Jocko Underground: How Can Jocko Not Step Up and Talk About America's Short-Comings?

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

• 0:00Jocko Willink?

  This is the Jocko Underground Podcast, number 200 with Echo Charles and me, Jocko Willink. We have been issued questions from you all, the troops in the field, and we are going to try and provide answers if possible, courses of actions to follow, or at least some recommendations of maintaining the path. So that's what we got. Let's get into it.

• 0:21Speaker 01

  All right, first question, a long time listener. I've read all your books. I've supported the underground, and now I have a crisis of faith as to whether you are complete and utter bullshit. In the grand scheme, it doesn't matter. We all have flaws, you included. But given what's happened in the United States with the killing of two citizens, the government responding with pure propaganda, e.g. no right to possess a weapon, domestic terrorists, and your role in promoting and platforming this very government, when do you feel some ownership and step up and address this? Your response to raiding another country to capture the leader, Venezuela, caused me to end sponsorship of your underground podcast. Your failure

• 1:04Speaker 01

  to do anything to address this mess will make it clear that you don't represent extreme ownership. And worse, your silence makes your sacrifices in your younger days worthless if we lose ours, our freedom in the process.

• 1:21Jocko Willink?

  Okay, well, first of all, thanks for the support. Much appreciated over the years, and hopefully we've taken away something positive from the books and the podcast and whatnot. And you are correct, we all have flaws, me included, of course. And there are a lot of things going on in the country right now that are very polarizing. A lot of things going on in the country that are very polarizing. I am, I don't aim to be one of those things that's very polarizing. My goal as a person and as a leader in any organization that I'm in, whether I was, when I was in the SEAL Teams, whether I'm in business, or a citizen in the country, my goal, first and foremost, has always been to try and find common ground

• 2:05Jocko Willink?

  and, and bring some unity to various situations. And one of the most profound places that I learned that lessons was when I was running the Advanced Training Command. For the suit for the West Coast SEAL teams, sometimes SEAL platoons would have infighting. Cause, cause there's all kinds of things to infight about when you're in a SEAL platoon. Different techniques, different procedures, different postures, you have different personalities in the platoon. And if the platoon leadership and the platoon themselves, because once you have, once you have two divergent leaders, then they get their own teams within the team. And if they start going at each other, the platoon can't find the common ground.

• 2:49Jocko Willink?

  And things fall apart. And so the extremist political sides of our country do a great job of capitalizing on people's egos and on people's fear and anger and resentment and other kind of reactive emotions. You ever notice like someone can say something to you and you, it will cause an emotional reaction. Like just, that's just, that's just the way it is. So that's not good. And if you pull the string on what's causing that emotion, a lot of times it's ego. But if it doesn't cause, if it doesn't cause an emotion, one of the fear resentment or anger, a lot of times it will just trigger your ego. So, um,

• 3:33Jocko Willink?

  I've always been very cautious about that. And if, you know, you've read all my books, which is awesome. I thank you. My default

• 3:42Jocko Willink?

  mode is to detach from emotions and detach from chaos and detach from mayhem and try and understand things and be balanced.

• 3:51Jocko Willink?

  So another thing you might recognize from reading all my books and listening to thousands of hours worth of podcasts that I've said over and over again, along with detachment and emotional detachment and putting your ego in check is one of the most underrated tools of being a leader is listening. So I try and listen and assess what's going on. And quite frankly, in this every single day, there are events taking place that I could go through great effort to address these things, right? Whether it's riots or killings or arsons or, or arson or protests or assaults or bombings, right?

• 4:36Jocko Willink?

  And all these things are on different scales, some, some bigger than others. And depending on what side of the media you're on, they're either completely amplified or completely ignored.

• 4:47Jocko Willink?

  But the thing is, you gotta remember is each one of these things has their own little nuances and their own little details. And you could analyze them for years.

• 4:58Jocko Willink?

  And I just don't, I just don't live in that world. I'm not monitoring the news 24 hours a day, poring through reports, trying to decipher the details of countless news stories. I don't, I have other things that are happening. Right? I have businesses. I have hundreds of employees. I have vast projects and tasks and charities that I work with and teams and family, of course. And, you know, I work 12 to 16 hours a day. And I'm not, none of my work revolves around being a political commentator. I'm a American working man.

