239: Avoid The Trap. It's Critical to Learn Lessons From Different Angles. With Dave Berke

0:00:00 - Opening 0:08:00 - Combat Lessons: Rank and File in Combat: What They're Doing and How They're Doing It. 1:44:08 - Final thoughts and take-aways. 2:06:32 - How to stay on THE PATH. 2:34:11 - Closing Gratitude. 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 239 with Echo Charles and me Jocko Willink. Good evening, Echo. Good evening. And also joining us tonight is Dave Berke. Good evening, Dave. Good evening. So last podcast, we went through the Wu Zi, which you did some, you did some research and we did not come up with the meaning of the word Wu Zi, other than room. Okay, so Wu Zi by Wu Chi from ancient China. Lot of solid leadership lessons in there. And I was thinking about these leadership principles and how leadership principles are not supposed to change.

• 0:43Jocko Willink?

  Right, that's kind of, you know, I say, oh, you know, leadership principles stay the same. And when you read through the Wu Zi, you start to get some supporting evidence to that. Because he's talking about the fact that you need to be benevolent and you need to treat people well and treat them with respect and take care of your people. Which is all things that, you know, I talk about, we all talk about. But then in the Wu Zi, it also says, "To execute anyone that disobeys your orders." So, so that leads you to think, well, maybe some principles have changed.

• 1:23Jocko Willink?

  And, you know, I used to actually have a rationalization for this or an excuse for this. And what I would say is, there's, there's a difference in leadership when you're leading conscripts instead of volunteers. And so as leadership moved away from, on military leadership, and that, by the way, when you go back in time, it's not just military leadership. Because what are the people? The people are serfs and peasants and they're being led by these kings with divine power. So, but as time went by, it's like, okay. So that's why the leadership principle might not really fit. Maybe that's why it changes. But then I started thinking about that.

• 2:07Jocko Willink?

  What if you go ahead and actually let those things play out? Right? And actually, that question has been answered, right? That's what history is. And what happens is if you're executing people, if you're not treating people the right way as leaders, what happens? Eventually, what do you get? You get a revolution. You get people to come after you and take you out of power. And look, just like we talk about, you can get people on board for a little while, right? If I have, you know, 5,000 soldiers and they see me execute two people that didn't follow my orders, they're going to follow my orders for a little while, right?

• 2:48Jocko Willink?

  Maybe for a long time, maybe since that extreme measure, maybe they'll follow my orders for a year. They'll just live in fear. But when that opportunity arrives for them to step up and take that power away from you, they're going to do it. That's what we see play out. And then the other side, so now we go to the side of, okay, so I'm going to take care of my people. That's what I'm going to do. But just like we say, that doesn't mean we coddle our people. Because if we coddle our people, then they're, they're soft and they destroy themselves. They, they fall apart. So, and we see that play out in the world.

• 3:29Jocko Willink?

  When a, when a society gets too soft, they can no longer survive. So even in ancient times with conscripts and peasants and serfs and slaves, if you let things play out, the leadership principles still actually apply. And, and then I started thinking about tactics, which this is another thing that I used to sort of, I used to, I used to sort of say the same thing about tactics, which is, hey, you know, the principles on the battlefield, they don't change until you go before the machine gun, right? Or the, at least the gun, right? Because that's, that's where you start to talk about covered move.

• 4:12Jocko Willink?

  And that's where it really plays into, plays into how you're going to fight. But then.

• 4:21Jocko Willink?

  If you adjust your perspective a little bit, if we're fighting with spears and we're in a phalanx, guess what? I've got my shield, I'm holding my shield up. It protects the left part of my body and it protects the right part of the person to my left. And I am being protected, covered by the person on my right. And what we're gonna do is cover for each other as we advance with a phalanx. So, we still have to look out for each other. Teamwork still absolutely applies.

• 4:55Jocko Willink?

  And then I was thinking about the fact that, you know, here's a, here's a military principle that, I was just trying to think of things that don't apply, right? Well, in modern combat, we follow a rule of dispersion, meaning we want to be spread apart. We don't want to be too close together. So that's obviously completely contrary to the idea of being in a phalanx, where we're gonna get as close as we can, we're gonna keep tight, we're gonna move forward. But if you change your perspective just a little bit, you, and this is, this is one of those doctrinal terms that I was able to uncover because of what I used to tell guys is, hey, if you're alone on the battlefield, you're gonna die. If you get too far away from your element, the other element, you can't support each other.

• 5:39Jocko Willink?

  That's what cover and move is. So if you're too far away, you're, you can't support each other and you will get killed. Cause if we're alone, we die. And that, that doctrinal term, that when I found it, I, I used to get these beautiful satisfactory, satisfactory moments in my life where I would have an idea and then I would see that it already existed. And, and that doctrinal term that I would then walk around as if I, as if I knew it, you know, as if, as if it was just, you know, but it's called supporting distance. So you, Dave, shouldn't take your squad beyond where my range, the web, the range of my weapons. And then when you start to talk about that, that means, you know, communications as well.

• 6:22Jocko Willink?

  If I don't, can't get, you know, communications with you, then I can't support you. If my weapons can't reach out and touch and give you support, then we're not in supporting distance. And that's too far away. What does that mean? You just change your perspective a little bit and dispersion, which is positive, but if you get too far apart, it's negative.

• 6:42Jocko Willink?

  So.

• 6:45Jocko Willink?

  These lessons are the same over time and yet, we still have to teach them. Cause we still make mistakes. And when we learn things from a different angle and even reading a document yesterday that's thousands or the last podcast, a document that's thousands of years old, you'd think to yourself that after thousands of years, thousands of years, we would be talking about these leadership principles in the most commonly known way that everybody just like, you know, I couldn't have written extreme ownership because people would have been just, you know, saying, "Hey, no kidding dude. What are you talking about? This is, this is, this is part of the fabric of life."

• 7:29Jocko Willink?

  But these things aren't, they're, they're not, they're not the fabric of life. They're, they, they just seem to need to be rediscovered over and over again, which is, which is horrible. But one thing I think allows us to learn them in a more complete way is seeing them from different angles, from other experiences. And today, we're going to take a look at combat lessons. Which you know, when that's the name of the document, you're, you're setting up in a good spot. The subtitle, it's published in 1944, the subtitle is Rank and File in Combat. What they're doing, how they are doing it.

• 8:10Jocko Willink?

  So you know, when I see that, I'm thinking, okay, we are going to learn something. So with that, we will bust into this book. Combat Lessons, number one. I've got number two. I'm sure it'll make an appearance in the future. The introduction to this thing, this is one of those things where you get done reading the introduction and maybe you don't even have to read anything else because you're just almost there. Introduction. "The purpose of combat lessons is to give our officers and enlisted men the benefit of the battle experiences of others." Which comes right out of, uh, Learning, United States Marine Corps. "To be of maximum benefit,

• 8:55Jocko Willink?

  these lessons must be disseminated without delay. They do not necessarily represent the carefully considered views of the War Department. They do however, reflect the actual experiences of combat and therefore merit careful, merit careful reading."

• 9:12Jocko Willink?

  For this reason, also, no single issue can cover many of the phases of combat. Lessons will be drawn from the reports as they are received from the theaters of operation and quickly disseminated so that others may apply them. The suggestions which are made or implied are not intended to change the tactical doctrine by which our army has been trained, but rather to elaborate thereon. Much of the subject matter has been covered in training literature, but the comments show that shortcomings continue to manifest themselves on the battlefield.

• 9:49Jocko Willink?

  And then it says this, "The paramount combat lesson learned from every operation is the vital importance of leadership. Our equipment, our supply, and above all, our men are splendid. Aggressive and determined leadership is the priceless factor which inspires a command and upon which all success in battle depends.

• 10:18Jocko Willink?

  It is responsible for success or failure."

• 10:28Jocko Willink?

  I don't know if I have that thing trademarked of leadership is the most important thing on the battlefield. I don't, I don't know if I, but I don't know if I could even get it trademarked, right?

• 10:39Jocko Willink?

  Same exact thing, same exact thing. This is signed by General Marshall,

• 10:48Jocko Willink?

  who's the chief of staff in the army during World War II. He was in World War I, First Division.

• 10:56Jocko Willink?

  He was an infantry platoon commander in the Philippine-American War. And he's signing this thing. So let's jump into it.

• 11:08Jocko Willink?

  And, and you're going to see that this is one of the most straightforward documents that, well, it's as straightforward as you can get because all it is basically is quotes from people on the front lines. That's all it is, just quotes. There's no, there's, there's, there's some little added commentary occasionally.

• 11:30Jocko Willink?

  Section one infantry.

• 11:34Jocko Willink?

  Again and again, reports from the battlefields confirm the importance of leadership in every grade, whether it be corporal or colonel.

• 11:44Jocko Willink?

  Other combat lessons are important. The exercise of leadership in battle is vital. Leadership has often been defined in theory. Here are some instances of its application or its absence on the battlefield. These are but a few examples. There are many others.

• 12:02Jocko Willink?

  Junior officer in battle, Captain T. Captain William T. Gordon, infantry, Sicily. Since November 8th,

• 12:11Jocko Willink?

  I have had 17 officers in my company.

• 12:15Jocko Willink?

  And I am the only one who started out with it, who is left to fight.

• 12:20Jocko Willink?

  In Tunisia, the, from troops pinned down in the dark, I have heard enlisted men call out such things as, "Where is an officer to lead us? We don't want to lie here. We want to attack. Where is an officer?"

• 12:35Jocko Willink?

  In each case, an officer or officers have risen to the occasion, but this nevertheless shows beyond anything else, the demand for battle leadership.

• 12:47Jocko Willink?

  You know, it's interesting, Dave, we had a, we just kind of went off yesterday during EF Online, talking about the leadership vacuum, right? And knowing when to step up. And this is, these situations right here, you know, my immediate, my immediate thought is, if I don't have enlisted, if I have enlisted people that are calling out, you know, "Hey, where's an officer? We want to attack." I'm, I'm not happy with my training. I'm not happy with my troops. I'm not happy with the job that I did. I'm not happy with my performance in preparing them for combat. Because if they need, if there's a leadership vacuum and no one's stepping up, they need to step up.

• 13:29Jocko Willink?

  We had a conversation, again, that was on EF Online yesterday, where you, just because you're in charge doesn't mean you need to talk.

• 13:39Jocko Willink?

  In fact, if you don't need to talk, then you shouldn't talk.

• 13:48Jocko Willink?

  If I walk into a room, if we're having a meeting at Echelon Front, and Jamie, our operations director, is, you know, if she's, if she's putting out the word about what's gonna happen, and I go in there and I see that she's got the timeline laid out, and she's telling us where we need to be, at what time, and we're getting ready for the muster, and she's got everything laid out, what do I need to say?

• 14:12Jocko Willink?

  I mean, I'm officially in charge. What do I need to say?

• 14:15Jocko Willink?

  Maybe, maybe,

• 14:18Jocko Willink?

  looks good, thank you? Like, maybe?

• 14:22Jocko Willink?

  So, you don't need to step up. And, you know, I went into great detail in this, in Leadership Strategy and Tactics, talking about this, this leadership vacuum, and how it appears sometimes, and the real nitty gritty techniques that you pay attention to. One of the things that you pay attention to is, if there's a leadership vacuum and no one else knows it, they're not ready, they might not be ready to make an, to, to follow.

• 14:50Jocko Willink?

  When no one knows there's, when, when they don't sense it, when they're just kinda sitting there, "Oh, we're doing okay", and you say, "Hey, we need to move", your immediate response might be, "Why? Wait, what are you talking about?" They haven't sensed the leadership vacuum. They don't know that there's a problem. So sometimes you hesitate just a little bit longer. Let everyone feel that,

• 15:11Jocko Willink?

  feel that lack of leadership. And then when you step in there with a command, boom, they're waiting for it. They're waiting for it. And that is an important thing, and that's an important,

• 15:23Jocko Willink?

  it's an important dichotomy, I'm sorry, I have to say. It's an important dichotomy is that, yes, there will be many, many times when you, as a leader, don't have to say anything, and there will be many, many times where your team is absolutely waiting and begging to be told, "Hey, this is what we need to do now."

• 15:52Jocko Willink?

  Back to the book. A company officer must build a legend about himself. He must take calculated risks. He must, on the other hand, do what he expects his men to do. He must always dig in, always take cover. His men must know that when he ducks, they must duck. On the other hand, they must not believe that when the officer ducks, they must run away.

• 16:15Jocko Willink?

  The officer must come through every barrage and bombing with a sheepish grin and a wry remark. Masterly understatement of hardship and danger endured, plus a grin, always pays dividends.

• 16:36Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, um, we got ambushed, my, my first deployment to Iraq, and I was in vehicle two. And the tail end, because we were driving fast at night and everything, and they got, and I saw, I mean, I saw us getting ambushed, but we were going fast. It was on a, it was on a highway south of Baghdad. And, you know, I'm looking and at this point, we were, we were, we would face not forward, we would face out the sides. And so, you know, I see RPGs going over and exploding and tracer fire, um, to and from. And, but then, you know, what we just, you know, the lead drivers like push through, push through, which was just kind of what we were gonna do, keep going.

• 17:17Jocko Willink?

  And then the, the shooting stops and we're still driving. And then my, my, my chief, who is in the, the rear vehicle, which is purposely set up that way, because that way, if you have to reverse, you've got, you know, your, your, your most senior leader, enlisted leaders in the back, he's gonna take. And also if something goes wrong, he's gonna assess. So he's back there. And, you know, he says, he, he's, they got, they got, you know, those RPGs were close, a lot closer to him than they were to me. He comes up, he's like, hey, sir, which, you know, first of all, he rarely would call me sir, you know, but he's like, hey, sir. You know, we got ambushed back here. And I could hear in his voice, he's a little freaked out. And, uh, I waited a solid, you know, like,

• 18:02Jocko Willink?

  Ten seconds and then I came up and said Roger. And that was it. And you know, they all, once we got down to where we were going, they're all like, oh, Roger, you know? So yeah, I like this thing of, you know, hey, just a little grin, a wry remark.

• 18:20Jocko Willink?

  We'll be good.

• 18:21Speaker 01

  It's kind of like when your kid falls down.

• 18:22Jocko Willink?

  Yes, exactly like when your kid falls down.

• 18:25Speaker 01

  And then he looks at you, kind of like, what are we doing here? We crying? Or we whatever? And then, yeah, you know, no big deal kind of a thing.

• 18:33Jocko Willink?

  We're laughing. Yeah, we're laughing. You know, I used to say like, oh, that was awesome. Nice.

• 18:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:41Jocko Willink?

  You check out this, check out your leg. It's gonna bleed.

• 18:47Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. My kid came home yesterday, just blood everywhere. He hit the reef.

• 18:56Speaker 01

  You were so proud.

• 18:57Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, no, it's just, you know, he's just covered in blood and like, hmm.

• 19:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, the reef will get you.

• 19:04Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. The barnacles, what it is out here in California. The reefs are just rock. It's not coral. Like you always hear about the coral reefs with the razors.

• 19:13Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 19:13Jocko Willink?

  This is just rocks, but they have barnacles on them. And if you go touch a barnacle, they're sharp. And if you fall and you scrape against them, you're getting cut open. You're gonna be bleeding everywhere. But do not come into the house with the blood is the main moral of the story. Get the hose, get, take care of business. Next section.

• 19:34Jocko Willink?

  This is an interesting one, and this really shows you. This is one of those things where you think, you know, the world is different.

• 19:43Jocko Willink?

  This was a different time. This section says, hate your enemy.

• 19:51Jocko Willink?

  Our men do not ordinarily hate. They must hate. They are better soldiers when they hate. They must not fraternize with prisoners, must not give them cigarettes and food the moment they are taken. Hate can be taught men by meticulous example. The Rangers are so taught.

• 20:14Jocko Willink?

  That's a different world. That is not in any modern army publications. And then you think about, you know, World War II. You think about what those guys were going into. You think about what you had to get, the mindset you had to bring out in people when they were in a landing craft and they were going to go land on Tarawa or Iwo Jima or Normandy. You gotta, you gotta dig deep. It's an interesting, it's an interesting comment. We are, we are at total war.

• 20:54Jocko Willink?

  Just so everyone doesn't freak out, this isn't taught anymore. And I will say this, it's not taught anymore right now. But we better remember this. Because if the world, we could get to a place where this is needed again. I'm sorry to report, and I hope we don't. I hope we can always be going into wars saying, yep, it's a small element of people and they've got some bad feelings and they've got some reasons for their, their anger towards us, but we need to go and show them that we're a benevolent group and we can help them move on. Yeah, those are all, that's great. Hopefully we fight wars like that.

• 21:38Jocko Willink?

  Hopefully we don't have to fight any more wars where the doctrine is being adjusted to get us to hate our enemy. Next one, leaders in front. Staff Sergeant Richard E. Dealand, infantry, Sicily. We want our captains out front. We don't much care about the position of our battalion commander. That's it. That's the whole, that's the whole note.

• 22:14Jocko Willink?

  Keep them moving.

• 22:17Jocko Willink?

  Operation Report, 7th Army Sicily. During an attack, officers and non-commissioned officers must never allow men to lie prone and passive under enemy fire. They must be required to move forward if this is at all possible. If movement is absolutely impossible, have the troops at least open fire.

