68. Unlocking the Power of the Creative Process with Justin Mikolay

Brock Briggs  0:00  

Hello and welcome to the Scuttlebutt podcast, the show for current and former service members looking to think deep and act big. I'm your host, Brock Briggs and today I'm speaking with Justin Mikolay. Justin is a former Submariner in the world's finest navy. I'm a little bit partial and he is as well. He was a speechwriter for several notable figures, including General Petraeus, General Mattis and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta. You'll hear what he learned about leadership from each of them. I don't think that I've ever spoken with someone who has thought more about the creative process than Justin. 

He's got a prolific Twitter feed and is extremely adept at summarizing information from some of the world's smartest people. You're going to learn a lesson in nuclear fission and how it applies to our creative process in today's conversation. You also hear Justin's inspiring words on why it's essential to put your words out into the world and how to use those as a lighthouse to draw like minded people to you. We get into several other subtopics, what he regrets about his time in the military, working at Palantir, heuristics on habit forming so much good stuff, you're really gonna enjoy this. 

The last thing before we start, I need a favor. I've set a big, hairy audacious goal, as some would call it, of hitting 100,000 downloads this year. Given we're a long stride from that still, I've put my foot down on curating the most insightful, action oriented content for you as I can. If you're listening to this, I would really appreciate you sharing it on social media, whatever you use, doesn't have to be anything crazy, a screenshot, something you learned, a quote, anything interesting and share that post and tag me in it. Those shares go a long way in helping us reach that goal. Please enjoy this conversation with Justin Mikolay.

Brock Briggs 

One of the things that I was going to ask to get started with you was how is your rhythm, but that might be a little bit overplayed. Just given that that's come up in a couple of your interviews. I'll maybe start by asking if you're aware of the fact you have a 4.3 out of five stars on Rate My Professor at your time at the Naval Academy.

Justin Mikolay  2:29  

I'm embarrassed by that. That’s hilarious. In fact, there's one comment on it that says something like this is the worst instructor I've ever had. He just talks about, he just tells stories. But there's other glowing reviews as well. So I really enjoyed that time. That's a funny first question. And I suppose things live forever on the internet.

Brock Briggs  2:54  

4.3 out of five is pretty good. Like, I don't think that that's going to push anybody away from taking that class.

Justin Mikolay  3:00  

Yeah, I have a few hot tamales.

Brock Briggs  3:04  

That's a nice way to put it. Yeah, I find it funny when people like they say you shouldn't take this class. But it's really easy. And it's funny that often that doesn't correlate to necessarily what is makes it good or bad glass.

Justin Mikolay  3:20  

One thing that I really was proud of in that experience is I intensely edited every paper to the point of insanity. So I had a lot of writing assignments and would hand edit and like track change the paper for the student. So try to teach them like how to write a more compelling essay. And it took me forever. Most teachers just like assign a grade to a paper. And I like went kind of nuts on the editing of these student papers to try to teach them sort of the last in about professional communication. So at least I did that for them.

Brock Briggs  4:00  

You definitely did. Did you find that that was successful to them? Like was that valuable to maybe even a few people?

Justin Mikolay  4:09  

You know, it's hard to know what sticks with people. It's funny because you know, all of us have these experiences where somebody says an offhand remark and then it sticks with you for the next 20 years. And that person who said that remark would never remember that episode. So my hope is that there's a few people out there who are inspired to get creative and to put their thoughts in writing, which of course, is the only thing that helps you order your thinking. It's the classic. It's the classic line you don't write to express what you think you write to discover what you think.

Brock Briggs  4:45  

I've found that to be absolutely true. And I think that more people need to have that same realization because I don't think that even knowing that statement to be true. It really doesn't hit you until you actually see it play out, I think in your own life.

Justin Mikolay  5:02  

It’s so true. I have a feeling like most people have never really tried to write, they do it for school. And then when school ends, they don't keep writing, which is like a very odd thing. So that it's like I have a second theory, which is related, like most people have never been in great physical condition like great shape. If you're like an excellent physical condition, then running actually feels effortless. And most people have never felt that in their lives. And it's sort of the same metaphor for writing. Like, it's super hard. I read one of your substack posts and you're like, wow, I've just realized how hard this is to do every week for like, write a newsletter and publish it every week. And so it's kind of like I would say, it's like, almost equivalent to like a physical fitness or a condition like the writing clearly, quickly. And well is like a skill in the same way, like being in shape is, you know, a condition a state that you're in.

Brock Briggs  6:07  

I think that there's also some interesting parallels to that come about. After so much repetition, it becomes something that you almost can't live without. I know that you were a runner when you're at the Naval Academy. So I know that this will resonate with you. But there comes a point in your fitness. I certainly am not there with writing yet. But I'm getting there and working to see that. But there comes a point when you start to eliminate things that get in the way of your workout, or like, oh, if I have this one drink at dinner, I'm not going to run as fast. I'm going to be 22nd pace slower, the next day or whatever, that even just a slight tinge of something not being right, and then take that to writing. It's like, oh, well, this will, my process is so important. Like I need to adhere to this and you get naturally self-select into the best way to optimize for that one behavior.

Justin Mikolay  7:08  

Yeah, I think the word for that is systematic. So a lot of people, you know, LeBrons, like I have the process that he follows or TV 12 The program. But it really is like my coach used to quote, the Villanova coach, I think his name is jumbo Elliot. And he said, there's four words for every, for every great runner live like a clock. And it's like structure your entire lifestyle, for the activity of training. And to be clear, that is not what my life is, like right now, sadly, I don't have like the world's greatest rhythm, I'm not in shape. So I'm not trying to be one of these, like, you know, hustlers or strivers or you know, these Twitter personalities who, you know, claim perfection or anything like that. But I do think that if you do like a certain set of things to eliminate from your life, then like, success becomes automatic, or getting in shape becomes a byproduct, like the product of that greater abstraction. So like, if I drink less alcohol, go to bed early and wake up to an alarm, like instantly, and like get out of bed instantly. Those three things, if I just did those three getting in shape would be automatic. 

Brock Briggs  8:27  

I completely agree. And it's interesting because I am a recovering, or in the process of recovery on dealing with how do I want to put this. I'm trying to get over being a person that constantly looks for the way things ought to be done. Because what the beauty of the processes is actually finding it out for yourself. And to do that you need to start with a really wide scope. And then like you said, systematize, you naturally kind of want to do it when you really liked something or when you really are loving a process, you automatically go that direction. 

I know, in some of my younger, more reckless years, I would constantly claim and brag about my caffeine intake and to talk about how caffeine didn't affect me when I slept. And then I went for a period of time without taking any caffeine and watched my sleep increased dramatically, almost overnight. And I was like, huh, I wonder what this is. And in hindsight, it's, hey, stupid, like you are impacted by these things in ways that you don't anticipate. That's just one example. But there's a lot of things that fall into that category of lifestyle changes that over a long enough period of time make a big difference in your life.

Justin Mikolay  9:53  

I agree. And these wearable devices, the oops the aura rings the Fitbit as the Apple Watches. They actually provide data that is quite jarring. If you watch how many steps you're taking adjust, then just to be aware of that changes your approach to your daily life. And prior to these devices, we just, I mean, I guess if you carry around your phone, it automatically tracks your steps. But, you know, 10, 15 years ago, we just had no idea on like, like the real raw data. Having said that, though, I think there's something like mystical about performing at a high level, that you do it best if you're less. Like, if you're logging less data, in your own mind, like weighing yourself down mentally with it. 

So for example, if you're like a runner and you do a training log, I did that in high school for one or two seasons that had terrible seasons, because I was like, sort of overthinking it, like the best attitude is to be a hippie about it, and just go run as a free spirit and train according to a program that a coach will give you. But then, you know, like, do it for joy, like the primitive pursuit of, you know, running fast and competition, it's like better than I think logging every calorie that you eat, or something like that. My coach always would say, assassinate your desserts. We literally had to put ketchup on top of any dessert that was on a table in the Naval Academy, which was sad, because there's wasted food, but we were required to do it by our coaches. It's called assassinating your dessert, which so you don't you're not like tracking calories, but you're part of the culture of that program. I thought that might be funny to share. 

