Tag Archives: Podcast

Good

08 Monday Aug 2016

Posted by in War

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Jocko Willink

Echo Charles: How do you deal with setbacks, failures, delays, defeats, or other disasters?

Jocko Willink: I actually have a fairly simple way of dealing with this. I use one word in most of these situations — “Good.”

This is actually something that one of my direct subordinates pointed out to me. He would call me up, pull me aside with some major challenge and say, “Boss, we have this problem and that issue and another thing…”

And I would say, “Good.”

Finally, one day, he was telling me about an issue that he was having, and he said, “I already know what you’re going to say.”

And I said, “Well, what am I going to say?”

“You’re going to say ‘Good.’ That’s what you always say. When something is wrong, you always just look at me and say ‘Good.'”

And I said, “Well, yeah, and I mean it.” And that’s how I feel. When things are going bad, there’s going to be some good that’s going to come from it.

Oh, mission got cancelled? Good — we can focus on the other one.

Didn’t get the new high speed gear we wanted? Good — we can keep it simple.

Didn’t get promoted? Good — more time to get better.

Didn’t get funded? Good — we own more of the company.

Didn’t get the job you wanted? Good — you can get more experience and build a better resume.

Got injured? Good — needed a break from training.

Got tapped out? Good — better to get tapped out in training than tap out in the street.

Got beat? Good — you learned.

Unexpected problems? Good — we have the opportunity to figure out a solution.

That’s it. When things are going bad, don’t get startled, don’t get frustrated.

And I don’t mean to just spout off a cliché, and I don’t mean to sound like Mr. Positive. I’m not. But find the positive… Get up, dust off, reload, recalibrate, reengage, and go out on the attack. It’ll bring that attitude to those who look to you for guidance and leadership, too.”

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Jocko Willink, speaking recently on his podcast — you can also see a clip of this speech.

Willink is a retired Navy SEAL commando and world-class mixed martial artist. On another one of his podcasts he tells the story of leading a night patrol during one of his tours in Iraq. A worried soldier ran to the patrol as they set out from the base and informed them that recon had spotted several new enemy positions on their assigned route. Willink’s response was, apparently, unflinching: “Good. That’ll give us a chance to get after it.”

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Speaking Freely when the Guns Go Off

07 Thursday Jan 2016

Posted by in Current Events, Politics, Religion

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[Play the brief clip above]

“This is what it’s like for peaceful people to gather in a cafe and attempt to have a conversation about our basic freedoms in an open society.

You have to ask yourself: what kind of a world do you want to live in? What kind of world do you want your kids to live in?

This is the world you’re living in now. And as someone who is spending a fair amount of time dealing with these issues, I can tell you that I no longer feel safe doing so… And this is not just me. I’m talking about those people in Copenhagen. I’m talking about those people in open societies everywhere, who have to deal with this growing menace of Islamic jihadism.

Unless we can speak honestly about this, unless we can resist the theocratic demands being placed on us, we will lose our way of life. In fact, we have already lost it in many respects.

We have to reclaim our freedom of speech. So if you care about living in an open society that doesn’t more and more resemble Jerusalem or Beirut, if you care about free speech, real freedom of speech, not just its political guarantee — the reality of being able to speak about what you need to speak about in public, without being murdered by some maniac or without having to spend the rest of your life being hunted by a jihadist mob…

If you care about my work, or the work of other secularists, or of other Muslim reformers like Maajid Nawaz or Ayaan Hirsi Ali; if you care about our ability to notice and criticize and correct for bad ideas, then you have to condemn [the dishonesty of the regressive left]. Please push back against this. Please lose your patience at shocking displays of intellectual dishonesty used to excuse it. Your response to this really matters.”

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Sam Harris’s reflections on the shooting at the Krudttoenden cultural center in Copenhagen last February, in which 40 people had assembled to discuss the state of free expression in post-Hebdo Europe.

The audio clip records the horrific seconds when a gunman burst through the door, letting off a hail of bullets that would kill one and injure several others. The woman’s voice you hear in the opening is that of Inna Shevchenko, the Ukrainian feminist activist, who had just taken the stage and was discussing the excuses many Westerners make on behalf of those who kill because of cartoons.

Today is the one year anniversary of the Hebdo massacre, and Saturday will be the anniversary of the Hypercacher Kosher supermarket shooting (but who remembers that?). I’ve just ordered the posthumously published book — completed three days before the attacks — by Charb, with a forward from Adam Gopnik, Open Letter: On Blasphemy, Islamophobia, and the True Enemies of Free Expression.

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Freedom of Speech by Norman Rockwell

Sam Harris: The Meaning of the Paris Attacks

16 Monday Nov 2015

Posted by in Current Events, Essay, Politics, Religion

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Paris Terror Attacks

“This is the big story of our time, and it is an incredibly boring one. Let the boredom of this just sink into your bones: realize that for the rest of your life, you’re going to be reading and hearing about, and otherwise witnessing, hopefully not firsthand, the lunacy and attendant atrocities of jihadists.

Please pay attention to the recurrent shrieks of Allahu Akbar. This is the cat call from the Middle Ages, or from Middle Earth, that we will have to live with for the rest of our lives. So this fight against jihadism — this is a generational fight. This is something we are doing for our children, ultimately, and for our children’s children.

We have a war of ideas that we have to wage, and win, and unfortunately we have to wage it and win it with ourselves first. And again, this requires an admission that there is such a war of ideas to be waged and won.