• 22:38Jocko Willink?

  The act of firing induces self-confidence in attacking troops. The familiar expression "dig or die" has been greatly overworked. Attacking troops must not be allowed to dig in until they have secured their final objective. If they dig in when momentarily stopped by enemy fire, it will take dynamite to blast them from their holes and resume the advance.

• 23:06Jocko Willink?

  This is another thing, and we're going to get into some of this. There's another element, again, where you get to total war.

• 23:16Jocko Willink?

  And that's what, that's what, that's what, that's what these things are leaning towards. We're in a totally different situation. You know, this is, this is an existential war, where if we don't win, America's not going to exist. Freedom will not exist in the world.

• 23:33Jocko Willink?

  NCO leadership. Staff Sergeant Robert J. Kemp, Platoon Sergeant, Infantry, Sicily. NCO leadership is important. Leaders, NCOs, and officers should be taken to an OP for terrain instruction and study before an attack. This has been possible in my outfit about one-fourth of the time. We have what is called an orders group, which consists of that group of officers and NCOs that must be assembled for instruction before any tactical move.

• 24:02Jocko Willink?

  Simple, clear, concise orders. Get people together, get face-to-face with them, look at the terrain, show them what they're seeing, show them where they're going to move to.

• 24:14Jocko Willink?

  And this seems real obvious. And yet, this guy is saying, "Hey, you better do it."

• 24:26Jocko Willink?

  Keep your mission in mind. Colonel EB Thayer, Field Artillery Observer with 5th Army Italy. "Difficulty was experienced in making patrol leaders realize the importance of bringing back information by a specified hour in time to be of value. Patrols often returned after encountering resistance without accomplishing their mission. Sending them back to accomplish their mission, despite their fatigue, seemed to be the most effective solution to the training problem involved, although the information required often arrived too late." And then this other guy says, this is Lieutenant Colonel TF Bogart, Infantry. And actually, Dave, I know you haven't heard this yet.

• 25:10Jocko Willink?

  I went on kind of a massive tangent the other day, on the last podcast, about seeing some of the SEAL machine gunners, and just how in tuned they were with their weapons and the great lengths that they would go to develop their own personal individual standard operating procedures, so that they're working that thing like a painter works a brush. And just, I said if, if I could take videos, and there's two guys in particular that, that I was, I actually went through SEAL training with both of them, and then I ended up in platoons with them at SEAL Team One, back in the day.

• 25:50Jocko Willink?

  And if I had videos of them assaulting through targets with their M60 machine guns, and the incredible smoothness with which they would handle the weapon and, and open up the feed tray and slap out extra links and pull out their new belt and slap feet, just, it would look beautiful. And I was like, eh, if, if we could have, if you could post those videos, no one would want to go to war with America, if they know people like that are out there. And it's not, and obviously it's not just SEAL machine gunners. It's like every, it's like, there is a pocket of every, every sector of the military, where there are people, that is what they are doing. That's who they are.

• 26:36Dave Berke?

  Yeah, there's, there's a version of that in everything for the people that that kind of fall in love with what they're doing. You know, when they just fall in love with whatever their job is. I was just kind of remarking as you go through these. They're said in a way that I can't think of anything else to say other than, yeah, do that. That's really good. And that the way he said it is, is, is right. And I'm kind of racking my brain. I'm like, how can I create some context around this? Like, no, that's, that's it. That's pretty good.

• 27:04Dave Berke?

  So I think I'm just going to sit here for the next hour, listen to you repeat what these guys have said. But I mean, the thing that's crazy about it is they seem so obvious. And it's like you said earlier, is in some ways, it's a little bit disheartening at how often they need to be repeated. Because the way they're saying it isn't really that complex. Like, man, that's, that's as clear as anybody could say it.

• 27:26Jocko Willink?

  Do you think you take a statement? And this, this goes back to what we were talking about as far as, hey, I'm a leader. If I walk into a room and I sit through the brief and nothing needs to be said, I'm not going to say anything. If someone takes a, something like a, a fundamental principle of combat, cover and move, right? And they say, okay. But I'm going to expand on that a little bit. And then they expand on it. And then someone else expands on that expansion. Then someone else expands on that expansion. And the next thing you know, you don't even, you can't, you can't see cover and move anymore. It becomes something else.

• 28:01Dave Berke?

  For sure. The, the, the, the complexity of those things, that's I think why these things are so powerful. I was even writing down the little notes to myself of what was my version of what you were just saying. I wrote down like, we, we had the phrase mutual support. That's what we called it in airplanes. We had to apply mutual support to each other. It's cover and move. It's just cover and move. That's all it is. And technology is sort of redefined where we would need to be to apply that mutual support. But the principle hasn't changed. But if you're not careful and you get too wrapped up around this piece of technology allows me to get to this range. Over time, you lose the idea that all that really matters is that you and I work closely enough together.

• 28:42Dave Berke?

  That I can cover you and you can cover me and those roles will go back and forth in some sort of unknown. It's not predetermined. It's just going to happen. And the better we are at it, the more naturally it happens. But all it is is mutual support. And I remember sitting in briefs. I'm like, hang on, are you just saying you want me to stay a certain distance away from you? So I can help you with the, and when we interact with other aircraft? Hey, just say that. And if I, it's training too, because if I get it wrong, we could just come back and debrief it. It's okay. But you have spent like nine minutes talking about the nuances of that when there's no way to predict. And I've lost sight of what you're really trying to tell me, which is, don't get too far away, man. Check.

• 29:16Jocko Willink?

  The, I, I, that just made me think. I was up with an air wing in Fallon. And I remember, I don't even, this, this is definitely one of my early sort of graspings of the idea of cover and move. Was we would put a, a squad on the ground. And when we would get extracted, when we put on the ground or we get extracted. I remember briefing the helicopter pilots and I don't know if I learned it from them or, I don't know. But I remember saying, hey, and I actually have, I have a, I have a book that I wrote. I have a book that I wrote when I was at SEAL Team when I was a communicator. It's called Communications. And a lot of it, I wrote it with a buddy of mine who is another communicator.

• 30:01Jocko Willink?

  And he wrote a lot of this technical stuff about how to operate each individual radio. And I just wrote, my section, I mean, I helped him a little bit with that. Very little, because he was smarter than me. And so he wrote, you know, how to do the little things and. But I wrote all the stuff about, hey, when you're calling in a helicopter, here's what you need to do. And, and I'm going to find this because I have this book, I have it. And, and one of the things I said was, leave one helicopter at altitude to provide cover fire for the helicopter that's on the ground. And here I was, a new guy, kind of thinking that I had a little something, you know, I had a little something for these guys.

• 30:43Jocko Willink?

  And that's one of the initial kind of thoughts around, or me starting to realize that cover and move wasn't just, that, that it really was the fundamental of everything that we were doing. And, and the other thing that I scratched down. When, when I talk about people, you're talking about people being really good at their jobs. I was doing some kind of an exercise up at Camp Pendleton and somehow we got linked into a mortar, a Marine Corps mortar element. And, bro, these guys were doing IADS, immediate action drills with their mortars. And, you know, I just remember watching them.

• 31:21Jocko Willink?

  And I don't know what, I don't know how you put words. I don't know, but you know, they were, you know, they're freaking 18 years old and they hear, you know, contact, right? And then boom, a guy's slapping down the base plate, the guy's lights on, boom, and they're getting rounds out like in so fast. I don't know how fast it was, but so fast.

• 31:44Dave Berke?

  Accurate rounds.

• 31:45Jocko Willink?

  And then immediately correcting, bracketing, and they're good and they're on target. And you just think, you know what? We're good. America's good.

• 31:57Jocko Willink?

  All right, Lieutenant Colonel TF Bogart.

• 32:01Jocko Willink?

  Greater emphasis must be placed on inculcating in junior officers and NCOs the will to accomplish assigned missions despite opposition. A few accounts of patrol actions illustrate this point. And he goes through these reconnaissance patrol consisting of a platoon was sent out about 1901 evening to determine the strength of any, if any, of Germans in two small towns, the first about two miles away and the second about three miles farther on. The patrol reached the outskirts of the first town and met an Italian who told them there were no Germans in the town and then started to lead the patrol into town. A few hundred yards further, farther, a German machine gun opened up, the Italian disappeared, three of the patrol were killed and the others dispersed. They drifted back to our battalion

• 32:41Jocko Willink?

  during the night and it was not until nearly daylight that the practically valueless report of action was received. Not the slightest conception of the strength of the first town was obtained and no information of the second town. It was necessary to send out another patrol with the same mission. So that's, that's number one.

• 33:03Jocko Willink?

  And again, I think this is, this is, this just shows you that this is a different time. And they're like, hey, you took some casualties, you got three guys killed. You, you, it doesn't matter. You got it. You still gotta go figure out what the strength was in there. Obviously, you got some Germans in there. And by the way, there's another town two miles away. You need to go get on that too. That is not a consistent attitude with the current operations, right? Where you go, oh yeah, we took three casualties, but we're continuing down here on this reconnaissance mission, by the way.

• 33:31Jocko Willink?

  Freaking legit. Two, a patrol was sent out with the mission of determining the condition of a road, especially bridges, over a three-mile stretch to the front. When this patrol had covered about a mile, it ran into a motorized German patrol. Two of the Americans were killed, and the platoon leader claimed six Germans. The patrol leader forgot his mission, returned to the battalion CP with the remainder of his patrol, and had to be sent out again with a great loss in time getting the information desired. This dude's out there, gets into contact with a motorized German patrol, has two guys killed, killed six Germans, comes back to base, he's probably totally amped and feeling like he did a great job, and they say, "Hey, did you complete your mission?" "No." "Oh, Roger that. Go back out."

• 34:14Jocko Willink?

  These are hard men. Yeah. Last one. "On several occasions, patrols were sent out on reconnaissance missions with instructions to get certain information by a specific time. The hour would pass, and sometimes several others, without a word from the patrol. Sometimes it was due to difficulties encountered, sometimes to mistakes in computation of time and space factors, but in all cases, there was no good reason why some information didn't get back by the specified time."

• 34:41Jocko Willink?

  And here's, I said there were some occasional comments amplifying information, so here's the comment. Comment, "The failure of patrols in these instances stems from a lack of appreciation on the part of NCOs and junior officers of their missions. In patrol actions, as in the operations of larger units, the mission must be kept uppermost in the minds of all ranks, and no action should be undertaken which does not contribute directly to the accomplishment of that mission. Conversely, no incidental or inadvertent contact with the enemy should deter or divert patrols from the complete accomplishment of their

• 35:22Jocko Willink?

  missions, to include compliance with all instructions given where humanly possible."

• 35:29Jocko Willink?

  These guys are freaking just legit. That's because this is total war. Yeah. That's because this is an existential war.

• 35:40Dave Berke?

  There's so much insulation that we sometimes try to create and I remember feeling it on my deployment to Ramadi, which is very different than my deployments in an aircraft. And I even remember feeling the sense of wanting to insulate my own family from what I was doing. The feeling of just wanting to keep them insulated from the reality. When actually, all that did, to be honest with you, for my wife is made it kind of worse because she had to create something in her mind and she had to try to piece it together, which she simply couldn't do. But that need to insulate, if that ends up on the inside with your own folks,

• 36:14Dave Berke?

  and that becomes most obvious when you start losing people. And the question of, hey, how much time are we going to take? How much downtime are we going to take? And I'm listening to this and it's like, that's not even, there's not, we're not even, that conversation isn't even happening. We're not talking about, hey, what are we going to do to acknowledge what has happened here? Which of course you want to do, but this is not an option. And the leadership isn't even contemplating that. It's funny, the way he said that, my mind immediately went, I want to write that differently. Instead of these staff NCOs and the junior officers not understanding it, it's the leadership has failed to explain to them the context that they should understand and we actually aren't doing our jobs.

• 36:58Dave Berke?

  I might have gotten ahead of myself, it looks like you're laughing at something.

• 37:01Jocko Willink?

  I'm laughing.

• 37:02Dave Berke?

  Even when he said that, it's like, no, that's not what happened.

• 37:05Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I'm laughing because you can see my note right there says, "Ownership?" Question mark. Exact same thing is, you know, when you blame your NCOs and your junior officers because they don't appreciate their mission and they don't understand it. Well, guess what, whose fault is that all day long?

• 37:20Dave Berke?

  Totally.

• 37:21Jocko Willink?

  It's my fault as a leader for letting those junior officers go out there.

• 37:24Dave Berke?

  And I'm not sitting over here trying to pick apart the things they're saying. I'm just picturing every time, every time I placed a demand on guys on my team that they understood, it wasn't even hard for them to step up. I mean, it was a challenging situation, but if they understand why we were just stepping up and making things happen when it was hard, no factor. My 18-year-old Marines were gone, no factor.

• 37:45Jocko Willink?

  But if I failed to give them that and then something difficult happened that created some friction and some doubt, that was a much harder problem to get past if they didn't understand why they needed to get past it. And that was always, always on me, always. Or it was on the 18-year-old kid on his very first deployment that one of his closest friends had just gotten killed. It's either on him or it's on me. It was not even hard. But if you gave him that context, what they could overcome and endure, I don't mean to say that it wasn't hard. Maybe that's the wrong way to describe it, but boy, they did it every single time without hesitation. Yeah, and that's, that's the whole US military, even though, you know, as I read this, I'm like, man, these guys were hard. But that's what we do in the military, you

• 38:24Jocko Willink?

  know, you take casualties and then you, you go, you go do your job. That's what you do. Next one, team up, Captain William T. Gordon, Infantry, Sicily. I have found that men in position must fight in pairs in order that 50% stay awake is thus easily enforced. It bolsters morale and nerves. Rally point in every company attack order, a reserve force must be prescribed. I always do, even though sometimes this force consists only of myself and my first sergeant. Often a soldier who a moment before is run away is converted to

• 39:07Jocko Willink?

  a fighter by leadership. A reserve force gives him a rallying point. That's brilliant. Just having a fallback point, even if it's two people. Hey, if you gotta run away, run to here. And then who's there? The platoon commander and the first sergeant like, all right, buddy. Here, take some ammo. Get ready, because we're gonna rock and roll. Fear is normal. Colonel George Taylor, Infantry, Sicily. Fear of being afraid is the greatest obstacle for the new man in battle to overcome. There is no reason for shame in being afraid. Men who have had excellent battle records freely admit they are scared stiff in battle.

• 39:48Jocko Willink?

  The important thing is that every soldier must be taught all he needs to know so well that battlefield thinking is reduced to a minimum. Automatic disciplined reactions to battlefield problems must be the rule.

• 40:04Jocko Willink?

  In battle, the worst element is mental and nervous exhaustion. There is no real rest under fire. The ability to withstand fire is more important than all the knowledge in the world.

• 40:22Jocko Willink?

  What are you writing down?

• 40:23Dave Berke?

  Nervous exhaustion.

• 40:24Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 40:25Dave Berke?

  The idea that you will exhaust yourself and render yourself incapable just by creating the fear in your mind by when you don't react to what's going on, you just you and you I've seen it where people get overwhelmed by the moment and they end up doing nothing and they literally exhaust themselves in in their own minds by being afraid of what's out there rather than just facing what's out there, which is extremely hard to do. But just the way he wrote that that nervous exhaustion is such an awesome way to describe what sometimes people do when they're just freaking out of what's happening. They exhaust themselves into doing nothing.

• 41:04Jocko Willink?

  The I got mortared a couple of times and actually my platoon of my first deployment, we went to this outstation. It was a special forces outstation. It was in a rough neighborhood in Baghdad and we got mortared a decent amount that night and like the next day, I let me rephrase that. We probably got hit with a RPG or two, maybe a rifle fired grenade and then

• 41:40Jocko Willink?

  I don't know, some number of mortars more than more than three or four like decent, right? Which by the way,

• 41:52Jocko Willink?

  when you compare it to this is just nothing, just nothing. And the reason I bring it up because even that one night, you know, one night of receiving some pretty consistent mortar fire was enough that you could see the next day, guys were on edge. Guys were legitimately on edge after one night of light mortar attacks.

• 42:15Jocko Willink?

  And that's just crazy. And you could see that Over time, and it's what we see in World War I, you know, those awful videos of World War I of guys that had shell shock, legit shell shock. And when we, when we covered Shot at Dawn on here, you, you break down. People break down. And it doesn't matter what you say, what you do, you're telling them you're gonna shoot them if they, if they desert and they do it anyways.

• 42:43Jocko Willink?

  So, the ability to withstand fire is more important than all the knowledge in the world. I'll tell you something else.

• 42:52Jocko Willink?

  I think the ability to withstand fire is related to an acceptance of death.

• 43:02Jocko Willink?

  I mean, if you are,

• 43:05Jocko Willink?

  if you are scared of dying, this is going to drive you insane.

• 43:10Dave Berke?

  Yeah. I, I think that's the nervous exhaustion, right there. You're gonna go insane if that's what you think, think about. Look, man, when I got, when I got to Ramadi, I was afraid of dying for a very brief period of time. But I was, I got there and I, I, I remember, I, I wrote about it and I remember realizing as I probably was there for, you know, a little bit, I had, in some ways, the benefit of knowing people that had been there, knowing, knowing, knowing what I was gonna get myself into, but when I got there, I'm like, oh, man, I'm here now. And I remember thinking for a little while, like, oh, this, maybe, maybe this is a bad idea. Maybe this was a mistake. And there was a little bit of fear of dying.

