300: War is a Racket

Insane profits from war. Smedley Butler. 0:00:00 - Opening 0:21:22 - War is a Racket 2:17:39 - Final thoughts. 2:24:02 - How to stay on THE PATH. 2:41:08 - 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 300 with Echo Charles and me Jocko Willink. Good evening Echo. Good evening. And also joining us tonight, Dave Berke. Good evening, Dave. Good evening.

• 0:13Jocko Willink?

  The Secretary of the Navy takes pleasure in transmitting to First Lieutenant Smedley Darlington Butler, United States Marine Corps, the Brevet Medal, which is awarded in accordance with Marine Corps Order Number 26 for distinguished conduct and public service in the presence of the enemy while serving with Second Battalion of Marines near Chenzin, China on 13 July 1900.

• 0:43Jocko Willink?

  On 28 March 1901, First Lieutenant Butler is appointed Captain by Brevet to take rank from 13 July 1900.

• 0:55Jocko Willink?

  Awarded for actions, War Department, General Orders Number 177, December 4, 1915, the President of the United States of America, in the name of Congress, takes pleasure in presenting the Medal of Honor to Major Smedley Darlington Butler, United States Marine Corps, for distinguished conduct in battle in the engagement of Veracruz, Mexico on 22 April 1914.

• 1:24Jocko Willink?

  Major Butler was eminent and conspicuous in command of his battalion. He exhibited courage and skill in leading his men through the action of the 22nd and in the final occupation of the city.

• 1:40Jocko Willink?

  Awarded for action, the President of the United States of America, in the name of Congress, takes pleasure in presenting the Medal of Honor, Second Award, to Major Smedley Darlington Butler, United States Marine Corps, for extraordinary heroism in action as commanding officer of detachments from the 5th, 13th, 23rd Companies and the Marine and Sailor Detachment from the USS Connecticut. Major Butler led the attack on Fort Riviere, Haiti on 17 November 1915. Following a concentrated drive, several different detachments of Marines gradually closed in on

• 2:22Jocko Willink?

  an old French bastion fort in an effort to cut off all avenues of retreat for the CAKO Bandits.

• 2:31Jocko Willink?

  Reaching the fort on the southern side where there was a small opening in the wall, Major Butler gave the signal to attack and Marines from the 15th Company poured through the breach, engaged the CAKO's in hand-to-hand combat, took the bastion, and crushed the CAKO Resistance. Throughout this perilous action, Major Butler was conspicuous for his bravery and forceful leadership.

• 3:04Jocko Willink?

  So there you go. Major Smedley Butler.

• 3:09Jocko Willink?

  A United States Marine for 34 years. Fought in the Philippines, China, Central America, fought in the Caribbean during the Banana Wars, fought in World War I, although against his wishes, he was more in a support role. He's one of only 19 men in history to receive two Medals of Honor. He's one of only three men to receive the Marine Corps Brevet Medal and the Medal of Honor. And he's the only man in history to receive two Medals of Honor and the Brevet Medal.

• 3:44Jocko Willink?

  And with that career, after he retired from the Marine Corps, he wrote a book called War is a Racket.

• 3:58Jocko Willink?

  You heard that right. War is a racket. This is a book that harshly condemns war, denounces the military-industrial complex, vilifies the captains of industry and politicians along the way, and disparages Americans, America's foreign actions in war.

• 4:22Jocko Willink?

  So there's a bit of an about-face going on.

• 4:26Jocko Willink?

  And these are some extreme views that he has. And when individuals make extreme statements, sometimes that's not the best approach to take. Because sometimes extreme statements, though they may be true, or parts of them may be true, it can also alienate the general populace and kind of kind of lead people to throw the baby out with the bathwater on some stuff. Meaning that they throw away someone's ideas. They throw away all of someone's ideas because some of the ideas that the person has,

• 5:08Jocko Willink?

  or the way that they state them, is in an extreme manner. Which is, I personally don't think it's a good idea. Well, it's a good, it's a good thing to understand. It's a good thing to understand because what that should tell you is that if you, if you back off the extremity of your statements a little bit, you're going to get more people to listen to them. So that's a good thing to understand. And it's also a good thing to understand that if people are talking in a really extreme way, you shouldn't just say, ah, you know what, this person's just crazy, I'm not going to listen to them. Maybe you should actually listen to what they try and say and decipher what's just extreme and maybe not true, but are there kernels of truth in what people are saying? So I think it's a smart idea for us to listen.

• 5:52Jocko Willink?

  And I think as we have watched America's withdrawal from Afghanistan in the late summer of 2021, after 20 years of war, after thousands of lives, after trillions of dollars, and no progress, maybe we should at least listen to what this Marine Major General, Smithley Butler, one of the most decorated Marines that ever lived. Maybe we should listen to some of what he has to say. And see if there are some things in there that make some sense.

• 6:32Jocko Willink?

  We have to get a little basic understanding of Smedley Butler, who he was, where he came from.

• 6:38Jocko Willink?

  Born July 30th, 1881. Elder of three sons. Father was a lawyer and a judge. He came from a good background.

• 6:47Jocko Willink?

  His grandfather was a congressman. And his, and his father was connected. He was a connected guy. And Smedley Butler went to an exclusive private school, which is sort of an east coast thing. I mean, I guess they have them out on the west coast, but on the east coast is a bigger thing. To have exclusive private schools. He went to one called the Havaford School.

• 7:11Jocko Willink?

  And so you kind of get this image, you know, you kind of get this image, okay, well, you know, he's this rich kid that went to this exclusive school. And then you hear that he left school 38 days before his 17th birthday to enlist in the Marine Corps.

• 7:29Jocko Willink?

  Which is, I think we have to give him credit, right? We just have to say credit. That's pretty much what you say, credit.

• 7:37Jocko Willink?

  He still got his diploma. They allowed him to graduate. He lied about his age. And gets commissioned as second lieutenant. So I don't know how he pulled that off. But this is back in the day, man. There's no records. You're just showing up. How old are you? 23? I went to college, whatever. People like, oh, okay. You know what I'm saying? This is back in the day. There's no-

• 7:58Speaker 01

  Isn't that the kind where like your ID card is written in like by half?

• 8:02Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you like change that one to a seven and we're good.

• 8:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, or you just erase it.

• 8:06Jocko Willink?

  Just making adjustments.

• 8:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 8:08Jocko Willink?

  So I feel like I missed out on a lot of stuff in life because I didn't have that kind of. I mean, we were close, you know, but we were just, they were still tracking stuff.

• 8:19Jocko Willink?

  So he's 16 years old and he leaves his high school to go and join the Marine Corps. Shows up, gets a commission as a second lieutenant. And he's, the Spanish-American War is going down. But he gets there a little late. Ends up showing up in Gitmo after it's been invaded, after it's been captured. Doesn't really see any combat. Gets assigned to the, to the Philippine-American War. He shows up there. He's bored at first.

• 8:49Jocko Willink?

  Gets in trouble, gets temporarily, temporarily relieved of command because he's drunk and doing whatever. Gets his job back, however. Um, October 1899, he gets his first combat action. Leads 300 Marines in to take the town of Novaletta. One Marines killed, 10 are wounded, his first sergeants, company first sergeants wounded. There's a little noted about him like panicking at first, a little bit, and then he kind of gets composure.

• 9:21Jocko Willink?

  Ends up in the Boxer Rebellion. So Battle of Chinjin, this is in China. He, he definitely kind of shows up now. There's a wounded Marine officer and he is in the trench.

• 9:35Jocko Willink?

  Smedley Butler's in a trench and he exposes himself to enemy fire. To rescue this Marine, he ends up getting shot in the thigh. His commanding officer, Major Waller, who later became the best man at his wedding. He commended him and wrote, "For such reward as you may deem proper for the following officers, Lieutenant Smedley D. Butler, for the admirable control of his men in all the fights of the week, and for saving a wounded man at the risk of his own life under very severe fire." And that's what got turned into the brevet promotion. Which, which the brevet, um, if my memory serves me correctly, the Marine Corps had it for like maybe 20 years. And it basically was you're getting promoted.

• 10:20Jocko Willink?

  It was a promotion. So that's why even when I read it says, oh, he went from first, from, from first lieutenant to captain. It was a promotion and then they, people that got promoted that way, they eventually got an award. Called the brevet medal. Which looks like the ribbon of a Medal of Honor, you know, the Medal of Honor has the white, it's, it's a light blue. The brevet with light blue with stars, the brevet is red with stars, but it looks very similar as far as the ribbon goes. So he gets that promotion, he ends up in the banana wars.

• 10:54Jocko Willink?

  These are police actions and these are police actions that we're conducting to maintain, you know, trade and, and the way we want things to be, the way America wants things to be in Central America and in the Caribbean. Honduras, rolls into Honduras, he gets tasked with defending the US consulate during a revolt there. He rescues the consulate in Trujillo. He gets this nickname. His nickname is Old Gimlet Eye. Gimlet is a, is a hand drill. It's something that, it's a tool, it's an old school tool that used to drill wood. So he had this piercing look that he would give

• 11:36Jocko Willink?

  people and they called him Old Gimlet Eye. Broken service, gets out, gets married, has kids, runs a coal mine in West Virginia, goes back in Marine Corps. It must've been easy to get out and in and out of the Marine Corps back then. He does it a couple of times. More fighting in Central America. Battalion commander in Nicaragua fought in the Battle of Mazaya,

• 12:05Jocko Willink?

  leads the assault, the bombardment, the assault and the capture of Coyotepe Hill.

• 12:13Jocko Willink?

  Next up is Veracruz. These guys are, he's rolling. I mean, they're doing, they're, they're getting it on with these low intensity conflicts. I remember one of my old senior chiefs said, "What we need is a low intensity conflict in a high per diem area," which I always got a kick out of. So that's what he's got going on. These guys are in low intensity conflict, high per diem area. Mexico, Veracruz, first Medal of Honor. So they end up going through Veracruz. They're kind of clearing it door to door. There's 5,800 sailors and Marines on this operation. Seventeen killed in action, 63 wounded in action, which if you think about that, there's 5,800

• 12:56Jocko Willink?

  sailors and Marines, there's 17 killed. This is, so the, the fighting, I'm trying to say that the fighting wasn't that extreme, but there was medals of honor given out pretty.

• 13:11Jocko Willink?

  Pretty, um, a lot. So, one army guy got a Medal of Honor, nine Marines got a Medal of Honor, and forty-six Navy sailors got the Medal of Honor. From this action at Veracruz. So, he eventually tried to return the medal. And said, "Hey, I didn't do anything to earn this." And they, not only did they tell him to keep it, they told him, "You better wear it too." So, that's his first Medal of Honor. He didn't feel comfortable about it, um, but he got it. Haiti, second Medal of Honor. Fighting the Haitian, the K-Go's rebels, the rebel group down there. And they have this stronghold, you kind of heard me talk about it in the,

• 13:48Jocko Willink?

  in the citation there.

• 13:51Jocko Willink?

  But, he's getting the Medal of Honor, the, the whole battle was twenty minutes long, this assault. There was one Marine wounded, and he was wounded by being hit with a rock in the face.

• 14:04Jocko Willink?

  All fifty-one of the rebels were killed.

• 14:08Jocko Willink?

  So, he got the Medal of Honor for that. And, that's what happened. After that, he became like a public administrator, or sort of, sort of a military, I don't know, mini dictator, kind of running things a little bit. The public works and keeping things, you know, the social order, and he also, it's also said that they hunted the remaining rebels like pigs.

• 14:36Jocko Willink?

  World War I comes around. He requests, he wants to go into combat again.

• 14:44Jocko Willink?

  He had a reputation of being brave, he had a reputation of being smart, he also had a reputation of being a little bit of a, a little bit of a rebel, a little bit unreliable. And, and so, I don't know if that's why they decided not to put him in combat, because I'm thinking if World War I, they would have been like, "Oh yeah, you're just the guy we're looking for. You're brave and you're smart, but you're super crazy? Come on up to the front lines, we got something for you." But, they didn't. He ended up running this debarcation depot, you know, in the rear. And, the, by all accounts, he did a great job, and squared this thing away, it was, it was a real mess when he showed up and he squared it away. And, he got the Army and the Navy Distinguished Service Medal.

• 15:31Jocko Willink?

  After that, he goes and he's the commanding general at Quantico.

• 15:36Jocko Willink?

  When he was the commanding general, this guy was always doing something. He's one of those people like he always was doing something. When he was the commanding general at Quantico, they used to form up the troops and they would march to various battlefields, Civil War battlefields and do reenactments. And he would lead the marches. So, yeah, I mean, he's just, they, they marched from Quantico to damn Gettysburg, right? And he was in front, leading it. And they got up there, let's do, let's do the walk at Gettysburg.

• 16:11Jocko Willink?

  So, so then he's, so he gets done with that. Now he has a broken service.

• 16:16Jocko Willink?

  And he becomes the Philadelphia Director of Public Safety. And, and, and this is like, I might need a movie reference here, Echo Charles. Yes, sir. Uh, what's a movie where they're like gangsters, they're trying to crack down? Untouchables? Sure. Okay. He, so there's, there's, this is the time there's speakeasies and the prohibition is going on. And he comes like law dog, right? He is, he comes into, he has a personal war on crime for two years. And it seems like, when, when you read about it, it seems like it's its own movie, right? This guy is going in just ready to take things on. He wa, he wasn't allowed to fire.

• 16:58Jocko Willink?

  If I remember this correctly, he wasn't allowed, he found out he wasn't allowed to fire individual police because the union and whatever. So what he did was he would just take and just move them all around all the time. So they didn't have, they didn't have time to get, to get to know the local criminals and get paid off. He just moved them all the time. They were moving. That's like one of the things that he did.

• 17:18Jocko Willink?

  And he, he made a lot of enemies because of so many people are corrupt. Made a bunch of enemies. Finally, he gets kind of a little bit, he did, does it for two years. He cleans up a lot of stuff, but also makes a bunch of enemies. His final shot in the papers before he went back in the Marine Corps. He said, cleaning up Philadelphia was worse than any battle I was ever in.

• 17:40Jocko Willink?

  Uh, when he comes back in, he's, comes, comes the base commander in San Diego. Deployed with the Marine Expeditionary Force to China, does a good job there. Politically influences a bunch of people, makes major general at 48 years old.

• 17:58Jocko Willink?

  And in that time also, his dad died, his dad was super influential. He was, like I said, he was always kinda, he always kinda had a spotlight put on him. And one of the things when Mussolini's now in power, he, and there was some weird, like a conspiracy about Mussolini, it hit and run or something like this. I forget, but he sort of spread those rumors. You know, I think if he had Twitter, he would have been a real popular Twitter dude. Because he started spreading this guy, you know, this guy's a murderer and. And the Italian government, this was before the war, and the Italian government was like, hey, get, get your boy in check, and they pressured the SecNav to, to court martial Butler.

• 18:42Jocko Willink?

  And they did, they court martial Butler. I think he was the highest ranking military person to be arrested after the Civil War. So he got arrested and he apologized, and they let him off of the reprimand. Um, the commandant of the Marine Corps died at the time, and he was kind of in the running. And he ends up, it's pretty obvious that he's a, he's not enough of a company guy to get commandant, and he doesn't get it. So he retires from the Marine Corps, October 1st, 1931. He starts going on like a lecture tour, speaking. And he gets paid for it, he donates a bunch of the pay that he gets for the unemployment relief.

• 19:26Jocko Willink?

  He runs for senate, he loses. He supports the Bonus Army, which was when the World War I vets. They had these things called service certificates that they, that they bought. And when they bought those things, they had, again, I'm, I'm sorry if this isn't perfect, but it was something along the lines of, when you bought these things, they had like a 20-year maturity time on them. And the depression's going on, and everyone's like, hey, we want that money. And all these veterans, thousands and thousands of veterans are, are saying, hey, we, you know, we gave you that money, we bought those service certificates, which are like bonds. We want, we want to cash them in now.

• 20:08Jocko Willink?

  And the government was like, hey, those are 20 years, man, you bought those in 19, you got another, you got another few years before you can cash those things in. And this is when they had all the, the big standoffs in the, you know, the, the World War I veterans marched down and set up camp in Washington DC, and he, he supported that.

• 20:28Jocko Willink?

  Gave more speeches. Uh, here's a, here's an example. This is what, is when we know where he's heading mentally, right? I don't mean that in a bad way. I mean, we can see what his angle starts to become. This was, and this was a, a summary of one of his speeches that was published in Socialist Magazine. That was called Common Sense. It says, "I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period, I spent most of my time as a high-class muscle man for big business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.

• 21:05Jocko Willink?

  I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico, which is a city in Mexico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902 to 1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927, I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested.

• 21:50Jocko Willink?

  Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents."

• 22:04Jocko Willink?

  So he's kind of pissed.

• 22:07Jocko Willink?

  1934, again, this guy would have been all over Twitter. 1934, he's sort of the leader of this thing that was called the business plot, which was this, that there's this, this conspiracy, that there was this plot for business leaders to overthrow President Roosevelt.

• 22:27Jocko Willink?

  And in 1935, he wrote this book called War Is A Racket. Now, we're gonna read it.

• 22:41Jocko Willink?

  Some of it's extreme. Some of it may be too extreme. Some of it's not accurate. Some of it's his feelings, his emotions.

• 22:52Jocko Willink?

  You know, in Colonel David Hackworth, when he went and talked to the press?

• 23:06Jocko Willink?

  And you and I have had that discussion, Dave, like, did he give up his influence? He could have been a division commander or brigade commander next and a division commander. And, and I think people sometimes reach a point where they emotionally can't take it anymore. And I think David Hackworth got there where he had had seen enough American soldiers and he loved, so he loved his soldiers and he loved all soldiers and he loved the army. And just to see the soldiers being utilized in a way that he didn't think was tactically sound, eventually he just couldn't take it anymore.

• 23:39Jocko Willink?

  And I think that Major General Smedley Butler got to a similar point.

• 23:48Jocko Willink?

  And of course, this is 1935. So, I mean, we got Hitler in power in 1933. So he sees, though, he hears the war drums beating. And as he sees the war drums beating, he doesn't like it. What are your thoughts so far, Dave?

