558: What We Can Learn From John Spencer Almost Dying 20 Times.

>Join Jocko Underground Full Episodes< https://app.redcircle.com/shows/64a89f88-a245-4098-8d8d-496325ec4f74/exclusive-content Urban warfare expert and retired Army officer John Spencer returns to share stories from 20 Times I Almost Died, from Ranger School and Iraq to Ukraine, Gaza, and some incredibly close calls. Along the way, John and Jocko break down leadership, intuition, modern warfare, resilience, and the importance of developing a personal code to live by. 00:00 – John Spencer: 20 Times I Almost Died 02:53 – Kashmir: India, Pakistan & Modern Warfare 05:10 – Lebanon, Hezbollah & the Changing Battlefield 11:17 – Ukraine, Drones & the Future of War 15:54 – Inside a Hamas Tunnel Under Gaza 24:43 – Iraq: Common Sense, Orders & Leadership 39:08 – The IED Trap: Trusting Your Intuition 45:28 – “Pepper”: The Fight That Cost John His Ear 1:08:27 – The “Sopranos of Baghdad” & Humility 1:29:02 – Ukraine, Bucha & the Will to Resist 1:38:00 – Ranger School: “You Can Always Quit Tomorrow” 1:44:03 – The Best Ranger Competition & a 40-Foot Fall 1:55:48 – Iraq: A Deadly Humvee Crash & Duty 2:01:31 – Azerbaijan’s Special Forces & the Battle of Shusha 2:11:08 – Going Full Rambo as an OPFOR Soldier 2:16:01 – The Mission to Capture Saddam Hussein 2:27:05 – The Current Situation in Gaza 2:42:38 – Who Are You? Building a Code to Live By 2:53:21 – Closing Thoughts With John Spencer 2:54:19 – Jocko & Echo Closing / Supporters Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

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

• 0:00Jocko Willink?

  This is Jocko Podcast number 558 with Echo Charles and me, Jocko Willink. Good evening, Echo.

• 0:04Speaker 01

  Good evening.

• 0:05Jocko Willink?

  My left ear is a natural conversation starter. It is visibly damaged about half missing. People get curious. They ask about it. It is a good story and people's eyes tend to get wide. Man, you could have been killed. Oh, there's more where that came from, I smiled and casually mentioned this or that. I was a soldier for 25 years and I am now known in defense circles for my globe trotting war research, teaching, writing and public work. It is a life and career that has landed me in jeopardy a time or two, or 20. 20 times I almost died. Hard to believe, but here they are. Tales of war, of travels in unsafe places, training incidents, freak accidents that could have happened to anybody, and

• 0:46Jocko Willink?

  a few that were purely my own fault. The good, the bad, the weird. All autobiographical, but this is not an autobiography. These are stories about the moments that shaped me, about lessons that stayed with me long after the danger passed. And that right there is an excerpt from a book called 20 Times I Almost Died: Life Lessons From the Edge of Survival, and is written by John Spencer. John is a retired US Army soldier, Ranger, Ranger instructor, who rose through the ranks from private to major, served in combat as a platoon commander and as a company commander. He is the Chair of Urban Warfare Studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point, Director of the Urban Warfare Project. He's

• 1:31Jocko Willink?

  the host of the Urban Warfare Project Podcast. He's the Chair of War Studies at the Madison Policy Forum, and the co-founder and Executive Director of Urban Warfare Institute. And with all that, he's also written scores of articles, case studies, books, including Understanding Urban Warfare, which is based on the podcast, Connected Soldiers, which we reviewed last time he was on the podcast, episode 462. And he also authored the mini manual for The Urban Defender, which has been translated into dozens of languages after it became a staple of warfighting in Ukraine. And we talked about that, as well as his time on the ground in Ukraine and Gaza when he joined us for episode 463. So if you want

• 2:15Jocko Willink?

  to hear John's full backstory, his military experiences in their entirety, go and listen to those two episodes, 462 and 463. But for tonight, it's an honor to have John back here with us to discuss his latest book, 20 Times I Almost Died. Well, it's good to see you, man.

• 2:34Speaker 01

  It's good to see you, brother, and you, Echo, as well. It's awesome to be back.

• 2:37Jocko Willink?

  And you're, uh, you're still on the, still on the, on the road chasing war, huh?

• 2:42Speaker 01

  Absolutely. More than ever. Unfortunately, there's a lot of war going on and I'm, just in the last month, Southern Lebanon, Gaza, Kashmir, working on work in Azerbaijan as well.

• 2:53Jocko Willink?

  Kashmir. Give me a quick brief on Kashmir, because that was a little blip on the radar for most of the world, but it was a big deal.

• 3:00Speaker 01

  Sure. So writing a book about this four-day war that happened between India and Pakistan, two nuclear armed countries in 2025. It was a blip and it was interesting what the media covered from it. It's a massive, actually, war and exchange started with a gruesome terrorist attack against civilians, singling out men, asking their religion, shooting them in the face in front of their family. Twenty-six civilians died. India responds by attacking those terrorist locations. And then there's an exchange between the Pakistan Army or military and the Indian military. Twenty thousand artillery rounds exchanged, hundreds and hundreds of drones. And then India kind of ends it by escalation management, hitting 11 air bases across all of Pakistan, showing, look, you want this to end, because

• 3:43Speaker 01

  we can hit you where we want, when we want. Just got back from Kashmir, though, one of the, basically the field commanders, just amazing individual, and getting those first person experiences of what happened during those four days, and there'll be a book about it probably next year.

• 3:58Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, the, uh, the Indian militaries, I've, I've covered some of their stuff on, on this podcast, just because there's a, you know, their, their tradition comes from England, obviously. And so they have a strong military. It has a lot of similar attributes that they try and keep in their, kind of in their culture.

• 4:15Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And they have, and this is part of why you need a book, you know, four days, how do you write a book about four days of war? Because it's, it's the evolution of terrorism in this region, some changes that happened, but even the modernization of the Indian Army, which is this kind of story where India about a decade ago says, we're not going to rely on anybody else's traditions, weapons, or anything. It's going to be a make in India. And they created some unique capabilities that get tested, right? We, you often talk about war's going to test all those assumptions. And this, it became the test. So a lot of those investments and changes that the Indian military government had made showed them their favor. And you can look at the Pakistan side, which is a Chinese-based military, but it's, most of their military equipment comes from China,

• 4:58Speaker 01

  and how it performs. So as an American, I'm like, there's a, there's a story here where Indian, actually Israeli, American systems going against Chinese-backed systems and how that performs, that could be a benefit to a lot of individuals, other than just telling the story of the war.

• 5:14Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And what about Lebanon? What, what's going on there right now? What does that look like?

• 5:19Speaker 01

  Sure. So there's a, you know, the, I had been multiple times since October 7th, actually, some, you know, of course, we talked last time about the pager operation. It was just, I mean, there's a movie and a story in that. But Hezbollah kept it up. I think in 2025, Iran passed Hezbollah a billion dollars. So Hezbollah is Iran's crown jewel proxy army, and it's, it's an army. It isn't just a terrorist organization. I went last month to visit with the IDF to see where there, there's been this negotiated kind of pause to allow the Lebanese government, which is great, for the first time in the history of Lebanon, they recognize Israel as a state. So massive on the strategic level. From the warfighting element, though, how far the IDF are forward, really since the Second Lebanon

• 6:03Speaker 01

  War, they're farther forward. So even traveling there was probably like number 22, we're practicing rollover drills. It was pretty interesting is how to get into where the IDF are now, holding this line forward until, till the Lebanese army is able to clear out Hezbollah. Also, the what they've found in Lebanon, you know, tunnels, we talked about tunnels and Hamas tunnels I've been into. And I've been into Hezbollah tunnels before, but since in the last 20 years, they've built bunker complexes. They're not tunnels. And what they're finding, I went all the way forward to something called the Belfort Castle, which is like a crusader castle. And Lebanon's all about terrain. So you really, you gotta go there and see it and see how many ridge lines, and how you look back and you can see

• 6:45Speaker 01

  almost all of Israel. And it's almost like downhill. And that's why it's always this fight over ridge lines and everything. But one of the, there are a couple of things that, if I had not gone, I wouldn't understand, like the, the impact of these wire-guided commercial off-the-self drones, you know, they're, they're a problem in Ukraine. If you go to Ukraine and some of the battlefield looks like it's just all white, because this piano wire that, that's attached to their drone hits the ground. I don't know if you, you know, that like the tow missile? Do you ever go to a tow missile firing range? Like, you're just walking over piano wires? Those started popping up in Lebanon and killing lots of IDF soldiers, because there's really very few countermeasures, because you can't use anything electronic. And if you don't, and they fly low because of the fact that

• 7:27Speaker 01

  they're wire-guided, they can go almost 15 kilometers. It's still a threat in Southern Lebanon to these IDF positions, which are all kind of hold it, although they're blowing up. And what they have to do to blow up a bunker complex is very unique compared to what they, like in the Gaza tunnels, where they fill with concrete or with liquid explosives. But for these tunnels, they have to like, take jugs of explosives and fill like caverns from floor to ceiling with explosives and blow it. And it actually will register as an earthquake in, in Israel. Some of the, what they had to do to-

• 8:00Jocko Willink?

  And then where does it collapse on itself?

• 8:01Speaker 01

  Yes, it collapsed on itself and you have basically new terrain.

• 8:04Jocko Willink?

  Is the Lebanese army working with Israeli army at all? Or are they-

• 8:08Speaker 01

  I wouldn't say that. Uh, they're, the Lebanese army, for the first time, which actually, real interesting, CNN did some unique reporting about this. They're, the Lebanese army has never had the ability to do anything against Hezbollah. It's just a bigger army, way more financed, armed, everything. The Lebanese army is taking some of these trial areas that Israel has already kicked Hezbollah off of, but there's still like tunnels and everything. So Lebanese army is coming in and taking control of those and keeping a separation and there's coordination with the Israeli military. But the Israeli military is like, I'm going to hold this line until you fill in with some security or do something else.

• 8:47Speaker 01

  But what's really interesting is that Hezbollah's been cut off. So because of the fall of Syria in 2024, which in fact is actually because of Israel's operations against Hezbollah, because Hezbollah used to send tens of thousands into Syria to prop up Assad whenever he was facing problems. When that was gone, Assad fell really quickly. But now the new guy in Syria, which is, you know, former Al Qaeda ISIS terrorist, is not a fan of Iran. So he's cut off the lifelines of shipping missiles. He actually stopped the vehicle, which is really interesting. One of the vehicles Syria stopped recently was just full of these wire-guided drones. Because they're having such an impact on the battlefield that they, somebody is trying to push them in, whether it's Iran or Russia.

• 9:31Speaker 01

  But because Syria is not this highway to Hezbollah, Hezbollah is really struggling to survive. But to say the Lebanese army is working with Israel wouldn't be right, but there is a hope here.

• 9:40Jocko Willink?

  At least there's coordination. That's why I asked you. I was going to be very surprised if they were, you know, like, actually doing some kind of joint operations together. But even the coordination, that's kind of similar to what we would try and do in Iraq. We'd get, you know, an area secured and then put an Iraqi police element in there and hopefully, over time, you can turn it over to them completely. And it sounds like that's similar to what they're trying to do there.

• 10:02Speaker 01

  Hopeful. Yeah, there's, just like there was in Iraq, there's a capability kind of problem and how to rapidly do that in the midst of a war and everybody wants to hurry up. And for Israel, they're like, well, we're going to hold these positions until you get this fixed, because if not, Hezbollah just moves back in. And as much as you can see now, you can see a Lebanese army flag maybe in the distance. I used to visit, and even last year, you could stand in Israel and see a Hezbollah flag flying just on the other side where they're not supposed to be. Because there is this whole UN mission. Millions of dollars spent for this UN mission to keep Hezbollah out of this kind of buffer area between the Litani River and Israel's border. And that's that, that road I had to take down to the Litani River and back up.

• 10:46Speaker 01

  Which actually, from a military perspective, one of the other interesting part is because Israel hasn't been in this ground so, so long, they're not used to projecting power out that far. So logistically, is how do you get logistics, you know, what we say, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, to get that logistic trained, to keep it under the drone threat as well with wire-guided drone threat is a massive problem because they don't have like basing or anything to project out. It's not an expeditionary military.

• 11:15Jocko Willink?

  What about, have you done any trips to Ukraine lately?

• 11:17Speaker 01

  No, actually, my last one was December of 2023. Once Gaza kicked off, from an urban warfare perspective, the urban guy, I've been, I made my eighth trip to Israel, seventh trip into Gaza, and I was in Gaza this last month as well, just seeing like, what's the status of this? Haven't been back, but still say closely connected some, some very interesting Ukrainian officers doing some of the robotics and some of the fighting over there.

• 11:43Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, definitely wild to see. And I was, you know, some of the, the advancements of how fast the drones and how fast the battlefield changes and the technology changes, it's like, it's incredible.

• 11:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I know you would appreciate this. I also, but I also spend a lot of time, you know, McMaster, I don't know if you've had him on.

• 12:02Jocko Willink?

  I have not yet.

• 12:03Speaker 01

  Amazing, but he has this article about the fallacies of war, because he's a true, like you were, scholar. One of his is the vampire fallacy, because it just won't die no matter what. Is that, you just need that one piece of technology, right? That the drones are going to save us all. And it's not saving anybody in Ukraine and Russia. There's still a thousand a day dying. And they can't really move the lines because of the just mass and combined nervous maneuver. But if you listen to most people in the world, they're like, we just all need more drones. We should need millions and millions of more drones. Like, that's, yes, and that's not going to solve all your problems and you're not going to have this. I think China is trying to put out humanoids. They did some fancy Hollywood movie, like that's their future. They're going to put humanoids and not have to risk humans, not to put the man in the mud to seize that ground, to hold that ground.

• 12:48Speaker 01

  It's just all fallacy. So I, I, I cringe a little bit about the drone conversation. I believe it, they're important. If you don't have them, whether, like we were talking in policing or in soldiering, if you don't have them, you're going to be found wanting. If you don't have a countermeasure to what the most advanced version is, you'll have, but that's not going to win your war, depending on what your objective is. You've still got to put men and women in the mud to do hard things. And actually, the book I have coming out in October about the Azerbaijan Armenia war, which was one of the real first stories of like drones in 2020. And you go there and I now interviewed every commander on every battlefield. I mean, it's like SEALs and Rangers humping up 40 kilometers of mountain terrain with rucks on their back to get to that objective,

• 13:32Speaker 01

  where a drone might or might not be present and breaching mine, wire, fields of trenches. It wasn't about drones, but that's this weird myth that we have that people want us to believe that that's the future. Like, it's a part of the future.

• 13:47Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, there's always going to be these advances in technology that when you get into them, they seem like they're going to change the game. But I always say, technology doesn't change the game, it's become part of the game. It's just part of the game and you have to adapt to it and it's still going to get back to what, what it is.

• 14:03Speaker 01

  I mean, there are revolutions in military affairs. I believe in that. And teaching at West Point, you try to distinguish, okay, what's a revolution in military affairs? Like, black powder, the machine gun, telegram, railroad, nuclear weapons, these things, aircraft, these things change the true character of warfare. You're never going to show the nature. But even drones, they're not a revolution in military affairs. There's an evolution of air power. Yes, they're cheaper, but if you don't have air power, which is what people just don't want to talk about in Ukraine, like neither side have air superiority, air control. So the drones are present for many reasons. I think AI will potentially be a revolution in military affairs across a couple of domains, but wait to see.

• 14:47Jocko Willink?

  Check. What made you decide to write this book?

• 14:49Speaker 01

  I mean, it's really storytelling. As I, the more I travel, the more I talk to, there's actually, I think we talked in my first book, one of my writing mentors is Max Brooks, the guy that wrote the book World War Z, just a really creative writer. And I would tell him some of these stories, like, you have to write these down. These are insane. Nobody's going to believe these, but you have to write them down. So I started doing that. And then, like reading your books about living by a code and other things, it just started to, as I was writing, just to kind of record my own history, there are, there are lessons that shaped me and who I am and put me to the test. And I don't write it in the front of the book, but the rule, there are many themes that run through it. And I know it's kind of silly telling you, but the fact that stress reveals character.

• 15:34Speaker 01

  Which when I finished the book, it was almost too late. Like, that's, that's the thing is that all these are stressors I got put under. Some of them changed me forever, like, like the ear bite story, I'm sure. Others tested me and tested my character at the moment. Sometimes I, I look back and say, okay, did it change me or did it test me?

• 15:54Jocko Willink?

  Check. Well, let's get into it here. And like I said, if you want to go back and hear the rest of John's backstory and the military experiences, it's episodes 462 and 463. But let's get into 20 times I almost died. So this is, I'm going to jump in here. This is post October 7th. You're in a tunnel, in a Hamas tunnel under Gaza, and you're researching what's going on. And you say this, "We were all wearing protective gear but bunched up close together in an enclosed airless space. Even a small detonation would shred us like confetti. Everything in my experience signaled this was not a safe place." You're pretty astute with that assessment. "And being part of an ad hoc study group was not the norm for my research. It made me even more nervous and I am not the nervous type.

• 16:39Jocko Willink?

  I looked up at Rowi, am I saying that right? Rowi?"

• 16:41Speaker 01

  Rowi, yeah.

• 16:41Jocko Willink?

  Rowi. "For some, hoping for some verbal or visual cue, how far was he taking us? We kept on. It was cowboy uptime. I estimated we were 100 feet down. Rowi confirmed the actual depth was 150 feet. There was enough room down there to drive a vehicle through. And later recovered home videos indeed showed the terrorists gleefully zipping about in a small pickup truck, which explained the extensive ventilation system. Without it, carbon dioxide exhaust would have been fatal." We were, here we halted. "The guards were some 20 meters ahead, sweeping their lights about the blackness and beyond. Again, I wondered how much farther Rowi intended to go. Just walking around down here stirred up wafts of thick dust that contained who knows what toxins.

• 17:24Jocko Willink?

  No one in our group seemed eager to go much further. But my attention was locked on the soldier standing forward of us, his flashlight beam cutting into the void. Beyond him stretched more than two miles of unknown tunnel, running deep into the Hamas stronghold of Gaza City. Nothing about it was cleared or secured. Even if patrols had been there here yesterday or an hour ago, what way to beyond his light could change in an instant. The soldier was peering off into uncertainty itself, into the possibility of an ambush, hidden explosives, or fighters slipping back into the darkness. The fact that we were even going down there was, if I'm honest, insane. I began visually collecting information, how the tunnel was constructed, what the builders had planned to do with it.

• 18:06Jocko Willink?

  This tunnel was estimated to extend two and a half miles back into Gaza City, and it was hard not to think about the people who built it. How long was it since Hamas fighters had been right where we were standing? The longer we lingered, the more uneasy I became. Nor was I much enamored with my group. Nice enough people, but if things went haywire down here, every non-professional in the mix would only put us at further risk. Mercifully, Rowi declared it was the end of our tour and explained why we were likely the last civilians to bear witness to it. Everything we had seen was marked for destruction. The thousands of hours, material and money Hamas dumped into this pit would soon be utterly obliterated. Exhaling in collective relief, we began to head back the way we had come." And then you get into the lesson here. If there's one lesson I learned,

• 18:50Jocko Willink?

  if there's one lesson I carried out of this memory is the importance of presence. There is no replacement for it. Not in the parent, not in parenting, not in leadership, not in business, not in research, not in war. Titles and words matter, but showing up matters more. A four-star general walking into a unit, Elon Musk on a factory floor, a parent sitting behind, beside their child, presence communicates something that cannot be underestimated. The knowledge gained from presence, from simply being there, cannot be replaced. So there you are, wandering around in these.

• 19:24Jocko Willink?

  Do you just occasionally go, what the hell am I doing here?

• 19:27Speaker 01

  That was one of the most vivid examples of how, how I get to this point. Usually I'm traveling in these war zones by myself or with a commander and his tank or whatever it is. That one was very unique and in the situation like we should not be down here. And, and I, I think because of my experiences, I even looked at it differently than the, some of the other people that was with us. Like this is crazy. The, the two guys standing in front of us and it's unclear tunnel for two miles in front of us. I mean, as you know, you could just shoot and, and it's going to hit everybody. Um, I never find myself in a similar, I've been in plenty of tunnels in Gaza. Now there's, you know, an estimate of 600 miles of tunnels that they're dealing with.

• 20:10Speaker 01

  But that was one of those, but the, the knowledge I gained as, you know, I've been in tunnels in North Korea. There's, there's a similar one in between North and South Korea called Tunnel Three that you can go visit as a, as a, it's actually a tourist site. Where they take you down into it. It's actually not as sophisticated, but it's a similar like invasion tunnel. The amount that was invested in that tunnel.

• 20:30Jocko Willink?

  Was it captured by the South Koreans that the North Koreans built it?

• 20:33Speaker 01

  Correct. It was discovered with like, like some arrow had popped up. There, there's three of these that had popped up over time and there's been other, the, the North Korea, South Korean border is fascinating. Um, the fact that it's like exotic animals and things like that. Uh, they're, they don't know if.

• 20:50Jocko Willink?

  Wait, what's, what, what exotic animals?

• 20:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's like cranes and leopards and things like that. Cause this is a ground that hasn't been touched for, since the end of the Korean War. So there's no humans that have been in there. So like there's, there's like exotic animals and things like that, that have survived in an area that people aren't allowed to go into. And every once in a while they'll set off a landmine because it's also heavily mined. But I think it was a sentry saw this like a air escaping from a hole or something. When they found this one, this is in the seventies, but it's a tourist site now as an example. But that presence of understanding how much Hamas invested in that tunnel, um, I couldn't have gotten it. And, and all the other tunnels I was in, that one was very unique. It was an invasion tunnel. It led right up to the border with Israel.

• 21:34Speaker 01

  It was meant to flow thousands of soldiers, although they didn't use it on October 7th. Um, but it was one of those moments of what, what am I doing? And this is crazy, let alone me, but what, what are these other people doing? And it was only open for like three days, but that was the Israelis like, you want to see a tunnel? Okay. We got one right here.

• 21:50Jocko Willink?

  Okay. And there's 600 miles of tunnels in Gaza.