• 43:53Dave Berke?

  And the time that I spent thinking about that was, it's part, it was, it was exhausting. And then, I, you know what, you know what, that, yes, that might happen. I, I, I literally considered to myself, yep, that might happen. And I got past it and that was the end of it. I never lost the idea that it could happen. I fully understood that, but I'd sort of just stopped thinking about it. I didn't stop thinking about it because I didn't think it would happen. I just stopped thinking about it because it was a kind of a useless thing to think about anymore. But if you get trapped in that, and I remember a small period of time of that feeling of like, the paranoia that starts to build up of, what you can end up creating is that you're going to die. There's no way to get out of it. And that becomes the obsession that you think about. If you're gonna go to combat, you have to accept that that might happen.

• 44:38Dave Berke?

  And then you have to get past that and then go do whatever it is you're gonna go do, knowing that's the case without letting it control you at all.

• 44:45Dave Berke?

  But again, what I was going to face in my brush with war compared to any of this other stuff is kinda crazy.

• 44:54Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, there's another end of the spectrum too, and I think I kind of went back and forth between two mindsets of one is, you know what? I can die, that could happen tonight. And you know what? I'm not gonna die. It's not gonna happen. You know, whatever. Watch this. I'll stand out here in the street, doesn't matter, they can't kill me. I mean, in my first deployment to Iraq.

• 45:22Jocko Willink?

  What did I write? On my Humvee door, once we got the, um, we welded steel on there. I think, I think I wrote, um, "I cannot be killed on it." And my guys made me take it off. They were so freaked out. They're like, "Bro, don't do that, man. That's a total jinx. Don't do it. Don't do it." So, and you know, even talking to Dean Ladd, Dean Ladd, you know, going into Tarawa.

• 45:51Jocko Willink?

  It's like, "Oh, did you think you were gonna get killed?" And he's like, "No, of course not. What are you, you think I'm weak?" Yeah. And that might be the greatest story of all time when his buddy went, he pretended like he was dying. His buddy pretended like he was dying and had his, his friend, the chaplain, come over and was reading him his last rites and then he starts laughing.

• 46:16Jocko Willink?

  All right. Next section is about Sicily, Italy, and Attu. Night attacks.

• 46:25Jocko Willink?

  And they get into Attu, which is the, the

• 46:29Jocko Willink?

  battle up on the Aleutian Island, the island of Attu. Two thousand nine hundred Japanese soldiers.

• 46:40Jocko Willink?

  Two thousand eight hundred and seventy-two of them killed. Twenty-eight captured.

• 46:49Jocko Willink?

  Surprise saves lives. Major John R. Patterson, infantry, Sicily. The mission of our battalion after landing at south of Gela in Sicily was to capture the airport at Biscari. The battalion used the silent night attack. Three rifle companies were in line with heavy weapons company in reserve. To reach its line of departure, the battalion crossed two ridges using control lines, then climbed the cliff at the airport to the line of departure. All this was done silently under the cover of darkness. The attack was started with a hand grenade. We didn't fire until the Germans counterattacked. When we went in with bayonets and hand grenades and caught some of the Germans undressing

• 47:35Jocko Willink?

  and dressing, the tanks fired their guns but wouldn't close on us. The enemy knew their men were all about, so they fired their machine guns and rifles mainly into the air.

• 47:50Jocko Willink?

  Our attack lasted about 30 minutes. We had no casualties during the attack. Two were killed during the counterattacks.

• 47:58Jocko Willink?

  So that silent option, we were doing training. I was at Team Two. I was an assistant platoon commander. They captured one of our SEALs. They had him up in, this is an urban combat training. They had him up in the third floor of this building. And they're telling him, yell and scream, and so he's up there, "They're gonna kill me," and all this. And they're waiting for us, and they're waiting for us to do what we do, which is, you know, enter on the first floor, clear the first floor, move to the second floor, clear the second floor, move to the third floor, clear the third floor, get to the room where he is. And I'm like, you know, silence. We patrolled out. We took the fire escape up directly to the third floor. Didn't clear any of the other rooms and went right into where, because we could see where he was.

• 48:42Jocko Willink?

  We could hear where he was. So we knew he was in like one of one or two or three rooms. And we caught those OP-4 guys completely off guard. They're literally looking out the windows, trying to see where we were. And we walked in and shot them all in the back, rescued our guy.

• 49:00Jocko Willink?

  But what's important here is, and he goes into like a little bit of a little bit more detail, but you, because we're being quiet, you have to have good control lines of where you're gonna let people get to.

• 49:17Jocko Willink?

  Hand to hand fighting.

• 49:20Jocko Willink?

  Captain Gerald, infantry. At Biscari Airport, I used my trench knife twice. One of my men got three with his bayonet. He shot one, then another tried to grab his bayonet. He got this one with his bayonet. That got him started, so he got three in before it was all over.

• 49:45Jocko Willink?

  Small arms against armed. We found that the 30 caliber AP pierces enemy armored half tracks at close ranges. That's something that everybody should know.

• 49:59Jocko Willink?

  Platoon action, Lieutenant Hollrich, infantry. When the enemy machine guns opened up, we threw grenades. The machine guns pulled back out of grenade fire. Then NCOs and Browning automatic riflemen went up over the embankment, through and beyond the initial enemy positions. Eventually, we had a base of fire about 20 men, including the bars, the B A Rs. During the enemy counterattacks, we did pretty well with other fire, too. Lead was flying fast and furiously at 20 to 30 yards. We fire at flashes. In this kind of firing, you learn to fire and roll to one side, or they will soon get you. I read that whole thing just to get that last little part. If you're a trooper out there, if you're in the military, you shoot and then you move.

• 50:44Jocko Willink?

  Because if you pop your head up again in that same spot, you're getting, you're going to take one.

• 50:52Jocko Willink?

  Comment, in all these accounts of a successful night attack by a small unit, the application of the following principles is worthy of note. Close control during the approach by the use of control lines adjusted to difficult terrain features. Designation of a line of departure as close to the objective as possible, and after all major terrain obstacles have been passed.

• 51:16Jocko Willink?

  This is essential to assure proper organization of the unit immediately prior to the so you can apply that right there so many business things right there like you get everything ready to go you get past all the main obstacles once everyone's past the main obstacles then you execute attainment of the vital surprise use of the bayonet and hand grenades with no weapon firing permitted it may often be advisable to prohibit the loading of rifles and for anyone that doesn't understand why these guys are talking about using grenades so much grenades do not give away your position neither do bayonets so you can hunt grenades and no one knows where it just came from there's no one to shoot at there's no muzzle flash and so it's a great weapon when you

• 51:56Jocko Willink?

  are attacking from like a clandestine situation where you don't want the enemy to know where you are use of frontal attack only any attempt at envelopment tends to cause disorder and confusion note that one platoon which had advanced ahead of the general lines was pulled back to conform so they're saying frontal attack only and what they're saying is don't try and surround because if you try and surround people at night and you're gonna end up on opposite sides and you're gonna end up in a blue on blue situation I don't think that they mean don't set up flank situations a definite and limited objective capture of an airfield in this case in which the entire

• 52:39Jocko Willink?

  front could be covered by manpower rather than firepower oh that's good these are the major elements of successful night attack brought out in the foregoing account others not mentioned but which were undoubtedly contributing contributing factors of the operation are careful planning in minute detail precise specific orders careful arrangement for maintenance of direction thorough daylight reconnaissance by as many of the leaders as possible use of compound use of compact columns in the approach so the reason that they're saying precise specific orders that's different that's different than what we normally talk about the reason is because you are attempting to make this happen without having the enemy get a vote

• 53:23Jocko Willink?

  so once the enemy gets a vote if you're too specific things change now we don't know what to do but we are setting this thing up to be very specific and we should be able to get to our last points of concealment we should be in our positions everything should be good once that attack starts you know you still want to keep them constrained because it's nighttime

• 53:45Dave Berke?

  Yeah, and the context of the night piece is also, I think, really important because it seems what he's, what they're saying is that there's a lot more close control under a night attack. It requires a whole lot of other things because when the chaos ensues under a night attack, you are denied something that you usually rely on so heavily. And when you were reading that, and again, it's under the context of a night assault. It's different. It's different at night. You told a story a long time ago that I've used a bunch and there's a version of it I have from flying, which was when we started using NVGs. The way we described the use of NVGs, why we would use NVGs in airplane is the most simplest way to describe it is it allows us to use

• 54:27Dave Berke?

  daytime tactics at night, which before you just couldn't do. You actually, you want the least amount of close control as possible. You need to have some, but in the day you don't need it as much because you can rely on being able to see each other. And when you started to see people like reject the idea of things that allowed you to maneuver in different ways using technology because why would I do it like that?

• 54:52Dave Berke?

  The night creates an environment that's really hard to operate in. And if you're going to be successful at night, you have to do a lot more things than you would normally do during the day, which is why some of the technology pieces are so nice to allow you to do it. But even with that, you can't pretend like the two are the same. And, and the detail is going through, I'm all thinking like, yeah, you wouldn't do that during the day. You have to do that at night.

• 55:15Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Yeah. And now that we're talking about it, when you're talking about this size element, because I'm saying, hey, you could still set up flanks, but if it's nighttime and you've got a big element, I actually wouldn't. I would set up a complete online assault. We would all be together. We would all be within, you know, communication distance. And we're going to not make those mistakes and we're going to know where everyone is because when you're online, you've got free fire in 180 degrees ahead of you. It's an awesome thing. That's going to, that's going to. That's going to overwhelm or or make the idea of having another element on the flank obsolete because you because your firepower is so unrestricted when you're online.

• 55:57Jocko Willink?

  And that's, you know, it's like you can either solve online or you can set up an L. That's it. And then there's these little other variations where you can start to envelop it. Envelopment is very, very dangerous. And you better have some serious control measures in place if you're going to try that. Very serious control measures, including up to and including pieces of terrain that actually prevent you from having a blue on blue because there's a freaking mountain or a ravine or a whatever that prevents you from getting shot by your own guys.

• 56:31Jocko Willink?

  All right, this this little section here starts to jump into really specific stuff, knocking out pillboxes, and then it gets into individual initiative.

• 56:43Jocko Willink?

  The following cases of individual initiative initiative and heroism during the Salerno landing were reported by the infantry.

• 56:55Jocko Willink?

  Sergeant Manuel Gonzalez, upon landing, discovered the position of a German 88 in the sand dunes near the beach. This gun was firing on the assault boats as they landed. The sergeant crept around the position under machine gun fire, which set his pack on fire. And despite the hand grenades being thrown at him, he then calmly tossed several hand grenades into a gun emplacement, killing the crew and blowing up their ammunition.

• 57:23Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you're going to see each one of these. These are talking about individual initiative. What they are is just just pure heroics. Sergeant John Y McGill jumped on an enemy tank and dropped a hand grenade into the open turret, killing the crew. Private Clayton I Tallman on Hill 424 observed that the enemy was attempting an envelopment of the left flank of his company. Taking up a better position, he killed an enemy machine gun crew with three carefully aimed shots. In a few minutes, he repeated the same action when another enemy machine gun crew appeared. He alone protected the left flank of the company until the rest of the platoon arrived.

• 58:04Jocko Willink?

  Private Burrell B Reich discovered that he and a group of five men had been cut off from his company. He immediately organized them into a defensive position on a small knoll. They repulsed three rushes by the enemy who were attempting to establish machine gun positions on the flank. Private Reich was completely in command of the situation, giving orders and shouting encouragement.

• 58:27Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I was going off on that last podcast about having team members that are going to step up and just make things happen.

• 58:37Jocko Willink?

  Staff Sergeant Quillan H. McMitchen was shot in the chest and shoulder before his assault boat reached the shore.

• 58:48Jocko Willink?

  I say that again, shot in the chest and shoulder before he reaches the shore. Have you ever had a shoulder injury? Echo Charles? Uh, yes. Yeah, where you're like, ah, you know, I really can't do anything. Right. Right? Or you hurt your, you know, you get somebody that pulls their pack muscle or whatever. What do they do for the next six months? They, they, they sit around and drink warm milk. What does McMitchen do? Well, when the boat reached the beach, the landing ramp stuck and would not drop. The sergeant, despite his wounds, kicked the ramp loose and then led his section ashore, continuing to direct their operations until he received a fatal shot from enemy gunfire.

• 59:31Jocko Willink?

  Pre-assault, you get shot in the chest and shoulder. When you get shot in the shoulder, you're not using that arm. And then you get shot in the chest as well.

• 59:44Jocko Willink?

  Our men moved ahead in the face of the intense fire and cleared the beach as soon as possible. Lieutenant Carey, soon after reaching the shore, was fired upon by three Germans armed with machine pistols. He returned fire, but his car being jammed after killing one of the, of his adversaries. He then grasped his weapon as a club and advancing in the face of their fire, clubbed the second. Then he physically tackled, subdued, and disarmed the third German, taking him prisoner.

• 1:00:22Jocko Willink?

  The ability of the individual soldier to grasp the implications of the situation and take the necessary action should be fully exploited. The results of combat are the fruits of combined efforts of individuals. Every soldier should be indoctrinated with the idea that his individual action may be the decisive factor in the final result.

• 1:00:51Jocko Willink?

  Leadership, strategy and tactic. Every guy in the platoon is the most important guy. True statement. True statement.

• 1:00:58Dave Berke?

  That, that comment is so, I mean, it is so powerful. That they can, that they understand that what they do individually can change the entire outcome of the entire operation. And what's crazy when I'm listening to these, these stories of, just like you described, just total acts of heroism. They called it initiative and hero. What's crazy about that is for the ones that have ended up Medal of Honor awardees, the ones that end up telling their stories, they all say the exact same thing. And I'm paraphrasing, but they all say, "I, I don't feel like a hero. I just doing my job." That's what they all say. They just have this simple way of describing, "I wasn't doing it to be a hero.

• 1:01:41Dave Berke?

  I needed to take out that machine gun nest." Tom Fife's like, "I, I didn't think of it in like any heroic, I, I needed to blow up that tank. So I got out of the tank and took care of..." And they downplay it so much that when you're listening to it, you're kind of just in awe like, "Bro, are you, are you kidding me? You're a total hero." But they never see it like that. They're just like, "I had to do this. My men needed me to do this, so I just did it." The last thing I was thinking about was the write-up that I was gonna get if I attacked this position. And they do things that just seem completely superhuman and that the way they're able to do that is they understand that what they do has huge impact on the people around them. Which is crazy, you can teach that to a human being.

• 1:02:21Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, imagine if you had a company where every single person inside your company thought that each individual action that they had would have an impact on the entire company as a whole? What if you could indoctrinate and inculcate that idea into your team? Imagine what that team would be like.

• 1:02:44Jocko Willink?

  Action on Achoo. Operations Report Regimental Combat Team. To fight the Japs in this, in this country, our troops must stick to high ground and not only outflank, but out altitude the enemy.

• 1:02:59Jocko Willink?

  The high ground. Continuous movement is necessary to keep the spark in an attack. If a machine gun covers one point, then a group not at that point must continue to advance.

• 1:03:13Jocko Willink?

  When fire is shifted, the original group must move. Even if the platoon is entirely halted by the fire of enemy guns, then the commitment of additional troop results. Whereas by proper coordination, some portion of the platoon can be kept moving and the force committed kept to a minimum.

• 1:03:36Jocko Willink?

  That's his number one thing is cover and move.

• 1:03:43Jocko Willink?

  The tendency of lower commanders to commit reserves too early must be curbed. Security cannot be overemphasized. Any movement or group on the battlefield, even in rear areas, is subject to enemy action. In this connection, consideration must be given to the protection of medical installation. At present, these are left unprotected without even individual arms for their personnel. In the event of enemy penetration through our frontline positions, it is practically certain that these installations will be hit. Why are they given that lessons? Because that's exactly what happened on like a suicide attack from the Japanese. Aggressive patrolling, particularly to maintain active content, contact is of vital importance and can mean the difference between defeat and victory.

• 1:04:25Jocko Willink?

  However, mere numbers of patrols will not solve the problem. Special training in patrolling and organizing patrols must be initiated. Commanders must plan to have reasonably fresh men available for night contact. It is vital to organize patrol activity carefully to ensure that all lines are familiar with the routes returning, of returning patrols, so that the danger of mistaken identity in the darkness will be minimized.

• 1:04:54Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, they got, the, the, the Japanese on their attack made it. They broke through and it was fighting in the rear.

• 1:05:03Jocko Willink?

  Lieutenant General Simon B. Buckner, Commanding General, Alaskan Department. It was apparent that the enemy was particularly vulnerable to attack by units of our infantry, which pushed forward vigorously while the enemy was held down by artillery fire. What do we call that? Cover and move. Those units which had learned to advance closely behind their own artillery supporting fire had the greatest success. The Japs do not like our coordinated artillery fire, nor do they like our attacks with the bayonet. When under fire from small arms, they stay down in their holes and are easily approached. When attacking small groups of foxholes, our troops were able to keep the Japs down

• 1:05:44Jocko Willink?

  by fire from rifles and the Browning automatic rifle, while some of our men approached and dropped hand grenades into their holes. This is our favorite mop-up method, cover and move. When about to be run out of a position, the Japs seemed to feel it necessary to counterattack. These attacks were not well-coordinated and were welcomed by our troops, who were able to shoot down the enemy in great numbers. These Jap counterattacks were part of a suicidal character and were pressed home regardless of losses until practically all the counterattacking troops were exterminated. The enemy may believe that in such terrain, he can hold up the advance of an entire battalion with three men and a light machine gun.

