301: This Is Life. This Is Death. This Is The Final Spin. An Alternate Biography.

Final Spin. A preview and analysis. 0:52:22 - Final thoughts--Extended. 1:16:15 - How to stay on THE PATH. 1:37: 13 - 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 301 with Echo Charles and me Jocko Willink. Good evening Echo. Good evening.

• 0:10Jocko Willink?

  How did I end up here?

• 0:13Jocko Willink?

  I'm smart.

• 0:16Jocko Willink?

  I'm funny. I look pretty damn handsome if I do say so myself. But here I am.

• 0:24Jocko Willink?

  Nowhere.

• 0:27Jocko Willink?

  And it seems this is where I will always be.

• 0:32Jocko Willink?

  Nowhere.

• 0:35Jocko Willink?

  Bedroom. It is not an apartment, but it looks like one. Cheap furniture, well-used carpet, not clean, but not dirty. The bedroom is not unique in its wares: bed, desk, chair, dresser, small bedside table with lamp, overhead light, janky ceiling fan spinning at a low speed.

• 1:02Jocko Willink?

  Then there is the decor. Pictures hung neatly on the walls. They are strange. Or at least indicate a strangeness that is hard to interpret. Harmless, but different.

• 1:20Jocko Willink?

  Johnny walks in. Twenty-something, leaning towards 20. Pretty damn handsome for an unkempt young man who stays up too late and eats the wrong foods and drinks more beer and whiskey than he should.

• 1:36Jocko Willink?

  He looks at his brother.

• 1:39Jocko Willink?

  Johnny is frustrated. He tries to remain restrained, but it can be hard after all these years. What the hell cleaner? Man, I told you about these shirts. Artie looks distraught. Johnny sees. Johnny cannot stay frustrated.

• 2:01Jocko Willink?

  After all, this is Artie, his brother.

• 2:06Jocko Willink?

  And no one could really be mad at Artie. What? Is it not clean? Artie replies, earnestly concerned, wondering if he had somehow failed his brother.

• 2:17Jocko Willink?

  No, Artie, it isn't that it is not clean. It's clean, but it's just a T-shirt. I know. Artie cuts in. It's 100% cotton T-shirt. I used a warm, warm cycle. It shouldn't have shrunk at all. I'm always careful about that. It's not shrunk, Artie. That's not it. It's just...

• 2:40Jocko Willink?

  Never mind. Forget it. Forget what, Johnny? What's wrong? This was killing Artie. The one thing he was supposed to be good at, and it seemed like he messed it up. Artie, Johnny replied as kindly as he could. It's just that it's a T-shirt. You don't press T-shirts. You don't put starch in T-shirts, buddy. But the creases are sharp, aren't they? Artie replies, wondering what on earth the problem could be. The creases are sharp, Johnny concedes, but that's not the point. You don't put military creases in T-shirts. I've told you this before, Artie, but why? Cotton holds the starch really well.

• 3:26Jocko Willink?

  Johnny starts to get frustrated again. He's been down this road before. Many, many times. Look, cleaner. I know that. You always tell me that. And I always tell you, you just don't starch and press T-shirts because... Because you just don't do it.

• 3:47Jocko Willink?

  Mom likes hers pressed. Johnny lets out a sigh. Artie realizes he's gone too far. Listen, Artie, I get it. But I'm not mom, and I don't want my T-shirts to be starched and pressed. It's a Black Sabbath T-shirt. I just wear it out with a pair of jeans, okay? Can you just give me, give them a simple wash and dry from now on, please? Low heat tumble dry? Artie asks, wanting to get a good procedure locked down. Johnny smiles. Yeah, Artie. I think that would be perfect. Thanks, bud. I can do it now, Artie offers. I gotta go. Okay. It won't happen again, Johnny.

• 4:30Jocko Willink?

  Thanks, Artie, Johnny said with a smile.

• 4:35Jocko Willink?

  And Johnny, Artie asks, "What?"

• 4:39Jocko Willink?

  "I'm sorry." "It's okay bud." "It's okay." Johnny feels a little bad as Artie walks away. They are brothers. They even look a little alike. It isn't too much of a stretch to see the similar genes. Dark hair, blue eyes, pronounced eyebrows.

• 5:01Jocko Willink?

  But that is where the similarities end. After all, Artie is different.

• 5:10Jocko Willink?

  A little pudgy, glasses. It is possible to tell from looking at his face that something isn't quite right.

• 5:19Jocko Willink?

  There are medical names that could be assigned, but most of those wouldn't quite hit the mark.

• 5:26Jocko Willink?

  He's older than Johnny by six years, but his peculiarities keep him living at home.

• 5:34Jocko Willink?

  Johnny, on the other hand, doesn't have an excuse to still be living at home, other than Artie and his mom. They both need him around.

• 5:46Jocko Willink?

  That's what he tells himself, anyway.

• 5:49Jocko Willink?

  Johnny's bedroom is the same room he has always had. Mattress on the floor, no box spring, no bed frame.

• 5:58Jocko Willink?

  Posters of rock bands on the wall from when he was younger. Black Sabbath, Motorhead, Led Zeppelin, AC/DC. Some muscle cars, too. He hadn't bothered to take them down as he outgrew them. He also hadn't bothered to clean his room very often. Clothes, remnants of food and beer cans on the floor.

• 6:23Jocko Willink?

  This was all a stark contrast to Artie's room. Clinically clean, with the bed tightly made.

• 6:31Jocko Willink?

  And then there are the walls of Artie's room and their curious decor. The walls neatly display pictures of clothes, washing machines, and dryers. There are brochures about various lines of laundry equipment on his little desk. Some of the more colorful ones are also hanging on the wall. There are also coupons for laundry detergents, fabric softeners, and stain removal products on the desk in an envelope.

• 7:01Jocko Willink?

  The source of his nickname, Cleaner, is no mystery at all.

• 7:07Jocko Willink?

  Artie likes to clean. Laundry, to be exact.

• 7:18Jocko Willink?

  That right there is the opening

• 7:22Jocko Willink?

  to a new book. A new book called Final Spin, which was written by me.

• 7:33Jocko Willink?

  And it is a novel. I guess that's what it says on the cover.

• 7:37Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 7:37Jocko Willink?

  But it's also kind of a poem. It's also kind of a manuscript. I don't really

• 7:43Jocko Willink?

  I don't really know 100% what to call it, but it's not normal in the way that it is written.

• 7:50Jocko Willink?

  And

• 7:52Jocko Willink?

  so as far as the storyline goes, it's I was thinking about this. I think it's a little bit of an alternate autobiography of sorts. Have you ever heard of alternate history books? So it's where they take some event in the past and they change it, you know? What if the Nazis won, right? What if the South won the Civil War? They they call them alternate history books. So I was kind of thinking, this is almost like an alternate biography in a way. Maybe not specifically, but maybe some of my friends, some of the experiences we had, maybe my life, if I'd taken some different turns along the way.

• 8:27Speaker 01

  Well, I did notice the guy's name is Johnny.

• 8:29Jocko Willink?

  The guy's name is Johnny. Yeah, but then there's like, you're gonna see as we talk through this, there's some composite characters and it's almost like everyone's a composite character.

• 8:39Speaker 01

  What do you mean composite?

• 8:40Jocko Willink?

  Meaning different people from my past, kind of assembled together. Maybe two people that acted a certain way, or one characteristic from someone, maybe a little bit of a characteristic from me.

• 8:54Jocko Willink?

  So that was kind of the starting point, these kind of, these kind of humans. And you put them in this situation. So, so what is the book about? Let me, I'm gonna start off by reading a review of the book. The first review to come out about the book, and this review came from,

• 9:10Jocko Willink?

  from something called Publishers Weekly, which is a, which is a publishing trade magazine that's been around since 1872. And the subtitle of this thing is "The International News Magazine of Book Publishing and Book Selling." This is the heavy hitter of this industry. Since the 1940s, the book review section is sort of become the, the center of the magazine and the online website. And it carries a lot of weight. And, and truly ultimately determines a lot of what you read, depending on how it does and how, how this publication talks about it. The, what's interesting is the reviews in Publishers Weekly are anonymous. They're short. They're blunt.

• 9:55Jocko Willink?

  And oftentimes to the point of being brutal, you can see that the people that write them

• 10:02Jocko Willink?

  can be harsh and they're usually crafty writers. So they're harsh in a pretty savage way. I was reading a little bit about it. One author said, "A negative review is never pleasant, but Publishers Weekly reviews have a particularly heart-stopping quality." And this guy wrote a piece, I, I didn't write down his name, but it was how he got a bad review and just what it felt like.

• 10:26Jocko Willink?

  Now, as I said, this book is,

• 10:31Jocko Willink?

  it's different. It's not a normal book. It's hard to classify the form that I wrote it in.

• 10:37Jocko Willink?

  And I've written a bunch of other books before. Some bestselling books, some New York Times bestselling books. But here's the thing, those books were of a different genre, right? And that means a big, that means a lot in this world. In the, in the publishing world, in the literature world.

• 10:56Jocko Willink?

  I've written a bunch of these, you know, nonfiction adult books. That's what I've written. And I've written children's fiction books, right? But neither of those are fiction adult books. So it's like saying, well, I played professional football. So I can play professional baseball too. It's sort of like saying that, which we know doesn't really work that way. And most people can't handle that transition and don't handle that transition. So going into this, going into writing the novel. Right? I got warned. Ever tell you about this? Probably. I got warned by my publisher. By my, I got warned by my editor. I got warned by my agent. They were. They were, I think.

• 11:40Jocko Willink?

  Little bit trying to talk me out of it. A little bit trying to talk me out of it, right? They're saying it's a different world and they don't care what you've done before. And they might, they might actually hold your other books against you. They kind of say that kind of thing. Right? And you should just maybe stay in your lane. Which by the way, I got that about my kids books too. Uh, but.

• 12:01Jocko Willink?

  This story. Is one of the stories that's in my head and I got a lot of stories in my head. And this was the one that bubbled to the surface that needed to get out. So I got it out. And this is what Publishers Weekly had to say. So here we go. From the critics. Final spin, a novel by Jocko Willink, former Navy SEAL and children's book author Willink. Way of the Warrior Kid series marks his adult fiction debut with the downbeat and gripping story of a group of characters abandoned by the American dream. At age 23, Johnny cares for his alcoholic mother and mentally challenged brother Artie, while holding down a dead end job as a stock boy at a big box store.

• 12:44Jocko Willink?

  Artie is obsessed with clean clothes and when the laundromat where he works is slated to be sold, Johnny decides to buy the business in order to keep Artie employed.

• 12:56Jocko Willink?

  To come up with the $40,000 he needs, Johnny and his best friend Goat decide to rob the safe at their store, hand off the money to the owner, then high tail it to Mexico. They get the money, but the getaway scheme is flawed from the start, and Johnny and Goat quickly have the state police on their trail. To make matters worse, Johnny is forced to say goodbye to his girlfriend Jessica, who has just found out she is pregnant. Willink tells his story in quick blasts of haiku-like writing. And they give the example here, Johnny on the customers at his workplace, quote, "People,

• 13:38Jocko Willink?

  flesh-covered robot beings in need of fuel and meaning. They find both here," end quote, with dialogue reminiscent of early David Mamet. Told with a gritty simplicity, this retains a hold on the reader right through to the inevitable tragic climax. So, uh, that's the plot of the book, and that's the impression that they got at Publishers Weekly, which was really, uh, an awesome review. I was definitely very stoked to read that, as was my literary agent, as was my publisher, as was my editor. Everyone thinks you're rolling the dice. Everyone's nervous. They're scared.

• 14:23Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, you kinda are rolling the dice, but the nature of dice is you win and you lose. So, you know, a lot of times what people worried about is the losing part.

• 14:32Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 14:33Speaker 01

  But there is the winning part.

• 14:34Jocko Willink?

