415: How to Find Happiness. w/ Arthur C. Brooks.

>Join Jocko Underground< https://www.jockounderground.com/subscribe Arthur C. Brooks is the Parker Gilbert Montgomery Professor of the Practice of Public and Nonprofit Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School, and Professor of Management Practice at the Harvard Business School, where he teaches courses on leadership, happiness, and social entrepreneurship. He is also a columnist at The Atlantic, where he writes the popular weekly “How to Build a Life” column. Brooks is the author of 13 books, including the 2023 #1 New York Times bestseller, "Build the Life You Want: The Art and Science of Getting Happier" with co-author Oprah Winfrey and the 2022 #1 New York Times bestseller From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life. He speaks to audiences all around the world about human happiness, and works to raise well-being within private companies, universities, public agencies, and community organizations. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Jocko Willink?

  This is Jocko Podcast number 415 with Echo Charles and me Jocko Willink. Good evening Echo. Good evening.

• 0:07Jocko Willink?

  It was kind of a classic Southern California day and the waves were probably like four to six feet. Not overwhelming, but just a good solid sized ground swell. And it was at our spot.

• 0:24Jocko Willink?

  Glassy sunny out in the afternoon, no wind. And for whatever reason, which I don't know, can't understand, can't comprehend. It wasn't crowded. There was no one out. So just Seth and I, stoner. And we're out there surfing and we're running racetracks. We call it surfing, which means we're just catching wave after wave after wave.

• 0:48Jocko Willink?

  And I'm out there thinking, pretty much it doesn't get any better than this. And I paddled back out from a wave and Seth's sitting there. And out of the blue, out of nowhere, he says,

• 1:02Jocko Willink?

  "How am I ever going to find happiness?"

• 1:05Jocko Willink?

  Which is a weird thing to say, like we're out there, you know, the 38 seconds before this, I was hooting and hollering, going down the line on a, on an awesome wave. And now he's asking me, "How am I ever going to find happiness?" And look, he was going through some stuff at the time, but it still kind of caught me off guard because

• 1:23Jocko Willink?

  we're surfing and like I said, hooting and hollering. And then he's asking me this kind of deep philosophical question. So I said, "What?" And he says, "Happiness. How am I ever going to find happiness?"

• 1:37Jocko Willink?

  And this is coming from a guy who was just a, a really phenomenal human being. Smart, positive, honest, loyal and, and fun too. Like we were always having fun. We're always laughing, always smiling, whether we were surfing or whether we were playing guitar, or whether we were working or whether we were doing jujitsu or whether we were overseas in combat. It was always smiles and it was always good times.

• 2:09Jocko Willink?

  And so now he's out here asking me how he can find happiness.

• 2:17Jocko Willink?

  And I said, bro, what are you talking about? This is it. This is it. Here, now, the sun, the waves, the ups and downs, life. This is it. This is being alive. Then I caught another wave. And he got one and we carried on. And he continued to chase happiness. And found it sometimes, sometimes on the mats, sometimes with a guitar, sometimes in the ocean on a board, sometimes in the sky. Skydiving, the rush, the adrenaline, the speed.

• 3:01Jocko Willink?

  He continued to chase it and he died chasing it. Skydiving out of a hot air balloon on a crisp September morning. I like to think he found it. And I know at a minimum, he gave me some. But I met many people over the years. That have been looking for it, chasing it, chasing happiness, searching, trying to find that thing, that feeling, that emotion. Well, tonight, we have someone here with us that's an expert in happiness. And you probably didn't know there was such a thing, but there is. His name is Arthur C. Brooks.

• 3:46Jocko Willink?

  He's an author, academic, speaker, and a musician. And he's here joining us tonight. Arthur, what did I miss? What, I was trying to figure out how to describe you. Author, you've written books.

• 4:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:01Jocko Willink?

  Academic, you've taught and continued to teach.

• 4:03Speaker 01

  Yep. Full-time professor.

• 4:05Jocko Willink?

  Speaker, could you speak?

• 4:07Speaker 01

  Forty-eight weeks a year.

• 4:08Jocko Willink?

  And musician. You play.

• 4:09Speaker 01

  Used to do that.

• 4:10Jocko Willink?

  But you don't do it anymore.

• 4:11Speaker 01

  I was a French horn player for the first 12 years of my career, from 19 to 31.

• 4:15Jocko Willink?

  Right. And actually, we got connected through Rainn Wilson.

• 4:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right.

• 4:21Jocko Willink?

  Who is a bassoon player. Yeah. Bassoon player.

• 4:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:23Jocko Willink?

  More importantly.

• 4:25Speaker 01

  And he grew up five miles away from me in Seattle.

• 4:27Jocko Willink?

  No kidding?

• 4:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 4:27Jocko Willink?

  Is that how you guys knew each other?

• 4:28Speaker 01

  No, no, no. We met, we connected about that because we were both classical musicians. No doubt, we met each other at, you know, state, all-state band or something when we were in junior high or something.

• 4:38Jocko Willink?

  Nerd central.

• 4:39Speaker 01

  We're about the same age. Yeah, we're both, you know, we both kind of tried to make our way.

• 4:44Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 4:44Speaker 01

  Bumpily along.

• 4:46Jocko Willink?

  Well, let's start at the beginning. So let's get there.

• 4:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:49Jocko Willink?

  How you got here? So you're born up in Washington?

• 4:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, Seattle. I was actually born in Spokane, but grew up in Seattle. My whole family's from the Pacific Northwest.

• 4:57Jocko Willink?

  And what were your parents doing? What did your mom and dad do?

• 4:59Speaker 01

  My mother was an artist. My father was a college professor, a math professor.

• 5:02Jocko Willink?

  What kind of artist was your mom?

• 5:04Speaker 01

  She was a painter.

• 5:05Jocko Willink?

  And was this the kind of painter that was selling paintings down at the farmer's market? Or was she fetching millions of dollars for their paintings at Christie's?

• 5:16Speaker 01

  She was somewhere in between. She was showing at galleries all over the Pacific Northwest, mostly not selling paintings, but occasionally selling paintings. And it's a tough life.

• 5:26Jocko Willink?

  And what year was this?

• 5:27Speaker 01

  This is, well, I was born, I mean, I moved in the late 60s when we moved to our place in Seattle. And I grew up in the 70s. And that's when she was in the heart of her career, 70s and 80s. By the time, by about 1990, she was very ill. By the time she was in her mid 50s, she was already experiencing some real decline, cognitive decline. And so that, it didn't put an end to it, but it wasn't great.

• 5:49Jocko Willink?

  Was she a hippie?

• 5:52Speaker 01

  No. My parents were very religious, but they were pretty countercultural in their own way, too. They had a, the great thing about my parents is that they were entrepreneurs in the business of their own lives. And they both, they grew up together. I mean, they, I mean, to the extent that they met in college when they were 20, got married right out of college, and then built a life together that was kind of of their own design. And that was an incredible example for me. You gotta, you gotta build your life. Your life is your enterprise. You're the startup entrepreneur of the only enterprise that really matters. And that's really under your control, which is you. That's the whole point. And that's really, my dad, he was a college professor. That's what he wanted to do. And my mom was an artist because, I mean, nobody did that from her background. She comes from a working class background.

• 6:36Speaker 01

  Her, you know, nobody in the history of her family had ever gone to college. She went to college, was an amateur musician, found out she was really good at art. I'm gonna make this a career. And so we grew up lower middle class, but my parents were doing their thing. And I really admire that.

• 6:51Jocko Willink?

  And so what were you into? So you were into the French horn, apparently?

• 6:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, from the time I was a little kid, I started on violin at four, piano at five, French horn at eight, and that stuck, so I was good at it.

• 7:02Jocko Willink?

  And wait, you don't play any instruments anymore?

• 7:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I stopped. I stopped in my, in my early 30s. I gave, I mean, I did it for professionally. I mean, I was, I dropped out of college at 19, then took a gap decade from college. You know, traveled all over the world, toured for a couple of years with Charlie Bird, the guitar player. Played chamber music all over the world and then played a bunch of seasons in the Barcelona Symphony in Spain. Then, and then went back and got my bachelor's degree by correspondence and became a, became a scientist.

• 7:34Jocko Willink?

  But you're in sixth grade or something and you start playing French horn?

• 7:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, fourth.

• 7:39Jocko Willink?

  At fourth grade?

• 7:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 7:41Jocko Willink?

  And sports, any sports you're playing?

• 7:45Speaker 01

  Nothing, seriously, nothing. I mean, I wasn't, I was never that good in sports. My kids are great at sports. My kids are unbelie, because my wife was, was actually a ranked track and field athlete when she was, when in, for, for, in Spain, when she was a teenager.

• 7:59Jocko Willink?

  So some genetics came through?

• 8:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, they got good genetics on her side. So my kids are, I mean, my daughter was a Maryland State champion in gymnastics and now plays college rugby.

• 8:08Jocko Willink?

  Oh dang.

• 8:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, my son was a semi-pro cyclist in high school and then went on to the Marine Corps.

• 8:13Jocko Willink?

  Dang.

• 8:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, and my oldest son, who has the, who is the least athletically capable, was actually a, a pretty serious varsity wrestler.

• 8:20Jocko Willink?

  Oh, okay.

• 8:21Speaker 01

  Before he went to college.

• 8:22Jocko Willink?

  Props.

• 8:22Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah, good for him. He's just a hard worker.

• 8:25Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 8:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:25Jocko Willink?

  Did he, did he transition into jujitsu?

• 8:28Speaker 01

  He did not.

• 8:29Jocko Willink?

  Okay, well, we'll work on that.

• 8:30Speaker 01

  He transitioned into studying math at Princeton.

• 8:33Jocko Willink?

  Well, he's gonna need to work the rest of his body as well.

• 8:36Speaker 01

  But that's motto a motto.

• 8:40Jocko Willink?

  So as you're growing up, one of the things I was reading in your book, you have, I think the term you used was a mystical experience at the shrine of Guadalupe.

• 8:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:51Jocko Willink?

  You're 15 years old. Tell me about this. What's going on? You be, you become a Catholic. What, so you said both your parents were very religious?

• 8:58Speaker 01

  They were. They came from, they both came from evangelical backgrounds, evangelical Christian backgrounds. So I have missionaries on both sides of my family. My father was born in the Navajo Nation. In New Mexico where his father ran a school and then later his father was the dean of students at a place called Wheaton College outside Illinois, which is kind of the evangelical Harvard. It's very, it's a very elite place. My mother grew up as a Southern Baptist in, in the Pacific Northwest of all places and, and, and so they were, you know, really religious, but again, they had this spirit of the entrepreneur, the spirit of the pioneer. Go, go build your life, man. Go build your life. And so I, you know, I sort of, you don't want to be sentimental about things like religion. You want to be serious about something like religion. You get to choose once. That's kind of my theory.

• 9:42Speaker 01

  You get to choose your politics, your, choose your politics once. Don't go changing around and converting and being a sentimentalist about this nonsense. Figure out what you think is right and do it.

• 9:52Jocko Willink?

  Does that mean that you're anti someone changing their mind and getting older and their views change over time about their political viewpoint?

• 9:59Speaker 01

  Well, it's normal to change how you interpret the facts, but the whole idea of I go from left to right, to left, to right. I mean, that's just sentimentalism. That just means you're going with feelings. Look, you opened up with a, a monologue about your friend, who is obviously an incredibly meritorious guy and incredible person, but he was chasing the feeling of happiness. Don't chase feelings. If you chase feelings, you're going to convert your religion every 10 minutes. You're going to convert your politics every 10 minutes. You're going to go with your feelings. Your feelings are liars. Your feelings will deceive you again and again and again. The whole point of a happier life is transcending your feelings, is managing your feelings. That's the whole point. I mean, discipline, which is central

• 10:42Speaker 01

  to everything that you talk about. It's the reason that, you know, all the cool dudes in America listening to the Jocko podcast is because discipline matters and you need a coach in discipline. Whether that manifests in MMA or math, what it really is all about is conquering yourself. And to conquer yourself, you have to conquer your feelings. And so that's the point. You get to choose, but don't be bouncing all over the place like a pinball. That's just sentimentalism and that's your feelings managing you and that's a, a sign of a lack of discipline and that's a problem for your happiness, but also for your effectiveness as a person.

• 11:16Jocko Willink?

  Right. But as you. Learn new things and grow and become older and more mature. And you have an open mind, your perspective can certainly shift.

• 11:25Speaker 01

  Absolutely. No, no, all of the, you understand the facts in a different way as you get older. The wisdom that actually comes from the, the emergence of your crystallized intelligence, which is something that tends to happen in your 30s and 40s and 50s. It makes you see things differently. You're also less rigid intellectually than you've been in the past. But that's different than, than basing your ideology and your religion, your politics on how you feel.

• 11:49Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 11:50Speaker 01

  That's a different.

• 11:50Jocko Willink?

  It's also strange. It seems like people are driven to make a statement about what they believe at any certain time.

• 11:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, totally. I mean, it's all virtue signaling and theater. A lot of it is. Which is, you know, once again, it's all just sort of feelings based nonsense. You know, are you going to be the, are you going to build your life on purpose? Are you going to build your life with a, a sense of strategy? With a goal in mind of the person that you want to be? Or are you going to go according to how you feel this morning? How breakfast sits and how well you slept last night, whether your spouse yelled at you this morning, probably so. And, and you know, I mean, we live in the world, right? But we can't let that world, what the world does to us, the atmosphere, the environment, the ecosystem around us, determine actually how we're going to feel and therefore create our path for us. That's a mistake.

• 12:37Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, we don't want our feelings to dictate our behavior.

• 12:40Speaker 01

  No.

• 12:41Jocko Willink?

  For sure.

• 12:41Speaker 01

  On the contrary.

• 12:42Jocko Willink?

  So, so we're going back to this mystical experience.

• 12:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:46Jocko Willink?

  So, so talk me through this. What happens? So, so wait a second. So you go down there, are you going to church all the time with your evangelical parents?

• 12:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, I grew up going to church every week for sure. And praying every day with my, with my family and I'm a believer.

• 12:57Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 12:58Speaker 01

  I mean, I'm a Christian guy.

• 12:59Jocko Willink?

  So you have that going on? And now you get down to Guadalupe. Why are you in Guadalupe?

• 13:02Speaker 01

  I was there for a school trip. I was actually there for a school music trip. Um, when I was a sophomore in high school. And, you know, we're walking through all this tourist nonsense. You know, we go through this boring old dusty church and ugh. So, I'm, you know, I'm 15. I want to talk to the girls. I don't want to be looking at a church. And we were at the shrine in Guadalupe, a famous place for Catholics. I didn't know any Catholics. So it's not like, this wasn't registering for me at all. But I was sitting in the church, it was one afternoon. It was the old basilica. The new one is this kind of late 70s or early 80s modernist architecture. The old one was a classical construction from the 18th century. And the tilma of Juan Diego, that was the poncho of the peasant

• 13:46Speaker 01

  guy Juan Diego in the early 17th century. The Virgin Mary appeared to him on a hill outside of Mexico City. Now, this was an incredible thing, this apparition of the Blessed Virgin Mary, according to Catholic legend, or mythology, or, I believe, truth, that at the time, the Spanish settlers, the colonizers, were having a terrible time getting the native people to follow the Catholic religion. Like, it's a pretty bad advertisement, you know, convert or die. It's like, not very compelling, it turns out. So the Virgin Mary appears to an indigenous guy, Juan Diego. She appears as a mestiza, which is to say, a woman of mixed race. Now, today, you'd be like, oh, cool. But then? Are you kidding me? That's

• 14:28Speaker 01

  like, totally subversive. That's like a complete transgression of everything. But of course, that's what it takes. And her image is imprinted on his garment. This garment made of cactus. And it's called a tilma. He comes back, he shows it, he shows it to the bishop. They display it, and everybody who looks at it converts. So in the next nine years, 7 million indigenous people converted to Roman Catholicism. That's the story. I mean, that's, and then the whole story is that anybody who looks at it is going to be affected. I didn't know this at the time. I didn't know this. I was like a 15-year-old kid. I'm just there to play the French horn and have some good times. I look at it, and I couldn't get it out of

• 15:08Speaker 01

  my head. I just looked at it. Looked at it for maybe 10 minutes, left, went home, went back to my life, couldn't stop thinking about it. It was the weirdest thing. Because, you know, it's not like that was happening to me a lot. It never happened to me before. But I couldn't stop thinking about the image of the Blessed Virgin Mary on the tilma of some dude in 1609, Juan Diego. And she was looking at me. Now, of course, eyes following you, that's a technique. Elvis on velvet, those eyes can follow you too. So let's not get ourselves, right? But I couldn't get it out of my head. And so, I read, and read, read some more, converted. What are you reading?

• 15:49Speaker 01

  I'm reading the catechism of the Catholic Church. I'm reading, you know, the lives of the saints. I'm just reading the Bible. You know, I'm reading and I'm trying to understand what it is that I was seeing and what it actually means to me. And I'm thinking, of course, about the rest of my life. You get one shot, man. And, and I, I knew that maybe this was what I was choosing or what was being chosen for me. And I'm, my, my adult life is laying itself out in front of me. That's what, that's what was going on through my head. You know, I'm 15, so my, my judgment is not perfect at this point. But I didn't know any Catholics, so I had to meet some.

• 16:26Jocko Willink?

  And where did you go to meet Catholics?

• 16:28Speaker 01

  I went to the local Catholic church.

• 16:30Jocko Willink?

  How'd your parents feel about this?

• 16:31Speaker 01

  They thought it was probably better than drugs.

• 16:36Jocko Willink?

  Your rebellion was going deep Catholic?

• 16:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, they were like, eh, well, you know, it's like all the neighborhood kids are smoking pot. So this looks like it's, and, and of course you can do both. You can be Catholic and smoke pot. But, you know, the, but the point is that that was, that was, it was good. And so, and they also had a lot, they had a lot going on. My parents had a lot going on. They were, you know, had troubles of their own. And so they weren't, I was, you know, look, in the seventies and eighties, people, teenagers were completely unsupervised. I mean, this is the era of, you know, getting the back of the station wagon and roll around on this, on the freeway.

• 17:11Jocko Willink?

  Hundred percent.

• 17:11Speaker 01

  Uh huh. I mean, it was freedom, baby. And, you know, my mom would be like, don't come back until dinner. And there was no cell phones. And so we're like, okay, mom doesn't, you know, I could even literally let us into the house until six. So let's go like, let's take a bus someplace. I don't know. My parents had no idea. There was so much freedom, which was great and terrible. I don't know. I don't know.

• 17:32Jocko Willink?

  So did you get like a mentor down at the Catholic church?

• 17:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, the local priest, a British guy, a British Catholic and great guy, wonderful guy. Father Tony Haycock, I remember him still. And he was a sailor and, you know, played guitar, smoked cigarettes. And he, he showed me the ropes. He showed me the ways. And, and he was a real spiritual guy. And he understood exactly what was kind of on my mind. And he said, this is, he helped me lay the scaffolding for what was going to be my Catholic existence. And now, I mean, it's the center of my life. And I go to mass every day.

• 18:08Jocko Willink?

  And how many times a week do you do confession?

• 18:10Speaker 01

  I do confession once a month. I go to mass every day. I go to confession once a month. I'm not that sinful.

• 18:18Jocko Willink?

  So you're 15 years old. Do you have a vision of what you're gonna do with your life besides being this Catholic?

• 18:26Speaker 01

  I'm gonna be a French horn player.

• 18:27Jocko Willink?

  That's it?

• 18:28Speaker 01

  I'm gonna be the world's greatest French horn player.

• 18:29Jocko Willink?

  How much do you have to practice French horn?

• 18:31Speaker 01

  All day, every day.

• 18:32Jocko Willink?

  Six hours a day?

• 18:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, five, six, playing in every ensemble that's available. I was playing pro by the time I was 15, 16. Every gig I could take, had lessons with the guys who played in the Seattle Symphony. I was studying in the summers at Tanglewood, which is the big music festival in western Massachusetts. And so my teachers there were the Boston Symphony guys. And I was playing every competition. I was trying to win every competition. It's like kid's sports at a very high level. So you're semi-pro by the time you're in high school. If you're really good at certain kinds of sports, you're playing every competition, you're doing it all day long, you're completely focused.

• 19:05Jocko Willink?

  And there's some level of natural talent, some level of hard work?

• 19:08Speaker 01

  It's both. Like everything else, it's both. I mean, with hard work, you can be pretty good. With natural talent, you can be pretty good. And together, they can interact to make you great.

• 19:16Jocko Willink?

  Do you get to that point in music, in French horn, or any other instrument where you're looking at Fred and you know Fred, he just has some talent that you don't have and you work as hard as you can and he's gonna win that competition?

• 19:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. And that was me in high school.

• 19:32Jocko Willink?

  Were you Fred or were you?

• 19:33Speaker 01

  I was Fred. And then I got out of my local market, you know, and then I met real Fred. You know, this is what happened. So my son, my oldest son went to Princeton. And he was the valedictorian at his private high school and, you know, the smartest kid. And he got there and like, everybody's the valedictorian. It's 1,300 valedictorians. That's what's going on, where you actually, you have the sort of collective of the people that have this very high level. And I met people who were significantly better than me by the time I left and went pro.

• 20:05Jocko Willink?

  So when you're go pro, what does that, what does that consist of?

• 20:09Speaker 01

  Well, for me, it consisted of getting thrown onto academic probation in my first year of college because I had dropped my required classes and was taking Indonesian dance and, and North Indian classical drumming.

• 20:18Jocko Willink?

  What were you attempting to study?

• 20:20Speaker 01

  I was attempting to study music in Music Conservatory, you know, up the grapevine here in, in Valencia, California, a place called California Institute of the Arts.

• 20:27Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 20:28Speaker 01

  And I was, I just, you know, what I wanted to do was play pro and I didn't want to be studying and I was an unmotivated student. I wasn't ready. And so I was on academic probation. I bailed and I took a job playing chamber music with a, a group out of Maryland. And we toured, you know, five dudes in a van, um, and we, I did that for six years, just driving around.

• 20:46Jocko Willink?

  What, what, what kind of gig do you play?

• 20:48Speaker 01

  Chamber music concerts.

• 20:49Jocko Willink?

  I don't, don't you know what this means?

• 20:51Speaker 01

  Chamber music is small ensemble classical music, small ensemble classical music. So we did a lot of world tours, but it was, but it was very, very poorly paid. I mean, it sounds like I did a world tour. I could have a T-shirt with a world tour on it, but I was making fourteen thousand dollars a year and driving a van with two, you know, a big and oversized Ford van with two gas tanks on it.

• 21:09Jocko Willink?

  This is the same thing that like punk rockers do.

• 21:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:12Jocko Willink?

  Just FYI.

• 21:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 21:13Jocko Willink?

  Like the exact same.

• 21:13Speaker 01

  Uh huh, uh huh. Yeah, no, it's very similar in this way, except that it's classical music, which means it's, it's not cool. It's like, it's all of, it's all of the things about like, you know, unsuccessful rock and roll, but not, also not cool. Yeah, that's great.

• 21:25Jocko Willink?

  Is there, at least if you're a punk rocker, you're hoping that some label sees you and you get signed and you make a hit record. What are you hoping for when you're in a van with a French horn?