Brock Briggs  11:50  

That's an interesting, kind of like heuristic. And I bet probably like a funny thing, you sit down at the table with your running buddies, and it becomes somebody grabs the ketchup first thing, and we're just we're gonna get this out of the way and ruin it. So it doesn't sit there and look at us. I have found that so true. This last summer, I was going to do an attempt at a half Ironman and spoke with several like ultra runners. And they were asking me all these questions about, you know, how much time are you spending in Z2 and like, you know, how many miles are you logging on this? And I'm like, man, I'm just trying to like, run a marathon. Like, I'm not. I can't think about trying to track all of these things. Like that's, I'm just trying to finish. And I'm not worried about time or anything like that. So I think yeah, I think that it's, you need to be aware of the improvements and sometimes you need to see the data, but you can easily get caught up in what that might look like and get too focused on it.

Justin Mikolay  12:53  

Yeah, I agree. It sucks the joy out of it sometimes. Did you finish that Half Ironman?

Brock Briggs  13:02  

No. Embarrassingly, like, I think physically, I would have been able to do it. But I drastically underprepared monetarily. I started buying things for it way too late. And then all of a sudden, it's like, oh, I bought a wetsuit. And then I'm like, I still didn't have the shoes that I needed. And then I also didn't have my race entry. And, you know, all of a sudden, it was like, the last two weeks before the race and I have like $3,000 worth of things I need to buy. And I was like, no, but I'm gonna try for a full this year. I've got a much better head, start on it and have almost all of the equipment. So we're going to try and do like a big, raise a bunch of money for charity and try and do that this year. So we'll see.

Justin Mikolay  13:49  

That's really neat. That's an unexpected answer, by the way. I never would have considered the financial aspect of it.

Brock Briggs  13:55  

It's tremendously expensive. And probably one of the most expensive sports that I think that I've seen.

Justin Mikolay  14:03  

Yeah, that's brutal. I mean, getting in condition in three different sports is insanity and swimming and running are among the very best activities to get in shape very hard. I swam in high school. I know how hard it is to get in swimming shape, it's just a time consuming enterprise.

Brock Briggs  14:25  

That was one of the things I noticed too is like it you know, you want to go do like a trial and do like all three evolutions in one day. It's like that's the whole day. You wake up do your morning routine and it's like, you know, you spend an hour in the ocean or like an open water or in the pool and then you go bike for three, four hours and then you know, run for an hour to like you're and then you're also cooked at the end of that, like you're not doing you're not walking after that. You're gonna go sit on the couch.

Justin Mikolay  14:56  

Well good luck with it. I think it's very, very cool. I ran a marathon once and vowed at the finish line never to do it again. So I'm gonna honor that commitment.

Brock Briggs  15:07  

I appreciate you being able to stick with your word on that. After watching you like the last couple of years, like from the sidelines, it seems like you have a very systematized way of thinking we were just talking about like how your body is like systematizing different and optimizing for a certain process. And I would guess that you have spent a fair amount of time thinking about that was that something that you have always done or something that was developed over time.

Justin Mikolay  15:37  

I've read quite a few books on the creative process, thus, and you never know what you're really interested in. Except in retrospect, I call it spiraling into what you enjoy spiraling into a passion, if you will. And looking back on it. Now, I've realized I've always really enjoyed writing the process of trying to express yourself on the page, and that extends all the way back to early high school. I've always enjoyed it. And it's, it's a very odd thing, because the writing to me, is painful, truly, like physically painful sometimes. And very taxing. But nevertheless, even though I understand that it's painful, I still enjoy it. And I don't know exactly why. 

But like, I think a lot like if my family would describe me, potentially, they've seen me behind the keyboard for a long time, all the time. You know, in high school, I'd be like in the Office, Windows one, whatever the version was back in the day, just typing away, happily typing away. So that's like the core of it is this like inherent curiosity and like trying to make an argument, but, but the process of it, I've never like been a guy that has like prolific output. Unfortunately, they've never like mastered getting the creative rhythm in a system year in and year out. I wish I could be better at this. But I definitely have discovered the very best way to fill yourself with ideas and then to start writing with them. And this way, I think, is like boneheaded ly obvious to everyone, but maybe they don't put it in these words, the most important thing is to choose very high quality sources, like the classics in the field. 

And to read those again, and again, and again, then the key point is to take notes from clippings, so surprising them into a file of any kind, this could be in in your own writing, physically, handwritten or digitally and I founded a company around this process, which ultimately failed, we can get into that in a second. But once you have excerpted something from a very high quality source, then you need to assign it a theme, and then rewrite it in your own words, which proves that you understand what you just excerpted. And if you do that, it's very simple, then you're literally creating from what you're consuming. So making the process of consumption, an actual affirmative creative act, is the whole point of like reading quality things.

So shifting from a passive to an active exercise is bottom line, like, you know, Mark is a really as good could have told you this 1000s of years ago. But that's the system, it's very obvious, but and I've got a notion file that I use. And I probably excerpt two to four things in it on a given day. And that just populates over time. So it's got, you know, many fields of things that have resonated with me. And that's another way to discover what you're doing is to just do that daily for several years, and then read the file and then you're, you're naturally going to pick things that have a resonance with you. So whatever is in that file, is what you're passionate about. So you don't have to go choose your passion, like your passion chooses you.

Brock Briggs  19:20  

You've talked elsewhere about that idea of active consumption, and we are natural consumers and become more consumer ish every day by just tick tock and especially it's just like this weird. Our attention span just is getting lower and lower and lower over time, but you need an outlet in some way. And I've never heard somebody pitch trying to find your passion in that way. But I bet that that's extraordinarily effective. You also had mentioned in another conversation, I think you were you were a Submariner, I believe and you talked about, I think We're making a physics joke, but you're talking about the density, like a density function and having a bunch of ideas in like really close proximity and like bouncing against each other, and how that is like a great way to form new and creative ideas. 

Justin Mikolay  20:17  

Yeah. So the key point there is that every creative process to be successful has to reach a point where it is self sustaining. And in the nuclear context, we learn about a thing called que effective the multiple of when you have a nuclear fission reaction occurring with let's say, uranium, some isotope of uranium, if you have enough uranium close enough together at the right temperature, and with the right conditions, you know, the sort of PV equals NRT sort of thing. You can start the reaction only when one fission creates more than one additional fission one or more. So the reactor is so called critical when the k effective is one meaning one, fission creates one or more efficient additional visions. 

So the reactor is self sustaining. And so your creative process will only be self sustaining, if you have a high enough density of ideas that are colliding with one another. And so the idea is to collide ideas against each other. And so like all creativity is a process of recombination. Creativity does not come from within your head, it occurs outside of your head. Creativity comes from without, there's a great quote on that. But I have this theory that when you see ideas on a page, those are the actual ideas, not the idea in your head. And this is a very fundamental thing. In other words, you cannot actually have an idea unless you can see it outside of your head. Because we think in symbols, we're taught language when we're young and languages words. And those words are symbols. 

And those symbols themselves are the ideas not some metaphysical thing that doesn't exist inside your head. It's like the sentence is composed of symbols. If I'm being a little bit pedantic, I don't, you know, stop me but, but that is like, the most important, like part of creating a self sustaining process is to have enough ideas in front of you. This is why ChatGPT is a massive game changer for everyone in the world. I am going to write a thread, maybe tomorrow about how AI is massively still underhyped not overhyped. 

Everyone says AI is very hyped. It's like it's in a hype cycle right now, I think, because language is the most useful technology ever developed. Now that machines can use language and understand it, and then communicate them back to us, we already will have the ideas outside of our head structured, to then combine with and play with outside of our heads. ChatGPT is incredibly useful, incredibly, incredibly useful. Even if it's not like it puts ideas in front of you that you don't have to ever it risks. He rescues you from the blank page forever. No one will ever struggle with a blank page. If you're 10 years old. In the next five years, it's going to get so good that it will pre populate something that you can then massively refine and edit and make your own.

Brock Briggs  23:37  

I've had quite a bit of time messing with it. And it is an unbelievable tool. And I think that it's going to aid much more than just writers for several of the reasons that you just discussed. It's re mixing, it's new angles, it's all of these things. I heard an interesting take, since you brought up ChatGPT, I heard an interesting take about how humans are interacting with it, in that we are wanting ChatGPT and several of these other like image generation and like all of the things in that field. We're wanting those systems to create new and original ideas. 

But we're wanting to like systematize ourselves, like we're wanting the robots to get creative. And like it's not robots, it's that area, it's AI. It's all that we're wanting new combinations built from that. But simultaneously, we're trying to like decrease our own creativity, which I think is a really, really interesting take by like, trying to outsource that in I think that that's not right. I think that your point of view is actually the more effective use case of something like this. It's having our own things fed back to I send it in a new way.

