201: Life is Precious, Short, and Unpredictable. Don't Wait to Become the Person You Want to Become. “The Knock At The Door” W/ Ryan Manion.

0:00:00 – Opening 0:07:35 – Ryan Manion. "The Knock at The Door" 2:24:46 – Final thoughts and take-aways. 2:32:54 – How to Stay on THE PATH. 3:00:16 – Closing Gratitude. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

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

• 0:00Jocko Willink?

  This is Jocko Podcast number 201 with Echo Charles and me Jocko Willink. Good evening, Echo. Good evening.

• 0:12Jocko Willink?

  I had left my daughter Maggie with my parents while I and my business partner drove a few minutes away to look at a vacant store right in the heart of town.

• 0:23Jocko Willink?

  As soon as I saw it, I knew it would be perfect. As the landlord was putting the lease in my hand for me to sign, my cellphone rang and I saw it was my mom, thinking she was just checking to see when I would be back. I ignored the call.

• 0:40Jocko Willink?

  When my phone immediately rang again, I knew something was up. My initial fear was that something happened to my 10-month-old daughter. My mind went to the worst place and at the time, I didn't think anything could be worse than that. When I answered the phone, all I heard on the other end were muffled screams. It was clearly a noise made by someone who was so broken up and in such a state of shock that he or she couldn't even cry properly.

• 1:16Jocko Willink?

  I didn't know how to prepare myself for whatever news I was about to receive. I started shaking uncontrollably. "Tell me what happened?" I cried.

• 1:27Jocko Willink?

  I was terrified that something horrible had happened to Maggie. Had she tripped and split open her head, choked on something? My mind was running wild with possibilities, not knowing was almost worse than knowing at this point.

• 1:43Jocko Willink?

  "Have you called an ambulance?" I yelled. "Yes," answered the voice on the other phone before the line suddenly went dead.

• 1:52Jocko Willink?

  I knew that I was too upset to drive. I asked my business partner to take me home. A five-minute drive I had traveled countless times before, but this time those five minutes felt like an eternity.

• 2:03Jocko Willink?

  And while the car was crawling through the streets, my mind was racing at a thousand miles a minute. My husband was at work about an hour away. While I wanted the comfort that his voice would bring, I decided not to call him until I got home to the house and could figure out what was going on. I didn't want to upset him if I didn't have to. As we pulled onto my parents' street, my heart started racing as fast as my mind. I didn't see an ambulance anywhere in sight. For a moment, that gave me a sense of relief. Maybe things weren't as serious as I had led myself to believe. My dad was standing in the driveway next to a friend, Lieutenant Colonel Corky Gardner.

• 2:46Jocko Willink?

  He and my father had served together in the Marine Corps. And he was a dear friend of the family. He and his wife lived about forty-five minutes away, so it struck me as odd to see him standing there, especially since my parents had not mentioned he would be coming over. I jumped out of the car while it was still moving. "Where's the ambulance?" I screamed. My dad stared back at me with a blank look. Then, in a very measured tone, he said, "Travis was killed."

• 3:31Jocko Willink?

  I heard those words loud and clear, but they didn't make any sense to me. It took me a few seconds to process what I was being told. Since the moment I hung up the phone, I'd known something was wrong, but this was far worse than anything I could have imagined. I'd thought my daughter was in imminent danger, and here I was, being told that my brother was dead. He was twenty-six years old.

• 4:02Jocko Willink?

  And that right there is an excerpt from a book called The Knock at the Door.

• 4:09Jocko Willink?

  Three Gold Star families bonded by grief and purpose. And this book is written by Ryan Manion, who wrote that opening section, who is the sister of US Marine First Lieutenant Travis Manion, who was killed in Iraq. It was also written by Amy Looney Hefferman, the surviving spouse of Lieutenant Brendan Looney, a SEAL officer killed in Afghanistan. And the other author, the final author, is Heather Kelly, the surviving spouse of First Lieutenant Robert Kelly, a Marine Corps officer, also killed

• 4:52Jocko Willink?

  in Afghanistan. And you may recognize these names because I've talked about all these names on this podcast.

• 5:04Jocko Willink?

  I read a speech on podcast number 162 about two brave Marines, Jonathan Yale and Jordan Herder, who held the line at an outpost while being attacked by a vehicle borne bomb. And these two brave Marines stood their ground and stopped the vehicle before it could enter their outpost

• 5:27Jocko Willink?

  and kill many more of their fellow Marines. But the bomb did detonate and it killed both of them.

• 5:36Jocko Willink?

  And that speech was made by a Marine Corps General, General Kelly.

• 5:44Jocko Willink?

  And I mentioned, when I read that speech, that General Kelly's son was killed in action. And that was, that was First Lieutenant Robert Kelly. And then you may have heard me talk about Brendan Looney, a SEAL that I put through training.

• 6:04Jocko Willink?

  Who was loved by his brothers in the teams.

• 6:09Jocko Willink?

  Who was a few days from coming home after a tough deployment in Afghanistan. Who volunteered to go on a turnover operation. And was killed in a helicopter crash in Afghanistan on September 21st, 2010.

• 6:26Jocko Willink?

  And when I talked about him, I, I spoke a lot about. His best friend. Travis Manion, and I talked about Travis Manion as well when I had Brian Stan on the podcast. Well, Travis Manion was killed in action on April 29th, 2007. And I went into detail around the relationship between Travis and Brendan.

• 6:50Jocko Willink?

  Who are buried next to each other. At Arlington National Cemetery, when I had Travis's dad. On the podcast number 72, and we discussed his book, which is called. Brothers Forever.

• 7:07Jocko Willink?

  And this book.

• 7:10Jocko Willink?

  That I'm reading from today, The Knock at the Door, this gives a.

• 7:16Jocko Willink?

  A different perspective.

• 7:19Jocko Willink?

  A perspective of pain and of anguish, but also of surviving and overcoming.

• 7:28Jocko Willink?

  And of moving forward through the pain.

• 7:32Jocko Willink?

  And to a place of pride and a place of purpose. And it is an honor to have one of the authors of this book. With us here today. Ryan Manion, sister of Travis Manion, to share some of what she has learned.

• 7:51Jocko Willink?

  So, Ryan, thank you for coming out here and thank you for coming on the podcast.

• 7:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm really happy to be here and I'm happy to talk a little bit more about the book.

• 8:03Jocko Willink?

  This is a tough way to start off a book.

• 8:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:07Jocko Willink?

  With, I mean, with what's gotta be the worst day of your life, I'm assuming. Or at least right up there.

• 8:14Speaker 01

  100% the worst day of my life. And, you know, it's interesting to hear you reading it. You, you become a little desensitized when you're putting things on paper and when you talk about it a lot. But to hear you reading it, it definitely brought emotion. It's probably in the way that you read too. But, you know, it, it kind of brings you back to, to that place.

• 8:41Jocko Willink?

  Well, whenever I read something like this, not only am I thinking about what you went through, what your family went through, but I'm also thinking about how many times this happened to my friends, my friends' families, and the pain and anguish that this, that this causes. And, yeah, it's just, you know, you titled the book, The Knock at the Door. And for, for anyone that doesn't understand this, the, the military has a very well-defined protocol that they take when a service member is killed overseas.

• 9:23Jocko Willink?

  And it's a personal notification, which is, which is actually a great thing compared to what they used to do. And I don't know if you've ever seen the, what are those little messages that they used to send?

• 9:34Speaker 01

  A telegram.

• 9:35Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, like a telegram message. That's right. It was a telegram. They would send a telegram that said, you know, "Dear Mr. and Mrs. Smith, we're sorry to inform you that your son Barry Smith was killed in action around this day, in around this area." So at some point, someone smart realized that that was a horrible way to notify families. So they have a very strict protocol. And what the protocol consists of is uniformed personnel from the service branch that the service member was in going to the home and...

• 10:12Jocko Willink?

  And knocking on the door in full dress uniform. And it's these days, what's become challenging about it is it's a race against social media and it's a race against the news. So when you have, when you're overseas and one of your, one of your troops are killed, there's like immediate radio silence. You're not allowed to tell anyone because it's all to prevent the family from finding out that this has happened on the news. And let's face it, even with this protocol, which is designed to try and support the family as much as possible. I mean, it's, it's still just an absolute, it's just an absolute nightmare and it's the, the worst fear of, of any family

• 10:53Jocko Willink?

  that has a service member on, on active duty deployed. This is the worst, the worst nightmare for, for all of us. I think you did a great job of capturing how that, how that impacts. Now, before we go further down this story, um, I wanted to give a little bit of background between, between you and Travis and I, I think it's, it starts to tell the story of, of your relationship with him. I'm going to the book here. Travis and I had been born only 15 months apart. So to say we were close would be an understatement. The fact that ours was a military family also brought us closer than most siblings.

• 11:33Jocko Willink?

  Like many military families, we had to adjust to new situations very quickly until I was 12 when my dad left active duty. Before that, we had moved almost every two years. We knew that no matter where we moved next, no matter what school we ended up in or which sports teams we'd be on, be the new kids on, we always had each other to depend on. Travis had been my built in best friend at every stage of my life.

• 12:02Jocko Willink?

  What about the, what about the sister brother dynamic?

• 12:07Jocko Willink?

  Did you, were you, you were older, so were you kinda like the?

• 12:12Speaker 01

  I mean, I was definitely, I was the older sibling, yes, there was, there was no doubt about that. And it was funny, I was having a conversation with someone last night and they were asking me about my relationship with Travis. And, and I said, you know, Travis really did look up to me. And sometimes that didn't fare him well because I was a bit of the wild child and, um, you know, I wasn't always listening to my parents and so I could kinda skew him in the wrong direction. Um, and you know, looking back on things, I look at who my brother was and, and he was very driven. Um, even at a young age, there was something different about him.

• 12:55Speaker 01

  And, you know, I, I talk about a little bit in the book, like I felt like at times like, well, what happened to that piece of DNA for me? Because I didn't have that drive, I didn't have that commitment to, to goals or anything of that sort. But, you know, along with that came this idea that in the, in the way that he was, I admired him so much. It wasn't a, a jealousy, I wasn't like, oh, you know, there's great Travis or, you know, I was so proud of him and I was so proud to have him as my brother.

• 13:27Jocko Willink?

  So that's pretty unique.

• 13:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, my, I remember in high school, my girlfriends and I, we'd follow him around the Philadelphia area to his wrestling matches. And we were like his main cheering squad in the front row. And I'm like, that's my brother, the all-American wrestler, you know, I was so proud of him. And it was, it was really cool to grow up with someone that even, he was younger than me, but that I could look up to so much, you know? And I think at the end of the day, he helped me from not going too far off the rails, you know?

• 13:58Jocko Willink?

  It's weird and you got three children.

• 14:00Speaker 01

  I have three children.

• 14:00Jocko Willink?

  So I have four children. And it's weird how and I always try to explain to people that they're gonna be different.

• 14:07Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 14:07Jocko Willink?

  You know, they're gonna be different. And you just kind of have to brace yourself as a parent, which it sounds like your parents had to brace themselves for you.

• 14:15Speaker 01

  Oh, my dad braced himself for many, many years, many, many years. And, you know, growing up, I mean, I, I was an athlete and.

• 14:26Jocko Willink?

  And what sports did you play?

• 14:27Speaker 01

  I played lacrosse through, I played every sport growing up, soccer, basketball, everything. But I played lacrosse through high school and college. And my dad always said, you know, between you and Travis, like you were the born athlete. Like you had athletic ability, it came naturally to you. Like Travis had to work hard at everything he did. Travis played on, I remember we moved to Pennsylvania, he played on a CYO football team. And he was a short, little chubby kid and his nickname was Pork Chop.

• 15:01Speaker 01

  And, you know, and that and Travis had to work to become. Who he became. I glided right through, never worked at anything, still got some money to go to school for college and play lacrosse. And I look back now and I'm like, God, if I'd only even applied myself a little bit like and really tried to work at something.

• 15:22Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's weird. That's a, that's a trait, right? Like this work ethic thing?

• 15:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:27Jocko Willink?

  It's a trait that some people have and some people don't. I don't know. But what's it, I heard a quote, I heard a quote from one of my Brazilian friends. And he said, there's a, there's a saying in, in Brazil that there's a reason that God doesn't give wings to a snake. Because if he did, we'd all be screwed because the snakes could just fly around and kill you. So that's like what happens, right? You can have that awesome work ethic, but you maybe don't get the full athletic capability that is optimal. Or you can be this really gifted athlete, but you know, you like to party.

• 16:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. That, that, that pretty much describes it. Yeah.

• 16:11Jocko Willink?

  And it's cool that you.

• 16:14Jocko Willink?

  It's cool that you didn't have this jealousy thing going on, right? Well, I guess you were an accomplished athlete as well, so I guess it really wouldn't be there.

• 16:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was that, but more than that, it was also like, hey, my parents were so focused on Travis that I could kind of slide by with a lot of things, you know? It was like, hey, you know, we're, we're taking Travis to Lehigh for the, uh, the Nationals for wrestling. I'm like, sweet, I'm gonna have a rager at the house this weekend.

• 16:39Jocko Willink?

  So would you legitimately do that?

• 16:41Speaker 01

  I legitimately did that.

• 16:42Jocko Willink?

  When your parents were gone, you would have ragers?

• 16:44Speaker 01

  Yes, several times.

• 16:46Jocko Willink?

  And you, and, and did you ever get caught?

• 16:50Speaker 01

  So, I'll tell you a story. It was my brother's senior year, he was going to wrestle at the national preps. It's, it's huge. I mean, it's the hugest tournament he's gonna wrestle in. And, um, he goes up to, uh, he goes up and we, uh, my best friend and I, my mom took us out to, uh, breakfast. And she's like, I'm taking you out to breakfast. Before they left, they were heading to Lehigh for the weekend. And my girlfriend, Chris, and I are sitting there and my mom says, doesn't say to me, she says, Krista, look me in the eye, you are not having a party at my house this weekend. And Krista said, I promised Mrs. Manion, we're not gonna have a party. She said to this, this day, it's the, like, she's like, I lied to your mom's face.

• 17:34Jocko Willink?

  Just straight up.

• 17:35Speaker 01

  And I mean, we had, we had the kegs being delivered, like, you know, within the hour after they were gone. And the party got a little out of control. We were, you know, we had all these upperclassmen show up. It was, and I'm like, oh my gosh, it got, it got ahead of us. And so finally, we get everybody out, the house is trashed. And so like my core group of friends were cleaning up the house. We're trying to get everything taken care of. And I tell my mom buddy, there's, there must be 12 bags of trash. And I said, take this trash, you're on trash duty, get it out of here, get it in a dumpster. So he leaves with the trash and I'm feeling pretty proud. I'm like, I think, I think we can cover this up, you know? So my parents come home the next day and um you know my mom walks in and she's kind of like

• 18:20Speaker 01

  looking around like sniff like do you have people over here? No, it was just Krista and I.

• 18:25Jocko Willink?

  Investigator.

• 18:25Speaker 01

  And I'm looking at everything and we kind of I'm like we got away with this. It's about two hours later, knock on the door. My mom goes in to answers the door and there's a lady standing there with all 12 bags of trash at the front door and she's like these were thrown into the field behind my house. She went through the trash, found like, because we had taken out the trash with like mail in it, found our address and uh and I just remembered looking at Travis and he just shook his head like you're such an idiot.

• 18:57Jocko Willink?

  I've uh when I go away and you know I got teenage kids now and even well a couple of them in college now, but I used to go away for whatever with my wife or whatever and leave the kids at home. And I'd be like, are you guys gonna have a rager or what? I kind of encouraged them and they were like, no, they're like dad, no, none of our friends will come to our house. They like don't want to come here because of you.

• 19:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, totally.

• 19:19Jocko Willink?

  And I'm like, oh, well, okay, I guess that's a positive thing. So that's awesome. You guys had a had, it's awesome that you didn't have that rivalry which can, which can happen.