  Yep. Now, so they compare me, they compare the, the, uh, writing, or at least the dialogue to, yeah, the dialogue, and I don't want to give myself too much credit here, but they, they, they compare the dialogue to David Mamet, Mamet, who is, well, straight up, he's a Pulitzer Prize-winning freaking author. Uh, he's a playwright, he's a film director, director, or screenwriter, he's written all kinds of stuff. You ever heard of Glengarry Glen Ross?

• 15:03Speaker 01

  Yes, sir.

• 15:04Jocko Willink?

  Yep, he wrote that.

• 15:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:06Jocko Willink?

  Coffee's for closers. Always be closing. Uh, Speed the Plow, he wrote the screenplay for The Postman Always Rings Twice, Little Jack Nicholson, uh, The Verdict, The Untouchables, Hoffa, Wag the Dog, Hannibal.

• 15:21Jocko Willink?

  He wrote and directed Things Change, Homicide, Oleanna, The Winslow Boy, State in Maine, Spartan, just a bunch of stuff. What I'm saying is that this guy's a highly respected and accomplished writer. Definitely, I was very pleasantly surprised and humbled to be compared to him in any way. So, we're off to a strong start. We're feeling good about it so far. Much appreciated. Because this is a different world.

• 15:46Jocko Willink?

  So, it's interesting. Appreciate, yeah, people, if you, if you want to get the book, that will be awesome.

• 15:56Jocko Willink?

  And it's not a complete dud. We'll say that. So, now, this is an interesting, we're gonna get into the book a little bit.

• 16:06Jocko Willink?

  Which is gonna be a little bit tricky because I don't want to ruin the story, story spoiler, spoiler alert, so I'm gonna keep it a little bit focused on not going too much into it, but at the same time, getting into the characters a little bit. So, the characters. Let's start with this guy Artie. So, we got this guy Artie, who you already heard about, he's got some kind of mental challenges, which I don't name in the book. And the reason I didn't name him in the book is because a lot of times I've met people in my life where I know that they have some kind of mental challenge, but

• 16:45Jocko Willink?

  I don't know what it is. I'm not a doctor. There's no, they're not wearing a label on their hat that says whatever mental challenge they've got.

• 16:56Jocko Willink?

  And so I didn't want a label, you know, I didn't want to throw a label on there. This is the particular situation that this person's in. And the other thing is, you know, people have such a wide variety of mental challenges that you don't know what you're gonna get.

• 17:12Jocko Willink?

  So where did this character came from? Well, I, this is a very direct story. I worked at Wendy's.

• 17:19Speaker 01

  Hell yeah.

• 17:20Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. I don't know if that, I don't know if that warrants a hell yeah, but I worked at Wendy's. And when I worked at Wendy's, you've been to Wendy's before, right?

• 17:28Speaker 01

  Yes, sir, I have.

• 17:29Jocko Willink?

  Which, let's face it, kind of props to Wendy's. Wendy's is good to go. Wendy's, Wendy's serves it up. And I used to, I used to get my chow on at Wendy's when I was a teenager. Well, this Wendy's where I worked, there was, there was a salad bar. You know, they have a salad bar at Wendy's? I don't know. Do they still have a salad bar at Wendy's?

• 17:44Speaker 01

  Not that I know of, but I don't, I don't know.

• 17:47Jocko Willink?

  So back in the day, back in the day, they had a salad bar at Wendy's and the person that ran the salad bar, that took care of the salad bar, that resupplied the peach slices and the Caesar salad dressing, was this woman who clearly had, she was probably, I'm gonna say 55, maybe 60 years old. So an older woman, thin, short hair. Her name was Jean.

• 18:15Jocko Willink?

  And she obviously had, it seemed like some kind of perhaps autism. But I, again, I don't know. She's not wearing a label. But she was super into the salad bar. She was probably the best, one of the best employees ever. She loved this salad bar. She wanted to be squared away. She was out there with a washcloth, wiping up. If anybody, if you spilled a drop of salad dressing on your, on your maneuver from the spoon to the plate, she was on it. She was standing by with a rag. She was gonna wipe that up, like almost bumping into you, but she also knew that that wasn't correct. So she'd give you, you know, three quarters of a second to take one step towards the croutons and then she was in there getting on it.

• 19:01Jocko Willink?

  So she's there and she's working and she loved it. I mean, like she was obsessed with it and no one would talk to her, right? Everyone was kind of mean to her, right? Cause you could make fun of her and she was an easy target. And I was cool to her, you know? I'd always say, hi, hi Jean, how you doing? You know, I'd try and talk to her a little bit. And every time I would start a conversation with her, hey Jean, how are you? You know, hey Jean, how's it going today? And she'd be like, I just opened up a new can of, of, of croutons in the, or new, a new can of sliced peaches. They're gonna be so good. And I'd be, oh, that's awesome. You know? And I'd say, oh, you know, it's here at like lunch break. Hey Gene, are you gonna take a lunch break? Yeah, but first I'm gonna get more sliced onions out here and Have you seen the onions? They're so fresh. She was just fired up, man.

• 19:46Jocko Willink?

  To the point where

• 19:49Jocko Willink?

  I was torn between thinking if it was an abusive situation where she was being taken advantage of? To where the other's like, complete opposite, was she just were they so, was she so lucky to be there? And happy that they hired her and like here she was with this job?

• 20:14Jocko Willink?

  So that was one part of it. The other part of it that struck me, that stuck with me for my whole life

• 20:21Jocko Willink?

  is that she was happy. Right? So here I am, this young freaking punk ass kid and I'm there with other punk ass kids that are working at Wendy's and everyone's kind of miserable. Right? Did you ever work at a fast food joint? Did you ever work at a restaurant?

• 20:39Speaker 01

  I did not work at a restaurant. The bar nightclub was the closest.

• 20:42Jocko Willink?

  But even being a bouncer in a bar nightclub is not that's, let's face it, that's like a little bit kind of cool. A little bit, right? You have a little power.

• 20:52Speaker 01

  I was also a bar back at one point, at other clubs and bartender, so it's, it's service for sure, but it's different. You're correct, it's different.

• 20:59Jocko Willink?

  It's a little bit cool.

• 21:01Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 21:02Jocko Willink?

  To be a bouncer at a club.

• 21:03Speaker 01

  Yes, sir.

• 21:03Jocko Willink?

  Right? I mean, that can be definitely a cool job. It's not cool to work at Wendy's running the grill, running the salad bar. You're not happy about it. There's no benefits. Zero. You know, other than you're getting paid money, which is kind of cool. So what struck me, what I always remembered is we're all kind of miserable. Even, this is what I also remember, like the, the general manager? And I don't remember his name. But he was like, work, he was one of those guys that was just a work, working, you know, working, just always pissed off about something like, hey, what you, you know, always mad. So even the owner, I mean, he was, I don't know if he's the owner, I don't think he's the owner, but he was definitely the general manager. He might've even been the franchise owner or something, but he's using there all the time.

• 21:49Jocko Willink?

  But you, he had to be making legitimate money because when you, when you're a general manager, one of those, you're making good money, but he was freaking miserable. So I'm thinking to myself, everyone here is miserable, every single person here. One hundred, I mean, how many employees did they probably have? Probably a total of thirty-five to forty employees, you know, day shift, night shift. You know, everyone. Everyone's part-time, you know, so no one's really working. So there's like probably forty employees there total. And every single one of us was miserable. And hated life. Except for Jean. And she was smiling and she was into it and she was amped. So. I took that idea. And.

• 22:35Jocko Willink?

  The reason I ended up with laundry. Is because I worked at, or with the, with a place where I used to go to the laundromat in San Diego. Had this. The people that owned the laundromat. The, the, they were from Asia. And the wife didn't speak English. But the husband would be, kind of be there, but the, the. The wife didn't speak English, but she'd come out and talk to me. In. I don't even know where she was from, but she would talk to me and smile and laugh and make jokes. Not in English. Not in English. But they were funny.

• 23:10Jocko Willink?

  They were so funny that I did laugh, I would laugh, I would give my wife, I would laugh and not even know what it was about. You know, she might point at like, you know, a pile of clothes and say something. In whatever language she was talking to you and then just start laughing. My wife and I would just laugh. It had to be pretty funny for her to get that much joy out of it, right? So. I don't know, that I landed on laundry.

• 23:34Jocko Willink?

  So there we go. There we get Artie. That kind of wraps up this guy Artie as a character where he came from. So now we get this other character, Johnny. Which, as you said, that's, I guess my. My real first name is John. So do we get Johnny from that? Kind of, but I don't know, maybe just the generic of.

• 23:54Jocko Willink?

  Of the name Johnny, more than anything else, but probably the strongest influence on this character is a kid that I grew up with, a kid named Jeff Lang, who I've talked about on this, on this podcast before. So Jeff Lang was like my best friend from maybe third grade, maybe second, no, probably second, second, first or second grade until seventh grade. And in fifth grade, we were in the same classroom together all day. Cause that's before you start going to different classes, right? So fifth grade, we were in the same class, you know, sitting next to each other and we were, we were

• 24:37Jocko Willink?

  troublemakers, right? Just always getting in trouble, always causing problems, always, you know, laughing when we shouldn't be laughing, just doing stuff that we shouldn't have been doing.

• 24:47Jocko Willink?

  But he was always a little bit more. He had a little bit, he had a little bit less obedience in him. I didn't have much. He had even less obedience in him. So like at that point when the teacher would threaten, oh, you, you two be quiet or you're going to the office. That was, he could, I got checked by that. Jeff wouldn't get checked by that. He'd go next level, get sent to the office, right? So he had a little bit extra and he was super funny. I mean hilarious, you know, kind of an athletic stud. Which, which, what does that mean? That means when you're in fifth grade, you kind of kick ass at dodgeball, right? You play kickball and he's really good and

• 25:28Jocko Willink?

  so yeah, just fast and all that stuff. Just a good, really good athlete, better than me, funnier than me. Tall, you know, just, just a good, he was just kind of like a little bit better than me and everything. And he also had a little bit of extra rebelliousness. So as we got older, I started kind of, we, we started, it started to deviate in our lives together. You know, we were, we were still always friends, but he started like drinking, started doing drugs, started listening to, I guess he went down like the kind of,

• 26:09Jocko Willink?

  Hippie music, drugs, that kind of thing. And I was going into the hardcore music and more like the straight edge thing. And so our paths really kind of deviated. But we were still friends because we were such good friends for so long that it doesn't matter what he's doing and what I'm doing. We're still friends. We just have this, you know, huge common connection.

• 26:32Jocko Willink?

  And as we got so, so as we got older, he went really, you know, I don't even know if he, I don't even remember if he graduated high school. Because he went hard, you know, doing drugs and drinking and just doing that whole thing. Um, and not, not a bad person. That's just what he was doing. And still I'd see him, see him in town. We'd, you know, we'd always connect. We'd always just had that friendship. And I remember I joined the military, joined the Navy. And, you know, small town and he kind of knew.

• 27:06Jocko Willink?

  He'd heard what was going on. And then I saw him. And I remember I, he said something to me like, because you know, when we were little kids, we'd play army all the time, right? When you're, look, when you're seven years old, 10 years old, 12 years old, and you live in the woods, you're playing army, right? You're putting, you're burning a cork and putting, making your face black and putting camo on and shooting BB guns at each other. That's what we did. We would shoot BB guns at each other. And every time you got hit, you had to take a layer of clothing off. And I remember the red rider, it makes a little boom when it, it's like boom. The, the, it's spring activated. Oh, yeah, yeah. And because, you know, we'd try and put limits on the number of pumps you could put on the pump

• 27:49Jocko Willink?

  action weapons. But I remember the red rider because you, you could hear it boom and then it would hit you.

• 27:57Jocko Willink?

  So, so, you know, he was into the same kind of stuff I was. And then as we got older, we deviated. So I see him, the last time I see him, before I leave for the Navy. He's, you know, clearly not on a great path.