Justin Mikolay  25:01  

Yeah, the way I think of it is all computing advances, fundamentally, are about creating new interfaces between the machine and the human. And so if you look at every Apple product that has been a breakthrough, it's always a breakthrough in one particular interview, one particular aspect of the interface between the human and machine, so the click wheel for the original iPad, the resistive touch on the touchscreen, the iPhone screen without the buttons. All of those are interface advancements and the ChatGPT advancement was an interface advancement as well, it wasn't. So it's not about the fundamental technology behind it, which is are the large, the large language models have been around the, the breakthrough was allowing somebody to creatively interact with these language models. 

And they can summon all of the collective human knowledge and history within a very simple and intuitive interface. So that if like, when writing was invented in Samaria, like that is when civilization took off, it was like jet fuel for civilization. And this is going to be like, you know, even much more more powerful because you not only are just sharing ideas between one human to another, it's like you're interacting with these language models, which have trillions of parameters or will have trillions of parameters. So I really don't think it can be overstated. The consequences of this technology are astounding, in my view.

Brock Briggs  26:46  

I certainly agree. And I was thinking about why or thinking about your history in preparation for this interview and thinking about your time as a speechwriter for several very notable historical figures. And I'm wondering, do you think that the speechwriter position goes away for the military? Did they get that outsource to ChatGPT?

Justin Mikolay  27:12  

That's funny. That's a very good question. Unexpected one. I think knowledge workers, people in creative fields, designers, both visual and, and writers, I think those those fields are simply going to translate are simply going to be transformed by the most creative people most effectively using these AI tools. So anytime a technology advances like this, I have never had a concern that jobs would be lost. It's better to say that more jobs will be created, but the jobs will be much different and a higher order. So it's going to emancipate our minds and free us to solve harder problems, and create even more beautiful thing with through these tools. It's just that the people who are going to be the most successfully creating with them are going to have to master these new set of tools. 

It also like Paul Graham, has a famous Twitter personality and the founder of YC, and just incredibly prolific writer, himself a deep thinker. And well ahead of the curve on many technologies, he actually tweeted something that I massively disagree with. And that is, he will never outsource his thinking to any of these tools. In other words, he prefers writing in Word or writing in Google Docs or whatever but he doesn't think that he would. He doesn't want the machine to put words in his mouth. And he thinks that will be inherently less interesting and surprising and creative, the output. I think he's going to change his mind on that. I think he's going to use these tools and take ownership of the end product, obviously, every single word of the end product. But I think these tools are inherently useful for even a guy like him, even though you can write well without them. 

So to answer your actual question, I think the necessity for leaders to communicate throughout the breadth and depth of an organization and then externally from that organization, both to the masses, and then to the elites. All of those things that necessity to persuade an audience is evergreen that will never go away. And making words sing is I think, an inherently human capacity. Because you have to like think about what will reach an audience and emotionally intellectually At the same time, what will hit their head and their heart at the same time. So I think the speech writers of the future are going to have these great powerful ways to assist them in helping leaders think because that's all you're really trying to do in that job. The point of speech writing, is to not to write for someone is to write with them, and to help them reach these other human beings. And so maybe it's much too long of an answer to all of your questions. But those are my thoughts.

Brock Briggs  30:31  

Earlier, you're talking about rereading the greats and like, solidifying on like a few handful of like, just key core ideas, and just kind of resonating on those and marinating on them. What were some of your big takeaway ideas that you took from spending time with these? General Mattis? SecDef. As Panetta said, he notes that. 

Justin Mikolay

Yep 

Brock Briggs

What were your takeaways from them? Those little excerpts that you pulled from your time with them?

Justin Mikolay  31:10  

Yeah, first of all, I've learned a lot more than just speech writing from those experiences. 

Brock Briggs  31:18  

And oh, yeah, that's exactly what I'm getting at. 

Justin Mikolay  31:21  

Because what you're doing, like, I learned about writing and about speech writing clearly, because that was part and parcel to the role, but what you're really seeing is leadership, and specifically leadership at the strategic level, and of large enterprise, large organizations, so pentagon, US Central Command, etc. And I started US Central Command when there were 230,000, soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines, Coast Guardsmen in the area of responsibility CALLED US Central Command. And that spans from, you know, let's see, Israel on the west to Afghanistan, on the east, and from Tajikistan, and the north, down to Oman, and in the south. So the Middle East, broadly. And it's a challenge to lead an organization, which has that, that breadth of different activities ongoing. 

And so behind the scenes, what you're seeing is how they are sort of getting the big ideas expressed, both to their leadership, so to the President and to the Secretary of Defense, and down to the soldiers on the ground, you know, somebody who's wearing boots in Baghdad. And one of the coolest things that, that, that betray us, David Petraeus, pioneered was writing what he called the SecDef weekly report. And he held himself accountable to writing to the SecDef, every Saturday morning. And so that was the principal responsibility of actually the speech writing team and what he called the commander's initiatives group or his brain trust. So there's maybe eight to 10 of us in this sort of Office adjacent to his. 

And throughout the week, he would be emailing us ideas of what to put into the SecDef weekly, which is what am I doing in my area of responsibility, Mr. Secretary, and that was extremely difficult to write, but unbelievably important, because by the end of every week, he sort of knew what the big takeaways were, from, what he was learning that week, and then how to implement them and oversee them. And then sort of in a cyclical process, capture feedback, and then refined further refine the big ideas. So that then would be the basis for, you know, memos or guidance to the troops, or public statements or speeches. So they would reverberate like what was on the page, this is a secret document. So not top secret, but not confidential. So in between the facilities, it's, it's the most popular level of classification at that level. 

And so you're on. You're on your unclassified machine for part of the day and your classified machine for the other part of the day writing this classified memo. But then you take unclassified portions, the ideas from it, and you can use them in public speeches and so forth. So what what you learn is like, how important writing is to inform those big ideas. And Petraeus once gave a speech back at Princeton, he accepted a an award called the Madison metal. And we wrote, like, what are the responsibilities of a strategic leader? And it's a very interesting that quite simple ideas. 

It's to get the big ideas correct, to communicate them to oversee their implementation and then to capture feedback and refine the ideas in a cycle. And he always said this is conceptually easy cycle to understand, not optional, but very hard to execute. And so that's what I learned is like the process of leadership through the, the process of ordering your ideas and writing. So a lot of people don't realize, like 80% of my job wasn't writing the speeches, it was like doing the memos internally that no one ever saw, except for a very small handful of people at the Pentagon.

Brock Briggs  35:30  

It's a really interesting take on what leadership means. I think many outsiders and even people in the military for that matter, if you were to ask them about the definition of leadership, it usually comes back to some war movie about how people led the charge in the face of all odds. And, you know, it's a fighting thing, typically is how it's pitched. Not. It's a war of words, more is what you're describing, I'm thinking?

Justin Mikolay  36:03  

Well, words can be used as tools to win a competition of ideas, is what I would say. And to be words can be wielded to unify large ideas into a common narrative, which then inspires groups of people to action. And ultimately, that's what some of the most inspirational military leaders have done is to inspire this action through their example, principally, and through their words. There's a limit to that, of course, like, I've written about that a little bit. 

But that's what I think, like the point of the point of leadership is to decide and to inspire action among a group. And this is why like political ideology, and like politicians, or, you know, the most successful politicians figure out how to unify a broad set of ideas into like, a worldview, and then capture people's attention of that on that worldview. And yeah, I'll stop there. It's like a, what you're trying to do is like, settle on a philosophical, philosophical point of view about the world and share with the people and often that resonates. I think

Brock Briggs  37:42  

What you just described is something that very, very few people do. But it may be one of the most important things that we can do, because it informs how we act, it informs what's important to us and the things that we're pursuing in life. A, I think, if you were to ask I just think of junior troops primarily in the military of all branches. And you were to ask them, what their definition of that is. And I don't know if anybody could really answer that. 

Justin Mikolay  38:23  

Yeah. Meaning what is motivating their everyday actions to get up and put themselves in harm's way? And that sort of thing? Is that you mean, yeah, then they, then a lot of people say you're 21 years old, and you're an army sergeant, like they might not be able to express like, what's motivating them as I think I think that's what I'm trying to understand. Your question is,

Brock Briggs  38:42  

Yes, that's a much more eloquent wording. And but then take that to pass the service. It's, you know, what, what is it that we're going after everything, the time horizon and the thought processes and looking big enough, it's very much so focused on what's happening today, and maybe tomorrow, but just kind of getting through this process, rather than thinking like, hey, what am I? What am I going after? Why am I doing this?

