Jocko Underground: If Something Stinks, FIX IT. Get People to Trust you. New Police Training Procedures.

If it stinks, fix it. How to build trust up the chain of command. Putting up with shit, and checking your ego. Implementing new Police training procedures. Cover and move with your spouse. 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 the Jocko Underground Podcast, number 13, with Echo Charles and me, Jocko Willink. Good evening, Echo. Good evening. All right, so I was in a house in Iraq, in my first deployment to Iraq, so 2000, this was either 2003 or 2004, and it was a small farmhouse out in the middle of nowhere. I forget the full background of the scenario, but it was something like one of the elder sons of this particular family had been mixed up in some kind of insurgent operation. So we're out there looking for this kid. And by kid, I mean, you know, 25-year-old, military-age male.

• 0:43Jocko Willink?

  We raid this house, looking for this, this military-age male. And we get the building cleared, and the guy wasn't there, but, you know, his family was there. And so we've got the interpreter, and the interpreter's kind of talking to the family. And there's some kids there, and so the guys are giving some, you know, candy to the kids and this kind of stuff, looking around. The house was basically one big room. Basically, one big room. And there was mattresses on the floor in one of the corners. This is real common over there for some of the people on the lower end of the economic spectrum. They would just sleep with mattresses on the floor, and they'd have blankets and mattresses

• 1:28Jocko Willink?

  kind of piled up. And that's where the family would eat. So that was in kind of one corner. Then there was a table for eating with a couple chairs around it, a few chairs around it, you know, four or five chairs around this table. And then there was another table next to it that was sort of, I guess it would be considered the counter space of a kitchen. And then there was a sink with a water faucet, right? So it was, there was some form of running water and a sink of some kind, you know, just picture like an old-school kind of porcelain thing.

• 2:03Jocko Willink?

  All pretty old fashioned sink, but is working and then

• 2:08Jocko Willink?

  in between the table where the kind of counter table where they would prepare food and the table where they would eat and those were separated by call it six feet, five feet, six feet.

• 2:23Jocko Willink?

  There was a slit trench

• 2:28Jocko Willink?

  to go to the bathroom in.

• 2:31Jocko Willink?

  Now, okay, so what's a slit trench? So what this is, this is a, a little ditch, probably about six inches wide, maybe eight inches wide, probably about six inches deep. About two or three feet long and it's perpendicular to the wall. And then when it gets to the wall, there's a hole through the wall. And out the hole is a big, a big pit and it's a sewage pit. Actually, these are pretty common in Iraq. They're weak. We call, I don't know what they're called. We called them, we called them shit pits because they were just big pits that were filled with sewage.

• 3:13Jocko Willink?

  Kind of like almost an above ground septic tank, right? You go to the bathroom in there and over time, I guess maybe it goes away. I'm not a hundred percent sure. But there's this trench. There's, there's no running water down this trench. This is just in the concrete, in this concrete floor. And it didn't really have too much of an angle to it.

• 3:37Jocko Willink?

  This, I mean, at least not enough of an angle because most of the, most of the excrement and urine was, or, or I shouldn't say most, there was a bunch of excrement and urine in this slit trench.

• 3:55Jocko Willink?

  And I remember sitting there thinking about this, how, just thinking how must, how messed up this is, right? This is, this is messed up. And here were these people. And they were just normal people. I mean, sure, they had a son that had been rogue, right? It'd be like if your kid, your son got wrapped up in some gang and all of a sudden the cops try and come and find him at your house. And you're looking around going, wait a second, we're just normal. That's who this family was. They were, they were just kind of normal. My interpreter was having a good conversation with them and that, you know, he was kind of asking what their background was. When's the last time you saw your son and stuff like that? But it was also, you know, what do you do here? And they were farmers and they've lived there for a long time. You know, we're trying to figure out, do you have any other houses where your son could be? They're like, no, we don't have any other houses.

• 4:37Jocko Willink?

  This is where we live. This is our farm. This is what we do. They had, they had actually money. They had, you know, a couple. I think they had an Opel and then a, they had a couple, like a car and a truck. So they, they're able to get around. They're, they're obviously make money. You've got to get gas and stuff like this. So they have, this is, this is a family that's kind of put, they've got some things going for them. Right? They got a business. They got vehicles. They got housing.

• 5:04Jocko Willink?

  And yet with all that, they have this, this slit trench of shit that divides their, basically their kitchen and their dining room.

• 5:17Jocko Willink?

  And now listen, it, it's, it's in these types of rural areas, when you get out into these rural areas of Iraq, there's, it's pretty common that they wouldn't, they may or may not have running water. Right? There may not, may or may not have plumbing.

• 5:32Jocko Willink?

  But this, this level of kind of unsanitary conditions was not something that I saw very often. Most of the places, most of the farms, look, when you're in Baghdad and stuff, they have toilets and everything else, no factor. But you get out to the, the rural places, they would have like an outhouse or something, right? I mean, it's, you got to deal with it, right? You got to deal with it. So they'd have an outhouse or they'd have a separate room in the house. They kind of box something in and then there'd be a slit trench in there. But they'd have some way of making the consistent human issue of waste. They would have a way of making it either sanitary or somehow acceptable, right? They, they would figure it out.

• 6:17Jocko Willink?

