The Tractability of Calmness: How Uncompromising Leaders Fail

Everybody. Welcome to Nontrivial. I'm your host, Sean mcclure. In this episode, we take a look at leadership, specifically the idea of the strong leader, those individuals who stand by their convictions and dominate the room with their charisma and commanding attitudes. These are often the people we gravitate towards when we see them on screen giving their speeches. These are the people we often help bring to power.

But history shows that it's often the calm tranquil and reasoned leader who fares much better when it comes to bringing about positive change, implementing effective foreign policy and gaining the support of their party and the general public. In this episode, I will pick apart some of the underlying mechanisms that show how calm leadership can be much more effective, even though it can appear weak from the outside.

I'll explore how leadership can be modeled mathematically and how all of this speaks to the power of remaining calm, something that can dramatically improve our ability to be successful in this world. I am calling this the tractability of calmness. Let's get started.

OK. So from an overview perspective, um I think this is gonna be a pretty interesting conversation as I like to call them on the podcast, even though it's just me speaking, um we're going to really dive into uh this idea of leadership, this idea of being a strong leader. You know, this is the kind of thing that we typically get uh that we gravitate towards, right? We want our leaders, whether it's in a uh an, an organization, right?

A company, some kind of business, uh some institution or what we typically think on the political sphere, uh in the political sphere, the leader of a country, right? We want them to be strong individuals. We want them to, you know, look good to sound good to have convictions that obviously align with ours. We want them to stick to those convictions. We want our leaders to be strong, but there is a massive downside to that.

And uh and if you actually step back and get the bigger picture similar to the last episode, right? We said if we stand too close, um things look crazy. But if we, we, you know, step uh if we have more time, if we can step away, we can get the more holistic picture, we can see what actually works. And I think this is a good example of that.

I think the leaders that make the most positive difference in the world are ones that don't necessarily come with these kind of overbearing attitudes or these, you know, the the this relentless addiction to a to a con uh to a, to a conviction that they won't walk away from. These are people who are, uh able to persuade other individuals. Uh They, they can create good bridges, they compromise.

Um, they can remain calm in the face of crises and, and, and over the long run, these can be the people that make the most positive change. So I think that's really an interesting conversation because it says something about just calmness in general. You know, we go through life and there's, uh, you know, a lot of things to wrestle through uh in life and we can get, uh, you know, mad or we can just get uh disheartened.

Um, we can get stressed out about a lot of the things and the ability to, you know, remain calm amidst the storm and to allow yourself to have enemies, to allow yourself to have people who don't agree with you, but to still interact with those people, we're gonna talk about how, you know, from a, from a trail standpoint, the ability, you know, the, the underlying mechanism to solve problems.

We're gonna show how it's really, really beneficial to have a tolerance for your own enemies and, and to try to put yourself in their shoes and, and all that kind of stuff. So, uh, that, that, that's what I'm calling the tractability of calmness to be able to just, you know, kind of relax into it. Uh, you know, love yourself as well as your enemies and, and be able to build bridges and don't burn them all. And just that over the long run, although it might not be easy.

It can lead to a much better outcomes. So, we'll take a look at that. Um, I'll, I'll also touch on some of the, uh, I, I'll dip into mathematics a little bit. It's not gonna get too crazy. I'll keep it very high level. So don't run away just because the word math is in there. Um But I think it's interesting that, you know, we can add a little bit of rigor to the mechanisms uh to, to take a look at how those get modeled.

Uh We'll take a look at the role of leadership in a group and things like cohesion within the group. So the way to kind of mathematically model that and what do those models tell us about leadership? I think that's pretty interesting and they'll end off with some kind of life lessons at the end.

So some of the patterns and concepts I'll be discussing in this episode, decision making, uh self dampening systems, system constraints, group, problem solving, dispersal of power and just overall tractability. The book that I will be using to anchor the uh the conversation this week is the myth of the strong leader by Archie Brown, the myth of the strong leader, political leadership in the modern age. It's a book by Archie Brown. Uh I recommend it.

It was really interesting, you know, goes into a lot of details about different leaders. Uh you know, which ones failed, which ones were successful, which ones had the support of the party, which ones lost it and had to resign. A lot of the stuff that I'll be talking about in this episode. Um But it was really just a good kind of counterview to what we normally are exposed to this idea that leadership is supposed to be strong.

And if you actually look at political leadership in the modern age, you'll find that the story is quite different. So the myth of the strong leader, political leadership in the modern age by Archie Brown, go ahead and check that book out. I'll use that to anchor this episode. OK. So let's begin with just talking about types of leadership. Um Archie Brown in his book, The Myth of the strong leader uh has kind of three main categories. He has a few others that he talks about.

He is, but really three main types of leaders, the redefining leader, the transformational leader and the revolutionary leader. OK. So in redefining leadership, this is uh basically a leader is able to do course correction. So something is going on, let's just say in the country. And uh it's maybe not that great, right?

There's, you know, maybe it's uh economically something's going down socially is going something is, is not working out that well, maybe the two of them, something is just, you know, not as good as it could be. So there needs to be some kind of course correction. And so you have leaders that are, that, that have this redefining leadership, they're able to come in to, to the system and help redefine what's needed.

We'll take a look at, you know, how these different things work, but just think about these as the three main types. So redefining leadership is one, transformational leadership is an actual systemic change. And so you're not just doing a course correction within the system, you're actually kind of uh uh doing something more inherent, more deeply profound within the system itself that has to change in order to produce a positive outcome, that would be a transformational leader.

And then the revolutionary leader is one where you basically do a system overhaul, right? So, so redefining leadership is the course correction, transformational leadership is the systemic change. Revolutionary leadership is, you know, essentially overhauling the entire system in order to bring about the change that, that that is hopefully better. So redefining transformational and revolutionary.

Well, among those, I mean, if you go back, if you think about those three things right there, there obviously is a need for a type of strength in there. If you're gonna have a course correction in your system, you need a type of strength to make that happen, or at least it seems what we would consider strength, right? Strong, um you need to be able to influence, right, the people in your party, you need to be able to influence the public.

You have to bring about the change if it's transformational leadership up one step from redefining, you know, even more so, and if it's revolutionary, you would imagine that uh you know, you would need, well, a revolutionary as a rare, you know, an extremely strong charismatic individual who can lead the people and uh who can stick by their convictions.

So we're gonna challenge some of these ideas that although there are leaders who are redefining, transformational revolutionary, the type of individual, the traits that you might normally associate with an individual who could bring about those changes might not be what you think if you actually take a look at the political history and we can see this in organizations as well. So that brings us to, to kind of this next topic, which is what does strong mean.

Well, the common interpretation or, you know, is this charismatic individual, right? These personalities that, that lead to their popularity, they typically have kind of domineering traits. Uh It tends to centralize decision making power to one or a few individuals, right? Because they're strong, right? These are, you know, we'll take a look at some historical figures um throw politics uh in a bit.

But these people who kind of centralize that decision making to either just themselves or to a very small party um because that's the strength they, they stick by it, they're not gonna dilute their power by letting everybody have a voice. Um and they tend to develop kind of a cult of personality, right? You, you people tend to become obsessed with the individual beyond who the individual actually is. It kind of becomes this, you know, enigmatic, not even real anymore kind of thing, right?

This personality, this name that is attached to this individual has little to do with the individual anymore. It kind of developed this cult of personality. So that's kind of what we typically mean by strong, in other words, strong looks strong, right? It doesn't sit in the back, it's not unknown, it's, it's very well known, it's very in your face, it's popular, it's demanding, it demands the attention, right? And, and people naturally gravitate towards that definition of strong.

Well, let's start to pick this apart a little bit as we take a journey into trying to understand how important it is to have a quote unquote, strong leader as I've just defined it. And the first part that kind of goes against this narrative is when you take a look at the constraints on leadership.

In other words, if you take a look at the political systems that exist and the leaders within those systems, and you realize that they're actually quite constrained to do things that those traits of strength that I just defined, you know, you gotta be charismatic and you gotta, you know, kind of centralize the power and you got to stick by your convictions, start to become less and less useful. So, in other words, even if those were good traits, you might not be able to execute them anyway.

And therefore, if you do look at leaders who give you a good job, it couldn't have been those traits that led to it because of the constraints on leadership. OK. So let's pick that apart a little bit. Well, it's actually very difficult as uh as was described in the book by Archie Brown, the myth of the strong leader. It's very difficult to be a redefining leader. That was one of the, you know, had redefining transformational revolutionary.

So if you start with kind of the redefining leader, it's very difficult to be even just a redefining leader, someone who has uh a little bit of a course correction within the system. In fact, it's almost impossible to be a transformational leader in the 20th or 21st century usa so difficult to be a redefining leader, almost impossible to be a transformational leader where you get actual systemic change.

So a good example would be uh you know, us presidents uh that, that have their full political resources at their disposal. They, they tend to have less leverage than German Chancellors and British Prime Ministers. So if you take, I'm using us presidents as an example because, you know, I guess the most powerful country on earth. And typically we use the United States as kind of an example of a lot of leadership. But we'll use um some of the German and British later as we, as we make comparisons.

But, but the US president, let's use that as an example. You know, we want that us president to be strong, we think strong leaders throughout history, but they actually have a lot less leverage than German uh Chancellors and British Prime Ministers. If you take a look at the systems, and I'll talk about this in a bit, but there's a lot of constraints put in place uh in the, in this, in the US presidential system that don't allow a US president to, to really wield that much power.

So even if you have someone who's very charismatic and, and uh you know, appearing quote unquote strong, someone that a lot of people gravitate towards, you have to ask yourself whether or not they're going to be able to execute that strength, they, whether they're going to be able to use that so-called strength to even make a difference anyway.

And the reason why again I'm bringing that up is it starts to kind of chisel away at that myth of the strong leader because even if you have traits that you think are strong, but you can't actually leverage them, you can't actually, you know, execute on, on, on this big personality that you have on these convictions that you have that whatever successful outcomes you do have in the US presidency or other types of leadership couldn't have been from the, from the personality of the individual.

Anyway. Does that make sense? Ok. So it starts to pick away at that myth a little bit. Um You, you, you could say throughout history that Roosevelt and Johnson were probably the only redefining leaders in the US and, and a lot of, you know, if you think about why that was, it wasn't necessarily these big overbearing personalities or the charisma. It wasn't necessarily the, you know, addiction to conviction. It was actually due to their ample and effective use of the power to persuade.

Ok. So, although that still kind of sounds strong, but it's a little bit softer than, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's this individual who has these convictions and can get everybody to just get aligned. Um It's the power to persuade. It's a bit of a softer side of things. And we're gonna see as we start to look at the traits of individuals who are successful, they tend to be um a little bit more on traits that we would associate with, with things that are a little bit softer than strong.

Let's let's pick apart Rose. Uh Franklin D Roosevelt a little bit, uh and Johnson a little bit just to kind of uh have this conversation about what I mean by that. Ok. So Franklin D Roosevelt, right? Uh we know that Hoover came right before and, and Hoover had troubles with the press and the bureaucrats and especially with Congress, we'll just do a little comparison here.

