Human Nature, Leadership, and Atrocities w/ Daniele Bolelli and Darryl Cooper

0:00:00 - Opening Intro. 0:04:20 - Daniele Bolelli and Darryl Cooper talk. 1:57:15 - Support: JockoStore http://www.jockostore.com stuff, Super Krill Oil and Joint Warfare and Discipline Pre-Mission http://originmaine.com/origin-labs/jocko/, THE MUSTER 005 in DC http://www.extremeownership.com/washington-dc-005. Origin Brand Apparel and Jocko Gi http://www.originmaine.com, withJocko White Tea http://www.jockotea.com, Onnit Fitness stuff, http://www.onnit.com/jocko and Psychological Warfare (on iTunes) https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/psychological-warfare/id1183222322. Extreme Ownership (book) http://amzn.to/2jonHTx, Way of The Warrior Kid 2: Marc's Mission http://read.macmillan.com/mcpg/way-of-the-warrior-kid/?utm_source=authorsite&utm_medium=authorsite&utm_term=jockofollowers-jockopreorder&utm_content=na-preorder-buynow&utm_campaign=9781250156792&et=44236-a110035216-n20273057, The Discipline Equals Freedom Field Manual, http://amzn.to/2szgaEj and Jocko Soap. https://irishoaksranch.com/storefront/jocko-soap 2:31:44 - 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 with Echo Charles and me Jocko Willink. Good evening Echo. Good evening. And tonight's podcast is a little bit different, but I think it has some good information in it. I was asked by two people who have outstanding podcasts of their own to sit down and have a conversation about leadership and specifically leadership inside of atrocities. And when we recorded it, I wasn't really expecting it, but we decided that we would all

• 0:40Jocko Willink?

  release it on our podcast platforms. So the two people that I recorded this with are Daniele Bolelli and Daryl Cooper. Unfortunately Echo Charles was not present for this recording.

• 0:58Jocko Willink?

  And Daniele Bolelli, first of all, he's a history professor. He's a martial artist. He's an author and yes, he's a podcaster. He has two podcasts that are great to listen to. They're great podcasts. One is called The Drunken Taoists and the other one is History on Fire. They're great podcasts. They're entertaining podcasts. They're educational. They're, like I said, they're super informative. And the podcast that you're about to listen to is based on a couple other podcasts. The first one being by Daniele from his History on Fire podcast,

• 1:37Jocko Willink?

  number 32 Alpha, 32A for civilians out there. And the, the podcast is about the Sand Creek massacre, which took place in present day, Kiowa County, Colorado on November 29th, 1864, where there were about somewhere between 70 and 170 Cheyenne Arapaho Indians, mostly women and children.

• 2:07Jocko Willink?

  Who were slaughtered by a 675 man force of the Colorado US Voluntar Cavalry.

• 2:18Jocko Willink?

  Brutal situation, horrible situation. And like I said, Daniele Bolelli talks about that on his History on Fire podcast, number 32 Alpha. The other podcast this is related to is from Daryl Cooper's podcast. His podcast is called The Martyr Made Podcast and specifically podcast number 10. It's about the My Lai massacre. And that is when about 500 innocent civilians, again, mostly women and children were murdered and many also raped and mutilated by US soldiers in Vietnam.

• 3:01Jocko Willink?

  Daryl Cooper is also an incredible podcaster. He's a great storyteller and he goes through ridiculous, I would say, depths to give all perspectives of a story. And his podcast Martyr Made is fantastic. He doesn't put them out off as often as I wish he would, but the podcasts are great. The one on the Palestinian Israeli conflict that he started his first, I think it's his first six podcasts on Martyr Made. That's what it's about and they're fantastic. And he's a veteran of the US Navy. He's a wrestler. He's a jujitsu player and he's really smart, well-read person

• 3:45Jocko Willink?

  and great to listen to. And then the last podcast is my own podcast, Jocko Podcast, number 31, Four Hours in My Lai, which is when I did an assessment of a book by that name and talked about that same massacre in Vietnam. And in this podcast that you're about to listen to, the three of us discuss how these atrocities come about and what can be done to prevent them in the future. So that's the lay down. And here it is.

• 4:22Speaker 01

  Daniele Jocko, everybody, I'm here. Daryl Cooper, talking to two of my favorite people.

• 4:30Speaker 01

  We're gonna go some dark places today. You've listened to the last two podcasts that Daniele and I have put out and maybe about 60% of the podcasts that Jocko's put out, then you know we're gonna dive into some dark places. I want to get it started pretty quick. We've been talking beforehand, so let's just jump right into it.

• 4:49Speaker 01

  Daniele and I recently did a series that we cooperated on where he covered the Sand Creek massacre in 1864. Some US Army soldiers massacred some Native Americans in Colorado. I did the My Lai massacre, similar situation 104 years later in the jungles of Vietnam.

• 5:09Speaker 01

  We're fortunate enough to be here with Jocko. If you don't know who Jocko is, I guess we'll go ahead and let you introduce yourself just a little bit.

• 5:17Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, my name is Jocko Willink. I was in the military for 20 years and retired in 2010. And now I've written a couple of books and have a podcast called Jocko Podcast because I don't get really creative with the names of things, so.

• 5:36Speaker 01

  Jocko's pretty direct about things, so he's also kind of humble. Jocko is a Navy SEAL commander in Iraq. He led Task Force Bruiser, is that right?

• 5:44Jocko Willink?

  Task Unit Bruiser.

• 5:45Speaker 01

  Task Unit Bruiser into the Battle of Ramadi. If you know anything about the war in Iraq, you know, Battle of Ramadi and the Battle of Fallujah are probably the two big fights that get mentioned the most, but whereas Fallujah was more of a direct assault on the city after the insurgents captured and tortured and mutilated some US contractors and Bush ordered the Marines to retaliate. The Battle of Ramadi was a little bit different. Jocko's gonna talk a little bit about the environment that they went into going into it, and so he's got some military experience, not only being on the ground, but of leading men in battle in an environment, an insurgent war where you've got different groups of people,

• 6:28Speaker 01

  different sects, the Sunni and the Shiite Iraq, who are fighting a bloody battle that... We're in the middle of, but who we can't engage with on their level. You know, these are people who are fighting a very, very dirty and ugly war against one another and against us if they get their hands on us. As Americans going into a war like that, you know, we've got a, we've got a different mentality. We try to avoid behaving in ways that dishonor us and it's something that Jocko takes very seriously. And he, he had to lead men into combat under those conditions. So we're going to talk about that. It was 2006, April of 2006, when you led your men into Ramadi to begin with, is that right?

• 7:05Jocko Willink?

  Yes, yeah, that's what it was.

• 7:06Speaker 01

  So shortly before that, a couple of months before the Golden Dome of the Al Skarid Mosque was blown up by Al Qaeda in Iraq, Zarqawi's people, this is an ancient Shia mosque, one of the most sacred places to Shia Islam.

• 7:21Jocko Willink?

  Well, well, interestingly, Ramadi was, is primarily Sunni. In fact, it's almost all Sunni. And interestingly, the majority of the military forces in Iraq, especially the army, were, were Shia. And so you had to kind of diffuse that tension on a pretty regular basis to make sure that there weren't, you know, reprisal killings. And the, there was definitely some level of mistrust between the Sunnis that lived there in the city and the Shia military. But it's definitely, it's, it's absolutely, it was absolutely clear that the, the Sunnis

• 8:05Jocko Willink?

  that lived in Ramadi, the local Sunnis that lived in Ramadi, much preferred the Shia army soldiers to the insurgents that were there, that were being run by Al Qaeda in Iraq, by Zarqawi and the likes. And because what they were doing was just savagery and, you know, everything that you hear about, they were skinning people alive, they were beheading whole families, they were torturing, raping and murdering, murdering the local populace in to get them to support them as much as they could through pure terror. And so the local populace. Even though they might not have been, you know, they're they're basically going with

• 8:50Jocko Willink?

  who's their worst enemy at the time, their worst enemy at the time was without question, al-Qaeda in Iraq. And so the Shia army that was there to fight al-Qaeda in Iraq, the the Sunnis were were generally in support of what the army was doing there. So it was it was a little bit different than in areas like Sadr City where the the Shias in Sadr City were very active, there was an active fight going on against coalition forces. So, yeah, it's a it's definitely a tricky situation.

• 9:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. When when you roll into a situation like that with American soldiers, where both sides are engaged in just a hurricane of atrocities across the country and where the people who are there, they might be looking to you for safety, or I guess that's a question I would have, they probably, under the circumstances, where the people in the city, I mean, they probably were looking to you to protect them.

• 9:41Jocko Willink?

  Absolutely. And and just before we showed up, just to just to kind of paint this as clear as I can, and and I forget the exact numbers, and I apologize for that, but just before we showed up, the insurgents murdered, it was something like seven, eight, nine, 10 of the leading tribal sheikhs in the area. And the tribal sheikhs that survived that left, they left. And so that just put the whole, the whole city, you know, under such a grip of fear of the insurgents, that they just basically surrendered, as much as you can surrender, which means, hey, if you want to come and stay at my house, and you want to sit in my backyard and launch mortars at the coalition forces, we're not going to say anything to

• 10:26Jocko Willink?

  you, because we're going to, we want to live. We don't want to get killed. And that's what you end up with, you end up with passive support, and that's what the locals were doing. They were passively supporting the insurgents only because they didn't want to have their heads cut off. And so as we, and and this was a brilliant strategy that was spearheaded by the 118, the the Ready First Brigade of the First Armored Division, run by a guy named Colonel Sean McFarlane, who ended up being a general, and he's a brilliant guy and and a great leader. But, you know, his I, his attitude, which he actually got from H.R. McMaster, which he had employed up in Tal Afar and and

• 11:08Jocko Willink?

  111 AD had actually gone into Tal Afar and gotten a turnover and understood what they had done up in Tal Afar and the strategy was called seize clear hold and build, which was go into these enemy controlled territories, these enemy controlled neighborhoods and stay there. And so that's what, that's what the strategy was. And that was a lot different than the strategy that had been being used up until this point, not just in Ramadi, but in all of Iraq.

• 11:32Speaker 01

  Is that a strategy that it almost seems like, looking at, reading about Ramadi from the outside of somebody who's never been in combat, it almost seems like the goal was to go in there and establish your dominance over the city, almost to show the people of the city that you don't have to be afraid of these people because they're afraid of us. And we're gonna, we have freedom in this city. We can take our Humvees and patrol these streets and they're not going to come out and fight us because they're afraid of us. And so you don't have to fear them. It almost seems like that was the goal there.

• 12:01Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I wouldn't use the word dominance because we weren't trying to dominate the local populace. We were trying to provide security for the local populace. And obviously that's a big difference because when you start having an attitude of we're going to dominate the local populace, that that's just a small step in the wrong direction, right? That's a small step in the wrong direction. Whereas saying, hey, we're here to protect and secure and stabilize the local populace, that is, that is what we were doing.

• 12:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it took us maybe a little bit longer than we wish it would have to recognize that before you can do anything, counter insurgency, you have to provide security to the people. If you're not leaving them a choice, then they're going to provide that passive support, right?

• 12:42Speaker 02

  And I think that's one of the issues that shows up with the kind of episodes we did, you know, both the story of Sun Creek and the story of Milai. You have a situation in which suddenly some guys begin to look everybody on the quote unquote other side as belonging to the same field. Why? Because they are all Cheyenne or they are all Vietnamese. They are all, there's no sense that they are not all in the same boat. Some people are your allies. Some people are your enemies. Some people are exactly what you were saying, stuck in between where I kind of have to cooperate with your enemies, not because I want to, but because I really have no other choice. And you cannot treat all of them the same way. And so I think the dilemma that you are facing, this idea of having to figure out, okay, there are people that we're here to protect. Those are not the people we're

• 13:25Speaker 02

  going after. There are other people that we need to take care of. That seems to be one of the things that was very much missing, you know, that nuance, that ability to look at people who may look the same way, but they are not the same people, to look at them with different eyes. That seemed to be really what was missing in some of the stories that we treated, where the guys who did what they did is because to them is like, an Indian is an Indian, Vietnamese is Vietnamese, whatever, it's all the same, doesn't really matter. And I think is like, how do you see what leads to that point on one side and vice versa? What is that you guys were doing to make sure that it doesn't go to that point where your

• 14:07Speaker 02

  guys would not make that switch to that frame of mind and keep their priorities very clear in terms of differentiating in terms of who they are facing?

• 14:16Speaker 01

  And real quick, can I just add a supplement to that question? Because that's kind of what I wanted to ask as well is, how do you, how do you train your men and lead your men in such a way that they can pull the trigger when they have to? And when civilians get killed accidentally, that doesn't destroy them emotionally, right? There's got to be some kind of separation there without having them fully enter over into that mindset that Daniele is talking about, where you're just dehumanizing the enemy altogether? When you have to lead your men in a situation like that, like, how did you deal with that?

• 14:52Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, well, this is leadership. This is leadership, and this is leadership in war. And this is, you know, this question that you're asking is the, you know, one of the largest possible questions you could ask about combat leadership. And, you know, I appreciate that you guys keep referring to me, but I was, I had thirty five or forty SEALs there, depending on the time, and there was five thousand six hundred soldiers and Marines that were there, that were discriminating targets every single day, and that had outstanding leadership, that were, that were making sure that guys with less training than my guys, guys that were younger than my guys, guys that had a tougher job than my guys in many cases, would still discriminate targets and make sure that they

• 15:36Jocko Willink?

  were, were engaging enemy personnel and not civilians. Now, I'm certainly not saying that civilians didn't get killed, because civilians got killed. And it's an awful thing, and it's one of the things I talk about all the time, if you go to war and you're not... comfortable with the fact that you're going to kill innocent people, then you probably don't have the will to go to war and maybe what you're going to war for isn't, doesn't meet the threshold of what warrants a war. Mm hmm. And, and if that's what the conclusion you come to, that's fine. You know, let's hope you come to it before you've, before you've, before you're on the ground and, and blood has been spilled. But there's so many little things to, that would, that would, that you know, that we'd

• 16:21Jocko Willink?

  cover to talk about. I mean, just even the distinction that I just made between like, hey, we're, we're going in there to dominate. That, that's a little step. It's one little step. And using that word and then following it up. And, and we talked a little bit about this and, and Daryl, I was listening to your podcast about the Mila massacre and I did one about it as well. And one of the things that, that really, that I talked about in pretty great depth, because for me, I had, I, I had incredible correlation, correlation between what happened to Mila and what I sometimes saw happen overseas. And that was with the intelligence that you're receiving. And you could see, and I pointed it out in my podcast and I, I don't remember like all

• 17:04Jocko Willink?

  the exact verbiage, but you know, at the senior levels of intelligence, the intelligence report was that Pinkville or the area of Pinkville or Mila, whatever you want to call it, Mila four, that that area, the, the initial intelligence was, you know, suspected Vietnamese in the, or suspected Viet Cong, uh, area could be possible, you know, Viet Cong. And, and then it went down one level in the chain of command. And the next people that briefed it, it was, you know, just a little bit stronger, you know, it was, you know, Viet Cong area, Viet Cong controlled area.

• 17:46Jocko Willink?

  And then it went down one more level and it was Viet Cong, uh, headquarters area. And then it got down to, this is all Viet Cong. And then they threw in the, the fact that, you know, the.

• 18:01Jocko Willink?

  The people going to the market, right? It's market day. You know, that started off as, hey, some people will be at the market on this day. And by the time it got to the guys on the ground, it was everyone that's good is gonna be at the market. Everyone that's still in the village is gonna be bad. They're gonna be VC. And, well, you know what to do with VC.

• 18:21Speaker 02

  Yeah. What he says is really interesting in terms of just human communication. How in that case, before you even go about Americans and Vietnamese, you even discuss war or lead just the basics of human communication. How sometime starting one degree off, before you know it, if you keep it long enough, that one degree off took you so far off course from the reality they are trying to describe, that the words, which is kind of like playing telephone, you know, when you whisper something in the other person's ear, it doesn't sound that different from what you just heard, but you just tweak it just tiny bit. By the time you're down twenty people, the message has no similarity whatsoever to the original one.

• 19:02Speaker 02

  And it seems like that as, I think we do it all the time in daily life, but nobody dies as a result of it, whereas in that kind of scenario, people do die. The consequences are so much more dramatic as a result of that.

• 19:16Jocko Willink?

  And what's interesting is, and Daryl, you kind of brought up in your podcast, and you did as well, Danielle, is how does this happen, right? How does this happen? Because if you take a normal human being and you drop them into the middle of that thing, they look around and they go, what the hell's happening? Which is, which is actually what happened when, when Hugh Thompson came in his helicopter, he, he dropped into this situation and said, what the hell's going on here? This is totally wrong. Uh, but as you're, as you're getting there, if you're not on that trip, if you're not on that train as it's going off the rails, you, you don't recognize it.

• 19:57Jocko Willink?

  And that's why one thing I talk about all the time, from a leadership perspective, is the ability to detach from all the chaos and all the mayhem that's happening. Because if you don't have to, if you don't have the ability to detach from that chaos, you're in it. And if you're in the chaos as a leader, you don't see the mayhem that's happening. And so it's so important for a leader. In the business world, but certainly in the military, to be able, or in any leadership position, to be able to step back and, and observe what's actually happening from a detached perspective, because otherwise, you're in the storm, and that is not a good place to be as a leader.

• 20:37Speaker 01

  You've got to have rules for how you're going to behave before, while you're going into it, because if you just, you know, if you're going to react to everything on the ground, once you arrive, I mean, it's always more expedient to just shoot them. You know, at the time, it's always easier and safer, probably, to just do the easy thing and be violent or whatever, so you have to have rules going into it.