• 19:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:28Jocko Willink?

  In in in a sibling relationships. My kids don't really have it either now that I think about it, which is cool.

• 19:36Speaker 02

  What about like competition, like even on a more friendly level? Like, did you ever feel like you're competing with him?

• 19:42Jocko Willink?

  Ping pong death matches or anything like that?

• 19:44Speaker 01

  I mean, listen, you know.

• 19:46Speaker 02

  Just in life, I mean.

• 19:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, growing up, I mean, as when we were young, like I used to tease him endlessly. I mean, my aunt tells the story of her wedding, you know, and and she said, all you did was make Travis cry by teasing him the entire day. We were like 10 and 11 years old, so we fought like siblings. But I think by the time we hit high school, um there really wasn't competition. Like hey, would I, would we get out back and play basketball and you know? Yeah, that's that sort of stuff, like friendly cup, but like there was nothing um competitive in terms of how our relationship worked.

• 20:27Speaker 02

  Huh, interesting.

• 20:28Jocko Willink?

  Awesome. All right, you you dive into this a little bit more. I'm gonna go to the book here. On a wooden wooden beam in our basement by the bench press on which he would punish himself nightly, Travis wrote his goals in permanent black marker.

• 20:41Jocko Willink?

  Here they are, all-American wrestler, first-team All-Catholic in lacrosse, maintained 3.9 GPA. My aspirations were far more modest, rarely recorded, and let's be honest, not terribly admirable. While Travis's key performance indicators consisted of grade point averages and athletic milestones, mine were quantified by number of parties attended or classes skipped without getting caught. Travis had a work ethic uncommon amongst most 16-year-olds, and as his older sister, I found it fascinating and a little unnerving. I marveled at Travis's ability to set a goal one year out, even two years out, and then work tirelessly to meet it.

• 21:25Jocko Willink?

  Occasionally, I questioned what genetic material was absent from my DNA that caused this quality to skip me, but I never lost sleep about it. And though I admired his self-discipline and focus, I'm pretty sure Travis envied my vibrant social life and lighthearted attitude towards responsibility. So you guys kind of balanced each other out?

• 21:44Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 21:45Jocko Willink?

  Did you, when you were looking at him with his goals and everything like that, and you're saying, "Well, that skipped me," did you ever say, "Well, it didn't skip me. I can make a goal and I can go for it." Did you ever, did you, did that ever cross your mind? Or is that just not part of your?

• 21:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, I mean, I have to be honest, I just didn't really care. You know, I, I was, I was happy to take the backseat to his stardom.

• 22:09Jocko Willink?

  But you played lacrosse in college?

• 22:11Speaker 01

  I did.

• 22:11Jocko Willink?

  I mean, that's no joke.

• 22:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, uh, yeah, I mean, I, I broke some school records at my, playing college lacrosse. And you know what? And so I don't want to take away anything from that, but it was like, I went to a D3 school, I played lacrosse. I was the leading scorer on the team and, and it was a lot of fun. Um, and you know, and Travis would come to my games. I remember Travis came to one of my games and- And him and my uncle Chris were like heckling the goalie because the goalie had like had a cheap shot at me. I played attack. I was right up front and and so they're like standing behind heckling the goalie. And after the game, you know, we win the game and we're

• 22:52Speaker 01

  standing there and the coach says, the coach is like, doesn't directly say anything to me, but she goes, I'm just gonna say this right now. If I see anybody's family messing with, you know, messing with another team again, that so-called player will not be playing on my team anymore. And so I like leave it. I'm like, thanks a lot, guys. You know, you come to one game and you know, I'm about to get kicked off the team for what you're doing.

• 23:18Jocko Willink?

  What the hell are they doing? I mean, you gotta make a pretty significant impact on the game.

• 23:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, there was, it was a, it was a cheap shot by her and what, you know, I shot, she came out and whacked me so hard and in an intentional way, you know, and and that was my brother, like, he was, if someone messed with me, like, don't mess with me.

• 23:41Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 23:42Speaker 01

  I mean,

• 23:42Jocko Willink?

  If someone messes with you, he's gonna heckle them.

• 23:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, but yeah, if you're a girl, you're gonna get heckled. If you're a guy.

• 23:48Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah.

• 23:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:49Jocko Willink?

  So you, you tell a good story in here. It's like a, a Saturday night and there's a party going on and I, you have this ideal situation because you got your brother who's kind of a straight and narrow kind of guy. So that means you have a designated driver. You invite him to go to this party. The party, you know, it goes, gets kind of wild and then the cops show up. And so here we go into the book, teenagers scattered. Travis, Krista, who's one of the people you're with, and I quickly found one another and joined the mad rush toward the back of the house. We barreled through the kitchen door, hopped the fence that surrounded the property and sprinted for the woods behind the house. Those woods were our ticket to freedom. They also represented a blessed escape from the terrifying

• 24:33Jocko Willink?

  wrath of my parents, who almost certainly would have disowned me for what would have been my third underage drinking citation in my high school career.

• 24:43Jocko Willink?

  So you had some milestones you were making. Uh, so you're running in through the woods. There's a foot bridge and somehow you fall off the foot bridge, which actually the word you're using here, you say, I got thrown off the foot bridge. What does that even mean?

• 24:56Speaker 01

  Well, because there's a hundred kids running over a bridge that's this wide. All trying to hit that same cornfield. So yeah, somebody, you know, pushed off.

• 25:06Jocko Willink?

  Cause you get to the cornfield and then you're good.

• 25:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:09Jocko Willink?

  Cause they cannot find you in a cornfield.

• 25:11Speaker 01

  They're not running. The cops are not chasing us into a cornfield, you know?

• 25:15Jocko Willink?

  Cornfields are crazy.

• 25:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:16Jocko Willink?

  Like you can get lost in cornfields.

• 25:18Speaker 01

  I have many times.

• 25:19Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. All right. So you end up, you, you end up getting thrown from this foot bridge and you, going back to the book, I, I became aware of a pain coursing through my leg. I looked down and saw that my shin was covered in blood. My khaki pants were red. So now Travis is like, Hey, we gotta get you some help. And you guys discussed that a little bit. Finally you are going to walk back to the car and finally the car was within sight, but just as we rounded a giant pine tree, a blinding light shone in our eyes busted. Hey kids, get over here. A square jawed officer examined us with his flashlight. He wanted names, ages, and a full account of our whereabouts that evening. Somewhere in the interrogation session, a light bulb seemed to go off in his

• 26:04Jocko Willink?

  head. His eyes softened and his lips turned up into a smile. Hey, wait, you're Travis Manion? Yes, sir. Hell of a wrestling season you've had, kid. Thank you, sir. And so then he, you know, Travis kind of plays this thing up to get you guys, to get you guys out of, out of trouble.

• 26:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:26Jocko Willink?

  So this is the kind of, this is the kind of thing that you two had going on.

• 26:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. It was, uh.

• 26:33Jocko Willink?

  Did, uh, did your, since you guys are close in age, did your friends all hang out together?

• 26:38Speaker 01

  Oh yeah. Totally. I mean, my friends were his friends.

• 26:41Jocko Willink?

  Did he go out with any of your friends?

• 26:42Speaker 01

  Um, he's hung out with some of my friends.

• 26:45Jocko Willink?

  Did you go out with any of his friends?

• 26:47Speaker 01

  Little bit. Yeah. No serious relationship.

• 26:50Jocko Willink?

  My kids are like, my oldest three kids are about eighteen to twenty-four months apart. It's eighteen for the first two. And so there's always, but the oldest two are girls. And then there's the boy.

• 27:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:03Jocko Willink?

  But the weird thing is the boy's like six-three and he's always, he's been taller than them since. So I don't know. It's, but there's, there's like a little, there's like a little line with my kids. The friends all hang around, but there's never been like a relationship anywhere.

• 27:18Speaker 01

  Yeah. No, I mean, I'll tell you like in, in, I think it was my, was it my senior year? My senior year, you know, we had, I had one friend who didn't get asked to prom. And, you know, it was a sad thing, you know, and she's like heartbroken about it. And I'm like, Travis, you're taking her to prom. And he's like, I don't even know this girl. I'm like, you're taking her to prom? He's like, fine. You know, like he always just kind of like stepped in. I mean, certainly a lot of my friends were enamored by Travis. I'll put it that way.

• 27:51Jocko Willink?

  Travis was the stud.

• 27:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:54Jocko Willink?

  All right. So you guys have this awesome relationship and I'm going to go back now to

• 28:03Jocko Willink?

  the day you find out.

• 28:07Jocko Willink?

  So here we go. I couldn't believe it. I didn't want to believe it. I collapsed in a heap right there on the driveway. I remember thinking that the asphalt felt unnaturally warm for a mid-April afternoon that had been mild. It's not fair. It's not fair. I screamed over and over into the sky. I wanted to make sure that everyone, even God himself, knew that he had made a terrible mistake.

• 28:30Jocko Willink?

  As I screamed, my parents' neighbors spilled out of their houses to find out what was happening. My dad didn't rush to my side to comfort me.

• 28:39Jocko Willink?

  He let me get those tortured screams out of my system before I went about the hard work of trying to understand what had happened and pick up the pieces. As had always been the case with my dad, he knew exactly what I needed before I did. I have no idea how long I lay on the ground screaming. I just know that it was long enough to get the rage out of my system.

• 29:01Jocko Willink?

  At some point, one of the neighbors helped me up and walked me down the driveway toward my house. As I walked, I turned around and saw an unfamiliar car parked out in front of the house. In my shock, I hadn't even noticed it earlier. Inside sat a young man about my age in full military dress blues. His forehead was resting on the top of the steering wheel, pressed between two folded arms that cradled his head. His eyes were closed, and he looked dejected or perhaps unconscious.

• 29:33Jocko Willink?

  I later learned this poor Marine, 26 years old, had been charged with the unfortunate task of sharing the news with the people closest to Travis that he had been killed in Iraq. Captain Eric Cahill, as I later learned his name was, had been assigned to carry out the job since he was local and had graduated from the Naval Academy the year before my brother. Lieutenant Colonel Gardner had also been called, since the military knew that he was a family friend close by. Together, while I had been out scouting sites for my boutique, they had approached my parents' door and knocked. My mother opened the door, took one look at Corky in the young Marine in uniform, and slammed the door in their

• 30:14Jocko Willink?

  faces. She simply couldn't face what was on the other side.

• 30:26Jocko Willink?

  Like I said, that's what every, every military family knows. There's only one reason that that person's coming to your house in their dress uniforms.

• 30:34Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 30:35Jocko Willink?

  And, and since, since your dad was in the Marine Corps for whatever 20 something years, and she obviously was, knew this as good as well as anyone.

• 30:50Jocko Willink?

  So.

• 30:52Jocko Willink?

  She wasn't sure she could face what was on the other side. I wasn't sure I could either. When I reached the front door with the help of my neighbor, I stopped. I had walked through that door thousands of times before, but this time I wanted to turn the other direction and run away. I knew, deep down in my soul, that once I passed through that door this time, the life that I had known was over, and there was no going back.

• 31:31Jocko Willink?

  That

• 31:34Jocko Willink?

  permanence.

• 31:37Jocko Willink?

  I was

• 31:40Jocko Willink?

  at the SEAL Teams, I was in the training command and a guy got wounded really bad overseas. And somebody called me and said, hey, this guy got wounded really bad. And I, I think the guys that called, the guy, there's two guys on the other end. And I think

• 32:03Jocko Willink?

  they were looking for

• 32:08Jocko Willink?

  like

• 32:11Jocko Willink?

  a little bit of sympathy. Right? Like, hey, one of the guys got wounded really bad. And I remember saying, because I'd heard the initial report that a guy was wounded really bad, really bad. And then these guys, this, this call came probably thirty six hours later. And I, I said like, hey, is he stable? And they said, yeah, he's stable. And I said, well, then we're good. And for them,

• 32:47Jocko Willink?

  I mean, for them, they were still thinking like, hey, this guy's gonna lose limbs. Like this guy's gonna be in really bad shape. But for me, like, because, you know, I'd only come back from Iraq a little while before and lost guys there. And so for me, the difference between, hey, this guy's as messed up as this guy's gonna be. Is horrible the situation is and the wounds that he suffered are horrible.

• 33:16Jocko Willink?

  But he's gonna be here. And this permanence of what you, you know, that's what, that's what I was thinking about when I was reading about you saying, when you walk through that door, the line between life and death is like, it's like you can't even, you can't even identify it. It's so, so slender. And it falls on one side or the other.

• 33:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, I've, I, you know, you go through that initial phase of shock, but I remember thinking like, why couldn't he just been like, why couldn't we be flying to Germany right now, you know? And, and I've even had dreams about like Travis being there, but, but he's like, super wounded, you know, he's missing both his legs, but I'm like, who cares? It's Travis, you know, I, I, of course, you take them in any form, if they're alive, you know, and it's just that idea. And I think for me, you know, when my mom opened the door, it, it's, I, I don't, I don't write about it in the book, but like, it was a super volatile time when he was there.

• 34:23Speaker 01

  And my mom had gotten an email a week before from, um, the major's wife on the MIT team and she had, you know, said, I can't speak to it now, because she was kind of the, the liaison to all the families. I can't speak to it now, but I just want you to know that something happened last week that was very significant and your, you know, your husbands and sons, what they did is, you know, was incredible. And, you know, all, all a mother thinks is, well, you know, bad stuff is going down. And so she, leading up to that knock, she was on edge.

• 35:08Speaker 01

  She was on edge that entire deployment, but even more so after that email came. And, you know,

• 35:15Speaker 01

  I think that is, she tried to, every morning when she woke up, she sent him an email. He didn't email back, but she sent him an email. Every day, she was sending another care package. That probably wasn't getting to him, it was getting to, you know, Fallujah, but where he was, he wasn't having care packages dropped at his door. But it was like, those were the things she had to do to like, process while he was there. Like, this is what's gonna get me through. And that Sunday, I think there, there's something about the fact that, you know, she woke up that morning and just said, "I wanna have people over." Like, it wasn't, it was, there was no plan around it. Um, and she was a planner. So, but that morning, she woke up and said, "Tom, let's have people over."

• 35:57Speaker 01

  So, you imagine all these different scenarios, all these different knocks that, that people get. And, you know, you see mine, you're gonna see Heather's and Amy's in the book as well. But imagine a scenario where the mother and father are opening the door, and there's thirty people in the house, you know, there to have a family barbecue. And I remember when I walked in that door, I could see smoke coming off the grill. Because my dad had walked to answer the door and left all the meat on the grill, and it's out there like, on fire. And I, you know, and it was like, it was pure pandemonium.

• 36:40Speaker 01

  Like, my people, nobody knows what to do. And people are just literally running around the house like screaming. All the women are just like screaming. Like, there is no sanity in this room. And I think that's why my dad's just like, "I'm gonna stand out in this driveway." You know, with, with Colonel Gardner, because he's just like, and then the rest is like, all these women, and people are coming up like, "What do you need?" I'm like, "What do I, like, what kind of question is that? I don't know, I don't even know what, what is up right now, you know?" But-

• 37:11Speaker 01

  That chaotic scene is something that that plays out a lot in my mind over and over, you know?

• 37:20Jocko Willink?

  What time of day was it?

• 37:21Speaker 01

  It was like one o'clock in the afternoon, you know, it was like come up for a Sunday barbecue. And, you know, aunts and uncles are there, my mom, my dad's siblings, my, you know, some of my dad's siblings, all of my mom's siblings, my grandmother, it was my cousins, you know, it was just that. And and my mom was always like, kind of the person like, coming to my home, you know, let's do something. Um, but just to have those people there when that moment took place. Yeah, it's, I I remember turning, as I turned to walk in the door, I turned and it was my, my little cousins and it's my dad's sister, my aunt Susan, she was standing there with um,

• 38:06Speaker 01

  my godson and her two other kids and they were standing on like the step going to the back of the house. And she's just trying to console these little kids who grew up with Travis. I mean, literally grew up with him and she's just trying, and I'm just like,

• 38:24Speaker 01

  you, you can't even, you can't even play that scene out in a movie, you know? I mean, you can't even capture what, what it was.