Justin Mikolay  39:09  

Yeah, I understand. Well, that everyone is motivated by different things. Some of them most, some of the broadest things, people that motivate people are attaching themselves to something that's larger than themselves, so that they can create meaning in their life. And I remember my very first day at the Naval Academy, looking down at my nametag and seeing the name like lay on an actual military uniform is like an out of body experience. Because I'd never associated my last name with the country of the United States. And, you know, there's like, it's a physical manifestation that you're connected to this larger thing called the Constitution, which is the compact that, you know, overarching, compact of our republic. 

So fundamentally, we're all motivated to protect our way of life. and to protect if you're taught history well enough, you understand, it's like a precious idea. It's an experiment, and so forth, that we're running in real time. And it's incredibly unlikely that like life would exist on Earth. And then we reach a point where, like, an actual constitutional republic is self sustaining. But then you realize it actually not self sustaining, it requires everyday work forever, if we're going to maintain it. So like, ultimately, that's, I think, where people like, why they potentially join the services like they, they might not be able to say it in those words, but they're like, I want to serve something. And it's like a natural patriotism that draws them to that service. 

I really believe, however, this is a deeply held conviction that I did not understand until I left the military, which is very odd. When I was in the military for maybe 12 years, plus the four years at the Academy, I never would have, like had this, like, realization about service. What do you tend to do, and I was on a submarine once and like I was on the periscope, where we were surfaced and I was on the bridge, and I was looking over at the Atlantis resort, which is on an island, literally called Paradise. And here I am, like, you know, a stuck on a submarine. And looking at people like in the distance on a cruise ship that's like, based in paradise island in the Caribbean. And I was like, Man, I really resent these people, they're having fun. 

I'm just stuck here, breathing, the metallic, you know, the the smell of aiming, which is sort of the chemical that we use on a submarine. And I did not realize that service is much, much more profound than that, because it separates you. When you take the oath of office, you are profoundly separated from other American citizens in the sense that you now literally have decided to join this subset of American citizens that are currently in active duty service. And stop me if I'm just getting super long winded. But this is the point I'm trying to make. What you are what you like on a surface level, you're trying to protect Americans from harm. But actually, that's not your real role. Your job is to free them to do whatever the hell they want to do. 

And not to not just to protect them from harm or protect the country to keep the country so concerned, so called safe. So like, I always thought that was my job. My job in the military is to keep America safe. It's not not at all your job, it's to prevent most Americans from having to serve, so that they can do more interesting things in the arts and the humanities and science and engineering, like freeing the rest of Americans to go do really cool things to create great art, to create Keeping Up With The Kardashians, whatever it is, don't resent them for that, like the health of our societies, the output of our scholars are artists, and are engineers. That's the health of our society. So the point of the military is to free them to do that, not just to keep the country safe. And that's, I think, a much more interesting way of looking at service. 

Brock Briggs  43:37  

This will be a broad generalization about service that isn't entirely accurate, but I know that many people feel it. While in the service, it is extremely difficult to gain the empowerment to be doing things that are not affiliated with service, doing creative work, you know, owning a business there, the population of people within the service that do those things is very, very small. What's ironic about what you just said is that I agree with you, that is what we are serving as allowing them to do that. 

But in order for them to do that, we have to like not be able to do that. Kind of like that. That's the sacrifice that we're making. And there are certainly that's like I said, it's a generalization. But I've talked in several past episodes before about how the military can kind of stifle creativity, there isn't this open free minded thinking that is encouraged or pushed, it's not fostering to those types of ideas because there is a standard operating procedure for everything. And so it's I once I like I said, that's ironic that you say that because it's you have to sacrifice your ability to do those things and so that others can do it. So a different level of sacrifice that I think most people talk about. Yeah.

Justin Mikolay  45:05  

And I want to react to that briefly. The people who pay the ultimate price and make the ultimate sacrifice, they truly have given their lives for this meaningful purpose. People who are, you know, life changing injuries, and so forth, people who have, you know, ongoing mental injuries, that that is true sacrifice. But for people like me who were never injured in the service, I'm not sure I would use the word sacrifice. I've been thinking a lot about this, because often, I'm kind of frustrated that I spent, you know, 15, some odd years in my 20s and early 30s, in the military and I feel really behind professionally behind my peer group, because they're all senior vice presidents at whatever company because they've been there forever. 

And, you know, they had 15 extra years to get started in the civilian world. So I sometimes think, man, I made a sacrifice, but I just don't think that's true. Because like people, people say, people say thank you for your service, right? And they do that too because it's like, socially awkward when you realize you'd like somebody who served in the military, and they didn't, and they feel somehow guilty, which is absolutely misplaced emotion, in my view. Like, I think it should be like the relationship between people who have served and having served should feel like the relationship between like a mechanic and a farmer, like, the mechanics doing something unimportant. 

And the farmer is doing something important. And they should just acknowledge each other by like nodding at each other, like, thank you for doing what you do. Thank you for doing what you do. And that's like a mutual appreciation, because they're all part of the same group, not part of different groups, like those who have served in those who have not the same group is like, we're all loyal to the Constitution, whether we served or not been one of us served one function, and you're serving some other function and like some financial services firm or whatever. So I just don't think sacrifice is the right concept, except from the first sort of group of people that I mentioned. I kind of need to get over this because like, I'm not sure how to characterize it in my brain, like, what do. It doesn't matter that I'm behind professionally, ish, because I gained so much from it as well. So it's complicated. In my mind.

Brock Briggs  47:46  

That's an interesting take. And I think I would disagree on just like the bottom level, just because if it truly was as close as you say, and there was, what you're implying is that there's not a lot of difference. We're serving different functions, but it's just a different type of job. And it is, but I think way more people would do it if the gap was that smaller, like there's just is so few people who actually are in the military. And that isn't to tout that like, I hate that 1% bullshit that people say that is the stupidest thing. That is just it's not a very intelligent way to describe what being in the military is like, but because it is such a small portion of people. It's not like it's not 50% farmers and 50% mechanics, it's 99%, this and 1% this. 

Yeah, that is interesting that you speak about the professional differences that you've kind of experienced and are working to overcome. I felt the exact same way. And I didn't even I served, I mean, I served for four years. And I still feel that. And it's interesting, because getting out of the military was exactly what I needed to understand everything else in life that I wanted to accomplish. Before that I was this dirt bag kid who just like had no aspirations of anything. But then getting out I saw I'm like, wow, look at all of these things that I can go do. But then for some reason that that small time period, the thing that actually unlocked this different worldview, this different perspective and an understanding of what I was actually capable of in life. Somehow I look on that period as

Justin Mikolay  49:41  

It's a setback.

Brock Briggs  49:43  

And for the exact same things that you said it's my friends are here they have they already I got out and my friends were they had their degrees already. It's the same thing, but just kind of Rewind it a little bit.

Justin Mikolay  49:57  

Yeah. And does this get at your or your previous point related to the lack the common lack of people doing creative work outside of their roles, their specific roles in the military. And therefore they're not sort of in that cyclical, continuous cycle of learning something that's not their, their assigned task. So let's say you're going through nuclear power school, and then you're serving on a submarine. You're, you're already busy enough doing that job that you can't improve yourself elsewhere. Is that what you mean?

Brock Briggs  50:38  

Yes, that's exactly what I'm getting at. And that's,

Justin Mikolay  50:42  

Yeah. Go ahead. So it's funny, because nuclear power school is serving on the submarine were the hardest intellectual things I've ever done by an order of magnitude. And, you know, I've gone to Princeton and gone to the Naval Academy. So I've been in like, challenging academic environments, but nuclear stuff took it to a whole new level. And it's just exceedingly it's first principles all the way to the metal, like, you know, everything about nuclear red radiation, you know, all of the chemistry, all of the electrical engineering, all of the calculus, every thing all the way, there's like eight different subjects that all combined together to inform how to operate safely than a nuclear reactor. 

And I often think, man, I knew so much science and engineering, when I was when I successfully took the chief nuclear engineering exam. For when you're sort of halfway through your your first tour on a submarine, you go to Naval nuclear reactors and take this extremely hard exam, and you have to have all of it in your head. And I often think I have forgotten more on that one subject alone, that has not helped me at all. And so professionally, it's not been a stalagmite that has been growing because of all the drippings of all the things that have been learning, all the drippings have been all over the place, like I've learned, you know, I've been in a lot of different professional roles. 

