Jocko Underground: The Ways That You Are Technically Insane, Delusional, and Compulsive. Covid Vaccine?

Close to home discussion about insanity. Covid Vaccine Building Relationships at work from long distance Jiu Jitsu for kids. 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 the Jocko Underground Podcast, number 12, with Echo Charles and me, Jocko Willink. Good evening, Echo. Good evening. Also joining us tonight is Daryl Cooper. Good evening, Daryl.

• 0:11Speaker 01

  Happy to be here.

• 0:17Jocko Willink?

  Everyone is insane.

• 0:22Jocko Willink?

  Everyone is insane. I have been thinking about this lately. The clinical definition of insanity is

• 0:34Jocko Willink?

  "A mental illness of such a severe nature that a person cannot distinguish fantasy from reality, cannot conduct their affairs due to psychosis, or is subject to uncontrollable impulsive behavior."

• 0:51Jocko Willink?

  That's the clinical definition of insanity. And I was reading about someone recently that was clinically insane. And then I was also reading a book about a particular general during a war,

• 1:11Jocko Willink?

  who, he wasn't maybe clinically insane to this level, but his actions started to make me think that he actually does have some level of insanity, because he couldn't distinguish fantasy from reality.

• 1:31Jocko Willink?

  So, let's break this down a little bit. Because I think I'm right. What I think is everyone's insane on some level. So, first of all, think about this. The first section there, "Cannot distinguish fantasy from reality."

• 1:47Jocko Willink?

  Cannot distinguish fantasy from reality. Okay, so you get the stereotypical person on the street that's yelling at a telephone pole, or whatever, right? They're delusional. They don't think other people can see what they're doing.

• 2:00Jocko Willink?

  They think they're more capable than they are. You know, that's, that's kind of the thing that clued me in off this whole idea, was this, this particular military general who was doing things, who didn't understand the reality of the situation that he was in. Just didn't understand it.

• 2:15Jocko Willink?

  So cannot distinguish fantasy from reality. That's part one. Part two, cannot conduct affairs due to psychosis. What does that mean? That means you're not doing what you're supposed to be doing. You're not doing what you're supposed to be doing. Is there anyone listening to this echo Charles? Is there any day that you don't exactly do what you're supposed to be doing? Does that ever happen? You don't conduct your affairs the way you're supposed to? Does that ever happen to you, Daryl? Has there ever been a day where you didn't quite conduct the affairs you were supposed to do?

• 2:45Jocko Willink?

  Well.

• 2:46Speaker 01

  No, no comment.

• 2:48Jocko Willink?

  Okay, subject to uncontrollable impulsive behavior.

• 2:56Jocko Willink?

  Do we even need to ask that question? Right? What about a donut? Who, what about a piece of pizza? What about the anger? What about the smashing of the whatever, the, the, the kitchen counter?

• 3:10Jocko Willink?

  Uncontrollable impulsive behavior. You can't stop yourself from doing that thing at that moment.

• 3:20Jocko Willink?

  And here's the other part of this, and it's not part of the definition, but I looked it up and it is, it is part of insanity is that insane people don't know that they're insane.

• 3:31Jocko Willink?

  They don't know that they're insane. They're not aware of it. And this is another thing, reading about this particular military leader, who didn't realize what was happening. He didn't see how obviously mistaken he was with the moves that he was making. Like anybody on the outside would look and say, oh yeah, this guy's clearly making mistake after mistake after mistake. And he didn't even realize it. Didn't even realize it.

• 3:55Jocko Willink?

  And I think what happens is, what, what that reminded me of,

• 4:00Jocko Willink?

  is that you're, if you allow your head to be an echo chamber for your own ideas and your own thoughts, and you only let those thoughts rattle around in there, it's not gonna go well after a while. It ends up in a feedback loop. Was it a positive feedback loop? It's a positive feedback loop. It's feedback on a, on a, on an amplifier.