• 20:58Speaker 02

  I guess, yeah, one thing that I want, because the point he brings up is super interesting, but I think essentially what you're saying is that the person in a position of leadership needs to be a zen master, you know, they need to be in the middle of emotions that clearly are affecting everyone around them, and they are bombard, they are getting bombarded with those emotions, they need to be completely detached from this stuff. It makes perfect sense, how do you do it, because it's a hell of a lot easier said than done, clearly, and how do people even train to get to that place?

• 21:33Jocko Willink?

  So, well, for one thing, when I was running the training for the West Coast SEAL Teams, I would fire up that training to a point that it was, there was total temptation for the leaders to get wrapped into the scenarios that I was developing for them. There'd be total mayhem, and if they let it happen, they would get wrapped up in these horrible scenarios mentally, emotionally. They'd be mad, they'd be mad at me, because I was the guy that was running the training, they'd be mad at the opposing force role players, they'd be mad at their guys, they'd start yelling and screaming, they'd make bad decisions, and, and I wanted them to get there, because I wanted them to see what happens when you get wrapped up in this stuff emotionally.

• 22:14Jocko Willink?

  So, and then what I would do is teach them that they have certain, what I would call red flags, certain, certain signals that they need to learn how to pick up.

• 22:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:25Jocko Willink?

  If you feel yourself, start raising your voice. Well, then that probably indicates that you might be getting emotional. If you're breathing heavy, if your fists are clenched, there's all these things that you start to recognize. And once you can recognize them and you say, okay, I'm starting to get emotional right now. Need to step back. Now, interestingly, what I would often do and an easy methodology for training these guys was, first of all, stop looking down the sights of your weapon. Like you're not allowed to. And we'd give, we'd give a leader a stick if we had to and take their gun away. So that they weren't going to be shooting, they weren't going to be wrapped up in that tactical situation. And literally put that weapon at high port and step back away from the firing line.

• 23:09Jocko Willink?

  You know, Cali, Cali is with his M16 gunning people down. He's completely wrapped up in what's happening. Medina is yelling and screaming. I mean, I talk about this with, with police forces as well. If you want to hear people, go, go listen to some of the bad shootings that you hear. And police have a incredibly hard job. They need way more training, but go listen to some of those shootings that take place and listen to the pitch and the tone of the officer. If, and, and what are they doing? They're saying, get the hell, get the hell, get the hell. They're, they're, they're completely emotional.

• 23:46Speaker 02

  Right.

• 23:46Jocko Willink?

  And that emotion is going to drive bad decision making. So you have to learn how to detach. The way you do it is, and the way I would initially teach guys to do it is by physically putting their weapon at high port, stepping back away from the, the actual firing line. And look, moving their head around and looking around, you know, so the story I wrote about an extreme ownership is, you know, we, I had the, the Delta Platoon commander who's a great guy, smart guy, you know, Ivy League Naval Academy. And just, just a brilliant guy, great guy. And he was, we were doing some training. And it was in Humvees and we were doing immediate action drills in Humvees.

• 24:29Jocko Willink?

  You're out in the desert and your targets pop up and you engage the targets. It's like, it's like being mini tank commanders and you've got five vehicles. You've got to maneuver them on the battlefield while they provide cover fire for each other. And it's, it's a little bit chaotic. There's big machine gun shooting and, and when I was going with him and I was sitting behind him, observing him do this. And

• 24:51Jocko Willink?

  Every time the shooting would start, he would kind of lock up, right? He'd kind of like lock up. There's so much happening that he wasn't processing it quick enough. And so I took a Sharpie magic marker and I, and I, and I wrote down on the window in front of his face. I wrote, okay, here's what I want you to do. When, when the shooting starts, I want you to do this. One, relax. Two, look around. Three, make a call. And at that time, I hadn't thought through this stuff as much as I have now because I've been doing it for much longer. But what I was telling him to do was, you know, detach from what's happening. And, and the way you do that is you relax, you look around and, and then you get on the, the radio and you make a call. And, you know, the next run, I watched him and I was sitting behind him and I'm looking over his shoulder.

• 25:36Jocko Willink?

  And once the shooting starts, you can't hear anything. So I'm just, just watching him and I, I see him, the shooting starts, I see him look at the window and I see him take a deep breath and exhale. And I was like, okay, he just relaxed and I see his head start to turn and I realized, okay, now he's looking around and, and, and that, those two simple items were enough to make him detach from all that chaos, actually assess what is happening and then make a good decision. And so that is one of the most important things that you can train a leader to do.

• 26:02Speaker 01

  Sounds like coaching a jujitsu weight belt. First thing you tell them, they're on the ground getting beat on and they kind of, for, the first thing you tell them, breathe.

• 26:09Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 26:10Speaker 01

  Just breathe.

• 26:11Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 26:11Speaker 01

  Relax until you can do that, then nothing's going to work.

• 26:14Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's one of those, it's one of those things too. People talk about like breathing exercises. And one thing that I would instinctively do, and it's another thing that I would train my guys to do was like, you don't panic on the radio. You don't yell on the radio, you don't scream on the radio. You, no matter what's going on, when you get on the radio, you say, you know, Bruiser one six, this is Bruiser over. I mean, that's, that's what you do and. In order to do that, you have to relax. You, you, so it forces you, if you're not gonna sound panicked on the radio, which, which if you sound panicked on the radio and, and your team hears it, guess what, you're gonna have panic going on.

• 26:57Jocko Willink?

  So you have to, it's another, it's another method to detach. So when you hear your voice getting excited, when you, you know, when you read about Lieutenant Cali yelling and you hear about Medina yelling, that, that, you know, Cali started yelling likely because Medina was yelling at him. And now that's what happens. We're just, we're just sending that panic through the chain of command and it's, it's a horrible, horrible thing.

• 27:19Speaker 02

  I think what's fascinating about it is that the parallels, even though the scenario you're describing is something that 99% of the people listening, 99% of the human beings will never have to deal with because they're never gonna be in combat, which bullets flying all around them and all of that. And yet, it's easy to forget that the same dynamics are at play in most people's lives in ways that they may be able to recognize in with less extreme consequences. But like, when you're a parent and you have your kids going wild and suddenly you find yourself, you know, raising your voice and starting to yell at them. And not the, cause I mean, there's a time and a place. Sometimes it's the right thing to do is to kind of cool them on their stuff in harsh ways. But there's a difference between raising your voice with an intent

• 28:04Speaker 02

  and raising your voice because you're losing it and you're getting overly emotional and you're getting angry. And kids realize it and they will hear you. They will see how you are losing your stuff. They will see how you are less of a credible presence in their life that they not can count on you that way because you are wrapped in your own emotions. And, you know, they press a little button and you go off. Sometimes they'll press that button because they enjoy seeing you go off. Sometimes they'll press that, but you know, the, the point is you're not a good leader as a parent at that point.

• 28:33Jocko Willink?

  And it's the same thing. I mean, uh, my company now, we work with businesses all over the world and it's the same exact thing. And I teach the same exact thing. If you're starting to get mad at your employee, you're starting to get mad at your subordinates, if you're starting to get mad at your boss, what should you be doing as a good leader? You should be detaching, taking a step back. I've told people, hey, if you Start feeling that way, you stand up from the meeting table. Just, just, you know, no one's gonna say, "Hey, what are you doing?" You just, you know, stand up, stretch out, step back away. People are having a heated argument and you start getting involved in it. Instead of getting involved in it, take a step back. By the way, when you do that, you look like a tactical genius, because everyone else is starting to lose their temper. They're starting to say things that they shouldn't say, and you're the one that's listening. I just, just covered a book,

• 29:17Jocko Willink?

  and, and, just, just like, a little thing is, if, if there's, if you're talking, I'm gonna let you talk. Because if I let you talk, I know twice as much as you. I know everything that you know, and I know everything that I know. So, I'm gonna win that tactical situation.

• 29:31Speaker 01

  I want to come back to what you were just saying, Daniel, about leadership as a parent. It, it ties into something he was talking about a few minutes ago with like, a police officer who's panicking. We were mentioning this on the car ride over here, about police shootings, like, more often than not, what you see is that they're the result of incompetence. They're the result of a socially inept cop who can't manage the situation, and it's not an easy situation to manage. You've got a potentially dangerous person, you don't know them, and maybe they're lightly resisting you just verbally, and you've got to take control of that situation. Well, unless you're an exceptionally competent and confident person, maybe the only tool you have to bring that person under control is your baton,

• 30:13Speaker 01

  or whatever it is. And you get the impression, in Vietnam especially, once you get up to 68, 69, where, you know, they're starting to just throw junior officers in right out of, you know, ROTC, and just throwing them into combat. And you hear stories about, you know, officers getting fragged. You start to hear stories about-

• 30:32Jocko Willink?

  You know, Cali washed out of OCS three times, right?

• 30:34Speaker 01

  Three times, right. And you, you get these people now into a situation where you have a military unit that recognizes their incompetent leadership, and they're scared, they feel- incompetent themselves as a unit and you get them into a place where and maybe this is something that you can contrast really well because you dealt you led primarily SEALs and Marines right?

• 30:57Jocko Willink?

  Well SEALs.

• 30:58Speaker 01

  Okay, just so you know, and you worked a lot with Marines.

• 31:00Jocko Willink?

  We worked a lot with Marines and Army soldiers as well, yeah.

• 31:02Speaker 01

  Okay, yeah.

• 31:03Jocko Willink?

  Actually mostly, there was one battalion of Marines in inside Ramadi.

• 31:07Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 31:08Jocko Willink?

  The 38 Marines, awesome.

• 31:10Speaker 01

  When you're dealing with the American military today and I know, I mean, this is something that gets lost on a lot of people is that as highly trained and motivated and all those things as our special forces are, you know, they're very specialized, you guys are, you know, trained for very, very specific intense missions and stuff, but you go pull an average Ranger or Marine or something or infantryman, you put them in combat with good leadership and that is an unbelievably effective soldier. I mean, American soldiers today are all volunteer force, these are incredibly well-trained and motivated people if you, you know, if they have the proper leadership. When you get back into a situation like that with Vietnam where you get a whole unit in

• 31:52Speaker 01

  that situation that that cop's in, where they're in maybe a village, they don't exactly know how to handle this situation without resorting to lethal force and they start to feel threatened and everything runs off the rails. You know, it's unrealistic to expect, just like, you know, you're a happily married man and you don't want to cheat on your wife, then when you're off on a business trip, after you've had a few drinks with the coworker that's on travel with you, it seems innocuous, maybe it's totally innocent at the time, don't go upstairs of the hotel to watch a movie, because if you get to that point, you're just putting yourself in a terrible position, right?

• 32:31Speaker 01

  And in that military context, the idea that all of the built-up momentum behind something like Meili, the idea that you're going to get right up to that moment on March 16th, 1968, where the only thing That stopping it from happening is a few pounds of trigger pull. That's the last bit of, you know, that's your last opportunity to avert this catastrophe. It's just that few pounds of trigger pull. Good luck with that. You know, that's something that you can't let it get to that point. And, and that was something that, and then I'll let you guys take it over. But I wanted to talk about something that it was fascinating to me that you picked up on as soon as I said the word establish dominance on the streets of Ramadi, you reacted against that. And you're right, that's incredibly important.

• 33:13Speaker 01

  And it ties into what you were just talking about, about you would make people either back away from the situation or stop looking down the sights of their gun. Because when you're looking at a person down the sights of your gun, it's your framing of the situation. And you haven't put down their gun. And now it's just a person. It's not a target. It's not anything like that. If you've got a bunch of people going into Ramadi and they're thinking in terms of our job is to go establish dominance on the streets of this city. Well, you're framing that in a way that under the right circumstances could, you know, lead to trouble. And so framing, it seems like is what you're talking about.

• 33:47Jocko Willink?

  And, and I also want to make it perfectly clear that if the soldiers, Marines, SEALs that we work with in the Battle of Ramadi, if they didn't dominate the street as we move down it, you know, we would be just be, oh, we'd be killed. So there is, the job is even harder than I made it out to say, to be because I don't, I, I wouldn't want to use the word dominate the city of Ramadi, but you're damn right, we're going to dominate the space that we go into. And we're going to do that by being very, very aggressive. And so there is this fine line. And by the way, you'd go into a, you'd kick a, kick a door in, in Ramadi.

• 34:30Jocko Willink?

  And there's, there's gunfire in the street that you're on. You'd kick in a door and there would be a, a mom and a dad and a couple of kids. And there'd be a normal household with green grass and a soccer balls. And that would happen. That, that's what the city was filled with. And so the, the fact that these guys, you know, were able to flip that switch over and over and over again was, was amazing. And it's a, it's a testament to, to the military forces that we have and to the leadership. I want to give equal credit to both, but to your point about, hey, you know, Milai, these were draftees. There was. Hundreds of thousands of draftees that went over there and did an incredible job.

• 35:15Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 35:15Jocko Willink?

  They were well led, that stood up when people, when, when the wrong things were happening. So, this was a horrible scenario.

• 35:23Speaker 01

  Daniel, let's follow up on that then. I mean, that's, cause that's, what's the difference? Like, what happens?

• 35:28Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 35:28Speaker 01

  Um, you didn't get all the psychopaths in the army and round them up into one unit, right? Um, by all accounts, the guys at MEI, uh, talked, they were the type of people that when the folks back in Kansas heard about what happened, they couldn't believe that little Johnny would ever do anything like that.

• 35:46Jocko Willink?

  And same thing at Sand Creek?

• 35:47Speaker 01

  Right.

• 35:47Jocko Willink?

  Same thing.

• 35:49Speaker 01

  And so, because you're right, we were talking about this on the way too. Uh, something today, it is, uh, for, we have something like Abu Ghraib happens. It's a terrible situation, a lot of bad things went on there. The idea though, that an entire company of American soldiers would go into an Iraqi village and wipe out 500 innocent people, that is inconceivable today. Uh, in, in the sense that so many things would have to go wrong and break down and degrade and degenerate in the American military for that to have happened, that it's just, it seems like a completely different moral universe and...

• 36:27Jocko Willink?

  Well, you look at what the chain of events that led to MEI, it, it was those, and, and if any of those chain of events, any, anywhere along that chain of events could have broken that whole chain. Lieutenant Calley could have gotten killed when the mine field, and now you could add someone else came in that was a better leader and didn't have a Napoleon complex and was able to stand up morally to other people. There's, there's so many things that could have changed on that, you know, that could have changed that whole scenario. The most, the most powerful one being a different leader, same thing at Sand Creek, different leader, that, that actually never would have happened.

• 37:03Speaker 01

  Right.

• 37:04Jocko Willink?

  Never would have happened.

• 37:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, in fact, you do see that, you know, you see all the guys under Silas Soul. Like unanimously, they all agree with him, whereas all the guys with Chivinton unanimously. It's like clearly there's a leadership element where the average guy in those units is heavily influenced by who's setting an example for them. And that is one of the things that interests me about human nature that, you know, one of the things, because we're discussing, like, does that mean that human being, you know, one of the things you hear a lot is, are human beings just evil by nature? And it's like, no, they're not evil. The majority of people are not. There are, of course, the exceptions, there is that whatever small percentage, but the majority of human beings are not evil. The problem is that the majority of human beings are extremely easily influenced, like

• 37:47Speaker 02

  their moral compass can range in so many different directions that under right leadership, they will be awesome human beings. And the wrong leadership is not that hard for them to start sliding down a really dark direction. So to me, it kind of is a matter of weakness more than evil. You know, it's not that these guys are a complete psychopath where, you know, you have dinner with them and they are nice people and they help the old lady cross the street. And yet, the degree, while they may have good intentions, good intentions don't go too far without crazy discipline, strong willpower, a lot of the qualities that allow

• 38:26Speaker 02

  you to keep those good intentions real under heavy emotional pressure, where it doesn't all fly out the window, and it's like, I don't know what happened, I just lost my mind, or hey, they told me that this was the thing to do, and so I just followed orders. You know, where you have that integrity to stay present in a crazy situation. You're asking human beings to be kind of extraordinary in those circumstances, because the ordinary human being may go down a bad path. So the antidote in some ways seem to be to make yourself extraordinary, to be, to be able to withstand that kind of situation. And that's where a great leader make a huge difference, because so many people will be like flecks in the wind, you know? If the wind is tilting one way, they will go with it.

• 39:11Speaker 02

  If the wind is tilting heavily the other way, they'll also go that route. And so that's what interests me is because while a few humans will always choose a pretty messed up evil side.

• 39:23Speaker 02

  A bunch of humans can go either way. What is that shape? The kind of human beings that will be able to be a great leader? Or even just for themselves, even if they are, they have nobody under them, just they will make choices that in an ideal scenario, most human beings would want to make. What does separate the guy who, you know, is sitting there on the couch saying, oh, I would be that guy and the guy who actually is that guy?

• 39:49Speaker 01

  I think one of the difficulties with that is Jocko, you and Jordan Peterson talked about this in your podcast together. You were talking about the book Ordinary Men and how, you know, you've got a couple guys, a group of guys there who are going to, who are being ordered to do something that's grotesque. And it's not simply a matter of like, you know, that's a real good situation of let's say you are a person of strong moral character of just all the things that you would want him to be. You've got two conflicting moral systems here because you have a duty and obligation to your fellow soldiers who are going to have to go do this one way or another unless you revolt completely. And then you're betraying your country and there's all these other things that are brought

• 40:32Speaker 01

  into it that, you know, that are moral things. These are, you know, it's moral to not want to abandon your friends and your colleagues to have to go do the hard work that has to be done so that you can go nurture your self-righteous sense of personal morality, or at least that's the type of thinking that might go through a person's head like that. What right do I have to put my own personal idea of what's right ahead of my obligation as a soldier, ahead of what my country is telling me to do, ahead of just being in there with all of my friends and fellow soldiers and leaving it to them? Like, that's a moral thing. That is, that is something that you want people to feel, right? And I, and I, and I wonder sometimes how much of these situations are filled with people who.

• 41:17Speaker 01

  You know, maybe ninety percent of them, the vast majority that aren't those few evil ones, they're all kind of looking at each other like, maybe inside, they don't necessarily think this is right, or they don't want to be doing this, but they don't want to abandon their friends. And their friends are looking at them thinking the same thing, and you just have this vicious cycle.

