Coup D'œil
This is the No Bell podcast where we talk about how to optimize your technology, life, and mind. We're joined by special operations veterans, entrepreneurs, investors, and others who have overcome difficulty to make it to the top of their craft by staying in the fight. I'm Sam Alimo. Welcome to the No Bell podcast. I have Bruce Goodminson with me, military veteran, Marine Corps veteran, military historian.
Sam Alaimo:You've authored many books, Stormtroop Tactics, On Infantry, On Artillery, The British Army on the Western Front, and many others. Very excited to have you, thank you for coming.
Bruce Gudmundsson:Well, thank you. I'm honored to be here.
Sam Alaimo:Well let's start from the very beginning. Where did you grow up?
Bruce Gudmundsson:This may take up the entire podcast. I had a very interesting childhood, a lovely childhood, a very fine childhood. So my parents met at the UN, at the United Nations, in in the nineteen fifties when it was a very different place than it is now. A much happier place, I'm sorry to say. My mother came from the smallest town in the Canadian province of Manitoba, Waskata, Manitoba, about three miles from the North Dakota border.
Bruce Gudmundsson:Very small town. Many people? Her father was wheat farmer. And my father came from Iceland. He came from downtown Reykjavik where his father worked on the docks in the harbor in Reykjavik.
Bruce Gudmundsson:And in those days, he was born in 1912. Reykjavik was little more than the harbor. It was basically a fishing village. It wasn't the the refuge for the tragically hit. It is now.
Bruce Gudmundsson:It has since become very very different world. So I was born in Copenhagen in the hospital where Kierkegaard died, if you like philosophy. And then my first memories actually come from Pakistan. So when I was two and a half, my family moved to Pakistan to Karachi. This is before Islamabad had been built.
Bruce Gudmundsson:Islamabad was being built at the time, this early sixties. And that was a wonderful experience in many many respects. It gave me a sense for the much wider world. It gave me a sense of my good fortune, how lucky I was. Regular encounters with lepers will do that to you.
Bruce Gudmundsson:It was very much almost a thousand and one Arabian Nights experience with snake charmers and camels and horse racing on the beach, and actually going down to the beach on a rope to get to the beach and seeing women walking with water jugs on their heads. A very wonderful education, I think, for a small child. Gave me a taste for Kipling. Gave me an ear. I don't speak Hindustani or Urdu or Hindi, but it gave me an ear for the language so that I could watch a Bollywood movie and figure out what's going on between the song and dance numbers.
Bruce Gudmundsson:That's a useful skill. And then moved back to Copenhagen. And that was also an education going from the third world to the first. Much more Scandinavian place than it is now. Scandinavia was much less English or Americanized than it is now.
Bruce Gudmundsson:But it it was a childhood full of full of Lego. My father spoke the Danish language very, very well. He had a wonderful job, perhaps the easiest job in the world, selling the UN to Scandinavians. Right? He was a public affairs officer.
Bruce Gudmundsson:Both my parents were in the public affairs business. And then at the age of eight, we moved to moved to Yonkers, Yonkers, New York in the Hudson Valley. My dad worked at the UN headquarters. That was not a happy time for him because the UN had already become well, I won't mince word. He had become corrupt.
Bruce Gudmundsson:And that broke his heart. That was very hard for him. But he soldiered through, mostly at that point to get the pension, take care of the family. In 1967, we drove up the Hudson Valley, through through the Adirondacks, up to Montreal for Expo sixty seven. And that was a wonderful education because it gave me my passion for for the War of Independence, for the French and Indian Wars, for American history, for the eighteenth century.
Bruce Gudmundsson:So so that really shaped me in a big way. Actually, an experience very similar to I think Mark McGrath's experience. You know, Moose is a friend of mine, and the I really enjoyed your review of of him on this podcast. And so it was an Italian neighborhood next to a Polish neighborhood next to a Russian neighborhood. But I went to a Lutheran parochial school, which was run by the people I I say vulifection were refugees from a garrison keeler monologue.
Bruce Gudmundsson:Right? So it was like a little bit of the Midwest, 18 miles from Times Square. And the contrast between that and my previous experiences and also being in the orbit of New York City created I think a great deal of creative tension for which I'm very grateful. So I spent summers in Iceland, some summers, every second summer in Iceland, working on the language which I've yet to master. Again gave me a taste for the variety of the wider world.
Bruce Gudmundsson:I worked at a farm. I know one of your guests talked about shoveling manure. I cleaned out this very large manure pit underneath a stable for some prized bulls. It was a very very good experience, painted a lot of farm machinery, raked a lot of hay, this is actually an interesting farm. It was, if you've ever read Journey to the Center of the Earth.
Sam Alaimo:Yeah. Yeah,
Bruce Gudmundsson:Jules. The farm was in the shadow of that mountain where they started their journey. I spent a summer in the Icelandic coast guard, which was interesting. Not really a military experience. For one thing, we were unionized.
Bruce Gudmundsson:So the bosun of the ship was also the shop steward. The enlistments were for two weeks at a time. Mostly I swapped decks, but that was also a very good experience. When I speak Icelandic, I can discuss farm matters and nautical matters, but not much else. Though one of the many gifts my father gave me was the gift of Icelandic poetry.