• 38:37Jocko Willink?

  You um, you you talk about that scene. And then, and then you say this, "In all the chaos and furious movement, I locked eyes with my grandmother who was seated alone in a wheelchair in the dining room, tears streaming down her cheeks. She was receiving neither comfort nor attention from anyone. My heart broke in that instant. I'll never forget that image.

• 39:00Jocko Willink?

  The rest of the day is a blur. I floated between feelings of painful shock and dark emptiness."

• 39:09Jocko Willink?

  When I woke the next morning, I remembered what it felt like coming out of anesthesia from an operation I'd had in college. First one eyelid opened cautiously, then the next, but my body remained frozen. My mind was already churning, going over the details of the previous day, and coming to terms with the unalterable fact that my best friend and brother was dead. This marked the first of what turned out to be many anxiety-ridden mornings that would follow. Every day, I would slowly and warily transition from sleep to consciousness, hoping that my overwhelming anxiety wouldn't make another appearance, but it always did.

• 39:54Jocko Willink?

  Did you ever have the, um, did you ever wake up in the morning and forget for like three seconds what had happened?

• 40:03Speaker 01

  No, um, I, I didn't. It was actually more like as soon, as soon as I opened my eyes, tears, I would be crying. Like if I was awake, I was either like, non-functional, just like, you know, or I was crying. And it's, and I would say for a good month, I woke up and I'm like, oh my gosh, I think so every day for the rest of my life, I'm gonna wake up crying. You know, you, you're like, you, you go through these phases like, okay, this is the new normal. I will wake up crying every day. And I honestly could not wait every night to fall asleep because the only time I wasn't in pain was when I

• 40:48Speaker 01

  was sleeping. So it was just like, how quickly can my body, and, and in those moments, it's not easy to sleep, right? So, sleep didn't come very easily. So I was so thankful when I, my body would let me sleep. And, you know, that was the only time I was necessarily forgetting.

• 41:08Jocko Willink?

  I've experienced like when something really bad happens, like when I've lost friends, and I wake up in the morning, and for like three se- literally three seconds, you know, the alarm clock goes off, and I, you know, shut off the alarm clock, and I, and I, and everything's like totally normal, for like, for three seconds. And then I take two steps out of my bed and boom, I get hit. Oh.

• 41:39Jocko Willink?

  Now, you all go to meet Travis as he is flown home. And we're going to the book, "The greeting at Dover was gut-wrenching." "My parents and I were plagued by questions in those early days that were difficult to ignore. Who was Travis with when he died? What happened? Was it instant?" Slowly, the answers started to unfold. We learned that Travis wasn't actually scheduled to be out on the mission the day that he was killed. Instead, a fellow Marine was slated for the patrol, but he wasn't feeling up to it. Travis, who had been assigned to do some humanitarian work at a local Iraqi school, offered to take his place. During the course of the patrol, Travis and his team of Marines were ambushed.

• 42:21Jocko Willink?

  A firefight erupted, and they were quickly pinned down, taking fire from three sides. Travis, seeing his Navy corpsman shot and line wounded in the middle of the road, immediately ran out into the line of fire to carry his colleague to safety. As the ambush intensified, Travis again entered the line of fire to pull another wounded Marine back to safety in a covered position. Then Travis moved out to take on the ambush that was now overwhelming his patrol. Undaunted by the onslaught, he fired his M203 grenade launcher, taking out an enemy position, and then expended a firestorm of rounds at the other positions before running out of ammunition. His efforts pushed the enemy back and changed the entire momentum of the ambush, ultimately saving the lives of his entire patrol.

• 43:09Jocko Willink?

  It was then that Travis was shot by a sniper, and immediately, the enemy began to pull back. His teammates quickly grabbed him and provided what emergency medical care they could. He was rushed back to Camp Fallujah, where he was pronounced dead by the medical staff that had worked feverishly to try and save him.

• 43:31Jocko Willink?

  There's no part of that story that doesn't sound just like my brother.

• 43:38Jocko Willink?

  Offering to take the worst assignment to help a friend in need, that was Travis. Thinking about the safety of others before ever considering his own, that was Travis too. Seeing the dismal odds that didn't bode well for him and choosing to grit his teeth and answer a fire with more fire anyway, also Travis.

• 43:58Jocko Willink?

  My brother was a protector and a warrior in every sense of those terms. I certainly felt it as his sister and I'm proud to know that his fellow Marines got to experience it too.

• 44:14Jocko Willink?

  When I learned that he'd been killed by a bullet, I was nervous I wouldn't be able to stomach the sight of him in an open casket. My mind imagined the worst.

• 44:24Jocko Willink?

  I was shocked then when the lid of the casket was raised at the viewing to see my brother looking as though he were sleeping peacefully. Just as I'd remembered him.

• 44:35Jocko Willink?

  I approached the coffin. And rubbed his head as I'd done a hundred times before.

• 44:43Jocko Willink?

  From the time he was a child, Travis had always sported a buzz cut. And as I felt the surface of his freshly cut hair with my fingertips. I thought, yep.

• 44:55Jocko Willink?

  That's Travis's head.

• 45:14Jocko Willink?

  That was Travis.

• 45:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:21Jocko Willink?

  And it's like his whole life was leading to this moment where

• 45:31Jocko Willink?

  he needed to do something beyond what is expected of a human being to do.

• 45:38Speaker 01

  I think, you know, when you look back

• 45:44Speaker 01

  at his childhood, I think he was doing things that were beyond what a ten-year-old child was supposed to do, or what a fifteen-year-old kid was supposed to do. You know, it was like, and they were small moments, right, in the whole scheme of things, but they ultimately prepared him for that last day.

• 46:10Jocko Willink?

  I was, uh, after Mikey Munster got killed and we came home and I was talking to Mikey's sister and he was, she, she was just, she just said, yeah, she said, when I found out what happened, I wasn't even remotely surprised at all.

• 46:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:26Jocko Willink?

  She's like, oh, he jumped on a grenade and saved three of his friends. She's like, that, that's exactly, she's like, I don't want to say that I knew that this would happen, but she said, this is no surprise at all.

• 46:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:47Jocko Willink?

  Going back to the book, I stood by his side all day, greeting friends and family who had taken the time to pay their respects. One of Travis's best friends and roommate at the Naval Academy, Brendan Looney, was unable to make the funeral. He was in San Diego attending the basic underwater demolition SEAL school, the training program required for Navy SEALs. Leaving to attend the services on the East Coast would have surely meant relinquishing his chance to become a SEAL officer. But Brendan's girlfriend at the time, Amy, who had also been close to Travis, did come to say her final goodbye.

• 47:22Jocko Willink?

  I remember Amy walking up to the casket and bursting into tears. I knew the loss cut her deeply as well. It was a physically and mentally exhausting day. And as much as I could hardly bear the idea of standing by that casket one minute longer after hours of doing so, I also didn't want to imagine that time coming to an end.

• 47:46Jocko Willink?

  I knew that after the last person knelt down to say a prayer in front of Travis, the funeral director was going to close that casket forever and that would be it.

• 47:59Jocko Willink?

  I'd never seen my brother's face again.

• 48:03Jocko Willink?

  I rubbed his head one last time and felt my heart sinking as my father gently pulled me away.

• 48:23Jocko Willink?

  After the funeral, the burial and the celebration of his life that followed, I remember sitting on the back stairs outside my parents' home, the same place where I had sought solace in the chaos after first hearing of his death. The winter had melted away and a beautiful spring day had sprung up in its place. In the weeks and months that followed, I often found myself outside, crouched on that stair and in those stairs in that same position.

• 48:51Jocko Willink?

  Time was passing, life was moving on, I was watching it happen, but I was not participating in it. I felt bitterness towards the people who could return to their normal lives, jobs and families while I sat on the same stair in the same red sweatshirt, terrified of what might come next.

• 49:20Jocko Willink?

  I, you know, when you were talking about,

• 49:25Jocko Willink?

  like saying, "Oh, this is just the way it's going to be from now on. I'm just going to be crying all the time." And I had somebody ask me about, you know, when is this, when does this end, this like, how do you get through this? And the way I tried to explain it is by saying, when you first experience something devastating like this, you're going to get hit with these waves and the waves are going to be...

• 49:54Jocko Willink?

  Really powerful, really strong, and they're gonna come really often. And what's scary about them is be by the time you're 28 years old, or 20 years old, or whatever, however old you are, you've learned to control your emotions and all of a sudden you're in a situation where you don't have control anymore.

• 50:14Jocko Willink?

  And it seems like, like you said, that's just the way it's gonna be from now on. And then, what I've noticed is, over time, those waves, they start to lose some strength. They're just not as strong as they were. And over time, those waves, they separate, and they get further and further apart. And what happens, and this is what I thought of when I read this, this part that you wrote,

• 50:41Jocko Willink?

  is, you know, the closer you are to the person, the stronger those waves are, and the longer it takes for that calm to approach. So when you see other people that are already kind of have found some calm again, and they're moving on, it makes you, it can make you mad.

• 51:00Speaker 01

  Totally. I, you know, they have that, this 12 stages of grief, I couldn't, I couldn't name all 12 stages, and then follow, but like, I know anger's up there, and I felt anger, you know, and it was just like, and it was anger at everyone else. Like, screw you guys, you know? We're, we're, we're just, we're here, we're living it, and you're living their lives. On the flip side, you know, having some perspective, like, thank you for being there for us. Thank you for doing what you did. Thank you for leaving your job for a week to support my family. You know, you don't have that mindset when you're in it. You're like, oh, you're going back to work?

• 51:45Speaker 01

  You're, you're flying back? Like, what do you mean? Like, no, you're all supposed to be here, and, you know, we're all gonna live together in this house, and, and support each other.

• 51:56Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you, you think to yourself, life is not gonna go on, the way it was ever.

• 52:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, and, and that was the, that was the scariest part. So it was this, this idea of like, it was that initial walk through the door, and then, then everything takes over. You know, you go into this autopilot of like, we've got to plan for everything. So it's the anticipation of being at Dover. But, that anticipation comes with...

• 52:24Speaker 01

  A level of

• 52:27Speaker 01

  excitement isn't the right word, but like, I can't wait till that coffin comes on the plane, off the plane. There he is. He's now with us. You know, and it's these small steps and it's like, okay, next is the viewing. I can't wait to be able to see my brother. And then it's like, we're closing that casket and it's like another thing. You know, you walk through that door, the casket's closing. The funeral mass happens. Everyone comes back. You've got hundreds and hundreds of people at a reception. And then it's like, that last bag of trash is taken out by the neighbor. And they say bye and you're like, oh crap. Now we actually really have to think about what this means. You know, because you're just kind of going through this process.

• 53:20Jocko Willink?

  By the way, I failed to mention this so far. I'm not reading the whole book. And so if there's some things that are jumping around or whatever, that's why. Because I'm not here to do an audio version of this book.

• 53:33Jocko Willink?

  But that's why I'm reading chunks of it, but you've got all kinds of detail in there that I'm not going over and connecting these chunks that I'm reading. So that's why people should just buy the book. So I haven't said that yet, but if there's anything that seems jumpy, that's why it is jumpy because I'm jumping around from section to section. You continue on here.

• 53:56Jocko Willink?

  It was hard to believe that only weeks before I'd been so happy blissfully, blissfully ignorant of how my life would be cruelly abruptly and permanently changed. I remember sitting in my kitchen two weeks before Travis died. I was watching my baby girl all nine and a half months old pull herself up to stand on uncertain and wobbly legs. She stood with her chubby hands on the screen door. She stood next to our dog pup and giggled excitedly as she peered outside and watched a bunny rabbit hop around the backyard. Life is so completely perfect. I remember thinking at that moment. I was a happy new mom, had a fantastic relationship with my husband. Business was good and Travis would be back in time for the grand opening of my second store.

• 54:39Jocko Willink?

  I felt wholly in control and at peace.

• 54:44Jocko Willink?

  To this day, that peaceful feeling sometimes comes back to me for a moment. When life feels effortless, my mind is at ease and all seems right in the world. But now it dissolves in an instant. In fact, as soon as I experienced that kind of serenity, I become terrified. What terrible tragedy is going to shatter this picture of perfect peace? I asked myself. I still wonder if the sense of calm I experienced that day had been a harbinger of the doom to come. I worry that I was foolish for not having recognized it for what it was. All the signs of catastrophe were right in front of me. How could I have been so blind? This train of thought is, of course, completely paranoid and insane.

• 55:27Jocko Willink?

  So do you feel that now to this day?

• 55:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, I, I do.

• 55:36Speaker 01

  I don't have many times where life feels effortless anymore. But, you know, I, I remember that feeling I had that day in my house. I remember that feeling so vividly. Just, it was this wave that came over me where I was like, oh my gosh, like, this is, what a great life I have, you know? I'm like looking at my new daughter and I'm just, and, and I think I had just gotten off the phone with Travis like a day or two prior and, and our conversations had nothing to do with what he was doing in Iraq. He's like talking to me about, you know, what, what kind of men's brands did you get for the store, you know? Is there cool stuff?

• 56:17Speaker 01

  And, um, and so it was just like this super peaceful feeling. And I lived up until that point, not really fearful of anything.

• 56:31Speaker 01

  And, you know, I, I certainly.

• 56:35Speaker 01

  Today, I'm certainly afraid of, um, I'm afraid when I get a random call. I'm afraid when my husband calls me twice in a row. You know, those things can set me into a different place. They can, they can certainly, you know, I, my favorite show was, um, my favorite show was Big Love. That was an HBO series on like polygamy. Um, and it was really popular when, um, scripted series, when, around that time. And I loved the show was, um, God, who was the guy who was in it? He's, he's since passed away, but anyway, great show. Bill Paxton? It was Bill Paxton, yeah. Echo with the wind, right there. Yeah, there you go.

• 57:20Speaker 01

  That's what he's here for. Yeah, it was, it was a great show. And I remember watching that show and, and these are the things that you don't realize are gonna happen. So I'm watching the show and it's like the series finale. And it was those little things where I was like, this is post Travis's death. And I'm like, well, you know, uh, um, Big Love's on. That's something I can enjoy. I'm gonna watch this season finale. And I'm watching the finale and on the finale, like, the head, head polygamist gets shot. And he gets shot on the street. And wa- watching him get shot, it sent me into a full-blown panic attack. It was such a visceral reaction that I wasn't expecting, that it stunned me.

• 58:04Speaker 01

  And I was like, oh my God, I, I can't, I can't see that. I mean, my, my five-year-old walks around, he's got a little like, uh, pistol that was, that was Dave's, my husband's. And he brought it, my mother-in-law found it and she brought it back about a month ago. And it's the cutest little thing with the holster. And I can't be around Travis holding it, my little Travis, holding it. It, it, I'm like, David, there's something about like guns now, you know? There's seeing them pointed, being shot, like, it sends me in a, in a bad place. You know, and it's, it's those sort of things that you don't. You don't realize until a little bit after the fact that, okay, these are the residual

• 58:45Speaker 01

  effects and some of them go away and some of them don't, you know, um, and some of them just are a part of who you are now. And I've, I'm, I'm definitely a, a jumpier person, you know, like I hear some thought, I'm like, what, what happened, you know, where before I was not like that. I was kind of like, oh, I heard something, you know?

• 59:11Jocko Willink?

  You talk a little bit about that more here. You say, "The fear and paranoia that follow in the wake of grief can create a tremendous roadblock. It stunts our personal growth and darkens our overall sense of well-being. Some people respond to unexpected and trying situations with passive acquiescence and others with fire and fury. I responded by heightening my vigilance. After Travis's death, I found myself compelled to be wary. I was always on the lookout for the next great tragedy to befall me. This hurled me down some very dark and troublesome paths, from panic attacks to self-destructive behaviors, but also led me to some amazing gifts like recovering my sense of humor and living with intention." What self-destructive behaviors did you pick up?