• 1:06:29Jocko Willink?

  In fact, however, he is critically vulnerable to intelligent action by officers and men who understand the necessity for immediate maneuver against small parties of the enemy seeking to hold them up. The fact was that a small maneuvering patrol is easily disposed of machine gun positions on reverse slopes behind mountain spurs, whereas any tendency to lie down and call for artillery support would have resulted only in tremendous wastage of artillery fire and attempting to seek out targets which, in fact, were inaccessible to artillery fire. That's an important point. So you think, "Oh, we got a machine gun up there, we need to call for fire." And now you think about how hard it's going to be for this artillery to hit this place that's bunkered in, or they're on the reverse slope of a mountain, or whatever. It's a real problem.

• 1:07:14Jocko Willink?

  And yet, these guys realized if they just aggressively maneuvered on that machine gun, they'd be able to take it out. The two action likewise indicated that standard Japanese infiltration tactics can be offset by a system of anti-termite patrols organized behind our lines protecting artillery, command posts and supply lines. Wherever troops know that these friendly patrols were behind them, firing our rear will mean simply that our patrols are cleaning people up.

• 1:07:43Jocko Willink?

  Goes into the South Pacific, talking about the jungle, jungle notes, aggressive action, flexible plans.

• 1:07:53Jocko Willink?

  Report of the 43rd Division, New Georgia, aggressive action is necessary. Never relax the pressure.

• 1:08:02Jocko Willink?

  Never relax the pressure. That's a good, that's a good just thing to think about every time you wake up in the morning. Never relax the pressure. Maneuver of small units at risk of temporary loss of communications is important. Plans and orders must be so flexible as to permit prompt maneuver change. This is another thing where I would feel like I was cheating when I was, you know, going through training and stuff. Because we would make these really flexible plans and, and of course, the training cadre is gonna do things to disrupt your plan. And when your plan gets disrupted and it's super flexible, you're like, oh, whatever, you know, go with Plan B, go with Plan C, no factor. Never relax the pressure.

• 1:08:44Dave Berke?

  It's actually pretty hard to disrupt a plan that's not very rigid, you know? Yeah, we didn't have like 37 steps that you can interrupt. We had a basic idea and some real good ideas of how we're gonna maneuver and disrupting that's much harder.

• 1:09:00Dave Berke?

  Dude, that, that, that last one was awesome.

• 1:09:02Jocko Willink?

  Which one?

• 1:09:04Dave Berke?

  The, the one we talked about, never, never relax the pressure.

• 1:09:08Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:08Dave Berke?

  Like, but I think the title of that was aggressive action, flexible plans. Whatever that title was, just that alone, obviously the description makes it even better, but that in and of itself, that will solve just that mindset, solves so many problems in your world, anywhere in your world.

• 1:09:26Jocko Willink?

  There's a couple of things that you need to be aware of. The way that you have flexible plans is you are religious about making sure everyone understands the commander's intent. That's if you can do that, hey, this is what this is the overall thing that we're trying to accomplish. Here's the couple of parameters you got to work within. Other than that, make it happen.

• 1:09:49Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:50Jocko Willink?

  Get aggressive making it happen. Cause if you just make a flexible plan and you think, hey, you know, you guys come in from the west and you guys come in from the south. There's all kinds of things that can go wrong with that plan. It's super flexible, but no one knows where they can go, where they can't go. There's no de-confliction setup, so you need to think about it. The other thing that's interesting about aggressive action, flexible plans is the more you plan, the more detail you get, the worse your plan becomes. Now, if you come up with a plan in three minutes, you probably need a little bit more time. Although I have executed operations where I, we planned for 15 minutes. My boss asked me that. My boss said, how much time do you guys need to launch? This is my first deployment. My second deployment, no one asked me. They already knew the answer.

• 1:10:35Jocko Willink?

  My first, how much time do you guys need? And I was like, 15 minutes. That's how much time.

• 1:10:44Dave Berke?

  What you're getting at though, is the propensity of how do things usually work out? Do we usually plan too much or not enough? It's pretty rare that we don't plan enough. What typically happens is we overplan and overplan and overplan. And there's an old saying, and I don't know if it's just in aviation, is how long do you have to plan your mission? And the joke is 30, how long do you need to plan your mission? And the joke is 30 minutes more than you have. And the reason is, is we have a propensity to overplan.

• 1:11:11Jocko Willink?

  You guys say that in aviation?

• 1:11:13Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:14Jocko Willink?

  I thought I made that up.

• 1:11:15Dave Berke?

  You did not make it up. Unless it was on your trip to Fallon and all of a sudden you're the reason we said, and we've been saying that for years. And the point is kind of what you're getting at is, oh, if you gave me nine hours of plan, guess how long I'm going to plan?

• 1:11:26Jocko Willink?

  Nine hours.

• 1:11:28Dave Berke?

  Can you underplan? Yes, you absolutely can. You can plan for two minutes when you actually need to spend some more time. But the driver is, is what you were saying is, hey, I only need 15 minutes. I need to cover the key points, the highlights. And if you've got a team that's well-trained, they might even recognize, hey, you know, listen, we got a little additional risk here because we didn't really have time to dissect this one. So when we get to this place in the mission, we need to be a little more aware that we're going to need to be a little more flexible. We have, we're less aware than we like to be. But I know that. As opposed to, hey, let's take three days to plan. And by the time I get to the objective, it's a total waste of time because, because that mission has come and gone. Most teams that we work with, overplan. They overthink, they overcreate, and then when they go out to implement, they're either too late, or they're so rigid in what they

• 1:12:11Dave Berke?

  do, they can't maneuver around. So if you're looking for the balance there, less is typically more. Not always, not 100% of the time. But that's where your bias should be.

• 1:12:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's kind of like packing, right? For a trip. It's kind of the same mindset.

• 1:12:26Jocko Willink?

  Which is?

• 1:12:27Speaker 01

  Like overpacking. People will overpack because they think of all the different scenarios. They're going to need this jacket, those socks, this shoe. I need flip flops too for the, you see what I'm saying? Meanwhile, you got a washer dryer there. You know, you don't need all that stuff. You gotta be flexible. See what I'm saying? Otherwise, you got all these suitcases, you know? It's the same mindset is what I'm saying though. You know what I'm saying? Like if you underpack, but you're flexible, it's way better. Maneuver, you can maneuver, you know?

• 1:12:55Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it is weird that it's such an advantage to come up with a nice, flexible plan that everybody knows and it's so easy. Man, the, the planning, the planning, what would I call it? Like the, the evolution of planning inside the SEAL teams. You know, at, at one point, it was beyond insanity. We wrote about it in, in Extreme Ownership. I mean, the way Seth and Leif were taught to plan was, was mayhem. It was, it was 150 slide PowerPoints.

• 1:13:26Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:27Jocko Willink?

  That, you know, oh, and your font's wrong. And oh, you better do this. And oh, you that. And you need to go through this branch plan and this other thing over here. Man, when those guys started working with me, I, I remember when, when I, and I talked about this in Extreme Ownership, when I was telling those guys, hey, just make a plan. That the lowest common denominator, get up, have people walk through it, look at the map, use the map, draw a picture, draw it up on the whiteboard, do that. I remember Seth was looking at me like he was gonna get fired. Like when he gives this brief, he's gonna get fired. And it's funny because usually I would get that, I would feel a little bit more pushback from Leif

• 1:14:09Jocko Willink?

  on stuff, and Seth would be like, yeah, Roger, and Leif would be like, why would we do it like that? And this time, for whatever reason, I think, I think Leif actually just realized that this was the smartest thing he'd ever heard. I think Leif just said to himself, you know what? This actually freaking makes sense. And he was so on board with it, he was so stoked, and he had, and he had, BTF Tony was his chief, and that's the way, you know, Tony knew how to make shit happen. And, and I just, but Seth was just freaked out like, well, I mean, you think, and he was so freaked out by the fact of thinking that he was gonna get fired for, for trying to make his men understand what was going to happen on this mission.

• 1:14:51Jocko Willink?

  And the cool thing was, the commanding officer, when, when they got done, because it was two platoons going out on, on an SR, you know, on a reconnaissance mission, and they both took their platoons out, when they got done, the, the, you know, the, the commanding officer, who had gone around and watched all the platoons give all their briefs, and give all these 150 PowerPoint slides, and do all these, you know, what is it called? Animation in your slides. He'd watched all those things, and he, he said, these are the, these are the best briefs I've seen. Which was freaking awesome, it was awesome. Because if the commanding officer can't follow what the hell's gonna happen on an operation, how is a new guy, E4 machine gunner, he's not following anything?

• 1:15:33Jocko Willink?

  And the more flexible you make these plans, when you're not all rigid.

• 1:15:38Dave Berke?

  What's kinda crazy about that is that commanding officer was probably stoked that the brief took nine minutes, not forty-nine minutes. He was probably waiting like, here we go.

• 1:15:46Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:46Dave Berke?

  We're gonna come in and, and he would probably look at it like, that's it? That's awesome.

• 1:15:49Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I mean, it was, you know, it's still an hour long.

• 1:15:52Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:53Jocko Willink?

  But an hour long of real information as opposed to, you know, an hour and forty-seven minutes of slides that are of, of, you know, uh, asset matrix for the.

• 1:16:06Dave Berke?

  Where he knew represented thirty man-hours of PowerPoint work to make the arrow move. The, the point behind that was, and I saw this in the Pentagon all the time, I, I wouldn't be surprised if you saw some of this in the EA world, working in, in, you know, with admirals and generals is, we create this thing where we are, hey, this is how the boss wants it.

• 1:16:26Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:16:26Dave Berke?

  And so, we give the boss what he wants, and some of the bosses are pretty, they don't wanna go down there and micromanage their people, so they kinda tolerate it. And we convince ourselves, this is what the boss is looking for, so I'm gonna do what make, most of our bosses don't actually want this. They just wanna make sure they know that you know what you're gonna go do to go get it done. And the least amount of time it, it takes to make him comfortable that you know the plan is actually what he wants. And I remember putting these briefs together and I'd get these templates to go brief these generals up in the top floor of the Pentagon. It was this big thing, you've got nineteen minutes, get to fitness calendar. And we'd go in there and for the first couple of briefs, we'd have forty-seven pages and he'd go, hey, can you just skip to the summary slide? Click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click. Summary, he's like, okay, okay.

• 1:17:11Dave Berke?

  Hey, that make, hey, bullet through, what do you mean by that? Hey, sir, we're talking about this. Okay, cool. Awesome. Hey, I hate to do it to you guys, I gotta get going. Thanks. But I'm good at your plan, go execute. They didn't want any of that garbage, but we followed this template, we were so sure that they wanted, most leaders really just want to know that you understand.

• 1:17:28Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and they want to understand the wave tops of what's happening so they understand. I had this guy was putting up, I was putting a group through land warfare. And this guy gave a brief and it was horrible and long and freaking too detailed and covered stuff that didn't matter to anyone in the room. And then he gave another brief that was, you know, not enough and, you know, skipped like basic contingencies. And then he was kind of frustrated and he goes, well, you know, what, what, can you even tell me what a good brief is? As if that was like a trick question. And I was, I thought about it for four seconds. And I said, a good brief is a brief where your men understand what is going to happen and what to do during an operation.

• 1:18:15Jocko Willink?

  That's a good brief.

• 1:18:17Jocko Willink?

  And he was able to dial it in. Yeah.

• 1:18:23Jocko Willink?

  This, we're in the jungle. You might've forgot that. Patrolling in the jungle, an officer with considerable experience in the jungle patrolling gives this advice. Patrols are most likely to give away their presence in an area by their footprints. Shine from the smallest metal surface such as a belt buckle or watch must be avoided. A luminous watch constitutes a real danger. Any noise such as talking, coughing, spitting, etc. must, has to be treated with the greatest of all dangers. A man on patrol must learn to move silently, making every possible use of natural cover. That's just old school stuff. I got to feel some of that when I was hunting. I was like so happy to be moving quietly.

• 1:19:05Jocko Willink?

  Some more patrol tips. Positioning camouflage are more important than I learned in the States. In training, in training, bear down on cover and concealment. Bear down on avoidance of the blundering approach on patrols, on fire maneuver, which are equally important. And I didn't read that well. In training, bear down on cover and concealment. Bear down on the avoidance of blundering approach on patrols, on fire maneuver, which are equally important.

• 1:19:37Jocko Willink?

  Size of patrols. Lieutenant Colonel W A Walker, Tank Destroyer Battalion Commander, Tunisia. Which, you know, let's just face it. You're getting a title. Tank Destroying Battalion Commander is right up there. Many men were lost in Tunisia. By using squad patrols. The Germans used stronger patrols and just gobbled them up. A patrol should be either a sneak patrol, small enough to escape detection, or a combat patrol, large enough to fight its way out of difficulty. Never allow one man to go out alone.

• 1:20:17Jocko Willink?

  You know what's interesting about that?

• 1:20:22Jocko Willink?

  We don't want to be balanced. Right? Well, I was talking about want to be balanced, but what he's saying is like, you either want to be small and maneuverable and quiet, or big enough to fight. Don't, don't, don't try and make the mistake of trying to do both. Hey, we'll just take out a squad plus. Then you're making a bunch of noise. The difference between, you know, six guys

• 1:20:48Jocko Willink?

  and 12 guys is a massive difference. It is a massive difference on a patrol. It's a totally, like when we'd go out on the squad patrol in, in the SEAL teams, you know, you got eight guys. It's this tiny little thing and you can see everyone in, in the, at night, with no night vision, you can see everyone if they're quiet.

• 1:21:08Jocko Willink?

  You, when you take out a platoon patrol, it seems like you've got this just massive thing. And when you take out a task unit patrol, it's just freaking gigantic. Like they're gonna hear you.

• 1:21:19Jocko Willink?

  Don't make that mistake.

• 1:21:20Speaker 01

  So this is one of those things that's like, it's not a dichotomy either or one of those rare things?

• 1:21:25Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, because normally we're saying, hey, you know, don't go to the extreme one side or the other. You want to be balanced.

• 1:21:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is kind of like a-

• 1:21:31Jocko Willink?

  Fall into the trap of, well, I want them to be small enough to be light and nimble, but big enough where you know they can defend themselves. And what you're going to end up with is not small and light and not able to defend themselves.

• 1:21:42Speaker 01

  Like not, not big enough to fight, yet not small enough to move.

• 1:21:47Jocko Willink?

  Yes.

• 1:21:47Speaker 01

  It's kind of like, uh, you surf, obviously. It's kind of like when you judge waves, right? You're either too far for it to crash on you, or you just go 100% under the wave. You know what I'm saying? Otherwise it crashes on you.

• 1:22:00Jocko Willink?

  You either go over it or under it?

• 1:22:02Speaker 01

  Under it, or it crashes way before it can hit you.

• 1:22:05Jocko Willink?

  Oh, that's, that's a positive thing.

• 1:22:08Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:22:08Jocko Willink?

  You don't want it to crash on you. Yes, you are correct.

• 1:22:10Speaker 01

  You don't want to be in that one, that little middle ground.

• 1:22:12Jocko Willink?

  You don't want to be in the, in the, the zone of destruction.

• 1:22:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, the red zone. There's a movie called The North Shore.

• 1:22:18Jocko Willink?

  The Impact Zone.

• 1:22:19Speaker 01

  Impact Zone, yeah. So, the North Shore, he covered that.

• 1:22:22Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:22Speaker 01

  He was like, yeah, you're like, you don't want to be, actually this guy Turtle, you ever watched North Shore, Dipper?

• 1:22:27Jocko Willink?

  No.

• 1:22:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, Rick King. Anyway, guy from Arizona wins a tank surfing competition, so he's like, of course I'm going to the North Shore.

• 1:22:34Jocko Willink?

  So he was, he was kind of a tank destroyer.

• 1:22:40Speaker 01

  In a manner of speaking, yes. Nonetheless, tank waves are pretty small and tame. You know, the, the artificial waves in Arizona, apparently. So he goes to the North Shore and, you know, he kind of gets wrecked for a little bit. Anyway, meets this guy Turtle and Turtle says, if the wave is here, don't be here because you're going to get drilled. Classic line, man. So same deal in this.

• 1:23:00Jocko Willink?

  Maybe we should cover that movie on here, just to get these, make sure we pass on these lessons learned.

• 1:23:06Speaker 01

  I'm just saying, these concepts are everywhere. That's, that's the thing.

• 1:23:11Jocko Willink?

  Next section's called Infantry Weapons, goes through detail, M1 rifle, frag grenades, the Thompson submachine gun, the Browning automatic rifle, the light machine gun, heavy machine gun, 60 millimeter mortar, 81 millimeter mortar, the 37 millimeter AT gun, the 4.2 inch chemical mortar, which was originally called that because it was originally made for firing chemical shells, but eventually they adjusted it, put HE in there, what they still called it, the, uh, so it goes through like really good, kind of pragmatic details of, on, uh, on how to operate those weapons, talks about, next section's about artillery.