Bruce Gudmundsson:So we were both early risers, and before the rest of family awoke, we would have breakfast together and recite Viking poetry. So, That's a tenth century poem.
Sam Alaimo:What what is that in English?
Bruce Gudmundsson:That's my mother told me that there should be bought for me a ship with beautiful oars.
Sam Alaimo:There we go. Good Viking. Nice.
Bruce Gudmundsson:Right. Right. Actually, that poem has been turned into song by a number of people on YouTube, and I think featured I haven't seen the History Channel Vikings show, but I think it features there. It's actually a 12 year old boy trying to encapsulate the Viking spirit. The last line is, Sail into harbors.
Bruce Gudmundsson:Hew men, as in hew as in hewing with an axe, you know, and others. Right? So so it's it's
Sam Alaimo:It gets me amped up in a good way. I like it.
Bruce Gudmundsson:Yeah. So, yeah. That was a big part of my my education. And then I joined the Marine Corps. I actually I joined the Marine Corps reserve.
Sam Alaimo:What was the what was the earliest memory you have of the Marine Corps? Was it Pakistan? Was it Copenhagen? Was it Yonkers? Or was it
Bruce Gudmundsson:Yeah. Okay. So so in in Pakistan, we had in our household a a bearer. And again, you go back to Kit Point, in the days of the Raj in India, the British rule in India, which was then only barely over, this was in the early sixties, so that ends in 1947. So still the shadow that world was I went into the shadow.
Bruce Gudmundsson:Was still very much part of our reality. So the bearer in our household was a patan, as they said, a pushtun. He was secundered, you know, from the hills in this great big henid mustache. And he had been a sergeant in the old Indian Army, the pre-forty '7 Indian Army. I later learned that he joined the army because he was fleeing from a blood feud, which you know, common thing in the mountains.
Bruce Gudmundsson:He went down to the plains and took service with the king emperor. And he would drill me and my older brother who also became a Marine before our porridge in the morning. So that's certainly part of the experience, being a little close order drill at the age of four or five or six. And all with wonderful tenderness and care and all appropriate to childhood. Then in Copenhagen we had royal guards, you know, the ones who marched through Tivoli Garden.
Bruce Gudmundsson:That was I think an example of a different kind of military experience. We always enjoyed that. And then coming to The US really in the middle of the Vietnam War, and seeing I was, I mean, greatly distressed by what happened in the Vietnam War. I was ashamed of the older boys who would spend a lot of time planning their ways to avoid service. I read a great deal about the war.
Bruce Gudmundsson:I became convinced that it was a noble war. That our loss of that war set all sorts of bad things in motion. Of course, the people who suffered the most from it were the Vietnamese people. That had a huge effect on me. And I was convinced that there were a couple of I saw a couple of big problems.
Bruce Gudmundsson:One was that our military leadership was not doing what it should have done. It was a badly handled war from a military point of view. And the other one was that the whole question of how do we how do we get people involved with the armed forces in a healthy way. Was convinced that I was an American. Right?
Bruce Gudmundsson:I'd lived in America for ten years and saw myself as really an entirely American. And more than everyone else saw me as American. Funny incident when I was going to the courthouse to get my final citizenship, my sponsor was an American of Japanese descent. And everyone thought that I was the sponsor and he was the fledgling citizen.
Sam Alaimo:That's America.
Bruce Gudmundsson:Yeah. So doing the most American thing I could think of, joining the Marine Corps, was part of it. I joined the reserve rather than the active force largely because it was very important to my father that I go to university. And I was the first person in my family, my line, to go to university since the, as far as we can tell, the thirteenth century.
Sam Alaimo:Well done.
Bruce Gudmundsson:Yeah, there was a fellow back in the thirteenth century who went to the Sorbonne according to the legend.
Sam Alaimo:What year did you enlist?
Bruce Gudmundsson:Enlisted in '77.
Sam Alaimo:So just after the war. Okay. After You were gonna be sent over.
Bruce Gudmundsson:Yeah. So again, joined the Marine Corps Reserve, went through basic training, was a wonderful experience. That had been squared away by then. Very, very encouraging experience. Felt that I was in the right place.
Bruce Gudmundsson:Going back to the thirteen week recruit training, which I think is a very good thing. And at week 11 or so, there is a sense of cohesion in the platoon, almost supernatural, that sense of connection.
Sam Alaimo:So 1977, was there any sort of aspersion cast on you for wanting to join the military, and not of the military, the Marine Corps, given the nature of the protests at the time against the war, there was a lot of backlash against the military, which historically everyone knows is kind of injust. Was there any aspersion cast in you for doing that?
Bruce Gudmundsson:I think I think my my high school teachers thought I was nuts, or worse. My father didn't understand it. He had no military tradition in the families. I mean, again, for five hundred years. My mother understood it.
Bruce Gudmundsson:And she was, again, from Western Canada, which if you look at the history of the world wars, I think sent a higher proportion of this young man into battle than any part of the British Empire except for Rhodesia.
Sam Alaimo:I didn't know that. That's awesome.
Bruce Gudmundsson:Yeah. Yeah. And you have to look carefully at the numbers because of course Canada is big place. But But Western Canada in particular, she was of Scots Irish ethnicity. And if you've looked into that, if you've read what was the book?