So I can tell you what I mean by the power to persuade, you know, Hoover had little success in persuading others to go along with his programs. Right? He kind of had this um personality that was shy. He was not very articulate. Ok. So then you got Franklin D Roosevelt that comes in and in stark contrast, uh we think of Roosevelt as being a very spirited individual, right? He confronted the same economic and social problems uh when he replaced Hoover in 1933.

So the same things that Hoover was essentially dealing with, right, Franklin D Roosevelt had to deal with, but he worked very hard at selling himself and his New Deal programs. OK. The New Deal, if you're not familiar with a series of programs, uh you know, essentially these public work projects, you know, financial reforms, regulations, they were enacted by FDR in the US between 1933 and 1939.

And he was able to convince uh you know, a lot of men and women to accept what would be considered now kind of and at the time, unfavorable appointments, right? He motivated his congressional leaders to provide legislative action. He was able to convince the business community and its labor to support presidential initiatives. So some people might already be saying, well, it does sound like strong, you know, it's like a strong individual.

But I guess what I'm trying to get at here is it's not necessarily, you know, Franklin D Roosevelt was his big personality sitting on the stage and giving these commanding speeches and he looks strong. It was more of an individual who kind of almost behind the scenes had this power to persuade. He knew how to have the conversations with the right people. At the right time, he knew how to uh work with people and their strengths so that he could get a lot of these initiatives passed.

So that the New Deal, these series of programs, these public work projects, these financial reforms and these regulations that he had to enact could actually be successful between 1933 and 1939. He had the ability to kind of leverage other people's strength to get them to do what he thought was, right. And so it's not necessarily something that, you know, at point blank looks like a uh a strength, but it's kind of this behind the scenes almost uh almost like a sales skill.

And a lot of people say, you know, good political leadership in actuality is, is a lot like a salesperson. I don't necessarily mean because they're selling to the crowd. I mean, the ability to strike the right kind of conversations that convince people to do what's right. Um Let, let's continue that conversation actually let me just touch on, uh Johnson a little bit too because I think that's another example, Lyndon Johnson.

Um, you know, he was one of history's most legislatively active presidencies, uh, presidencies, right? Uh, he was essential to the passage of what was, uh, you know, called the Civil Rights Act, uh, to Medicare Voting Rights Act and even the Public Broadcasting Act. Ok. He rose from poverty in West Texas to become a, a congressman. He was the youngest senate majority leader in history and ultimately president as we know. So there's, there's something called the, the Johnson treatment.

Ok. So Lyndon Johnson's persuasive tactics, uh you know, Mary, uh mccrory, which was an American journalist and column, uh columnist described them as an incredible potent mixture of persuasion, badgering flattery threats, reminders of past favors and future advantages. I'll say that again.

So, so again, uh Mary, uh mccrory who was an American journalist and columnist described uh Lyndon Johnson uh using this quote, an incredible potent mixture of persuasion, badgering flattery threats, reminders of past favors and future advantages. So, you know, it's not necessarily all, you know, happy go lucky, but he's got this power to persuade, he's got this power to talk to people to remind them the thing. Apparently, he had a very good memory.

It's these things that aren't necessarily in your face traits of strong individuals. They're more how to strike good conversations with people to get things to happen Ok. Um, Lyndon Johnson, uh, you know, he'd immersed himself in the facts of a situation. You know, he's known for reading hundreds of pages on a topic and speaking to everyone he could about it. Right.

So again, he's not getting up and speaking to, you know, necessarily in a strong fashion, he's speaking to a lot of different people in a lot of different ways and, and that's so that he could ultimately make the most persuasive case possible. So it's this kind of behind the scenes, you know, having the right conversations, different types of conversations, you know, everything from flattery to badgering, you know, uh reminders of different past favors.

You were really taking an assessment of the situation and doing what's needed to, to do what he thought was best. And so, and so in many ways, this is the not so powerful president under the usual definition of power, under the usual definition of strength. And if you take a look at the systems, if you, you know, and actually the on the next episode, we're really gonna start looking at democracy and some of the myths of democracy.

But if you look at the way these systems are designed, they're designed with constraints and they're designed with constraints because they don't want, you know, things like tyranny to happen. They don't want any one individual who will definitely have failings baked into what they do to last too long. So we switch out the leaders on a regular basis, there's a lot of things that are baked into the system to make sure that those constraints are in place.

So changing the way people think about politics and introducing radical policy change is, is a very tall order for any American president and, and any leader really in any democracy. Uh but especially in the US. Uh And again, I use the US as an example because I think, you know, you get more, you tend to get more of the kind of charismatic type leaders, not always, but you know, you think of the US and you think of freedom and you want that strong leader.

So I'm just kind of using them as an example right now, but we'll definitely take a look at other uh nations going forward. But let's take a look at some of those constraints that are in place in the American system. So reasons would be uh strictness, separation of powers. Uh So, so strictness in terms of the, the laws that they put in place separation of powers.

Uh Congress is an unusually strong legislature, the Supreme Court is willing to pass judgment on presidential actions and powerful lobbies. OK. So even though you've got the lobbies and you've got presidential actions, you've got the Supreme Court there and they're willing to pass judgment on those, right. There's a willingness for dissent there. Um There's a strictness to adhere to those principles.

Uh So, so the American president's scope for action is actually far more limited than the prestige of this apparently ultra powerful office would suggest. Again, why am I talking about the constraints on leadership? Because if you have a lot of constraints on leadership, then the, the so-called strong traits of an individual can only do so much. So it goes against this idea that a strong leader is gonna come in and shake things up. Well, they can't really shake things up.

Not, not the way we we normally think in, in fact, the best way to do that would be again, like, like the, you know, the Lyndon Johnson example and the, the, the Franklin D Roosevelt example is kind of more behind the scenes striking a lot of different conversations, understanding both your friends and your enemy, having the ability to persuade, persuade is a softer thing, right?

In my opinion, it's not really a I get up and shout kind of thing or it's not like I have to look really strong because that's more of a cult of personality, right? When someone comes across and just looks strong, that alone tends to, you know, people will gravitate towards it. Like I just want that person in power.

Whereas the power to persuade is a softer kind of protracted uh takes a while different types of conversations, really good memory knowledge of the system, good knowledge of facts, how to talk to people. It's, it's more of a a drawn out calm kind of thing that ends up leading to really good outcomes as we'll see in a bit.

So that's why I'm talking about the constraints on the system, the constraints on the system make it so that you can't really get in there and like, you know, like a bull in a china shop and just start messing things up it. You, you're not able to do that.

So if you're going to make a positive change, you have to have that power of persuasion, you have to understand people, you have to be able to as we'll see, do things like make concessions and compromise and get into that behind the scenes type of stuff. Um Leader slip, leaderless revolutions is another thing and, and the reason why I'm bringing this up is because then it's, you know, kind of begs the question, well, are leaders even need it, right? Um Not all around.

But if, if you can have things like leaderless revolutions, then what, what does that say about this idea of strength where you need a strong leader to come in? And that's where the revolution comes from again. Going back to those three types of leadership. We got the redefining leadership, we got the transformational leadership, we got the revolutionary leadership where you actually have like, you know, essentially a system overhaul.

Well, if you can have leaderless revolutions, what does that say about that spontaneous revolutions have begun with no leaders at all without deliberate planning, uh you know, but they still take off with rapid speed. Now, this should be, you know, for my usual non-trivial listeners, you should probably start thinking about some of that, you know, collective decision making, how uh things can, you know, emerge in groups in aggregate and how that can end up solving problems, right?

So we'll get into a little bit that later, obviously, but um spontaneous revolutions that have no leaders uh happen throughout history. Uh And that leaders will typically come after the revolutions, right, Jacobins in France, um the mess and Bolsheviks in Russia, some examples where you've got this kind of spontaneous revolution happening. And then even though we associate a strong leader with the revolution, they actually came after the fact after it had emerged.

OK. Um it's often impossible to predict opposition and resentment against the state and and and the explosion that happens across the country. So these things emerge, right? Essentially spontaneously, French revolution of 17 89 the Russian revolution of 1917 and the, you know, the Chinese revolution of 1911 would satisfy this kind of spontaneous pattern of of leaderless revolution again, even though after the fact, a leader will come in and take over from there.

So, so again, it's begging this question, right? Are leaders even needed to, to have what is actually the strongest form of these three main types of leadership, right? Redefining transformational revolutionaries even in a revolution, they can occur without any leader at all. OK. Again, why am I bringing that up? Because it goes against this myth that you have to have the strong leader in order for something to happen, right? What does that say about leadership at all? Right, in general?

So there is such a thing. So, so what does all this mean? Right, kind of stepping back from this? Well, I think there's such a thing as too strong, right? And this shouldn't be too surprising. There's this kind of self a dampening aspect to self assuredness. Uh I've used that term self dampening before and this idea where it's almost like a snowball.

You can imagine where you've got something and then it rolls and rolls and, you know, the more let's say, the bigger it gets, it starts to slow down, you can kind of imagine as an analogy. So in other words, you might have something that appears really strong, but it, it, it ends up biting you in the long run. And I've got this kind of for, for, uh the Patreon viewers um can kind of see on this visual that I have here.

I've got this little chart at the bottom, right, this little trend line where you've got this self assured attitude that starts to take you um in good places, let's say, you know, you're self assured, you're confident, it maybe it has a good impression on people, but then all of a sudden it, it, the, the, it, it stops you and then all of a sudden it starts to slow you down, you know, kind of the, the ego is the enemy kind of thing and the outcome ends up being really bad.

Um Let's use some examples of, of this kind of self dumping, dampening aspect to self assuredness, some leaders. So Lloyd George Neville, Chamberlain, Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair. Um if you actually look out, look through history and and understand the stories behind these individuals, they paid a serious political price for their dominating attitudes. OK. These are, these are prime ministers who resigned. Uh They could no longer have the confidence of the house, right?

They had no, they, they, they lost the confidence of the house, their own people essentially turned against them. Um This kind of thing leads to removal from office as a result of alienating a sufficient number of their own colleagues, ok. Rather than like, you know, from the more usual form of rejection, you know, at the hands of the electorate or whatever.

So, um if we take a look at some of these people, um let's do you know, thinking about Lloyd George, you know, that's a very controversial figure. Uh his own party could not decide whether or not to support or abandon him, right? He was largely, you know, he largely disregarded the problems facing the party. Uh He preferred to work for himself. Right. As a result, he's, he's one of the greatest liberal leaders who also was largely responsible for the party's downfall.

Ok. So you've got this individual who behind the scenes wasn't doing the kind of things that we talked about, uh, with the case of Johnson and, and, and Roosevelt. Right? He wasn't building the bridges, he wasn't making the compromise, he wanted to essentially work for himself and his own ideas. He wasn't, you know, willing to walk away from his own convictions.