• 24:05Speaker 02

  It's interesting to hear you recount some things that I remember. Because obviously, as a Marine, this is one of the characters in the history of the Marine Corps that you are, are given early on.

• 24:17Jocko Willink?

  So they give it, they give you Smedley Butler early on.

• 24:19Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 24:20Jocko Willink?

  Is there, is there not risk in that? Aren't they like, wow? The weird thing was, the weird, the Medal of Honors, right? Look, I'm in no position to be like, well, I'm not sure. But when 46 Navy sailors got a Medal of Honor and there's 17 killed in action, like, that's a,

• 24:40Jocko Willink?

  that, that seems very...

• 24:43Jocko Willink?

  That seems, that seems strange.

• 24:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure.

• 24:46Jocko Willink?

  Seems strange.

• 24:47Speaker 02

  And that's the, that's really kind of the point that I'm thinking about in my mind is, you know, there's a little bit of a contrast.

• 24:55Speaker 02

  This is a guy that you, you hear about. And certainly in, and listen, you could, I mean, I gotta be careful with my words too, because I don't want there to be a negative connotation to it, but there's a, there's an indoctrination you go through when you're a Marine. And that indoctrination is, we're kind of awesome. And our history is pretty awesome. And we've got some amazing people that did some amazing things. And you start to think about who those people are. One of the things that's interesting about the name Smedley Butler is when you see the pictures of this guy, and like, you'll be in a class and it'll be about Marine Corps history, and they'll literally have a slide or a picture up on the wall of the person. And he's not, he doesn't really look like a, a, I guess.

• 25:33Jocko Willink?

  He looks like.

• 25:33Speaker 02

  Poster boy Marine.

• 25:34Jocko Willink?

  He looks like a guy named Smedley.

• 25:35Speaker 02

  He does. And that went to a, maybe a private school, East Coast. And, and then, you know, you're, you're seeing Basilone, and you're seeing Chesty in these pictures, and just the pictures alone are enough to be like, okay, this, this dude is legit. But, you know, they also, I, I, I don't have any recollection of, of the things that he did and the times that he did them and the awards. I don't ever remember being given sort of the other side of it. It was, hey, listen, it was a different time, different circumstances. So, as I hear you talk about that, and I'm listening to that, I just did some basic math, you know, 5,600 people, and then you sort of did the W wounded and killed. I'm like, well, I've seen that. I know what the middle or, or more of the other side of that looks like. And those numbers are good numbers.

• 26:18Speaker 02

  You know, by, by, by standards, like you said, this is probably not the most high intensity thing that, that, that Marines have been through. But the other side is, is, this is also, you just said he's 48 years old, he's a major general, this is a guy that went back in the Marine Corps twice, this is a guy that left high school, and by rights could have probably just coasted on a pretty easy life. So you're kind of forced to reconcile in your mind that, I, I think, to maybe the whole point of this podcast is that I probably need to listen to what he has to say. But yeah, no, he's, he's, he is one of the characters that, and I'm using that term just, you know, to illustrate that we are introduced to historic Marines that have, have had impact in history, and that's someone that you, we know about, for sure.

• 27:03Jocko Willink?

  We could probably do a whole podcast about awards and whatnot, but I forget what year like the Bronze Star and the Silver Star, it wasn't, they didn't have those yet at this time, I think. And so this was, if you were gonna get an award, it was gonna be the Medal of Honor. And there you go. Again, it's like crazy because you've got this guy that has two medals, two medals of honor and this Marine Corps brevet thing, which there's, there's not many of those things handed out either. It's, it's a tiny number. And, and also, the type of combat that they were going into, I mean, this is pre-World War I is the combat he's talking about. So combat was totally different between, ah, you know what, I mean, you got the Civil War, we knew what combat

• 27:48Jocko Willink?

  was, but, but, um, yeah, there'd been, there'd been a generation, maybe that was a little bit, that, that hadn't quite been there.

• 27:57Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I think the sense that I've always had was that, that when you think of conflict, or you think of combat, and you think of World War I, it has a very strong sense of organized conflict between two well-established, well-organized sides, sides that have design and structure and, and components that you can almost align against each other. And that certainly for World War I produces probably like the most heavy intensity of conflict. Whereas before that, you have this sense of this well-organized team, the United States Navy, the United States Marine Corps, the organization of those two working together where we're gonna get you to the beach, you're gonna embark, and you're gonna, or, or, or debark and get onto the land,

• 28:38Speaker 02

  and we're gonna support you. And, but the, the, the people you're in conflict with don't have that level of organization. So when you said, um, you know, one wounded on the good side and 57 killed, I'm like, I can, and again, I should be careful.

• 28:52Jocko Willink?

  Wounded by a rock.

• 28:54Speaker 02

  But you can picture that, like, this is a lopsided scenario. And it doesn't mean that, that weren't incredibly brave actions that didn't happen to solicit that outcome. But when you think of World War I and World War II, or really conflicts we've had since then, that organized versus organized, you don't get those sense of that long period of Marine Corps history. And those are all in Marine Corps history. We, we've learned about all those things. But you don't get a sense of this force on force conflict.

• 29:19Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 29:19Speaker 02

  That we're traditional.

• 29:20Jocko Willink?

  The near peer, um, world war one, world war two. We're going against someone that's pretty much like we are.

• 29:26Speaker 02

  Professionally trained, professionally outfitted and prepared for, for this type of conflict.

• 29:31Jocko Willink?

  Check. So he writes this book, War is a Racket. And people, people, I, I don't know. I've had this book for five years. In fact, I couldn't even find, I have two copies of it and I haven't, I wasn't able to find them. So you can get this thing on PDF.

• 29:46Jocko Willink?

  And the reason I couldn't find him is because of the moving scenario. I've been calling through, so all my books are in big giant boxes. And I was like, it's time to do it. And yeah, what, what makes it time to do it? Cause well, one of the things that just totally provoked me was a trillion dollar price tag on Afghanistan and thousands of lives lost. And you're thinking, hold on a second. Who, what was, what was the overall goal here? Because if I, I could spend a trillion dollars and do literally anything. You give me a trillion dollars, a trillion dollars. You're telling me you couldn't square away a country with a trillion dollars in 20 years?

• 30:27Jocko Willink?

  And basically an unlimited supply of people and, and assets. It's crazy. So what was going on? So as I'm thinking about that, here I am, a guy that's, that supports the military. That is very patriotic. And I'm thinking, who spends a trillion dollars? And, and doesn't, doesn't get the job done. How's that happen? Who are you? What are you thinking about? What is your ultimate goal? And that very quickly, my mind very quickly jumped on, oh, this is probably what Smedley, Smedley. But now I'd read War is a Racket. I was always kind of like, yeah, well, yeah, I mean, that's one way of looking at it, right? So let's look at it.

• 31:11Jocko Willink?

  Here we go, chapter one, war is a racket. It always has been.

• 31:16Jocko Willink?

  It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.

• 31:32Jocko Willink?

  A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to be to the majority of the people. Only a small inside group knows what it's about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the very many. Out of war, a few people make huge fortunes.

• 31:57Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 31:59Jocko Willink?

  If we're just gonna fact check this thing as we go. So far, we are factual, right? That's what a racket is, right? A racket is something where a couple of people kind of know what's going on, everyone else is getting fooled. The couple of people insiders are gonna make a bunch of money. Other people are kind of gonna get screwed. That's what's gonna happen.

• 32:18Jocko Willink?

  In war, there are people that make a lot of money.

• 32:26Jocko Willink?

  He calls it the world war because there was only one at the time. In the world war,

• 32:31Jocko Willink?

  a mere handful garnered the profits of the conflict. At least 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires were made in the United States during the world war.

• 32:42Jocko Willink?

  That many admitted their huge blood gains, or sorry, that many admitted their huge blood gains in their income tax returns. How many other war millionaires falsified their tax returns, no one knows. Okay, so a lot of people made a lot of money in the war. I just saw an article that there's several billion dollars in taxes that are avoided by the top 1% earners in this country. So are there people that are doing things to get around taxes? Yes.

• 33:18Jocko Willink?

  Were there people that were made into millionaires and billionaires after September 11th? Yes, there were.

• 33:29Jocko Willink?

  Next, how many of these war millionaires shouldered a rifle?

• 33:35Jocko Willink?

  How many of them dug a trench? How many of them knew what it meant to go hungry in a rat-infested dugout? How many of them spent sleepless, frightened nights ducking shells and shrapnel and machine gun bullets? How many of them parried a bayonet thrust of an enemy?

• 33:54Jocko Willink?

  How many of them were wounded or killed in battle?

• 34:01Jocko Willink?

  Rhetorical questions that I think we all know the answer to.

• 34:07Jocko Willink?

  Not many.

• 34:13Jocko Willink?

  Out of war, nations acquire additional territory if they are victorious. They just take it. This newly acquired territory promptly is exploited by the few. The self-same few who wrung dollars out of blood in the war. The general public shoulders the bill.

• 34:34Jocko Willink?

  Fact check.

• 34:36Jocko Willink?

  Kind of negative on this one.

• 34:40Jocko Willink?

  I mean, America, speaking of America, we haven't, we've, we, we, we kind of are established what we have territory-wise, and we haven't taken any new territory in recent wars. That's not been our goal.

• 34:58Jocko Willink?

  So, and even, you know, the, the idea that, oh, we're just going in there to take the oil. We don't actually go in and take the oil. It doesn't, it hasn't happened.

• 35:14Jocko Willink?

  And what is the bill?

• 35:17Jocko Willink?

  This bill renders a horrible accounting.

• 35:21Jocko Willink?

  Newly placed gravestones, mangled bodies, shattered minds, broken hearts and homes, economic instability, depression and all its attendant miseries. Backbreaking taxation for generations and generations.

• 35:42Jocko Willink?

  Factually true.

• 35:47Jocko Willink?

  Horrible accounting.

• 35:53Jocko Willink?

  And taxation to pay for these wars for generations.

• 36:01Jocko Willink?

  For a great many years as a soldier, I had a suspicion that war was a racket. Not until I retired to civil life did I fully realize it. Now that I see the international war clouds gathering as they are today, I must face it and speak out.

• 36:17Jocko Willink?

  And again, that's because he's looking at World War II. What do you call them? The war clouds. Again, they are choosing sides. France and Russia met and agreed to stand by side by side. Italy and Austria hurried to make a similar agreement. Poland and Germany cast cast sheep's eyes at each other, forgetting for the nonce their dispute over the Polish corridor. I had to look up what nonce was. It means, uh, it means like a one time, a one time deal. Just, hey, we're just going to forget about our dispute over here because we're going to be friends right now.

• 36:53Jocko Willink?

  The assassination of King Alexander of Yugoslavia, complicated matters, Yugoslavia and Hungary, long bitter enemies were almost at each other's throats. Italy was ready to jump in, but France was waiting. So was Czechoslovakia. All of them are looking ahead to war. Not the people.

• 37:11Jocko Willink?

  Not those who fight and pay and die, only those who foment wars and remain safely at home

• 37:19Jocko Willink?

  to profit.

• 37:27Jocko Willink?

  What do you got?

• 37:31Jocko Willink?

  You gonna fact check that?

• 37:32Speaker 02

  No, no, no, no. That's, yeah. Um, um. I'm kind of sitting here listening to you talk, which is his work.

• 37:40Jocko Willink?

  Have you read this before?

• 37:40Speaker 02

  No, I have not. And so that's why this is like a

• 37:42Jocko Willink?

  It's hard.

• 37:43Speaker 02

  This is hard. And so, I mean, I wrote down a bunch of different notes. The last one I just wrote down was was just literally the word angry. Like, and I don't think you're trying to convey that emotion on purpose. It's literally the words that you are reading. If you just If you try to put yourself in his shoes, and I was just kind of recounting, we were talking about low intensity conflict and maybe the things that happened up until prior to World War I. And I did think of something after I was talking a minute ago about, you know, the word low intensity conflict. I do remember the first time I was shot at, like for real. And there's a moment when you're the one who is, you know, the victim or the potential

• 38:25Speaker 02

  victim here. It feels like World War III because when you're the one being shot, it doesn't really matter the scope of what's going around you. That sense of things like, oh damn, those people are there trying to kill me and they're actually pretty darn close. You don't say, well, you know, in the grand scheme of historical things, this is a very low intensity conflict and this particular engagement isn't, you don't think like that. You think, okay, this is a big deal. This is a huge deal. And then with you, if you observe that and you're in his shoes and you lead up to the travesty of World War I, I'm just trying to be empathetic to the level of frustration you would have at the hands of a few number of decision makers, both military and civilian, by the way, when we talked about World War I. It's not hard for me to try to understand that

• 39:10Speaker 02

  as he said, I'm just almost picturing him writing this down and just the frustration and the anger that he has and how clearly that's coming through and hearing you say his, the words that he's saying, that it's hard not to get a sense of his frustration. And you've even talked about with Hackworth, is it where you just kind of boil over, you're not able to really even articulate yourself, I don't mean to say correctly, but, but the way that you would normally want to, when you can keep your emotions in check, which you can't.

• 39:39Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and I know you got a, you found it very interesting when we did, when we talked about B H L Delhart, just the fact, like, once you realized he was in the Battle of Psalm, you're like, oh, okay. So this guy has a totally different perspective, which is completely grounded and, and fermented in what he experienced on the battlefield. And yeah, this is a, yeah, it's definitely, it's definitely a similar, a similar deal.

• 40:10Jocko Willink?

  Moving on, there are 40 million men under arms in the world today. So this again, this is 1935. And our statesmen and diplomats have the temerity to say that war is not in the making. Hell's bells. Are these 40 million men being trained to be dancers?

• 40:27Jocko Willink?

  Not in Italy, to be sure. Premier Mussolini knows what they are being trained for. He at least is frank enough to speak out. Only the other day, Il Duce, in international conciliation, the publication of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said, quote, "And above all, fascism, the more it considers and observes the future and the development of humanity, quite apart from political considerations of the moment, believes neither in the possibility nor the utility of perpetual peace. War alone brings up to its highest tension all human energy and puts the stamp of nobility upon the people who have the courage to meet it." End quote.

• 41:14Jocko Willink?

  That's a...

• 41:17Jocko Willink?

  It's one thing for Ronald Reagan to say peace through strength and hey, we've got to be strong and we've got to, you know, the best way to avoid war is to be prepared for it. But when you got Mussolini just saying, hey, there's, I don't believe in the possibility or the, or the freaking utility of peace. War alone brings to its highest tension all human energy?

• 41:41Jocko Willink?

  And puts the stamp of nobility upon the people who have the courage to meet it? That's the leader of your country? Guess what's happening? You're going to war.

• 41:48Speaker 02

  You're going to war.

• 41:51Jocko Willink?

  Undoubtedly Mussolini means exactly what he says. His well-trained army, his great fleet of planes, and even his navy are ready for war. Anxious for it, apparently. His recent stand at the side of Hungary in the latter's dispute with Yugoslavia showed that. And the hurried mobilization of troops on the Austrian border after the assassination of Dolphus showed it too.

• 42:15Jocko Willink?

  There are others in Europe who's saber rattling Prasage's war sooner or later. Herr Hitler, with his rearming Germany and his constant demands for more and more arms, is an equal, if not greater, menace to peace. France only recently increased the term of military service for its youth from a year to 18 months. All this stuff is going on, he's just tracking it. He sees everybody's just heading to war. Yes, all over, nations are camping in their arms. The mad dogs of Europe are on the loose. In the Orient, the maneuvering is more adroit. Back in 1904, when Russia and Japan fought, we kicked our old friends, the Russians, and backed Japan.

• 43:00Jocko Willink?

  Then our very generous international bankers were financing Japan. Now the trend is to poison us against the Japanese. What does the open door policy to China mean to us? Our trade with China is about $90 million a year. Or the Philippine Islands. We have spent about $600 million in the Philippines in 35 years. And we, our bankers and industrialists and speculators, have private investments there of less than 200 million. Then, to save China, to save that China trade of about 90 million and to protect these private investments of less than 200 in the Philippines, we would all be stirred up to hate Japan and go to war.

• 43:40Jocko Willink?

  A war that might well cost us tens of billions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of American lives, and many more hundreds of thousands of physically maimed and mentally unbalanced men. Of course, for this loss, there would be a compensating profit. Fortunes would be made, millions and billions of dollars would be piled up by a few. Munitions makers, bankers, shipbuilders, manufacturers, meat packers, speculators, they would fare well.

• 44:19Jocko Willink?

  Yes, they are getting ready for another war. Why shouldn't they? It pays high dividends.

• 44:25Jocko Willink?

  But what does it profit the men who are killed? What does it profit their mothers and sisters, their wives and their sweethearts? What does it profit their children? What does it profit anyone except the very few to whom war means huge profits? Yes, and what does it profit the nation? So.

• 44:56Jocko Willink?

  I kinda have my thoughts on all this that I'm gonna save a little bit. But. What's, what's, what's the, the? I would say the methodology of the argument that he's presenting is to show one side of the argument, which is, it's a good, it's a good argument. I mean, you can't, you can't really. You can't really come at this argument. You can't say, well, people aren't gonna make money. No, people make money. That's what happens.

• 45:30Speaker 02

  And that by itself isn't automatically a bad thing either.

• 45:34Jocko Willink?

  This is true. That's the other, that's the other part. That's what I'm saying like this. There's.

• 45:38Speaker 02

  I know you've got thoughts on this, and I gotta be careful. I could probably chime in like I usually do in every single thing that's said, and there's thoughts going through my head like crazy. Yes. Yeah, I mean, there are profiteers and there are people that profit and, and if I'm using the terms correctly, you can distinguish between those two.

• 45:53Jocko Willink?

  Right, and they can be aligned.

• 45:56Speaker 02

  For sure. I mean, it's easy for me to sit here in retrospect, but it's like, hey, Hitler, Mussolini? Yeah, we probably wanna go to all of those people now. Not let them do what they want. That's not a good plan, and I know this now, sitting here, looking back. But you're right, and, and. I think to your point. His perspective is. Correct. It's not the whole story, but it's a perspective that.