Bruce Gudmundsson:Born Fighting. A book worth looking into. Their book called People Without a Name. But if you look into the history of the Scots Irish, particularly in America, you'll see a certain bellicosity there. So she was I know this is strange.
Bruce Gudmundsson:Usually it's the dad who's more supportive than the mom. And then again, my mother had three sons, all three became marines. And I mean, to her dying day wore the Eagle Globe and anchor on a chain. So very very proud of that. Then after basic training, went to Camp Lejeune, was Camp Lejeune in 1977 was a very depressing place.
Bruce Gudmundsson:And I think we were still getting rid of all the wrong people we had brought in the seventies. And so that was a very depressing experience and it made me commit really myself to military reform to finding better ways of doing things.
Sam Alaimo:So you saw a military that was wracked from a long war, very high death count, very even higher wounded count, who drafted people who in no way shape or form wanted to be there, and that's when you showed up. You showed up to an institution that was like hurting from the inside out. I guess you said that's sort of your idea, your passion for military reform. How did that shape, I guess, the rest of your twenty year career?
Bruce Gudmundsson:I'll go back a little bit. I think in 1977, the problem was less Vietnam per se than the first four years of the all volunteer force. In fact, I mean, the Vietnam Vets, like my senior drill instructor, Staff Sergeant Beck, still remember him fondly. And distinctly, he was a Vietnam Veteran. The other three drone instructors weren't because the Marine Corps really leaves Vietnam in 1970 in a big way.
Bruce Gudmundsson:I mean, there are other things going on, but bulk of the Marine Corps leaves in 1970. We were, you know, seven years away from the Vietnam War, four years away from the draft. So the real problem was the personnel policy. It's just the lack of quality control. My subsequent commitment and I didn't really have, I mean, on paper, a twenty year reserve career.
Bruce Gudmundsson:But I was in and out several times. So I had that initial period of active duty, went to college, then after college went to OCS, served for four years as an officer in the fleet in the logistics field. They found out in in college I'd worked as a forklift operator in a in a warehouse in New York, and that was a great experience too. And then I I left. And then in '89, I went back on active duty.
Bruce Gudmundsson:And then I'd spent some time in in the twenty fifth Marines in the reserve battalion in New England. But I went back on active duty and and got the wonderful job of designing what I call the gifted and talented program for the Staff College. This was the school of advanced warfighting. And the idea this is very much part of the Al Gray maneuver warfare movement. And I I was part of that and had written a book that had just come out before then and that General Gray apparently read the book and said, you know, I want that boy running one of my schools.
Bruce Gudmundsson:So at the age of 29 with a bachelor's degree I got to design a graduate school. And I had a blank piece. It was an incredible opportunity. A blank sheet of paper. I designed that, taught there for a couple of years.
Bruce Gudmundsson:When General Gray left, there was a backlash against the warfare movement against anything that had been touched by General Gray. I left active duty. It was actually my last active duty, which ended in '92, but continued to live in Quantico, continued to do a lot of work for the Marine Corps. And again, sort of living on the margins between the Marine Corps and the world of military history and of writing for publication.
Sam Alaimo:So if you look back twenty years, eight active, 12 reserve, what what on the one hand would be the best aspects of the military, and then the other hand the worst aspects you came across?
Bruce Gudmundsson:The people and the people. I've just met some remarkable people, remarkable in all sorts of ways. It really is people from all sorts of all walks of life, very often very interesting people with interests, of all sorts of interests. I know in twenty fifth Marines, my platoon sergeant was a surrealist artist, and he was a painter. If Dave Kennedy, if you're out there, I'd love to hear from you.
Bruce Gudmundsson:And at the same time, there were some real bozos. You know, real I mean, people I would now again, I'm not that kind of doctor, but classify as narcissist. And this I think is one of the problems with an inherent problem with the way we reward people in the service and the way we ask people to manage their own careers is that it's something that's very well suited to a narcissist.
Sam Alaimo:You dig in on that one please? Define what you mean narcissist in this case.
Bruce Gudmundsson:I'm gonna
Sam Alaimo:give you some concrete examples. I'm very sure.
Bruce Gudmundsson:Yeah. Yeah. So a narcissist is a person who constantly needs to be reminded that he's not just okay, but better than okay. Right? So he needs this thing that the psychologist called narcissistic supply.
Bruce Gudmundsson:And anytime that sense is threatened, he will lash out and punish people. And his main motivation in life is getting that narcissistic supply. So I know of one case. This a commanding officer, what was then called a landing support battalion, which is almost like the old World War II pioneer units. And the idea is that don't land with the first wave, but you land with second wave and set up the beach.
Bruce Gudmundsson:And also do a lot of work with helicopter support teams and running ports and things like that. And this is actually a very easy battalion to run because it basically is a home for detachments. We just send out detachments and come back sober. And this one battalion commander was constantly in need of praise, reassurance. His welcome aboard speech was a two hour account of how wonderful he was.
Bruce Gudmundsson:I was hoping to find out, tell me about this battalion, this mission, where we are, what are we trying to what our challenges are. But it was all about him. And that made life very very difficult because I basically spent my time trying to reduce the damage doing damage control. Know, reduce the damage he was doing. That was a very unpleasant experience.