And so ultimately, even though he probably came forward as a pretty, um, you know, transformational figure, seemingly, um, it ended up going against him and he had to resign. Ok. Um Neville Chamberlain, right, famously acquiesce to Hitler, right? Giving it to Hitler's territorial demands. So most of us know the story. Um Chamberlain, of course, hope that, that, you know, kind of humiliating sacrifice would satisfy Hitler's last major territorial demand. And that's a version of the catastrophe.

Of course, that did not happen. Uh, you know, Chamberlain had a complete failure of his efforts to preserve peace. You could argue, right. So again, you can, you can understand it. Well, maybe, you know, he was trying to make a concession there and that was good. But, um, if you take a look at how Churchill actually characterized Chamberlain, he said he was, you know, he was an upright, competent.

Well, meaning man fatally handicapped by a diluted, self-confidence with compounded and already debilitating lack of both vision and diplomatic experience. So, so Churchill's quote, there is an upright, competent, well meaning man. So it seems good. But then Churchill also quipped that poo would come badly out of history. I know I will write that history. Ok. So, so Churchill on one hand said, I look like this is a well meaning man, but you know, it's not gonna come out well in history.

And so you can kind of get into the history of, of Nebel Chamberlain and see that he was making some decisions that again weren't really listening to, maybe some of the experts around. I mean, a lot of people were saying, look, I don't think giving into Hitler is necessarily a good thing. Um Hitler's got this kind of, you know, way of doing things that make sense that I i it makes sense that he's probably gonna turn um turn around and not fulfill his, his promise.

And of course, that was the case. Um Margaret Thatcher, uh you know, in the 19 eighties, um you, you've kind of got this mere simultaneous crisis of communism in the East and social democracy in the West. Uh That kind of gave her the opportunity to do great deeds, right? Uh And, and obviously that would require a great leader to take advantage of it. She was known as the Iron Lady, right?

But, you know, she was one of the most divisive British prime ministers of the modern times, she was admired and reviled, you could say, in equal measure, owing as much to the self righteous way, which she pursued her policies, right, the self righteous way that she pursued her policies. Um You know, she won famous victories, right? Uh but showed no generosity to the defeated in word or deed as a result, she failed to create harmony out of discord.

She was always preferred winning a fight to reaching a compromise. Again, these are not my opinions, right? So if you go read a lot about the history of Margaret Thatcher and how she actually did her Iron Lady thing, you know, she was very, very uncompromising. Uh she really wanted to, to win. Um And so that's how she got that term kind of Iron Lady for that decisive leadership specifically in the Falklands War. But most of most of her battles were fought against sections of her own people.

So like they actually take a look at the history of Margaret Thatcher and what was going on at the time she was fighting internally, she was fighting with her own people, right? So even though she was, you know, arguably Britain's, well, definitely Britain's most successful female politician ever, you know, um she regarded feminism as poison. She did little to encourage women to follow her. Um Yeah, you know, the shift towards finance that Thatcher promoted heightened inequality.

He actually looked at the history, you know, it, it made the economy, much more volatile. Uh And ultimately, she resigned as Prime minister and party leader in 1990 after a challenge was launched to her leadership. So again, Margaret Thatcher, the Iron Lady, a strong personality coming forward, you can see why many people would gravitate towards that.

But if you look at the way that she conducted business, the way that she did decisions kind of for herself, the way that she just wanted to win an argument, traits that are strong, right? Quote unquote, strong. Um but ultimately do damage, do damage to the party. And then most of the fights she ends up happening with, with her, her own people and then again, forcing the resignation ultimately. So again, go down to the, the people on, on Patreon and you can see that image that I have.

You got the self assured attitude. You're not deviating from your convictions, you're strong, you're the Iron lady. It, it has the self dampening aspect that ultimately leads to the to to bad outcomes. And even though you've got some victories in there, again, history is going to really remember the bad stuff, right? It's gonna take a look at the, the the failures of the leadership that come about from not being calm, from not being tranquil, from not listening to those around you.

Again, I'll define calm and tranquility more uh from a mechanistic standpoint as we go forward. But, but that's, that's what that is. Let's use one more example, Tony Blair. Um, you know, so I think, uh, history largely attaches his name to what happened with the Twin Towers 9 11. Right? So when the Twin Towers came down nine months after, you know, Bush entered the White House, Blair's words were the most powerful that Americans have heard from abroad.

So Americans at the time were really clinging on to Tony Blair's words. You know, they were elegant. He's a great speaker. He was speaking from the heart, at least that's how it sounded. Right. Um, Tony Blair believed absolutely in the existence of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction. Of course, that was mistaken. Right? He convinced himself that that too much delay would be a display of weakness. So, there we go.

Right. So Tony Blair thought that again, let's say that again that, that he had convinced himself that too much delay in, in going after, um, the so-called weapons of mass destruction in Iraq would be a display of weakness. And, and so he was totally set on that conviction and no one could change his mind, right? He had this, this deep loyalty to Bush at the time, um, after the 9 11 and it just really trumped everything else. It trumped everything else.

So the result of course was the invasion in two 1003 right? Iraq had come to dominate Blair's legacy so much that, um, even though if you take a look at, uh, you know, Tony Blair's other notable achievements, right. He had the, the, the Good Friday agreement. Yeah, the, the, you know, the devolution of, of Scotland and Wales the minimum wage and the number of social reforms. Um you know that they just get completely overshadowed by this, you know, Iraq invasion of two 1003.

He resigned as Prime Minister and the labor party leader in 2007 and was of course succeeded by George uh sorry, Gordon Brown.

So Lloyd George Neville Chamberlain, you know, Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair, they, you know, on the surface did appear to many as very strong leaders uh with deep convictions, but it was that inability to walk away from those convictions to listen to the other uh experts and and and individuals and even the general public, you know, they wanted to win their fights, they wanted to appear strong. Again, that example of Tony Blair, right?

He wanted to act fast, he wanted to appear strong and, and that ended up leading to bad outcomes and ultimately the resignation of all four of these individuals. So um that that alienation of your own colleagues is something that comes from uh too much strength. And again, iii I put quotes around that strength. I would say that's not a real form of strength, is it?

But that appearance of strength appearing to be strong can have really, really bad outcomes for, for yourself as an individual and everybody that you drag along with it. So if you're the ceo of a company, if you're the leader of a nation, these can have a pretty dramatic uh byproducts. OK. So there's this, there's this looking strong versus being strong and, and this is what I want to get into now is, is this idea of strength. True strength. So let's take those quotes of quotes off it.

Um True strength operates backstage, right? If leaders don't have as much power as we think, because we just took a look at the constraints of the system and, and all the bad outcomes, their charismatic personalities and so-called strong traits can't be the reason for certain leaders to succeed. Ok. So that's why I was talking about all those constraints on the system, right? They don't have that much power to begin with.

So, so all those so-called strong traits can't be the reason that, that they necessarily succeed, but it can be the reason that they fail because uh with, you know, it's asymmetric, right, you've got these constraints on the system and you're constantly pushing up against those constraints with the need to win battles and the the the need to appear strong, strong. Uh it, it you don't, you're not able to wield that.

So when you do go to force something to happen, it go, it, it butts up against all these constraints and the system strains because of it and the, and then the people who respect, you know, the democratic pro the democratic process and all those constraints that are in place for a reason, uh turn against you and on and on. OK. So, so looking strong and being strong and not the same things. True strength, you could argue works behind the scenes. Right?

Again, I think that, you know that, that Lynne Me Johnson example is really good of that just striking different conversations, understanding the facts, slowing things down, taking time. It might not appear strong, but in the end, it really is strength because it takes a true strength of character to do that, to slow things down and to, to talk to you.

And we'll use examples, you know, Nelson Mandela, individuals like this who we'll talk about in a bit who, who, you know, had to really work with their enemies, right?

Uh I think Mandela being the extreme example of just being able to take someone who you vehemently disagree with and, and slow it down and try to understand where they're coming from and just try to, to, to strike that compromise that middle ground or, you know, even if it's kind of still leaning to his side, that takes an amazing strength of character to do that.

Uh a really deep self awareness, an awareness of the situation, the ability to rise above it to see something bigger than the current moment. You know, that is true strength and that works largely behind the scenes because it's not something that you communicate at large in, in a speech, it's not something that riles up a bunch of people really quickly. It's something that is protracted and takes a while and uh and and definitely works behind the scenes.

Now, I also want to talk about this idea of crises uh presenting opportunities for control, the reason why I want to talk about this. So a crisis, right? Something you know, a war is going on and something major is happening, you know, a virus or whatever, right? This, this presents opportunities for control. The reason why this is important to understand is because you could say, well, how did the, you know, a lot of these really charismatic leaders get into power anyways?

I mean, I've already said that you kind of get gravitated towards them, but if they've got these really, you know, kind of traits that are self dampening and problematic, you know, how come so many of them not, can just get into power but can stay in power, right? Well, crises actually presents opportunities for a lot of control, for a lot of rise of power and that shouldn't be um too, too uh surprising. So if you take a look at Roosevelt's New Deal, right?

That was a response to economic depression in the 19 thirties and he exercised his greatest power while us was engaged in a global war. Now again, Roosevelt, um it's got some good aspects to him in terms of his leadership, but the ability to get there in the first place um was, was very much a response to the economic depression in the 19 thirties. So there was a lot going on at the time. Now, you still have to be able to skill.

If you're gonna have a good outcome, you still have to be skilled in terms of what's going on during those depressions, right? And to, to be able to get that change to happen. But that's a lot of the opportunity for control Johnson as well. We talked about came into the White House right after JFK was assassinated. You know, he sees the moment to persuade Congress, persuade Congress to pass legislation which redefined citizenship.

Um You know, you could say that the last president with a strong claim to a transformation as a transformational leader would be someone like Abraham Lincoln, right? 19th century America was in deep internal crisis at the time. So a lot of that is coming out of the turmoil is coming out of the crisis and people um you know, are looking for, looking for that leader. Um you know, and and that can be good and bad, right?

If the leader that goes in from that crisis knows how to do things kind of behind the scenes and stay calm amidst the storm, then they can have a good outcome. But you can also get really bad leaders um that arise in crisis because uh you know, it's a crisis and people are grabbing at straws and they just want someone to really be strong.

But if that strength is something that allow, uh, disables their ability to walk away from convictions that they have to win fights and they, they, they, they get addicted to appearing strong. You know, that can be very problematic. Take a look at 9 11 and the pretext surrounding that towers came down. Um, You know, Wolfowitz, Wolfowitz refused to believe that an organization headed by Osama Bin Laden could not carry out the 9 11 attacks without a state sponsor.

You know, he believed that sponsor had to have been Saddam Hussein. You know, he was preoccupied with Saddam Hussein. Well, before 9 11, um you know, the government was looking at Iraq for a while, uh crisis happens, you've kind of got this reason, that's not the real reason to then go invade, right, this pretext. You got Cheney Rumsfeld Wolfowitz and, and they, they use that kind of reasoning of the 9 11 attacks to go ahead and invade Iraq.