• 21:54Speaker 01

  That, I think it's more, um, that the last visit I had, I sat down and they have like a graphic of all the ones they've found, suspected, everything. I mean, they found over almost a hundred and 50 of them between the 10 mile, between Gaza and Egypt. There's a border that was used for smuggling weapons and they found, and the only way they found them, which is its own study is how do you find a tunnel? That one was, they actually had intel that drove them to know that that tunnel was there and then they went and dug it out. But one of the ways they just drill a hole in the ground every 10 feet. And they did that along this border for 10 miles. So 10 miles, just to make sure they all the way down to their water table, and then they stick a camera down. And for some of these, that's the only way you can know.

• 22:36Speaker 01

  So the estimate is a thousand kilometers or about 600 miles in this very small piece of ground. Because they've been doing it for 20 years.

• 22:46Jocko Willink?

  Damn. That's wild. And those clearance operations are still ongoing.

• 22:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. And they're filling them with concrete, which is very expensive or exploding them. But it'll take years to, to fill them or to deal with them.

• 23:00Jocko Willink?

  How, what, what's the procedure for clearing them as far, do they try and clear them? Like, does an infantry element go down there and clear them?

• 23:08Speaker 01

  It depends. Uh, I spent a lot of time with, so they're the only unit in the world. Besides some special community people that have an entire brigade dedicated of engineers for underground for tunnels. So they, they have robotics, they have dogs. Last resort is to send a guy down there, especially now that all the hostages are. That was one of the, kind of the constraints of if there's a hostage in a tunnel and they were, the hostages were in tunnels. Now they don't have to, I mean, especially with the, the robotics, um, they can clear them another way. But then you have a blast door. So there are cases, because there's the blast doors, which is again, research geeky stuff. Um, I was there in 2021 when there was a war between Hamas and Israel called the Guardian of the Walls.

• 23:49Speaker 01

  And Israel thought they had been successful at destroying tunnels. So they bombed a lot. But there's a letter that, yeah, yeah, send more sign to put in more blast doors. Because a blast door will stop the concussion from a tunnel going down it, which it also stops robotics from investigating the tunnel. So there's some challenges there, but there's no one way they do it. I know that they're leaning towards, they tried to fill them with water at one point, like to flood.

• 24:13Jocko Willink?

  I remember that.

• 24:14Speaker 01

  Didn't work. Uh, they're just too porous. The main way they do them now is they will send robotics down i- if they need to clear it. And then if there's nothing of value, depending on what value it is, sometimes they want like the value of what's down there. And they've found some crazy stuff from like manuals on how to use the hospitals as headquarters for the military Hamas. To other stuff, but once they clear it, then they'll fill it with either explosives or concrete.

• 24:44Jocko Willink?

  Long war.

• 24:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:47Jocko Willink?

  All right. I'm going to jump here and obviously I'm not reading the whole book. Get the book, everybody. Once again, 20 times I almost died. I'm jumping forward here. You're in, uh, in Iraq, you're a platoon commander. You jumped in and you're setting, settling into your combat operations. And again, I'm jumping, I'm just jumping, like reading some highlights of the book. There's so many good details in here about how you end up. But if you're a little, if you're wondering, oh wait, what's going on? Well, get the book and you can figure out the rest of it. Uh, we, we were to travel by road with no lights, just by night vision goggles, which at the time illuminated the world in a blurry green, green hue with terrible depth perception. We wouldn't be blind in my lead vehicle, but I sure hoped my driver, Ralston, had eaten his carrots.

• 25:27Jocko Willink?

  Behind him sat Meyer on fire support, Cathcart, who our, our radio man sat behind me. And standing between all four of us was Brooks, who manned the heavy 50 caliber machine gun up top. All four were young enlisted men, sons of the South. And after two weeks riding with them, I felt we had a decent working rhythm. That too would pay off down the road, but let's get back to the mission. Our road south would cross a major bridge, then continue another kilometer to a crossroads where I would deploy my men and vehicles along the bisecting road. One detail bothered the hell out of me though, that business about setting up wire and warning signs. Higher headquarters really thought that was necessary, whom we were supposed to be warning? Civilian, a looky-loos s- uh, sashaying up in the dead of night?

• 26:11Jocko Willink?

  So they wanted you to put up like, you know, a checkpoint and put up big, um, these signs, you know, warning people.

• 26:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:18Jocko Willink?

  I debated asking for clarification, then I hoped, then hoped that, that aspect would be scratched. But no, a supply truck turned up to unload rolls of Constantina wire and large prepared signs. I can't read Arabic, so I assumed they said, stop, you are entering the kill zone. Do not pass go, do not collect $200. When we were supposed to put, when were we supposed to put up these decorations? Once my men were in place along the road, we had to begin our attack, not wait around for some Iraqi patrol to raise the alarm. A more cynical officer might've forgotten the wire and signs, but I simply decided I'd handle that part. A good leader does not build unit cohesion by passing the stupid on down the chain. So what'd you end up doing?

• 27:00Speaker 01

  So I, I mean, this is a, a, a tack, an attack, literally like rolling in with as much firepower as we had in a parachute brigade. With artillery firing behind us and we were going to ride up and just literally ride, drive up to this division headquarters and open fire. It was cleared hot as soon as we arrived. Um, what they wanted me to do is to put wire in front of us for some reason. So once we rolled in, literally mark 19, 50 cal, everybody engaging. I, I put my radio down, me and my driver, cut the wire off, threw it into the street, threw the signs into the street and then got back to commanding the fight.

• 27:42Jocko Willink?

  Would, do you think that that was the, um, the spirit of the order?

• 27:47Speaker 01

  Hey, I, like I said, I wasn't going to pass it down, but, um, I actually say at the end of the chapter, I think they're still there. I mean, I, we left them there, we, we accomplished the mission because had I argued that at, at the time, it just wouldn't have wasted time. But yeah, I think it met the spirit of the mission. So did the immense amount of firepower that our entire platoon was laying down for a long time.

• 28:10Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. You know, uh, when building combat outposts in Ramadi, they would put up signs, you know, and they were, they were, they made, it actually made a lot of sense. Because you couldn't have vehicles and pedestrians walking towards this combat outpost as it was being built. Cause it could be a vehicle borne ID or it could be a suicide vest. And so there was legit Constantina wires and the signs put, put out there that said, you know, had skulls on them and stuff like stay away. And it's fairly effective. So I guess in that sense, it does, in that case, it probably does make sense. But, um, you know, maybe not in this one.

• 28:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's like the Band of Brothers when Tom Hanks goes up and sees the staff with the food and the bread. Somebody thought that was a good idea without even visualizing the context.

• 28:55Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. You know, that's, uh, in, in Band of Brothers, that's a case that I bring up because sometimes you're going to get ordered to do some dumb stuff. And well, that's one, one of the best examples, you know, everyone loves Dick Winters, you know, as a, as a leadership example. Well, at the, in the end of the war, the war is almost over. They're, you know, they're about to sign their treaty and everybody knows it. And he get, they gets, he has to send guys over on a recon across this river. And the first night he sends guys across the river, there's a gunfight, someone, I think that, I think someone's got killed. There's some casualties. It's a bad deal. They come back and the next night, the, I think he's a brigade commander says, hey, I want you to do another recon. And you know, Dick Winter says, hey, sir, you know, I'm not sure if that's the best idea, you know, there's really not much we're going to see.

• 29:37Jocko Willink?

  We took casualties yesterday and I was like, nope, you're doing it. Okay. Roger that, sir, you know, and goes and they all sit down in the basement of one of the buildings and drink wine and never do the recon. And that's one of those things I heard the same story about a, a few times in Vietnam, SEALs in Vietnam, that they were told to go out to a particular, you know, set an ambush. Oh yeah. We, we got intel that there's going to be something, you know, this, we want you to set up an ambush on this ri- river or this road or whatever. And the guys knew like, this is not, it's either too far of an insert or the enemy is too thick there, or there's not going to be anything. And so there was times where the guys, yep, Roger that, and they'd push back and they'd get told, no, shut up and do it.

• 30:20Jocko Willink?

  And they'd go, Roger that. And they'd go and patrol 200 yards outside the wire and set up a perimeter and sit there for six hours. And then they patrol back. Yep. Hey, we set up the ambush, didn't say anything. And, uh, you know, there's actually a really good. Have you ever heard of a, of a video series? It's called Charlie Company in Vietnam? It's really good. Uh, you, it's actually on YouTube, so you can just go watch it. But it shows a really interesting dynamic. It's, it's such a great leadership example. It's sort, it's sort of like, um, what, what you see in the first episode of Band of Brothers with, uh, Sorbel, Sorbel. And, you know,

• 30:57Speaker 01

  Sobel.

• 30:58Jocko Willink?

  Sobel, Sobel.

• 30:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:59Jocko Willink?

  Who, which is a tragic story. I don't know if you know that guy killed himself, uh, eventually.

• 31:02Speaker 01

  I do.

• 31:03Jocko Willink?

  But, um, you get that, that dynamic of this really hardcore guy that's, you know, uh, thinks, you know, he's very authoritarian and all that. And then eventually Dick Winters takes over and he's a much better leader. In this thing on, uh, Charlie Company, it's, it's the opposite. When you, when you're introducing, this is a documentary. It's just, you know, there's guys out in the field with cameras. You, you introduce this guy's Captain Jackson and he, you can tell he is just admired by the guys. He listens to what they have to say. He's very, um, uh, easygoing when he talks to them. And a lot of admiration. And then another guy comes in and takes over for him. His name Captain Rice and Captain Rice is, you know, like the first image that you see him.

• 31:45Jocko Willink?

  He's kind of standing with his hands on his hips and he looks like, you know, he's Captain America type pose. And you go, oh, let's, and you know, he's immediately kind of giving directives and not really listening as much as he should. And eventually you fast forward in the documentary and they're saying, well, you know, hey, Captain Rice, you know, how's it going? And he says, you know, it took a little time for the guys to get used to me, but they, they realized that, you know, they, they just got to do what I say. And then they, then they go to some of his guys that are out in the field. And the guys are in the field. They're like, oh yeah, we just called in the radio. We're not doing anything. We're not listening to what he's saying. You're going, dang. So I always say that like, there are times when you're going to get told to do stuff that doesn't make sense.

• 32:30Jocko Willink?

  And sometimes, you know, you gotta figure out a way around it. For instance, in your case, taking those signs, throwing them out in front of the vehicles and calling it good.

• 32:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's a great conversation of, you know, lawful orders, unlawful orders that I get sometimes in my, I do a lot of media questions about. I mean, like, the officer takes an oath to the constitution, then listed to the, the officers appointed above them. Lawful, unlawful order, some, there is a gray area between this. Like that's just a stupid one.

• 32:57Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. I was going to say there's, there's lawful orders, there's unlawful orders and there's stupid orders. I, when I, when I've gotten, I've got asked that question a couple of times. I'm like, uh, no one ever gave me an unlawful order. You know what I mean? It's like, there's not some kernel that's coming down, hey, I want you to do this thing that's totally illegal. Like, no, that doesn't, that just does not happen. Uh, at least I never saw it happen.

• 33:18Speaker 01

  Right. But we get drilled in, you know, being enlisted and going to, to officer. Um, how many times I had to, which is a great vignette and I do case studies of the, the massacre of my lie. Those that were told to do awful things. That was an unlawful order to kill unarmed civilians, to do the things that was done. Um, there are plenty of other examples now, whether it's, you know, Black Hearts or other books that, um, it happens, but it is very rare and, and most people can distinguish and, and it's, it's not a thing that, that the media tries to make it out to be. Yeah.

• 33:51Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Yeah. They make it like it's a thing. Like you just pointed out, there are, if you think about the millions of troops that deployed and millions of operations that were conducted in Iraq and Afghanistan. And the amount of times where something, you know, unlawful happened, it's very rare. It always gets found out and it's a nightmare. Um, but if you think about all the times that good, you know, guys did the right thing over and over and over and over again, and did everything they could to mitigate, uh, uh, uh, casualties with civilian populace, all that stuff. So it is, it's so rare that, you know, when you hear about it, you're like, well, that's not, it's not really a thing.

• 34:32Jocko Willink?

  But you're right. I mean, you do need to emphasize that if something unlawful does come down, then you, you know, you have to, you have, you are required to not do that, obviously. But, um,

• 34:46Speaker 01

  And that may, may take a lot of personal courage, depending on what the climate and culture of the unit is. That may take a lot of courage, but it's, that's why you want the, the training, the leadership training is, you may have to be standalone against an unlawful order, how rare it may be.

• 35:00Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Yeah. Um, like I said, I never got told to do anything that was even like questionable. You know, it's just, yeah, uh, cause we got a bunch of good people. So, and, and yes, we do get some, some bad people occasionally. And you have those kinds of cultures, like you're talking about occasionally where you have maybe a, a platoon or a squad where the, the things are out of balance and things can get, uh, can, can go off the rails, unfortunately.

• 35:30Speaker 01

  And it's the, the, the gift that I'm given, travel in the world, get to see other militaries where, you know, whether it's a conscript military or, you know, a less professional military, depending on what side you're talking about where, um, those systems that we have from the day you enter, uh, when you raise your hand to the oath, may not be present in some other places in the world. And I appreciate what we have.

• 35:51Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm. Check. Um, getting to your lesson on that one. The lesson is common sense. The US military is full, is full of maxims, principles and rules. From Sun Tzu's sayings to the principles of war, they are handed down as lists memorized by generations of soldiers off without anyone knowing exactly where they first came from, but they endure because they work. There are lessons that despite context prove useful more often than not. One of those lists I learned as a young soldier was the five principles of patrolling. Planning, reconnaissance, security, control and common sense. At first glance, common sense might seem too obvious to even include, but over the years I came to understand why it earned its place right alongside planning and security. Common sense saves lives.

• 36:36Jocko Willink?

  I think one of the times, one of the reasons you have to, you have to remind people about common sense is because when people get too close to a problem, then all of a sudden, common sense can disappear. You know, and it, that was one of the things I learned from one of my platoon commanders when I was a young SEALs. We'd be, he'd have us in the room doing all the planning ourselves and then he'd wander in after we'd been, you know, staring at this mission for eight hours and he'd point out some obvious thing. That was complete common sense that we hadn't seen because we were too close to the problem. And, you know, I always thought he was just a tactical genius when I was a young guy. Be like, oh, this guy's a tactical genius. He, he, he sees these things that we miss. We miss the most obvious things.

• 37:16Jocko Willink?

  But then I realized just because he was seeing everything from an elevated position, because he made sure that he didn't get too far down in the weeds. And that's what I always try to do. But the closer you are to a problem, the less common sense you might have.

• 37:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. And that common sense on that one was when we were about to drive into a, off a cliff and somebody broke the silence that was drilled, even to me as a soldier, you don't break the silence. Um, and he yelled out, stop, like the common sense over there. But the, the fascinating part, uh, you know, whether it's teaching at Westport or whatever, but the, the meta thinking, how we're taught to think, whether it's a military decision-making process or whatever, and you can get so tied into that, that you're generally, like common sense is to go right.

• 37:55Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 37:56Speaker 01

  But the, the process overcomes that sometimes.

• 37:59Jocko Willink?

  I remember they were really pushing the military decision-making process on like platoons. And I finally said, guys, this is for like brigade level staffs. This, the military decision-making process, this giant, you know, staff-driven process is for up a staff. It's not for a platoon commander, it's platoon sergeant. Like, no.

• 38:23Speaker 01

  But the machine will eat that, right? Cause troop leading procedures are supposed to be for that lower level. And then you have M D M P and, and even you have higher levels of this, when people, that pushing down where it really becomes Eisenhower's quote of, you know, plans are useless, but planning is everything. So it's the thinking through and what you want, which is, you know, whether we talk about Iran and the Strait of Hormuz, a people were thinking that we weren't, nobody had planned for that. Like you haven't been around the military. We plan to plan to plan, whether it's space, you know, Martians landing in Vegas. There are plans and there is a whole task force, as you would know better than I, that plan for the Strait of Hormuz. We don't have a problem plan, planning. It just, sometimes you get caught in the process.

• 39:03Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Yeah. Um, fast forward a little bit.

• 39:08Jocko Willink?

  Looks like a wire, sir. Coming out of the dirt on the right, on the right there, going across the field. I found what he meant. It was a wire with yellow insulation, bright yellow. That alone was peculiar. I had seen my share of IEDs. The wires were usually black or subdued colors. Following the yellow line, I saw it indeed led to a dirt mound right beside the road, which was undoubtedly concealing a half-buried artillery shell. We sat a minute as I debated our options. One of those moments, I felt four pairs of eyes on me, waiting to see how I handled it.

• 39:43Jocko Willink?

  I guess, I can guess what's beside the road. What I can't figure out is what that wire, where that wire is going. There's nothing out there. I was musing aloud, not inviting opinion, but I heard a murmur of agreement. I finally decided, let's drive around it to the far side to see if we can see anything. We turned onto the field, eased along what I hoped was a safe path, staying parallel with the cord. When I felt we had driven far enough, I ordered a halt and opened my door. Cathcart, let's go. We followed the wire with our eyes, where it disappeared from view, I assumed it was buried, buried. We walked beside it, maybe another 20 meters, then it simply ended. As in not buried and not connected to anything.

• 40:27Jocko Willink?

  So you think about this for a while, let's call EOD, I decided. We'll keep the four trucks here, the rest can head back. Roger that, sir. Signed Cathcart took a knee and got on the horn. Sure, I had just killed the rest of our day, but I was not about to risk some other passing patrol getting killed for real. So this is a situation where, you know, you see something and you had a gut feeling. Explain your gut feeling on this one.

• 40:54Speaker 01

  Sure. So the part that we would drive around and I, it was a 155 round, laying on the side of the road. And there, this is pre kind of advanced EFP, this is early in 2003, right? When a variety of IEDs are happening, 60 millimeter mortars, 155 rounds are primarily what's being done. But this was just laying on the side of the road and we'd actually driven, driven past a family with a broken down road, which we were supposed to, to stop at, but time, all these things. But there was a stage of at this point where somebody would come and lay the IED and then somebody else would come and lay the trigger. Then somebody else would come out, explode it. So there was some common sense here to what was happening. But the, the moment in the field is standing over this yellow wire, which is odd.

• 41:36Speaker 01

  And the Cathcart next to me says, sir, we could just pull this out of the way. Not that we hadn't done that in the past. We just pulled this out of the way. At this time, your EOD wasn't even a, there was only an air force thing. So you had air force EOD attached to you. So you'd wait hours. You think, so if we call this in, we're going to be out here all day. So there's that listening to subordinate element, but you're still the leader having to make the decision. And it was a bit of, of something wasn't right, intuition. In my favorite book, Gavin DeBecker's Gift of Fear, there was some processing happening, even in my subconscious, like no. And I don't pull it, I surround it, luckily I didn't because it was all a trap. It was too obvious, right? In hindsight, of course, that's too obvious, yellow wire.

• 42:20Speaker 01

  At the time though, it was like, no, we just pulled this off to the side of the road. It was all booby traps. So underneath that 155 round was four 155 rounds. There was actually a tripwire, if you walked in to even look at it. And this is what the EOD, he was really upset about it because it was actually a trap for not just us, but it was a trap for the EOD as well. Because it had layers of booby traps under this thing. And had we pulled this, of all the stories, which one was like probably the closest to death? It was that one because it was a split, said a split second decision on whether to pull that out of the way or wait. And we waited for hours and it was a trap.

• 42:55Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 42:57Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's, that, that decision-making process, we were like, oh, it's going to take. And plus you see wires all over the place. It's not like this is some weird, like, oh, this is totally, no, there's like stuff on the ground and there's that. And you go, oh, I've seen this a million times, whatever, let me just pull this thing.

• 43:13Speaker 01

  There was no initiation to it. So that's the thing, like in order for these to go off, you had to have some electronic charge. This is a wire that ended in a farm field, like, of course I can pull this.

• 43:24Jocko Willink?

  Uh, the lesson here, intuition is the ability to understand something immediately without the need for conscious reasoning. In combat and in life, I have felt this gut feeling many times, a very subtle sense that something was not right. Our brains are supercomputers taking in information in a depth we do not fully understand. We are doing pattern recognition, scanning for dangers, even subconsciously running on biological code that is ancient and hardwired.

• 43:55Speaker 01

  That's the hair standing on the back of your neck or whatever it is, it's there. And it's that book, The Gift of Fear, which I had read before this. I mean, it's how many times we actually override that and say, well, that's, don't listen to that signal. This one was a gut feeling.

• 44:10Jocko Willink?

  And the weird thing is sometimes you override that feeling and it's like, oh yeah, everything's fine. And it's, you know, you know, you got lucky and you start to doubt your intuition a little bit. I remember when I was a kid, these, um, one of my buddy's girlfriends and she was supposed to like fly down and see him. And she just, she just didn't get on the plane. And he was like, what do you mean? He's like, well, whatever, I forget shitty shoes in some Florida or something. She says, I, I, no, I'm, I'm not coming. And he was like, well, why, what happened? He's, she said, I just couldn't get on the plane. I had a bad feeling or, you know, the plane didn't crash, you know?

• 44:51Jocko Willink?

  Now who knows Echo Charles, maybe she would have right gone on that weight, little extra weight difference, you know, or whatever.

• 44:58Speaker 01

  In war though, there is, as you, Clausworth, as we all quote about, would play this war game, part of the planning, and he would roll the dice. And that chance in war is so present in every day. So there is the, some of those luck, bad luck, good luck. It's the probability and chance of war.

• 45:18Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, there's no doubt about that. And you can do everything right and it's still, you can still get caught.

• 45:24Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 45:25Jocko Willink?

  And you can do everything wrong and come out unscathed.

• 45:28Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 45:30Jocko Willink?

  All right, moving to chapter six, which is called Pepper.

• 45:35Speaker 01

  I think we talked about this last time.

• 45:36Jocko Willink?

  We did, but not in this much detail. Age 19, two years into my service, all my dreams came true when I was assigned to second battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment, Fort Lewis, Washington. At long last, I was one of them, the best of the best, and I was thrilled to, uh, by that truth every waking moment. So you're a Ranger, you're a young Ranger, how old are you?

• 45:55Speaker 01

  At that point?

• 45:56Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 45:56Speaker 01

  19.

• 45:56Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, check. 19 years old, two years in the army. There's a local watering hole called Cowboys.

• 46:05Jocko Willink?

  And this is where all you guys.

• 46:06Speaker 01

  What's wrong with that?

• 46:07Jocko Willink?

  All you guys would roll down there.

• 46:08Speaker 01

  Sounds good.

• 46:11Jocko Willink?

  And a bunch of young Rangers with high and tights rolling down there.

• 46:16Speaker 01

  I don't know if you remember those, they were like Mohawks.