Bruce Gudmundsson:And I've seen that not so closely, but you see that often with general officers in particular. It's clear they're in it for this supply, this kind of reassurance. And that of course makes it very hard to get anything useful done. It paralyzes them in terms of doing the right things, but it means their subordinates, in order to get anything done, have to master the art of sycophancy. They have to learn how to be courtiers.
Bruce Gudmundsson:And that's something I also observed. I think this is, know, as a brand new lieutenant, I had a little bit of experience. You know, I had four years in the Reserve, but still very young and seeing all these captains and majors spending their time polishing apples.
Sam Alaimo:What about best and worst day in the military?
Bruce Gudmundsson:So many good days. So many good days. Actually I remember an exercise up in Pickle Meadows, the Mountain Warfare Training Center. I was the executive officer of the weapons company of the twenty fifth Marines. And the commanding officer later became a congressman.
Bruce Gudmundsson:I say that without admiration. We'd been hiking up a mountain, and halfway up through the hike, somebody slipped, and he said, oh, I need to take care of my Marine. Jumped on the truck and disappeared. Right? And so I was in command.
Bruce Gudmundsson:And I had to organize a raid. And I pulled something out of the First World War, adapted it, you know, gave the order right there, and we had our raid. And we had a journalist there from the Sacramento Bee who was able to record that. And the troops had a great experience. And I did too because enjoying the thrill of improvising on the spot, but at the same time being able to put my historical work to use.
Bruce Gudmundsson:It was, you know, very practical. I don't know if this would've worked in practice, but at least I had the plan in my mind that it could adapt it to the terrain and explain it.
Sam Alaimo:Let's roll then into some of your professional work, I think that's a great pivot. Some of the work you've done, I forget which piece it was, but you talked about the strike of the eye and supposing, I think it was the education of the enlightened soldier.
Bruce Gudmundsson:Yes. Yeah.
Sam Alaimo:And that's pretty much what you're talking about. It sounds like your mind was churning in real time, observing the environment, strike of the eye, and then supposing what would happen if if x occurred, or y occurred, or z occurred. And in in in the military, was taught three questions. What's the condition of my weapon? What would I do if I were contacted right now?
Sam Alaimo:How can I best support my buddy? That, when I when I when I thought about it, that's more of like a ground pounder. I'm on the ground pulling a rifle, my job is to execute. What you're talking about seems to be more elevated, more of an officer position. Can you talk about the strike of the eye and the supposing, the theory behind it and how it applies?
Bruce Gudmundsson:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This this is something that comes, that develops in the eighteenth century, the theory of it. Because this eighteenth century, the the the word is French.
Bruce Gudmundsson:Right? Literally strike of the eye, being hit by the eye. And it's interesting that we think of eyes as being passive rather than active. But clearly it's the eye that's doing the punching, right? The same word as punch in French.
Bruce Gudmundsson:So initially it was used by engineers, military engineers, who were trying to make sense of a piece of terrain. How do we defend it? How can we attack it? How can we fortify it? So it starts off being slow, and then somebody in the eighteenth century may have been Fred of the Great, but he may have got it from somebody else.
Bruce Gudmundsson:I haven't traced it all the way back, said, no, no. We're doing this quickly. This isn't about the engineer with his paper and his pencil drawing, you know, the perfect plan. This is about somebody looking at the terrain and making an instant evaluation of it. What's really important here.
Bruce Gudmundsson:And Napoleon makes a big big deal of this. And of course his great stock and trade was speed. And you can only march so fast, you can only ride so fast, but you can think quickly. And that was what he was doing. And then the folks who organized themselves to fight against him said, We can't make one Napoleon, we can make lots of little Napoleons.
Bruce Gudmundsson:Lots of guys who are doing this. One of them is Scharnhorst, the Enlightened Soldier. And there's a biography in progress, first volume is out, by Charles Edward White. He rewrote a book years ago called The Enlightened Soldier. That was a big inspiration for the maneuver warfare movement in the late eighties and early nineties.
Bruce Gudmundsson:That was really just a small chunk of his life. He's now working on a big biography, And I was happy to contribute to that with that little article called The Education of the Enlightened Soldier.
Sam Alaimo:Oh, that's great. And then do they talk about how to actually apply that? How to learn it? How to apply it? How to make it habitual?
Sam Alaimo:Did they have recommendations or do they kind of stop, hey, here's the theory, here's how it transitions into reality, or did they give recommendations for the the young officer, the young leader to actually execute it?
Bruce Gudmundsson:The story about the, when Scharnhorst moves from being an engineer and artillery officer, finds himself in the cavalry, and the colonel will take him out for a ride, say, okay, see that village. Imagine that it is occupied by so many troops. You have these reports. What do you do? And he'd say, Oh, Colonel, happy to tell you I'll get back to you in a week.
Bruce Gudmundsson:I'll sit down with a paper and a pen and I'll make you a plan. And the colonel says, Oh, no, no. Tell me now. And there's this letter he writes back to his uncle in saying, you know, this is something that I tried to use the methods I was taught at this engineering school. It's a remarkable school by the way, I imagine it as a military Hogwarts.
Bruce Gudmundsson:So he had been taught to think slowly and think deliberately and had this brilliant education in that. And then now he's told, okay, do it much more quickly. And he develops this method which we now call the TDG, the tactical decision game, where you set up a situation and you say, okay, what's going on here? And what do you do? What are your orders?
