yes more scope

So when you get into that scope and complexity, you have to make that realization. First, you have to give up some ego. You got to give up some passion and you have to embrace things you may not like, which is logistics, human resources. systems and processes, visions, mission statements, decision making, critical thinking, organizational and operational design. And in our school system that I showed you earlier.

you'll notice back to this picture there's this big ass thing right here in the middle okay that's that transition that's the school system it takes to teach you now, when you were over here and you had a couple hundred people, it was easy. You're getting ready to transition. All those pipes go into this little tiny pipe and you're about ready to be in charge of real organizations.

that are huge and the budgets are huge and the the outcomes of what those organizations do can be catastrophic if they're not done correctly and so we recognize that so that transition for us is between battalion and brigade. A battalion is about 1,800, and a brigade is 5,200. That's a big jump, you know, in the world that I come from. And so you have to understand.

how systems and processes work. And the best way to learn them is to actually go do them all. And so when I was telling, you know, Ethan, the other day, we were talking about this is. Someone like me has been geared to understand that, again, it goes back to rogue memory, the gymnastic person doing things over and over and over again so they become instinctive so then you can be innovative, adaptable, and agile.

When you get your systems and you start looking at those systems, whether they exist or not, you have to go through a process with an organization. What I have always done. After I was taught to do it, I didn't make this shit up, but I used it. It's just one of those things. You can get taught a lot of stuff, but if you don't use it, it's not going to help you. But I was taught, always go with the organization and ask three questions, okay?

ask the first question, which is the hardest. And you can end up spending your entire time trying to do that one question, which is what do we need to stop doing? Okay. That is a hard, hard question. Because I'm assuming you're coming into a position that's been there for a while. And all the systems and all those processes that were designed before you got there all probably had a good reason when they were designed.

Do they still have a purpose today? And you can find people. I can go, Devin, what should we stop doing? Go, I don't know why I got to do this report every Thursday because nobody reads it. Well, let's stop doing the report. And that takes a lot of courage for an organization to one. identify superfluous crap, and two, to actually do something about it because people get nervous that maybe it's job satisfaction. I haven't used a computer to put this spreadsheet together in 35 years.

to track all the students that come through this institution. And if we automate it, I'm going to lose my job. So I'm not going to say get rid of it because I think it's awesome. But if I get sick, nobody else knows how to do that shit. So I don't lose my job. The organization has to have a leader that goes in and says, look, I'm not going to get rid of any jobs. I just need to know what we need to stop doing. Because time is a resource. These questions are based on three resources.

people, and money. Weak leaders will come to you and say, I need more people and I need more money. They'll never talk about time. Good leaders will come in and say, my time is limited. I don't need any more people. I don't need any more money. I just need to do less shit. And the shit that I do has to be important. If it's important, then I want to focus my time on it with the people that I have.

and the resources you provide me. Once I get that figured out, then we're going to be okay. So focus on that. But what I see in the civilian world is everybody's like innovation, innovation, innovation. We got to be innovative. Let's be innovative. Are you being innovative? Show me your list of innovations you did this month. Well, okay. Well, he's trying to be innovative when he's completely bogged down with bullshit that doesn't make any difference. So how about we thin the bullshit?

Okay. And once we thin the bullshit and we have 10 hours of work time given back to us, let's dedicate and discipline ourselves. Devin, we're going to discipline ourselves. Not to use all of that 10 hours. We're going to use five. We're going to set five aside. Let's take that five hours and let's figure out what is it we're supposed to be doing that we're not doing well because we've been doing this other superfluous bullshit.

So let's go cut through the superfluous bullshit. Let's go figure out what we need to improve that we're supposed to be doing, which is our core function. And let's dedicate five hours to that. But let's save those other five hours. and say now that we're operating well what should we do with the five hours well let's take two hours dedicated to innovation and how to do things better

And let's give the other two back to the workforce because we've been busting them so hard for years. A lot of them are quitting and not retaining. That's the scope and complexity of what happens when you transcend it to organizations. that are massive okay and a lot of organizations can't make that transition because the leaders will go in and it's fun just to sit on and ride the and just keep going with it and say i'm about innovation

And when you're about innovation and you haven't thinned, what happens is you just keep piling more shit on people. And then when you look at those organizations and say, what is their retention rate? You find their retention rate is terrible. People aren't surviving past three to five years because they don't like working there. And at the same time, they don't trust you because you say, I want you to do all this innovative shit.

