135: Supreme Excellence with Discomfort and Extreme Ownership. With Dave Berke.

0:00:00 – Opening 0:07:59 – Dave Berke on History and importance. 0:52:55 – The Mental game. 2:14:09 – Support. 2:40:40 – 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 135 with Echo Charles and me Jocko Willink. Good evening Echo. Good evening.

• 0:11Jocko Willink?

  Dear Mrs. Spearing.

• 0:17Jocko Willink?

  There is grief in my heart and in the hearts of all my comrades for the great sorrow that this war has brought to you and to us.

• 0:29Jocko Willink?

  We all unite to express our heartfelt sympathy and condolence to the mother and family of one who has fallen in a cause as imperishable as will be the names of those who have fallen to defend it.

• 0:46Jocko Willink?

  Should there be anything my comrades and I can do to mitigate your grief and to allay your sorrow, some little keepsake of Walt as a marine perhaps, but name it dear lady

• 1:05Jocko Willink?

  and it shall traverse the ocean to you.

• 1:10Jocko Willink?

  Because you do not know me, please do not think it presumptuous for me to write. You are Walter's mother.

• 1:19Jocko Willink?

  I was his inseparable friend and comrade. That makes us two kindred souls in common grief for our nearest and dearest.

• 1:32Jocko Willink?

  Then too, this letter fulfills my duty that I am bound by oath and will to perform. Many months ago Walt and I promised each other that should the God of battles call to one, the other would console the sorrowing mother.

• 1:54Jocko Willink?

  Now Walt has gone west to home and to you forever.

• 2:00Jocko Willink?

  But his figure, his voice, his wonderful personality will always be living truths to me.

• 2:11Jocko Willink?

  I, myself, should the great call come, will go gladly. Confident of a reunion, and with faith in the eternal truth of that cause for which I die.

• 2:27Jocko Willink?

  Beneath the green and bellowed woods,

• 2:31Jocko Willink?

  Forever connected to the honor of the Marines, lies Walt with his two comrades. Dead on the field of honor.

• 2:43Jocko Willink?

  Above their graves the stately pines sway in their grandeur. An imperishable monument. But, greatest of all epitaphs, Is that engraved within the hearts of his comrades? A man than whom there was no peer.

• 3:05Jocko Willink?

  In kindliness, in understanding, in comradeship,

• 3:11Jocko Willink?

  Beyond compare.

• 3:16Jocko Willink?

  We alone know what could have been, Had circumstances so willed it.

• 3:25Jocko Willink?

  Whatever befall, whatever sorrow fills us, One thing I swear to you here, hard by that lonely grave, The very paper that I write upon, taken in a captured German dugout.

• 3:43Jocko Willink?

  I swear that Walt is well avenged, that he has died not in vain. For his spirit leads us on to ultimate victory.

• 3:58Jocko Willink?

  You are proud, I know, for you are the mother of a martyr, a martyr in a holy cause.

• 4:07Jocko Willink?

  Freedom.

• 4:09Jocko Willink?

  And liberty.

• 4:14Jocko Willink?

  Dear Lady,

• 4:17Jocko Willink?

  The very thought that you are in grief tears my heart.

• 4:24Jocko Willink?

  Do not sorrow.

• 4:27Jocko Willink?

  Death, after all, is not so terrible, and here,

• 4:33Jocko Willink?

  why here?

• 4:36Jocko Willink?

  It is glorious.

• 4:41Jocko Willink?

  Mother,

• 4:43Jocko Willink?

  in the name of the 23rd Company, in the name of the Marines, I salute you.

• 4:50Jocko Willink?

  And all my comrades salute you.

• 4:56Jocko Willink?

  Devotedly,

• 4:59Jocko Willink?

  Saul Siegel.

• 5:08Jocko Willink?

  And that was a letter written by Saul Siegel.

• 5:16Jocko Willink?

  Who was an .0333 heavy machine gunner.

• 5:22Jocko Willink?

  And he was 20 years old when he wrote that letter at the graveside of his Marine Corps brother.

• 5:32Jocko Willink?

  Walter Spearing was his name, who was from Philadelphia, who'd been amongst the earliest of the Marines to ship over to war.

• 5:41Jocko Willink?

  And who was one of the 1,811 Americans killed at the Battle of Belleau Wood.

• 5:52Jocko Willink?

  And Walter Spearing died on June 26, 1918. And as he said, that letter was written on captured paper from a German dugout. And you hear that writing.

• 6:08Jocko Willink?

  That articulate, that poetic writing by a 20-year-old Marine Corps machine gunner.

• 6:19Jocko Willink?

  And it's a letter that captures

• 6:23Jocko Willink?

  so many different aspects of war.

• 6:29Jocko Willink?

  And in capturing different aspects of war, it teaches us.

• 6:37Jocko Willink?

  It teaches us about leadership, it teaches us about human nature, teaches us about suffering, it teaches us about death, and it teaches us

• 6:49Jocko Willink?

  about life.

• 6:53Jocko Willink?

  And tonight, back here again to

• 6:59Jocko Willink?

  talk to us about all those different subjects as a Marine that I was honored to serve with on the battlefield and who I am now honored to work with once again on a different front.

• 7:15Jocko Willink?

  His name is Dave Berke. He's been on the podcast before already. So if you haven't heard that one, it was podcast number 69 and you should listen to that one first to hear about Dave's incredible background as a Marine Corps F-18 fighter pilot, F-16 pilot, F-22 pilot, F-35 pilot, Top Gun pilot, Top Gun instructor, Top Gun senior instructor, and of course, Anglico team leader on the ground with us in the Battle of Ramadi. And if you've listened to podcast 69, then you can hear all about that. And tonight, we'll go a little deeper on all these different subjects. Dave,

• 8:00Jocko Willink?

  thanks for coming back on the show.

• 8:02Dave Berke?

  Thanks Jaco, I'm stuck to be here, man.

• 8:08Jocko Willink?

  You just find these letters like that and it's, it's incredible. I know, I, I was like, hey, read this. And you know, your reaction's like, this is a 20-year-old Marine. Is it a different time? Is it, the language is different back then?

• 8:24Dave Berke?

  Yeah, and the language is different. And if you just hear the words, it sounds like a completely different world. And then when you think about what he's saying, I know exactly what you can, you can feel what he's feeling and it comes through so, so clearly and, and.

• 8:42Dave Berke?

  I've read letters like that. I've heard you read letters like that. I've seen letters like that and I've written a letter like that. It didn't sound that eloquent. It didn't. But I know that feeling and it's incredible that after all this time, how powerful that comes through, man. It was, that's awesome.

• 8:59Jocko Willink?

  As you, and this is another thing that you and I were talking about, these lessons that exist in history, in literature, and, and it's funny because it's, it's things that are written by privates, it's things that are written by corporals, it's things that are written by majors and colonels and generals, and it's things that are written by emperors, and it's things that are written by conscripts, and everything in between. And every time I, every time I, even that right there, it's like I get another angle to appreciate and to realize. And then you start, you know, you start, I'll cover Bella

• 9:43Jocko Willink?

  Wood on this podcast for sure. But I mean, when you read about Bella Wood at all, it was just savage battle.

• 9:49Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 9:50Jocko Willink?

  Savage battle. I mean, there's one Medal of Honor for, for a guy that his buddy didn't have his gas mask. So he took off his own gas mask and gave it to him and then, and then died. I mean, it's, it's, it's unbelievable. And so you were telling me, you kind of opened back up the history books, the war books.

• 10:12Dave Berke?

  Yeah. I used to, certainly as a kid and, and early in my career, I would read military history all the time. I mean, some of it was an assignment, you know, we'd become a lieutenant in the Marine Corps and there's a kind of a reading list that you want to go through. And you do some of it, kind of, they call it professional military education, PME. But I used to be really interested in it and I just kind of did it on my own. A lot of it was aviation centric. But I got away from it. And for the latter half of my career, I didn't do military history at all. It wasn't, it just wasn't something that really captivated me. And in the last year and a half or so.

• 10:51Dave Berke?

  Partially, no, not partially, mostly because of this podcast. I've actually gone back and reread some of the books and, and you and I've talked about a lot of different ones.

• 11:02Dave Berke?

  With the Old Breed, Eugene Sledge. So that was a book I read a long time ago and it was, it was incredible book, very powerful, but I went back and reread that book. A little while back.

• 11:15Dave Berke?

  And I had stopped thinking and paying attention to the meanings. I was, I was, I was almost paying attention to the chronology in the past. Okay, this has happened here. This is the lesson learned and this is the movement and it was all kind of very sanitary and I lost what it meant to hear their stories. And I used to read them and I think I just tried to pay attention to what happened and not really learn as much from him or from them and, and I've read more in the last year than I had in, honestly, Jock, probably the previous five, if not more.

• 11:53Dave Berke?

  And I'm reading all the time and I'm, and, and once you start sort of digging into that world, there's, there's more books than I could ever read in my entire life.

• 12:02Jocko Willink?

  Absolutely.

• 12:03Dave Berke?

  Everywhere.

• 12:05Dave Berke?

  And it has renewed the way I, I, how much I read, but it's also changed the way I read. And it's been a really good experience for me. I have learned a lot in the last year.

• 12:17Jocko Willink?

  The, and this is another thing I talked to you about, as we, we were talking about this subject the other day. And I brought up this quote from Musashi.

• 12:26Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 12:27Jocko Willink?

  And, and the quote is, "If you know the way broadly,

• 12:32Jocko Willink?

  you will see it in everything."

• 12:33Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 12:33Jocko Willink?

  And to me, that is what makes, that is what has, I guess recalibrated reading for me. Is that when you start seeing all these connections and everything. And, and part of it, quite frankly, comes from the fact that I wrote a book that is about this subject. And once you go that deep in it, it's like, okay, now I start seeing it everywhere. And I mean, even. It kind of all started, it definitely all started with About Face for me. With About Face for me, when I was in Iraq. And I knew, I knew About Face was a great book. This is, this is on my second, on my first deployment, my book was With the Old Breed. As a matter of fact, that was my book. Yeah.

• 13:17Jocko Willink?

  And I thought, okay, but it was so disconnected. It was such a stretch. I mean, my first deployment to Iraq was absolutely, absolutely nothing like With the Old Breed. Other than the fact that we were American. Right. Like, the similarities ended there, right? It was nothing like With the Old Breed, nothing. You know, other than in my mind, okay, well, these are horrible things that are happening. You just, it was really hard to make that connection. I'll tell you what, though. Our deployment to Ramadi, the similarities between Ramadi and, and About Face were incredible. Not just, you know, one of the things that hit me right out of the gate is when Hackworth gets to Vietnam

• 14:00Jocko Willink?

  and those guys are getting killed and they're getting killed by sniper fire, indirect fire, and booby traps. Right. Which we now call IEDs for whatever reason. And that one section of the book where they've taken hundred, like a hundred something casualties and they've, and they've, they've contacted the enemy zero times. Enemy, it's an enemy killed, zero. And I'm thinking to myself, this is a nightmare. This is a nightmare. And that nightmare, it shows itself over and over and over again. And what's so hard is, and I'll tell you where it hit me again. It hit me again on, on Lewis Puller. When Lewis Puller is rotating between the three different sections and one of them was called Riviera.

• 14:45Jocko Willink?

  Hmm. And he's saying every time they go into Riviera, they take wounded or they take killed. And on top of that, they don't ever see the enemy. And I'm thinking to myself.

• 14:59Jocko Willink?

  It's maddening, right? It's maddening when you look back and you're detached, which we're detached now. And I don't know if culture's different. I don't know if our culture's different. I don't know if we value human life more. I don't know that. But when you read it, it's maddening to think about that. And you could see that like Hackworth, he, he, he didn't like that. He didn't like that at all. And that was all, that was, I think, maybe it was you that told me when I had Jim Mukuyama on. And, or a couple of people told me, they were like, you sounded giddy.

• 15:38Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 15:39Jocko Willink?

  And I said, well, yes, I was giddy. And, and here I was, but it was very interesting to go and talk to Mukuyama. Because what was interesting to me is you, you, there's the, there's the public persona of some guy that was in the military. Right? There's the public persona of some guy that was in the military. Myself included, you, all of us. There's that public persona of, oh, this is what this guy's perceived as. But then there's like, okay, what about all the people that served with that person? What do they really think?

• 16:07Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 16:08Jocko Willink?

  And what was Hackworth really like? And so going to meet Mook, I was very curious. Now, I had read an interview with him where I, I knew that he had these very, he held him in the highest esteem.

• 16:23Dave Berke?

  Yeah, that he was a real deal.

• 16:24Jocko Willink?

  It didn't come as a surprise to me, but still it was, it was incredible that the perception that I had of Hackworth was accurate. It was accurate. And when you, when you heard Mook talk about it, when he said, we call them Mr. Infantry. I, I, I was just thinking to myself, is there anything cooler in the world than to be known throughout the army? As Mr. Infantry?

• 16:53Dave Berke?

  Yeah. You said something that, that, that jumped out at me a little bit. You, you were just talking about, you know, is, is culture different or is, is something different? So let me just say this a little bit because, you know, I've even thought a little bit about, why do I see things differently than I used to? What, why have I evolved in a certain way? So did I spend 23 years in the Marine Corps? 23 years as a US Marine and a whole bunch of years just wanting to be a Marine.

• 17:22Dave Berke?

  I was in Ramadi for seven months. So if you just kind of do the math, it's just not a lot of time.

• 17:31Dave Berke?

  Everything I think about, every leadership lesson, every, when I hear you talk about a book, when I read a book, when I think, all of those things, the frame of reference I have, the thing I think about, is those seven months. And had I not had those seven months of, and look, Ramadi obviously was, it was a maddening place, it was crazy. Um, but if I didn't have that, I don't think I would be able to appreciate or understand, and without that frame of reference, without that understanding of some connection to that, it actually makes it difficult, and I would have never guessed it if I were to tell you, hey, I'm gonna look back at my 23-year career and all those things, I heard you listen to my bio, it's always strange to hear someone read it out.

• 18:16Dave Berke?

  The, the, the, the most powerful thing in that was seven months in Ramadi. That's the thing that outshines all of it, because of what you just described, because of that feeling.

• 18:26Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 18:27Dave Berke?

  Um, and I don't know if it's that, that, that culture is different, or society is different, or we have different values, or we value human-like differently, but without the frame of reference, it can be hard to capture. But if you start to think of it in, in, in a different way, and that's sort of what that, that quote means, and I know this is kind of a deep thought, but that's, you see things differently, and you think about things, and you start to see things you didn't even know were there before. And that's why when I went back and read, look, I have read a book, and I read the exact same book again, and to see and hear and understand things differently the same time in a book that was, and for me, for me, it was With the Old Breed. That was the book that sort of hit me square.

• 19:10Dave Berke?

  I got to go to Okinawa, I got to walk that ground, that, and to go back and reread that book recently, and have it seem so different, that has really stuck with me, and, and, and that was sort of the reason why I got back into reading, some of them the same books, and some, some are different, but there is something about that perspective that changes you, and I would have never guessed that throughout my career, I always wanted to be a pilot, that's all I ever really wanted to do, that I would sort of define my experience based on those seven months, and how that influenced everything that I see now.

• 19:40Jocko Willink?

  And, and the weird thing is about Ramadi, is when you compare Ramadi to Pelelu.

• 19:47Jocko Willink?

  You compare Ramadi to Okinawa, you compare Ramadi to Normandy, you compare Ramadi to, you compare Ramadi to those places and our experience was just, it just pales, it just absolutely pales.

• 20:03Dave Berke?

  Yeah, you and I have talked about this a lot. You actually sent me, I think you sent me a text or an email a couple of weeks ago. You're like, hey, do me a favor. Just verify I got this right. I wanted to just make sure I got your combat experience in, in your first deployment, correct? And it was that I was in combat in Iraq and I was thinking, yeah, yeah, no, you got it all right. I, I dropped a bomb.

• 20:29Dave Berke?

  That was my, that was a legitimate combat experience.

• 20:32Jocko Willink?

  That's before, that's pre 9/11.

• 20:33Dave Berke?

  Yeah, pre 9/11.

• 20:34Jocko Willink?

  You were one of the few guys with combat experience.

• 20:37Dave Berke?

  Combat, yeah.

• 20:38Jocko Willink?

  Which meant you had dropped a bomb.

• 20:40Dave Berke?

  A bomb.

• 20:40Jocko Willink?

  Singular.

• 20:41Dave Berke?

  And I, and the thought wasn't just how ridiculous that sounds, but I thought, I don't ever want Charlie Plummer, Bill Reader to hear me say that.

• 20:49Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 20:49Dave Berke?

  I don't want them to, I was almost embarrassed and, and even like you said, Ramadi, which for me, which was sort of like the World Series and the Super Bowl combined into one, like the most powerful thing. And with the old breed, since we've been talking about that, you talk about the Battle of Okinawa and what they endured.

• 21:10Dave Berke?

  I mean, it is so humbling. And, and almost honestly, man, doubt Ryan, a little embarrassing to try to share the same experience. We saw that with Tom Fife and I remember Tom Fife was on the podcast and he was so grateful for, for, he was thanking me for what we had done and what we accomplished. And I'm thinking, this is a man that has a purple heart from World War II, Korea and Vietnam, and he's thanking me for what I did. And, you know, that's, that's a frame of reference that I think is important and, and something the podcast does is so extremely well is it gives those guys a chance to share that story that, that otherwise they wouldn't get a chance to.

• 21:50Jocko Willink?

  Is there a way to get, I'm trying to figure out what I was missing, right? I was trying to, I'm trying to figure out what, how can you get somebody that's a 18-year-old corporal to read a book with the perspective, with the right perspective? Is that possible?

• 22:10Dave Berke?

  An 18-year-old Dave Berke, it wasn't possible. I can tell you that for sure. It wasn't.

• 22:16Dave Berke?

  And I don't know if that's the case. But I do know that if you get an 18-year-old Dave Berke, 18-year-old, anybody to start to read and start to think about it, that actually builds over time. And that creates some sort of foundation that I think with time and perspective, you can actually reach those, reach that. But there's no way at that age, no matter what you said, no matter how articulate you were, no matter how powerful the story was, I don't think you're reaching me. And I don't mean that to be discouraging, but I think that's a hard lesson, I think, you know, for certainly what I was going through at that time in my life.

• 23:01Jocko Willink?

  It's just not gonna happen.

• 23:06Dave Berke?

  It's gonna, yeah.

• 23:07Jocko Willink?

  It's weird too, because what you're focused on when you're 18.

• 23:09Dave Berke?

  Yeah, and you read With the Old Breed. You're like, like, I remember my earliest memories of With the Old Breed are these guys were ripping people's gold teeth out with pliers. You're thinking, whoa, that's crazy. Like, that's the big, that's, that's probably the big takeaway from my first read when I was whatever years old of With the Old Breed. It's, you, you see it for the things that seem not real. And you're like, man, that is incredible and that is awesome. And I also think that goes, you talked about a lot, that, that sort of that feeling of invincibility too, when you're young.

• 23:47Dave Berke?

  And that like immune to not just the physical risks, not just the potential of getting hurt or getting injured or getting shot or some of those worst things. But the mental and emotional risks that go along with experiencing that. That's a really hard lesson. Now, the other side of that is, you know, when I deployed to Ramadi, almost everybody on my team was a first deployment, brand-new, young US Marine. You met Marcos Perez, he came to the muster. You know, he was a young kid. And you walk in there sort of with this, kind of this bulletproof approach and...