Bruce Gudmundsson:You've got five minutes. So the time pressure that makes the difference. You know, it's interesting when he is in a position to mentor young Carl von Klauswitz, he says I want you to teach two things. I want you to teach artillery and gunnery with mathematics and all that deliberate, slow thinking stuff. And I also want you to teach small wars.
Bruce Gudmundsson:I want you to teach guerrilla warfare. So Plasbids is there pulling these examples very often out of the American War of Independence. He was a great student of the American War of Independence. You know, talking about ambushes and the defense of forward positions and these small scale engagements. There's again where you don't have weeks to plan the defense.
Bruce Gudmundsson:So Sharnhorst uses that tension as the basis for not just his own work, but also the way he trains his subordinates, the most famous of whom is Crawford Klasmis.
Sam Alaimo:You're talking about the execution, but then going, I guess, upstream back in time, there's the book study, there's the general education. How necessary is that book study, general education, to battlefield mastery? Given the historical record that used to be a major aspect, I guess it still is at the academies, but any elaboration on that? Any unique insights?
Bruce Gudmundsson:Yes. I think that you need a lot of military history, both so you can imagine the range of possibilities, the first thing. The second thing is to I think realize just how peculiar each situation is so that you don't end up with trying to apply one theory over and over again. History is also about people. Right?
Bruce Gudmundsson:And leadership is about people. You learn all sorts of personalities. Again, I don't think book learning alone will serve you. But it is interesting. And this is something that's a big shock to the armed forces or the the armies in particular of the world in the mid nineteenth century where the Prussians, and these are the people who are the linear descendants of Scharnhorst and Clausewitz, have a very academic approach to the study of war.
Bruce Gudmundsson:And they're beating opponents with a lot more experience. So they beat the Austrians in 1866, and they beat the French in 1870. And that is the I'll use a boomer analogy here. That's the '69 Metz. Right?
Bruce Gudmundsson:That's the absolute upstart. That is the the big surprise that this this nation of of philosophers defeats the the descendants of Napoleon. And and and just, you know, how think about how influential the French were at that time. Right? I mean, we fight our own civil war with French uniforms, French weapons, French tactics.
Bruce Gudmundsson:You know, if you read the writings, you know, the orders very often of people, certainly at the start of the civil war, they're half in French. It was an incredible upset. And that is what really sparks a great deal of interest in, I wouldn't say the academic study of military matters, but the bookish study. Really, study of military history.
Sam Alaimo:So probably an impossible task, but one or two books that someone listening might wanna read if they wanna do their own general education to, I guess you'd recommend for someone trying to do that battlefield mastery, whether it translates to actual warfare or the business environment. What are one or two good books that would help people zoom out and get that education?
Bruce Gudmundsson:Yeah. I would start with Aristotle's Politics.
Sam Alaimo:Nice.
Bruce Gudmundsson:Yeah. Alright. So and I read that when I was 15. Was working at the farm in Iceland and you know, looking at that dead volcano in all its beauty. And the thing I pulled from Aristotle's politics is the ability to think on two tracks.
Bruce Gudmundsson:So Aristotle is saying, okay, given human nature, this is the best constitution. But we're living in Athens. Okay. And Athens has these peculiarities. So given the situation of Athens, what's the best we can hope for here in Athens?
Bruce Gudmundsson:So it's that ability to think on the two tracks, that the ideal and the applied at the same time. It's not airy fairy. You know, he's not up into the sky like Plato often was. But at the same time, it's also not cynical. It's that constant tension.
Bruce Gudmundsson:And as you can see, the next book I recommend also is based upon attention. It's by Francis Tuker. It was called The Pattern of War. And there he's talking about the two very different kinds of war that he experienced in the world wars. The position warfare or trench warfare, and then the mobile warfare.
Bruce Gudmundsson:And he was very much involved in the mobile warfare in North Africa in in World War two. So getting a sense of these these tensions, it's not an either or. There's a lot more and than than either or.
Sam Alaimo:I did not expect you to say Aristotle politics. The Greeks called it mende on the one hand on the other. I'm still trying to get that inside of my brain to think that way and not just make the immediate decision, but think about both sides of that coin and not cynically, which is one of my favorite aspects of Aristotle. You mentioned earlier slow thinking. So can you talk about the difference between slow thinking and fast thinking?
Sam Alaimo:Obviously, it pertains to combat, but also let's try to pivot it to like a business environment. How do those two aspects apply?
Bruce Gudmundsson:Yeah. Well, first of all, they are complementary. Right? You don't want someone to say, well, I'm always flying by the seat of my pants. Or I need a week to think things through.
Bruce Gudmundsson:Sometimes you have a week, sometimes you don't. So the first, I think, first bit of advice I'd give really to anybody that's doing anything in life is that you have to do both. You can't be a one trick pony. You have to be able to do both. And they complement each other.
Bruce Gudmundsson:And very often you will make a decision in the heat of the moment. It will not be the best decision. Guarantee you that. It will not be optimum. But if it works, it works.
Bruce Gudmundsson:If it doesn't work, you think again and do something else. And then you reflect upon that. You reflect upon your quick decisions and do that slowly. But then you also do all the things that build up your mental arsenal. And a big part of that is accumulating models.