Despite, despite the fact that there, there was strong CIA um opposition to that, right, the CIA position was that there was no convincing case for the linkage between, you know, uh the, the, the tower was coming down at 9 11 on 9 11 and uh and whatever was going on in Iraq at the time.

So they kind of had this fake reason to make a connection that they've been wanting to make for a while and then they used that and so on this, you know, the previous one where I'm saying, you know, you've got this crisis and maybe some good leaders come into play here. You got some crisis where uh existing leaders start to wield it for wrong reasons and, and it just, you know, again, they need to, it's a perfect example of needing to appear strong, right?

Understandably, I mean, towers come down September 11th and uh the country is just in crisis and, and something happened that not many people thought could even happen.

You know, you've got the United States, the most powerful nation on earth and, and you know, these, these people from this, you know, essentially a country that's nowhere near as um economically successful and, and are able to, to do everything they had to do from a kind of a logistic standpoint to bring down these icons, these two towers, you know, in New York City, it's just, it's, it's got that kind of cognitive dissonance to it, right?

And um like we talked about in the last episode and uh and it, there's, it's a perfect example of, of a country looking towards strength and so people can get away with a lot of bad things here, right? If someone says, well, we think there's a connection between these and, and weapons of mass destruction, you know, a lot of people will go along with that. And again, you've got the Tony Blair coming in and who's, who's got this oratory, this ability to speak really well.

And he's, you know, getting people motivated, you know, logic reasoning, uh tranquility starts to go out the window in moments like this because people do the knee jerk reaction. OK. So, OK. Um So, yeah, we talked about, you know, the types of leadership, right?

The kind of the cult of personality that pops up from that uh the constraints on a system, uh the ability to have allusions without leaders in general, the self dampening aspect of that self assuredness that can kind of come and then the role of crises that can bring about, you know, essentially put people or maintain people into power that maybe shouldn't be um you know, unless you're a good leader that can do it.

So I want to take a look uh at this idea of collectivism now, um because we're talking about leaders, right? And if you think about one of the kind of the main obviously movements or philosophies or ideologies that kind of goes against putting too much power in an individual would be something like collectivism, right? And one of its many manifestations. Um so I want to talk about group priority versus centralized power for a second and, and kind of overlap that with what that means for leaders.

So obviously, uh you know, whether it's, you know, kind of a weaker form of socialism or full blown, um, you know, communism or whatever kind of manifestations of collectivism you wanna talk about? Right. Well, it only works when the role of the leader, true. Collectivism would only work when the role of the leader is minimized. Right? Because you're talking about collectivism and you want, you know, really good representation.

You want many people to be able to kind of weigh in their opinions, But we know that, you know, true. Uh at least maybe I shouldn't say true, but at least the collectivism that was promoted throughout history and politics only actually occur with uh a dictator, right? You need someone to enforce the collectivism. So you kind of got this paradox, right?

Where you want collectivism, a lot of people to weigh in on what happens, you want to have that equality of outcome if you can get there or at least some form close to it. But in order to do that, you have to enforce a lot of rules and so collectivism kind of demands this dictatorship or, or some type of authoritarian rule. Um So you've got individuals like Stalin and Mao, right?

Um Obviously two examples of, of nations that, you know, from whatever failures came before, they said, look, we need more kind of collectivism. So they really bought into that philosophy. Uh you know, Russia really setting the stage for that. And then Mao later, do you know, essentially a copying and then going on from what Stalin was doing and those are uh obviously largely regarded as um massive failures throughout history, right?

Uh in terms of politically so Stalin, uh you know, he, he really perpetuated the hostility toward the West for the sake of Soviet security. You know, by the time Gorbachev, it was clear by the time Gorbachev came in, it was clear that capitalism was, was not about to collapse.

So that was a failure on Stalin's part, this kind of direct extreme hostility towards the West and the, and the the capitalist ideology, you know, under, under Stalin's leadership, millions, um millions of lives were lost due to famine, right? Um You got Mao Zedong who was the first, you know, five year plan, he, he had this what we called the five year plan for the future of China, right? It was, it was launched by Mao in 1953.

Um in which the Soviet Union was actually held up as a model for development, right? So you've got what was happening, the Soviet Union at the time and, and Chinese saw that as a great thing and they wanted to copy it at least mounted. Um you know, they had this kind of saying that the Soviet Union's today is our tomorrow, right? That's what that was said in China by Mao. So he brought about the so-called great leap forward it, right? That was from 1959 to 1961.

And he, and he just, he praised the Chinese as a, you know, as an especially disciplined people who would do, you know, do as their government demanded, right? So you kind of, you've got this propaganda of being like, look every if, if we believe in it and you do this for a while, there will be this, this really great, you know, equality outcome in the end. So just trust the government.

So you've got this again, this, this kind of idealism of collectivism that demands the centralized power, right? Um And so they, you know, involve industrialization of the agricultural reforms and and agricultural reforms, they have this promise of eventual utopia, right? Um Mao's measures involve, you know, uh kind of the consolidation of collectives into gigantic people's communes, right? And that was supposed to achieve essentially economies of scale.

Um But, you know, the problems of agricultural food being eaten by birds in the fields and sparrows, they, they were going to eliminate those by a campaign against birds and wipe them out. So they all kind of in hindsight, seemingly kind of goofy policies, right? This this extreme intervention where the government can come in and control things to try to force the equal, you know, outcomes of things or, or even in the environment, right, good outcomes for the people.

Um So, so that that kind of war against the birds to try to get rid of all the insects was essentially e uh an ecological disaster, right? Um Yeah, the, the insects just ended up proliferating at an absolute horrific rate. So it's kind of an example, but the reality of the whole thing was that harvest failed.

Uh And there was this great famine that, that, that, that followed all of these, you know, the ecological disaster and these, these things that were put in place to try to get everybody into a collective. Um It's been called the greatest largest famine in human history. And it's believed that up to 40 million people died as a result. OK. So, so Stalin and Mao are for all intents and purposes, right?

These massive failures that happened in the pursuit of collectivism and, and, and that's not to say that, you know, the other side of things doesn't have bad stuff as well, right? Um But uh you know, just a little bit of history here. You, you have um you know, so you got Mao and, and then you've got Deng, right? Uh Deng shipping, which was much more who was much more successful and what's interesting here.

And the reason why I want to kind of do this backdrop is you've got, so you've got Stalin Mao collectivism, massive failure.

And then you've got Deng coming after Mao who wasn't in the top position in government, he never actually held the top position, but he had this willingness to listen to many different opinions and his outcome is by far through, you know, according to history, much more successful than Mao, right Deng emerged as China's new leader in the aftermath of the death of Chairman Mao Zedong.

Right Deng Deng arranged a meeting called the third plenary session of the 11th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China. So he brought this is very kind of new at the time, right to bring together a committee to kind of make this big decision that brought an end to decades of suffering by the Chinese people under Mao's mismanagement and disastrous campaigns, right?

These policies, you know, they they really unleashed the the the creative and even entrepreneurial potential of the Chinese people, right? They allowed China to break out of its self imposed isolation, right? He opened diplomatic relations with the United States. Um even though that was essentially initiated by Nixon and Kissinger. But but he was part of that to open up the the those those relations with the US and the capitalism, right?

Deng understood that China needed to develop and would require a stable external environment that was conducive to an international trade and investment, right? So he he understood the power of being able to open up access the external environment. You don't have to agree with what all of the nations are doing. But by opening up those borders and and being able to to be involved in international trade and investment ends up being a very, very good thing for China, right.

He, he really did away with the Maoist support for, for that kind of global anti capitalist revolution side of things. And you know, he he came in and set aside a lot of the maritime disputes that China had with his neighbors, with its neighbors. And and he really tried to gradually but still integrate China into much of the US led liberal international order. Ok. So we had this kind of quote unquote reform and opening, which was just greater engagement with the international community.

And and China just saw a remarkable period of economic and social development, right, just unprecedented in human history, right? Uh China has increased since then, its per capita income 25 fold. It's brought more than 800 million Chinese people out of poverty, poverty and uh and and that's actually more than 70% of the total poverty reduction in the world.

It now China has, has now one of the largest economies in the world by some measures, the uh largest and it's it's just an absolute global political power uh with, you know, with a rapidly improving military. So look at the difference, right, you've got Stalin and Mao who on the surface would actually appear as stronger leaders by that kind of classic definition of strength, right?

Uh the oratory, the giving the speeches, the demanding people to get in line the the extreme centralization of that power, you know, the the the zero acceptance of dissent, you know, um strong leaders but they led to massive failures, massive famines, massive downside for the country where someone like Dong, uh someone like Dang, sorry, much more successful.

And he wasn't even in the top position, but he had this ability to listen to different opinions, to bring people together, to hold the committees and, and the, the improvement to the Chinese were just, I mean, it's almost unfathomable, fathomable uh compared to where they were before. So it's a different style of leadership, right? Uh You know, you, you could say dang is much more behind the scenes and not really a clawing for power. Uh As much as someone like a Stalin or, or a Mao, right?

Uh less centralization opening, opening up the borders, uh taking a look at a country like the US, which is almost diametrically opposed to the way that your country is doing something and saying, OK, you know what, let's, let's at least work with them, let's have less of that friction, let's access the benefits from our surrounding environment while still preserving a lot of what we have as our own country. You know, trying to strike that balance, a very hard thing to do.

It's easier to just say, you know, I'm gonna take the strong opinion, I'm gonna hold to our convictions and I'm not gonna budge and you can get a lot of people around that message, but it's typically quite damaging. Um You know, you have stories of, of Genghis Kong who, who is, who always kind of folded in the the inventions and the customs and the cultures of the people that he, that he conquered, right?

And there's a real benefit to doing that, to open yourself up to what other people are doing, but trying to strike a balance so that you still preserve your own culture and your own identity. So I think that's an interesting story with that. So um also kind of interesting is that free markets just in general tend to exhibit more genuine collectivism than socialist regimes, right?

If you think about the ideology of collectivism itself and getting a lot of people to get together, well, you have to allow for the opening up, you have to allow for dissent, you have to allow for the everyday individual to have that freedom. So it's kind of this paradox collectivism and and its traditional centralization of power that really, really works against it. OK? Um And then we've also got this idea that just ego is error prone, right? Ego is the enemy, right?

This this idea that, you know, if you don't go through life with a decent amount of humility that that's really going to work against you. And it does, you know, leaders who tend to fancy themselves as strong individual leaders, individual leaders are throughout history. Shown to be much more prone to serious error, much more prone to serious error because they don't, they don't, they don't have any kind of system to check on themselves. Right.

The idea that you're going to have all the ideas that you, that you've got this belief that is so strong that you're just gonna push it through no matter what can have, um, you know, a lot of damaging things. Right. And you could argue that maybe some of that works for, uh, you know, a while. Right. You've kind of got the Steve Jobs story of, you know, well, he had this kind of bubble of unreality or whatever they called it around him.

And he just, he had this strong conviction that things had to be a certain way. And, and, you know, there's, there's some upside to that, obviously, in terms of innovation, there's a lot of downside to that. I mean, he got fired from his own company, right? Um It's also debatable how much he was really like that.