• 21:35Speaker 01

  I wanted to get to the point where I could become a soloist, where I could play, um, in front of the solo repertoire, which is most of the great composers write concertos, which are the, the, the solo pieces where the orchestra's playing and the soloist is in front of the orchestra. And I wanted to do that for a living. And that requires you be one of the three or four best in the world at what you do.

• 21:56Jocko Willink?

  Where did you make it?

• 21:59Speaker 01

  Um, there's no ranking, you know, it's not like.

• 22:02Jocko Willink?

  But I mean, if you, if you had to estimate, how, how far were you from? Did you ever get that job?

• 22:07Speaker 01

  No, I mean, I did a lot of solo work. I actually did, you know, I got a lot of solo thing, but not at the top tier. I wasn't playing, I wasn't soloing with the, you know, the Berlin Philharmonic. I wasn't doing stuff like that. I was in the top few hundred in the world. At the top of my career. I left to join a symphony orchestra in Spain.

• 22:22Jocko Willink?

  You leave college?

• 22:23Speaker 01

  No, no, I left college and I played for six years chamber music.

• 22:26Jocko Willink?

  Okay, got it.

• 22:27Speaker 01

  And then when I was twenty.

• 22:28Jocko Willink?

  Making fourteen thousand dollars.

• 22:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was fantastic. And then.

• 22:30Jocko Willink?

  Where are you living at this time?

• 22:31Speaker 01

  I was living, uh, part of the time in Maryland and then I moved to, I was in New York City. Living with a bunch of dudes in an apartment in, um, Washington Heights at a hundred and, hundred and, hundred and seventieth and Riverside Drive is very sexy.

• 22:46Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 22:46Speaker 01

  Yeah. Me and a few dudes and a bunch of cockroaches.

• 22:49Jocko Willink?

  Are these people all musicians?

• 22:51Speaker 01

  All musicians, all musicians, all trying to make it, all trying to make it. You know, like technically I had made it. I mean, I was actually making a living and I was making records and I was getting concerts and I was getting paid, but it was just peripheral to the kind of success that I wanted. I was just outside that all the time. So I took a job in an orchestra when I was twenty four. Moved when I was twenty five because I'd actually met a girl in Barcelona and it was highly motivating to me. I couldn't. She was, you know, European, which means that she didn't, you know, go to church or believe in marriage or any of that, but I've, I've, I sort of figured I could, you know? And she also didn't speak a word of English and, and I, and she lived in Barcelona. She didn't speak a word of Spanish, but I had this intuition.

• 23:33Speaker 01

  Once again, you build your life, right? And you gotta go all in. If you're an entrepreneur in the business of life, you gotta take big risks. I mean, hit it hard, do it, take the risk. If you're gonna fail, you're gonna fail, right? And so I had taken the risk by dropping out of school or, you know, the Catholic thing, but okay, this is the girl. If it's right, it's gonna happen. I'm gonna close the deal and that's it for life. One and done. So I moved to Barcelona.

• 23:55Jocko Willink?

  How do you interact with a girl that you don't speak the same language as?

• 24:00Speaker 01

  Monosyllabic grunts and a lot of hand gestures and, uh.

• 24:03Jocko Willink?

  And where'd you meet her?

• 24:04Speaker 01

  I meet her, I met her, I was on tour in the Burgundy region of France, playing chamber music concerts and she was studying music there.

• 24:10Jocko Willink?

  Okay, so there's a little common language of music.

• 24:13Speaker 01

  Music, that's kinda it. She was also unbelievably beautiful. Um, I mean, just. Incredibly lovely. And so we, you know, we had enough, you know, common Latin rooted words or something that we could kind of figure out that I figured out she wasn't married. That was good. It was a good start. And then there's some alarming things like, yeah, no, I don't believe in God and I don't believe in marriage and, you know, all that kind of stuff.

• 24:37Jocko Willink?

  She's saying these things to you?

• 24:38Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, totally. Yeah. But I'm like, a mere technicality.

• 24:41Jocko Willink?

  No factor.

• 24:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. We can, we can, that, that, and so, and I got back from, it was in Dijon, in Dijon, France. I got back and I, after a week, I, you know, gone out three times or something. I said, Dad, I met the girl I'm gonna marry. He's like, great, let's meet her. I said, well, I got these technical problems. I mean, she's, doesn't live in the United States, she doesn't speak a word of English, and she doesn't believe in marriage. And, but I think I can, I think I can. So I put together a plan. I went and visited her. She came and visited me in New York. I went and visited her in Barcelona a couple of times, as a matter of fact. I didn't tell her, but I took a job in the Barcelona Symphony. And the next summer I moved to Barcelona. And she's like, you moved here?

• 25:22Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 25:23Speaker 01

  In the meantime, she'd been studying a little bit of English. I started studying Spanish. And it took me two years, but I closed the deal. We've been married 32 years and have three grown kids. And our, our communication has marginally improved.

• 25:35Jocko Willink?

  So, so you go to Barcelona and you're at the Symphony in Barcelona?

• 25:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:41Jocko Willink?

  You're courting your soon-to-be, hopefully, wife?

• 25:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:45Jocko Willink?

  You're, are you getting paid over there?

• 25:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm not getting a living over there. Now it's good. But it's very, it's kind of a, it's, it's journeyman work. It's not the path to stardom anymore. I'm off the, you know, I'm a waiter in Hollywood waiting to get discovered. I'm more on the path of, you're gonna, you're, I'm doing like, Dr. Stan commercials now.

• 26:08Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 26:08Speaker 01

  That's what, that's what Symphony Orchestra work is, you know? And so you're like, oh, you're the guy that was in the nose spray commercial. That's what it's like to be in the Symphony Orchestra for a classical musician. You're not gonna jump from that to soloist anymore.

• 26:19Jocko Willink?

  It's game over a little bit?

• 26:21Speaker 01

  It's not game over. It's game paused because I'm in love and I don't know. And, but it was, you know, I tell you, Chaco, I had this experience when I was 22. And I was, I thought I was at the top of my game, but it wasn't. And the way that you, when you're in classical music, the way that you, the notches on the bedpost for your career, as it were, that's a bad image, but, is the concert halls you play. And so I'm really gonna make it when I do my Carnegie Hall debut, right? So I'm 22, I get my Carnegie Hall debut in chamber music, playing with these other four guys. And during concert, there's one thing that I had to do in the second half of the concert. I had to talk about the piece to the audience. That's what you'd always do. You'd come out and tell them a little bit about it so they'd be interested in it.

• 27:04Speaker 01

  I was incredibly nervous as a public speaker. Now it's what I do for a living. But I was so nervous. So I was thinking about it. The concert was going well. And as I get up to talk about it, I'm walking toward the audience and trying to, you know, be appropriately dramatic about what I'm, and I'm not watching my feet. And I fell into the audience in my Carnegie Hall debut. And it was like, this is a signal of something. And I took, you know, the subway back to my apartment that night. I'm like, God is trying to tell me something. And so I kinda knew by the time I went to Barcelona that it wasn't, it wasn't what I thought it was gonna be. You know, it wasn't gonna be the top of the profession.

• 27:50Speaker 01

  It was gonna be okay.

• 27:52Jocko Willink?

  I, um, talk about guitar. I play guitar.

• 27:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:55Jocko Willink?

  Very badly, but.

• 27:56Speaker 01

  Do you enjoy it?

• 27:57Jocko Willink?

  I love it. But there's, um, I always say you can go to any guitar center in America and put up a, put up a sign with those little take my phone number thing that says, hey, I need a guitarist that can play this song, this song, this song, this song, this album. And there'll be a hundred guitarists that will contact you because there's thousands and thousands of really good guitarists out there. But a lot, most of them are waiters or carpenters or whatever. So you gotta have some other thing. You gotta basically have some creative thing that allows you to write, create music, or create something new and special. Is there anything like that when you play French horn or you're in classical music? Or is it like you're constrained by the classical music that's been written by these other people?

• 28:41Jocko Willink?

  And that's what you're gonna play? And how much can you? Very, you know, I always talk about, you know, like, studio musicians that are getting paid to play. Like, you play the note that they told you to play, that's what you play. There's no variation here.

• 28:53Speaker 01

  No variation.

• 28:54Jocko Willink?

  You play what they told you to play.

• 28:55Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 28:55Jocko Willink?

  Jimmy Page was like, you know, the famous, you know, Led Zeppelin, but he was a studio musician. He played what they told him to play, and he got so good that when he was allowed to do what he wanted to, it was awesome. So when you're in a, when you're playing French horn, what are the options here?

• 29:09Speaker 01

  The options are to play what they tell you to play, and where you've got the job, where it happens to be. If you're playing chamber music, you play what's on the score, in the score. If you're in an orchestra, you play, and you play the music in front of you the way the conductor tells you to play it. The only time you have any latitude is if you're a soloist, then you're playing the music you want to play. You're playing the pieces that appeal to you the most, but you're still telling, you're still playing what Mozart told you to play. When I played with Charlie Bird, I played for two years, and I toured with Charlie Bird, the great bossa nova guitar player. He's the one with Stan Getz who brought bossa nova to the United States in the late 50s, early 60s. And near the end of his life, he was, he was kind of a legend. And, and I wound up doing a couple albums with him.

• 29:51Speaker 01

  You remember Tommy Newsom, who was the bandleader with Doc Severnson of the Tonight Show Band, with Johnny Carson?

• 29:57Jocko Willink?

  I probably would recognize him if I saw him.

• 29:58Speaker 01

  He did all the arrangements of the Tonight Show Band. He did a whole album of arrangements for Charlie Bird and some brass players, five brass players, including me. And I toured with him, and I worked a lot with Charlie Bird, and he taught me a lot of improvisation. He taught me a lot about what it means to be a jazz musician. That's a different kettle of fish. That was way freer, that was, that was composition on the fly. It was hard, because I was trained as a classical player. And so I was, I was as square as they come. And so he was, it was kind of an exercise in futility, but it was, it was helpful to my soul. Because I got outside, I got outside the, the parameters of what the, what composers would write at that point.

• 30:39Jocko Willink?

  So when I think of a musician, I think of a creative person.

• 30:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:42Jocko Willink?

  And yet, you're a musician, but you're being constrained by being told what you have to play, what's on the page.

• 30:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right.

• 30:47Jocko Willink?

  That's a weird dichotomy.

• 30:48Speaker 01

  It is a weird dichotomy, except that a lot of classical musicians are really not. They're not compositional artists at all. They're technicians. They're super ultra technicians. And so you'll find that what they love to do is to at the highest technical level to play things correctly. They like to not miss notes and not play out of tune and not get behind or ahead in the rhythm and do everything exactly right. It's more like accounting than it is like composition. You know, it's like, don't screw it up. No mistakes.

• 31:16Jocko Willink?

  So this makes so much sense when you look at classical music and classical musicians and rock and roll people and go all the way down to punk rock where it's like I can play three chords and make a bunch of noise and I'm wild.

• 31:29Speaker 01

  That's right. It's a it's a different it's a different life. It's a different life and they're usually different people.

• 31:34Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 31:35Speaker 01

  They're called musicians and that's where it stops.

• 31:37Jocko Willink?

  And that's about the only similarity.

• 31:39Speaker 01

  Uh huh. Yeah, that's right. And and you know, the truth of the matter is I would have been a happier jazz musician than a classical musician, but I was trained in classical music. I love classical music. I mean, I love it. I'm crazy about it. I listen to it constantly now, all day long.

• 31:50Jocko Willink?

  It's weird, this whole personality thing. So I I think I did four podcasts about this book called The Psychology of Military Incompetence.

• 31:57Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 31:57Jocko Willink?

  And it's an incredible book, but it's written by a guy. First, you know, I was I was like, ah, some academic guy. What does he know? He's some psychologist who's writing a book about the military. And then, of course, I researched the guy and he was in World War II. He's a British guy and he was wounded and he was had experienced a lot of combat.

• 32:14Speaker 01

  Right.

• 32:15Jocko Willink?

  And he wrote this book, but the the premise of the book is that the military attracts people who have like an authoritarian mindset oftentimes, and people with authoritarian mindsets that like everything orderly and they like high, high levels of discipline amongst the troops and they like everyone to be uniformed and everyone to have haircuts and everyone to behave the same way. That's what they want. And they see the military, they look at the military from the outside and they go, that's what I like. That's what I want. So that's what I'm going to go do. And that's what they go do. And they actually do well in that role when there's not combat happening.

• 32:44Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 32:45Jocko Willink?

  Because in combat, people don't listen to you.

• 32:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:48Jocko Willink?

  Mayhem happens. People aren't doing the right things. The enemy has a vote. They do what you don't expect them to do. And so it's total chaos. So people that can't improvise. Don't do well in actual combat. They do well in garrison, what we call garrison, the military. In other words, on the parade field when your son in the Marine Corps was out on the parade field, doing the strict close order drill movements. There are some people that are really good at that, but they're terrible in actual combat because it's mayhem.

• 33:13Speaker 01

  They don't know what to do. They actually, there's no rule to follow.

• 33:15Jocko Willink?

  There's no rules. There's no rules.

• 33:17Speaker 01

  For sure.

• 33:18Jocko Willink?

  So it's interesting that in the music world, you can have a similar thing where you have people that would listen to music and be like, wow, I love the way those notes are so quickly played. And I want to be able to play those notes quickly at the right time, at the right moment, over and over again, very professionally. Cool. Classical musician. Someone else that's saying like, oh, I want to express myself.

• 33:38Speaker 01

  Right.

• 33:38Jocko Willink?

  And that's a different personality.

• 33:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:40Jocko Willink?

  And these traits come out even in music.

• 33:42Speaker 01

  That's exactly right. And actually, I was never happy because of that. In retrospect, I was never happy. And, you know, I was doing it for the wrong reasons. Like, I was pretty good at music and I like music. But I wasn't happy being a classical musician because I was so utterly constrained. And the reason I continued to do it is because I was good and I wanted glory. I mean, the limited glory that comes from being a professional, famous French horn player. You're not going to get, hey, isn't that so and so in the, you're not going to get recognized in the airport.

• 34:09Jocko Willink?

  Your bar for glory was low.

• 34:10Speaker 01

  This is like, I'd be the Jocko Willink of French horn, you know?

• 34:13Jocko Willink?

  Do you get, uh, when you're, when you're a classical musician like that, you're not getting recognized anywhere. Like, no one cares.

• 34:20Speaker 01

  It depends. I mean, it's a

• 34:22Jocko Willink?

  Except for like Yo-Yo Ma or something, right?

• 34:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, yeah.

• 34:25Jocko Willink?

  That's the only, that's the only person I can, by the way.

• 34:27Speaker 01

  Famous opera singer or something, you know, there are a few people out there. I mean, you know Yo-Yo Ma. That's how famous he is, right? I mean, because, you know.

• 34:34Jocko Willink?

  One person I can name.

• 34:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. But you know, there's other people like, you know, Placido Domingo that you've heard of and

• 34:40Jocko Willink?

  But it's all good. It's all good. This isn't my world. This isn't my world, you know? I never, I never try and act like I'm a super cultured person. I'm certainly not.

• 34:48Speaker 01

  You know, today, actually, it's a different world because everything's on the internet. And so, you know, you can get recognized as a, an author. You know, and, and you all do this podcast, seven million people will listen to it or something. And somebody will, in the airport, in the next few weeks will be like, hey, you were on Jocko's show. That's the new world.

• 35:07Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 35:07Speaker 01

  For everybody's a celebrity.

• 35:10Jocko Willink?

  So how long do you, do you stay on this path? You're a musical technician.

• 35:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:15Jocko Willink?

  Playing what they tell you to play. You're starting to feel like maybe this isn't the thing to do.

• 35:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:20Jocko Willink?

  And what's your exit strategy?

• 35:22Speaker 01

  My wife, then I got married and my wife said, you actually have a brain. Why don't you do something with it? You're unhappy. You're unhappy. I demand that you do something. Cause you know that you, I thought that I had chosen, you get to choose once, right? That that was my choice. She said, that was wrong. That was chosen for you. You were in fourth grade. Go choose the thing. What's the thing? What's that? I don't know. I don't know what the thing is. She says, why don't you study? She was, she actually dropped out of high school when she was a sophomore in high school to sing with a rock band. So she was a rock and roll singer. And so.

• 35:55Jocko Willink?

  What was the name of the band?

• 35:56Speaker 01

  Atlanta.

• 35:57Jocko Willink?

  Atlanta.

• 35:58Speaker 01

  But in.

• 35:59Jocko Willink?

  In Espanol, what does that mean?

• 36:00Speaker 01

  Atlanta. It's just the city and it, it's just the city of Georgia, but it sounded cool.

• 36:04Jocko Willink?

  Oh, okay.

• 36:04Speaker 01

  And they were a pretty famous band in the eighties in, in Barcelona. Yeah, they were pretty famous.

• 36:08Jocko Willink?

  We got some, we got some recordings?

• 36:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, you can, you can look on YouTube and you can see my wife at, you know, 18 years old, you know, wearing short skirts and.

• 36:17Jocko Willink?

  And she's got some pipes on her.

• 36:18Speaker 01

  Oh, she could sing. She's a great singer. She's a terrific singer, but she dropped out of high school. So by the end of, by, by the time we were in our late twenties, living in Barcelona, now married.

• 36:27Jocko Willink?

  So you convinced her that marriage was good?

• 36:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, oh yeah, yeah.

• 36:30Jocko Willink?

  What, what did you convince her about God?

• 36:32Speaker 01

  That took a little while longer, but I got that sale too.

• 36:36Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 36:37Speaker 01

  Now she goes to mass every day.

• 36:38Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 36:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, my wife is like, she's, she's completely committed to her Catholic faith. Her parents think, you know, I slipped her a Mickey or something. I was like, what did you do to her?

• 36:48Jocko Willink?

  And her parents weren't Catholic?

• 36:49Speaker 01

  No, nobody went to mass. No, it's Barcelona. Barcelona, everybody thinks it's some big Catholic place. It's a post-Christian country. 3% of people in Barcelona go to mass, like Denmark. Imagine, yeah, yeah, for sure. And so it's completely counter-cultural to be traditionally religious in a place like, in any place in Europe at this play, at this point, actually. So she was studying to finish her high school diploma when we were in our late twenties.

• 37:12Jocko Willink?

  And where are you living now?

• 37:13Speaker 01

  Barcelona.

• 37:14Jocko Willink?

  You're still living in Barcelona?

• 37:15Speaker 01

  Barcelona. And she's like, you gotta, she's like, I think. You might dig this stuff. And so she taught me a little bit of calculus, just for fun. Cause she was studying. And, and I said, this is awesome. This is like doing crossword puzzles. This is, and she said, see, you're smarter than you thought. And I said, huh. So I, I signed up for some correspondence classes and got really into it. And I thought to myself, What year is this? This is 1992. So this is mail, like you're mailing. Oh, yeah. No, there's a fax machine and books in the mail. Totally. This is, this is way pre-internet. Yeah. I was an early adopter. And, uh, and I started studying this stuff and I'm thinking this is the exit strategy. And, and why I started studying economics. I thought this is the most amazing thing.

• 37:58Speaker 01

  Why? Because economics is the, is the social science about human behavior and which markets work and incentives matter. And it was the whole theory of your life as a startup. It was the, the superstructure, the intellectual superstructure of your life as an intellectual startup. And so I studied economics. I got my bachelor's degree by correspondence. And then what was next? I was living, we moved to Florida and I was teaching at a music conservatory just so I could, I could finance my education. You're teaching French horn? Yeah. At a music conservatory in, in Boca Raton, Florida. So you got like bratty kids in there or is? Hey undergraduates, they were okay, but, but it was. It wasn't like nine year olds? But it was, no, no, no, no. It was a, it was a college and it was, but, uh, but it was like, you know,

• 38:42Speaker 01

  Boca, Arthur and Esther Brooks in Boca Raton, Florida. Sounds like we're 90, right? And we're, we're getting like metagap insurance sales calls. And, and I finished my bachelor's degree and I, I go and get a master's degree in economics at the local university, Florida Atlantic University, fine university. And then at that point, I'm like, yeah, I'm all in, man. I'm ready to go. So I quit. And, uh, to start my PhD and we moved to Ithaca, New York and I started at Cornell doing my. Do you have kids yet? No. We did kids actually in the middle of my PhD. How, how are you funding this? Uh, out of my pocket, out of my pocket. So you'd saved up money? Yeah. Teaching French horn? Yep. And I was, I did my entire bachelor's degree by correspondence for $10,000.

• 39:25Speaker 01

  Including the books in today's dollars. That's the 10 K BA. That's the way. And, and people can do it. I mean, it might be 20, but the whole point is this whole idea where we need the government to give everybody free college for $75,000 a year. It's complete insanity and it's ludicrous. And it's not entrepreneurial and it's a mistake.

• 39:43Jocko Willink?

  And, and actually it's not free because you gotta pay that money back, by the way. And it's gonna take you however many years, 20 years. I have friends that are paying off their student loans at my age.

• 39:53Speaker 01

  But a lot of people think that the government should actually pay for it. In which case it's also not free. Because, you know, the three of us are paying for it in taxes. You know, it's nothing's free. And the whole point is do it yourself, build it yourself. Don't take any debt and there's a way to do it. If you think about it entrepreneurially.

• 40:11Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 40:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so I was very, it was great. I had a great experience. I also was not in a classroom. I had no indoctrination. There was no politics. It was just a fax machine and a bunch of books sitting around the dining room table and telling my wife that calculus is awesome.

• 40:26Jocko Willink?

  And so, so from Florida Atlantic University where you get your, where you get your original degree.

• 40:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:32Jocko Willink?

  Then you go, where'd you go next?

• 40:33Speaker 01

  Cornell for a year. And then I finished up the, my PhD at a place called the Rand.

• 40:37Jocko Willink?

  Is it hard to get into Cornell?

• 40:39Speaker 01

  It is when you have a bachelor's degree by correspondence.

• 40:42Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, like what? Okay, so let me rephrase my question. How did you get into Cornell when you had your bachelor's degree through correspondence?

• 40:48Speaker 01

  Perhaps an admissions officer was not paying adequate attention. I mean, when I first, you know, I, I, the, the, this main professor that I had by correspondence, I'd never met him, but I was doing really well in these classes. This guy's like, you're the best student I've ever had by correspondence. He said, you should go get your PhD. I'm like, wow, this thing, this thing's like, he said, where, where should I do it? And he writes back to me, this is all like letters. And he says, you should go to Harvard. I'm like, really? He says, yeah, I think you could do it. So I, I, you know, with full confidence, because this guy told me.

• 41:21Jocko Willink?

  Of course.

• 41:21Speaker 01

  That I could get into Harvard. Of course, he doesn't know. I, I, I applied to Harvard. I got rejected in a week. I mean, with complete prejudice. It turns out their core demo is not a 30-year-old French horn player, college dropout studying by correspondence. That's not what Harvard. in the market.

• 41:36Jocko Willink?

  They weren't looking for you.

• 41:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I, you know, I applied.

• 41:38Jocko Willink?

  So how'd you get into Cornell?