But we go back to all the superfluous stuff. It seems to be more important. This is like, I think projects, people, resources, procedures all have inertia. I actually I did a talk on Twitch yesterday about when to break rules and when to end rules and how to make exceptions to rules. And I think you're tying into that in that ending things is really hard. It takes.

a brave leader or a brave individual at some level to not do something that we've always done or to not do something that some boss once wanted um obviously there's an element of human courage but if you're in the middle of an organization you're not the top leader or you're an individual how do you thin the bullshit do you have any practical advice because you must have faced this

So what I train people to do is to make the list yourself. Wherever you sit in the organization, make it one to infinity list, one to end list. This is all the shit that I do in this organization. Okay. This is all the stuff I do on a routine basis. And here's the added stuff that jumps up. The good idea fairy comes in and hits me with their star and wand once in a while says, here's a good idea. Add this to your list.

So I would make a list and then I would look at the company's vision and mission statement. And then I would go, okay, so based on this data point, I'm doing this shit. And when my boss tells me important, I would rank order at one to infinity. And then I would sit down and say, here's how much time I spent on each of these tasks. And then I would draw a document line at 40 hours, a document line at 50 hours.

and a decrepit line at 80 hours. And then I would go to my supervisor and I would say, boss, we need to have a conversation about my workload because I want you, I want to invest in you. I need you to underwrite some of the risks. I think. These are the top five things that I do. Okay. These below here are nice to do things. And the stuff at the bottom of this, I don't think I should be doing or I should only do if I accidentally find some time.

But right now, I want to make sure this is the list. Can you please confirm or deny that list for me? And the boss is now put on spot, you know, and what I've seen are three kinds. One. You know, this shit's all important, Chris. I'm not going to tell you that. Go back to work and do what's important. I trust you. I'm empowering you to do the important shit. So go do the important shit. You know my priorities. Okay?

Just so you know, this is what it's going to look like. And you just validated it for me. Well, I didn't say that. Well, but you did. And so I'm forcing that leader to be nervous to hopefully motivate them to go up and do the same thing with their boss. OK, so all I can do is influence them by being some sort of a forcing mechanism. The other the other thing is, if you get the boss who says.

ah you know i don't think that's it and all of a sudden they're moving your priorities around and they're drawing a line they're underwriting your risk and so what i made sure they knew was you know what you just underwrote the risk of us not doing these things So if I get in trouble, you're going to back me up, right? And he said, yeah, I'm going to back you up. He said, okay. You know what, boss? You just won my trust. Now, a week later, when I get my ass chewed because I didn't do something.

and they don't come to my defense now i want to make sure i let my boss know that they've lost my trust okay because you didn't underwrite it you just threw me on the bus let me get run over and they backed me up backed up on me That is hard to do. And like you said, that takes personal courage. That takes you truly believing that you're doing the right thing to force that from within an organization.

And I actually have a class on how to do that, that I teach to leaders, how to prioritize, how to rack and stack, how to draw a document list. There's the four quadrants of prioritization because. Everything right now is number one. And if everything in your organization is number one priority, then you are doomed to fail. Yeah. Yeah. We talk about, we've talked about that a lot and I really appreciate.

uh some of your insight on leading at that kind of scale uh because i i certainly even in my level i ran up against there's a book called what got you here won't get you there which as a title anyway summarizes that transition from directly leading a small team to leading an organization indirectly and obviously you've taken that to to a bigger extreme

Ethan, before I forget, I want to make sure management by wandering around, understanding that the important things are the things you check. So only the things that are going to get done are the things that leaders check. And that's a lost skill in our development in this nation, which is don't sit behind your computer and read spreadsheets and look at reports.

Be the leader that just all of a sudden appears in the factory dressed like a factory employee who's sitting in the break room listening to the conversations. You know, I was taught when I was very young that the most important place on a military installation is the barber shop on Saturday and Sunday. And you go in there, you put a hat on, you sit down and you listen.

to soldiers getting their hair cut talking to the barbers. And you will be shocked and amazed at what you can learn by wandering around, going on a walkabout. So I literally had, as a two-star general, I had blocked windows on my calendar. And my staff knew it was me disappearing and appearing places where nobody would expect me, especially on weekends. And so they didn't close just to listen to see is what you're saying here.

actually matriculating and, and being talked about here. Okay. It may not always be successful conversation, but if you're saying you want this shit done. and you hear people at this level talking about it on a weekend to their barber, then you at least know information's flowing down. Now, when you listen to them describe what it is they got to do, and it's completely different than what you put out, then you know where to go.