• 28:17Jocko Willink?

  And he said something to me along the lines of.

• 28:22Jocko Willink?

  He's like, yeah, you're joining the Navy. I said, yeah. And I don't even remember if we, if he knew what a SEAL was. I think he kind of did. The only I kind of did at that time, I mean, no one knew too much about it. But he, I remember he said something like, hey, I wish I could go with you. And I was like, you can, bro, let's go. And I could see like, maybe that could. And he said, I can't. He's like, I can't, I can't. Something like, I can't anymore. Like, he knew he was kind of too far gone to correct the path that he was on. So I end up going to Navy and I was going through SEAL training.

• 29:01Jocko Willink?

  And I was probably around just before hell week, maybe just after hell week, I forget. But I called my parents to check in. I talked to my mom. And I found out that Jeff had killed himself. And he had, he had broken up with his girlfriend at the time and he'd killed himself.

• 29:22Jocko Willink?

  And that was, you know, just, just a very sad because, well, I think what made it the most sad to me was that he had gone down this path.

• 29:37Jocko Willink?

  And he had way more potential than I had as a human and, and it was all gone.

• 29:44Jocko Willink?

  And that was really sad. And then when, and when I looked him up, you know, this is when the last time I recorded, that I talked about him on, on this podcast, which was a couple of years ago, I had Googled him, just Googled his name, which you can Google people from, you know, seventeen forty-five and there's some record and there's some, you know, genealogy report about who they were and you Google someone from nineteen forty-two and there's, you know, an obituary about who they were. And I Googled his name and there was like, nothing.

• 30:16Jocko Willink?

  Nothing.

• 30:20Jocko Willink?

  Which is just horrible because he was freaking hilarious, smart, just an awesome guy. And, and quite, I didn't mention this, but the book, you know, the dedication to the book is just says for Jeff Lang.

• 30:39Jocko Willink?

  So that was sort of a lot of where this character Johnny came from. Somebody with kind of potential and just

• 30:54Jocko Willink?

  stuck, made bad choices. Made, maybe not bad choices, but different choices. Maybe had some bad luck thrown in there. Lived his life.

• 31:06Jocko Willink?

  So that's Johnny. You hear about these two.

• 31:12Jocko Willink?

  Next up, you get a guy named Goat, who's Johnny's best friend. I'm gonna, I'm gonna go to, uh, page seven here in the book.

• 31:27Jocko Willink?

  "Nice shirt, man," Goat says with a smile as he sees Johnny's starched black Sabbath t-shirt. "It's military creases running from each shoulder down to the waist." "Up yours," Johnny replies. "That cotton really holds the crease, doesn't it?" "Yeah, it does," Johnny says. "You couldn't iron them out or anything?" "I tried, but damn, he uses an industrial press and he looks at me like I'm ripping his heart out. What can I say? My brother is crazy." "Yeah, but that son of a bitch can iron some shirts, can't he? He sure as hell can." "You want another one?" "What time do we have to be at work?" Goat asks. "Not until 10:30." "Shit, let's do this." "Two more," Lucy, Johnny says to the barmaid.

• 32:10Jocko Willink?

  BB's Bar. Dingy, working-class watering hole. Cheap vinyl seats, even cheaper drinks.

• 32:19Jocko Willink?

  Goat is about the same age as Johnny, though he looks a little younger. His dark skin has an almost childlike texture. His black hair looks as if it is always organized regardless of what he has been doing. His eyes are dark and deep. He is handsome. He too, has that look about him that says he shouldn't be here. Shouldn't be in a dead end job. Shouldn't be in a dead end bar. Shouldn't be in a dead end life.

• 32:51Jocko Willink?

  But he is.

• 32:58Jocko Willink?

  So there's Goat. Full name, George Martinez. That is Johnny's best friend. And again, this guy is kind of a composite character of friends that I had growing up. The story takes place in Southern California.

• 33:19Jocko Willink?

  So he's a Mexican kid. I grew up with a bunch of white people primarily. But when you're out in California, you see the, there's really no distinction between, you know, different people.

• 33:35Jocko Willink?

  And that's just another kid. Another kid that has a bunch of potential. Another kid that's talented, another kid that's smart, another kid that's handsome. And another kid that's kind of stuck in a dead end scenario. With what I say, dead end job, dead end bar, dead end life, right? That's where we end up.

• 33:56Jocko Willink?

  That's where we're at.

• 34:00Jocko Willink?

  And, well, we were talking before the podcast about the young,

• 34:06Jocko Willink?

  uh, I think, I think Carrie was saying, you remember what it was like when you were younger and it was just all in? Kind of like you're just on board, right?

• 34:14Speaker 01

  Down for the cause.

• 34:15Jocko Willink?

  Down for the cause, right? Down for the cause. And that was- The characteristic that I kind of tried to throw in here with goat was that characteristic of being down for the cause and what's cool, when you, when you talked about Johnny being based on me. There's parts, definitely elements of me in Johnny for sure, but one of the elements that's, that's from me in goat is just down for the cause. I mean, the stuff that you do and you're 16, 17, 18, and then when I got in the Navy, you're 19, 20 years old. Guess what? Well, that's what, as you like to say, Echo, that's what we're doing. Yup, down for the cause. We're down. We're ready to go. Well, is that what we're doing? Hey, all right. Once you kind of slip that switch.

• 35:01Jocko Willink?

  That's why, man, the young, the young men in the world, they'll do some crazy shit sometimes. Cause they're just ready to rock and roll, ready to rock and roll. So there's your two main characters. And again, one of the things, one of the immediate feedback points when I submitted the manuscript. Was how about some more character development, right? And what I said is, you already know these characters. We already know these characters. We grew up with these characters. Everybody knows these people. Everybody knows these people. We all know them. We are them in many ways. So I was like, what, what, what else do I need to tell you?

• 35:42Jocko Willink?

  What else do I need to tell you? You know these people. I know these people. There's your character development. Look around.

• 35:50Speaker 01

  You, uh, you started this with Artie and that's one of the first things that jumped out at me. Where it's like, not only do I know who that guy is, I've known a guy or girl like that since I was a little kid. And it's just, he's just there. He's down for his cause, some negative, some positive, some are like angry at everyone. Some are just happy to see every, you know, like, but, but really in a, not a, kind of in a generic, almost kind of way. I mean, it's more particular because of the book and everything, but you know that guy, totally know that guy. That's the first thing that jumped out at me.

• 36:22Jocko Willink?

  For Artie?

• 36:23Speaker 01

  Artie.

• 36:23Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah. And how many Arties have you known?

• 36:27Speaker 01

  Twelve, I would say, yeah. And but they fit that in one way, another little different flavor over here, you know? Oh, man, I could go deep into it too, where some people would tease them, just like your, your girl Jean. Same exact thing, man, and they're everywhere. So it's like, yeah, you know, we all know Artie, I think, most of us.

• 36:46Jocko Willink?

  We all know an Artie, we all know Jean, we all know Johnny, we all know Goat.

• 36:50Speaker 01

  Yes, sir.

• 36:51Jocko Willink?

  These are our people. And there's the character development.

• 36:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:54Jocko Willink?

  And look, obviously, there's more character development that goes on, but, you know, for me to take the time to explain this, this is one thing you're, you're gonna notice when you read this book is, I'm not, I'm trying not to waste any time. I'm trying not to waste any words. I'm trying to get you there. Get you there. Get you into this as quick as possible and allow you to, to utilize what you already know as a person.

• 37:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:22Jocko Willink?

  To, to put the context around what's happening.

• 37:25Speaker 01

  Use the schema. I was reading this book and they, they went deep in the word schema.

• 37:29Jocko Willink?

  Oh, damn.

• 37:31Speaker 01

  That's all you're doing. You use, you use stuff that you already know to describe, you know, some, something new.

• 37:36Jocko Willink?

  Right.

• 37:37Speaker 01

  Interesting. And you use like, you do this in real life too, where you use less words than necessary kind of thing. And it's weird because it makes you kind of go like deep in your own head almost when you read it. Like even that one, uh, when you're describing, um, people, you know, me, however you described it in the news, just like, bro. It's like, you didn't do this, like the opposite of that, the opposite of that is like some grandiose thing where it's like, you know, one after another, the people piled in like a this and like a that, and then this person, and it's the, but no, you did the exact opposite. But meanwhile, you get the same effect, but it's more like in your own head, like real, real personal kind of.

• 38:16Jocko Willink?

  You know, there's something I talk about with leadership, it's minimum force required.

• 38:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:21Jocko Willink?

  Right? I, as a leader, want to use the minimum force to get you to do what I want you to do.

• 38:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:27Jocko Willink?

  To get you to do what we need to do, right? Minimum force required. I don't want to say, hey, Echo, here's what you need to do. I might say, heck, what do you think about doing this? And you're like, oh, yeah, that's probably be good, right? I want to use the minimum force.

• 38:41Jocko Willink?

  I try and write, I tried to write this book where the, the feeling is there with the minimum amount of words. Get the point across with the minimum amount of words.

• 38:52Speaker 01

  It does add drama to it. Let's admit that, cause even in real life, this book aside. Like, it's more dramatic that way.

• 39:01Jocko Willink?

  Well, I also say all the time, the less you talk, the more people listen.

• 39:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 39:06Jocko Willink?

  I give that as leadership counsel. Hey, if you're in there and you've got something to say in a meeting and you say it in 14 sentences and it takes you seven minutes. Maybe 14 seconds, maybe, maybe, maybe it takes you seven minutes to say something.

• 39:21Jocko Willink?

  That you could have said in 14 seconds, the 14 second route was way, is way preferred.

• 39:29Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 39:29Jocko Willink?

  And it's gonna have so much more impact.

• 39:31Speaker 01

  Yes, sir. But let's face it, the, the added, specifically added drama is undeniable. Like, so if, if we're here, I don't know, let's say we had to, I don't know, make keychains or something and there was like a hundred thousand keychains that needed to be, be made and we get here at 5pm or whatever and I'm, and I ask you. And you're like, yeah, we need to get these done or whatever. And then I look at him, I go, hey, are we gonna do all these tonight? And, and there's two different scenarios where you could be like, you know what? Yeah, we're gonna, we're gonna get all these done tonight. Or you could just look at me.

• 40:05Speaker 01

  I know already the answer is fucking yes.

• 40:07Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 40:07Speaker 01

  It's hell yes, but it's way more dramatic.

• 40:09Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, didn't even say anything.

• 40:10Speaker 01

  Didn't say anything, exactly right. Or you could pull which, what you typically do, you'll just say, yes. And that's it. I want more. I want you to make me feel good. I want to, but it's just this big, black hole of, of nothingness that I'm just left with except for yes. Like with that, you, you gotta make of it, whatever you're gonna make of it, but yes, you know? So it's like, yeah, way more dramatic. Good though.

• 40:35Jocko Willink?

  So that's what the book is written like. I, we're gonna roll into, I'm just trying to give some of the characters, right? Some of the, some of the characters. Here's the, I guess this is our leading female character in the book. Here we go.

• 40:54Jocko Willink?

  She is a pretty but tough-looking girl. Thick, black hair that wants to curl, but is for the most part straightened by its own weight and volume. Pale skin, dark eyes, eyes with a hint of fight left in them. But most of the fight is gone.

• 41:16Jocko Willink?

  Worn away by long hours and hard work, and worn away by the reality of life.

• 41:24Jocko Willink?

  Jessica.

• 41:27Jocko Willink?

  "Where have you been?" she asks. "Working. Where else?" Johnny responds defensively. "You can't call or anything?" "Sorry," he replies. "I'm a prick." "Yeah, you are," she says. "You never held that against me before. Don't start now. You buy me a drink and I'll forgive you." "Lucy! Soko and Coke!" Johnny shouts to the barmaid. "Soko and Coke, got it!" the bartender responds. "How's work?" Johnny asks, although he knows the answer. "The usual. Mark's an asshole. Everybody comes into that place is a fucking asshole, and I do what I do." Smile and kiss their ass. "Why don't you quit?" Johnny asks. It's an earnest question, even though the answer is known by him.