I mean, I think the guy probably still had some, some decent, he definitely had the power to persuade and I'm sure he was still doing things a lot uh behind the scene because when you're really passionate about things, that's what you tend to do. But people in general who discount the accumulated knowledge of those with expertise typically fail, right? And uh you know, foreign policy decisions are almost always worse with authoritarian and autocratic regimes.

Um because these regimes don't allow dissent from below and they believe that one leader can make, you know, essentially all the decisions, you know. And again, Margaret Thatcher, right. Iron Lady example, you know. Yeah, it's good to have convictions, but you have to be able to walk away from them. And we've talked about, you know, the true purpose of Ockham's razor, right? This idea that you're gonna put a super tight, simple narrative in place.

So that could be your conviction like here is specifically what I believe. OK, that's good because you're precise and you could be very clear about it. But the reason why it's so good to be so clear about that is so that it can die easy, right? So that it can be attacked because if it's vague, people don't really know what you're talking about, it ends up getting propped up longer than it should.

But if I'm very precise about what I believe, then it's easy for you to attack it and that's what you want, but you have to be willing to kill it, right? If it survives over a long period of time, while you're very precise and tight with your narrative and that says something about its ability to be a good, you know, philosophy or ideology or whatever it is policy, right?

But if you're very, very tight with your narrative and specific, but people are trying to, they are, you know, raising really good objections to it and you don't listen to it, you don't allow that dissent that's gonna come and bite you because it's just not compatible with the system as a whole.

It's not something that is meant to survive and nature will eventually win out if you push something that is too strong that is supposed to die because it just doesn't work with the way the mechanics of nature work and, but you, but you prop it up artificially through centralization of control, uh, through tyranny, right, through threat, through force, whatever it is, then uh it's, it's, it's, it, it will definitely fail eventually because it will definitely lead to bad outcomes because that's how nature works, right?

It, it's not, it has to be whatever it is you put forward, it has to be commensurate with, with, with, with the mechanics of nature. And if you take a look at the tractability of problems and how things get solved, if you talk about it all the time on this podcast, right? You know, it, it, it won't work, it won't work. Um And unfortunately, in politics that means you can bring a lot of people down with you, right?

A famine that kills 40 million people because of your in, you know, inability to walk away from a conviction. Uh and to listen to those around you is uh to say it's a tragedy is an understatement, right? So it, it pays to be aware of how things actually um happen um dispersal of power. I want to talk about now. So, so that gets into this idea that, you know, the dispersal of power will lead to success, which is, which is against kind of this myth of the strong leader, right?

Because those who appear strong typically are not dispersing their power. Because if you disperse your power, you will delegate to other people, you will allow their strengths to come forward. You will, you will be doing, you know, matchmaking and subtle persuasions and facilitating of the conversations and a lot of things that quite frankly happen in the background. And you won't be again, sticking to that conviction, super strong and yelling it from the from the mountain top, right?

You will disperse that power and because the power is getting dispersed, you will get less attention because of it. But that that is what leads to better outcomes. And history will show that you were truly a strong leader for dispersing the power and trying to maintain it for yourself. And you can see this throughout history. So in the history of the two major Communist states, the Soviet Union and China, right, the periods of increased collective leadership were far less devastating.

Ok. Take a look at at, at Soviet Union and China, the periods of increased collective leadership, you know, again, they still have a lot of collectivism to them and communist aspects to them. But the periods of increased collective leadership where you are now to be clear, we're using the term collective as in, you are listening to others like true collectivism, right? You're listening to those around you, you're allowing, you're, you're allowing for dissent, you're allowing for change.

Those types of leadership were far less devastating. And Deng is a, is a perfect example of that, right? So totalitarian and authoritarian regimes, they, they exist on a continuum, right? On the totalitarian extreme. You have someone like uh Envier Hoja, right? Envier Hoja of Albania who um well, I'll talk about him in a second. Um And, and, and Kim Il Sung of North Korea, right?

Two individuals would be on the tata totalitarian side of things and on the other side of things you have, you know, maybe what you might call mild authoritarianism like Singapore, right? It's not a democracy and it has a vibrant market economy, but it's still got some maybe authoritarian aspects to it. And then on the other side, you might, you know, say you've got democracy, although I guess it kind of depends, depends on how you define democracy.

Um But let me talk about so, so I'm gonna talk about just kind of the spectrum and, and that just gets into the fact, the reason why you have to disperse power. But uh you know, in Hoja was the 22nd Prime Minister of Albania um from 1944 to 1954 right? And Hoja and his government were very hostile to Western popular culture. So there's that theme again. Uh And that was manifested in the mass media along with uh you know, against consumerism and cultural liberalism that were associated with that.

He was very much against that. Um He demanded strict conformity. He had a 40 year tyranny that emerged as one of the most depraved in modern history, right? His atrocities uh are arrived only by, you could say Adolf Hitler and, and, and Joseph Stalin, um you know, scientists and intellectuals were favorite targets, ok? Because those who were educated, he actually feared the most anything foreign was denounced as a danger.

Musicians were banished to reeducation camps for playing things like Mozart or worse the Beatles and uh and his communism ultimately failed. So you've got this extreme totalitarianism in Envier Hoja of Albania as an example, you can go read about them and, you know, not good outcomes, right? These things don't work. I it's an extreme centralization of power. It's a, it's an, it's an extreme version of not listening to uh others.

You know, he didn't like the scientists, he didn't like the researchers. Those are actually his favorite target. You know, the the experts that were trying to tell him if something was, was, you know, maybe not great. The dissent which just absolutely wasn't allowed. So an extreme clinging to one's conviction is extremely problematic. And again, if it's in politics devastating to, to, to potentially millions of people, um Kim Il Sung North Korean, right?

Um North Korean life changed drastically for the worst right after Kim Il Sung's death in, in uh 1944 because of his policies that he had put in place during his, his time, um you know, large scale famines again devastated the country. Right. That would be in the late nineties. Uh you know, he had foreign and economic policy failures uh that just contributed to the crisis.

So, yeah, you know, again, extreme centralization, extreme, you know what you would call a totalitarian where essentially one man holds the supreme power, they, they just don't have good outcomes, right? Um Now, that's not to say democracy is all great and all perfect, but it is kind of a play against that. Um You, you and you do got to be careful about putting democracy on the other end of the dispersal of power because that can really, really not happen in democracies.

So we're actually going to talk about this in the next episode. OK. And we're gonna, we're gonna really pick apart democracy and how that gets defined in all kinds of ways and kind of the BS narrative that all came out of Athens and all that kind of stuff. So we'll get into that. So I, I have it for people on, on um on, on patreon dot com can see that I've got uh democracy as kind of the right on that spectrum.

That's uh you should probably put quotes around that because there's all kinds of ways to define democracy and democracy can have problems go uh bad with it too. But the line dispersal of power is very much correct in the sense that you've got regardless of what you want to call the government, right? Totalitarian, authoritarian democracy, the less you disperse the power.

OK. So let's just be agnostic to the labels, the, the, the less you disperse that power, the more problematic it's going to get history will show. OK? And that's the take home message here, the more you disperse the power, which is kind of a weakness, quote unquote, it appears right at face value, it appears weak. The more you disperse your power, the less you're gonna be known more like the dang example, right?

You're not gonna be not necessarily like the most charismatic and the most commanding, right? You're not commanding a bunch of respect, you know, you, you're not disallowing dissent, you're allowing the dissent, you're allowing the conversation, you almost take a bit of a back seat for the most successful leaders and history.

History will reward those leaders as, as signs of true power, as, as individuals who had true power over those that you know, just would not walk away from their conviction. OK. So now I'm gonna jump into um some mathematical models of leadership. So we talked a lot about, let's just do a really quick recap and don't run away just because you heard Mathematica, I'm not gonna go super crazy. I'll speak about it at a very conceptual level and high level, it's only about five or six kind of points.

Um Again, so we've got those types of leadership, right? We've got the redefining leader of the transformation of the revolutionary. You know, you either doing a course correction or you're bringing about an actual systemic change or you're overhauling the system. Um You know, we take a look at what strong means typically, then we took a look at the constraints on the systems and how if you have those constraints in place, then how much can a leader really do anyway, with that personality.

In other words, if you do have a good outcome, uh it must be because of not necessarily the the power to wield your conviction across the whole system, but rather your ability to work within those constraints to persuade, to kind of work behind the scenes. But if you do go the other way, you've got this asymmetry and you do hold on to that conviction, you know, the constraints of nature, the constraints of the systems are really going to to explode.

They're, they're, they're gonna cause the system to essentially collapse. Um leaderless revolutions where you know, leaders aren't even needed to big to bring about the biggest change ever, right, French revolution, Russian revolution, Chinese revolution, you know, you've got these, these examples where the leaders aren't even needed.

Um The self dampening aspect to that self assured attitude and the unwillingness to walk away from that convictions to true strength really being something that works behind the scenes. We talked about the crises. Uh And then we got into this collectivism and the ego being a problem. And then we got the spectrum of the dispersal of power. OK. So what I want to do now is take a look at mathematical models of leadership. So don't get scared if math is not your thing.

Um I just, you know, I talk a lot about uh in, in nontrivial episodes. What I do is I basically, you know, try to, to understand the mechanisms behind the patterns that I see, right.

So, you know, if I'm talking about a particular, you know, high level concept or pattern that I think is important or like I do in season three where I kind of anchor the conversation with a book, but either way I still, you know, identify a pattern or a set of patterns that I think are particularly profound or universal. And then I try to investigate um the underlying mechanisms behind it, right?

You know, what, what is, how does this pattern play out, what are the main core pieces and, and, and how do they relate to each other? Well, one way you can do that from a kind of a, a slightly more scientific standpoint is obviously through mathematical modeling. And I'm not here to dive into a bunch of heavy math.

But I think it, you know, the coming up with a mathematical expression for something can be a nice way to capture, you know, the core concepts that are being teased out by intuition, right? I think concepts in intuition are far more important than, than the laying down of things through mathematical symbols.

But the mathematical symbols bring a precision and an anchor that can kind of help you really see how things relate to each other and they can facilitate the conversation because of course, you can embody or manifest those equations within computers and then you can plot them and you can uh you can kind of play with them and see how things change and I'll show you in a bit.

Uh I've actually set up a, a dedicated site which I'll do from from this point forward for non-trivial that I call the non-trivial playground. Um You can actually find it uh at uh nontrivial dot online instead of dot com. It's dot online. So Nontrivial dot online, it's called the non-trivial Playground. And I'll start setting up basically these different um You just have like little sliders and little graphs that change.

So you can kind of play around with the mechanisms that I talk about, but on these episodes, right? So I basically, you know, take the mathematical model from, from one of our studies. I bake it into this, this this playground application and you can go play with them So I'll show you that in a bit. Um show you for the uh Patreon subscribers uh for, for those with audio, you can still head over, you can still have access to the playground.