• 4:24Jocko Willink?

  What does that mean? It means we need to be able to detach. You know, if you wanna, if you wanna distinguish fantasy from reality as a human, you gotta detach from the situation you're in. If you want to conduct affairs regardless of how you're feeling, you gotta detach from that. If you wanna overcome your impulsive behaviors, you've gotta detach. You gotta be able to take a step back and detach. And by the way, if you don't do that, you don't realize your own psychosis.

• 4:52Jocko Willink?

  And this is similar from a leadership perspective.

• 4:57Jocko Willink?

  If you're in an echo chamber from a leadership perspective. If, if I'm the leader and I'm coming up with ideas and Echo's a yes man and Daryl's a yes man and they're saying, "Yeah, boss, great idea. That sounds great. Let's, let's go ahead and do that." And no one questions me, no one pushes back. We're caught in an echo chamber of ideas and we're gonna fail. Or chances are, we're gonna fail.

• 5:17Jocko Willink?

  So, we need to push back against ourselves. We need to question ourselves. We need to remember that the reality that we see, the reality that we actually see with our own two eyes, looks different from other people's eyes. And you need to see if you can see what they're seeing.

• 5:38Jocko Willink?

  You gotta remember how things look compared to what other people think they look like.

• 5:46Jocko Willink?

  You gotta remember that this idea of being insane is something that we all have a tendency to lean towards, right? We, we fail to identify or accept reality. It's one of the things I was talking about with a bunch of businesses. As, as COVID kicked off, there were some people that were all going, "We're not gonna be locked down. This, this can't last." So, fast forward, six months, three months, one year.

• 6:14Jocko Willink?

  People didn't accept the reality that they were facing. "We're just gonna keep doing things that doesn't work." So, so we have a tendency to fail. We fail to accept reality.

• 6:26Jocko Willink?

  We have a tendency to fail to do what we're supposed to do. We have the, we have a tendency to fail to conduct our affairs.

• 6:35Jocko Willink?

  That's a tendency that we all have. We have a tendency to fail to control impulsive behavior. These are things that everyone, no one can deny these things.

• 6:47Jocko Willink?

  And we don't even recognize and realize what we're doing.

• 6:54Jocko Willink?

  So we don't even see that little bit of psychosis setting in. We don't even see, we don't even see that little bit of psychosis setting in where we are actually losing touch with reality. Our heads in an echo chamber. And the echo chamber amplifies the lies that we're telling ourselves. It amplifies our problems, prevents solutions. So what we have to do is we have to detach, we have to ask questions, we have to listen. Don't be a yes man to yourself. Don't let that happen. Don't let that happen.

• 7:39Jocko Willink?

  So insanity, what do you think, Daryl? Am I wrong?

• 7:44Speaker 01

  You're not wrong. I think one of the, one of the most interesting things, interesting points to make to people in this respect, it's just like so many other qualities about people, right? Take, take courage, for example. You know, some guys who would run into a firefight at the drop of a hat to rescue their friend, but they just, they don't have the courage to stand up to their wife when she's acting in a certain way or something like that, right? It's domain specific and insanity is often domain specific. It makes me think of this, uh, this one woman I knew very well. I still know her. Um, she's a, she's a, she's a great person, very intelligent, philosophy degree, master's degree, graduated with honors in philosophy.

• 8:28Speaker 01

  She works in education. She's been a teacher, vice principal and administrator, and she's the best bureaucrat that anybody who has ever worked with her has ever seen. She's great at her job. Everybody who knows her, she's, she's brilliant. She's great. She's just a normal person. I knew her very, very well. And, um, she had a touch of paranoia that she was an anxious person, a little bit paranoid. Now, some people are paranoid. They think, uh, people are talking about me behind my back when they're really not interested. That's a version of it, right?

• 8:58Jocko Willink?

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

• 9:08Jocko Willink?

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

• 9:53Jocko Willink?

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