And this Admiral right before I was deciding whether to get out or stay in the military Admiral Stavridis, who I think he was the stack your maybe the US European command commander, and the NATO allied commander. He like he was a four star Admiral and made time for me. It was like a lowly lieutenant, and, you know, seven ranks below him. And he said something like, what's cool about the Navy is you go to sea, and then you come on land, and you learn on each of these different contexts. So you can challenge yourself on your land, short assignments and your sea assignments. And so it's very creatively refreshing to shift from one to the other. And meanwhile, you're being promoted. So within that bureaucracy, you're just going higher and higher and higher while having more interesting stuff. 

And if you get out, you're just going to leave your stillwagon stalagmite droppings than all these different areas, and you won't be elevated to the pinnacle of that stalagmite. And so like the coolest thing about like, seeing all these people in Washington, DC and traveling with them, it was like, I was, I would, I would always imagine a metaphor of like a bunch of stalagmites and the people that are talking to each other are on the top of each slag night. So everybody that you know, Leon Panetta was meeting was like the CEO of whatever organization, so he was the CEO talking to another CEO, both at the top of their bureaucracy, bureaucratic stalagmites. 

And that's like, a lot of like, what people say is like, their professional goal is to reach the top of their field. And so he advised me to stay in for that very reason. And I often think about that, because I've sort of jumped around. I don't think I'm gonna regret it on my deathbed, because I've had a really interesting, unique life so far and done interesting things in different fields. But that's one way to think about professional development. One thing I'd like to talk about is just how challenging the transition is when you get out and everyone across the board to a person universally underestimates the significance of that transition. If you've served for one year or 10 years or 20 years, one thing you can do is start a stay in the defense industrial complex. 

And that is a very natural transition or way to transition. I very affirmatively made the decision that I found that broader military industrial complex to be soul sucking. And I really think one of the worst things in life is to be cynical, but I got kind of cynical about it. In many ways, because a lot of these defense contractors, I believe, waste a lot of American like American taxpayer dollars. But so if you want to like, like, do a hard break and do something other than the defense industrial complex, that's really, really hard to do if you served for like 10, 15 years, you know, trying to like take an interview at Google, after having been a Submariner is extremely hard. I joined Palantir, which is an incredibly technical company, composed of primarily, you know, 95%, world class software engineers, and computer scientists and so forth. 

Developers, but I joined in a non technical role. And that learning curve was vertical for me, stepping into their company slack, and just trying to make sense of all the technical concepts that people were talking about behind the scenes was, you know, I consider myself I can assimilate a lot of information very fast. So one thing I think I'm very good at and like sort of distilling that information into plain English. But that was super, super hard to make that transition and emotionally, just like a black and white difference between being in the military, which is like, you're kind of a domesticated animal to like, you have to, like, literally live with the wolves. And it's just hard, man. I really would love to hear your thoughts on this.

Brock Briggs  56:38  

It is extremely difficult. And I vastly underestimated it as well, even spending four years. I still to this day, I got out in 2018. And I think in some ways, I'm still working on it. And going through the podcast process over the last year has certainly accelerated that. I've mentioned in several prior interviews, when I got out, I tried to kind of walk away from service, which was the exact opposite thing of what I should have done. 

In my head, I was like, I don't want to be just this veteran that just is rubbing it in people's faces all the time and was so repulsed by that. I made a very conscious effort to not bring it up and try to just kind of assimilate into society again, which wasn't the right thing to do, like I said. Talking with people and understanding other people's experiences and also embracing the tools and resources available have been extremely helpful. But I don't know the whole what is it? The phrase that the Marines talk about, like once a Marine, always a Marine kind of thing, that was something that I think everybody kind of feels like it will always be a part of you and there may be a lingering thing forever there that's just kind of in the back of your head about. It's always going to be there.

Justin Mikolay  58:15  

Yes, yes. Well said, By the way, I would recommend the Street Journal, Op Ed, that Jim Mattis wrote by himself without any assistance. I'm not sure when he wrote it exactly. But it's called The Meaning of Their Service. And it is an absolutely beautiful, breathtaking, spellbinding 800 words about what service means. It probably will like self contradicts a couple of the things that we've been talking about or at least that I've said because in his view, it's like it's just different. It's like different to serve in that capacity than it is to do the mechanical farmer thing. But anyway, I would just recommend people read that I may be behind a paywall, but I think I have the version. I can compose it somewhere.

Brock Briggs  59:10  

Yeah, perfect. I'd love to get a link to that in the show notes so people can read it and I haven't read it. So I would love to read it. Do you regret getting out? 

Justin Mikolay  59:17  

No, not at all. I thought you were gonna say do you regret serving?

Brock Briggs  59:29  

That would be a bold statement. Well, I haven't had anybody on here yet that I would ask that question. I would need to find somebody very salty. Because I don't think that anybody would say, I don't think anybody.

Justin Mikolay  59:42  

Oh, no, I regret it to some extent. I've actually had a debate. We were at a bar in Annapolis with my best friends and many of them are Submariners, and we're all around the table. And many have moved back to Annapolis. We're all hanging out. And I think We had, you know, the number one grad in our class was there. He was a Marine. And then the rest of us, I think we're submariners. And I asked the question, do you guys regret it going into the academy, for example? And then obviously serving subsequent to that? And every one of them's like, no, no, no, no, I love it, it was great. It was, I would never change a thing. And I was like, I don't know, I think I regret going. 

Part of me does like a significant part. Because of some of the things we've been talking about, already. Like, because, for example, the best way to put this is, I was obsessed with technology. In high school, I loved computers. I went to the science fair, sort of a nerd in that way. And this was 1997, when I graduated, what I ought to have done is moved directly to Silicon Valley and go to Stanford. And I could have started a great company that could have changed the world. And or, you know, done something really interesting at one of the unicorns, because that's who really, I was, and then I changed into a different person at the Academy did political science, because I wanted to round out the engineering, which is, you know, you get a bachelor of science there. 

And then I did more engineering and Nuclear Power School, and so forth, and came out of it. And I have naturally spiraled back into this creative world, I still love, you know, creative technical tools and things like that. So in that way, like part of me does regret not going to where I was naturally inclined to go, but instead decided to, you know, serve the country, which is kind of a weird thing to say, but I definitely don't regret getting out because I am. Like, I just didn't want to surf for the next several years underwater. And I was looking at like, eight of the next 11 years at sea underwater on a submarine, to then, you know, be this the commanding officer, and then, you know, go to be the Commodore on a squadron of submarines, and so forth and so on. I think I could have done very well, if I stayed in. I think I really could, because I love writing. 

And I think that's like a really important part of these leadership positions. And like the people who can communicate super effectively, I think, are elevated, promoted very rapidly. But I didn't meet my wife, Maggie until I was out. Oh, no, I was still in when I met her. But I was making the decision to get out or stay in, like, in parallel with that. And I'm like, you know, I would like to get married to her. And I'll be underwater for eight of the next 11 years. That doesn't sound right. So I'm very happy with where I am in life. Like, I feel like I'm having a great work life balance. And that's like, probably the most important thing. And I'm not sure what I had that if I would have stayed in. That's not to say that it's not perfect for some people to, you know, become senior military leaders. But that's my personal perspective.

Brock Briggs  1:03:21  

I normally ask questions like this towards the end of the conversation, but I think it may be relevant based on how you responded to this question. What is the end game for you? Like, what is? What will you be upset with? If your life like what do you wish that you would have done if you'd like if you died tomorrow? Like what would be that one thing? Because I'm guessing. I'm gonna speculate here before you answer. It has something to do with some sort of accomplishment around building a company you've talked about, you've started Erasmus, the personal content. I forget what the exact phrase that you use for that was, but that and you also talked about why you regret joining the Navy a part of it? Well, I won't fault you for that. But thinking of what you could have achieved, had you not gone in? And so that tells me, that brings me to that question.

Justin Mikolay  1:04:31  

First of all, I want to clarify that like, I think 20 years from now, everything I just said I might like amend or revise because I feel like part of that is like a super selfish way to think of that experience serving in the military. And like, I bet if I get more wise and mature, I'll probably like say that the statements that I made before were just like selfish and immature. But in any event, I have a file on my computer I called the basics. And it's just like putting in plain English just bullet points of like basic things I've realized. And it goes from like, I'll just like bringing it up. Like the things you realize when you move through life. 

And if you're like thinking through life, you're like, learning about, like, the nature of reality is like the first thing, the first layer of things you learn about, like what is life like. It's like both beautiful and sublime and harsh and unforgiving at the same time. So that's like the reality of life, your environment, your conditions that are surrounding you. And like, the whole, most important part is like choosing who to surround yourself with and like actively creating your own environment. And then you learn, you can actually like change your environment. You're not like a victim of that environment, if you will. And then it's like, okay, well, what attitude do you want to adopt for your life? Like, what is your disposition, your like outlook, your approach? 