But anyway, so mathematical modeling uh definitely can serve its purpose. It's a nice, nice way to anchor the conversation, but you should never take these models too seriously because they are, you know, definitely make extreme approximations to, to how things play out um based on the concepts.

But here for, for Patreon subscribers, you can see uh for audio listeners to try to envision, I do have a formula here that comes from a study uh called an evolutionary justification of the emergence of leadership using mathematical models. And so basically, it says, look, if we want to go ahead and, and model leadership, which is obviously what we're talking about in this episode, um you can do so by thinking of it in terms of the probability of survival.

In other words, you have a group of people and then you have a leader and that leader is either helping that group survive or not. And the way that you can model survivor is a survival story is with a survivor or survival function and a survival function has a, you know, there's a number of different ways to write it out.

But you can see for uh Patreon subscribers, what it looks like here, you've got, you know, obviously, uh you know a summation sign that basically sums all the individuals together, what it's summing is their actions, which is just a number. You can kind of just think of it as, as, as a random variable between zero and one and that uh in, in the way that they've defined it here, if you're, if, if that variable of the individual is close to zero, then it's more optimal.

Whatever that means just you're kind of arbitrarily assigning that as optimal. And if you deviate from that zero, then it's non optimal. So you can sum all those together, you can multiply it by a beta which is another parameter for the harshness of the environment. And then uh and then, yeah, you're summing it over the entire group.

So what you have are kind of three dials or levers that you can play with on this expression, you've got the size of the group, the harshness of the environment and then those actions taken from the individuals, whether or not they're close to optimal or not. And if you're close to optimal, then you know, as a model of leadership, you can imagine the leader is having some positive influence over the individuals in that group, right?

In other words, if those XS in this formula are closer to zero, And if, if you kind of see how that plays out in the formula they get minus off the 100. So basically you want that very right? Side of that equation being low and the left side uh to the right of the equal sign, you basically want the 100 to be as much 100 as possible in order for the Survivor survivability to be high.

But anyways, the take home message here that I wanna point out is that you've got these kind of three levers to play within this model size of the group, harshness of the environment and actions taken by the individual. You can see a plot to the right for for no for Patreon subscribers, you basically um change the harshness of the environment and then you also change on the X axis. The uh the the kind of how optimal the actions taken by the group are.

And you can see that if they are less optimal, you get away from the zero, it starts to drop off and it drops off at a different rate depending on the harshness of the environment. So these are these kind of levers, these toggles we can play to try to understand the dynamics of these patterns that I talk about in these episodes. And I thought this study was pretty interesting. So we can uh kind of take home message here from this graph.

This equation, we can say the more challenging the environment, the more important it is for individual actions to be close to zero. So more important is for those individual actions to be optimal. So from a leadership perspective we want that leadership that, that leader to be having positive influence on the individual. So that given the different harshness of environments that they play into, um you know, they have a good chance of survivability. And so a lot of this is pretty intuitive.

It makes sense. Like if you have a harsher, more uncertain environment, you would expect the ability of a group to sur uh survive to be lower. If the individuals in that group are not close to optimal behavior, we would expect the survivor uh the survivability to drop off in that group.

Um And so even though those are pretty obvious, the fact that you have a simple mathematical, relatively simple mathematical expression to capture those patterns means this is a way to anchor those concepts, right? And you might say, well, you know what's the point, right? I mean, we already know this kind of intuitively why capture those mathematical symbols.

Well, we can embody or manifest this mathematical equation on a computer and because we can do that, then we can make it play out, we can run it, we can try different combinations of size of groups and harshness of environments and actions taken by individuals. We can um go it right. We can set up this equation with the front end. Uh And we can put little toggles and levers and you can move them yourself and you can start to play around and see how the graph changes as you do that.

And that's a nice way to build intuition around the dynamics or the mechanics of the patterns that we talk about so much so that I've actually set up a dedicated site called uh that you can find on nontrivial dot online. So instead of dot com, it's dot online, nontrivial dot online, anybody can head over there. I call it the non-trivial playground.

Um It, uh when you get to the kind of the, the home page, you just click on the square for the episode and then that will open a dedicated site that has um one or more of these models baked into it and it's got levers and it's got the charts. You can kind of play around with the mechanics of the model. I just want to do that because again, on all these non-trivial episodes, I'm talking about the underlying, you know, kind of mechanics of the patterns that I think are interesting.

So if you want to interact with those mechanics and see how they play out with some of these models that gives you a way to kind of build some intuition around it. So for those interested, go ahead and head on over to nontrivial dot online. It'll take you to the non-trivial playground. I've just got the one episode set up now this episode because I've just started.

But from this point going forward, I'll do this for, for all my episodes, play around with the mechanisms that we talk about um on this next uh visual for, for the Patreon subscribers that you can see another way that you can model uh the group dynamics and and the role of leadership is through cohesiveness. So the better group cohesion you have uh the better aligned, the individuals are uh to each other. They're all kind of doing the same thing as one way of thinking about this.

And so one way that you can introduce this into the model that I just described previously is you can basically take an average of all the actions. Again, those actions are just numbers, right? They're just random variables. But if you take the average of them, and so you represent all the actions of those individuals with a single number, which is what an average is.

And then you plug that into this uh other formula that basically discounts the individual or diverse actions by a cohesive parameter and uh augments or improves the, the average because that's what cohesion is. Then you basically come up with a new individual action that can then be summed. So probably pretty jargony there, maybe losing a few of you, especially if you don't have the visuals to look at. Don't worry about it.

What I'm saying here is there's a way to reduce cohesiveness because in the original one, when we're just summing a bunch of people together, there was they were all independent actions. OK? But from a mathematical perspective, you might want to say, well, you know, people are talking to each other, right, they're working together, there should be some kind of cohesion. And in fact, from a leadership perspective, you could imagine that a leader would be able to help the group cohesion.

In fact, that might be a mathematical way of defining what leadership is. And so there's a way of kind of using averages and plugging those back into the original formula to introduce this dependence that people have on each other within a group. That's, that's the take home message there. And uh for those on Patreon, you can see the chart to the right there where we actually look at the effect of cohesion on survival.

So as the cohesive factor increases, in other words, people are kind of working and getting more aligned, you can see the survival probability goes up because again, we're just plugging it into that survivor function at the top there. Um Again, pretty obvious, right? But, but the purpose of this is not necessarily to see something that you didn't already know.

It's the fact that these mathematical expressions are at least a reasonable anchor to the mechanisms that we, we understand about groups, right? And that, but you can also find some interesting surprising things as well. Um Now in this and, and I'm gonna show you the, the nontrivial playground in a second for those that are on Patreon and, and for those on audio only, you'll just have to listen to what I speak with and hopefully it will still be interesting.

But before I do, I just want to show that everything here was kind of analytical. You've got the mathematical expression, you can go ahead and plot it, you can see the trend lines and you know, make comments about what's happening in the groups and what the role of leadership might be, which I'll use going forward as we get back into some of the political examples. Um But one more thing is the simulation.

So when you have a lot of these combinations, you know, we're doing these little dials, these levers, we're changing the parameters of the equation to see how things play out. Of course, there's this kind of combinatorial explosion that happens. There's so many different combinations of those parameters and sometimes you just want to do thousands and thousands or millions of different combinations to see what happens. And that's where uh you know, the computer can really, really help, right?

We can, you know, essentially program these mathematical expressions in a numerical fashion into computers. And then we can mix and match an absolute ton of different combinations of those parameters. And that's where simulation comes. So various combinations of group size, harshness and diversity in the case of this survivor function, uh we can, we can choose a range of values to explore the different scenarios between two extremes. So you can have like no chance of survival.

On the other end is, is you can have a group that survives no matter what. And so as we change these parameters, we're somewhere between those two extremes and, and we can try those different combinations. So um here, here's the take home message from all this if we step back and say, OK, we tried to capture some of these interesting patterns from these mechanisms of leaderships, right, in group of leadership in groups and their ability to survive.

And you can model that out mathematically and look at it from an analytical perspective. You can run, you know, kind of these massive simulations on a computer at the end of the day, you can step back and say, well, what has that told us? Is there anything interesting here or is it, is it at least aligned with what our kind of intuition is about leadership in groups? So here are some of the results from this particular study.

Again, this is the uh an evolutionary justification of the emergence of leadership using mathematical models. That's a paper I got the link in here. So head on over to Patreon to check that out. Some of the results are um diversity and action can actually hinder leadership especially in large groups or harsh environments. OK. So you know, I've talked a lot about the importance of variation on diversity and making, you know, particularly complex problems tractable.

So we know diversity can be a very good thing. But one of the costs to increase diversity is the need to manage it. So, when we're thinking about this in terms of leadership and uh you know, too much diversity can actually be a bad thing. And unless you have a way to manage it, right, unless you have a way to um basically coordinate the actions of the group.

And anyone who's done any kind of leadership in their life knows this, if you've, you've been, you know, a manager or something in a director level or CEO of a company or whatever it is, and you've got a decent sized amount of people, the more people that you introduce into a project, um you know, the more challenging it can get, uh you, you have the benefit of the different diverse opinions that can be really, really good information to help, you know, statistically sample from the possibility space, as I like to say, to try different things and use that trial and error to solve problems, but you still have to manage it, you still have to coordinate those actions.

So the diversity um can actually be good up to a point. But if that group size gets too large, it can, it can hinder uh the ability to lead effectively. And so that's why, you know, you get this more hierarchical structure in very large organizations because the leaders have to hire, you know, lower level leaders who hire lower level leaders and you kind of have to fractal that out in order to try to coordinate the actions over thousands and thousands.

Um Another one is um and, and that's not just the size of the group that's also based on the harsh, so the harsher, harsher the environment, the more uncertain, it is um the harder it is to coordinate the actions with increased diversity. So diversity is good. It brings a lot of point different points of view that can help you solve the problem. But it does need to be coordinated.

Uh Leaders who emerge in smaller groups with less harsh environments will have a better chance to lead a group to survival than a leader in a large group under harsh uncertain conditions. Better leaders are more severely affected by diversity of actions than worse leaders. That's interesting. So this, so this uh study was able to basically distinguish between uh you know, better leaders and worse leaders.

And then they looked at what the harshness of the environment did and the better leaders and diversity story. So the better leaders as they defined, it were actually more severely affected by the diversity. And that's probably just a way that the better leader is maybe having this method of coordination. But then uh if the diversity, by definition changes, then maybe the coordination gets more challenging. Uh as group size increases, the quality of the leader matters more, right?

And you actually see this nonlinear drop-off between ranked leaders. If you go to that paper, you can see how they do that leader quality is much more important for large groups in harsh environments than smaller groups. Leadership emergence is favored in large groups under uncertain conditions. Um So really good examples of this would be something like Nelson Mandela or Matt Hama Gandhi or MLK Junior.

Um You have these very uncertain conditions and that's where you typically see the leadership emergence, be favored leaders will emerge out of that. So remember, we talked about already, you can have this kind of spontaneous uh revolution start to grow and then often the leaders will kind of emerge after the fact. And that's a pattern that you see in these groups. Um when group co and the last one here is when group cohesion is present, the need for a leader coordination is actually diminished.