• 46:20Jocko Willink?

  What he sees and the way he's presenting it is correct.

• 46:23Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 46:23Jocko Willink?

  It's just that there is more to it.

• 46:25Speaker 02

  There's more to it.

• 46:26Jocko Willink?

  And, and as you said, there's nothing more obvious than that than a guy named Adolf Hitler.

• 46:30Speaker 02

  Right.

• 46:31Jocko Willink?

  That's about to go on a tear.

• 46:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 46:33Jocko Willink?

  And kill millions of people.

• 46:35Speaker 02

  And it's interesting. He's using him like, hey, he might be worse than this other guy. Yeah, he might be.

• 46:39Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, 1935, he didn't seem so bad compared to Mussolini.

• 46:44Jocko Willink?

  He's gonna give a little example here. Take our own case. Until 1898, we didn't own a bit of territory outside the mainland of North America. At that time, our national debt was a little more than a billion dollars. Then we became internationally minded. We forgot or shunted aside the advice of the father of our country. We forgot George Washington's warning about entangling alliances. We went to war. We acquired outside territory at the end of the world war period. As a direct result of our fiddling in international affairs, our national debt had jumped to over 25 billion.

• 47:19Jocko Willink?

  Our total favorable trade balance during the 25 year period was about 24 billion. Therefore, on a purely bookkeeping basis, we ran a little behind year for year. And that foreign trade might as well have been ours without the wars.

• 47:38Jocko Willink?

  Again, when you just look at the numbers, run the numbers.

• 47:43Jocko Willink?

  Man, we were a billion dollars in debt and now we're 25 billion dollars in debt. That hurts.

• 47:50Jocko Willink?

  It would have been far cheaper, not to say safer, for the average American who pays the bills to stay out of forward entanglements. For very few, this racket like bootlegging and other underworld rackets brings fancy profits. But the cost of operations is always transferred to the people who do not profit. And now we get into chapter two, who makes the profits? The world war, rather our brief participation in it, has cost the United States some 52 billion dollars. Figure it out. That means $400 to every American man, woman and child. And we haven't paid the debt yet. We are paying it. Our children will pay it and our children's children probably still will be paying the cost of that war.

• 48:34Jocko Willink?

  The normal profits of a business concern in the United States are 6, 8, 10, and sometimes 12%. But wartime profits, ah, that is another matter. 20, 60, 100, 300, and even 1,800%. The sky is the limit. All that traffic will bear. Uncle Sam has the money. Let's get it.

• 48:58Jocko Willink?

  Of course, it isn't put that cruelly in wartime. It is dressed into speeches about patriotism, love of country, and quote, "We must all put our shoulders to the wheel." But the profits jump and leap and skyrocket and are safely pocketed. Let's just take a few examples. Take our friends, the DuPonts, the powder people.

• 49:21Jocko Willink?

  Didn't one of them testify before a senate committee recently that their powder won the war or saved the world or saved the world for democracy or something? How did they do in the war? They were a patriotic corporation. Well, the average earnings of the DuPonts for the period of 1910 to 1914 was six million dollars a year. It wasn't much, but the DuPonts managed to get along. Now let's look at their average yearly profit during the war years, 1914 to 1918. Fifty-eight million dollars of profit a year, we find. Nearly 10 times that of normal times, and the profits of normal times were pretty good. An increase of profits more than 950%.

• 50:05Jocko Willink?

  Take one of our little steel companies that patriotically shunted aside the making of rails and girders and bridges to manufacture war materials. Well, their 1910 to 1914 yearly earnings averaged $6 million. Then came the war, and like loyal citizens, Bethlehem Steel promptly turned to munitions making. Did their profits jump? Or did they let Uncle Sam in for a bargain? Well, their 1914 to 1918 average was $49 million a year. Or let's take United Steel. Normal earnings during the five-year period prior to the war were $105 million a year. Not bad. Then came along the war and up went the profits. The average yearly profit for the period 1914 to 1918 was 240 million. Not bad.

• 50:49Jocko Willink?

  Then you have some of the steel and powder earnings. Let's look at something else, a little copper perhaps. That always does well in war times. Anaconda, for instance. Average yearly earnings during the pre-year wars of 1910 to 1914, $10 million. During the war years, 1914 to 1918, profits leapt to $34 million a year. Utah Copper, average of $5 million during the pre-war period, jumped to an average of 21 million yearly profits for the war period.

• 51:20Jocko Willink?

  Let's group these five with three similar companies. The total yearly average profits of the pre-war period, 1910 to 1914, were 137 million. Then came along the war. The average yearly profits for this group skyrocketed to 408 million. A little increase in profits of approximately 200%. Does war pay? It paid them. But they aren't the only ones. There are still others. Let's take leather. For a three-year period, the, before the war, the total profits of Central Leather Company were 3.5 million. That was approximately 1.16 million dollars a year.

• 52:02Jocko Willink?

  Well, in 1916, Central Leather returned a profit of 15 million, a small increase of 1,100%. That's all. A general chemical, the General Chemical Company averaged a profit for three years before the war of a little over 800,000 dollars a year. Came the war and profits jumped to 12 million dollars a year, a lead of 1,400%. International Nickel Company, you can't have a war without nickel, showed an increase in profits from a mere 4 million dollars a year to 73 million dollars a year. Not bad. An increase of 1,700%. American Sugar Refining Company averaged 2 million dollars a year for three years before the war in 1916, a profit of 6 million dollars was recorded. Listen to Senate Document Number 259, the 65th Congress, Congress, reporting on corporate

• 52:48Jocko Willink?

  earnings and government revenues, considering the profits of 122 meat packers, 153 cotton manufacturers, 299 garment makers, 49 steel plants, 340 coal producers during the war. Profits under 25% were exceptional. For instance, the coal companies made between 100% and 7,800% on their capital stock during the war. The Chicago Packers doubled and tripled their earnings. Let us not forget the bankers who financed the Great War. If anyone cream, if anyone had the cream of the profits, it was the bankers, being partnerships rather than incorporated organizations, they did not have to report to stockholders, and their profits were as secret as they were immense.

• 53:30Jocko Willink?

  How the bankers made their millions and billions, I do not know, because those little secrets never become public, even before a Senate investor investigatory body.

• 53:44Jocko Willink?

  People make money. I mean, and part of that is supply and demand. And one of the reasons that America does so well during war is because we have capitalism. And that's how we're able to outproduce other countries. Even, especially companies that have socialized or communist controlled industry. They just can't do what we do. Why? Because they're not driven to do it. There's no, hey, look, I'm running this factory for whatever. For the Soviet Union, they want me to make 100 tanks. They want me to make 200 tanks. I'm going to get the same paycheck regardless. And if I'm a guy, whatever, working on the fabrication of one of those tank treads,

• 54:27Jocko Willink?

  I don't care if I make 20 today, or if I make 100 today. I'm going to get the same paycheck. So, these people are going to make a lot of money because they're going to turn out something that is in high demand.

• 54:45Jocko Willink?

  Here's how some other patriotic industrialists and speculators chiseled their way into war profits. Take the shoe people. They like war. It brings business with abnormal profits. They made huge profits in sales abroad to our allies. Perhaps like the munitions manufacturers and armor makers, they also sold to the enemy. For a dollar is a dollar, whether it comes from Germany or from France. But they did well by Uncle Sam too. For instance, they sold Uncle Sam 35 million pairs of hobnailed service shoes. So that's a big number. There were 4 million soldiers, 8 pairs or more to a soldier. My regiment during the war had only one pair to soldier.

• 55:27Jocko Willink?

  Per soldier. Some of these shoes probably are still in existence. They were good shoes. But when the war was over, Uncle Sam has a matter of 25 million pairs of shoes left over, bought and paid for, profits recorded and pocketed. And this is, you should start getting into the idea of just like the government waste. And it's just the crazy, crazy government waste. Which is why the free market is so powerful. Because people try and streamline things. There was a lot of leather left, so the leather people sold your Uncle Sam hundreds of thousands of McClellan saddles for the cavalry. But there wasn't any American cavalry overseas. Somebody had to get rid of this leather, however. Somebody had to make a profit in it. So we had a lot of McClellan saddles.

• 56:12Jocko Willink?

  We probably still do. Also, somebody made a lot of mosquito netting. They sold Uncle Sam 20 million mosquito nets for the use of soldiers overseas. I suppose the boys were expected to put it over them as they tried to sleep in muddy trenches. One hand scratching cooties on their backs and the others making passes at scurrying rats. Well, not one of these mosquito nets ever got to France. Anyhow, these thoughtful manufacturers wanted to make sure that no soldier would be without his mosquito net. So 40 million additional yards of mosquito netting were sold to Uncle Sam. You know why? Because you're not spending your own money. You're not spending your own money. When you're not spending your own money, man, you spend it on stuff. Because it's

• 56:54Jocko Willink?

  really easy to, you know what? They might need them. You know what? Let's get them. And all politics are loco. And who knows who was putting in those, where those mosquito nets were made? These were pretty good profits in mosquito netting in those days, even if there were no mosquitoes in France. I suppose if the war had lasted just a little bit longer, the enterprising mosquito netting manufacturers would have sold Uncle Sam a couple of consignments of mosquitoes to plant in France so that more mosquito netting would be in order. Airplane and air and engine manufacturers felt they too should adjust their profits out of this war. Why not? Everybody else is getting theirs. So a billion dollars, count them if you live long enough, was spent by Uncle Sam in building airplane engines that

• 57:36Jocko Willink?

  never left the ground. Not one plane or motor out of the billion dollars worth ordered ever got into battle in France. Just the same, the manufacturers made their little profit of 30, 100, or perhaps 300%. Remember the fraud, waste, and abuse hotline? Apparently, they didn't have that. Like in the military, Echo Charles, they got a thing called the fraud, waste, and abuse hotline. You can call up and say, hey, we're buying plane engines. We got them lined up. We're not using them. We're buying mosquito nets. We're not using them.

• 58:10Speaker 02

  Did anyone actually use that? Or do you know of anyone who?

• 58:13Jocko Willink?

  I never used it. Did you ever use it, Dave?

• 58:14Speaker 02

  I never use it, but I know the sticker on the wall.

• 58:16Jocko Willink?

  I know. If I would have had to use it, I probably would have used it on my tasking or my platoon for the money we were wasting on ammunition. Just slaying ammunition.

• 58:28Jocko Willink?

  Undershirts for soldiers cost 14 cents to make. And Uncle Sam paid 30 to 40 cents each for them. A nice little profit for the undershirt manufacturer and the stocking manufacturer, the uniform manufacturers, and the cap manufacturer, and the steel helmet manufacturers all got theirs. Why? When the war was over, some 4 million sets of equipment, knapsacks and the things that go to fill them, crammed warehouses on this side. Now they are being scrapped because the regulations have changed the contents. But the manufacturers collected their wartime profits on them and they will do it all over again next time.

• 58:58Jocko Willink?

  There were lots of brilliant ideas for making profit during the war. One very versatile patriot sold Uncle Sam 12 dozen 48-inch wrenches. Oh, they were very nice wrenches. The only trouble was that there was only one nut ever made that was large enough for these wrenches. That's the one that holds the turbines at Niagara Falls. Well, after Uncle Sam had bought them and manufactured, and the manufacturer had profited from them, the wrenches were put on freight cars and shunted all around the United States in an effort to find a use for them. When the armistice was signed, it was indeed a sad blow to the wrench manufacturer. He was just about to make some nuts to fit the wrenches. Then he planned to sell those to, to your Uncle Sam.

• 59:39Jocko Willink?

  Still another brilliant idea that the colonels shouldn't ride in automobiles, nor should they even ride on horseback. One has probably seen a picture of Andy Jackson riding on a buckboard. Well, some 6,000 buckboards were sold to Uncle Sam for the use by colonels. Not one of them was used. The buckboard manufacturer got his war profit. Buckboard is like a wagon. It's like a carriage with leaf springs to be towed behind a horse, 6,000 of them.

• 1:00:10Jocko Willink?

  The shipbuilders felt they should come on, on some of it too. They built a lot of ships that they made a lot of profit, more than $3 billion worth. Some of the ships were alright. But 635 million worth of them were made of wood that wouldn't float. The seams opened up and they sank. We paid for them though, and somebody pocketed the profits. It's been estimated by statisticians and economists and researchers that the war cost your Uncle Sam $52 billion. Of this sum, 39 billion was expended in the actual war itself. This expenditure yielded $16 billion in profits. That is how the 21,000 billionaires and millionaires got that way.

• 1:00:50Jocko Willink?

  This $16 billion in profits is not to be sneezed at. It's quite a tidy sum and it went to a very few. The Senate Committee probe of the munitions industry and its wartime profits, despite its sensational closers, hardly had scratched the surface. Even so, it's had some effect. The State Department had been studying for some time, methods of keeping out of war. The War Department suddenly decides it has a wonderful plan to spring. The administration names a committee with the War Navy Departments ably represented under the chairmanship of a Wall Street speculator to limit profits in wartime. To what extent isn't suggested? Hmm.

• 1:01:30Jocko Willink?

  Possibly the profits of 300 and 600 and 1600% of those who turned blood into gold in World War, in the World War, would be limited to some smaller figure.

• 1:01:42Jocko Willink?

  Apparently, however, the plan does not call for any limitation of losses. That is the losses of those who fight the war. As far as I have been able to ascertain, there is nothing in this scheme to limit a soldier to the loss of but one eye, or one arm, or to limit his wounds to one, or two, or three, or to limit the loss of life. There's nothing in this scheme, apparently, that says not more than 12% of a regiment shall be wounded in battle, or not more than 7% of a division shall be killed.

• 1:02:14Jocko Willink?

  Of course, the committee cannot be bothered with such trifling matters.

• 1:02:19Jocko Willink?

  So they put together a committee and say, "Well, you know, they're making a little too much money. We should put a limit on how much money they can make."

• 1:02:27Jocko Willink?

  Possibly limit those war profits.

• 1:02:35Jocko Willink?

  Chapter 3. Who pays the bills? Who provides the profits? These nice little profits of 20, 100, 300, 1500, 1800%? We all pay them in taxation. We paid the bankers their profits when we bought Liberty Bonds at $100 and sold them back at 84 or 86 to the bankers. These bankers collected $100 plus. It was a simple manipulation. The bankers controlled the security markets. It was easy for them to depress the price of these bonds. Then all of us, the people, got frightened and sold the bonds at 84, 86. The bankers bought them.

• 1:03:15Jocko Willink?

  Then these same bankers stimulated a boom and government bonds went to par and above and then the bankers collected their profits. But the soldier pays the biggest part of the bill. If you don't believe this, visit the American cemeteries on the battlefields abroad. Or visit any of the veterans hospitals in the United States. On a tour of the country, in the midst of which I am, I am doing at the time of writing this, I have visited 18 government hospitals for veterans. In them are a total of about 50,000 destroyed men.

• 1:03:57Jocko Willink?

  Men who were the pick of the nation 18 years ago. The very able chief surgeon at the government hospital at Milwaukee, where there are 3,800 of the living dead, told me that mortality among veterans is three times as great as among those who stayed at home. So this was interesting because we, we hear a lot about what happens when we come home. We hear about PTSD and you, you see like the images of shell shock in World War II, especially in England and the Brits. You don't hear a lot about it from World War I. And this, this is a weirdly written sentence. I tried to read it in a way that made it made

• 1:04:41Jocko Willink?

  sense, but it says, "The very able surgeon, the very able chief surgeon at the government hospital, semicolon, at Milwaukee, where there are 3,800 of the living dead, told me that the mortality among veterans is three times as great as among those who stayed at home." So what he's saying is, people that fought are three times likely to die, three times more likely to die than someone that didn't fight. Doesn't talk about how, but my guess is a lot of those are suicide.

• 1:05:12Jocko Willink?

  Or just like the crazy violent deaths that military people that have that experience end up having.

• 1:05:22Jocko Willink?

  And here he goes into it a little bit, in the most simplistic and so obvious way. "Boys with a normal viewpoint were taken out of the fields and offices and factories and classrooms and put into the ranks. They were remolded. They were made over. They were made to about-face, to regard murder as the order of the day. They were put shoulder to shoulder and through mass psychology, they were entirely changed. We used them for a couple of years and trained them to think nothing at all of killing or of being

• 1:06:06Jocko Willink?

  killed. Then, suddenly, we discharged them and told them to make another about-face. This time, they had to do their own readjustment, without mass psychology, without officers' aid and advice, and without nationwide propaganda. We didn't need them anymore. So we scattered them about with any three-minute or liberty loan speeches, or without any three-minute or liberty loan speeches or parades. Many, too many of these fine young boys are eventually destroyed mentally because they could not make that final about-face alone."

• 1:06:54Jocko Willink?

  That's pretty straightforward.

• 1:07:00Jocko Willink?

  And he gives up example here, he says, "In the government hospital in Marion, Indiana, 1,800 of these boys are in pens. 500 of them in a barracks with steel bars and wires all around the outside of the buildings and on the porches. These already have been mentally destroyed. These boys don't even look like human beings. Oh, the look on their faces. Physically, they are in good shape. Mentally,

• 1:07:30Jocko Willink?

  they are gone.

• 1:07:34Jocko Willink?

  There are thousands and thousands of these cases and more and more are coming in all the time. The tremendous excitement of the war, the sudden cutting off of that excitement. The young boys couldn't stand it.

• 1:07:53Jocko Willink?

  I'm gonna have to dig into that. I'm gonna have to get some research going on that because that sounds horrific.

• 1:08:03Jocko Willink?

  1,800, 1,800 men, boys, he's calling them, but, but this is 1935. You know, the, the war ended in 1918, so he's, these are young men. And you just don't hear about this.

• 1:08:21Jocko Willink?

  You hear about it now.

• 1:08:24Jocko Willink?

  You don't hear about it from World War I.

• 1:08:28Jocko Willink?

  And in fact, World War II, I've talked about like, well, you know, in World War II, you got to come home on a ship with some other guys and you got to decompress for five or six weeks and you, you were held up as a hero and all this stuff. And that's why it was easier to adapt. It's like, no, what about World War I?