• 46:18Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 46:20Speaker 01

  They don't do them anymore.

• 46:21Jocko Willink?

  No.

• 46:21Speaker 01

  We had.

• 46:22Jocko Willink?

  Why don't they do them anymore?

• 46:24Speaker 01

  It was, I forget, I don't think it was General McChrystal, somebody came in and said that this is in the counter insurgency, you know, the, this is the beard area. Like you're just causing yourself to stand off. Where are the actual, if you go back to World War II, where does it come from? This distinction of this haircut. But they basically said it was causing you to have to stand out more than blend in. So then they went to, not a relaxed standard, just went to a.

• 46:48Jocko Willink?

  Regular.

• 46:48Speaker 01

  Regular haircut, certainly, yeah.

• 46:51Jocko Willink?

  I got, um, my buddy Seth Stone, he was in Solder City, 2008.

• 46:57Speaker 01

  Hey, that's where I was.

• 46:58Jocko Willink?

  Yep. And we talked about this last time, but he, he, he gave himself a straight up Mohawk, right? And he, he, uh, he ends up getting into Solder City and he's got a brief, like some Colonel or some general. And he's got his helmet on because he doesn't want to take his helmet off because he's got a Warhawk. And he said, he stood there talking to this guy, the guy's like, you know, you, hey, you know, hey, uh, Lieutenant, you can take your helmet off, you know, take your, he's like, no, I'm good to go, sir, no factor. But he was really just hiding the fact that he has a Reagan Mohawk. And I've got a great picture of him in Solder City, like looking off in the distance as the walls being built. And there's smoke in the, you know, in the background and everything.

• 47:41Jocko Willink?

  And he's, he's got his helmet off and he's sporting that Warhawk. So, you know, occasionally that's, that might be the, the proper haircut for the situation.

• 47:51Jocko Willink?

  Uh, so here you guys are, you guys are at Cowboys, the bar, one of your buddies Kent, he's talking to some dudes and some girls and you know, the stuff. And they decide all you guys are going to go out to this place called the quarry. And you get out to the quarry and this is a, you know, a campfire scenario and you're, you're there talking to some girls, et cetera, et cetera. Next thing you know, you're just, you're out.

• 48:14Speaker 01

  I, I have a little nap.

• 48:16Jocko Willink?

  Hit in the head with a baseball bat?

• 48:17Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 48:18Jocko Willink?

  Hit in the head with a baseball bat?

• 48:20Speaker 01

  And I, I didn't feel a thing. It was just literally like, I woke up later, but I didn't, I didn't feel the impact, nothing.

• 48:26Jocko Willink?

  Damn, that's crazy. That's, that's potentially lethal blow.

• 48:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:30Jocko Willink?

  I mean, an unexpected blow to the head with a baseball hat?

• 48:34Speaker 01

  Back of the head, towards the top back of the head. And I got a pretty good stitch, but.

• 48:39Jocko Willink?

  Oh, it opened you up too?

• 48:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, it opened me up too. Miracle. What, what, the opening up is part of the story because I went to the hospital, got stitches, didn't answer any questions and then went back to my, my barracks. It, that would later come back to haunt me like, wait a minute, you were there and then I'm in the same ER the next, the next night. Like, wait a minute, you were here last night. And then the MPs come and I answer, God do not lie, cheat or steal. As part of our code, I answer all the questions and it becomes a longer.

• 49:07Jocko Willink?

  So, so you're getting, you get knocked out, um, you get stitched up, but you don't really say what happened. And now your boys are like, wait a second, you got jumped? This is about, you know, you, these, these people are disrespecting, well, the first of all, they're trying to hurt, they hurt one of our brothers. Unacceptable. And they hurt a fellow ranger.

• 49:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:29Jocko Willink?

  Fully, fully unacceptable, unacceptable.

• 49:32Speaker 01

  And they beat the other guy down and he was very present and awake for it. So they, they knocked me out. I'm, I have a ranger buddy. Kind of a code, you don't go anywhere alone. They beat him down really bad. Um, but he, I mean, to the point where he still was able to walk and everything, but he was a very visible sign where I'm like, nothing happened to you. Like, he was a very visible sign of how they had attacked two rangers at this party.

• 49:53Jocko Willink?

  So your ranger brothers are like, we gotta go get payback.

• 49:57Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 49:58Jocko Willink?

  And this is the, so this is that, that night, like you, you got knocked out one night and now the next night you're going back?

• 50:05Speaker 01

  Correct. It's like a Friday night and you're at barracks and everybody like, what happened? And we're making calls, not to dime you, but out like chain of command calls and everything like, and then we're going to go back up like, okay. So two truckloads full of, of rangers go back up on a Saturday night.

• 50:24Jocko Willink?

  You roll in there and by the way, so that's the reason the chapter is called Pepper, because as all this was going on, your buddy heard someone call out the name Pepper.

• 50:32Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 50:33Jocko Willink?

  And so that was the intel that you had gathered.

• 50:34Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 50:35Jocko Willink?

  Was it some dude named Pepper did this?

• 50:37Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 50:37Jocko Willink?

  So you go into Cowboys and you go into the bar, I'm looking for Pepper. And sure enough, you found him.

• 50:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, they, a group of, a group of individuals said, also came up and said, you're looking for Pepper? Like, yes. And he said, he's in the alley down the street. Don't bring your friends or we'll bring ours. This is very like childish kid stuff in hindsight. And of course I walked down this alley, leave the, so it wasn't a bar fight. Actually, that was a non-alcohol. No, there's no alcohol involved in this, just stupidity.

• 51:08Speaker 01

  We walked down the street, down this alley, dark lit alley. There's already a giant arena of civilians. You know, young kids with one guy standing in the middle of it.

• 51:17Jocko Willink?

  This is straight out of a, a Roadhouse type scenario.

• 51:21Speaker 01

  And we walked out, so I.

• 51:22Jocko Willink?

  This is like an eighties freaking movie.

• 51:25Speaker 01

  It's so awful that I was there. I actually went back to the, like, really recently, I was given a, a, a brief to the Ranger Regiment and I went back to that.

• 51:33Jocko Willink?

  Did a little battlefield tour?

• 51:35Speaker 01

  That's right. Um, and we were walking, so now we're like, literally like reservoir dogs, shoulder to shoulder, walking down this alley with all the, all the rangers I had brought. And one of them said, at this point, um, you should take your shirt off because I, I had lifted weights, you know, swole. So I take my shirt off.

• 51:51Jocko Willink?

  How much did you weigh?

• 51:52Speaker 01

  I probably weighed one, one eighty. Rangers, you know, they run a lot. Um, one eighty. But this, there's many points to this story. One of the points to this story is that I'm inside freaking out. I have no, I'd never been in a fistfight basically at all, ever. And I'm walking into this arena with a guy sitting in the middle of it. Because of the UFC one, of course, and I tell this, and I told you this, of course, we had had the, um, Hoist Gracie and his brother kind of tutorial that now Matt Larson, who was the, you, you've talked about is actually kicking butt at West Point.

• 52:29Speaker 01

  Um, teaching combatives still.

• 52:31Jocko Willink?

  That's awesome.

• 52:31Speaker 01

  We had had that like tutorial, like two weeks of not knowing what you're doing in jujitsu. That's the amount of training I had. So from a very kind of war studies perspective, I was as unprepared as any individual could be for the battlefield I was just voluntarily walking into. And Pepper clearly had had some experience, um, as a scrapper, basically. So I take my shirt off, enter this arena and there's a guy sitting in the middle of it.

• 52:59Jocko Willink?

  And then, and it's Pepper?

• 53:00Speaker 01

  It's Pepper. And actually, I think I might even said, are you Pepper? And it was just, he just started swinging.

• 53:06Jocko Willink?

  And you knew, you knew at least to close the distance?

• 53:10Speaker 01

  I did. I, I was really professional. I was really proficient at closing the distance, grabbing the arms. Uh, and that's why I did what I, at this point, all of my adrenaline, like, this is the, the story, even in my first book, I tell like, as a great case study of what it feels like to be unprepared for something. Like all my adrenaline, cortisol, everything's just off the charts. And I barely remember parts of this fight. Because I'm, I'm not ready. So I close the distance, wrap him up and take him, and literally, um, and this is the part when you tell the story like this didn't happen. Um, we're in the alley and now we end up in the gully in like ankle knee deep water.

• 53:49Speaker 01

  In the gully of this alley and I am, I had successfully closed the gap and achieved a mount on top of him. So I was mounted on the side of this gully with basically our feet in the water. And we're having this fight with fingers into my eyeballs, scratching, like everything. Cause he had clearly never been wrapped up. He's, he's just a swinger. Um, and at one point, unlike they, they taught us, I, I achieved arm control, but my face was close to his face and he, I thought he bit into my ear. Uh, because it hurt really bad and then he let go. And then I got him in some like crucifix reverse choke till he passed out.

• 54:29Speaker 01

  Got up, felt better about myself. Um, and then like the movies, there's like sirens in the background, like we gotta go. And I get my shirt that I hadn't been wearing, like, and your ear looks pretty bad. They gave me my shirt. We leave before the cops show up, kind of like a movie, like cops slid in, we're sliding out. Um, and then I do the visor on the, while the guy's driving to the hospital really fast, do the visor, my ear's gone.

• 54:55Jocko Willink?

  Like how much of your ear is gone?

• 54:56Speaker 01

  Oh, you've seen it. It's like three quarters.

• 54:59Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's pretty, check.

• 55:02Speaker 01

  And I could have actually, which is the, all these, this, this one story has allowed me to, you know, you know, have conversations with my, my kids, have conversations with young men. One, you know, nobody can disrespect you. You earn respect. It is given, it is not demanded. Um, but even, I don't get the ear, in ear surgery, I get offered the ability to have my ear fixed. And because I'm, my identity is so tied to the Ranger Regiment, I'm like, I can't do that. I can't miss. I have a Ranger School slot. Uh, if you're in the regiment and you were gone too long, then you gotta go. Um, so I, I denied all the surgeries and just wanted to get back to my unit to serve as quickly as possible because my identity

• 55:43Speaker 01

  was tied so much to it. And then eventually they kicked me out. They, they don't kick me out. I get released for standards. It's the terminology. And actually, it's, um, Lieutenant Colonel Stanley McChrystal at, at the moment of two, seven, five. And he says, basically, you have a, you have a profile. You, you have to leave until you are healthy and you come back.

• 56:01Jocko Willink?

  What's profile?

• 56:03Speaker 01

  Um, that's when you're injured and you have like, you're recovering from an injury. So you can't do certain things. So I, because of my ear, I couldn't wear a helmet for like three months. They're like, well, you can't be here. You gotta go get healthy and come back.

• 56:15Jocko Willink?

  And that, was he on your board? Was Stan McChrystal on your board?

• 56:18Speaker 01

  He was the battalion commander. So he basically signed this as a counseling statement, you know, basically.

• 56:23Jocko Willink?

  What was the actual term that you used for?

• 56:26Speaker 01

  Relief for standards.

• 56:26Jocko Willink?

  Relief for standards. Could, is that a disciplinary thing or is that just like a medical thing?

• 56:33Speaker 01

  So, no, it's, it can be disciplinary too. It's unique to the Ranger Regiment is, you know, every, it's a longer conversation, but in Ranger Regiment, if you have a discipline in medical or anything, um, they don't have to have any like admin, US Army administrative action. They just sign this, this document.

• 56:48Jocko Willink?

  God.

• 56:48Speaker 01

  And then you go, go somewhere else.

• 56:51Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 56:51Speaker 01

  And I just went to literally the, the infantry unit on the other side of the Ranger Regiment fence. So as a young man, there's so many lessons here about, you know, my life, like a depression and I, my identity is gone. Cause I wanted to be a ranger so bad.

• 57:04Jocko Willink?

  What year was this?

• 57:05Speaker 01

  This is nineteen ninety-six.

• 57:07Jocko Willink?

  Damn dude.

• 57:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. But it, things happen for a reason. I go on to have, to this day, if that hadn't happened, I wouldn't be sitting here. Uh, but that, that story gave me so many life lessons in the hard way. Uh, that I had to include in the book. To include in jujitsu, Echo.

• 57:25Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 57:28Speaker 01

  And I would go, I would go on and learn jujitsu and know how bad I did in that fight, but.

• 57:32Jocko Willink?

  But it is kinda crazy that even with your, I think in the book, you say you had done like four classes of jujitsu. And that's what you needed to get close the distance on this guy. Like there is, if you're not, if you're not skilled opponents, the gross motor movements of jujitsu are actually not that hard. Like rush the guy, grab onto him, get him on the ground. Like that stuff, if someone doesn't know what's happening, that's what was so crazy when I did jujitsu for the first time. Having no idea what was going on, none. Like there was no, this is pre UFC. There's no, even a comprehension of like the guard was not a thing. The mount was not, it wasn't even a thing, it was like nothing, it was just nothing.

• 58:17Jocko Willink?

  It was, I don't even know a good metaphor to describe what it was. My, the master chief that was teaching me, this literally did whatever he wanted to. And you had no idea what was happening. You weren't like, oh, I'm going to keep my arms in, you even know your arms were out. You didn't think, well, I don't want to turn my back. You're like, I don't even know, he's on my back and had nothing to do with me. It was crazy. And so you only had this minimal amount of training. And you still understood these concepts, you're able to impose them. That's one thing that was, cause when I started to learn jujitsu, I, I only knew three things, but I could impose them because someone else didn't know anything.

• 58:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, this is Matt Larson, again, having, Matt Larson was in, this is where jujitsu starts for the entire military. Cause Stanley McChrystal sends Matt Larson out to all these schools saying he wants to, which is actually unfortunate, they're going back towards this bayonet jabbing, hand to hand combat thing, he wanted to redo that system, so he sent Matt out.

• 59:12Jocko Willink?

  We're going back to that?

• 59:13Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 59:14Jocko Willink?

  In what way, what are you talking about?

• 59:15Speaker 01

  They restarted some of the bayonet assault courses.

• 59:17Jocko Willink?

  I understand, I like the bayonet assault courses. I mean, I think that that's cool to like run around and like aggressively slaughter some dummies. I think that's cool for aggression.

• 59:27Speaker 01

  You know, like in the basic, for the basic training, that means, is that replacing?

• 59:31Jocko Willink?

  Oh, no, that's not a good call.

• 59:32Speaker 01

  That's not a good call, right? Cause there's no, which is really the close the distance is about the courage to move forward under that. That's what Matt said, like it isn't about building UFC fighters in the military. It's giving them examples to overcome their fear of being punched in the face. So that closes distance with the initial lesson, but Matt used to teach all these lessons, like it's crazy that even in our movies and everything, everybody's strategy is to take their hand with the most amount of fragile bones and banging against the hardest part of the human body, the skull. And that's the game plan of most people in a whatever, street fight or whatever. That's the stupidest plan.

• 1:00:09Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it is stupid. You know, there was a, some of the stuff that we learned, cause I was lucky to, well, I guess lucky in a way that I got to see like the various martial arts come into the SEAL teams over time. And yeah, the, the reliance on striking as a way to control somebody is, it was really interesting to see. Because striking is not a good way to control people, you know, Rodney King. Rodney King, like how, how well did striking work to control him? You know, it's like they had to beat the living shit out of that guy. And that's very common. It's hard to knock someone out. Go watch a boxing match. It's hard to knock someone out. You know, if you get a complete sucker punch on someone, you probably have, what do you think?

• 1:00:53Jocko Willink?

  What's the percentage chance, if you get a sucker punch on someone, 50%?

• 1:00:58Speaker 01

  50%.

• 1:00:58Jocko Willink?

  I think it's 50%. I think it's 50% of the time, if you get a sucker punch on someone. And now look, if the guy's like a skilled boxer and he sucker punches, maybe it's a little higher percentage, but a random dude doing a sucker punch at someone else, it's like a 50% chance that you're going to get, that you're going to knock them out. So now we're thinking, oh, if we strike someone. There was this fantasy in the SEAL teams, like if you strike someone with your muzzle or you strike them in the face, that they were going to be now like fall down and be compliant. Which was, it turned out to be so wrong. We had guys muzzle striking dudes in the face and all it did was open up a bunch of, you know, cuts and acute damage to their face, which didn't get them under control.

• 1:01:38Jocko Willink?

  And now you had a bleeding and an injured prisoner that you have to deal with, right? And now you're turning him over to the diff and this guy's got like big lacerations on his head. And they're like, what happened? Well, you know, one of my guys muzzle struck him three times in the face. Well, why'd he do it three times? Then why does he, oh, cause someone else then had to go and tackle him because he still wasn't controlled. Because a strike, generally speaking, doesn't get someone under control. So yeah, it is interesting that how much, it's the, it's like the fantasy of the seventies, you know, before the UFC. You know, I'm going to hit you with, you know, throw the three strikes and you're going to fall down. It's like, it doesn't work that way.

• 1:02:14Speaker 01

  Which is the point of UFC one, puts all of that to the test. So much, I don't know if you remember the boxer wore a boxing glove.

• 1:02:20Jocko Willink?

  Art Jimmerson.

• 1:02:22Speaker 01

  Cause he knew that it would break his hand and all of those first fighters in UFC ones, they're all breaking their hands, banging their hand against these people's skulls. There's that one with the big like 600 pound guy and the guy keeps striking him because he's broken both of his hands. And he still has got to strike this guy.

• 1:02:37Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, well, it's, I'm, well, hopefully Matt Larson has got a handle on keeping things the way they're supposed to be.

• 1:02:45Speaker 01

  He's pushing, again, culture and everything. He's pushing and we have some leadership, but it's,

• 1:02:51Speaker 01

  because sometimes it does veer right. Like we're not trying to prepare you for a UFC fight.

• 1:02:55Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 1:02:56Speaker 01

  There is, there, it's a, it's a bureaucracy that can veer left and right without the right leadership. And he's constantly, and at West Point, which is an amazing place for him to be, about what, what is it about? Not, not just the skills, but is this, you want to test somebody's courage, which he uses like the Jessica Lynch story as well as, you gotta fight. And there's no better way to test somebody to fight than put them in a fight where they're not going to injure as much. So then there's the skill sets.

• 1:03:26Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and you know, obviously I like jujitsu a lot, but I was never bought in that jujitsu is the, the only solution. It's like, no, jujitsu, boxing, wrestling, Muay Thai, and then whatever other kind of stuff, you know, you can figure out that works and pass that information on. Getting locked into one thing ever, that's like saying, hey, this is the, this is like saying we're on the battlefield, this is the only tactic we're going to use. Like I would never say that, why would I say that about fighting? So.

• 1:03:52Speaker 01

  It's more about, and I think this, as much as I, I talked last class about what Ranger School is for us, it's, you know, a test of character. It's what it is, it's a lot of things, but it's, it tears you down to your individual and now I get to test your character. Will you quit? Will you lie, steal food, all that? Combatives starts with, it will give you, test your courage. As much as West Point still does boxing as well, requires one.

• 1:04:17Jocko Willink?

  Which they should.

• 1:04:17Speaker 01

  Semester of boxing.

• 1:04:18Jocko Willink?

  Do they do judo too or wrestling?

• 1:04:20Speaker 01

  They're all, those are all optional, boxing is mandatory.

• 1:04:22Jocko Willink?

  Okay, cause I think, I want to say the Naval Academy is like a semester of boxing, a semester of wrestling and a semester of judo maybe? And maybe it's turned into jujitsu now, but like wrestling and boxing is a great combination.

• 1:04:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've had my son do boxing, just not so much to, one, to know how to throw a punch, but how to not get hit by a punch. As much as I have jujitsu.

• 1:04:43Jocko Willink?

  And if you have a good like combo.

• 1:04:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:46Jocko Willink?

  You, you'll beat 80%, 90% of people in the street with just one, two combo, maybe throw a three and a four on there just to finish it off. But yeah, and a little bit of head movement, you're going a long way.

• 1:04:58Speaker 01

  But now there's, I just saw a video of Matt commenting on like the Danes of trench combatants. So the setting matters as much as once you do this progression of, you're not going to be on the mat in a combat. The Danes had set up basically a trench line and then they jump in and they basically have, and they have fake knives. Cause this is what we're seeing.

• 1:05:17Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:18Speaker 01

  And they, you know, which we have like the, like the electric knife, things like that, that throw that into a combative fight. But like, let's put the realism, as much as you were talking about S A Marshall's gift, of all the things he gave about that realism of training. So it's the same thing for combative training. You, you should elevate this to realism.

• 1:05:34Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:35Speaker 01

  So put you in a trench and then your weapons, knives, everything.

• 1:05:39Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, man. Good stuff. Your lesson from this, and you kind of mentioned it already, but respect. Respect is one of the most misunderstood values among young men, young soldiers and even many adults. At its core, respect is a positive feeling, admiration for someone's character, ability or achievements. It is not the same as honor, though the two are often get tangled together. Honor is about esteem, even prestige. Respect is deeper, it is not demanded, is not taken, it cannot be forced. Respect is earned. In my youth, I believed the opposite. Like so many young warriors, I thought if someone disrespected me or worse, disrespected my tribe, then a fight was the only way forward. That mindset leads you down dark avenues.

• 1:06:19Jocko Willink?

  You tell yourself that respect is something you have to defend at all costs and that the mere perception of disrespect justifies violence or revenge. That thinking destroys lives, it nearly destroyed mine. Through time and service, I learned the truth. Respect is not something you shout about or fight for. It is something you build patiently through your actions and excellence. True professionals, true leaders, the giants in any field, whether military, business, sports or scholarship, do not demand respect, they earn it. And because it is earned, it lasts.

• 1:06:53Jocko Willink?

  Important lesson.

• 1:06:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, you think about even gang culture, like it's such a such a fallacy about respect and disrespect.

• 1:07:02Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, and it's one of those things that as you know, a young, like you said, young warrior, right? That that stuff means a lot. And when it gets, when it gets ruffled, it's very, very difficult for a young man to sort of detach from the part of respect that is all wrapped up in their ego and thinking, oh, yeah. I've, you know, I said something about, some guy asked this question one time, you know, somebody said something to me in the street, I wanted to beat him up type thing. And I said, you know, you don't have to try and earn respect from somebody that doesn't respect themselves. Like, anyone that's running around the street, I think this guy was like some drunk idiot, you know, like saying something about whatever, his girlfriend or his wife or something like that. And it's

• 1:07:45Jocko Willink?

  like, bro, you, now you're gonna go get in a fight with this guy? That's what we're doing? We're gonna go in a fight with this guy on a Friday night, you just took your wife out for dinner? And now you're gonna go fight some random loser in the street? Possibly get sued, possibly go to jail, possibly get stabbed, possibly get jumped by his friends? Uh, you know, not, not, almost no outcome is good. And that's what we're doing? Like, no, we should not be doing that. You need to, you need to elevate a little bit and just be careful with that.