• 24:31Dave Berke?

  It's not how it is when you leave. It's not the same and in some ways, like you said, the scale is different than a than a Pelluloo or a Guadalcanal or any of those things, you know, that we just talked about. But when it's happening to you, it could be a single round, a single mortar, a single shot, a single wound. If it's happening to you, it sort of feels like it's happening to the whole world. It's really impactful. And that's probably why, if I look back on my career, the thing that's the most powerful experience that I had that sort of outshines everything by so much is that time in Ramadi because I was exposed to things that I never saw as a pilot and never would have seen had I not been on that deployment.

• 25:15Jocko Willink?

  You know what I was thinking? So one of the things I remember probably, I don't know if it was 10 or 15 podcasts deep into this podcast, I remember saying during one of the podcasts, and I've said it a few times along the way, I remember saying that these people that I'm talking about in these books, they're not characters.

• 25:38Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 25:39Jocko Willink?

  These are people. And I think at some point for me, that transition in my brain happened where I was saying to myself, these are, these are people. And I think I got a little bit of it in my platoon commander tour because, you know, there was, hey, it was a good, solid deployment. Was there risk? Sure, there was risk. It wasn't super high risk. I had a great crew of guys, but you know, there was, there was stress and there was personalities. And you start to see that when you read about a guy and you think, I kind of know that guy. Just, I just know him a little bit. I just know him a little bit. And, and you start to realize that those people in these books, they're real people.

• 26:19Jocko Willink?

  And I think that for me was a huge leap between connecting me to the text that I was reading. And I'll tell you another thing, and straight up.

• 26:33Jocko Willink?

  Voice. When I started thinking about reading these things, when I started reading these aloud, when I started reading them and hearing them in my own headset, like on the podcast, that was an impact. And now it's happened, it happened with Bill Reader, it happened with Jody Middick, it happened when these guys come on here and they hear me read what they wrote. And it hits them. And so that's another part of it, too. There's an element when you read that's missing. There's an element of voice that is just more powerful. It's just more powerful. And I remember when I read The Forgotten Highlander. When I read that book, I read it on the plane, coming back calling a guy over in Scotland, a buddy of mine, who I had done some work with.

• 27:18Jocko Willink?

  He gave me this book and I was on Podcast 11. And he goes, hey, you gotta check out this book. I won't try and do his Scottish accent, plus he's a mumbling. He's not like, you go to Scotland, check out this book, mate. And so he gives me this book and I'm sort of thinking, okay, you know, I just, I wasn't sure, but I had made enough of a leap in my brain that when I started reading that book, I said to myself, wow, this is gonna be, this is gonna be a really powerful podcast. So I read the book, so then when we come, this is podcast number 12. When we came, when I came in to record it, I thought, yeah, this is gonna be really heavy. But when I read it, it was like I was getting hit in the head with a sledgehammer. And that's the first podcast that when I got to the end of the book, I actually didn't

• 28:03Jocko Willink?

  know what to say, because what do you say? What do you say about a guy that, what do you say about a guy that, that, that put maggots on his flesh to eat away the dead flesh? What do you say about that? What do you say about that? And so that's the first podcast where I said, when I got done with it, the next time I did a podcast that was heavy like that, I knew that I had to get myself somewhere to go. I had to give myself some thought about how am I gonna make this? How does this become something? How do I get out of this hole? Cause that's what you're doing. And so, there's a level of that as well. When you hear, like, when you hear a hardcore history podcast.

• 28:48Jocko Willink?

  Great storytelling, but he's reading quotes from people. But it's so much more powerful when you hear it audibly. And we, you know, people say that about Extreme Ownership too. People say, "Oh yeah, I love that book and this and that." And we'll say, "You gotta get the audiobook." Cause it's Leif and I reading it. And you can hear, I mean, how much is communicated in the tone of voice? There's a lot.

• 29:10Dave Berke?

  When you said earlier about the audible piece of that.

• 29:17Dave Berke?

  When you finished my first podcast. So when I was on, uh, this, we were talking about, this is almost a year and a half ago now. You know, April, I think of last year, I guess. You finished with a letter that Kat wrote to Chris. Now, I didn't know, we hadn't discussed that and I didn't know how it was gonna finish. And, uh, you know, we spent all that time, you know, talking about me and my experiences and things like that. I knew that letter very well. I have a copy of that letter and I've read that letter several times. I had never read that letter out loud to myself. I never read it to anybody. But I've shared it, you know, with Whitney and I've shared that letter.

• 29:55Dave Berke?

  Hearing you say a letter that I knew, almost line by line, I know that letter really well. Made that letter like I'd never heard it before. And I remember, look, it's hard to hear it because it's Chris. And it's hard for me because it's a really impactful thing, very emotional thing. And that is a, that's a crusher for me, man. I know you understand that, but I had never heard it out loud. And in- There's a book I'm reading now that I have read the preface of the book, which is only about three pages, kind of explained. I've read it out loud to myself like five times. And it's, it's something that I overlooked the impact of hearing it as opposed to reading

• 30:39Dave Berke?

  it. I read the book, it's a really cool book. I think I sent you a pair. This book's awesome. You should check it out. I read the, the, the preface out loud to myself and having read it three or four times already, hearing it, it was like reading it for the first time. The, the voice that you give that makes it, makes the words become real. Like a, like that person who wrote the book is saying out, out loud and that difference there. It's not subtle. It's huge. It's a huge, huge thing that, that is one of the great things about when people do it, when they do it on podcasts and you're putting somebody else's voice into action. Most of the time we're reading books by people that are long gone. Uh, and you're telling stories that nobody would ever hear. And even if you read them, it misses something. And, and I think the power of that is huge. And it brought me

• 31:22Dave Berke?

  right back to our last podcast, which was you sitting right where you are, reading Kat's letter to Chris. And as like I said, like I had never heard it before. It was, it, it's a totally different level.

• 31:40Jocko Willink?

  You know what? Uh, podcasts was another podcast that, that sort of, it, it caught me was, uh, One Soldier's War by, um, Arcady. And that part in the end of that podcast where, uh, it's again, that was podcast number 18 and he's, he's, he's quoting these wounded soldiers that were sitting begging for money, basically. And

• 32:12Jocko Willink?

  He's talking about how this guy is saying if I would kill all these, he's talking about this, this soldier's talking about everyone on the streets in Moscow. He says, I would kill every one of these people to bring back my brothers. You're reading this going, good God. That is a powerful, powerful book. Did you see him in the news recently?

• 32:32Dave Berke?

  No.

• 32:34Jocko Willink?

  He faked his own death.

• 32:35Dave Berke?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Yes.

• 32:37Jocko Willink?

  All these people, they hit me up on social media and I was, oh, man, what a travesty.

• 32:42Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 32:42Jocko Willink?

  And, yeah, I was totally bummed out. And then, sure enough, he had faked his own death. He had even fooled his wife. He didn't tell his wife. That's, that takes a lot of courage. He's a courageous guy already, but to fake your death and not give your wife a heads up about it?

• 32:59Dave Berke?

  That's, that's hardcore.

• 33:01Jocko Willink?

  That, that's problematic.

• 33:02Dave Berke?

  Yeah. And, and that, that feeling to, it's one thing to sort of have that feeling, but to be willing to express that feeling that I would do that to all of these people?

• 33:14Dave Berke?

  That is, that's a, that's saying a lot, man. I mean, that is deep to, to, I mean, I've had some pretty hardcore thoughts, certainly in my time, like, nah, I'm probably not gonna share that one. Uh, but to put it out there, you know, I mean, that's, that gets to the core of, of just how, how much people feel from those experiences, how powerful those feelings are.

• 33:35Jocko Willink?

  And those guys had no mercy. Those, those Russian soldiers, they had no mercy. It was, that, that part where he's talking about the sergeants beat the corporals, the captains beat the sergeants, the majors beat the captains. It's just a nightmare.

• 33:49Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 33:50Jocko Willink?

  It's just a complete nightmare.

• 33:51Dave Berke?

  It, it makes you wonder how any of that is, is, makes any of it remotely functional. Like, how does that system function at all under that setting, under that environment? How, how could anybody at the bottom of that hierarchy be willing to go do any of the things they went and did? You know, you, you're talking about, you know, this thing from, from Bellewood. They're, they literally know, most of you are gonna die. We're gonna charge across open fields into machine guns. We use that example at Echelon Front as something that you would never do. And that's what they were doing. I mean borderline just, human waves, if we do it enough, we're gonna get fifty, seventy-five yards of terrain out of it. We're gonna move the line forward a hundred yards.

• 34:36Dave Berke?

  And we're gonna send wave after wave after wave to, and, and guys on the left and right like, this is borderline a death sentence. What, what people are capable of doing in, under those environments is, is unreal sometimes.

• 34:51Jocko Willink?

  World War I, it just is, it's just...

• 34:56Dave Berke?

  You know, you know what's funny? Is that I say that about everyone, every war. So, the World War I, like unbelievable. And then, you, you talked about Napoleon, and like, nothing like that. And then I read the book on the coldest war, or colder than hell. Like, no- nothing like that. Like, there is, there is something that has happened in every one of the stories you've talked about, where I think, how is that possible? And they all have their own unique thing about them that just seems unreal. I'm, I'm gonna throw on an orange vest, and mark my position in thirty below, so you can see me, so you know where I am.

• 35:35Jocko Willink?

  Cause I'm the leader.

• 35:36Dave Berke?

  Cause I'm the leader, and you, yeah, yeah.

• 35:40Dave Berke?

  Yeah, unreal.

• 35:42Jocko Willink?

  That being said, World War I? No. I, I, I, I don't, I don't know that that, I don't know that that is out there. The, the complete lack of control that you had as a individual soldier.

• 35:58Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 35:58Jocko Willink?

  As a, not, not, even as a, a platoon commander, as a company commander, you had no control over your fate. That's, that's what, that's what scares me so much about World War I. It wasn't like, hey Jaco, here's, here's, here's the situation, here's what we're trying to accomplish, why don't you go figure out the best way to do it? And I go, okay, you know what? Cool, I can do this. We can, we can come up with some cool tactics, we can make some stuff happen. It was, hey, tomorrow morning at zero six hundred. 14,000 of us are gonna go at 0600 and then guess what's gonna happen at 0615? Another 14,000.

• 36:35Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 36:35Jocko Willink?

  And guess what's gonna happen at 0630? Another 14,000. And guess what? A vast majority of them are gonna be wounded or killed. And that's that. So that, that to me, and, and I'll tell you what.

• 36:49Jocko Willink?

  They call that the war to end all wars. I think if there would have been

• 36:55Jocko Willink?

  internet.

• 36:56Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 36:57Jocko Willink?

  Photographers.

• 36:58Dave Berke?

  Yep.

• 36:58Jocko Willink?

  Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, that might have been the last war.

• 37:03Dave Berke?

  Right.

• 37:04Jocko Willink?

  That might have been the last war. If you were, and it's not, if you saw that as a leader, cause I'm just, when I think about it, I think about like you're a general and you're in charge and you organize this big operation. And then you, you give the execute order and then 22,000 men are killed in the first 24 hours. Who does that?

• 37:29Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 37:30Jocko Willink?

  Who does that? Now, and this is, this is a dichotomy because are there situations where people have done operations and are there situations at war that it's like, hey, guess what? We are gonna do this mission and we don't have a real good chance of coming back and that's the way it is.

• 37:47Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 37:47Jocko Willink?

  And it's a strategic piece of the mission. And does that happen? Could that happen? Absolutely. And do people in the military sign up for that? Would I sign up for that if that was what was required? Well, yeah, that's what we signed up for. But as a leader like that, to be sitting there looking at 25,000 men and you gained, you know, 75 yards of mud. And, and you know what? You go, okay, that was bad. We're not gonna do that again. No, no, no, you know what? You say, you know what? We'll do it harder.

• 38:17Dave Berke?

  Right.

• 38:18Jocko Willink?

  We'll do it harder, which is, which is what makes me, um, it makes that war to me just absolutely sickening. And it's, it's sickening.

• 38:30Dave Berke?

  It is. It, it absolutely is. And the calculus that goes into that is something that is completely disconnected from the value of human life, completely disconnected of what that impact is. And then you, you read this letter and that's 14,000 moms.

• 38:50Dave Berke?

  On that one wave, that one time, that's fourteen thousand of these letters. And the disconnect of of human life, um, yeah, it's it's it's actually hard, kind of hard to fathom. You talked about, you know, yeah, the high-risk operation, you know, we're gonna go in uh in in into the worst possible situations, because, yeah, and you know what? We all kind of secretly would say, hey, if that opportunity, I'm gonna volunteer for that, you know, the higher but as as that's just how we do operations all the time, that's just what we do.

• 39:22Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 39:23Dave Berke?

  No.

• 39:24Jocko Willink?

  That's that's uh, that's actually a nightmare.

• 39:27Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 39:31Jocko Willink?

  And the other thing with World War One, right? Like, World War Two, you're looking at Nazis? And you're looking at the Imperial Japanese Army. And you're thinking, we've got real bad guys here. We got legit bad guys. That's that's a factor too, right? It it, Germany, World War One, it's like, oh yeah, we wanted a little extra land. Who's that land for? You know what I talk about with, you know, when we work with companies? And I say, so, okay, CEO says, ah, you know, my frontline troops aren't doing what they're supposed to do. And it's affecting our bottom line. And, you know, I say, oh, well, you got to explain to them why it's important, right?

• 40:16Jocko Willink?

  And so then the CEO goes down and says, hey, you guys need to do a better job on the front lines so that the company can be more profitable. And the frontline people are like, we don't care for a company more profitable. I'm I'm, that doesn't mean, that doesn't matter to me.

• 40:28Dave Berke?

  Yeah, I'm making seventeen bucks an hour.

• 40:29Jocko Willink?

  I'm making seventeen bucks an hour. And I got a wife and I got a kid and I got a basketball game tonight and I got a mortgage and I got a house payment. The company being profitable makes no difference to me whatsoever.

• 40:38Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 40:39Jocko Willink?

  So imagine now you're World War One and you're gonna get an extra fourteen miles of land. That's the goal, to get fourteen miles of land in some country. And and it's not for you, it's for like The government.

• 40:56Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 40:57Jocko Willink?

  It's absolutely, it's atrocious.

• 41:00Dave Berke?

  Yeah, and, and when you're sending US Marines across the Atlantic Ocean to get engaged in that war, like to keep Germany from encroaching a little bit too far west. You know, France, yeah. Let me, yeah, the, the why doesn't, you know, that doesn't, that doesn't resonate.

• 41:20Jocko Willink?

  Have I, have I ever talked about, I do, I don't know if I've talked about, have I ever talked about the white flower thing they did in Britain? The white flower? So if you were like a able-bodied young man, if you were a military-age male.

• 41:34Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 41:34Jocko Willink?

  And, and you weren't wearing a uniform and you weren't like fighting? Women would come up and give you a white flower. It was the mark of shame and the government started that campaign. Yeah, the government started that campaign of, hey, you see, you see someone that's not in uniform? Military-age male, able-bodied fighting man? You go up and give him a white flower. He's a coward.

• 42:00Jocko Willink?

  I'm, I'm prepping a book right now for the podcast and actually a couple of books, but it's a nightmare because what they're doing is they're, they're executing British soldiers that have, that, that, that desert or run away or have shell shock.

• 42:20Dave Berke?

  Yeah, they're just dysfunctional.

• 42:22Jocko Willink?

  They, they can't do it anymore.

• 42:23Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 42:24Jocko Willink?

  And it's, it's awful. Some of the stories, these guys are soldiers that have been on the line for a year. And they break.

• 42:31Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 42:31Jocko Willink?

  They break, which everyone, um, Dick Winters talks about people brave, the bravest guys, yeah, they might break. And you gotta get them off the line. Hackworth, same thing. You got brave guys, sometimes you gotta get them off the line.

• 42:45Jocko Willink?

  World War One, we got a British soldier, he's been fighting for a year in the trenches. He's been getting mortared, he's been getting bombed. He says, I can't do this anymore. Okay, we're gonna shoot you at dawn. And they did it.

• 42:56Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 42:57Jocko Willink?

  That's another thing. It's completely insane.

• 43:00Dave Berke?

  Yeah. We use the analogy a lot. We talk about this at National Front and like, hey, it, it, your folks, when you're pushing your folks too hard, it's like, it's like driving a car in the red. You, you're running this car in the red, you're running them hard, and if you keep them in the red too long, that car's gonna break, that, and engine's gonna break. Now, you can, you can push to the red a little bit, you can kind of throttle up and, and do that, and then you gotta bring it back. And that's sort of one of leaders' job is to sort of pay attention to that. This is the idea of like, I'm gonna run my car in the red until my car explodes, and then I'm gonna be mad at the car. I'm gonna blame the car. Uh, and the, the disconnect of, the, and we, like you said, that, the disconnect of the impact of the human being that, that, that that's what leaders are supposed to do. That's their job, is to, and Dick Winters had that,

• 43:44Dave Berke?

  he talked about the idea of like, hey, when, when somebody puts their head in their hands, that's the, a physical, they're literally showing you, hey, man, I'm, I'm breaking right now. And the willingness to just say, go do it again, and then get to the point like, I can't, and then go, we're done with you. We don't have any more use for you anymore.

• 44:05Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 44:06Dave Berke?

  Um, that's hard to comprehend.

• 44:08Jocko Willink?

  It's hard to comprehend. I, I, um, but like I said, I'm prepping these books. It's awful to read them. It's awful to read them. Some of them are the quotes from the soldiers that were chosen to be the executioners.

• 44:19Dave Berke?

  Right.

• 44:19Jocko Willink?

  I mean, well, what's that? What's that? I remember I started one podcast off with that, with like, these soldiers were picked to go, this, this kid had been in the army for a couple of weeks, and he had to go shoot a deserter. That was just one of his first assignments. What the hell?

• 44:34Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 44:35Jocko Willink?

  So, there's some kind of a, some, some kind of, ah, you know, do we value human life more? No. That's the question. I think the answer, if you compare today compared to World War I, the answer is 100% yes.

• 44:52Dave Berke?

  Without a doubt.

• 44:53Jocko Willink?

  100% yes.

• 44:54Dave Berke?

  We do. We do in the military. We do in, we do everywhere, I think. We absolutely do. You got a nice, long history of podcasts that are just sort of soul crushing. You know, you've hit some real home runs there with some podcasts. You're like, wow, that is, that is hard. But, you know what? The reason that we hold human life in greater value now is because of that, is because of those stories, is because this letter. I mean, there's that, that, that small piece of having to understand that we are here because of where we came from. We are here because of what we did and what we endured. And that's not to say we won't go back to do that again. That doesn't mean that we can't end up back in that place, but

• 45:36Dave Berke?

  those, those stories, that, that legacy of that just

• 45:42Dave Berke?

  crazy, impossible to understand how you can do that to that many people and just say, that's just how we do business, that's just what we do.

• 45:53Dave Berke?

  We have come a long way and I think we've moved in the right direction. Now, there is a piece that

• 46:02Dave Berke?

  when people go to war, people die. Oh, yeah. You know, that's, and we, we can't get to a place or to a point or to a belief in our society where that is not acceptable. That it's, that is not something we're willing to have happened in order for us to be successful. That, that is not okay. To get to a point that any loss of life or any injury or any sacrifice is not okay. We can't get to that point. So, overshooting that is not good either. I wouldn't use World War I as a benchmark, you know, that's just, it's not even close, but the reality is, is that that's not just how war is, but that's actually necessary.