So you've kind of got this this two sides of things. On one hand, a leader can come in and do really good cohesion. But if you just had a group by itself that had group cohesion, the need for very strong leadership is actually diminished. And so an example of this in nature would be things like, you know, self organization, like you see in complex um situations, I think a good exam, complex problems are or complex systems.

So a good example again, might be, you know, the the spontaneous emergence via a revolution where maybe you've got some kind of natural uh coordination within groups and then that allows a lot to happen and then it gets to a point where a leader does need to come in to continue to, to uh coordinate going forward as they get more refined in, in the approach. So anyways, those, those were the results of uh you know, running these simulations and doing these mathematical models like that.

So what I wanna do now before I just jump into the rest of it and we kind of finish off uh the episode is I just want to take a quick look at the non-trivial playgrounds for the people that are on uh that the, the Patreon subscribers can see uh the visuals of what that looks like. And I'm just gonna kind of move the toggles back and forth and just relate that back to some of the things that we've been talking about. So let me do that now. Ok. So here I am in the non-trivial playground.

So just a simple site that I set up. Um So you can log in again to Nontrivial dot online and we'll load this website. Um It's, it's really for desktop and you know, it technically appears on mobile, but um definitely works better on desktop. So just click on the episode, the trail of calmness. And then I've got these charts uh similar to the ones that I showed from the paper. But again, these are interactive. So you can play around with it. So here, I've got two.

the first one is related to the probability of survival versus that, that deviation from optimal actions. And so what we can do is we can come in here. Uh You click on the equation. See the equation I'm talking about here, this is the survivor function. Uh We can start to toggle things like the environment of harshness, the group size and action deviation from optimal. So again, zero is optimal.

And if you start to toggle that to the right slide that to the right, the uh you can think of that as the group taking less and less optimal actions before I start toggling that you can just see, I've got that kind of three bar. This is basically just reproducing what was in the paper uh originally in a static sense. So they've got, you know, the three betas, right, the harshness of the environment 25 50 100. So as the harshness increases, um you've got uh so the the most harsh rate 100 is blue.

And so you can see that the the rate or the survival probability drops off uh much more quickly, right? And then again, as you deviate from optimal actions, it also drops off. So just as a general pattern, right, we know the harshness of environment is important, we know that we want to get kind of uh obviously closer to optimal actions within the group So if I start sliding these, now, then you can see this bends back and forth for people that are on Patreon.

And so I'm increasing the harshness of the environment. And you can see that in order to maintain a survival probability that's closer to 100 closer to the top here, um, you really need those actions to be closer to optimal. If the environment isn't, that, isn't that harsh, isn't as harsh? Sorry, then uh tho those individual actions don't have to be as optimal, right? Because you still have decent probability.

So this is just a simple example of, again, we're, we're capturing the dynamics of the system and you can come in here and you can think about what that means and, and then, you know, really don't just think about the math, don't think, just think about the science of the statistics, think about what this means in everyday life, right? Think about the leadership, right? If you're in a harsher environment, you know, you're going to have to get better.

Um You have to influence the activity of the individuals of your group that much more, get them more aligned to whatever that means, right? Get them closer to how you define the optimal uh activity. I can also do group size. So for the same kind of uh you know, let's say pattern that we've established here, let's say I've got this environment harshness sitting at, you know, 57 on a scale from 1 to 100 I start to increase group size.

As soon as that group size increases, it starts to drop off very dramatically. So you can start thinking, well, if I have an appreciable group size, I that environment to be backed off, you know, in into much more favorable conditions in order to have a decent survivability, you know, kind of uh curve here. Again, if you're only listening to from an audio perspective, you're gonna see obviously hard to visualize this.

So head on over to the site if you want and then this is not changing the graph, this just shows that as I deviate from optimal behavior, you can see the survival probability drop off. So these are the kinds of things that we try to capture in models, right? How, how harsh is the environment? What is the size of the group? How optimal are the behaviors?

And you can think about that in terms of, you know, a particular political leader, a particular size of the group, uh the likely you know, the level of of kind of alignment or optimal of those of the people within that group and things like that. So I think it's pretty interesting. Again, interactive visuals like this just help build that intuition, you can almost build a bit of a muscle memory around kind of the dynamics of the patterns that we talk about.

So I think that, you know, that's why it's interesting that's why I wanna set this up. Um The second one here that I have is the probability of survival versus group cohesion. So again, this is kind of how well uh the individuals of the group are, are essentially doing the same thing, right? We had that average term and they're a very simplistic way of thinking about cohesion and people working together. But still uh still kind of interesting.

Um So we can, we can talk about different things here. So I can again increase the environment harshness. And uh what it's doing is plotting the survival probability against the group cohesion. So obviously, better cohesion increases the probability of survival if I back harshness off, right, you've got a better chance of survival regardless of the cohesion. If the environment gets worse, right? You're going to want to have um you much more cohesion in order to have a decent chance of survival.

Right? Again, we can do the group size. If we increase the group size, it starts to drop off. Um You know, if we back off the environment and then play with the group size like that, you got a much better chance for survival and then group diversity is just uh how different the actions are within that group. OK. And so if they're much more diverse, you're gonna have to have that much better cohesion in order to still have survivability and on and on.

OK. So you've got the three toggles for the cohesion at the bottom, you've got the three toggles at the top for um the probability of environment harshness. And so head on over there if you want and just kind of play with the toggles and think about what it means.

Think about it in your own life or your own group if you're leading, if you're running a business, think about an organization or your role within that organization, if you're, you know, an employee and not in a management position, uh or, you know, think about it in terms of the political leadership of different wars that have happened.

You know, what I'm trying to say here is, it's not just all kind of nerdy out on math, it's interesting to think about these dynamics and what that means for some of the, you know, political leadership and leadership in general that has happened throughout history. Um And just use it to anchor. Again, these models are very approximate. Uh but they're nice anchors to that conversation.

OK. So let's bring this back to the kind of political examples that we're using and the idea of leadership, you know, so again, we've got, you know, these considerations of environment, we've got these considerations of, you know, the group size and the cohesion and the dynamics and the ability of a leader to affect the uh you know, kind of the, how optimal the actions are within that group.

Um You know, and, and I want to bring this back to what I call this episode, which is the tractability of calmness and this ability of leaders to have that positive impact on the, the individuals within a group. And that positive impact largely comes from a way of tranquility of being able to, you know, really see the bigger picture to, to, you know, build those bridges to, you know, uh have strike consensus, uh you know, make concessions and, and, and, and do compromise, right?

So consensus concessions and compromise the ability to concede one strength for something bigger than the, than the current moment, right? And history shows us that truly effective leaders do not dominate those around, right? They tend to see consensus, uh you know, with a style that's often described as collegial, they make concessions and compromises.

And so it's not that kind of usual definition of strength that domineering attitude, that dominating attitude where they, you know, just are always speaking strongly and sticking very closely to their uh convictions. It's the ability to, to make those concessions and appear almost at the surface maybe softer a week to some. But, but really gives a true definition of strength in the long run. I think Nelson Mandela is a really great example of this, right? He has this virtue of compromise.

I mean, he just stepping back and thinking about the history of Nelson Mandela a little bit, you know, he served 27 years in prison, right? His defining moments, uh really involved acts of compromise, pragmatism and, and you know, reconciliation, right? Uh you know, Mandela consistently displayed flexibility and magnanimity. So if you think about when he was in prison, right, um you know, he had to basically learn Afrikaans, which was the the the language of his oppressor, right?

And, and he did that so that he could work with them. And uh and that really taught him the power of persuasion and negotiation, right? We use those examples with the people uh previously, that ability to persuade, to negotiate. And uh and he really used that approach going forward to just repeatedly win over, you know, what was at the time, a skeptical white minority, right?

Um You know, Mandela opposed black nationalists who said that whites didn't belong in South Africa instead, he stressed a multiracial, so a multiracial society, right? And, and this is one in which, you know, the whites were not only welcome but necessary to the country's success. He was always looking for ways to, to, you know, to reach out to different groups uh that were, that were not currently his allies, right? We know that he won the, you know, the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993.

Uh He really helped lead the transition from apartheid to, to what we would consider a multiracial democracy. You know, he's the first black president of South Africa served from 1994 to 1999. Um He just made a ton of change in that time. And, and he's, he's very well regarded for a good reason. You know, um he helped keep those political negotiations on track at a time. Now, think about the harshness of the environment, right, at a time when many worry the country could spiral into civil war.

So there was a ton of uncertainty at the time, think about the harshness of environment and we're looking at those models and how important leadership is specifically when you have that harsh environment.

Think about those toggling the the little sliders and seeing the, you know, the graph change as we did that and, and, and building that intuition around those dynamics, we can think about those dynamics and how they relate back to very real world, things like the leadership of Nelson Mandela, right? Um you know, talking about the tranquility of the communist, you know, he was willing to give in on a variety of different issues that allowed white civil servants and judges to keep their jobs.

So it wasn't coming in and, you know, totally Uprooting the whole thing. He worked with the oppressors with the white people that, that were part of this apartheid system. I I just think Nelson Mandela is a really good example of that at that virtue of compromise. He, he, he, he didn't have the super strong conviction that was against the oppressor and was gonna come in and wipe the whole thing out. He still obviously had, you know, those feelings and those emotions.

I mean, look what he went through with the 27 years of prison and having to live under that kind of regime if you will. But being able to come to, to rise to power and say we're going to work together, you know, the blacks and the whites are gonna work together on this. We're not gonna just remove the oppressor overall. We're gonna figure out how to get this to work in a compromising fashion.

But I think that's a really, really great example of the tractability of calmness because in that in a massively uncertain environment when, when, when the people need that cohesion, when people need the positive leadership impact on their actions so that their actions can be much more close to optimal. I think Nelson Mandela was able to come in and do that in a very uh yeah, with, with consensus, concessions and compromise and just a just a really beautiful example.

Um I want to talk a little bit about the tyranny of unconstrained personal rule when you give too much strength. So again, we saw that dispersal of the Nelson Mandela example is another example of dispersal of power, right?

We talked about that previously, you know, don't give all the power to yourself, disperse the power, give it to other people, let other people shine, even your enemies uh to, to, to make those compromises because the the, the, the tractable solution is going to have to involve a lot of different pieces.

Um You know, Adam Smith is, is noted for just the, the quote unquote gross abuse of power as well as the, the perverseness, absurdity and unreasonableness that were more likely to be found under the role of single persons. That's what Adam Smith said. Right. So, so you give too much power to the single person and it causes a lot of problems. And you can contrast that, you know, in our last episode on the delusions of crowds where we said, you know, groups are less stupid, right?

Even though they can get delusional. What the the take home message on that episode really was that, you know, that's a cost of complexity. And there is this kind of when you step back this ultimate reason to the the immense problem solving ability of crowds. So you need to tap into that. Uh you know, again, you gotta, you gotta have that on balance. Uh increased diversity is really, really good.