Bruce Gudmundsson:And you get that from reading history. And again, seeing all of these different examples, none of which will fit perfectly the situation you're in. But it is remarkable how some of the old stories prove practical. For example, buying a car. There's a story from ancient Rome about the Cumaean Sibyl.
Bruce Gudmundsson:And this is early in the history of ancient Rome when they still had the Etruscan caves. In fact, the story of I think this was the last Etruscan king. Tarquin the Proud. Not Tarquin the wise, not Tarquin the thoughtful, but Tarquin the Proud. And there's this Sibyl, this prophetess who lives by the Tiber River.
Bruce Gudmundsson:And she sits down and she writes down the future history of Raab on some wooden tablets. And she takes it to the king and says, I've got these 12 tablets with the future history of your city, and I'll sell them to you for this outrageous price. And the king says, crazy lady, go away. And she goes away and burns three of the tablets. Next day, she comes by, comes back with nine tablets and offers them for the same price.
Bruce Gudmundsson:And that process continues until she's got three tablets left and the king pays the full price for a quarter of the prophecies. Now, what does that have to tell you about buying a car? Well, wanted to buy a used car, and I saw one advertised. And I said, okay, I'm gonna go. I'm going on a Wednesday morning because no one buys a car on a Wednesday morning.
Bruce Gudmundsson:There'll be a salesman to be eager for a sale. And I saw the list price and I got a certified check for about $2,000 less than the list price. And I said, I'd like to buy this card, please. Here's the check. And they said, Oh, but the price is this.
Bruce Gudmundsson:I'd like to buy the card. Here's the check. And they said, Oh yeah. But do you want financing? He said, No, no, no.
Bruce Gudmundsson:Here's this certified check. Finally, I had to do a lot of convincing because they had a certain way of doing things, but I ended up getting the car for the price I wanted, and the car served me for a good decade. And again, the the I had taken this story from the classical world and applied it to some some very very pedestrian business.
Sam Alaimo:You made a caveat when you were talking about that transition from fast thinking to slow thinking, where you kind of have to make a decision and then think about it afterwards, and over time iterate, become better. The expression I heard in the military was decision analysis paralysis, where if you had too much education without enough application, you'd be stuck in that rut, unsure what to do and never actually make a decision. Do you have any recommendations on how to how to make that iterating cycle faster from fast thinking, making a decision, knowing full well it might not be the best decision, reflecting on it, and then being faster and more accurate next time. Do have any recommendations?
Bruce Gudmundsson:Practice with speed. Mhmm. Like I said, like, any sort of any sort of drill, you just do it quickly. You get you become comfortable with doing things quickly. You become comfortable with sub optimization.
Bruce Gudmundsson:You know? And, again, this is very different from, on the eve of the Vietnam War, we had the McNamara era. And the idea was that some clever people, often with the aid of computers, would be able to come up with optimal solutions. And then, you know, we had all these military officers, rather than studying military history, going to get degrees in operations analysis to again make these perfect decisions in an air conditioned room, in an actually very cold air conditioned room because the computers generated a lot of heat in those days. And that I think is a big part of our our defeat in Vietnam.
Bruce Gudmundsson:In fact, it's remarkable how little military history was studied in the fifties and sixties. There was the sense that we'd seen the end of history, that we're in the age of push button warfare. In fact, it wasn't I think until the late seventies, maybe even the eighties, that history, military history was taught at West Point. That it was taken out of the curriculum sometime in the, I think, the late forties or early fifties, and didn't come back until I'm thinking either very late seventies or early eighties by a guy named Bob Doty, who's by the way a terrific scholar of the French army. And a big part of this reform movement was the revival of military history, which has a number of contributors.
Bruce Gudmundsson:One of which was the bicentennial, which I think a very a very healthy thing for America, and really brought a lot of got a lot of people interested in in writing military history.
Sam Alaimo:I'm gonna write on my whiteboard when we're done the quote comfortable with sub optimization, because I think that is the cure to the this there's a there's a movement. I mean, there always has been in America, guess, this desire to be as optimized and as perfect as possible to gain that extra point 1% in performance, and that is enough to cripple people to not even try in the first place. So to be able to be comfortable with sub optimization, get out there and take a risk and iterate and become better, that is just gold. Let's talk about, a lot of our audience is in the business world, so they're very familiar with case studies, but probably not so much with decision games, and probably not decision forcing cases, especially when you add that Socratic element to it. So can you talk about the DFCs?
Bruce Gudmundsson:Yeah. So the DFCs inspired by a number of things, one of which is the way they they teach case studies at the Harvard Business School. And I spent two and a half years at the Kennedy School right across the river from from the business school. And I got that job actually through the Marine Corps Reserve. Was hired by my my my commanding officer in in the twenty fifth Marines.
Bruce Gudmundsson:He was working at Harvard at the Kennedy School. At that time, the Kennedy School was trying to adopt the case method, so I spent a lot of time talking to professors at the business school and and what have you. And so I was struck by the degree to which they ask students to do the same thing, to make a decision and defend it, fully realizing that they don't have weeks and weeks to prepare. Now, they do spend a lot of time with the spreadsheets. You know, when they prepare when they come to class, they often have a great deal of information.
Bruce Gudmundsson:Sort of information military folks are not gonna have. And they're all very often able to reduce them to a bottom line because there's no military equivalent of cash. Right? So many things you can't quantify in military matters. You're trying to do so many things at once.