• 42:11Jocko Willink?

  She knows the answer, too. She also has the same question: "Why don't you quit your fucking job, stock boy?" "Ouch. Thanks," Johnny mutters, dejected. "Well, I mean, fuck. Of course I'd quit that job, same as you, but who's gonna pay the rent?" The bartender approaches them and places the southern comforting Coke in front of Jessica. "Soko and Coke," she says, matter of fact. "Thanks, Lucy," Johnny tells her. "Thanks, Johnny," Jessica says to Johnny. "Anything for you, darling," he says with a smile. "Great. You're horny," she says. "Hey!" he replies defensively. "I'm just..." "Don't worry." "I am too," she says with a smile.

• 42:55Jocko Willink?

  So there's Jessica. Um, again, where does Jessica come from? Kind of a composite character. Of growing up, of traveling, going to different towns, different cities, restaurants, bars, you know, she's a waitress. Um, I've known many Jessicas in my time. And like you said, I think we've all known plenty of Jessicas and, and look, she's hardworking. Um, she's determined, but she's up against the odds.

• 43:28Jocko Willink?

  And she's also productive and you've learned this in the book. She's a product of some bad decisions, or at least some decisions that aren't great ones, right? So she kinda ends up in her stuck in this position as well. And, and to quote Harvey Keitel from Reservoir Dogs.

• 43:45Speaker 01

  Yes, sir.

• 43:46Jocko Willink?

  Waitressing is the number one job for female, non-college graduates in this country.

• 43:52Jocko Willink?

  And I always, I always, you know, cause I worked in restaurants, man. That's a freaking hard job. And you gotta smile, right?

• 44:01Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, kind of customer service is critical.

• 44:04Jocko Willink?

  Smile. So not only are you working a hard job and people are treating you bad in some cases.

• 44:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:10Jocko Willink?

  Where this, this isn't cooked good enough. By the way, if you, if you, if you ever are serving me and I return something to the kitchen, it is totally jacked up. Cause if it's not totally jacked up, I'm just gonna like, just gonna get it done.

• 44:22Speaker 01

  Yes, sir.

• 44:23Jocko Willink?

  I mean, you gotta give me a raw bleeding piece of meat if you think I'm gonna return to the kitchen.

• 44:28Speaker 01

  What about the wrong thing? Someone gives you the straight up the wrong thing. They mess your order up. Wrong thing.

• 44:32Jocko Willink?

  Is it something I'm down with? You know, like, is it okay? Is it like, hey, I ordered the ribeye, get a piece of prime rib. Cool. I'll eat it.

• 44:40Speaker 01

  What if you get a fish?

• 44:42Jocko Willink?

  Probably going back. I'll be cool about it.

• 44:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:45Jocko Willink?

  I'll probably just say, you know what I might do in that situation? This is how nice I am. Like, I hate to say it, yeah. No, cause I'd probably be like, hey, you know, I'm also interested in getting a steak. Can you bring me a ribeye?

• 44:55Speaker 01

  You get both.

• 44:55Jocko Willink?

  To go with my fish.

• 44:56Speaker 01

  My man, yeah.

• 44:57Jocko Willink?

  And maybe, maybe put that in a, in a doggy bag or something.

• 45:00Speaker 01

  Do you, uh, do you, on the inside, do you actually feel bad that you have to do? Like, if you have to, you feel bad, huh?

• 45:06Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 45:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm with you, man.

• 45:07Jocko Willink?

  I don't like, um, I don't like messing with waitresses.

• 45:11Speaker 01

  I know.

• 45:11Jocko Willink?

  I don't like, you know, anybody in service, right? You know, anybody in service. I don't like being that guy.

• 45:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:17Jocko Willink?

  The, the proverbial guy, right? That's like, hey.

• 45:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, man.

• 45:22Jocko Willink?

  Can you hurry up with that?

• 45:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:25Jocko Willink?

  Uh, you know, I'm the guy that'd be like, I guess I guess I'm not drinking water tonight. Haven't seen a homegirl in a while.

• 45:34Jocko Willink?

  Um, but hey, you know, when someone does good service, like I'm, I'm definitely going to take care of them too.

• 45:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:40Jocko Willink?

  You know, that's what we're doing. But that's Jessica, right? We get this, she's sort of, she's honestly, she's kind of like a female Johnny. In a way, right? She's smart. She's good looking. She's witty, but maybe not the best choices. Maybe she didn't roll out in the best environment. And that's addressed to in the book, you know, there's some, there's a level of ownership that gets, you know, responsibility for our actions. And she's the one that kind of pushes that. Like, hey, you can sit around here because at a certain point, I don't want to get too much into it, but Johnny starts saying, well, you know, we didn't, I didn't, I, I, I didn't have the right upbringing and all this. And she's like, hey dude, no one made you quit school. No one made you do this. No one made you, you did those things.

• 46:25Jocko Willink?

  Um, but like you said, these are, these are, these are people, these are normal people. These are people in the world. These are people I grew up with. These are my friends to this day. Uh, people I met along the way.

• 46:41Jocko Willink?

  Now, that's kind of your main characters. The one more character I want to introduce. And there, look, there's a bunch, there are a lot more characters in the book. I shouldn't say a lot more. I try to limit the number of characters as much as possible, right? I don't want to have this big, complex, uh, storyline that's hard to follow. I wanted it to be, when you heard someone, I want you just to know who it is and boom, you're locked. That was my goal, simplicity. Um, there's another character that I want, I do want to bring up because he does, you've got some, he's got some, a little bit of impact. And this character, as you heard from the review, from the publisher weekly review, Johnny and Goat, they work at a big box store. And their boss is this guy named Gerald Lundstrom.

• 47:30Jocko Willink?

  Jerry, also known as Jerry, and they call him The Weasel. That's what they call him. So let's get an introduction to Gerald Lundstrom, The Weasel. Let's get an introduction to the big box store, to what their jobs are and what they do there.

• 47:47Jocko Willink?

  They're stock boys. So here we go.

• 47:51Jocko Willink?

  "You would think Americans survived on fucking mayonnaise," Goat says, disgusted. "No shit. Stock boys. Boxes. Tile floor and industrial shelves, food, detergent, electronics. Pretty much anything can be found here. Every day from the time the doors open until they close, there are customers here. Buying milk and batteries and toilet paper and garbage bags, tomatoes, popcorn, salami.

• 48:25Jocko Willink?

  People can buy anything here. And they do. Consumption in massive quantities to fill their massive bellies and run up their massive credit card debt. People.

• 48:38Jocko Willink?

  Flesh-covered robot beings in need of fuel and meaning. They find both here. "I mean, honestly, who the fuck needs a half a gallon of Miracle Whip for their house?" Goat asks, earnestly trying to comprehend this madness. "Well, obviously, a bunch of people need it. All this will be gone in a couple of days." Goat shakes his head. "What the hell do they do with it? Do they put it in their cereal or something? I think they butter their wives up with it." "God damn, that's fucking disgusting." "Yeah, it is," Johnny agrees. From the end of the aisle, a loud, high-pitched voice breaks their conversation. Jerry, the night manager.

• 49:20Jocko Willink?

  "You guys need to stop talking and get that stuff stacked up. Less talking and more stocking. We've still got pickles, mustard, Crisco, and canned ham." "I got your canned ham," Goat whispers under his breath. Jerry walks toward Goat and Johnny. Thin. Late 30s, smoker, greasy hair, beige Levi Dockers, polo shirt, yellow. Gold colored necklace with cross, gold colored watch, fake. "What did you say?" Jerry asks aggressively.

• 50:00Jocko Willink?

  Goat stands up straight and belts out, "I said, I got your canned ham." Jerry shakes his head. He tries to think of an original comeback, but he can't think of anything good. He resorts to all he knows. "Well, you just keep running your mouth like that and we'll see if you ever make supervisor."

• 50:20Jocko Willink?

  Not wanting to engage in a verbal battle, Jerry quickly walks away. Goat stands there shaking his head. "Motherfucker," he says quietly, then unable to contain himself shouts, "Supervise this, you weasel looking motherfucker."

• 50:37Jocko Willink?

  Johnny looks at him. "I'd fucking kill myself if I ever made supervisor at this shithole." "Yeah, and that fucking prick walking around like he's fucking Steve Jobs." "Loser, fucking loser." "At least he's easy to rip off," Johnny concedes. "Yeah, he's got that going for him." "I'm getting a couple of bottles of Jack tonight," Goat says. "I'm getting the nastiest rot gut gin I can find."

• 51:06Jocko Willink?

  So, there you go. That's the manager. Have you ever had a manager like, like my boy, like the weasel?

• 51:18Jocko Willink?

  Do I need to do character development or do we know who Jerry, the weasel, Lundstrom is, right?

• 51:24Speaker 01

  We're gonna use the schema on that one, yeah, for sure.

• 51:26Jocko Willink?

  And I had so much fun writing that dialogue. I heard you chuckling. I heard K-Dog behind the scenes over there chuckling as I was rolling some of that. Just, because that's what it's like, right? You know, you're 22, 23 years old, you have, you have a crap job. You know, you know Dave Burke?

• 51:45Speaker 01

  Good deal, Dave.

• 51:46Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, he was a stock boy at Target.

• 51:48Speaker 01

  Hell, yeah.

• 51:49Jocko Willink?

  And he was a stock boy when he was at Target and he was like 15.

• 51:55Jocko Willink?

  And he's like, you nailed, you nailed that dialogue, you nailed those characters. And I go, I was like, I said, how can that be? You weren't like that. And he goes, no, I wasn't like that. I was 15, just trying to do a good job and trying to get money. He goes, but I worked with guys that shouldn't have been working there, that were 22, 23, 24 years old. And I would hear them talking and you freaking nailed it. These guys talk to each other and talk shit.

• 52:22Jocko Willink?

  So we all know managers like this, kind of a stereotypical manager. And that's the way the world kind of gets put together for this book. Now, again, I don't want to spend, I don't want to start covering the plot of the book. You kind of heard it from the review, a little bit of what happens in the plot. You don't get the whole deal, but that's sort of the direction we're heading in. Got to get the book to get there. But I did want to kind of just talk about some of the themes, some of the other themes that are in the book.

• 52:54Jocko Willink?

  One of them is, is kind of this idea of being obsessed with random things, which we all certainly do. I do. We all end up obsessed with these random things. And if you look at it from the outside, it doesn't make any sense. So jujitsu, surfing, archery,

• 53:17Jocko Willink?

  rock climbing, music, guitars, NASCAR, lawn, super into your lawn, right? Super into fishing, super into yoga, super into cooking, super into grill. Like there's all these things that people just get into. And that level of obsession could be about anything, right? And that was, that was one of the fun things that I had with Artie was I was thinking, what would be the most random kind of thing that you could be obsessed with? How about laundry? Do laundry? But there's not that much difference between being obsessed with doing laundry and, and archery.

• 53:56Jocko Willink?

  And I'm, believe me, I'm pretty obsessed with archery. I spend a bunch of time doing it. I spend money on it. Like, why? I could be making super clean clothes. Jujitsu. Hey, we're super into jujitsu. Yeah, we could talk about this freaking skill and this and that, but. At this point, we have kind of the basic skills that we need to defend ourselves. We're just doing it for a whole nother reason, right? Lawns, right?

• 54:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:23Jocko Willink?

  Like lawn care, people get fired up for that stuff.

• 54:26Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 54:27Jocko Willink?

  So that's something that we do. It's an underlying theme in the book is, man, think about what you're doing. What are you obsessed with? Why are you obsessed with it?