• 46:45Dave Berke?

  And that's a, as a leader, that's a huge burden. That's a huge burden. And the burden is to balance the, the responsibility that you have to do everything to ensure that doesn't happen to your people, knowing full well, knowing full well that it will.

• 47:06Dave Berke?

  And I'll be really, dude, I'll be really honest with you.

• 47:11Dave Berke?

  I did not

• 47:16Dave Berke?

  When I went to Iraq, I did not really grasp that it might happen to my guys. I just didn't. And I'm...

• 47:29Dave Berke?

  I just didn't give it enough thought that the risk was actually gonna end up with me and my guys, and that Chris was gonna get killed. And I look back on that as a leader and I... I should've thought about that more. I should've prepared for that more. And I should've known what that meant more than I did. And the reality is, is that anybody in this business that goes to combat in any shape or form has to be prepared for that. And to recognize that that is what happens in combat. And that your job as a leader is to do everything you can to prevent it, knowing full well that that is going to happen. That's what happens.

• 48:13Jocko Willink?

  How long did it take you once you were on the ground in Ramadi?

• 48:16Dave Berke?

  Not long. So... So, the sledgehammer for me... Sir, I mean, I will never forget the day. I'll never forget June 20th, ever. The sledgehammer for me was the first day I got there. The guy that I was replacing got in a Humvee, hit an IED. Now, he was wounded, but he broke both of his legs in a Humvee that I was supposed to take from him. We were supposed to do the turnover of that Humvee. Ended up, obviously, not getting that vehicle because it got blown up. But it was a major in the Marine Corps. And it was like, majors and a major aviator in the Marine Corps got blown up by an IED?

• 48:58Dave Berke?

  So, I got up to speed very quickly. And that place had an ability to get you to be aware of the reality of it very fast. So, I think I got there very fast. Day one, something happened. But the anticipation of that getting there, that was kind of a sledgehammer for me.

• 49:15Jocko Willink?

  What about reading reports when you were going in?

• 49:19Dave Berke?

  So... I, I, we talked about this last time. My best friend was in Ramadi. Yeah, Neil. Neil was in Ramadi in third Battalion, Seventh Marines. So make no mistake, Jaco. I objectively understood what was going on. I mean, I, I was aware. I knew I was getting myself into when I asked to go on that fact tour to Ramadi. But the disconnect was what it meant.

• 49:44Jocko Willink?

  It's sort of like the same disconnect that we were talking about when you read these books.

• 49:48Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 49:49Jocko Willink?

  Like you're reading reports, but you're, you're not there mentally.

• 49:52Dave Berke?

  Well, look, combat for me was dropping a bomb in Iraq. You know, and Afghanistan was a certainly more aggressive experience for me. I mean, it was a lot more regular pace. Um, there was certainly some risk involved. Um, but you've talked about the first combat experience on this podcast a lot. We've talked about just the first combat experience as well.

• 50:16Dave Berke?

  I did not really get it until I saw it. And, and actually in some ways you could say I didn't get it till I heard it. You know, the sounds of combat, what it really sounds like to have a bullet go past your head so close to you can actually sort of gauge how close it was to your head and whether it was closer to the guy next to you, three feet away or closer to you. Who was the sniper actually looking? I've had those thoughts. I know you have too. So the sights, the sounds of that, um, it's just, it's hard to replicate. And I've actually been envious. You've talked about the training that you did for your guys at Task Unit Bruiser and some of the things you did. I didn't do a lot of those things, you know, and I, and I showed up and like, this is no criticism. I'm not, I'm not throwing a hit on anybody.

• 50:59Dave Berke?

  This is just the way it was. I got to that, that, that unit that I deployed with. I, I showed up in October. I did some training. Uh, I kind of really joined the unit in earnest in like January and I was in Ramadi in February. We kind of, you sort of laughed at me last time. I I shot my rifle in training once. I I BZO'd, I I oriented my my sights on my rifle when I got to Ramadi. You know, and that that training range they had just on the outside and and made sure my sights were in good shape before I went out on my first patrol the next day. So in a lot of ways, I was just kind of in over my head with what that was. And then on that deployment, it just, yeah, it's crazy.

• 51:40Jocko Willink?

  That's crazy.

• 51:41Dave Berke?

  And it happened. So there was, you know, that's the sort of the the trial by fire story. I mean, that's what it was for me. But I I will say this.

• 51:51Dave Berke?

  I got up to speed quickly in the re- the recognition, the reality. And look, people were were getting wounded. People were getting killed pretty regularly that you could see like, man, that's that's close. That's real. That's on a street I've been on. That's in a patrol I've done. That's in an OP that I've manned. So I I I got to that point very quickly. And the lessons that I had grown up with as a leader, the way that I I was as a leader, I was able to leverage that. They they still worked. Leadership in combat, it's it's certainly more dynamic. It it will certainly strike more fear in you. But the principles don't change. And I was old enough and mature enough and I had enough under my belt to say,

• 52:35Dave Berke?

  okay, I need to control this. I need to control how I react in this setting and I need to do what I do. And I need to do the things that I know what I need to do. Uh, and I was lucky enough to be able to do that and and keep my, you know, my wherewithal and not get overwhelmed by it. And I saw guys get overwhelmed by it here and there. It was a place that that could do that to you. But I was able to fall back on

• 52:54Dave Berke?

  leadership principles, how you lead in Marines.

• 52:56Jocko Willink?

  Were you, did you think mentally, right? The mental game of being able to detach and be able to take a step back and as a fighter pilot, did you just say, oh, this is what it's like as a fighter pilot? This is what it's like. Oh, I remember it's like landing on an aircraft carrier. I'm going to be stressed out. Oh, I need to overcome that. Did you just apply the same mechanisms to, all right, now I'm going to be stepping foot on the battlefield and this is how I I need to apply the same mentality, the same mechanisms?

• 53:23Dave Berke?

  I had enough experience with being scared and controlling the fear that comes along with things that are scary that. It looked different, it smelled different, it sounded different, but the feeling was exactly the same. Does that make sense?

• 53:36Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, so that's what I was, like I said, that's why it's a softball, because I'm imagining that, you know, even, even for us, okay, so let's say free fall, like you're going to free fall. Well, you're jumping out of an airplane and I, I was, I thought I would be more scared the first time I jumped out of an airplane, but I was actually pretty pumped. So that's not a great example, but there's times in the SEAL teams where you do something in training, where you're like, okay, this is a little bit sketch, right? This is a little bit sketch and you know, what do you do? You do the same thing, you know, okay, this is what I'm gonna do. I've practiced it, I've rehearsed it, I'm gonna, I'm gonna execute this thing and we're gonna make it happen. And you learn how to do that. So when you get in combat,

• 54:17Jocko Willink?

  you have a protocol to follow to take that, if you're good. Now, you know, we see people that they, they, they have the protocol and they aren't able to apply it to the situation.

• 54:29Dave Berke?

  Yeah, I, I never really freaked out when I was there. It, the, the reality was, oh, this is a lot closer to me than I thought it was gonna be. The reality was it hit me harder than I expected and my preparation wasn't where it needed to be to be ready for it. But when I got there, I knew that feeling and I felt that several times in my career. And the response to it is, is it's all the same. And one of the best things about responding to those situations is that as a leader, you're really busy. There's a lot to do. You, you've got a lot going on, a lot of decisions you have to make, a lot of things you have to be aware of. And that's actually one of the best remedies for all that. And you know, it's probably really tough for someone that really junior in the organization that

• 55:12Dave Berke?

  may feel like it doesn't know what's going on, doesn't have a real sense of those things. I was never really bored.

• 55:18Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 55:18Dave Berke?

  You know what I mean?

• 55:19Jocko Willink?

  You didn't have time to think about it.

• 55:19Dave Berke?

  Have a lot of time. Now, I, I, I know the feeling, I've had it, I felt that feeling. And it's like, man, this is a lot different. I'm in Humvee, I can't see things I'm used to being able to see. My situational awareness is different, how I gather information, all that is different because the environment is different. The feeling is the same and the response is the same. And like I said, I had the luxury, if you want to call it that. I was always busy. I always had stuff going on. I had always things to do. I never, I didn't just sit there and think, wow, this is terrifying and scary and I don't know what to do. It's.

• 55:46Dave Berke?

  In the aftermath, I look back and oh, man, that was, that was crazy. You know, I remember, I have this very vivid memory of, of doing, we called them, um, presence patrols. So we take a couple of Humvees and cruise around, and in this case, it was, uh, the town, it was called Tamim. It was a little town in, in Ramadi there on the south side, and just a nasty place, just not a good place. And a presence patrol is really just, you're just waiting to get shot at. And we would weave in and out of, of the, the streets and, you know, the buildings are two, three stories high. And we pulled up to an intersection and we're, we're the second vehicle in this two-vehicle patrol. And the vehicle turns and as soon as the vehicle, yeah, two vehicles.

• 56:21Jocko Willink?

  Get some.

• 56:22Dave Berke?

  Yeah, get some. Yeah, we're number two. Let's get some. The first vehicle makes a right-hand turn and as soon as he turns right, a guy with an RPG, I can see him up, you know, right at my 12 o'clock position, and it goes over the hood of our vehicle, hits the wall. It doesn't detonate, but I think I might've mentioned this before, and I'm just yelling, go, go, go, go, go. Uh, and those are the stories that in the after, when you look back in the aftermath, like, man, that was crazy. But at the time, you, you don't really spend a lot of time.

• 56:51Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you're saying you're.

• 56:52Dave Berke?

  Yeah, you're like, oh, you want to go to the right, hey, and you're on the radio, hey, where's the other vehicle? Hey, this is what just, you're, you're talking, you're communicating, you're doing all the things you're supposed to do. So you can look back on those things and a lot of times I look back on it like, man, that was out of control. That was nuts or, but during those times, even some of those, those terrifying experiences, I was just too busy to really worry about it and I was making decisions and, um, I think as a leader, that's, that's actually good because I don't want to sit there and think about all these things that are scaring me. I want to just respond to it and just make a decision and do something. Um, and I actually had a lot of time in my career where I was, I got very comfortable making decisions in difficult environments very quickly. That's aviation in a nutshell. Um, and so I think I was able to adapt to that very quickly. And that's part of the reason why I was able to get through that, that deployment the way that I did.

• 57:37Dave Berke?

  You know, I had some decompression. We talked about that after, after the fact, but not a lot while I was there.

• 57:43Jocko Willink?

  Did you ever punch out of your aircraft?

• 57:45Dave Berke?

  No.

• 57:46Jocko Willink?

  Did you ever eject?

• 57:46Dave Berke?

  No.

• 57:47Jocko Willink?

  Is that just luck?

• 57:49Dave Berke?

  Yeah, I mean, some of it's beyond your control and it's pretty rare. It doesn't happen all that often.

• 57:53Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 57:54Dave Berke?

  But not me. Thank God. Yeah.

• 58:00Jocko Willink?

  Check. You know, one of the things you were talking, when you were talking about, you know, well, you basically went on a whole comment there about, you know, you gotta, you're in a situation, going back to the original subject here. As a leader, you're in this situation where you're going to take these guys that you care about and you're going to do everything to protect. And you're regardless of how much you want to protect them, there you're gonna put them in situations where they can get killed and that that the the new book coming out, the first chapter is called the ultimate dichotomy. It's what it's called. It's the ultimate dichotomy. And there's a reason. Because that is the ultimate dichotomy. There's no that for a leader.

• 58:42Jocko Willink?

  As far as I'm concerned, that is the absolute hardest thing that you have to deal with as a leader. The fact that you care about these guys. It's your all you've been taught, all you believe, all you think, all you your your morals and your values are all these for these guys that are doing anything for you. And you'll do anything for them. And you know their families and you know their kids. And it's like, yeah, guess what? Take all that. And now you're going to send them on missions. Where there is no doubt that they can get wounded or they can get killed.

• 59:17Dave Berke?

  You you met Marcos at uh at the muster. We talked about him earlier and this is a kid that would have done anything for me. To this day, he would do anything for me. This is a kid that loves me. I love this kid too. And that's that feeling that is very hard to explain if you haven't gone through it. And it's very hard to describe how powerful that is. And every single day, I threw Marcos in the turret of my Humvee, stuck his head up. You know, it was an armored Humvee was great. But at the end of the day, you know what the turret gunner has to do? He's got to get his head up out of the turret. And man, that two forty golf or fifty cal, whatever we had on that on any given day.

• 59:59Dave Berke?

  And stick his head out of that Humvee every single day. And I thought about that all the time, all the time. And it is exactly what you just described. This is someone that would have done anything for me. This is someone that I loved and would have done anything for. And every day it was get in the turret and let's go.

• 1:00:25Dave Berke?

  That's what you do.

• 1:00:26Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:26Dave Berke?

  And you do everything you can to prepare them and everything you can to make sure it doesn't happen. And the last thing you tell them is, hey, get up there. We gotta go. We gotta go do this.

• 1:00:33Jocko Willink?

  No. Just can you even fathom? Can you even fathom that that happens and you do it for months and you do it for months and you do it for a year? And finally, he says, you know what? I can't do this anymore. And then you say, you know what? Okay. We're pressing charges against you. You're going to court martial. We find you guilty.

• 1:00:54Jocko Willink?

  That's insane.

• 1:00:54Dave Berke?

  And to take it a step further, we're gonna get somebody else in my unit to pull the trigger. We're gonna get another guy from this unit, from this battalion, this from this team to follow through with that that order. It's it's not, actually, no, I can't comprehend that. I can't understand that.

• 1:01:12Dave Berke?

  I can't.

• 1:01:13Jocko Willink?

  I can't either. I mean, um, like I said, I'm doing a podcast about it in the near future.

• 1:01:18Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:18Jocko Willink?

  But for the love of God, that's a trajectory. It's it's thank God, uh, being in this time period.

• 1:01:28Dave Berke?

  Yeah. And and we could talk about this stuff for days. You've talked about it. You just the last podcast with the Imperial Japanese doing those experiments. We talked about the dehumanization. And look, obviously, it's it's grotesque, but the dehumanization of your enemy. I I understand how that happens. I can I can understand that.

• 1:01:53Jocko Willink?

  We can get there.

• 1:01:54Dave Berke?

  Yeah, I can. I can see how people can get there. Yeah, I can see that. And I know that that I know the seeds of how that grows. And I know that feeling of how that feeling grows over time of of that disdain and that dehumanization that I said I would never have happen to me. And I felt and I know that feeling. So I I my point is that

• 1:02:10Jocko Willink?

  Well, if you've ever heard me say with our enemy, we didn't really have to dehumanize them because they dehumanized themselves. Because we saw what they did. We saw the acted.

• 1:02:17Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:17Jocko Willink?

  And

• 1:02:18Dave Berke?

  What they did to the civilians. Yes, totally.

• 1:02:20Jocko Willink?

  It's absolutely you. You dehumanized yourselves and

• 1:02:23Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:23Jocko Willink?

  And you're gonna suffer the consequences of that.

• 1:02:25Dave Berke?

  Yep. And so that's a bridge in my mind I can cross. I understand that. I don't understand how you can get to a point where the value of the human life of your own men is that you just discard them. At the end, like, oh, you're done? Got it. Line them up. And that, to me, is kind of horrifying because

• 1:02:50Dave Berke?

  I had a small unit. I don't have a big unit. And I certainly knew my guys pretty well. And maybe when you have a huge unit of a bunch of unnamed people, you don't build strong relationships with. But at the end of the day, they're wearing your uniform. At the end of the day, they're, they look, sound, talk, and are just like you. A lot of them come from the same place as you.

• 1:03:08Dave Berke?

  And that's really difficult to accept that human beings are capable of doing that. Like I said, when it's your enemy, or it's when it's someone that's different than you, you at least can comprehend that. And you've seen, we've seen that in history, but your own guys, that's a different level.

• 1:03:28Jocko Willink?

  It's a different time period.

• 1:03:29Dave Berke?

  Yep.

• 1:03:31Jocko Willink?

  So going back to, or not going back to, but going forward, right? You got out of the Marine Corps. I mean, obviously, we covered a little bit of this on the last podcast. We covered about, you know what we did? We kind of read the text last time you were on the podcast of kind of how the transition, you know, you got out, you came to an event with Leif and I, and we hung out and you were thinking to yourself, yeah, this looks like what I want to do. But there's been more to it than that, that you've kind of briefed me on a little bit.

• 1:04:05Dave Berke?

  Yeah. How much time we got? Yeah, there is, there's a lot more to it.

• 1:04:15Dave Berke?

  The work that we do is awesome. And I wrote you a letter several months ago now, but I wrote you a letter to kind of, in some ways, you know, some ways like, hey, thank you for bringing me part of this team. And there was, you know, I wanted to express some gratitude, and I did that to everybody to have been brought into something that is really incredible. And I wanted that to be clear, but I also wanted to kind of explain what I was going through as part of the transition. And what has hit me the hardest is not the things that I expected to happen that have happened. And look, some really good things have happened. This is an awesome company. We do great things. I get to make an impact,

• 1:04:59Dave Berke?

  and I love being a part of this. And I saw it, so I sort of expected to be able to do that and be a part of that and see the impact of that. But I didn't give much thought at the time to how it was going to impact me and what the impact of being a part of this would mean for my growth and for myself. I think we just talked about this earlier today when I get introduced at these events all the time and they read my bio sometimes and I hear the words of what we're doing and everything and what I've done and I was at a point that I can look back and very easily think that I could have coasted. I could have said, "Hey, I did some good work in the Marine Corps.

• 1:05:44Dave Berke?

  I got a really cool resume and I've kind of got it figured out. I don't have that much more to learn and I'm going to glide. I'm going to kind of just go straight and level for a while." And the biggest part of this transition for me is the recognition that what I have done to this point, what I accomplished as a Marine and the things that I did as a pilot, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter because if I cash in now and I check in the box and I'm done and I coast from now, I'll define my life by having

• 1:06:25Dave Berke?

  coasted for the rest of my life. And I wasn't really prepared for having to recognize of how much more there is for me to learn and how much more there is for me to do. And that has been by far the best and the most humbling part about this. And you know me at this point, you know me well enough that I'm not afraid to admit, you know, things that are kind of hard to admit. I'm not afraid to kind of humble myself. I'm not afraid to say, "Wow, I got that wrong. I didn't see that coming." This transition has been way, way more than I thought it was going to be. And in some ways, it's actually put

• 1:07:10Dave Berke?

  me on my heels a little bit. It's been a reminder that, man, I'm not even close to doing the things that I want to do before I'm done. I'm not even close. And that's a hard feeling sometimes. It's actually, I struggle with that a little bit because a lot of the times people around me tell me I've done great things and I hear that a lot and it's great to hear, but...

• 1:07:34Dave Berke?

  I'm not even close, man, and, and, and that is something I struggle with every day. And I work at every day and I, I have a lot, a lot, a lot to do.

• 1:07:45Jocko Willink?

  I don't think that you, you didn't get to where you were without feeling that, right?

• 1:07:50Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:51Jocko Willink?

  You don't get to, you don't get to be, you know, the, all the things that you did in your big bio, without saying, without, without having in the back of your mind, like, I need to do more and I need to do better, right?

• 1:08:03Dave Berke?