And go up and down that chain to make sure your intent is clearly articulated to those leaders between you and that young man or woman on the ground. Sorry, couldn't resist that one. That's so cool. You used to hear in the 1900s, I would read older books by Drucker, and he'd be talking about stuff like that, where people would walk around and they'd participate in the mailroom. Some really high-level executive would just tell one person, like, hey, I work here.

uh for this day and then just act normal right that's a super cool thing yeah i like that a lot i dispatched vehicles in a motor pool at fort stewart georgia as a one-star general for about four hours until somebody finally knows that there was a star there. One little star on your uniform in the middle kind of looks like a specialist.

And so they just thought I was a specialist dispatching vehicles. And finally, I think that's the deputy commanding general for operations. A great commander comes running in. How long have you been here? Holy shit, about four hours. I just can't hope somebody would find me earlier. This is hard work. That's awesome. I remember I was with Ethan. We were in an elevator in Amazon.

And, uh, you met someone on your team. You remember that? Like just, just, just, uh, just randomly. It's kind of, yeah. The funny thing was, um, Ethan had a modest car. and i remember that was the thing that he took away from it right was like he was basically expecting so ethan and the team i think at the time like 800 900 people or some insane amount that were working on twitch prime and uh when we were in elevator and someone's like hey i'm on your team and like he reckoned

and Ethan's like oh great and then like they both walked out and he made some comment like because he saw Ethan's car I think he was expecting like a fucking you know like like eight hundred thousand dollar one million dollar car Ethan's running a really modest car it made an impact on him like it was like that that sort of like leadership by yeah example thing well it's it's something we haven't talked about which is the leader is always being watched and in that case that that gentleman

He followed me to the garage. He didn't have a car in the garage. He was taking a bus or whatever. He followed me to the garage to see what kind of car I drove. He wanted to check it out and evaluate me in that way. and yeah i drive uh 2000 i still have the same car i drive a 2006 jeep cherokee um which is starting to fall apart so i may be forced into an upgrade in not too long But he was very surprised by that.

And, you know, I had cracked a joke about, oh, I left the Bentley at home. And he was eager to believe that. Like, oh, you have a Bentley. No, no, I do not have a Bentley. Devin, you like it. Just about every assignment I had as a general officer. I would set up a CrossFit place that was fun for me because I did a lot of CrossFit on weekends, but I always tried to make sure it was remote enough that it wasn't obvious, but it was public enough.

that people would see it okay to see that you know on my own time i was doing the discipline i was i was practicing what i preached And my last assignment, we put it at a rail yard, which is a lot of fun. I had two at rail yards. What happened in the rail yard was on the main drag at Fort Knox, Kentucky. And so we're out there throwing tires.

you know, doing all the medicine ball stuff. And we put obstacle course over these middle bands and chin ups and pull ups and flipping railroad ties. And it was amazing because, you know, people. yeah they expect it when you're at work but they don't expect you in your personal life to do that but my wife and i used to go over the weekends and one of the things that drove me crazy was i i just

You know, I teach officers never walk past a piece of trash. As you walk past a piece of trash and somebody else is going to think it's okay. You know, and so my wife and I, we do it now out here on the farm. We walk up and down the... gravel road with a trash bag but i always walked over with the trash bag and walked back with the same trash bag and if i saw trash i would get in the ditch and clean it out but it was because you are like ethan says you're in a fishbowl as a leader

And, yeah, okay, so there's theatrics where you've got to set the example, but you've got to understand that the moment you don't set the example is the impression you're going to make, and that's what they're going to keep, and that's what they're going to believe.

And so going back and forth over there, great for my physical fitness. But the coolest part was I'd be over there on a routine basis, disciplined at a certain time, which I love the heat of the day in the summer. Everybody hates the heat of the day in summer. But by the time we left, we had about 40 or 50 people who would show up and work out with us because they wanted to do the right thing.

And it was really cool to meet people like that who were trying to aspire. And again, it became a mentoring situation as well. That's an awesome answer. Yeah. So.