• 41:36Speaker 02

  Of course.

• 41:36Speaker 01

  That ends in one of these things.

• 41:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, and part of the problem there is the human willingness to rationalize and make justifications for oneself. It's like, well, in that, because you know, when you look at the principles that people hold, like what they believe their philosophy of life is and the way they behave, even in much more ordinary circumstances, I mean, you made the example of the cheating husband, right? How many people seriously believe that monogamy is the right thing? And you don't cheat on your spouse? There would be lots and lots and lots of people who say, yeah, of course I believe in it. How many people actually live up to it? And it's like, come on, man, that's not, nobody's shooting at you, nobody, there are no, it's a much more mellow situation, and people, in many cases, can't live up to their ideals

• 42:23Speaker 02

  in very ordinary circumstances, let alone when you start pressing the buttons and when the circumstances are no longer ordinary, but it becomes real panic time and stress, and all of that goes up. So to me, it's like you need to have almost a maniacal determination to have this code of conduct that you will hold up no matter what happens. Like, I use it as, it's a joke, but it's not a joke. Like, I use it for daily life as, like, to me, once, I have very few moral rules that are absolutes, but the ones that are, there are no exceptions. So for me, like, if you give your word to somebody, there are no exceptions. It's like, don't give your word unless you are a hundred and ten percent sure you're gonna keep it.

• 43:06Speaker 02

  Don't, I don't mind, you know, we can have a regular conversation and you don't give your word. But if you do give your word, to me, there is no, oh, sorry, I didn't think in that situation, or there was that exception. To me, the only way you apologize is a samurai style. You know, you stick a knife in your belly and you slice back and forth. That's how you say sorry, there is no exception to that.

• 43:26Speaker 01

  It's almost as if, uh, you, that those rules serve as pole stars. When you're in a situation, it's as chaotic as something like

• 43:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:33Speaker 01

  combat, where you have to have a few rules that, I mean, maybe they're arbitrary, but you'll die for them.

• 43:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:39Speaker 01

  Because when you're in the midst of a situation that is completely outside the realm of your normal experience, They give you reference points. You know, they structure the situation a little bit for you. So you're not just lost in chaos. There's some structure to it and then you can evaluate the rest of the environment relative to those hard and fast rules that you've got. Because in the situation, you know, when you're in my lie and you're one of the people who's kind of on the fence. But now people are shooting. That is not the time to have this argument with yourself.

• 44:10Speaker 02

  No, that's not when you're gonna figure it out, for sure.

• 44:13Jocko Willink?

  Well, this might sound really obvious and it is. It's a very simple, obvious answer to this really, really hard question of, you know, how do you prevent this thing from happening or who's the kind of person that will stand up? And the answer is actually quite simple. It's training and education. It's training and education. And if people understand that these kind of things can happen and they get put in these pressure situations and they get trained and they get debriefed on mistakes that they made and they saw that they got emotional and you train them correctly. Well, then you've got someone who gets into a me lie situation and says to themselves, wait a second. We're not getting shot at right now. Cease fire.

• 44:58Jocko Willink?

  And that was the most incredible thing about that story is that's all it took was one leader to say, hey, stop killing people. And they literally stopped that moment. So training people and putting them in these situations and educating them so that they understand, so that they have pattern recognition, training them so that they can learn how to detach, training them so that they can control their emotions, training them that they can see when horrible things are unfolding before them and then how that they can put a stop to them. That is what is important. And as you mentioned, Daryl, as the Vietnam War drove on, the training got less and less

• 45:41Jocko Willink?

  and the officers were getting sent over quicker and quicker and you're getting on the job training and the person that you're getting on the job training from is a person that's only been doing it for two and a half months longer than you. And that's how these things occur. So you have to invest in people that are going to be in these situations. And it's the same thing. Again, I tell this to businesses all the time. Have you done? You know, on a construction site, have you done a drill if you have a mass casualty? Do you know where you're gonna call in casualty evacuation? Do you know what the air flight or life flight number is? Does anyone have the life flight number here? Because if someone gets hurt, you need to make that call. And do you know what station you're gonna call? What helicopter you're gonna call? Do you know where they're gonna land? Why would you not run those things?

• 46:26Jocko Willink?

  And if those things unfold and you're not prepared for them, you're gonna fall apart. And it's the same thing with these ethical and moral situations where if you don't understand what they are, you don't understand what can go wrong, you're gonna have a bad day.

• 46:42Speaker 02

  And I thought it was brilliant what you brought up a little bit ago when you said there are steps along the way that long before the crisis manifests itself, there's that ability to recognize the tiny little steps that are leading there. Now, when you look at that tiny thing, it looks tiny, it doesn't look like a big deal. That's no crisis, that's not a problem. But it's that first step that's taking you down that path. And it's a lot easier to stop it early than when crisis is on. And so in that sense, that does become a training, that does become a thing of like, how do you recognize the steps? How do you work on it? And you know, you were saying things like even something as basic, hey, breathe one second. Take one second to breathe before you react. Then think how you wanna react.

• 47:27Speaker 02

  It's the same thing that apply to everything. It apply to conversation when people are, people you care about maybe are getting you angry. Do you really wanna respond right away? Or maybe take three seconds to take a breath, then decide how you wanna respond, you know? And I think he's, like to me, is weird, is as silly as that is because you know, clearly war and parenting are very far universes in so many ways. But to me has been one of the, well, depending on your kids, I guess.

• 47:56Jocko Willink?

  I got four kids. Get some.

• 47:58Speaker 02

  But I guess to me has been one of the most unforgiving mirrors that I that I ever had put in front of me was seeing how I react under extreme stress. When you haven't slept for two days, when somebody's throwing a fit that's completely unjustified, when and suddenly it's like, yeah, you have all the good reasons to be mad, but really this is how you respond. This is why you react to a forty year old kid who's just been a forty year old kid and you get all emotional and you start yelling and suddenly like ten seconds into me blow it up, I see myself from the outside and I'm like, I'm everything that I despise in this moment. You know, that man right there that's responding their way has all the reasons, has all the, I can see why,

• 48:41Speaker 02

  doesn't matter, you still don't do it, you know. And rather than just being like, okay, let's weep myself, I'm a horrible human being, I discovered that, it's like, okay, what can I do not to get here next time?

• 48:53Jocko Willink?

  You you got real world training, right? Because now you recognize the situation and now you don't let it happen anymore.

• 48:59Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 49:00Jocko Willink?

  You know, I had, I was talking to you guys earlier. We I hit it, my first deployment to Iraq, we went and hit a target. And and it sounds almost like, you know, like what you'd imagine in a movie, we'd get handed a map. And on the map, it'd be a city block in Baghdad, and there'd be a red X on one of the buildings. And that's all I needed. Oh, you want me to go hit that red X? Cool, we'll go hit that red X. And one night, we went and hit, you know, the building with the red X on it. And when we hit the target, it was, you know, like the most normal family you could ever imagine. And as we started talking to them, and we had our interpreter get in there and figure out, you know, hey, do you know who this person is? They're like, yeah, he lives two doors down. Oh, okay. And so then I went back and eventually said to

• 49:45Jocko Willink?

  myself, a question that if I wasn't, if I had more experience, I would have asked this question for me, I said, hey, I got a question, who put that red X on that building and why?

• 49:55Speaker 02

  Right.

• 49:55Jocko Willink?

  And as I pulled the string on it, it, you know, it was one of those things where They had gotten some intel which, you know, I won't talk about where it came from, but it was, it was intel that, you know, put it in that general vicinity. And they like picked the, the center of the general vicinity. There's the center of the general vicinity. There, there will put the X. And no follow-up. And so I always taught that as something, hey, guys, make sure you know who's giving you this intelligence. And that's, that's the case that happened to me lie where the, the person on the, no one, no one at the platoon level. Said, hey, hold, hold on a second. Who's, who's confirming that this is a hundred percent VC in this village? A hun- you're telling me this is a hundred percent VC in this village? That's what we're saying right now?

• 50:41Jocko Willink?

  Who's, who's saying that? I want to talk to that person. And that's another thing I talk about all the time is.

• 50:48Jocko Willink?

  You don't, as a leader, you don't want to be surrounded by yes men. You don't want to be surrounded by yes men. And, you know, we're talking about the horrors of Vietnam war and I'm reading another book right now and there's a platoon commander. And his guys are going, they're, they're rotating between three locations. And two of the locations are not too bad. The other locations is a nightmare. It's, it's, it's Vietnam war stereotypical. It's booby traps, snipers and indirect fire. They never see the enemy. They just never see the enemy. And all they do is they go out there on patrol. They get blown up. They get shot. They get mortared and they never see the enemy and the guy, the guys are getting wounded or killed. And

• 51:30Jocko Willink?

  as you think about that.

• 51:33Jocko Willink?

  I, I would. I would pray. That if I was the company commander or the battalion commander, that that platoon commander would come to me and say, hey, Jocko, this is stupid. Let me tell you how many people we've lost. Let me tell you how many other of the platoons have lost and let me tell you what we've gotten out of it. We've got nothing out of it. And we we need to stop this, or we need to find a better way to do it. If you want to send us in there, let us set up a strong point. Let us set up a bunkered position. We'll stay and we'll observe. But us just walking around in there waiting to get blown up makes no sense whatsoever. Please, let's do something else. And as a leader, you have to have the open mind to say,

• 52:13Jocko Willink?

  "Okay, I I thank you. I appreciate that feedback. What are your suggestions? You've been in the area of operations? How do you recommend we do it?" And whenever I hear these stories of guys that get put in really terrible situations in the military, it it it sickens my heart because what you need is a culture inside any organization, the military, yes, but any organization, of people to raise their hands and say, "Hey, wait a second. This is stupid. Hey, wait a second. Do I not see an American flag on that Indian reservation with a white peace flag underneath it? And wait, wait, hold on, stop. Why? Wait, wait, stop." And that takes moral courage. It takes training. And it takes a culture inside an organization to stop people and question what they're doing.

• 52:58Speaker 01

  And it takes that certain level of detachment that you were talking about.

• 53:01Jocko Willink?

  It absolutely takes detachment.

• 53:03Speaker 01

  You know, it's like you were saying about like dealing with a four-year-old or something like when you're in the middle of it, it's seems normal. It seems like the way to behave. And it's only when you step back and say, you know, one of the things about human beings, our great strength, I suppose, is that we're supremely adaptable creatures. I was talking to a psychologist one time who used to work for the State Department. He would, he worked in Africa for a while. He talked about, he was telling me some of the stuff that he would encounter, whole villages where every woman had been raped 10 times over the years, where kids in this village had watched their parents killed, just horrifying stuff. And my question to him at the time, because he was a psychologist,

• 53:45Speaker 01

  was, I mean, how are are these people not just completely blown out with PTSD and everything else? Like, how are they functional at all, given what we know about PTSD and how it does function under? Circumstances that are far less severe than that. And that's what he said. He said, you'd be surprised. Humans are very, very adaptable. And to them, this is their environment. And that can work the other way, too, though. You know, that can work in the direction of, in the new Ken Burns Vietnam documentary, which is just, I don't know if you've watched it yet.

• 54:16Jocko Willink?

  I haven't watched the whole thing yet, but I watched the, probably, I think, the first two episodes.

• 54:20Speaker 01

  Okay, so, one of the ones you're coming up on, the name of it is, This Is What We Do. And it starts out talking about this new recruit, and he shows up to this place, and like, the first thing he sees when he gets to the base that he's at, it's not a massacre or anything like that, but it's just sort of a, you know, Vietnamese prisoner or captive being led along by, you know, a corporal or something. And he's just being rough with them and kind of pushing them along and doing stuff that clearly is outside of regulations. And this new guy shows up, and he's like, hey, hey, hey, like, are you supposed to be doing that? Or whatever it is. And the first thing he hears when he gets over there is, kid, this is Vietnam. This is what we do. And he said that the whole rest of the time that he was there, when he saw something he didn't like, when he was doing things that he wasn't sure about, he just repeated

• 55:05Speaker 01

  in his head, this is Vietnam. This is what we do. This is what we do. And after a while, he didn't have to repeat it anymore. After a while, that was his environment. And, you know, it reminds me, I used to have these recurring dreams, I probably shouldn't share this on the air, but, I used to have these recurring dreams, I still have them every once in a while. The details and the setting differ, but it'll be something like, the dream starts, and I'm in like a helicopter, say, and I'm flying around like a city, like LA or wherever, and I'm just shooting people like Grand Theft Auto. It's just like a video game, da, da, da, da, da, da. And I'm going through, and I'm doing this, sometimes there's people down there I know, my friends and stuff, and it's just, all, it seems just like I'm in a video game.

• 55:48Speaker 01

  And then the way the dream goes, is at a certain point, after a few minutes of this, all of a sudden, it hits me, what I'm doing. And I look around, and I, it's almost as if I wake up in the dream, and I'm like, oh my god, like, I'm killing all these people. What, what am I doing? But at the time, it was completely normal. It seemed exactly like this is just what I should be doing, or anything like that. And that's something that I think that is, well, it's why you told people, stop looking down the barrel of your gun. You know, you gotta step back and be able to get that distance so you can change your frame.

• 56:19Jocko Willink?

  And again, with the proper training? And the proper education, you will know as a leader that that behavior will escalate. That behavior will escalate, and if you allow it to happen, it will continue to get worse. And so it starts off, and I've read all kinds of books about Vietnam, especially about Vietnam, where it starts off, it starts off with, hey, the villagers are, we kind of know them, everything's cool, give them lollipops. But then, you know, one of our guys dies, and then, well, we're not getting lollipops. As a matter of fact, we're kicking the kids away. And it only escalates to there, and it escalates to murder. And it escalates, or I should say this, it can escalate.

• 57:04Jocko Willink?

  It doesn't automatically escalate, because all it takes is someone to step in and say, hey, no, that's across the line. Like, you know what? You want to slap a guy? I get it. I get it. But that's the line. Anything, once, you know, one thing that we used to say, and I used to tell my guys, once the cuffs are on somebody, so once we get somebody zip tied, it's over. Like, you do what you got to do to get a guy under control. Once they're zip tied, it's done. And now they're, they're getting taken care of. And you treat them firm but fair. That's it. And so those lines, you have to draw them, and you have to hold the line as a leader, because things start to escalate. You know, it's the thing that you were asking me about earlier,

• 57:46Jocko Willink?

  about the Chechen war, and the Russians against the Chechens, and it's, they didn't, they didn't hold the line with the little things. And when you lose that discipline, even on the smaller things, well, eventually, then you don't have the discipline on the bigger things. Can you go overboard with that? Yes, you can. I can hold the discipline so hard on the little things that no one listens to me on the big things. That's why leadership is hard, because there's a dichotomy there that you have to balance. You can't be freaked out because, you know, you didn't blouse your boots when you were supposed to. But at the same time, if I start to let too many things slide, well, it will escalate.

• 58:25Speaker 01

  And it seems like maybe with things like that, a lot of people who are civilians, they laugh when they see in movies, or, you know, TV shows or something, about how soldiers in combat are still expected to groom themselves, they're still expected to take care of themselves and comport themselves in a military way. And what I tell them a lot of the times is, And maybe you can confirm this, because I don't really know what I'm talking about. But is that, you know, my feeling on why that stuff is so important is that you can't have,

• 58:58Speaker 01

  you can't have Iraq and the sectarian war and all the stuff, the storm that's going on around them. You can't have that become the environment to which they're adapting. The environment to which they need to be well adapted is the US military. That's their environment. That's what they're focused on, following these rules and behaving in this way. And then, when that's their environment, they can go into these places and do their jobs. If they get in there and they start reacting to what's going on around them. Because, I mean, then you can tell a guy-

• 59:26Jocko Willink?

  He's talking about going native, right? You can't go native. Yeah. That's apocalypse now, right?

• 59:32Speaker 01

  You can tell a guy, once the cuffs are on. But, you know, if I was talking to a family yesterday, and this is the guy that just cut their heads off. Well, I mean, you know, you can't have, you can't put yourself in a situation, because it does make sense to beat the shit out of that guy. It does make sense to put a bullet in his head when the cuffs are on. Like, even from a moral standpoint in certain ways. Like, you can justify that, you know? And so that's why you can't be reacting to whatever it is that's going on. And it sounds like that's kind of what you're saying.

• 1:00:07Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and there's actually an interesting dichotomy there as well. Because you need to follow the rules, right? Because if I told, if the three of us decided, hey, we're gonna go on this village raid, and we're all gonna use our morals as our guide. Well, we have three different scenarios. You just admitted that you'd be executing somebody that was already handcuffed. Who knows what you'd be doing?

• 1:00:32Speaker 01

  Don't wanna know.

• 1:00:32Jocko Willink?

  You know, I don't even wanna know, right? So we're all over the map, right? Maybe you're saying you're not even gonna, don't even wanna handcuff anyone, because you think that's too offensive, and I'm somewhere in the middle. Whatever the case may be. We're all over the map. So I would always tell the guys, look, you need to do what is legal. What's legal? But then the paradox of that is, sometimes what you can get away with legally still isn't the right thing to do. And that's, again, that's why there's a dichotomy between those two. Between, do I follow the rules exactly? Or, I mean, you know, look at me, I look at Sand Creek. My boss told me to shoot this guy. Told me to shoot this three-year-old baby. My boss told me to do that.

• 1:01:16Jocko Willink?

  I'm, should I be following orders? Is there a threat that I don't know about? You know, these days, you know, I've heard a lot of stories now. The guys that, that took down Mosul, right? The, the enemy was sending surrendering children

• 1:01:32Jocko Willink?

  to come and surrender to coalition forces. And they would be strapped with IED vests, suicide vests. And over and over and over again, it was our US military, you know, especially our, our explosive ordinance disposal folks and that were going and disarming these bombs on these kids. But yeah, how do you feel? After you see two or three of those little kids get killed, plus two or three EOD guys get killed, and now you're going to fight those guys and they want to surrender? That's a very challenging thing. And if you don't maintain discipline, it's a slippery slope.