• 1:23:51Speaker 01

  Wait, what's chemical mortar?

• 1:23:53Jocko Willink?

  Chemical mortars were to fire, well, what they disguised it was, was this is a smoke mortar. So we're gonna shoot, if we have to use smoke to, you know, cover movement, or we wanna disrupt the enemy's ability to see, we have a mortar for firing smoke. But that was really, so we could fire chemical weapons if we were going to use them.

• 1:24:15Speaker 01

  Like what, like to your nerve gas or something like this?

• 1:24:17Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, like, yeah, like you're gonna die. But, we didn't do that, we ended up making an HE round, high explosive, which is kind of a normal mortar round for it, and they liked it.

• 1:24:30Jocko Willink?

  A section called masked fires, Lieutenant Colonel James, Infantry Sisley, our division artillery was never out of support for more than five minutes throughout the whole campaign. We've got a wonderful set of battalions in our division artillery, and we have worked so closely together that they're as much part of our outfit as our own battalions. They kept, they keep right up on our heels all the time, and that is just what we've got to have. I don't know what we could have done without them. They leapfrogged their batteries continually, and went into some of the damnedest positions I had ever seen, and delivered the goods. We just can't praise them too much, they were always right there when you needed them. In one place where we couldn't get forward because the Hines were on superior ground

• 1:25:13Jocko Willink?

  and had us pinned down with rifle, machine gun, and mortar fire, the division artillery masked nine batteries on them and plastered them with fifteen hundred rounds in less than thirty minutes. We then walked through that position without a scratch, and the German dead were all over the place.

• 1:25:35Jocko Willink?

  Teamwork.

• 1:25:37Jocko Willink?

  Infantry Tank Team, Captain Putman.

• 1:25:41Jocko Willink?

  Putnam Infantry, Sicily. The infantry should be given practical training in cooperation with tanks. I don't mean the armored infantry. They're part of the armored division and work with them all the time. I mean, ordinary infantry like us. I know our regiment didn't have any training with tanks in preparation for combat. We just didn't know how to work with the attached tank unit. When the jer- when the tanks came up to support us after we had broken up the German attack, we did not follow up the tanks properly as they went forward. Had we done so, we could have cleaned out most of the battalion of Germans. We had not been trained to work with the tanks. And when we remained in position, they went- and we remained in position after they went forward. If we would have known how to go forward with them, we could have done a much better job and could have gotten all the German vehicles and materiel.

• 1:26:26Jocko Willink?

  After this experience, we strongly recommend that all infantry be given practical training in cooperation with tanks in action. Get the infantrymen used to the tanks and how to fight together with them. That, that, for me, that's a, a comment about training in general. You know, you can't expect people to do things that they've never trained to do. So, don't expect them to do things that they haven't trained to do. If there's something that they need to know how to do or that they might have to do, train them on it.

• 1:26:53Jocko Willink?

  Infantry tank attack. Lieutenant Colonel Perkins, Tank Battalion Commander, Italy. The rush to battle is the wrong idea. Here, we creep up. Each tank should overwatch another tank. Each section should overwatch another section. Each platoon should overwatch another platoon.

• 1:27:18Jocko Willink?

  Ranger training. Buddy system. Lieutenant Colonel William O. Darby.

• 1:27:28Jocko Willink?

  Commanding officer of the Rangers in Italy. And I think everybody kinda knows what I say when I say Lieutenant Colonel William O. Darby. I know they at least think of the Darby Queen. The, the Ranger Off-School Course. In our work, we always use the buddy system. The men work in pairs. They live in pairs, eat in pairs, do guard in pairs, even do KP in pairs. Confidence in each other is developed. They can pick their own buddy from within their platoon.

• 1:27:56Jocko Willink?

  Same thing in the SEAL Teams. Day one, you get a swim buddy and you stick with them. Realism, in our training, we never do anything without battle noises and effects. We always use live ammunition. We use mines, barbed wire, and protective bands of machine gun fire extensively. If the problem is to capture a machine gun nest, there's always a machine gun nest there with a machine gun firing in a fixed direction. The men very quickly get accustomed to having live ammunition flying around them. Captured Italian and German machine guns and machine pistols are used by the enemy in our problems that he's talking about the op for. Our men quickly learn to distinguish between the fire of our own weapons and that of enemy weapons. Also, the enemy makes constant use of flares. We always carry our normal load of ammunition with weapons loaded.

• 1:28:39Jocko Willink?

  If a man knows his weapon is loaded, he will be more careful in handling it. An accidental discharge of a weapon automatically means a fine and immediate reduction to the grade of private.

• 1:28:50Jocko Willink?

  In our work, we must take drastic measures to guard against accidental discharges of weapons. We learned our lesson in Tunisia, where the accidental discharge of a rifle queered a raid and caused a 24-hour delay in operations. So, all kinds of good stuff in there. And I will say this, so when I got to SEAL Teams, it was almost all live fire. We did live fire for everything. And it gave you that kind of pressure and that kind of, you got accustomed to machine guns and hearing them and, you know, rounds snapping overhead and you just got used to it. In fact, there were days where they would put us downrange and just shoot, you know, put you downrange, you'd go behind a berm or whatever, you'd get in a safe spot, and then they'd just shoot at you.

• 1:29:35Jocko Willink?

  So, you'd start getting used to like, okay, this is what different rounds sound like. And you, you know, that happens even being in the butts at a, you know, on a normal range. But that kind of realism is important. Here's the drawback. The drawback is the enemy doesn't maneuver. The enemy doesn't shoot back at you. So when we started using simunition, paintball, laser tag systems that totally improved our tactical capability to to an incredible amount.

• 1:30:05Speaker 01

  The accidental discharge, that's still a huge deal, right?

• 1:30:08Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:30:09Speaker 01

  What is it now like that? I mean, they're they're talking about fining people and busting them down to private.

• 1:30:13Jocko Willink?

  Uh, I mean, I I think some of it depends on the circumstances, you know, if you have an accidental discharge in the SEAL teams, it's gonna be your careers, your careers on the line, you know, if you if you have something like that happen, it's not necessarily going to be over. But you're gonna have a real, you know, you're you you're gonna have to keep your hopes up that you don't that you don't get.

• 1:30:36Speaker 01

  So even like um, like a, they call it AD, right? Or UAD?

• 1:30:41Jocko Willink?

  AD, ND, which is a negligent discharge.

• 1:30:44Speaker 01

  Are those two different things?

• 1:30:46Jocko Willink?

  I think they are now. I'm not, I'm not like totally caught up on the on the um terminology of where it's at right now. The ND just started coming around when I was sort of in my later years.

• 1:31:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, um, yeah, I feel like negligent, that's like careless, you know?

• 1:31:04Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, so like an accidental discharge, which to your point, you can have a, you can have a round just cook off, like you're out in the desert in Imperial Valley in California, it's one hundred and twenty degrees out, and you dump six mags on your last run, and you're standing there, your weapon is scorching hot, and if there's a round in the chamber, it can cook off. It can just shoot. That's why you have your weapons painted, uh, pointed in a safe direction at all times. If that happened, you you're not gonna get, I mean, you know, you're not really gonna get in trouble. I mean, if everyone didn't have their weapon clear and safe, but when it's hot out, everyone would be like, hey, clear and safe your weapons. But you know, we also used to have a command safe and let them hang, which is just, you just safe your weapon and you just let it hang there. So if you've got a hot round in there, it can cook off.

• 1:31:47Jocko Willink?

  You're probably not, you know, you're not gonna get in trouble for that most likely. You occasionally a weapon will have some kind of a malfunction that will cause a problem. Um, what else could happen?

• 1:32:01Dave Berke?

  I feel like something like that, like a weapons malfunction.

• 1:32:04Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:32:05Dave Berke?

  That's like an accidental. Negligent is the kind like.

• 1:32:08Jocko Willink?

  Excellent. I had my finger in the trigger.

• 1:32:10Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:10Jocko Willink?

  And, you know, somebody called a ceasefire and all of a sudden, you know, I kind of let my weapon hang and it's resting on my finger and I crack off a round.

• 1:32:19Dave Berke?

  Right.

• 1:32:19Jocko Willink?

  You're gonna get in a lot of trouble for that.

• 1:32:20Dave Berke?

  Yeah. Interesting.

• 1:32:25Jocko Willink?

  This is more on Ranger training. Physical conditioning. One of our best means of physical conditioning is speed marching. Finally, reaching a point where we march 10 miles at a rate of 6 miles an hour to keep in condition, we use calisthenics and a daily 5-mile speed march.

• 1:32:43Jocko Willink?

  Discipline.

• 1:32:46Jocko Willink?

  Disciplinary drills are all important. We have a retreat formation daily, conditions permitting. At this formation, the men are inspected and some manual of arms performed, followed by retreat. Every Sunday morning, there is a review, followed by inspection in the ranks and then inspection of the camp or quarters. We have at least four periods a week of closed order drill and manual of arms and one period every week devoted to military courtesy.

• 1:33:12Jocko Willink?

  Infractions of discipline, military courtesy, and uniform regulations are dealt with quickly and severely. The officers must bear down on these things. The Army in general has not stressed strict discipline enough. Without it, you are lost.

• 1:33:33Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, one of those things.

• 1:33:37Jocko Willink?

  Can you go too far with discipline? Dave Berke.

• 1:33:40Dave Berke?

  Yes, you can. Absolutely.

• 1:33:43Dave Berke?

  I mean, I obviously don't know the background of that story, but you know, the version of the story that he's talking about is the guys that could field strip their weapon in the dark at night. On the worst possible situations, we had nine seconds to get that weapon back in action. You need discipline and repeat and rode and over. You need that. And then the flip side is exactly what you just started this whole conversation with. If I just, if I, if you do it because you're scared of me and I tell you to do it because if you don't, you're gonna get punished. Sooner or later, sooner or later, that approach will fail. And look, I know where the context of this book is, so it's driven by that first scenario, but you absolutely can overdo it.

• 1:34:21Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And then you could be like John Basilone.

• 1:34:26Jocko Willink?

  Bazzy. And you'd hear stories, you hear stories from guys that worked with him. And they absolutely loved doing the right thing, drilling with those weapons. He set the example. He did it in front of them at night, blindfold, all those things. He did all those things. He did, and he, like, they loved doing it. He was inspirational. He imposed discipline on them. He showed them and gave them the gift of self-discipline, which is far superior.

• 1:35:01Dave Berke?

  Dude, and think of the mileage you'd get is if I have, as a leader, the discipline that you demand from your people and the punishment that might come from not doing it, if you actually impose it upon yourself as well and hold yourself to the same standard, as opposed to get out there and go do that, and I'm gonna sit in here and, I don't know, watch TV or something.

• 1:35:22Dave Berke?

  That piece of it, when you're talking about that discipline, what you get when you hold yourself to the exact same standard as your people.

• 1:35:28Jocko Willink?

  Bazzy.

• 1:35:32Jocko Willink?

  Section two, field artillery. Morale effect, the incessant firing of our artillery during the six-week period produced contrasting effects on the nerves of our own troops and on those of the enemy. Our infantry often stated that having those rounds continually landing in front of them was one of the best morale builders, especially at night. In the JAP, on the other hand, it produced severe cases of war neurosis. He couldn't sleep at night because he never knew when or where the next round was going to land. He couldn't sleep in the daytime because when our infantry wasn't attacking him, our artillery was giving him hell.

• 1:36:15Jocko Willink?

  And this is nice. The following statements made by prisoners are interesting. So these are Japanese prisoners, of which we know there wasn't a lot. Between the airport, between Bebelo Hill and the airport, we had many guns of all sizes before this campaign, but now many of them are gone, knocked out by artillery. It has completely demoralized many units, reduced many units in strength, and has made many men go crazy.

• 1:36:48Jocko Willink?

  We were awakened at night by the slightest noise because of the bad state of nerves. At night, three men stayed in one foxhole, two smoked while one slept. During the day, we also tried to get some sleep by alternating, but the continual artillery fire kept us on edge and we got no rest. Even in the two-story dugouts, many men were killed just by concussion. A direct hit would kill all the men inside. The artillery is the one thing that is universally feared by all our ground troops. It continues over such long periods of time and the rounds come so fast.

• 1:37:27Jocko Willink?

  Except for the artillery, we could continue our defense. That's horror. That's just horror. Section 3, miscellaneous. Booby traps. 7th Army reports Sicily. A German Luger pistol was booby-trapped on a table. A new replacement picked it up. Two were killed and 14 were wounded in the resulting explosion. There's another little... I wasn't gonna read this, but I'm gonna read it. A Luger pistol was found lying on the ground. An American infantry lieutenant carefully tied a long cord to it and then, getting into a hole, pulled it to him and put it in his pocket.

• 1:38:10Jocko Willink?

  Later in the day, while examining the pistol, he attempted to remove the magazine. The explosion killed the lieutenant and two other men, with six soldiers wounded. The reason I'm reading that is because that was a freaking... They set that thing up. That's a massive explosion from a small piece of... From a small pistol. Timeliness of orders. Major Kinney, infantry. Our chief difficulty throughout the campaign was the lack of time given for the execution of orders. Frequently, we received operations orders, which did not allow enough time for proper preparation and execution. At San Fratello, we received an order after 11:00 PM to attack at 6:00 AM the next morning.

• 1:38:54Jocko Willink?

  Now, when I read that, I was like, hey, man. I was kind of thinking, I'll come up with a simple, flexible plan. No factor. I got this. What are they whining about? Read on. The six battalions were assembly, were in assembly areas some five or six miles from the line of departure. So even to get to where they were supposed to leave from, they had to go six miles. The terrain over which they had to move to get in position in the dark was the roughest, most rugged mountain country you could imagine, and all ammunition, weapons and supplies had to be taken by hand and by mule pack. Although it might seem that 11:00 PM to 6:00 AM was sufficient time, the actual conditions were such that it was less than half than enough. Because the terrain, darkness and transport difficulties, also the men had just completed

• 1:39:37Jocko Willink?

  marches over mountain trails of nine to 14 miles and were not fresh for the new movement.

• 1:39:48Jocko Willink?

  Maps, 7th Army. Report, Sicily. Instill in all personnel an appreciation of the value of maps. The supply of maps will never be adequate to the demand. Training in the care and preservation of maps is as important as training in the care and preservation of materiel.

• 1:40:09Jocko Willink?

  Most important thing you need to know? Most important piece of information is where you are. And if your map is destroyed, have you ever seen those old school silk maps? Those things are legit. They print them on silk Echo Charles. Because then they could survive.

• 1:40:25Speaker 01

  I understand.

• 1:40:29Jocko Willink?

  I like this section. This section is called Room for Improvement. The following comments indicating weaknesses which must be corrected were made by the commanding general, and they don't give the division. I guess they're keeping it secret. Here we go. Sometimes units failed to dispose themselves properly for all-round defense when halted on an objective or when placed in position for defense. So when you go into defense, they're not putting themselves in the right positions. Next, in the attack. Riflemen frequently failed to provide fire that would cover the movement of adjacent units merely because they were not able to pinpoint definitely the location of the enemy rifle and machine gun elements firing on our troops.

• 1:41:15Jocko Willink?

  What does that mean? That means you fire where you suspect the enemy will be. And that's something that infantry men and special operations people learn is if you don't know where the enemy is and you're in a gunfight, shoot where you think they might be. This is perhaps one of my favorite things from this book. Some small unit commanders selected positions apparently with cover and concealment for themselves as the primary objective rather than positions from which effective fire could be brought to bear on the enemy.

• 1:41:56Jocko Willink?

  And the last one, due to the enormous division frontage in the second phase of the landing at Salerno, some company, some commanders attempted to stretch their units excessively and as a result permitted faulty dispositions. Prioritize and execute. They go into some details on the Japanese overall. And you know, I've been, I've been reading the book and saying Japs. I know that's a derogatory term towards Japanese people. I'm not referring to Japanese people. I'm referring to the Imperial Japanese Army members that were fighting against America

• 1:42:39Jocko Willink?

  and were being referred to by their sworn enemy, the Americans, as Japs. Superman myth exploded. That's the title of this. Operations report, 43rd Division, New Georgia. Our troops here came to regard the Superman stories about the Japanese as ridiculous. The Jap is tricky, but not so tricky as many have led, been led to believe. He is not, he is not nearly so ingenious or adaptable as the average American. And the truth of the matter is, he's afraid of us, of our artillery and of our sea and air power. Our troops must learn this and never forget it.

• 1:43:25Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:29Jocko Willink?

  This is the last, I think this is the last, the last note. And this gives some stuff about the Japanese as an enemy and then it gives some stuff about the Germans as an enemy. And this is the last one here, the last one from this book, from part one

• 1:43:46Jocko Willink?

  of Combat Lessons. Minor Tactics, Staff Sergeant's Richard E. Dealand and Robert J. Kemp, Infantry, Sicily. Never let an apparently lone machine gun suck you into a trap. The Germans will usually not fire on the individual, but will wait, watch where he goes, and get a whole flock.

• 1:44:16Jocko Willink?

  And that's, that's the last point in here. And I think it's a, it's not the last point in this whole book. There's a few more, but I think it's a good place to stop. And the reason why I think it's a good place to stop

• 1:44:29Jocko Willink?

  is because it's a warning.