So once you understand the nature of life, it's like, how do you attack it? So like, what kind of attitude do you want? And I always like people who are curious, inquisitive and aware. So that's like, step layer two. Layer three is like, well, what do you want to learn? Like, what's the knowledge? Like what understanding do you want to develop? And then you learn like, well, the way to succeed in life is thinking ahead and cooperating with others. And then finally, it's like, what is your goal? What is your purpose in life? Like, what's your direction? And to me, it's pretty simple, health and mind, body and spirit, relationships that are positive and loving with family and friends, and a positive contribution to some worthwhile endeavor. 

So like, it's not enough just to be healthy in all of those respects. And to have positive and loving and loving relationships, like humans have an innate drive for novelty and originality and like creating something new. I've always been obsessed with this idea of knowledge management, personal knowledge management. I would love to build something around that before I go. And so that's like, that's how I would describe like, my purpose, my animating purpose is all of those things.

Brock Briggs  1:07:24  

That's a pretty good answer, high level but a good answer nonetheless. I hope that in some time, that you will look back and maybe that that feeling of maybe regret, even if it's a small tinge will go away. And that it will be feeling that sense of serving something that's creating something that's worthwhile, even though that there is an infinity thing inherently creative about serving in the military. I don't think in some respects it is. But it's generally you're filling a position and a body for a larger purpose. But I think that that's I like having like a weird kind of out of body experience right now. Because I never thought that I would be the person to like, sit here and try and convince you of this was the last thing that I thought what I was going to be saying today.

Justin Mikolay  1:08:25  

That's funny. Yeah, I mean, my cross country coach at Navy, he always used to say, spend yourself in a worthy cause I really like that. Like, spend your energy in some pursuit, that is that you can define us as worthy. Like we're really only here on life. Like, it's a miracle that we're here. Like I did a thread the other day on like seven mind blowing things that you can discover about the universe. And I watched this video for like an hour. Over the last couple years, I've watched this video by a professor who describes what he calls the origin of the elements. And it is, like, for some reason, it's captivating to me, that all of the atoms that make you up have been in four stars during the history of the universe. 

And it just so happened that those atoms on their fourth visit around a star which happens to be our Sun, like landed right at the surface of the earth. And like, it's not like we're, we're here now. It's an absolutely mind blowing miracle. And so we ought to be doing something with it. And I actually thought, this is gonna get really heavy for a second. I actually had this thought the other day, like for no reason, but I'm like, this is gonna I'm taking a risk here and sharing this with you very strong risk. My roommate at nuclear power school committed suicide. And I actually thought about him while watching that video and thinking man, what a miracle it was that he was alive. 

And what a shame it was that he took his own life because maybe he didn't understand or internalize sufficiently, like how miraculous his own life was. And I think all of us should like step back and realize we have one opportunity to do something interesting. And to help other people or to, you know, love other people. So, yeah, that was a significant event in my life. But I'm like still processing that. That happened 20 years ago. So yeah, I just wanted to sort of reinforce emphasize the point of how unlikely it is that we're here and how special it is.

Brock Briggs  1:10:56  

Well, first off, I appreciate your vulnerability and sharing that the Navy faces. Probably the biggest challenge right now, in my opinion, is probably worse than it's ever been. But they face a tremendous challenge with suicide right now, and morale as a whole. There's a lot of work to be done on that. The idea of having one life to live and like serving a worthy cause is something that resonates with me really hard. And it's a very tremendous burden at the same time, because I'm not sure that if you feel this way, as well, but sometimes I worry that like, maybe you get to the end of your life, and you won't have like completed enough, like you, if you if you start to think like that. 

Sometimes I feel like I need to suppress that feeling. Because I feel like if I think too much that way, I would literally quit my job, quit everything that I'm doing and commit my life to solving like the world's biggest problems, space, deep sea exploration, nuclear energy, like, why am I not working on that? And I had, like, I scare myself sometimes. And I haven't, I was just talking to my wife about this the other day, and she was just like, What are you talking about? And I was like, well, there's just so many interesting problems and like, why am I not working? Do you ever feel that way?

Justin Mikolay  1:12:28  

That's an absolutely beautiful point. I really liked that idea that you just shared. Because I think the other day, I had a realization as well, that maybe I'm not doing things that are tackling a vision, like, really to execute vision, which would then allow me to learn very fast, because like, there's a great naval Raava Khan, quote, he said something like, success is merely a byproduct of learning the curious you are about it, the more successful you will be. That's a great idea set of ideas. And so maybe I'm not curious enough about a hard problem at the moment. And it's not driving me to do something valuable for society for me, or whenever. So I think like, I need to do some, like internal personal reflection about like, maybe I need a mission, like what mission? Do I want to go on? What problem do I want to solve? That's hard? And interesting. 

I want to say one other thing that's kind of related, kind of not related, but I really appreciate your invitation to have me on this podcast. And you said such like kind words like you, you've are a thoughtful guy, and I've been following you. And I was like, man, like, you know, lately, whatever I tweet doesn't get any engagement. And I don't know if that's the algorithm or me or, or what have you. And like, it's just your note reinforced for me that like if you put yourself out there that might actually impact someone else like, and you have no idea who is reaching. And the more you put yourself out there, the more you discover about yourself, and so there's like a and then the more you discover about yourself, the more you can share with others. And that's a wonderful reinforcing cycle, a feedback loop, a spiral icon. 

So like starting that spiral can be super useful for you and very useful for someone else. So I think more people should crawl out of their shell and shout into the void for as long as it takes to reach somebody and just keep that momentum going. I wish I would have started tweeting in 2009 When I started in my Twitter account, but instead I lurked and did nothing. The first 10 years I was on Twitter. I tweeted 100 times. That's it, and reached exactly no one. And then I started tweeting more regularly and engaging with people directly. And like developing relationships very genuinely with like, I would reach out to Jack book butcher when he had like 4000 followers, and we become very good friends. And like, it's incredible that you can, like, it's the world's most incredible thing that you can reach anyone in the world, if you just put yourself out there enough, that just did not exist for all of written history, until the last couple decades, it's really a remarkable thing. So I don't know why I just said all that. But I've been meaning to share it with you.

Brock Briggs  1:15:42  

I appreciate it from a third party, external observer perspective of you and what you're doing. I would certainly believe without having you having said what you just did, that you were already on that path, and that you are already serving this thing, because you are doing what appears to be interesting to you. And I think that there's an important line that needs to be drawn about searching the world to do something that the world wants, rather than pursuing what it is that you want. Because there's a certain element of authenticity that people can pick up on. And eventually, doing something for other people in a way that isn't authentic isn't one, it's not sustainable. And to it's not valuable, because it's not you. So I think that whatever path that you're on right now, maybe I'm not going to tell you what the most important thing is for you. 

But it certainly appears optically that you are and I certainly have found value. And I literally have been I was listening to you on clubhouse, like that's years ago. Now. So this conversation has been a really long time coming. I know, I had only messaged you a year ago on Twitter about getting on the show. But this is I've been waiting for this moment. And it's interesting, because there, this podcast has been a very great medium to talk to interesting people, people that I have looked up to a guy I just recorded with earlier this week. He also we were just kind of talking about something randomly and for some reason, he brought up Jack Butcher. 

And I was like, oh, like somebody else who knows Jack like that's, that's great. Like, I also have been following Jack and he's like, oh, no, we're friends. And I was like, they like they live near each other and are like friends. And I'm like, what like I am. So in the same way that you talk about putting yourself out there. And speaking, even if seemingly to no one. Whether it be on Twitter, whether it be a podcast, whether it be something, you need to give yourself the opportunity for serendipity or karma or whatever you want to call it to begin and do it long enough where it can come back to you totally agree. 

Justin Mikolay  1:18:28  

There is, I think an important aspect to human happiness, which is like standing for something having some conviction around. Like just having a set of ideas that like fit together into what I would call a personal philosophy. There's an incredibly great book called this I believe, which was I think, I think maybe Edward R Murrow, the radio personality and newscaster in the 50s, I think started this series, where he would tape he would record somebody talking about literally what they believe in two minutes, and just play that on the radio. And these are all very, very thoughtful people who have throughout the course of their lives, like developed a personal philosophy about something, anything could be like fly fishing, or something. But there's, you know, profound things you can say about life in the context of fly fishing. 