• 41:39Speaker 01

  I don't know. I mean, I think they were cool. They were. They were like, this is an interesting guy. It's a French horn player. He built it by himself. Take a shot. And I did one year of the of this sort of core curriculum in the, you know, the economics. And then I transferred to a place called the Rand Graduate School, which is part of the Rand Corporation up in Santa Monica. And I worked at the think tank. I was doing theater level combat modeling for the US Air Force. Behind in a SCIF during the day, I was doing large scale math modeling. And then, you know, in the afternoons, I was actually taking my coursework and working on my PhD.

• 42:13Jocko Willink?

  So they hired you for that job?

• 42:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:16Jocko Willink?

  And then you got the schooling as like a benefit, a benefit?

• 42:19Speaker 01

  Well, the benefit, I came in as a graduate fellow, a graduate fellow to the PhD program. And the way that I paid for it was by working as an analyst for the Rand Corporation. Doing this, you know, big simulate battle simulation stuff, using a string of Unix machines and, and, you know, 250,000 lines of FORTRAN and all that stuff. And I was learning. I was learning like crazy. I was learning my math modeling. I was learning and I, you know, I was doing military operations, research analysis.

• 42:46Jocko Willink?

  Enjoying working for the DOD?

• 42:47Speaker 01

  It was great. It was great. I had a Pentagon pass while I was a graduate student. I was going back and forth. I was I had an action officer in the US Air Force, a lieutenant colonel. I was doing, you know, blue team, red team simulation. It was very interesting. I learned a ton. I learned a ton about the military.

• 43:02Jocko Willink?

  What kind of war gaming were you doing?

• 43:04Speaker 01

  It was looking at future analysis of potential conflicts and then and then figuring out, you know, putting together force deployment schedules and putting them into large scale simulations of what could happen under these circumstances. I developed with a bunch of other guys a technique called exploratory analysis. Where instead of saying, I'm going to put in all these specific parameters into a model, including the weather over some country. And then say, here's how the battles are going to go. And here's how the war is going to turn out. We said, here's all the range of parameters that can happen. And so here's the range of outcomes. And in doing that, you can actually look at these highly complex situations. What I learned during that time is something that my father told me about. My father was a mathematician and he always said, There's two kinds of problems in life.

• 43:47Speaker 01

  There's complicated problems and there's complex problems. It sounds like I'm splitting hairs, but I'm not. Complicated problems are problems that are very hard to figure out. But with enough brains and computational horsepower, you can and you can solve it with perfect accuracy over and over again, like designing a jet engine or putting together the internet or building a toaster. Complex problems are the most interesting problems in life. Those are things where you you totally know what winning means, but you can't actually simulate it. You can only live it. And so no matter how much computational horsepower, you can't predict if the Steelers are going to win this weekend. You can't do it. You have to watch the game. That's why we love it. Love is a complex problem. War is a complex problem.

• 44:32Speaker 01

  That's why we actually don't know. And so the problem is that simulations that the DOD runs are a complicated simulation of a complex problem, and that's why they're always wrong. That's why they said, you know, at the beginning of Desert Storm, they said, we're going to have 60,000 American dead. Because they were actually parameterizing a complicated model using Vietnam era data for a complex problem that turned out entirely differently. And so what we developed a technique for was to actually to deal with complex problems by looking at ranges of possible parameters and looking at the outcomes across spaces. It could be best case, worst case, most likely case. We could put we could put probabilities across an entire range of parameters, across an entire range of outcomes.

• 45:17Speaker 01

  We got all these all these academic awards for these techniques that we're using, you know, running future scenarios in war.

• 45:24Jocko Willink?

  And you guys did this in the 90s?

• 45:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was 1996, '07, '08, when I was finishing my PhD.

• 45:31Jocko Willink?

  And apparently no one's wanted to use any of these models for the last 20 something years of wars that we've had.

• 45:37Speaker 01

  There's a lot of the good stuff going on in the Pentagon still, for sure. And they've actually gotten better at this exploratory analysis since we developed it, the Rand Corporation in the mid 90s. But yeah, it's still too many people want the one and done solution. This is what's actually going to happen. You can't do that in a complex and adaptive environment like war or love or your cat or a football game or by the way, anything that we actually care about. But we keep trying to do it. I'll give you an example. People want love and they're lonely. And so we developed something like social media, which is a complicated solution to a complex problem. And all it does is makes us lonelier. And that's why.

• 46:15Jocko Willink?

  How does that work? Complicated solution to a complex problem of love.

• 46:19Speaker 01

  Exactly right.

• 46:20Jocko Willink?

  So I want to interact with other people.

• 46:22Speaker 01

  Right.

• 46:22Jocko Willink?

  I'm lonely. I want to interact with other people. I pick up my phone. I go to Instagram or Twitter or Facebook or Snapchat or anything else?

• 46:32Speaker 01

  What all, yeah.

• 46:33Jocko Willink?

  Oh, so I go to one of them.

• 46:34Speaker 01

  TikTok.

• 46:35Jocko Willink?

  And or TikTok and they start, they start showing me other human beings.

• 46:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's an algorithm that actually, that is a simulation of the human experience. It sets you up with people that to have an interact with virtually. It gives you nothing of what you actually want. There's a, uh, there's a, a neuropeptide in the brain called oxytocin that you actually need, which only comes from eye contact and touch. The reason we're doing the podcast right now in person is because we're looking at each other. That creates oxytocin. It creates a human bond, a human link. We have a much better conversation as a result of that. You don't get it when the complicated algorithm simulates the social experience, which is the complex issue that we're trying to solve. This is what we do again and again and again. The reason, you know, people are like, oh, is AI going to make us happy or unhappy? It's like, it's a wrong question.

• 47:20Speaker 01

  AI is a complicated solution to the complex problems of life. It, it's not going to help us in the things that we really want. There's a reason I studied love and happiness because I'm in the complex problems business.

• 47:33Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, as the, the, the war thing, I've been talking about, I've talked about this all the time. There are so many variables in war.

• 47:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:40Jocko Willink?

  As you now know, because you actually tried to input all of them as many as you could possibly.

• 47:44Speaker 01

  Simulate war. You did war. I simulated war. It's like, shows how much cooler you are than me.

• 47:48Jocko Willink?

  But as soon as someone starts giving me like relatively solid prediction of what's going to happen in some wartime scenario, it immediately tells me that I need to watch out for this person because they have no idea what they're talking about.

• 48:00Speaker 01

  They don't know the difference between complicated and complex.

• 48:02Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 48:02Speaker 01

  To use the mathematical terminology, but basically it's very simple to figure out. When somebody basically says, let me explain to you what being in love is all about. Don't trust them.

• 48:14Speaker 01

  Because it's the same thing as trying to explain exactly what's gonna happen in war. They don't know, or somebody who basically says, "Look, if the Patriots play the Steelers this weekend, here's exactly what's gonna happen." You're an idiot. You're an idiot. That's actually not how it works. Everybody kind of knows that's not how it's gonna work. But, but again, like, the world is... The world has just given us all these complicated toasters, when all we want is complex cats. Because cats are warm and they give us companionship. It's like, "I'm lonely, I want a cat." "Here's a toaster." "I already have a toaster. It's a better toaster." "Okay, my house is full of frickin' toasters. I want some cats."

• 48:50Jocko Willink?

  At least one cat.

• 48:51Speaker 01

  Something. I need some warmth. Anyway, you get my point.

• 48:55Jocko Willink?

  Alright, so you get done with this job at, at the Air Force, and you get your PhD in public policy from Rand Graduate School. What's after that?

• 49:05Speaker 01

  I took a job. I taught for 10 years as a professor of, of public administration, public policy, economics. And I taught at Georgia State University in Atlanta for three years, then I taught at Syracuse for seven years. Syracuse is usually thought to be the best public policy, public administration school in the country. And so that was a real goal, was to get to... Once again, I was just trying to be, you know, the French horn soloist, but just in another field. You know, chasing obscure glory, again.

• 49:36Speaker 01

  And so, so I went to Syracuse and, you know, did 10 years in academia and got my, you know, tenure promotion and all the stuff you do in academia. Became a full professor of public policy, published a million articles that nobody's ever read.

• 49:48Jocko Willink?

  Did you like that?

• 49:49Speaker 01

  It was pretty good, I gotta say. I mean, it was intellectually incredibly rich, because I learned a lot. I learned what I... I learned my... I got my math down, I got my statistics down. I became a much better social scientist than I'd been in the past. And I got super interested in human behavior. And I talked about beauty, how people absorb beauty and why. I talked about philanthropy. I did tons of research on why people give, why people are impelled to give, and the taproot of those two things is happiness. And so by the end of that 10 years, I was studying love and happiness. That's really where my heart was. And I published my first book on happiness in 2008. And then I quit.

• 50:27Jocko Willink?

  Then you quit. You quit that. I remember my, my oldest daughter was going to college, and it was like...

• 50:37Jocko Willink?

  She was all caught up in the scene, in the college scene of where are you getting your internship? What tech company are you in workforce, all these things going on? And you know, she was stressed out about get a job there, all this stuff. And you know, what program are you getting enrolled in and all these things going on? And it was stressing her out. And you know, I said, hey, this is just like a weird ecosystem of the world that you're in. And no one outside that ecosystem cares anything about this.

• 51:02Speaker 01

  Completely right.

• 51:03Jocko Willink?

  You know, and when, you know, as I'm sitting here thinking of you as a French horn player, trying to get to the top of the ecosystem of French horn players. And like, I can't even name another French horn player in the world besides you. You're the only French.

• 51:17Speaker 01

  And I don't even play anymore.

• 51:17Jocko Willink?

  You don't play anymore. So this is, I can't tell you anything about, you know, when you were in there getting these papers published. And that's what the, and look, this is the same thing with I'm in, I'm into jujitsu. There's a whole ecosystem in jujitsu. There's people fighting to get to the top of the SEAL teams, the same way. There's an ecosystem, the SEAL teams, like people are trying to try to get to the top. And I did this job and I did that job and I got this award. So if you are feeling in life like you're competing and maybe you're not going to make it to the top of this thing that you're in, you should actually take a step outside that ecosystem and look around. Cause there's a decent chance that no one really cares about that ecosystem except for you.

• 51:50Speaker 01

  But this is evolutionary psychology. This is what I, this is what I talk about all day long. This is what I teach my students. The evolution is that we're hierarchical creatures and we're, we, we understand ourselves on the basis of social comparison. Now, social comparison will ruin your life. If you let it run out of control and you're comparing yourself to billionaires on, that you see on social media will be unto you. But you understand who you are by looking around at your own ecosystem. And you want to rise in the social hierarchy and there's nothing wrong with that. Now, it doesn't mean you've got to tear somebody else down, but what does that impel you to do? It impels you to be excellent. It impels you to live with discipline and, and that's a really good thing. I love hierarchies and I love competition because they lead to human excellence as long as we don't let them ruin our lives.

• 52:35Jocko Willink?

  And then going, but going back to what you were talking about earlier, if you are looking around in this ecosystem and I am training to, to play my French horn and I'm doing everything I can, and I actually. Feel like I'm not, A, I'm not gonna get to the top and B, I'm not really that gratified in playing the French horn anymore.

• 52:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I stopped. That's why I stopped.

• 52:54Jocko Willink?

  And that's a piece of advice for people.

• 52:56Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 52:57Jocko Willink?

  Look, we enjoy competition. I love competition, clearly. I love competition. I definitely, we and our egos, we look around, we're like, well, I think I can do better than that. I'm gonna try that too. But at a certain point, if you don't actually enjoy this endeavor that you're in, and you're looking around comparing yourself to a bunch of people that are fighting in this ecosystem to be the top of it, and you don't care about it and you're still in there fighting, you're to me, that seems like a really negative outcome in the long term.

• 53:24Speaker 01

  It does. It does. And that's the reason that self-awareness is so critically important. You know, that's why I talk to a lot of young men. I mean, who reach out to me and because of the work that I do and happiness and, you know, the work that I do, the social science work that I do. They'll reach out and say, I'm feeling aimless. I'm feeling lost. And, you know, young men kinda need four things. To get happier. They need hard work. They need ambition. They need a sense of the divine and a spiritual path, and they need a great woman or partner. That's what they need. Those are the four things you need. Those are your ambitions. Those are the things to actually get. So, you know, it's like, in work, bust your pick.

• 54:06Speaker 01

  Have a sense of greatness and a lust for glory. Good. But also have a sense that there's a divine purpose, a spiritual path in your life, and then have a great partner who's gonna kick your butt when you're doing the wrong thing. This is the secret to success. This is the secret to get, I mean, there's more to it. I'm not gonna reduce my entire career to these four pillars. And, you know, and everybody's different and what the divine means is different to different people and there's, and I'm not just, you know, talking about men, women too. But the truth of the matter is, it's not, it isn't rocket science. You need to actually be striving and struggling and sacrificing and making progress, but you need parameters around it so you don't ruin your life that way. That's why you need to love the divine. You need to love another person.

• 54:50Speaker 01

  And have the other person love you so much that they're looking out for your well-being and they wanna take care of you.

• 54:56Jocko Willink?

  Sounds like some people need to train jiu-jitsu.

• 55:01Jocko Willink?

  And one thing that Makes me a little bit, well, let me just ask you a question about that. So you say people gotta have ambition. I just want to make it clear that that doesn't mean that you feel like you need to be at the top of the hierarchy of some system or some ecosystem or some industry. Because you don't.

• 55:22Speaker 01

  No, that's not it. Ambition is about progress. That's what I see. We're wired for progress. Now, we think this is called the arrival fallacy in psychology. The arrival fallacy is once I get to my goal, then I'm gonna just, it's gonna be the best thing ever, but it's not true. Like I deal a lot, I'm a nutrition and fitness nerd and I deal with a lot of people who have all these goals. And they think when I hit my, my fitness goals or, or when I hit my weight goals, people were trying to lose a lot of weight, then it's gonna be really great. The worst thing, the reason there's a 95% failure rate in dieting is because of the arrival fallacy and the fact that it's unbelievably frustrating and disappointing. So every day,

• 55:59Speaker 01

  your reward for the scale going down is the scale going down itself and you're willing, it's much better than the cost of actually not eating these things that you find wonderful. Your goal, I mean, your, your reward for hitting your weight goal is you, congratulations, you never get to eat what you like ever again for the rest of your life. Which is why about 25% of people who are on a big diet wind up with an eating disorder because they go beyond their dieting goals because they still want to get rewards. The point is progress. Humans are wired for progress. Have a goal because you have to have an intention. You have to have intentionality. It's like a sailing trip. You gotta know where you're going, even though you're gonna be blown off course. Because if you don't, you're gonna go in circles like a cruise ship, which is depressing.

• 56:39Speaker 01

  Don't have your life be a cruise ship. Have your life be a navigation toward a particular point and then make progress every day. The ambition is for the progress. And when we start to understand our lives like this, we get much happier and we can actually have a, a life full of goals that make sense for us. And we don't get so tied to them that we wind up wiping ourselves out.

• 56:59Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and I guess what stemmed me to ask that question is so I have consulting company, I work with all kinds of companies and I would get someone and I've had now dozens and scores of people ask me this question over the years, you know, I've got Fred. And you know, Fred's a really good guy. He's smart. He does a good job, but he, you know, he gets here at nine, he leaves at 4:59, you know, five o'clock, the bell rings and he's out of here.

• 57:18Speaker 01

  Right.

• 57:19Jocko Willink?

  I, I talked to him about, you know, moving up in the, you know, becoming a manager and he, he doesn't want to do it. He dislikes where he's at. And you know, what should I do to, should I, people have had people say to me like, should I fire him?

• 57:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:31Jocko Willink?

  And you know, in a SEAL platoon, there's guys, it's a bell curve, just like anywhere else. And it's the same thing with any of these, any company, any business, any team in the world. There's some people at the top of the bell curve. They're hyper ambitious. They wanna step up. They wanna run things. They wanna do things. And there's a bunch of people in the middle of the curve that they wanna do a good job.

• 57:50Speaker 01

  Right.

• 57:50Jocko Willink?

  They're gonna get it done. They're gonna show up on time. They're gonna do the required work. And then they're gonna leave because they have a family and whatever.

• 57:56Speaker 01

  They wanna have a really good marriage.

• 57:58Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And, and that's cool. And of course, you got some people at the bottom that really don't care. They wanna be there. We have to address them.

• 58:04Speaker 01

  Right.

• 58:04Jocko Willink?

  But I just wanna make it clear that ambition isn't tied to your job. It, you can be a person that worked for thirty-two years as a plumber technician at a company, at a big plumbing company that grew a lot, and you kept working as a plumber. And meanwhile, you raised five kids, or you did all these other things in your life, and you just didn't want to do something beyond that inside of being an awesome plumber.

• 58:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:31Jocko Willink?

  So, does that make sense?

• 58:33Speaker 01

  It's perfect, because here's the deal. Remember, your life is a startup. Your life is the enterprise. Your life isn't just your work. Your life is your faith. It's your family. It's your friendships. For some people, it's their hobbies. It's their avocations. And, and so if you just pay attention, if you think of your life as an enterprise, and you're only paying attention to the work part of the enterprise, that's like actually having a company and only paying attention to one division of the company. It's gonna be asymmetric. You're gonna starve the other parts. You're probably gonna be unsuccessful, as a matter of fact. There are a lot of different ways for you to run that enterprise. You know, I do a lot of work on the trajectory of people's careers. And there's basically four career trajectories for, for different kinds of people.

• 59:13Speaker 01

  There is, you know, the, the linear path, which is what we sort of think at the Harvard Business School is, our, our students have to have. That's where you're once, the only time you ever move from a job is because of the next step up. It's the next best thing. You're more power, more money, more, you know, prestige. That's why you change. But that's the only reason you change. And most likely, every four to seven years, you're gonna go. From one company to another, but that's only one path. That's for the, you know, the super hard chargers that actually want to get ahead in that, you know, that with the seals, the same thing. Then there are people who are called experts. This is a neck, a different career trajectory. It's a little bit better every year, not a lot, a little bit better. But I want to be able to support my life with this.

• 59:57Speaker 01

  I wanna, I wanna work to live, not live to work. And so, you know, my dad had an expert career trajectory. He probably got a 2% wage raise every year. He, you know, he worked moderate hours. He didn't think he was going to be at the best university in the world. He wasn't trying to be, he wasn't chasing glory the same way that I've neurotically done it over the course of my life. And the result was just chugging along little by little by little by little. There's two others. There's the Was your dad happy? Uh, he could have been a lot happier, but he had a lot of health problems. My mother had a lot of health problems. There's a lot of exogenous circumstances that made it a little bit harder. Um, he should have been happier. I mean, he did a lot of the right things to be happier, but intervening circumstances.

• 1:00:40Speaker 01

  The transitory career trajectory is one where it, your, your, your job entirely is to support a particular lifestyle. So if you're like a surfer dude and that's really what you had, you want to, then you're going to be a barista sometimes, you're going to drive a truck sometimes. You're gonna, you're gonna work to support your lifestyle. You fall in love with somebody in Maine, you move to Maine, you know, whatever it is. That's what you're, everybody listening to us, young dudes, your mother's worried about that. And then the last is the spiral career trajectory that a lot of people have and they don't know it. And that's where your life is a bunch of mini careers. You're no doubt a spiral, Jocko. I mean, you like did this and, and then you go on to, and every part builds on everything else. And who knows, you know, 10 years from now, you might actually walk away from high income

• 1:01:24Speaker 01

  because there's something you really want to do when you want to run your foundation or whatever it happens to be. But every, your, your, your career is a series of mini careers of your design with a kind of a mad scientist plan behind it somehow. And that's what a lot of people really have and they need to be able to develop. And they can't do that unless they're, unless they're free to do that. And that means they, that doesn't mean they need to be free, that the government needs to give them some sort of benefit to do it. It means they need to be mentally free to be able to understand that they are entrepreneurs and they're not constrained by somebody else's understanding of their own career. So spiral is good. Spiral's awesome. I'm a super spiral and a lot of my students are too. So I teach MBAs. My, I have 180 MBAs in my, in my happiness science class at, at HBS.

• 1:02:09Speaker 01

  And they are, um, a lot of, they're all, they all come in thinking that they're linears, but they're, a lot of them are uncomfortable with it and they don't know why. And then I teach them about the spiral career path. They're like, ah, I finally feel seen. First time in my life, you know, my parents are like, a lot of them have, you know, come from immigrant families where their parents sacrificed a lot to be in the United States and, and they feel like, you know, if I'm not doing something that's not traditionally unbelievably successful, that I'm screwing up and what's wrong with me and I'm, am I betraying my abilities? And no, no, no, no, you just need to understand yourself in a different way. You've got a lot of things to do. So, you know, for me, I've taken my career down totally to the studs every 10 years. And I'm on my fourth career right now and, and, and we can do that.

• 1:02:54Speaker 01

  I mean, by the way, God bless America that we're in a, we're in a system that allows us to do that too.

• 1:02:58Jocko Willink?

  Yes, indeed. So you, you, this is when you're writing books, right? You co-authored a bunch of books, The Performing Arts in a New Era, Gifts of the Muse, Gifts of Time and Money.

• 1:03:09Speaker 01

  Those things weren't big bestsellers?

• 1:03:14Jocko Willink?

  Portrait of the Visual Arts. So these, you know, this is, this is what I, what I was researching.

• 1:03:19Speaker 01

  Jocko's got my whole oeuvre.

• 1:03:23Jocko Willink?

  2006 book comes out, uh, Who Really Cares? The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism.

• 1:03:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:31Jocko Willink?

  Did George W. Bush coin that phrase? Compassionate conservative?

• 1:03:36Speaker 01

  He's, yeah. I mean, he's, he made it most famous. I don't know if he actually coined it, but he, during his, uh, his, uh, first election campaign, he talked about being a compassionate conservative. And a lot of people were offended by that because they said, we shouldn't have to put a qualifier around what it means to be a conservative. But the truth was that it was a good thing for him to do and he's an unbelievably good man, compassionate man. I loved W. I mean, it's just, it's like, nobody's perfect, but he's an incredibly good person. He did things that people don't even know about. I mean, his, his initiative- of called PEPFAR, which was trying to eradicate AIDS in Africa, was unlike anything that any American president has done before. I mean, it was, and it was from a Republican entirely on the basis of what was right.

• 1:04:21Speaker 01

  What was right to set other people free, you know, in a faraway place. It just because, and what he basically, the whole premise was, these are our brothers and sisters. We have equal dignity, zero exceptions. And they're being held back by this thing and we can, we can actually do something about it. So that's what the whole idea of his compassionate conservatism was. And, you know, I wrote a book in 2006 and it changed my career.

• 1:04:46Jocko Willink?

  How did it change your career?

• 1:04:47Speaker 01

  I was beavering away in academic obscurity, writing those books that you first listed.

• 1:04:53Jocko Willink?

  The Performing Arts in a New Era.

• 1:04:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I had 40, 50 readers, you know, and it was.