  Yeah, that's true. That, that is true. But the magnitude of, of it, it gets bigger over time. It doesn't get smaller. The magnitude continues to grow.

• 1:08:18Jocko Willink?

  Oh. And you know, I know what this is. This is like when you start jujitsu.

• 1:08:22Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:23Jocko Willink?

  And you're like, well, you know what? Give me a few weeks.

• 1:08:25Dave Berke?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let me figure this out.

• 1:08:27Jocko Willink?

  Like two or three months, I'll probably be tapping this guy out.

• 1:08:29Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:30Jocko Willink?

  And then,

• 1:08:31Dave Berke?

  No.

• 1:08:31Jocko Willink?

  Oh, two weeks into it, you're going, oh my God, there's a whole nother thing here.

• 1:08:36Dave Berke?

  Yeah, that might be one of the best metaphors for it, you know, that, that, that experience. Look, the jujitsu thing started because, and on the podcast, I was describing, the last podcast, I was describing flying to you. I was describing, I was describing dogfighting to you. And like, dude, that sounds exactly like jujitsu. And that's kind of what sparked my interest was, is there a way to kind of replicate those experiences that I had that I know I can't do in an airplane anymore, but can I, can I replicate that in some other way? And that was what was intriguing to me. Um, and that was what got me on the path of that. But look, I, I heard he said this, I didn't think the magnitude of the panic of, oh God, I'm running out of time. I have so much more to do was going to get bigger over time.

• 1:09:17Dave Berke?

  And that is sort of what like jujitsu is, is, and, and I, again, I think we've had this conversation.

• 1:09:25Jocko Willink?

  Well, I've made fun of you on this podcast when you weren't here.

• 1:09:29Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:29Jocko Willink?

  Of you be, you know, you sent me a text like, bro, I'm, I'm, this is horrible. I'm like, oh, what's, what's going on? You're like, whoa, I, I'm never gonna be like really, really, really good at jujitsu.

• 1:09:41Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:42Jocko Willink?

  You know, like, hey, man, you're whatever, you're forty-six years old, you know, get good, you know, get good. It's all good.

• 1:09:48Dave Berke?

  Yeah, no, certainly. I, I think that the, the message is, and, and the lesson for me is, is a reminder of, of something I did know, something I have known throughout my life, of that feeling of the clock is running. You're on the clock right now. You don't know when that clock's gonna end, but I'm gonna tell you right now, you're on it. And every second that you're not grinding on that clock, you lose it. And there's a point where complacency will try to sneak in. The complacency will try to crawl up and go, dude, you've been crushing it. Look at what you've done. And that voice can kinda get loud and it can kinda tell you like, dude, it's time to kinda turn the corner and coast a little bit, kinda, kinda glide just a little bit, you're good.

• 1:10:32Dave Berke?

  Um, and I think the best thing that's happened to me is that exposure to

• 1:10:38Dave Berke?

  Echelon Front, exposure to, to, to the, to the team. And exposure to jujitsu in a way of not like, oh, I'm not gonna be some world champion, it's that, bro, the more you know, the more you learn, the less you actually know, because learning just means like, oh, there's more out there. So you go from one to two, but what's available is a hundred to a thousand, and you get to three and a thousand turns into ten thousand. And jujitsu's infinite. And so every time I get to whatever the next step is, the next level, all it really does is, is just somebody's opening door and go, oh, it's actually bigger. So it's almost like you're getting worse, you know, if you do the math, like, I'm now at level four out of a million.

• 1:11:21Jocko Willink?

  You're like, yesterday, there was only four moves I didn't know.

• 1:11:25Dave Berke?

  Yeah, yeah, that's exactly right.

• 1:11:27Jocko Willink?

  Today, there's forty moves I don't know.

• 1:11:28Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:29Jocko Willink?

  And the other thing is from a, from, okay, for our dogfighting in an aircraft, right? It seems like there would be some limitation.

• 1:11:39Dave Berke?

  Without a doubt.

• 1:11:40Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 1:11:40Dave Berke?

  I, we, and we haven't, you and I have not had this conversation, but I've had those thoughts, there absolutely, absolutely is a limit. There's only so many things that you can do.

• 1:11:49Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:50Dave Berke?

  Um, and that's actually not true.

• 1:11:54Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you know, and and in an aircraft, you know, just just by constraints of time, I mean, you can't, you can't go up and dogfight for four hours a day every now, you do that in Top Gun for for a few years. But the opponents that you have, well, I guess you go against the other striker, that's that's as good as you're gonna get.

• 1:12:11Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:12Jocko Willink?

  But jujitsu, you can do that for twenty years.

• 1:12:14Dave Berke?

  The the parallels undeniable, the parallels and you saw that right away, you and I talked about that, there's no question, that has been the most intriguing thing for me is that it's I'm able to replicate those feelings. But the unlimited nature of how of what's out there, if I had a guy in a Hornet that I was gonna go do BFM with and he was, we were gonna do these these maneuvers and he'd be like, I like to do this when I'm defensive and it wasn't exactly what he's supposed to do, he was gonna lose every single time. I'm like, oh, you you're not gonna do the best method in this situation? Good, I'm gonna savage you.

• 1:12:51Jocko Willink?

  Mm hmm. Jujitsu is not like that.

• 1:12:54Dave Berke?

  Like that, yeah, if there is no, this is what works and everything else is inferior. And we have the geometry, we have the math, we have the science, the physics, and we actually at Top Gun, through a ton of effort and trial and error, actually figure out, this is what you need to do here, this how you create the most amount of closure, these are all the things you do to maximize your aircraft. And so if somebody deviates from that, it's just better for you. That's not true.

• 1:13:20Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's not, there's like, it's been so broken down and so studied that there's no possibility that someone could come up with something and go, oh, I came up with something new.

• 1:13:29Dave Berke?

  No.

• 1:13:30Jocko Willink?

  Not happening.

• 1:13:31Dave Berke?

  Nope, not happening. And and when you're, when you're a Top Gun, when you're a Top Gun, I would love to somebody to try something new.

• 1:13:38Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:39Dave Berke?

  Go for it.

• 1:13:40Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:41Dave Berke?

  Yeah, do your worst, do you come up with your best game plan? Because I know what you need to do in this situation, and if you don't do that, you're just giving me opportunity. That's what you're doing.

• 1:13:49Jocko Willink?

  And so there is a level of that in jujitsu where, you know, they're only gonna put your arms up, there's all that you're gonna give up your back, there's all these things that you can't do, but for instance, Jeffy Glover, he'll give up his back and then he's rolling away from you, or Dean Lister, he's, you're getting him in a triangle, you think, and then you're getting your guard pass, you're getting smashed. So there's, there's times where the things that you don't expect someone to do, they do, and it's problematic.

• 1:14:16Dave Berke?

  Yeah, and I want to be very careful.

• 1:14:20Dave Berke?

  I'm so new at this that I almost should not even be telling you what I think I know about this. But the glide path to get from seeing the inside of an F-18 for the first time to being right at the very apex of that community.

• 1:14:40Dave Berke?

  Six, seven years.

• 1:14:41Jocko Willink?

  Oh, really?

• 1:14:42Dave Berke?

  Yeah, about seven years from, I'm going to introduce you to this airplane. Now, you know, you know how to fly, but I'm going to introduce you to a combat aircraft for the first time in your life. A real combat machine, you're going to get in that thing. I got there in 1998, first time I sat foot in an F-18. I got to Top Gun in 2000, uh, uh, 2002. I left in 2005, so I would say I was kind of at my apex in 2005. So from 98 to 05, that's how long it took me to be at the top of, of, of that world.

• 1:15:16Dave Berke?

  Am I going to, can you imagine like the best guys in jiu-jitsu, the guys that have been doing it for five to six years?

• 1:15:21Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, well, there, well, what you'd have to do is you do, there are some anomalies out there.

• 1:15:25Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:25Jocko Willink?

  There's guys that are incredibly, incredible natural athletes, and also you'd have to take someone and say, okay, this is your job. Cause that was your job. That's a big piece. Hey, this is your job. And that happens. Some kids get into jiu-jitsu and they're like, oh, I'm going to sleep on the mat. All I'm going to do is train BJ Penn, got his black belt and did well. Did he win the worlds in, after three years? I don't know. I don't think so. But, you know, in three years, got his black belt and he was a legit black belt. Someone was asking on social media the other day, hey, is this guy legit? He's, he seems to have gotten his black belt, got his black belt from Donahue in a short period of time.

• 1:15:59Dave Berke?

  Oh, you mean the judo, uh, Olympian, silver medalist?

• 1:16:02Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, he might have some skills. Yeah. He might be able to get up there pretty quick.

• 1:16:06Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:06Jocko Willink?

  Yes, uh, for that answer, yes, that dude is legit. You can get your black belt. You can get your back, black belt pretty quickly if you have a bunch of natural talent. Maybe you have some kind of base wrestling, judo, something like that. And then you make it your job.

• 1:16:20Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:20Jocko Willink?

  You can get your, you can get really good, really fast.

• 1:16:22Dave Berke?

  Yeah, but yeah, basically if your mind is like addicted to it in one way or another. And then you have some prerequisites, like, you know, the, the Gio and

• 1:16:31Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:32Dave Berke?

  The, yeah, the Martinez brothers, they had breakdancing, but a lot of the same stuff, you know? And that kind of went along with their style, I think.

• 1:16:38Jocko Willink?

  I would go so far as to say, this is, this is a guess. I would go so far as to say that most people that have their black belt in jujitsu were in the obsessed mode at some point in their life.

• 1:16:55Speaker 02

  Makes sense.

• 1:16:55Jocko Willink?

  That's what I'm gonna say.

• 1:16:57Speaker 02

  Sure. I cannot disagree with that.

• 1:16:59Jocko Willink?

  Right? Have you ever known someone that's a black belt that was not, at least for a period of three years, was just, that's all they thought about?

• 1:17:07Speaker 02

  I don't know of any, no.

• 1:17:08Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, they were just into jujitsu, real hardcore.

• 1:17:12Speaker 02

  That's true.

• 1:17:13Jocko Willink?

  And then maybe they grow out of it a little bit, or whatever.

• 1:17:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:17:17Jocko Willink?

  Some people just keep training, training hard.

• 1:17:21Jocko Willink?

  That's how it is.

• 1:17:28Jocko Willink?

  One of the things that you did, and this is going, I hate to cycle back to the podcast again, but I'm gonna do it real quick, because I had a note about it. And it's something that you and I have talked about several times. When Tom Fife came on the podcast, Purple Heart, you know, served in World War II, Korea, Vietnam. Purple Heart, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Battalion Commander in World War, in Vietnam.

• 1:17:53Jocko Willink?

  Company Commander in Korea, and I think-

• 1:17:56Speaker 02

  Tank Platoon Commander in World War II.

• 1:17:58Jocko Willink?

  Tank Platoon Commander in World War II. So, if that's your resume, what's up?

• 1:18:02Speaker 02

  I'm sorry, engineer in World War II.

• 1:18:05Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's where it was. And so, so there's his resume, but it was really interesting. So when he came on the podcast, and we were talking about, you know, leadership and stuff like that, and he gives this answer of, we were talking around the subject of, you know, how do you get someone, you know, how do you get your people to listen to you? And he says, hey, you tell them to do it, and they do it. And I remember you and I talking afterwards, it was like, man, that was not a, that was not a Jaco answer of like, hey, you know, hey, listen, you gotta build a relationship with people, you gotta, you gotta get their trust, you gotta earn their respect, you gotta, you gotta treat them how you want to be treated, and then, if you explain to them why the mission is important,

• 1:18:47Jocko Willink?

  and they believe in the mission, and they know that you're gonna back them up, then they're gonna back you up when you need them to do something. Like, I got this whole thing, right?

• 1:18:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:18:56Jocko Willink?

  It's this big problem, it's this big, uh, uh, dance you gotta go through as a leader, and, and I think to myself, yeah, I've got this figured out. And so he goes, no, I tell people to do it. I'm like, man. That's kind of, that's kind of a bummer. I'm thinking, what?

• 1:19:12Dave Berke?

  I'm gonna tell Echo to edit that out, right?

• 1:19:15Jocko Willink?

  Just kidding. But then this was the cool part was then he, he continued to talk about it. And he gave just the most perfect answer, the things that, everything that we say all the time. Everything that we talk about in Echelon Front, everything that I talk about on this podcast, he gave, he gave it all.

• 1:19:33Dave Berke?

  Yeah. He, he, he really just did it in reverse order of conversations that we have. We explain sometimes that in, in really challenging environments, sometimes you gotta just say, hey, go make this happen. And you gotta have your people say, Roger that, and they go make it happen. You, you gotta be able to do that sometimes, but the only way for that to work in those really demanding, difficult, challenging environments is to go way back before and build all those relationships and create all that trust and do all those things. So when people go, Dave just said, go make this happen, or go make it happen, we'll ask questions later. He just went to that part because I almost set it up for that because the question I was asking him was, how do you get a guy to jump out of your tank under fire to fix the turret? And in his mind, that's the like,

• 1:20:16Jocko Willink?

  There's rounds hitting the tank.

• 1:20:18Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:18Jocko Willink?

  Ping, ping, ping, ping, ping. And the, the tank track falls off and someone's gotta get out there and fix it.

• 1:20:26Dave Berke?

  And he goes to the junior guy and he's like, you gotta get out there and fix it. And so it was, he just did that whole thing in reverse order. He went to that part and then, and I remember thinking like, man, that's kind of a bummer answer. I really wasn't expecting that. I was like, you just tell him what to do?

• 1:20:41Jocko Willink?

  And then, why didn't that work for me?

• 1:20:43Dave Berke?

  Yeah. Uh, I might have to change the way, yeah. So when he started to go, and I remember that feeling of like, oh, and now he's starting to explain it. And I looked at you a couple of times like, and he did the whole thing. And he, he, he, he speaks very plain language too. And he just sort of distilled it all down as like, You have to take care of your people. You have to treat your people well. And if you do, they will do the same for you. And if you don't, guess what? When you say, "Jump out of the tank under fire," they're gonna say, "No."

• 1:21:16Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that was the best part is when he actually came all the way back around and said, "If you just think you're just gonna tell someone to get out of a tank under a fire, and they don't believe in what's going on, and they don't trust you, and you haven't taken care of them, they're not going anywhere."

• 1:21:29Dave Berke?

  Every time I hear all the people you've had on the podcast,

• 1:21:34Dave Berke?

  I know the stories are different, but they're all saying the same thing. They're all saying the same thing in their own little nuanced way, their own little experience, but it's always the same thing. And that was, of all of them, my favorite because I got to know Tom before the podcast, and we got to talk quite a bit, and I got to spend time with him before we went live on that recording. So I enjoyed that one the most, but it's, everybody's saying the same thing.

• 1:22:00Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Mook made a huge point about that, about caring about your people.

• 1:22:04Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:04Jocko Willink?

  You gotta care about your people. Again, these are guys that were, that were leading

• 1:22:12Jocko Willink?

  draftees, Vietnam draftees, and I went off on this at the event we were at the other day. Is there any more hostile workforce in, in the, okay, maybe not in the history of the world, but is there, this is right up there. You've got guys that have been, because it's, you know, if you're in World War II and you get drafted, guess what? The country's behind the war.

• 1:22:31Dave Berke?

  It's World War II.

• 1:22:31Jocko Willink?

  You're gonna be a hero, you're fighting against Nazis or Imperial Japanese that are evil humans, and you're on board for the big win. We get that. That's what happens. Korea, like, not quite so clear, but guess what? We still even remember World War II, so guess what? We're gonna go get in the game.

• 1:22:50Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:50Jocko Willink?

  Vietnam, they straight up don't believe in the war. They just straight up don't believe in the war. They're there against their will, under threat of prison. They show up there, and these are the people you're in charge of. And this is the answer I give all the time now for when people ask me about millennials. People are like, "Oh, you know, we got millennials, and they got a bad attitude." "Oh, really?" Oh, really? The millennials have a bad attitude. Compare that to a drafted Vietnam soldier. And here's the thing that I realized, because and when I pulled up, when I started going through Hack again, uh, about facing it, and I started reading that, I realized that you gotta change your perspective as a leader.

• 1:23:34Jocko Willink?

  It's not just, it's not just, hey, because we simplified it. Like, well, if your millennials aren't doing what you want, it's your fault. That's, that's a simplification of it. Because what you really gotta do is you gotta shift your mindset a little bit. And say, like, what, wait a second. How do I take advantage of? That's what Hackworth was doing. Hackworth was saying, wait a second. How do I take advantage of these guys? Guess what? They're gonna question me if I do something wrong. They're gonna report things that aren't done correctly. They're gonna say no if I plan something stupid. Is that a bad thing? Let me think about it. Actually, no. That's actually not a bad thing. So if you've got a millennial, that's like, hey, if I don't like the leadership here, I'm leaving the company. Guess what? Let's get that person some good leadership.

• 1:24:17Jocko Willink?

  You got a millennial that says, hey, if I don't understand why we're doing what we're doing, I don't, I don't care. I'm not gonna do it. Okay, well, let's explain to that person why. So they have a full understanding of what it is we're trying to get done. You shift your, your mindset a little bit about the whole deal, and you end up in a much better position, but it's a perspective shift.

• 1:24:35Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:35Jocko Willink?

  You, it, it's the same thing we always say of, it's not just take ownership of it. So it's if you, if you say, oh, my millennials aren't doing what I need them to do, that's my fault. That doesn't make them to start doing what you need them to do. You actually have to make changes in your leadership style to adapt to this attitude that's coming your way. And at the end of the day, if you do that, you'll have someone that's smart, that's motivated, that will get on board with the program, and will do a great job.

• 1:25:03Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:04Jocko Willink?

  Just like a draught.

• 1:25:05Dave Berke?

  Just like a draught. And when, when we see it in, in leaders all the time, they, they present it like,

• 1:25:14Dave Berke?

  Can't lead these people. This is unsolvable problem. It is a problem that and we're we're going downhill at at at supersonic speeds. And when you do what you just said and try to change that perspective and then put it in comparison to the story of the draftees. They're almost a little embarrassed like, oh, yeah.

• 1:25:33Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's one of those answers. When I give that answer, I I I have to soften it a little bit. Because I just can't hit people with a baseball bat like, hey, these guys were taking. I don't I don't throw this in their face of like, hey, these guys were taking draftees that didn't even believe in the war. And we're gonna get killed.

• 1:25:53Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:53Jocko Willink?

  You're like, hey, you're asking someone to stay late on a Tuesday night.

• 1:25:56Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:57Jocko Willink?

  That's what you're asking for. They were asking them to patrol through a mine-ridden jungle.

• 1:26:02Dave Berke?

  Right. Not to mention, this person is actually interviewed at your company, applied for a job, wants to be there. Yeah, there there's a clear difference in generations, something to think about, but nobody forced this person to join your team.

• 1:26:15Jocko Willink?

  Under threat, under prison.

• 1:26:16Dave Berke?

  Prison, yeah. And you see that in the the the when the recognition hits, you can see it of like, oh, yeah. No, you're right. This this actually is a very solvable problem. It just takes some work on my part.

• 1:26:29Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 1:26:30Dave Berke?

  Um, and I mean, that's true with everything.

• 1:26:33Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, we got, I mean, we obviously, we have all kinds of companies out there that we work with now. And their workforce is now becoming all millennials. I mean, they're frontline people. Right now, at a company, the frontline people are all millennials. And so if you don't figure this out. Who who are you gonna hire?