• 54:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:37Jocko Willink?

  We get into some weird stuff.

• 54:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, it is weird.

• 54:41Jocko Willink?

  Um, consumerism. Buying stuff, that's another thing we do. You wrap that, you wrap the obsession around, also around consumerism, buying stuff. And if you've ever been to a big box store, which I certainly have been to many, and still go to, or I should say still shop at, because, because I don't go to them very often. My wife, my wife kind of gets that done. But you go into those places and it's, we consume a lot of stuff, right? And here's, here's what I think is interesting. And nowadays, you know, this, this, this book takes place in the early nineties, late eighties. I'm going to say early nineties. Uh, so there's no cell phones.

• 55:27Jocko Willink?

  But one thing that I've found that I think, I believe, and you can tell me what you think. I think we, I think, have you ever built something?

• 55:35Speaker 01

  Yes, sir, I have.

• 55:36Jocko Willink?

  And it gave, that took you some time and effort? What's the biggest thing you've ever built?

• 55:41Speaker 01

  Big, biggest, I don't know, but.

• 55:44Jocko Willink?

  That wasn't, that did not come from Ikea.

• 55:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, okay, so I, I don't know the biggest thing. That's going to take a while for me to think of, but the thing that did jump out at me was I used to make slingshots when I was a kid.

• 55:57Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 55:58Speaker 01

  So,

• 56:00Speaker 01

  um, you'd go down in our, in my case, I'd go down the valley, the canyon, whatever. Um, and you'd find a guava tree. I like the guava tree wood. Uh, you, and then you find where there's like a perfect Y. It can't be like too narrow of a split. Got to be, and it can't be too wide either, and a lot of those. You gotta find the perfect one. Boom, you cut it, you cut it all three spots and you bring it back. You skin it, let it dry for a little bit, like a few days or whatever. Um, I used to, this is when I went extra on it. I'd sand it down so it looks kinda cool. Uh, you can put finish on it. I never really did that. Um, and then you go by, it's called surgical tubing.

• 56:38Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 56:40Speaker 01

  Then you, uh, yeah, you attach them and then you cut off the tongue of your shoe. Of like an old shoe or whatever. You cut it off and then poke the two holes, use a knife or even like a hole puncher. It's harder to do the whole puncher, but you, you know, you do the two, uh, holes, attach the surgical tubing. What I would do is I'd do this, surgical tubing, go in the hole, curl back, I'd super glue it together. Wrap it with thread, not too tight, cause it might start cutting into when it starts to oxidize a little bit. And then tape, like small piece of tape. So it'd be super strong, super strong. Do the same thing, both sides are all four attachments and boom, there you go. Looks nice too.

• 57:17Jocko Willink?

  How did you feel when you were complete?

• 57:18Speaker 01

  Wow, amazing. That's why I do a bunch of them. Like I don't need like five slingshots, but yeah, I'd have the two or three going.

• 57:24Jocko Willink?

  So I think there's some, I don't know, there's probably some chemical dopamine hit or whatever that you get when you actually do something. When you build something like I've built, like redoing my house, like remodeling, like ripping out, gutting my hat. One time I did my kitchen and I gutted it.

• 57:47Jocko Willink?

  In seventy-two hours, I gutted the whole thing, demoed it, got it out, redid the electrical, redid the plumbing. Put in a sub box, what's that called? I put in a, a sub box for the electrical. I forget what it's called. Uh, but I put it in like a whole new electrical system and then I drywalled it. And I did that all in seventy-two hours. And, but you feel like accomplishment, right?

• 58:14Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, yeah.

• 58:16Jocko Willink?

  Building like fences at my houses, building, uh, I remodeled my other house. So, so like these major projects. You feel this good sense of satisfaction when you're done. Well, in the modern world, we do a lot less of that, right? So, how, so you can replace that sort of satisfaction by clicking on the Amazon, whatever, buy now, right? And all of a sudden you feel like, but the thing is, since you didn't put much effort into it, it's not that gratifying. So you want to do it again.

• 58:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 58:48Jocko Willink?

  So I think that's why people roll into freaking Costco. They roll into Costco and they roll out with way more stuff because they just walk through those aisles, getting that dopamine hit, dopamine hit, dopamine hit, dopamine hit. Cause they feel like they built that thing or they harvested.

• 59:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:06Jocko Willink?

  It's the same thing when you go hunting and you like harvest the meat. Super gratifying. Super like 1,000 times more gratifying than buying a steak at the store. And believe me, buying a steak at the store is kind of gratifying too. But you get that dopamine, you're like, oh yeah, then this is going to be so good, but it's way less. So you buy another one.

• 59:28Speaker 01

  Right.

• 59:28Jocko Willink?

  You know, and then you buy this and you buy that. Right?

• 59:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's weird, huh? So it's kind of like when you kind of, uh, maybe cut it all the way down to what the hell is going on with that little transaction? It's like, you know, like almost for lack of a better way of putting it in the wild or in the, you know, nature, whatever. You put in this work and then you, uh, you run through some challenges, you overcome those challenges, then you get the reward, right? Any pursuit, that's sort of the system and your brain, you know, follows along accordingly. Boom, you put in the work, you get obsessive over it, you, you, you run into a challenge, you overcome the challenge and you're back on your path to, you know, for that main goal. You know, and the harder you work, the bigger the reward usually, right? As far as in your brain, like the bigger the payoff, you know? So it's like if you overcome all the, and then you, then you, you finally reap that reward.

• 1:00:15Speaker 01

  In, in your case, it's hunting the elk or, you know, whatever, whatever the reward is, the prize, right? There, boom, there's your, your ultimate satisfying dopamine hit, whatever.

• 1:00:26Speaker 01

  But now it's the same thing, except you reduce the work part so much, but you still get the little reward.

• 1:00:33Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, but here's the thing, you reduce the work, the reward, you get rewarded, but it's less work, less reward. So what do you do? You do it again.

• 1:00:40Speaker 01

  Less satisfying.

• 1:00:41Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's less satisfying, but you just do it again.

• 1:00:42Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:00:43Jocko Willink?

  Coleman, I order this, I'm gonna buy that.

• 1:00:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:45Jocko Willink?

  And so you end up in this sort of weird cycle of of satisfaction by just buying stuff.

• 1:00:52Speaker 01

  Bradley, and you know, and we've talked about this too, brothers, the people who make the stores, the layout and stuff, oh, they know about that kind of stuff. That's why they, that's why there's a thing called impulse buy, right? So they put the candy right there by the checkout, stuff that you didn't plan on getting, but it's like, oh, I could use one of those right now. You know, kind of a thing, it's like an impulse buy. You ever get, I, I don't see you doing this, but maybe you do, I don't know. But you know, when you're shopping on Amazon, right? And me, I, I get a lot of, relate to this, where I get a lot of little cables and little tools and whatever, you know, just for this thing or that thing or whatever. Um, and then when you check out or when you add it to the cart, they'll introduce all these other things.

• 1:01:29Jocko Willink?

  People also bought.

• 1:01:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, and then I'm like, yeah.

• 1:01:33Jocko Willink?

  You, you're like, double me, double me.

• 1:01:34Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, I could use that, never gonna use it. But I could, I could imagine myself using this pair of pliers, you know, so many, I have two pairs of pliers, by the way, already. Oh, but that one with the red handle, and that one's kind of dope. And it has a little thing on the side.

• 1:01:47Jocko Willink?

  I am the, I am the most, I research stuff to the point where it's stupid. You trying to get me to buy something? I was looking at, uh, someone's, I was looking at one of my, I was looking at one of my kids. Yeah, my kid's Instagram, and my, my daughter was like, oh, I have an advertisement every third, whatever, picture is an advertisement.

• 1:02:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:09Jocko Willink?

  And I go, no, no, I go, I hardly have any. And I, she's like, no way. And I showed her and I have like almost no promoted ads. You know why? I never click on them and they know I'm like low, low, I'm like the lowest conversion ever. They're not even wasting their money throwing that thing across in front of me. Cause you, you could have the best freaking idea in the world and I'm gonna start like, I'm gonna have to research that.

• 1:02:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:34Jocko Willink?

  And I'm surprised Amazon just doesn't check me out without showing me anything, because they're just over it.

• 1:02:39Speaker 01

  Don't even try.

• 1:02:40Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, don't even try.

• 1:02:41Speaker 01

  Not worth it.

• 1:02:42Jocko Willink?

  So that's an underlying theme, but here's, here's the, here's the kinda, the real, um, I don't know, maybe it's the, maybe it's the heaviest underlying theme is just the idea, and it is, is about happiness, right?

• 1:02:57Jocko Willink?

  Not only about happiness, but this sort of underlying

• 1:03:03Jocko Willink?

  unhappiness in the world, underlying sadness in the world. When I was a kid and I was working at Wendy's and I saw Jean and I saw that she was freaking happy.

• 1:03:21Jocko Willink?

  And I knew that I wasn't.

• 1:03:26Jocko Willink?

  And I didn't even know if I could be. It didn't seem like an achievable thing. It seemed like there was too much, it seemed like there was too much

• 1:03:38Jocko Willink?

  underlying things in the world that just are gonna be bad. Right?

• 1:03:46Jocko Willink?

  And I always sensed that in the world. I always sensed, always, I always had this sense in the world of this underlying sadness, this underlying despair, this underlying suffering.

• 1:03:57Jocko Willink?

  And, and I don't wanna use the term depression, cuz maybe you wrap all those things together, because depression seems like it's a clinical, sort of like a problem that you treat type thing, and I didn't feel like this was a clinical problem.

• 1:04:10Jocko Willink?

  It just seemed like life to me

• 1:04:15Jocko Willink?

  was not gonna go the way you wanted it to go.

• 1:04:20Jocko Willink?

  For anyone.

• 1:04:23Jocko Willink?

  You're gonna end up in the wrong job, you're gonna end up in the wrong relationship, you're gonna, something's gonna be wrong with your health, something's gonna be wrong in your family. And we're gonna die. And we're all gonna die. And before we die, we're gonna suffer. And by the way, everyone that you know and everyone that you love is gonna suffer and die.

• 1:04:46Jocko Willink?

  And so I would always, I kinda had this underlying sense of the world. And then I would catch like glimpses of people that were happy and sometimes it was someone like Gene, there was another guy that worked at a freaking junkyard. Who was kinda jacked, especially when I was younger, you know, when you were younger. And in the, in the seventies, if someone was jacked in the seventies, like it was a whole, it was like a next level, right? Because you're, you're not used to seeing people that are jacked at all. And I remember seeing this guy who's worked at a junkyard.

• 1:05:26Jocko Willink?

  And, and he looked happy and I was like, dude, this guy's just jacked and just lifting engine parts around the junkyard.

• 1:05:37Jocko Willink?

  And it seemed like he was happy. So, that's sort of this underlying theme and I'll tell you like when I got to the teams, thank God. When I got to the teams, that's when I started feeling like, oh, like kinda happy, like this is cool. The people I'm with are kinda cool and life's not gonna be perfect, but we're gonna have a good time. Living this imperfect life. So I started to get a little bit relieved of that as I got, as I got older. But I think that, you know, Johnny kinda realizes that he's not gonna be happy.

• 1:06:16Jocko Willink?

  And, and this is the other sort of, the other sort of underlying theme. Is this idea of, of

• 1:06:25Jocko Willink?

  sacrifice. And when Johnny realizes that he can't be happy, or at least he doesn't think he can be happy. He sees that, you know, kinda the way I looked at Gene, the Wendy's salad bar girl. But that's his brother. And the situation unfolds where he's not gonna be able to be happy anymore. Where, where Artie is not gonna be happy anymore and Johnny knows if he makes sacrifices, he could preserve the happiness for his brother. Especially because he's never gonna be happy himself.

• 1:07:05Jocko Willink?