• 1:08:46Jocko Willink?

  And that freaking psychotic war.

• 1:08:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, everything that's in my mind, obviously, has to be tempered with the fact that I truly cannot claim to appreciate the reality that he's describing. He said he's been, basically talking about VA hospitals, he's been to 18 different VA hospitals. This is a passion for him. He's going around seeing what's going on. And

• 1:09:14Speaker 02

  at least in this sense of, of when you think about World War II, that there was this, and I got to assume it was felt at the time, this very clear sense of good and evil, right and wrong, and the sides that we are on, and the, the, the justification and the necessity, the global necessity. And if you think about World War I, to at least try to reconcile the loss, and what was it for, and what was really at stake, and how much blurrier, and just, you don't feel that in World War I, and you talk about probably a nation that's just totally ill-equipped to have a 25-year-old come back after seeing what they saw, without even being able to say, "Hey, I at least saved the world." You know? From

• 1:09:58Speaker 02

  Holocaust, or nuclear war, whatever could have been at stake by the end of World War II. And being totally ill-equipped to know how to even handle that.

• 1:10:11Jocko Willink?

  At least in modern times, right? You're at least a little bit desensitized, right? You seen horror movies, you seen blood and guts, you're playing first-person shooter video games. Like, this is, can you imagine coming from freaking Omaha, Nebraska, where you're like, going to school? You, you know, I mean, you're just a, a normal kid. That might not even be the best example, because at least in Omaha, Nebraska, you're, you're slaughtering pigs, you're, you're shooting guns. But if you're in... Whatever, if you're from the city and you're just not around that, you're not seeing it. And then boom, you're thrown into World War I.

• 1:10:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:50Jocko Willink?

  And there was another section that I know about, Smedley Butler. There was a point, I think it was when he was in China, where he for the first time saw like mass slaughtered Japanese. And it's just one of those points that he had seen some real violence and that was before World War I. But yeah, at least nowadays, this might be a bad thing. Is that people are desensitized somewhat, you know, go on, go on, um, whatever, YouTube. I don't know, does YouTube filter out like heinous shootings and stuff like that?

• 1:11:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:27Jocko Willink?

  So where do you see stuff like that now?

• 1:11:29Speaker 01

  Oddly, and I don't want to go too deep into it, but oddly they had a few websites out there that you could just go. They say click here, make sure you're 18, whatever. And then you can watch whatever sick video you want, but as I've noticed, not that I frequent these things, but as I've noticed, they've been kind of disappearing.

• 1:11:45Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's interesting. Like I remember there was a video of a, of a a Russian soldier being killed by a, by a Chechen.

• 1:11:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:56Jocko Willink?

  And it's brutal. They're putting his boot on his head and they're just, he's screaming and they're cutting his throat and he's sort of like slowly.

• 1:12:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:03Jocko Willink?

  The impact of the knife blade.

• 1:12:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's old school. There's way worse stuff.

• 1:12:07Jocko Willink?

  I'm saying that's old school, but I haven't seen that in a long time.

• 1:12:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:11Jocko Willink?

  And, but I'm sure there's like some websites where you can just see all that stuff.

• 1:12:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I, like I said, I think they're kind of quietly doing away with them. Maybe because they encourage certain like groups to be like, oh, let's see if we can put ours up, you know, because in that dark area of the internet, it's like the people who are responsible for making those videos.

• 1:12:36Speaker 01

  Sometimes they get into these little competitions to see who can make the sickest video.

• 1:12:44Jocko Willink?

  Well.

• 1:12:45Speaker 01

  And they go hard, for sure.

• 1:12:46Jocko Willink?

  Even if you just saw rated R movies.

• 1:12:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:49Jocko Willink?

  You would be more accustomed to this kind of scenery.

• 1:12:53Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, and, and you got, you have like, like, yeah, the exposure of what war actually is, is way more now compared to at a time like that.

• 1:13:01Jocko Willink?

  Hey, if you watched Saving Private Ryan.

• 1:13:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:04Jocko Willink?

  You're like, okay, man, I mean, this is.

• 1:13:06Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:13:07Jocko Willink?

  And there's reports, plenty of reports that World War II veterans that were at D-Day were totally, you know, thought that nailed it. And they were very disturbed in watching it and had to take a break, had to walk out, whatever, because it was so realistic.

• 1:13:20Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:13:20Jocko Willink?

  So that's gonna condition you.

• 1:13:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:23Jocko Willink?

  But if you leave freaking Maryland, where you live in a small neighborhood, and your dad works at the factory, and next thing you know, you're in World War I.

• 1:13:37Jocko Willink?

  And then, and then all of a sudden, three weeks later, you're back, back in Maryland. In your neighborhood.

• 1:13:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:42Jocko Willink?

  It's gonna be a rough one.

• 1:13:43Speaker 01

  That's a good way to put it. I was like, hey, they take you out of your normal world and make you do an about-face with all this essential training and like all this, you know, this influence and stuff. And then, when that's done, just all of a sudden, hey, do another about-face, but hey, do it on your own, kind of a thing. It's like, dang, that's exactly what happens, huh?

• 1:14:01Jocko Willink?

  You know that song by The White Buffalo that he played when he was on here? It's called Wish It Was True?

• 1:14:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:07Jocko Willink?

  When he was on here, he played that song. And, and I actually had, like, asked him to play it.

• 1:14:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, the slow one.

• 1:14:12Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And, um, but the song, you know, it's got a line in there that basically says, hey, you're just a number, and we, we used you and you're through. And there's a couple of people that, you know, left some comments or hit me up, like, this is an anti-war song. What are you talking about? And I was like, hey, bro. This is what happens.

• 1:14:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:29Jocko Willink?

  It doesn't happen all the time, but this is a, this is a song written from someone's individual viewpoint of, hey, went to war, whatever war it was, maybe it was World War I, World War II, World War, uh, Korea, Vietnam. There's plenty of people that went to those wars, came home, and this is exactly what happened. That's what that song is about.

• 1:14:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:47Jocko Willink?

  It's not saying, oh, you, you just got used by every single soldier. It's not saying that.

• 1:14:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:52Jocko Willink?

  But there are, this happens. This does happen. And that's why it's such a powerful song.

• 1:14:57Speaker 01

  This might sound a little bit insensitive, but you don't, you don't Rambo. That's what that story was essentially about. When you, when you watch First Blood, right? Like, that's essentially what it was about. And then they, then they, of course, they do him dirty again, send him to jail, and then Rambo 2, they're like, oh, wait, wait, we need that guy again. You know, let's go get that guy. And then they do him, try to do him dirty again, see what I'm saying?

• 1:15:17Jocko Willink?

  That is essentially the story.

• 1:15:18Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:15:19Jocko Willink?

  And it's not, a- and, and look, there's plenty of people that come home from war and they get, they, they're able to deal with it. And they go, cool, you know what? I did what I had to do, and now I'm going back to work, and I'm going back to the factory, I'm going back to the construction site, going back to the, to the insurance business that I'm running, or that I work at. Like, it's people, people do, and they also saw different things. What did this person see? They'll do different things. What did this person do? So we gotta take all these things into account. But like you just pointed out, Echo, the fact that you're gonna take hundreds of thousands of people. In World War I, in World War II, you can take hundreds of thousands of people and train them to kill. And then, when it's over, you're like, cool, we're good. Hey, appreciate it. See you later.

• 1:16:01Jocko Willink?

  And, I mean, I don't, uh, Eugene Sledge, I mean, he had a really hard time when he came home from war. A really hard time when he came home from war. And he still carried on with his normal life. I mean, actually, all those guys did. Um, all those guys that were over, over there had a real hard time. But there's also millions of veterans that came home and like, they, they carried on with their life.

• 1:16:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:16:27Jocko Willink?

  I mean, um, I, I, I mean, I've had, had him on this podcast. I mean, Charlie Plum. How does he come home from six years of captivity and it's just like, okay, cool, well, you know, do, you know, we're gonna move on. William Reader.

• 1:16:41Jocko Willink?

  By the way, William Reader, forty years, like, stayed in the army for another, whatever, thirty-eight years, doing his job, getting a fit rep. How do you write a fit rep for, for William Reader? How do you not just say, hey, sir, what, look, I'm supposed to be in charge of you, you just tell me what you wanna do. Cause you have done more than, for the military than I could have ever hoped to have done. And I appreciate you sitting here and not like, not like beating me up, or whatever, not, not counseling me on what an idiot I am. So there's plenty of people that come home and they, they are, now I will say this, and Charlie Plum pointed this out to me. They're, the amount of like, post-traumatic stress that the guys that were in the Hanoi Hilton had, was less on average than normal infantrymen.

• 1:17:26Jocko Willink?

  And it's because they had this camaraderie. At least that's what he said. At least I think I remember what he said. But, but they had this camaraderie, so it was like, hey, you know, we were all, and they had time to process it, and, and then they got this huge, beautiful welcome home. And, I mean, when I, it was Jim Sturzle. I think it was Jim Sturzle, when he, you know, he's lost both legs and his arm, and the guys came home from being POWs with the white, you know, with the big reception. He was like, "Hey, bro.

• 1:18:00Jocko Willink?

  Uh, I understand you guys were held captive. I'm sorry, um, you know, I, I got back and just went to a freaking rehab for nine months, and then I'm out here with one arm."

• 1:18:12Jocko Willink?

  So, that probably helped the, the guys that were cap- captives in, in Vietnam as well, is that they got a very warm welcome home, and as we know, a lot of Vietnam veterans did not get a warm welcome home.

• 1:18:27Jocko Willink?

  And I, from what it sounds like here, same thing, World War I.

• 1:18:32Jocko Willink?

  Oh, the look on their faces, physically they're in good shape, mentally, they are gone.

• 1:18:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:18:39Speaker 02

  I wrote that down too, that, that, the metaphor that he describes about, we take them, we have them doing a bad face, and then we have them doing another bad face, and it's, they can't do that second one.

• 1:18:49Jocko Willink?

  We have them do the second one on their own.

• 1:18:51Speaker 02

  On their own, and they can't do it.

• 1:18:56Speaker 02

  It, it's not unreasonable to think, and just, I was literally just thinking about, what, what, who, who are you if you're a 21, 22-year-old male in 1914, going to World War I? Who, who are you? And, and it's-

• 1:19:11Speaker 02

  It's not unreasonable to think that they had no idea what war was, period. What war was. And if you think about today, like, joining the military, to your point, at least some exposure is accessible to anybody. You have some idea what war is. You've seen Platoon, you've seen Full Metal Jacket, you've seen Saving Private Ryan, you've seen Apocalypse Now, you've seen all these movies. Yes. And it's in the national psyche too. People are talking about it. People have been talking about it. If you were in World War I and you're 20, I mean, the last, yeah, there's historians that probably do some math, but like, unless you have some connection to the Civil War, which ended 50 years ago, and you're getting stories from your grandpa, you have no idea what war is.

• 1:19:56Speaker 02

  And then you're going to World War I, where the use of human capital, the use of a human being was, was

• 1:20:07Speaker 02

  less significant than, than any other piece of material that was out there. And, and today, like, I did 23 years in the Marine Corps and I retired like five years. It's like 30 years coming up on my military experience. We take excessive, sometimes tactically unsound lengths to preserve American lives. Now, obviously, we know that doesn't always work out, but

• 1:20:31Speaker 02

  we don't by design waste lives. And you can kind of almost count on that, like, hey, there, there are no more human waves. There's no more, hey, listen, gents, have a seat, let's talk about this plan. We know we're all gonna get wiped out, but we have to go do this. Like, those conversations aren't really happening. And so you kind of know what you're getting into a little bit, at least softens out a little bit. You know what war is, some idea what the war's gonna be like. I can't imagine a bigger contrast of being 19 years old, hey, you're going to Europe. And like, hey, where is that? Okay, cool, it's here. Hey, what country is that? That's this country here. Okay, who are we fighting? These people over here. Oh, how is this gonna work? Well, when you get there, we'll show you. Okay. Cool.

• 1:21:15Speaker 02

  And then, and then, and then you see World War I. Yeah.

• 1:21:20Speaker 02

  The second about-face to do on your own?

• 1:21:22Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's gonna be a rough one.

• 1:21:23Speaker 02

  It's not gonna work out, right? And he's now touring the country going, "Yeah." And, and yeah, the frustration is, should we probably take a couple of those dollars? I mean, the sarcasm with, with, just the, he's so, should we take a couple of those dollars and maybe help these folks with that about-face? These patriots over here making money? Again, and this is just me saying, I can appreciate this point of view.

• 1:21:46Jocko Willink?

  You get where he's coming from.

• 1:21:47Speaker 02

  I get where he's coming from.

• 1:21:51Speaker 02

  And this is, this is not some coward. This is not some, um, this is not a dude who's sitting on the sidelines casting judgment. This is a guy who, who, for whatever, got back in the, this is a guy who can speak, you know, from a first-person point of view.

• 1:22:05Jocko Willink?

  Certainly can. So he gets done talking about that part of the bill. And he says, "That's a part of the bill. So much for the dead, they have paid their part of the war profits. So much for the mentally and physically wounded, they are paying now for their share of the war profits.

• 1:22:25Jocko Willink?

  But others paid too. They paid with heartbreaks when they tore themselves away from their firesides and their families to don the uniform of Uncle Sam, on which a profit had been made. They paid another part in the training camps where they were regimented and drilled while others took their jobs and their places in their lives and in their communities. They paid for it in the trenches where they were shot at, and they were shot, where they were hungry for days at a time, where they slept in mud and cold and rain, with the moans and shrieks of the dying for a horrible lullaby.

• 1:23:01Jocko Willink?

  But don't forget, the soldier paid part of the dollars and cents bill too. Up to and including the Spanish-American War, we had a prize system, and soldiers and sailors fought for money. During the Civil War, they were paid bonuses in many instances before they went into service. The government or the states paid as high as $1,200 for an enlistment. In the Spanish-American War, they gave prize money. When we captured any vessel, vessels, the soldiers all got their share. At least they were supposed to."

• 1:23:34Jocko Willink?

  Then it was found we could reduce the cost of wars by taking all the prize money and keeping it. But conscripting the soldiers anyway, so just going to the draft. Then soldiers couldn't bargain for their labor either. Everyone else could bargain, but the soldier couldn't. Napoleon once said, "All men are enamored of decorations. They positively hunger for them." So by developing a Napoleonic system, the medal business, the government learned it could get soldiers for less money because the boys liked to be decorated. Until the Civil War, there were no medals. Then the Congressional Medal of Honor was handed out. It made enlistments easier. After the Civil War, no new medals were issued until the Spanish-American War.

• 1:24:18Jocko Willink?

  In the World War, we used propaganda to make the boys accept conscription. They were made to feel ashamed if they didn't join the army. So vicious was this war propaganda that even God was brought into it. With a few exceptions, our clergymen joined in the clamor to kill, kill, kill, to kill the Germans. God is on our side. It is His will that the Germans should be killed. And in Germany, the good pastors called upon the Germans to kill the Allies, to please the same God. That was part of the general propaganda, built up to make people war-conscious and murder-conscious.

• 1:25:02Jocko Willink?

  Beautiful ideals were painted for our boys who were sent out to die. This was the war to end all wars. This was the war to make the world safe for democracy. No one mentioned to them, as they marched away, that their going and dying would mean huge war profits. No one told these American soldiers that they might be shot down by bullets made by their own brothers here. No one told them that the ships on which they were going to cross might be torpedoed by submarines built with United States patents. They were just told it was going to be a glorious adventure.

• 1:25:34Jocko Willink?

  Thus, having stuffed patriotism down their throats, it was decided to make them help pay for the war too. So we gave them a large salary of thirty dollars a month. All they had to do for this magnificent sum was to leave their dear ones behind, give up their jobs, lie in swampy trenches, eat canned willy when they could get it, and kill and kill and kill and be killed. But wait, half that wage, just a little more than a riveter in a shipyard, or a laborer in a munitions factory safe at home made in a day, half that wage was promptly taken from him to support his dependents, so that he would not become a charge upon his community. Then we made him pay what amounted to accident insurance, something the employer pays for in an enlightened

• 1:26:16Jocko Willink?

  state. And that cost him about six dollars a month. He had less than nine dollars a month left. Then the most crowning insolence of all, he was virtually blackjacked into paying for his own ammunition, clothing, and food by being made to buy liberty bonds. Most soldiers got no money at all on paydays. We made them buy back, we made them buy liberty bonds for a hundred dollars, and then we bought them back when they came back from the war and couldn't find work at eighty four dollars and eighty six dollars. And the soldiers bought about two billion dollars worth of these bonds. Yes, the soldier pays the greater part of the bill, his family pays too. They paid

• 1:26:59Jocko Willink?

  in the same heartbreak that he does. As he suffers, they suffer. At nights as he lay in the trenches and watched shrapnel burst about him, they lay home in their beds and toss sleeplessly. His father, his mother, his wife, his sisters, his brothers, his sons, and his daughters. When he returned home, minus an eye, or minus a leg, or with his mind broken, they suffered too. As much, and sometimes even more than he. Yes, and they too contributed their dollars to the profits of the munition makers and bankers and shipbuilders and the manufacturers and the speculators made. They too bought liberty bonds and contributed to the profit of the bankers after the armistice in the hocus pocus of manipulated liberty bond prices.

• 1:27:45Jocko Willink?

  And even now, the families of the wounded men, and of the mentally broken, and those who were never able to readjust themselves, are still suffering and paying.

• 1:28:03Jocko Willink?

  Fact check.

• 1:28:06Jocko Willink?

  I'm gonna go ahead and say, "Truth."

• 1:28:10Jocko Willink?

  So what's going on?

• 1:28:21Jocko Willink?

  Chapter 4. How to smash this racket. Well, it's a racket, alright. A few profit and the many pay. But there is a way to stop it. You can't end it by a disarmament conference. You can't eliminate it by peace parlays at Geneva. Well-meaning but impractical groups can't wipe it out by resolutions. It can be smashed effectively only by taking the profit out of war. The only way to smash this racket is to conscript capital and industry and labor before nation's manhood can be conscripted. And there's just an interesting thing I gotta point out. When he talks about capital, industry, and labor, he's talking about those groups of people. And I'm not gonna change, it would be saying like,

• 1:29:05Jocko Willink?