• 5:39Jocko Willink?

  I can also tell you, and I would probably gather that, you know, that you might be able to, to sense that the media and the political spin is not healthy for you. It creates divisiveness and hatred between our citizens. And it kind of does that on two levels. One level is because they want division. And the other level is on the media side, they want you to click on the stories and they want you to share our stories. And there's no faster way to get someone to share a story than to make them emotional about the story. So if you love it, you share it. If you hate it, you share it. And that's, so that's what they're looking for. So they're feeding you the, the most emotion that they can give you. And my take is, I don't want to add to that unless I think I can offer a perspective

• 6:24Jocko Willink?

  that some people might not see. So I stayed attached, so I don't get caught up in either side's propaganda. And in the meantime, of course, I mean, I see what's going on. I'm not, I'm not living in a cave. So I see things that are happening. And I see multiple sides to all these different issues.

• 6:46Jocko Willink?

  I see where both sides are right, and I see where both sides are wrong. I see both sides make mistakes. I see both sides make sense, and I see, also see both sides act crazy.

• 6:59Jocko Willink?

  So, you know, what do you specifically ask about, oh, two citizens were killed? That's absolutely awful. That's terrible.

• 7:08Jocko Willink?

  It was really horrible to watch. And those officers were not trained to be properly detached in very stressful situations.

• 7:20Jocko Willink?

  And the two citizens that were killed were somehow led to believe that it was their duty to go out and aggressively interfere with armed federal law enforcement.

• 7:32Jocko Willink?

  Which is not good.

• 7:35Jocko Willink?

  So, here's what, here's what I can tell you. These are human beings.

• 7:41Jocko Willink?

  These are human beings that have been put in stressful situations and human beings in stressful situations do what human beings do in stressful situations. So, when you mix these ingredients together, you're gonna get bad things.

• 7:57Jocko Willink?

  So, so, so there you go. Did I progress this, you know, argument any further? No, I didn't. I told you that humans act like humans. You tell one group of humans that the, that there's evil people coming in and you need to stop them, and then you put those people in with other people that are federal agents that are executing what they've been told to do, and they think they're right to do it, because they're, they're getting rapists and murderers out of the country, and so they're trying to do their job. So now you have these two opposing forces and you're gonna mix them together, and guess what's gonna happen? Bad things are gonna happen. So, I wouldn't encourage that. I would de-escalate that on both sides.

• 8:37Jocko Willink?

  So, you know, there's one. America took out Maduro. And I, yeah, if you're on the side that says, hey, that's none of our business, we don't have the right to do that? Cool. I can see your point. And if you're a person that thinks Maduro was a tyrannical leader that's killed thousands of Venezuelans and imprisoned anymore and conducted mass extrajudicial executions? And on top of that, he's facilitated the influx of drugs into our country that's killed hundreds of thousands of people, and that the people of Venezuela celebrated his removal? And so you think it's a good move? I can see that side too.

• 9:19Jocko Willink?

  So I can see this is that this is history taking progress. History isn't perfect. History isn't nice. History doesn't know whether it's going to be right or wrong, by the way.

• 9:30Jocko Willink?

  You know, how do those things turn out? I don't know. I hope, I hope that Venezuela transitions well. It seems like it is. There's not a civil war happening. There's not a power vacuum that's being filled. The infrastructure's been left in place. In fact, it's being improved. They're doing something that we didn't do in Iraq. Remember in Iraq, we went in and we eliminated the entire Ba'ath party and fired 400,000 soldiers? And then what did they have? No jobs. And what did they do? They found a job being insurgents. So we did, it seems like we did a little bit better in Venezuela. I certainly hope it turns out a lot better. I hopefully they, this transition takes place and they hold elections and they move towards a nice situation where they have freedom and democracy. That's what I hope for. Can I guarantee that? No. Can anyone guarantee that? Nope. Nope, they can't.

• 10:15Jocko Willink?