The audience has been waiting patiently. They've submitted a number of questions. I want to take a couple of those just because I do think they're excellent questions. And I know you've also been with us a long time, Chris, so I don't want to keep you... too much i'm just looking because i just want to see if we had enough time well depends on if you can go over we're we're at the end of what you said you could chat with i'm already in trouble i was supposed to help gary boxes

maybe you can give succinct answers but thank you for saying what would you say i would slide for be brief be clear and no no wow that yeah he taught me this saying be brief be clear be gone but but for the from the nsa who's now watching because i know somebody thinks i was disparaging congress and i'm not there is no better system in the world this is behind me i think this might mean Yeah, we were trolling. Go ahead, Devin.

The fact that he's a two-star general and the first thing he's aware of is the NSA is watching it. It terrifies me. I know he's joking, but your mind goes to that. Well, this stream's been live two hours. We have at least one. NSA viewer at this point I'm sure oh yeah the inspector general of the army is going to call me and say I can't believe we're disparaging congress I get in trouble when I try to get people to think about how important those jobs are

No disparagement. We're raising the public expectation of our elected representatives, and I will fully endorse that. So if you get in trouble, you send them to me and we'll discuss what we were doing. You cannot help me even if you do drive a Bentley. I want to say something real quick. I have never voted in my entire adult life until this last election. And the reason I did it was because I was retired. And I'm still not going to ever tell you what.

My political beliefs are because I'm apolitical because I still represent you as your soldier. But I want to make sure the reason, you know, I self-selected not to vote my entire adult life is because how can I be apolitical? and support and defend the Constitution if I pay attention enough to go into a booth and choose a side. And so I have self-selected, which a lot of officers do. They don't have to. They can vote.

But to be apolitical, how can I honestly be apolitical if I have voted? And so in retirement, my first time during COVID and all the craziness, I voted for the first time in life. And I'll never tell you. what i did because it's none of your freaking business but also because i even though i'm in retirement i'm still a political and so that's what i make sure the nsa the chinese and everybody else who's listening to us right now to include the inspector general of the department of defense

You don't need to tell us who you voted for because we all know you wrote in Dwayne The Rock Johnson. It's fine. But the point is completely... this is twitch and like on this platform like nothing you said was even remotely unreasonable it's just like everything is completely fine nobody perceived it that way you've been completely above the board the entire time yeah compared to like what's going on

real time like across the board of you know 50 other top streams right now like oh my god yeah so so uh Yeah, so for anybody, I think you probably caught the joke, but Chris went along with me to put Top Secret on his board and then some stuff that if you really take a screenshot and blow it up, you might be able to read. but none of it is actually top secret. That said, I thought it was good that he got the joke.

And was willing to go along because we put that up. He had the whiteboard all empty when he came in. Anyway, first question people wanted to know is what were the biggest changes you led and what were the signs they were necessary? So that's probably too broad for the time we have. Just pick a big change and what clued you in? I'm trying to think of what's the most exciting one as opposed to the biggest one. Well, I mean, the Army, as you all saw, the Army is a very educated organization.

which nobody gives it credit for. And you'd never know that watching any movie produced by Hollywood. We're all idiots and we couldn't get jobs anywhere else. But that aside, a highly educated organization. When I was a one-star, came out of Afghanistan, I was put in charge of the Army entire educational system. And I stared at it and said, okay, why do I have 114 schools that are in all different accredited?

regions of the country without one umbrella. Why is this not a university? The Air Force had a university, the Marine Corps had a university. So I went to school very quickly on all of them and said, we're a university, bring them all under one umbrella. go to the Secretary of the Army. 18 months later, we formed a single accredited institution under a single umbrella under the Higher Learning Commission and created the Army University, which meant...

that now all these schools that my soldiers were going through, I could now capture them accredited and put them on a transcript. So by the time they left the army, they would either have some college credit or college degree. So when they transitioned over to civilian life, they got credit for their military service. You know, earlier you were saying you didn't really go to so many schools. I have 19 degrees, but only four of them are recognized in the civilian world.

OK, because they weren't accredited. The others were not accredited when I grew up. Now they are. And so men and women who have had basically degrees for years coming out of the Army now are officially. going to have accredited degrees that make them more valuable. So people quit saying, oh, we're going to hire 10,000 veterans this year because we really feel sorry for those poor people with PTSD and they need jobs. How about.

we're going to hire 10,000 veterans here because they're highly qualified, credible degrees and we want them in our organizations. Yeah. And I, I will say I've that narrative. I love that. Yeah. That's fantastic. I have had a number of veterans work for me from different branches of service in a number of roles, and they are extremely highly successful, highly driven. My best friend is a retired officer from the U.S. Army. But the training clearly works. Veterans are typically highly successful.