But if you can't coordinate it, you know that this is how, you know, you have a really, really good leader, you tap into the diversity, you even tap into the uncertainty of your environment because there's informational content of those things that can improve the trail of the solution. But only if you can coordinate it, only if you can leverage it, leverage the uncertainty and coordinate the diversity, right.

So, so while groups are obviously capable of coming to stupid decisions, as we saw on delusions of crowd, the unconstrained personal rule is far more dangerous. So a good leader is going to, you know, quite frankly dilute their power uh or at least diversify it, spread it out, empower those around them, right? Um So, so in terms of calmness and tractability, think about as a mechanism, you know, what is communist doing? Why does it work?

You know, I, I talk about sampling the possibility space, right? So any time you have to solve a problem, you have to, you know, poke nature and try to tease out the information that's going to help you solve that problem. And so that's why you want to poke it from a lot of different angles and calmness is a way of actually poking it from a lot of different angles. I would say that calmness actually samples, right?

Samples to take different pieces of that possibility space much better than aggression because aggression, you're going to come up against a wall very quick. Um You know, aggression is gonna have you burn too many bridges, you're not gonna be able to poke nature from AAA number of different angles if you get angry, right?

And that's not to say there, there isn't a time and place for anger, but when you're too quick to anger or you're, or it doesn't even have to be anger, it can just be you know, when you don't remain calm, when you don't have the tranquility, when you don't see the bigger picture, you resist, you put up a wall and then you end up walking away from the opportunity, right? And you can see this play out. We, we've probably all done this to some extent in our own lives.

Um You know, the you calmness has a way of inviting you into the moment. It has a way of allowing you to tap into many different potentially positive pieces of information and opportunities that you can use to, to do really great things. So being calm enables more interaction with the environment. Whereas aggression or anger will will or or the inability to remain calm is going to put up lockers and prevent us from engaging. Right?

Calmness is inviting and it's easy to work with groups that solve problems better than individuals, groups do solve problems better than individuals.

So calmness is a powerful technique in life because calmness is gonna allow you to work with a lot more people a lot more effectively and it's, it's really really powerful and in some sense again, it kind of sounds a bit obvious but you know, it's, it's also obvious that it's very easy to get worked up and to get flustered by the storm that surrounds you and maybe toxic individuals that are in the group or people that you don't agree with, but your ability to, to, to remain tranquil to see the bigger picture has, has a massive return on investment.

It really does. It's a very, very practical thing. Um It's not just like a feel good thing. So this idea of letting others take the lead, right? True power is a willingness to appear quote unquote weak. It's not true, weak, but it, but it is a uh uh an ability or willingness to actually appear weak, right? Um We've got the famous Chinese philosopher Lao who said, you know, a leader is best when men barely know he is there. Not so good when men obey and acclaim him.

And I'll say that again, a leader is best when men barely know he is there, he or she, right? Not so good when men obey and acclaim him. So this idea of the strong leader as the acclaimed, look at him or her up there almost worship, right? The the uh in a cult like way that that's not, that's not true strength and that's not gonna lead as we've seen throughout history. And this, this countless examples that's not gonna lead to good leadership, it's not gonna lead to good outcome.

Um You know, some presidents using the US President's example have really been the most effective by letting others take a lead, right, Harry Truman, um let Secretary of State George Marshall lead the Marshall plan for the European recovery, right? The Marshall plan is just, you know, also known as the European recovery program. That was a US program providing aid to uh to western Europe, right?

Following the devastation of World War Two, uh it was enacted in 1948 provided more than $15 billion to help finance rebuilding efforts on the continent. So if you, if you go look at the Marshall plan, so, but that's an example of Harry Truman, you know, which really could have taken the lead on. That kind of gave a lot of power to George Marshall. They called it the Marshall plan, you know, really leveraging people for what they're good at.

If you have to lead a group, get to know a good leader, gets to know what people are good at and lets them do that and lets them run with it. They don't try to take over the whole thing. Um You know, I do have this one tweet that I did recently that said that said what gets you there isn't what keeps you there.

And so this is something interesting to think about, you know, sometimes you see uh successful, that's one example years ago where I went to this um conference and there was this really, really successful guy, he's like a billionaire and he's, he's, he's kind of up there and he was all calm and he was sipping his herbal tea and he was kind of talking about, you know, when I was young, I used to be, you know, aggressive and, and, and really, probably burned a lot of bridges and went after a lot of things and yada, yada yada.

And then I learned later in life that, you know, that's really not what's important. And, and, and really, and then now he's got a kind of, kind of this, like zenlike demeanor. Well, the counterargument to that, to this idea of calmness is that, you know, maybe you needed that aggression a little bit to get you there. But now that you are there, it makes more sense to calm down. I think there is a little bit of truth of that too. That that's worth, that's, that's worth bringing out.

And I don't think people should be super aggressive and angry all the time, but sometimes you do need to kind of punch through and I think that can help you open up some of the, some of the opportunities originally. But once you're there, that's a different story. You know, it's kind of like, you know, Steve Jobs was maybe like, really crazy to innovate a lot of stuff. But then he got fired from his own co company even though he got brought back later, right?

Uh, if certain presidents might get into power by saying a lot of, uh, uh aggressive or, or maybe off putting things because it resonates with a certain group of people or enough people to vote him, vote him into power. But then once he's in power, if he keeps being like, that it can actually work against him and then he can get, you know, impeached or something. Right. The, the, what gets you there is not what always keeps you there.

So, I think a little bit, you know, it doesn't mean you need to be completely calm and tran of all the time, especially at the early stage of things, maybe you need to really go for something. But if you want to maintain it and if you want it to be sustainable, uh the the the calmness and the tranquility is really what's needed. I mean, I mean, another example again is the is the spontaneous kind of eruption of revolutions. That that is an aggressive thing, right?

That's something that is not very calm, but once that kind of um emerges and takes a foothold as something real, right? Kind of like a new innovation coming out of nowhere, seemingly, right? It's almost got a bit of aggressive kind of nature to it. It explodes out say, oh, this is something new. But if you want to take that new thing and make it work over the long run, make it a tractable sustainable thing. That's where the calmness and tranquility has to come in.

We see that in organizations, we see that with innovation, we see that with political leadership uh to, to, to really have the long term success, you're going to have to have the calmness and the tranquility to make that work. So what gets you there isn't what keeps you there some. So, so sometimes it might be different people, right? Sometimes you need the Steve jobs to come in kind of aggressive and have these crazy ideas.

And then once you've got that you need other people to kind of come in from the more kind of levelheaded reasoned management perspective and say, ok, now we're gonna take this and we're gonna like, you know, make this into a real thing that, that lasts. Um And that's OK, you can have different types of people on that uh with that. Um I think you see this in music, at least his historically, right?

You can have um kind of really on the edge, eccentric musicians that are coming up with all kinds of crazy new music. But then you've got these management teams that come in and actually manage that so that they can get that onto a record, they can get the recordings, they can turn that into a business, right? So it's kind of two different things. So what gets you there is not necessarily what keeps you there, it's just something to think about. Um OK, so I'm, I'm just gonna finish off now.

It's a bit of a long episode at the end of the day, you know, tranquility, think of it as the goal, right? Being interested in something bigger than the moment, you know, even though again, these, these kind of little boats of aggression might poke nature enough to get something interesting to come out no matter what it is that's gonna die away.

We got that self dampening aspect of aggression or that, that self dampening aspect of talked about of kind of putting too much of the focus on yourself. You, if you want it to be sustainable, if you want it to be successful, if you want it to grow, you have to kind of, you, you have to find a piece with things and I I, you know, I something else I tweeted recently was uh you know, calmness is being interested in something bigger than the moment.

Um Another one is a sustainable process is a calm process. So it's not always as exciting, right? Um We wanna like punch through and we're excited but give your problems to time, give your problems to time and give them to people that work with you and not, don't make it about yourself. Don't think that you need to be front and center, don't think that you need to, you know, have this focal point beyond you for control. Um Be willing to give a lot of that up.

That that's a type of power, be willing to disperse the power, uh be willing to work behind the scenes, be, be willing to do things for the bigger, more proper reasons. And that will bring a lot of peace and tranquility to your own life. And I think if you end up doing something big history. We will remember you in a much more positive light. Um You don't need to be the iron, right? You need to just do what works.

And if you learn to relax into the moment and be calm, be inviting, create the bridges, make compromises. Think of Nelson Mandela as that beautiful example. Work with your enemies that not only will will will you reach a level of, you know, contentment, which is really, I would argue the ultimate goal in life, but you will have much more positive effective outcomes. You'll have a real return on investment in your life.

It's a, this is a very practical, real thing to remain calm and to use calmness as a very powerful tool. So, so giving up control to that ultimate power, giving up control is the ultimate power. I've got a GIF on the right here for people on non Patreon or sorry on Patreon. Um It's kind of a well-known uh meme this little GIF video in the, in the bottom right corner. It's got this dog sitting around all this fire and he's just drinking his coffee and he's like this is fine.

I think he's supposed to be in hell or something. But it's just this idea that look, life is complex. It's got a lot going on. You're always going to be in a storm, you're gonna have enemies, you're gonna have naysayers. Uh and you're also gonna have friends and you're also gonna have supporters, you're gonna have a mix of all that, but you kind of have to sit like this dog in this little video here and just sip and say, you know what? This is fine, right?

Because there's something bigger there, there's a long term tractability to all this and and I know that that seeing that and being tranquil and being calm in the moment is going to lead to better outcomes ultimately. So that is what I think is the tractability of calmness. So I hope uh that was a good episode. I know that was a little bit long again. Um Go check out that website that I put together if you want to play around with some of those mechanisms.

Um I think that's a, you know, non-trivial dot online and you can play around kind of build a muscle memory. I'm gonna be doing that on those episodes. Now try to just kind of see how anchor some of the the the patterns and the mechanisms that to talk about from a mathematical standpoint. So you can play around with it. It's not to get jargon about math, it's not to get all, you know, to nerd out on a bunch of things.

I just think it's it's good to play around and see these mechanisms, you know at play, right? See the dynamics of it. Uh I got some suggest a bunch of suggestive reading um that you guys can check out for the Patreon subscribers at the end. And, uh, the only other thing I want to mention is, um, you know, I've got a couple of really good reviews. Nice rating on Apple podcasts. It really helps out a lot.

Uh, if, if people go head on nowhere to Apple podcasts and give me a five star rating and if you want, just give me a nice little review, it just helps the show a lot, really helps support it. And of course, the other way to support it is to head on over to patreon dot com slash nontrivial. And then you'll get access to the visuals that I use throughout these episodes. And of course, you can download the actual deck and PDF format if you want.

So if you have that for yourself again, go check out that nontrivial dot online if you want to play around with some of those mechanisms. Thanks for uh for, for listening. Uh I've got the other episode coming up, hopefully pretty soon. Uh As always your support means everything until next time, take care.