• 1:02:08Speaker 02

  And it's funny because we're saying two things at the same time, which sound contradictory, and yet that's life. Though on one hand, you need to have these super strict rules that you're not going to bend under any circumstances. And on the other hand, the thing that you rightly point out is the fact that real leadership is also the ability to think on your feet and no two situations are alike. So the rule-following approach, while it may save you from some of the war's abuses, is not always necessarily the right thing. And there is also the time when we almost follow the rules, except when we don't, because that's the one time when it's correct. And that ability to make the right call at the right time, that's what make an extraordinary human being.

• 1:02:50Speaker 01

  When we're just sort of in debates or popping off at the mouth today, we sort of take for granted that the whole, "I was just following orders" question was settled at Nuremberg. It was not settled at all. That's an incredibly complicated question for just the reason you were describing. You know, somebody who worked at a Nazi death camp, you know, they didn't make 10,000 independent decisions to kill somebody. They made one decision that their own personal moral compass was going to get outsourced to the state and that they were going to do their duty and follow their orders. They made that decision once, and now, once you've made that decision and you've outsourced your moral compass, which again...

• 1:03:31Speaker 01

  Under most circumstances, that might be the thing that keeps you from doing the wrong thing. That might be the thing that keeps me from executing that, you know, Al Qaeda guy. But when the institutions themselves start to get warped, or if you're in, even if the institution is an individual unit or something, you know, it's, I can't remember where I heard it, but there's some zoologist or somebody who pointed out to him that he had asked why zebras have black and white stripes when the grass is gold colored and yellow and they don't blend into that at all. Clearly tigers can see that. And he pointed out to him that that camouflage isn't to blend into the environment. That camouflage is to blend in with each other. They blend with the herd. And so the tigers have a difficult

• 1:04:15Speaker 01

  time tracking down, like, and focusing on an individual. And they, oh, they figured that out because they wanted to try to, you know, put ear clips on them or something to track these things around. But they noticed every time they put something identifiable on one of them, the tigers would kill it. And it was because now they had something to focus on. And so, and that's, you know, I'm not making a literal evolutionary comparison here, but there's an interesting, like, just sort of analogy, which is this instinct to blend in with the herd. There's just, there's safety there. There's a sense of security there. And there's, there's virtue in forfeiting a certain amount of your personal judgment to the group to which you have obligations. That's a good thing under most circumstances, you know, and at least in a lot of circumstances, you know, that's what duty is. That's what,

• 1:05:00Speaker 01

  you know, just fulfilling your obligations to your people or your, you know, your unit or something. Who are you, especially if you're an 18-year-old kid who just got out of high school and you're over there, and you're in a situation where you've got, you know, like in Mele, you've got officers, you've got, you know, not just your immediate officer, but it seems to be being reinforced by your captain above, you know, your company commander. At the time in Mele, there was a, there was a major general in a helicopter observing buzzing around that place. And so, you know, you're in a situation where you say to yourself, like, who am I to say that what's going on here is wrong? It seems wrong to me because of what I learned from my mama, or whatever. But what does that mean?

• 1:05:44Speaker 01

  Like, I've got a captain, I've got a lieutenant, I've got my sergeants, I've got this major general in the air, and, you know, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe this, you know, I just got here four months ago. This was, this is Charlie Company's first major combat operation. They really hadn't made contact, direct combat with the enemy. And it's the first time any of them have seen combat for the most part. And I think it's, uh, there's certainly a certain amount of weakness that's involved, like you were talking about. But I also think there's a certain amount of moral confusion that happens.

• 1:06:15Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, of course.

• 1:06:16Speaker 01

  And that's, that's, there can't be that kind of confusion. Like, that is where leadership has got to take over.

• 1:06:21Jocko Willink?

  I can add another layer of complexity to this. Okay, so, so first of all, I do think that the, well, Napoleon said, "If you execute an order that you know is wrong," and when he was talking about it, he's not talking about something immoral, he's talking about, "If I do something where a bunch of my men get killed because the general said to do it, and I do it, I'm culpable." So that's, that's pretty clear, that if your boss tells you to do something that you know is gonna, in Napoleon's case, it was get a bunch of your guys killed, then, then you say no. And if you do it, you're culpable for what happens. You could say the same thing, "If, if I get told to do something that's morally or ethically wrong, and I do it, well, guess what? Then I'm responsible for that." What, what becomes a little bit complicated to me, or adds another layer of complexity

• 1:07:06Jocko Willink?

  is this. If I'm going to Sand Creek, and I'm with Chivington, and he's, or Chivington, and he says, "Hey, we're gonna go there, and we're gonna execute this, and we're, we're gonna kill these guys. We're gonna, we're gonna conduct a raid." And I don't believe in it. Okay? So I say, "You know what? I don't believe in it. I don't think it's the right thing to do. I think that we've made enough peace with them, we've caused enough problems, that's their land. I'm not going." Okay, so now you don't go. Because you didn't believe in the mission. Well, now who's out there conducting the mission? Everyone that's going out there to conduct the mission is people that are compliant with what he's saying.

• 1:07:45Jocko Willink?

  So you would be, you would be morally a better person if you said, okay, I'm gonna go ahead and do this. Because if I don't, I know it's gonna be someone that's totally compliant with Chivington. And I'd rather be there to at least spare some of the people, which we know people did. And so there's, there's a little complexity. You know, I talk about this in the business world too. People say, my boss told me to do this and, and I, I think it's a bad idea and I don't think we should do it. Okay. So are you gonna get put off the project? Are you gonna get pulled to a different, a different department where you no longer can take care? Cause you, this is too hard on my people. I'm, I refuse to do this. Okay, that's fine. You refuse to do this.

• 1:08:28Jocko Willink?

  I'll put someone in there that won't refuse and you no longer can protect your people and your people in a worse situation. So, you know,

• 1:08:34Speaker 01

  The whole organization is degraded.

• 1:08:36Jocko Willink?

  The whole organization. So you raise your hand, you make your protest, but sometimes you've gotta say, okay, I've made my protest and I understand that you're still wanting me to do this. And even though I think it's the wrong thing to do, I'm gonna proceed down the path. Because I'd rather me be able to mitigate as much of this problem as I can, than have somebody that's just gonna do, do, do this to the fullest extent that you would want them to do. So there's another additional complexity there that it gets involved.

• 1:09:07Speaker 02

  Absolutely. Cause sometime, as you said, just denying, you're just making yourself feel better. But the reality is that plan is gonna go ahead. You are the only thing that's standing in the way of that plan going to the 100 percentile. You can bring it down to 50, you know? It's still gonna feel ugly. You're still gonna feel part of something you don't wanna be part of. But the only thing you do by refusing is patting yourself on the back and say, am I not a moral guy? It's like, yeah, but no, cause you know, it's like the thing is you can use that power in that situation to, for something that is better than if you just look yourself in the mirror saying how great you are by not doing it. And in fact, that's what was pretty incredible about the Sun Creek story. Silas Soul, you know, they, he's told right before.

• 1:09:53Speaker 02

  You don't want, stay home, you know, nobody's forcing you, just stay home, don't be part of it and Saul and Kramer and some of those guys said, no, we wanna be there, we wanna be there to observe, to maybe able to make the choice on the spot and it makes a huge difference right there.

• 1:10:10Speaker 01

  My feeling on it, just sort of looking at it all from the outside, is that especially in a counter insurgency war, that without strict military discipline and strong leadership, that abject savagery is gravity will take you there. That's where things will head on their own unless you are supremely focused on discipline and leadership and education and those kind of things, that you don't have to, you don't really have to ask the question, how can this kind of thing happen? The real question is, how does this not happen all the time, right? How is it that American soldiers in Iraq and, you know, you go into Iraq and they're seeing

• 1:10:52Speaker 01

  maybe husbands and fathers that they spoke to the previous day that they know are innocent and not part of the fighting and they see his wife beheaded and him with a power drill hole in the side of his head? How are American soldiers not going and executing reprisal attacks against these people all the time? How is it not just completely getting out of hand? And like that to me is by far the more interesting question. I don't have to ask myself, how is it that, you know, somebody went and shot up, you know, the house of the person who did something like that? That's an easy question to answer and the much more interesting one is how it doesn't happen all the time. And it seems like it's, it has to be institutional.

• 1:11:33Speaker 01

  It can't come down to like, you know, institutional culture, right? Relating it to their sense of personal identity and social identity with the group, that this is not who we are, that if I do this, it's not going to win me any kudos from my teammates or anything like that. They're gonna look at that as a betrayal because I'm bringing dishonor upon us because this is not what we're about and they have to be able to look at it that way. And if they don't know that, if they don't know that by doing something like that, they're going to, you know, they wanna blend in with the group, they wanna be accepted by the group, they wanna be looked at as somebody that can be relied on. And that has to mean following the rules and doing the right thing.

• 1:12:17Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, well, Danielle, you pointed this out earlier. You said, well, this seems like it's just the communications aspect is so important. And that's 100% right. So as we all know, the, the

• 1:12:32Jocko Willink?

  strategy in the Vietnam War for America was to kill more of them than they did of us. And drop more bombs on them and eventually they'll just break, just a war of attrition. And, and so the, the strategy was get rack up as many kill count, as high kill count as you possibly can. So that's the messaging. That's the messaging. So when that's the messaging, that's the messaging. Yeah. In, in Iraq, they were very clear about, hey, we're here to, we're, we're not an occupying force. We're here to liberate these people. We're here to secure the populace and make sure that they can have a free country. That's the messaging. So does that messaging always make it down to the front lines?

• 1:13:16Jocko Willink?

  No, that's why we do have incidents where, you know, bad horrible things happen. Absolutely. But it is about the messaging and it is about everyone understanding why they're doing what they're doing, what their mission is, what is, what is right and what is wrong. And you can be educated on that legally. Hey, you're not allowed to do this. You can do that, but you can't do this. And then the other point that you made, which is, well, you said, you got to be able to manage people in a time of crisis as a leader. But more important, and you, you actually, you, you actually asked a really complicated question and then answered it yourself. And you did that like three times in that one sphere of conversation that you had with yourself. This caffeine. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:14:00Jocko Willink?

  Is, is you said, you know, you got to be able to manage people in these pressure situations. And then you added that, but what you really need is culture. And you're right, because you're not going to be there. The leader is not, I wasn't with my, all my elements on the battlefield all the time. They were out there all the time without me, all the time without me. They were the ones that had to understand what they couldn't, what they couldn't do. They were the ones that had to make those hard decisions. They weren't calling, my snipers didn't call back to me and say, hey, Jocko, I see this with this guy. They didn't even ask their platoon commanders that. They didn't ask anyone. They knew what the rules of engagement were. They knew what our strategy was. They understood.

• 1:14:41Jocko Willink?

  And one of the things that I told them, you know, speaking of rules of engagement. So our rules of engagement was, you know, several page legalese document written by some lawyers in Washington DC or wherever. And, you know, I've got kids in my platoon that are 20, 21, 22 years old, you know, high school graduate and they came in the SEAL teams like I did, by the way. And so they're looking at a legal document like that, that doesn't, doesn't mean anything to them. Sure. You know, my rules of engagement for them was very simple. Make sure the people you're killing are bad. You make sure the people you're killing are bad. And why? And then I, I explained to them why that was important.

• 1:15:21Jocko Willink?

  And the reason why that was important was because the day that some civilians brought a headless body that had taken a 300 wind mag round to the head and their head was gone. And they said, this was our Imam, or this was our school teacher, or this was our neighborhood doctor, and one of your snipers killed them. And they would figure out it was us. First of all, our operations would get shut down. So selfishly, we don't want to get our operations shut down. But more important than the selfish reason, if that happened, we would leave all the soldiers and Marines that we were working with on a daily basis that we were providing Overwatch for, we'd leave them without the support

• 1:16:03Jocko Willink?

  that we had committed to give them because we weren't allowed to operate anymore because we weren't being discriminatory enough with our fire. So the culture is so important. People understanding why they're doing what they're doing is so important. And if you don't get that messaging and to your point, Dan- Daniele, if you don't get the communication correct, then you're going to end up in a world of hurt.

• 1:16:26Speaker 02

  And the point you just made, the make sure the people you kill are bad is such a, think about it, there are so few words, right? You say it in like very, very few words and yet it's so central because you look at not only San Creek or Milai, but look at even like. Half of the, you know, when the Nazis invade the Soviet Union and then when the Red Army does the counter and they start invading Germany, both armies do horrible things to one another civilian. And the idea is, well, the Nazis did it to our people, so we did it to theirs. Well, that mom that you are shooting in the head, that she had nothing to do with what happened to your people.

• 1:17:08Speaker 02

  She's not, she's not the Nazi soldier who did it. She's not the bad one. Just because she's from the same nation, are you kidding me? That's not, that doesn't make her the bad person. And I think that's part of the problem with group identity. That's often, that's why stereotypes are dangerous, because you start grouping individuals into this mental category you may have of like, those guys are bad. That individual only shares some physical characteristic with the other one. They share, maybe they are even related, but they are not the same person. You know, they are, they haven't made the same choices, they haven't committed the same action. So the fact that you treat all the Cheyenne the same, or you decide you treat all the Vietnamese the same, or all the Germans the same, or all the Russians, that's where everything

• 1:17:53Speaker 02

  goes wrong, because you are not making sure that the person you are hurting is the bad one, is not the one, there's no revenge there, they are not the same people. And so, and yet it happens over and over again, where people fall into this idea of group mentalities. Well, I couldn't catch that guy, but he's one of their group. It's like, no, man, there are individuals that are involved, there are not, there's no collective guilt of, it's kind of the same reason why, for example, terrorism strikes us as so awful in every possible way, because you're not going against the guy that you have a grievance against, you're going against the guy from the same nation. It's like, that has nothing to do with one another, you know, there.

• 1:18:34Speaker 01

  I feel like sometimes, group identity, it's one of those double edged swords, right? Because on one hand, there's the side of it that we mentioned earlier, maybe your loyalty to your group and not wanting to bring dishonor upon them, if that's the culture, is what keeps you from putting a bullet in the head of the guy you just cuffed, right? You might be able to appeal to, you know, you can say to people, hey, we're Americans, and this is not how we behave, and you're appealing to their group identity there, you know, and that...

• 1:19:12Speaker 01

  It's a double edged sword.

• 1:19:13Speaker 02

  But that is a case in which you're using group identities for as the good guys. And granted, yeah, it may not be that every single one from that country really fit that idea, but you're putting a nice ideal and you're encouraging people to live up to it. That's already difference from while it's similar in dynamics to them, the bad guys, and plugging everyone into that group where do you know that that person really fit that stereotype that you have of that group?

• 1:19:40Speaker 01

  How did you make clear to your men when you said, you know, make sure the people you're killing are bad, that they understood what was meant by that?

• 1:19:49Jocko Willink?

  It is, well, there's, first of all, there are specifics in the rules of engagement, and one of them is clear hostile intent, hostile act or hostile intent, which means this person has to be doing something actively that's gonna cause a negative impact. Now, you can tell which people are bad. You can tell when they're starting to do something that's hostile act or hostile intent. You can tell. And these, you know, my guys would, they knew, they would err on the side of like, I'm gonna make sure that this person is doing something bad. But, you know, we had some decent arguments about the rules of engagement. I had some decent arguments about the rules of engagement up the chain of command because

• 1:20:33Jocko Willink?

  the rules of engagement were applying to all of Iraq. And Ramadi was not like the rest of Iraq at this time in 2006. And, you know, if you've got someone that is, for instance, observing a location with binoculars, right? If you're observing, if you're in Baghdad and you're looking at a location with binoculars, you're gathering intelligence, which is, which could be considered, which is not considered a hostile act. It's the intelligence gathering. You might suspect the person being bad, but there's no way to prove that. In Ramadi, if you saw somebody that was looking with binoculars at friendly forces, they weren't gathering intelligence.

• 1:21:17Jocko Willink?

  They were absolutely coordinating attack, an attack. And that is a, that is a big difference because that is a hostile act and it's damn sure hostile intent. And so, you know, those are the kind of things that I would discuss up the chain of command. And we would provide them the resources, you know, it's... I talk a lot about playing the game, right? Like if my boss tells me to do something, I'm gonna play the game. I'm gonna, I'm gonna try and do it. And, and, and occasionally I'll get the question of like, well, what if you get told to do something that you really don't want to do? What if you got told to do something that you didn't, that you were opposed to? Right? What if you got the order to go to the Meleih massacre and you got the order? Well, yeah, I'd say no. I'd say no.

• 1:21:59Jocko Willink?

  And first of all, that doesn't happen. The closest, the closest example I have to that happening was for me in Ramadi, we had been told that we had to take a certain number of Iraqi soldiers with us on every operation we conducted because we were trying to turn the war over to them. And so they needed to get out there and do operations. And they, they were telling us, they were putting this, this rule all over every American unit in Iraq. You needed to have an Iraqi face on every operation. So what did the Americans do? What did, what did the American units do? What they did was they say, okay, yeah, we're gonna take our platoon of 40 guys. And we're gonna take two Iraqis with us and there's your Iraqi face. Well, that doesn't move the, the war forward.

• 1:22:43Jocko Willink?