• 59:58Speaker 01

  I mean, I think, you know, self-destructive in a way that, you know, I stopped kind of taking care of myself. Um, you know, you, I, I go into the next place where I'm talking about, um, you know, I decide to run a marathon, but I'm running a marathon, smoking a pack of cigarettes a day. And, you know, I'm drinking a lot and I'm just kind of like, I'm gonna do this, but on the same token, um, you know, this is kind of who I am now, you know, and, um,

• 1:00:32Speaker 01

  You know, with the, with that, that hypersense of paranoia, you know, I really went into some, these ideas of, and I, and I, I know what, I know the reasoning behind it, if I can look back and like psychoanalyze myself. When Travis was in Iraq, I was not worried about him. And when he was there the first time, when he was there the second time, even though I knew the second deployment was different, I was aware of that because my husband told me, he's like, hey, this is gonna be different, you know, I've had conversations with your brother, but I had no fear of my brother being in Iraq.

• 1:01:12Speaker 01

  It was this notion of, more than anything, you think about like these crazy stories, right, um, you know, iceberg, or like, you know, icicle falling off a garage and like impaling a woman on her head, right? And it's like these totally crazy stories and you're like, that's so crazy, well, I mean, it's never gonna happen to you, right? It's like the plane crash theory, like, we all fly on planes, but, you know, you tell your kids, planes are, planes don't crash, you know, you're not gonna be in a plane that crashes. So you don't think about that happening to you. And that, maybe it was a defense mechanism, but that's how I got through Travis being in Iraq.

• 1:01:55Speaker 01

  I wasn't, you know, I didn't show any fear, I didn't show any, I, and I didn't even have any fear. It wasn't that I didn't show it, I really didn't have it. I let those emotions all go. So then when it did happen, it was like, I guess when you do this idea of like preparing, right, where you're, it's almost like, I knew this was coming. Like you hear people like, I knew it, I knew it, right? Like, I had no idea. And so, to have something shock your system that much, um, I think it kind of rewires you, where you're kind of waiting for that next shock to the system and, you know, you lead on throughout the book and, and I've had other things that have, that have happened

• 1:02:37Speaker 01

  since, where I know like, that no one is void of having something happen, you know? Whether it's random in nature, I've had a lot of random crappy things happen to me, you know, over the last several years.

• 1:02:53Jocko Willink?

  I guess it's it's similar. Again, this is something I just talked about with Jim Sersli, who was on the last podcast, who was in Vietnam. And the range of level of fear that guys have going into combat, there's some people that are scared. They're like, they think they're gonna die.

• 1:03:09Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:03:10Jocko Willink?

  And there's some people that are kind of like, that that will actually not happen to me. Like, I'm, I'm, I'm not gonna die. And that was kind of his attitude was, you're, you're, you're thinking, oh, that's, yeah, like, he volunteered to go Vietnam. He wasn't like, I'm volunteering to go Vietnam, and I might die. He was like, I'm volunteering to go to Vietnam, and I'm gonna go do my job. And, and so I guess it's no surprise for some people on the family side to think, well, yeah, that's not gonna happen to my loved one.

• 1:03:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:39Jocko Willink?

  I, I've never really asked my parents this. I don't think my parents ever thought anything would ever happen to me ever, you know, I thought, I think they just thought I was just overdoing, and just whatever. Part of that is because I, I kind of inculcated them to just not never knowing what I was doing ever. And I was in for a long time. And before the war started, I'd already been in for 13 years. So they never knew that I was jumping out of airplanes, or doing whatever I was doing. And so when the war started, I was just still going on deployments. Like, I'd always gone, I'd been, I'd gone on deployments. I'd gone on five deployments before I went to Iraq. So that to them, they were saying, oh, he's going on another deployment. We'll hear from him in six months, whatever. My wife, maybe the same thing, but

• 1:04:24Jocko Willink?

  until like, when, when I was in Ramadi, and my wife was at home, and she was going to my guys' funerals. And when that happens, every single family member that's there is thinking that the person that was killed could easily be, you know, my husband, my brother, my son.

• 1:04:56Jocko Willink?

  Now you talk a little bit about just this idea of grief. The fact is grief will transform you. And you've got will italicized, which I think is important.

• 1:05:12Jocko Willink?

  Because you're saying, listen, like you, because I think that's where I think that's the the discovery that you made in that statement is you're thinking, hey, I can get through this and everything is I'll be back to the way things were. And you're saying, no, the fact is grief will transform you. Whether you are grieving the loss of an identity that you once had, or the loss of a loved one, at some point you will look in the mirror and see someone you simply don't recognize staring back at you. It is inevitable. Maybe you should, maybe you'll be proud of what you see and maybe you'll be ashamed. At some point, I bet you be both, I bet you will be both. The most important thing you can tell yourself is that you get the last word.

• 1:05:53Jocko Willink?

  Only you can determine how your experiences will change you. And only you can be held accountable for that transformation.

• 1:06:05Jocko Willink?

  So these are, these are powerful things. I wrote a book and I guess I talk about an attitude of extreme ownership of taking ownership of what's going on. And you know, there's always someone that wants to

• 1:06:26Jocko Willink?

  make different points or trying to, I'll be positive about it. There's people that want to, that people that want to test the theory, right? Sure. Of taking ownership. And so one of the things that can happen is, you know, hey, I got cancer. That's not my fault. How do I take ownership of that? And it's like, well, you're right. You can't take ownership of the fact that you got cancer. You take ownership of how you respond to it.

• 1:06:47Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:06:47Jocko Willink?

  And I just was out with, working with a group of people and one of the guys had cancer.

• 1:06:55Jocko Willink?

  And he was like, hey, I started listening to the podcast. And he's like, I listened to your podcast for seven hours a day, every day, the whole time I was in the hospital.

• 1:07:06Speaker 01

  Oh, my gosh.

• 1:07:07Jocko Willink?

  Which makes me feel good about having 500 hours worth of podcasts. But that's what he did. He took ownership of how he responded.

• 1:07:15Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:07:16Jocko Willink?

  And that's what you're saying here. Look, you're gonna, something's gonna happen, there's gonna be changes, but you do have, what do you say, you get the last word.

• 1:07:24Speaker 01

  Right. Well, I think, you know, one of the things that I have people still to this day say, you know, and, and I'm 12 years out from the loss of my brother.

• 1:07:41Speaker 01

  Seven years out from the loss of my mom. And nine years out from the loss of Brendan, right? And, and people will say, you know, when does, when do you stop grieving? And I'll even have people that have newly lost someone, like, explain this grief process, like, when is it gonna end? And I'm very clear to tell them, it doesn't. It never ends. I'm not gonna say, don't worry, you know, in a year, it's over. Because everybody's journey is their own. But the fact of the matter is, is that I entered into my, if you want to call it grief

• 1:08:23Speaker 01

  journey, in, in a way that wasn't best for me, right? I wasn't, it was a, it was a process. And now, when you look at, like, talking about looking in the mirror, and are you the person you want to be, like, when I look in the mirror today, I'm the person that I wished Travis saw when he was alive. Like, that's, and so that for me is, like, that was my wake up. I'm like, okay, so this is what the grief of my brother has done to me. It's actually allowed me to become the person I should have been when he was here.

• 1:09:02Jocko Willink?

  I was, I had a guy on the podcast, his name was Tom Fife, he was, he was, he was in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. And he, he was a Purple Heart recipient from all those wars.

• 1:09:18Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:09:19Jocko Willink?

  And he was a battalion commander in Vietnam. And I was talking to him about it. And like I asked him, you know, basically, you know, I think I asked him, how many casualties did you take, or how many guys did you lose as a battalion commander? And so this is, I don't know, 50 or 60 years later. And he got choked up. And when that happened, I thought to myself, oh, the emotions that I have, they're never gonna go away.

• 1:09:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:53Jocko Willink?

  And that's just the way it is.

• 1:09:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:54Jocko Willink?

  And there's nothing wrong with that. You know, the waves get, the waves get more separation between them over time, but those waves can hit you.

• 1:10:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:06Jocko Willink?

  At any time.

• 1:10:07Speaker 01

  And I think, you know, what I find now is, the further you get out, the waves actually come at like really inopportune times. So, I'm not an incredibly emotional person to begin with. That bout of the first month after Travis's death was probably the most crying I've ever done in my entire life. But it was like, it was an involuntary response, like I could, there, there was not, that's just what it was. And I, if I was out in public, I had on the biggest sunglasses you could possibly find because I did not, I get uncomfortable when people see me emotional, and so I was, I

• 1:10:52Speaker 01

  had, I tried to cover it. Um. And but now today, you know, the way those waves come, it's it could be something so small that someone says or something I see and it doesn't matter where I am and it's just like, oh, my God, and it kind of like takes your breath away, takes you back to that place. And, you know, I do a lot of public speaking and and I share Travis's story and and everyone's like, I don't know how you do that without breaking down. And I'm like, listen, that's not the time for me to break down. Like, I'm I'm there to do a job. I'm there to share that story and make sure that you hear that story. But if you think for one second that there aren't times I'm driving in the car and a song comes on, or I'm out on a run, or I'm sitting there looking at my kids and, you know, yeah,

• 1:11:36Speaker 01

  that still happens. And and it and it doesn't come as as often. But, like you said, you know, 50, 60 years out, a service member talking about his friends, like, that's never going to go away. And nor would I want it to.

• 1:11:52Jocko Willink?

  Exactly. Exactly. You continue on here, like anyone who has received a jarring knock at the door, literal or figurative. And that's what's important. And you, again, since I'm jumping around this book, you know, that there's the metaphorical knock at the door that a service member's family can receive. But the knock on the door can be anything.

• 1:12:12Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:12:12Jocko Willink?

  Right? Anything that is unexpected in your life. And everyone's going to get them in your life. You're going to get a knock at the door that that you want to do what your mom did, which is slam the door and don't let it come in. But it's coming.

• 1:12:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:27Jocko Willink?

  I've been to the darkest, deepest, and ugliest corners of my mind, and I've learned a thing or two. I don't hope to spare you the hurt or pain that comes with the knock. I'll read that again. I don't hope to spare you the hurt or pain that comes with the knock. I don't think that I could. I only hope to share the lessons I learned in the process, the ones that have the power to transform you in all the right ways and remind you that you are not alone. So, yeah, you you're not saying that you can.

• 1:13:01Jocko Willink?

  Make the pain go away. It's gonna hurt.

• 1:13:05Jocko Willink?

  But there's, there's steps you can take to move through that hurt that make more sense, like you said, looking back.

• 1:13:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, this book is all built on perspective. I'll, I'll tell you that, you know? I mean, I, I, I couldn't have written this book even five years ago, you know? I mean, it, it took 12 years to be able to say, okay, um, I'm ready to put pen to paper. And listen, I'm no expert, but um, I've got a lot of experience in grief, you know? So I'm gonna kind of share, share my thoughts on that.

• 1:13:44Jocko Willink?

  Well, it helps anytime you can have, anytime you can see something unfold for someone else. It makes you able to better handle it yourself. That's a hundred percent. That's why I read war books all the time. So I was able to try and figure out what was happening in combat. Even if I'd never seen it before, I'd seen it before.

• 1:14:04Jocko Willink?

  You say this, "In the early days after Travis was killed, my decision-making was more impulsive than rational. Impulsive decisions can be catastrophic and a few of mine have been. But they've also been a great way for me to channel my nervous energy. I think subconsciously, I believed that as long as I was doing something, anything, then I would have to, then I wouldn't have to acknowledge the intense pain that was overtaking my spirit and fighting to get out.

• 1:14:28Jocko Willink?

  Two weeks before Travis was killed, he called home from Iraq. "I wanna, I wanna run the Marine Corps marathon," he told my dad. "That's great, Trav," my dad responded, "and I want you to run it with me," he finished. My father was then in his early 50s and in solid shape, but this was no small request. After running the Marine Corps marathon a couple of times, when he was younger, my dad had retired his marathon shoes. Forever, he thought. But he wasn't about to say no to his son, fighting a war thousands of miles away. "Let's do it," he replied. In mid-May, when the funeral services were over and my parents, extended family and friends were gathered in the living room, my dad remembered his promise to Travis. "I'm still gonna run that marathon," he proclaimed to the quiet gathering of distraught, dumb-struck family members.

• 1:15:11Jocko Willink?

  I'll run too, Tom, said Chris, my dad's youngest brother. I'm in, echoed his wife, my aunt Susan. One by one, people picked up their heads, hardened their gazes and joined him. Pretty soon, every single person in that room had committed to 26.2 miles in honor of Travis. I was conveniently engrossed in a thread on the carpet when I felt a dozen pairs of eyes landing intently on my face. I looked up. Now, I had been an athlete in college, but that was almost five years earlier. I'd given birth to Maggie only 10 months before and I hadn't run so much as a 5K in ages. But those stairs were burning a hole right through my skin and thankfully, my bullheadedness kicked in. Alright, I'll do it, I said. I mean, how hard could it be?

• 1:15:56Jocko Willink?

  And then you, you get done with your first training run. At the end of that first one-mile run, wheezing forcefully and doubled over in pain, I gave myself a little pat on the back. Good job, Ryan. You did today's run. You're done now. Go home, drink some water and chill, but make damn sure you show up for tomorrow's run. And that's how it went. Every day for four and a half months, no matter how slow, ugly, or painful the run might have been, I completed it. There was no 26.2 mile run ahead of me. There was no 26.2 mile ahead of me. There was only today. As the proverb says, there's only one way to eat an elephant, one bite at a time. So you, you talk about your training. I thought it was cool. You, you got Travis's iPod.

• 1:16:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:16:36Jocko Willink?

  How awesome was that?

• 1:16:37Speaker 01

  It was awesome. Yeah, I came back in his footlocker and I'm like, alright. And he was so into music. And we both shared like a deep love of music. We went to concerts together all the time. And so that was like exciting. I didn't have an iPod at the time. So it came back and it was, and I'm like, gosh, I hope I can get this thing working and you know, plugged it in and I was like, alright, there we go.

• 1:17:01Jocko Willink?

  It's so crazy to think that these digital memories of people, I mean, and even, I mean, today. Today, the digital memories of people are gonna be crazy. I mean, it just, you're gonna have all these images and videos and writing and posts and all this stuff for people.

• 1:17:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:17:19Jocko Willink?

  Like even just something like that, what is it 12 years ago, you know, this iPod, you know, you fast, you could rewind another 20 years behind that. There's no iPod. There's no, there's, you might've had a mixtape, I guess.

• 1:17:31Speaker 01

  Well, I look at too. It's interesting. Like, and I remember talking to Travis on his first deployment. I'm like, let me set you up a MySpace profile. He's like, I'm not doing that. I'm like, come on. And, and, you know, so he had no imprint on social media at all. But just a few years later, you know, when Brendan was killed, I was Facebook friends with Brendan. Brendan had a Facebook page, you know, and it was just that, that small, that small time. But to have that iPod, the coolest thing about it for me is that it wasn't just like it was Travis's iPod. I'm like, th- this is what he was taking in when he was in Iraq.

• 1:18:07Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 1:18:08Speaker 01

  You know, so like, I'm listening to it and I just felt, it, it, it felt like such a, a deep connection with where he had been.

• 1:18:15Jocko Willink?

  And you know what's so cool about that? What you just said, you don't even realize how right you are because like, I had my iPod in Iraq, my last deployment, which was 2006. And those songs, like what, however many songs were on my iPad at the time, like whatever, 215 songs or whatever it was.

• 1:18:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:18:35Jocko Willink?

  Whenever I hear those songs right now, I'm right back. I mean, I was 100% listening to the same songs over and over and over and over again.

• 1:18:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I'm, and I'm now brought back. I hear any of those songs, I'm brought back to training for that marathon. That's where they bring me back to.

