General Jim Mattis

With Ryan, what I saw in his writing and wherever I followed him, it seemed like everywhere I went, I'd show up at the Naval Academy.

I'd go to Notre Dame, and guess what?

Ryan Holiday was here last week.

I think, well, I'm not going to look too good this week then because he's a lot better at this stuff than I am because he's really done his homework.

He's studied the applicability, and he understands it in almost classical terms.

And so that was what drew me to Ryan's writings.

Well, Tom Ricks has written a book about this sort of thing called First Principles.

And what you do when you're in a crisis, you fall back on your first principles.

Well, what are our first principles?

Declaration of Independence, you just mentioned, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights.

and you fall back on those things, and you look at our founding fathers who, drawing from the enlightenment, which is all based on the ancient Greek and Roman philosophers, they had guidelines for themselves.

And based on those guidelines, they drew up

those documents with a lot of skepticism about human nature, yet a belief in, quote, the people, unquote.

And so what you do is you look for something to kind of ground yourself on.

I mean, think of the Simon and Garfunkel song,

about Mrs. Robinson, and where have you gone?

Joe DiMaggio, our nation turned its lonely eyes to you.

In the midst of this time, we can be turning back to our first principles and the Joe DiMaggio kind of leadership, which is mature, humble, competent, and all these things that really are summed up

in in a code that you live by again a song uh you when you're on your road have got to have a code to live by crosby stills nash and young for us gray-haired guys right sir and so you the the code you live by is probably found somewhere in those principles because there's nothing new under the sun as ryan said and people have been through it before

I mean, the people who think this is so bad, what's going on right now in the country, and yet the founding fathers were mostly still alive when we nearly made Aaron Burr our president, okay?