  They were obeying the rules. So the, the senior leadership figured this out and said, no, you guys are playing games. Here's the new rule. For every, and I forget what the number was, they made a ratio. For every seven Americans that you have, or for every one American you have to have, you have, you have to have seven Iraqis, or there was some number, some ratio. And in Ramadi, some of the units of Iraqis that we were working with only had 18 guys or 17 guys. And so that would have been me sending my guys in the field with two or three SEALs only. Which sending, if you've got a, if you're gonna go into a bad area and you're gonna, who are you gonna send? Cause you want to have a radioman, you want to have a medic, you want to have a guy that can call for fires,

• 1:23:27Jocko Willink?

  you want to have a leader, and you want to have a couple heavy, heavy weapons guys. That's, that's six or seven guys right there, minimum. Right. And so when the chain of command told me, hey, you gotta do this ratio. I looked at the ratio and then, and I said, hey, guys, uh, in Ramadi, that's, that's not a good idea. And here's why. I'm not gonna send my guys in the field without a corpsman or without a radioman or without a JTAC or without a machine gunner. I'm not, I'm not gonna do that. And you know what they said? They said, that makes sense, Chaco, you proceed. Like, if you articulate yourself correctly, then you can get your point across. Now, had they said to me, hey, listen, no, you're only allowed to do this. Well, then I would have objected further up the chain of command. And I would not have put my guys at risk to do something that didn't make sense.

• 1:24:12Jocko Willink?

  Not gonna do it. And, and again, that's what I always encourage military people, but not just military people, business people as well. If you're the CEO of a company and you've given some directive that you don't understand the full depth of the directive that you've given and your frontline, somebody in your front lines realizes that's gonna have a hugely negative impact on your company, do you want them just to follow orders? You absolutely don't want them to follow orders. You want them to raise their hand and say, hey, boss, this doesn't make sense.

• 1:24:44Speaker 02

  And the thing that you said about, yeah, you don't wanna surround yourself with yes men, which makes perfect sense. Then again, it's, it's one of the things where you really need to have work on yourself. Because the reality is that most people have an ego. Most people don't like to be told, hey, boss, sorry, but that doesn't sound right. It's like, what do you mean? You know, there's that reaction, it's like stung in their pride, which of course, that where all bad decision making start going, but it's a very normal reaction. You know what I mean? It's like, most people have to one degree or another, an ego. And especially if like your guy maybe phrase it, maybe they are right, right? They make a point where they are pointing to something in your plan that doesn't work. But they phrase it in a way that's kind of blunt. So A, you don't like being reproached.

• 1:25:29Speaker 02

  B, you don't like the tone. By that point, even though their content is perfectly correct, you're not hearing it. Because it's like, you have a better, I don't like you. First you criticize me and then you're going about it with that tone. The guy is just saying things plainly how they are. Maybe he doesn't have a bad tone, he's just not cuddling you in like slowly, gently saying, hey, let's see it this way.

• 1:25:53Jocko Willink?

  And, and you know what? A guy in that, because I get, I get that kind of question all the time with all the companies we work with. Oh, I got this guy and my, my boss has a big ego and I can't correct him because he just, he just gets offended. Well, first of all, when you, just like you said, if, if you've got a big ego and I tell you that your plan is wrong, I'm attacking a fortified position and you're only gonna bolster your position stronger.

• 1:26:12Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 1:26:13Jocko Willink?

  And so don't attack that position. Instead of simple technique that you can use is say, hey, boss. I'm really not sure why we're using this approach. Could you explain this to me? Because I want to make sure that I really understand what it is you want me to do. And it seems like if I do this right here, it's going to cause this reaction. And I don't want, I know you don't want that to happen. So could you just give me a hand in fully understanding what your plan is? And that way you're, you're, you're, you're kind of massaging their ego a little bit. And it opens their mind. And that's all you have to do is open up their ears. That's the goal is just to open their ears a little bit. So that you can start to have a conversation with them. And so that they can, going back to the whole topic of today, so that they can see you as a human being with, with an idea or an opinion that actually matters. As opposed to seeing you as someone that's attacking their ego.

• 1:26:56Jocko Willink?

  And that ego thing, I mean, if you think about the wars that have been, you know, we always talk about the wars that are caused by religion, but the wars that are caused by ego are also pretty severe. And a lot of these incidents that we talk about, these retaliatory incidences. Well, who's going to be the first person to say, you attacked my tribe? And I'm going to let it slide. But that's, that's, that's a tough person. That's a hard position to be in. You're seen as weak. You're seen as, you know, vulnerable. You're seen as someone that can be pushed around. So there's, that's a very delicate game that you have to play. And that causes problems and that, that ends up, it's, it's a game that's so hard to play.

• 1:27:36Jocko Willink?

  In fact, that most people or, or many people across the span of time have said, no, I'm not going to say that. They did, they, they drew blood. We're going to draw more blood.

• 1:27:46Speaker 01

  Yep. And it, I mean, goes to what you were saying a second ago. So your people have to know that you're going to ask those questions of your leadership and that you're doing that work because they got to trust you. You know, that way, when Jocko comes to them and says, hey, guys, I know this is going to sound a little bit weird, but here's what we're doing and here's who you're bringing with you. And this is what we're doing. They know that if you're telling them to do it, it's got to be done. That every discussion has been had, that every angle has been looked at, that you've run it up the chain of command and registered your objections if they're there. But they know that Jocko is not going to send us out to do something like this unless it simply has to be done.

• 1:28:29Jocko Willink?

  And? I get asked this question a lot. Well, what do I do if one of my subordinates has a question about the way I've planned something and I don't have a good answer? What do I do then? And I say, well, what you do then is you listen to them. You actually listen to what they're saying because if, if, if I've told you to do something and you've then responded with some reason why we shouldn't do that thing and I can't explain away your reason, then probably I'm wrong. And, and as a leader, this is another thing where our ego plays a role. As a leader, our ego says, well, if I admit that I'm wrong to the troops, they're gonna think I'm a, they're gonna think I don't know what I'm doing. The opposite is actually true. If I was in charge of you two and I presented you with a plan and you

• 1:29:13Jocko Willink?

  guys came back and said, hey, that plan's not smart. And I said, shut up and do it the way I told you, you don't respect me more, you respect me less. And if, if I came to you two with a plan and said, hey, guys, here's the way we're gonna execute this and you say, hey, that's not a good idea, we should do it a different way. And I say, okay, well, what do you recommend? And we come together with a collaborative plan. You don't think less of me as leader. As a matter of fact, you think more of me as leader. You think that I'm a humble guy that will listen and take input. And by the way, bonus is, you all now have real true ownership of the plan and we all feel good about it. And when you guys go in the field, you execute it to the utmost of your ability because it's something that you own.

• 1:29:52Speaker 01

  It's amazing how everything you're saying is, it's as if you took a list of all the traits of Lieutenant Callie at Mila and literally just said, do the opposite of all these things. He was a guy who couldn't take criticism from his men.

• 1:30:05Jocko Willink?

  Hundred percent.

• 1:30:06Speaker 01

  Who asserted, you know, who, who pulled rank anytime, anything like that happened. Who was a complete transparent yes man to his captain above him who was just never ask any questions. I mean, just right down the line. And as a result, his men had no trust in him. So that when they got into a situation, it was chaotic, they felt like they were standing out on the corner by themselves in a country they didn't understand with nobody looking out for them. I don't want to say this in a way that makes it sound like I'm trying to justify anything they did, of course not. But you put men in a situation where they feel like they're in complete chaos and They happen to have automatic weapons in their hands. Well, if I find myself in a situation where I'm completely overwhelmed by chaos,

• 1:30:50Speaker 01

  that automatic weapon's probably gonna start to look like the best tool I have for structuring my environment.

• 1:30:54Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, there's, and, and obviously this went way beyond that. Years ago, I forget how many years ago, there was a shooting in New York City. I think it was 38 rounds were fired at, uh, maybe a homeless person, an unarmed person. I forget the situation. But there's a lot of people that just couldn't believe that all these, all these police officers shot at this unarmed individual. Freaking horrible situation. And again, I, I always, I always will say this, like, whenever I talk about bad police shootings, I, I've been on ride-alongs with cops, I've done hits with cops, it's a freaking hard job.

• 1:31:31Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:31:31Jocko Willink?

  And, and, and I'm not a guy that, like, I've done that a couple times here and there, but go out on that beat every day and deal with those scumbags of the world every single day, and you're gonna have, it's gonna be, it's the freaking, it's one of the hardest jobs in the world. That situation, people say, "How the hell did that happen?" Well, there's, there's a lot of tension in a situation. The emotions are high, people are screaming, we're not trained well. Everyone is sitting there with their slack out of the trigger, and when that first bang happens, it's a, it's a chain reaction. That's one of, one of the situations that, you know, I would see with my guys that was beautiful in Ramadi, was they wouldn't do that. If, if one of the snipers took a pointed shot at someone,

• 1:32:14Jocko Willink?

  they would take the pointed shot and the others would hold fire, check fire until, you know, the, the situation either evolved or, or de-escalated. But the, the army was always quite impressed with the fact that we would take really surgical shots at bad guys and there wouldn't be, you know, massive amounts of collateral damage. Again, sometimes it's unavoidable, but...

• 1:32:38Speaker 01

  Maybe you can talk a little bit about that, because I think that's one thing that gets, uh, really lost on a lot of people today, and I think there's a lot of propaganda that helps it get lost. You know, there's no question that there's been an evolution in, um, our values and our relationship to these kind of things over the years. You go back to something like Sand Creek. 1864, there might not have been a whole lot of people shedding too many tears over what happened. You get up to Melech and, you know, there's some controversy and there's some, you know, there's a cover up, all those kinds of things, but once it comes out and it's laid bare and the evidence is clear, things had changed from 1864. And that, that incident and a few, you know, other incidents that were going on that made

• 1:33:21Speaker 01

  it out, or a few pictures that came out, it turned people against the war. They decided that this is not worth putting our men in a situation where we're going to be doing things like this. This is not worth it. And you get up to today, in the Iraq war, something like Abu Ghraib, which is an unacceptable situation, but we're talking about prisoner abuse that doesn't, that wouldn't cause the people who were working that prison five years before that, the Iraqis who worked for Saddam, that wouldn't even, you know, they, they, wouldn't even make it through their filter, right? So, I mean, what was going on there with the American soldiers? It was, it was not okay, but it wasn't walking into a village and massacring 500 people.

• 1:34:06Speaker 01

  It wasn't, you know, brutal torture in the same way that we would think of what was going on before we took control of that prison. And yet, our response to that, and the military's response to it, once it came out, was pretty dramatic. I mean, there's, and it was quick. It didn't, there was not as much of a delay. As soon as it comes out, there's, so there's a clear shift that's going on there. If, if even primarily from the standpoint of, it's just, it's a breach in discipline. That's not how you behave.

• 1:34:35Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and, and one of the things that I talk about with my guys is, because you've got to frame this right. Because, you know, you mentioned earlier that if you had dealt with this person that had cut the heads off of the three-year-old girl yesterday, and now you, you had him cuffed and knew it was him, that guy deserves a bullet, right? Hey, I agree with you, that guy deserves a bullet. The problem is, well, number one, it's a breakdown in discipline, but to me, more important, and what I would tell my guys is, if we behave that way, we have a significant chance of strategically

• 1:35:16Jocko Willink?

  negatively impacting our war effort. So I get that you want to kill these bad guys, but more important than us killing these bad guys is us winning this war. And so if we run around doing dumb things, we're gonna have a negative strategic impact. And that was actually always the biggest worry as a leader, is you don't want to have something happen where you, you know, you, you drop a bomb on the wrong area, or, you know, and a bunch of civilians get killed, or, you know, you don't want to have that thing happen. That's a real, and the effort and lengths that American forces go to to prevent civilian casualties is incredible.

• 1:35:54Speaker 01

  I don't think most people have any idea.

• 1:35:56Jocko Willink?

  No, they don't.

• 1:35:56Speaker 01

  How it works.

• 1:35:57Speaker 02

  And I think that's one of the cool things about creating a certain mythology that people want to live up to. The first time you say it, it may not be true. It may be a wishful thinking that you are those people, and you're not quite there. But as people keep repeating it, and you run again and again with the fact that your behavior doesn't match your ideals, more and more people will keep working on trying to actually build that thing. They don't want to feel that, like hypocrites. They actually want to live up to that ideal. And that's one of the things where, while sometimes people get turned off by when you have this high-minded ideal and this very poor behavior, they're like, ah, look at that hypocrisy. They say these things and they don't mean it. Well, sometimes when you say it long enough, people actually do want to live up

• 1:36:40Speaker 02

  to it, and they do change their behavior. So while the theory may not match the practice when you start, if you keep at it long enough, the practice may try to inch closer to matching that theory.

• 1:36:51Speaker 01

  The ideals matter a lot.

• 1:36:52Speaker 02

  And that's not a bad thing. Yeah.

• 1:36:53Speaker 01

  I mean, you can take it to a political context, right? When people can point back at the United States, say, before the 1960s, and before the Civil War, and point to the Constitution and Declaration of Independence, and these high-minded ideas, and people love to be the cynical one that says, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, but slavery, and but this, and but that. And yeah, totally, totally true. But the conclusion to draw from that is not that the...

• 1:37:23Speaker 01

  ideals don't matter, or that they're just on paper. The fact that those ideals were there was what allowed the civil rights movement to eventually come into being. That's what gave us the room. In fact, you could even say that the thing, we're talking about the same thing, that gap between ideal and reality. One way to talk about that is hypocrisy, but at the same time, that gap, that opening, is, that's the opening where people realize that and say, there is a gap between our professed ideals, and it makes room for that kind of positive change, right? I mean, you can go back, there was, the Mongols were never, ever going to give up slavery, because their moral system didn't have room for that.

• 1:38:05Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:06Speaker 01

  And so, you could go up to them and say, well, how dare you enslave these people? And they're not gonna get defensive. They're gonna look at you like you're crazy, because there's no room for that, you know, for that gap.

• 1:38:18Jocko Willink?

  That idea doesn't even exist.

• 1:38:20Speaker 01

  Right, right. And so, the ideals matter. And when, when they're broken, you know, again, I think that there's a motivation on the part of a lot of people who are more cynical than they should be, given the country that they're fortunate enough to live in, you know. This is something that you get from going overseas to a lot of places. It's something certainly that I got from spending so much time in Africa and the Middle East for work is, boy, you come back after the first trip to, over to those places, and you realize, you wanna kiss the ground when you get off that airplane, and you wanna go around and just hug everybody you see, because you are so fortunate to live in a place where

• 1:38:59Speaker 01

  things that we absolutely take for granted over here are miracles. And, you know, I think, one of the things I did, really didn't wanna do, when I was talking about Me Li in that episode, I stayed very focused on the incident itself, sort of, because I, you don't wanna, you don't wanna be making excuses for something like that. You don't wanna make it seem like you're trying to gloss over an atrocity. But...

• 1:39:36Speaker 01

  But you don't want to give fuel to that idea that like this is this speaks to like a larger problem in our society because I just don't believe that.

• 1:39:45Speaker 02

  Well, that's why it's a dance, right? You know, if you start pushing the button too much in the direction of making apologies for, well, after all, we are good guys and there are a few exceptions, but look, we are, we stand for freedom and democracy. He's like, yeah, maybe, but let's not be so quick about sweeping under the rug all the bad stuff. Let's look at it. The guys who instead push on the button of, hey, look at all the bad stuff, that means that all these ideals are crap and it's not real and it's all hypocrisy is like, whoa, slow down a second. Yeah, you get a couple of points where you're right, but you're also missing the boat. It's like, it's almost like, and that happens in most discussions, like in most situations, you rarely have somebody with 100% wrong, is that they take a partial truth and they

• 1:40:29Speaker 02

  take it too far and they lose perspective of the other side of the equation.

• 1:40:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, like people don't understand, like, American soldiers were killed and maimed in situations that absolutely could have been avoided if we disregarded our rules of engagement and if we made, like, we made conscious decisions to put ourselves at risk when we did not have to because we were trying to be sensitive to the environment and to the people that were there. And I don't think enough people recognize the historical anomaly that that is. I mean, that is just a, you can't, for thousands of years of human history, that is just completely unthinkable. You couldn't imagine something like that. And the extent to which we go, I mean, Jocko has talked about this before on his show, the extent to which we go to try to make sure that the people, you know, the targets

• 1:41:15Speaker 01

  that we're, that we're dealing with are targets. I think if more civilians had, had an idea of that, people would feel a lot different about, about what we do over there. You know, it doesn't mean that when something happens like Abu Ghraib, they're not going to react against that, but they're going to react against it from a place of, hey. We're a good country. That shit is not gonna fly, alright? That's not, you're not gonna represent us that way. And that's fine. That's a healthy way to respond to something like that. But, you know, again, a political situation or whatever else is going on, like, you know, people have more of a knee-jerk reaction to those things that you're talking about.

• 1:41:55Speaker 02

  And I think in that sense, it goes back to that Dan Carlin approach to things, right? That ability to look at things one way, and just when you're getting comfortable with the conclusions to say, yes, maybe that is the conclusion we take, but it's not that easy. There's also a 20% from the other side that's not really wrong, and you should include in that. And that keeps you thinking on your toes. You don't become dogmatic. You don't become thinking in purely black and white terms. You always have to have that nuance approach, which, and that's the problem. That's the other paradox, is most people take nuance to mean weakness. Then you can't make up your mind. You are too wishy-washy. You are, eh, it's not black, it's not white, it's somewhere in there. It's

• 1:42:36Speaker 02

  like, no, that's also a weakness, is the ability to look at things both ways and also make a decision. That's where to me it comes in as, where it's valuable. And I think it's funny, because so many of the things that Joe brings up are so about really the kind of human being that you wanna become, you know, about self-perfection, really, because that's what it boils down to, which is then what makes you a great leader, because there's no great leader without somebody who's worked on themselves a lot. And, you know, when you break down to the principles, nothing sounds like it's that hard, right? It's all like, okay, of course, yeah, that makes sense. Oh, that completely, and yet, it's one of the things where, while the theory may not be that hard, the practice is unrelenting.

• 1:43:20Speaker 02

  You have to be at it every single day, or it's too easy to sleep. There's, there's a great line in The Dora Ching that I was mentioning to Dara when we were driving down. There's- There's the line that say, "My way is very easy to understand and very easy to practice, but nobody understands it and nobody practices it." And I love it because in theory, yes, it's not that bad. It's fairly straightforward. And yet, there are so many steps along the way where it's easy to go the wrong path.