Bruce Gudmundsson:That's one of the inspirations. And again, the way they do it is by saying, okay, you you are the CEO of Coca Cola Company. Pepsi has introduced this you know, is beating you with the Pepsi channel. This is 1986. Right?
Bruce Gudmundsson:What do you do? And then Coke ends up with the new Coke, turns out to be a complete disaster. The question is why. So a lot of business schools will make the mistake of using the case study as a springboard for the professor's ideas. So the students read the case study, the professor says, okay, let me explain this to you.
Bruce Gudmundsson:The good professors at Harvard, and I'm a little worried that they're slipping on this. They just celebrated their hundredth anniversary of the case method at Harvard Business School. People at Darden at Virginia are very good at this. The professor's not gonna give you his opinion. May he may give you some some ideas at the end, but he'll basically say, okay, you're the boss.
Bruce Gudmundsson:You're the decision maker. What do you do? It's really that simple. Sir, are your orders? And when you say, let me think about it, the teacher, whoever he is, says, no, please tell me now or tell me in five minutes.
Bruce Gudmundsson:Maybe consult with your colleagues, but tell me very, very soon. And it's really that simple. It's not it's just very different from the way so many other things work in life, particularly the way a school works for many people.
Sam Alaimo:I think you teach a course. If it's not a course, it's a book, I can't remember what case is, but Klauswitz. Do you have do you have one or two or three, like, major takeaways that that you could share here from that course?
Bruce Gudmundsson:Some of the cases were were drawn from the War of Independence, from the American War of Independence, where and and the the textbook that Klauswitz used, there's a book by Johann Ewald called Treatise and Partisanal Warfare. You can get it for free on archive.org. And these are situations, encounter battles, ambushes, things like that. So that was one part of it. And the other part is in a much higher level, Napoleon's eighteen fourteen campaign, where with inferior forces he really manages to keep three very large armies away from Paris for several months.
Bruce Gudmundsson:And it's really a brilliant campaign. He's dealing with very little in the way of resources and dealing with a number of actually very different enemies. So he's got Field Marshal Blucher who is absolute madman, very aggressive. And he's got Field Marshal Schwarzenberg who is in charge of leading the Army of Bohemia. You can imagine the Army of Bohemia there.
Bruce Gudmundsson:He's an Austrian. He's actually working for Napoleon's father-in-law, and he's planning on making a deal. So he's marching slowly, deliberately, not taking any risks. So the problem for Napoleon is, okay, how do I deal with these two very different opponents? I've got this madman who takes risks and then I have the army of Bohemia where they're listening to progressive jazz and drinking espresso.
Bruce Gudmundsson:How do you do that? So that was the case from Klausmitz. So I took these episodes from the writings of Klauswitz or from his the the cases he was using to teach, and then turned them into into decision forcing cases.
Sam Alaimo:Let's do kind of a lightning round. I'm gonna go through some questions. We'll answer quick. What are a few things you do to prime yourself for the day? And I ask because you're you're in a heavily intellectual endeavor.
Sam Alaimo:You probably have to do a lot of deep thought. It takes a while to get in there and then stay in there. How do you prime yourself?
Bruce Gudmundsson:I prime myself before I go to sleep. So I I think about what I'm gonna write the next day. I get up very early. Again, I'm in my sixties, so it's easy to get up early. The young people like to sleep in.
Bruce Gudmundsson:Young people are nocturnal. I'm up with chickens. I'm up well before the chickens. And then I write for three or four hours in the morning. And that's those my my most productive hours of the day.
Bruce Gudmundsson:So and and I do it, you know, no breakfast, no coffee, just making use of of the energy I accumulated while asleep. And I have a gift for sleep by sleep. There's another thing about having spent a little time in the service is that you get good at sleeping. You sleep whenever you can. And I think that my subconscious mind works on the problem.
Bruce Gudmundsson:It doesn't always work that way, but the the words will flow like like Honey in August.
Sam Alaimo:I've talked to a lot of writers, and a lot of them say the same thing. They'll think about it before they go to bed, wake up, put pen to paper or fingers to to keypad, and just get after it. I've never been able to do it. So when you're visualizing at night, do you set a problem and then fall asleep on the problem? Or how does that work?
Bruce Gudmundsson:Yeah. Usually, I because I'm I'm so history based, right, that that that I I rely on sources, I will assemble the sources, put them together in a folder on the computer. Very often I'll do diagrams. I'll often draw before I write. So when, you know, in the afternoon, in the evening, where I'm not really a %, I do a lot of graphics work.
Bruce Gudmundsson:Very often when I'm writing, I'm describing the picture.
Sam Alaimo:Awesome. What about at the end of the day, pivoting away from work? Do you have any routines you abide by?
Bruce Gudmundsson:Not really, no, no. I I You know, my kids are grown up. My wife likes to read, so we have our dates in the morning, sort of after I've done most of my writing, before she goes to work. And it's longer on weekends, but we sit around and have a little coffee. So that's my personal time.
Bruce Gudmundsson:But I love what I do. As I said before, my father was an Icelander and the dream of every Icelander is to make your living with your pen. So I count myself very very fortunate. So I'm basically writing all the time. If I'm not writing, I'm preparing to write.
Sam Alaimo:How do you get your best work done? How do you get in the deepest mode of focus and stay there?