• 1:04:59Speaker 01

  And then I wrote this book, which is pretty boring and, you know, pretty academic too. It had a mathematical appendix to it, but it basically said, all the best data on who gives to charity. Like who's giving to charity? Who thinks they're giving to charity? How's that different? You know, it's like, what do I think are the most, you know, generous people? They're the people who talk a good game about generosity. Who's actually giving is the whole point. These are people who are quietly giving, you know, quietly supporting people in need, doing it out of a sense of, of, you know, what it means to be a good person in the world. It's not always the people that you actually think and not the people who are actually yelling in the public square. And, you know, I, I, I wrote the book, I thought it would sell, you know, a few thousand copies. My publisher thought it would sell a few thousand copies.

• 1:05:41Speaker 01

  And George W. Bush read it when he was president and called me to the White House to talk about it. And suddenly I was in the papers.

• 1:05:49Jocko Willink?

  What year was, that was 2006 that all this happened?

• 1:05:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I was just a professor at Syracuse and, and my life was changing. I was, you know, hearing from strangers and, you know, I was doing these talk radio shows and, and going on television for the first time and having to get my hair cut to figure out, you know, what is, you know, like, oh my God. And, you know, I had to get coaching to be able to give an answer on broadcast television that's less than, you know, 40 minutes long and.

• 1:06:15Jocko Willink?

  You have seven seconds.

• 1:06:16Speaker 01

  No, I know. And it was just, it was, and my, my, my career never was the same after that.

• 1:06:22Jocko Willink?

  So then did you do another book deal for Gross National Happiness? That was your next book?

• 1:06:25Speaker 01

  That was my next book was about the social science of happiness. Who's happy and who isn't? It was just an observational study about who are the happy people and who are the unhappy people? And what are they, what's different about their lives? And that one was completely, a complete flop.

• 1:06:39Speaker 01

  And so, everybody thought, since that last, that first book, you know, it was like a big deal. So, the next one's gonna be a bigger deal. It's a great topic. And it was the seventh book about happiness that came out that year. Oh, it was brutal. You know, it sold hundreds of copies.

• 1:06:53Jocko Willink?

  But I hope you got a good advance based on your, on your 2006 book.

• 1:06:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, but you know, you know how it is with advances. You know, you get an advance and then you don't earn it out and you feel embarrassed. And, you know, the point is-

• 1:07:04Jocko Willink?

  I don't know that.

• 1:07:07Jocko Willink?

  But I'm sure that's got us there.

• 1:07:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, it stung. And I actually, I published the same year a textbook on philanthropy and nonprofit management. And then, you know, I was thinking to myself, you know, I can do this and, you know, write another book every two, three years for the rest of my career. But it was time to take it down to the studs again, so I quit.

• 1:07:24Jocko Willink?

  And so, the next move was to the American Enterprise Institute.

• 1:07:27Speaker 01

  Think tank in Washington DC dedicated to better public policy for politicians. It was a 1938 company, formed during the Great Depression, when economic growth was minus 4%, 25% unemployment. And the whole idea was, we need actual scholars, actual intellectuals, who are not saying that the secret to solving the Great Depression is socialism. The secret to the Great Depression is spreading capitalism all the way to the margins. The solution is setting poor people free, not shackling everybody. That was the, the, the whole idea of the American Enterprise Institute. And it had been around for years and years and years and they, I became their president in 2000, end of 2008.

• 1:08:11Jocko Willink?

  So, what do you, what do you do and what do they do? How do they, how do they make change happen?

• 1:08:16Speaker 01

  So, it's a, a think tank is basically a university without students that does studies that are then delivered to policymakers so that they can write legislation and, and create policy that's more aligned with good ideas and that will actually help people more. And, you know, sometimes it's effective and sometimes it isn't. The surge in Iraq was actually a product of the American Enterprise Institute. That idea with, with Jack Keane and Fred Kagan, who authored the surge in Iraq policy, which was, which was an inflecting policy. I mean, it was, it was a big risk, but it was, you know, based on, on highest intellectual ideals from both military and civilian experts who said, this is something that could, could actually work. Welfare reform in the late 1990s, where the whole idea is-

• 1:09:01Jocko Willink?

  How well did they do executing the surge, from your perspective? So you were right in the midst of that.

• 1:09:06Speaker 01

  No, that was before I was there. It was before I was there. And I would have liked to have, you know, taken credit for being the president of the place when it was actually doing the surge in Iraq. But it was, you know, like everything else, it's a limited success. You know, a great idea, but the execution is everything. Execution of strategies is everything. I would turn that back on you. How do you think that the surge turned out?

• 1:09:25Jocko Willink?

  I think that the surge went well and it definitely had a huge, it shifted. It shifted the war to a situation where we were going to have a positive impact. And, you know, I just, you know, there's been obviously a lot of talk going around right now about Israel, Gaza, West Bank, the whole nine yards. And, you know, I've talked about the fact that we were fighting a counter insurgency.

• 1:09:49Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:09:49Jocko Willink?

  Once we recognized we were fighting a counter insurgency and we needed to fight it like a counter insurgency. We needed more troops on the ground. That's when the surge happened. And actually, I was in the Battle of Ramadi in 2006 and they definitely utilized the success of the Battle of Ramadi. To say, hey, look, what happens when we utilize this, this strategy?

• 1:10:10Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:10:10Jocko Willink?

  Right? And they utilize that and that's one of the things that was able to convince people that the surge would be a good idea. So brought in more troops, did what, you know, I thought this was a great phrase from General Petraeus, who said, we can't do drive by and counter insurgency. Meaning you have to get out of your vehicles. You have to go into those towns. You have to go into those neighborhoods. You have to go meet with the local populace. You have to show them that you're going to be there. You have to be willing to sacrifice. You have to show them that you're going to stay. And if you do all those things, they're eventually going to go, hold these, this is, this is a better way of life is ahead of us.

• 1:10:40Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:10:40Jocko Willink?

  And these coalition forces are willing to make sacrifices. They're protecting us and it definitely worked. It worked in the Battle of Ramadi. We saw a radical transformation take place there, but it also worked in Tal Afar. It worked in Al Qa'im. It worked in Baghdad. It worked in Sadr City. So it worked.

• 1:11:00Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:11:01Jocko Willink?

  Unfortunately, in 2010, 2011, we decided, oh, we.

• 1:11:07Jocko Willink?

  We're done and we'll leave now. And that was not a good move because there was still embers of

• 1:11:14Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:11:14Jocko Willink?

  extreme Islam there. And when we left, they rose up and we got ISIS.

• 1:11:20Speaker 01

  It's persistence. And so, you know, it's interesting because the what the the surge was, was a combination really of three things. Strength, persistence and brains. And that's what we need. But by the way, this is what we need in our lives. This is what we need. You got to bring strength to bear. Get into the gym. Develop your body. Get your sleep. Eat right. Be strong. Persistence. Work your butt off. Be ambitious and brains. Learn, learn, learn, learn and use what you learn. If you put those three things together, you become unstoppable. And when you, when you scale that to something like strategy in the surge in Iraq, that's what it took. Because if you did, you only had two legs of that three legged stool, it wouldn't have worked.

• 1:12:05Speaker 01

  You just sent in a bunch of guys. Sorry. If you'd only done the persistence where we have the same kind of pitiful force and we say, we're going to stay here for a really long time and, you know, try to embed in the culture, it wouldn't be good enough. And if we actually didn't have a, a concept of what the coin, the counter insurgency strategy was, it wouldn't have worked in the first place because we wouldn't have an intellectual superstructure of what we're trying to do. So this is the idea. All of us should have a surge in Iraq mentality for our lives. Everybody, in particular, when we're in crisis. When the people are listening to us, if you're not in crisis now, you will be. And something's going to happen. Model your strategy for getting out of the crisis and getting your life on track on the counter insurgency strategy. Brains, learning, using ideas.

• 1:12:51Speaker 01

  Persistence, hard work, commitment and ambition and force. And that force actually comes from being strong and doing what it keeps, it takes to be strong. And some of that is just, you know, getting into the gym and eating right. Some of that's stopping drinking and stopping the stupid nonsense in your life.

• 1:13:07Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, the, the, so I had a conversation with one of my bosses wherein we'd just arrived in Ramadi in 2006 and we started doing counter insurgency operations, which was not what SEAL teams had been doing for the previous three years in Iraq. And a few weeks goes by and I get a call from one of my bosses and he says, you know, you guys are doing these, these missions, but those aren't typical SEAL missions. We, and we, we haven't seen any change in enemy attacks. So you need to go back to what we've been doing. And luckily I had just read from cover to cover, the FM3 Tac 24, which had been released as a draft, which was the counter insurgency manual. And I, I said, hey, sir, with all due respect,

• 1:13:51Jocko Willink?

  the average counter insurgency takes seven years.

• 1:13:54Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:13:54Jocko Willink?

  It's been three weeks. Can I get some more time to see some impact here? And he was like, yeah. But then again, if you look at that, the surge started in 2008 and all of a sudden in 2010, we're leaving. Like we didn't give it the time to, to, we didn't, the persistence part, we failed on the persistence part and then we pulled everyone out. Now we don't have the strength, we don't have the persistence and, and the thing falls apart. And it's, it's terrible too, because unfortunately we in America, our strategic planning is going to be no more than four years. It's going to be no more than the next election cycle. And then it's like, hey, we, we said we're going to get out of that war, whatever it was. We said we're going to bring all the troops home. And listen, there's no one that's more pro bringing troops home and not, let's not be in war than me.

• 1:14:37Jocko Willink?

  I don't want to be in war and I want all the troops to be back here in America. That's what, that's what I want. But I also realize that you've got to have peace and stability in the world. And if you're going to make these moves, you've got to be willing to stick through and, and continue until you actually achieve your goals.

• 1:14:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. There's a, the reason that we have people in around the world, which is because the world's unbelievably dangerous and America's a great country. Okay. So there's two ways to not have people all over the place and not doing things. Either we decide we're not a great country or suddenly the world becomes like, you know, rainbows and, and unicorns and dolphins, you know, flying through the air. Wouldn't that be great? And whale songs. Well, guess what? You know, that's a, it's a tough choice, isn't it? I'll take what we've got and I'll get, and I'll take, I'll take stronger. And you know, it's not. I didn't do it, you did it. But, you know, I have a son in the Marine Corps. And I've, I listen to my son too. And he believes these things.

• 1:15:36Speaker 01

  He believes that we have an opportunity, we have a privilege of actually standing up for our, our values. Why? Because people have dignity around the world. And people live under circumstances that are not as fortunate as what we have. And we're not going to be everybody's policeman, or we're not going to solve every problem. But man, there is a lot that we can do. And there's a lot of strength that we can bring and a lot of goodness that we can bring on the basis of this strength.

• 1:15:59Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, no doubt about it. And so that's what you're doing while you're at the American Enterprise Institute. You're, you're helping move policy forward. What, do you present it to politicians? This is what we came up with?

• 1:16:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, a whole lot of congressional testimony, a whole lot of publication of books, op-eds in the major papers, you know, getting it in front of the public eye, getting information just in front of politicians as they're thinking through what they're trying to do. Getting it in front of business leaders, other academics, in front of journalists. These are the policy ideas that are going to be helpful, that are going to make the world better, you know, on the basis of the free enterprise system, of American strength, of, you know, health and education policies that are good for ordinary Americans, of bringing opportunities to periphery of society, trying to wipe out poverty on the basis of opportunity. And so that people can lift themselves up. And what a wonderful world that would be. And that's the, the basic ideology behind these, these highly technical ideas that we

• 1:16:55Speaker 01

  would bring.

• 1:16:56Jocko Willink?

  And as you're, as you're kind of moving towards the end of that.

• 1:17:00Speaker 01

  Which is mostly fundraising, by the way. I mean, it was, it's a nonprofit organization. I had to raise $50 million a year. I was at a peer philanthropy. We took no government money from any government, any place in the world, not a dime. Because, you know, we shouldn't force any taxpayers to, to, to pay for what we think is right. It's our opinions. That's the democratic thing to do. That's sadly unusual, that ideology. But we really believe in that sort of freedom. And so our donors were really stepping up. And we're, you know, this, this $50 million a year, we were putting it toward, so I was supporting 310 people doing this research. Yeah, it's great.

• 1:17:38Jocko Willink?

  You released a film.

• 1:17:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:17:40Jocko Willink?

  Which is called The Pursuit.

• 1:17:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:17:41Jocko Willink?

  Which, I watched this film. And fundamentally, it's like socialism versus capitalism. That's kind of the fundamental, underlying message of the film. You, you, you go to different places in the world, but you, you look at India, pre, you know, post-British rule, all the way up through 1991. And, all the way up through 1991, it's very socialist. There's no mobility. It's sort of, and I remember these days, it's sort of the poster child of, you know, poverty and slums and the caste systems in place. Like, it's a, not, not a nice place to be, in India. And then in 1991, they, they kind of changed the way they were doing things.

• 1:18:23Speaker 01

  And started to liberalize.

• 1:18:24Jocko Willink?

  They started to liberalize. Um, and really had a, a huge impact.

• 1:18:29Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And now, it's not perfect, and there's still tons of poverty. But you started to see the emergence of a middle class and an entrepreneurial class, creating jobs and opportunity and growth in India, India. And so now people in the United States who've never been there, they think, ah, it's really, it's just all slums, it's all poverty. You go there, it's the most exciting place. India is cooking, man. I mean, it's like, it's completely chaotic. It's hilariously chaotic. But it's a wonderful, spiritual, fun, interesting, hardworking place. Everybody's got to go to India. It's one of the, my favorite places to go. I go every single year.

• 1:19:02Jocko Willink?

  It's interesting, we have a lot of, because it's English speaking. The English is the, the, what, the official language?

• 1:19:07Speaker 01

  That's one of the two official languages of India, yeah.

• 1:19:09Jocko Willink?

  We have a lot of listeners from India.

• 1:19:10Speaker 01

  India's great, I love India. And I go, you know, I, I have spiritual teachers in India, and I meet with entrepreneurs in India. It's great. And, and by the way, the sense of humor and the food and the sports, it's all good. It's all good.

• 1:19:22Jocko Willink?

  I wrote down a quote from the movie, "Set people free. Let people decide what they are going to do with their talent and time and treasure. They will spontaneously organize in a way that creates the most wealth."

• 1:19:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, and that doesn't mean every single person is making every single good decision. But when you aggregate up to a society of people who have freedom of movement and opportunity and a competition of ideas, good things happen. And it's not even a theory anymore. I mean, we know this because if you look at the world, you know, what's happened over the world where 80% of starvation level poverty has been wiped out in my lifetime since the early 1970s because of the liberalization of economies and ideas and setting people free, setting women free, setting everybody free to, you know, live their dreams and build their lives entrepreneurially. It's extraordinary. The world's completely different than it used to be, and the reason is because of freedom.

• 1:20:18Jocko Willink?

  You also spent some time in that movie up in the Scandinavian region.

• 1:20:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:20:23Jocko Willink?

  And you talk about the Scandinavian dream of, well, you know, I think we should, everywhere should be like Scandinavia, which has these high happiness quotients and really great social welfare programs. What did you uncover there?

• 1:20:36Speaker 01

  Well, I went to Denmark and, you know, Denmark wasn't chosen, you know, at random. I didn't throw a dart at a map. My grandparents came from Denmark and, but Denmark always comes down in these United Nations comparisons and these big world comparisons of happiness as the happiest country. But those comparisons are all bogus because the way that they set it up, it's like saying, who's got the best music? Well, I don't know. I'm going to go to 100 countries and ask 1,000 people in each country how much they like their local music and then I'm going to say who's got the best music on the basis of that. It's all nonsense. You don't compare countries this way. I mean, they don't even answer the happiness questions the same way in these countries. And so Denmark, for example, when you ask them about how happy they are, they answer

• 1:21:18Speaker 01

  that with respect to this concept of contentment, how contented they are. Now, that probably gives you Jocko Willink the heebie-jeebies because it's like contentment, kill me.

• 1:21:27Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:27Speaker 01

  I don't want contentment. I want adventure, baby. I want, I want an act. And that's the reason that the Willinks came. My guess is they weren't landed gentry, you know? They came to America as total riffraff, right? And started a farm or something, or worked in a factory. Now, look at you. That's the story. That's the story of America. And that's the reason that people sort into different places and do different things. So God bless the Danes, but I'm glad I'm not one. Because contentment makes my skin crawl. I don't want it. And they do. Good for them. That's the whole point. So I mean, I sort of debunked that, but I do ask them, you know, what's the deal? And I learned a lot in, you know, that part. You know, they have a system that's, that's, that's very market oriented.

• 1:22:10Speaker 01

  It's much easier to dismiss a public servant in Denmark than it is in California. I mean, you actually have a tax system that's more egalitarian. It's very high marginal taxes, but it's quite egalitarian. You know, we have approximately 50% of the American population that has no federal tax liability in the United States. And you find that, you know, the top one, five and 10% pay the vast majority of the taxes in the United States. I'm not saying that's right or wrong. It's just a fact. It's a highly progressive tax system, more so in the United States than most of Europe in that way, as measured in that way. And then you ask them, you know, what it's all about? Do you want to live here or not? And they all say, yeah, it's good. It's good. You know, they have a word called hygge in Danish, H-Y-G-G-E, which is hard to translate.

• 1:22:54Speaker 01

  It's like the, the cozy conviviality and the comfort of friends on a comfortable couch or something like that. It's like, I don't want it. I don't want it. But they want it and they want, they have a highly homogeneous population of people who have, are culturally very similar. There's only five million of them. There's 25 million pigs and five million Danes. So it's like, it's a small country and they're, and they're, they're quite the same. And they have this particular culture. And the ones who wanted adventure, they came to America and were my grandparents. And they, they made the Willinks and the Brooks's, et cetera, et cetera. And so I found that, that there's a, they have a good answer for them is the way that this turns out, but it's not a good answer for us.

• 1:23:38Speaker 01

  For the highly variegated population, 330 million people living in chaos and all wanting different stuff and mostly immigrant stock. That's a beautiful thing, but it's a different thing to be sure.

• 1:23:53Jocko Willink?

  It comes through in the movie. Uh, another quote, or another area you went to is, uh, Inez in eastern Kentucky.

• 1:24:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:24:01Jocko Willink?

  You know, these, these are coal miners and just seeing what that, what they're thinking.

• 1:24:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:24:06Jocko Willink?

  Totally different. You got a quote in there from FDR, "Welfare is a subtle destroyer of the human spirit."

• 1:24:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, crazy.

• 1:24:14Jocko Willink?

  That's from FDR.

• 1:24:15Speaker 01

  Totally, totally. No, no, because it, you know, the whole idea that you gotta earn your success if you're gonna have dignity in life. You know, you find that it's not just welfare, it's also winning the lottery or getting a huge inheritance. And grandpa is a destroyer of the spirit. You know, it's not just that we're dumping on people who are getting a check from the state. No, it's, it's not earning your ways is terrible for people. It's terrible for happiness. It's terrible for motivation. It's terrible for earning your success and feeling like you're a person of dignity and worth is what it comes down to. So we need a system where people can earn the success, you know, so they can get an education. They can make progress every day.

• 1:24:53Jocko Willink?

  And, and this is not just your opinion. This is...

• 1:24:56Speaker 01

  I'm a social scientist, you know, you know, and I come from a, by the way, I come from a very politically progressive family. So these, these are not the ideas, these are not mother's milk ideas. On the contrary, my parents thought I was dropped on the, my head a lot because I like capitalism.

• 1:25:11Jocko Willink?

  I was a little surprised when you get to the Dalai Lama.

• 1:25:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, I love the Dalai Lama.

• 1:25:15Jocko Willink?

  Four secrets for a happy life. Enlightenment, spirituality, worldly satisfaction, and wealth.

• 1:25:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's, that's, these are the four secrets, the secrets of happiness from Tibetan Buddhism, which is, you know, most people don't understand, but it's not just wealth, wealth, wealth as in money. It's the whole idea of the accumulation of the resources that are a marker of the success and value you're creating with your life is what it comes down to, which is the depth of your relationships, the, the, the, the, the relationship you have with God. It's all part of the wealth. It's the stock of love and happiness in your life is really the wealth that you'll accumulate. If you're trying to, you're trying to just count this in money, you're making a big mistake.

• 1:25:54Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, the, the three things they point out is build something. Earn a living.

• 1:25:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:26:00Jocko Willink?

  Serve other people.

• 1:26:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:26:01Jocko Willink?

  Those were the things that will give you wealth.

• 1:26:02Speaker 01

  Build something, build something with your life, earn your success, earn a living, meaning that you are standing on your own two feet as a human being and then, and then serve other people. I mean, it's sort of makes intuitive sense, but we sure are doing a good job for getting it. Look, the Dalai Lama, it's like, everybody thinks the Dalai Lama is some sort of, you know, robed Marxist or something. No, he's, he's somebody who's taught me so much about, I love him and I've worked with him for the last 11 years. It's such a beautiful experience for me to learn, I've, you know, I've learned meditation technique with the, with his monks at the, at the, his monastery in Dharamsala in the Himalayan foothills, where I visit him every year. And so he's taught me a great deal about what it means for me to be a Christian man.

• 1:26:45Speaker 01

  And for me to have better technique in my meditation practice, but he's also taught me a lot about, you know, basic common sense and ethics.

• 1:26:51Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I, I definitely would agree that that's what people envision the Dalai Lama as, but the Dhamma Lama, Dalai Lama, another quote you have from in, in the movie is individuals change the world.

• 1:27:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:27:03Jocko Willink?

  I was like, hold on.

• 1:27:05Speaker 01

  I know, man.

• 1:27:05Jocko Willink?

  This is what we've been talking about.

• 1:27:07Speaker 01

  I know.

• 1:27:07Jocko Willink?

  And we got the Dalai Lama saying that.

• 1:27:09Speaker 01

  Says that, it's from his lips. Yeah, for sure.

• 1:27:12Jocko Willink?

  You know, this is a, the, the fourth law of combat leadership that I teach and learned and now teach is decentralized command. And it's so obvious on the battlefield that if one person tries to control everything, everything is going to be lost. And the minute you empower people to step up, make decisions, make things happen, you are going to win.

• 1:27:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:27:34Jocko Willink?

  And this just happens in business and it, it obviously it's from a, from a governmental perspective as well. The more control that's imposed on people, the worse off they're going to be.

• 1:27:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is a, believe it or not, this is a big Catholic idea. It's called subsidiarity. It's a fancy word for a very, a very sensible idea. Subsidiarities always push power down to its lowest possible level. Now, sometimes it's not at the level of the individual. I mean, sometimes you gotta say, everybody go do this. But if it's a, a decision that can be made at the state, don't make it at the federal level. If it can be made at the city, don't make it at the state level. If it can be made by a community, don't make it at the city level. If it can be made by a family. Leave the community out of it, can be made by the individual, then they have to work together in the family to get it done. And if you're in a company of Marines, if you're in your

• 1:28:28Speaker 01

  platoon level, sometimes has to do something with platoon command. But sometimes you're in a situation where power needs to be pushed down to the individual where it actually becomes most effective. And that's how we should live our lives, quite frankly. That's how we should be thinking about our society. And that's when things work best, is when we're empowered. That subsidiary, that ancient Catholic, that medieval Catholic philosophical notion, sure sounds good to me today.

• 1:28:52Jocko Willink?

  You can watch that movie on YouTube, by the way. Once again, it's called The Pursuit, and it's free on YouTube. Next book, 2019, Love Your Enemies. Interesting.