  "The capitalists and the industrialists and the, and the labor force." You, you could say that, but that's what he, there's the words he uses. His capital industry, he's talking about those people. "One month before the government can conscript the young men of the nation, it must conscript capital and industry and labor. Let the officers and the directors and the high-powered executives of our armament factories and munition makers and our shipbuilders and airplane builders and the manufacturers of all other things that provide profit in wartime, as well as the bankers and the speculators be conscripted to get thirty dollars a month, the same wage as the lads in the trenches get.

• 1:29:45Jocko Willink?

  Let the workers in these plants get the same wages. All the workers, all presidents, all executives, all directors, all managers, all bankers, yes, and all generals and admirals and officers and all politicians and all government officer, office holders. Everyone in the nation can be restricted to a total monthly income not to be, not to exceed that paid to the soldier in the trenches. Let all these kings and tycoons and masters of business and all those workers in industry and all our senators and governors and majors pay half of their monthly thirty-dollar wage to their families and pay war risk insurance and buy liberty bonds. Why shouldn't they?"

• 1:30:24Jocko Willink?

  They aren't running the risk of being killed, or having their bodies mangled, or their minds shattered. They aren't sleeping in muddy trenches. They aren't hungry. The soldiers are.

• 1:30:34Jocko Willink?

  Give capital and industry and labor 30 days to think it over and you will find by that time, there will be no war. That will smash the racket, that and nothing else.

• 1:30:45Jocko Willink?

  Maybe I'm a little too optimistic. Capital still has some say, so capital won't permit the taking of profit out of war until the people, those who do the suffering and still pay the price, make up their minds that those they elect to office shall do their bidding and not that of the profiteers.

• 1:31:06Jocko Willink?

  You know, so here you get to like a, a, a kind of a,

• 1:31:11Jocko Willink?

  an argument, you know, that's like, hyperbole, right? Hey, what you need to do is first just to, if you're gonna go, and, and if, you know, no one will argue with it because it makes sense, but it's just, it's, it's just an unrealistic thing to think about. Unfortunately. Guy, we all get the idea. Yep. You wanna go, you wanna go to war? Cool. And he's, the interesting, he's not even talking about them going to war. He's just talking about, you just get the pay. For, and he's only talking about for 30 days. He's only talking about for 30 days. 30 days, you know, you're the CEO of a, of a defense company. For 30 days, you're gonna get this pay. I actually don't think that's enough right now. I think it'd have to be a lot more. You, you know, you always hear that.

• 1:31:56Jocko Willink?

  And actually, that when, when you, when you read about the Vietnam War, one of the things that really started to turn the tide of the American public against the Vietnam War was the draft. Because all of a sudden, it wasn't just, you know, the, the freaking poor redneck from West Virginia, or the inner city black kid from Harlem that was getting shipped off to war. All of a sudden, it was like, oh, you're in a, you're from wherever. And your, your dad is a lawyer, your dad is a judge, your dad is a business owner, and you got a bunch of money. And guess what? Yep, yeah. Load up. Load up on the bus. Cause it's time to go get some.

• 1:32:40Jocko Willink?

  And that's, as that expanded, and normal, richer people started going to war. It was like, rich kids, the rich parents started sending their kids off to war, that's a problem. And that's one of the things that started to push the, the, the, the resistance against the Vietnam War. Cause when it was just, hey, we're sending a bunch of damn poor people. Hey, cool, whatever, that's not my kid, my kid's not, my kid's going to freaking, uh, uh, college next year. He's not going to boot camp, he's not going to NOM, so I don't care, yeah, it seems like a great idea, let's stop communism over there. Until little Johnny gets freaking called up, and then they're like, ooh, maybe not.

• 1:33:22Jocko Willink?

  So I would say, from that perspective, that's, that, that's a, a good assessment. Realistic assessment, that if you start saying, oh yeah, you wanna send, you wanna send America to war, cool, your kid goes. People start changing their freaking minds real quick.

• 1:33:39Jocko Willink?

  Factually.

• 1:33:44Jocko Willink?

  He doesn't stop there, he's got another step. Another step, which is funny, because he, he starts off by saying this is the only thing you need to do, but he does have another step. Another step necessary in this fight to smash the war racket is limited, a limited pleci- plebiscite, sorry, plebiscite, which is, a plebiscite is, is a direct vote. Like, it's just a vote, plebiscite. Another step necessary in this war, in this fight to smash the war racket, is the limited plebiscite to determine whether a war should be declared. A plebiscite, not of all the voters, but merely of those who would be called upon to do the fighting and dying. There wouldn't be very much sense in having a 76-year-old president of a munitions factory,

• 1:34:28Jocko Willink?

  or the flat-footed head of an international baking firm, or the cross-eyed manager of a uniform manu- manufacturing plant, all of whom see, see visions of tremendous profits in the event of war, voting on whether the nation should go to war or not.

• 1:34:45Jocko Willink?

  They never would be called upon to shoulder arms, to sleep in the trench, and to be shot. Only those who would be called upon to risk their lives for country should have the privilege of voting to determine whether the nation should go to war.

• 1:35:01Jocko Willink?

  There is ample precedent for restricting the voting to those affected. Many of our states have restrictions on those permitted to vote. In most, it is necessary to be able to read and write before you may vote. In some, you must own property. It would be a simple matter each year for the men coming of military age to register in their communities as they did in the draft during the world war and be physically examined. Those who could pass and who were therefore to be, who would therefore be called upon to bear arms in the event of a war would be eligible to vote in a limited plebiscite. They should be the ones to have the power to decide and not a congress. Few of those, few of whose members are within the age limit and fewer still of whom are in the physical condition to bear arms.

• 1:35:45Jocko Willink?

  Only those who must suffer should have the right to vote.

• 1:35:52Jocko Willink?

  There you go. And as I said, in NOM, that kinda worked.

• 1:35:57Jocko Willink?

  People said, "Not Johnny."

• 1:36:03Jocko Willink?

  And he said there was one step, and he's introduced two. Here's the third one. "A third step in this business of smashing war racket is to make certain that our military forces are truly forces for defense only. At each session of congress, the question whether a, whether further naval appropriations comes up. The swivel-chair admirals of Washington, and there are always a lot of them, are very adroit lobbyists and they are smart. They don't shout that we need a lot of battleships, we need a lot of battleships to war on this nation or that nation, nation. Oh, no. First of all, they let it be known that America is menaced by a great naval power. Almost any day, these admirals will tell you, 'The great fleet of this supposed enemy will strike suddenly and annihilate 125 million people, just like that.'" Then they begin to cry for a larger navy.

• 1:36:48Jocko Willink?

  "For what? To fight the enemy." "Oh, my, no, oh, no, for defense purposes only." Then, incidentally, they announce maneuvers in the Pacific. "For defense, uh huh. The Pacific is a great big ocean. We have tremendous coastline on the Pacific. Will the maneuvers be off the coast, 200 or 300 miles? Oh, no, the maneuvers will be 2,000, yes, perhaps even 3,500 miles off the coast." "The Japanese, a proud people, of course, will be pleased beyond expression to see the United States fleet so close to Nippon's shores, even as pleased as would be the residents of California, where they did dimly discern through the morning mist the Japanese fleet playing at war games off Los Angeles."

• 1:37:27Jocko Willink?

  The ships of our navy, it can be seen, should specifically limited by law, should be specifically limited by law to within 200 miles of our coastline. Had that been the law of 1898, the main never would have gone to Havana Harbor. She never would have been blown up. There never would have been no war with Spain with the attendant loss of life. 200 miles is ample in the opinion of experts for defense purposes. Our nation cannot start off an offensive war if it is ships can't go further than 200 miles off the coastline. Planes might be ready to go 500 miles from the coast for the purpose of reconnaissance, and the army should never leave the territorial limits of our nation. To summarize, three steps must be taken to smash the war racket. One, we must take the profit out of war. Two, we must permit the youth of the land who would bear arms to decide whether or not

• 1:38:12Jocko Willink?

  there should be war. And three, we must limit our military forces to home defense purposes. Again, not a great strategic plan to sit back and like just stay in your own AO. You want to project power a little bit. You don't have to piss people off, but you definitely want to project some power out there. What are you writing down, Dave?

• 1:38:35Speaker 02

  I'm just summarizing what he said. I'm just trying, I'm spending this all this time just trying to appreciate what he's saying. Because obviously, and I'm gonna wait, you know, I know there's a couple more things to read here, I'm gonna, I'm gonna wait to the conclusion, but I spent a lot of time in my own brain saying, I hear what you're saying. I hear what you're saying.

• 1:38:56Jocko Willink?

  Well, this is a, but there's a, yeah. Well, this is the thing that we have to do. That's like what the whole start of this thing. Hey, hey, listen, man, we just spent a trillion dollars.

• 1:39:06Speaker 02

  Totally, man.

• 1:39:07Jocko Willink?

  In a 20-year war. And when we got there, the Taliban was in control of whatever percentage of the, of the country. And now we left and they're now going to control 100% of the country.

• 1:39:19Speaker 02

  Totally.

• 1:39:19Jocko Willink?

  We spent a trillion dollars. We have thousands of lost lives. We have thousands more wounded, maimed for life.

• 1:39:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:39:31Jocko Willink?

  And, and, and you have to at least open your mind and say, okay, what was this guy talking about?

• 1:39:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:39:37Jocko Willink?

  What was he talking about? Because like you said, this isn't some armchair quarterback. This is a guy that fought.

• 1:39:47Jocko Willink?

  Chapter 5, To Hell With War.

• 1:39:53Jocko Willink?

  I am not as fool to believe that war is a thing of the past. I know the people do not want war, but there is no use in saying we cannot be pushed into another war.

• 1:40:03Jocko Willink?

  Looking back, Woodrow Wilson was re-elected president in 1916 on a platform that he had, quote, "kept us out of war," end quote, and on the implied promise that he would, quote, "keep us out of war."

• 1:40:17Jocko Willink?

  Yet, five months later, he asked Congress to declare war on Germany. In that five-month interval, the people had not been asked whether they had changed their minds. The four million young men who put on uniforms and marched or sailed away were not asked whether they wanted to go forth to suffer and die.

• 1:40:33Jocko Willink?

  Then what caused our government to change its mind so suddenly? Money. An Allied commission, it may be recalled, came over shortly before the war declaration and called on the president. The president summoned a group of advisors. The head of the commission spoke. Stripped of its diplomatic language, this is what he told the president and his group.

• 1:40:57Jocko Willink?

  "There's no use in kidding ourselves any longer. The cause of the Allies is lost. We now owe you, American bankers, American munitions makers, American manufacturers, American speculators, American exporters, five or six billion dollars. If we lose, and without the help of the United States we will use, we, England, France, Italy, cannot pay back this money, and Germany won't." So... End quote. Had secrecy been outlawed as far as war negotiations were concerned, and had the press been invited to be present at that conference, or had the radio been available to broadcast the proceedings, America never would have entered the World War.

• 1:41:41Jocko Willink?

  But this conference, like all war discussions, was shrouded in utmost secrecy. When our boys were sent off to war, they were told it was a, quote, "war to make the world safe for democracy," and a, quote, "war to end all wars."

• 1:41:56Jocko Willink?

  Well, 18 years after, the world has less of democracy than it had. Besides, what business is it of ours, whether Russia, or Germany, or England, or France, or Italy, or Austria, live under democracies or monarchies? Whether they are fascists or communists, our problem is to preserve our own democracy. And very little, if anything, has been accomplished to assure us that the world war was really the war to end all wars. Yes, we have disarmament conferences and limitations of arms conferences. They don't mean a thing. One has just failed. The results of another have been nullified.

• 1:42:38Jocko Willink?

  We send our professional soldiers and sailors and our politicians and our diplomats to these conferences, and what happens? The professional soldiers and sailors don't want to disarm. No admiral wants to be without a ship. No general wants to be without a command. Both mean men, both mean men without jobs. They are not for disarmament. They cannot be for limitations of arms. And at all these conferences lurking in the background, but all powerful just the same, are the sinister agents who profit by war. They see to it that these conferences do not disarm, or seriously, limit armaments.

• 1:43:23Jocko Willink?

  The chief aim of any power at any of these conferences has not been to achieve disarmament to prevent war, but rather to get more armament for itself and less for any potential foe. I remember having this thought when you and I were in the Battle of Ramadi. And that thought was how freaking awesome the US military was, and how much of that awesomeness relied on these individual human beings that were making things happen.

• 1:44:03Jocko Willink?

  Because when you look at the operations that were taking place, when you look at the effort that was put forth, it was literally...

• 1:44:14Jocko Willink?

  Platoon commanders, company commanders, battalion commanders, brigade commander, that was, that was through force of will, making things happen. Making things happen. You could, if, if, if the brigade commander didn't really care, and just wanted to kind of do a deployment, get it under his belt, and just like, uh, yep, I did my deployment. If he didn't care, if he didn't want to do good,

• 1:44:40Jocko Willink?

  we wouldn't have done anything.

• 1:44:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:44:42Jocko Willink?

  Right. Battalion commander, that's going to push into an area of operations that hasn't been pushing. There is individual effort.

• 1:44:52Jocko Willink?

  And here's what's scary, is, look, in the Battle of Ramadi, we were trying to, we were trying to stabilize and secure the city of Ramadi.

• 1:45:03Jocko Willink?

  If there's no goal like that, a clearly defined goal, and you have people that are trying to do, make their best individual effort to make their mark, to leave their mark, to do something, to get a good fit rep. What are you gonna do? You're gonna say, well, I, we're gonna do this, we're gonna do that, we're gonna expand, we're gonna grow more, I need more people.

• 1:45:26Jocko Willink?

  This idea that there's no real competing, competing, um, asset, or competing, competing, uh, perspective of someone that's saying, hey, wait a second. What, what are you actually doing over there? I mean, if, let's say, you went, you were, you were in the Marine Corps, and you were supposed to train Iraqi soldiers.

• 1:45:47Jocko Willink?

  And I do turnover with you, and you say, yep, hey, Jaco, we trained 100 Iraqi soldiers. And I go, that's great. How many Iraqi soldiers do you think I'm gonna train?

• 1:45:58Jocko Willink?

  How many do you think?

• 1:45:59Speaker 02

  101.

• 1:46:00Jocko Willink?

  At least 101, at least 101.

• 1:46:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:46:03Jocko Willink?

  I'm gonna do more than you.

• 1:46:04Speaker 02

  Totally.

• 1:46:05Jocko Willink?

  I'm gonna do more than you. I remember, this is back in the day, I remember going out on a, um, workups with the, with the fleet. And you could see, I did a workup with the fleet that was, I wasn't, I wasn't embarked, but we did some work with Marines.

• 1:46:25Jocko Willink?

  Then my next deployment, I did a full workup with the Marines. Then the next one, I did another full workup with the Marines. So I did, basically saw three workups in a row with the Marines. And each one of them was a little bit more. Each workup was a little bit more.

• 1:46:38Speaker 02

  For sure.

• 1:46:39Jocko Willink?

  Hey, oh yeah, you guys did, you guys did four amphibious landings?

• 1:46:43Speaker 02

  I'm gonna do five.

• 1:46:43Jocko Willink?

  We did five. Oh, what about the next, the next guy's doing six? This is real.

• 1:46:48Speaker 02

  Yeah. I had similar experience and even in training, you know? Classic question was the outgoing squadron versus the incoming squadron. How many pounds of ordnance did you drop? You know, 74,000.

• 1:46:59Jocko Willink?

  Cool.

• 1:46:59Speaker 02

  Hey, right on the board. We're dropping 75K. And that's why I said 101.

• 1:47:02Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure.

• 1:47:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, oh cool. Yep, whatever that is. Yeah, 100%, 100%.

• 1:47:10Jocko Willink?

  So when you get, so that, that just reminds me of what we're talking about here, which is no admiral goes, you know what? I think we need less ships. The amount of admirals that say that is zero. The amount of generals that say, I need less divisions, I need less brigades, I need less battalions. The number of generals that say that is zero.

• 1:47:29Jocko Willink?

  Or, you know, sure, there are some, I'm sure there are, but the vast majority and those, those few that say, well, I think we need less ships. He's not getting, he's definitely not getting promoted.

• 1:47:38Speaker 02

  He's not gonna be the CNO.

• 1:47:39Jocko Willink?

  He's definitely not gonna be the CNO. Hey, I'm the guy that downsized the Navy. Promote me. It's not happening, right? It's not happening. Hey, I got us less brigades, less combat brigades. Good job. Yeah, let's promote you. No one says that. So you have this self fulfilling prophecy and this self licking ice cream cone, which is a term, I understand what it means, but I'm not exactly sure. You know, where it came from.

• 1:48:01Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:48:02Jocko Willink?

  But that's what you have, right? Is we want to have more. And that's exactly what he's talking about here. There was no one, there was very few people that would come back and say, hey, uh, yeah, the Iraqi soldiers, we had to do it in Ramadi. We had to say, these guys are not ready yet. Because it was, it was so obvious what would happen if we just sent them out on their own. And they tried. I mean, you remember they turned over like some of the checkpoints, like two, nine or five and they turned it over and, and two days later, the insurgents hit it and overrun it. Yep. ECP three down there by, on the bridge, same thing. Turned it over to the Iraqis. Hey, these guys are ready. You know, it's like, actually, no, they weren't ready and

• 1:48:43Jocko Willink?

  they got annihilated. So there wasn't really the, the opportunity for us to be like, well, yeah, the Iraqi troops that we are trained are now a hundred percent, what'd they call it? What'd they call it? They're ready for unilateral operations. Right. I didn't send up a message saying, yep, our Iraqis that we've been training for six months are now ready for unilateral operations, even though that was what everybody wanted us to say, but we couldn't say it there because you would find out on their first operation that there is no possible way they were ready. But if we would have been a more permissive environment, the pressure to say, yeah, hey, they can conduct unilateral, unilateral operations, the pressure would have been so great. Because otherwise, I'd be like, hey, Jaco, the last, the last task unit commander that's out here has, you know, he trained up four platoon special

• 1:49:27Jocko Willink?

  mission unit elements that are now, that were now ready to perform unilateral operations. What did you do? I'd be like, well, actually, I don't think those four are even capable and we should downgrade them. Well, what's wrong with you, Jaco? The last task unit commander was able to do this. Why couldn't you do that? So you would have felt that pressure. And a lot of times people break to that pressure. I mean, obviously, I think that happened a lot in Afghanistan. Yeah, hey, we trained these guys for six months. And who says, yeah, we trained somebody for six months, they're not capable. We trained them for a year, they're not capable. It's difficult. It's a difficult thing to do. It's also difficult to assess. So I think you get this. That's what he's talking about here. There's no, no admiral

• 1:50:12Jocko Willink?

  wants to be without a ship. No general wants to be at our command. So what do they do? They want more.