• 1:08:17Speaker 01

  And it translates against echelons. I mean, from war, even war, I mean, there's the three reasons people go to, nations go to war still stands, fear, honor, and interest. Honor is not the same as respect, but honor is a big part of why nations go to war.

• 1:08:31Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Um, I'm gonna fast forward a little bit. You're with, you're, you're in Iraq, you're with Ahmed, who's like a tribal leader slash gangster. Ahmed was all smiles. And there's a guy that shows up, Najib. Uh, Ahmed was all smiles. My dear friend Najib, what a delightful surprise. May I conclude my business with Captain Spencer? And then I shall be entirely yours. Najib stared icily at him, pretending not to notice. Ahmed turned the music down a notch, then addressed me, I've thought about your civil affairs, plan to start delivering large dumpsters in the neighborhood so everyone stops throwing it in the streets. I knew what he was doing, making Najib wait, letting Najib overhear us, as if Ahmed was the kingpin and I, the hapless US Army officer, had come hat in

• 1:09:15Jocko Willink?

  hand to seek his counsel. Ahmed started naming local drivers who might agree to the work. Najib listened, seething, until his patience finally broke. Ahmed, what about my sister's boy? Brad was at my ear, rapidly translating. Quite unfortunate, Ahmed admitted, but that is how headstrong young men behave. They shot him like a mangy dog in the street, and now they walk around smiling? Now I knew of the beef. One of Najib's guys had refused to stop for Ahmed, for an Ahmed checkpoint. Ahmed shrugged. Had it occurred in your territory, your men would have done the same. Najib's eyeballs bugged out. He started to sputter.

• 1:09:56Jocko Willink?

  But Ahmed calmly raised a palm. You are being discourteous. I'm speaking to Captain Spencer. Captain Spencer can go to the devil. His fists were balled with rage, and the look in his eyes was the one my mom used to get just before she erupted. Only the weapons here were a lot worse than a belt. Najib's man, Najib's man's hand went closer to his guns to one of his like little, uh, security dudes. Uncle likewise reached toward his vest, and this is one of Ahmed's guys. The table guards leveled their AKs and Fitz's eyes went wide in a flash. All three of us saw how precarious our position was. If anyone in that room said or did the wrong thing, in the next few seconds, we'd all be lying in a pool of blood. I was an airborne ranger, trained to destroy troops. How had I wound

• 1:10:40Jocko Willink?

  up here? I slowly raised my palms, speaking smoothingly, soothingly, and Brad, and Brad matched my tone. Gentlemen, we're all friends here. That wasn't true. Shooting Najib's nephew was like dumping gasoline on a roaring blaze. All I could hope was that neither boss wanted to die over such petty grief. Not that either would give an inch in the moment, of course. It was the same story all over Iraq. Bad guys, worse guys, and US troops caught in the middle. The young man seems to have made a huge mistake in his actions, I told Ahmed. The, but the bullet struck his face and he is disfigured. They told him to stop. He disobeyed, disobeyed. I looked at Najib. I know Ahmed, he's a generous man. Is there some compensation for your family that you might accept? I had been

• 1:11:24Jocko Willink?

  in Iraq long enough to know tribal or even cultural settlement for wrongful deaths could be paid in what we called blood money. Najib sneered. The only thing I will accept is his head on a stick. Seemingly bored with all this posturing, Ahmed casually waved. Half a million dinar. Najib exploded in rage. Half a million, four million. The boy is injured, but he lives. Three million, you cringing jackal, or I'll kill you where you stand. I'm not standing, Najib. One million, or you'll be dead before you hit the floor. Najib cast his eyes slowly about the room. Uncle stood like iron, ready to die. The two guards at the table and Sergeant Fitz were remarkably steely. Any shooting, he'd be the first to fall. Najib's eyes locked on mine like lasers. I didn't appear to be

• 1:12:08Jocko Willink?

  armed, but in fact had my nine millimeters pistol ready under the table. All things considered, a million dinar was nothing to sneeze at. So Najib finally nodded. Allah is good. I slowly exhaled. I don't have it here, Ahmed, cautioned. You're a man of your word, Najib allowed. Just take care of, just take care of, this never happens again. He nodded to his man and uncle let them out, death staring them every step of the way. Brad was quavering beside me, and Sergeant Fitz slowly rolled the tension out of his neck. And Ahmed, just another day in the office. He smiled benevolently as we stood. It was a pleasure to see you as always, my captain. Please extend my fondest wishes to your mother.

• 1:12:50Speaker 01

  The Sopranos of Baghdad. Yeah, which is, there's a article I wrote called The Gangs of Baghdad, which is um, kind of a macro level of what I was doing day to day in Baghdad, was driving around to these, these Tony Sopranos, legit, and they were in character, like full Adidas jumpsuits. I mean, this demeanor, I don't know if they washed it, but they were legit. Um, and they had gangs, uh, they had, it was mafia, and I would go around and give them lots of money, which is where the chapter starts off. And I get in the room, very dark, similar to this Jocko, um, with me, my translator and my bodyguard, who kind of stands off to the side, but entering into this basically mob scene of the guys taking guests of like,

• 1:13:32Speaker 01

  you do me a favor, I do you a favor. And I'm one of the people coming into his meeting, and then the guy storms in, and it's, you know, I go from a, you know, a, a street fight, now I'm almost in a gunfight in a, in a very small room, where everybody, uh, is hot tempered and a gun on, on the trigger, hand on their trigger. It was crazy. And how did I get here? And I had a, I had about four of those Tony Sopranos to deal with in this, in an area of Baghdad of about 75,000 people. And that's how we achieved stability. I know Ramadi, um, I'm sure there were power brokers, more of a tribal. This is urban. So this is like, you asked about the tribe, was like, what, we talking about my tribe?

• 1:14:12Speaker 01

  Um, it was more of these, you know, people who controlled gangs and had the power to do it.

• 1:14:19Jocko Willink?

  Gangsters. Uh, your lesson here is humility. The Sopranos of Baghdad chapter may read like a gangster movie set in the middle of a war zone, but for me, it was one of the hardest and most important lessons I carried forward. The lesson is simple to say, but difficult to live. Be humble. In the military and business and in life, people often tell you to be aggressive, to be the smartest person in the room, the toughest, the smartest, the most, the most lethal. I have lived that world, and yes, there's a place for strength and resolve, but there is also greatness and humility. The real honor is not the honor we receive, it's the honor we give.

• 1:14:51Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, painful.

• 1:14:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:55Jocko Willink?

  You know what's funny is like, how often you actually have that kind of, you gotta do the same thing with, in many cases, just like your straight up chain of command. Like, you're gonna be working for some people that you may not hold in the highest regard, you know, people that may be inexperienced, they may be arrogant, they may be, like, who knows? But there are definitely people that you're gonna work for, where you have to put, you have to just be humble. Because if you let your ego flare up, their ego's gonna flare up, and you're gonna get crushed when they're the boss. So.

• 1:15:29Speaker 01

  And I had situations in Iraq, similar that where I thought I was the boss in a room of, of where they were the bosses. If I didn't have the humbleness, like I did that, just to be quiet for most of it, um, it could have gone badly. And there were a couple of other situations where I learned, uh, where I was like, I'm the American, I'm the captain, I, I'm in charge of this whole area, you come in, like, that's not gonna work.

• 1:15:52Jocko Willink?

  Uh, fast forward a little bit. This is, um, still in Iraq. I don't know who suggested using this oppo- opportunity for a weapons check. But it was not unusual. Soldiers in combat are trained to keep their weapons clean, lubricated, and serviced almost religiously, but from time to time, they need to test fire their weapons to be certain they are ready to spring into action.

• 1:16:13Jocko Willink?

  That junk pile of barrels did not look like anything that required further investigations. I requested radio permission from my company commander, and he granted us the okay to light it up, a simple test fire of weapons. My guys grinned. Nothing like some live fire to clear the senses. I gave the honor to my Mark 19 grenade launcher mounted atop my vehicle. It's basically a belt-fed 40 millimeter grenade machine gun that makes a distinctive womp womp womp when fired, followed by a boom boom boom, a thoticle, and beautiful in its symphony of destruction. We backed my Humvee up about 300 meters. I didn't want to be any closer on the off-chance those barrels were filled of gasoline. The rest of the platoon waited another 100 meters

• 1:16:53Jocko Willink?

  behind us. Brooks was above me in the vehicle gun hatch, sliding the large lever back to arm the Mark 19. When he looked for, to me for approval, I calmly announced, "Fire at will." Having blown up all kinds of stuff over the last month or two, I figured I had seen it all. What I had never seen before or since was time stands still. The tank ditch vanished in an explosion I can only liken to slow-mo foot, slow-mo footage of the moonshot blasting off from Cape Canaveral. Only this wasn't slow-mo. And we saw this immense white wall of shock, uh, shockwave flying out to meet us. I just had time to duck between my driver's side door before it hit us with the sound and fury unlike anything I'd ever

• 1:17:37Jocko Willink?

  known. Non-lethal, thankfully, but a thing you actually felt pressing down into your guts. When I was sure it was past and gone, I slowly rose and just stared stunned. A butte-sized column of smoke and fire was pouring into the sky, mushrooming out, and it just kept climbing a mile high, maybe two, maybe more. My stunned guys looked at each other and to me. All of us, all of our ears were ringing, jaws unclenching, realizing we were lucky to be alive. Radio static cut the wonder. It was my commanding officer. "White Six, White Six, this is Attack Six. Was that you?"

• 1:18:19Jocko Willink?

  I swallowed, feeling so mortal and unworthy before the looming hammer of the gods. Raising the mic, I replied as blandly but confidently as I could. "Attack Six, this is White Six. Test fire complete."

• 1:18:34Jocko Willink?

  There was no way to hide it anyways. The street, the clouds streamed into the sky like a signal flare visible for miles in every direction. Calls were already pouring in from units across the region, every one of them demanding to know what in God's name had just happened. It was not the kind of thing you could cover up. The sky itself told the story.

• 1:18:51Speaker 01

  So this isn't, the book's not written chronologically. This is going back to 2003 as a young platoon leader. Uh, and it's again, another lesson learned of stupidity, um, of shooting at, at these barrels. And at this time, we were, and people just don't understand the battlefield collection, these things that people get assigned to do. Our job was to go out and find any stockpiles, and we'd find entire warehouses full of stuff, and we'd collect all that up. And a lot of times, we would just blow it in place. So like, literally like we're playing pyro around the, all of Iraq, just stack. We would take, um, we would take just Iraqis who had been kicked out of the Iraqi army because I was there for that. We'd load them up on, um, two and a halves and take them out in the fields and just

• 1:19:35Speaker 01

  collect up all the artillery rounds and put them all in a pile and blow them up. But this was that test fire into that tank. And it literally just echoed, it was just black barrels and like, probably rocket fuel is what we think that it was. Um, most likely it was rocket fuel that we, we shot at. And I've never seen, to this day, a mushroom cloud as big as one that created.

• 1:19:59Jocko Willink?

  We blew some missiles in place and same thing. It was a legitimate mushroom cloud. It was crazy. And we had, we had stopped. It was kind of by the highway. I think it was Route Tampa. Did Route Tampa go south of Baghdad? I think it was Route Tampa. And so we were down there and we'd, you know, some aircraft had identified these big missiles on the ground. So we're like, cool, go blow them in place. We go out there, we set security. And I'm looking at my EOD guy and I'm like, you know, he kind of set, you know, the, the safe distance. And it was, you know, probably like half a mile or something. Cause we, cause they were by the roads. We had to stop the traffic on the freeway. And, um, I was kind of like, dude, I think we might be, you know, little, little, being a little extra cautious,

• 1:20:42Jocko Willink?

  a little risk averse here. I don't think we need this much of room. Boy, was I wrong. Those things went, it was crazy explosion. So this sounds like, this, uh, this one sounds even worse, man.

• 1:20:52Speaker 01

  And it was that moment when he, we, I still talk to that company commander, Ned Richmond. Um, and he, he thought I would come back with like burnt off eyebrows and everything, but we still laugh about this. Test fire complete.

• 1:21:04Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Actually, you had a funny one with, uh, Leif. We were hitting a target in Ramadi and his breacher, one of his breachers had breached a, a car trunk while they were searching it. Well, in the car trunk, they had a thing of gasoline in there, you know, like a five gallon can of gasoline. It caught fire. There's this raging fire and I'm, I'm like a few buildings over and I see this just probably like 40 or 50 foot fire. And I get on the radio. I'm like, uh, Leif, mind telling me what's going on with that fire over there? You know, he kind of said, we breached the thing, but putting it out now. I was like, okay. But it was the same thing. And it, you know, things go a little bit sideways from

• 1:21:46Jocko Willink?

  time to time. But, um, you know, the important thing here, there's a lesson here was integrity. You say from the day soldiers enter service, crossing the line from civilian to soldier, they're indoctrinated with a list of values. At first, they are memorialized like, memorized like multiplication tables. Over time, they are tested, sharpened, and proven in training and in combat until they are no longer words but character. Integrity is at the center of that list. Any profession, any human relationship is built on trust. Trust between a soldier and a commander, between a worker and a boss, between a husband and a wife, between citizen and society. Once trust is broken, it's almost impossible to win back. That is why integrity is not an accessory to character. It is the core. The West Point Cadet Honor Code states simply, "A cadet will not lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate those that do." It was first

• 1:22:30Jocko Willink?

  formalized under General Douglas MacArthur, and it is the, a single sentence that can be applied in every corner of life. The US Army value of integrity expands on it. Do what's right legally and morally. Integrity is a quality you develop by adhering to your moral principles. It requires that you do and say nothing that deceives others. As your integrity grows, so does the trust you, others place in you. The more choices you make based on integrity, the more, the more this highly prized value will affect your relationships with family and friends, and finally, the fundamental acceptance of yourself.

• 1:23:08Jocko Willink?

  Um, you know, last time, we, this didn't make it into this book, but I think it's worth revisiting. You had, first of all, I think you were a, you were a company commander and you had a young, you had a couple of kids that were playing around with guns and one of the guys shot the other guy in the neck.

• 1:23:27Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:23:28Jocko Willink?

  Uh, got wounded, hurt really bad. And then shortly thereafter, you had a young lieutenant that had a negligent discharge, which that's something that was supposed to be reported up the chain of command. You already were jumping into a situation where the, the platoon had a bad reputation. You had this freaking kid get shot and you just decided like, I don't need to put any more bad, um, shade on this platoon. And so you decided that you were not going to report this up the chain of command. Um, how does that tie into this integrity?

• 1:24:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, there, there, there is, this one is a story of, it's kind of easy to tell the truth that there's a mushroom cloud. Um, but you, you're right. We should couple that with times like when I was offered $10,000 by a guy at a checkpoint to try to just, just let them through. Um, and I could have taken that. And there's so many cases where people don't. That case wasn't a, an issue of whether I was, it was almost whether I was going to follow an order, which is report, not lie about it. Actually, the company commander asked about it later and I, he agreed with my decision. Like in that moment, when, in that story with connected soldiers, the, the unit where I was making a decision that I felt was, I was taking some of the burden on myself by not reporting it to allow this

• 1:24:48Speaker 01

  entire unit. Um, and he couldn't hide because it literally, his weapon exploded into the clearing barrel. He couldn't hide it in front of his soldiers, of course. He wasn't going to lie. Uh, that complexity is the human nature of stress revealing character. Of course, we do not lie, cheat, or steal, but that's going to put it into the reality of human conditions and situations. How do you maintain your integrity doing things that's right for your, your unit, your family and everything without breaching your integrity? And this, these are real examples of being able to do it. Funny thing about this is my daughter, um, you know, I built this into the code really like your book talks about

• 1:25:30Speaker 01

  living by a code, a family code. And, and we have that, we do not lie, cheat, or steal. And, and she's at church and she hears it. It's not like I created these things. Actually, I took it from, you know, the West Point, um, kit, uh, cadet conduct code, code of conduct, basically. But these are universal values, uh, and why they're so important is we got to put them to the test. Uh, so it closely links to that, that situation, although the, the stress of that, those days, as you know, from our, our last talk was intense. So having to make those decisions like that were really hard and accept that risk to myself professionally of not lying about it, but not reporting it. So is it, is it, are you

• 1:26:11Speaker 01

  maintaining your integrity by not reporting it? I, and I made a, a real decision that it wasn't. So I maintained my character while still doing what I thought was best for the men.

• 1:26:20Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Yeah, that's a, definitely a tough call on that one. And you, you, and you talked to your company commander later.

• 1:26:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:26:29Jocko Willink?

  And he was like, yeah, you, you made the right call. And I think a lot of times, you know, I've, I've played things out in my mind like, okay, if this gets found out and I have to sit down with my boss and explain why I made this decision, why I did this, is it defensible? You know, was I doing this for my own benefit?

• 1:26:47Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:26:47Jocko Willink?

  You know, which is always a big red flag. If you're trying to take care of yourself, like, I mean, you're not going to get in any trouble if this, you know, lieutenant has an AD or an ND and you report it, you're, you're, you're not going to get any trouble for it. He's not, you're not, it's not coming down to you, especially because you just took over the platoon. So it's not like you were doing it to protect yourself. You were doing it really to protect the platoon, get their morale moving in the right direction, gain some trust from them, you know? And at the same time, that's risky too, because I always tell the young, the young leaders in the military. If they think that you are gonna cover for them, stand by, because you're gonna need to cover for them, because they're gonna do shit that they shouldn't be doing.

• 1:27:27Jocko Willink?

  And if you set that precedent, and then all of a sudden, you know, they cross a line that you know, but they don't know. Now we have a major issue, you know, so when you cover for them on some small scale, without saying, okay, look, you can get, because I've had this conversation with many guys, oh, you got in trouble for drinking? Okay, cool. This one is your, you get out of jail free pass. If this kind of shit happens again, you, I will not be able to help you, and I'm not gonna help you. So you gotta draw that law line in the sand where they understand, okay, I got away with a little bit. My boss isn't a tyrant, but if I do this again, it's good, there's no escape. So, but a lot of times guys make the mistake of, they just go, okay, well, you can get away with it this time.

• 1:28:08Jocko Willink?

  And then the next thing they do is even worse, and then they're surprised when you, when you come down on them, because you need to, and they're surprised about it. And so you gotta really set that standard of, you know, this, this, this, the line, and if you go over this line, I got nothing for you. So.

• 1:28:26Speaker 01

  And we, and I had to have that talk with the men to make sure they knew I wasn't covering for anybody. And that, and I, and that platoon leader faced consequences, absolutely, for his action. He had to, you know, stay up and clear everybody of, and drill it and everything, but I had to make that very visible, because it's in the gray that somebody may take a decision to being that they can get away with thing. So I was very deliberate in explaining what happened, and then what was going to happen as a consequence of it, what the hires knew or not, that was a different story, but the men definitely knew what was the rationale and the leadership decision that was made.

• 1:29:01Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, check. Leadership is hard, man.

• 1:29:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:29:07Jocko Willink?

  Fast forward, we're going to take you to another war zone, Ukraine. Around Kiev, there is no single grand clash. The battle unfolded across hundreds of square miles with numerous medium and small scale engagements. We had several locations we wanted to inspect, and Bucha, am I saying that right?

• 1:29:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, Bucha.

• 1:29:25Jocko Willink?

  Bucha was the first on our list. By the time we arrived, Bucha had already become a name whispered in horror. Russian soldiers tied Ukrainian men, women, and children, and the elderly with their hinds behind their backs, and slaughtered them at close range. Some were shot point blank, others execution style. The images emerging from the town were not war. They were evil, a special kind of evil. This was not the kind of violence Liam and I hardened by conflict had seen before. This was intimate murder, cruelty close up, and for that reason, in its own way, even worse. The somber truth was still being uncovered. Videos would surface later, mass graves would be exhumed. Stories of torture, mutilation, and sexual assault would flood the world.

• 1:30:10Jocko Willink?

  Authorities recovered hundreds of bodies after Russian forces withdrew. The local count eventually rose to 458 in Bucha alone, most of them shot, and many with binding marks on their hands. A mass grave about 45 foot trench near St. Andrew and All Saints Church held a dozen or more bodies in body bags when satellite imagery first revealed it. Entire families were found in their homes, their lives extinguished in what local testimonies later described as acts of systemic terror. Seventeen bodies were found in a mass grave just days after we visited. Among the earliest grim confirmations that what was happening in Bucha was only the beginning to be fully known.

• 1:30:54Jocko Willink?

  The full number would climb later.

• 1:31:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's, so this is my post-career of war research, going, we wanted to recreate the Battle of Kiev. Think we might have talked about it last thing, but one of the most decisive battles, but this story of the massacre of Bucha, and I deal a lot with media and War on One and accusations of war crimes and things like that.

• 1:31:22Speaker 01

  It all has very deliberate definitions, but what the Russian unit did in Bucha, and they actually received the awards from Putin for their operations in Bucha, was tie the hands of civilians behind their back and shoot them in the back of the head, execution style, and other horrible things. I do believe there's a, that was a special type of evil, and to be there was very somber of what the, that town village of Kiev experience was awful to see firsthand.

• 1:31:51Jocko Willink?

  You show up there, and what's an interesting point that you make in, in the book, you talk about the fact that in, in the movie Red Dawn, right? In the movie Red Dawn, it's like the teenagers from the high school that go out and do the resistance, and you make the point that more realistically, in Ukraine, and if Red Dawn ever happened in America, it's gonna be the veterans that step up, that have the experience, and sure, they might, you know, command some teenagers from the high school football team, echo Charles if needed. But it's gonna be the veterans that step up, and you, you meet one of these, one of these colonels. And, you know, when our guide introduced me as Major Spencer, the man who wrote the manual, the Colonel's eyes lit up, pumping my hand in gratitude, he rallied his men, sang my praises.

• 1:32:33Jocko Willink?

  They broke out into appreciative whistles, cheers, and applause, and that's because you had written this, we talked about it last time, but you had written this like a mini, mini manual for urban defense, and it spread throughout Ukraine.

• 1:32:44Speaker 01

  It did.

• 1:32:45Jocko Willink?

  Like wildfire.

• 1:32:46Speaker 01

  It blew my mind that it did.

• 1:32:48Jocko Willink?