• 1:18:50Jocko Willink?

  So you talk about the training and then here we go. As the big date approached, this is for the marathon, my family and I headed to Washington, through which the marathon course runs. The night before the race, we held a dinner for our team, which by now had grown to nearly 100 people. Aunts, uncles, cousins, friends, neighbors, lacrosse and wrestling butter buddies, fellow Marines and Naval Academy grads, all of them were participating to honor my brother. At dinner at a hotel, we invited a few people, including Brendan Looney, who was to say a few words. Brendan stood solemnly at the microphone. He stared, he started in about how Travis had been a brother to him and how he couldn't believe he was gone. He was a great friend, Brendan said. I'll never forget him and I miss him. He'd been choking back tears and finally his voice broke.

• 1:19:34Jocko Willink?

  I have to get out of this room, I thought. I simply couldn't watch this tough Navy SEAL break down as he remembered my brother. It was too much. I slipped out of the hotel and found myself gulping in the cold fall air outside. My head was spinning and I couldn't help but feel that I was learning for the first time that Travis was gone forever. I lit a cigarette. It had been on and off habit of mine over the years, one that Travis had always chastised me about. Maybe one day I'll write a book about what not to do in running a marathon. Chain smoking the night before the race would certainly make the list. But it's not even the worst transgression I've committed. Fortunately for you, this isn't a book about endurance training. It's a book about grief, which perhaps isn't so different. The key to navigating grief I've found is to have the courage to allow it

• 1:20:19Jocko Willink?

  to transform you.

• 1:20:23Jocko Willink?

  Same, same theme. Like, accepting the fact that it's gonna make you different. I've had to remind myself time and time again, we're only human. We can only take so much. Don't be so hard on yourself when you take one step forward and several steps back. You made it this far. You got up today and put one foot in front of the other. You completed today's run. Go home, relax, and get ready for tomorrow's.

• 1:20:48Jocko Willink?

  Now you get into the marathon, which is a great story. I'm jumping ahead a little bit here, but got to mile nineteen and I still had seven point two miles to complete. At this point, the wheels had all but come off. My brain was no longer able to bully my body into behaving. My knees, my ankles, my arches, everything was rebelling. I had slowed to a walk and began to debate with myself, began the debate with myself that any distance runner knows well. Eighteen miles is great. You should be proud of yourself. There's no shame in stopping here. You just lost your brother, for God's sake. Did anyone really expect you to get this far? Call it now and leave with your dignity and your joints intact. So you're having that... The quitters conversation. Totally.

• 1:21:32Jocko Willink?

  The quitters conversation. You're having it, but you're not a quitter. So I made one last ditch effort. I reached into my fanny pack and rifled through my unused power gels and energy beans until my fingers rested on the mask card with Travis's face on it. November nineteenth, nineteen eighty to April twenty ninth, two thousand and seven, twenty-six years old.

• 1:21:53Jocko Willink?

  I gripped it tightly and offered a silent prayer. This is it Travis.

• 1:22:00Jocko Willink?

  The Marine Corps Marathon course ends at the US Marine Corps War Memorial. A statue based on the iconic picture of six Marines struggling to raise a flagpole on the island of Iwo Jima during World War II. It's an incredibly powerful sight and when you come upon it, you feel every bit as tired and as strong as those men huddled together appear to be as they raise the American flag.

• 1:22:24Jocko Willink?

  I didn't care if my leg fell off in that very moment. I was not walking up that hill. I hustled into a full sprint, bounded over crushed plastic cups and past exhausted runners. Somehow I felt my legs were fresh. In reality, I was probably every bit the Frankenstein I had appeared to be at mile 19, just an hour older. What I actually looked like, I can't say for sure and I'd rather not imagine, but I pushed forward and grabbed Aunt Susan's hand as together we crossed the finish line. Then I collapsed.

• 1:22:55Jocko Willink?

  I can honestly say that I'm a different person because of that race. Pushing myself through that training and navigating the emotional strain and physical stress taught me a lot about myself and even more about grief.

• 1:23:07Jocko Willink?

  It took me years to process my brother's death and years more to organize my thoughts around what wisdom I could possibly gain from it. It's only after more than a decade of reflection that I can share what I now know.

• 1:23:23Jocko Willink?

  And here you kind of lay some of these out. First, what you don't know can't hear, can't hurt you. Which is an interesting concept. What, what you don't know can't hurt you. Wait, hear me out. I know this advice is usually given sarcastically and that can be for good reason, but consider for a moment the wisdom in that phrase. Sometimes being naive is a blessing. If I had known the physical, mental and emotional toll that the race would have taken on me, I wouldn't have run it. I would have become paralyzed with fear and self doubt and my eyes would have remained forever fixed on that thread in the carpet. But fear and self doubt often keep us from knowing our own strength. And that's something we simply can't risk.

• 1:24:05Jocko Willink?

  If I had never run that race, I would never have discovered what I was capable of achieving. Preparation and training are great tools. They provide us with confidence to dream as big as we want to, but without a healthy dose of fearless ignorance, we might never bother dreaming at all. It's interesting advice.

• 1:24:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:24:24Jocko Willink?

  I like it.

• 1:24:25Speaker 01

  It's advice I still follow to this day. I mean, it's, it's kind of, I'm, I will say, you know, pre Travis, didn't really live with fear, right? But I didn't really do anything to be fearful of. And today, I, I definitely have those like, I say, you know, I'm on edge. I'm always on edge. But I'm also on edge in a way that I'm like, what's next? Like, I'm like hungry for what's next. And I, the things that I have done over the last 12 years, I don't even know if I could

• 1:25:06Speaker 01

  pick five of them that I would have done pre 2007, or frankly, had any interest in. I mean, had Travis come home, nobody, you see, Travis placed a call from Iraq to my dad to say, run the marathon. He wasn't calling me to say, run the marathon. That wasn't even a thought in his head, because he knew that there was no way I would even consider running a marathon. And I've just kind of approached things as like, I'm just gonna do it. You know, what's the worst that can happen? And, and you do, you have this like, what's the, my brother is dead. What's the worst that can happen? You know, I don't make it. I don't make, I don't finish the race.

• 1:25:50Speaker 01

  And, you know, and, and that was 12 years ago, and that was my, I remember saying, I'm gonna do, finish this marathon, and then I'm gonna be able to say, I ran a marathon. And I'm, and people are like, oh, you're gonna get the bug once you run one. And I was like, I never got the bug. I'm like, nope, I have my check mark. I can say, when people say, oh, I'm running a marathon, I'm like, yeah, I ran it, you know, and, but, I don't know.

• 1:26:18Speaker 01

  What changed, but you know, here I am again, like 12 years later and I'm rucking the Marine Corps Marathon in a week. And

• 1:26:26Jocko Willink?

  What, 40 pounds?

• 1:26:27Speaker 01

  Oh, God, no. 20 pounds.

• 1:26:29Jocko Willink?

  20 pounds?

• 1:26:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:26:30Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 1:26:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. Um, yeah. And, and this is a person who's never rucked before. So I go, well, I, I, we have a fantastic partnership with GoRuck, the GoRuck community. And so I get to meet the founder of GoRuck. Have you ever met Jason McCarthy?

• 1:26:48Jocko Willink?

  I have not.

• 1:26:48Speaker 01

  He's a great guy, West Point grad. Um, and he just has this fabulous community. I didn't understand it, but I knew that the people, uh, connected with the Travis Manning Foundation, loved rucking. So I'm like, all for it. So they asked me to do this promotional video with Jason and to highlight our partnership. And we're in Georgia and we're, they're filming us and we're walking around a lake and he's like, let's get Ryan a rucksack. And so I put this rucksack on.

• 1:27:16Jocko Willink?

  He had this set up, pre-planned, big time.

• 1:27:18Speaker 01

  I mean, the rucksack had like newspaper in it. So I'm just like, okay. So I'm like, oh, this is fun. He goes, and he's explaining the theory of rucking is like, the nice thing about it is like, your pace is always at a conversational pace and you know, and I'm like, I, I like that. Like, I like that I can sit here and talk to you and we're exercising. And he's talking about the benefits of it from a child perspective, like, you bring your kids out because they're going to be walking slow, but you just put more weight on and you're getting a workout. So, conceptually, I'm like, okay, I like it. Well, later that night, we were at a summit. We had like a hundred veterans, um, through the Travis Manning Foundation, we had brought for like leadership training. And later that night, everybody's by the bonfire and we're a few drinks in and

• 1:28:03Speaker 01

  everybody's talking about, oh, I'm rucking the marathon. And, and it was like another one of those scenes. Instead of in my parents' living room, I'm behind, behind, you know, around a bonfire with a bunch of veterans and they're like, it's like, I'm gonna, I'm gonna ruck the marathon. I'm gonna, and it was like, came to me and I'm like, I'm rucking the marathon. And I woke up the next day and I was like, yeah, I don't know if I'm rucking the marathon. But then I get back to Philadelphia and a rucksack shows up at my front door and I was like, oh crap.

• 1:28:33Jocko Willink?

  You're rucking the marathon.

• 1:28:33Speaker 01

  I guess I'm rucking a marathon, so.

• 1:28:37Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's I was uh I was talking to Travis Mills.

• 1:28:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, I love Travis.

• 1:28:43Jocko Willink?

  Travis is awesome.

• 1:28:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:28:44Jocko Willink?

  But we were talking about, you know, I was talking to him about like, why didn't you? And he was a total stud in high school football. He'd set records like he's and he's just like a beast of a human and athlete. And you know, I said to him, well, why didn't you go to like special forces? Or why didn't you go to Ranger School? He's like, I didn't know if I could make it. And I was like, oh, that's funny. Cause I, as a young 18 year old kid, when I joined the Navy, I had enough of this right here. I had enough of, what do you say, uh ignorance?

• 1:29:12Speaker 01

  Fearless ignorance.

• 1:29:13Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you know, I was, I was like an average athlete.

• 1:29:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:29:17Jocko Willink?

  And I was like, oh, SEAL training? I'll make it through whatever, you know? And here's a total stud that was, he was like, I didn't know if I could make it. I was like, um, you didn't have, he didn't have enough fearless ignorance.

• 1:29:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:29:28Jocko Willink?

  But um, yeah, so it's same thing. And, and I, I find that a lot with these young kids that there's some kids that wanna be SEALs. But I meets, I have people come to my gym here and they're like, I really wanted to go SEALs, but I didn't know if I could make it. I'm always thinking, man, you're in better shape than I ever was.

• 1:29:45Speaker 01

  Right?

• 1:29:45Jocko Willink?

  But you gotta have a little bit of fearless ignorance.

• 1:29:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:29:47Jocko Willink?

  Just a little bit.

• 1:29:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I mean, hey, I'm, I'm using my fearless ignorance again to rock this marathon. I'm just, you know, and but, but that also comes coupled with um knowing how hard a marathon is. So Krista, who's in a lot of this book, you know, she's, I've convinced her to rock the marathon with me. She's never done a marathon before and we did 18 miles last week. And she's like, I feel great. Like this feels great. I feel like I could keep going. And I'm like, you don't understand, it's that last 7.2 miles that, that puts you over the edge. I'm like, she has the fearless ignorance. She has no idea.

• 1:30:27Jocko Willink?

  Got it right where you want.

• 1:30:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm like, I know. So I, I'm like, I'd rather be in your shoes right now.

• 1:30:33Jocko Willink?

  Uh, here's your next piece of advice from this section. Second, embrace your support system. Relationships are everything. Friends, family and loved ones can get us through our darkest and saddest moments. We just need to let them. Our friends and families feed our wild ambitions. They gently and lovingly protect us from our own self-destructive habits. They list, lift us up when we can't go another step. With a loving support system, we can afford to be a little naive. Be bold, be fearless, but don't do it alone. You are human and you are one person. Allow yourself to be carried forward by those who love you.

• 1:31:06Jocko Willink?

  And then your last piece of advice in this section, and finally, don't wait.

• 1:31:12Jocko Willink?

  I beg you, please don't wait. I had no idea how tough I was. Why did I wait until my brother was dead to find out? My only regret of that marathon in 2007 was that it didn't take place in 2006. You know who would have loved to run and train with me? Travis. Something like that, which required focus and discipline, was far more up his alley than mine. He would have been so proud and we would have had a ball together. There are so many things I wish I could have done together, wish we could have done together. I'm not the same woman he knew when he was alive. I'm better, I'm stronger. Why did I wait for him to disappear before I became the woman I wanted to be?

• 1:31:54Jocko Willink?

  Don't wait.

• 1:31:56Speaker 01

  Don't wait.

• 1:32:02Jocko Willink?

  Continuing on, in 2007, if you were to graph my emotions for that year, you would produce an interesting line, a fairly stable horizontal line of contentment for the beginning of the year, a drastic drop in April when Travis died, then a gradual climb back up toward happiness until the marathon six months later. I was so grateful to have something to focus on that helped me put the pieces of my life back together after the loss of my brother. It was precisely the medicine I needed. But by winter, my line was dropping again. The decline in my happiness and well-being was persistent, steady, and interestingly, almost undetectable. I, of course, knew that my life had been far better when Travis was in it, but I was managing, wasn't I?

• 1:32:45Jocko Willink?

  After all, I was getting up, going to work, being a mom, I was running errands and knocking out personal goals, I was socializing and even laughing and finding joy here and there. By any external barometer, I was improving. I was wounded, no doubt, but I was happy. But grief is very much an internal battle. It's not kind enough to play by the rules, and it certainly doesn't register on any emotional barometer. It can be deceptive, and believe it or not, so can you.

• 1:33:15Jocko Willink?

  In fact, I would wager that no one can deceive you as effectively as you can deceive yourself. Grief, pain, sadness, these feel like disadvantages. They threaten our survival so naturally, we shed them. We convince ourselves, we convince ourselves that they've gone away. This is precisely what I did, and it's amazing what I managed to hide from myself and for how long. My emotional slope continued to creep stealthily downward. For several years, it continued right under my nose until Christmas night of 2012, when I reached rock bottom. But the seeds of my deterioration had been planted several years before.

• 1:33:57Jocko Willink?

  Now, we've talked about your brother, and obviously I had your dad on the podcast. We're going to talk about your mom a little bit, and this is how you describe your mom Janet. Janet Manion was a tough, optimistic, and focused. She made every decision with self-assurance, as if despite any concerns or doubts that she may have been harboring. The anxieties, the worries, they were there, of course, they had to be.

• 1:34:22Jocko Willink?

  She simply would not allow them to triumph over her. She had Herculean willpower. For years after Travis's death, my mother continued to be the picture of stalwart strength. She ached in a way that only a mother who has buried her son can, but she never let it keep her down.

• 1:34:42Jocko Willink?

  It was especially disorienting for me then, when I learned a few years later that my mother, this pennant of courage for our family, had only eight months to live.

• 1:34:56Jocko Willink?

  We got the news in 2011, four years after Travis's death. A surgery revealed that stage four lung cancer had spread throughout her body.

• 1:35:09Jocko Willink?

  Eight months after, eight months later, a few days before the fifth anniversary of Travis's death, my mother joined him in heaven.

• 1:35:17Jocko Willink?

  In only five years, my only sibling and my mother had died. My family of four had been reduced to two. I was devastated. No marathon was going to make this loss any easier to bear. I had no idea where to turn for help. I simply couldn't stomach the thought of picking up the pieces once again. I hadn't even collected them all the first time.

• 1:35:40Jocko Willink?

  In the months after my mother's death on April 24th, 2012, I turned to the methods of coping that had become familiar to me. I threw myself into my work and into my family's busy schedule. I set small goals, losing weight, reading, running, anything to keep waking up every day and moving.

• 1:35:59Jocko Willink?

  It had worked before, hadn't it? It could work again, I figured.

• 1:36:06Jocko Willink?

  I was wrong.