• 1:50:20Jocko Willink?

  There's only one way, back to the book, there's only one way to disarm any semblance of practicability.

• 1:50:27Jocko Willink?

  That is for all nations to get together and scrap every ship, every gun, every rifle, every tank, every warplane. Even this, if it were possible, would not be enough. The next war, according to experts, will not be fought with battleships, not by artillery, not with rifles, and not with machine guns. But it will be fought with deadly chemicals and gases. Secretly, each nation is studying and perfecting newer and ghastlier means of annihilating its foes wholesale. Yes, ships will continue to be built, for the shipbuilders must make their profits. And guns will still be manufactured, manufactured, and powder, and rifles will be made, for the munitions makers must make their huge profits.

• 1:51:09Jocko Willink?

  And the soldiers, of course, must wear uniforms, for the manufacturer must make their war profits too. But victory or defeat will be determined by the skill and ingenuity of our scientists.

• 1:51:23Jocko Willink?

  If we put them to work making poison gas and more and more fiendish mechanical and explosive instruments of destruction, they will have no time for the constructive job of building greater prosperity for all peoples.

• 1:51:38Jocko Willink?

  By putting them to this useful job, we can all make more money out of peace than we can out of war, even the munitions makers. So I say, "To hell with war."

• 1:51:56Jocko Willink?

  And that's the end of it.

• 1:51:59Jocko Willink?

  Again, you know, he's, he's in the end, you know, kind of got the fantasy, got the fantasy argument of, hey, can't we just have people working on

• 1:52:09Jocko Willink?

  good, have the scientists working on good stuff instead of evil stuff? And like, yeah, cool. Like, so it's, it's such an extreme argument that people go, oh, he's, he's just crazy, right? And let's throw this whole book out.

• 1:52:23Jocko Willink?

  But if we're to actually listen to what he's saying and maybe put some of it in the crazy pot and put some other in the just factual pot and then some of it is debatable like okay, what does that actually mean? How does that apply today? I think it's, I think it's very important for us to do that. I, I was recently on Russell Brand's podcast and the thing is it's behind a paywall. Is that right?

• 1:52:50Speaker 01

  Yes, sir.

• 1:52:51Jocko Willink?

  Pay, a firewall?

• 1:52:52Speaker 01

  Paywall.

• 1:52:52Jocko Willink?

  Paywall. It's behind a paywall. And so Russell Brand, if you don't know who he is, he's a guy from England, super nice guy, very funny guy. He's, is he originally a comedian? Kind of a movie comedian?

• 1:53:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, kinda and, and a performer as well.

• 1:53:07Jocko Willink?

  So he does?

• 1:53:08Speaker 01

  AKA Aldous Snow.

• 1:53:10Jocko Willink?

  What's this now?

• 1:53:11Speaker 01

  Aldous Snow, that's his other alias.

• 1:53:15Jocko Willink?

  Oh, really?

• 1:53:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's like his character, you know?

• 1:53:17Jocko Willink?

  And what's that guy supposed to be like?

• 1:53:19Speaker 01

  Singer.

• 1:53:20Jocko Willink?

  Really?

• 1:53:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, get him to the Greek, uh, forgetting Sarah Marshall. Look into it. That's who Russell Brand is.

• 1:53:28Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 1:53:28Speaker 01

  He's a man.

• 1:53:29Jocko Willink?

  So was he an actor? He's an actor too?

• 1:53:31Speaker 01

  Yes, sir.

• 1:53:31Jocko Willink?

  Look, super nice guy.

• 1:53:33Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:53:33Jocko Willink?

  Um, and he, he asked me to be on his podcast and it was pretty, it's pretty cool because he started off the podcast, he was saying like, he was being real complimentary of me and like, and, and, and just being nice, you know, this guy, you know, he, he thanked me for my service and, and, you know, he, he said, I did great, bunch of great stuff and, and real complimentary and real nice. And, and I kinda said, hey, man, I, I appreciate it. I said, bro, I'm not like this, I'm not a rare, uh, hero from the military. I said, I had a kinda average career. Um, and then he goes, well, you know, I just wanted to say that because I want you to know that I respect the military, but because I want to set that up properly because I also have like

• 1:54:18Jocko Willink?

  some issues and I'm gonna probably go, he didn't use the term hard in the paint because he's from England, but he basically meant, I'm gonna go hard in the paint on some topics. And then I said, well, hey, you should then know that. Even though I spent my adult life in the military, I was also like a hardcore kid growing up, listening to heavy metal playing in bands. I'm a rebellious kid. I listened to punk rock and heavy metal. And so you should just know that too, that even though I, because he also mentioned that he was like, as I look like a hippie. And I was like, because I know I look like the most military human that you could imagine. That's true. Yeah, that I also know that, you know, you should know that I'm kind of a rebel and that as

• 1:54:59Jocko Willink?

  well. And so then we had a little laugh and so, so eventually, you know, we get to, we start having the conversation and then he posed this kind of two questions and they were somehow paired up, or they were somehow, there was like a semi colon between them, meaning they were attached. They weren't quite separate, but they were still attached, but they were, they were a little bit separate. So the one of them was like, isn't war driven by the profitability of the military industrial complex? That was kind of question one number one. And then similar question, isn't capitalism and, and businesses and corporations, aren't they simply driven by the profitability

• 1:55:42Jocko Willink?

  for the rich owners and shareholders? So that was kind of the question. Aren't these two major forces in the world, the military and the corporate world, aren't they just driven by greed essentially?

• 1:55:58Jocko Willink?

  And then I answered him and you know, my answer was, well, Russell, the answer is yes.

• 1:56:08Jocko Willink?

  And I think, I think he was a little bit taken aback by that answer, but the fact of the matter is, it's true that profits certainly drive corporations to do things, to, to make products. And defense companies certainly get rich during wars, as we just heard from Smedley Butler. Those are totally true. Totally true. And

• 1:56:39Jocko Willink?

  Just like Smedley Butler, like you and I were saying, Dave, that that's like one part of the argument, that's not the only driver. That's not the only driver. And

• 1:56:51Jocko Willink?

  I mean, for the corporate example, I've worked with hundreds of companies.

• 1:56:57Jocko Willink?

  And Dave, you've worked with hundreds of companies and the companies make money. They make a lot of money.

• 1:57:06Jocko Willink?

  And they are certainly driven by profits in some way, but they're also making products that people want. And they're making products that people need and they're employing people. And they're making products that make people's lives better. That's what's happening. In, in the vast majority of cases, no better example than medical device companies, pharmaceutical companies. And I've worked with scores of medical device companies. I've worked with scores of pharmaceutical companies over the last decade. And some of those companies that I've worked with, that you've worked with, Dave, some of those companies make hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars in profit, billions of dollars in profit.

• 1:57:50Jocko Willink?

  And so you could say to yourself, well, that's what's driving them, just to want to make money. But I have also seen and met their patients along the way.

• 1:58:01Jocko Willink?

  You go to an event and they got a, a man or a woman or a chi- a child, a little boy or a little girl. And the only reason that that child is still alive

• 1:58:14Jocko Willink?

  is because of this device that that company makes or this drug that this company makes. That's, that's, that's why they are on stage. They, they will present.

• 1:58:24Jocko Willink?

  And they'll get these people up there and say, thank you. And those patients who are only alive because of these companies are grateful to be alive. And they are overjoyed that those capitalist doctors were greedy enough, right? To take the risk and invest money and push hard and toil and do the work to create products that actually saved people's lives.

• 1:58:52Jocko Willink?

  And the same thing, the same thing can be said for war.

• 1:58:58Jocko Willink?

  The same thing can be said for war and I have participated in wars that made some defense companies tons of money.

• 1:59:10Jocko Willink?

  And I said, I said to Russell Brand, something along the lines of like, listen, I could be talking to my platoon and say, all right, guys, here's what's going on tonight. We're going to go out, we're going to risk our lives in it. And I just wanted to let you know that every round that you fire is going to put 12 cents into the pockets of the wartime profiteers. Right? And that would actually be true because that is true. Those, those rounds cost money and those defense companies make money from those things.

• 1:59:39Jocko Willink?

  But I also know what happens on the ground. Dave, you know what happens on the ground. I know, I know that we help people.

• 1:59:48Jocko Willink?

  The people on the ground. I know that we killed evil terrorists and insurgents that systematically tortured and raped and murdered the innocent local populace.

• 2:00:03Jocko Willink?

  I know that we did that. I know that we were able to protect children from these insurgents, from these terrorists. I know we were able to protect families. I know that those families wanted these insurgents out of their city and out of their country.

• 2:00:21Jocko Willink?

  And so while there were defense companies certainly making money, there was a simultaneous

• 2:00:30Jocko Willink?

  good that was taking place.

• 2:00:34Jocko Willink?

  Then we took lives, but we also saved lives. And that's the truth.

• 2:00:41Jocko Willink?

  Enriching global corporations and enriching the military industrial complex, that enrichment certainly influences behaviors, right? It influences someone that's making a weapon system to try and make their weapon system better. To try and make better body armor. There's a, there's someone right now as we speak that is trying to make better body armor. And part of the reason they're trying to make it is to protect the American soldier. But guess what? They got a mortgage to pay. And they want to make better, better body armor because they want to make more money. And if they can make better body armor, then the US government goes, wow, that's lighter. It's stronger. It provides more protection. We're going to buy it.

• 2:01:23Jocko Willink?

  It's not that the person is just thinking about money. But the money, the, the, the two goals are aligned. There's a simultaneous drive that is, that is moving behavior in the right direction. And oftentimes, like I just used that example, body armor, they're aligned. Where there's a company out there, Acme Body Armor. They want to make best body armor. They want to make it, do they want to protect Americans? Yes, they do. Do they want to make money? Yes, they do. So I have no problem with that. If they're aligned, it works out perfectly. Here's the problem.

• 2:02:02Jocko Willink?

  The problem is if they're out of alignment. That's where it can become awful. And that's what we need to watch out for. What is the driving force behind going to war? Are we going to war because it's the right thing to do? Are we going to war for benevolent reasons? Are we positive that it will have a, a positive impact? That will offset the natural negative impacts of war? Because when you go into war, there's going to be negative impacts. People are going to die. People are going to get wounded. And is the positive impact going to offset that negative impact? Is it going to help stability in the world? Is there a strategic benefit for us as America?

• 2:02:45Jocko Willink?

  If we're going to war for those reasons, because there's going to be a strategic advantage, because it protects our national security, because it's going to be truly good for the people on the ground that need protection, that need help to get out from a tyrannical, a tyrannical regime or an evil regime. And there are evil regimes.

• 2:03:06Jocko Willink?

  And if you don't think there's evil regimes, you're wrong.

• 2:03:11Jocko Willink?

  Because there's people in the world, there's regimes in the world that will systematically rape little kids.

• 2:03:21Jocko Willink?

  So if we're going to war for those reasons,

• 2:03:28Jocko Willink?

  okay.

• 2:03:30Jocko Willink?

  It's, we can consider it. If the primary driver of going to war is to make money, if it's to profit, if it's to sell more guns and bombs, if it's not gonna stabilize the world, if it doesn't help us protect our national security, if it's gonna be a strategic defeat,

• 2:03:51Jocko Willink?

  then we're wrong. And, and can there be alignment by these two drivers? Yes, there absolutely can. I don't mind, I don't mind someone making great body armor, ma- making money off it. I don't make, I don't mind somebody making a great weapon system that makes a bunch of money and it helps us win a war. I have no problem with that at all.

• 2:04:10Jocko Willink?

  But if these things aren't aligned and we're fighting for money or we're fighting for profit and we're not getting positive impact and we're not getting strategic benefit,

• 2:04:19Jocko Willink?

  well then we need to listen to Major General Smedley Butler and say, "To hell with war." That's what I'm thinking. Dave?

• 2:04:30Speaker 02

  Um, I'm with you. I was thinking of a story as you, as you said that I, I don't even remember why I was in the Pentagon, but I was in the Pentagon for something. And it was maybe like I was just taking over this F-35 job and I had to go meet somebody in the Pentagon, whatever. Dave came up to the Pentagon and talked to some general. I'm literally walking through the halls of the Pentagon and I run into who was an old battalion commander that I worked with, who was now, I happen to be a one-star. Just literally walked into him in a, in a waiting room of some office somewhere, waiting for some meeting. And we bumped into each other and he was there with a couple of people from a company in industry, so civilians in the industry.

• 2:05:11Speaker 02

  And he was there to show the technology of a helmet that they designed to stop a 762 caliber sniper rifle. A helmet, light enough but strong enough to stop a sniper rifle.

• 2:05:24Speaker 02

  And for those of you who are listening that don't know the story of, and I've talked in general terms about my radio operator, Chris Leon, who was on my team, the first Angloco Marine killed, my radio operator was killed in Ramadi. The first Angloco Marine killed in Iraq was my radio operator, was shot and killed by a sniper that pierced his helmet, went right through the temple of his helmet and killed him.

• 2:05:44Speaker 02

  Was I on board with this company making profit, making money off the American taxpayer to design a helmet that would somehow have prevented what happened, or at least can prevent what might happen in the future? Yes, I'm on board with that plan. I'm on board with that plan, and I support that plan, and I want that plan to not only make them money, but make enough money to continue to build even better technology, grow their company, and be a positive force for whatever may happen. So I am, I am totally on board with that idea and this idea of alignment. And while, where I struggled, especially towards the end, listening to him talk, you

• 2:06:25Speaker 02

  reading his words, was, I think a trap that is so easy to fall into is that we describe it as the government, or industry, or the military. One of the things that I've learned in our current job is that these are actually people. They're people. The military is just people, and generals and admirals are regular people. And you know what? There are some really good ones, and there are some not so good ones. And people in the government, I know classmates of mine that are, that work in the government. And you know what they try to do most of the time, every day? The right thing? They try to do the right thing. Do they always do the right thing? No. Are there forces at play that make it difficult? Of course.

• 2:07:08Speaker 02

  But when you fall into this trap of like, oh, it's the government, it's really, is it created a narrative by which their only goal is to somehow, whether it's lie in their pockets, or whatever that might be, is we lose sight of the fact that most of the mechanics that are going on inside industry, these companies we work with, are regular people trying to do the right thing. Even for the most part of my experience, at the highest levels, we work with CEOs of multi-billion dollar companies.

• 2:07:40Speaker 02

  And what you get to know is that for the most part, for the most part, they're people trying to do the right thing. Are they trying to make money? Yes. Because for a whole host of good reasons. They want to pay their bills. They want to pay their people. They want to grow. They want to expand. They want to build brighter products that are safer. They can reach more people. All these things. And I'm not naive. And I don't want people to think the exact opposite. It's like everybody's just altruistic in it for the, for the big. No, that's not the case.

• 2:08:08Speaker 02

  But there's a trap that we can fall into, which was, there's this, this thing. The industry. Well, if it's just the industry, then yeah, it's easy to paint them as, as this, this thing. That's not a real thing. It's not a person. It's not a human being. And what this thing wants is to just soak up dollar bills or waste human life to get to their end state with no regard for that. And, and that is a, a, that is a trap that I think it's easy to fall into. And you can hear his words like, hey, hang on a second. Just hang on. Who is this company? Who are these industries or governments or whatever these things we're talking about?

• 2:08:52Speaker 02

  Most of the time, most of the time, they're people trying to do the right thing. That's what they are most of the time.

• 2:08:59Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Uh, you know what survivor bias is?

• 2:09:04Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:09:05Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Do you know what it is, Dave?

• 2:09:06Speaker 02

  I think so.

• 2:09:06Jocko Willink?

  It's like, um, if you go out and you talk to 10 people that started companies and you say, you know, hey, how hard was it to start your company? They're all like, yeah, it was pretty easy, man. You know, I got it going. You're not talking to the 90 other people that failed. So you get this survivor bias. We at Echelon Front probably have a little bit of Echelon Front bias, which is we, the companies that we work with. They've read Extreme Ownership. They're in the game. They listen to podcasts. Like these, these are companies that have a, a good sort of fundamental value system.

• 2:09:40Jocko Willink?

  We, we kinda have a little bit of that bias because you're right. The amount of companies that we've worked with where I've said, wow, this guy is going to put this product out there. That's harmful or this guy or this woman is making a decision that's gonna cause their employees to suffer. It doesn't happen. It does. Now, are there companies like that? Yes, there are. And, and, but I would tell you same thing, even though, even with, even if you take into account the EF bias, the echelon front bias, which is that most people that we work with have a good value system. Even with that accounted for, most companies these days, you have to have a good value system. You have to be doing the right thing because there's just too much information out there.

• 2:10:24Jocko Willink?

  And a damn Yelp review. I mean, on the like this, the, the base level. Hey, if you run a restaurant and you treat your employees or your customers bad, a Yelp review. Now you go big and you run into, you know, the Wall Street Journal is doing an expose on what you did to maximize profits while you hurt your, you know, your, your employees or your clients or whatever. So, so the, even in cases where you have people that might not be the most altruistic people.

• 2:10:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:10:54Jocko Willink?