  And I'm great guidance for people that are trying to defend their, it's, it's literally meant for them.

• 1:32:53Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 1:32:54Jocko Willink?

  You know, you didn't write it for them, but you wrote it for them.

• 1:32:56Speaker 01

  Yep, to block the streets, and eventually how to, how to do an L-shaped ambush, things like that, that's like very basic stuff that, that they translated and printed hundreds of thousands across the country. He, and even in Bucha, had, had a copy of it, and, and was there with me, so it was, it was surreal to, for that posting on X to translate into a war zone for civilians, him being a veteran of, which are so many that I think Russia underestimated, veterans with access to weapons and not wanting to be subjected to, you know, Soviet rule were able to do, but it was surreal.

• 1:33:33Jocko Willink?

  I'm surprised they didn't throw a couple Vietnam vets into Red Dawn. I mean, the Vietnam vet in Red Dawn would have been like 40.

• 1:33:39Speaker 01

  But wasn't the dad, so that's the interesting part, the dad who gets captured, what was his background that he had trained them in?

• 1:33:45Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I don't know. Maybe, maybe he was.

• 1:33:48Speaker 01

  But then there's that Air Force pilot that gets dropped in, yeah, but I actually, I want to write that book of, because Ukraine is such a real story of, of, you know, from grandfathers on the roofs with RPGs that they had gotten from their other grandfather, that they took out this whole convoy of 100 vehicles in, in, right off of Bucha, actually, they, they, 100 convoy of, of vehicles, of Russian vehicles, because grandpa's on a roof hitting the last fuel vehicle with an RPG he had taken from the Russians at another location. The Red Dawn gets it really wrong, you gotta add some veterans in there.

• 1:34:21Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, well, yeah, America right now with guys, two decades worth of war.

• 1:34:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:34:27Jocko Willink?

  That'd be hard, we'd be a hard place to invade. We'd already be hard, just because we got a lot of guns around these parts. But now that we have 20 years of combat experience too, guys, everyone between the ages of like, what, I guess maybe 25 and 55? I'm 55, by the way, so that's like, yes, or even older than me, and guys that are 65.

• 1:34:50Speaker 01

  The manual is so specific, actually, even for a US veteran is, how many times, we do a lot of, we did a lot of defensive, like, even within Ramadi, you know, defensive site, but what if you're the, the civilian now helping design the defense of the entire city? And, and your goal is just to keep them out, or to attrit them, all of this, that very common urban warfare history that has worked, even against us, threw that into the book, and the fact that they immediately translated it into actions.

• 1:35:18Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and that's where you get this lesson here, uh, service. Service is the act of helping or working for someone beyond yourself. One of the US Army Corps values, selfless service, teaches, put the welfare of the nation, the army, and your subordinates before your own. Selfless service is larger than just one person, and serving your country, you are doing your duty loyally without the thought of recognition or gain. The basic building block of selfless service is the commitment of each team member to go a little further, endure a little longer, and look a little closer to see how he or she can add to the effort. That value captured what I saw in Bucha and what I have seen in other war zones. Service means putting something greater than yourself first.

• 1:35:59Jocko Willink?

  When your family, your community, or your nation is under attack, when freedom, yours or someone else's is threatened, or where there is a bully, and I hate bullies, you stand up to. To serve is to step forward. Powerful.

• 1:36:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, and that guy wasn't, just to be clear, he wasn't military, he was a civilian. I called him a Colonel because he had, I think he'd been one in the Soviet military a long, long time ago. And he formed like a militia, like we would want in a neighborhood, but actually, how many people would volunteer to, to serve and be that? And that's what you saw in Ukraine, and why they survived the, the initial onslaught was just a bunch of civilians standing up and saying, no.

• 1:36:38Jocko Willink?

  Going out and making things happen.

• 1:36:39Speaker 01

  Serving each other. There are some chaos that it caused as well as giving civilians weapons also without training, which is a bit of, of the, what's your plan, whether you talk about, and I get asked this a lot. The book was translated in sixteen different languages. It isn't, you know, cut and paste. It does depend on culture, service, preparation. Access to weapons really important. Um, if you're going to resist an invasion, like you said here, depending on what state you, you might attack, you might, but are they going to be organized? Um, because there's, there's an element that was really interesting about the Ukraine war. It was just about slowing the Russians down, because if you can get into the city, like we were talking about the attack of Baghdad,

• 1:37:19Speaker 01

  which the plan was to encircle the entire city of six million and clear it house by house, which would have went horribly. But if you can get inside that city and do a psychological, then people actually lose that service mentality, that will to fight. Like, well, it's over now. There's a, there's an American tank sitting in the middle of Baghdad. It's over, right? And they all walk away.

• 1:37:40Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Yeah. And it's interesting. I mean, the, the way the locals can fight compared to, you know, the invading army. I mean, even, even, you know, in Iraq, once the Anbar Awakening kicked off and you had the locals, the tribal leaders that were putting their tribesmen out into the Iraqi police, and now they were policing up the areas. It was like so much easier, because they're just, they understand the culture better. They can make things happen smoother. Um, fast forward a little bit, we're in Ranger School.

• 1:38:05Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:38:06Jocko Willink?

  Phase two. I knew I'd had it. Had to get off that mountain ASAP or I was done for. The ice storm was just my final stroke of rotten luck. I'd have to go back and start over. Was I crying as I turned away, letting the rest of the file pass me? I couldn't feel a thing. On the verge of passing out, I moved mechanically toward the ambulance when a familiar figure suddenly stood in my path. Nice night for a walk. It was Sergeant Hall, trying to smile through his grimace. In a winter wonderland, I rasped. Where are you heading, John? I tried to swallow, nodded toward the ambulance. Yeah? You sure about that?

• 1:38:47Jocko Willink?

  Shame welled up inside me, and it felt a lot worse than hypothermia. He gave my shoulder an encouraging jab. You can always quit tomorrow. That was not just a Ranger line, but it was the kind of fatherly wisdom I had never had growing up, passed to me at the exact moment I needed it most. I slowly nodded, tapping my last ounce of strength, I about faced, and we took shelter. And I'm gonna fast forward a little bit to Ranger School Phase Three. Meanwhile, more men fell out with foot pain. Seeing their faces as the stretchers carried them off was heartbreaking,

• 1:39:26Jocko Willink?

  and never more so than when I went to the weekly religious service offered to Rangers in the middle of the swamp. There was Sergeant Hall, and just seeing him gave me a burst of energy. But when I greeted him, he hung his head in near tear, tears. His feet were so swollen, he was wearing boots two sizes bigger, but that wasn't enough to quell the pain. I guess it wasn't, I guess it just wasn't meant to be, he muttered. Well, Sarge, uh, you know, he looked up sharply. What? You can always quit tomorrow. He stared at me long and hard. Then, holding a tree for

• 1:40:05Jocko Willink?

  support, he hauled himself up to his feet. I'll walk you out, John. It was my turn to steady him, the way a family does. That moment sealed it for me. He was no longer just my sergeant, he was my brother. His face was so red from holding it in, I thought he was going to burst, but he didn't quit that day or the next. And then miraculously, his pains largely subsided, and he carried on.

• 1:40:31Jocko Willink?

  Guys were there for each other in those frigging dire moments.

• 1:40:34Speaker 01

  And by random luck, um, he, he appears in the book multiple times, as, as much as my development as a, from civilian to Ranger to whatever, um, Sergeant Hall, Leon Hall, later Colonel Hall, uh, I actually was just with them for summer vacation with the kids, um, was there. The Ranger School, like we talked about, is, is our, is going to test your character, um, all the way, break you down. That one was interesting, as a Ranger instructor, and I know your, your time as an instructor, but for this one, the uniqueness of what the, what that sleep deprivation, food deprivation will do to the human body, depending on what status, you know, everything from child up to that moment

• 1:41:16Speaker 01

  will do to the human body. Ranger School exposes so many, like, you would never see it unless you went to that environment, what that does to the body. And one of those things was what he was experiencing, which, you know, we were in the mountain phase in Dahloneka, Georgia during the winter, where the, it was at times negative twenty. Uh, so just freezing temperatures. And you're in that phase, and you go to the swamps of Florida, in, in, in lower Florida, and, and it's in the nineties. Well, some people's feet had frozen so bad, and it chillblain, not frostbite, but chillblain, that those molecules, when they thawed, um, they didn't like thaw correctly or something, but it caused like them to be walking on needles for not one day, but like, it just didn't stop. And that's what he

• 1:41:59Speaker 01

  was experiencing, very unique human stuff. And as much as, actually, I gotta tell you this, because it was freaky. In the, in the mountain phase, as an instructor, you go back and you see some cadets that, or some students, call them studs, had to go to another phase because their necks would basically be locked down, and they'd be facing down. This huge hump would form on the back of their neck. We called it rubber neck, because their, their muscles just weren't so developed that carrying that rucksack on an incline had done something to their neck, and it was a real, like, medical phenomenon that would happen. Freaky. They were a hundred percent fine, and some of them kept going, just looking up, uh, and like, you all right? Like, I'm fine. I, I can do this, uh, what the human body does. But the

• 1:42:42Speaker 01

  fact that he was with me, that was one of the themes in the book that I wanted to make the theme, although there's lots of things of, you know, the, you, of course, have talked about on the show many times, but the, the sheer ability just to take one more step, just to wait one more day, um, what that will do to your, your mentality, let alone mind over body. And, but the fact that I wasn't alone, that he was there in the course with me was, was so unique for me to experience. And there are other times, um, when he was still there with me, but in that part of, you know, that, where the US Army went really bad with the, the army of one kind of aspect versus, you know, be

• 1:43:22Speaker 01

  all you can be, all this stuff, that you're never an army of one. And I wasn't in that school uniquely, and even though it wasn't, he was in a different platoon, that just his presence for me at that age, uh, was such an immense thing, but that, that motto that was, you can always quit tomorrow, was really big for us in that course.

• 1:43:42Jocko Willink?

  Uh, your lesson is not just about quitting, but family. Family is blood, of course, but not exclusive to blood. The truth is bigger than that. Families found wherever people choose to walk through the fire together, refusing to quit on one another. That is the real lesson. No one is meant to go through life alone. We all need people who steady us when we stumble and remind us that we can endure. When Leon told me, you can always quit tomorrow, it was more than a Ranger line, it was wisdom given at the exact moment I needed it most. Fast forward a little bit, um, and this gets into the best Ranger competition. That's a hardcore evolution right there.

• 1:44:17Speaker 01

  It is.

• 1:44:18Jocko Willink?

  So, so tell me about, because they take it serious.

• 1:44:21Speaker 01

  Yes, they do.

• 1:44:22Jocko Willink?

  The army does not play around.

• 1:44:23Speaker 01

  They do not.

• 1:44:24Jocko Willink?

  When it comes to the best Ranger competition. So what unit were you stationed at when you did it?

• 1:44:27Speaker 01

  I was in the Ranger Training Brigade. So I was a Ranger School instructor, was the only chance I was gonna get to do it. Um, so fascinating who I, who wins the competition, but just to do the training and to do the competition, which is, for us, is like the Olympics of.

• 1:44:42Jocko Willink?

  Do you, do you get selected from the Ranger instructor group to represent at the best Ranger challenge, uh, Ranger competition?

• 1:44:52Speaker 01

  You do your own competitions in each battalion, and then in the regiment. So each division basically gets, I think, two teams. In the Ranger Regiment, because it's the best Ranger, gets a little bit more. Both the Ranger unit, you know, the, the three battalions and the school get a little bit more slots, but you have to compete. So you do a competition at, within the unit, um, in each one of the battalions, and then you come do it. So then, yeah, you have to get selected. And they select individuals and they make teams, because it's a two-man competition on who they think will win. So buy your, all your scores and whatever it is. And they cut you from duty, which is hard, why an officer, it's hard for officers to do it, because in order to compete for it, um, you're training like six months in advance of this. It's an endurance competition.

• 1:45:37Jocko Willink?

  You trained six months in advance just to get selected to be one of the guys? Or are you saying, once you get selected, now you're training for six months?

• 1:45:43Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 1:45:44Jocko Willink?

  And you, you, so you kinda had to be an ass kicker?

• 1:45:47Speaker 01

  You had to be in extreme physical shape, just to make it to the team, but also survive the team, which is actually, as you know, one of the stories is that, how many people go into the competition injured, because this is this ultra endurance competition, that you're training so much to prepare for these three days that you, you're over training. Basically, you, you exert yourself, and you have all this medical team, but you're like a pro athlete by the time you join the team. You have a, you know, dietitian and, and medical team, all this stuff.

• 1:46:17Jocko Willink?

  The whole nine yards.

• 1:46:18Speaker 01

  They take it very seriously.

• 1:46:20Jocko Willink?

  Does, does every unit that participates take it that seriously?

• 1:46:23Speaker 01

  No, no, some.

• 1:46:24Jocko Willink?

  But the Rangers have to take it seriously.

• 1:46:26Speaker 01

  Well, if you don't, so this is the thing, if, if a division, and I, as a Ranger instructor, because I actually helped run the first year, and then it was my second year as a Ranger instructor that I competed in it. The teams that, every division can send a team. If you send a team, and you haven't let them prepare for a three-day competition, which is always the fascinating part, like, you could be the fastest, like a twelve-mile road march, it's the Army. You could be super fast in doing that. But then you, if you don't do that back to back to back for three days, you won't make it. So fifty percent of the competitors who may have been given six months to train or may have not, fifty percent, just historically of this competition, die out in the first day, because they just, they're college

• 1:47:07Speaker 01

  athletes or whatever, they're not trained to do three days of it nonstop with, you know, an MRE a day.

• 1:47:13Jocko Willink?

  How did they screen for, to make sure that you are good for three days to get you on the team?

• 1:47:20Speaker 01

  So the competition, the, the tryout was a full day and that's pretty, a pretty good test. Because there is, and you're with now, you can do all the testing of how fast you can recover. How much lactic acid are you building? Like all these things, you can test for somebody's ability to recover quickly. And that's the competition. The competition is something really hard. And then there's depending on how, which is really fascinating. Again, just like Ranger School is so developed by if you finish faster, you have more rest. You have more recovery time. But if you're, if you're barely surviving, it's going to trickle into the next event. And you're now the first for the next event based on where you placed. The way they tested, we tested was the, the tryout to get on the team was a full day.

• 1:48:01Speaker 01

  So some people would die out in that day because they gave a hundred percent in the five mile run and the 12 mile road march. And then they're not ready for the, you know, thousand meter swim and all the rest of it. And they actually just, their body quits on them. So it's pretty easy selection. Okay. He's not on the team. So there are a couple of ways that they.

• 1:48:17Jocko Willink?

  But it is weird how some people just have a certain genetic like composition that makes them better for this type of event. Where I could see someone going, oh, you know, this guy was a great, you know, wrestler. We, we should put him in best Ranger. It's like, hmm, that might not be the best call. But this guy was great, whatever, you know, because there obviously there's going to be wrestlers that are, would be awesome. But I'm just saying it's, it's a very unique.

• 1:48:42Speaker 01

  It's like.

• 1:48:42Jocko Willink?

  Competition.

• 1:48:43Speaker 01

  It's like the MMA of endurance competition. You can't be good at one thing. Doesn't matter if it's physical, because there's some tactical, there's land navigation, shooting, rope climbing. There's all these other individual skills that you have to be good with as well. But the overall foundation, if you can't go for 60 plus hours nonstop, which is, which is fascinating. The guy who won my year is, you know, is a special unit person. Like you cheated, you're already at like this elite status of, of selection into an elite status. So it's just like an every, and he's like, I didn't prepare for this. This is another day at work.

• 1:49:20Jocko Willink?

  Oh damn.

• 1:49:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:49:21Jocko Willink?

  Talking smack.

• 1:49:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, smack.

• 1:49:23Jocko Willink?

  Wasn't he like 36 years old?

• 1:49:24Speaker 01

  He was. That's, that's, that's my research partner now, Liam Collins.

• 1:49:28Jocko Willink?

  Oh, right on.

• 1:49:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:49:30Jocko Willink?

  And I think though the endurance athletes, if I remember correctly, endurance, endurance athletes peak at like that age. They peak at like 35, like triathletes, I want to say the, the best triathletes are in that age zone. Am I right, Echo Charles? Do you have any idea?

• 1:49:44Speaker 01

  I don't know.

• 1:49:45Jocko Willink?

  Do you have any idea? Well, thanks for your input.

• 1:49:48Speaker 01

  But it, it, he's a freak of nature, to be clear. So even at 36, let alone at, at 46, that I still knew him and he's still running a hundred miles a day.

• 1:49:57Jocko Willink?

  Just beast.

• 1:49:58Speaker 01

  And it doesn't, and it's not just the runner, because that's also the competition. Like you, great, you run fast, but that doesn't mean you can carry a lot of weight for an unknown amount of distance over the three days.

• 1:50:09Jocko Willink?

  Does the Ranger competition change year to year?

• 1:50:12Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And there's some fascinating stories of where one sergeant major comes in, like I want to do this, this, this year. Like we did pugle sticks one day, like that's weird. And how do you, because it's all about points and weighted points.

• 1:50:24Jocko Willink?

  How did they point the pugle sticks?

• 1:50:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. You fall, you did it on a plank. So this guy had watched the wrong like movie or something, but you did it on a plank. And if you fell off, you, you, you won the round and you get a certain weight. Some, again, it's almost a science to the competition as well as you know, which events are weighted the most. So it's not just who got first place, but that, like the endless road march, the first night ends with an unknown distance road march. It can be 12 miles, it can be 30 miles. It's weighted a lot because it's, it's, it's so you, if you win that, then it doesn't matter if you won the 10 events before it. That's weighted more. So a true strategy, and this is what the teams will do. Each team has a coach knows where, okay, you need to, you need to finish top three in this event.

• 1:51:10Speaker 01

  As much as so as like the pugles, you just gotta do your best and it doesn't really matter. It's not weighted that much.

• 1:51:16Jocko Willink?

  Check. This particular thing, you ended up falling off the cargo net as you were trying to go down at a high rate of speed. And you're falling to your death. You know, this is one of the times you almost died. And in the last second, your foot got tangled up and like spared your life.

• 1:51:32Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:51:33Jocko Willink?

  Did you get injured? Did it rip your knee apart or anything?

• 1:51:36Speaker 01

  Nothing, freaky. And it is in front of everybody because everybody can watch this like a, this is done every year for Ben in Georgia. And so everybody, they have spectators everywhere. My family's there, but we had trained this because we have home court advantage. Some people say it's cheating. If you work at Ranger School, where you can of course, train on all these, there's more than one obstacle courses. There's a two mile one, this is one of the shorter ones. And you develop tactics to do every, you shave seconds off of everything. So we developed the tactic of this 40 foot cargo net. You go up and then you're stringing one line. If you follow one line up on the way back, you just curl your legs up and you just slide down it. You have control.

• 1:52:15Speaker 01

  But we hadn't accounted even working there that between all the practice that we had done on all these obstacles, they upgraded them. Like they paint things, they switch out nets. So on the morning of, we get to this obstacle, we're doing our method. This, the entire net had been switched out and had been tightened. So when I went to do that tactic, I just free fell. Cause I didn't have my feet in it and I just free fell 40 foot off this thing. And just by again, sheer luck, I was, I was falling now headfirst down and my boot caught into the net, tangled in the net and stopped me and my head is like this far from the, the bottom. Freaky. And then I still gotta get off and keep going.

• 1:53:01Speaker 01

  So it was a split second and all the, the, the black shirts and Ranger instructors were, you know, black Rangers were running to, to me. And I had to keep going because I, you know, this, this competition I had prepared for, for so long.

• 1:53:12Jocko Willink?

  And you guys end up what 12th?

• 1:53:14Speaker 01

  Yes, me and my partner who later, you know, cuts the dead weight, he wins another year. That's what I used to say in my own defense is that that was the first year. And everybody, you know, 50% of the competitors die off on the first day, just their bodies fail. Doesn't matter how, how good you are. And just to finish was, was a badge, for me, a badge of honor. But nobody up to that point, that year, 2007, had ever won their competition, who had not done it before. Because you learn so much about your body and what training you need to do. And actually the winners would say your training started the, the day after the competition. You, you gotta increase that, those injuries, that, that overtraining by training for that day. And some people, you know, had won multiple times.

• 1:54:01Speaker 01

  Liam had done it before, so who wins? Yes, I got 12th place with me and my partner. He will later goes on and does it twice more and wins on his third time with a different partner.

• 1:54:11Jocko Willink?

  Are you allowed to eat? Like is nutrition open?

• 1:54:14Speaker 01

  No. So back to that, you know, difference between Rangers and SEALs. Now you got one meal, you get one meal a day during the competitions. There's not, it changes again, like they said, the.

• 1:54:25Jocko Willink?

  Is it MRE?

• 1:54:26Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:54:27Jocko Willink?

  Damn dude.

• 1:54:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:54:28Jocko Willink?

  Let's go.

• 1:54:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. And it's 60 straight day. I mean, the first night is this unknown distance road march. The second night is the land navigation where the, the farther you cover, the more points you get, the, you know, the more you're, you're up in your level. So that's the second night. There's like historical events, they'll change a lot of the in betweens, but there are historical events because they are the crushers that actually cold, they're hard and it makes it easier.

• 1:54:51Jocko Willink?

  I'm surprised they don't, I know, I've seen it on television before, but I haven't seen it like covered, like on Wide World of Sports or something.

• 1:54:59Speaker 01

  No, the history channel, history channel covered it for multiple years. ESPN covered it for multiple years.

• 1:55:05Jocko Willink?

  I guess I just missed it.

• 1:55:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. And it was actually rated, I think it was, I don't know what magazine, Discovery Magazine is the, the toughest military competition in the world. If I.

• 1:55:13Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:14Speaker 01

  How hard.

• 1:55:15Jocko Willink?

  Freaking no joke, man.

• 1:55:16Speaker 01

  Yeah. And it was just an honor to, to do it, serve and to finish it. I was.

• 1:55:20Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:20Speaker 01

  And, and actually the person who picked me up afterwards with Leon, there he is, Sergeant Hall, was the guy who, who did it. But it's a good joke. And I see Liam who won that year. And it was like, like another day at work for him. And they won, like sometimes it's close, like, and it's all changing, like him. And it was actually that his partner was a sniper when I was in 275, when I got my ear bit off. That's how small, you know, the community is. And they're all, they're both in a special unit at that point. And it was like, they were in the lead from day one and by like a great margin. Like it doesn't matter what you do, you're not going to catch them. It's not like that every year.