• 1:44:32Jocko Willink?

  It's a warning about a trap. It's a warning about a trap that the Germans use, which is, you know, put a lone looking machine gun out there by itself. Oh, that looks exposed.

• 1:44:43Jocko Willink?

  And it seems real obvious when you read it. You're like, hey, if I see a, that looks too good to be true. Right? This is too good to be true. This is the situation. And so it's real obvious to anyone that's looking at it going, oh, that's too good to be true. There's a ripe machine gun that's waiting to be taken out. Looks real obvious, an obvious trap. And yet the warning is there.

• 1:45:07Jocko Willink?

  Why is the warning still there? Because people still fall for it. You will still fall for it. I will still fall for it. We will all still fall for that trap. Just like we will fall for the trap

• 1:45:24Jocko Willink?

  that we're good to go. That we know everything that we need to know, that we understand everything that we need to understand, that we have reached our highest possible form.

• 1:45:40Jocko Willink?

  And all those little thoughts

• 1:45:45Jocko Willink?

  are a trap.

• 1:45:48Jocko Willink?

  Because we're not good. And we don't know everything, we don't understand everything, and we have absolutely not reached our highest form. We all have work to do, so watch out for that trap because it is enticing.

• 1:46:06Jocko Willink?

  It is enticing like a lone machine gun just kind of sitting out there by itself. Waiting to be taken out.

• 1:46:15Jocko Willink?

  And it's real easy to tell yourself that you're good.

• 1:46:21Jocko Willink?

  So here's a little warning for all of us. Especially me.

• 1:46:28Jocko Willink?

  We can't fall for that trap.

• 1:46:38Jocko Willink?

  Well, that wraps up that.

• 1:46:42Jocko Willink?

  Any other notes, Dave?

• 1:46:45Dave Berke?

  No, we addressed all of it that I wrote down and a whole lot more.

• 1:46:51Dave Berke?

  You know, they're

• 1:46:54Dave Berke?

  these lessons, all those statements, the comments, the explanations. They all come from the same place as that trap. They're all lessons learned the hard way. And as repetitive as they sort of sound, they're all because all of those are the same thing. I'm going to say this over and over and over again because this keeps happening over and over and over again. And it's in some ways, it's heartbreaking, but that is the reality is that even those lessons of the things we're supposed to do come from.

• 1:47:25Dave Berke?

  We had a saying in aviation, they come, they were written in blood. They all came from a lesson that's already been, we already know that, but we learned it the hard way. And

• 1:47:37Dave Berke?

  you, you, you repeat yourself all the time. And I don't mean that about you. You repeat yourself. We do it echelon front. We repeat ourselves all the time. We take the same thing and then try to apply the context to whatever world, whatever company, whatever business, whatever problem we're dealing with. But we're always saying the same thing because these lessons, these lessons get learned over and over and over again. And the biggest The biggest thing that prevents us from making that lesson stick is what you just said is ourselves going, "Oh, no, I got it. I've heard it enough. I understand it." And the minute you are convinced that you've heard it enough and you've got it is when you're going to learn the exact same lesson again.

• 1:48:20Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's weird. How, I mean, this happens to us all the time at Echelon Front. You, you go, we go into a company, the company's in the game. They're in the game. They're, they're telling me, I mean, there's definitely people. It happens on EF Online. Somebody would bring something up and somebody would be like, "Oh, Jocko Podcast number 128. He talks about that." I, I, I don't know off the top of my head, but someone's answering that question in a millisecond, right? People that know the material. So we go into companies where they know, they've read, they know. They wrote, memorized. I guess know is a strong word, right?

• 1:49:02Jocko Willink?

  But, and I talked about this on, Daryl Cooper and I got into it a little bit on the Unraveling Podcast. Because he was saying to me, "Well, how do you handle something when you know that the other person's premise is wrong?" And, you know, he was pretty dug in. And I said, "Well,

• 1:49:27Jocko Willink?

  do you actually really know that?" Because I'm not going to approach anything. If Dave Berke comes to me and says, "Hey, Jaco, a UFO just touched down in my backyard. I need support here ASAP."

• 1:49:45Jocko Willink?

  Right?

• 1:49:45Speaker 01

  Not the split hairs, but you mean extraterrestrial?

• 1:49:48Jocko Willink?

  What did I say?

• 1:49:49Speaker 01

  UFO.

• 1:49:50Jocko Willink?

  Okay, yeah.

• 1:49:51Speaker 01

  UFO is just unidentified.

• 1:49:53Jocko Willink?

  Okay, so he identified. So he calls me up and says, "A unidentified extraterrestrial machine just landed in my backyard."

• 1:50:04Jocko Willink?

  Do, what do I say? Look, I know that's not true. Or do I? Right? You know what I say? I say, well, what does it look like? What, what, what sort of, what sort of weaponry do you see? Do, are they, is there a covering element? Can you extract from the AO until we can assemble a counter force to go after these guys? Right? I don't just say, hey, Dave, shut up. You know what? I hate bringing that up. I'm like, I'm like, that's a dumb example, right? But it's really hard for me to think of something that

• 1:50:33Jocko Willink?

  I, I should say it's really hard. It's not, man. People think that they know stuff all the time.

• 1:50:38Dave Berke?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:50:38Jocko Willink?

  And what I say on EF Online the other day, I said, don't mistake your opinion for the truth.

• 1:50:46Jocko Willink?

  Don't mistake your opinion for the truth. Don't mistake people's, don't mistake what you've heard and what you've said for the truth. Don't mistake the way you've always done things for the truth. Don't mistake your perspective for the truth. And that is why when you speak the truth, and you and I talked about this the other day, Dave, when you speak the truth, what you should do is speak the truth humbly.

• 1:51:10Dave Berke?

  From a place of humility.

• 1:51:12Jocko Willink?

  Speak the truth from a place of humility. That's how you speak the truth. Because even when you believe something and you quote, "No, it's right", there is a chance, and you need to open your mind to this chance, that you are actually wrong. And you didn't understand something. You didn't understand a different perspective. And all those things, all those things of, you know, thinking that you know, thinking that you don't make this mistake, all those things, thinking that your, that your opinion is the truth, all those things, those are all traps. Those are all just traps. And they seem so obvious when we're sitting here talking about them. And yet, day after day after day, you, you, you see people fall into those traps.

• 1:51:55Jocko Willink?

  And so what's interesting is when we talk about these lessons and where I was starting this little idea is that you and I work with companies all the time.

• 1:52:05Jocko Willink?

  And they know the material. They can recite the material. And yet, they're caught up, they're not detached, and they're not executing correctly. And so, one of the primary things, and it's great being in echelon front, because when we come in, we are instantly, we're detached. That's our function. So as soon as we just take them and we move them over to our position, three feet, and say, "Look at that meeting, look at how that meeting just went." Or, you know, "Look at this, look at this, this task, the way you put this out to the troops, look at this. Just look at it." Does that sound like you're micromanaging?

• 1:52:48Jocko Willink?

  Does that sound like you're not giving any ownership? Like, what does it sound like? If you read this, and all of a sudden people go, "Ah." So, you've gotta watch out for these traps in the world.

• 1:53:01Dave Berke?

  I'm gonna say something that's a total contradiction. Because, all the things that you, all these quotes, all these lessons, all the things you were just reading about in that, in this book, or whatever this is, this compilation of people's lessons that they've learned. I was thinking about how often these things get repeated. And it's this idea of, hey, the minute you think you know these lessons, the minute you think you, "I know this," is when you actually have the most amount of risk. And at the same time, I'm thinking to myself, "I wish I knew all this stuff." At the very beginning of my career, and to think about what I actually could have done with my time in the Marine Corps,

• 1:53:46Dave Berke?

  if I knew this stuff. And, like, just the ultimate dichotomy of, "You never know this stuff, you have to learn it over and over and over again, and if I just knew this stuff, how much better I would have been at what I was doing."

• 1:54:01Jocko Willink?

  The, the broad understanding of it is, is what people, is what makes it hard for people to understand at a level where it can be utilized. Because I know for a fact...

• 1:54:17Jocko Willink?

  That you were taught, you know, hey, okay, when you're going through the basics, I was like, okay, you got this element over here, they're gonna put down, you were absolutely taught that. I was absolutely taught that. And yet I ended up having to teach this stuff to SEALs, guys that had been in for 15 years, 20 years, be like, hey, why aren't you putting some machine guns out on the flanks while you cross this road? Oh, it's like an old school thing. No, it's actually covered move. This is a basic thing that we do all the time.

• 1:54:46Jocko Willink?

  You know, and I'm not saying every SEAL, but I'm just saying SEALs that had been in the, in the Navy for a long time.

• 1:54:55Jocko Willink?

  And that's what's so difficult about these things. And I was thinking about this the other day.

• 1:55:04Jocko Willink?

  You start, okay, when you do jujitsu, you're at a jujitsu academy. And you, the more people that are at the academy and the better they get, it's like a pyramid. If you're at the top of the pyramid, so Dean Lister is at the top of the pyramid at Victory MMA. Every single time someone shows up new, they're a white belt.

• 1:55:27Jocko Willink?

  When they show up here and they take their first class, that pyramid gets a little bit taller and Dean Lister gets a little bit better from one person showing up here because that one person's gonna train in a different way and he's gonna prop up somebody else and that little movement raises everyone up. By the time it gets to me, I'm going up a little bit and then Dean's going up, just getting a little bit better. So what happens, I think, is these ideas, when you first hear them, they're just sort of there and you don't connect them. And then as you start to connect them together, all of a sudden, well, not all of a sudden, as you start to connect them together, they start getting taller and taller and taller and taller and you start to see more connections.

• 1:56:08Jocko Willink?

  And really for me, this is, it does boil down to what made me start to connect these things was jujitsu. The fact that I could see in jujitsu, what I saw people supposed to do in the battlefield, those were the first two connections that I made. And, and it's probably because I heard it somewhere. I'm sure somebody said, you know, martial arts are like combat. I'm like, oh, what does that mean or whatever? But then I started seeing the actual connection between the two. And then at some point.

• 1:56:39Jocko Willink?

  I started seeing that, oh, those same things actually work in leadership inside of a team, period. And now all of a sudden, everything looks connected. And now all of a sudden, when you start, when you, when you learn a move in jujitsu, when you learn a move in a jujitsu, and you don't know anything, that move is a solitary thing by itself. It's unsupported in any way. You really can't even barely even utilize that move because it's just by itself. You know, you don't even know what position to get into. You don't know how to get into that position. You don't know how to set it up. You don't have, you don't know anything. You know that move, but it's, it's so easy to forget because it's not connected to anything else. The better you get, the more knowledge you have, all of a sudden, you start putting

• 1:57:22Jocko Willink?

  these things together. And now they become a system. Now they're all interrelated. And now when you see something, hear something, it fits in, you see how it fits into this overall broad view of things, which is why, you know, we constantly are quoting, if you see the way, if you see the way broadly, you'll see it in all things. And that's what this is. But it takes a certain level of understanding before you can see the way broadly. And, you know, I talked to young guys that are going in the SEAL teams, and, and they just have no, this stuff isn't even on the, it's not even on the radar in any way, shape, or form,

• 1:58:02Jocko Willink?

  right? And part of it is because they don't see the SEAL teams, they see the SEAL teams as like, oh, I'm gonna go make it through BUDs, and I'm gonna go and, you know, I'm gonna go run, and we're gonna shoot machine guns. They don't understand what this profession is. And it's better now than it was. I mean, the guys, when, when I came in, I didn't freaking understand any of this stuff in any way, shape, or form. I barely even understood what it meant to, okay, you're gonna be part of this squad, and this squad has responsibilities to an overall, I barely grasp any of that.

• 1:58:38Jocko Willink?

  But as you start to assemble this information, and so that's what's hard. So going back to working with the client, like until you can start bringing things together for them, until they start connecting these things in their own head. That's another thing is I can sit there and with a ball peen hammer, hit you with one spot and go cover and move, cover and move, cover and move. Until you see that cover and move is connected to these other things. It's, it's very, very difficult to force the knowledge onto that, onto another human.

• 1:59:13Dave Berke?

  Yeah. And I made the comment earlier, but I wish I knew these things. There's a whole bunch of reasons why you simply can't at the beginning, just like you described. Like I said, Second Lieutenant Dave Berke almost can't know this, no matter how crystal clear these lessons are from World War II and forever back. And the other side of that though, is that even, even when you can, it's, it's still never ends finding more to know. Dude, I, I taught at Top Gun. The, the, the argument, the apex of aviation and the pinnacle and all these things that we use to describe Top Gun,

• 1:59:54Dave Berke?

  this PhD level graduate level system of combat aviation, Top Gun. You know what I was teaching there?

• 2:00:02Jocko Willink?

  Cover and move.

• 2:00:03Dave Berke?

  Cover and move. And do you know why I was teaching cover and move? Because the mistakes that Top Gun made, the students made to go through Top Gun, were mistakes. They weren't doing cover and move, even at that level. The reason I was talking about simple plans at Top Gun, we didn't use the same words, but I was teaching that same thing is because the plans weren't simple and nobody really understood them. And they go out and missions come back and hey, why, why they screwed up? Well, these guys didn't listen to me. Well, that could be it, but actually it's probably not. What probably is, is that you didn't explain it very well. The reason I was teaching these same simple fundamental things at Top Gun is that those are the mistakes that were being made repeatedly by some of the best, most experienced pilots in the world.

• 2:00:45Dave Berke?

  And as I hear myself say, I wish I knew this stuff. And almost now laughing at the phrase, know this stuff.

• 2:00:54Dave Berke?

  It's crazy how even now that I know.

• 2:00:58Dave Berke?

  It's so much more than I ever knew. What I really know is how little I still really know and how much more there is out there. And that's why every time you break out another book, I'm like, dude, that book was awesome. Even though saying the exact same things they're all saying.

• 2:01:17Dave Berke?

  But that's actually, that's actually really good.

• 2:01:22Dave Berke?

  Because we get to do this again.

• 2:01:25Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, we get to do it over and over again.

• 2:01:27Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:28Jocko Willink?

  And get to see it from a different angle and get to understand it a little bit deeper. Like when this example comes in, the pyramid goes up just a little bit more. And it ties together another little part of your brain.

• 2:01:44Jocko Willink?

  And I often wonder, you know, there's some lessons that you cannot teach to someone, like they have to, they have to experience it, right? And there's unfortunately a lot of lessons like that. Let's face it. Let's face it, that is the vast majority of lessons. Because everyone, otherwise, everyone would, you know, get issued a certain book at age 12, and here's what you need to know. And they'd be like, oh, cool. Got it. Okay. Uh, save my money. Okay. Eat healthy. Okay. You know, there's all these fundamental things that a human being could do, that if you did all these fundamental things. And, and by the way, these are not hidden knowledge. These are common knowledge. These are, these are just common knowledge things that everyone kinda knows.

• 2:02:27Jocko Willink?

  And yet, we think it's gonna be different for us. We think we can, I don't need, I'm gonna do it a little bit differently. And it's, no, that's not gonna work. No, it's not gonna work. So, taking these things, and that's what, that's another good thing, is you have to experience them. Some, in some way, you have to experience them. And that's one good thing that happens at Echelon Front, is you are in an environment where you get to use this stuff real world. And that's been interesting, you know, sort of after the first six weeks of the COVID lockdown, not even six weeks. The feedback we started getting was, from, from many of the companies we work with was, this stuff really works. And the reason that they were saying is because they'd never really been

• 2:03:13Jocko Willink?

  tested in it before.

• 2:03:13Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:14Jocko Willink?

  You know, they're doing great. They want to do even better. And now they go and do better. And they go, wow, this stuff really works, doesn't it?

• 2:03:23Jocko Willink?

  So, hard to learn and the thing that makes it hardest to learn is if you fall into the trap of, I know it. I wish there was another, I'm familiar with it, right? There's gotta be a lesser form of I know, because I know is a, there's, that's a hundred percent. I know is a hundred percent. There should be a lesser form of no. Maybe I'm familiar with. I, I, I understand at a decent level, some of the concepts that we talk about.

• 2:03:53Speaker 01

  This is not new to me.

• 2:03:55Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, this is not new to me. That sounds a little bit, is that a little bit kinda?

• 2:03:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:04:00Jocko Willink?

  No, is it a little bit arrogant though?

• 2:04:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:04:02Jocko Willink?

  Oh, okay.

• 2:04:03Speaker 01

  That's why. That's kinda part of the gig.

• 2:04:07Jocko Willink?

  No, I'm, I'm looking for a word that actually says, I'm very familiar with this, but I know that I have a lot to learn. We should make a word.

• 2:04:15Speaker 01

  Oh, you want the opposite?

• 2:04:15Jocko Willink?

  Yes.

• 2:04:15Speaker 01

  Gotcha. Okay, okay.

• 2:04:17Dave Berke?

  The word for how I feel.

• 2:04:19Jocko Willink?

  The word for how we should all feel.

• 2:04:20Speaker 01

  Okay, okay. I thought you were.

• 2:04:21Jocko Willink?

  Which is, I am striving to be better. I'm familiar. I know that these things exist and I know that I don't.

• 2:04:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:04:32Jocko Willink?

  Know them completely.

• 2:04:32Speaker 01

  Like basically saying you're a white belt at this.