  The reality of modern technology keeps, keeps the vast majority of them in check. Yes. So that's true. The other thing is, look, there's gonna be these two, these two things, they create a nice, positive, natural tension. That's what we want. We want to have someone saying like, hey, yeah, if you guys go to war, we want you to have the best gear. That's good. And the other, the, the business should be saying, hey, if we want you to go to war, we want you to have the best gear. And the general should be saying, yeah, we don't want to go to war, but if we do, we want the best gear. There's a little tension. These guys might want to go to war more. These guys might not, but there, there should be a natural tension. And I think what we have to watch out for is when there's no. When people lose that, when there's no tension, when there's no one saying, hey, hey,

• 2:11:37Jocko Willink?

  you know, you know, you know, I just want you to think about something. If we go to war, it's Johnny over here that's gonna get killed, that's gonna lose his legs, whatever the case may be. That's what we never, that's what we need to make sure people think about. And you know, this goes back to one of the, actually, I think it might have been the first, like, ever thing that I got recorded saying was when we did the, the warfighters thing for the History Channel about Mark Lee. And I've repeated this on a bunch of occasions. How do you know when it's time to go to war? And the, it's time when you are willing, when you are willing, you have the will, but it's the will to die, and it's the will to kill. And that's what's gonna happen, you go to war. So you need to put that overlay on this.

• 2:12:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:12:21Jocko Willink?

  And if you ever forget about that overlay, that you think, well, you know, this is worth it because it's gonna be beneficial. Okay, cool. It's gonna be beneficial to the people there. Do you know that we're gonna kill some of the people there? Not just the enemy, but some of the people that are there are going to die because of us. And we're going to have our own people killed. That's what we need to think about. We can never lose that tension. And, and I think that that tension does get lost. I think that the people that, that hold up their hands and say, hold on, wait a second. But what are we doing here? And, and part of the reason is because, what is it? There's a saying, old men wanna go to war and young men do too. I mean, you know, it's, that's the thing. You survey freaking 19-year-old kids that are in the Marine Corps, and you ask them, how many people, how many

• 2:13:05Jocko Willink?

  you wanna go to war? There's a big percentage that's coming through in the affirmative.

• 2:13:10Speaker 02

  And that's the coolest part about the comment about that tension, which is, I mean, that's actually the tension that you want, is I want, I actually want Marines that wanna go to war. That's what I want. I want Marines that wanna go to war. And do I love the idea of world peace? Yes. I love that idea. I love that idea.

• 2:13:30Speaker 02

  That idea is not gonna happen today or tomorrow. It's not gonna happen. And as much as I love the fantasy of the simple things we need to do to achieve that. The tension is with that reality too is that hey, not only is that not likely, there are people that actively do not want that. Actively do not want that. And you know, he was talking about, hey, you know, the next step is we're gonna see war with chemicals. And he was sort of foreshadowing what the, and he was correct. Obviously, you know, we know that there was, you know, some of those things he saw that in World War II, the chemical warfare, and he was foreshadowing this ever-growing capacity for people to wage war against each other in these awful, awful ways.

• 2:14:14Speaker 02

  Well, you know, you could get rid of all the weapons in the world, and there's people waging war with computers now. So this persistence of the reality, even with some of the nefarious things and the profiteers that might be out there, there's a reality out there that we also need to accept and face. And I wanna be around people that wanna do that. I wanna be around those people. And I want Marines, I want Marines that have that exact same feeling. And yes, you wanna manage that and temper that and guide that and shape that. Yes, all those things. But I want to be around those people. And I think that that tension that you talked about, that natural tension, because those two things exist in the world. And to pretend like they don't is not a good plan.

• 2:14:59Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I don't know what the percentage of people, let's say, let's say you did what they said. If you take the young men that are gonna have to go to war, and they get to vote. I almost feel, I almost don't feel super comfortable with that, because I think a lot of them would be like, oh yeah, it's on.

• 2:15:14Speaker 02

  Here's my chance.

• 2:15:14Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's on. But I'm not sure, that's also my own warped, that's sort of the Jaco bias, which is I think everyone's kinda thinks like me, which I know is not true. There's also a chance that I'm wrong, and a bunch of people would say, no matter what was happening in the world, they'd be like, no, we're not going to war. You know what I mean? So you gotta have somebody with a detached perspective. That's actually saying, you know what, now is not the time to go to war. Or a detached perspective and say, hey, we're looking at this whole thing. We see Nazis, we see them running roughshod all over. We need to do something about this.

• 2:15:46Speaker 02

  And you described it again, I, I, I, you know, whether you call it the tension or this idea, hey, when you've got some skin in the game, when it's not Johnny, it's your Johnny. When you're talking about who's going to war, I, I, yeah, I love that idea of, oh, you're talking about me now? Okay, hang on, let me, let me put some thought into it because in the end, the answer actually might still be, yeah, I'm going to send my son off to war. But I'm certainly going to think about it a lot harder, the closer it is to me. And I mean, that's been the challenge in society forever, which was, do we want to insulate our people from war? Yeah, we do. I want, I want to insulate America from war and you could look at, we talked about Afghanistan. Are there some good things that have come out of that? Yeah, absolutely.

• 2:16:28Speaker 02

  And if you insulate them so much, if you, if you remove them so much that they don't even understand what really is happening, those decisions actually aren't the best decisions because what do they care, right? Yeah, sure, it's a great idea, go, go, go to war. Doesn't affect me at all. I don't want a society that has no, no impact on that either. And even inside that, you talked about that tension of, I want to keep, I want to separate us from that as much as possible, but if not, but not so much that they don't understand what it actually, what that really means to send somebody off to war. We were just talking an hour ago, when these people went to World War One, did they even know what they were doing? They even know what it meant to send someone to war. And there's just no way. Yeah, there's some, some great things with technology and

• 2:17:12Speaker 02

  if you're doing something for the wrong reason, it's pretty, it's, it's much harder to hide that now than it ever used to be. If your industrial plan or your company plan is really nefarious, you're, you're running the risk of getting found out. There's just too much information that's free out there. It's really hard to keep those secrets anymore. But sending somebody off to World War One, do you think anybody really knew what that meant? No. And do I, do you think they should know a little bit? Yeah, I see his point. It's your kid going, you might think twice before you, you send him. But just like you said too, there are actually times that you're gonna say, yeah. Because the alternative? Yep. That's not acceptable.

• 2:17:49Jocko Willink?

  Well, definitely, um, I think the lesson here is keep your minds open and listen and try and understand these various perspectives that are out there because I bet there's a bunch of people that hear this and they go, "Well, that guy was a traitor," or whatever they're gonna say. Yeah. Or say, "Hell yeah." It's, it's, it's just, that's what makes it so interesting because you can't call a guy that did what he did in his life a traitor. And what we should actually do is listen. That's what we should do. With an open mind. With an open mind. Goes a long way. Yeah. With that, Echo Charles.

• 2:18:27Speaker 01

  Yes, sir.

• 2:18:28Jocko Willink?

  So, we're trying to keep our minds open, but we're also trying to keep our minds sharp.

• 2:18:31Speaker 01

  Yes, sir.

• 2:18:32Jocko Willink?

  Keep sharp minds, gotta keep the, the vessel that the mind is contained in, gotta keep that kinda up and running.

• 2:18:40Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 2:18:41Jocko Willink?

  Concur?

• 2:18:42Speaker 01

  The brain?

• 2:18:43Jocko Willink?

  Well, yeah. No, well, the brain, the brain is in the body.

• 2:18:47Speaker 01

  Sure. The skull, more specifically, I guess.

• 2:18:50Jocko Willink?

  More specifically, yup. See, look at you.

• 2:18:52Speaker 01

  I'm trying.

• 2:18:53Jocko Willink?

  Very accretive to my comments.

• 2:18:55Speaker 01

  There was, there was a, uh, there was a part in there where he was, he was kinda going hard, you know, exposing all these prophets and all this stuff. And it makes sense, man. So, and you can kinda get a taste of his emotional state.

• 2:19:07Jocko Willink?

  Right. It makes sense, but also you gotta say, "Hey, man, if I was having to fight the freaking Nazis, how happy am I that I have some American steel manufacturer that is staying awake 24 hours a day?" You ever seen that, that when they used to build those Liberty ships? You know what I'm talking about, Dave? Yes. These big Liberty ships that were used to transport stuff back and cross, back and forth across the Atlantic Ocean. Yeah. They were making them in a day. A freaking whole ship, bro. This is impossible. And America was doing it in a day. Now, if I was over there on the front lines and I needed some more ammunition, I would be so damn happy and I would be more than happy that people are making a bunch of money. Now, did the profits get a little bit extreme? Maybe they got a little extreme.

• 2:19:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, so in, in, that, that's kinda the point there where... You can kinda, he goes hard in like both directions and you're like, oh man, I see that. Especially when he's talking about the waste, you know, like the ships that don't even run and it's like, no, we're still paying the bill and it's like, and then meanwhile, you know, from his perspective, he sees all the, all the downside of war, right hardcore. And then he kinda see, and he looks and he sees all these numbers, all these dollar signs that go to other people, whatever, who are making shitty ships and all this stuff. Oh man, I get it. But he went a little bit too hard in a, even in these little subtle ways.

• 2:20:19Jocko Willink?

  Extreme.

• 2:20:19Speaker 01

  Extreme, so he goes.

• 2:20:20Jocko Willink?

  It makes you shut him out.

• 2:20:20Speaker 01

  About that little bit, yes. And, and I was trying to stay like with you guys where like, okay, I get it. No, no, no, maybe not. But there was a part he was talking about the boots, right? He was like, oh, they made all these boots and like all this stuff or whatever. And I'm, so I'm thinking, wait, that's the, we kinda need those boots.

• 2:20:36Jocko Willink?

  But we only had four million soldiers and we bought 25 million boots.

• 2:20:39Speaker 01

  Yes, okay. And then that part, it's like, okay, yes. As far as the waste goes, 100%, that's gonna apply across the board. Um, and then he, he went on to even add, like, oh, those were good boots.

• 2:20:49Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:20:50Speaker 01

  I was like, yeah, we need those boots.

• 2:20:51Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, but we don't need 25 million.

• 2:20:53Speaker 01

  Of course, of course, we don't need the waste. That's true. Same thing with the ships and all that stuff. But so, you could tell like, all you gotta do is kinda detach from like that very specific perspective, just a little bit. And you're like, okay, this guy might not be getting it, you know, in certain ways.

• 2:21:07Jocko Willink?

  Well, I, I don't think that's a great example because you can also say, hey, he gets it. These are boots. We need boots. They're good boots. They're probably lasting for a long time. We didn't need 25 million pairs, bro.

• 2:21:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's true.

• 2:21:20Jocko Willink?

  So, he, he's getting it. Where he loses it is just saying that that's the only reason that they're doing anything.

• 2:21:24Speaker 01

  And that's what I mean where, and cause that's, it seemed like it, put it this way. It seemed like he was going hard in that direction. It's like, that's what he kinda wanted you to think.

• 2:21:33Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's, it also shows you that the, you know, you have a government organization that's running things and it's not your money.

• 2:21:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:21:43Jocko Willink?

  You're gonna get fraud, waste and abuse.

• 2:21:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, that makes sense.

• 2:21:46Jocko Willink?

  That's why, that's why it's usually better to have a little bit less government control over things.

• 2:21:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's so true.

• 2:21:54Jocko Willink?

  Keep things as decentralized as possible. And I know I covered a little bit of, of Thomas Sowell's book.

• 2:22:03Jocko Willink?

  Well, I think, I don't even know if I even got to it. It was, I don't, I don't think you were on the podcast, it was with Jordan Peterson. But he got this little section where he just talks about how freaking hard it is to like, control price. You just, you, you can't, you can't do it. You can't control price. It has to do with the pelts of some animal. There's worth a certain amount.

• 2:22:22Jocko Willink?

  And then he goes through how hard it is to control the price. And then he says, and by the way, there's whatever, 1.2 billion products or line items that you need to control the price of. It's impossible. You gotta let the free market work a little bit. And that's where you run into problems where you have the free market brush up against the government, the government checkbook.

• 2:22:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:22:45Jocko Willink?

  And they're like, yeah, we can make, you probably gonna need 25 million boots. How many soldiers you got? Four million?

• 2:22:53Speaker 01

  They need extra.

• 2:22:54Jocko Willink?

  Sign here. So.

• 2:22:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's true, huh? Cause you know, like, when you get what the old thing, the irresponsible person with the crew, when they first get a credit card, kind of feels like, oh, it's not my money, right? So then they overspend, they can't pay that kind of stuff. So it's like, like, it makes sense, that phenomenon.

• 2:23:10Jocko Willink?

  Does make sense. People will spend their other people's money like crazy. They do it all the time. That's what the government does. The government spends other people's money all the time. You know? Do we need to spend some money? Yeah. But if you looked at it from like a household perspective, if this, if this, either this state we're in California or this country, if you looked at it from that standpoint of, hey, our budget, you know, we make, hey, look, here's, here's, hey, you know, hey darling wife, we make $5,000 a month. That's how much income we bring in. Um, we're gonna buy a car that's gonna cost us $2,000 a month. And we're gonna rent a, a, a, an apartment that's gonna cost us $4,000 a month.

• 2:23:55Jocko Willink?

  And then we're gonna go out to eat every night. That total's gonna be $7,000 a month. You can figure out real quick, like, oh, I'm in the hole. This is the credit card problem. So, but if it's not our money, we're kind of like, hey, we're going into debt a little bit. It's all good. We'll wash out, man.

• 2:24:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, wash out.

• 2:24:11Jocko Willink?

  It's gotta be careful with this stuff.

• 2:24:13Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:24:14Jocko Willink?

  All right. What do we got? So.

• 2:24:15Speaker 01

  Speaking of being careful.

• 2:24:17Jocko Willink?

  I like it.

• 2:24:17Speaker 01

  We gotta be careful with what we put in our bodies, especially on this path. The path is hard, Dave Berke. I'm saying it's hard. It's not always easy. It's fun. It can be fun from time to time.

• 2:24:30Jocko Willink?

  Occasionally.

• 2:24:30Speaker 01

  Especially when you're collecting those long-term gains. See what I'm saying? Capability, cognitive enhancement, smarts, all that stuff. Better decision-making too. Either way, when we're on this path, we want to stay healthy, stay ahead of the game health-wise. Dave, I noticed you're drinking the mango discipline. Good choice. You could have drank the orange. You could have.

• 2:24:49Jocko Willink?

  But I have a little bit of a love-hate relationship with the mango.

• 2:24:51Speaker 01

  I understand fully. So, discipline, go. That's what this is. That's what we're talking about here. It's a health, the healthy energy drink.

• 2:25:00Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 2:25:01Speaker 01

  It's a big deal. Most times the energy drink as we know them, or as we knew them.

• 2:25:05Jocko Willink?

  You know where I'm gonna go with this right now.

• 2:25:07Speaker 01

  Where are you going?

• 2:25:07Jocko Willink?

  Well, we were talking earlier about the fact that, hey, most companies are out there trying to do the right thing. And guess what we have? We have some companies that are out there saying, oh, you know what? If I can cut the cost of my product by a little bit, add some chemicals to it that are a little bit cheaper, give people an addictive thing called sugar, and they'll just buy more of it. Cool. So we got our example now. We got some nefarious companies.

• 2:25:34Speaker 01

  I agree.

• 2:25:34Jocko Willink?

  Out there making poison and feeding it to people.

• 2:25:36Speaker 01

  It's, it's kind of a spectrum. And, and consider, I'm not just saying necessarily energy drinks or whatever, but like in general, especially when it comes to stuff that you eat or put in your body, whatever. Cause you're dealing with two different forces there.

• 2:25:48Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. You know what bothers me about that though, is this, like, is the attitude of like, yeah, but that's what people want.

• 2:25:53Speaker 01

  Right. That's what I'm saying. There's two different forces.

• 2:25:55Jocko Willink?

  And that's not a good, that, that's, that's what people want. That doesn't mean you can't just make adjustments to give them what they want and not give them poison.

• 2:26:05Speaker 01

  Hey, some people want crack. Some people want straight up, and some people want vodka, straight up mainstream. Some people want vodka. Is vodka good? Is vodka good?

• 2:26:14Jocko Willink?

  No.

• 2:26:15Speaker 01

  Kind of hard to make that argument on, you know, on many, many levels. Either way, I dig what you're saying. But guess what? We don't have to worry about that kind of stuff anymore.

• 2:26:21Jocko Willink?

  We are not a nefarious company.

• 2:26:23Speaker 01

  Negative.

• 2:26:23Jocko Willink?

  We are making the clean.

• 2:26:25Speaker 01

  The clean energy drink.

• 2:26:26Jocko Willink?

  Energy drink.

• 2:26:26Speaker 01

  Both. Uh, win-win. Upside short-term, upside long-term. In many ways too, by the way. This electrolytes in this one.

• 2:26:33Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:26:34Jocko Willink?

  Uh, imagine just being saying, oh yeah, you want to try something? All upside.

• 2:26:38Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 2:26:39Jocko Willink?

  How often you get that in life?

• 2:26:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:26:41Jocko Willink?

  Hey, here's something, all upside.

• 2:26:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, and as far as like the mango flavor, it's like really upside.

• 2:26:46Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:47Speaker 01

  Especially, you see what I'm saying? Like, it's compared to other flavors, which is just normal upside, which I understand, of course. Either way, if you want, if you want to take part in this energy drink, rather than the poisonous.

• 2:26:58Jocko Willink?

  Now, I'm starting to go down the path, now we're, now we're starting to talk about nefarious companies. I'm going straight to the clothing manufacturers next. That are out there cutting the corners and saying, oh, we'll just get this made in China. We got slave labor over there.

• 2:27:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:27:11Jocko Willink?

  We got the Uighurs over there in actual slave labor camps, making your, making your shorts.

• 2:27:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:27:16Jocko Willink?

  How's that feel?

• 2:27:17Speaker 01

  Doesn't feel good.

• 2:27:18Jocko Willink?

  No.

• 2:27:19Speaker 01

  I don't feel good about it.

• 2:27:21Jocko Willink?