• 1:36:16Speaker 01

  You know, I think when I look at the, the five-year span between Travis and my mom, I kind of, I'll say,

• 1:36:31Speaker 01

  I peaked in terms of like, with that marathon, it was like, I'm gonna do this, you know? And, and then from there, it just became this idea, like, I talk now, like, when people ask me, does grief end? Like, no, it doesn't. But, at that time, I didn't know that. And so I thought grief, grief was over for me.

• 1:36:54Jocko Willink?

  Did you have any,

• 1:36:57Jocko Willink?

  was there any indication of what was gonna, what was gonna happen with your mom?

• 1:37:02Speaker 01

  No, I mean, if you looked at my family dynamic after Travis was killed, um, she was the Sparta woman that had taken over and was leading the charge. And it was kind of my dad and I following behind her. I mean, I can't put into words the, the strength that she displayed. And, and now with three kids of my own, I can't even, I can't even fathom it. Um, and so, you know, I was doing things between those five years. She had started the Travis Manning Foundation.

• 1:37:42Speaker 01

  And at first, my dad and I looked at it as almost a labor of love. It was like, okay, well, this is good. It's like this small memorial fund and

• 1:37:53Jocko Willink?

  It'll keep her distracted.

• 1:37:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, seriously, we had those conversations like, great way for her to channel her grief, to work through things. She can help people locally. I mean, that's how we saw it.

• 1:38:05Jocko Willink?

  That is, that is so funny because you're sitting there going, oh, that's and she's like got a master plan going.

• 1:38:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, oh, it was like, it couldn't, looking back, it couldn't have been more short sighted. Um, on our parts to think that she was just gonna la di da around town, you know, and be like, I've got a memorial fund, like, no. I mean, she right away was like, we're gonna be one of the, I mean, she would say things like our nine 11 heroes run. This was like a 5K run, um, that we had the year after Travis, uh, was killed. Nine 11 heroes run, it was 300 people in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. You know, a small suburban town outside of Philadelphia. And I was like, this is so cool, like great run, great to have the community out.

• 1:38:51Speaker 01

  And my mom comes up and she's like, I want this to be the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure for our military community. We need one of these in every city and state across the country. And I'm like, and you know, my dad and I would be like, okay, Janet, like, like eye roll, like, why don't we just try to get like a thousand people at the run next year? You know, that would be like a cool goal, but, um,

• 1:39:15Speaker 01

  You know, you look at where we are today. We've got, we just finished our race series. Ninety runs across the world. We brought out 60,000 people.

• 1:39:25Jocko Willink?

  Janet wasn't playing.

• 1:39:26Speaker 01

  We are the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure for the military community. You know, bringing awareness to our military and first responders. And so, you know, I'm watching her do that. And I joined the foundation in early 2010. And I'm just kind of, I mean, my title was executive director. My real title was Janet Manion's assistant. You know, I mean, I was her assistant. And I was happy to be that and to play that role because frankly, I had no idea what I was doing. And I'm following behind her and just kind of, it was like,

• 1:40:11Speaker 01

  you know, she was teaching me, you know. It was, I was watching everything that she did. I was trying to emulate how she was doing it. She was so bold and fearless, like she would, she had no problem asking anyone for anything. And I was just like, God, if I can just hang around her enough to gain some of that experience. And so, our time was so limited that I was able to do that with her. Till the time she was diagnosed with cancer. And it was another one of those just like gut punches. But it came in like a different form as opposed to like knock on, right? It comes as, my arm hurts.

• 1:40:56Speaker 01

  Your kid was, you know, being a pain in the butt. And when I tried to pick her up, she wiggled out of my arm. And we're down at the beach and, oh, mom, throw some, throw some ice on it, you know? And we get back home and she's like, God, my arm still hurts. It's not incredibly swollen or anything like, how many, you don't think anything of it. And so, it's like a couple of days later. I think I'm going to go to get my arm checked out. All right, I'll go with you. We go down to our, she calls our friend who's in orthopedic. Hey, can you run an X-ray on me? I think I might have broke my arm. Yeah, come on in. You know, we left the foundation office. We go in, they give her an X-ray and he comes out. And I just, you just, you knew, and he comes out and he goes,

• 1:41:41Speaker 01

  um, so you have a little break there, but I want to send you down to my friend at Penn, um, to take a look at it, um, cause it, there's, you know, just to, just to get another look and, you know, get another opinion. Well, all right, you just told me I broke my arm, you're not going to cast it, and I'm like, this is weird. So, I'll make you an appointment, let's get you down there tomorrow. And we show up at the office, and it was my mom, my dad and I, and I remember we walk up, and it's like, doctor, so-and-so, orthopedic oncologist. And we were like, wha, you know, I'm like, and I'm like, my mom has bone cancer? You know, that's all I'm thinking, like, what?

• 1:42:23Speaker 01

  And so she goes into surgery the next day, and, you know, you don't know what a diagnosis looks like, it's like she's got a tumor in her arm. Okay, that's the most random thing I've ever heard in my life. Um, and they're like, well, she had a tumor in her arm, we removed it, but the tumor didn't, didn't start there. So now we have to figure out, like, where it came from, but that also means that wherever it came from, it has spread. And so it's like another, and that night, my parents are slated, my mom's in a bed at University of Pennsylvania Hospital, and my parents are supposed to be getting the, um, Commodore Berry Citizen of the Year Award,

• 1:43:07Speaker 01

  presented to them by General Dumford. And so, my dad and I, um, head to the event, we come back, um, and we get back to the room, and the doctor's like, yeah, it's, uh, started in her lung, it's in her brain, it's in her back, I mean, it, it was everywhere. And not one symptom at all, like, not one symptom. She was not smoking cigarettes while training for a marathon, you know, I mean, it was, it was crazy. It was like, how does, how does this happen, you know? And I've read a lot of studies on like grief manifestation with stress,

• 1:43:47Speaker 01

  and how like your body sometimes can, um, let go of certain cells when you're experiencing trauma. And I think there's, I mean, I have to believe there's something to say to that, um. You know Brendan Looney's mom died three years after he was killed from cancer. So, I mean, the coincidences are, are a lot. But you know, the doctors tell us like, you've got eight months to live with treatment. If you decide to go the treatment route, it's just going to help prolong you. We're going to give you about eight months. My mom never really took that and was like, she didn't do one of these, I've got eight months to live.

• 1:44:32Speaker 01

  This is what I'm going to do. She was just like, okay, I'm going to start my treatments and I'm going to keep working. So, you know, she's diagnosed with stage four cancer and she's back in the office the next day. And she's standing there with a, you know, a wrap around her arm where she had just had surgery. But like, it was, it was a little off putting because nothing changed. It wasn't like, okay, everything changes now. What, she was like, no, we've got, we've got a job to do. And it wasn't until the very end, when her health started to take a bit of a decline, that I took on more of a caretaker role with her.

• 1:45:11Speaker 01

  But this was like, it was like eight months and six and a half of those months were just, you would have never known anything was different. So, you know, she's going to chemo treatments, maybe she's sick for a day, she's back in the office the next day. Very, you know, she's serving, she had an appointment.

• 1:45:32Speaker 01

  An official appointment at Arlington, she served on the Arlington Committee. And, you know, she's, she's taking calls and doing meetings from her bedside, you know? And so she, she kind of kept focus on, she didn't focus on what her, her illness. She focused on everything else. And it just got to the point at the end where her body wouldn't allow her to, to keep going like that. But it was, it was, you know, two weeks where she was really, where you're like, oh, you're, you're sick. But the rest of the time, you would have really never known. You know, people look at pictures of my mom and I'm like, yeah, that's just a couple of weeks before they, she died. And they're like, what?

• 1:46:14Speaker 01

  Cause you have, you know, the image in your head of someone with dying of stage four cancer. Like, she just, she didn't look like that.

• 1:46:22Jocko Willink?

  And what were you thinking this whole time?

• 1:46:25Speaker 01

  I was very pragmatic. I was like, my mom's dying in eight months. I, I did not, um, my dad on the other side was like, I'm not listening to that. Like, there's, there's miracles happen every day. We just gotta, you know, stay the course. Things, we'll see if there's trials, you know, they're trying all sorts of different holistic diets. And, and I was very much, um, supportive of that. Let's try everything and anything. But I almost felt so jaded at that point, eh, in, in life a little bit that I was like, yeah, I mean, we got, we got eight months. Let's see what these eight months look like.

• 1:47:14Jocko Willink?

  You, you say here, grief is a savage and shrewd beast that isn't easily tamed. As soon as I found a method of fending off my grief that worked for me, it caught on and found a new mode of attack. Staying goal oriented and tough minded got me only so far. Then the year my mother died on Christmas night of 2012, it came to find me in my home. And so your mom dies and you, again, this is all stuff that you talk about in the book, these big parties that you guys have, these big Christmas parties and they kind of go, they've gone from generation to generation and your grandparents had them, then your parents had them. And, and so now it's your turn. And so you have this big party and, you know, uh,

• 1:47:56Jocko Willink?

  the, the pandemonium or whatever of a party and the planning and all that stuff. And then the party's over and after the, after the party, you lay down, you know, you're really tired from doing all the work of getting it ready. And you're tired, but here we go back to the book, but sleep didn't come. Something much nastier arrived in its place. I felt like I received a direct punch to the gut and my eyes immediately sprang open. I started hyperventilating. I couldn't breathe. Pressure was quickly building inside my chest and my mind was on fire with anxiety. It was the most terrifying panic attack I had ever experienced. Dave, you have to get me to the hospital. I managed to get out. I think I'm dying. I will forever be grateful for what my husband said next.

• 1:48:39Jocko Willink?

  No, you're not. Stop, Ryan. Just relax and go to bed.

• 1:48:45Jocko Willink?

  Then you say you might think I'm kidding, but I'm serious. And I did think you were kidding, and you are serious. My husband always knows what to say to me when my emotions reach a fever pitch. If I had sensed even the slightest bit of concern in his voice, I know the situation would have only escalated. At the time, however, as you may imagine, I did not appreciate it. I immediately set off into a flurry of accusations that thankfully I can no longer remember. Dave, the peaceful warrior that he is, remained unfazed and steady. He continued to speak rationally and firmly. It was probably only a few minutes, but they felt like my last. With the intense feelings of anxiety, when the intense feelings of anxiety disappeared, and my breathing slowed into a natural rhythm, I had an internal come to Jesus with myself.

• 1:49:27Jocko Willink?

  Clearly, I was not okay. I had dealt with some minor anxiety before, initially when Travis was deployed, and then immediately after his death, but nothing like this. This was positively debilitating. For several, for the next several months, I was a ghost of my former self. The identity I'd painstakingly built for myself after Travis died had shattered. On December 24th, 2012, I identified as a tough, capable, resilient woman. I was a marathon runner. I was a dedicated mom and supportive wife. I had taken over as executive director of the Travis Manion Foundation, the organizer, the organization my mother had formed to honor my brother. I led a talented team, and people looked to me for guidance and leadership, and I gave it to them. But December 25th was a different ballgame. I was gasping for air and cursing my, cursing

• 1:50:11Jocko Willink?

  out my exceedingly calm husband. I was smoking again. I'm crying in the shower, and regularly feeling seized by anxiety that I simply couldn't shake off. If this is what life is like going to be, if this is what life is going to be like from now on, I thought to myself, one day, I'm done. I can't live like this.

• 1:50:33Jocko Willink?

  And then you talk about communicating with some of your friends, commiserating with Amy. This is Brendan's, Brendan's wife, was deeply helpful in putting me back on the path to recovery. Two years earlier, she had lost her husband Brendan. If there was anyone with whom I felt I could be completely vulnerable, it was her. One day I called her overwhelmed and furious. My therapist diagnosed me with post-traumatic stress disorder today. I shouted into the receiver, can you believe that shit? I don't have PTSD. And then you go on and she says, it's okay, Ryan. She told me, my therapist told me the same thing. At that point, we both chuckled and it dawned on me that there was likely some truth to the diagnosis.

• 1:51:16Jocko Willink?

  Naming my problem didn't do much for me, but sharing it with someone else did. During the following six months, I started to regain my confidence, humor and peace. I slowly reclaimed myself. Life slowed down. I focused on my mental health. That did not mean I threw physical challenges out the window. Quite the opposite. I began to understand what my dad meant when he told me to go for a run. When I wasn't feeling myself. Exercise has a tremendous positive effect on the mind. I was using simple exercise as a tool to help with my mental state. And you, again, you go into some pretty good detail about this idea of not just exercise,

• 1:51:58Jocko Willink?

  but setting these kind of little goals and doing things that sort of give you an immediate short-term gratification. And you get sort of on this treadmill of you're looking for these short-term gratification things to really propel you for the next 10 minutes, whatever, next hour. And, you know, whether it's a run or whether it's a goal or whether it's some party or you're just, you're looking for, you're looking for like happiness.

• 1:52:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:52:29Jocko Willink?

  Gratification, temporary joy. But you realize that that's not giving you the profound happiness that you're looking for.

• 1:52:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:52:41Jocko Willink?

  So you say this, to break away from that unforgiving pattern of searching for unmatched joy, you need to do one very important thing. You have to be honest with yourself. No more self-deception. For a long time, I had lied to myself about how happy and fulfilled I felt. Frankly, it was easier that way. I even lied about things that made me feel happy and fulfilled. If I just stay busy, I would think. Maybe the story you tell yourself is a little different. If I just lose a few more pounds, if I just earn a few more thousand dollars this year, if I can just get that guy to notice me, then I'll be happy. Then I'll be okay. When we shed those deceptive stories we tell ourselves, we create a space where we're

• 1:53:25Jocko Willink?

  able to see what actually does make us authentically happy. I bet you'll find you weren't totally off. As I said, we all seek some, the same things, love, acceptance, purpose. We just look for them in the wrong places. When I talked with Amy, I knew that I had found them. A sense of community, friendship, growth, they were all right there, laid out in front of me. And it was because I took a moment of quiet away from the activity and the chaos that I got to experience and appreciate it in an intentional and meaningful way. Intention was the key that I'd been missing. I was so caught up in goals and milestones and challenges and ambitions that I'd missed

• 1:54:07Jocko Willink?

  the simple but profound element that makes everything worthwhile. And the fact is, I'm still hungry. I'm still ambitious. I'm still a fighter. I like to push my body and do things I may not quite be ready for. And hell, hell yes, I've still got goals and dreams. But now I also have something else. I believe that the single greatest key to resilience is setting intentional goals. Achieving a goal for the sake of vainglory and sheer accomplishment will bring satisfaction, but that satisfaction will prove to be short-lived. Achieving goals that have deep meaning to us will bring us far more happiness. When we set goals that have meaning outside of our own selfish ends, we discover it's not about the destination, it's about the journey.

• 1:54:56Jocko Willink?

  That's powerful. And for me, that part right there at the end, when we set goals that have meaning outside of our own selfish ends. And that's the lesson that when I, when I hear Travis's story, it's like, oh, what made his life so meaningful is that what he was doing was not for himself.

• 1:55:19Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:55:22Jocko Willink?

  Everything he was doing was so that he could be a leader, so he could be a warrior, so he could protect, so he could defend.

• 1:55:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:55:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, it, that, you know, you talk about April 29th, 2007 is the worst day of my life. But if you try to find the worst time of my life, it would be after my mom passed away. It was one of those things where, you know, you kind of do this. Oh, when I thought I was the, when I thought Travis being killed was the woman being hit with the icicle falling off the garage, like, this is like, let me tell you about the craziest story I've ever heard, you know, like, how,

• 1:56:12Speaker 01

  how could my mom and my brother both not be here? And

• 1:56:21Speaker 01

  through that five years, I was led by my parents largely in terms of things I was doing to honor my brother. But it was, I don't want to say robotic, but it was, it was these small little things. It was like, okay, run a marathon. And it was like, go to this ceremony. And five years out from a loss, there's still a lot of attention that's brought to that loss and the loss of a service member. I mean, you're going to have, you know, you're going to have the local schools that want to honor them at Memorial Day. You want, the families want to be brought in on Veterans Day. It's, it's those things and they kind of like, they lead you through the years.