  You know, I had this conversation with Stoner one time. We were out surfing. And he was asking me that way. He's like, "Bro, I don't know. It's like the same thing." He's like, "Bro, I'm never gonna be, how you, how am I ever gonna be happy? I'm never gonna be happy." And we were literally, it's like a beautiful Southern California. We're out at our surf spot. For whatever reason, there's not many guys out. There's a little offshore breeze. The water's warm. It's a, you know, chest-to-head high swell, pretty consistent. Like, it's, it doesn't get any better. And he's out here saying to me like, "How do you ever, how you ever find happiness?" And I'm like, "Bro, this is it, man. This is it right here." And that's what,

• 1:07:52Jocko Willink?

  you know, that's what, that's what you have to be able to find. You have to be able to find that the path that you're on,

• 1:08:02Jocko Willink?

  even though it's challenging, even though there's suffering, that's, that's the happiness too.

• 1:08:11Jocko Willink?

  And the sacrifice part is putting others above yourself, you know? And obviously on this podcast, we talk about heroes and we talk to heroes in many cases.

• 1:08:22Jocko Willink?

  And most of the ones that we talk to here are military people, right? Soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines.

• 1:08:31Jocko Willink?

  But those aren't the only people. Those aren't the only people in the world that are heroes, right? And, and I'm not just talking about law enforcement and, you know, firefighters and first responders as well. There's all kinds of people in the world that put others above themselves.

• 1:08:46Jocko Willink?

  And put other people's happiness above themselves. And, and whether that's mothers and fathers,

• 1:08:56Jocko Willink?

  and sisters and brothers and wives and husbands and friends. I mean, there's friends that do that.

• 1:09:05Jocko Willink?

  Friends that put other people's happiness and other people's success above themselves. And...

• 1:09:14Jocko Willink?

  Really, that's, that's the under, that's one of the other underlying themes of the book. Is, and then, you know, that's, that's a theme that's consistent with all the books that I've written, fiction, nonfiction, people that are putting others above themselves. That's what leadership is, and ultimately,

• 1:09:36Jocko Willink?

  that's what life is about.

• 1:09:41Jocko Willink?

  So,

• 1:09:44Jocko Willink?

  I think if you can put other, others before yourselves,

• 1:09:50Jocko Willink?

  then if we do that, then you can find some happiness, and at a minimum, at a minimum,

• 1:09:56Jocko Willink?

  you can leave the world in better condition than you found it.

• 1:10:01Jocko Willink?

  And if you can pull that off, I think if you can pull that off, then you can die with a clean conscience, and you can die with a smile on your face. And you can leave a smile on the face of the people you left behind.

• 1:10:20Jocko Willink?

  And that's a good life.

• 1:10:25Jocko Willink?

  And that is Final Spin.

• 1:10:32Jocko Willink?

  So, we can't obviously cover the whole plot, the details. What we'll do is maybe in a year. Remember what we did with Musashi?

• 1:10:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:42Jocko Willink?

  With Musashi? So this is episode 301. Episode 401. That's actually two years, isn't it?

• 1:10:53Jocko Willink?

  We'll give people two years to sort it out.

• 1:10:56Jocko Willink?

  Is that long?

• 1:10:56Speaker 01

  Nah, well.

• 1:10:57Jocko Willink?

  Should we do one year? Should we do, should we say 350?

• 1:11:02Jocko Willink?

  Okay, we'll go 350. We'll shoot for 350. So 350, we'll do full spoiler, we'll just tell everyone what's going on. We'll take a bunch of questions about the book.

• 1:11:14Jocko Willink?

  And, yeah, we'll do it again, where we can go a little bit deeper on all the plot. You know, as I start getting feedback from people, and people start asking all those awesome questions that you ask when you read books, and what's this part about, and what does this represent? We'll do all that. Uh, the book's for, for sale right now.

• 1:11:34Jocko Willink?

  I would order it if I were you. Why? Clearly because you want that first dish. Uh, and here's another reason. This is us against the establishment, by the way. This is us against the literary critics, right? This is us against the big publishing companies, the media companies. We're the outsiders. I'm an outsider. I'll tell you what, I go to New York City and I roll into those publishing offices. I am an outsider. I might as well be purple.

• 1:12:06Jocko Willink?

  Because I'm not from that world, right? They don't, the interesting thing is, I mean, I was an English major in college. They don't know about that. They just look at me, think knuckle dragger. Meathead, which I take as a compliment generally.

• 1:12:24Jocko Willink?

  But yeah, they don't want us to win. So, join the cause, right? Let's, let's, let's, let's take the fight to them.

• 1:12:34Jocko Willink?

  Get that first dish. And here's the other thing. I was planning to do a speaking thing, kind of like Jaco Live, what we did last year, right before COVID hit. I was, we were booking it up and the whole freaking

• 1:12:48Jocko Willink?

  the industry's still paranoid and a bunch of the venues started getting crazy with the way they were gonna run them and someone wanted to cancel. And so I said, all right, fine, we'll put it off. So I'm gonna do a Jaco Live tour with this. I don't know, I don't know what cities I'm going to. The only city I keep saying I want to go to is Detroit. I just want to go to Detroit. And by the way, there's, so you know who Jack White is?

• 1:13:16Speaker 01

  Jack White?

• 1:13:16Jocko Willink?

  White Stripes.

• 1:13:17Speaker 01

  Oh, I'm thinking Todd White. Um, no, I do now, yes.

• 1:13:20Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. So he's got a thing up in Detroit.

• 1:13:25Jocko Willink?

  He's got a place where he can record bands, straight to vinyl.

• 1:13:32Speaker 01

  Oh damn.

• 1:13:33Jocko Willink?

  So it just straight to vinyl. I think it's a venue that holds like 50 people. So I want to do Jocko Live there. I want to record it straight to vinyl.

• 1:13:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. My man's getting artisan on us.

• 1:13:44Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, bro. Straight to vinyl? How's, I think it's, it might be the only place in America where you can do that.

• 1:13:52Speaker 01

  That sounds correct.

• 1:13:53Jocko Willink?

  And plus, the White Stripes are awesome. Jack White's freaking awesome. So that would be sick to do. So I'm gonna try and go to Detroit. Maybe I have to do a big show before that. To get everyone in there, but then after that, we'll go straight to Third Man Records. Straight to vinyl.

• 1:14:09Speaker 01

  Do you have a record player?

• 1:14:10Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:12Speaker 01

  I was looking into that on one of my Amazon spirals, the record player. They have a lot nowadays.

• 1:14:18Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's vinyl dude.

• 1:14:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, man, it's not going away.

• 1:14:20Jocko Willink?

  We're talking about people being obsessed with things.

• 1:14:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:23Jocko Willink?

  Vinyl's one of them.

• 1:14:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:25Jocko Willink?

  Get that vinyl out. That record sounds better, allegedly. I remember, there's, there's a Motorhead album where he put in between the songs on the CD, has like the record sound, like the.

• 1:14:39Speaker 01

  I'll do that sometimes.

• 1:14:40Jocko Willink?

  Come on, man. It's pretty sick, right?

• 1:14:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, that's, I mean, even with film, that's all right. Where it's like, no, film looks like way better. Video and, and photography. They're like, no, film, all day. Digital is whack.

• 1:14:52Jocko Willink?

  Digital's lame.

• 1:14:53Speaker 01

  Lame, doesn't look as good, doesn't look as natural, doesn't look as, you know, doesn't flow with your senses.

• 1:15:01Jocko Willink?

  So Detroit, that's one city I know I'm going to. Why? Cause we want it to flow with our senses.

• 1:15:06Speaker 01

  Yes, sir.

• 1:15:06Jocko Willink?

  We're going straight to vinyl and.

• 1:15:07Speaker 01

  Straight to vinyl, dude.

• 1:15:08Jocko Willink?

  I don't even know if that's a possible thing. I don't, I don't know if it's possible. They, you know, people might be like, you can't do that. You need, you're not even a band. I'm like, no, I'm gonna talk though.

• 1:15:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's an, you've done albums.

• 1:15:20Jocko Willink?

  We have done albums, with tracks, right? So this would be an album.

• 1:15:23Speaker 01

  An album, straight up.

• 1:15:25Jocko Willink?

  You've been to Jocko Lives?

• 1:15:26Speaker 01

  Yes, sir, I have.

• 1:15:28Jocko Willink?

  Some of them might be cool records, right?

• 1:15:30Speaker 01

  Yes, sir, they would be.

• 1:15:32Jocko Willink?

  Vinyl.

• 1:15:33Speaker 01

  Vinyl all day, man.

• 1:15:34Jocko Willink?

  Then you get clear vinyl, you get the red vinyl, right? You know what I'm saying?

• 1:15:38Speaker 01

  I don't know what red vinyl is, but.

• 1:15:40Jocko Willink?

  The vinyl's red, that's what red vinyl is. Where you get the clear vinyl.

• 1:15:42Speaker 01

  What's clear vinyl?

• 1:15:43Jocko Willink?

  Clear. The record's clear, you can see through it. You ever heard of that?

• 1:15:47Speaker 01

  I never heard of that before.

• 1:15:48Jocko Willink?

  K-Dog's in the house.

• 1:15:49Speaker 01

  In the game, yeah.

• 1:15:52Jocko Willink?

  So, when I do that thing, I guess it's gonna be spring or something like that, we'll go live. We'll hang out. If you're rolling up, you got that second edition, let's face it. I'm still appreciative.

• 1:16:08Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:16:09Jocko Willink?

  But you know, I know, we all know where you're at. Appreciate the support. Let's crush the world with this book.

• 1:16:19Jocko Willink?

  Echo, speaking of crushing the world. We kinda have to crush ourselves, right, in order to crush the world, which by the way-

• 1:16:27Speaker 01

  It'll make you tougher.

• 1:16:28Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, which by the way, I just came back from hunting. And for, I think it was 13 days, I did not lift weights, because I was in the mountains. Or, as I call mountains.

• 1:16:42Jocko Willink?

  But I came back and I was all fired up, you know, and felt like I needed, man, I have DOMS in my arms right now. In my, I haven't had DOMS in my arms in a long time, dude.

• 1:16:54Jocko Willink?

  So, we gotta crush ourselves. That can take a toll at times. What do we need to do to kinda stay on the path to get better? So we can crush the world?

• 1:17:03Speaker 01

  Well, keep in mind mentally and physically, DOMS in the arms, that indicates that you're working out your arms, which I respect. So, you know, I'm sorry that you have the DOMS, but welcome to my world.

• 1:17:14Jocko Willink?

  Ah, that goes true.

• 1:17:19Speaker 01

  Well, okay, so we wanna minimize DOMS, well, no, no, maximize yet, minimize, mitigate, DOMS?

• 1:17:25Jocko Willink?

  Okay, I would say that's a good call.

• 1:17:27Speaker 01

  It's kind of a dichotomy, really.

• 1:17:30Jocko Willink?

  But let's face it. Would you, would you want to have DOMS every day on your arms? Would that include, would that increase progress or not? It'd be bad, right?

• 1:17:42Speaker 01

  You know, I, obviously, there's a lot to it, but generally speaking, simply put, DOMS every day, no, probably not.

• 1:17:48Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 1:17:48Speaker 01

  You, when the DOMS heals, then you wanna elicit more DOMS in one way or another, yes. But it's a process, isn't it? It's ongoing. Nonetheless, I'll tell you what you do need is supplementation. That'll help you. Through DOMS or no DOMS, you know? Through this path we're all on supplementation is very helpful. So we'll talk about energy drinks first. Right. As far as energy, see, I know I said it, energy drinks.

• 1:18:12Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. As if that, as if what we're talking about fits in with all the other categories of all these other drinks that are in the energy drink category.

• 1:18:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. So may, you know, me, if you're new to this.

• 1:18:23Jocko Willink?

  When they're not. They're not. They don't.