  And this family was, didn't do that. Again, this is normal. These are people that I'm thinking, this was what was so mind boggling to me. It wasn't like these people were inbred, you know, whatever. It wasn't like they were, they were some stereotypical people that couldn't understand. They were normal people.

• 6:38Jocko Willink?

  So.

• 6:41Jocko Willink?

  It was, it also wasn't like this family had just arrived, right? Cause the interpreter's talking to them. They'd been there for a while. I mean, look, if you showed up at a place, if you, if you moved in three days ago and you haven't got a chance to figure this out yet, you know, okay, I get it, right? Takes a little time, but this was their actual home where they'd been. They'd been there for a long time for. I mean, I'm assuming maybe a couple of generations, but at least. At least many years, many, many years.

• 7:13Jocko Willink?

  And they still hadn't like remedied this problem.

• 7:21Jocko Willink?

  So. If you look at the other side of. Well, not the other side, but for us in the US military, all the times in the SEAL teams included, we would go and we would move into old buildings.

• 7:37Jocko Willink?

  We'd move into old buildings that were.

• 7:42Jocko Willink?

  You know, former, whatever, former regime elements or whatever. We'd move into buildings, we'd take them over. Maybe they're just hangers, right? Whatever. We'd move into buildings, we'd take them over and as soon as we'd move in somewhere, we'd start like. Doing a reorg and fixing stuff and rebuilding things and retrofitting whatever we could to make these things more livable. We'd do that almost instantly.

• 8:05Jocko Willink?

  And yet here was this. Situation where no move had been made to improve the scenario. And look, I'm talking about a place in Iraq, but you, this happens in America. Right? You go watch a, go watch a.

• 8:23Jocko Willink?

  An episode of Cops, right? And you see and you look at what's going on here. There's a bunch of little things that could be, you know, squared away in this particular situation. Why is this like this?

• 8:39Jocko Willink?

  And the reason that I'm saying this.

• 8:44Jocko Willink?

  Is because it kind of left a mark on me. It's something that I, it's something that I, that left a mark on me in two ways. The first way that it left a mark on me is I thought to myself, well, maybe the, maybe they, maybe these people for whatever reason just didn't understand the situation. Maybe this was just what was normal for them. You know, if you, this is how you were raised. This is what we do. This is how it works. But, but, but I actually don't even believe that. Because what ma, what makes that hard to accept? What makes that hard to accept is that there's shit in your kitchen. That's what makes it hard to accept.

• 9:26Jocko Willink?

  Right? There's different, yeah, you get raised in a certain cultural way, or you get raised by a family that, whatever they're doing, and that's what you understand the reality to be, and that's how you grow, that's how you grow up, and you think that's, that's the way it is. But you don't really, you don't really need to get taught that, that, you know, having a, having a trench to go to the bathroom in, in your kitchen, you don't need to get, no one needs to tell you that's, that's unsanitary. No one needs to tell you that. No one needs to tell you it's not hygienic to do that, right? You don't need to get told that. It, it reeks. It smells bad.

• 10:08Jocko Willink?

  And so you look at it, you go, you know what? This smells really bad. I'm gonna do something different. We're gonna make a change here. That's what we're gonna do. We're gonna make a change here. This, this system of sewage disposal could use some improvement. I'm gonna try something else. And then you do it. You try something else. You, you, you, I, I don't know what it is. Maybe you build a room around it. Maybe you move that thing outside. There's a bunch of different things you can try.

• 10:35Jocko Willink?

  But that, but so that's the other mark that got left on me is

• 10:42Jocko Willink?

  if something stinks,

• 10:45Jocko Willink?

  then fix it.

• 10:49Jocko Willink?

  If something stinks in your life, if there's something wrong, then fix it. Now, look, I get that there's things that, there's some things in life that we can't fix. Right? You can get a disease, you can have acts of God unfold upon you with no mercy and there's, you, you, well, then what you do is you, you face those things and you take ownership of how you respond to those horrible events when they happen.

• 11:21Jocko Willink?

  But

• 11:23Jocko Willink?

  oftentimes, there's things in our lives that stink.

• 11:30Jocko Willink?

  And we can actually do something about it.

• 11:35Jocko Willink?

  We can actually do something about it. So when I see something in my life, when I see something in my life that needs to get fixed, I, I, I might, I might blow it off once and go, ah, you know, no big deal. And then I think,

• 11:48Jocko Willink?

  so that is a little excerpt of what we are doing on the Jocko Underground Podcast. So if you want to continue to listen,

• 11:58Jocko Willink?

  go to jacood underground.com and subscribe and we're doing this, we're doing this to mitigate our reliance on external platforms. So we are not subject to their control and we are doing this so that we can support the Jocko Podcast, which will remain as is free for all, as long as we can keep it that way. But we, but we are doing this so we don't have to be under the control of sponsors. And we're doing it so we can give you.

• 12:30Jocko Willink?

  More control, more interaction, more direct connections, better communications with us. And to do that, we are, we're building a website right now where we'll be able to utilize to strengthen this legion of troopers that are in the game with us. So, thank you. It's jocko underground.com. It costs $8.18 a month. And if you can't afford to support us, we can still support you. Just email [email protected] and we'll get you taken care of. Until then, we will see you mobilized underground.