• 1:55:57Jocko Willink?

  Studs.

• 1:55:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:55:59Jocko Willink?

  Awesome. Fast forward a little bit, we're going back to Iraq. Patrol, mounted patrol, Humvee.

• 1:56:06Jocko Willink?

  Something had hit us really hard. Was it an RPG roadside bomb? No, there was something else outside May's window wreckage of some other vehicle, but whose? I cranked my neck, found Sergeant Wood in the seat behind May in the same predicament pierced by shards stuck in his seat. His door and window smashed too. Guys trying to help. My door opened and hands pulled me out. Everything hurt like hell, but at least I could stand. I spotted Khalid, our interpreter, a few meters away. He'd been sitting behind me and looked shaken, but intact. Where was Brooks? I glanced up and backed toward the turret, but he was no longer maintaining that manning the heavy machine gun. Then I spotted him among the group, helping May and Wood. I later learned that he'd been thrown from the vehicle landing in a nearby field in a freak stroke of luck that kept him alive.

• 1:56:48Jocko Willink?

  The gun itself was gone, sheared off in the crash, but the crap, but crashed with what? Was it a suicide ta- attack? Nobody seemed to think so. It was an Iraqi civilian van heading for Kirkuk in the middle of the night without any lights on. It flew past our parked vehicles and T-boned us at what my guys all agreed was easily 60 miles an hour. My blood ran cold. How bad is it? Trust me, sir, you don't want to see it. He was right. Being in command, though, I didn't have much choice. Still a bit dazed, I came around for a look. From the road, it looked like the van had slammed into a brick wall. The front was a split, a splay of abstract metal, metal sculpture dripping with engine and body bodily fluids.

• 1:57:30Jocko Willink?

  I had seen men torn apart in war, but nothing compared to the wreck in front of me. At least three corpses. Was it four? There's six, sir. It looks like the two in the back are still breathing. I saw that was true, but what I also saw made me think they wouldn't be breathing much longer. Then I heard Wood cry out and turned to my own. We need to call a medevac, I said. Done, sir. They're already in the air. Minutes later, the chopper was putting down medical teams, jumping out in full gear. Minutes after that, more headlights coming from the north. What had to be every emergency rescue asset from the cop was pulling up in a semi circle around the accident. I pulled my guys back to let the pros in. They had to cut May and Wood free, bandage them up before they could bleed out.

• 1:58:12Jocko Willink?

  Both were hefted onto litters to be whisked off by the chopper, but May wasn't having it. I'm good, sir. We don't have to do this. Hey, Lieutenant. I came closer. The doc stood next to him, shaking his head. He's not going to walk this off. That bandage looks good, sir. That's all I need, May pleaded. I knew where he was coming from. That soldier instinct to defy all adversity, to sacrifice and to never leave your team or your family. Then I glanced at the wreck and at the dead civilians now mercifully covered by ponchos. Should I have ordered the medics to leave May to let him stay with us? No, they would have looked at me like I was out of my mind. So he was carried off to the medevac helicopter yelling all the way. They put him in the chopper, which got him and Wood to the best army hospitals, first in Baghdad and then in Europe.

• 1:58:58Jocko Willink?

  Following surgeries, surgery and physical therapy, both were able to walk again, but not run, and both were discharged from the army. May saw it clearly that night. Once he was on the chopper, he knew he would not finish the fight with his wartime family. What May displayed in that moment was something I had read about in books, seen in movies about World War Two in Vietnam and witnessed many times already in our platoon in Iraq. Another aspect of a soldier's commitment to duty involves how they respond to injury. You might expect that being wounded is a golden ticket to get out of the war zone and return safety at home. The reality is often the opposite.

• 1:59:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, gnarly. Yeah, that was a.

• 1:59:39Speaker 01

  Luckily, well, I think I mentioned it. I mean, this is 2003. This is the time we're rolling around in regular cargo Humvees with, you know, with slats on the side. I was in a M998, which is an up armor or 1096, forget what it is, 1096, I think. An up armored Humvee, just one that we had. Um, and we were churning in a road and the thing T-bonus like six miles. Had it been any other vehicle in my formation, all dead instantaneously, but the fact that we were basically in this wheeled tank.

• 2:00:10Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:10Speaker 01

  Um, it saved us, didn't save all six civilians in this van.

• 2:00:14Jocko Willink?

  Did any of them live?

• 2:00:15Speaker 01

  None of them. They didn't make it to even pick up. They're, they were all dead. Uh, and then how bad the metal that did, it still, it still collapsed that side went into the legs of, uh, May and Woods.

• 2:00:29Jocko Willink?

  Lesson duty is an obligation. As much as we should all serve something greater than ourselves, we also each have a duty in the military. That duty is both moral and legal. The army, army definition includes a simple but profound instruction, fulfill your obligations. Doing your duty means more than carrying your assigned tasks. Duty means being able to accomplish the tasks as part of a team. You fulfill your obligations as part of your unit every time you resist the temptation to take shortcuts that might undermine the integrity of the final product. But duty is not only a military concept, it is part of everyday life. Every day we face temptations for shortcuts, temptations to look away, temptations to serve ourselves rather than others.

• 2:01:09Jocko Willink?

  To choose duty is to choose responsibility to keep faith with those who rely on us.

• 2:01:19Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Not always easy.

• 2:01:21Speaker 01

  No, and I had to get up that next morning for myself and, and go back on patrol.

• 2:01:26Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:26Speaker 01

  New vehicle, lost up to two individuals, only, only, um, and then go back to work this duty.

• 2:01:34Jocko Willink?

  The war doesn't stop.

• 2:01:35Speaker 01

  No.

• 2:01:37Jocko Willink?

  Um, fast forward a little bit, and we kind of discussed a little bit this in the beginning, but in late 2020, numerous articles that noted that new fighting had broken out in the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karbar. How do you say that?

• 2:01:51Speaker 01

  Nagorno-Karabakh?

• 2:01:53Jocko Willink?

  Nagorno-Karabakh. That news is unlikely to garner attention from anyone outside the family in the region or some expertise in the former republics. Nagorno-Karabakh had long been a flashpoint between Armenians and Azerbaijanis going back to the early 1990s. I read how the tide had turned when the Azerbaijan, Azerbaijani Special Forces scaled the sheer cliffs, rising more than 400 feet that protected the mountain city of Susha. So we talked about this a little bit, but just tell us about this crazy offensive operation by these Azerbaijani Special Forces and what they did.

• 2:02:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. So this is the book that I have coming out in October. This is actually the story of 2021, when I went in by myself. Interesting because Liam's my boss now at this point. So the guy who beat me in Best Ranger 2007 becomes my boss at West Point. And I retired. Now I'm doing this war research. Like, I want to go here. I don't know if you can, and I'm in 2021, uh, like nine ish months after the, the war had ended. Going through checkpoints as a civilian. It's one of those times like this is too much. I, as much as that tunnel was as me, the only American anybody in this entire region has ever seen going through Azerbaijani checkpoints right beside Russian checkpoints, trying to get to the city

• 2:03:12Speaker 01

  that ends the 2020 war. So this is the city of Susha and why I was there as an urban warfare guy.

• 2:03:18Speaker 01

  Um, the war starts in these massive, you can't describe it. We tried to in the book. Uh, line of control, flat, open land, uh, mine, wire, wire pickets as far as you can see. Entire cities that used to be there, taking brick by brick to nothing. So they're, they're a city on the map and you drive by them like, where is it? And all you see is, as far as you see foundations of homes, because they, they took every brick from these cities and demolished them. It starts in the flatlands and then it goes into high mountains where as the Azerbaijanis in, in September of 2022, break through the line of control, have a breakthrough, which was, um, really just soldiers on the ground doing it. It isn't drones or anything.

• 2:04:01Speaker 01

  Then there's a war that continues on and while they're fighting in one part of the battlefield, they send 400 special forces um, through the wood line despite, you know, aerial movements. Um, and they have to basically ruck for about 40 kilometers with about 60 pounds on their backs to get to this city that is important to both sides, the city of Susha. It sits on a cliff 400 feet and it's an ancient city. And why? Because it's a fortress city. And it overlooks actually the capital city. So it's like decisive, what we call decisive terrain. I had known a little bit about it, but you know, again, I want to go see it, walk the ground like,

• 2:04:40Speaker 01

  um, not only follow the path that these, um, basically a ranger unit, an Azerbaijani unit, 400 of them walk. And what they do to try to stay hidden for this 40 kilometer movement. And they set up a patrol bases around this cliff city. Well, what they don't even know, and this is how the, the special forces kept it so secret. They assigned us special forces general basically to this operation to take this city of Susha. And there's, uh, four teams of 10 who have the job of scaling the cliffs. Because this, it's a really easily defendable city. I mean, it sits on a cliff and there's only one entrance that you can fully block off.

• 2:05:21Speaker 01

  And they had lost it in 1990s, but they, even the 400 that are of these teams don't know that there are these four teams of 10 that are like the sniper, the, you know, SEALs. Actually, they, they, they do develop the, some joint task forces. So they had their version of SEALs and others in this, this element, but nobody knows that this is happening, that these four teams, uh, one of them gets actually compromised. And there's, they send, uh, a whole unit to another city to, as a diversion. Like it's a, the, the planning that went into this was masterful. And then they have the 400 that are split up into 100 person teams that also have to scale basically cliffs.

• 2:06:01Speaker 01

  Not the, the 400 sheer, but like straight up hands to infiltrate this city and take it with very minimal fight, because as soon as those four infiltrated the city, they, they set up in like hotels. Um, and serve as snipers to start taking out the defenders and reporting on the defenders. But then a fog rolls in. So this is the whole thing about, you know, Murphy. Um, you, you have this key piece of technology. So nobody's drones work. So it's actually November 7th, 2020. And the Azerbaijan, the Armenians actually send massive tanks and reinforcements from the capital city towards the, so that it starts being like this. Like this moment where it can go both ways and they run out of anti-tank guided munitions

• 2:06:46Speaker 01

  to do anything about the tanks because they can only bring what they carried with them. It's such an epic story that you would think would come from war two and it's 2020. But a fall grows in eliminates all the drones, nobody has drones and it's just battle to the very end. But they've basically back and forth and they've taken the inside of the city. Fascinating and it ends the war because once Susha, the city is called clear now they have the high ground over the capital. So Armenia goes through Russia, basically asked for ceasefire and the war ends right there because that urban city was taken. So as an urban warfare guy, like that's, I need to research that and try to recreate the story.

• 2:07:30Speaker 01

  And in 2021, I was able to recreate some of the story, but that's where I've been spending the last two years is going and learning every part of it. So I have a lot more context now, of course, the time passed of talking to every general in all the previous battles, walking the ground, making new maps of it.

• 2:07:48Jocko Willink?

  And you talked to the guys that were, that were on that 40 man element?

• 2:07:52Speaker 01

  Yes, yeah, yeah.

• 2:07:54Jocko Willink?

  How's their attitude about this whole thing?

• 2:07:56Speaker 01

  They have a very, um, it's, this was the hardest project I've ever done and probably will remain because of not only the translation problems, because you know, you, you have to have a translator there and we're understanding, doing this research and I know you, we talked about SLA Marshall going in like, no, he had access to World War One, World War Two, people right after what they had experienced. But I'm talking to people on the same team that were in the same battle with different views on how it went and, and trying to arbitrate, okay, you said you, you were here. He says he, uh, that's made this really hard to recreate this, this, especially that battle, but we actually did all the battles of the war.

• 2:08:41Speaker 01

  And this is a pretty big, all the decisive moments. Um, those guys were very quiet, didn't want to talk, you know? But learning about the fact that how they planned it, that, that general and kept that secret of the, the four teams away from the other guys who had no clue that they were there and then do those deconflictions was really interesting to learn about.

• 2:09:03Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. No, I can't wait till that book comes out. Um, lesson here, discipline. Many people think that military disciplines, discipline is simply about following orders. It is that, the take that hill moment when obedience and courage come together, but is also much more. True discipline is doing the right thing, even when no one is watching, when there is no order to follow. It is acting in accordance with your values, maintaining control of your thoughts and actions in an absence of supervision. Discipline is hard work, consistency and goal setting. It is, it is getting up every morning to exercise, not because you want to, but because it's part of the job and part, and the part of the job that demands it. Like the Azerbaijani soldiers who climbed those mountains to reach Susha, discipline is the endurance of both body and mind in the face of challenge.

• 2:09:47Jocko Willink?

  One of the earliest lessons in discipline I ever learned came from my mentor, brother and family, Leon. At Fort Polk, he showed me that discipline was the daily grind, the choice to put in the work when others would not. The military provides endless opportunities for advancement, physical development, specialized schools, competitions, education and leadership, but only for those willing to outwork everyone else. Leon and I set goals and worked toward them every single day. We stayed late, studied, trained and pursued mastery while others were content to simply show up and do their job. That was discipline, not waiting for orders, but creating your own standards and living up to them.

• 2:10:25Speaker 01

  I think you say discipline is freedom?

• 2:10:27Jocko Willink?

  I do believe I say that.

• 2:10:29Speaker 01

  And it, for me, the, the research is that this job that I have where there is no like guidebook of like how to succeed, it's the discipline of going to these areas, finding that information, getting to the truth, that is a, one of the reasons I wanted that to be in there.

• 2:10:44Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, no, it's the truth. Uh, speaking of Fort Polk, so Fort Polk is the Joint Readiness Training Center. It's where the, where the army sends its brigades, battalions, divisions to go and train and get ready to go to war. It's sort of like a big giant, uh, test in the field and they have one out there and they have one in Fort, Fort Irwin, California. I've never been to the Fort Polk one, but I've been to Fort Irwin one.

• 2:11:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, which is bigger.

• 2:11:09Jocko Willink?

  Freaking out state. It's a, it's insane. Like it's amazing.

• 2:11:12Speaker 01

  We have three, they're called the Dirt Combat Training Centers, one in Germany as well.

• 2:11:15Jocko Willink?

  Okay. Oh, that's right. Yeah, I forgot about that one. So I guess I've only been to one out of the three. Uh, and you actually got stationed there as what we call OPFOR, which is opposing force. So you were a bad guy.

• 2:11:25Speaker 01

  I was a bad guy and I learned more about field craft and fighting than I would for my rest of my career.

• 2:11:30Jocko Willink?

  I'll tell you, like the guys that would come and work for me at Trade at, the same thing, like, cause they, they would be OPFOR. Not all of them, but some of the guys would be OPFOR and you just get so good, so sneaky, so crafty, your field craft goes up and just everything gets better. And, uh, yeah, you learn. So you got to do that. How long, how long were you stationed there for?

• 2:11:47Speaker 01

  About, so this is before going for that ear bite fight. Uh, that's one of my first units. So I was there about 16 months before I applied to go to Ranger Regiment, um, which is fascinating going to other armies is the armies that take those individuals. We really don't, although that's supposed to be a combat deployable unit. What if you took all of your OPFOR and then sent them into combat?

• 2:12:08Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:09Speaker 01

  The Israelis do that.

• 2:12:10Jocko Willink?

  That's smart.

• 2:12:11Speaker 01

  Uh, they send their instructors, they'll take, they actually, and I, it's fascinating learning in Gaza where they'll take their instructors and turn that, those instructors, which, which are going to be your elite. Okay. Now you're a unit and immediately push them into the fight.

• 2:12:23Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, no, that's, that's awesome. Uh, so we're there, you're there and you're, you know, it's funny because you just said, was the army of one? You said you're never an army of one, but you actually were an army of one at this point.

• 2:12:35Speaker 01

  I was.

• 2:12:36Jocko Willink?

  So, uh, taking a prone firing stance, you, you basically were like, you're, you're, OPFOR unit got hit, there was chaos and confusion and you end up alone in the field.

• 2:12:45Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:12:46Jocko Willink?

  And you decided you're just going to go full rogue Rambo activities and started sniping and killing people.

• 2:12:51Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:12:52Jocko Willink?

  Uh, taking a prone firing stance, I drew practice bead on the silhouettes moving below 200 meters off, not an impossible shot, but no sure thing either. I keyed in on one figure who had to be a senior sergeant, just by the way he stood, planted fist on hips, barking orders at unseen subordinates. He liked to peer off into the distance, standing perfectly still. He was like General Patton or somebody, in other words, begging to get shot. That's kind of like the guy I just described earlier. I waited until I saw an observer controller loitering about 10 meters from him, then fired. The shot cracked through the air and sure enough, Patton's sensor lit up. This is laser, a high-speed laser tag system. He turned yelling at his men, assuming it was friendly fire, but the ref was right there to set him straight.

• 2:13:35Jocko Willink?

  And just like that, I was gone again, hunting for my next sniper perch. And so you're out there for three days, just go, going full Rambo. And what's, what you bring up that's important is that your, your buddy, um, Sergeant Hall, they're trying to shut you down and the talk and everything. They're like, hey, we gotta stop, we gotta pull him out of the field. We don't know where he is and all this stuff. And Sergeant Hall's like, hey, he's good to go. Just let him keep doing what he's doing.

• 2:14:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. Cause it's not normal for a single, as you know, in any military to have a single guy that you haven't heard from in days, like it, it would be like a entire post shut down and do search and rescue for this guy. But Leon, who had gotten killed, he, he's my, my sergeant, this is before Ranger School. We, we all got killed and I'm, and he is the one now sitting basically watch over them, not letting them like, and he would see reports of people getting shot where it just didn't make sense that there was a, you know, people dying from one OPFOR guy, like he's, he's there, he's, leave them be. If not, they would have shut the whole, literally the whole post, the whole exercise down to search for this one soldier specialist out by himself.

• 2:14:43Speaker 01

  So the fact that I even was allowed to be out there was very unique and, and some people like, that's not, it didn't happen. Like it happened, it was crazy.

• 2:14:51Jocko Willink?

  And the lesson is never alone. And the military part of our creed is never leave, leave a fallen comrade. There's comfort in that promise, whether you are a soldier in the field, a nurse in the hospital ward, a teacher in the classroom, or anyone who's never feared being alone, who has ever feared being alone is the assurance that your people, your team and your community will come for you. But beyond that code lies an even deeper truth. You are never truly alone. When you are physically by yourself, even when you're physically by yourself, you carry the pack with you, the training, the names, the people who shaped you, the rhythm of their footsteps, the mission you share and the look on the mentor's face when they refuse to give up on you are all still forms of company. They march with you in memory and in muscle. Every skill you have mastered, every voice that guided you is still there, even in the

• 2:15:35Jocko Willink?

  silence. Check.

• 2:15:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, which is, first book, Connected Soldiers, about this virtual world is so many people go down dark roads thinking they're alone, like you're never alone. I wasn't alone in that moment and you're truly in life, you're never alone. You let yourself think that.

• 2:15:49Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:15:51Jocko Willink?

  Uh, fast forward another section of the book and again, it's not chronological. So we're going back to Iraq. Just as I was getting cozy one night in Kirkuk, some hot new intel came over the wire, a possible location for the ace of spades. Jaws dropped. We couldn't pronounce half the names on the most wanted cards, but everyone knew the ace of spades. El Jefe, the boss of bosses, Saddam Blankety Blank Hussein. About 168 square miles of Iraq to hide in, and someone thought the fallen tyrant was here in our sector. Visions of glory flashed through my head, conspicuous gallantry, headlines, ticker tape parades, even a ridiculous image of a White House reception and the Bush twins.

• 2:16:32Jocko Willink?

  The thought came and went in an instant. This was beyond a serious moment. This was the mission of all missions. And unlike a well-planned raid, we did not have months to build a mock site and rehearse every detail the way they would for the bin Laden operation years later. We had minutes. First things first, I called my squad leaders in and laid out what little intel we had, a suspected safe house west of the city center. A farm near the Tigris lowlands, not a fortified compound. Expect bodyguards in a fight. Reports mentioned suicide vests. Move fast, but, but think smart. Keep your heads. 20 minutes later, we were back on the road. So you got the freaking call that Saddam's out there.

• 2:17:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. And to move now, which as you, as you know, it made all that training because sometimes you will get zero time to do all that planning, what are TLPs, whatever, NDMP like, no, go now.

• 2:17:22Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's freaking epic.

• 2:17:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. And the fact, and I, I think I tell it, I mean, we do the search, of course, there's a dry hole and just, but the fact that he was found not far from, so this is really near Al Huijio, which is a really bad place, actually. He's found not too far from there outside of Tikrit, in a farmhouse in a hole. Like, did we miss him? So I always, you know, we were there when he was caught. This is really, and we were there in December by the time when he actually came, when they caught it, like, did we miss him? There's always that little question in my mind as it was just a farmhouse of nowhere. Like, well, he actually was caught in a farmhouse nowhere in a, in a hole. Like, did we miss him?

• 2:18:01Jocko Willink?

  Wait, did you like even have time to figure out where this intel was coming from? Was it just coming from like your, because you're a company commander at this point?

• 2:18:07Speaker 01

  Platoon leader.

• 2:18:09Jocko Willink?

  So you're a platoon, so is your company commander like, yo, here, they're saying Saddam's out, this target's like, go hit it.

• 2:18:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, it came from battalion, same thing. He, all he got was a grid and, and, and, and then some of that detail of like,

• 2:18:20Jocko Willink?

  Did you hear of other people hitting targets like that?

• 2:18:24Speaker 01

  No. Uh, we, we had done some missions for like chemical Ali and things like that. Again, I did the invasion, the deck of cards. So we had done a previous operation, uh, about a month before, much more organized though, with a battalion operation with multiple companies moving on this, this farmhouse that they thought chemical Ali was in. He wasn't there either. Uh, but that was not abnormal for this to be like, no, move now.

• 2:18:46Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:46Speaker 01

  Um, I don't know where the intel came from, but.

• 2:18:50Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's, that's definitely wild.

• 2:18:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:18:53Jocko Willink?

  We hit, we hit, we got intel about some chem bio site, you know, and we got jocked up full mop level four with the whole nine yards and went and hit that, but there was nothing in there. But again, it was a very like a short notice kind of thing. Cause I remember we're like scrambling and getting out our, our full mop levels for suits and putting the freaking rubber boots on and all that stuff. And, um, yeah, we didn't have a bunch of time to prepare for it. And you know, like 20, we got 20 minutes or I remember my, my commanding officer one, you know, he asked me like, hey, how much time do you guys need to, to roll out and hit a target? And I was like 15 minutes and he goes, no, seriously. And I was like, oh, I'm serious.

• 2:19:31Jocko Willink?