• 1:29:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:29:08Jocko Willink?

  I really like this idea.

• 1:29:09Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:29:10Jocko Willink?

  Talk to me about what's the premise behind Love Your Enemies?

• 1:29:11Speaker 01

  Well, Love Your Enemies is the most transgressive idea in the history of civilization. And so this comes as, you know, anybody who's listening who's either aware of or practicing the Christian faith, this comes from the Gospel of St. Matthew, the fifth chapter, the 44th verse, where Jesus is giving the Sermon on the Mount. And he's given all these crazy ideas. I mean, just like people are going, their minds are being blown by this rabbi. And he says, "Today, you know, you have heard that you should love your friends and hate your enemies. But today I give you a new teaching. Love your enemies. Pray for those who persecute you." And people start just walking off, right? Like, no way, man. That is the most transgressive teaching ever. Why? Because it's the most pragmatic teaching

• 1:29:56Speaker 01

  that is the source of true power. Jesus didn't say, "Like your enemies." That's sentimentality. Look, you like somebody because you like somebody. I like you, Jocko, because you're awesome, right? But even if I didn't... The job is for me to love you. And even if we're at war and you're on the other side, I'm still called to love you. What does that mean? That's, I mean, it's like blowing my mind. It's just blowing my mind. But the whole point is that's total power. Because you can only redeem your enemy when you love your enemy. And your, and to love is to will the good of the other, to make a commitment to do so, notwithstanding your feelings. You want to discipline your feelings? You want to discipline the will? Love people, notwithstanding your feelings. That's huge. And that's what Jesus was teaching.

• 1:30:39Speaker 01

  Jesus was teaching the most muscular kind of philosophy ever in that. And so the question is, are we going to do it or not? You want power? Love your enemies. It doesn't mean you got to have them over for dinner. It doesn't mean you have to give them your money. What it means is you have to, you will their good as them and act as such, even if they don't like it. Which is, by the way, how you raise teenagers. You and I have raised teenagers. And, you know, they're, they're acting like your enemies sometimes. And you're loving them by do, by willing their good, even when they don't want it.

• 1:31:14Jocko Willink?

  One of my friends is a devout Catholic. And one of the biggest challenges he has that he states is like, what was really hard for me was praying for Osama bin Laden.

• 1:31:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, totally, totally. And again, you know, you know, you're military. My son is a, you know, he's a combat Marine. And we've talked about this. He's a Catholic. He's a church-going Catholic. All my kids go to mass. And they're all church-going Catholics. I said, Carlos, what does it mean? What does it mean for you to love your enemies? And, you know, he says, well, in the Marines, we're not taught to, we're sometimes taught to kill our enemies. I say, are those two ideas incompatible? Can you will their good? And, and the truth is, I don't know how to sort out that. That's a, that's a Gordian knot. That's a really, really tough one. But I can tell you in my ordinary life, I have to do hard things all the time that people aren't going to life like. But I will not hate my enemies. I, I refuse to hate my enemies.

• 1:32:09Speaker 01

  I will will their good, notwithstanding the fact that I have to do things that are, that they don't think are necessarily in their interest. Like, I've been a boss. I've had to fire people. I've had to say goodbye. to people who wanted their jobs. But if they're not a fit for the company, I'm not willing their good by doing this. I'm willing their convenience. You know, I'm willing the easiest possible path for them. And I have to tell you because you've holy mackerel, I can't even imagine the decisions you've had to make. That went against the will of a lot of people, but it was for the good. Is that fair?

• 1:32:40Jocko Willink?

  That is fair. That is fair.

• 1:32:47Jocko Willink?

  You're at this point, this is 2019, this book comes out now. You're also teaching it. This is when you start teaching at Harvard.

• 1:32:53Speaker 01

  This is right before I left the American Neurology Institute and I had, I had said, I had announced. A year and a half in advance that I was going to retire as CEO.

• 1:33:03Speaker 01

  You got, when you're running something, when you're the boss. You have two choices about leaving. You can leave before you're ready, or you can leave on somebody else's terms. There's only two choices. And I don't like either, so I'm going to leave before I'm ready. Because I sure as heck don't want to leave on somebody else's terms. If you hang around long enough, you're going to leave on somebody else's terms. So I resigned when I was 55.

• 1:33:25Jocko Willink?

  And this was taking it down to the studs again, basically, taking your career.

• 1:33:28Speaker 01

  Down the studs.

• 1:33:29Jocko Willink?

  Down to the studs. We're going to start again.

• 1:33:31Speaker 01

  Yep. Yep.

• 1:33:32Jocko Willink?

  What was your, what was your plan?

• 1:33:35Speaker 01

  My plan was I was, I mean, I thought I prayed about it a lot. Because, because this is a philosophical concept called discernment. Whenever you have a lot of people listening to us right now, they've got a. Do I ask that girl to marry me? Do I go back to school? Do I change jobs? They're, they're discerning something. Discernment takes work. Don't wait for inspiration to flash because it won't. You'll just hang around and, and then you'll be forced to make a decision. It might not be the right one. Do the work. And to do the work, you start basically making lists of pros and cons and you have to be thinking about something specifically, usually 15 minutes a day. I recommend. I'll put people on a discernment program.

• 1:34:17Speaker 01

  Think about the decision you're making, but really think deeply about it for 15 minutes a day for 30 days and you will have. Incredible enlightenment about this that you've never had before because you'll have, you won't have this. Decision necessarily, but you'll be you'll have structured the decision in your mind. That's also a spiritual concept in in in Buddhism, it's called in Theravada Buddhism, it's called panna, which is a word from Pali that means, you know, the enlightenment. Where you go through the process of trying to make a decision by thinking or praying about it. In the the ancient Greeks called it sunnissus. The discernment of spirits in the Ignatian Catholic tradition is a structured way to make these decisions. And I did, you know, for six months, I spent time on my knees every day, man, every day, every in

• 1:35:00Speaker 01

  front of the Blessed Sacrament, you know, I would pray in front of the presence of the Lord. Lord, and here's what I prayed. What do you want? You know, guide my path, just guide my path. And I felt that the will was.

• 1:35:15Speaker 01

  It the will was that I was supposed to go someplace to say things that people didn't expect and where I wasn't necessarily invited. So. I left my job at the think tank, which is very comfortable and very secure. And I went, I went back to academia, but in a different roles, a professor of practice, where the world is the classroom in a public and electoral role. I went to Harvard University between the Harvard Kennedy School, which is the government school and the business school, 50 50. And and I became a columnist at the Atlantic, talking about the science of happiness and how we can use it, how we can spread the ideas, how we can all be happiness teachers and build a life based on love and happiness, spreading the ideas of love and happiness. Back to the studs.

• 1:35:59Jocko Willink?

  Writing for the Atlantic, you got a, there's a ton of articles that, by the way, they're all available, you can just Google them and find them, but measuring your happiness so you can improve it, how to cope with election agony, reading too much political news is bad for your well being, why it's so lonely at the top, success addicts choose being special over being happy. Echo is probably going to give me a sideways eye on that one.

• 1:36:26Speaker 01

  Addiction does is as addiction does.

• 1:36:30Jocko Willink?

  A college degree is no guarantee of a good life.

• 1:36:35Jocko Willink?

  So that's what you're writing.

• 1:36:36Speaker 01

  It's every week, every week, every Thursday morning in the Atlantic is 1300 words on the science of happiness, 52 times a year.

• 1:36:44Jocko Willink?

  I was. intervening with one of my friends who was having a drinking problem.

• 1:36:51Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 1:36:52Jocko Willink?

  And I

• 1:36:53Speaker 01

  Common, common problem.

• 1:36:54Jocko Willink?

  Went to his house and this was at the, you know, in the midst of an intervention that had been ongoing for a long time.

• 1:37:01Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:37:02Jocko Willink?

  And, you know, he'd come clean for a little while and now he's been missing for a couple of days or whatever.

• 1:37:06Speaker 01

  You know what's going on.

• 1:37:07Jocko Willink?

  Go to his house, I'm banging on his door, banging on his door, banging on his door. He answers the door. Of course, he's drunk, you know? And, um, I'm saying, hey, listen to you, you gotta stop like you're, you're addicted, you're addicted. Like this is controlling you. And he looks at me and says, well, yeah, you're addicted to power.

• 1:37:27Speaker 01

  You're an addict.

• 1:37:28Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I was an addict too. So that's what he got me on that one.

• 1:37:31Speaker 01

  It's fair, you know, and, and, you know, I, we can talk about, talk about the neurophysiology of success addiction, which looks an awful lot like the neurophysiology of methamphetamine addiction. Does where you get your rewards. The dopamine patterns in your brain are habituated to what gives you the anticipation of great reward. And, and, you know, the, the, the dudes listening to us who drink too much and then quit are going to be in danger of becoming addicted to every single other thing in their lives, including the gym, including, you know, business success. And, and the truth is you have to look out for that. You have to look, and it's not addictive personalities. It's just brain chemistry is the way it works out for sure. Absolutely.

• 1:38:10Jocko Willink?

  And so this is what you're writing about in all these different articles.

• 1:38:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, the science of happiness. So it's about 30% neuroscience, which is a lot of what I teach these days. About 50% social psychology and behavioral economics, and the rest is how you can apply these ideas to your life. So every week, um, I talk about, you know, what's the, what's the question? What's the science? And, and not for scientists. I mean, you know, I'm, I, I've read a hundred thousand academic journal articles. So the readers don't have to. I mean, this is like, I'm a translator at this point, you know, I'm reading all the, you know, the deep science. This is how I'm trained. And then I say, here's what it means. Here's actually, you turn it into three lessons for your life. And I'm usually eight to nine weeks out in my column. And so I'm trying these things. I'm a complete happiness guinea pig. I'm trying. So my wife's like, what are you doing? It's like, ah, it's a column, you know, it's like,

• 1:38:57Speaker 01

  why are you trying to learn to walk on your hands? Or, you know, whatever, whatever the thing is, but it's because I'm trying something out for my column.

• 1:39:04Jocko Willink?

  Now, it sounds like you had another hit with the book From Strength to Strength.

• 1:39:09Speaker 01

  That was 2022, and that was a book that I was working on when I retired, and I didn't retire. When I changed careers and I came back again to dedicate my work to happiness, to the science of happiness. That was the first big science book on happiness that I wrote after I came back to Harvard.

• 1:39:24Jocko Willink?

  And I guess it spawns from the title of one of the articles that you wrote, which was, "Your professional decline is coming much sooner than you think."

• 1:39:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's true.

• 1:39:33Jocko Willink?

  Which is depressing.

• 1:39:35Speaker 01

  It's sort of depressing, except that it has a happy ending to it. And the problem is that getting into the basic neuroscience of how our careers work, we're good at what we do in our 20s and 30s on the basis of something called fluid intelligence. Fluid intelligence gives you unusual focus. It gives you creative energy, has a ton of working memory behind it, and it allows you innovative capacity to do new things and to solve problems yourself, like a ninja, like a cowboy. And people who are super motivated and really disciplined, hard workers, they're listening to your podcast for a reason. That's you dudes. In your 20s, you're getting better and better, and it's awesome. And the brain power behind

• 1:40:18Speaker 01

  that is called fluid intelligence. This was identified by a social psychologist in Britain named Raymond Cotell in the 1960s. And the problem is that it peaks in your late 30s. That fluid intelligence, your working memory, your focus, your innovative capacity, your ability to solve problems by yourself in new ways, that peaks in your late 30s. That's the reason that the average tech startup with a $1 billion valuation, the startup founder's 31. But you look at the kinds of professions that require more standing knowledge, so medicine or law, you find that the hottest litigators are in their late 30s, the most innovative surgeons are in their late 30s, the best financial professionals who are

• 1:41:01Speaker 01

  doing things in new ways are in their late 30s, musicians, authors, electricians, air traffic controllers, they're peak focus when they're in their late 30s. And then it starts to decline. And that's why people start to burn out. Typically in their mid 40s. They're like, I don't know, I used to love being a dentist, but now I guess I'm gonna start taking Fridays off. I don't know why. The reason is the progress principle, once again. They, nobody else thinks they're incompetent, they're still really good at what they do, but they're not making progress anymore. And they don't know that it's because their fluid intelligence has started to decline. So they can't actually continue to get better the way they did before. That's why people go into decline. You see case after case after case. I talk about it in the research, like, um, Charles Darwin,

• 1:41:46Speaker 01

  who, you know, he did his peak, most innovative work in his 20s and 30s, when he developed the theory of natural selection, AKA evolution. And then, you know, after he was about 50, he never made any more advances. You know, his, his field passed him by. He wrote tons of books, but it wasn't innovative. And he, he went to his grave thinking that he was a charlatan and a fake, because he hadn't done any new work for decades. He hadn't done any new theoretical work. It was all coming out of, you know, younger scientists. The reason was because he was trying to stay on his fluid intelligence curve. And his, that curve was in the cellar, man. You know, I was, I was writing stuff in my, in my, in my, in my early 30s. I was writing research that was so mathematically sophisticated, I can't read it today.

• 1:42:30Speaker 01

  I was doing work on early artificial intelligence algorithms called genetic algorithms, which are learning algorithms. And I was applying, you know, warfighting simulations into, into this learning algorithm to see what would work best and let these warfighting scenarios learn to get better. So I was using artificial intelligence, a rudimentary form, and I was writing papers that was modeling, you know, economic scenarios and, and getting these high fluid publications that nobody read, of course, because it's too technical and, and really boring. And I can't read it now, because that was my fluid intelligence curve. And that's what a lot of people get stuck on and they feel disappointed by.

• 1:43:12Speaker 01

  And then they wind up the rest of their lives going, yeah, and just, and, and going for that next big hit. You see entrepreneurs who have a huge hit in their 30s and in their 50s, they're trying to start a new thing and, and struggling and feeling frustrated and feeling kind of burned out. And that's because they're on the wrong curve. The good news, the happy news comes after that, which is there's a second intelligence curve that's different, that's increasing in your 30s and 40s and 50s and is highest in your 60s and 70s. And that's called crystallized intelligence. That's based on your wisdom and pattern recognition and your ability to put a whole bunch of different ideas together. That's why you're a much better teacher when you're 50 than you were when you're 30. And even better when you're 70.

• 1:43:57Speaker 01

  The best teaching evaluations at my university, at Harvard, go to professors who are over 70. And it's not because the students are merciful, God knows. It's because they're better prepared. You know, like, young guys will come out of, men and women will come out of graduate school and they'll ask, you know, what's the secret to great teaching evaluations? I'm like, get old. Because you get on your crystallized intelligence curve and that, your pattern recognition is high, your ability to use metaphor is really good, you're just a much better teacher, you're a better coach, you're a better mentor, you're a better team leader. You don't want a team leader who's 25. Team leaders who are 25 are actually dangerous because they think like individuals. You want people who are 45 and 55 who really appreciate the unique capabilities of 25-year-olds and put them together in their particular groupings.

• 1:44:42Speaker 01

  Is this making sense to you? I mean, how old are you, Jocko?

• 1:44:45Jocko Willink?

  I'm 52.

• 1:44:46Speaker 01

  You're 52. You're a young guy.

• 1:44:48Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:49Speaker 01

  But you're on your crystallized intelligence curve.

• 1:44:51Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, well, I was thinking about my life and so I was like, oh, well, I didn't really rebuild, rip myself down to the studs every 10 years because I was in the Navy for 20 years. Then I was like, oh, no. I was enlisted my first eight years, went to college and then was an officer my last 12 years. And then, and then I got out and then I started doing other things and definitely.

• 1:45:12Speaker 01

  You're a total spiral. I mean, as soon as you told me that, because you, you know, I knew this about your career, you've told me this before, that you were enlisted and then you did officer training, went to college and then did command, which is a completely different kettle of fish, related, same company, same organization. And then you come out and you're an entrepreneur and being an entrepreneur in a different way in the first part of your entrepreneurial life than the second part of your entrepreneurial life. Now you're, I mean, you even have a podcast network. Why? Because you're helping other people to succeed. You're finding other authors and you're, the imprint that you're doing, because you're helping other, you're recognizing talent and helping it to succeed because you're on your crystallized intelligence curve. You're a spiral with crystallized intelligence.

• 1:45:55Jocko Willink?

  My fluid intelligence is gone. I have no new ideas. So I'm like, yo, can we get some young guys in here to make some stuff happen?

• 1:46:02Speaker 01

  But that's, you know, it's like, it's no joke. It's, it's the, the secret to success and happiness. And so you find the people throughout history who've been happiest. They're the ones who actually became the, the, the graybeards. They're the ones who actually, and became very comfortable with the idea of bringing up the next generation of talent. And getting their satisfaction from that. They became the great instructors, talent recognizers. They go from, you know, from startup entrepreneurs to venture capitalists. And that we can all do that in our own way. The key thing is what's your crystallized intelligence curve? And then if you're in your twenties and thirties, what do you think it's going to be? And what are you doing to make it easier to step onto it when the time comes? That's what that book was about.

• 1:46:43Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Um, next up came the most current book that you wrote, which I have a copy of here today. Build the life you want. The art and science of getting happier. What, was this just an extension of the articles initially?

• 1:46:57Speaker 01

  No, what it was, it was the brainchild of my co-author on this. It's the first book I've written with another person in 20 years, as a matter of fact, which is pursuant to a very interesting phone call I got on from Oprah Winfrey.

• 1:47:11Jocko Willink?

  The co-author.

• 1:47:12Speaker 01

  The co-author. Oprah Winfrey calls. This is Oprah Winfrey. And I'm like, yeah, and I'm Batman.

• 1:47:19Speaker 01

  So Oprah Winfrey and she's a reader of my column and she had read from strength to strength, the book that we were just talking about. Uh, the first day it came out, I went on her podcast and her idea was collaborating on something that could get the science of happiness to a, a different audience than I'd ever been able to touch before. Into a much bigger audience because, you know, Oprah Winfrey has, I mean, she's one of the most respected and iconic figures in American culture. World culture, as a matter of fact, and justly so. She's amazing. Um, energetic, idealistic, helpful, full of love and wants to bring these happiness ideas because the science of happiness she felt had really helped her a lot

• 1:47:59Speaker 01

  during the coronavirus epidemic as she'd been reading my column. And so we spent, you know, I, we, we got together at her place in California and cooked up the structure of the book and we went away and, and wrote it and passed it back and forth. And it came out September of 2023. Build the life you want. It's about emotional self-management. It's about treating your emotions and understanding your brain as something under your management as opposed to managing you. That's the central idea.

• 1:48:27Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I mean, you kick it off here. You got a thing. You're talking about Viktor Frankl. We covered Viktor Frankl's.

• 1:48:33Speaker 01

  Man's Search for Meaning.

• 1:48:34Jocko Willink?

  We covered that book on like one of the earlier podcasts that we did because obviously it's such an important, powerful book. You're saying here Frankl's message was not that life will automatically be good, however, which it obviously isn't, nor was it that we can somehow escape pain with some special mind trick. He acknowledges that every life has suffering, some a lot more than others. Further, as a psychiatrist, he knew that we react to suffering with negative emotion, which is natural, but a bad life is not our fate because we have a choice as to how we respond to our emotions. In Frankl's words, "Everything can be taken from a man, but one thing, the last of the human freedoms, to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."

• 1:49:17Jocko Willink?

  In other words, you can't choose your feelings, but you can choose your reaction to your feelings.

• 1:49:23Speaker 01

  You could have written that. You could have written that because that's, you know, I listened to you. That's what you're talking about. You can, you got two choices, man. You could be managed by your feelings or you can manage your feelings. Choose wisely. Choose appropriately. Choose in a way that will be empowering to you. And too many people are going through life hoping for a better day, going through life hoping that that good feelings will find them. And so, okay, so Viktor Frankl wrote that. And I said, let's do, Oprah and I said, let's, let's, let's actually explain the science on how to do that. Because the truth is to do that, you need to do three things. You need to understand the science. You need to change your habits and you need to help others. In helping others, you imprint these ideas in the prefrontal cortex of your brain. You experience the ideas

• 1:50:05Speaker 01

  where you can retain them in memory. That's why teaching is so critically important. The reason I teach is because this is, you know, not research, me-search. The reason is because I want to be a happier person with more love in my life. And so I teach people how to do it. And so that's what we do. We talk about how does this work? What is the science of what's called metacognition of understanding and experiencing?

• 1:50:25Speaker 01

  Your emotions as simple information. There's no bad feelings. There's no such thing as bad feelings. There's just information coming from the limbic system of your brain, which is taking the outside stimuli that's being sensed by your brain stem, sending it to the limbic system, a console of emotion-producing brain tissue, and that information, sending it to the prefrontal cortex where you decide what it means and decide what you're gonna do. That's how it works. And once you understand that mechanism and adopt a bunch of techniques for doing so, it's like your brain's under new management. And there's a new sheriff in town, man, and it's the prefrontal cortex, the C-suite of your brain. And that is a different life experience. Changed my life completely.

• 1:51:07Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you have a good, the way you explained it here in the book, you say, "Feelings in the enterprise of your life are like weather to a construction company. If it rains, or snows, or is unreasonably hot, it affects the ability to get work done. But the right response is not trying to change the weather, which would be impossible, or wishing the weather were different, which doesn't help. It is having contingency plans in place for bad weather, being ready, and managing projects in a way that is appropriate to the conditions on a given day. The process of managing this weather is called metacognition. Metacognition, which technically means thinking about thinking, is the act of experiencing your emotions consciously, separating them from your behavior, and refusing to be controlled by them.

• 1:51:51Speaker 01

  Yep, that's exactly right. You are not your feelings. Your feelings are simply information to give you, to help you understand what's going on around you in the world. The decision on how to react is yours.

• 1:52:04Jocko Willink?

  So I use the term detachment to describe what a person, a leader, a human being, has to do when things are getting crazy, when there's emotions going on, when there's chaos going on.

• 1:52:13Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:52:14Jocko Willink?

  I've now, you know, I talk about how to detach, like what the protocol is to detach. Talk to me a little bit about how you teach people to practice metacognition.

• 1:52:25Speaker 01

  So your mother, when you were a kid... What did your mother call you when you were a little boy?

• 1:52:32Jocko Willink?

  Jocko.

• 1:52:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, okay, that's good. That makes sense because that's your name.

• 1:52:34Jocko Willink?

  Yep, they gave it to me.

• 1:52:35Speaker 01

  Well, that's your nickname.

• 1:52:37Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it is a nickname. My real name is John. My father's name was also John. They didn't want to have two Johns in the house. They gave me the nickname. I'm from, I'm from New England. They give you weird nicknames.

• 1:52:45Speaker 01

  I know, that's totally badass. Good for your mom.

• 1:52:48Jocko Willink?

  Well, my dad, my dad actually made it up and my dad now, you know, he wants a cut.

• 1:52:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, totally.

• 1:52:53Jocko Willink?

  He wants a cut. He's like, oh, I could have named you Biff or whatever.

• 1:52:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, I could have named you Chad or something. Yeah, yeah. You'd have made that cool too. They could have called you, you know, you know, puffin' boy. Now that would be like super cool. Because you made it as such. So, um, what, what? What we find is, and what I talk about is the, is the fact that, well, actually, get back to this. Your mother probably taught you, hey Jocko, when you're angry, count to ten. I mean, that's, that's classic.