• 2:04:35Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And maybe it's like saying I'm a purple belt at this.

• 2:04:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:04:38Dave Berke?

  Which is. That I'm just on the path.

• 2:04:40Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:40Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, Hoiler, back in the day, a long time ago, I did a website for him and he was at my house and it was me and Kid Paliro. And Hoiler.

• 2:04:49Jocko Willink?

  What's up, kid? What's up, Hoiler?

• 2:04:50Speaker 01

  Yep. And so we're, me and Kid Paliro were looking.

• 2:04:54Jocko Willink?

  He texted me that after we had Hexit, he's like, hey.

• 2:04:59Speaker 01

  So we're looking at it and he's like, hey, we're trying to integrate his, we're doing some technical stuff, right? So I'm doing this. I was like, okay, this is what you gotta do. You gotta do this, I think. And he's like, hmm, maybe if we did this. So we tried it his way, boom, and it worked. So it like, you know, it rendered on the screen. And Hoiler's like, it's his website, but he doesn't know this part. He's like, oh, I'm a white belt at this stuff. And it gave me that feeling that, that you just mentioned right now. Like it reminded me of that time, kinda like, he knows what's going on, but he has no idea how deep it goes, you know, in the backend like that.

• 2:05:30Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Well, there's that, there's definitely that time period when you start jujitsu. And you, the first couple of days, it takes a little while to go, wow, I really don't know a lot. Cause in the beginning, you think it's finite.

• 2:05:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:05:44Jocko Willink?

  That's the big difference. In the beginning, you think it's 13 moves. And then you go, oh, wait, it's actually probably 35 moves. When I started jujitsu, I thought it was nine moves. I thought that was the whole thing.

• 2:05:56Speaker 01

  I know me too.

• 2:05:56Jocko Willink?

  Give me my black belt up in here. I know the Americana. I know the guillotine. I know the rear naked choke. I'm good. What, what, what? Give me my black belt. And then you get really good at it. And the better you get, the more you realize, I don't know some, I don't know a lot of stuff.

• 2:06:16Speaker 01

  There's a lot of stuff out there. We don't know.

• 2:06:17Jocko Willink?

  And that's the way this is. That's the way this is. And you get, and like I said, the biggest thing you gotta watch out for is that trap.

• 2:06:28Jocko Willink?

  And we gotta avoid the trap. And speaking of avoiding the trap, and speaking of staying on the path, Echo Charles. We want to avoid the trap of complacency.

• 2:06:38Speaker 01

  Complacency.

• 2:06:39Jocko Willink?

  We want to improve. We want to get better. We want to be better. Recommendations?

• 2:06:43Speaker 01

  So complacency and that, well, how do I, you know, where, why does complacency come in as far as working out goes?

• 2:06:50Jocko Willink?

  Cause you think you're good.

• 2:06:51Speaker 01

  You think you're good to go, or maybe you don't need it as much or whatever. Cause here's a big one. It's gonna sound kinda offbeat. Maybe, maybe not. I don't know. But let's say you get married, kids.

• 2:07:04Speaker 01

  That's an easy one.

• 2:07:05Jocko Willink?

  Bro, my favorite thing is when people tell me, oh, man, I was really into jujitsu, but I got two kids.

• 2:07:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:07:10Jocko Willink?

  And I was just looking at them. I got four kids. What?

• 2:07:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. As if, well.

• 2:07:17Jocko Willink?

  Or I'm old. I've had people go, yeah, I'm just all old now. I'm like, how old are you? They're like, I'm 42. I'm like, bruh.

• 2:07:25Speaker 01

  There's two uh kinda kinda reasons or excuses or whatever there when they're like I got kids. That's either saying I don't have time. Well, okay, so back to the working out thing when you when you after you get married. There's two reasons kinda like, oh, well, my focus is on something else now, you know, meaning like I don't really have time to do these extracurricular things. Quote unquote. And then the other one is um I don't need to anymore. Cause a lot of people that's kinda whether they have it consciously or not, it's like, well, I don't need to necessarily be in great shape. Cause I already have a girl kinda thing. Cause part of their reason is to attract a girl. You see what I'm saying? And it goes both ways. It's a two way street, obviously. So that can be one of the reasons for complacency. Like, oh, I don't need to stay in shape that much.

• 2:08:10Jocko Willink?

  Most definitely.

• 2:08:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't need to lift heavy anymore. Not to say you should be lifting heavy, not to say, not to say you shouldn't be. But I'm just saying that that's a potential excuse. See what I'm saying? Anyway, lifting heavy or not, doing jujitsu or not, because some of us are not doing jujitsu, not recommended, but those are the facts some of the time.

• 2:08:29Jocko Willink?

  Meaning it's not recommended to not do jujitsu.

• 2:08:32Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 2:08:32Jocko Willink?

  That's a problem.

• 2:08:33Speaker 01

  But those those are the facts some of the time. See what I'm saying? Unless.

• 2:08:37Jocko Willink?

  Do you find it weird that I sit here and say that these kinda connections that opened the door to begin to understand some of this stuff? Came from this weird thing where you roll around on the floor with another person and try and choke them?

• 2:08:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:08:51Jocko Willink?

  It's kinda weird, right?

• 2:08:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, um from maybe, yeah, from the outside I can see that. But the inside, you're like, brother, this this thing is just completely explaining jujitsu.

• 2:09:03Speaker 01

  You know what's a weird parallel as well? It's like lifting weights and just your human body. The human body, how it works is like the same thing. It's like a team of systems.

• 2:09:12Jocko Willink?

  That's true.

• 2:09:13Speaker 01

  Doing one thing for the other, you know?

• 2:09:14Jocko Willink?

  And they have to cover and move for each other.

• 2:09:16Speaker 01

  They gotta adapt. It's like all this stuff. Anyway, speaking of human body. You need supplements. If you're going hard in the paint, on the path.

• 2:09:24Jocko Willink?

  You used to say supplementation. It was kind of one of your go to words and now you've gone back. Now, now you're just saying like supplements.

• 2:09:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Does that sound more like marketing?

• 2:09:35Jocko Willink?

  I don't know. I just was really used to you saying supplementation, which was not a normal thing to say.

• 2:09:41Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:09:41Jocko Willink?

  Seems like maybe you're just sort of falling in with the norm. Maybe you got peer pressured.

• 2:09:45Speaker 01

  Maybe. Alright, well, let's go back to supplementation because now that you just said it.

• 2:09:50Jocko Willink?

  I feel good now.

• 2:09:51Speaker 01

  The way like you just.

• 2:09:52Jocko Willink?

  I feel like you're back.

• 2:09:54Speaker 01

  Cool. Well, you saying it kind of brought it to light. Like, yeah, I kind of like how supplementation sounds. You see what I'm saying? When you're on the path in the game, going hard, which we are, you know? Unless we're not, I don't know.

• 2:10:06Jocko Willink?

  Did you lift today?

• 2:10:07Speaker 01

  I did not lift weights today. I'm gonna lift afterwards. Not yet. Yeah, hardcore. Oh, yeah, for sure. Till failure. Anyway. Your joints sometimes take a beating, right? Supplementation will help that. As Dave Berke says, no factor. We got supplementation for that. Joint Warfarin, Super Creole Oil, which I took both of today. I'm on the routine.

• 2:10:26Jocko Willink?

  Of course.

• 2:10:27Speaker 01

  I got some help from you, obviously, but you know, some people out on the interwebs, out in the field. You know, they're demonstrating that they can stick to that routine, leaving it out on the.

• 2:10:37Jocko Willink?

  Oh, did you make adjustments?

• 2:10:38Speaker 01

  Yes, sir.

• 2:10:39Jocko Willink?

  You got them in your bathroom now?

• 2:10:40Speaker 01

  No.

• 2:10:41Jocko Willink?

  Where?

• 2:10:41Speaker 01

  On the counter in the kitchen. Where I always come down. I always come down. See what I'm saying?

• 2:10:45Jocko Willink?

  But you said the bathroom was just a no-go, non-starter.

• 2:10:48Speaker 01

  Well.

• 2:10:49Jocko Willink?

  You don't like to be eating stuff in your bathroom, even if it's just a little capsule.

• 2:10:52Speaker 01

  Given my current routine.

• 2:10:56Jocko Willink?

  I said, I said go pills to be little. Brian Littlefield, that was the original thing. And I don't like to take, so there's, I didn't know this. There's a difference between a capsule, which has the little coating, it's got stuff inside it. And a pill is like a hard thing, right?

• 2:11:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:11:13Jocko Willink?

  And they're a little bit harder to swallow or whatever.

• 2:11:17Speaker 01

  I've found the capsules are harder.

• 2:11:19Jocko Willink?

  Oh, really?

• 2:11:19Speaker 01

  I've found, yeah.

• 2:11:20Jocko Willink?

  That's too bad. You're not in charge of a supplement company.

• 2:11:26Jocko Willink?

  Cause he the original go pills that he made were I said, hey, make these things. I want to, you know, have the stuff from just glow, but make it, make it, um, make it, you know, smaller. So I, the whole story was, hey, man, you know this, Dave, you don't wanna, you don't have to drink a drink before you go and present to a group for two, a half hours. Cause you don't have to say, hey, can I even hold on, let's take a little bio break here. No. In fact, when people, when people tell me, hey, you know, for while you're speaking, we're gonna put waters up here. And I say, if I drink, if I have to drink during the next one hour, if I go, hold on a second while I'm presenting, I need to take a drink right now because my voice is dry. If I have to do that, we got a problem. I failed. You're not, you don't wanna, you're not sitting

• 2:12:09Jocko Willink?

  there so you can see me drink. We're not drinking. Now, if I'm up during the muster, I'm on stage for six hours. Yeah, we're up there drinking and chilling and whatever.

• 2:12:18Speaker 01

  Plus you guys are taking turns.

• 2:12:20Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah. But the, so the go pills, I said, hey, man, I can't be drinking a drink, filling my bladder up while I'm, you know, before, cause I don't want to have to stop. Can you make something compact, compressed? There you go. That's the discipline go in a pill format. Get that, get that mind cranking.

• 2:12:41Speaker 01

  So just to be clear, the discipline go is a pill or a capsule?

• 2:12:46Jocko Willink?

  It is a capsule. Okay. Yes. So the original one that belittle made was a pill cause that's what I had requested. I told them the wrong thing. I didn't understand the difference.

• 2:12:55Speaker 01

  Got to know the lingo, I guess. Okay. So pill, compressed.

• 2:12:59Jocko Willink?

  Yes.

• 2:13:00Speaker 01

  Capsule is a capsule that you can unscrew and take the powder out. Gel cap.

• 2:13:05Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yes, yes.

• 2:13:06Speaker 01

  Oil and D vitamins. Those are gel caps.

• 2:13:10Jocko Willink?

  Yes, they are.

• 2:13:10Speaker 01

  It's different. So the three, uh, delivery methodologies.

• 2:13:15Jocko Willink?

  Look at you.

• 2:13:15Speaker 01

  Just to be clear.

• 2:13:16Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:17Speaker 01

  Okay. There you go. So nonetheless, these things will help you on the path big time. Also, again, we mentioned the D three boom. That's a every, that's a daily. Those are small too. So that's like, kinda like no excuses. You know, some people that like swallowing, swallowing pills. Some people like that for sure. This one, no factor. It's a gel cap, which is arguably-

• 2:13:36Jocko Willink?

  I used to take, I used to take pills one at a time.

• 2:13:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:13:40Jocko Willink?

  One, like, so I would take whatever, seven or eight pills.

• 2:13:44Speaker 01

  Right, so you-

• 2:13:44Jocko Willink?

  I would take one, one.

• 2:13:46Speaker 01

  Why, just, just-

• 2:13:47Jocko Willink?

  I just didn't like it, kinda like what you're saying. I was one of those people. And then I realized it was inefficient.

• 2:13:52Speaker 01

  It is.

• 2:13:53Jocko Willink?

  And I had to overcome this, you know, scenario.

• 2:13:55Speaker 01

  Bro, I'll tell you the technique to swallow pills. You swallow ten pills at once, if you want. Well, I've never tried it, but I'm saying, given the theory, theoretically, cause I, I, what do I take? And this is all at once. Uh, two divi- uh, two D vitamins.

• 2:14:08Jocko Willink?

  Oh, you take two of those?

• 2:14:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:14:10Jocko Willink?

  I take, okay, go ahead.

• 2:14:12Speaker 01

  Uh, three krill oil.

• 2:14:14Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:14:15Speaker 01

  Three joint warfare, and every once in a while, I'll throw in two Cold War. So what is that? Two, six? I don't know, I didn't do the math. Nonetheless, it's a lot. Let's say it's six.

• 2:14:24Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I take all those at once.

• 2:14:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. All you gotta do is when you drink your water with it, wait, you drink water with it?

• 2:14:29Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 2:14:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, that, you know, some guys are advanced, they just boom, no-

• 2:14:31Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's, that's a hardcore dude right there.

• 2:14:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, um, but we're not all there, so we're gonna drink our water with it. But, bro, all you gotta do, some people, they lean their head back.

• 2:14:40Jocko Willink?

  Oh.

• 2:14:40Speaker 01

  Here's the thing. When you lean your head back like that-

• 2:14:43Jocko Willink?

  Narrows the throat chamber?

• 2:14:45Speaker 01

  No, well, I don't know, maybe, maybe not, but that's not what I found, uh, as far as feelings go, the, uh, those capsules that you talk about, they float in the water.

• 2:14:54Jocko Willink?

  Oh.

• 2:14:54Speaker 01

  You want it to sink, really. The pills sink, especially if they're coated with something.

• 2:15:00Jocko Willink?

  Got it.

• 2:15:00Speaker 01

  Like, it's like, anyway, so if you go straight up, straight back, boom, the gel caps float. Sometimes they don't go, go down.

• 2:15:06Jocko Willink?

  Interesting.

• 2:15:07Speaker 01

  This is what you do. You turn your head to the side.

• 2:15:11Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 2:15:13Speaker 01

  See what I'm saying though? Because look, it still floats, but since it's to the side, it's on the side of your throat, not on the top of it, so it goes down easier. Five pills, six pills.

• 2:15:21Jocko Willink?

  Learn something new every day. There I was, thinking I knew how to take capsules.

• 2:15:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:15:27Jocko Willink?

  Now I learned the truth.

• 2:15:29Speaker 01

  I guess technically, I shouldn't even say that's the best way. I'm just saying, currently, that is the leading way.

• 2:15:34Jocko Willink?

  My little daughter was getting sick. And I said, hey, you need to take some Cold War. And so then she's, she does not like to take pills or capsules. And I said, no problem. Um, I broke it open, mixed it up in water.

• 2:15:48Speaker 01

  It was water.

• 2:15:49Jocko Willink?

  You cannot do this. It is, cause there's garlic in there, like a lot of garlic, which, which is an awesome ingredient to have. But man, I mixed it up and it was nasty. Yeah. Try it with one, just to, just to kind of, just to kind of see.

• 2:16:06Jocko Willink?

  That would be a, that would be a, that would be an exercise in discipline. Just mix up Cold War pills and just drink them like shots.

• 2:16:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. Ah, man, I think maybe sprinkle them on some eggs or some, or maybe some bacon or something. That might be something.

• 2:16:19Jocko Willink?

  Interesting, interesting concept.

• 2:16:20Speaker 01

  But, uh, that's the thing though. I'm sure Cold War is not just garlic powder.

• 2:16:24Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, no, no.

• 2:16:25Speaker 01

  I'm sure there's some like actual.

• 2:16:27Jocko Willink?

  That's when you mix it with water and smell it. You're smelling something that is strong.

• 2:16:34Speaker 01

  All right. Well, nonetheless, however you choose to take these things, they will help you a hundred percent. In the game on the path. A hundred percent. Don't forget about Molk, protein in the form of dessert, protein, additional protein. It's not like you're not eating protein ever.

• 2:16:49Jocko Willink?

  If you weren't, it would be.

• 2:16:51Speaker 01

  Boom. Now you are.

• 2:16:52Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:53Speaker 01

  There you go.

• 2:16:56Speaker 01

  What else? Jocko White Tea. Yes. We're deadlifting. Not like we're not deadlifting, unless we're not, I don't know.

• 2:17:02Jocko Willink?

  Should be deadlifting.

• 2:17:02Speaker 01

  We should be. I think so. That's my opinion too. Um, well, what does Jocko White Tea have to do with that? Because it allows you to deadlift eight thousand pounds. Is it eight?

• 2:17:12Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:17:13Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Well, that's the guarantee. Could be more.

• 2:17:15Speaker 01

  Could be more.

• 2:17:15Jocko Willink?

  If you go hard, I guess. And you can get all this stuff at the vitamin shop. The vitamin shop in your local AO area of operations.

• 2:17:23Speaker 01

  Yes, sir. Also at originmaine.com. If you don't want to go to the vitamin shop, you want the delivery system to your door. And you go, yeah, originmaine.com. Also at originmaine.com is jujitsu stuff, gi's, rash guards. Um, you know, there's t-shirts and, you know, other clothes or whatever, but more importantly, actually not importantly, but additionally, significantly additionally, jeans and boots.

• 2:17:52Jocko Willink?

  There's something else coming. You probably don't even know about, because you're not really like, you know, building good relationships in this circle.