• 1:57:06Speaker 01

  And, and I'll tell you what, they're meaningful and they, and they mean something. And they're very much appreciated. But then after.

• 1:57:17Speaker 01

  My mom was killed or passed away. Um, I just felt lost. I was like, oh my gosh, like, I don't.

• 1:57:30Speaker 01

  I don't know what you do from here. And I, I just handled it the same way. Well, okay, you know, Travis Manion Foundation Board of Directors, three weeks after her death holds a board meeting and they're like, you're up, you know, you're the president. Oh, well, and when I joined my mom as executive director, I joined my mom as a, you know, it was still a small organization. But she takes in five years and turns it into one of the top leading, um, nonprofits for veterans in the country. And they're like, okay, Ryan, go. And I'm like, oh crap. Like, I don't know what, how to do this. I have no idea.

• 1:58:14Speaker 01

  And, um, I always tell my husband, he's gonna hate that I say this. Um, I told him that this was gonna be the title of my next book. He's like, no, it's not. But I said, like, I, I did a little like fake it till you make it. So I was like, okay, I'm the president and, and I know what I'm doing and, you know, this is how it's gonna be and, um, and the first thing I did, I just started like, hiring really smart people. I'm like, okay, who are the smartest people I can find? And I'm gonna get them and they're gonna be the team of leadership that's gonna make sure, um, that we drive this forward. But then there was also this tremendous weight. Because here you had, this organization that was named after my brother,

• 1:58:59Speaker 01

  that had become like people at this point, like you say Travis Manion and they know that name. So there's a heavy burden to make sure you uphold the responsibility of what that name represents. And then on top of it, you uphold the responsibility of the woman that created it that's no longer here. So I felt pressure like I had never felt before. And I didn't take any. Steps to say, okay, how intentional steps to say, how do I move forward doing this? It was just became the same rat race that I had been doing for the five years prior. It's like, okay, gotta keep going. And that felt really tough to me.

• 1:59:44Speaker 01

  I was like, you know, I remember sitting there the day of before my mom's funeral. And there was all these people around, much different scene than the chaos around Travis's death. I'm sitting there and I'm like, I need you to do this. Uh, this is my eulogy. I want you to go home, go back and make these revisions on the computer, print it back. Like I was running the show. I'm like, I'm in charge. I'm taking over. I'm gonna make sure all this is getting done. And we do the most beautiful tribute to this woman. And after that, I kept going just with that same like doot, doot, doot. Like grind every single day, whatever it may be.

• 2:00:26Speaker 01

  And then it was that Christmas party where, and my husband, again, you know, um, he's, he, he has some insight and he said, I don't think you throwing a Christmas party this year for a hundred people is smart. Like we are, we've got so much going on. We are so incredibly overwhelmed. Um, you're so busy, like, let's just give it a rest. I mean, I think he was even like dangling, you know, a trip to the islands for Christmas in my face. And I'm like, no way, you know? It's all about the memories. We have to have it, you know?

• 2:01:05Speaker 01

  And the, the idea that the year after my mom passes away, we wouldn't have this. Like, that's just unheard of. Like, there's no way. And so I continued in that robot, robot mode. Like, this is what I gotta do. I have to execute. This is what needs to be done. And it was, once I hit that wall after it was done, it was like, that was the Mecca. I'd hit it and everything just came kind of crashing down. And, you know, that panic attack that night.

• 2:01:41Speaker 01

  It was, I, I, I've had anxiety a little bit, you know, growing up in my teens, like, you know, what, what I, I should say, what I thought was anxiety. This was, literally, I thought I was dying. I was like, I'm, I'm, I'm dying here on Christmas night. And, and it was my husband being like, and you know, he's like, shut up. You're not dying. I'm tired. And it was hearing those words, like, I'm tired. I'm like, all right, well, clearly if I'm dying, my husband's not gonna tell me he's tired and to be quiet, you know? And it brought me down, but you know, after that, it was waking up every day.

• 2:02:24Speaker 01

  That was one thing, you know, a panic attack a year over something like, and I could understand that. I got that. It was like, well, yeah, you had a panic attack because you've had such an adrenaline rush for the last five months, building up to everything you've been doing, culminating with this event that your mom used to host. Like, I could justify a panic, it made sense. Like, your body was just having that let down and it went into an anxious response. It was that idea that I was waking up every day. And I woke up and upon eyes opening, I wasn't crying, I was like shaking. And I'm like, what is going on? And I hid it for a while.

• 2:03:07Speaker 01

  I didn't tell my husband, I didn't tell my friend, like, I told no one, because I'm just like, ooh. So, you know, I was-

• 2:03:13Jocko Willink?

  Where you don't want your husband to say, shut up, I'm tired.

• 2:03:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 2:03:17Jocko Willink?

  Which is what he said last time.

• 2:03:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was just like-

• 2:03:19Jocko Willink?

  These are not good words.

• 2:03:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:03:21Jocko Willink?

  In most cases.

• 2:03:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I'm just-

• 2:03:22Jocko Willink?

  Husbands beware.

• 2:03:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, don't, you know, and, and to this, he's like, you know, here I am, who am I in the book? The guy that tells you to shut up when you're having a bad time. And I'm like, no, babe. Um, it's what I needed. Um, but-

• 2:03:38Speaker 01

  It was that each and every day and I'm and I got to the point where I'm like like I'm I'm having mental health issues right now like this is not just a isolated event like something's something's happening here and to have me go sit on a couch with a therapist was like for me that was that was a big deal and

• 2:04:03Jocko Willink?

  A big deal because you thought you're too you're too strong for this you don't need it?

• 2:04:08Speaker 01

  It's just like not who I was. I mean, I think when I opened up the first time to my dad about this, it was my dad and my husband and we were in the kitchen and I said, hey, I'm I'm I'm struggling. I don't know what's going on with me, but I'm I'm not feeling right. Um, I'm living in a perpetual state of anxiety and I don't know how to get out of it. And you know, at that time, I I had um lorazepam. It's like a low dosage Xanax that I had because I would take it when I flew, you know, and oh, here's something just to cut the edge when you fly. And next thing you know, like I'm taking these every day and they're not even doing anything. And

• 2:04:52Speaker 01

  I'm like, okay, so I I finally break down. I tell my dad and tell my dad and Dave and my dad's like first response is, well, I mean, I haven't seen you working out in a while, Ryan. So I mean, that and that's how I was raised and he was like, you know, I mean, you gotta go out and run. And I'm like, and and I knew that was going to be the response. And so for a while I was like, I'm not going to say anything, but from there was, you know, and in my dad's defense, you know, I think after he he said that I broke down in tears. I'm like, it's not that, you know, and he was like, oh crap, something serious is going on here. And so, you know, we I got into therapy and um and therapy helps.

• 2:05:36Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, so this is something that I've realized. So I I used to um not really understand what therapy was or what a psychologist did or any of that.

• 2:05:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:05:47Jocko Willink?

  And to me, it just seemed like voodoo, whatever kind of uh, things, right? And it wasn't until a friend of mine, Jordan Peterson, who's a who's a psychologist came on here and he was he explained to me like two two things that he solved for people. And that's when I realized and I coined a term of my own called either a mind mechanic or like brain mechanic because when your car, when, when your car isn't running right, you don't just keep driving it. You go, oh, this isn't running right. I'm going to take it to mechanic. And the mechanic actually every day sees different cars with different problems and knows how to fix them. So a psychologist or a therapist, they deal with people that have been through all these different things

• 2:06:31Jocko Willink?

  and they have little solutions for them to tell you to things to do to, to, to get your mind in the right space so you can carry on. That's what they're doing. They're not doing any voodoo, voodoo. They're just doing some mind mechanic adjustments.

• 2:06:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. And you can't imagine how, I know for me, I think my first therapy session, I went in and she's asking me questions and, and you know, it's like I'm having a conversation with a friend and then she's like, okay, time's up. I'm like, well, when, when are we going to start therapy? She's like, I was therapy. And I'm like, oh.

• 2:07:07Jocko Willink?

  Did she give you, did she give you like techniques?

• 2:07:09Speaker 01

  Totally. Yeah.

• 2:07:10Jocko Willink?

  Can you give me an example of just one?

• 2:07:13Speaker 01

  So, you know, there's like the breathing techniques, of course, like for me, a lot of it was like the breathing because I would get to like these peaked, um, peak feelings of anxiety where, you know, it was like fight or flight. And it was like breathing exercises to help get me back down.

• 2:07:30Jocko Willink?

  So she says, okay, when you start feeling like that, here's what you're going to do.

• 2:07:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:07:34Jocko Willink?

  Well, tell me, what would you do?

• 2:07:35Speaker 01

  Uh, like, you know, it was, you know, you, I think one of them was like, you're going to take a deep breath in. You're going to hold it for three seconds and then you're going to let it out for 10 seconds while holding your diaphragm. So you can actually like feel, um, the breaths coming out. I developed my own techniques too. Like I, I have, to this day, I've developed my own techniques to help when I'm feeling anxious.

• 2:08:01Jocko Willink?

  Can you give me an example of one?

• 2:08:03Speaker 01

  Oh, they're so girly, but yeah. Um, my, my examples are like.

• 2:08:07Jocko Willink?

  I'm not saying I'm going to use them.

• 2:08:10Speaker 01

  So one of my examples is, um, most of the time, and I actually don't, most of the time I keep my, my, uh, nails polished. Okay. And I can get it, I'll, I'll, and I'll like peel the nail polish off if I'm feeling super anxious. But what it is more than that.

• 2:08:28Jocko Willink?

  Wait, so that's a sign that you're getting anxious?

• 2:08:30Speaker 01

  No, no, that's like if I'm super anxious.

• 2:08:33Jocko Willink?

  So if you're super anxious, you start picking at your fingernails?

• 2:08:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, taking the nail polish off.

• 2:08:37Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 2:08:37Speaker 01

  And I put the nail polish on because I don't want to pick the skin off my fingers.

• 2:08:40Jocko Willink?

  So that's a, that's a technique is to?

• 2:08:43Speaker 01

  Well, it's my technique. It's not a.

• 2:08:45Jocko Willink?

  Okay, but it's, it's something that calms you somehow?

• 2:08:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know what it is though? I'll say it's not so much the peeling the nail polish off here. It's finding something that you have to concentrate on.

• 2:08:55Jocko Willink?

  Got it.

• 2:08:56Speaker 01

  So, once I pick a piece of nail polish off my finger, I'm not gonna let my hands look like that. So I have to get every last piece of nail polish off without nail polish remover with my, with my fingers. And that takes time and effort and I just become focused on that.

• 2:09:16Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 2:09:16Speaker 01

  And so it's like that sort of thing can kind of bring you into, for me, it brings me into a place of like, I'm concentrating on this.

• 2:09:24Jocko Willink?

  So, one thing that I realize that I do?

• 2:09:27Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 2:09:27Jocko Willink?

  Is when, when you're in the military, when you talk on the radio, you don't want to sound like you're panicking, ever, right? And so like, if I was gonna key that radio, I'd be like, no matter what was going on, I'd say, you know, whether I'm just exerting physical energy or there's chaos going on, it'd always be like, oh, I'm gonna talk on the radio and I just put on the calm voice. You know, and I think that's, when you, when you say, hey, we need 14 more guys to come over to this building now. And when everyone hears you and you hear yourself, you're like, okay, things aren't that bad. We're good. So I always, for me, we're trying to keep my voice in check. And I think that leads to a, a sense of calmness, even not, not just outwardly, but inwardly as well.

• 2:10:10Jocko Willink?

  And I never really realized that until, until I started having conversations with people about this very thing. Cause people would say, well, how did you remain calm? And I would think about it like, oh, just stay calm. And then I thought, well, what, let's think about it. What actually? And the other thing is, I would tell guys, you know, that I was training. I'd be like, hey, man, don't pe- you know, I'd hear a guy on the radio, we need more guys over here now during a training operation. And I'd say, bro, you need to calm down. Don't sound like that on the radio. You're freaking everyone out.

• 2:10:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:10:36Jocko Willink?

  And, and they're freaking out.

• 2:10:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:10:38Jocko Willink?

  And so when I go, bro, don't talk like that. Say it again. Say it calm. And they'd be like, hey, we need six more guys moving forward. And you could see them visibly. I'd watch them. They would get calmer.

• 2:10:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:10:49Jocko Willink?

  Because you have to get control. So, those are the kind of things that the- Mind mechanic will give you these tools.

• 2:10:58Speaker 01

  Totally. And, and you know, but for me, it was, it was less about staying calm. It was about like, I was afraid of that crescendo where literally it's that fight or flight. And you don't want to go off that edge. And so it was like, when I get to that point, what, what do I do? Because I don't know if you've ever had an actual panic attack.

• 2:11:19Jocko Willink?

  I have not.

• 2:11:20Speaker 01

  You feel like you're dying. It is the craziest feeling in the world.

• 2:11:24Jocko Willink?

  The thing that makes me really, uh, which must make this hard, right? Is if you, like, let's say you're starting to have a panic attack.

• 2:11:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:11:33Jocko Willink?

  Isn't it like a snowball? Because you're like, I'm having one. Oh, you've been it. It's coming. It's coming. Oh, my God, this is gonna be it. This is gonna be a bad one. So it actually, it's a, it, it's like self, it propels itself.

• 2:11:46Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 2:11:46Jocko Willink?

  It makes itself worse.

• 2:11:47Speaker 01

  Well, you know, I, so I was saying, I used to take, uh, like Larazepam when I flew. You know, and it was just like, hey, it was like my fear of, you know, flying, right? I fly so much now, I'm over it. But people would say, were, were you scared of the plane crashing? And I was like, no, I was scared of getting too scared on the plane. You know, like, I don't want to be on the plane and start getting scared. So I'm gonna, I mean, it's like, your, your, your head does crazy things, you know?

• 2:12:19Speaker 01

  But yeah, I worked through that and, you know, I was very intentional about, even when I felt like, okay, I'm coming out of this. I'm feeling better. It wasn't like, I'm gonna stop. It was like, I, okay, I gotta keep going and I'm gonna keep going until she tells me it's, you know.

• 2:12:40Jocko Willink?

  How long did that take?

• 2:12:42Speaker 01

  Um, it was about six months of like intensive therapy where I'm talking like.

• 2:12:48Jocko Willink?

  How many times a week?

• 2:12:49Speaker 01

  Two to three times a week.

• 2:12:51Jocko Willink?

  And exercise? So after you.

• 2:12:54Speaker 01

  So exercise becomes again, a big part of it, but it's not exercise where I'm gonna run a marathon. Or I'm gonna, it was like, I'm gonna go out for a run every day, every other day. Because it's what my mind needs, not necessarily what my body needs.

• 2:13:11Jocko Willink?

  I was talking to my friend Joe Rogan on his podcast.

• 2:13:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:13:16Jocko Willink?

  Right after. Chris Cornell killed himself. He like killed himself that day or the day before. And so we started this podcast and look, I mean, obviously I'm no psychologist and we were just talking. We weren't trying to give out advice, but you know, both of us was like, ah, you know, gotta get some exercise. And a million people said, you have no idea what you're talking about. Like, I know, I'm just saying that, you know, it feels good to work out. But then what was interesting was my other friend, Tim Ferriss, who actually went through like a suicidal episode in his life. And he's, and he's like, no, you have to like get outside and exercise. It will make you feel better.

• 2:13:58Speaker 01

  I don't subscribe to anybody that thinks that your physical health is not 100% tied to your mental health. Like, you know, I used to think my dad was incredibly insensitive when I would try to talk to him about like, you know, ailments of the mind and he would tie it all back to like, you know, well, if you ran more. But you know what? Like, he was right. He was right. And is it all that? Is it like, hey, I'm suffering from depression. Go run. No, that's not, but it is, it is 100% a component. My husband runs every single day. Every day he runs.