• 1:26:51Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:52Jocko Willink?

  Who are you gonna hire? I mean, it's like being in Vietnam, you you were gonna have draftees if you don't figure that out. And and that's the other thing is you hear the bad leaders from Vietnam that was that will say, oh, the draftees were horrible. I couldn't work with them. They were, you know, they didn't want to do their jobs. Maybe you should look in the mirror a little bit.

• 1:27:09Dave Berke?

  Yeah. And and the the the best part about that is when you asked, same thing with Tom Fife.

• 1:27:16Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 1:27:17Dave Berke?

  Because he's like, that's all that's all we ever had. He's almost like he didn't understand the question. He's like, yeah, no, that's that was our military back then. When I was in in the when he was in the army. It was like, I didn't, I couldn't tell you who was a draftee and who wasn't. I didn't, I didn't know the difference. They, I, they're people.

• 1:27:34Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:34Dave Berke?

  They're human beings.

• 1:27:35Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:35Dave Berke?

  And I treated them like that. And so, the, just the idea that you would segregate those to the draftees and the, and, and the volunteer military, was immediate indication of what kind of leader you had.

• 1:27:47Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:47Dave Berke?

  And these guys were like, I don't, I, first of all, I don't understand the question. All we had was draftees at the time. We, everybody was being drafted. And second, didn't matter to me.

• 1:27:55Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:56Dave Berke?

  They didn't care. I didn't care. We had a mission to do. I explained to them the impact and the importance of the mission. Told them their role in that mission and what would happen if they did or didn't do it. I cared about them. And we just did it. And that's my favorite part about Tom Fife is he's, he's just a plain spoken guy. He doesn't have this really flowery articulate language. He's like, "Oh yeah, no, I treated my people really well. And when I asked them to do so, they did it." That, that's kind of, that's kind of it.

• 1:28:18Jocko Willink?

  That's a pretty awesome leadership.

• 1:28:19Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:20Jocko Willink?

  Advice.

• 1:28:20Dave Berke?

  It is.

• 1:28:21Jocko Willink?

  Treat your people really well. And when the time comes that you need to do something, that they need to do something for you, they're gonna do it.

• 1:28:27Dave Berke?

  They're gonna do it.

• 1:28:28Jocko Willink?

  Take care of your people and your people are gonna take care of you.

• 1:28:30Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:31Jocko Willink?

  We said it about our gear. Take care of your gear.

• 1:28:33Dave Berke?

  Gear, yeah, same things.

• 1:28:35Jocko Willink?

  Take care of your people. How about, how about we start with that one?

• 1:28:38Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:38Jocko Willink?

  And then your people are gonna take care of you too.

• 1:28:39Dave Berke?

  Yeah. We, I think we, we forget those lessons sometimes, you know, we're like, we're treated, it's, it's human capital. It's like, no, they're, they're people. They're just people. It's, just treat them like people. Treat them like you would treat anybody else. And, you know, some of those fundamental lessons, you know, across leadership. I think in a lot of ways, I was lucky to, to, to, to see that modeled early in my career. Uh, and, and I think a lot of times we end up on the path of, of who we're following on day one and, and they can take you down the wrong road if you've got the wrong people. Um, but when you see it in other people and they treat you that way, and that feeling of, oh, this guy, this guy really cares about me. This guy really is invested in me being successful and me having a good, good life and a good career.

• 1:29:23Dave Berke?

  It's, it's not hard to recognize like, oh, that, that's how, that's what I should do.

• 1:29:27Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:27Dave Berke?

  And the exact opposite is true. And like, When the people and I have worked for people that I despised and I despise because of how they treated me, how they treated other people and it's very evident like, don't be like that.

• 1:29:41Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:41Dave Berke?

  It doesn't work.

• 1:29:42Jocko Willink?

  I'll be in a group of leaders, you know, we're doing, working with a company. I've done this many times where I'll set it up with, hey, who here has had someone in your life as that was in charge of you, that invested in you and took care of you, raise your hand. And everyone raises their hand. And or 99% of the people will raise their hand, if not 100% of people raise their hand because that's, you know, usually we're talking leaders in the company and so the leaders have made progress somehow and they've made progress because someone at some point taught them and took them under their wing and cared about them. And so I say, who's had someone that cared about them, invested in them and took care of them, took care of you? And so everyone raises their hand. And how did that feel?

• 1:30:25Jocko Willink?

  And everyone says, I had felt awesome. What would you do for that leader? I'd do anything for him. Why don't you be that leader then? Why don't you be that leader and take care of those people properly? And you'll end up with a team that'll do anything for you. Not for selfish reasons, because they'll see right through that.

• 1:30:40Dave Berke?

  Yep.

• 1:30:41Jocko Willink?

  You've got to be doing it for the team. When you want the team to do well, then they'll do anything for you.

• 1:30:49Dave Berke?

  Yeah, I think that's a really important lesson for any leader out there, for leadership in general, is how obvious what you're doing is to other people. And whatever thing you're trying to hide or whatever thing you're trying to cover up or something you're trying to mask.

• 1:31:05Jocko Willink?

  Everybody sees right.

• 1:31:07Dave Berke?

  Everybody sees it.

• 1:31:07Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:08Dave Berke?

  Everybody sees right through it. And, you know, we asked the same question is, okay, what would you want your subordinates to do to you? Come up and say, it's not my fault. I didn't have anything and this isn't, this isn't my fault. I couldn't anything about it. You didn't set me up to win? Or would you like someone to walk up and say, hey, boss, I screwed this up. There's a couple of things I could have done differently. Here's what I learned. And you know what? I'm going to do this next time and I'm going to get this right and I'm going to fix this. And you said those two are really obvious, two different scenarios. And you ask a leader, what would you like to have from your subordinates? 100% of the people are going to go, I want the guy that comes in and says, hey, it's my fault. I'm going to fix it. It's super obvious. And then the very nice question is,

• 1:31:46Dave Berke?

  Why aren't you doing that with your boss? Why do you not think that your boss is having the same feelings you would have with your subordinates? And that recognition of everybody sees exactly what you're doing.

• 1:31:58Jocko Willink?

  That's uncomfortable for people.

• 1:32:00Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:00Jocko Willink?

  The uncomfortable part is it's hard for people. I guess, I guess we think that if you're my boss, I think you're not as smart as me. And I think, well, he's just gonna blame me. When I come in and say it's my fault, you're gonna go, yeah, I know, that's why I'm firing you. The reality, you know what I mean? It's like, no, people are smarter than that. And, and no one wants to hear excuses.

• 1:32:20Dave Berke?

  Yep.

• 1:32:20Jocko Willink?

  No one wants to hear excuses.

• 1:32:21Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:22Jocko Willink?

  Think, you know what? Sometimes people screw things up so bad that they're gonna get fired.

• 1:32:27Dave Berke?

  I, I was just gonna say that, like.

• 1:32:28Jocko Willink?

  And guess what? If you go in and make excuses, guess what?

• 1:32:31Dave Berke?

  You're definitely gonna get fired. Yeah. You're gonna take whatever limited chance of maybe salvaging that at the last second of like, hey, boss, hang on. Let me just, if you do, that you're just guaranteeing the outcome.

• 1:32:45Jocko Willink?

  Leif talks about that when he was the XO at, at a SEAL team. And he, he says, you know, you get a guy that was, something was going wrong in a platoon and a guy would come in and say, you know, it's not my fault, my chief's no good, or my, my, my LPO doesn't know what he's doing. It's like, okay, you're fired.

• 1:33:01Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:01Jocko Willink?

  And the next guy comes in and says, hey, I'm not doing a good job as a leader. Here's the things I'm gonna change. Like, okay.

• 1:33:06Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:06Jocko Willink?

  Keep working on it. Let me know if you have any questions. Let me know if I can help you out. Let's get you the support you need.

• 1:33:11Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:11Jocko Willink?

  That's, that's a no, that's extreme ownership, duh.

• 1:33:14Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:15Jocko Willink?

  Sorry.

• 1:33:17Dave Berke?

  We, we would, we would have boards sometimes for, for pilots, you know, performance boards and, and we would review a lot of material. And a lot of times you, you'd have to fire somebody. I mean, don't like doing it, but in aviation, you, it's, a lot of times it's their whole, it's the dream. We, same thing with the teams, like they dreamed about this as a kid and you, you know, that you are ending their life's dream.

• 1:33:37Jocko Willink?

  Dream crusher.

• 1:33:38Dave Berke?

  Yeah. Dream crusher. You, you're gonna, you're gonna do that.

• 1:33:40Jocko Willink?

  Not to mention, uh, paycheck gone.

• 1:33:43Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:43Jocko Willink?

  Well, like for officers in the SEAL teams, a lot of times it's, or retirement or whatever. It's, it's a bad situation.

• 1:33:49Dave Berke?

  Yeah. It, it's, it's massive impact. It's a huge deal to do that. And you, you take that very seriously when you're in a position where you're gonna, you're gonna be one of the deciding factors in whether that person stays or goes.

• 1:34:02Dave Berke?

  Anytime you get to that point where your mind like, hey, the best thing is to get rid of this guy. And if you bring him in for that final interview, that final interaction. The guarantee way to seal your fate, the guarantee way to ensure what they've already kind of concluded, because that's why they're bringing you in in the first place. Is to not take any responsibility, to not take any ownership. That is 100% guaranteed. Now, it doesn't mean. That you might just not be able to, you might not have the technical skills or the capability. Sometimes you're gonna get fired and, and sometimes your mistake. Is so egregious and does so much damage.

• 1:34:34Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:34Dave Berke?

  You gotta go.

• 1:34:35Jocko Willink?

  You're gonna get fired.

• 1:34:36Dave Berke?

  You're gonna get fired. But even then. The, the best thing you can do, the best thing you can do is to take ownership of all that and be like, hey, boss. I understand. I'm sorry. Or you can go the other route. And you could start to throw everybody under the bus.

• 1:34:54Jocko Willink?

  And you know what? This is what's interesting. There are some people, and I've talked to many of them over the years, many of them. They don't make that connection. They literally don't make that connection. They don't make the connection. They're looking at their boss and they're saying, hey. This wasn't my fault. It was my whoever. It was my subordinate leader. It was the maintenance guy. It was this. It was that. They literally don't make the connection. That if you're in charge of something or you're responsible for something and it goes wrong. You're responsible for it. And they cannot make that connection. You feel like you're.

• 1:35:35Jocko Willink?

  You, you, you just, I, I, I would watch when we would have a bad SEAL platoon going through my training. And I'd bring in a, a, a platoon commander or a platoon chief. And they, they would like, like an assault chief. So the guy is in charge of the assault. He's in charge of the assault. And it's like. Hey. All your men went to the wrong target.

• 1:36:00Jocko Willink?

  What happened? Well, it was briefed wrong. Well, it was this. Well, we marked the target wasn't marked correctly. The battle maps. I mean, literally, just you could come up with 20 excuses. And you know what? They're all, they all make sense. They're like, hey, someone made, someone put the wrong number on the brief? And, and everyone heard the wrong number and they looked at their battle map and they went to that building? Okay, that's what happened. Whose fault is it? It's not the guy that made the battle map. You're in, you're in charge of the assault team. You're in charge of the assault team. This is, this is your fault. And it would, I would, sometimes I would just, actually, I would hardly ever say, this was your fault. I would milk, I would try and milk it out of them. I would be like, so, well, I mean, but still, like, who is in charge of the assault?

• 1:36:45Dave Berke?

  If only we had a guy in charge of that process.

• 1:36:47Jocko Willink?

  And they'd say, well, you know, I mean, even as the assault chief, you know, you can't expect the guy to be confirming that every single guy knows where the target is. Really? Okay. Okay, so you're not responsible for getting the men to the target? As the, you're not responsible for the assault as the assault chief is what I'm here. So, it's really horrible when you see that someone can't make the connection.

• 1:37:12Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:13Jocko Willink?

  And what, and, and this is, this is another cool thing, like, on social media, I see this a lot. Guys will hit me up, girls will hit me up. Uh, something went wrong with a client. I stepped in, I took ownership, they thanked me, problem solved, got it squared away. I can't, people are surprised. People are surprised that it works. People are surprised that it works. And again, just to make sure everybody knows. That, that alone doesn't work. You still have to prob, solve the problem that you caused with the client, right? You, you, you gave them what they needed late, or it's gonna be late, and now you say, it's my fault? That doesn't mean that you don't need to get it to them ASAP and make up some corrective measures and lower the price, do something so that it makes up for the problem.

• 1:37:55Jocko Willink?

  But the worst thing you can say is, well, you didn't specify exactly what you wanted in the order and therefore we couldn't get you what you wanted on time. Okay, we're never coming back for business again, and we're angry this whole time, and I'm gonna short you money when we pay you in anyways, if I pay you at all.

• 1:38:08Dave Berke?

  Yeah, let's make it, let's make it the customer and the client's fault. Let's do that. And it gets back to something you said earlier about the, the, the conversation about the millennials is, just for a minute, detach, just take a step back real quick and just put yourself in their position. What do they wanna hear? What do they want to hear? This client that things went sideways, that what they needed from you didn't happen. They didn't get it delivered on time, it didn't work the way it was supposed to work. Or worse, you gave it to something and it created a problem for their customers down the line.

• 1:38:42Dave Berke?

  What do they want to hear from you right now? You or them, go. And the allergy that should come from hearing an excuse is the allergic reaction to hearing someone tell you it's their fault. Or, or it's not, it's not their fault, it's somebody else's fault. A hundred out of a hundred times, you should understand. And, and the point is that it's, that's still hard to do. It's still hard. And that bridge is, is hard to cross. And reading the book isn't enough. It, it sets the table, it exposes you to it. But I think it comes like with everything, you, you have to get inside it. You have to live it. And, but the thing of it is, is the first time you do it, the first time you do it, because it works every single time.

• 1:39:28Dave Berke?

  Once someone, once you get to that tipping point, once the, the domino falls and think it's, then it's like magic. Then it just, things are just happening on their own. And all your people going, no, no, no, no, this is, this is definitely what we're going to do here. We're going to tell them exactly what we did wrong, how we're going to solve the problem, what we're going to do to fix it. And to make sure it doesn't happen again. And it de-escalates. The client is like, oh, man, I was really hoping we could fight and argue and you're not letting me do that now. Because what you're saying is everything I actually really need to hear. And I'm forced to say, okay, let's go solve this problem. And when you see it from the inside out and you start to do it, that tipping point, it happens quick. It just takes a lot of time to get there.

• 1:40:12Dave Berke?

  And there's so much resistance, that human nature resistance to, oh, there, there's no way I'm taking the blame for this. I've actually got a bunch of good reasons that I can give you a why, it's not really my fault. And I'm going to kind of sell like, hey, boss, you, you know, those guys aren't, they're not, they're not the best guys. You know, it's not the best team.

• 1:40:29Jocko Willink?

  Here's, here's a, here's a, let's call it a drill or a, or a coaching. I'll, I'll call it that, a coaching. When, the next time you get into a situation. And you write down, or you take the excuses and the reasons that you come up with. Look at them and then figure out how they were, how those things were actually your fault and/or how you could have prevented them. Because a lot of times it's like, here's, here's, here's one. Hey boss, we didn't get the mission accomplished because the weather rolled in and we couldn't launch on the mission. That's, that's the problem. Now, we all know that we don't control the weather. So when you, so you write the problem down, we failed the mission because we didn't control the weather.

• 1:41:14Jocko Willink?

  We, we can't control the weather. That's why we failed the mission. That's my excuse. That's a, that's a logical reason. There's, that's, that's, that's a legitimate excuse, but don't use it. What you do is you say, what could I have done to have controlled the weather? Okay, I know, okay, okay, wait, I can't control the weather. What could I have done? I could have come up with a contingency plan. I could have come up, we could have staged in a better place. So then you go to the boss and you say, look, boss, here's what happened. The weather went south really bad.

• 1:41:48Jocko Willink?

  That was a problem, but it's a problem that I should have done a better job taking care of. What I should have done was, I should have had a contingency plan. I should have staged closer to the target area that I could have taken vehicles instead of helicopters. That's my fault. From now on, I will absolutely have a secondary plan. This won't happen again. We can't control the weather, but we can control how we plan and how we execute, and this won't happen again. There you go. So you take the most outrageous thing that you know you can't control. You figure out a way to control it. And you take ownership of that thing and it is gonna, it's gonna make your life so much better. And by the way, the next time you have a mission and you plan that contingency and you actually execute and implement what you said you're gonna do, guess what?

• 1:42:33Jocko Willink?

  You will accomplish the mission. There's a whole part of ownership that preempts the problem. If you've got someone that knows, if I know that I can make an excuse, if I know that I can make an excuse, then guess what? I'm not gonna set things up properly. If I don't set things up properly more often, or more often than the other way, I will fail to, to execute what I'm supposed to execute. If you have an excuse, right? Same, same thing with you as an individual human being. You as an individual human being, if you got some excuses that you can throw out there that you can say, I had no control over that. Then you know what you say, okay, what are my contingency plans? What could I have planned differently? Let's eliminate those excuses. Take ownership of your freaking life.

• 1:43:19Dave Berke?

  Yeah. And in that situation too, when you're talking about this example of the weather. And if you as a leader actually accept the excuse like, hey, boss, that storm rolled in and just crushed us. And you're like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Out of your control, there's no way you could have solved for this problem. It's unsolvable. What if you just guaranteed will happen every single time the weather rolls in? You set that in stone, it will never be different. The weather will crush you every single time. Or you could go, I don't know. Look at your weather app and go, we gotta go six hours early in stage and we're gonna walk in. And it works both ways. And if you accept those excuses, you're now getting like, that's a free pass for here or not. Ah, the weather is actually something we can't control.

• 1:44:03Dave Berke?

  So that was now something that is okay why we fail.

• 1:44:08Dave Berke?

  Yeah, it's, I understand that it's hard. I know that feeling and then, but when you see it get to the other side and you see people do it, like, don't.

• 1:44:14Jocko Willink?

  So that was sort of like a turning point for me mentally. Cause as I, as I grew up and I said to myself, you know, well, I, you know, I, I understood that I needed to take responsibility for what was happening. But the turning point for me came when I realized that no matter what happened, if I'm the guy in charge, if I'm the guy in charge, we need to get this thing done. That's the way it is. And when you, when you have that thought in your brain, the preparation you do is so much more solid because there's no way out.

• 1:44:48Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:48Jocko Willink?

  There's no way out. So you gotta execute.

• 1:44:53Dave Berke?

  When, when leaders see the world like that, when they see it that way, they just work until the problem gets solved. They just do everything they need to do until they find a way to fix the problem, to solve it. And when they don't think like that, they, there, there are outlets, there are off ramps of like, ah, can't do it, can't do it, can't do it, can't do it. And we use it, we call that the excuse matrix. That's the word, you're like, ah, comes the excuse matrix. Yeah.

• 1:45:21Jocko Willink?

  And, and, and then the other part of this you gotta remember is this doesn't mean, this doesn't mean that I'm gonna bang my head up against the wall forty seven times.

• 1:45:29Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:30Jocko Willink?

  To accomplish the mission. It's like, oh, guess what? Part, part of this is, hey, I didn't plan it well. I made some mistakes. I didn't calculate correctly, and now we are not gonna get this done. And that's the way it is. And, and so, I'm not saying you continue to beat your head against the wall forty seven, forty seven is the limit. Don't do forty eight. When you've done forty eight, you've gone too far. You're not gonna get through the wall.