• 1:43:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:43:50Speaker 02

  That is like, the theory is easy. The practice is you need to put in the work and there's no substitute.

• 1:43:55Speaker 01

  Each of those steps matters so much too, because, you know, Jocko was talking about escalation in those situations. The, um, the book about the war in Chechnya, you talked about, I think the line, I hadn't read the book until I heard your podcast on it and it just, it's one of those things that when you hear it, it's so obvious, but if you were to just step back from the context a little bit, it kind of seems ridiculous, which is that the savagery started when people stopped shaving, when soldiers stopped shaving. And I think part of the reason for something like that is, uh, once, it, it's like, escalation's like a ratchet. Once you stop shaving, well, now you're a unit that doesn't shave anymore. Okay, whatever. Well, what that means is if you're a unit that lacks discipline, well, now your lack

• 1:44:39Speaker 01

  of discipline is not going to manifest as not shaving. You already don't shave. That's normal. That's totally normal. So now your lack of discipline is going to get to the next thing. Now I'm not cleaning my weapons properly. And then pretty soon, you're a unit that doesn't shave and doesn't clean your weapons properly, and that doesn't even seem like a lack of discipline anymore. That just seems like daily life. And now your lack of discipline, or whatever it is, is going to go up to the next spot. And it can happen with, you know, it can happen with just brutality and savagery and things like that as well, where now this kind of thing is just normal. So if I'm angry, uh, and it's totally normal for us to be able to smack these prisoners in the face, but now I'm really pissed, well, I'm not going to smack them in the face. I smack them in the face anyway. You know, so I'm going to show my anger now by stepping it up.

• 1:45:23Speaker 01

  And well, okay, if that's, if that slides and the leadership doesn't step in, well, now that's normal. And we're, you know, we don't just smack soldiers, we punch and kick soldiers. But that, once that's the baseline, it ratchets up to that point, well, it's going to escalate from there because, you know, that's kind of where it goes. And that's why catching those things right at the beginning and letting people know that, you know, all of these things matter. I mean, that's probably the life lesson in a lot of the stuff that you even talk about is everything matters. It all matters.

• 1:45:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, and.

• 1:45:55Jocko Willink?

  Not, it takes some time, like I didn't, I didn't realize this when I was a 20 year old SEAL or a 25 year old SEAL, you know, I kinda started getting the indications. And, and that's why, again, you know, I talk about training and leadership because that's what this stuff is, you know, putting somebody into a moral dilemma with no training is like putting someone onto the jujitsu mat with no training. They're just gonna get destroyed. Whatever's gonna happen is gonna happen and they have no control over it. And, you know, you gotta think about these things. You gotta think deeply about these things. So that you have some sort of an anchor that's grounded.

• 1:46:38Jocko Willink?

  That won't get ripped out at the first person that says, hey, shoot that three year old baby. You want, you need to be grounded and have thought about these things in a deeper way. And, and, you know, what you said about people swaying one way or the other. You're right. And people actually want to be led. And they want to be led even more so. When there is a pressure situation going on, when there's something that, that, that you're not used to, or that people aren't used to, some kind of stressor, some, some kind of stress or pressure.

• 1:47:18Jocko Willink?

  If you can step up and lead at that moment, people are looking for it. They're looking for a leader. And those, I remember you were talking about one of the guys in Milai, the six foot three guy. And he's a natural leader, right? He's a natural leader that people kinda followed. And what he started going sideways and started just getting completely savage and brutal. People just kinda, okay, you know, he's a guy, you know, like, okay, that guy's stepping up. And, and that's, and, and there was no one on the other end of the spectrum to say, hey, no, we're not doing that. Stop. And that's the biggest lesson from that situation, actually from both the situations.

• 1:47:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:47:56Jocko Willink?

  And, you know, you know, people talk about is the leader, how can the leader be responsible if they're not there? You know, yes, the leader's responsible, whether they're there, the way they train the people, the way they educated, the way they communicated, the culture that they set with those people, they're responsible. And certainly, these leaders were absolutely responsible in these scenarios.

• 1:48:14Speaker 02

  I guess before we wrap, one last thing I want to ask you is these days, you say you work a lot with businesses. You clearly are, you know, you're working primarily on the concept of leadership and how to teach people better tools to handle it. How do you go about it? What's your, what's, is it primarily like a business oriented approach now with major businesses that are?

• 1:48:36Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, we'll go in and do an assessment and figure out where the friction points are, figure out where they're having problems. And, and then we solve the problems that they're having through leadership. And that's every single problem in every single organization is a leadership problem. All of them, whether it's your P and L's upside down, whether it's your processes aren't working correctly, whether you got the wrong people in the wrong positions, it doesn't matter. The problems are going to get solved through leadership and leadership alone. And that's why we, that's why we're doing well, because if you've got a, if you've got a P and L that's upside down, you've got leaders that aren't paying attention to their expenditures and their income.

• 1:49:18Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:49:19Jocko Willink?

  If you've got processes that aren't working, you've got leaders that are in charge of those processes that are allowing them to continue to exist without refinement. If you've got people that are in positions that shouldn't be in those positions, you've got leaders that are allowing them to be in those positions without either being coached and mentored and trained so that they can lead or removed from those positions. And you can go right down the list with any problem that any organization is having. There's a leadership solution to that problem and that's what we do.

• 1:49:48Speaker 01

  Seems to me like it's definitely the thing I'm going to take away from the most. And listen, you talk about this stuff is one of the things that struck me is I came in with a lot of questions in mind. I wanted to talk to you about like, that I started out with, right? You, you got your guys, you're going into a horrible situation and there's these horrible things going on. How do you restrain your guys from going and retaliating in these terrible ways? And your response and the look on your face and everything to it, it actually like kind of threw me off a little bit. It wasn't what I was expecting because. Your, your answer to that really was dude, if I have gotten to the point where we're there in Iraq and there's a guy with handcuffs and I have to figure out how to restrain my guys from doing something, I failed a long time ago. You, cause you took it as almost like,

• 1:50:31Speaker 01

  eh, well, you know, you deal with it. That was taken care, we, how do we stop them?

• 1:50:35Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:35Speaker 01

  We stopped them in training. We stopped them in boot camp. We stopped them at BUDs. We stopped them in, all the way up to here.

• 1:50:40Jocko Willink?

  And I don't want to make that, I don't want to, I don't want to make that, I don't want to make light of that. Cause that, that is a hard situation. And when you lose guys in a unit of 35 guys and you got guys that are wounded and killed, there is absolutely, there is an absolute fire that you have to control. Because we know who's doing it. We, we can find them. We can get out there and, and get after them. And so we, we do have to keep ourselves in check. We do, I mean, we had many conversations of, hey,

• 1:51:21Jocko Willink?

  remember why we're here. Remember who we represent. Remember that if we get out of line, we won't even be allowed to do what we do anymore. Oh, so, so don't take it the wrong way that in any unit, any unit, you lose people, you lose your friends, you lose your brothers. That is an emotional, it's an emotional thing and you're in an emotional situation already and you have access, direct access to unleash your emotions if you are allowed to. And yeah, the, you know, with the platoon commanders that worked for me with, I mean, those guys, you know, Leif who wrote the book with me, I mean, he absolutely

• 1:52:06Jocko Willink?

  had to, had to sit his guys down and explain to them, hey, let's remember why we're here. Let's remember that.

• 1:52:14Jocko Willink?

  We could go to jail if we do the wrong thing. And nothing that we do here is worth any of you going to jail for any amount of time. So I didn't mean to make light of how hard that is. And, and how difficult that can be. And, and it's not just for me. Uh, not just for, for the SEALs, but you know, the Marines, the soldiers that were there who are dealing with, like I said, they're dealing with younger kids and, and uh, less, with less training. And you know, those, when you come in the SEAL teams, you came in because you wanted to go to combat. Like every single SEAL wants to go to combat. They want to be there. I don't know if you've ever heard my retirement speech. It's, it's, it's on YouTube, but when,

• 1:52:55Jocko Willink?

  like I made a list and said, hey, if you want to go over to the eastern part of Ramadi and live in, uh, in a blown out bunker. And get into firefights every day, put your name on this list. And I walked out of the room. I came back 20 minutes later and every single guy in the task unit had their name on the list. So, we're, we're dealing with guys that every single guy, that's what they want to do. Now, do they get tired? Do they get combat stress? They absolutely do. Do they get scared? Yes, they do. It's, it's hard. But we have a guy that at least start from the position of, I want to do this. This is my profession. The army, you know, you, you definitely end up with guys that are coming in the army because they wanted to pay for college or they wanted to, get a job or they wanted to get out of whatever hometown they're in. And, and that's how they ended up in the army. Again,

• 1:53:39Jocko Willink?

  there's also a great number of soldiers that are just as eager for combat and certainly a great number of Marines that are the same attitude. So each, each one of those people, you have your own challenges and it, and it is hard and you do have to, and what, goes back to what this whole thing has been about. As the leader, you can't be the one that's getting wrapped up in those emotions. You can't be the one when, yeah, I'll tell you what, your heart's going to be fucking broken. When you lose guys, it's going to be broken and you're going to want nothing more than to go out and, rubble cities and salt the earth. So everyone is dead and no one will ever live there again.

• 1:54:20Jocko Willink?

  But if you let that get a hold of you as the leader, your, your, your team and your men are going to be in hell. That's where they're gonna end up. And so that's why the education, the training, the understanding, I've had so many people contacted me after I did the, the, the Mila podcast that you thank you, that they, they play that Mila podcast for leadership training inside multiple military organizations. It's, it's awesome. I'm so happy that they do that because when I came out with that podcast, I had tons of people that said, I didn't know about that. People that were in leadership positions, didn't understand, didn't know what the Mila massacre was.

• 1:55:02Jocko Willink?

  And it's a, it's one of the darkest stains on our history. But you have to talk about it. And you talked earlier about, hey, I don't want to make, I didn't really want to go into too much of what led up to it because I didn't want to make excuses. Man, I went into detail of why it happened because I want everyone to understand all those little things. How when you cut those corners, how when you play the, the telephone game with your intelligence and you let people say things that you don't put them in check. And you don't, you let them use words that aren't correct. And you have people that don't have a culture to ask why we're doing this. And you set those situations up and you let bad leaders into situat- or in positions that they shouldn't be in Cali,

• 1:55:43Jocko Willink?

  failing out of OCS multiple times. Like, that's it. That's it. You let those things happen and you're gonna end up in hell. And as a leader, that's your job to stop it.

• 1:55:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. It's a good place to wrap it up, man. Mila, Mila didn't necessarily happen on March 16th, 1968. It happened when Cali failed OCS. It happened when the intelligence failed to get passed down properly. It failed every time somebody was allowed to smack around a Vietnamese and they didn't get called on it. That's when it happened. You know, the, the, the, the actual acute incident was just the result of a long, long process. So.

• 1:56:22Jocko Willink?

  Awesome.

• 1:56:22Speaker 01

  It's great, man. Thank you so much.

• 1:56:24Jocko Willink?

  Thanks for having me on. Thanks for you guys for what you do. And you guys put out kick ass podcasts and I appreciate listening to them. And maybe we'll get to do this again sometime.

• 1:56:35Speaker 01

  Thank you as well. I mean, I can tell you from my own personal experience, listening to your podcasts, as well as a lot of guys I know of all ages, guys from high school all the way on up into their 50s. I have one guy that I know is a huge fan. You know, I don't want to, it's just three of us and it's getting a little sweaty in here already, so I won't get on my knees too much, but it's not, it's not an exaggeration to say that you're changing people's lives. So, thank you. Keep it up.

• 1:56:58Jocko Willink?

  Appreciate it, man.

• 1:56:59Speaker 01

  You've had a great effect on me personally. So, thank you.

• 1:57:02Jocko Willink?

  Thanks, brother. Thanks for listening. Thanks, guys.

• 1:57:05Jocko Willink?

  And that wraps up the conversation. And thanks for listening and thanks to Daryl Cooper and Daniele Bolelli for organizing that discussion. And I look forward to having some more of those types of conversations in the future about history and about human nature and about leadership. And in the meantime, Echo.

• 1:57:32Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:57:32Jocko Willink?

  Speaking of leadership, if people want to lead themselves down the right path.

• 1:57:39Speaker 03

  The path, yes.

• 1:57:41Jocko Willink?

  Do you have any maybe recommendations for them?

• 1:57:45Speaker 03

  Sure. Of course I do. So, we're all working out, right?

• 1:57:51Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm. Pretty much, yeah.

• 1:57:52Speaker 03

  Every day.

• 1:57:53Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:54Speaker 03

  You work out every day.

• 1:57:55Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Although I got sick. Straight up.

• 1:57:58Speaker 03

  Got a rest.

• 1:57:59Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Flu.

• 1:58:01Speaker 03

  Flu.

• 1:58:01Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. You know what that is?

• 1:58:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, man. I hear bad things.

• 1:58:05Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. No, it wasn't good.

• 1:58:06Speaker 03

  You're gonna get the flu shot.

• 1:58:07Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I didn't get that.

• 1:58:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, man. You know, I hear mixed reviews about the whole flu deal. Either way, you're obviously better. You seem better.

• 1:58:15Jocko Willink?

  Well, I'm better.

• 1:58:15Speaker 03

  Which is good, because now you can get back to working out. And when you get back to working out, you still want to maintain your joints. Sick or not sick, maintain your joints. That's what I think. I think everyone would agree with me on that one. And the way you maintain your joints is to take joint supplements like krill oil. Jocko's super krill oil. That's the good one. Choco supplements, that's right. Also, a good supplement called joint warfare. Take those every single day, man. Every single day, no breaks, no slack.

• 1:58:43Jocko Willink?

  No slack.

• 1:58:44Speaker 03

  Unless you run out, but here's the thing, you don't have to run out anymore. You get the subscription situation. Every what, 30 days, 60 days, whatever, however much you use or whatever, you gotta estimate and then boom, you do your subscription, you get one in the mail every month. Never run out. Maintain the joints, important. More important than your power mass gainer 5000. I think so. You think so too?

• 1:59:12Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:12Speaker 03

  Also, you want some cognitive enhancements, which you do. You do, you totally do. Brothers, like, you know, cellphone signals and, you know, pollutions, pollutants from cars. It messes up your brain sometimes, you need some cognitive enhancement. Choco is another supplement called discipline. It's a pre-mission, cognitive enhancement, physical enhancement, cognitive enhancement, all in one. Boom. And it tastes good, boom. Take it. I would say take that every day. You take it before stuff. So you call it a pre-mission indicates you take it before you do something where you're gonna use it.

• 1:59:50Jocko Willink?

  Before I do a mission.

• 1:59:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:59:52Jocko Willink?

  That mission could be going to work with a company. Like, hey, I'm gonna need to be on my A-game mentally, cause we're solving problems, we're digging into leadership situations, we're finding out what's going on. A-game has gotta come. Also, jujitsu.

• 2:00:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:00:07Jocko Willink?

  But the people always say, well, I thought you didn't take pre-workouts. And I don't, not for a workout.

• 2:00:13Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:00:14Jocko Willink?

  For the workout, I mean, I might do that one out of every 10 workouts. Maybe even one out of 20. Would I take some kind of a pre-workout?

• 2:00:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:00:25Jocko Willink?

  It's, cause when I wake up in the morning, I'm not hungry. I'm not even third, I'm, I mean, I drink water, but I'm not like, I don't feel the need for some

• 2:00:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:00:34Jocko Willink?

  Jack me up during the workout.

• 2:00:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:00:36Jocko Willink?

  I'm just gonna go get it.

• 2:00:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, and you don't really drink coffee, so you don't even have that situation.

• 2:00:41Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, no, I don't like coffee.

• 2:00:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:00:43Jocko Willink?

  People ask why I don't like coffee, don't like the taste of it, tastes horrible.

• 2:00:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, so what that did is it eat like, it made you, or it didn't allow you to get into the coffee system, because that's really what it is. I mean, I hate to call it.

• 2:00:54Jocko Willink?

  And everyone says it's an acquired taste. My question is, when something's an acquired taste, how many times do you have to drink something that sucks before you're like, okay, I like this now?

• 2:01:03Speaker 03

  Before you acquire that thing?

• 2:01:04Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:04Speaker 03

  Uh, yeah, man, and.

• 2:01:06Jocko Willink?

  And there wasn't, to me, there was no, it wasn't like, hey, if I can get this, if I can start liking this, I'll be, I'll be stronger. No, that wasn't gonna happen. It was like, hey, if I start liking this, then I'll spend four dollars a day at a coffee store.

• 2:01:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:01:19Jocko Willink?

  No, not happening.

• 2:01:20Speaker 03

  Well, usually, I mean, like beer, right? When you first drink beer, typically, for most people.

• 2:01:24Jocko Willink?

  Acquired taste, that's what everything is. I don't, I'm not, I'm not good with any acquired taste.

• 2:01:28Speaker 03

  No, not chocolate milk, chocolate milk right off the bat.

• 2:01:30Jocko Willink?

  Everyone loves it, right?

• 2:01:32Speaker 03

  Immediately acquired, yeah.

• 2:01:34Jocko Willink?

  Wait till you try the milk.

• 2:01:36Speaker 03

  That's not acquired taste.

• 2:01:37Jocko Willink?

  No, it's so good, it's ridiculous.

• 2:01:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, and that's probably why you make things taste good, because you don't, you're not down for the whole acquired situation. Well, okay, so like beer, coffee's the same deal, because there's a, there's a benefit beyond just the taste. So beer is like, yeah, you get drunk or whatever, and people like that. But it's like, dang, the beer is kind of this barrier, like, I wish it tasted better, blah, blah, blah. That's why they do Jell-O shots, you know, to just get in the, anyway, so after a while, you're like, you know what, I'll endure the taste to get.

• 2:02:11Jocko Willink?

  But then eventually you like the taste.