• 1:53:21Jocko Willink?

  Classic.

• 1:53:22Speaker 01

  Do you know who made up that, that axiom, count to ten when you're angry?

• 1:53:26Jocko Willink?

  Well, it's in your book.

• 1:53:28Speaker 01

  Thomas Jefferson.

• 1:53:29Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:30Speaker 01

  Thomas Jefferson.

• 1:53:30Jocko Willink?

  And when you're really angry, count to a hundred.

• 1:53:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and the point is get space between your limbic system and your prefrontal cortex. Now, your limbic system is a, is a console of tissue. It's evolved over a 40 million year period. Its whole job is emotions and cravings and desires. That sends signals about what's going on. Now, where do you want to make?

• 1:53:52Jocko Willink?

  By the way, those things used to keep us alive.

• 1:53:54Speaker 01

  Oh, totally. And you know, negative emotions in particular. Thank God for your negative emotions. There are four fundamental negative emotions, fear, anger, disgust, and sadness. All of them are evolved for particular reasons. I mean, fear and anger come from threat and, and it's fight or flight. And that actually stimulates a part of the limbic system called the amygdala, which will then illuminate when something crosses for the visual cortex and the occipital lobe of your brain. That will send a signal through your hypothalamus, to your pituitary glands, to your adrenal glands sitting over your kidneys, spitting out stress hormones, and 74 milliseconds after seeing that car barreling toward you in the crosswalk. That, of course, bypasses all of your conscious mind and that, and that's when your limbic system with negative emotions has saved your life for the thousandth or the tenth

• 1:54:39Speaker 01

  ...thousandth time and you in the military more than that. Thank God. Your sadness keeps you aversive from being torn away from your kin, from the people that you love. Your disgust keeps you from eating something that you shouldn't eat because it might have a pathogen. All of these negative emotions are incredibly adaptive and super important and we should be really grateful for them. We don't want them to be maladapted or to manage us is really what it comes down to. The way that you do that is making sure that your understanding of those emotions and your reactions are occurring not in the limbic system where they're created, but in the prefrontal cortex, part of the neocortex, the most evolved part of the human brain. The wrinkly outside of the brain is wrinkly because it's a one-square-meter piece of tissue that's scrunched up inside our cranium.

• 1:55:23Speaker 01

  The most evolved part of that, the most quintessentially human part of that is the prefrontal cortex, a bumper of tissue right behind your forehead. That's your C-suite. That's where you're making decisions. But it takes time for the information to get from your limbic system to your prefrontal cortex. Now, sometimes you want to take immediate action like jumping out of the way of an oncoming car or doing something that you've taught yourself instinctively to do, like somebody's firing toward you, running toward the fire instinctively. So you've retrained your amygdala to do something that doesn't feel instinctive, but it becomes a new instinct. That's great. But most of the time, when you have aversive reactions, when you have aversive emotions, you want to understand them and make a decision. What is the right thing for me to do? I've got this negative feeling.

• 1:56:08Speaker 01

  What do I want to do? What's the decision that I'm actually going to make? And that requires time. Metacognition is a set of techniques to put time between what you feel and what you do. And the way that you do that is by understanding yourself, is by saying, this is why meditation. Most, for example, Vipassana meditation, which is a very famous meditative technique of understanding yourself. You say, you know, Jhankos feeling sad and angry today. Strange because things are going pretty well. So what's going on? You're talking about yourself in the third person. You're observing yourself at a certain remove, which sounds sort of weird, but, but remember, that's what detachment is. You are not your emotions. You're a person

• 1:56:50Speaker 01

  that has emotions. So treat them as such with that kind of remove. And that's like counting to 100 is effectively doing that. Journaling your emotions is a very easy way to move the experience of your emotions into your prefrontal cortex. You can't write them down from your limbic system directly. You can only do that using your really modern brain. Prayers of petition are a great way to do that. Lord, help me understand why I feel this way and help me, you give me the grace to, to act appropriately. What is your path for me, given these things that I'm feeling? This is a perfect meditate, metacognitive technique. And, and when you understand that you aren't your emotions, and there are ways that your, that the C suite of your brain can actually act and, and help you to decide either to put a substitute emotion in place,

• 1:57:34Speaker 01

  to get a different reaction, to act as if you had different emotions, to disregard your emotions. Those are four, you've got a repertoire of four things right there, but you can't do it if you're reactive.

• 1:57:46Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, so I had to learn how to do this, you know, being in the military, being in the SEAL Teams, there's going to be times where people are panicking, times where people are freaking out, times where people are angry, all these things. And so I had to learn how to do it. And then I realized I had to teach other people how to do it too. Cause you can't have a subordinate leader that is losing his temper, or is flying off the handle, or is panicking and freezing up. So I actually figured out, oh, I gotta teach these guys to detach. Some of the things that I would teach them, take a step back away from the problem. Like even if it's six inches, like even if you take a step, this might sound cowardly, but if you're in a gunfight, step into a doorway where you can like take a breath, where you're not worried about dying in the next three seconds,

• 1:58:30Jocko Willink?

  and you can take a look around and see what's happening. Take a breath. This is something that I learned from being on the radio. When you talk on the radio, you don't want to sound like you're panicked. You don't want to sound like you're freaking out. Number one, because you'll make everyone else panic and freak out. Number two, because they'll make fun of you if they're not freaked out. So you don't want either one of those two things to happen. So whenever I keyed up the radio, before I'd key the radio to talk, I'd be, something going on. Hey, it's Jocko. We need to move down the street to the next building. Boom. And you want to sound, but what that does is, and I didn't realize this at the time, but that is slowing down your breathing, your, your, your, and when you slow down your breathing, it detaches you, looking around, just the physical act of looking around and seeing what else you can see. And we actually do this to a point when you shoot your weapon, when you get done engaging a target,

• 1:59:14Jocko Willink?

  you train to mechanically turn your head to the left, turn your head to the right. So you can, you, you're physically scanning and it forces you to look around.

• 1:59:22Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:59:22Jocko Willink?

  It, it, and also widening your view, widening your horizon. That's like a calming thing. This is why when we go to the ocean, we watch the sunset, makes us feel good. When we go to a, a mountain and we look at the broad mountain, it makes us feel good.

• 1:59:34Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:59:34Jocko Willink?

  When we're in a, sitting in a cubicle all day and things are closed in and we're focused, we're too focused and it's, it, it makes us, it doesn't make us relax. It does the opposite. It makes us anxious about things.

• 1:59:44Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:59:44Jocko Willink?

  So these are the things to do to step back and make sure that you're not letting your emotions make decisions.

• 1:59:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:59:51Jocko Willink?

  Because if we're making most emotional decisions, we got problems.

• 1:59:53Speaker 01

  And you know, this is, everybody listening to us was little kids. Your kids are freaking out all the time. You know, they, they, why? Because they're incredibly limbic. They're limbic animals. And so you say, you always yell at your kids, use your words. That's just saying be metacognitive. And so in my house, I'd say to my kids, be metacognitive. It's like, oh man, what a drag having a, you know, social scientist for a dad. But it, and, and, but people who are highly reactive are incredibly unpleasant to be around. Because they're ma, they're being managed by their emotions as opposed to their emotions managing them. All of us can be way, way better at this if we understand that these things are possible. And it's just creates so much power. Oh, it's been unbelievably life-changing for me. Now,

• 2:00:36Speaker 01

  it's, it's, it's tricky because the, the wiring between the limbic system and the prefrontal cortex is not complete among adolescents. They, they have a very completely wired amygdala, for example, but an, an incompletely wired prefrontal cortex, which is why the threats and opportunities are so acute, but they don't understand, they can't make this metacognitive decisions about risk very appropriately, which is why they'll, you know, the, the full wiring of the brain is not, for women is about age 21 and for men, it's about age 70. So.

• 2:01:11Speaker 01

  So yeah, um, so the point is that you got

• 2:01:14Jocko Willink?

  Trying to get me cancelled, trying to get me in trouble here? I got three daughters and a wife.

• 2:01:19Speaker 01

  I mean, so, you know, this is one of the reasons that young guys, they take stupid risks a lot is because they're, they're not as, they, they can't, they're not as good at being metacognitive, literally because of the, the plasticity or the, or the wiring of the brain is inadequate to it at that point. But you can make it faster and better, um, by, by teaching people metacognitive techniques and you can even do it with little kids and you can see dramatic results.

• 2:01:42Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, writing things down and you mentioned it, the way I've described that to people when I say, hey, listen, if you're getting emotional, writes, write down, you know, as simple as when your parents would say, make pros and cons, right? That's a way to detach from the emotions of this decision that you've got to make. I tell people it literally detaches, you're now 18 inches from the problems you're looking at, that you wrote them down. I, when, uh, matter of fact, I, I opened today talking about my friend Seth who was, who died in a parachute accident. And when he died, my, he was very close with my whole family, you know, he was over for Thanksgiving and Christmas and all these things. Cause you know, his family lived in another part of the country and he's, you know, he's in the SEAL teams. And so he's growing, my kids are growing up around him.

• 2:02:24Jocko Willink?

  And when he died, my son, who was very close with him, cause you know, we all surfed, we all play guitar, we're all hanging out all the time, almost like a bunch of, uh, kids, basically. And, but my son was very close with him. So when, when Seth died, maybe a couple of months go by and he was, I think about 14, but he's in high school. And after a few months came home and you know, my son's not a very, you know, he not a very like highly emotional person or anything, just a normal kid, right? And more important, like a normal boy. So there's not a lot of like emotional things going on. It's like, oh, well, what's the problem?

• 2:03:01Jocko Willink?

  No problem. We'll carry on, you know, just kind of that attitude. But one day he came home to me and said, like, I, when I'm in school, I keep thinking about Seth and I, I'm, I'm feeling sad about it. And I can't really concentrate.

• 2:03:13Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:03:14Jocko Willink?

  And what I had learned, and this kind of crystallized this thought for me was that when my friends had died, including Seth, what did I, when I lost guys in combat, what did I have to do? I had to go and write a eulogy. I knew I was, I know when one of my friends dies, I start writing because I gotta write. I know I'm gonna be talking in three days at the memorial. So that became what I've, what I had done. And what I realized was, when you write, it helps you process those emotions. So I told my son, hey, I want you to write a letter to Seth and tell him what you thought, what you thought of him, the good times you had, what you're gonna miss. And sure enough, he did it. And he never asked me about him again.

• 2:03:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, this is a classic case. And you know, this lists are, it's journaling is so powerful because of this, because of the metacognitive effect that it actually has on the brain. And so another example of this is, you know, a lot of people, there's an explosion of so-called generalized anxiety in our, in our society today, especially among young adults. And so they'll go to therapy and they'll say, you have anxiety, as if it were some sort of a switch, which is not. It's a, it's a dial. Every single person listening to us is anxious. The question is, how high is the dial turned and how disruptive is it for their lives? This is what it comes down to. Anxiety is unfocused fear. Now, fear is an amygdala response to, to threat. And the way that, that, that our, our biology

• 2:04:38Speaker 01

  is evolved is for fear to be intense and episodic. That's how fear is supposed to work. You're on the, in the Pleistocene, you're living on the savanna, you hear a twig snap behind you, your amygdala illuminates you, take off running, you don't think, huh, that must be one of my friends behind me. No, you're like, that's probably bad, or it might be bad. And you don't stop to think, and you run, you climb a tree, and that's your amygdala saving your life. That's the fear response, episodic and intense. The problem is, in modern life, it's constant and vague. And so, and that's, gives you a little drip of cortisol into your brain all the time, all the time, all the time. So that unfocused fear is generalized anxiety. And the way that you deal with this, most appropriately,

• 2:05:21Speaker 01

  is by focusing it, is focusing your fear. And the best way to do that is when your chest is tight, and you've got butterflies in your stomach, and you don't know why, you say, all right, I'm, I'm kind of freaking out a little bit, a little here. So I take out a piece of paper. Number one, what's, what am I afraid of right now? Like, like, come on, put it down here. What am I worried about? I'm worried about something. I'm, I'm afraid of something right now. Write it down. What is it? Why do I feel this way? What's the worst thing that can happen? And what am I gonna do if it happens? Now, let's go on to number two. By the time you get to number five, you're like, I can handle this. Why? Because you've focused your unfocused fear and you've taken generalized anxiety and you've organized it around the way fear is supposed to feel, which is an abnormal part of a normal life.

• 2:06:04Jocko Willink?

  And it's a positive thing when it's the right

• 2:06:06Speaker 01

  Thank God for it. Thank God for fear. You'd be dead. You wouldn't make it past your second birthday.

• 2:06:13Jocko Willink?

  I'm gonna fast forward, and by the way, much of what you're saying is in the book. Go get the book. We don't have time to read the whole thing. But fast forward to here a little bit, a section that's about focus less on yourself. And you've got this really interesting, I don't know if I want to call it an experiment, but they take these three groups of people, 263 participants, and they group them into different, three different groups with different set of instructions. The first group is called the moral deeds group. And they're instructed, today, you have to go and do at least one moral deed for someone else. Go out and help somebody else.

• 2:06:49Speaker 01

  Random back to kindness.

• 2:06:50Jocko Willink?

  The next one is the moral thoughts group. And what they're directed to do is go out and have at least one moral thought for other people. And then the last group is the treat yourself group. And it's today, do at least one positive thing for yourself. So these are the three groups. And you go into some detail about it, but I'll fast forward a little bit here. The moral deeds group reported higher scores on a range of well-being measures than the moral thoughts group, and both reported higher scores than the treat yourself group.

• 2:07:25Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:07:26Jocko Willink?

  Those caring for others actively felt greater purpose in life and sense of control, while others did not. They were also the only ones who felt less anger and social isolation.

• 2:07:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:07:41Jocko Willink?

  That's, you may want to pay attention to that, people.

• 2:07:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, this is the thing. This is if you don't know, if you're feeling bad and you don't know what to do, help somebody. If you're, if you don't know what to do and you're feeling crummy, go help somebody. Go do something.

• 2:07:56Jocko Willink?

  I'm so happy to hear you say that. I have people, you know, say, oh, I can't, I don't really know what I should be focused on. I can't find a purpose. And I'm like, oh, you, you don't can't figure out what to do? Go, go help someone else. Go down to a soup kitchen and start helping other people.

• 2:08:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Or, or what the advice that a lot of young people get to get today is if you're feeling really crummy, self-care. You need some self, self-care. I've even heard radical self-care. I mean, what the heck is radical self-care? The whole point is other care, man, is what it comes down to. If you're feeling lousy, if you're feeling lonely, if you're feeling rejected, if you're feeling blue, go do something for somebody. And, and by the way, there's so much that you can do. There's so much around us. You know, we're in Southern California right now, which is, I mean, there's so much homelessness around us. What can you do? I was actually talking to a group of, of, of Christian college students. And they're like, so, so what does it mean to love my neighbor? What, what do I do for one of the homeless people? And, you know, there's a lot of controversy about that. Should I give them money, not give them money?

• 2:08:52Speaker 01

  Probably not, because there's so much substance abuse and, and give them a sandwich? Sure, absolutely. But, but then go one step further. You want to, you want to, you want to make it radical? Say to the guy, would you pray for me and my family? Why? Because you just gave him dignity. Because you said, I need you. I need you. Why? I mean, look, Christian people, we believe that God hears the cries of the poor. Special. God hears the cries of the poor. So he needs a sandwich? Great. You need his prayers to get you into heaven. That's what you need. So ask him for them. I mean, your life's going to change. You're going to help him because you gave him the dignity, but your life is actually going to change. Your day is going to change. Your outlook is going to change. You ready for that?

• 2:09:37Speaker 01

  You ready, ready to be a radical? Or you can, or you can go get a massage.

• 2:09:42Jocko Willink?

  Go get cucumbers in your eyes.

• 2:09:47Jocko Willink?

  You talk about these pillars. You say you can find thousands of dubious happiness hacks on the internet to adopt for a monthly subscription fee, of course.

• 2:09:58Speaker 01

  One weird trick. Don't eat grapes. I don't know.

• 2:10:03Jocko Willink?

  You talk about the social science research and you get to these four pillars. The four pillars are family, friendship, work, and faith.

• 2:10:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:10:11Jocko Willink?

  Family. These are people we are given in our lives and generally don't choose, except for our spouse. Friendship. This is the bond with people we love deeply but who aren't kin. Work. This is our toil to earn our daily bread to create value in our lives and the lives of others. It might be paid or unpaid in the marketplace or at home. And faith, this does not mean a specific religion, but rather is a shorthand term for having transcendent view and approach to life.

• 2:10:37Speaker 01

  Yeah. These are the four. I mean, it says that there's 10,000 habits of the happiest people, but they're all trivial. You know, should you eat asparagus or broccoli? Should you do MMA or resistance training on any given Wednesday? I mean, it's great, but and it's interesting, but the truth of the matter is that there's a portfolio of things that we need to invest in every day, sort of the happiness 401k plan. Every day, pay attention to your faith. Every day, pay attention to your spiritual walk, the sense of transcendent, making yourself small, getting out of your own personal psychodrama, zooming out, right? Second is your family life. And you know, family are these mystical relationships. I mean, we could talk about

• 2:11:18Speaker 01

  the the neurophysiology of oxytocin, which is a neuropeptide that bonds us to each other. We sort of mentioned that a little bit earlier, and that's especially acute, especially intense in the case of family relationships. But it's magic, man. You remember when your first baby was born? And you made eye contact with your first baby and you would literally die for that baby in one second. And that was, it was like the Fourth of July is on your head. And it's weird because you know, you didn't know that baby, that baby didn't know you. And yet, and that's magic. And and people are walking away from those relationships because of idiocies like politics. It's so insane. Getting conscripted into some baby boomer politicians' culture war. It's just nuts. And then friendship, you know, friendship is a crisis in America, huge crisis.

• 2:12:01Speaker 01

  It's one of the great climate changes in happiness is the fact that that technology has made it harder and harder for us to have in-person relationships. Uh, and real friendships, not deal friendships and not virtual friendships. Deal friendships, people can help you professionally. Virtual friendships, people you don't see and touch, those aren't good enough. You need real friendships. They're good and useless is what it comes down to. And last but not least, you've got to do two things with your work. You've got to earn your success the old fashioned way through hard work, personal merit and responsibility, and you've got to serve others. And if you do those things, your life's going to change. But you've got to not be distracted and you have to pay attention. You have to do it on purpose. And so that's actually worth a strategic plan for the rest of your life is faith, family,

• 2:12:46Speaker 01

  friends and work. And I mean, I have, those are the, those are the strategies that actually get you to the basic macronutrients. The protein, carbohydrates and fat of happiness are really enjoyment and satisfaction and purpose. Those are the three macronutrients of happiness. And the way that you feed yourself, those things are with faith, family, friends and work that we're talking about here. And you need a strategy for that. I have a, I have a very complex strategy that I have put together with a spreadsheet where I take my, my macronutrients, enjoyment, satisfaction and purpose. And I have the micronutrients that scale up into those macronutrients. And every month I'm looking at them and every half year, every, my birthday and half birthday, I'm, I'm putting together a strategy to make sure that it's on point and I'm making progress. That's how important that stuff is.

• 2:13:31Speaker 01

  And, and you know, I'm 60% happier than I was five years ago. So, works for me and, and I've seen it actually work for my students as well.

• 2:13:38Jocko Willink?

  The chunk on family, you've got a whole chunk on family in the book. It's a, it's called build your imperfect family. So, I think everyone, that doesn't need any explanation. You talk about conflict, acknowledging family conflict is good. Yeah. Improves communication. This is just that acknowledgement. Like when you have an argument with somebody or disagreement with somebody, it's okay.

• 2:14:00Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 2:14:01Jocko Willink?

  As long as you don't get emotional about it and fly off the handle.

• 2:14:03Speaker 01

  If you don't, then you don't love enough. You know, I'm married to a Spaniard, so it's like 10,000 fights. Yes, for Spanish people, it's just the, it's a, it's a kind of communication is, you know, angrily yelling, but the, but you know.

• 2:14:17Jocko Willink?

  I'm married to a Brit and there's like, no.

• 2:14:19Speaker 01

  Stiff upper lip.

• 2:14:20Jocko Willink?

  We don't, we don't have arguments either. We're just like so chill.

• 2:14:24Speaker 01

  Wow. What's that like, I wonder?

• 2:14:26Jocko Willink?

  Awesome. I mean, yeah, yeah. She, you know, we, we just don't, I mean, first of all, I don't get emotional about things. I don't get mad about really anything, you know, like no matter what my wife does, doesn't really make me mad. And my wife, when she gets mad, which I do things that will make her mad, it lasts about eight to 12 minutes.

• 2:14:44Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:14:45Jocko Willink?

  She'll clean aggressively during those eight to 12 minutes. That's what, that's what her thing is. She'll aggressively clean.

• 2:14:51Speaker 01

  And that's how you know.

• 2:14:52Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And that's how I know. And then, and then she's, then she realizes that, you know, I'm probably just, I'm just dumb or, you know, I do dumb things at a minimum and she forgives me and we move on.

• 2:15:02Speaker 01

  Just Jocko being Jocko. Yeah. That's great. And you know, and we all have, how long you been married?

• 2:15:09Jocko Willink?

  As I tell my wife.

• 2:15:09Speaker 01

  She's gonna be cleaning aggressively tonight.

• 2:15:12Jocko Willink?

  She's already here, I always say the same thing. When somebody asks me that question, I go, I don't know, but it seems like forever.

• 2:15:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. My wife is like, it seems like 10 minutes underwater.

• 2:15:21Jocko Willink?

  Eight years or something like that.

• 2:15:23Speaker 01

  28 years.

• 2:15:23Jocko Willink?

  20 something like that. Yeah. 27, 28 years.

• 2:15:26Speaker 01

  32. It's, it's, it's, you know, and, and she's the last person you lay your eyes on as you take your dying breath.

• 2:15:33Jocko Willink?

  My wife? Oh yeah. I'm sure she will be.

• 2:15:35Speaker 01

  That's beautiful.

• 2:15:36Jocko Willink?

  She might be barking orders at me or something.

• 2:15:38Speaker 01

  No, she'll be cleaning aggressively.

• 2:15:40Jocko Willink?

  Why are you leaving?

• 2:15:43Jocko Willink?

  You talk about this complimentary relationship thing and, and how, you know, you go through this, and again, get the book, it's all in there. But, you know, this idea that, oh, you gotta find someone that's like you.

• 2:15:55Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:15:55Jocko Willink?

  To be, to have a happy marriage, when in fact, I wouldn't say the exact opposite, but certainly.