• 1:45:57Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:58Jocko Willink?

  Trust me, if you can get through a wall, it'll get through by the forty seventh headbutt. After that, it's not happening. So you gotta take a little, uh, you gotta look for the alternate route.

• 1:46:06Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:07Jocko Willink?

  So there's a difference. There's a difference between we're gonna get this done no matter what, and we're gonna get this done no matter what.

• 1:46:17Jocko Willink?

  Sometimes you gotta back off.

• 1:46:19Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:19Jocko Willink?

  Sometimes you gotta reattack.

• 1:46:21Dave Berke?

  Yeah, sometimes you gotta reassess your plan. And sometimes you gotta, you gotta go a different direction. And win at all costs doesn't mean I'm gonna charge that elevated machine gun desk through open ground. It wave after wave after wave. It means you're gonna do something else. It doesn't mean you're gonna abandon the attack on that position, but you might actually do it a different way. And it may be like, my plan sucked. Here's all the things that I learned about my stupid plan. Anybody got else, and maybe I can get some help. Hey, I've seen this before, this is what we did. That's a good idea. Let's do that plan. And, you know, we, again, we could talk about this for a long time, but I think that, that natural tendency to be exposed as, as someone who

• 1:47:04Dave Berke?

  doesn't know something, to be exposed as someone who doesn't have all the answers, to be exposed as a leader who doesn't know everything. I'm gonna let you in on a little secret. Everybody already knows that. Everybody knows that you don't know everything and if you try to act like you do, it will make it 10 times worse than just saying, "I actually don't know what to do here," or "I made a mistake here." When you make a mistake, everybody knows it. Your subordinates know it, your peers know it, your bosses know it. And the worst thing you can do is to tell them that you didn't.

• 1:47:39Jocko Willink?

  That's why being insecure in your leadership capabilities is a downward spiral. Because the more insecure you are, the more you try and manipulate and maintain everything and keep everything under your wraps and do everything your way and that's how it is. So when you're insecure as a leader, and that's another, that's another thing that takes a little bit of a leap of faith. That's another like progression that I personally made. I personally made and I can't remember when, but when I was like, "You know what? It's okay. It's okay. I'm, I'm not gonna be... I'm not the best in the world." And everybody knows that and the more I try and act like that, the more obvious that's gonna be.

• 1:48:24Jocko Willink?

  And the minute you say that, the minute you recognize that, people are going, "Hmm, okay. He might not be the best, but at least he knows that." As opposed to, "He's not the best and he thinks he is." That's a nightmare. No one wants to work for that guy.

• 1:48:39Dave Berke?

  And, and the, the best part about what you just said is that that's something we all had to learn. That's something we all had to figure out at some point in our life. None of us were born like, "Oh no, I knew all this at birth." It's from these giant errors that we've made or giant mistakes or these giant realizations like, "I've been doing it wrong."

• 1:48:57Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:58Dave Berke?

  And everybody has to figure that out.

• 1:49:01Jocko Willink?

  And that, and that right there, that is one of the most gratifying things about what we do now. Is that this gap that we talked about earlier, this little gap between like, how do you read something? You read something and then how do you get that thing out of it? How do you extract that vital piece of information that's in there? How do you do that? How do you tell? It looks like when you're a kid and you don't listen to your parents, right? You just, how do you get, how do you close that gap? And what's awesome about what we do now is that we get to close that gap with people. We get, I mean, I see it on a daily basis, on a daily basis with the leaders that we work with. You get to see their eyes open up and you go boom, they get it now.

• 1:49:44Jocko Willink?

  Everything we just talked about, which, you know, which we had to learn over time and extrapolate from our experiences. And then on top of that, go through horrible situations where we failed as leaders and we've figured out a way to say, look, here it is. Here's how it works. And to see people's eyes open up and then to see the performance, that's the best, to see the performance go through the roof as the leader. And then of course, when the leader starts doing well, then the leaders start doing well. And when all the leaders start doing well, guess what? Now we have a winning team.

• 1:50:20Dave Berke?

  Yeah. To emphasize what you said, that eyes opening, that's a literal thing.

• 1:50:27Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:28Dave Berke?

  Like it's not a metaphor. You look at them and when you finally get it to click, when you, when their eyes actually open up and they sit up straight and they kind of sit back a little bit and there is a moment, a physical moment where you recognize that they got it.

• 1:50:46Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 1:50:46Dave Berke?

  And when you see that, and you can actually see that in an audience, when you, when you, when you're, when you're talking to a group, like maybe multiple leaders on a team and you're around a conference table and you're interacting and you bring up a particular example that they're dealing with, you lay out the different possible scenarios and the one that is obviously the right one and they go, oh, oh my God. When they get that, that feeling is unbelievable. It's the best part about this is when they get it, but you literally see that happen. Uh, and that is awesome.

• 1:51:13Jocko Willink?

  And that's that for me, so went out my last three years when I was in the teams and I was working, running the training for the West Coast SEAL Teams. And I got to see that. I got to see that with these young leaders and just, I remember, it's, it's in my head right now, I gotta, I gotta tell the story. There's a young kid who I know, who's an awesome guy, and I didn't really know him that well at the time, but he was kind of like a pipe hitter in a platoon. And there's total mayhem going on, total chaos going on, and I just like go over to him and like his, you know, his platoon commander was simulated dead and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And the team chief was simulated and LPO wasn't making a call and this total chaos man when I walk over to him, I'm like, hey, man. And he's like, yeah. And, and I go, hey, man, bro, are you gonna do something about this right here?

• 1:51:56Jocko Willink?

  And, and that was all he needed to hear. All he needed to hear was like, that guy that was in charge of all this training was telling me like, was asking me a question. He was questioning me and saying, are you gonna do something about this? His eyes opened up and he said, oh, hell, yes, I am. And boom, he started stepped up, started making calls and the whole, the whole paradigm in the situation completely changed. Cause he's, he stepped up and led. And so I got to see that then and I get to see it now. So that's a cool thing.

• 1:52:27Dave Berke?

  Yeah, it is. And the stories about my experience at Top Gun are, are identical and when, when you go on missions and they suck and you get savaged and it's just terrible, guys come back and, and they're miserable. Losing sucks, man. It sucks. When you have this huge plan, you go out there and you get savaged, it sucks. And then when you go through this whole thing and, and there's that recognition and they change the way they breathe, they change the way they train, they change the way they do things with their guys and they go out and they come back and, and when you dominate, that feeling of coming back from a flight and you just dominated,

• 1:53:03Dave Berke?

  that's a really good feeling. And so when, when they do this and they start winning, like you just described, you got that team, then they start winning. Dude, then, then, then they are, then they're thorough, but as they're running on your own, then you get, as a leader, you get to back off and like, and just get to watch them go dominate. That feeling of being successful, when you implement these things as a leader, that's the best feeling in the world. And when you see that on, from your junior, from your subordinates, from your team, and you see them go do that, there is nothing better than that.

• 1:53:34Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And then you get, well, we get to see it. I used to get to see it. Now, see, open, you get to see it start to take hold.

• 1:53:40Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:41Jocko Willink?

  And, but Echo, you've talked about this where I'm like, where you, you know what I'm doing. Like with you, you know what I'm doing. You sat here through hundreds of hours of me talking about how I'm gonna treat someone on my team.

• 1:53:56Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:53:57Jocko Willink?

  And you're like, you know what I'm doing, and it still works.

• 1:54:00Speaker 02

  It still works, yup, 100%.

• 1:54:03Jocko Willink?

  And what's cool is, when you know what the person's doing, when you know what your leader's doing, and it still works, then you go, you know what, I'm gonna do it too. And that's how it spreads throughout these organizations.

• 1:54:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, cuz, okay, so, let's say, I don't know, I make a mistake, or something like that, and you say, "Hey, it's, you know, I should've done this little better," right, so. It's like obvious, like, that has never been your job, you know, since, whatever that may be, right? So, obviously, I'm like, I know what you're doing, you're taking extreme ownership, you know, just so we can get the problem solved, I get it. But, to me, what I felt was not what you're doing, but what you're not doing. You're not telling me, "Hey, what's up with this?" You know, "Hey, why did you make that?" You're not attacking me, so I have to be defensive, you know? You're not doing that, so it's not defensive. I see what you're doing, the whole thing, but who cares?

• 1:54:58Speaker 02

  I don't have to defend myself, so whatever, I'll be like, okay, alright.

• 1:55:01Jocko Willink?

  And what you wanna do is get it done, whatever the thing is.

• 1:55:04Speaker 02

  We all wanna get it done, that's the thing, we all wanna, even like with your wife, that's a huge one. So, you guys always talking in context of business, and you know, the boss and the subordinates, whatever. Same exact thing with your wife, same thing, even though it feels like counterintuitive, you know, you had all this stuff to do that you're doing for her, by the way, and you didn't take out the trash. I don't know, I'm not saying that happened to me, not saying it didn't happen to me.

• 1:55:30Speaker 02

  But you didn't take out the trash. Meanwhile, you did, literally, from the moment you woke up to that moment, you got, you know, accused or whatever, you did stuff for her, right? You could've done that hypothetically.

• 1:55:44Speaker 02

  You her her saying, hey, you know, you you didn't take out the trash. All those feelings in your mind and your heart is to it's not to be like, you're right. I should have done that. It's not to say that it's to say the opposite.

• 1:55:57Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:57Speaker 02

  That's like.

• 1:55:58Jocko Willink?

  I did all this other stuff for you.

• 1:56:04Speaker 02

  The point where it's overwhelming overwhelming like I will not and cannot bring myself to say you're right. You're right about that. But if you can manage to do that, you'd be baffled how easy, how good it works.

• 1:56:17Jocko Willink?

  It works.

• 1:56:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, but yeah, it's it's what you're not doing. I think like if you know, like, I see what you're doing. I see what you're doing there, using your little chocolate tricks, all this stuff. That's not the influential part. The influential part is what you're not doing, you know?

• 1:56:31Jocko Willink?

  It's so funny now because everyone I deal with now, every single person that I deal with on any level, on any um, on any depth at all, they all know all my little tricks, as you call them. They all know every, every person I'm involved with knows them all.

• 1:56:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:56:50Jocko Willink?

  And it's like, yeah, yeah, cool.

• 1:56:52Speaker 02

  I'll go even one further with this guy. He'll go, he'll, it's almost like he'll double do it to the point where it's a joke insulting you. And you think it's funny, yet you're still not defense. So he'll be like, I don't know, whatever. Let's say I didn't press record on the thing, forgot. We'll just say never done that before. May or may not have ever done that before. But he'll be like, hey, you're right. You know, I should, I should have double and triple check that thing. You know, I mean, it's where over there, but I still totally could have, you know, so obvious. He's throwing it in your face, you know, that it's not his fault. But he's like going through the motions, almost like, like kind of condescending, you know? But it's so funny because that's the rule kind of thing. So it's like, he's he's blaming you, but he's not really officially blaming you. And it's just, but it still works.

• 1:57:37Speaker 02

  That's the thing, you know, because it's all just one big.

• 1:57:41Speaker 02

  Meanwhile, yeah, the whole recording is trashed, by the way, because it didn't even happen. But yeah, you're not defensive because it's just, you know, it's like.

• 1:57:47Jocko Willink?

  Well, and I'll, I'll say this, the reason why it works, quote unquote, the reason it works is a reason it works with the people that I deal with in my life, from my family to my business partners across the board. The reason that it works is because I'm not doing it for me.

• 1:58:05Jocko Willink?

  That's the big difference. So if you're out there and you're thinking, oh, cool, I'm gonna learn these tactics so I can, I can get further in my life and I can get things out of the world. It's like, no, it's not gonna work out well for you. On the surface, cuz I'm gonna tell you what, you gotta take that one step further cuz guess what? If, this is the, this is the amazing thing. If what you're doing is you're focused on taking care of the team, taking care of your people, doing the right thing for the right reasons. And you're, and you think to yourself, so if you're listening to this right now going, well, I really wanna, I really wanna get ahead. And Jaco just said, I'm not gonna get ahead if I,

• 1:58:46Jocko Willink?

  if I put myself to get ahead, then it's not gonna work. So this isn't for me. Here's the, here's the dichotomy in this thing. And it's a huge dichotomy. If you're there, and you're in a leadership position, or you're just in a position, you're in a relationship, whatever, and you're doing things for the team, you're trying to take care of the others, you're putting other people above you. In the end, you're going to win. And you're gonna win way bigger than you could if you were clawing and scratching and ripping things and bringing them back to yourself. In the end, that person that thinks, that thinks that they're doing the right thing,

• 1:59:29Jocko Willink?

  or thinks that they're doing something good for themselves, but what they're really doing is taking things from other people, that person, they might get a couple tactical victories along the way, but in the end, the person that puts everyone else first is going to win. They are going to win. So, it's, it's kinda hypocritical. Cuz it's like, on the one hand, it's like, no, I don't care about myself. I'm not trying to improve, I'm not trying to improve my station in life. But by doing that, you will improve your station in life, and you will improve your station in life beyond anything that you could have done if your goal was to improve your station in life.

• 2:00:09Jocko Willink?

  That's good stuff right there.

• 2:00:10Speaker 02

  Yes, here it is.

• 2:00:12Jocko Willink?

  Take note of that one.

• 2:00:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:00:14Jocko Willink?

  You know what?

• 2:00:17Jocko Willink?

  We've been going, we've been going two hours right now.

• 2:00:21Jocko Willink?

  Any other major topics that you wanna bring up tonight?

• 2:00:27Dave Berke?

  It works especially with your wife. Not also with your wife, but especially with your wife.

• 2:00:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:00:36Dave Berke?

  And so it should just be habit that anytime she says, "You didn't do this." It actually, she's right. You didn't.

• 2:00:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:00:43Dave Berke?

  And just be like, "You're right. I didn't."

• 2:00:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:00:47Dave Berke?

  I have learned that lesson.

• 2:00:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:00:49Dave Berke?

  A few times.

• 2:00:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, and again, this is gonna sound obvious, but it's one of those things you gotta kinda consciously remember. Especially if you're with your wife, with someone you're with every day, or really, really often, the part, yeah, you take you take ownership, you know, you take responsibility, but then you actually do have to actually solve the problem.

• 2:01:06Dave Berke?

  Yep.

• 2:01:07Speaker 02

  Cause if you're like, "Hey, you're right, I didn't take out that trash," you know, I mean, you know, uh, it won't happen again, and then tomorrow, same thing, tomorrow, same thing, next week, same thing, same thing, then you just sort of become the husband that doesn't take out the trash, and it just says, "Yeah, it's my fault," kinda thing.

• 2:01:21Dave Berke?

  And you, you'd become the, "Hey, that's my bad."

• 2:01:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, my bad.

• 2:01:24Dave Berke?

  "My bad, my bad, sorry about that."

• 2:01:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:01:26Dave Berke?

  And then, that's all you do, is say that it's on me.

• 2:01:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, and, and, yeah, so don't, I mean, obviously, don't be like, "No, well, why don't you take out the trash"

• 2:01:35Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:35Speaker 02

  "Once in a while," kinda thing, you know, obviously, don't say that. Um, but you actually do have to take out the trash.

• 2:01:41Dave Berke?

  You do.

• 2:01:42Jocko Willink?

  Problems get solved.

• 2:01:43Speaker 02

  See, I learnt that from Jaco.

• 2:01:45Jocko Willink?

  Alright, that's a good one. And Dave, obviously, thank you for coming on again. Thanks for your service in the Marine Corps, and for everything you've done for America.

• 2:02:01Jocko Willink?

  It's always an honor to have known you, to have worked with you, and it's an honor to be working with you right now. And I actually wanna close out this conversation with another letter. And it's also written by that same, that same young, articulate, even poetic, Marine Corps machine gunner, Saul Segal, who wrote the letter that opened this podcast. And this one is written to the cousin of one of his comrades. One of his comrades named James Trowbridge.

• 2:02:41Jocko Willink?

  And the cousin did not know what happened to her cousin Corporal Trowbridge, who had gone missing in World War I, and she didn't know what happened to him. And so, this is another letter, written after the end of the war. It's dated February 18th, 1920.

• 2:03:05Jocko Willink?

  And it reads, "My dear Miss Trowbridge, my old Sergeant Major Clifford has written me and has enclosed a copy of your letter to him in which you request information concerning your cousin Corporal James H. Trowbridge. It is indeed unfortunate that his family should be left so uncertain concerning his sad end. I know that it has been the cause of great concern with you. I am sorry too that I had not known of this before, for I was the last of his friends to see him alive.

• 2:03:43Jocko Willink?

  Though Sergeant Clifford wrote me January 16th, I have been out adventuring in the oil fields of northern Texas, and I have only lately ventured back into civilization.

• 2:03:55Jocko Willink?

  Your letter was forwarded to me from my home in Ohio, and I received it tonight and am taking this first occasion to answer it. I hope it will clear up Jim's case. And if there's anything I can do in the future, any service I can perform, any advice I can offer to Jim's folks, I will be at their service at all times.

• 2:04:18Jocko Willink?

  We who have survived this hell on earth, count it the least we can do to console the sorrowing mothers and families of our dead comrades in arms."

• 2:04:32Jocko Willink?

  I still remember when I first met Jim. It was in Bella Woods.

• 2:04:38Jocko Willink?

  On the 13th of June, we were making ready for the attack when replacements arrived to fill up our broken ranks. Jim was assigned to my gun crew, and the way he went over the top like the brave soldier he always was, and his subsequent actions, made me his proud friend and comrade to the day he went west.

• 2:05:03Jocko Willink?

  I still remember one night on guard with Jim in the little hole alongside. The night held an eerie stillness, a night fit for such a hellhole.

• 2:05:16Jocko Willink?

  I was deathly tired, and though there was no wire, only an empty space between the Germans and us, I slept.

• 2:05:26Jocko Willink?

  And Jim, like the good pal he was, kept watch until the officer of the watch came by, when he awakened me that I might not be shot for sleeping at my post.

• 2:05:36Jocko Willink?

  It was for deeds like that, that every man in the company idolized him.

• 2:05:42Jocko Willink?

  And I can assure you that Jim Trowbridge's name and memory will forever be held in reverence by the survivors of the 23rd Company.

• 2:05:54Jocko Willink?

  So many men were wounded, and left us, then came back during the battles that followed Bella Woods, to the last phase of the Argonne Drive, that I must confess ignorance as to whether Jim was or not.

• 2:06:09Jocko Willink?

  You see, Jim was assigned to a crew of his own, and a machine gun of his own, and on the battle line, the Number One and Number Ten gun may be in the same company, yet they are a world apart.

• 2:06:24Jocko Willink?

  Each carries on and knows that the other is carrying on, and so the battle is won.

• 2:06:33Jocko Willink?

  Yet I dimly remembered that Jim was either gassed or wounded in the Champagne Drive in which the 2nd Division captured Mont Blanc Ridge.

• 2:06:45Jocko Willink?

  It began on October 2nd, 1918. Jim came back to us before the last phase, the Argonne Drive, which began on November 1st, 1918. Through the mud and rain and fog, we pushed forward over the top that glorious day, the 2nd Division leading the whole army.

• 2:07:08Jocko Willink?

  We captured every piece of Boche field artillery, white-hot they were, and we sent the Germans scurrying back and broke their invincible line to bits.