• 2:02:12Speaker 03

  You end up liking the taste, because you can kind of recognize certain, you know, it is all kinds of reasons. Same thing with coffee. You kind of start to like the taste, because originally, initially, you want to get the, the boost, the caffeine boost.

• 2:02:25Jocko Willink?

  Well, the good thing is, with, with the products that we make, there's no, they're not acquired taste, they just taste good.

• 2:02:32Speaker 03

  Direct, uh, delicious.

• 2:02:34Jocko Willink?

  You can just get after it from the get-go.

• 2:02:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, and this, this discipline, premission is no exception, tastes good. It's like a lemon lime, is that the official flavor?

• 2:02:43Jocko Willink?

  That's the official.

• 2:02:43Speaker 03

  Lemon lime?

• 2:02:44Jocko Willink?

  Official, yeah.

• 2:02:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's a good one, because that's like a real, like, broad, like, most people gonna like the lemon lime. Like, it takes a weirdo to not like lemon lime.

• 2:02:51Jocko Willink?

  No, you gotta have something, you gotta have, you gotta have issues.

• 2:02:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, you're probably missed.

• 2:02:57Speaker 03

  But nonetheless, it does taste good. I will agree with that. And I think it's one of those deals where you can just take it, even if it's not right before some stuff.

• 2:03:06Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I just drink it. Sometimes I'm just straight up want something sweet.

• 2:03:12Speaker 03

  Straight up. It's all good for your brain and stuff.

• 2:03:15Jocko Willink?

  Is that a lack of discipline? I want something sweet?

• 2:03:18Speaker 03

  No, because unless it's like a bad thing. No, no, no, because you think about it, you want to break it down. What makes something a lack of discipline? It's like when you slip, when it's like goes beyond your intentions, right? If you intend to do something, but then it's like, oh, my immediate payoff is gonna kind of get in the way or whatever, then that's.

• 2:03:36Jocko Willink?

  So that's why it's okay to be like, tomorrow, I'm gonna have a mint chocolate chip milkshake.

• 2:03:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, it kind of is.

• 2:03:40Jocko Willink?

  Not today, tomorrow.

• 2:03:42Speaker 03

  But if that deviated from your original whole plan, then it's lack of discipline. Like if you're like, oh, I'm really craving a shake. I won't have it today, but I'll have it tomorrow. Even though the plan is doesn't entail you having it tomorrow, then it's like a lack of discipline, just on a bigger scale, I guess. Or more long longevity skill. Nonetheless, discipline. It's good. Tastes good.

• 2:04:02Jocko Willink?

  Feels good.

• 2:04:03Speaker 03

  It won't take discipline to take discipline, is what I'm saying. Like, because it's gonna taste good, it's gonna make you, you're, you know what it is when you take it?

• 2:04:13Speaker 03

  I was talking to Jade about this. It's like, um, you know how like when you're searching for a word? You know, when you're trying to explain something and like, let's say, I don't know, your brain is off, you're hungover. Or you're didn't get enough, I don't know, whatever. And you're searching, oh, what's that word again? Or you forget someone's name, like your friend or something like this.

• 2:04:30Speaker 03

  It's almost like.

• 2:04:31Jocko Willink?

  The discipline is gonna connect those dots for you.

• 2:04:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, and this is what it feels like. You know, like, you know, you ever played the lottery? Like Powerball or something?

• 2:04:39Jocko Willink?

  Not really.

• 2:04:39Speaker 03

  Well, you ever seen like on the news how they get the balls? Yeah, it's like this big round cage that they spin and all the, all the balls fly around in there. And then they just kind of one randomly comes into the little chute there. That's what it feels like. It's like, that's all the words.

• 2:04:55Speaker 03

  And that's all the words and man that correct words just not shoot is not coming in there. You know what I mean? But the discipline shoots the right words in there like no like one speed boom boom boom boom.

• 2:05:05Jocko Willink?

  Hey.

• 2:05:05Speaker 03

  See what I'm saying? That's what it feels like.

• 2:05:07Jocko Willink?

  Take this one, win the lottery. Check.

• 2:05:11Speaker 03

  Yep, same exact thing. Nonetheless, it's good. Get that at originmaine.com. That's where you can get all this stuff. Origin Labs are producing it, you know, by the truckload for us. Also on originmaine.com. There's some good gees on there. Really good gees. Only gees I'm wearing now forever, forever, straight up. And they're made in America, by the way. The cotton's made in America, sewn in America. Loom is not a verb.

• 2:05:41Jocko Willink?

  Woven.

• 2:05:42Speaker 03

  Woven.

• 2:05:43Jocko Willink?

  Yes.

• 2:05:43Speaker 03

  With looms.

• 2:05:44Jocko Willink?

  The wrong word lottery just popped in there. Loomed. Used to loomed into a verb. Maybe that's proactive.

• 2:05:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:05:53Jocko Willink?

  You're creating words.

• 2:05:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's true. See?

• 2:05:55Jocko Willink?

  Hey, when Shakespeare made up a word, everyone was cool with it.

• 2:05:58Speaker 03

  Bro.

• 2:05:58Jocko Willink?

  All of a sudden, that came cool.

• 2:05:59Speaker 03

  And you can make words.

• 2:06:00Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:00Speaker 03

  All you need is people to sign up. So you know what? The cotton is straight up loomed in America. And so, you know, assembled in America, they're made in America, straight up. The gees, there's rash guards on there, compression gear, if you will, pants and tops.

• 2:06:17Jocko Willink?

  By the way, it's not just cotton, you know? That's why it's so different.

• 2:06:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:06:21Jocko Willink?

  Because it's, it's, it's a hybrid blend.

• 2:06:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:06:24Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's not just cotton. So, yeah, there's, that, that's why the material dries quicker. That's why it's antimicrobial. That's why it doesn't smell bad. That's why it dries out quick. That's why it's lighter, because it's, it's made from the get-go for jujitsu.

• 2:06:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:06:42Jocko Willink?

  So.

• 2:06:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, and that is a big deal. If you, if you take jujitsu and you even just pay even that much attention to that kind of stuff, it makes a difference.

• 2:06:48Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:48Speaker 03

  And then try to go back to your old gi, you can be like, bro, why did I even do that? To my origin gi, sticking with it. That's why I'm sticking with it. Also, speaking of jujitsu, there's an immersion camp coming up.

• 2:07:02Speaker 03

  Sept, or August 26th through September 2nd, there's two, two sessions. Right, early, late session. I'm going. Jock, are you going?

• 2:07:12Jocko Willink?

  I am going.

• 2:07:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:07:13Jocko Willink?

  Going to both sessions.

• 2:07:14Speaker 03

  Poor Jock was so mad he couldn't participate last time.

• 2:07:17Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it hurt rib.

• 2:07:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:07:20Speaker 03

  It was almost like something was there just bothering you the whole time, just a little bit.

• 2:07:24Jocko Willink?

  Oh, no, no, a lot.

• 2:07:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, you didn't show it that much, but you could tell.

• 2:07:29Jocko Willink?

  Well, yeah, I wouldn't say I let it get to me, but it definitely bothered me.

• 2:07:33Speaker 03

  It would show every, every once in a while. Nonetheless, Jock will be there in full effect this time.

• 2:07:40Speaker 03

  And, uh, yeah, I'll be there. And, uh, you know, we can immerse ourself in jujitsu. That's what it is. It's not a boot camp.

• 2:07:49Jocko Willink?

  August 26th through September 2nd.

• 2:07:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a good one. In Origin. Yeah. So go to originmaine.com. You can look at literally all of these things.

• 2:07:57Jocko Willink?

  It's immersion, it's jujitsu immersion camp. You can only do jujitsu. How many, how many hours a day can you do jujitsu?

• 2:08:03Speaker 03

  What, in real life or in the camp?

• 2:08:04Jocko Willink?

  In the camp and in real life.

• 2:08:06Speaker 03

  I guess technically in the camp, you can do it for 24 hours, really.

• 2:08:11Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, okay.

• 2:08:12Speaker 03

  Technically, if you really want.

• 2:08:14Jocko Willink?

  Now, realistically, what do you think? Someone does two or three hours in the morning and two or three hours in the afternoon? Or two hours in the morning, two hours in the afternoon, two hours in the evening, six hours a day?

• 2:08:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:08:23Jocko Willink?

  You'll be sore.

• 2:08:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, if you're going to get in after it, which you're not obligated to do, but you, that's the freedom you have and that's how good it is.

• 2:08:31Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:31Speaker 03

  And that's the thing, man. So you know how like, let's say you, for example?

• 2:08:34Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:35Speaker 03

  And you're like, hey, I wanna, I wanna roll two hours in the morning, two hours afternoon, two hours at night. I, but here's the thing, you can't just decide to roll. You gotta roll with somebody. Otherwise, you're just rolling by yourself. So that's a problem in the real world. Not everyone, you know, but Brad, this camp, oh.

• 2:08:50Jocko Willink?

  There'll be someone.

• 2:08:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, every single time, plenty of people, by the way, all levels, boom. So, yeah. Get some, even if you've never done jujitsu, ever, still go and learn some jujitsu. Get off to a.

• 2:09:02Jocko Willink?

  It's a good way to learn.

• 2:09:03Speaker 03

  Get the ground running.

• 2:09:03Jocko Willink?

  Immersion. Well, that's the best way to learn.

• 2:09:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, fully. So, yeah, originmaine.com. Check, look at all this stuff and, you know.

• 2:09:10Jocko Willink?

  Dave Burke's coming, by the way.

• 2:09:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm looking forward to that one.

• 2:09:14Jocko Willink?

  Mystery immersion jujitsu.

• 2:09:15Speaker 03

  Anytime Dave Burke calls me, I see his name pop on my phone. It's like, you know, every once in a while, you'll run into that guy who kinda gives you that feeling like, oh, Dave Burke's calling me.

• 2:09:22Jocko Willink?

  Good deal, Dave.

• 2:09:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, good deal, Dave. It kinda like brightens your day a little bit.

• 2:09:26Jocko Willink?

  I know who else is coming. I don't know if JP's gonna come or Leif.

• 2:09:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:09:29Jocko Willink?

  Gotta check the schedules.

• 2:09:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:09:31Jocko Willink?

  Gotta block the EFT's schedules.

• 2:09:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, that'd be good if both of them come. They've been, I've been noticing they've been getting their train on.

• 2:09:38Jocko Willink?

  Trying to train.

• 2:09:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, man, that's good.

• 2:09:42Speaker 03

  Also, speaking of training.

• 2:09:46Speaker 03

  If you want some good fitness gear, mix up the workout. Get more creative with the workout with the movements and equipment. Go to on it.com slash Jocko. Get yourself some Primal bells. I highly recommend.

• 2:09:59Jocko Willink?

  By the way, someone hit me up because we had this conversation last time. You said that my workouts were boring.

• 2:10:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:10:06Jocko Willink?

  And someone kind of sided with me, just so you know.

• 2:10:10Speaker 03

  Cool.

• 2:10:10Jocko Willink?

  Cause I said, the workouts can be boring if you're boring.

• 2:10:15Speaker 03

  Right. Yeah. We, but the thing is we did conclude that.

• 2:10:17Jocko Willink?

  Some people sided with me. Yeah. Just so you know.

• 2:10:20Speaker 03

  Well, they're right. And, and straight up, you're right because I think we kind of concluded that too, where. Yeah. You know, if you're boring, or if you intentionally make it boring, yeah, it's boring. That's how. In fact, the boredom and the boringness of the workout can be part of a certain type of training. You know, it's like a mental endurance training. So it's a whole big thing and I was irresponsible to accuse you.

• 2:10:44Jocko Willink?

  Do you ever do a workout where you just do one movement?

• 2:10:47Speaker 03

  The whole time?

• 2:10:48Jocko Willink?

  The whole time?

• 2:10:49Speaker 03

  No.

• 2:10:49Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:10:50Speaker 03

  Wait.

• 2:10:50Jocko Willink?

  There is some mental.

• 2:10:52Speaker 03

  Not a full workout.

• 2:10:52Jocko Willink?

  There's some sort of like, there's definitely something to that mentally.

• 2:10:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:10:55Jocko Willink?

  You know, like, oh, I'm just gonna do 500 repetitions of whatever this is.

• 2:11:00Speaker 03

  Actually, yes, I have. It was snatch. So.

• 2:11:04Jocko Willink?

  Catbell snatch?

• 2:11:04Speaker 03

  Here's the thing though, it was.

• 2:11:05Jocko Willink?

  Catbell snatch?

• 2:11:06Speaker 03

  No.

• 2:11:07Jocko Willink?

  Oh, barbell snatch. Okay.

• 2:11:09Speaker 03

  It was a CrossFit.

• 2:11:10Jocko Willink?

  500 snatches?

• 2:11:12Speaker 03

  It, no, it was, um.

• 2:11:15Jocko Willink?

  That's no joke.

• 2:11:16Speaker 03

  I forget how many. It was a dumb amount, put it that way. Well, at the time I thought it was anyway. I forget how much. It was probably, I think it was like 200.

• 2:11:25Speaker 03

  20 is already dumb. I think it was 200.

• 2:11:27Jocko Willink?

  You got bored at 15. You powered through those last five reps though.

• 2:11:33Jocko Willink?

  I'm gonna suck it up. Mental focus.

• 2:11:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Did it. But that was it. That was the only thing. Super sore the next day.

• 2:11:40Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:41Speaker 03

  But that's it. Yeah. Snatch. But snatch is kind of a fun exercise though. It's a thing.

• 2:11:45Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Well.

• 2:11:47Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, even though it's fun, but the movement is like it's more dynamic than just a, um, you know, like.

• 2:11:53Jocko Willink?

  The thing with exercises like this snatch, if you're not focused, oh, this one's real simple, but if you don't focus, box jump, if you let your mind wander during a box jump, next thing you know, you got a eight inch savage scar on your shit.

• 2:12:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, very true.

• 2:12:11Jocko Willink?

  You ever near miss a box jump and it like wakes you up and you're like, oh, man, I wasn't paying attention. I just paid the man on that one.

• 2:12:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, I don't do that much box jumps. Probably used to. I used to box jump like a savage.

• 2:12:25Jocko Willink?

  Check.

• 2:12:26Speaker 03

  Just for your own perfect.

• 2:12:28Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, no, I'm super stoked that I know that now.

• 2:12:32Speaker 03

  Nonetheless,

• 2:12:35Speaker 03

  there's some, uh, cool workout equipment gear on there. Boring workout or not? Get creative. Boom. Look in there. A lot of stuff. I was just on there night yesterday, the day before. Good, good, good website. Good info too, by the way. On it.com slash Jocko. Good spot. Good way to support. Also, when you get these books, I think I'm redesigning the website.

• 2:12:58Jocko Willink?

  Good.

• 2:12:59Speaker 03

  Think so. I think it's old, old looking.

• 2:13:02Jocko Willink?

  Well, now there's, now there's people that'll be anticipating this for next year while you try and get around to it.

• 2:13:08Speaker 03

  Brother, website was old looking since day one, by the way. So, you know, nonetheless, um, anyway, back to the point, uh, when you get any of the books that we review, including Jocko's actual books, Way to Warrior Kid,

• 2:13:27Speaker 03

  Extreme Ownership, The Field Manual, all these books. Look, I'm listed on the website. And the books are listed by episode in the book section. You just click through there when you get them. Boom. Good way to support. Takes it Amazon, Amazon Prime, one day shipping. Boom. It's good, good way to support too. But yeah, come through there. Good way to support. Also, subscribe to the podcast if you haven't already. Seems obvious, I know. But some people haven't subscribed and they're not obligated to, but if you do want to support, subscribe. It's a good way. Also on YouTube. When I say subscribe, I'm talking iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, all that stuff. And YouTube, so don't exclude YouTube, the video version of this podcast.

• 2:14:08Jocko Willink?

  Which you've been pretty motivated on lately.

• 2:14:10Speaker 03

  We'll say active, sure. I don't, I don't count on motivation.

• 2:14:13Jocko Willink?

  That's good.

• 2:14:14Speaker 03

  I try to stick with the discipline.

• 2:14:17Speaker 03

  Yep, I see what you did there. Nonetheless, I am disciplined with it. But I am motivated too, because you know, I, I understand the value of excerpts now. Someone emailed me the other day, hey, this excerpt of, uh, not joining the military, or something about regretting not joining the military. This is what he did. He had, I think he had like a medical thing, where it's like, oh, he couldn't pass or whatever, but he still could do work for the military within other like,

• 2:14:40Jocko Willink?

  Right, right, right. You know, he went and did, he became like electronics technician for the military, even though he wasn't in the military.

• 2:14:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:14:47Jocko Willink?

  Still served.

• 2:14:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, see what I'm saying? So like, those little excerpts can kind of offer this info, whether it be advice, or just spark other questions in people. Maybe they wouldn't have got it, maybe they missed that episode. Or maybe they just weren't interested in listening to the whole damn thing.

• 2:15:00Jocko Willink?

  Actually, speaking of missing the episode, somebody pointed out, somebody made a really funny meme. That it showed, it's, I, I, it didn't show you making excerpt, but it showed like someone discovering excerpt, and like, wow, this is awesome. And then it said, oh, no episode number attached to this excerpt.

• 2:15:17Speaker 03

  Uh huh.

• 2:15:17Jocko Willink?

  So, meaning, hey, glad I got the excerpt, now where can I find this?

• 2:15:21Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:15:21Jocko Willink?

  So in the future, we may want to add the episode number in there.

• 2:15:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, so.

• 2:15:27Jocko Willink?

  Did you know that there was a big meme war?

• 2:15:29Speaker 03

  No.

• 2:15:29Jocko Willink?

  It was on the news.

• 2:15:30Speaker 03

  Meme war?

• 2:15:31Jocko Willink?

  I, I guess, and I can't really follow it a hundred percent, because it was all on Reddit.

• 2:15:36Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 2:15:37Jocko Willink?

  But I read an article about, there was like a legit meme war.