  You give me the location and the radio, uh, the frequencies of the battle space owner, we'll leave in 15 minutes. Like everyone's ready to go. So, yeah, 20 minutes, we're right there.

• 2:19:41Speaker 01

  We were doing those in Baghdad, there's time sensitive targets later, but this is, that's late, wait, you know, 2008, 2003, you're literally on, you know, Humvee top like, are you going to go this way? You're going to go that way. Uh, you got breach, you got outer security. If you've trained, you can, it is possible. It isn't ideal for sure, but it's possible.

• 2:19:58Jocko Willink?

  Dude, you must've been freaking, were your boys fired up?

• 2:20:01Speaker 01

  Everybody was fired up, but that's the thing is that gets us is like, did, I mean, he was moving at that time around like that, you know, like dressing like a woman, moving from farmhouse to farmhouse. It's like, we, we don't think that like it was a completely bad intel. It might've been. Might've not been the right farmhouse, but he might've been in there. You just never know. That gets us more than the craziness of just go.

• 2:20:25Jocko Willink?

  Uh, the lesson there is take action. A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week. General George S. Patton, words and Bonnie, the decisive leadership and belief that movement, even imperfect, beats paralysis. My mentors like Leon and Liam, of course, taught me how to, uh, taught me about setting goals. But from a firefight to life itself, it always comes down to taking action. Good things come from movement. Nothing changes without it. Whether you are leading soldiers, teaching cadets or facing personal decision, facing a personal decision, waiting for the perfect plan is often just fear disguised as caution. Boom. There you go.

• 2:21:04Jocko Willink?

  And, um, I guess we're getting kind of, uh, a little bit towards the back of this book. You're in Israel. Do you have a vest and helmet ready? That's always a good question.

• 2:21:16Jocko Willink?

  A minute later, we exited the building and hopped into a Jeep that drove us across the sand outpost to the general's command vehicle, which wasn't a black SUV or an IDF Hummer, but a Namer. Am I saying that right?

• 2:21:26Speaker 01

  A Namir.

• 2:21:27Jocko Willink?

  A Namir, essentially a tank with less firepower and extra armor. He showed it, he showed me in, gave me a seat and the driver wheeled us out the main gates. Within minutes, we'd crossed the border into Gaza. 15 minutes after that, we'd entered an urban area. I had no clue where we were, were. Finally, I asked. Khan Yunis. It was the place we just spent an hour discussing where his troops had fought the hardest, a notorious, a notorious terrorist stronghold, honeycombed with death traps. As you may have noticed, I visit places like Kiev, Susha, uh, Surat, Mumbai, where violent clashes recently took place, not during the actual battle itself.

• 2:22:05Jocko Willink?

  Now suddenly I was in a war wagon, infantry crammed in all around me, powering into a zone where heavily armed killers would definitely regard us as a primary target.

• 2:22:15Speaker 01

  This is the guy, I think we talked last time, the general Golpus, who's a, an Israeli Navy SEAL who they made a division commander. Um, and we're at his base, not in Gaza, talking through this battle of Khan Yunis. And I'm, and he's like, yeah, but let's go. And he just throws me in his, it's actually a tank with a, turned into an infantry pill, Schnucker, and he drives me into the, into the battle.

• 2:22:41Jocko Willink?

  We were taking a lot of hard turns. On the gunner's video monitor, I watched us skirt piles of rubble and squeeze through narrow passages between high buildings. We passed other IDF vehicles, dismounted squads, blocks and blocks of rubble. Then I heard gunfire, heavy machine guns and RPG booms, sounds I remembered in my bones, sounds you never forget, sounds you pray you'll never hear again. We came to a sudden halt, down with the ramp and we emerged. You never, you, you have a weapon, do you?

• 2:23:05Speaker 01

  I do. I have a weapon.

• 2:23:09Speaker 01

  It gets better.

• 2:23:10Jocko Willink?

  I would be like, bro, uh, yeah, I got a body, I got a body armor and helmet. Now give me a, a gun. It was a four-way intersection with tanks blocking all the other avenues, bombed out buildings all around, and what gunfire, maybe a block away, a scene straight out of World War II movie. Two turns down side streets brought up a sort of a public square facing a heavily damaged mosque, scoping the panorama. I saw IDF troops on the watch with a small group huddled at a far corner. That's who'd come to see. As we crossed toward them, I pegged them as combat engineers. They had a drill mounted on a small two-wheeled trailer about the size of an outdoor lighting rig, grinding straight down into the ground. Once they'd gone down about 50 feet, a camera attached to a fiber optic cable

• 2:23:50Jocko Willink?

  was slowly lowered down the one inch or down the inch wide hole, and the engineer saw what the camera did on a monitor. This was the technique the general wanted me to see. IDF teams were sinking hundreds of cameras a day. Once, uh, looking for tunnels, once discovered the Hamas tunnels were quickly breached, investigated and destroyed. We spent the rest of the day visiting other units in the general's command during, doing their operations. In one instance, feeling the building shake as an armor brigade commander explained the challenges he was facing from Hamas guerrilla fighting techniques. The general and I withdrew unarmed that day, but sadly two IDF soldiers died and IED blast there a few hours later on one of the very streets we traveled. That's about as close as the action I want to get to these days. So,

• 2:24:35Jocko Willink?

  yeah, once again, you know, what we were talking about earlier, you got to go out there and see it.

• 2:24:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. And the, not all my research, I need to see that. That one specifically Gaza, and that would not be the last time I was, I mean, that's, um, February 2024. You know, seven trips. And as they got to understand who I was, they're like, all right, you're, you're coming with us. Uh, and, and even if other people knew that I was doing that, it probably wouldn't be, let's say kosher. Uh, because there is a lot of risk. It's just not normal. I think, I think the, the world needs it. Uh, I'm not a reporter. Uh, I'm collecting. I actually just wrote a 63 page report of all of those tactical lessons I've taken from the IDF that I think the US military could learn from. And that, that element of the underground, of course, is that there was no way, there was no entries left.

• 2:25:23Speaker 01

  Uh, there's so much rubble that they had to go back because of intel to say, you might want to go back and look under there. There's a really big tunnel there that you guys missed that was coming out of the mosque. Some of these lessons that I've taken and why I'm there then put me going back because so many lessons were being learned that I think would be in any urban warfare scenario of that skill and veracity of the enemy and all of that that I've collected, but I found a bunch more times after that, like it's a different type of research than going after like that Susha, which is, you know, nine months after, although there were still enemy in the area, which was unique on that one, what they called enemy patrols, trying to breach their perimeter. This one is like, I'm bound in between buildings, like, what am I doing?

• 2:26:08Speaker 01

  As I didn't ask for that, but they want to say, hey, you want to see, we're going to show you, which I have now discovered this, there is an element of doing research after a war, even in like a policeman, you know, they don't take everything that somebody says happened for verbatim, even with the police camera, because they're going to see it differently. For me to go in and be able to give, see and watch it happening is a lot different than the research I had done before that of asking them what they did. Does that make sense?

• 2:26:35Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, no, absolutely. Where's this 63 page report?

• 2:26:39Speaker 01

  Is that West Point? We'll see when it, when it has to go through editing and everything. Yeah, modern wars too. Yeah, it's got everything from may facial recognition, what they, what they were able to do with facial recognition would have changed what you and I did in Iraq, like where I used to sit, you know, at checkpoints with a, with a list of faces, a BOLO or something like that. They, the facial recognition has advanced so much, they can put them on drones, they can put them in a stand and just walk everybody through the stand and pick out all the combatants or the Hamas fighters out of the crowd, like, oh, you come, you step over here, stuff that we never had in our wars.

• 2:27:17Jocko Willink?

  Where's, um, what's the status right now in Gaza?

• 2:27:22Speaker 01

  So the status is the, the president, the administration, President Trump got this 20 point police plan. Nobody thought it was possible. Hamas returned every hostage to include dead bodies from years ago. So there was a basically a ceasefire agreed to. And then there's this line between what the IDF control and what Hamas controls, because of the 20 point plan is disarmament, new government, re-education. So there's basically low level conflict still happening as Hamas, I was just there and a few months ago, deep, not too far from where this happened in Sujia, in watching Hamas fighters still trying to infiltrate this new

• 2:28:04Speaker 01

  line that has been formed. There's, there's a basically a line where the IDF control and there's a line where the Hamas.

• 2:28:10Jocko Willink?

  Where is that line generally?

• 2:28:12Speaker 01

  Um, it's about halfway through Gaza. It's called the yellow line. So the Israel controls about now about 60 plus percent of the Gaza Strip and Hamas controls or they, it's Hamas controlled because until they take the guns, as General Master says, until you take their guns, they're going to be in control. 40% is Hamas controlled and that's the line.

• 2:28:34Jocko Willink?

  What's the, have you been in the 60% that's controlled by Israel right now?

• 2:28:37Speaker 01

  I have, but with the IDF.

• 2:28:39Jocko Willink?

  And what's, uh, so are there civilians there?

• 2:28:41Speaker 01

  Yes, that's where all this, they're not all the civilians. So there's still 2 million ish civilians. They're in that 40%. Um, there's still humanitarian zones, but in.

• 2:28:51Jocko Willink?

  Wait, isn't a total of 2 million civilians total?

• 2:28:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, 2.2 ish.

• 2:28:55Jocko Willink?

  So 60 in this, in the Israeli controlled area, what percentage or how many of those civilians are there?

• 2:29:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't know the total number, but there is actually in the southern part of Gaza, there is basically beyond the yellow line tribes that aren't actually, they have the same thing with families and tribes that aren't Hamas that are on this, on the other side of that line.

• 2:29:16Jocko Willink?

  On the Hamas side of the line? Okay.

• 2:29:18Speaker 01

  Well, no, on the Israel side.

• 2:29:19Jocko Willink?

  On the Israel side.

• 2:29:20Speaker 01

  There are civilians and there, and there is parts of the, what would be considered that 40% that is actually not Hamas controlled. It's the tribal, it's a different tribe controlled. It's really the, the major cities of Gaza City, actually where the IDF never went into, where a great majority of, in that central part of Gaza, the understanding Gaza Strip, though, actually where the urban area starts, what the IDF are sitting on really goes right up to the line where the urban area sat, but there is this fence line. So there's always this buffer between the Gaza urban areas and the fence. So of course, Israel now is sitting on this line in outposts, basically, and they still go forward to, to destroy tunnels

• 2:30:01Speaker 01

  that are in these rubble fields. Not all of, of the Gaza Strip was destroyed, but of course a lot, and there's combat and there was multiple battles across all of the Gaza Strip. So lots of it are destroyed and the rubble and the IEDs actually, the, one of the biggest challenges of creating some normalcy in Gaza will be dealing with the unexploded ordinance, just thousands and thousands of rounds that, that's one of Hamas's main weapons is to take those unexploded ordinance and turn them into explosive IEDs and things to, I was there in, was December of 2025 and a, an IDF tank had hit a 2,000 pound bomb that Hamas had taken repurposed as an IED. So the tank, the Merkava, hit a 2,000 pound IED and luckily they all survived.

• 2:30:47Jocko Willink?

  Really?

• 2:30:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:30:49Jocko Willink?

  Is there any Palestinian elements that are starting to step up wanting to, uh, you know, move forward in a peaceful way?

• 2:30:57Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Um, and there's, so there's the tribes, of course Hamas is still trying, and it's still until somebody disarms them because the war was stopped. So they were supposed to give up their arms, but the peace board, which is a separate organization that was set up to kind of implement the 20 point peace plan that has multiple countries on it and like Jared Kushner, one of the leads, they have, um, they've formed a new government that's not the Palestinian Authority, which, or Hamas, it's like Palestinians that are now like making the decisions over what governmental established institutions will be created. There's schools running with a new de-radicalized curriculum. There's a lot of stuff actually happening. A lot of people focus on the, you know, Hamas, you know, talking to Hamas or

• 2:31:38Speaker 01

  getting Hamas to give up their guns, but from a kind of still bite by bite, it's almost like a Ramadi part, uh, where everybody wants just immediately for everything to be okay versus what they're actually doing is taking it bite by bite. So areas that are less Hamas controlled, uh, they got to clear that rubble, clear the tunnels, clear the IEDs and they, they have multiple schools already opened and they have, of course, the pushing, the aid and the distribution and the hospitals and everything all throughout. But yeah, that Palestinian government called the INCAG, they stood up, vetted everybody and they're making the decisions on kind of rebuilding this, which is unique to anything that we ever faced, a complete society, basically it's 2.2 and I fought in, you know, areas of Baghdad,

• 2:32:22Speaker 01

  like Sadr City, that actually has 2.2, uh, a population. Isn't the scale the problem, but it's the fact that this area was run by terrorists who spent, I mean, they're billionaires. I mean, the Hamas leaders are billionaires sitting in Qatar, took all the money, didn't invest it. So they don't even have water, you know, desalinization. It was all NGO, you know, relying on NGOs bringing things in. So you have to rebuild a society and it's right to start a de-radicalization. So even starting, you know, they had Palestinian Sesame Street about how to kill Israelis and summer school, everything. So they're starting it, but they actually can do it almost like a Ramadi. How do you eat an elephant? We do

• 2:33:03Speaker 01

  it bite by bite. So they're starting in these southern Gaza areas where they have schools running tribal leaders that don't want Hamas, that they can vet. They have a, which is, we talked about like an international security force that will have to come in and provide the security until they can get a Palestinian police and all this up and running. They won't fight Hamas. Everybody's like, well, who's going to disarm Hamas? And that's the incrementalness that, that is the play, but the fact that they created this peace board to actually, unlike other wars, especially in this area where everybody was just demand to stop, kind of like what happened with Hezbollah, like the, the, the UN organization that was created to kind of supposedly keep the peace between Hezbollah and Israel, it

• 2:33:47Speaker 01

  isn't Lebanon, it's Hezbollah. Um, it just creates perpetual violence because the other side doesn't care what, what, what this UN organization with no power does. What they've done in Gaza is created this peace board that's separate than the UN, get them out of the business and they actually have US people kind of pushing it along, getting Palestinian leadership, getting schools, economy, you know, start teaching them trade, all that, but bite by bite. Um, depending on who I talk to, they're like skeptical, like they're never going to give up their weapons. These are the same people when we were talking last night, said that they would never give up the hostages. Like there's no reason they would give up the hostages and they gave up every single hostage to include ones that had been there for 10 years. They were holding on the bodies in tunnels of IDF soldiers.

• 2:34:32Jocko Willink?

  How many, I know the, the Hamas strength that won at, at its highest level was up 40 or 50,000?

• 2:34:38Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:34:39Jocko Willink?

  What do you, what do you?

• 2:34:40Speaker 01

  The numbers are so, yeah, but.

• 2:34:42Jocko Willink?

  Okay, let's call it 40,000. What do you think it's at now, the Hamas strength?

• 2:34:46Speaker 01

  I actually haven't heard a number during the war, people would say that they are, the recruitment was, they had recruited as many, although the average recruit in during, since October 7th for Hamas was 16. So they're, they have a really radicalized population of people and it's one of the only ways to make money. Again, if Hamas controlled every dollar and the NGOs brought things in, Hamas takes their tax, you can see where you get to this. So what's the true number of Hamas fighters? I don't think it's in the tens of thousands, but it could be. And this is the element of until you build like we did in Iraq and different places, you gotta start

• 2:35:26Speaker 01

  building almost like new societies of de-radicalized populations and giving them trade and jobs and things like that. So that isn't the only occupation. So tunnel digger and Hamas fighters are like your only occupations and you could sell things like markets and things like that. I don't know what the, I haven't heard a number. The, the, some of the challenges are about those small weapons, but what's another positive, everybody was focused on, is that, you know, we've talked about that, the, the border between Egypt and Gaza, which was just a highway of weapons, especially when, you know, after the Arab Spring and, you know, places like Libya and things like that. I mean, the amount of weapons that, that was discovered on, just in Israel on

• 2:36:09Speaker 01

  October 7th, you know, Chinese, Russian, American, because there was a highway going from Egypt into Gaza. Israel sealed that. They verified like 10 feet at a time that there's no more tunnels and they took control of monitoring that Gaza-Egypt border. Is that even if there are fighters, eventually they don't have the weapons, like to make more rockets, to have all those explosives that I told you about, but like heavy weapons and stuff. They got what they got. Of course, they have a radicalized population and this is the, you still see conflict happening as they send fighters forward to probe the line of this wall that's basically been created.

• 2:36:50Jocko Willink?

  Were the areas that were less radicalized in Gaza, so there, so there were areas like in the far north?

• 2:36:58Speaker 01

  Far south.

• 2:36:59Jocko Willink?

  Far south, far south that were less radicalized?

• 2:37:02Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:37:02Jocko Willink?

  And so these are people that have kind of already kind of gotten on board with this new Palestinian government?

• 2:37:09Speaker 01

  No. Some have now, which is interesting. It's almost like that Gangs of Baghdad, Sons of Iraq, Al-Anbar. At one point, Israel is arming the opposers of Hamas and there was a lot of controversy like, it's pretty kind of normal. Those people, there are now, absolutely yes. So let me answer it differently. Yes, there are tribe leaders and there's actually a mission going in to check on some of the schools that the tribe provides security for that outsider observer that are very anti Hamas. You know, this is the, the business of, they are still interested in power. So

• 2:37:46Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, of course.

• 2:37:47Speaker 01

  Creating that, that national Gaza, the INCAG, this government of Palestinians to make these decisions. I'm sure there'll be some resistance of even tribal leaders on, they want their cut of the pie, which is that cultural aspect of, they gotta be involved and they're approving like even school curriculum in their areas for their kids, which is the right thing to do. And they don't want the Hamas, the radicalization, because they lived under the cost of that dumping all your money into terror.

• 2:38:15Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Well, it sounds like at least there's some level of progress.

• 2:38:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. The, the fact that, so this is, there's a lot to be skeptical about, but the fact that the, the US administration got Hamas assigned this 20-point plan and that is conditions-based is, is historic. As much as I told you about Lebanon recognizing Israel's right to exist, the fact that Hamas, Qatar, Egypt, and all the other countries that would also be a part of this, because there are other countries that matter and it's like, that were a part of the problem. The fact that it's conditions-based, if you don't know the history of this region, like where even if there's a ceasefire, it's, it's a, yeah, we agree to pause for now. I'm gonna, I'm gonna kill you though. I'm gonna, I'm still gonna raise my people to, to kill you. That is conditions-based and you have leadership. So that the US administration, at least for this administration, is still doing a lot of

• 2:39:06Speaker 01

  business to see, okay, how are you progressing along this? And everybody's just not, okay, we stopped, we stopped the war, so we're good here. The fact that there, every element is condition-based, is even condition-based for the Palestinian Authority, which is the, you know, the government of West Bank, Judea and Samaria, where they have that pay-to-slay program and they have radicalized, their textbooks were just in the news recently. They're using October 7th math, you know, the old school of like, how far does a bullet travel is the math problem to kill this, you know, the Jewish person on October 7th? And they found some textbooks in Judea and Samaria. These are massive problems, but I'm actually optimistic that they, this board and these people that are actually conditions-based,

• 2:39:47Speaker 01

  checking on like, okay, we said we're gonna do this, what's the progress? If not, just letting it like, we just want the war to stop. That isn't a solution, the war.

• 2:39:56Jocko Willink?

  Well, what makes me optimistic is like when I hear about Palestinians that are actually stepping up and I understand the mob mentality and the gangster and the power struggle, but that, that's what, that's, that's what makes the world go round, you know? But if you have at least people that don't want radicalized children and that want, don't want to live under, you know, the terrorist like organization like Hamas, it's the same, you know, it's very interesting, you know, in, in, in Iraq, you know, you mentioned some of the tribal leaders, but one of the guys, Sheikh Satar Baze, who is kind of the, the biggest tribal leader that stepped up and kind of commenced the Al-Anbar Awakening, he had been, he, he was part of our targeting packages that we had when we showed up. So like the guys before

• 2:40:39Jocko Willink?

  us had been targeting him as a guy that was a, you know, a bad guy. And it's the same thing with General McFarland. He, he got asked by the MEF commander, he said, hold on a second, wait, you're, you're doing a meeting with this guy, this guy's one of people on our target list. And well, you know, like he's a powerful guy and how do you, you know, when he's a powerful guy and he's trying to maneuver and make things happen, so who's he friends with? The most powerful people around or who the most, at one point it was Al Qaeda. Okay, so he's making deals with Al Qaeda and he's making things happen. He's, by the way, he's making money, he's, you know, transporting stuff. And then he, oh, the Americans are here now? Okay, they're powerful. Oh, that, that's better for us, that's better for my people. And by the way, Al Qaeda did some things like, kind of like Hamas where it's like, oh, Al Qaeda murdered a bunch of people and, oh, I actually don't want to work with them anymore. So he has a change of heart and next thing you know, he becomes a leader. So when I hear

• 2:41:23Jocko Willink?

  about that kind of, you know, that's gives me some hope that there's Palestinians that are there that want some kind of peace, want some kind of normalcy. And if that's true, then hopefully that can spread and we can, you know, we have to be careful as Americans because when we help someone, we prop someone up and put them into power, it automatically makes people hate them. Right? You know, it's like, it gets used as, oh, you're, that guy's a puppet. And so hopefully some of those people are strong enough that they can actually hold their own when that kind of criticism comes their way.

• 2:41:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's, and as, you know, we, I'm sure we don't have time to talk about this whole idea of not getting in forever wars and people just using those as synonyms for nation-building projects or what does boots meet on the ground. This isn't a, a US organization coming in and rebuilding Gaza. It's actually, that's why it was, I, I think whoever put this together did it really well. And, you know, these are Palestinian Gazans being in charge of the future of Gaza and it's going to be done not just from a military security perspective, but it's education, it's religion. So we're working with the, the right, you know, religious leaders and all these other countries who dealt with their own radicalization,

• 2:42:34Speaker 01

  like Saudi Arabia, UAE and others being involved. Whoever put this together really had learned from some of those lessons of us trying to make societies like us. This isn't a US-led operation, it's Palestinian-led, which is important.

• 2:42:48Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah. Check. All right. Going back to the book here, lesson of all lessons. I have a question I like to ask people in groups. When I was in the military was, who are we? It was a question about our values, about the army values, our standards, not only the ones required by rules and regulations, but also the standards we held ourselves to, our norms. Now I ask not only myself, but others, who are you? At first, I usually get puzzled looks, then I tell them there is no wrong answer. I also tell them, I will go first. I am a father, a brother, a son, a ranger, a writer and a scholar. I am a man who lives by a set of principles, values and morals about right and wrong. I think the drill is

• 2:43:29Jocko Willink?

  important. Everyone needs identity and purpose. I also learned that neither identity nor purpose matter without values. Values are the foundation of who you are, what you do and who you choose to stand beside.