• 2:07:22Jocko Willink?

  My company suffered terribly, and dead and wounded.

• 2:07:27Jocko Willink?

  Yet we carried on, hungry and tired and facing the everlasting hail of bullets and shells.

• 2:07:35Jocko Willink?

  We pushed forward for six days, battling steadily.

• 2:07:40Jocko Willink?

  The 6th of November rose dismally. I remember passing Jim by the roadside, and he gave me a cheery hail.

• 2:07:51Jocko Willink?

  Then he followed up the rear. We went forward, and the Boche began shelling us. As the last of the column came up, I heard from them that Jim's crew had rested once again by the roadside. None of us were strong. We had not eaten in days.

• 2:08:09Jocko Willink?

  A great shell had exploded and had killed and wounded all of Jim's crew. Jim had had a foot torn off by a flying fragment.

• 2:08:22Jocko Willink?

  There was death and destruction all about. I volunteered to help carry a wounded man back to the first aid station.

• 2:08:31Jocko Willink?

  There was Jim, lying on the blanketed floor.

• 2:08:37Jocko Willink?

  I knelt down to speak to him.

• 2:08:40Jocko Willink?

  I marked that his face was already drawn with pain, and that he was gray from long exposure and loss of blood.

• 2:08:51Jocko Willink?

  He said, "Saul, old pal, I'm dying.

• 2:08:58Jocko Willink?

  Good luck to you, old man."

• 2:09:02Jocko Willink?

  I tried to cheer him up, but to no avail.

• 2:09:06Jocko Willink?

  On the battlefield, one knows when death approaches.

• 2:09:14Jocko Willink?

  That is all I know. For a few hours later, I was knocked out myself.

• 2:09:22Jocko Willink?

  Yet I doubt not that Jim went west to home and to mother soon after.

• 2:09:30Jocko Willink?

  Whether Jim died and was buried in the village, a few miles south of Sedan, in the Ardennes Department, or whether he survived until he reached a hospital, I do not know.

• 2:09:43Jocko Willink?

  You can find out by writing the Graves Registration Bureau at Washington.

• 2:09:49Jocko Willink?

  That he is gone, I am reasonably sure. I would advise his family to harbor no unfounded hopes in his safety.

• 2:10:03Jocko Willink?

  It is with deep regret that I ask yours and Jim's mothers pardon for my heartless and brutal description of this story. My experiences on the battlefield have caused me to use other than tender words that might soothe a broken-hearted mother.

• 2:10:24Jocko Willink?

  Believe me, nevertheless, that I grieve with her for her son and my comrade.

• 2:10:34Jocko Willink?

  And believe me too, that I stand ready to do all in my power to assist her in any possible way.

• 2:10:44Jocko Willink?

  It is hard, I know, yet at such a cost has liberty and democracy survived.

• 2:10:57Jocko Willink?

  Except, my dear Miss Trowbridge, the assurance of my profound respect.

• 2:11:08Jocko Willink?

  Most sincerely,

• 2:11:11Jocko Willink?

  Saul Siegel.

• 2:11:20Jocko Willink?

  So liberty and democracy survived.

• 2:11:31Jocko Willink?

  But at such a cost and so many bore that cost. The fighting that Saul Sagal writes about was part of the Muse Argonne Offensive. It was part of the Hundred Days Offensive.

• 2:11:54Jocko Willink?

  That brought the war to an end.

• 2:11:58Jocko Willink?

  And while bringing the war to the end, it cost the lives of 26,277 Americans.

• 2:12:09Jocko Willink?

  And Corporal James Trowbridge was one of those Americans. He died around the 6th of November, 1918.

• 2:12:20Jocko Willink?

  And as we know, the armistice was signed.

• 2:12:28Jocko Willink?

  And the war ended just five days later, on November 11th, 1918.

• 2:12:46Jocko Willink?

  War is hell. And the cost of liberty and the cost of democracy is immense. And I started this podcast, we were talking about that quote.

• 2:13:04Jocko Willink?

  The quote that says, "When you know the way broadly, you see it in everything."

• 2:13:14Jocko Willink?

  Well, in that vein,

• 2:13:20Jocko Willink?

  I think that if you know the cost broadly, if you know the cost of freedom,

• 2:13:28Jocko Willink?

  then you see it and you appreciate it in everything.

• 2:13:36Jocko Willink?

  In everything that we have been given.

• 2:13:44Jocko Willink?

  Especially our most precious gift.

• 2:13:52Jocko Willink?

  And that is

• 2:13:55Jocko Willink?

  freedom.

• 2:14:02Jocko Willink?

  And

• 2:14:05Jocko Willink?

  I think that's

• 2:14:08Jocko Willink?

  all I've got for tonight.

• 2:14:15Jocko Willink?

  And I think at this point, Echo, if you want to, uh,

• 2:14:21Jocko Willink?

  maybe give us an opportunity to decompress or

• 2:14:26Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 2:14:26Jocko Willink?

  Maybe we could help you talk about

• 2:14:32Jocko Willink?

  how we can take advantage of the freedom that we have.

• 2:14:38Speaker 02

  Yes, sir. Cool. We'll do both.

• 2:14:41Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 2:14:43Speaker 02

  And support yourself too, by the way, Dave. So first, we'll talk about origin. I know, little bit of a rough transition, because

• 2:14:54Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, because that's a, that's a letter right there.

• 2:14:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:14:58Jocko Willink?

  Again,

• 2:15:01Jocko Willink?

  twenty, what now, so now he's twenty-two, so that's nineteen, twenty, he's twenty-two years old, Dave. Yeah, unreal.

• 2:15:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:15:09Jocko Willink?

  I tried to figure out what happened to him. Like, wh- where, where he went? Did he take over, like, a big company? He must have done something awesome. Saul Segal.

• 2:15:20Speaker 02

  Segal?

• 2:15:21Jocko Willink?

  Segal. Yeah, it's S.E.G.E.L.

• 2:15:23Speaker 02

  L. Segal, Segal, Segal.

• 2:15:25Jocko Willink?

  He should have become a writer. Yeah, he should have absolutely become a writer.

• 2:15:29Speaker 02

  Maybe he was.

• 2:15:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, you, you know, you read these letters and again, you say this all the time, but you kinda can't help but remember, especially this kind of letters, that like this actual person. It's not just some cool letter, you know, kinda thing. It's like this is the actual person writing this letter to an actual person.

• 2:15:49Jocko Willink?

  About an actual person.

• 2:15:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:15:52Jocko Willink?

  About James Trowbridge.

• 2:15:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, crazy.

• 2:15:58Speaker 02

  Alright, well, I guess we can talk about Origin. Made in America, I guess there's that.

• 2:16:04Jocko Willink?

  There's that.

• 2:16:05Speaker 02

  So, yeah, so again, Origin, yeah, so they have American-made products. Good products too.

• 2:16:14Speaker 02

  Like.

• 2:16:16Jocko Willink?

  As in the best?

• 2:16:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think they're the best, but here's the thing, you know when people are like, "Yeah, they got the best thing." It's like, it's a matter of opinion, so I can't tell you they're the best, but I can't tell you I think.

• 2:16:26Jocko Willink?

  Can you not say it's the best gi?

• 2:16:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, oh, it's the best gi.

• 2:16:29Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 2:16:29Speaker 02

  Factually, that's a factually thing. Yeah, so gi's, so yeah, if, okay, on the path, we're on the path, Dave Berke here on the path. Jiu-Jitsu path, Jiu-Jitsu is part of that path, optional, for sure, optional, but it is part of the path. It's not not part of the path, you see what I'm saying?

• 2:16:44Dave Berke?

  You might be questioning whether it's optional.

• 2:16:45Speaker 02

  Yeah. I don't know, man, no, cuz you've heard of people who don't necessarily do Jiu-Jitsu, but they're on the path, on the path.

• 2:16:52Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, if you, yeah, you should try and train Jiu-Jitsu though, is my recommendation.

• 2:16:56Speaker 02

  It's like strongly recommended.

• 2:16:58Jocko Willink?

  Dave. Recommendation, yea or nay, Jiu-Jitsu?

• 2:17:01Dave Berke?

  It's not a recommendation, you need to do it.

• 2:17:04Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's weird, isn't it?

• 2:17:05Dave Berke?

  It's just, it's something unlike anything else I've ever done, and it's something you need to do, and it's, there's a million different reasons to do it. And it's, look, Echo, it's not an option, if you're on the path, you're training.

• 2:17:19Speaker 02

  Boom, you heard it here, folks.

• 2:17:20Jocko Willink?

  Dave Berke putting out word, and by the way, representing the Origin t-shirt.

• 2:17:24Speaker 02

  Big time.

• 2:17:24Jocko Willink?

  If someone's wondering about the Jizai-ny boy.

• 2:17:29Speaker 02

  You, Willie, so yeah, boom, there you go, so when you start Jiu-Jitsu, or if you're on the Jiu-Jitsu path already, you need a new gi. Origin gi, best one, made in America, hundred percent. Cotton's made in America, they make the cotton into a gi with, with other stuff, obviously, cuz it's, you know, a gi. They got rash guards and other Jiu-Jitsu stuff on there as well. originmaine.com joggers okay how you feel about joggers overall I mean we've come a long way let's face it

• 2:17:56Jocko Willink?

  wait you say we you're talking about me if you are you indicating that I have made some movement towards I'm gonna be sporting a pair of joggers if that's what you're thinking it's not you're there's been no movement

• 2:18:07Speaker 02

  no movement still at

• 2:18:08Jocko Willink?

  no movement

• 2:18:09Speaker 02

  pre-phase one

• 2:18:10Jocko Willink?

  pre-phase one yep they're not happening for me

• 2:18:12Speaker 02

  would you say anti joggers

• 2:18:14Jocko Willink?

  possibly

• 2:18:14Speaker 02

  cause I've been wearing a lot of

• 2:18:15Jocko Willink?

  I'm not anti I don't look at people and say oh man I can't believe that guy's wearing joggers I don't care about it that much

• 2:18:21Speaker 02

  right right but so but it's still like it's a zero it's not a negative

• 2:18:24Jocko Willink?

  yeah

• 2:18:24Speaker 02

  it's just the idea of joggers

• 2:18:25Jocko Willink?

  it's just a zero

• 2:18:26Speaker 02

  well

• 2:18:27Jocko Willink?

  it's just something that I don't get

• 2:18:28Speaker 02

  yeah yeah I dig it man there's a lot of things that you know you might not get nonetheless I am not in that boat I think joggers are cool I'm just saying there are things that you kind of you know don't get

• 2:18:39Jocko Willink?

  right on

• 2:18:39Speaker 02

  overall depends on what you mean by a lot anyway joggers t-shirts obviously Dave Berke representing big time hardcore if you will

• 2:18:46Jocko Willink?

  big time

• 2:18:47Speaker 02

  big time huge time actually yeah look at that shirt it's dope anyway there there are

• 2:18:53Jocko Willink?

  that's a legit shirt

• 2:18:54Speaker 02

  sweats as well you know sweats you most comfortable in the world that's factually that's like not even matter opinion

• 2:19:00Jocko Willink?

  check

• 2:19:00Speaker 02

  sounds like it's not though also supplements okay Dave Berke you're on the dis okay there's supplements right Jocko super krill oil

• 2:19:07Jocko Willink?

  mmm

• 2:19:08Speaker 02

  free joints omega threes all that antioxidants in there all kinds of stuff good for your joints legitimately

• 2:19:14Jocko Willink?

  yep

• 2:19:15Speaker 02

  not this you know one a day commercial thing this is for real good for your joints that's that joint warfare good for your joints in a different way but very good for your joints discipline good for your brain good for your muscles called discipline pre-workout pre cognitive not precognitive but pre-mission we'll call it cognitive enhancing neutrop

• 2:19:39Jocko Willink?

  okay well you know who's down with the discipline Dave Berke

• 2:19:42Dave Berke?

  I am down with the discipline

• 2:19:44Jocko Willink?

  When do you take it?

• 2:19:46Dave Berke?

  I take it usually twice a day. So get up, work out, I'm tracking for a while and about ten, ten thirty and I, that's about the time I sit down and I have to, I gotta grind at my computer and I really don't want to, but I need to. And I gotta put my brain into it. I will take discipline and I'll crank for a while. And then the other time I do it is typically like post bedtime, the kids and I, what I'd really like to do is just call it a day. But I, but I can't. Yeah, I gotta, that, and that's, that's when I'll take it.

• 2:20:18Jocko Willink?

  What about pre jujitsu?

• 2:20:20Dave Berke?

  I, every time I go train on, on, on the drive.

• 2:20:24Jocko Willink?

  I thought he was gonna be like, well, no, not really, cause he's like, no.

• 2:20:27Dave Berke?

  Every time I go train.

• 2:20:29Jocko Willink?

  I was mixing one up at the house today. And he's like, oh, are we going to roll? And I was like, yeah. And he goes, can I get some of that?

• 2:20:36Dave Berke?

  You had three legit scoops there. These are heaping scoops there. I think it might end up being four.

• 2:20:41Jocko Willink?

  And I don't know if you noticed this, but I, I had a pretty small water bottle. So I'm, I'm mixing up these supercharged.

• 2:20:49Dave Berke?

  Like the concentrate.

• 2:20:50Jocko Willink?

  Concentrate, yeah, I might as, I have eaten it before. It doesn't taste good bra, right? You don't, but I have done it if I had to. But anyway, so that's discipline.

• 2:20:59Dave Berke?

  Yeah, I dig it.

• 2:21:00Jocko Willink?

  And, and then you, you take Molk. Again, this is good that you're here, cause I tell everyone it tastes good that, to me, but I'm only one person. You like it too. Mince your flavor too, right?

• 2:21:14Dave Berke?

  Okay, so here's the thing. I gotta explain that. Cause you're here, Dave Berke, you're here, you're on the discipline train. I dig it. I'm on the Molk train. Okay, so, so what, here's the thing, I never was, and even like, uh, you know,

• 2:21:32Dave Berke?

  a number of episodes ago, I would say more than once, by the way, that I'm like, protein powder, that's what the kids take to make them think they're getting big, whatever, right? That's kinda how I felt about it. And I, you know, I, okay, okay, we'll say that. But, okay, so Pete sent me the vanilla. It was in a blank container. It's not done or. Yeah, yeah, so it's kinda like.

• 2:21:55Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:56Speaker 02

  So I'm like, cool. I put it in, I was like, dang, this is pretty good.

• 2:21:59Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:00Speaker 02

  In- interested in vanilla, by the way.

• 2:22:02Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Which is not a good flavor, right?

• 2:22:03Speaker 02

  I think even like one of the definitions of vanilla is like, it's just cool. It's fine.

• 2:22:09Jocko Willink?

  We're not excited about vanilla.

• 2:22:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, but it's good.

• 2:22:11Jocko Willink?

  Apparently you were a little bit.

• 2:22:12Speaker 02

  I got a little bit excited, so I'm like, hmm, but it could be my bias. You know, it's Pete. You know, thanks, Pete. You know, you get the big box, you're all excited. It could be, you know, you can be biased results. So I'm like, alright, you know what the test is? Here's the test. I have a one year or two year, he's almost two.

• 2:22:26Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:22:27Speaker 02

  So I'm like, alright, let me. So I give it to him. I don't recommend giving him a bunch. I don't know if all the protein, 22 grams of protein, by the way.

• 2:22:36Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:37Speaker 02

  Two grams of sugar. No, one gram of sugar, two total carbs. Two grams of fat, by the way. Which, I mean, feel how you want to feel about fat, like it's good or whatever. But, Brad, this is a for real protein deal. Like, you want extra protein, they're not going to give you a bunch of other stuff you didn't sign up for. Anyway, side note. So I'm like, okay, my son's.

• 2:22:54Jocko Willink?

  Do you have a real problem with things that you don't sign up for?

• 2:22:57Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 2:22:57Jocko Willink?

  I noticed that about you. Like, that's one of your things.

• 2:22:59Speaker 02

  One of them, yeah.

• 2:23:00Jocko Willink?

  If you don't sign up for something and it comes anyways, you don't like that. Unless it's a box of good stuff from Pete, then you didn't sign up for it, but you liked it.

• 2:23:09Speaker 02

  There is that, yes. So boom, I give it to him, mix it up. Milk, by the way, just to be in the spirit of accuracy. Boom, hit it. Yeah, he liked it. So I'm like, oh, okay, but it could be one of those things.

• 2:23:21Jocko Willink?

  Was that mint? Or was that vanilla?

• 2:23:23Speaker 02

  No, vanilla, straight up vanilla, yeah. So I'm like, alright, well, it could be anomaly, you know, you give like someone that maybe thought it was milk. I don't know, he'll taste it, you know, so he's like, more, more, more. So I'm like, oh, I'm trying to get out my phone so I can take a video to send to Pete. And he's like, boy, he's kind of tripping. So I'm like, alright, so I finally get the video going and I give it to him. Yeah, he wants it.

• 2:23:42Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:23:42Speaker 02

  Wants the milk. Two year old drinking milk. Not to say to give it to your two year old, I'm saying as a taste test, that works. And that's vanilla, by the way. So anyway.

• 2:23:51Jocko Willink?

  Test confirmed.

• 2:23:52Speaker 02

  Confirmed, and that's vanilla. So I like the, the, the mint chocolate way better. Hundred percent.

• 2:23:57Jocko Willink?

  And peanut butter chocolate is now live at originmaine.com.

• 2:24:03Dave Berke?

  Is that official?

• 2:24:04Jocko Willink?

  That is official.

• 2:24:05Dave Berke?

  That's official?

• 2:24:05Jocko Willink?

  Yes.

• 2:24:06Dave Berke?

  Alright.

• 2:24:06Jocko Willink?

  That is official.

• 2:24:07Dave Berke?

  So all my Twitter competition of who's gonna get the first peanut butter chocolate, it's on.

• 2:24:13Jocko Willink?

  It's good, dude. It's goo- cuz I've had it, cuz we, we tested and we went through like three, it didn't, the, the cool thing is, it didn't take that many iterations to get it. It was like a little bit more chocolate, a little bit more peanut butter. Alright, I think it was three iterations and we were good.

• 2:24:29Speaker 02

  I will say this.

• 2:24:30Jocko Willink?

  Send it.

• 2:24:31Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah, please. I put like a half a tablespoon of peanut butter in the mint chocolate, by the way, as a test, and boom, I like that too.

• 2:24:41Jocko Willink?

  There you go.

• 2:24:42Speaker 02

  So yeah, we're waiting for that. Anyway, yeah, and don't forget the Krill R and the Joint Warfare. These, these are daily things. We need this.

• 2:24:48Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:48Speaker 02

  Take it from me, we need this, so don't run out. Also, good way to support and represent, cuz representing is a method of support, in my opinion. Jaco's Store, it's called Jaco Store. You can get Jaco gear rash guards. Jaco gear, I guess like more geared towards the game. Get after it, all that stuff. Um, anyway, yeah, rash guards, t-shirts, discipline equals freedom, all these things, a lot of stuff, concepts, conceptually representing by way of apparel. You don't like the word apparel?

• 2:25:23Jocko Willink?

  No, apparel, apparel, clothing, yeah, those things are done.

• 2:25:26Speaker 02

  Fashion.

• 2:25:27Jocko Willink?

  No, over the line.