• 2:15:41Speaker 03

  What's a meme war, though?

• 2:15:42Jocko Willink?

  Well, meme war is different memes going back and forth at each other. But there was a meme war. And I've, I've seen a funny, somebody asked me one time, they had a, they had a ball cap. You ever seen the ball caps that say, you know, Vietnam War veteran, or, you know, Afghanistan, Afghanistan, Operation Iraqi Freedom War Veteran, or something like that? Someone wrote me, or sent me a picture and said, is this, is it offensive for me to wear this hat? And the hat said, you know, survivor of the meme war. And it looked like, it looked like a legit veteran's hat. And I kind of was like, no, man, as far as I'm concerned, you're good.

• 2:16:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:16:16Jocko Willink?

  I don't know what you've been through on the meme wars.

• 2:16:20Speaker 03

  I don't know what the meme more is. I will, I'm gonna look into it.

• 2:16:25Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, there's a meme more on Reddit.

• 2:16:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:16:27Jocko Willink?

  Apparently it had to do with sequels. I can't say the whole, I don't understand it well enough. But I understand it well enough to laugh and think it's funny.

• 2:16:35Speaker 03

  I think it's very compelling, hundred percent. Meme more, those memes are funny, man. They get real funny. People are creative. That's good, that's a good thing.

• 2:16:46Speaker 03

  Nonetheless, excerpts. I do put the episode on there, by the way. Here's the thing, when you go to, uh, uh, YouTube.

• 2:16:53Jocko Willink?

  Oh, you gotta go to the read more or something?

• 2:16:55Speaker 03

  You gotta click on read more, that's the thing. So it looks like-

• 2:16:59Jocko Willink?

  By the way, I was reading YouTube comments the other day.

• 2:17:01Speaker 03

  Oh dang, it's bold, that's a wacky wild adventure right there.

• 2:17:04Jocko Willink?

  Someone wrote, "Why are we even making these comments? Jocko and Echo don't even read them." Guess what?

• 2:17:11Speaker 03

  Jocko reads them.

• 2:17:12Jocko Willink?

  I read them.

• 2:17:12Speaker 03

  Dang, there you go.

• 2:17:14Jocko Willink?

  Meme more was going on, I had to do something.

• 2:17:18Speaker 03

  Take some, some kinda act, you know, just read the comment. Actually, that makes sense. Bro, cuz here's the thing about YouTube comments, this isn't new, by the way, so. A lot of people know this already, where YouTube comments seem to be, maybe there's probably other forums and stuff where they get worse, but YouTube has the most potential for terrible comments. And for no reason too, so.

• 2:17:36Jocko Willink?

  Well, isn't it because it's completely unregulated?

• 2:17:39Speaker 03

  It can be, yeah.

• 2:17:40Jocko Willink?

  Well, in other words, on a Facebook comment, or on a Twitter comment, generally it's your person, you're a human being.

• 2:17:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:17:47Jocko Willink?

  On YouTube, you're just, you're just a-

• 2:17:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, you can create an account pretty easy, that, and they can't really think, yeah, so it's anonymous, you know, it's, you know, close to anonymous, so the the key is, or the kind of the thing, the result is, like, if you're gonna read YouTube comments on your, your content, you gotta, gotta, gotta have thick skin. In real thick skin, cuz they get, it's like they're trying to hurt your feelings, like they're trying, you know?

• 2:18:14Speaker 03

  They are, and they can be, and that's the thing, people are creative and creativity is just, is a really broad thing. And people, when they use creativity to try to like, try to get you, they can't if you don't have thick skin. And I've experienced this, you know, remember when I used to do the Hinato show?

• 2:18:31Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:32Speaker 03

  Right, so that's a, anytime you're doing like comedy stuff, or I don't know, like any kind of like creative stuff. To me, your stuff now is really hard to be like, it sucks and try to like, you know, so it's kind of easy. I think you, we kind of have it easy in that way, in that way. Because if someone's like, Jocko's so stupid or something like that, they make themselves look dumb, because it's so obviously not stupid. But when you do like a comedy thing, or to me anyway, I don't know. So, when you do like a comedy thing, or you know, something like that, something of the nature of Hinato show, or Bikini Girls, you know, doing lightsaber fights or something like that. People are gonna tear that stuff apart, and the stuff they say is like, dang, I didn't even think about that.

• 2:19:14Speaker 03

  But now I'm kind of have a complex about my videos now, you know, kind of thing. So, that's how I started on YouTube, by the way. So, I was like, kind of new to YouTube and putting stuff on, when it got shredded, got shredded, man.

• 2:19:27Jocko Willink?

  Hurt your feelings.

• 2:19:28Speaker 03

  And here's the thing too about-

• 2:19:29Jocko Willink?

  You don't really have thick skin.

• 2:19:31Speaker 03

  I would say-

• 2:19:32Jocko Willink?

  And then, that, that time it was thinner.

• 2:19:34Speaker 03

  In the beginning, I don't think you even really have thick skin unless they have the heads up going in. So, and here's the weird thing, it's like, most people, they like it because they're fans of Hinato or something like that. But then when one guy now, after like fifty comments of like, haha, this guy's hilarious, oh, this video is funny, or whatever, whatever. One guy says it sucks, you're like, fuck, it sucks. I know, it's, you know, it gets to you, it's weird how that works. Nonetheless, the point is, you reading the YouTube comments is a wacky, wild, bold adventure. And I respect you for going, going on that adventure. Nonetheless, Jocko reads them, so boom, question answered, right? Was it a question? Or did he say they don't, they don't read?

• 2:20:13Jocko Willink?

  It was a statement.

• 2:20:14Speaker 03

  Saying straight up, they don't read.

• 2:20:15Jocko Willink?

  I don't know why we're even writing anything. Jocko and Echo, don't even read these comments.

• 2:20:19Speaker 03

  Meanwhile, he wrote that.

• 2:20:20Jocko Willink?

  I was borderline, like, maybe I should just respond for once and say, "Hey."

• 2:20:24Speaker 03

  What up?

• 2:20:24Jocko Willink?

  I'm right here.

• 2:20:25Speaker 03

  Reading, yeah. In the darkness, they came out of the darkness for once. Yeah, man, that's good. Maybe. That's another way to engage, right? I just figured, like, YouTube comments, um, is kinda, I don't know, it's not as authentic, you know?

• 2:20:38Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, well, it's random, uh, what is your, uh, anonymous.

• 2:20:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, a lot of stuff.

• 2:20:42Jocko Willink?

  Which is kind of a bummer.

• 2:20:43Speaker 03

  Yeah. Nonetheless, if you want, subscribe to the YouTube channel for the video version and excerpts, which are valuable. I've come to know the value of excerpts. And, um, you know, some enhanced excerpts. Call them enhanced. Put some music on there. Some text. Kinetic typography, you know what that is? Does that sound familiar?

• 2:21:04Jocko Willink?

  Well, kinetic, I know what that means, and typography, I know what that means, so I'm putting it together, yeah.

• 2:21:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, man, so, it, you know, eh, when you put it on a video, it's like, you know, the words kinda an- get animated on there? That's what it's called.

• 2:21:15Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you like that stuff. I like it, too.

• 2:21:17Speaker 03

  It does, it becomes kinda captivating.

• 2:21:19Jocko Willink?

  Hmm.

• 2:21:20Speaker 03

  Some people are really good at it, man, they do it. Anyway, nonetheless, cool videos on there. If you wanna subscribe, subscribe. Good way to support. Also, Jocko's store, it's called jockostore.com. It's called Jocko Store. The website is jockostore.com. That's what I'm saying. That's where you can get your shirts. Same shirt Jocko wears every day, the Victory MMA shirt, you can get it there. Boom.

• 2:21:46Speaker 03

  Also, discipline equals freedom, get after it. Some bumper stickers on there, decals on there, hoodies on there, women's stuff on there, patches, Velcro.

• 2:21:56Jocko Willink?

  Beanies? I haven't seen any beanies. We're waiting for winter now.

• 2:21:59Speaker 03

  Rash guards are on there.

• 2:22:02Jocko Willink?

  Cashmere blend directly picked from the high mountains of Bulgaria.

• 2:22:07Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 2:22:10Speaker 03

  Well, the good news about the beanies is that they're in route. In route, in route, in route. They're on their way. They're on the way. Straight up, put in the order. We came down to all the stuff and they're on the way, man, straight up.

• 2:22:26Jocko Willink?

  Good to hear. Well, you know, Christmas is on the way.

• 2:22:28Speaker 03

  I'm just.

• 2:22:30Jocko Willink?

  Right?

• 2:22:31Speaker 03

  It'll be worth the wait, I think, in my opinion. Nonetheless, it's called jocko store dot com. If you want something, get something. Check out the stuff if you like it. Get something, good way to support. Also, psychological warfare, if you don't know what that is, it's an album on iTunes and Stitcher and wherever you can buy MP3s. It's an album, Jocko album, with tracks, Jocko tracks.

• 2:22:53Jocko Willink?

  I don't think you can buy MP3s on Stitcher, by the way.

• 2:22:56Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, then don't go to Stitcher then for it. Go to Amazon Music or something like that, or Google Play, or, you know, wherever else you can get them. You understand what I'm saying?

• 2:23:06Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:06Speaker 03

  Anyway, it's a track with Jocko helping you. Okay, when you go on your path, you have moments of weakness. We all do.

• 2:23:14Speaker 03

  All of us do, even Jocko. I think. But when we, when I have a moment of weakness, you know, if Jocko's there to be like, hey, look, not yell. I don't want Jocko yelling. I don't want anyone yelling, really. Some people do. I get it. I respect. But personally, and a lot of us don't want Jocko yelling at us.

• 2:23:35Jocko Willink?

  No need to yell.

• 2:23:36Speaker 03

  No need, right?

• 2:23:37Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, a yell is not impactful.

• 2:23:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:23:40Jocko Willink?

  It's a short impact.

• 2:23:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:23:42Jocko Willink?

  I'd rather have a long impact.

• 2:23:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, and then yelling is kind of like.

• 2:23:45Jocko Willink?

  Something pragmatic telling me like, oh, here's an actual reason.

• 2:23:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:23:49Jocko Willink?

  Why I should not miss this workout.

• 2:23:51Speaker 03

  Yep, and that's exactly what it is.

• 2:23:52Jocko Willink?

  Not eat this doughnut.

• 2:23:54Speaker 03

  Exactly, right? That's exactly what it is.

• 2:23:56Jocko Willink?

  One of my favorite Twitter things of all time is that little girl from Australia saying, imitating me saying sugar-coated lies.

• 2:24:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, that was good. Hundred percent.

• 2:24:07Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. That's a good one.

• 2:24:09Speaker 03

  Yeah. Notice you weren't yelling on that one.

• 2:24:11Jocko Willink?

  No, she kind of made it. It's funny, the way she heard it was almost like yelling. You know? Like she goes, "These are sugar-coated lies."

• 2:24:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Actually, that is kind of how you said it.

• 2:24:24Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, very good. Nonetheless, it's practical. Jocko telling you practically and pragmatically why you shouldn't skip the workout, why you shouldn't, or why procrastination kills you. So it's like you'll be like, oh, it's almost like you gain a deeper understanding of the potential weakness and you can get past it. Works. Hundred percent success rate in my experience.

• 2:24:50Jocko Willink?

  Check. Well, also you've got, if you want, you can get some Jocko White Tea. And you know what? Sure, it tastes good. Sure, it's got antioxidants in it, but let's face it, there's no other drink that's guaranteeing an 8,000-pound deadlift. No other drink.

• 2:25:03Speaker 03

  Not that I know of, no.

• 2:25:05Jocko Willink?

  So, you get some Jocko White Tea, get an 8,000-pound deadlift. Check. Next question. A lot of people do all kinds of work and out. They try and, but try the triple complex, do the, oh, they come up with these big plans. Just drink Jocko White Tea, you're there.

• 2:25:19Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 2:25:20Jocko Willink?

  No need, no need to even play around.

• 2:25:23Jocko Willink?

  Check. Uh, books. Way the Warrior Kid. We talk about staying on the path. What's the path?

• 2:25:30Jocko Willink?

  A lot of people are looking for the path, but what if someone could show you the path? Well, the fact is, the path can be found and it's simply and clearly put forward to you in the Way of the Warrior Kid books, of which there are two. And they will put kids on the right path. This is the book everyone wishes they had when they were kids. Everyone. Everyone that's read it has said to me, "I wish I had this when I was a kid." I'm like, "Yeah, me too."

• 2:25:57Speaker 03

  Me too.

• 2:25:58Jocko Willink?

  I didn't have it. Had to just kind of wander around, trying to figure out where the path is, but no, you don't need to have that happen. So, a lot of the path is covered in book one, but now book two is coming out, Way of the Warrior Kid 2. It's called Mark's Mission. More lessons learned.

• 2:26:18Jocko Willink?

  Controlling your temper, saving money, how to get people to stop making fun of you. That's important to know as a little kid, right? Controlling fear of failure, because a lot of kids, you don't think of this. When you think of fear of failure, you think of like an adult that's saying, oh, you know, I don't really know if I want to step out. Man, that guy's afraid of failure. That's for kids even more so. Kids don't even want to try something because they're afraid they're going to look bad.

• 2:26:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:26:41Jocko Willink?

  I remember my daughter, when she was 13, my oldest daughter, she was 13 years old. And she was kind of interested in something. I was like, oh, why don't you, you know, try it? She's like, I'm too old to start. She's 13. You know what I mean? So, how do you get kids to come over that? Well, you introduce them to these books. Building a Business. That's something that kids don't think about very often. They should be. They should be thinking about starting businesses, earning money when they're young, learning the value of money when they're young. They should absolutely be learning about. This book's going to make every kid better. It'll make them a warrior kid. So, here's what you do. You preorder the book now. That's my recommendation, Mark's message, preorder the book now. There's a couple of reasons why.

• 2:27:27Jocko Willink?

  Number one, you don't, it's happened with other books that I've come out with. If you don't order it preorder, then guess what? You go to order and it's not out of stock. And then you're mad at me. Everyone's, oh, your supply and band isn't working really well there, Jocko. Hey, okay, I'll take ownership of that. Guess what? Order the book and you'd have it. How's that? That's my recommendation. So, if you order, the other thing that's good about it is if you order it, spreads the word and more kids will hear about it. Because there's no big advertising. I just got a thing the other day from somebody, it was a social media, I think it was Twitter. You know, you might want to check with your, I don't know what your marketing team's telling you. Hey, I don't have a marketing team over here. It's me and Echo, we're kicking it.

• 2:28:12Jocko Willink?

  So, if you want to help spread the word, order the book. It's due out April 24th. It's.

• 2:28:18Jocko Willink?

  Way the Warrior Kid 2 Mark's Mission and if you want to see a war an actual warrior kid in action check out Irish Oaks Ranch dot com Aiden he's a warrior kid he's only 12 years old but has his own business speaking to businesses you can get his soap that he makes from goat milk

• 2:28:35Speaker 03

  very good soap by the way

• 2:28:36Jocko Willink?

  yeah it's got a good motto too the motto of the soap is stay clean sounds simple but you know what there's a lot of layers there hey don't forget the discipline equals freedom field manual eating thinking fighting working out life we're talking about life get the manual on how to live your life the field manual discipline equals freedom for the amp for the audio version of that you can't find it on audible because it's not there the audio version of discipline equals freedom field manual is on iTunes Amazon Music Google Play other MP3 platforms as an album with tracks don't you know also extreme ownership combat

• 2:29:21Jocko Willink?

  leadership for business and life and on top of that Leif Babin and I are bringing out the follow on to extreme ownership it's called the dichotomy of leadership it's got knowledge and lessons learned from the battlefield and business and life you can preorder that book right now did you know that can preorder it now if you didn't know that you can preorder that book now comes out September 25th again if you want to get the book when it comes out order it now otherwise it'll sell out and you'll be mad at me hey I'm down you can be mad at me that's cool for even more leadership we have Ashalon front that's my leadership and

• 2:30:05Jocko Willink?

  my leadership consulting company me

• 2:30:09Jocko Willink?

  Leif Babin, JP Daniele, Dave Burke. You want us to come out to work with your team. Email [email protected] or you can check out that website. And of course, there's the muster. Which is our leadership seminar. We're only doing two year, two this year, Washington DC, May 17th and 18th, San Francisco, October 17th and 18th. Both are going to sell out. They're going to sell out. So get registered now at extremeownership.com. The entire Echelon Front team is going to be there. And no, we're not going to be in the green room. We're not going to be sitting back there drinking warm cups of milk. No. We'll be with you the whole time, interacting, answering questions.

• 2:30:51Jocko Willink?

  We'll be eating, we'll be talking, we'll be working out, just basically getting after it, as they say.

• 2:30:58Jocko Willink?

  So come and get it at the muster. And lastly, new announcement, roll call, roll call 001, September 21st in Dallas, Texas. This is for current military, law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, other first responders. One day leadership seminar about leadership in a dynamic environment. So you can also sign up for that at extremeownership.com. We thank you all for your service and want to give you a little bit back. We look forward to seeing you there. And until we see you at the muster or we see you at the roll call.

• 2:31:35Jocko Willink?

  If you have anything else for us, you can find us on the interwebs, on Twitter, on Instagram, and on the fable hockey. Echo is at Echo Charles and I am at Jocko Willink. And thanks to everyone for listening, especially members of the armed forces. That put it on the line every day to hold the line. And to the police and law enforcement, firefighters, EMTs and other first responders. Thanks for being there when we call on you.

• 2:32:15Jocko Willink?

  And to everyone else out there listening. Don't just listen. Lead. Take charge. Take a stand.

• 2:32:27Jocko Willink?

  Raise your hand and raise your voice and say, I got this.

• 2:32:35Jocko Willink?

  Then take up your position on whatever battlefield you are on. And get after it.

• 2:32:46Jocko Willink?

  So until next time, this is Echo and Jocko.

• 2:32:52Jocko Willink?

  Out.