And this series was transcribed into a book and it's you can get it on Amazon called this, I believe, and it's really wonderful. And my point is, I think it'd be great if we all developed a personal philosophy. So on our deathbed, like we stand for something, and we've shared it to the world. And I think what I'd like to express further is that you can't develop a worldview without sharing it in conversation with other people like without colliding those ideas against the ideas of other people. Which again, demands that you put yourself out there. And my life has been enriched a lot, since I started just writing things online and getting over my own ego. The thing that stops people from sharing is actually they have a high ego, not that they have a low ego. That's a very counterintuitive concept. 

But like, in my early days, I was like, oh, man, people aren't going to care about what I say. And therefore I'm that I should be like, oh, maybe I should hesitate to, to share it. The fact is, no one cares at all, what your ideas are, in a sense, they're just too worried about their own things and their own sort of how they're positioning themselves in the world. So like, if you counter intuitively, if you have like, a super low ego, and you're like, no one's really going to care about this, but I'm going to share it anyway. That's like, the thing that like is the unlock that helps you get out there. And I really think like doing that, it's just like, I really think it just, although there's billions of people, and it's like hard to reach and resonate with those with those people, there's actually like, super small subsets of those people for whom you can become best friends, or like with whom you could become best friends. 

And it's really cool to like, make contact with those people. And like, David Brock calls it being a lighthouse, you're like, you put your light on, and everyone's like, oh, wow, you're like, attract the people who have the same resonant frequency as you. I think that's a really fun, like, a lot of my very good friends now, I only know, having met from Twitter. And it's just a neat group of people like who are just inspiring. So

Brock Briggs  1:21:52  

I think that that's so true. I was listening to somebody talk the other day, I forget who it was. But they were saying something, they were speaking to people who are worried or nervous about putting themselves out there online. And the point that they were making is that you, first of all, nobody gives a shit, like the deal is you can't put yourself out there too much like it is impossible to do that, because it's what you put out doesn't get seen in the way that you think it does. If you post a tweet, and somebody sees it, there's a good chance that they won't see the next one, you could post something completely different 10 minutes later, they wouldn't see it. And it's because the way the viewing habits are not exactly intuitive to how we don't think about how we consume our own information, but we have a viewpoint about how others perceive it. And that just is wrong, first of all. 

And then the second point is exactly what you just said, by doing that you by putting yourself out there in a way you naturally attract. The people who agree, it's almost dangerous, because you kind of Become Your Own echo chamber of like, everybody who believes that is going to be interested. It's either that or you just attract a bunch of people who want to, like follow you and shit on you, which is usually like politically driven. And you know, it's not a good thing. But generally, you're going to attract the people who also believe that we think about our I consistently think about how divisive Joe Rogan is in some ways, but he's like the most popular person ever. Like he's got I don't have any viewpoint on his opinions on anything. But he's got some very controversial opinions about stuff, and some people hate him, but everybody loves him. So like, why would people think? Or why would you think that that wouldn't be the same for you?

Justin Mikolay  1:23:54  

I agree. To be clear, I am still not excellent at this yet. Meaning I still self censor 90% needlessly self censor 95% of my good ideas. And rather than share them, which is silly, I should be tweeting like 10x More than I than I actually do. Because it would, like I said, I think everyone should have a continuous cycle of learning. And like, I always resented people who just shared random thoughts on Twitter, but really what they're doing is just clearing out their creative process and like, getting it like the flow of information out of their heads, which is helping their own process of growth. 

I want to read to you a statistic that I sort of created by doing the math, you're gonna like this, I think the internet is 1,165,000 groups of 4000 people. I really like that way of thinking about it. So there's like every little niche that you can like possibly think of still has full 4000 people, and there's 165,000 groups of those. And like Twitter's daily active users would fill the largest stadium in the United States. 2000 times. That's like the University of Michigan Stadium is like 110,000 people times 2000 are on Twitter every single day. So it's the scale of opportunity and internet is hard to grasp.

Brock Briggs  1:25:30  

Well, and it's funny how we perceive scale, I think, early on in this podcast game as I am. And for other people also, on the podcast journey, very early days, you're looking at download numbers, and you're like, oh, my God, like, what? Only this like, this is the only amount of people I can reach. But you think about, you know, if you start out on Twitter, or Instagram or whatever, it's getting 100 followers in a month or whatever is probably not unrealistic. Think about talking to 100 people. Yes, exactly. Think about getting up on stage to talk to 100 people, that's 100 People that have said, Yes, I'm interested in what this person has to say, like that. It's we get into our heads about the comparison game, because you see, well, this person has a million followers, they have 100,000 downloads, they have this, whatever.

Justin Mikolay  1:26:23  

Yeah, yeah. Now there's a flip side of this, like, there's a disingenuous way to be sharing your stuff just to try to get growth and like hack the system. And like there's, it's a very, it's self evident to me when there's like certain people that are hacking it to hack it, rather than to, like, challenge themselves intellectually, or learn something or do something worthwhile, like. Now, the reverse. The counterpoint to that is, well, just hack growth until you actually have an audience. And then you can do interesting and valuable things with it. So there's a little chicken and egg problem there. 

Brock Briggs  1:27:09  

Yeah, I think that the people that try to hack growth will get they think about that, they think they're going to do that strategy. And then when it comes time to actually put together something real, they won't be able to, and they're going to tank, when your entire foundation is built on people that want to read Wikipedia articles and a new format. Then, the second you start trying to add interesting overlay, they don't follow you for your thoughts. You're not an original thinker. People don't follow jack on Twitter, because he's going to put out Wikipedia articles about how to, you know, some weird mental framework that you can't even pronounce, he doesn't do that. Like,

Justin Mikolay  1:27:54  

yeah, that's true. I do think, like, there's a lot of stuff out there around frameworks and mental models and ways of thinking about the world. And those are, like, I think, generally speaking, helpful. They can get a little cliche sometimes. Like, one thing that I struggle with a lot is, I feel like, if I've learned something 20 years ago, that like I've read, I saw silo bloom did a tweet on Benjamin Franklin's like virtues. He has like a list of 11 or 13, different like, I think they're called virtues or something like that. 

And I've read that 20 years ago, I like read his whole autobiography when I was a freshman at the Naval Academy, and really enjoyed that and, like, sharing it, to me seems obvious, because probably everyone else has already read it. But like, there's probably a lot of people who haven't read it, and it'd be nice to be valuable interesting. For me to share it. I often again, just like self censor things that I feel like, everybody's probably already seen that, you know, I'm not I'm trying to make but

Brock Briggs  1:29:15  

You have put a lot of thought into how to help individuals narrow down their ideas about what they have. That's valuable. You have the 10x writing course with Maven, which you're still teaching, right?

Justin Mikolay  1:29:32  

No, not actually. I have a full time job now. So I turned that off for a bit. 

Brock Briggs 

Okay

Justin Mikolay  

I bring it back because now Maven is like gone public. And it's kind of cool. And that team is really cool. West cow, Gaga and Biani. Those are great entrepreneurs, really fun. And that platform is super powerful. I would recommend it to anyone. I wasn't good at like closing the students to join the corps. And so I have a full time gig at a small tech company currently in business development. I like plan to continue to be active on Twitter and share thoughts and learnings and stuff like that. So one day, I could see myself teaching that course. 

But to your point, I really love, love, love, love engaging with creative people, it's like the thing that makes me happiest. And helping them express their ideas. A lot of what we've talked about, as part of this conversation, informs that. And I think a lot of people just need to like listen to their own voice of like, what is resonating with them. And it's fun to see when they can, like, build something or I worked with a gentleman who wrote about all the things he's learned teaching organizations to become learning organizations, Andrew Berry and it was a great, great process of helping him put that in writing. But I think you might have had a more concrete question about it.

Brock Briggs  1:31:15  

I was going to ask, what are the steps that you take people through when you were teaching that about how to get them from, hey, these are the things that I'm interested in to packaging them up and doing something with them, whether that be in a business way, or just in a way that we can help others?

Justin Mikolay  1:31:37  

That's a good question. We've actually looked at my workshops. So the bottom line is, we did a bunch of exercises. I co taught this course with James Baird. And what I learned from taking a course called literally how to build, I took a cohort based course on how to build a cohort based course, which is like, they needed to start a two sided marketplace. They needed students, this is Maven, they needed students on one hand, but they needed an instructor's on the other hand, so to start the flywheel going to train instructors on how to do these courses so that they could get students. It's kind of like how Uber needed drivers and riders in any event. So they taught us how to teach these courses. 