• 2:25:28Speaker 02

  Okay, okay, that's the line. Okay, I got you. So anyway, accessories, if you will, some, some hats on there, some good stuff, some women's stuff on there. If you wanna represent, go to jacostore.com, that's where you get the stuff. Also, you wanna subscribe to the podcast if you haven't already. Seems obvious, I know. And that's on Stitcher, iTunes, Google Play.

• 2:25:49Speaker 02

  You know, all these places where they play podcasts, good way to support, leave a review.

• 2:25:53Jocko Willink?

  And don't forget about this podcast. Also, there's the Warrior Kid Podcast.

• 2:25:57Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:25:57Jocko Willink?

  So, subscribe to the Warrior Kid Podcast. Dave Berke was the first guest on the Warrior Kid Podcast, number sixteen, which is out at this time. If you want to hear him answer questions from children about being a Marine Corps fighter pilot. And there's also some stories from Uncle Jake. In the most recent three podcasts, fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen, there's some stories from Uncle Jake talking about how Uncle Jake kind of established his principles in life. So, those are pretty cool. And, and in addition to the Warrior Kid Podcast being available through the various podcast channels,

• 2:26:39Jocko Willink?

  it is also available on YouTube on a separate channel from the Jocko Podcast YouTube channel, which has this podcast on it, which is pretty cool. But it also has the custom.

• 2:26:55Speaker 02

  Custom.

• 2:26:56Jocko Willink?

  Artistic.

• 2:26:57Speaker 02

  Artistic. Videos.

• 2:27:00Jocko Willink?

  Videos.

• 2:27:01Speaker 02

  Enhanced.

• 2:27:01Jocko Willink?

  I was looking, enhanced.

• 2:27:02Speaker 02

  Enhanced, there you go.

• 2:27:04Jocko Willink?

  And wicked cool videos from Echo Charles with about whatever.

• 2:27:09Speaker 02

  About whatever, yeah. And whoa.

• 2:27:10Jocko Willink?

  Hey, we, they, with this event, we just, actually, Dave and I just did an event and they played the Warpath video, the good one. And, and it was on, no, this is legit. It was on a giant screen with a sick sound system.

• 2:27:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:27:24Jocko Willink?

  And it was pretty cool.

• 2:27:25Speaker 02

  You like.

• 2:27:25Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:27:26Speaker 02

  Cool. Actually, that legitimately does make me feel good.

• 2:27:28Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and a big, big, crystal clear.

• 2:27:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:27:32Jocko Willink?

  HDTV something with a whole deal.

• 2:27:36Speaker 02

  It was a 4K, it was a 4K TV.

• 2:27:37Jocko Willink?

  It was massive.

• 2:27:38Speaker 02

  Probably, huh.

• 2:27:39Jocko Willink?

  And I was like four feet from it. Cause we were about to walk on stage, so I was real close to it.

• 2:27:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:27:44Jocko Willink?

  And I was.

• 2:27:44Speaker 02

  Got the full experience. I'm in that video, by the way.

• 2:27:47Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you are. You do your ninja pose.

• 2:27:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, ninja, Jedi. I don't think ninjas do that. Nonetheless.

• 2:27:55Speaker 02

  The YouTube thing, I was thinking about this too. Sometimes like when, when podcasts come out, not necessarily art, but you know, other podcasts or whatever, sometimes they'll put it on YouTube, but they'll just have the image on there.

• 2:28:03Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 2:28:04Speaker 02

  Just for another source of audio, which is good.

• 2:28:06Jocko Willink?

  This is more than that.

• 2:28:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, you got the added dimension where we do, it is a video, so if you wanna see what Dave Berke looks like, if you don't know, I'm saying, if you wanna see what Jaco looks like, if for some reason you don't know, boom, you can see what he looks like.

• 2:28:19Jocko Willink?

  I like that picture somebody posted of what they thought you looked like.

• 2:28:23Speaker 02

  You liked it on?

• 2:28:24Jocko Willink?

  You know what, I'm gonna ask that question on the social. I'm gonna say, what did you think Echo Charles looked like?

• 2:28:30Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:28:31Jocko Willink?

  And we'll just see how that goes.

• 2:28:32Speaker 02

  Okay, yeah, that seems like that would be-

• 2:28:34Jocko Willink?

  What did you think Echo Charles looked like?

• 2:28:36Dave Berke?

  I think he looks exactly the way he does. I was not in the least bit surprised.

• 2:28:39Jocko Willink?

  Oh, you, you, okay, check.

• 2:28:40Speaker 02

  It's a good deal, Dave Berke knows it, man, you heard it here. Actually, wait, did you, but you didn't hear me first, you met me first, right? That was early enough? Or did you hear first?

• 2:28:49Jocko Willink?

  No, no.

• 2:28:49Speaker 02

  I guess my voice-

• 2:28:50Jocko Willink?

  You couldn't have, I don't think.

• 2:28:51Dave Berke?

  I, I, I heard you, long before I met you.

• 2:28:53Speaker 02

  Oh, but you knew.

• 2:28:54Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:54Speaker 02

  You can tell.

• 2:28:55Dave Berke?

  Yeah, you can tell.

• 2:28:56Jocko Willink?

  You can tell you're a liar.

• 2:28:57Speaker 02

  Well, boom, there it is. YouTube, subscribe if you want, if you, uh, you know, good way to support. Really good. Also, to switch up your workout, get some kettlebells, get some battle ropes, get a jump rope if you don't have one, get some, I just got some battle ropes. They didn't come in yet. I think it's good for my workout. I got planned, oh, and I got some rings, boom. You'd think I already had rings, how much you talk about rings.

• 2:29:21Jocko Willink?

  I did not know you did not have rings.

• 2:29:23Speaker 02

  I did not have rings.

• 2:29:24Jocko Willink?

  Disappoint.

• 2:29:25Speaker 02

  I had pull-up bar, you know, that kind, but I don't have rings, I have rings now. They didn't come in yet, they're on the way. But anyway, you go to onnit.com/jaco, good stuff on, oh, sorry, slash Jaco, not Jaco, onnit.com/jaco, they got some good workout stuff on there. A lot of good info too, that's where I went when I was, when I was starting the kettlebell routine. Got, got the info from there, boom. Good stuff. Get some socks too, by the way.

• 2:29:48Jocko Willink?

  Psychological Warfare album. You can get it. Album with tracks blah blah blah blah blah.

• 2:29:54Speaker 02

  Nope, man. Some people, they don't know what that is.

• 2:29:56Jocko Willink?

  Okay, if you don't know what it is, go to iTunes, go to Google Play, go to MP3, you can get an album with me talking about why you shouldn't be weak for the various reasons. That's it. That's all we're saying about it. Other than to say, we are working on the new Psychological Warfare album. However, each time I say that, I should, I should caveat that by saying, I have had a lot of other things do so. I am, the work I have done so far on the new Psychological Warfare album is to begin to consider topics for the next album. I have a small list. It will be rolled out. What do you think?

• 2:30:30Speaker 02

  Smoking? Oh, when?

• 2:30:32Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah, people want smoking.

• 2:30:33Speaker 02

  ASAP, really?

• 2:30:34Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:34Speaker 02

  I mean, as far as like what people would tell me.

• 2:30:36Jocko Willink?

  Someone's out there that wants to quit smoking. Yeah, okay. Alright, so we're on that. We'll put it out there. The new Psychological Warfare. We do have a working title, which seems to be sticking pretty well. All your excuses are lies. Psychological Warfare 2.

• 2:30:48Speaker 02

  That's the one.

• 2:30:49Jocko Willink?

  Hopefully it'll be better than Jaws 2.

• 2:30:52Speaker 02

  But not Terminator 2.

• 2:30:53Jocko Willink?

  But not Terminator 2.

• 2:30:55Speaker 02

  I'm just saying Terminator 2 was, it was just as iconic as Terminator 1, in my opinion.

• 2:30:59Jocko Willink?

  We're good then. Jocka White Tea, you can get it on Amazon. You can get the dry tea bags and mix it yourself, or you can get it in a can. And if you get it, no big deal, you can deadlift 8,000 pounds. Way the Warrior Kid books. Dave, you've read them.

• 2:31:15Dave Berke?

  I've read them multiple times. They are on reread in the house.

• 2:31:18Jocko Willink?

  You got three kids, ages?

• 2:31:21Dave Berke?

  Nine, seven, four.

• 2:31:23Jocko Willink?

  And their feedback is?

• 2:31:25Dave Berke?

  Feedback is solid. The girls love the books.

• 2:31:30Jocko Willink?

  Interesting. People ask me, what about girls? Are you gonna write a book for girls? I did write a book for girls. It's called Way the Warrior Kid.

• 2:31:35Dave Berke?

  Yep.

• 2:31:36Speaker 02

  Yep. Agreed. Same here.

• 2:31:38Dave Berke?

  Lessons are universal. Kids love it. My girls love it. Girls started training jujitsu because of the book.

• 2:31:43Jocko Willink?

  That's awesome.

• 2:31:44Dave Berke?

  Yep.

• 2:31:44Jocko Willink?

  Do they study?

• 2:31:45Dave Berke?

  Oh, yeah. They study.

• 2:31:47Jocko Willink?

  Do they eat a little bit more healthy?

• 2:31:50Dave Berke?

  Look, they're on the path. No joke. They're on the path.

• 2:31:54Jocko Willink?

  It's legit. That's awesome. And I actually talk to your kids occasionally and I see that they are in fact on the path. What about the field manual?

• 2:32:05Dave Berke?

  They have not read the field manual. I have read the field manual.

• 2:32:09Jocko Willink?

  Feedback.

• 2:32:10Dave Berke?

  Feedback. Feedback is also legit. It is a prescription. If you need some help on getting and staying on the path, read the field manual.

• 2:32:20Jocko Willink?

  Have you ever read three pages of the of the field manual just just because?

• 2:32:25Dave Berke?

  Three pages?

• 2:32:26Jocko Willink?

  Have you just been like, you know, you're sitting there and it's on your desk and you're like, you know what? I'm gonna check. I'm gonna read this real quick.

• 2:32:31Dave Berke?

  Yeah. So the thing about the book is the cover of the book. That cover says, open this book. It's cover is awesome, man. That hardcover is legit, man.

• 2:32:42Jocko Willink?

  They asked me like, all right, when would you like to roll out the soft cover? I'm like, uh, never.

• 2:32:46Dave Berke?

  No, that is not a soft cover book, man. It is not.

• 2:32:49Jocko Willink?

  No, there's an iconic picture, they say. Echo says there's an iconic picture. He says the photographer that took the picture had an incredible

• 2:32:58Speaker 02

  day that day.

• 2:32:59Jocko Willink?

  Sense for art.

• 2:33:01Speaker 02

  Okay, I didn't say that.

• 2:33:02Dave Berke?

  For the soft cover?

• 2:33:03Speaker 02

  No, no, no, no.

• 2:33:04Dave Berke?

  Oh, yeah. Say, I don't care what the picture looks like. There's no soft cover.

• 2:33:09Speaker 02

  Well, it is actually, when I said it's an iconic picture, it means less of the notion or the idea that I took a great picture or nothing like this. I'm saying that picture that we took in my hallway, one random night with my cheap camera, became a picture that's kind of representative. Iconic, if you will.

• 2:33:28Jocko Willink?

  Okay, so he's claiming it.

• 2:33:30Speaker 02

  Of, you know, your whole.

• 2:33:31Jocko Willink?

  He's trying to downplay it. It could be called iconic, the picture that I took. One random night, no big deal.

• 2:33:38Speaker 02

  Well, you look at where the work kid, the picture on the back of that one, I took down too. But is that iconic? Maybe not. It didn't push me in that direction necessarily, but the one on the cover of Discipline equals Freedom field manual is.

• 2:33:52Jocko Willink?

  The publisher wanted a picture of me where I looked more approachable.

• 2:33:57Dave Berke?

  The one, the one in the back?

• 2:33:58Jocko Willink?

  The one in the back, over.

• 2:33:59Dave Berke?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 2:33:59Jocko Willink?

  And.

• 2:34:00Dave Berke?

  Hey, there's something about the Warrior Kid books that you didn't mention, though. You said you wrote a kid's book that's for boys and girls.

• 2:34:05Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:06Dave Berke?

  That's actually a book for adults, too.

• 2:34:08Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:08Dave Berke?

  That's what I said. Not just, not just for the adults, there are lessons for the adults, but that book is a great parenting tool. That's what I said. It's a legit parenting tool that I now get to go, is that what Mark would do? What would Uncle Jake say here? And I actually get to parent less now, because I just reference the book. That's, that's no joke, man.

• 2:34:29Jocko Willink?

  It's the ultimate flank.

• 2:34:31Dave Berke?

  It is.

• 2:34:31Jocko Willink?

  It really is, it's the ultimate flank, because here's the problem. Kids do not listen to their parents. Kids listen to a certain percentage of what their parents say, and there's a certain portion of them that is programmed to rebel against you as a parent. They're programmed that way, and the more you fight it, the worse it's gonna get. You come in from the flank, boom. There you go.

• 2:34:53Dave Berke?

  Yeah, it's true.

• 2:34:54Jocko Willink?

  Good point. What about Dave, this is your big night. What about Extreme Ownership? Feedback.

• 2:35:00Dave Berke?

  Feedback.

• 2:35:03Dave Berke?

  I have read that book several times. I've listened to it. I reference the book constantly because of the work that we do, and I get a lot of feedback on that book. That is the book that, when you talk about, when you see it broadly, that quote from Musashi, you start to see it everywhere. That's what that book is.

• 2:35:24Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:25Dave Berke?

  Because, once you tip on that, and once that gets embedded in your DNA, once you start doing that, you will see that everywhere. And, that is what's unique about that book. Yes, sir. The best feedback I've ever gotten on that book, from people we work on today, they say, "It just makes sense."

• 2:35:45Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:47Jocko Willink?

  We have a follow-on to that book coming out. It's called The Dichotomy of Leadership. It's about all those opposing forces you face as a leader, and I talked about the ultimate dichotomy tonight. And so that book comes out September 25th.

• 2:36:01Jocko Willink?

  Also, if you need live training, you need a little bit more than the book, you need a little bit more than the podcasts, you can bring us inside your organization. We have a company called Echelon Front. That's what Dave was talking about tonight. I was talking about tonight. All the companies that we work with, that's what we're talking about. We solve problems through leadership. Boom. Me, Leif, JP, Dave Berke, Flynn Cochran, and now we also have Mike Sorelli in the house.

• 2:36:32Jocko Willink?

  All right. What about the muster?

• 2:36:34Dave Berke?

  Muster six coming up, San Francisco. This will be my fifth muster.

• 2:36:39Jocko Willink?

  Oh, that's right. You missed the first one.

• 2:36:41Dave Berke?

  I did. I did not make the first muster. But this muster, like every other muster, is A, going to be awesome, and B, it's going to sell out.

• 2:36:49Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, actually, it's going to sell out.

• 2:36:51Dave Berke?

  It's almost there. Yeah. I talked to Jimmy just the other day about it. We are tracking way ahead of where we expected. It's going to sell out soon. You got to get on it.

• 2:36:58Jocko Willink?

  Now, because of the muster, we actually designed something else because we wanted to do something. First of all, the muster's got a pretty high price point. It's pretty expensive, and it focuses on real broad leadership across the board. But we have had come to all the musters,

• 2:37:19Jocko Willink?

  law enforcement, military, Border Patrol, firefighters, paramedics, other first responders. We want to do something a little bit, a little bit focused on what they do for a living. So, we have something called the Roll Call. It is September 21st in Dallas, Texas. It's a one-day leadership seminar for everyone out there in uniform. So, if you're a police officer, if you're a firefighter, and we've worked with police officers and firefighters, and we've worked with Border Patrol, and we've worked with military units, and we still do all of that, but if you want to come and get a one-day immersion into the combat leadership principles

• 2:38:03Jocko Willink?

  that we talk about in the book Extreme Ownership that we talk about on this podcast, come to the Roll Call, September 21st in Dallas, Texas. And for both the muster and the Roll Call, you can register for those at extremeownership.com. On top of all of that,

• 2:38:25Jocko Willink?

  We have something now called Echelon Front Overwatch, EFOverwatch.com. And Dave, you've been involved pretty heavily in us standing that up. We are, we, in our business, working with companies, we are always running into companies that need, what do they need? They need good leaders. They need good people. And because of our connections to the military, all of us having spent extended periods of time in the military in special operation as combat pilots, we have connections there. And this is a place where we have an opportunity to bring those two things together.

• 2:39:06Jocko Willink?

  People that want great leaders and people that are great leaders that need jobs. So we're bringing those together. Whether you're somebody that wants to employ people or whether you're looking to be employed as a spec ops individual or a combat pilot, then go to EFOverwatch.com, put your information in there and we will proceed down the line of getting you the best people you can. And I miss anything on EF Overwatch?

• 2:39:36Dave Berke?

  No, it's, it's like you said, and the best thing for the transitioning folks, if you're looking for a new mission, to find your next mission after you transition out of the service, this is the place to do it.

• 2:39:47Jocko Willink?

  Come and get some. And if you want to kind of keep carrying on this conversation with us, virtually, that is until we see you live, either at the muster or at the roll call or at the immersion camp up in Maine, then you can find us all on the interwebs, on Twitter, on Instagram and on Dajah Face and Poki Bo. Dave is at David R. Burke, B-E-R-K-E.

• 2:40:22Speaker 02

  Because that's the thing, I mean, you always forget your own thing. You're like Dave R Burke.

• 2:40:28Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, David R Burke.

• 2:40:30Dave Berke?

  Correct.

• 2:40:31Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's where you are. And you're there, you're there on Twitter and on Instagram.

• 2:40:37Dave Berke?

  Yep.

• 2:40:37Jocko Willink?

  And on that Facebook. Echo is, of course, Echo Charles, and I am at Jaco. Like Echo, anything else?

• 2:40:45Speaker 02

  Nope. Good to see you again, Dave Berke. Actually, you talk about him always texting you about jiu-jitsu and stuff. He calls me too. Same thing. Yeah, yeah, it's great.

• 2:40:54Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's how it is, man.

• 2:40:55Speaker 02

  It's one of those things where you see his name on your phone, you kind of get happy. Just for, you know.

• 2:40:59Jocko Willink?

  You get happy, and you're like, man, was Armlock question, escape at the mouth question.

• 2:41:04Speaker 02

  Yep, all that stuff. Good deal, Dave. Great to see you.

• 2:41:07Jocko Willink?

  Good deal, Dave Berke. Any closing comments?

• 2:41:09Dave Berke?

  Dude, thanks for having me back, man. I could do this all day. I appreciate the chance to talk again and being a part of this is a big deal for me. Thank you.

• 2:41:17Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, man. Awesome to have you on. And again, thanks for everything that you've done for me and done for our freedom as a nation. And I'm sure we will do this many times again in the future. So, yeah, this is just the beginning, my brother, right on. And everyone else in the military that is out there right now protecting our freedom, thank you. And to the first responders, police, law enforcement, Border Patrol, firefighters, paramedics, thanks for keeping us and our families safe. And to everyone else that is listening, thank you. Thank you for listening. Thank you for supporting.

• 2:42:02Jocko Willink?

  And thanks for remembering the heroes that gave their lives so that liberty and democracy

• 2:42:12Jocko Willink?

  can survive.

• 2:42:15Jocko Willink?

  And let the names of the fallen forever, forever be as unperishable as those glorious ideals for which they made the ultimate sacrifice.

• 2:42:35Jocko Willink?

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