• 2:43:42Jocko Willink?

  And the family code that I wrote to distill all my experiences adventures to pass on to my family. Here it is. The Spencer family code. Strong in body and mind. Sorry. Strong in mind and body. We work to improve both every day. We are always growing and improving. Treat all people with kindness. We treat others as we want to be treated. Respect is earned, never owed. We respect all others and ourselves. Own your decisions and take responsibility. We do not lie, cheat or steal, or bring unnecessary harm to others. We do not look to others for meaning or self-worth. Never quit. Life is hard. It will hurt.

• 2:44:22Jocko Willink?

  We will fall, but we will always get back up and move forward. Given nothing. If you want anything in life, you must put in the work. Set the goal. Do the work. Excel. And by the way, it's an acronym. Strong. Be strong. I love you. And we'll close it out with this. That is our family code is different from the codes I followed in the military, the Ranger creed, the army values and the warrior ethos, but it builds from them. None of these may be right for you, your family or your community, but I believe everyone should have a creed or a code, a set of values that defines who you are and who you choose to be. And no, you do not have to almost die to figure it out.

• 2:45:05Jocko Willink?

  Uh, so there you go. And I know we talked about my, my warrior kid code.

• 2:45:10Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 2:45:11Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's out there, which, you know, that's what I, one of the things I realized when I wrote that first book was, man, having some general guidelines, some general principles, it lets you, makes you, allows you to make such better decisions when you have them. And when you don't have them, you're just, you know, you've got no direction. And so for a seven, eight, six, seven, eight, nine year old kid that's out there, and then a nineteen year old kid, and then a twenty-four year old kid, and then a twenty-eight year old man or woman that got to make decisions that are in a leadership position like this is, you, if you don't, you need to have some kind of a code that you're going to follow. And sure, the military will issue you some, but coming up with your personal one is also extremely important.

• 2:45:48Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And it gave me a framework that I still use every day. We'll say, be Spencer strong. And it, it allows us to talk about challenges and who we are and who you are. And it's a foundation. I think a lot of people could value, and I, I got a lot of even reason, when my son was reading, reading the warrior kid books about that.

• 2:46:06Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I've had, believe me, I've had a lot of, uh, grown ass men and women tell me about how much the warrior kid books helped them out. That's awesome. So what else, what else you got going on right now? Got the new book coming? When's the next book coming?

• 2:46:19Speaker 01

  The next book is out in October. It's about the, the, the Nagorno-Karabakh war, the 2020, actually it ends in 2023. Um, have a book, spent a lot of time in India, like I said, in Kashmir, because we have a book coming out. It'll probably be out the beginning of next year about that, that war between India and Pakistan. Uh, I have a lot of writing projects, a lot of, um, travel to do because unfortunately there's a lot of war, but learning from war, from strategic to tactical, I, I love my job and, and my kids sometimes like to hear about their stories and I just wrote a few of them down in that book.

• 2:46:53Jocko Willink?

  Check. Uh, does that get us up to speed?

• 2:46:55Speaker 01

  I think so, yeah.

• 2:46:57Jocko Willink?

  All right. So where can people find you? You've got a johnspenceronline.com.

• 2:47:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:47:01Jocko Willink?

  You've got a new YouTube channel, I think.

• 2:47:04Speaker 01

  I just renamed it. It's an old one. Yeah.

• 2:47:06Jocko Willink?

  John Spencer War Scholar.

• 2:47:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:47:09Jocko Willink?

  It used to be John Spencer three ninety-eight?

• 2:47:11Speaker 01

  Yes, right.

• 2:47:12Jocko Willink?

  Well, we, we forgot to ask, what was three ninety-eight?

• 2:47:14Speaker 01

  It's the number they gave me.

• 2:47:16Jocko Willink?

  Fair enough. And then on Instagram and on Twitter X, you are at Spencer Guard.

• 2:47:22Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 2:47:23Jocko Willink?

  Uh, Echo Charles, you got any questions?

• 2:47:25Speaker 02

  We got one quick one. Okay. The, uh, remember rewind back to the gangster scene.

• 2:47:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:47:30Speaker 02

  This little standoff scenario.

• 2:47:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:47:32Speaker 02

  He was offering, what was the, what's the currency? Dinar? What is it?

• 2:47:36Speaker 01

  Dinar. Yeah, Iraqi Dinar.

• 2:47:38Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. What is the exchange rate for that?

• 2:47:42Jocko Willink?

  Then?

• 2:47:42Speaker 01

  Then, yeah.

• 2:47:43Speaker 02

  At that time?

• 2:47:43Speaker 01

  Two thousand eight?

• 2:47:44Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:47:46Speaker 01

  Let's see. It was about a hundred dollars to three hundred Dinar, I think.

• 2:47:50Speaker 02

  Okay. So that's, okay, okay, okay. So if he's offering like three million or whatever, that's like what, one million dollars?

• 2:47:56Speaker 01

  It wasn't that much. Yeah. I'd have to do.

• 2:47:58Speaker 02

  Oh, wait, three hundred?

• 2:47:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:47:59Speaker 02

  I'm doing my math off. Okay. Okay. So it's a lot less then.

• 2:48:02Speaker 01

  A lot less. Okay. They're talking about a hundred thousand dollars, maybe.

• 2:48:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:48:05Speaker 01

  And we did these, I mean, and I'm sure Jocko did, Zalacia payments for, you know, we'd go out and give out like a thousand, two thousand dollars. I forget what the Dinar exchange was at the time.

• 2:48:15Speaker 02

  And that's what, pretty common when like, oh, I shot your brother.

• 2:48:18Speaker 01

  That'll blood money.

• 2:48:19Speaker 02

  Let me give you some money.

• 2:48:20Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 2:48:21Jocko Willink?

  It's even when you breach their door or like.

• 2:48:24Speaker 02

  That makes sense.

• 2:48:25Jocko Willink?

  A tank runs over their fence.

• 2:48:28Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, that part makes sense. Cause like, yeah, if the freaking, you know, the garbage man comes to my house and bumps into my car and be like, hey, where's my money?

• 2:48:36Jocko Willink?

  It may seem, when you hear it in this kind of very simplistic terms, it seems like it's, it's a foreign idea to us. But believe it or not, in America, we have the same thing, or at least, at least something very similar in that if you get killed in a, some kind of an accident where there's negligence, like your parents, there's, there's sort of a precedent.

• 2:48:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, you sue them.

• 2:48:59Jocko Willink?

  And by the way, it's like a million bucks. And sometimes it's not a million bucks. Sometimes like, you know, five hundred thousand, but there is a number where the, you know, the guys go, hey, we're going to sue you. And they go, well, we'll settle. And they say four million bucks. They go, no, we'll give you a million. And your wife says, a million bucks for Echo Charles?

• 2:49:16Speaker 01

  Done.

• 2:49:19Speaker 01

  I was in a lot of meetings though, actually where it's just so cultural that the, like the tribal leaders would then, didn't matter what they thought, would agree within themselves what that person was going to get for their loss of their loved one. So it's so, it, there's a cultural element there that too is where they're deciding amongst themselves and their power structure, how much that person should get.

• 2:49:37Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I, you know, all my organized crime culture comes from movies. You know, not about me. But in one of my favorite movies, Training Day.

• 2:49:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:49:48Speaker 02

  That's what it was about. That was the whole thing.

• 2:49:51Speaker 01

  What?

• 2:49:52Speaker 02

  So Alonso, Denzel Washington, the backstory, the whole reason he was like, that whole day happened the way it did is because Alonso accidentally killed a Russian organized crime guy in Las Vegas. He didn't know he was organized crime. He just lost his temper, killed him. Then the rest of the family or whatever was like, hey, now you owe us a million dollars.

• 2:50:12Jocko Willink?

  Oh, it was a million bucks.

• 2:50:13Speaker 02

  Million dollars. Yep.

• 2:50:14Jocko Willink?

  There you go. You, you ever heard like where a company, I think they say this about the Ford Pinto. So the Ford Pinto, which had some kind of a gas, the, where the gas tank was positioned, if it got like, basically in a little bit of a fender bender, it could catch on fire. And again, don't quote me on this, but there's other cases like this where the company does the math. And they're like, okay, we're going to have to recall all these cars and do all these repairs and it's going to cost this much money. Or we're going to get four percent of the buyers of this car are going to have somebody killed. And they run their numbers and they're like, hmm, a little cheaper just to let it ride.

• 2:50:51Speaker 02

  So, uh, coincidentally, my, one of my other favorite movies called Fight Club, that's the guy's job.

• 2:50:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:50:58Speaker 02

  The main guy, you watch Fight Club?

• 2:51:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, oh, yeah.

• 2:51:01Speaker 02

  So he's one of his famous.

• 2:51:02Speaker 01

  We don't talk about it though.

• 2:51:03Speaker 02

  So before that, he's on the plane with some arbitrary person and he's like, I was a recall coordinator. And I, I could probably give you the exact lines, but to, in the, in the spirit of time, he says basically, uh, the amount of like the typical out of court settlement, you know, let's say fuel injectors explode, blah, blah, blah. Out of court settlement is A times the whatever is B times the whatever is C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less of the cost of a recall, we don't do one. That's what he said.

• 2:51:34Jocko Willink?

  Yep. So is it really weird to hear it in this plane speak? In this other culture, like, oh, you know, you killed my brother, you shot my brother in the face. I want this much money. It's weird. But for us, all that weirdness is camouflaged by just legal teams and, and, and the reality at the end of it, some freaking lawyer is looking at the wife of some guy going, how about a million? And the wife's going, no, I want to fight it. And they go, okay, you can fight it, but it's going to cost this much to fight it. You're going to call lawyers and the lawyer's going to take this cut. And by the way, here's what we paid in the last nine cases like this. And here's what we can prove. And she goes, all right, a million it is. So it sounds all weird.

• 2:52:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:52:13Jocko Willink?

  And the, the, the, you might also be, uh, you know, it seems like it's a lower price. Well, they have less money. So, you know, I guarantee same thing, like a lawyer that's talking to some low income poverty and, uh, poverty family. It's gonna be like, oh yeah, your husband, we're sorry, here's five hundred grand. Where some super rich person, who by the way, has the capacity to go to court and run up those bills will be like, oh, definitely, you know, one point five. So, but there's a number, man.

• 2:52:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:52:41Jocko Willink?

  There's a number for like, you lose a finger, you lose a hand, you lose an arm, like in some kind of an industrial accident, there's a number and that's what you're kind of getting.

• 2:52:51Speaker 02

  Yeah. Now that you're explaining this to me, you're absolutely right. Like you can literally just turn on the local TV and be like, are you injured in an accident? Well, we got a number for that. So it's like, all right, okay, cool. Yeah. Okay. That makes sense. So thanks for that clarification and exploration. Good to see you again.

• 2:53:06Jocko Willink?

  Anything else Echo Charles?

• 2:53:08Speaker 02

  That is it.

• 2:53:08Jocko Willink?

  That's it. John, any, uh, any closing, closing thoughts?

• 2:53:11Speaker 01

  No, I appreciate being here. It's, uh, twice. I mean, it's an honor. Uh, such a big fan. And my son, they wanted me to bring them. So I'm actually in trouble, both my son and my daughter, like you're, you said you would take us to see Jocko. Like, I don't think I said that. And they know that, that I'm here. So I'm going to be a little bit of a doghouse, but we're such great friends. Your work, can't wait for the movie.

• 2:53:32Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. November twenty-fifth, the movie's coming out, Echo Charles. Echo Charles is in it.

• 2:53:37Speaker 01

  Oh, really?

• 2:53:37Jocko Willink?

  Got a very pivotal role.

• 2:53:40Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:53:40Jocko Willink?

  As MMA Coach Three or something like that.

• 2:53:43Speaker 02

  Hell, yeah.

• 2:53:44Jocko Willink?

  We're going to find out what your actual title is.

• 2:53:46Speaker 02

  MMA Coach Three.

• 2:53:47Jocko Willink?

  Is it number three?

• 2:53:48Speaker 02

  I think so, yeah. Something, maybe one. I don't know. Um, funny enough, my kids, I'm in the same boat with my kid. Everything I want to do, they're like, oh, we want to come. That's right. Like, all right, man, you know, sometimes they go, sometimes they don't. Yep.

• 2:54:00Jocko Willink?

  That's good.

• 2:54:00Speaker 02

  True story.

• 2:54:01Jocko Willink?

  Awesome. Um, well, thanks for joining us once again. You know, thanks for sharing these experiences, lessons learned and, you know, that you learned kind of the hard way, some of these things. I'm glad the, uh, times that, that these are times that you almost died and that you didn't die. Uh, and thanks for your service in the army for fighting our nation's enemies. Thanks for what you continue to do today. Going out there and learning so we can teach the next generation of warfighters how to do it right. Thank you.

• 2:54:27Speaker 01

  Thanks, brother.

• 2:54:29Jocko Willink?

  And with that, John Spencer has left the building. Living by code, important thing. Part of that code.

• 2:54:39Jocko Willink?

  In my opinion, has to be being strong, being healthy, being capable, right? And you know what that means? That means we train in. That means jujitsu, wrestling, running, sprinting, lifting, fighting, swimming, surfing, getting after it in all forms. And when we get after it in these physical forms, we're in need of fuel. And we recommend Jocko Fuel. Check out JacoFuel.com. We got your protein. By the way, we have a, uh, we have a protein coming out that is, it's called, the trendy name for this kind of protein is clear protein. Have you heard of this?

• 2:55:16Speaker 02

  Clear protein?

• 2:55:17Jocko Willink?

  So it's, it's, it's protein, but it's not, but it's, in some cases it's clear. Ours is not clear, but instead of tasting like, like a, like a shake, it tastes more like a lemonade.

• 2:55:32Speaker 02

  I understand. Actually they, there was a name for it before. What was it? It's not clear, but anyway, I know what you're talking about.

• 2:55:38Jocko Willink?

  Anyways, that's coming. I've got, I got the, I got the early production and universally, my whole clan was on board immediately, like just so stuck. So my whole family was just totally fired up. Uh, tastes really good. And it's, what it gives you is it gives you a, like a different, what's it called? Like a different access point to protein. Cause you know, if you think about it, sometimes you don't want to have, you want to have something like light and refreshing.

• 2:56:09Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:56:10Jocko Willink?

  And this, we got you covered. So anyways, we got that coming. We got all kinds of protein. We got delicious protein that you can have for dessert. That is like a shake. We got energy. We got supplementation. We got Time War. We got Super Krill. Get on the Super Krill, please. Get on the Super Krill. Get on the joint warfare. We got everything that you need. You can get this stuff at JacoFuel.com or at any, pretty much any retailer, any, any store. Retailer is like an industry term, isn't it?

• 2:56:36Speaker 02

  Sure. Yeah, I don't.

• 2:56:37Jocko Willink?

  You, you never like, hey, I'm going to go down to the retailer. Like, no. So you can get any store. That's like when you use the term colorways.

• 2:56:44Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah. What do you mean?

• 2:56:45Jocko Willink?

  Dude, you did. You used it one time. I had to put you in check. Like, just like you should put me in check for saying retailer.

• 2:56:50Speaker 02

  I don't know.

• 2:56:51Jocko Willink?

  In the industry, it is a retailer. That's what you refer to it as. But just like in the industry, it's like colorways for shirts, but a human, normal people, we don't say, hey, I'm going to run down to the retailer or hey, uh, can you grab me the black colorway t-shirt? That is, no, we don't say that. So I'm putting myself in checks and you didn't help me out.

• 2:57:11Speaker 02

  No, no, no, no.

• 2:57:12Jocko Willink?

  We got what you need. JacoFuel.com. You can get it there or you get any store that you might go to a grocery store, a convenience store, a, a, a supplement store. We got you covered. If they don't have it there, then just go and ask. Say, hey, can you get some Jocko Fuel in here so I can get stronger, faster, smarter, healthier and better as a human being? JacoFuel.com, check it out. Also check out OriginUSA.com. This is where we make American made goods. American made t-shirts, hoodies, jujitsu gees, jujitsu rascals, everything that you need for life. We got you covered. So we got sneakers coming October 2nd. They're freaking legit.

• 2:57:55Jocko Willink?

  American made, a hundred percent American made. So we got what you need at Origin USA. Go to OriginUSA.com and get yourself American made products. And listen, it's the, you know, the holiday seasons are coming, right? Some of this stuff's going to sell out. Don't wait. Get it now. So that way, when you give your husband or boyfriend, because we don't have many women's products right now. Not that we don't want, but right now currently we don't. But when you want to get your husband or boyfriend, a pair of jeans, you want to get him something that's American made. You want to give him something that is the highest quality. You want to give him something that says, oh, I don't support communism.

• 2:58:39Jocko Willink?

  Cause trust me, your husband doesn't want a communist pair of jeans. He wants an American made pair of jeans. And you might think that some of those quote unquote iconic brands that are in America, you might think, you might have the naive thought that these iconic American brands are, are in support of America, but they're not, by the way, they're in support of communism. Our, our economic adversaries, that, that's where they're spending their money. So don't support them. Support America, the United States of America. Go to OriginUSA.com and get some.

• 2:59:10Speaker 02

  It's true. Speaking of holidays, need some more retail options, e-commerce retail options, various colorways, by the way. Uh, Jocko Store, JacoStore.com. It's where you can get your Discipline Equals Freedom t-shirts. Good, good t-shirts. Four versions of that, by the way. Uh, people seem to like it. Here's a, here's a note about Jocko Store. Every once in a while, your size might be sold out. It's way more rare than it was before. See what I'm saying? I'm on top of that.

• 2:59:40Jocko Willink?

  Yo, look at this guy. Turned over a new leaf.

• 2:59:42Speaker 02

  A little bit of a new leaf, but every once in a while still, you see what I'm saying?

• 2:59:46Jocko Willink?

  You're not perfect yet.

• 2:59:47Speaker 02

  I'm not perfect. Exactly. And you know, if your size and or color is sold out there, I'm going to, the chance of the restock is coming, like soon, within the next six days, sometimes less, sometimes one day. See what I'm saying? The restock is coming. So what you do is, and I provided this little option there. Instead of add to cart, you just say notify me when available. You put your email. I don't spam nothing. See what I'm saying? You just put your email in there. Boom, you get the email, but you can get it right when it comes in. Won't even miss it.

• 3:00:17Jocko Willink?

  GTG.

• 3:00:18Speaker 02

  GTG, I'm telling you, that's very helpful. A lot of people do that. Rather than being discouraged, you know, or something like this, you know, it's very helpful. You get what you want.

• 3:00:26Jocko Willink?

  You say, yo, it's not in stock? Good. Gives me time to prepare for it.

• 3:00:29Speaker 02

  Yeah. Sure. The whole thing. You see what I'm saying? Yeah, man. When you know, you know. Uh, also the short locker, subscription, new design every month. See what I'm saying? If you want to learn, uh, if you want to see what kind of designs, a little bit more creative, if you will, not your, you know, straight, kind of an indirect approach almost, creatively speaking. Anyway, you'll check it out. Go on the top, says short locker, click on it, show some past designs, some, you know, the current, it'll show the current design too of the month.

• 3:00:56Jocko Willink?

  Nice.

• 3:00:57Speaker 02

  Like kind of like a little sneak peek or whatever. So you can see what, you know, what it's all about, the vibe. You know, people seem to like it, but yeah, it's all on Jocko Store. You know, you like something, get something.

• 3:01:06Jocko Willink?

  That's what we hear. Um, we've written some books. So first of all, we got the book we covered today, Time, 20 Times I Almost Died by John Spencer. Check that book out. Also, Put Your Legs On by Rob Jones. Also Need to Lead by Dave Burke. And then I've written a few books. I think about, I don't know, 10 or 12 books. Some of them are for adults. Some of them are for kids. Um, but they're all for you and they will make your life better. Check out the Warrior Kid books. Warrior Kid movie coming November 25th, global release, Apple TV. Stand by to get some. That's what we're doing. Also check out Eslamfront.com. If you have problems inside your organization, they are leadership problems. They are leadership problems. So if you need help with leadership, which you do, check out Eslamfront.com.

• 3:01:50Jocko Willink?

  We have a bunch of different, various programs to help get you and your team aligned. Also check out ExtremeOwnership.com where we teach the skills of leadership on the interwebs. And then if you want to help service members, active and retired, you want to help their families, you want to help Gold Star families, check out Mark Lee's mom, Mama Lee. She's got an amazing charity organization. If you want to donate or you want to get involved, please do. Go to AmericasMightyWarriors.org. Also check out HeroesAndHorses.org and then Jimmy May's organization, BeyondTheBrotherhood.org. And of course, check out WarriorsInNeed.org. And finally, StrongholdRescue.org. There's a lot of charities we're trying to, trying to get out there into the world because they're all doing outstanding stuff.

• 3:02:34Jocko Willink?

  If you want to connect with us for John Spencer on the interwebs, he is JohnSpencerOnline.com. And then YouTube, John Spencer, War Scholar. And then on Instagram and Twitter X, he's at Spencer Guard. And then for us, check out Jaco.com. And then on social media, I'm at Jocko Willink, Echoes at Echo Charles. But if you can, just don't even go there because it's not good for you. It's not healthy. It's not helping you. But that's on you. We are trying to help you. Do not let it take your soul. And to all the soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines who are currently deployed around the world defending freedom and defending our way of life. Thank you for what you all do every day to keep us safe.

• 3:03:17Jocko Willink?

  Also thanks to our police, law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, border patrol, secret service, as well as all other first responders. Thank you for what you do to keep us safe here at home. And to everyone else out there, it's a good little lesson to remember. Good little protocol to follow. Ask yourself, who are you?

• 3:03:40Jocko Willink?

  What standards do you live by? What is the code that guides you? And your thoughts and your actions? What values do you stand for? If you answer those questions, it's going to benefit you. And don't, don't let it be by chance, right? Don't let life go just the way it goes.

• 3:04:06Jocko Willink?

  Own it. Steer it in the direction you want it to be moved.

• 3:04:13Jocko Willink?

  Do what you know you should do. And be who you know you should be.

• 3:04:20Jocko Willink?

  And that's all we've got for tonight. Until next time, this is Echo and Jaco out.