Just my endorsement on the other side is the business leader. I've seen it work. And it's also good, by the way, as a business leader, one of the great things about working with.

uh u.s military service veterans is you can have a very succinct conversation when you need to you can have the conversation that says i need your ideas and you could also have the conversation that says i need you to do x right now and we'll discuss why later and they are very capable of saying okay i have no idea why that is useful

But I will come back to you and ask you 10,000 questions after it is done. And sometimes in crisis management, that can be incredibly powerful. And that's something that other leaders won't necessarily do. You can't get that sort of immediate response when you need it. So the second question I'd like to cover here.

well someone asked one in chat so we'll I won't take too long at this but so there's a longer question here what are some things those guys you led before uh let me see if i can this question is a little convoluted i guess it's um when you led people who were who had fear who were afraid of leadership or afraid to take responsibility.

because of their upbringing how did you train young leaders is it possible to train a young leader to be more courageous or brave if that is not their family or or upbringing background is that a transformation that's possible or not yeah you know there there's the the all the uh smart people in the world get together and say nature versus nurture you know remember the old adage

Yes. Well, the army doesn't believe in nurture. I'm sorry, nature. I was going to say that sounded like a misstatement. Yeah, go ahead. And I'm getting old. We believe that you can take somebody and you can make them better. No matter where they come from, whatever their background is, whatever their family lineage is, whatever their culture, their language, we don't give a shit. We can make you better, okay?

But when it comes to leaders, again, we have people who are developing where we're starting to thin the herd. And so if you are fearful. okay so this is what we do when people are scared of we we send you to school and throw you out of an airplane five times yeah yeah okay and we go if you

Know what you're doing. Take care of your equipment. Trust the air crew. Understand what the Jumpmaster does. If you understand that we know what the hell we're doing, you will have fun jumping out of that airplane five times. That will terrify you.

And you'll scream all the way down the first time and you'll have a night jump because your eyes will be closed. But you hit the ground and go, hey, that wasn't so bad. I can't. And then you see these kids running to go do it again. So we start scraping away things where.

There are myths and beliefs and things that adults may have told them, you know, hey, you're stupid. You can't do that. And I'm like, oh, I love it that they said that. So you're going to do that. And you're going to be the first one to do that. And I'm going to help you.

learn how to do that and i'm going to make you go first you're like holy my world's coming to an end and then they do it and they go oh crap it really wasn't that bad so we spent a lot of time deprogramming human beings who through nature and nurture have had their world turned sideways and they don't really truly understand what they're truly capable of.

And the beauty of that is we're not the autocratic organization that is, you know, do it because I told you so, because that's disrespectful as hell. We do it because we talk you into doing it because we're more collegial. That's what Hollywood gets wrong. That's what the myths get wrong. That's what Ethan was talking about earlier. So when you've got a coach who believes in you, when you've got a coach who's...

coach a thousand kids before you and understands all the tricks to turn your knobs the right way to show you don't be afraid. And more importantly, when you have a coach who goes, yeah, you know what? We're about to attack that town. And holy shit, are you scared? Yeah, I'm scared. So the fuck am I. But you know what? I believe in you. And I need you to believe in me. You know what? Together, we're stronger.

And we're going to get through this shit together. I'll see you on top of the hill, dude. All right. You know what? Now that kid's going to go. Is he scared? Fuck yeah. Okay. But he knows I'm going to underwrite the risk. He knows that I'm going to bomb the shit out of that place before he gets there. He knows he's going to have Apache helicopters over his shoulder. And if it moves, it dies. Okay. He knows if he gets wounded, his ass is out of there in the golden hour.

And he's going to have the world's best medical support capable possible on the planet because I'm going to take care of him. That's what team leaders do. And that's what leaders do. And those are the skill sets applied in the civilian world. are just as valuable. This is crazy because I literally experienced exactly what you're saying. I was terrified. I would never skydive with a civilian.

I know the stats, right? I completely know it. But the Golden Knights, like, they hooked my shit up. They're like, this is the Rolls Royce of parachutes. We're going to explain to you why they put me in tandem with a guy who had 1,500 jumps. Like, there was a zero percent. possibility.