• 2:16:02Speaker 01

  A little bit of the opposite is true. This is a huge problem in modern dating because it's interesting because I've looked at the data, as you can imagine, when I'm teaching this class at HBS called Leadership and Happiness, this is the unit they're most interested in is romantic relationships and the neurobiology and psychology of romantic relationships. So I talk to them about the neurochemical cascade of falling in love, what's actually happening hormonally in your brain, what's the point after which you can't control it anymore. So, you know, when you have a case study of a CEO gets fired for having a romantic relationship with a subordinate and they're always saying at the end, "I don't know what happened." What happened is there's a certain point beyond which you can't let it go. And this is the reason you should not be palling around with

• 2:16:47Speaker 01

  people with whom you could conceivably have a romantic relationship at work. That's the reason that you have to, you know, guard your affections and guard your heart. That's the reason that you shouldn't be staring into each other's eyes for three minutes because you're going to be releasing a ton of neuromodulators into your brain that's going to start to capture your brain. It's going to start to hijack the control of your brain on the basis of this neurochemical cascade. And I walk them through all that, how the science works. And they're like, "Holy mackerel." I can also talk to them about how you can fall in love with almost anybody who would be appropriate to you, to your, you know, your sexual orientation and your age and whether or not you're single, et cetera, et cetera. But you can, through a series of steps, actually initiate that cascade.

• 2:17:32Speaker 01

  But then I talk about the mistakes that people are making. Initiate it on the other person? Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly. So there's a lot of research that shows, for example, that, I mean, there's this one famous experiment by a guy who teaches, a psychologist at SUNY, Stony Brook, a guy named Art Aaron, great psychologist. And he did a piece of research in which he did an experiment in which people who were complete strangers but who were theoretically capable of falling in love, college students.

• 2:17:56Speaker 01

  They would come into a room, they'd met each other for the first time. They started by asking each other a series of thirty-six questions of escalating intimacy. So the first is something dumb, like if you could have dinner with anybody, who would it be? And by the thirtieth question of thirty-six is, when's the last time you cried and why? You know, right? And so it's like, what's your, tell me what your relationship with your mother? You know, this kind of thing? And then, at the end, then they have to stare into each other's eyes for four minutes, which is just initiating this neurobiological explosion in their brains. Because that is actually how we release oxytocin. And so you're bonding with the other person, this love molecule's endogenously on a pump. And people walked out, and one after the other said, I feel like I just fell in love.

• 2:18:41Speaker 01

  I am, I, that person knows more about me than, than my girlfriend of six months, or two years. And, and one of the couples in that original experiment got married. I mean, not the day, not the same day, but you know, they started going out. And, and so I talked to them about actually how this works, and how it can be used for good, and how it can be used for bad, and how it can ruin your life, and how it can wreck your career. And then I talked to them about the mistakes that they're making, because they're not initiating these things in their dating lives. You know, if they're on the apps dating, you find that people have way more choice, a lot more variety than they've ever had before of potential mates, and they like and are attracted less, and are less successful in dating than ever before. Why is that? It's a real, it's perplexing, but it turns out it's scientifically very straightforward.

• 2:19:25Speaker 01

  The reason is because they're selecting people on the basis of similar characteristics that they're curating in their dating profiles. So when you put together your dating profile, we're all such narcissists. It's like, it's like, who do I want? I want, look, if I were dating right now, it's like, I wanna, I don't know, I, what do I want? I wanna date Arthur Brooks. You might as well. That is so not hot. And, and so what, what, what people do is that they, they're, they describe somebody they wanna date who's more or less like their sibling. And, and so that's one of the reasons that they, they get people who are a good match for them as a friend, but not a good match for them as a mate. What you need is a baseline of compatibility. Same religion, that's fine. Same region of the country, that's fine. You need complementarity. That's why matchmakers are so good.

• 2:20:09Speaker 01

  Matchmakers will find somebody who's the same enough, very low level, and then really different. There's tons of research that actually shows that when people are really different than us, that we sense the neurobiological difference or the biological differences than us, because that gives us a sense of the immunological differences. So that when we have kids, the kids have a more diverse immunological profile, and they're more likely to survive. So, for example, there's one experiment from the 90s that's really great. That's been replicated a bunch of times, so it's legit. Where these college students, these women, they're given shoeboxes with T-shirts in them. The T-shirts have been worn for 48 straight hours by different guys that they don't know.

• 2:20:52Speaker 01

  And they have to smell these holes in the shoebox, have to smell the shoebox, and to say how attractive the guy is, just on the basis of the smell. Then, they match up how immunologically different the guy who was wearing the T-shirt is from the woman, and compare it to how hot she thought he was on the basis of the smell of his sweat. Turns out, the more different he is, the more you like him. Because the olfactory bulb in your brain is ascertaining that he is physiologically more different than you, and so your kids are gonna be healthier. So, this all translates into find different people. Date people from different cultures, and different backgrounds, and different countries,

• 2:21:32Speaker 01

  and different races, and go wild, man. I mean, it's like, embrace diversity, literally.

• 2:21:41Jocko Willink?

  Check. Another thing you got in this family section is the negativity virus. You say, "The ambient culture in a family, or any close-knit group, determines the ability of the members to solve problems." Think of it as like a room temperature. If the room temperature in your house is 100 degrees and you're feeling too hot, it doesn't really matter how many clothes you take off, you'll still be too hot. Similarly, negative culture in a family can make problem-solving impossible, so there's no growing, growth or learning, just chronic unhappiness. This often occurs because of emotional contagion, which psychologists have studied extensively. There's not a particular problem to solve, just a "this sucks" attitude that moves between family members.

• 2:22:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, or between community members, or between... When I go into companies, this is the first thing I look for, is emotional, negative emotional contagion. And what I try to do is to help leaders inject a positive emotional virus into the company. This must be true in the military as well.

• 2:22:35Jocko Willink?

  So this is when I read that, that's the same thing I thought I there was platoons. You could see the platoon. You'd watch the platoon for three minutes and you go, oh, this is going to be a problem. I walk into a company. I've walked into companies where you feel the horror of the negativity that's going on inside that company. And you got to get a grip on that really quick and get it changed around.

• 2:22:56Speaker 01

  For sure. This is the problem in academia today. It's an emotional virus in academia of sadness and anger. Sadness and anger. What, what, what, what's rewarded sadness and anger is rewarded in a lot of academia. And that's a huge problem for the, the well being of the students and faculty. You know, that's, and so, and that requires leadership that's going to inject a better virus is what it comes down to. So you got to get it under control. You have to acknowledge the fact that the place is sick. You have to say, this is not what we want. We're not going to create a culture where this is encouraged. And then you have to have a leader who has leaders under her or himself who are propagating a better virus.

• 2:23:38Jocko Willink?

  Forgiveness.

• 2:23:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:23:41Jocko Willink?

  Huge part of things, huge part of the world, huge part of the failure of, of people and cultures and countries.

• 2:23:50Jocko Willink?

  You talk about forgiveness and you have some different strategies. There's discussion, let's talk through this so I can let go of the hurt. Explicit forgiveness, I forgive you. Nonverbal forgiveness, such as showing affection after a fight and minimization, which involves classifying the transgression as unimportant and simply choosing to disregard it. All four of these strategies can be effective, depends on the severity of grievance.

• 2:24:16Speaker 01

  Right. But the whole point is forgive more, forgive more. That's the secret to staying married is forgiving. That's the secret because. She's gonna bum you out and you're gonna bum her out and you have to have a policy of forgiveness, an explicit policy of forgiveness. And so you don't necessarily need to say when she's really mad at you, look, honey, I forgive you. Because that's gonna make her angrier because you know, she feels like she's the one who's aggrieved. And that's typically how conflict works. But the whole point is you gotta say basically, you know, by the end of the day, I'm gonna forgive, man. It's just, that's what we do. It's how we roll. We forgive. We forgive our kids. We forgive our loved ones and forgive over and over and over again. Now, not forgiving is basically like holding on to a hot coal, right?

• 2:25:01Speaker 01

  And hoping it burns the other person. That's, it's not gonna work and it's an incredibly self-defeating strategy is the way that this turns out. And a lot of people will hold on to it because they actually wanna be fired up by it. They wanna get the energy that actually comes from the anger and the hostility and the hatred toward others. And it's, it's, it's one of the best ways to become ineffective personally. And, and it's, it's a, it's a true and tried and true way to become as unhappy as possible.

• 2:25:27Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And then you talk again in the book about conditional forgiveness and pseudo forgiveness.

• 2:25:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, classic.

• 2:25:33Jocko Willink?

  Conditional forgiveness is I'll forgive you when you do X and Y. And pseudo forgiveness is like just not true.

• 2:25:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right. I'm gonna act as if I forgave you, but I'm not. And I'm gonna hold it over your head and I'm gonna bring it up every, you know, it's like, remember when you did that thing? It's like, I thought you forgave me for that. Yeah, well, I did, but now we're bringing it up again.

• 2:25:51Jocko Willink?

  Um, another challenge in the family situation, dishonesty. And you say here, in the 1990s, the writer and psychotherapist Brad Blanton argued just that in his book Radical Honesty. When the truth is hard to accept, telling it can have costs, including frayed relationships at home. But Blanton suggested that complete honesty, no white lies, no exceptions, is worth the consequences because it can reduce stress, deepen connections with others and reduce emotional reactivity.

• 2:26:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is actually a strategy that a lot of young people who are listening to us could adopt to great effect. Is to say, you know, I'm, I'm gonna stop lying. And so, so many people's lives are revolving around a series of shadings of the truth. And the way that they talk about themselves to protect themselves, or whatever it happens to be. And say, "I'm not gonna lie anymore. I'm not gonna lie about anything. I'm not gonna lie about how many beers I drank. I'm not gonna lie about how many people I dated. I'm not gonna lie about how long I've been looking for a job and I've been off the market. I'm gonna take every single shading of the truth out of my, out of my resume. I'm gonna talk to people in an honest way. When I don't like something, I'm gonna say it. When I actually do like somebody,

• 2:27:07Speaker 01

  and this is the really scary thing for a lot of young people. When I like somebody, I'm gonna tell them. Right? It's like, "Man, I find you so attractive." And saying just that kind of radical honesty, which opens you up to all sorts, exposes you. It exposes you. But then you become so much tougher and, and you've got nothing to hide anymore. It can be truly a life-changing thing. This is the one truth, is the one intervention that can actually make more difference in the lives of a lot of young people that don't feel like their life is on track than almost anything else. It's kind of like the, it's almost like the magic bullet. There is not one hack, because life is all about habits. But you know how the, you know, you know, what was it Admiral, was it McRaven?

• 2:27:48Jocko Willink?

  McRaven?

• 2:27:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, who said, you know, "Make your bed."

• 2:27:50Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 2:27:50Speaker 01

  Right? Okay, fine. But what that is, is, is, is have integrity. Even when it doesn't really matter, have integrity. And in so doing, you put your life in order. To stop lying, that's real. I mean, that is, that, and, and man, you wake up every day and say, "Today's another day. I'm not gonna lie." And sometimes it's gonna be good and sometimes it's gonna be bad, but it's gonna be interesting.

• 2:28:14Jocko Willink?

  When I think that, I've had quite a few discussions about this over the years and, because this is a huge component of moving forward in life, right, is telling the truth. And so we get into these discussions where, "Well, you know, if my wife makes chicken for dinner," in fact, this is the first time we talked about it on the podcast. It was years and years ago. My wife used to cook very dry chicken.

• 2:28:37Speaker 01

  She could cook it for an hour.

• 2:28:39Jocko Willink?

  This now has been completely solved because she got, received thousands of recipes and cooking instructions on how to cook chicken and keep it moist. So now she cooks the best chicken in the world. But she used to cook dry chicken. And you know, you think through, okay, when she says, how's the chicken? You know, she spent probably two hours making it because five minutes of prep, but then she had to cook it for an hour and 55 minutes. To get all the liquid and fluid out of it. But it took her two hours to make this thing, right? So I come home, she's been working, she went out and got the stuff, she got it ready, she's watching three kids, four kids, whatever. And she, you know, she puts the chicken in front of me and says, how's the chicken?

• 2:29:15Jocko Willink?

  And the common theory is, well, you tell her the truth. Right. Hey, this dry, can you give me a gallon of water, please, over here to wash this thing down? What's that going to get me? Where's that going to take me? But yes, I should tell the truth, but, and here's where I, I, I had a little bit of enlightenment in the way that I lived my life.

• 2:29:37Jocko Willink?

  For me, being very hardcore with the truth. I make sure that I aim that at my, myself first. So when my wife asks me, how's the chicken? The first thing I should ask myself is, well,

• 2:29:57Jocko Willink?

  how important is this to me as a person right now? Like, what's the truth about this chicken? What, what is the truth about this chicken? The truth about this chicken is, my wife spent all day making it. My wife did all these things. My wife put care and effort into this chicken, and that's freaking amazing. I know this chicken is, it's awesome. This chicken is awesome. Because, and this is the same with, you know, if you, if you work for me and, you know, I, you, you're not doing what you're supposed to be, you're, you got your project turned in late. Right. Okay, radical honesty, I go up to you and say, hey, you know, Arthur, you turned this project late, I'm going to write you up if this happens again. Okay, that's one way of doing it. But actually, if I aim that at myself first and I say, hey, Arthur, I noticed that you got your project turned in late.

• 2:30:41Jocko Willink?

  I don't think I gave you the support that you needed. I don't think I gave you the resources and I actually was reviewing our email chain and I didn't really clarify the actual timeline in a specific way. So I made it clear enough so you could understand. Next time, those are the things I'm going to change so that this project will get done or the next project will get done on time. So that's me being radically honest with myself and the things that I can change, the things that I can do better. And I think that's the point to start at.

• 2:31:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. No, being honest with yourself is the beginning of radical honesty. Being honest with others is derivative. And, and the people that we like to lie to the most are, are ourselves. We love to lie to ourselves. We lie to ourselves constantly and they will say, oh, I'll be, I'll be honest with you. But, and this is a very good point. It's also the framing of what we're talking about. The truth of the matter is that she's not asking you, how is the chicken? She's asking you, how do you feel about her taking care of you? And you feel really good about that. And you can say, yeah, and the chicken is one tiny part of it. The, the temperature and the dryness of the chicken is one, is 1% of the answer to this particular question. So let's answer the 99%, which really matters. And, and it's, it's critical because we can do that in almost everything that we do.

• 2:31:54Speaker 01

  And that's the way that we can use the truth as a gift and not as a weapon.

• 2:31:58Jocko Willink?

  And you can also answer that question with a question, which is, can you please pass the ketchup?

• 2:32:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right.

• 2:32:07Jocko Willink?

  As you go through the book, look, you go through the details of friendship, of, of work. You know, what, what you detail these things and in, in how we can move these things forward. And, and you know, you end up with really nice kind of pragmatic synopses of each of these, you know, you say blissful work of friendship. Friendship is incorrectly seen by many people as something that just occurs naturally without conscious effort or work. This is false. Like everything else important, friendship requires attention and work. It must be built on purpose. And you go through the, the protocol. The protocol, friendship is ruined when you look for people who are useful. Uh, too many deep friendships today are spoiled by differences of opinion. Isn't this the truth?

• 2:32:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure.

• 2:32:53Jocko Willink?

  Uh, the goal for long-term romance is a special kind of friendship, not undying passion. So you go through these things and you give really, really pragmatic advice. This isn't like a book that's

• 2:33:04Speaker 01

  It's not a theory book.

• 2:33:05Jocko Willink?

  Just about theory.

• 2:33:06Speaker 01

  Anybody who wants to read the underlying science, which is approximately 0% of the readers, um, it's all in the, it's all in the end notes to the book. You know, you'll get the actual academic citations, what we're talking about. If you want to read the neuroscience literature, great. More power to you. Anybody who wants to come study with me and do their PhD under me at Harvard, that's great. Read the, read the end notes and you know, and we'll write some articles together. That, but, but for the rest of humanity that just wants to live a better life in a, in an evidence-based, science-based way, that, that's, Oprah and I wrote the book for you.

• 2:33:37Jocko Willink?

  Um, and I'll close out the book with this again. Get the book. There's so much information in here. Um, you talk about, you, you already mentioned this, but become a teacher, right? And you say the reason is pretty simple. You already know it. You need to be metacognitive with the information to use your prefrontal cortex so you can understand and use it. The best way to do that is to be able to explain it clearly. This is what I, I learned that I was lucky enough in my career. I told you before we started that I had a very lucky career. One of the things that was so lucky is when I was an enlisted guy, my last couple of years as an enlisted guy, I worked in the training cell at SEAL Team One, where I taught

• 2:34:13Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:34:13Jocko Willink?

  land warfare, combat swimmer, close quarters combat, urban combat. I taught those things.

• 2:34:18Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:34:19Jocko Willink?

  And when you teach, you learn.

• 2:34:21Speaker 01

  It's magic.

• 2:34:21Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. By the time I was, by the time I was now in an off, in a, in a leadership role, I had learned well where I had crystallized information, really, at a pretty young age.

• 2:34:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, for sure. And it made it much, you made, you're, you're much better at what you do right now because of that training and, and the development of your crystallized intelligence before that was your strength. Which is so great. You were able to walk from one curve to the other. You're probably much happier than, I mean, you had a glorious, really great career in the military. You're probably happier now. Is my guess because you're living your right curve. You're living your correct curve, right?

• 2:34:52Jocko Willink?

  I would say that I've, I'm, I'm always pretty happy and I was very happy when I was in the military, the, the entire time. It's funny, you know, I look back, I was a new guy in a SEAL team. I was so happy. I was. On a, in an arg platoon on a ship in 115 degree birthing space.

• 2:35:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've heard about that from my son, how fun that is.

• 2:35:13Jocko Willink?

  I was happy.

• 2:35:14Speaker 01

  For three weeks.

• 2:35:15Jocko Willink?

  I was happy we were happy, you know, like that's, and then became an officer in a leadership position. All the pressure, happy.

• 2:35:22Speaker 01

  That's great.

• 2:35:22Jocko Willink?

  Just happy and then retired, found other missions to execute on, still happy, still getting after it.

• 2:35:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's great. And but a lot of people listening to us, they don't, that's hard to relate to because they find that they're, they're more melancholic. They find that happiness comes a little harder to them. The truth is that we all have different, different aptitudes for it. We all have different characters for it. We all have the same emotions, but we have different intensities of emotions. So one of the things that we talk about in the book, and I do a lot with my work, is I can actually, I can give people a personality test on the intensity of their positive and negative emotions. You're clearly a very high positive affect person. You're probably a relatively moderate, low affect person, negative affect person. So you're, you would fit the cheerleader profile a lot, you know, I fit.

• 2:36:14Jocko Willink?

  I know it's gonna enjoy that one.

• 2:36:16Speaker 01

  And well, I mean, it's like, yeah, especially because you're there with the pom poms and a little skirt right now. It's really, it's really becomes you, Jocko. I'm the mad scientist, which means I have very high positive and very high negative affect. And this is normal, about a quarter of the population has this. A quarter of the population has high positive, low negative affect naturally. This is the poetic affect. It has to do with a part of the limbic system called the ventral lateral prefrontal cortex, which is the part of the brain that's hyper developed, that's unusually big for people who are able to ruminate on certain things, which gives them a melancholic nature. It also tends to make them very creative because you ruminate on a business plan or an opera or a book of poetry. It makes them very romantic because you ruminate on another person. That's called infatuation.

• 2:36:59Speaker 01

  And those are beautiful things, but you have to learn to, you have to learn to manage that affect. And there are people who are very low affect people, low positive and low negative. It's not, they're not unhappy or happy. They just have low expression of their positive and negative emotions. And every, every one of us is in one of these quadrants and all of us, it's a gift, no matter what it is. You just have to know what it means and how to use it, how to surround yourself with people who can help you, who can complete you and learn how to manage it in a way that's, that builds you up and helps other people as well. So some people will listen to you and say like, Like Jocko's happy doing all these really aversive and hard things, you know, why can't I be like that? Well, because God made you different is the whole point, but that doesn't mean that you can't manage yourself. That doesn't mean that you can't make yourself better.

• 2:37:42Speaker 01

  You can't use your natural predilections for the good of yourself and good of other people. God wanted poets too, you know, and a whole world of cheerleaders would be problematic, actually, you know, we want all the different kinds of people that we have and we, and we need all different kinds of people that we have, but all of us can be much better than we were.

• 2:38:01Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Um, well, that's the latest book.

• 2:38:08Jocko Willink?

  What, does that get us up to speed for right now?

• 2:38:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, it came out in September 2023 and we're talking about that about, you know, two months after the book came out. It's been a wild ride. Being on tour with Oprah Winfrey has been quite something. There's a lot of security.

• 2:38:18Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 2:38:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, a lot more security than, you know, people are like, Arthur who? But, you know, yeah, no, it's great and it's, it's, uh, it's been a joy. I'm actually starting the next book, which will come out and probably in spring of 2025 called Start Strong, which is the science that people need to start their adult lives in their twenties in a way that will give them the absolute best trajectory for success, love and happiness going forward. The science-based approach on how to, how to build your life, starting good and young.

• 2:38:46Jocko Willink?

  And when's that one coming out?

• 2:38:47Speaker 01

  In the spring of 2025.

• 2:38:48Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 2:38:49Speaker 01

  Meantime, we're doing a lot of, a lot of, a lot of media projects. Oprah and I, we did a, we started a, we did a limited run podcast together, um, based on the book.

• 2:38:59Jocko Willink?

  And what's that called?

• 2:39:00Speaker 01

  That's, that's part of her Super Soul series on, on, but it's called Build The Life You Want. So if you look on YouTube, there's a series of conversations that we did at her place in, in Santa Barbara. And, uh, and who knows, you know, we were, we're talking to, you know, different television and, you know, video outfits on what we can do next, but the whole point is that people want to be happier. And it sure is great to be on the cutting edge of that business.

• 2:39:22Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it is.

• 2:39:23Speaker 01

  It's working.

• 2:39:24Jocko Willink?

  And people can find you, you got arthurbrooks.com.

• 2:39:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:39:28Jocko Willink?

  You've got, you're on Twitter.

• 2:39:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:39:30Jocko Willink?

  At Arthur Brooks. You're on Instagram at Arthur C. Brooks. You got a YouTube channel.

• 2:39:36Speaker 01

  Got a YouTube channel.

• 2:39:37Jocko Willink?

  At Arthur Brooks 123.

• 2:39:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:39:38Jocko Willink?

  Did you know that?

• 2:39:40Speaker 01

  Really?

• 2:39:40Jocko Willink?

  It's at Arthur Brooks 123.

• 2:39:41Speaker 01

  That's good to know.

• 2:39:42Jocko Willink?

  And then you're on Facebook.

• 2:39:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:39:45Jocko Willink?

  At Arthur Brooks.

• 2:39:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, and you're giving out, giving particular ideas. The one thing I'm not doing is, you know, diet and exercise, but that's why I'm going to other, other people. And I do work, I've done some stuff with Peter Attia lately. Yeah, and you know, good, good guys like that, because that's a, I'm an enthusiast, but I'm an amateur.

• 2:40:00Jocko Willink?

  Awesome. Echo Charles, you got any questions?

• 2:40:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, got a few. Unlimited, but I got it on this one. Okay, so as far as friendships go, right? In person, better. So what about exchanging memes? Is that conducive to friendship?

• 2:40:16Speaker 01

  It is. And part of the reason is because humor is a great source of bonding. And so as long as they're not bitter, as long as they're not denigrating, as long as they're not tearing other people down, that's important. Bonding over stuff that's actually legitimately, I know. We just got rid of all your memes. But anyway, if you're doing something that's genuinely funny, you know, humor is the, is the, the universal language of friendship. You know, it's, and it's an amazing thing, because we actually understand the neurophysiology of how, how humor works. And it's just a beautiful thing. It just lights up your brain.