And the key thing is to do a series of to draw information out of people's heads through a series of exercises. So you know, we'd send them an interactive Google Doc that would ask them a bunch of questions about their own thoughts, their own creative process and force them to write, you know, several pages on, like, describing their what, what is motivating them creatively, like what do they want to learn about? Or what do they know about specifically that other people don't know about? And how is that different from? How is their point of view different from anyone else? Like what makes them unique, philosophically? And so there was, I think we did this course. I'm very proud of the experience we had the very first time teaching this course, because, in my view, that very first course was like, the best outcomes for people like I think we did five weeks. 

And I was terrified. I'd never taught an online course and never taught a cohort based course. What's funny, because like, I sat across the desk, from the Secretary of Defense, to have them travel the world with them then to like 65 different countries with all of these generals and admirals, and, you know, Cabinet Secretaries and was never nervous. But I was super nervous teaching this course for reasons that I still don't understand. And like, you know, I'd log on to the zoom and do all the prep work, and I was ready. It was such a fun experience. We met like three times a week for, I think 90 minutes with these students. And did you know one big workshop for five straight weeks with like exercises and then a deliverable and they would like have to every Friday, Saturday, Sunday, or something like that, send a work product to the entire cohort, and then all of us would pick it apart, and it was a blast. 

And I think people came out of that experience with like, extra motivation and an under self understanding of what makes them unique. So that was the point of it. And then, of course, they had all the work products that we were building. I can't recall like what we did specifically and concretely intangibly, so I'm gonna fail on that on that score. But happy to follow up maybe in show notes with like, some ideas there.

Brock Briggs  1:34:42  

Yeah, absolutely. I and I think that as I was talking with you before we started recording I think that that is one of my goals with this podcast is inspire people to action to do something about their ideas. Everybody's got them not very Many people do something with them, and finding unique ways to package up the knowledge that we have and make a positive impact on other people in whatever way shape or form that looks like I think is much more important than people realize. I agree.

Justin Mikolay  1:35:21  

I would say, here's a way I would put this. What I like my purpose, I think, what I do on Twitter, which is still not like a hasn't seized, like broad attention, but because I haven't been doing it prolifically enough. But I actually do want to continue to do this more prolifically. Like, I really think it's like my life's mission to inspire people to be creative. And I feel like success is inevitable. With enough earnest effort over time, enough earnest creative work over time, like, in success could mean building a following. Or it could just mean like, publishing something really thoughtful. And, like I just think the world needs more thoughtful information out there. 

And so I like literally just want to inspire people to be creative. I tweeted like something yesterday about Albert Einstein. I think he saw it potentially. A kid, a really young child in his or her own handwriting wrote to Albert Einstein into 2017. And he, of course, died in 1955. But years late, a dear Albert there, dear Mr. Einstein, I hope you never stopped being curious. And I just think that is such a wonderful, like life goal is to just stay curious. And like, the coolest 80 year olds are like the most curious like, that is like a completely life affirming thing is to continue to learn. Like my grandpa, John Maskel. He's passed away now. But he was like, an inveterate his, his constitution was built to learn. He was like, great at the iPad when he was 83. You know, like he loved to learn, love to write, love to communicate and that kept him young, mentally, all the way to the end.

Brock Briggs  1:37:27  

You may have already just answered this question. But if I were to ask, what is something that we could learn from you that we could implement in our lives today? What would that be? 

Justin Mikolay  1:37:35  

I think what I call this Book of Wisdom is really a way for your ideas to instead of decaying or to grow on themselves, to build on themselves. So like, my method,what I like to do is have my ideas build on themselves over time. And the way I have discovered to do that is by just adopting a practice called Building a Book of Wisdom. And this is, again, we talked about it really at the beginning of this conversation, but it's very simple process. I'm actually going to look at the different columns of my notion file, so that I can describe it in, you know, concrete detail if I can find it. Here we go. So for context, I think you might have learned this from a podcast or two that I've done in the past. 

But Jim Mattis is a role model to me. I admire him. He's deeply thoughtful human being. Not perfect, of course, because there's no unalloyed heroes in the world. But he kept these voluminous binders, three ring binders, handwritten with that he called literally he called his Book of Wisdom. And he figured out this practice by hitchhiking to San Francisco when he was living in the central Washington state. And he met one of his role models, Eric Hoffer, who wrote a bunch of books and he's called the philosopher, the Longshoremen philosopher. I think he was like a lobsterman that deeply philosophical and a great writer and published a bunch of books. One of those was called The True Believer. And Eric told Jim Mattis, like write down the things that are resonating with you. That sounds silly because it sounds obvious. 

But he took that to heart and dramatically created these amazing testaments to everything's he's consumed in his life that has resonated with him. And they, by extension, represent his own personal philosophy if you just read through them. I was able to channel who he is as a human being by reading what he was quoting simply what he was excerpting out of the world. And I understood him better from reading the things he was reading than the things he was saying, if that makes sense. So I always say this to people, like if you admire someone's work, read what they are reading. And that's why I thought Erasmus would be such a great idea. And I still believe it could be done effectively and successfully and scale. 

But if you had a mechanism to see what other people are reading, so if the platform required you to share URLs and you were not allowed to tweet unless you shared something that you were tweeting about and the excerpt of it, you could see into other people's brains and into their heads what was going into their head, not what's coming out of their head. So I know there's a long answer, but hopefully, it's interesting. So Mattis created these. I wanted to create a digital version of this. And the simplest possible digital version of this is to have the excerpts of the thought and a heading for that thought, so like, the creative process and then an excerpt about the creative process from something you're reading, like a book about time management or something or Jim Collins interview and creativity and then a tag. 

So tagging, so you can sort and filter across all this stuff, you know, a decade later because it's gonna be a lot of thoughts, the thinker, so the source and then the so what. So the so what is rewriting that excerpt in your own words, creating from it and the only way you can prove to yourself you understand what you're extracting is to write it in your own original language. If you do that and in a pretty if you adopt that as a practical process in your life, then creating is inevitable in my view.

Brock Briggs  1:41:50  

Will you read us the first thing that's in your Book of Wisdom?

Justin Mikolay  1:41:55  

Yeah, sure. I actually, it is on the creative process. It says 20 mile march personal, professional organizational, something you do consistently that imposes a high level of discipline that accumulates to results and this was from Jim Collins. And I'll also say the last one. Takes a while to scroll here. Elbert Hubbard, conformists die. But heretics live forever. Actually, no, it just refreshed. That's not even the last one. Francis Crick, any theory that can account for all the facts is wrong because some of the facts are always wrong. I love that. It talks about 

Brock Briggs  

It’s really good

Justin Mikolay

It's pretty good. Yeah, good one.

Brock Briggs  1:42:42  

I really liked that idea.

Justin Mikolay  1:42:44  

Here's a great one from Frobenius, Eular or Euler rather. So Euler lacked only one thing to make him a perfect genius, he failed to be incomprehensible. I like that.

Brock Briggs  1:42:58  

I'd love the idea of putting down the things that mean something to you. And I would imagine that maybe over time, some things fade out and maybe don't mean as much. But it's still interesting to keep a log and kind of like a running timeline of how your own thought process develops over time.

Justin Mikolay  1:43:17  

But yeah, I like that. I call it building a Book of Wisdom. It's kind of the way I sort of pay homage to Madison Spirinate. 

Brock Briggs  1:43:28  

Absolutely. Justin, this has been a really, really fun conversation. I have very much appreciated your time and sharing wisdom with us today. What can the listeners and myself do to be useful to you?

Justin Mikolay  1:43:42  

Oh, wow, what a great question. Oh, my goodness. I would say, like, engage in a spirit of friendship. I would love to, you know, I call. It's funny there's a thing called generative AI. That's the hot thing. But I've like for decades, I've liked the word generative not in a technological sense, but I love people who are generative in the sense that if you put something out there, yes and type of people or not yes, but or you see the distinction there. Like they build on your ideas and make them stronger than steel against steel, that sort of thing. So there is a class of there are like trolls on Twitter, but there's the opposite of trolls. They're like people who are generative and like, add something interesting to the stuff that you're putting out there. And like, engage, comment. So I like the idea of like developing friendships, intellectual friendships. And, you know, like, saying interesting things that like, you know, help move you forward in life. So be generative, but I would say.

Brock Briggs  1:44:57  

Absolutely. Justin, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it.

Justin Mikolay  1:45:02  

Thanks, Brock. I've loved the conversation and I greatly appreciate the invitation