We have grown so effete as a civilization as to imagine that we have no enemies — or if we do, that they are only of our own making… It is not mere wartime propaganda that we will one day look back on with embarrassment to call ISIS a death cult. To call them barbarians. To call them savages. To use dehumanizing language.

They are scarcely human in their aspirations. The world they want to build entails the destruction of everything we value, and are right to value. And by “we” I mean civilized humanity, including all the Muslims who are just as horrified…

We have a project that’s universal, that transcends culture; that unites everyone who loves art and science and reason generally, who wants to cure disease, who wants to raise each new generation to be more educated than the last. And this common project is under assault…

And unfortunately, most of us have to keep convincing ourselves that evil exists, that not all people want the same things, and that some people are wrong in how they want to live and the world they want to build. And if we can’t convince ourselves of this once and for all, well then we’ll have to wait to be convinced by further acts of savagery of the sort we just saw in Paris. Why wait?”

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Comments from Sam Harris on the preface to his newly republished essay “Still Sleepwalking toward Armageddon”.

You’ll find more of Sam’s takes on these issues in his newest book, coauthored with Maajid Nawaz, Islam and the Future of Tolerance. I was lucky enough to meet Maajid two weeks ago in Washington and can enthusiastically recommend this quick, clarifying read. Watch Sam and Maajid talk about the roots of their conversation and the conclusions they’ve made in the following clip from The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell:


The photograph was taken this weekend as mourners gathered at The Place de la République in Paris.

More for the Francophiles:

What the Outrage over Cecil the Lion Says about Our Warped Moral Priorities

06 Sunday Sep 2015

Posted by in Interview, Philosophy

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Cecil the LionI imagine you have some thoughts about how well spent the moral outrage of seven billion people has been on Cecil the Lion.

“I do. Look, there’s some reason to believe the dentist did do something wrong. It’s not quite clear; he said he was hoodwinked by somebody else and he thought they had proper permits. And so, you know, if he did something wrong, broke the law, he should be punished. I don’t have any problem saying that. And also, I don’t have any particular love for big game hunting — I may be betraying my own liberal background but I find it kind of a repellant activity.

However, the lack of proportion in this case is astonishing.

I honestly think if the dentist went to Africa and shot an African, there’d be a lot less fuss. Instead he shot this beautiful lion… and the sentimentality combined with the mob attacks has been insane.

Of course, he was not hunting for food, he was hunting for trophies. Personally, I find myself totally unsympathetic to that, even though I can get right up to the door of it. I shoot guns because I’m very interested in self defense, and the truth is it’s incredibly fun to shoot guns…

So I can imagine that hunting is even more fun if you don’t have any scruple about killing the animal. And I’m under no illusions that my position as a non-vegetarian, as someone who eats meat and therefore delegates the killing of animals to others, is more ethical. I think the hunter who eats his kill is in a stronger moral position than I am. He’s owning the full process by which he’s arriving at his hamburger, or in this case, his venison steak…

What matters? What counts as a worse crime than another? What should one be allowed to do? And one can, as a reflective person, rank things. It’s worse to kill somebody than to beat them. It’s worse to steal one-hundred dollars than one dollar. It’s worse to kill an African human than an African lion…

If you feel the killing of Cecil is one of the biggest news stories of 2015, you’ve really got to reassess your values.”

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Remarks from two self-described liberals — Sam Harris and and Yale psychologist Paul Bloom on Harris’s Waking Up podcast last week (these remarks come at the 48 minute mark in the track below).

Bloom touches on many of these themes of moral psychology in his book Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil.

 

There’s more to see:

On the Twisted Need to Defend Pamela Geller

09 Saturday May 2015

Posted by in Freedom, Interview

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Pamela Geller

John Podhoretz:

It’s an extraordinarily distressing phenomenon and very telling fact about Western culture now…

You know, the great battles over censorship and free expression in the course of Western history over the last three centuries have largely been about high art. The suppression of Ulysses, the suppression of Lolita. The jailing of Voltaire and Diderot. The mistreatment of Flaubert over Madame Bovary and Theodore Dreiser over Sister Carrie.

And now — a fascinating phenomenon — that it is this kind of gleefully sophomoric, you know, na-na-na stuff, that we’re now called upon to defend in the name of free expression.

But if this is where the war has been declared, we have to fight for it.

Jonah Goldberg: 

That’s why [the Hebdo massacre] was an unequivocal win for the bad guys, the whole episode. No matter how it plays out, it was a win.

Everyone’s talking about how galvanized Western Europe is, how they sold 3 million copies of the next Hebdo issue.

But there’s a reason Lenin’s philosophy was “The worse, the better.”

When you live in a moment where radicals can create a crisis mentality — and create actual crises — you force everybody to take extreme positions.

In a normal situation where Muslim terrorists weren’t murdering people, none of us would want to run the crap that Charlie Hebdo ran. But we’re left with no choice but to defend running it.

So now we all defend it and we all run to the ramparts, and I’m 100% on that side. But in a healthier society, we wouldn’t even have to do this because it is offensive.

But the problem is you simply cannot be held hostage by people who murder people over this kind of thing.

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Podhoretz and Goldberg, talking in the 37th episode of their excellent and embarrassingly named podcast with Rob Long, GLop.

Though I don’t find myself aligning ideologically with them all that often, I’m a listener and fan of G’, Lo’, and P’ — they’re up to date, super well read, awash in cross-cultural references, and, probably more importantly, really funny.

For barely related riffs from both speakers, pick up Podhoretz’s short book on the Hillary Clinton presidential run Can She Be Stopped? or Jonah’s The Tyranny of Cliches: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas.

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