• 2:40:50Speaker 02

  So let me ask you this then. Okay, so I have a twin brother.

• 2:40:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. Is he identical or fraternal?

• 2:40:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:40:55Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 2:40:56Speaker 02

  So we, we grew up like I think a lot of guys, and even military like this, you know, when you play team sports like this, where part of the humor and part of the fun and the bonding is insulting each other.

• 2:41:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:41:08Speaker 02

  You know, but I always, I always had it in my head where the, the better insults are the ones that are more funny than insulting, kind of a thing. And the more clever, I guess, you know, so it's like this match back and forth where it's like, you know, and when you take offense, you kind of automatically lose, you know, kind of a thing. What's with that? Like, why do people bond on that? Whatever, Brad, you're the same way.

• 2:41:29Speaker 01

  No, no, just.

• 2:41:30Jocko Willink?

  Guilty as charged.

• 2:41:31Speaker 02

  Yes, sir.

• 2:41:32Speaker 01

  The, the closest relationships are ones where we can, we can recognize the foibles and weaknesses of a friend and then, and make it into a source of, of laughter as opposed, as opposed to a source of actual derision or contempt. This is the same, this is the thing. Because, you know, look, we all have weaknesses. And when you see the weakness in somebody else and treat it with affection.

• 2:41:53Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:41:53Speaker 01

  Generally speaking, the way that the guys will treat, will, they'll express that affection is with humor. And if it's understood as such, look, there's, there's a fine line. And so when you're making fun of your buddy because of, you know, whatever he's got, you know, his premature balding or whatever it happens to be.

• 2:42:07Speaker 02

  Choco sock.

• 2:42:07Speaker 01

  If it's a, if it's a source of affection, you're going to talk about it one way. If it's a source of contempt or actual insult, you're going to treat it a different way. And that line is really fine between them. And when you've actually gone from making them laugh to making them unhappy, that's when you know you've crossed that line a little bit. So it's, and it can be pretty subtle. It can be pretty subtle. Believe me, as a guy, I'm like the bald guy, you know, and we're, we're sensitive.

• 2:42:32Speaker 02

  Understood completely. And then, um, also the oxytocin in the workplace scenario you were talking about. So let's say my wife hypothetically has a coworker.

• 2:42:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:42:43Speaker 02

  You know, coed coworker that she's close to nowadays, you know, kind of a thing. Well, hypothetically.

• 2:42:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:42:52Speaker 02

  I'm my wife's coworker currently, so.

• 2:42:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's good. That's right.

• 2:42:55Speaker 02

  But is that a red flag?

• 2:42:56Speaker 01

  It, well, it depends. And so one of the things, one of the big mistakes that people make in companies is number one, saying that you actually can't start romance in the workplace. I mean, I understand the liability that comes along with that, but about 17% of people meet their spouse at work. The problem is when people who are not available meet each other at work and have an illicit relationship. That's when the real problems come. And usually those are pursuant to them doing a lot of stuff outside of work. And that might mean at work, but they're having personal conversations and a lot of one-on-one time and a lot of deep conversations, a lot of the revelation of personal traits and what's going on with their home relationships and a lot of deep looking in the eye, which will actually instigate oxytocin release.

• 2:43:36Speaker 01

  Then the second thing that workplaces will do that actually relate, that winds up creating chaos in the relationships of their, of their employees is a lot of offsite activities for team building. So if you're going canoeing with somebody who could technically be your romantic partner.

• 2:43:53Speaker 01

  But you're, you already have a partner? And you're, the canoeing with somebody, the outside fraternizing activity with somebody will stimulate a lot of the feelings that you'll get because you'll associate fun and oxytocin with a person who's not your spouse. And that's dangerous.

• 2:44:09Speaker 02

  Interesting.

• 2:44:10Speaker 01

  You gotta protect yourself. You gotta take measures. You gotta guard your heart. And, and if you're a boss, you should be helping and not making it harder for people to guard their hearts.

• 2:44:18Speaker 02

  So if you're a husband at home, your wife's going out on canoeing, team building scenarios with their coworkers, it's not necessarily like, you know, the husband might get accused of being this jealous husband, you know, they're just friends and all this other stuff.

• 2:44:32Speaker 01

  And it might be true. It might be just friends, you know, and, and you have to trust the integrity of your partner. You want to have a partner who has real integrity. But the whole point is that if they're just, they, they're, they really, really, really love those activities, that, I mean, that's just, you know, people are different, but there's risk that comes from this. There's just natural risk that comes from this.

• 2:44:50Speaker 02

  So the husband kinda has a leg to stand on some of the time.

• 2:44:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, and, yeah, I mean, it's, I, that, yeah. The biology suggests that that is, that there is risk involved. Now, how do you react to that in a mature way? That's a different kettle of fish.

• 2:45:05Speaker 02

  Kettle of fish. It's true.

• 2:45:07Jocko Willink?

  But it's not nothing.

• 2:45:08Speaker 02

  Bro, it's not nothing. Bro, I'm telling you, Ray, you get a, a pretty girl at work with a husband and some single guys at work as well or whatever, but you think the single guys have respect for the, all the oxytocin or lack thereof at home and all this stuff? They don't. Some just saying.

• 2:45:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, work is a funny thing because people spend so much time there. Most people spend more time at work than they spend with their spouse. And when you're spending time with somebody in a very tight knit work team, and especially having intimate conversations that are not work related, and especially doing things where they're sharing fun activities, and, and it's more time than you're actually spending with your spouse. I mean, you're, you know, you're opening up yourself to feelings that you probably didn't anticipate.

• 2:45:50Speaker 02

  Yeah. Oh, last question. So when we're in a... Chamber, French horn, scenario, chamber music, French, who are we playing for? Like, what, not at the nightclub or nothing like that?

• 2:46:03Speaker 01

  No, it's not a nightclub. It's usually audiences. And so what people, the Chamber Music Concert Series, where, where people subscribe and they come and they hear that, that they'll, they'll book four or five different groups over the course of the year and then they'll, they'll come and it'll be like a Sunday out.

• 2:46:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:46:16Speaker 01

  And then the touring group comes through.

• 2:46:17Speaker 02

  Oh, that's cool. Like, where would it be at, like, um, like a concert hall?

• 2:46:21Speaker 01

  Civic center.

• 2:46:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:46:22Speaker 01

  Concert hall.

• 2:46:23Speaker 02

  So like a jazz band compared to, yeah, the punk rock, I guess, right? So it'd be, okay, so there's like an audience.

• 2:46:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly right.

• 2:46:30Speaker 02

  That likes.

• 2:46:31Speaker 01

  That's super into it. Yeah, yeah. And so once again, you know, rising that, in that hierarchy is pretty esoteric.

• 2:46:36Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Like poetry, right? You know, you go down and watch the poetry and stuff?

• 2:46:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. You know, that's, that's the kind of thing. It just, it has its own, its own fan base.

• 2:46:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:46:46Speaker 01

  Super, people are super into chamber music.

• 2:46:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:46:49Speaker 01

  I love chamber music. I'm really into it.

• 2:46:50Speaker 02

  I like it too, actually.

• 2:46:51Speaker 01

  Oh, it's the best.

• 2:46:52Jocko Willink?

  My, my daughter, like I said, was a ballerina and, um, my oldest daughter, and so I would go to dance things. And, uh, some of them, I know what was happening.

• 2:47:03Speaker 01

  It was torture, right?

• 2:47:04Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, some of them were, were torture. Some of the stuff.

• 2:47:06Speaker 01

  Kid concerts are brutal. Kid sports is brutal, too.

• 2:47:09Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, some of these weren't kids. You know, I mean, eventually I was getting roped into doing like, whatever, some real cultured activities.

• 2:47:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:47:18Jocko Willink?

  And it wasn't landing with me.

• 2:47:19Speaker 02

  It wasn't, okay.

• 2:47:20Jocko Willink?

  You know, I'm a bad person.

• 2:47:21Speaker 01

  I hear ya. No, no, you're not a bad person. You're, you're flesh and blood, Jocko.

• 2:47:27Jocko Willink?

  Awesome. Any other ones?

• 2:47:28Speaker 02

  That's it, that's it for now.

• 2:47:30Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 2:47:31Jocko Willink?

  Any closing thoughts, Arthur?

• 2:47:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, it's like, a lot of people are always asking, what's the, what's the one thing to remember? And so I was thinking, what's the one thing? There's this, this study that we've done at Harvard called the Harvard Study of Adult Development. This, that tracked men from the late 1930s until death. And then their kids and then their spouses. And it matched up, you know, students at Harvard with people who didn't go to college. So it's socio-economically diverse. And they looked at all the things they did over the course of their lives that helped them end up happy and healthy at the end of their lives. So it's a crystal ball, you know, what do they do? And some of it's, you know, pretty obvious, diet and exercise and smoking and drinking. They didn't. Drink or drank very moderately. They didn't smoke or they quit early. They they exercised, but not to the point where they neglected their families and they they they kept a healthy body weight, but they didn't do yo-yo dieting. Okay.

• 2:48:17Speaker 01

  But then they had a way to deal with their problems because everybody's got problems that a way to deal with it, like talking to friends or whatever it happened to be. They had a technique for dealing with their worries and problems. So it didn't build up. They were lifelong learners and that was really good. But the one, the one of the seven practices that mattered the most by far is that they had close, loving relationships. You know, it was they either had a a marriage that they could count on or they or they had really close personal friends or even better, both is what it came down to. And the the conclusion of that is that happiness is love. Full stop. And so that's really the one thing to remember when you when you when you don't know what to do, go love somebody. When you don't know what to say, tell somebody perhaps in not so many words, I love you.

• 2:49:02Speaker 01

  When you're when you're thinking of thoughts that are destructive, turn your thoughts to what you love. Love will bring you happiness and that's the one thing we can actually all count on. It's the one thing that really matters in our lives. It's the one thing that gives us all a better future. So the last word is basically this. You don't know what to do? Love more.

• 2:49:23Jocko Willink?

  Right on. Well, thanks for joining us. Thanks for coming down. Thanks for your lessons learned and thanks for sharing your methodologies. And thanks for helping people live better, happier lives.

• 2:49:35Speaker 01

  Likewise, Jocko. You're doing a great service for a lot of people and I'm delighted to be some small part of it today.

• 2:49:41Jocko Willink?

  Right on. Appreciate it. Thanks. Thank you.

• 2:49:45Jocko Willink?

  And with that, Arthur C. Brooks has left the building.

• 2:49:52Jocko Willink?

  Happiness.

• 2:49:55Jocko Willink?

  You seem to like that. I could see. I I look over you. You're into it.

• 2:49:59Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah, I think, um, you know, I think you know this where I do enjoy feel like finding out how things work. You know, especially if they're just not that real simple to to figure out. And I think that's another one. Especially those kind of riddle ones because it's like a riddle, right? For this one where it's like, it's not like the direct, easy, obvious answer. So you'd be like, hey, what's the key to happiness? Oh, suffering and misery, you know, like it doesn't seem real. It's like counterintuitive. A lot of this stuff. So it becomes interesting, I think.

• 2:50:31Jocko Willink?

  Well, there you go. Get the books. You guys know the deal. Try and be happier. Choose to be happier. That's kind of what I feel like. You can be miserable or you can be happy. That might be something. Look, you're going through some basic seal training. You're young like I was. And you get your look, you're gonna be wet. You're gonna be cold. And you can be wet, cold and miserable, which is what they tell you're gonna be, or you can be wet, cold and kind of happy about the whole scenario.

• 2:50:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:50:58Jocko Willink?

  So I'm gonna be happy.

• 2:51:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:51:01Jocko Willink?

  Have fun with it at a minimum.

• 2:51:03Speaker 02

  So even when you choose.

• 2:51:06Jocko Willink?

  They see it.

• 2:51:07Speaker 02

  Who?

• 2:51:08Jocko Willink?

  The instructors. You know what I mean?

• 2:51:10Speaker 02

  Oh, you mean if you.

• 2:51:11Jocko Willink?

  Or your teammates, like your platoon mates.

• 2:51:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:51:14Jocko Willink?

  They're like, oh, Echo is looking like he's hating life right now.

• 2:51:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:51:18Jocko Willink?

  That's kind of not cool.

• 2:51:20Speaker 02

  It's not cool.

• 2:51:20Jocko Willink?

  Don't want to give off that.

• 2:51:22Speaker 02

  No.

• 2:51:22Jocko Willink?

  Let's be happy.

• 2:51:23Speaker 02

  And then even if you are happy during the suffering, when the suffering is over, it's not like the happiness goes away or nothing. It gets better, actually.

• 2:51:33Jocko Willink?

  For real?

• 2:51:34Speaker 02

  Now you got the memory of happiness and you got current happiness.

• 2:51:39Jocko Willink?

  But

• 2:51:41Jocko Willink?

  clearly uh, key components here. We talked about these and it's always surprising, right? And in, in, again, in the book, it's like if you do what, if you do what makes you happy, you're gonna end up not happy. You know, this is like a lack of discipline. This is the freedom equalling slavery. As opposed to discipline equals freedom. So that's what we gotta do.

• 2:52:08Speaker 02

  Well, you made it. You made a really good point a long time ago. And actually, it was such a good point and so simple and so easy to understand. That I tell my kids this all the time. When you say pay now or pay later. So it's like, hey, it's gonna be easy or and it, and it's gonna be hard. You just choose when, you know? So you want to do the pay, the pay is the hard. It's hard to pay. It's easy to collect, right? So if you collect now, you're gonna pay later. It's gonna be way junker, in my opinion, and I explain why, you know? A lot of it, you know, even if you talk about working out where it's like, hey, I'd rather pay now. She's like, oh, working out is hard. I was like, yeah, working out is hard, but I'll tell you what's harder. Being weak. It's harder when you're thinking about when, you know, when it's time to go to the beach

• 2:52:51Speaker 02

  or the pool or whatever, and then you gotta think and you're all anxiety because how does my body look or something like this? You know, that's way harder.

• 2:53:00Speaker 02

  Been working out. Anyway, pay now, pay later. That's a good one.

• 2:53:03Jocko Willink?

  I recommend we pay now.

• 2:53:05Speaker 02

  Yep, pay now.

• 2:53:06Jocko Willink?

  Health and discipline. It's gonna help you. Uh, DEF Reset, we got coming. And you just made a, you made a video. I got a, uh, what is it? A preview of the launch video.

• 2:53:19Speaker 02

  Oh, they call it a warning order, I guess.

• 2:53:21Jocko Willink?

  So this is the thing. So for the DEF Reset, last year was like, like January 1st. Oh yeah, here you go. Jump into it. Leif was saying, uh, cause I was, I was telling Leif and the EF team. I was like, hey, listen, I'm trying to give people a heads up for DEF Reset. Cause normally it's like, oh, it's a new year's resolution. Wait, why don't you just start now? Right? Which I've said that kind of thing. Like, don't wait for a new year's resolution. Start now. Here's the thing. DEF Reset, start January 1st. If you're not ready for it, it's gonna hurt. You're gonna pay later.

• 2:53:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:53:54Jocko Willink?

  So put some investment in now. Leif made the point that like last year's DEF Reset, he got, he, he got hurt like, I don't know, a week into it. He had to stand down.

• 2:54:04Speaker 02

  What? Cause he went hard out to get.

• 2:54:06Jocko Willink?

  Went hard. So what I'm saying is prepare for DEF Reset now. That means you should be waking up a little bit earlier. You should definitely start working out now. You should get things staged. You should be prepared. Don't go cold into DEF Reset. You don't want none of that. You won't make it. You won't make it. You won't be able to keep it up. So DEF Reset's coming January 1st. Prepare for it now. We got workouts and fitness with Jason Kalipa. We got leadership training with Echelon Front. We got discipline directives from me. And we got fuel, obviously Jocko Fuel. So we got a bunch of really good things gonna help a lot of people get back on the path. Set the trajectory of your life. Correct the trajectory of your life. Improve the trajectory of your life.

• 2:54:51Jocko Willink?

  Cause that's where that trajectory word means a lot. It's like you're just heading in a direction. Why not make sure that you're heading in the right direction, in a positive direction? That's where your trajectory is and Def Reset will help reset that trajectory and make it better. So that's what we're doing. Um, Jocko Fuel, you're gonna want some Jocko Fuel for this evolution for sure. You're gonna want some Mulk because you're gonna need some to rebuild. You're gonna want some hydration because you're gonna sweat. You got that Jocko Hydrate. We got Greens. Joint Warfare for sure. Super Krill, just Mulk, just the whole nine yards. That's what we're doing. Go to JacoFuel.com and get what you need to be ready. To be better, to be prepared.

• 2:55:37Jocko Willink?

  You can order it from JacoFuel.com or you can get it from the Vitamin Shoppe. You get it from Wawa. You get it from GNC, Military Commissaries, AP's, Hanford, Dash Stores in Maryland, Wakefern, ShopRite, HEB down in Tejas. Meyer, Harris Teeter, Lifetime Fitness, Shields. Small gyms all over the place. Jiu Jitsu gyms, CrossFit gyms, powerlifting gyms, Globo gyms. If you're going to one of those. If you own one of those and you want to sell Jocko Fuel, go to [email protected] and get some of that. So there you go. JacoFuel.com.

• 2:56:11Speaker 02

  It's true. Also, Origin USA, don't forget about that. Is Origin giving away, I think they might be giving away a gift card right for the Def Reset?

• 2:56:19Jocko Willink?

  Probably.

• 2:56:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think so. It's a good deal because they got some good stuff, American-made stuff, by the way. I was wearing, uh, you know, the, the, I don't know, what would you call it? The Moisture Wicking Hoodie?

• 2:56:29Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:56:30Speaker 02

  I don't know the names. Pete always has these cool names for them, but nonetheless, many compliments on that one.

• 2:56:35Jocko Willink?

  That's a good one.

• 2:56:36Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. All American made. Did I mention that?

• 2:56:38Jocko Willink?

  So I believe you're talking about the Tetra Lock.

• 2:56:42Speaker 02

  It's very possible.

• 2:56:43Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah. OriginUSA.com, get some cool stuff to wear. Get stuff that's made in America. Look, man, that's what we're doing. We're not, we're not, we're not supporting communism. That doesn't help people be happy. Where you go look at the communist pictures. You see any happiness over there? You're not going to see it. See happiness where there's freedom. So, originusa.com brings freedom, brings happiness to the world. Go get it. That's what we're doing.

• 2:57:09Speaker 02

  It's true. Also, Jocko Store, if you wanna, if you wanna represent on this path, whether it's Def Reset or beyond, you know, represent, discipline equals freedom. That's, you go to JacoStore.com. That's where you get your shirts and hats, cities, all kinds of merch. Anyway, good stuff on there. Also, Shirt Locker, new design shirt every month. It's a subscription kinda thing. People seem to like it on there. Check it out. Tell me what you think. Think it's cool? Go and subscribe to that one. It's a good one. Everything. JacoStore.com.

• 2:57:39Jocko Willink?

  Uh, if you need steak, which you probably do, check out PrimalBeef.com. Check out ColoradoCraftBeef.com. The best steak delivered to your house. That's what we're doing. Check those out. Also, subscribe to the podcast. Also, check out jockounderground.com. It's a little, we're about to record one of those when we get done here. So, that's what we do. Adjacent material, we also answer questions all the time that you email in. So, check out jockounderground.com. Also, YouTube, subscribe to that. Psychological Warfare, FlipsideCanvas.com. Dakota Meyer, making cool stuff to hang on your wall. We got a bunch of books, obviously, a bunch of books. Love Your Enemies by Arthur C. Brooks, Build The Life You Want by Arthur C. Brooks, and Oprah Winfrey.

• 2:58:23Jocko Willink?

  Strength to Strength, he's got a bunch of books. So, check those out. And then, of course, I've written a bunch of books too. So, you might wanna check those out. They're out there. Especially, check out the kids' books. Look, you don't need to be 38 when you learn these lessons. You can learn them when you're five. Maybe seven. Way of the Warrior Kid. Go get those books for the kids in your neighborhood. You got that neighbor across the street, he's kind of a delinquent, seems a little bit. He's nine years old. He's hucking rocks at trees and stuff. Look, I was hucking rocks at trees. You know what I mean? You can just let him continue to huck rocks at trees. Next thing, he escalates to like mailboxes. Then, he's going vehicles. Then, he's, you know, see where I'm going with this? Bad, bad scene. Warrior kid, get them on the right path. That's what we're doing. Also, Echelon Front,

• 2:59:08Jocko Willink?

  we have a leadership consultancy. Go to echelonfront.com for details on that. That's what we do. We work with companies. We square them away. We help them unify their leadership. So if you need help inside your organization, go to echelonfront.com. You can come to one of our live events as well. It's all there. Echelonfront.com. We also have online training, online life training is what it is. Look, it's, it's kind of represented as leadership training, but what is leadership training? Leadership is how you interact with other human beings, your friends, your family, your husband, your wife, your kids, and everybody that you work with. And the better you are with leadership skills, the better you're going to be as a human being.

• 2:59:53Jocko Willink?

  So go to extremeownership.com, check out our courses there. Also, if you want to help service members, active and retired, you want to help their families, Gold Star families, check out Mark Lee's mom, Mama Lee, she's got an amazing charity organization. If you want to donate, or you want to get involved, go to AmericasMightyWarriors.org. Also, heroesandhorses.org, we got Micah Fink, taking, taking our first responders and our veterans up into the mountains, where they get lost, so they can get found. Heroesandhorses.org. Also, Jimmy May's got his organization, BeyondTheBrotherhood.org. So, connect with those to help out. And if you want to connect with Arthur, once again, arthurbrooks.com. He's got Twitter, @ArthurBrooks.

• 3:00:36Jocko Willink?

  He's got Instagram, @ArthurCBrooks, YouTube, @ArthurBrooks123, and Facebook's @ArthurBrooks. Echo is @EchoCharles. I'm @JockoWilling. Just be careful. If you go to connect with us, looking for happiness, you're not going to find it there. Don't go there looking for happiness. All you're going to find is an algorithm that's going to grab you by the jugular and kill you. So be careful. Thanks once again to all of the military personnel out there around the world right now, keeping us safe and secure. We get to do every day, what we do because of the sacrifices that you make, and we are grateful. Same goes to our police, law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, Border Patrol, Secret Service, all first responders. Thank you for keeping

• 3:01:21Jocko Willink?

  us safe and secure here at home, and everyone else out there.

• 3:01:28Jocko Willink?

  Happiness is not found by doing what is easy or what feels good in the moment. At least not long-term lasting happiness. That's not what we're going for. Sure, you can go feel good right now by eating a donut. Or having a drink, an alcoholic drink. Or watching another Netflix program or scrolling through your social media. You can do those things, but it's not going to give you the long-term happiness that you're looking for.

• 3:01:58Jocko Willink?

  I say you start with helping others, working hard and doing the right things for the right reasons.

• 3:02:06Jocko Willink?

  And what I mean by that is basically if you want to be happy, I recommend that you go out there and get after it. And until next time, this is Echo and Jocko, out.