I mean, there was some possibility, but in my mind, like a 0% possibility that I was going to splat on that. Yeah, infinitesimal, right? Now, I still thought I was plummeting to my death screaming. That was my own thing, but you're 100%.

percent right like the the army showed me how they do that how they deprogram somebody from their from their fixed beliefs that says look if you rely on your team if you rely on this set of variables and principles that we you believe that we got you taken care of you can do insane shit like jump out of an airplane. And I love that. I just, I wonder how to translate it for people that will not get that experience. I'm one of like very few people that have that opportunity to see that in action.

and and and the percentage of people that get to see that in action that will join the military and see that value are unfortunately few as well yeah yeah I don't have a good answer for that one. Yeah. Yeah. It's what Ethan and I have messed around with this and talked about like adult boot camps and shit. Yeah. But it is and stuff. Yeah. Yeah. It was also funny. You you got.

uh that's the first time you got excited and like your your own enthusiasm came through chris it was very funny and i have to just say there's there's one viewer who wants your help she loves your if it moves it dies she says she has a spider problem in her house and she needs that. And I hate spiders and I'm terrified of spiders. Kill the son of a bitch. Chris will send the Apache helicopters. Yeah, there may not be a lot left of your house later, but we will kill the spider.

So the last question I want to ask you, and then I know Devin's been very patient and jumped. That was a great story about your Golden Knights experience. I'm very envious. Yeah, that's cool. What is that that Chris said? Exactly like that. That's what's so crazy. Exactly as he said it, they set my expectations that way.

They deprogrammed my previous beliefs. And I believed in doing something greater than myself that I did not think was possible because of their input. And there's no amount of money or Bentleys in the world. that can make up for what you just said. There's no, you know, the greatest joy I get in the world is a soldier sending an email, saying, you know what, I thought you were an asshole when you did that to me.

but it has changed my life and I'm a better person. I just want to send you that and say, thank you. That is a million dollars to me. And that's why, you know, when you meet men and women in military, they have not made a lot of money. OK, and they stayed in longer than they should have. Fifteen years beyond retirement for me in my particular case, because I became addicted to doing what those Golden Knights did for you, Devin. I was addicted.

It was my cocaine to go, come here. It's not that hard. Let me help you. And that's what Devin and I try to do here. That's also all the Golden Knights we're doing, too. When I asked him, like, why are you on jump number 12,000? They're like, it's about you. Like, we want to take someone up and have that first experience. And like they said, after I jumped and we hit the parachute, he's like, welcome to my office, right? Yeah.

thousand feet above the ground and he's like welcome to my office this is like that that was his thing yeah 100 yeah that's i totally get that yeah and to ethan's point yeah like um in in a much uh less We don't have the resources at the same level, but that same hope inspires us. Yeah, 100%. So the last question is...

Where have you failed and how did you deal with that? Can you share a story of a significant, well, I'm sure you can, but would you share? I'm trying to figure out what thousands of times I failed. Of course. Maybe something that would be illustrative, you know, to an audience, something they can take away how to address failure. Let's see. Okay. So, oh shit.

So let's go back to jumping out of airplanes. OK, so when I was a college student, I mean, not college. Yeah, no. When I was. Yeah, my senior going into my senior year. I was doing well in ROTC, and if you do well, they'll send you to real Army training in the summertime. So you can go to airborne school and other schools, adventure schools, where it's about personal development. And so I wanted to go to airborne school. I wanted to have those really cool little wings.

and have something on my uniform when I went in so I didn't look like a rookie. And so I went down to Fort Benning, Georgia, and I got into airborne school. And about three days into it, I... started getting diarrhea you know not doing well and um instead of saying something because you know you can't fail instead of saying something i i kind of got through it

And when I was on this thing called the 250 foot tower, they take you up and release you and let you do a little parachute drop for 250 feet to practice landing. I hit the ground like a shit bag full of shit and I failed. I just, I was, I was a soup sandwich. You know, I think I got drugged for about a hundred yards and I just did everything wrong because I was just completely weak. It was hot. And I was trying to get through not feeling well.