  I don't feel good about either, that's why, you know what? I don't get, I don't get shorts that are made in China.

• 2:27:25Speaker 01

  Yep, yeah, I dig it, man, I dig it. But, back to the energy drinks.

• 2:27:29Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 2:27:30Speaker 01

  We want to stick with those for mental and physical

• 2:27:35Speaker 01

  enhancements.

• 2:27:37Jocko Willink?

  Check.

• 2:27:37Speaker 01

  Enhance your capability. Also, uh, you can get stuff to, to take you out of any kind of roadblocks or speed bumps in recovery. We got protein, we got stuff for your joints, we got stuff for your immunity.

• 2:27:55Jocko Willink?

  We also got protein, but you could actually just call it dessert.

• 2:27:58Speaker 01

  Yes, another one of those upside, upside.

• 2:28:00Jocko Willink?

  I was having an emergency the other day, I thought I ran out of peanut butter.

• 2:28:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, wait, peanut butter flavored milk.

• 2:28:06Jocko Willink?

  Peanut, peanut butter flavored milk, yeah. But then it was in the back of the jabs. But I was like, speaking of crack.

• 2:28:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:28:13Jocko Willink?

  I look like a crack, crack cocaine addict.

• 2:28:16Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:28:16Jocko Willink?

  Digging through, like, wait.

• 2:28:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:28:20Jocko Willink?

  Cause one of my daughters just like went ham on the peanut butter.

• 2:28:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:28:24Jocko Willink?

  Milk.

• 2:28:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:28:26Jocko Willink?

  And it was like down to, I gotta, I gotta, you know, half a scoop, which is not gonna get you through the moment.

• 2:28:33Speaker 01

  Right, you, uh, you mentioned your daughter, and they're older, your kids are older, mine kind of young, where I play tricks on them. Where, they're, they're not tricks, it's a strategy, see what I'm saying? So I don't give them milk when they want it. I mean, one

• 2:28:45Jocko Willink?

  It's like a reward.

• 2:28:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, you see what I'm saying? It creates that that demand, see what I'm saying? So when they when they hit it, boom, that's the standard of the standard payoff of the dessert. See what I'm saying? Meanwhile, they're getting the the tail end of benefits. Yeah, it's a good idea. I'm out of peanut butter, by the way. Be little is on the case.

• 2:29:03Jocko Willink?

  You with the long walk going on.

• 2:29:04Speaker 01

  I'm over it trying, that's for sure.

• 2:29:05Jocko Willink?

  All right, we got a bunch of stuff. Where do we get the stuff?

• 2:29:07Speaker 01

  Jaco Fuel dot com. Also, okay, the the energy drinks you can get at Wawa, you can get at Vitamin Shoppe, you can get at Jaco Fuel dot com. Um, the rest of the stuff, mostly Jaco Fuel dot com and Vitamin Shoppe.

• 2:29:17Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, hey, just real quick, if you want it delivered, if you don't want to run out of peanut butter milk or whatever else, if you don't want to run out of if you subscribe to it, shipping's free. So that's our way of competing with some other large corporations that may not be as benevolent as Jaco Fuel.

• 2:29:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a good move right there. Also, Origin USA, this is where you can get American made stuff. You said it, you mentioned it. Like sometime, hey, some places, some some clothes that that some of the people wear is made with slave labor, straight up, and varying levels of slave slave labor too. You can go deep in that rabbit hole and find out some stuff that, Brad, you're not

• 2:29:58Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you can go on whatever those other YouTube channels are that you were talking about. You can watch, you know, little kids getting beaten because they didn't produce enough freaking pairs of shorts.

• 2:30:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, bro, it, uh, yeah, you can go deep for sure, but without depressing anybody.

• 2:30:12Jocko Willink?

  The factories where they got nets around them for when the people try and kill themselves, they they hit the net and then they drag them back in and put them back in front of the sewing machine again. You know what I'm saying?

• 2:30:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was really scary. I didn't know that that was real.

• 2:30:25Jocko Willink?

  That was real.

• 2:30:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, the but that's a scary thing to consider. Like, that's how common it is that they have a straight up SOP, like a little protocol in their place. Oh, yeah, this is just just to prevent the people from from actually dying when they try to commit suicide.

• 2:30:40Jocko Willink?

  That way we can get another day and a half of labor out of them.

• 2:30:42Speaker 01

  We need that labor, see what I'm saying? For this for clothes.

• 2:30:45Jocko Willink?

  So we're we're not down with that.

• 2:30:47Speaker 01

  Oh, we're not that down with that. So all this stuff is A, made in America, B, made in America by people who want to make this this stuff.

• 2:30:54Jocko Willink?

  They're so fired up.

• 2:30:55Speaker 01

  Hey, Brad, just grab one person from there. The, okay, so you can and you can see this on their YouTube channel, by the way, but you see the people making it. They're, Brad, they'll explain the whole thing to you. They'll be like, oh, yeah, this one is this and this and that. In fact, I saw one where they're saying, hey, I'm making this for this very specific person. I was like, damn. That's where I want to get my stuff from.

• 2:31:12Jocko Willink?

  For sure.

• 2:31:13Speaker 01

  Shoot.

• 2:31:14Jocko Willink?

  OriginUSA.com.

• 2:31:16Speaker 01

  It's true.

• 2:31:16Jocko Willink?

  Made in America.

• 2:31:17Speaker 01

  Yup, Jiu Jitsu stuff.

• 2:31:18Jocko Willink?

  Grown in America.

• 2:31:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, the seeds.

• 2:31:20Jocko Willink?

  Jiu Jitsu stuff, boots, by the way, we have, we made, we sold the government 24 million pairs of boots? We haven't yet, but even if we did, we wouldn't sell them 24 million. Not necessarily.

• 2:31:31Speaker 01

  Not if they don't need 24.

• 2:31:32Jocko Willink?

  No, especially because these boots are gonna last.

• 2:31:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:31:35Jocko Willink?

  So.

• 2:31:36Speaker 01

  And you're gonna look good too, let's face it.

• 2:31:37Jocko Willink?

  Let's face it.

• 2:31:40Jocko Willink?

  Echo, if Echo ever goes into combat, he's gonna be. Key component.

• 2:31:47Speaker 01

  Well, tha- that's something that does have some value, see what I'm saying? Cause I think a lot of people, we care about like, at the very least, a little bit about what it looks like. See what I'm saying? I put on the Delta 68, it's not like I didn't look in the mirror. I was like, it's not like I was like, you sure they fit? And then just kinda walked out.

• 2:32:04Jocko Willink?

  Interesting.

• 2:32:05Speaker 01

  I looked in the mirror a little bit and in fact, I remember when I redshirted in football. And we're warming up for the game, you know, you can, you can suit up for the game when you redshirt for football. And the coach said, he was like, dang, Echo looks good in his uniform. He's not ready to play, but he looks good in his uniform.

• 2:32:23Jocko Willink?

  Well, that could be also a foreshadowing of your tactical.

• 2:32:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:32:27Jocko Willink?

  Your tactical missions in life, you might not be ready to operate. You will look good.

• 2:32:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's what I felt when I put on the Delta 68. Yeah, I'm not ready for, you know, the, the Mekong Delta, but I'm ready to, to wear this stuff for sure, 100%. Unless, get it all at Origin USA, it's good stuff, guilt free stuff and superior stuff.

• 2:32:46Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 2:32:46Speaker 01

  Another win-win on that one. Also, Jocko's store calls Jocko Store. So you go to jockostore.com, that's where you can represent hardcore on the path. Discipline equals freedom. Good. It's a good way to look at things. Good. If you watch that video, yeah, that, that'll help a lot of us through some, some stuff, man. Unless you want to represent, that's where you can. Got some other stuff on there, some shorts, some hats, some hoodies. Women's

• 2:33:12Jocko Willink?

  When you heard me say that's good thing for the first time, we're like, oh, this is good.

• 2:33:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, I did.

• 2:33:16Jocko Willink?

  You like knew at the moment.

• 2:33:18Speaker 01

  Well, if you remember how that video came about or whatever, if you didn't want to call it coming about. I had my camera in the corner and when I was reading the notes, like, you know, I'd just go over the notes or whatever. I was like, oh, that one's gonna be a good one. So I, I didn't even take out the camera and set it up. If you notice, if you remember. Yeah, I kinda, I brought it out of the corner. And if you watch that video, if you look close, you can see like, there's like my computer monitor kinda obstructing like it wasn't set up. It's just like, I just sort of started running it. Cause I thought, oh yeah, that's looked good in the notes.

• 2:33:50Jocko Willink?

  Check you out, dude.

• 2:33:51Speaker 01

  So I just put some freaking music on that mother and send it out. Nonetheless, you wanna represent, like I said, jocko store.com. Go there. If you like something, get something. Also, we have a subscription thing too. Free shipping on this one as well. Some new, maybe more creative designs on that one. Good feedback on that one.

• 2:34:09Jocko Willink?

  Check.

• 2:34:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:34:11Jocko Willink?

  Yes.

• 2:34:12Speaker 01

  The shirt locker.

• 2:34:13Jocko Willink?

  That says check.

• 2:34:13Speaker 01

  Yep, it's true. Also, sure, you know, uh, there's, we have an homage to the Sea Wolves on there. We've got an homage to another group that we have grown very fond of. That's all I'm gonna say, man.

• 2:34:25Jocko Willink?

  Let me inspect that thing before you roll it out.

• 2:34:27Speaker 01

  That's all.

• 2:34:27Jocko Willink?

  You better let me inspect that thing before you roll it out.

• 2:34:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:34:30Jocko Willink?

  Please, cuz I gotta.

• 2:34:31Speaker 01

  Oh, you gotta have your.

• 2:34:32Jocko Willink?

  Give the ominous ominous.

• 2:34:33Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:34:33Jocko Willink?

  Just to confirm.

• 2:34:34Speaker 01

  Alright.

• 2:34:35Jocko Willink?

  There have been errors made in the past. I think we don't need to bring them up right now, but there have been things that have been created without approval and they were not correct.

• 2:34:43Speaker 01

  Alright, well, you know, it's a risk we all run, but yes, you're correct.

• 2:34:46Jocko Willink?

  And occasionally, occasionally, you know, look, I'm, I'm prone to run the things a little bit too decentralized. That's kinda what I do.

• 2:34:52Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:34:53Jocko Willink?

  But occasionally, let's do a little inspection to make sure we aren't making mistakes that we don't wanna make.

• 2:35:00Speaker 01

  What do we call it? QA, quality assurance?

• 2:35:02Speaker 02

  Before you print the shirt and send it to people, you should do that.

• 2:35:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think you might be right about that. Actually, okay, I understand what you're saying now. Yes, I remember. I remember Dave Berke in the house. Actually, Dave Berke was a big part of that, uh, rectification.

• 2:35:14Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, okay.

• 2:35:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:35:15Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:16Speaker 01

  When I say a big part, I mean the part.

• 2:35:18Jocko Willink?

  So let's, let's, let's just do a review. We'll call it a review. Hey, uh, subscribe to this podcast. Wherever you subscribe to podcasts, we also have Jocko Unraveling. We have the Grounded Podcast. We have the Warrior Kid Podcast. We also have Jocko Underground. Where we are talking about, uh, let's see, closely related topics.

• 2:35:38Jocko Willink?

  We're answering Q and A, so there's a special way you can send your questions in. And so we're answering Q and A on there and it is also our place to go in the event of problems.

• 2:35:52Speaker 01

  Problems.

• 2:35:53Jocko Willink?

  If we get banned or whatever, or they put advertisements on stuff or whatever.

• 2:35:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, you always like gloss over they, oh, just do Q and A or whatever. And a lot of those questions are like, that's like advice, like if you want life advice from Jaco.

• 2:36:07Jocko Willink?

  It's sort of the

• 2:36:08Speaker 01

  That's essentially it.

• 2:36:09Jocko Willink?

  Column, I guess.

• 2:36:09Speaker 01

  It is, bro, it is.

• 2:36:11Jocko Willink?

  And Jocko Willink, life coach. Jaco Underground dot com.

• 2:36:14Speaker 01

  Hell, yeah. Yeah, it sounds funny when you say like that, but conceptually.

• 2:36:18Jocko Willink?

  You know what's weird is I said that for the first time a long, like before I even got out of the Navy. Cause guys would come to me and be like, hey, this is going on. I'd be like, Jocko Willink, life coach.

• 2:36:27Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:36:27Jocko Willink?

  You know, and I'd say, here's what you need to do, bro.

• 2:36:29Speaker 01

  Amen. It's effective. I'm telling you, sometimes like they'll ask these questions and I'll be like, oh yeah, I'll read the question or whatever. And

• 2:36:36Jocko Willink?

  You think you know, you think you know what I'm gonna say?

• 2:36:39Speaker 01

  Well, I am, a lot of times I do know what you're gonna say in general, but here's the thing, here's what happens sometimes. Where someone, I'll read the question and, and, and I'll be like, oh yeah, that's a unique question for that, that person. You know, it doesn't really apply to me. So it'd be interesting to hear Jaco's answer, which I may or may not know the answer, you know, as far as the one he's gonna give. But then you expand on this answer. It's like, wait a second, I think I didn't use that right there. You see what I'm saying? So it kind of like, it kind of affects your life, even, even though the question's not like necessarily just yours.

• 2:37:08Jocko Willink?

  If you got questions, you want them answered, you want to hear what we talk about on that underground podcast, go to Jaco Underground dot com. It costs eight dollars and 18 cents a month. That's how you're supporting that whole thing. If you can't afford it, it's cool. We, we still want you in the game. Email assistance at Jaco Underground dot com. We have a YouTube channel.

• 2:37:29Jocko Willink?

  You can subscribe to that. Also, Origin USA has a cool YouTube channel where they're showing behind the scenes what's going on. Psychological Warfare is an album that Echo made. I talked on it. We made. Okay, so we made as a little collaborative effort. Sure. I came up with the things, I wrote it, I then I did the words, and then I said them in a proper way, and Echo collaborated by pressing record. Yep. Which was cool. Yeah.

• 2:37:55Speaker 02

  I do it.

• 2:37:56Jocko Willink?

  So, if you want to get the Psychological Warfare, you need a little help getting through some moment of weakness. We got you. Jocko Life Coach. We got you. If you want something to hang on your walls, go to flipsidecanvas.com. Dakota Meyer, speaking of metal of honor, Dakota Meyer, without question, earned that thing. And he's got a cool company, made in America, flipsidecanvas.com, making stuff to hang on your wall. Got a bunch of books. Final Spin, coming out soon. We don't even know what, is it a book, is it a novel, is it a poem, is it, what do you call it, Dave, you've read it? Literature.

• 2:38:32Speaker 02

  It's all those things, I guess. I know what it says on the cover.

• 2:38:35Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. What does it say on the cover, Final Spin? Oh, it says a novel. Yeah, that's right. They have to call it something.

• 2:38:41Speaker 02

  It's more than that, I know that for sure.

• 2:38:42Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Check. Then we have Leadership Strategy and Tactics Field Manual. That's going to answer all your questions about leadership. The code, the evaluation, the protocols. You gotta know, you gotta have a code. You gotta evaluate yourself. You gotta follow some protocols in life. There you go. We wrote them for you. Me and Dave Berke. Discipline is Freedom Field Manual, Way of the Warrior Kid 1, 2, 3, and 4, Mikey and the Dragons, About Face by Hackworth. I wrote the foreword to it. Extreme Ownership and the Dichotomy of Leadership that I wrote with my brother Leif Babin. Echelon Front, we have a leadership consultancy. And what we do is we solve problems through leadership. Go to echelonfront.com if you want to have

• 2:39:25Jocko Willink?

  us engage with your company, your business, or your team. Go to echelonfront.com. That's also where you can find out about the live events that we do. We do the muster, big leadership learning session, two days long. Next one up is in Vegas, Las Vegas, October 28th and 29th. We also do field training exercise, where you run around and do tactical missions and utilize the principles of leadership. We do EF Battlefield Tour, Gettysburg primarily. We don't make you march there. But we do walk around there and, and learn those lessons. We have an online training course because we, we, we want to get this information to as many people as possible. How do you do that? How do you scale that? I can't be everywhere. Dave can't be anywhere,

• 2:40:09Jocko Willink?

  everywhere. Leif Babin can't be everywhere. JP can't be everywhere. We can't just be everywhere. So what we did is we consolidated information onto the Extreme Ownership Academy. It's leadership courses. We do live sessions on there all the time. If you have a question, you come there and ask me. Go to extremeownership.com for that. If you want to help service members, active and retired, their families, Gold Star families, check out Mark Lee's mom, Mama Lee. She's got a charity organization that does all kinds of great stuff for our military members and our veterans. If you want to donate or you want to get involved, go to AmericasMightyWarriors.org. And if you want more of my prolonged proclamations,

• 2:40:49Jocko Willink?

  or you need more of Echo's derelict decrees, you can find us on the interwebs, on Twitter, on the Gram, on Facebook, Echo's at Echo Charles. I am at Jocko Willink. Where are you at, Dave? David R. Burke?

• 2:41:04Speaker 02

  David R. Burke? I escaped the, uh,

• 2:41:06Jocko Willink?

  The ridicule?

• 2:41:07Speaker 02

  The ridicule. It's nice. What ridicule?

• 2:41:09Jocko Willink?

  You know what?

• 2:41:10Speaker 02

  Derelict decrees. For you. Oh, right, right.

• 2:41:13Jocko Willink?

  If you're not getting ridiculed, it means people don't like you.

• 2:41:17Speaker 02

  There it is.

• 2:41:19Jocko Willink?

  And many thanks to all the men and women in the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines. You are the ones that carry out the will of our country. And you are also the ones who pay the price. And we are forever indebted to you for your sacrifice. And to police and law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, Border Patrol, Secret Service, and all first responders, you step up and you protect us here on the home front. And we are indebted to your service as well. And everyone else out there, this might seem obvious, but think about what you're doing. Weigh the risks and

• 2:42:04Jocko Willink?

  the benefits, the strategic benefits, the reward and the consequences. And make sure, make sure that you are doing the right things for the right reasons.

• 2:42:23Jocko Willink?

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