• 2:18:01Speaker 01

  Apparently not.

• 2:18:01Jocko Willink?

  So you know, the, the material that the gi pants are made of?

• 2:18:06Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:18:06Jocko Willink?

  It's called atomic twill. So, and it's, it's durable enough to be gi pants, obviously. And, uh, I was like, Pete, what do you think? I could use just a pair of pants. So he, he made them and they are freaking legit.

• 2:18:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, like work pants.

• 2:18:26Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, like work pants, but they're, yeah, they're basically just pants, but they're not jeans.

• 2:18:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:18:31Jocko Willink?

  They'll be coming. They'll be working.

• 2:18:34Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:35Speaker 01

  Yes, all made in America, by the way, which is a big deal. Fabric, cotton, grown in America, all the way to the, to the, to the deal.

• 2:18:43Jocko Willink?

  What about, what about like the things that you put together to make them stay up? You know what I mean? There's a certain thing there. What's that called?

• 2:18:51Speaker 01

  I don't know what you're talking about.

• 2:18:53Jocko Willink?

  What's it called? That, that keeps the two pieces of cotton fabric together? What's it called?

• 2:18:58Speaker 01

  I don't know.

• 2:18:58Jocko Willink?

  Not the zipper, above the zipper is the. The button, that's right.

• 2:19:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, the buttons. Yes. Even the buttons are made in America. Works of art, really. Function and fashion, as it were. Nonetheless, originmaine.com is where you get all this good stuff. Also, speaking of getting good stuff.

• 2:19:16Jocko Willink?

  Wait, Dave, how'd you like the Jaco Palmer? You're gonna go, go can.

• 2:19:20Speaker 01

  I liked it.

• 2:19:22Jocko Willink?

  Is it, is it the top of your list? Are you, because you're on a, what, Dax Savage? What?

• 2:19:27Speaker 01

  No hit on, on Dax Savage, but I was doing some Tropic Thunder, but now that, now that Palmer's in a can, that's number one.

• 2:19:37Jocko Willink?

  Just, just went to the top.

• 2:19:39Speaker 01

  Well, dude, Palmer powder is all I had.

• 2:19:41Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:42Speaker 01

  And, uh, the thing about go is like, I get them because I'm going somewhere. I'm on the go. So I don't have time to mix up the powder all the time. The powder was like almost a treat, almost like milk.

• 2:19:53Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:53Speaker 01

  So I'm like, I got time here. I'm gonna get crushed ice. I'm gonna get the powder. I'm gonna mix it up. I got some time and I'm gonna just, now.

• 2:20:01Jocko Willink?

  Done.

• 2:20:02Speaker 01

  All day.

• 2:20:02Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, I agree with the Jaco Palmer scenario like it was kind of surprisingly good. You know, when you think, oh yeah, oh, iced tea and lemon. Cool. Nice. Nothing new. Hey, this is nothing new to me. Boom. Take a hit. The sum is greater than the sum. What is it?

• 2:20:20Jocko Willink?

  The parts.

• 2:20:21Speaker 01

  You see what I'm saying. But anyway, it was that sort of situation. It's good. Feel good. Anyway, speaking of good, Jaco has a store. It's called Jaco's Store. This is where you can get your t-shirts, hoodies, hats. Other cool stuff on there that represent on the path. Discipline equals freedom. Good. Take the high ground or the high ground will take you. All this stuff you can find Jaco's store.com. Really? Uh, you know, we think that it's cool stuff, but you know, go on there, check it out. If you like something. Get some.

• 2:20:52Jocko Willink?

  In all these ways. By the way, if you just like the podcast and you want to support it, these are good ways to support the podcast. Cause other than that, well, I mean, the podcast, we don't have it behind the firewall.

• 2:21:04Speaker 01

  Paywall.

• 2:21:05Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, paywall. Right?

• 2:21:07Speaker 01

  Firewall.

• 2:21:07Jocko Willink?

  That's what everybody wants me to do.

• 2:21:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:21:10Jocko Willink?

  Put it behind the paywall.

• 2:21:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:21:12Jocko Willink?

  They, they, they want that because all the podcasts are now the new media stuff.

• 2:21:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:21:19Jocko Willink?

  So, well.

• 2:21:22Speaker 01

  Varying levels of advantage.

• 2:21:23Jocko Willink?

  We don't want to do that. We just want to do what we're doing.

• 2:21:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:21:26Jocko Willink?

  And in order to do what we're doing, a little support is nice on that one. Hey, if you, and speaking of this podcast, subscribe to it. Check it out. Echo Charles thinks that's important for me to say right now.

• 2:21:38Speaker 01

  I don't think it's unimportant. How about that?

• 2:21:41Jocko Willink?

  We also have another podcast that's out right now. It's called The Unraveling, the Jaco Unraveling Podcast, Daryl Cooper and me talking about things in the world and how things in the world, when you unravel them, you find out where they came from, why they're happening. And it gives you better understanding of the things that are happening right now. It used to be called The Thread. We had to change the name.

• 2:22:05Jocko Willink?

  There's also Grounded Podcast, which we haven't recorded in a while, but we'll get right on that. Warrior Kid Podcast as well. Don't forget about the Warrior Kid Soap made by Aiden, who's up there in a farm taking goat milk at a young age with a, running a business. So that the entire world.

• 2:22:25Jocko Willink?

  Can stay clean. We got a YouTube channel where Echo Charles is supposed to make videos. And he does sometimes, we'll say.

• 2:22:36Speaker 01

  Sure. I'm not gonna argue with that one.

• 2:22:39Jocko Willink?

  Some of them have explosions.

• 2:22:42Speaker 01

  Music, sometimes.

• 2:22:44Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, some have music and other enhancements.

• 2:22:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:22:47Jocko Willink?

  Skeletons.

• 2:22:48Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 2:22:49Jocko Willink?

  Fire.

• 2:22:50Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 2:22:50Jocko Willink?

  Tanks. Aircraft.

• 2:22:53Speaker 01

  Sometimes, yeah. Unless some don't.

• 2:22:56Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and everyone that thinks that Echo Charles should put one Easter egg?

• 2:23:03Speaker 01

  Easter egg.

• 2:23:04Jocko Willink?

  One pleasant surprise into these three hour podcasts. Like when Dave Berke says, "A mortar exploded. There should be a mortar exploding in this room." Just momentarily.

• 2:23:20Jocko Willink?

  And then the conversation continues. A lot of people think that's what should happen. So we all have a little bit of fun when we're watching a three hour.

• 2:23:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, we'll keep exploring that as an option, for sure. So, what else? Oh yeah, Psychological Warfare. Don't forget about that one. Hey, when you don't feel like lifting, bruh, I'll admit, yesterday, straight up, didn't feel like lifting.

• 2:23:45Jocko Willink?

  Like lifting today. But I did.

• 2:23:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, but you already have Psychological Warfare playing in your head on repeat. You know, one of those.

• 2:23:51Jocko Willink?

  Yes, I do, unfortunately.

• 2:23:54Speaker 01

  If you want it in your head, maybe not on repeat, maybe repeat for a little bit, and that's how you get it. Go to like, you know, wherever you can buy MP3s, Amazon, you know, Google Play, all these places. Get Psychological Warfare by Jocko Willink. What it is, is Jaco talking in your ear, telling you why you shouldn't skip the workout, why you shouldn't.

• 2:24:11Jocko Willink?

  Eat the donut.

• 2:24:12Speaker 01

  Pound that donut, or the whole box, or whatever, nut or butter cookies, you know, you get.

• 2:24:19Speaker 01

  Nonetheless, you know, gently, pragmatically, logically, bring you past those moments of weakness. And boom, you get, you get stuff done. It's real good, 100% effective, too, by the way.

• 2:24:31Jocko Willink?

  Flipside Canvas, if you want some kind of message to hang on your wall, my brother Dakota Meyer is making it for you. All kinds of messages, important messages. Check that out, flipsidecanvas.com. Got some books. One of them was written by this guy right over here, Dave Berke, The Code.

• 2:24:51Jocko Willink?

  The code, the evaluation, the protocols. What do you got? What do you got, Dave?

• 2:24:54Dave Berke?

  Dude, still getting a ton of messages from troopers who are still on the path and in the game. And it's so legit to hear. Something as small as this little, what is it? Field guide?

• 2:25:06Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, field guide. We weren't really sure what to call it.

• 2:25:08Dave Berke?

  No, but it's, it's been, it's useful.

• 2:25:11Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:12Dave Berke?

  Uh, which has been awesome. So keep those messages coming, man. I love hearing from them.

• 2:25:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is like one of those things where, you know, I called it like a reminder almost, but it, it's kind of like, okay, cool. A reminder doesn't make, you know, that much of an impact maybe on your mind, but think about it. Every day at, let's say at the end of the day, right? Most of us don't think every single day, most of us don't think, how did I do today? How did I do today in all these like critical areas as far as like making an improvement in what you're even doing?

• 2:25:39Jocko Willink?

  Imagine if you were part of anything and you never assessed that thing.

• 2:25:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. Doesn't even compute.

• 2:25:47Jocko Willink?

  Imagine if you wanted to make something better. You would assess that thing and see where you could improve it. Now imagine that the most important thing we have is our lives. And people go through their whole lives without assessing where they are, who they are, what they're doing, where they're going. Most important thing you need to know on the battlefield is where you are.

• 2:26:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:26:07Jocko Willink?

  Then you can move forward.

• 2:26:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:26:09Jocko Willink?

  That's, that's the, that's the protocols in this book.

• 2:26:13Speaker 01

  It's funny, like, you know, when like you're a kid and you're trying to like, I don't know, make the football team, right? And you have like tryouts, which, you know, a day or a week or what, sometimes a week or whatever. And after every little session, you'd like, come home and you're like, how did I do? How did I do? How did I do? That's just for some intramural football game. We're talking about life. See what I'm saying? You would think it'd be more obvious.

• 2:26:34Jocko Willink?

  You would think.

• 2:26:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:26:36Jocko Willink?

  That that book, that that book would just be, hey, this is, hey, what are you guys doing writing this? There's, you know, there's, this already exists.

• 2:26:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:26:43Jocko Willink?

  What are you doing writing this? It doesn't exist. Now it does. The code, the evaluation, the protocols. Dave Berke, Leadership Strategy and Tactics. What percentage of questions that you get in your constant leadership? As a, as a leadership instructor, as a leadership coach, as a, as an executive coach, what percentage of questions are answered that you have to answer that you could either answer on the fly and say, hey, here's, here's a good way to look at it. Or you could, if you had an extra 14 seconds, say, hold on a second, go to page 237 in Leadership Strategy and Tactics. What's the percentage?

• 2:27:20Dave Berke?

  It's a big number.

• 2:27:24Dave Berke?

  I don't want to do the math. It's a big number. I don't want to say it's all there because that would be, that'd be a lot to say it's all there, but it's there. And if it's not exactly there, there's a version of it that's there that will fit wherever you are. The other side of it, just, just read that book. Just read it and it's there.

• 2:27:45Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I, I think what's good about that book is the stuff that we're talking about today where you have to pull these other things and you kind of want to start fitting them together. I think this, that book is a good step of taking these various principles and starting to see how they play into the world. Which I think is a good thing.

• 2:28:06Dave Berke?

  Yes.

• 2:28:07Jocko Willink?

  Kids.

• 2:28:10Jocko Willink?

  You, you, you might have kids, you might know kids, you might as well get them on the path. Way of the Warrior Kid, one, two, and three. Those are available. Those are helpful. I'm, I'm telling you right now. If you could get a kid, these books, you are going to change the trajectory of their lives. And I know that's an arrogant and a, and a, and a bold statement to make, but I hear it all the time from parents, from teachers, and from kids themselves.

• 2:28:43Jocko Willink?

  It's, it's just, just please, just get it for the kids. Get it for the kids. And then if you've got a smaller kid, think about what it's like being a small kid. The world. You have to contend with the world. It's a scary place. We have fears to overcome. Mikey and the Dragons teaches kids how to overcome fear. Discipline Goes Freedom Field Manual. How to Get After It.

• 2:29:07Jocko Willink?

  For Adults and Extreme Ownership and the Dichotomy of Leadership. The Fundamental Principles of Combat Leadership that we talk about all the time that I wrote with my brother Leif Babin. We have Echelon Front Leadership Consultancy. What do we do there, Dave?

• 2:29:19Dave Berke?

  We teach leadership. Now, we help make the connection between all this stuff and the world that these people are living in, and it's the coolest thing in the world because I get to think about this stuff. We get to think about this stuff all the time.

• 2:29:34Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:34Dave Berke?

  Which is just completely awesome.

• 2:29:36Jocko Willink?

  Real world application.

• 2:29:37Dave Berke?

  Yes.

• 2:29:38Jocko Willink?

  On a daily basis into a multitude of scenarios and the outcomes are always the same. It's like, yes, we actually know what to do there and we can help you.

• 2:29:51Jocko Willink?

  Go to, go to echelonfront.com for that. And look, you don't have to necessarily have us to come to you, or you don't necessarily have to come to us. We had to cancel one of our musters that bummed a lot of people out. Me, you, all of us, we got bummed out. But this is, this is 2020. We are online. EF Online. All the stuff that we're talking about, when you need direct contact to help get through things, to improve your leadership capability, to improve your team's leadership capability, to get you all aligned. Go to EFonline.com. You might be thinking that, oh, that sounds like something where I'll

• 2:30:34Jocko Willink?

  go on there and, and watch a video about something and you, you will go, you can go and watch videos. But you can also come and ask Dave Berke a question. You can come and ask me a question. You can argue with me. You can say, actually, Jaco, cover move didn't work for me in this situation. I will gladly discuss this with you. That is what we are doing with EF Online. So it's awesome. What'd I miss, Dave?

• 2:31:00Dave Berke?

  Have you talked about, because we have a whole new platform right now for EF Online.

• 2:31:05Jocko Willink?

  Good point. Yes.

• 2:31:08Dave Berke?

  The, the, the feedback we're getting on that is how, how easy it is for people out there to connect with us directly in real time, not to talk theory, not to talk principle, but to talk, I'm having this actual problem or can you help me? Yes, I can. And then we're getting. We're getting feedback. We're getting

• 2:31:26Jocko Willink?

  Sit reps.

• 2:31:26Dave Berke?

  Sit reps. Hey, the thing you told me yesterday, I just did it. It worked. Thanks. And if you haven't, you need to tell people about this because the EF online access is so legit. It's, it's growing quickly, but it's growing because one of the other cool things about it is that we'll get a que- we're talking, we'll get a question like a little chat box. Dave got a question, but I'll be answering another question. Before I get to that next question, five other people, other troopers have said, hey, had the same problem at my job. This is what I did. And by the time I go to answer it, five other troopers have already engaged and helped them and given them some, so the interaction between the other troopers is just as good as the interaction with us.

• 2:32:07Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And all that stuff is taking place on, we have a forum in there too. So all that stuff, you can go in there and say, hey, my boss just told me to do this. This is what I think. And, and you know, one of us EF instructors or one of the other troopers, you know, oh, you know what? I'm in HR. I'm the HR chief at my company. Here's what you should think about. So it's, it's just an awesome format. It's an awesome thing. And even though we had to cancel one muster, we do, we are going to do the Phoenix muster, September 16th and 17th, Dallas, December 3rd and 4th. Go to extremeownership.com for details. Look, it's probably going to be social distancing. We're not going to have a bunch of seats. We're going to have to give, we're going to have to put away a bunch of seats. So it's going to sell out quicker than normal. So if you want to come, check it out ASAP. We

• 2:32:50Jocko Willink?

  got EF Overwatch and we are placing some awesome people from the military into executive leadership positions and leadership positions throughout the country in awesome businesses, people that, companies that want to have folks that understand the principles that we talk about here. Go to EFOverwatch.com. Whether you need leaders or whether you are a leader leaving the military, let us know and we will connect you. And then AmericasMightyWarriors.org. Mark Lee's mom, Mommy Lee, who has made it her mission to help families, service members,

• 2:33:31Jocko Willink?

  Gold Star families all over the world. If you want to get involved with her, she is getting after it and she has been for 14 years. And if you want to help out or get involved, go to AmericasMightyWarriors.org.

• 2:33:50Jocko Willink?

  And if you want some more of my hyped up hypotheses, or you want to hear more of Echo's semi-serious speculations, or maybe you just want to hear one more of Dave's stringent stories, then you can find us on the interwebs, on Twitter, on Instagram, and on Facebook. Dave is at David R. Burke, Echo is at Echo Charles, and I am at Jocko Willink. And thank you to all the men and women in uniform throughout history who learned these lessons in blood and passed them on to our modern warriors, who put them to use, put these

• 2:34:35Jocko Willink?

  lessons to use to keep peace in the world, and to police and law enforcement and firefighters and paramedics and EMTs and dispatchers and correctional officers and Border Patrol and Secret Service. Thanks to all of you for making sure we have peace here at home. And to everyone else out there, remember these lessons. And first and foremost, remember how this book started, that the paramount combat lesson learned from every operation is the vital importance of leadership. Aggressive and determined leadership is the priceless factor which inspires command

• 2:35:20Jocko Willink?

  and upon which all success in battle depends. Leadership is responsible for success or failure. So don't fall into the trap. We are not good enough. Go out there and be better. And until next time, this is Dave and Echo and Jaco. Out.