  In Minnesota, I don't know when you wrote me this, this question. It can't be too far, too long ago, but currently it seems as if local law enforcement is now cooperating with federal law enforcement to affect a turnover of illegal criminal aliens from the state prisons, prisons to federal law enforcement, which means that the federal law enforcement isn't going out door to door and doing raids to try and capture these guys, which means that the citizens aren't protesting directly, which means everything has calmed down a lot. Now, could things flare up? Yeah, they could flare up. I don't know. That's why, you know, when people think that they know everything about what's going on,

• 11:00Jocko Willink?

  they don't. And I am also one of those people that don't know what's going on. Or let me rephrase that. We might know what's going on, but we don't know what's going to happen.

• 11:10Jocko Willink?

  Time will tell.

• 11:12Jocko Willink?

  Time will tell.

• 11:14Jocko Willink?

  And listen, you know, as far as this podcast, we've had people from all different backgrounds and all different political beliefs on this podcast. We've had candidates from Democrats. We've had Republican candidates, Democratic candidates, independent candidates. We've had everybody on this thing. I don't, I don't platform any specific political agenda. A lot of times I have veterans on, veterans tend to lean more conservative. So yeah, I've probably had more of them on.

• 11:44Jocko Willink?

  But I've also had people from all over the dial. So

• 11:52Jocko Willink?

  that that to me is just it and anyone's welcome, by the way, I've invited all kinds of different people. So that's kind of open.

• 12:03Jocko Willink?

  And you know, you kind of kind of think the closing thing is like, we're going to lose our freedoms and stuff like that.

• 12:10Jocko Willink?

  Um.

• 12:14Jocko Willink?

  America has been through some really horrible and divisive times and it doesn't really seem like it because you read him. You may or may not have read them in a book and they don't feel as real as they feel right now to you. However, whatever situation you're in in life and these things seem so like drastic and crazy. But this is part, this is American history. Americans shit gets wild in America. Shit goes bad and wrong in America. Bleeding Kansas, you ever heard of that?

• 12:52Jocko Willink?

  1850s. It was pro slavery versus anti slavery guerrilla war. And then, I mean, once, look, we all know the Civil War. Where we literally went to war with each other, 600,000 people killed. Okay, so once that was over. It was over though. No, they assassinated Lincoln.

• 13:13Jocko Willink?

  Okay, well, then, once Lincoln was assassinated, maybe it was over then. No. What about the Memphis massacre? 1866.

• 13:23Jocko Willink?

  Whites in Memphis killed a bunch of black Union veterans. I've talked about this on this podcast before, like all the free blacks that made it to the north, they all fought. And it was a big number, it was like 10% of the Union Army. And when they war was over, okay, going down to Memphis. And imagine the white supremacists killing Union, black Union veterans, killed 50 of them. Wouldn't that spark something? Oh, by the way, the same thing happened in New Orleans, like 35 blacks were killed there.

• 14:00Jocko Willink?

  What about the Wilmington coup and massacre?

• 14:05Jocko Willink?

  Where the whites, the white supremacists, they had a coup. Meaning they took over the government successfully, by the way. Killed a bunch of black people and took over the government. And by the way, this is, this is what 40 years after the civil war? So what, isn't that the end of the world?

• 14:28Jocko Willink?

  1906, Atlanta Race Riot. I mean, it took a long time for this racial stuff. We, we think the racial stuff is horrible right now.

• 14:39Jocko Willink?

  The Red Summer, 1919, Chicago, DC.

• 14:47Jocko Willink?

  Elaine, Arkansas. 250 black people were just killed and thousands were displaced. Did you hear me when I said 1919? That's this, you know, that's the, just the last century. That's, that's century I was born in. Probably you might, here's one you might've heard of Tulsa Race Riot. Tulsa Race Massacre. Well, no one really knows the exact numbers. Whether it was dozens or hundreds or that, maybe thousands. But I do know that like 1300 homes and businesses were burned to the ground.

• 15:21Jocko Willink?

  The hell's that? Isn't that the end of the, must that be the end of the union? Now we're here.

• 15:29Jocko Willink?