• 1:18:25Speaker 01

  Don't the stigma that you felt like in your brain or whatever, oh, energy drinks, that stigma, don't worry about that. That stigma anymore. In fact, forget that stigma, forget it.

• 1:18:34Jocko Willink?

  Don't totally forget it because there's other drinks that still have, you need to keep the stigma in mind.

• 1:18:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:18:39Jocko Willink?

  But you can have the stigma avoidance.

• 1:18:41Speaker 01

  Yes, like, like, like detach from the stigma. How about that?

• 1:18:44Jocko Willink?

  Leave it behind.

• 1:18:45Speaker 01

  Just leave it behind. It doesn't control your brain and how you think of energy drinks necessarily anymore. If you know about Jaco Go. Okay, I can, is it Discipline Go or Jaco Go?

• 1:18:57Jocko Willink?

  It is Jaco Discipline Go, technically speaking.

• 1:19:00Speaker 01

  I got corrected by someone on the inside, which I respected by the way, but either way, go. Jaco Discipline Go. It's an energy drink that is good for you, front to back, good for you. Not the kind where you're drinking, um, you know, what, you ever seen that, there's this commercial, I think one of these comedy YouTube channels, they're like, oh, if like, if energy drink commercials were honest or whatever, and they called it like a a metal tube of psychedelic poison or something, but they, they kept referring to it as a metal tube of some kind of poison.

• 1:19:34Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, accurate.

• 1:19:36Speaker 01

  Yeah. Oh, Brad, watch the video. It's funny. You're like, damn, that is all true. And it's, it's interesting. Either way, it's not that. That's not what this is.

• 1:19:44Jocko Willink?

  No poison.

• 1:19:45Speaker 01

  It's different. Yeah.

• 1:19:45Jocko Willink?

  Actually good for you.

• 1:19:46Speaker 01

  It's good for you. It's like a health drink, energy drink, but even though that makes it sound kind of like not really what it feels like. Just keep in mind, it's an energy drink. It tastes good, is good, and is good for you.

• 1:19:58Jocko Willink?

  And gives you energy.

• 1:19:59Speaker 01

  And gives you energy.

• 1:20:00Jocko Willink?

  Legit.

• 1:20:01Speaker 01

  No chemicals. None of these weird preservative things because of the process, high quality, it's quality. Many flavors, the best in which is mango, factually, in my opinion.

• 1:20:15Jocko Willink?

  Check.

• 1:20:15Speaker 01

  But you're gonna have to choose for yourself on that one. It's called Jaco Go.

• 1:20:18Jocko Willink?

  Also got joint warfare?

• 1:20:19Speaker 01

  Yes, sir.

• 1:20:20Jocko Willink?

  Which today. Yeah, I, I, I must say even joint warfare has its limitations because I need more right now. I take it every day. Uh, thank God, because otherwise I might even be completely immobilized right now. I might be laid up.

• 1:20:35Speaker 01

  Here's the thing, joint warfare is not going to help your doms.

• 1:20:37Jocko Willink?

  Oh, really?

• 1:20:37Speaker 01

  I mean, not, I mean, maybe.

• 1:20:38Jocko Willink?

  What is gonna help the doms? The protein?

• 1:20:40Speaker 01

  Protein is gonna help your doms. Yes, sir.

• 1:20:42Jocko Willink?

  So joints, joint warfare, super krill, right? But when it comes to actual rebuild, we need to go milk.

• 1:20:51Speaker 01

  Yep, that's for the muscle. Yes. Additional protein in the form of a dessert.

• 1:20:56Jocko Willink?

  You know what I had for breakfast this morning, which I normally don't eat?

• 1:20:59Speaker 01

  Milkshake, pancakes.

• 1:21:00Jocko Willink?

  Milk. Guess what I had for lunch? Milk, because I could, I knew what you just told me. The doms, I know it needs to help.

• 1:21:08Speaker 01

  Yes, sir.

• 1:21:08Jocko Willink?

  I need to repair my muscles.

• 1:21:10Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:21:11Jocko Willink?

  Freaking sore, dude.

• 1:21:12Speaker 01

  Uh, by the way, speaking of milk, the, the new, and you actually, all the ingredients were in front of my face, but you turned me on to this, uh, or to the precursor of this new formula for the ultimate milkshake. Depends on what flavor you like, but if you like the chocolate one, this is the one. Mint chocolate or dark chocolate or, uh,

• 1:21:30Jocko Willink?

  Peanut butter chocolate.

• 1:21:31Speaker 01

  Peanut butter chocolate, whichever one you want. Half of a, or half of a frozen banana overripe.

• 1:21:37Jocko Willink?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:21:38Speaker 01

  Tulsi Garrett turned me on to that.

• 1:21:39Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 1:21:40Speaker 01

  So we got a, you know, a little collab going on. Frozen, half a frozen banana, two scoops of the milk. I did the darkness. Um, soy milk, you know, because like soy silk, I don't know, whatever. The, the one that, that it doesn't have lactose in it, it's, it's super low. Okay, if you go regular milk and you're concerned about, if you're trying to go lower on the calorie thing, regular milk, even 2% is not the best one for you.

• 1:22:05Jocko Willink?

  Because I'm over here on the whole milk. Sometimes straight up half and half.

• 1:22:09Speaker 01

  Well, you're not.

• 1:22:11Speaker 01

  Well, you're not going on a lower calorie scenario. It's basic. You can't, you know, your little machine can't handle that kind of stuff. Either way, if you are, this is the, the deal, because I was going to give it to the kids for the ultimate front end test. You see what I'm saying? Anyway, you go half. Soy milk or almond milk, whatever, the unsweetened one. And then half of that, it's lactose free. It was the chocolate milk that you you mentioned. It's like lactose free, there's way less sugar and it's like double, triple filtered or whatever. And you go half that too. Oh, just for the extra boost of chocolate or whatever. Man, drink that one. It tastes like ice cream. I think the banana, but it's not a whole banana. So you don't get the real super banana flavor, but you get the sweetness from the banana. And bro, it tastes like it's ice cream for real.

• 1:22:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. Oh yeah. Put ice in there. Boom. Mix that up. There you go, Molk. Uh, protein in the form of a highly desirable dessert.

• 1:23:03Jocko Willink?

  Highly desirable. I'm just having one right now. I've already had two today.

• 1:23:09Jocko Willink?

  That's how.

• 1:23:10Speaker 01

  It's true. Also, Jaco White Tea. If you're into tea, you know, something light. That's the OG. That's the original.

• 1:23:16Jocko Willink?

  That is the OG.

• 1:23:17Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:23:17Jocko Willink?

  That is the OG.

• 1:23:18Speaker 01

  I was never a tea drinker, to be honest with you. And but I was and I was surprised about how many like tea drinkers were like, brother, Jaco White Tea is that's the legit one. Yeah.

• 1:23:28Jocko Willink?

  It's legit.

• 1:23:29Speaker 01

  Interesting.

• 1:23:30Jocko Willink?

  You can get all this stuff at Vitamin Shoppe. You can get all this stuff at JacoFuel.com. By the way, if you subscribe, it gets shipped to you for free. You can get the the Henergy drinks.

• 1:23:45Speaker 01

  Here's the thing you say you mentioned Henergy from time to time. You know what Henergy is?

• 1:23:51Jocko Willink?

  It's

• 1:23:51Speaker 01

  Henergy is an actual thing.

• 1:23:52Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's it's a Henner Gracie's got something, right?

• 1:23:55Speaker 01

  It's Henner Gracie's charisma, his whole.

• 1:23:58Jocko Willink?

  Oh, that's his Henergy.

• 1:23:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, when he talks, he's like, he's real, brother. That guy's on it, man. You want to listen to that guy talk forever? And that energy that he brings, that's a Henergy, straight up.

• 1:24:09Jocko Willink?

  I thought it was like he ma- mixed some food up, you know, maybe an acai bowl. But that was a Henergy one.

• 1:24:15Speaker 01

  I think the presentation of that

• 1:24:17Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:17Speaker 01

  was the Henergy. So I'm just saying, we got

• 1:24:20Jocko Willink?

  Well, we need to talk to to Henner then and get it, you know, maybe he could approve of the Henergy drink over here.

• 1:24:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. But I think it's in the presenter. So I'm just saying, it might be, might be, I don't know. Maybe, maybe not, but it might be misleading to say, hey, they are considered Henergy drinks. You see what I'm saying? I don't know.

• 1:24:38Jocko Willink?

  So, okay, so this was not officially endorsed by Henner.

• 1:24:42Speaker 01

  Yes, okay.

• 1:24:43Jocko Willink?

  But if you want to get these drinks. Genergy drinks. I just made that up because there's a Jaco energy drink.

• 1:24:49Speaker 01

  Sure. Genergy, sure, hell yeah.

• 1:24:51Jocko Willink?

  If you want to get these gen- these Genergy drinks, you can get them at Wawa as well on the east coast. And by the way, we're, we're, we'll be rolling out for everybody else in the country. That's not on the east coast. That's been hitting us up like, what about this store? What about, we're working them. And we should start to see some of those other big stores across the country rolling out shortly. So that's the way you can get. So.

• 1:25:17Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, there you go.

• 1:25:17Speaker 01

  There you go. Especially, uh, speaking of getting some, you know, you want some, you know, some American made stuff. And when I say stuff, I don't mean just random stuff.

• 1:25:25Jocko Willink?

  Right.

• 1:25:26Speaker 01

  Good stuff. Jeans, boots, various other leather goods, depending on how creative Pete is feeling. Some wallets in there. Can you still get the wallet?

• 1:25:36Jocko Willink?

  Yep, both of them. Yeah, there's like a small one and a big one.

• 1:25:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, so back to the jeans, Delta sixty eight and the, the, what's your OG?

• 1:25:44Jocko Willink?

  Factory.

• 1:25:44Speaker 01

  Factory jeans.

• 1:25:47Speaker 01

  Impressive jeans. And I care about more elements of jeans as far as when you put on jeans than, than this Jaco guy. You care about a number of things which are critical and fundamental. I get it.

• 1:25:59Jocko Willink?

  Functionality?

• 1:26:00Speaker 01

  Yes, sir.

• 1:26:00Jocko Willink?

  Is all I care about.

• 1:26:01Speaker 01

  Yes, sir.

• 1:26:02Jocko Willink?

  In life.

• 1:26:03Speaker 01

  But me, I care about the fit. You know, when I put on the jeans.

• 1:26:05Jocko Willink?

  Fit is part of functionality.

• 1:26:07Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:26:08Jocko Willink?

  In my opinion.

• 1:26:08Speaker 01

  Okay, I care about the aesthetic fit as well. Okay, see, I understand. Yes, sir. So, you know, when I'm in the mirror, I look in the mirror and I look at myself.

• 1:26:19Speaker 01

  And I look at my wife next to me and if she's like giving me the approval, that means a lot.

• 1:26:26Speaker 01

  Versus I put them on and she's like stoic face, maybe sour face.

• 1:26:31Jocko Willink?

  Wow, that's gotta be rough in your household.

• 1:26:33Speaker 01

  Let's see what else maybe you have, like those types of reactions. That means, that means a lot to me. See what I'm saying?

• 1:26:38Jocko Willink?

  My wife's just stoked.

• 1:26:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:26:40Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:41Speaker 01

  Well, you know why she's stoked, because you put on the Delta 68 like it is in my case. Look, maybe it doesn't mean much to you. Nonetheless, it still reaps the same benefits. You see what I'm saying? And your wife, my wife, they're there to convey, you know, their approval and that and around we go. You see what I'm saying? So it doesn't matter if you notice it or not.

• 1:26:59Jocko Willink?

  OriginUSA.com.

• 1:27:00Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. American made. So when I say American made, it doesn't mean we assemble them, you know, in, you know,

• 1:27:08Jocko Willink?

  Sown and grown, grown and sown right here in America.

• 1:27:14Speaker 01

  Everything from the

• 1:27:15Jocko Willink?