Bruce Gudmundsson:Yeah. Again, it's the morning. It's the morning. It does not always work that way. So for example, when I do a long drive, I'll stop after an hour and find a place where I'll set up and write for an hour.
Sam Alaimo:Oh, that's great. That's great.
Bruce Gudmundsson:So the two different kinds of activities complement each other. And I think I'm thinking about what I'm gonna write when I'm driving Unless I'm listening to a podcast, and I love podcasts. I'm a huge fan of podcasts.
Sam Alaimo:I don't usually ask this question, but like what are what are one or two podcasts do you recommend?
Bruce Gudmundsson:Oh, I I like history podcasts, so I like David Crowder's History of England podcast. I think he's at episode 400 or something. And he's only reached I think he's up to about sixteen sixty. He's doing a deep dive. The History of the Germans, which is still in the Middle Ages, it's a little newer podcast.
Bruce Gudmundsson:There is a great podcast called Thugs and Miracles about the very early kings of France. I'm talking about before Charlemagne. If you like Dan Carlin, this is very very much sort of like Dan Carlin light. There's one called Pax Britannica which is also British history but with a very broad view. So he's doing like the deep background of India before he gets to the British in India.
Bruce Gudmundsson:So he's doing something, a small series in the Mughal Empire, and does some good things about British colonies in America. History of Italy, that's a lot of fun. And again, a lot of people are doing these, I call them soup to nuts type podcasts that give you the full history of a place. And they're they're they're moving very very slowly, which is just fine by me.
Sam Alaimo:Movies. Couple movies that you changed your life.
Bruce Gudmundsson:Yeah. Cromwell, nineteen seventy. Richard Harris as Cromwell. You know, and I was too young to realize the irony of an Irish actor playing Cromwell. Brilliant, brilliant movie.
Bruce Gudmundsson:Sometimes takes a few liberties with the facts.
Sam Alaimo:And what about books? We've talked a lot about books, but what are the books that have changed their life the There
Bruce Gudmundsson:was a book that came out shortly after the Vietnam War called Self Destruction. It was written under a pseudonym, the pseudonym being Cincinnatus. And if you want a sense of what happened there, I would recommend that book. Had a profound effect on me. It helped me make sense of the whole what I was seeing the time of the Vietnam War.
Bruce Gudmundsson:The other thing, another one is the Gulag Archipelago. It's a great big book by Balslotovnitz. And I still can't spell Sultanitz. I have to look it up every time I write it. But that was a powerful, powerful book.
Bruce Gudmundsson:The third is actually this is pretty obscure. This by an Israeli general named Yehuda Wallach. Wallach like like the actor Eli Wallach, w a l l a c h. Yehuda Wallach. Yehuda with a j.
Bruce Gudmundsson:It's interesting that he spells it the German way because he's basically a German who was sort of kicked off the team in the thirties for reasons we all know about. Went to Israel, and it's a critique of the Israeli embrace of the German methods, of the Blitzkrieg method. So this is one of the great ironies of history is that the biggest disciples of the Germans of the 40s, 30s and 40s, were the Israelis of the late 40s, 50s, and 60s. So the spiritual descendant of Rommel was Moshe Dayan. It's called the Dogma of the Battle of Annihilation.
Bruce Gudmundsson:And it's it's much more clearly written than the name suggests. Right?
Sam Alaimo:That is an epic name.
Bruce Gudmundsson:Yes. Yeah. Yehuda Volok, remarkable remarkable writer. It's again a critique of two things. One, how the Germans got a lot of things right but a lot of things wrong too.
Bruce Gudmundsson:And how basically warning to the Israelis, Let's not fall into the same trap. Let's imitate the virtues but not the vices. But because he was a German, a German speaker, in fact most of his publications are in German. This book he wrote in English, you can get it in German, but that is a translation from the English. It was a very good counterpart to a lot of literature that a lot of people, including myself, put out about the German methods and the very very adulatory literature.
Bruce Gudmundsson:This will make you reflect a bit, make you think about it, realize that there are shadows as well sunshine.
Sam Alaimo:How can people follow you and your work?
Bruce Gudmundsson:Yeah. I've got a couple of substats. One's called the Tactical Notebook, which you'd imagine is military stuff. The other one's called Extramuros, from the Latin for outside the walls. And it's about ways people from all walks of life can get the benefits of liberal education.
Bruce Gudmundsson:So I believe very strongly that, and I'm quoting actually Ferdinand Fosch here, there are no educated men, there are only men who educate themselves. Every educated person is self educated. I don't care where you've been. I worked at Harvard, was an undergraduate at Yale, got my PhD from Oxford. So I've been very fortunate.
Bruce Gudmundsson:I've been to all these name brand schools, been around them. But that experience has convinced me that it's all self education. And by all, I mean a %.
Sam Alaimo:That's a good way to finish it. I never realized I tried to boil a lifetime of thinking down to sixty minutes, but genuinely appreciate it. Couldn't be more stoked to have you on.
Bruce Gudmundsson:Well, you so much. This is a this is an honor.
Sam Alaimo:I appreciate it. That's it for this episode. If you wanna check out more from the podcast, head to 0Eyes.com/NoBell, where you can see show notes, read more about our guests, and suggest guests or topics of your own. Until next time, stay in the fight. Don't ring the bell.