  1935, Huey Long assassinated. The labor dispute, you ever heard of the Battle of Blair Mountain? Where dozens of American workers were killed by the federal government. But what, did that start, spark off a civil war? Did, had, did everyone, no, no, no, we didn't overthrow the government then. What about when Jim, Jim Crow laws kicked in next? Did we overthrow the government then? Nope, no, we didn't. What about the late 60s and early 70s? When now the Black Panthers and the Black Liberation Army? And the Sibenese Liberation Army? What about when they were murder, executing police officers? Like a dozen of them in America?

• 16:12Jocko Willink?

  Did that, we did that, was that what sparked it? Oh, no, no, it didn't. We're here. What about when they killed MLK, Martin Luther King? What about when they killed him? When the, the personified symbol of freedom for and equality for all men? What about when he got assassinated? Oh no, we're still here.

• 16:36Jocko Willink?

  Well, you know, what about when they killed JFK? No, we're still here. What about RFK? No, we're still here. What about race riots in Watts, Detroit and Newark? Massive, crazy race riots. Is that the end of America? No, we're still here. What about the Weather Underground?

• 16:55Jocko Willink?

  Remember when they bombed people and killed people? Leftists?

• 17:02Jocko Willink?

  Oh, well, what about when at Kent State? American soldiers killed four students that were protesting. Was that it, dude? Was that it? Nope, we're still here. What about Ruby Ridge? Or the Oklahoma City bombing? Did those things spark the revolution? The civil war here? No, they didn't. What about the Fort Hood jihadists? That went on a shooting spree and killed 13 American soldiers on a base? Is that when we decided we were going to export everyone? No, we didn't.

• 17:40Jocko Willink?

  No, we didn't. What about the Charleston church? When the white supremacists went in and massacred a bunch of black kids? That were in a church? Did that, did that send us over the edge? No, it didn't.

• 17:54Jocko Willink?

  What about when the guy came out and tried to kill a bunch of Republican guys? Republican government representatives that were out playing baseball? Did that start it? No, actually it didn't. What about the BLM riots? I hope you remember those. Was that the end of America? No, it wasn't. What about January 6th? Was that the end of America? No, it wasn't.

• 18:16Jocko Willink?

  What about Rachel Morin? Who's a mother of five? Who's raped and murdered by an illegal immigrant from El Salvador? Is that when we decided it was all over? Nope, we're still here.

• 18:31Jocko Willink?

  Jocelyn Nungre? Murdered by two illegals from Venezuela? Was that the, was that the final straw? No, it wasn't. Lake and Riley? Nursing student?

• 18:44Jocko Willink?

  Brutally murdered by an illegal immigrant? Was that, was that the final straw? No, it wasn't.

• 18:52Jocko Willink?

  Irina Zarutskaya, if you haven't seen that video,

• 18:58Jocko Willink?

  she got, was sitting on a bus, minding her own business, looking at her phone, got stabbed in the neck, murdered because she's a white woman.

• 19:07Jocko Willink?

  Was that the final straw?

• 19:11Jocko Willink?

  No, nope, it wasn't.

• 19:17Jocko Willink?

  Is this stuff good? No, it's absolutely not. Is this stuff polarizing? It absolutely can be.

• 19:25Jocko Willink?

  Is it the end of America? No, it's not. This stuff has been going on since the beginning of America.

• 19:33Jocko Willink?

  And we have our differences and we're going to have problems, but I am not going to add to them.

• 19:43Jocko Willink?

  I will help when I can.

• 19:47Jocko Willink?

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

• 20:01Jocko Willink?

  go to jockounderground.com and subscribe. And we're doing this, we're doing this to mitigate our reliance on external platforms. So we are not subject to their control. And we are doing this so that we can support the Jocko Podcast, which will remain as is, free for all, as long as we can keep it that way. But we, but we are doing this so we don't have to be under the control of sponsors. And we're doing it so we can give you more control, more interaction, more direct connections, better communications with us. And to do that, we are, we're building a website right now,

• 20:42Jocko Willink?

  where we'll be able to utilize to strengthen this legion of troopers that are in the game with us. So thank you, it's jockounderground.com. It costs $8.18 a month. And if you can't afford to support us, we can still support you, just email [email protected] and we'll get you taken care of. Until then, we will see you mobilized underground.