  Rebuilding this whole freaking country, bringing manufacturing back to here. And that's what we're doing.

• 1:27:20Speaker 01

  Yep, they're doing some great stuff over there. Uh, also Jaco's store. It's called Jaco's store. That's where you can get your shirts and hats and hoodies, anything you want to wear to represent the path. Discipline equals freedom. You can go deep on the idea of discipline equals freedom, by the way.

• 1:27:36Jocko Willink?

  Yes, you can.

• 1:27:37Speaker 01

  Yeah. Sometimes kind of hard to understand, but when you understand it.

• 1:27:41Jocko Willink?

  I mean, I wrote a whole day of book about it, so I would say I went deep.

• 1:27:45Speaker 01

  Some help. Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Nonetheless, you want to represent.

• 1:27:48Jocko Willink?

  Thank you for telling me I could go deep. I have gone deep.

• 1:27:51Speaker 01

  Well, I'm thinking, you know how, okay, you ever, you listen to music when you work out?

• 1:27:55Jocko Willink?

  Yes.

• 1:27:55Speaker 01

  Okay, so sometimes I will too. Sometimes, sometimes I'll listen to podcasts, depending on the podcast. Sometimes the podcast can distract you from the workout, by the way. So keep that in mind. But every once in a while, I'll, I'll go with nothing. Not listen to anything.

• 1:28:08Jocko Willink?

  Good.

• 1:28:08Speaker 01

  That's when your mind, like you find your mind just going deep on some random thing that's always in front of your face or whatever. And that's what happened recently to me. Discipline equals freedom. Like, man, I have the freedom to do all this stuff, but I'm not going to do it because I'm disciplined. You see what I'm saying? And you can go deep in your own mind. Anyway, if you're representing that, you can get your shirts and hats and hoodies and a bunch of other stuff on Jaco's store.com. Also, we have a subscription situation called the Shirt Locker.

• 1:28:36Speaker 01

  Kind of an exclusive deal, you know, it's a monthly thing. You get a new shirt different from the

• 1:28:45Speaker 01

  It's slightly exclusive. It's available to anybody.

• 1:28:49Jocko Willink?

  It's real exclusive.

• 1:28:50Speaker 01

  I'm just saying, if you're part of the shirt locker, you're wearing your shirt locker shirts. Someone who's not part of the shirt locker, they see your shirt, they're gonna be like, hey, where can I get that? You see what I'm saying?

• 1:28:59Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 1:29:00Speaker 01

  That's the in

• 1:29:01Jocko Willink?

  Exclusivity.

• 1:29:02Speaker 01

  It's pseudo-exclusive.

• 1:29:03Jocko Willink?

  Right.

• 1:29:03Speaker 01

  Nonetheless, cool, cool designs.

• 1:29:07Speaker 01

  JacoStore.com.

• 1:29:08Jocko Willink?

  Speaking of subscriptions, you can subscribe to this podcast if you want to. And it's everywhere. We also have some other podcasts, Jaco Unraveling Podcast with my bro Daryl Cooper DC. We're recording a couple this week. Grounded Podcast, which are we even, are we holding on to that? Are we holding on to it? Still out there.

• 1:29:27Speaker 01

  It's, yeah.

• 1:29:28Jocko Willink?

  People, some people are waiting for it.

• 1:29:30Speaker 01

  Let's say

• 1:29:31Jocko Willink?

  Like seven people.

• 1:29:32Speaker 01

  It's a non-scheduled podcast.

• 1:29:35Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 1:29:35Speaker 01

  We'll say.

• 1:29:35Jocko Willink?

  Maybe at some point, we just roll back deep on the Grounded Podcast, Warrior Kid Podcast. We also have the Underground, Jaco Underground Podcast. It's our It's our alternative location in case things get tyrannical around here.

• 1:29:55Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:29:56Jocko Willink?

  I don't think they will, but some days I wake up thinking, maybe they will. So anyways, we've built a platform that we can operate on with pure independence and not have to rely on the current platforms that we're on. We hope it doesn't come to that, but if it does, it would be foolish for us not to have a contingency plan. If you want to help us with that, you want to be a part of that, go to JacoUnderground.com. It costs $8.18 a month. You can probably figure out what that stands for. $8.18 a month, but listen, if you can't afford that, but you still want to support, you still want to be in the game, email [email protected]. We'll get you in there. We release another podcast once a week. That's a little bit more

• 1:30:38Jocko Willink?

  It it covers some tangential topics. Try and give you a little bit more information, let you know what's going on. Um, do a Q and A. We're answering a bunch of questions on there. So if you want to, if you want to help us out there, go to jockunderground.com.

• 1:30:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, that one's good. It's um, in the way I, you know, he like you go along with a certain thing and you could try to evaluate and maybe sum up like, what is this? What it, what is this? Right? And you know, you say Q and A, which it is essentially, but it's like, it's kind of like when you go through life, whether it be currently or before, whatever. I'm just saying, you think about your past, you think about the present, uh, there's all these weird questions. What, what?

• 1:31:14Jocko Willink?

  This is a funny way of saying it.

• 1:31:20Speaker 01

  It is true. It is true. Nonetheless, you're still gonna have like, you know how there's like questions rolling around like, what is this? What does this mean? Like, what's my take on this at the end of the day, you know? If you're the kind of ask, ask that question to yourself. I think you offer a really good, like your take on it. And it's usually really informed, usually. Um, and it can kind of help. A lot of us make sense out of certain elements of life, you know, whether it be the specific questions that people ask, or the first part that we talk about, like, you know, is our, are, is our, our children soft now? You know, is society becoming soft or like, you know, succumbing to the, to the trick of advertising or, you know, like that, that kind of stuff? Like, that's real stuff that we're dealing with like daily, you know?

• 1:32:04Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I think it brings awareness. And you ever heard me talk about if I wanted to scare you? But I told you, hey, I'm going to be in the house. And I'm going to scare you. What are my chances of being able to scare you?

• 1:32:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, lower.

• 1:32:17Jocko Willink?

  Almost zero. If you don't know.

• 1:32:23Jocko Willink?

  I would say I'm 99.9% gonna scare you. So with life. If you. Have an opportunity to think through a problem. Or think through a question before you actually have to contend with it, it's going to make you. Unscareable. So just that's as another, I think that's the benefit of the jockunderground.com podcast. Is we're addressing those kinds of things to get you in that situation where you can't be scared. Or you, where you're ready to deal with whatever's in front of you.

• 1:32:57Speaker 01

  But yeah, also, we have a YouTube channel.

• 1:33:01Speaker 01

  Chalk Podcast YouTube channel boom excellent excerpts on their video version of this podcast um some enhanced stuff on there Some behind the scenes

• 1:33:09Jocko Willink?

  I was gonna say some behind the scenes

• 1:33:13Speaker 01

  Yes, very occasional every once in a while We will happen a lot of times against your will but then it usually becomes against my will We go down like certain uh you know little pass or whatever and here's the thing I don't say we post behind the scenes stuff on there even though we do Because it's not very

• 1:33:32Jocko Willink?

  It's irregular

• 1:33:33Speaker 01

  But they're on there though for sure if there's some behind the scenes info conversations Worth posting they're on there Anyway I had a benefit yeah YouTube that's a good one also origin HD

• 1:33:48Jocko Willink?

  Yeah yeah

• 1:33:49Speaker 01

  YouTube channel very good you wanna see the you wanna see the What do you call like a phoenix out of the ashes industry and how someone can do that

• 1:33:59Jocko Willink?

  Yep

• 1:34:00Speaker 01

  Can achieve that Step by step boom that's that's a perfect example as we can see that go down for sure So yeah check that one out on YouTube as well

• 1:34:10Jocko Willink?

  Also got a speaking of albums now this one is not on vinyl

• 1:34:13Speaker 01

  No

• 1:34:14Jocko Willink?

  Not yet anyways not we didn't record it at Jack White's studio in Detroit I'm looking forward to that I hope I get to do that that'd be rad right

• 1:34:24Speaker 01

  It would be yeah especially that kind of like where you said there's like 50 people or something like that like a small yeah

• 1:34:30Jocko Willink?

  Super hype I wonder if I'd get super hyped for that I think I would you know sometimes I get hyped

• 1:34:37Speaker 01

  Yes I do know

• 1:34:41Jocko Willink?

  Well this one's not on vinyl but it's called psychological warfare little little Mental spots to help you get through those moments of weakness you can get that anywhere you get MP3s also flipsidecanvas.com that's Dakota Meyer He's got a company where they're printing stuff for you to hang on your wall awesome stuff Keep you on the path also got some books obviously first and foremost final spin You got the intro find out what the hype is about

• 1:35:11Speaker 01

  Good man

• 1:35:14Jocko Willink?

  Pre-order it right now comes out November first week of November competitive people are gonna be watching Who who's looking at it I don't know we'll see what happens it's a risk It's a risk. I asked my editor, when Discipline Equals Freedom Field Manual comes out, came out, or when it was about to come out, I said, have you ever taken this much of a risk before in a book? He said, no, never, because it's so different. He said, this one, same ballpark. These kind of books, this book doesn't exist. There's no book like this. So, final spin, if you want to support, you want to be high-fiving, you want that first edition, order that thing, Leadership Strategy and Tactics Field Manual, the code, the evaluation, the protocol, Discipline Equals Freedom Field Manual, the brand-new version,

• 1:35:59Jocko Willink?

  Way of the Warrior Kid, one, two, three, and four, Mikey and the Dragons, About Face by Hackworth, and of course, Extreme Ownership and the Guide of Leadership, that I wrote with my brother, Leif Babin. And speaking of Leif Babin, we have a leadership consultancy. We solve problems through leadership. Go to Echelonfront.com for details. We also have a muster coming up. It's a live event. It's in Las Vegas, October 28th and 29th. Come and get some of that.

• 1:36:27Jocko Willink?

  You can find all those things at Echelonfront.com. We also have an online training at Extreme Ownership Academy. The leadership is not something you just learn and now you're good at. Oh, I got a, I got a shot of leadership. I read one book. Now I'm good. No, you got to work at it like the gym. So we got a leadership gym for you. Go to ExtremeOwnership.com for that. And if you want to help service members, active and retired, you want to help their families, you want to help Gold Star families, check out Mark Lee's mom, Mama Lee, she's got a charity organization, and if you want to donate, or you want to get involved, you want to help out, go to AmericasMightyWarriors.org. And if you want more of my ridiculously rambling reads, or you need more of Echo's obtuse opinions,

• 1:37:10Jocko Willink?

  you can find us on the interwebs, on Twitter, on the Gram, and on that Facebook.

• 1:37:17Jocko Willink?

  Echoes at Echo Charles. I am at Jocelyn Willink. And thanks to all the men and women in the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines. Look, Final Spin is a book. It's a fiction story. I sat around and came up with this idea and wrote it. And the only reason I was able to write it, the only reason I had the freedom to write that is because you all are out there providing security and stability through your service. So thanks to all the military. And the same goes to our police and law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, Border Patrol, Secret Service, and all first responders. We get to do what we do because you do what you do every day to keep us safe.

• 1:38:02Jocko Willink?

  And everyone else out there.

• 1:38:06Jocko Willink?

  Happiness.

• 1:38:09Jocko Willink?

  Happiness isn't a destination. You don't get there, you don't arrive.

• 1:38:16Jocko Willink?

  You are there.

• 1:38:19Jocko Willink?

  This is it, and it might not always seem like it. But the struggles and the sacrifice, those are life, and those ultimately are happiness. And you will find them most clearly.

• 1:38:34Jocko Willink?

  If you put others before yourself.

• 1:38:38Jocko Willink?

  So keep pushing. Keep looking up.

• 1:38:43Jocko Willink?

  Stay clean. And of course, keep getting after it.

• 1:38:49Jocko Willink?

  And until next time, this is Echo and Jaco. Out.