And when I went in there and they were saying like, you know, are you okay? And I'm like, no, I'm really sick. Well, why didn't you say something? You know, you put yourself in danger. You put everybody else in danger. uh you're clearly not mature enough to be here to jump out of airplanes which quite frankly anybody can do okay but it was a leadership thing i'm sorry

Ethan's taken that wrong. No, no, no, no. I got your point. But I was a leader, a developing leader who put others in danger because... I wasn't confident enough in myself to speak up because I didn't want to fail. I didn't want to get sent home. So as a result, you know what they do? They sent my ass home. You know, I could have stayed and gone to the hospital.

gotten fixed up, you know, and actually on my way home, I started feeling better. I was okay a day and a half later, but because I didn't have the guts to speak up. Which they tell you to do when you get there. If something hurts, if you hurt yourself the day before, if you're aching, you hit your head hard, if you're sick, you got to let us know because you're putting your buddy on your left and right in danger if you're not 100%.

And you're putting the whole crew at risk if you're not 100%. You got to be 100%. And I didn't listen. And I learned a hard lesson. That was very young. And it was humiliating. to go back to my rotc unit without my wings okay so then it became a quest and when i got my wings a few years later you know they meant that much more to me

But the fact is I learned not an airborne lesson. I learned a leadership lesson. Everything in the army is about a leadership lesson. Okay. Never would have thought about putting everybody else's lives at risk because I was sick.

I was more concerned about me being selfish and getting my wings. Would you, being in the context of the audience that is here, is that... what you would want to leave people with so that's a really cool lesson i'm wondering i just want to give you like the opportunity like is there anything you want to leave with the audience that you would like them to to know uh that was really cool particularly like like like um i think to speak up and and and

And is there anything else? From that lesson? No, no. Across our whole conversation. Anything you'd like to say to the gathered audience. Anything you'd like to leave the people here with. Yeah. Well, I think we've been through so many different things. I think the biggest thing for everyone is that none of us know everything. And what's most important is for you to know you don't know everything.

I think that's critical. To me, even at my age, I am still constantly seeking out knowledge because I don't know what I don't know. OK, we all live in a spectrum of I don't know what I don't know. But the first part of understanding that is that, you know, is accepting that there is no way anybody knows everything they claim they know.

But if you pick one or two or three, I like to always pick three. Pick three things to discipline yourself. Pick three things to learn and master. And quite frankly, don't waste your time as a young person focusing on your weaknesses for Christ's sake. OK, find your weaknesses, identify your weaknesses, mitigate your weaknesses, but take your valuable time, money, people, any other resource you got and apply it to developing your strengths.

Please, if you take anything from an old guy who's been there and done that, if I had spent more time focused on my strengths than I did my weaknesses when I was younger, I would have gotten farther along quicker. Violently agree. Like 100%. How about that? Is that good enough, Kevin? Yeah, that was good. That was really good.

Yeah, that's the intensity I'm looking to end on. Okay, I'm happy. Yeah, that's good. Good, good. Thank you so much. And my reference to Keith Nash. Did anybody get it, Ethan? Chat looked it up. They looked it up and said it's... I've now forgotten, but it's a minor character in a gamer show. Is that right? No, it's in the movie Paul about the alien. Keith Nash is the guy that nobody's been able to, all the references in the movie Paul.

about the alien who did all this shit that nobody's been able to figure out why the one link to every sci-fi movie ever made is Keith Nash. Nobody knows who he is. And so I thought maybe one of your viewers might know the real reason why they use Keith Nash in that movie that. to help out paul the alien golden gamer wildly successful famous video game developer this is it is it is but that in the movie keith nash but is is that what they're referring to keith nash anyway

Paul, best movie ever. I watched it about 400 times when I was in Afghanistan because it's the only movie I had and I had about an hour every night to unwind. Well, so much of our audience would love you to come back for another conversation sometime in the future. We've gotten a lot of comments from viewers that this is the best show they've seen on Twitch either ever or in a long period of time. So I really want to thank you.

for taking uh not just your afternoon but enough of your afternoon to get in trouble with your your lovely spouse for not carrying things so I've gotten a ton from it, and I know everyone who's listened and who will watch or listen on podcasts or on YouTube later has gotten a ton from it.

absolutely phenomenal yeah and i i especially wanted to highlight the uh the particular thing that you said in the middle which was like i dare you to choose for six months to pick three things that you know will improve your life and do them at the beginning of the day that was kick-ass you've had so many inspirational moments here and i just wanted to honor and appreciate your your time as well thank you so much for being here thanks guys