• 2:14:42Speaker 01

  And he's, he's, people are like, oh, are you gonna run the marathon? He's like, I'll never run a marathon again. He's like, I run to live my life. Like, it's all, it's all for,

• 2:14:52Jocko Willink?

  Maintenance.

• 2:14:53Speaker 01

  It's all maintenance for him. It's just about like, in order for me to be clear headed, to be a good husband and to be a good father and to be good at my job, I have to run every day.

• 2:15:04Jocko Willink?

  So what's cool about this, you know, for, for folks that are listening right now that are running into whatever difficulties they're going through, like, hey, cool. The initial whatever, the initial prescription is, hey, get outside. And then, like you said, If it goes beyond that, then what do we need? Well, then you need to go and see a brain mechanic.

• 2:15:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:15:26Jocko Willink?

  Which is what you said to your dad. Hey dad, it's not more running.

• 2:15:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:15:30Jocko Willink?

  It's not more running.

• 2:15:31Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:15:32Jocko Willink?

  Which I probably had some conversations with like that about with my kids.

• 2:15:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:15:36Jocko Willink?

  Where, where, you know, my daughters, they'll say like, I just don't feel like doing anything right now. And I was like, well, that means you need to do something.

• 2:15:42Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah.

• 2:15:44Jocko Willink?

  And I'm sure at some time, at some points, they're like, oh my God, my dad's an idiot.

• 2:15:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean.

• 2:15:49Jocko Willink?

  But I want to say that you just said that your dad, which kind of supports my position. Your dad was right.

• 2:15:59Speaker 01

  He was right.

• 2:15:59Jocko Willink?

  So.

• 2:15:59Speaker 01

  He was right.

• 2:16:00Jocko Willink?

  Get some exercise, but then if it goes beyond that and you still feel the, the issues, then you've got to get some,

• 2:16:07Jocko Willink?

  some help.

• 2:16:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure.

• 2:16:10Jocko Willink?

  A couple more things to wrap this up. Along the road to intention, I came across countless bunts and bumps and pitfalls. But I also learned some, a few valuable truths. First, don't use a jackhammer when a chisel will do. When I saw a problem in front of me, I went at it with a jackhammer. I was convinced that if I applied enough force to it, I could make it go away. But some problems, even big ones, need only a well deployed chisel. Intention is the chisel. I was introduced to intention when my mom received her eight month prognosis. Travis's young life had been ripped from mine violently and quickly. But in the case of my mom, I was given the opportunity to say my goodbyes.

• 2:16:56Jocko Willink?

  I asked her questions about her life and wrote down her responses. We spent every day together and she held my girls every chance she got. After she died, all that disappeared. I believed for a time that I had been robbed. I was heartbroken and right back where I had started. But then I relearned a lesson on intentionality. I was crudely reminded of how short, sweet and precious our lives are. I know the cost of not having the opportunity to say what or do what matters most. And I refuse to squander the blessings that I have been given. I choose to live life with intention.

• 2:17:41Jocko Willink?

  Your next piece of advice, second, it's not either or, it's both and. Let me be clear, intention is not meant to replace goals and ambitions. It's meant to color them. Committing to vigorous feats, physical, mental, or otherwise, is often good in its own right. Maybe you want to pass those boards, or crush that personal best time, or compete for that promotion. These are all good things. These aims are fueled by discipline and focus, but they are nourished by intention.

• 2:18:14Jocko Willink?

  Difficult to attain goals and accomplishments are what keep our heart rates up and our blood pumping. They give us life.

• 2:18:23Jocko Willink?

  But intention is what gives our lives meaning.

• 2:18:28Jocko Willink?

  It's what makes life worth living.

• 2:18:34Jocko Willink?

  And this is your last piece of advice that I'm going to cover from the book. It says, "Failure is a bruise, not a tattoo."

• 2:18:46Jocko Willink?

  Before Travis died, I never bothered to think much about failure. That's not because I was wildly successful at everything I tried my hand at. Believe me, I failed at plenty of things. Rather, it was because I didn't care enough about anything to give it much effort. I was sometimes apathetic. Travis was ambitious. Travis was the ambitious, goal-oriented one. I was just coasting through life. After he died, and then my mom died, I had a major wake-up call.

• 2:19:16Jocko Willink?

  Now, I feel compelled to take advantage of the time I have left on this earth to lead a life they both can be proud of.

• 2:19:37Jocko Willink?

  And I think that's a, a, a good place to stop on my readings from this book to lead a life that they can be proud of. Cause that message right there is just a powerful message and it's one that I know that I think about every single day. Every single day I think about that. And mind you, we've only covered like a third of this book right here.

• 2:20:05Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:20:06Jocko Willink?

  Right? There are stories and lessons from Heather and from Amy. And like I said, hopefully I can have them on and we can go through their lessons learned and their experiences. And I look forward to doing that, but in the meantime, for, for folks out there, get this book and, and what's, what's awesome is those stories in this book, the, the stories, the book comes to an end and we're going to end this, but the, but the story doesn't end there. Because Travis and Brendan and Robert are still having a huge impact.

• 2:20:48Jocko Willink?

  And we've been talking about this, the, the foundation that your mom started, the Travis Manion Foundation, in which you are now the president of, the president of?

• 2:20:56Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:20:57Jocko Willink?

  And Amy's one of the vice presidents?

• 2:20:59Speaker 01

  Amy's vice president and then Heather is a

• 2:21:02Jocko Willink?

  Manager of

• 2:21:03Speaker 01

  Program manager here in San Diego.

• 2:21:05Jocko Willink?

  The west region.

• 2:21:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right.

• 2:21:07Jocko Willink?

  So, I mean, the, the lessons that you're putting out in this is, in this book are awesome. Tell us a little bit before we, before we stop, tell us a little bit about the Travis Manion Foundation. Uh, first of all, like what, what's the mission, what's the goal?

• 2:21:25Speaker 01

  I mean, really, at the Travis Manning Foundation, we are, we're creating a community. And we want to make sure that we are giving returning veterans and families of the fallen the opportunity to continue to serve, and more importantly, to be able to empower them post-military life. I think, you know, when you look at today, 55% of men and women who are taking off the uniform, when you ask them what their greatest challenge is, it's that, that loss of purpose. You know, they don't have that sense of purpose in their life anymore. And we have no shortage of ways at TMF to give you purpose again.

• 2:22:08Speaker 01

  And one of our biggest drivers, and a lot of it is, you know, it speaks to, I talk about Travis as a young kid, and I say, like, you know, there was something different about him. But it didn't come without having incredible mentors. You know, my Uncle Chris, my dad, some of his teachers growing up, the, the coaches, Joel Sheridan at the wrestling, at the Naval Academy, his wrestling coach, like, these were the, the mentors that helped frame him into who he became. And so we know the importance of that, and we know the opportunity have, we have with a group of men and women who basically were taught leadership.

• 2:22:50Speaker 01

  And so it's like, okay, so let's take this group of men and women who were taught to lead and serve, and just say, thanks for your service. No, how about, like, okay, you're back here, you're out, well, can you teach these kids how to lead and, lead and serve? So, we train veterans to go out and mentor youth. And they're out across the country, taking them through both physical and experiential learning challenges to build their own service and leadership. And not in a way to indoctrinate the next generation to all join the military, but in a way to say, hey, listen, as men and women like you, and Travis, and Brendan, and Rob,

• 2:23:34Speaker 01

  like, they were called to serve this country in military, but as Americans...

• 2:23:40Speaker 01

  Each and every one of us is called to serve. Like, we have a responsibility to do that. And if we're not passing that down to the next generation, then we're failing. And so that's, that's kind of our, our drive at, at the, the foundation. So we're, we just want to create a community that wants to pass that down. Um, and we've got eight offices across the country. Uh, we've got a membership base of about a hundred and 20,000 people. And, you know, we, we, we call ourselves the Spartans, like, and we're largely made up of civilians, believe it or not. But these are people that feel that sense of pride, um, for men and women like you, you know?

• 2:24:21Speaker 01

  And they want to be able to eat that up and be a part of it and, and be servant leaders right in their own backyards. And our, our organization does not exist if we don't have veterans leading the charge and Gold Star families. Like, they run our programs. So we're not a veteran service organization in the way where we're saying, these, this is what we offer to you. We're a veteran service organization that says, hey, we really want to do good stuff in the communities, so we need you guys to help us out.

• 2:24:50Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, no, it's an awesome program that, that, um, I, you guys made a video.

• 2:24:55Speaker 01

  We did.

• 2:24:55Jocko Willink?

  That I'm in. And, uh, I went to LA, but, but what's awesome is they're just, they're getting to kids, you know? And I, the same idea that I had.

• 2:25:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:25:10Jocko Willink?

  Which is, which is, hey, there's a bunch of kids in the world and what they need is to learn about life and learn about the word that you guys use, which I will use as well, because it's the right word, it's character.

• 2:25:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:25:24Jocko Willink?

  And, and how do you teach these young kids character? Well, that's, you know, I've written a bunch of kids books that, that try to teach kids about character and the values that will, the, the values that will give them a better life.

• 2:25:36Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:25:37Jocko Willink?

  That will give them a better life and will give everyone around them a better life as well. So that's awesome. The other thing that's awesome is What you just said, you know how many, you know how many times a day I get a message from someone that says, hey, I'm 52 years old and I never served and I feel like I, I, I regret it and I wish I could have, what should I do? It's like, this is what you do.

• 2:26:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:26:01Jocko Willink?

  This is what you do. You, you, you help propel the message and the, and the message of character back to the veterans, from the veterans, back to the youth. That's what you do. You, there's so many different ways to serve. You don't have to put on a uniform to serve. There's so many different ways to serve and what you guys are doing is offering, offering people the opportunity to find other ways to serve that are just as impactful. I'll tell you right now, you go out there and you help three kids get on the right path in their life. That is the biggest service you can make to the country. That's it. That's it. Go do that.

• 2:26:41Jocko Willink?

  That has such a massive impact and, and you guys are enabling that. Uh, you guys are at,

• 2:26:50Jocko Willink?

  so, so if people wanna, if people wanna get on board.

• 2:26:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:26:53Jocko Willink?

  We go to travismannion.org.

• 2:26:54Speaker 01

  Travismannion.org. Yep. You can join the mission right there. We have it and I mean, it walks you through everything like, this is everything we do. What do you want to be a part of? You know, and um, yeah, join the mission and learn more.

• 2:27:07Jocko Willink?

  You're a social media, cause Echo is really into social media.

• 2:27:10Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:27:11Jocko Willink?

  So it's on Twitter, it's TM Foundation.

• 2:27:15Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 2:27:16Jocko Willink?

  On Instagram, which Echo calls The Gram.

• 2:27:19Speaker 01

  The Gram, yeah.

• 2:27:21Jocko Willink?

  It's Travis Manion Foundation. On Facebook, it's Travis Manion Foundation. And you guys have a YouTube channel as well.

• 2:27:28Speaker 01

  We do. We've got great videos. There's a couple of you up there, actually.

• 2:27:31Jocko Willink?

  Is there more than one?

• 2:27:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, they broke down some of your outtakes and just did like, it's like a minute long, like.

• 2:27:38Jocko Willink?

  Wait, is it bloopers?

• 2:27:39Speaker 01

  It's not bloopers. It's like thoughts from Jaco, like.

• 2:27:43Jocko Willink?

  No, it was cool. I, I was gonna say, I don't know how many bloopers, cause they had a big chunk of time. Like hours and hours. And I was like, how long is it gonna take? They're like, well, we got five hours set aside. And I was like, okay, that's a long video.

• 2:27:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:27:57Jocko Willink?

  But it didn't take that long.

• 2:27:58Speaker 01

  Well, it was funny, cause I was with um, Pat Chapman, who was the one that, that filmed you. He was the producer of the, the piece and he's a good friend of mine. He lives in LA. And he said, I said, oh, I'm doing Jocko's podcast on Friday. And he said, oh my gosh, I have to tell you, he said, you know, I got in the car with like, I guess like the grips or whatever. And he said, yeah, you know, we're doing, we're doing a shoot today. This guy's name is Jaco. And they were like, are you kidding me? And he's like, and these, you know, he's like, they weren't in the military. So I didn't, he's like, I thought it was really like heavily focused on the military. He's like, these are like my key grips. And they were like, oh my God, Jaco. They were thrilled.

• 2:28:33Jocko Willink?

  That's awesome. Yeah. Yeah, it's really interesting. The, the demographics of people that listen to podcasts, it's everyone. It's really, it's really cool. And, and you know, like they find, well, this is a great opportunity for them to find a way to serve. Cause everyone feels that. They feel that somewhere in their system.

• 2:28:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:28:50Jocko Willink?

  If you go through your life, looking out for yourself, without helping other people, you'll look up one day and you'll say, I want to help other people.

• 2:28:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:28:59Jocko Willink?

  That's just, that's just the way it is. Um, yeah. So those are the ways to help, to join the mission.

• 2:29:06Speaker 01

  Join the mission.

• 2:29:07Jocko Willink?

  The way you said that.

• 2:29:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:29:07Jocko Willink?

  I kind of got, I gotta admit, that's good psychology that you just used on me. Cause as soon as I hear that, I'm like, what? Oh, we got a mission to join. See, I'm real easy when it comes to things like that. And you start throwing those words around and all of a sudden I'm breaking out the knives, getting ready to go to battle.

• 2:29:21Speaker 02

  Yeah. You say that, um, like new mission or whatever. I use that too now. It's very effective.

• 2:29:26Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Well, that's something that I say all the time to vets. Like when you get done with your military service, you need a new mission.

• 2:29:31Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 2:29:31Jocko Willink?

  And the people that don't get a new mission, they wander around not knowing what to do. So here's a good way, whether you're civilian, whether you're military,

• 2:29:42Jocko Willink?

  to get on board and go execute the mission. You got anything else?

• 2:29:47Speaker 01

  Um, I, I mean, obviously going to encourage everyone to go get the book.

• 2:29:54Jocko Willink?

  Yes. Get the book. Knock, the knock at the door. It's out right now. You, we, if you order this right now, you'll get a first edition, which.

• 2:30:07Jocko Willink?

  So I'm really into first editions.

• 2:30:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:30:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:30:10Jocko Willink?

  You gotta get the first edition. So if you guys want first edition of Knock on the Door, and then you'll be able to, people always say, how come you don't tell us what books you're gonna do on the podcast? It's because I don't know what books I'm gonna do on the podcast until like a couple of days before I do it.

• 2:30:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:30:23Jocko Willink?

  But with this one, since I'll have, hopefully Heather and Amy on at some point, you'll be able to have the book in your possession and have already read it.

• 2:30:32Speaker 01

  I love that. Yeah, take through third parts. Yeah, so Knock at the Door and then you can,

• 2:30:38Speaker 01

  you can follow me, R. Manion, at, you know, on Facebook and Instagram and Twitter, just to, you know, because I put up, Foundation's not putting up a terrible amount about the book.

• 2:30:50Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 2:30:50Speaker 01

  But, you know, I'm pushing out everything, where we're gonna be.

• 2:30:54Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 2:30:54Speaker 01

  Different events.

• 2:30:55Jocko Willink?

  So you're doing events and stuff?

• 2:30:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:30:57Jocko Willink?

  For the book?

• 2:30:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:30:58Jocko Willink?

  Promoting the book, getting the book out there?

• 2:30:59Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 2:31:00Jocko Willink?

  Spreading the message.

• 2:31:01Speaker 01

  Book signings, you know, so, yeah, all that sort of stuff.

• 2:31:04Jocko Willink?

  Getting after it.

• 2:31:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:31:05Jocko Willink?

  Speaking of a mission.

• 2:31:06Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:31:06Jocko Willink?

  Your own mission.

• 2:31:07Speaker 01

  I want a mission.

• 2:31:08Jocko Willink?

  Well, you know, um, thank you so much for coming. I mean, it's, it's awesome. And I know we have some mutual friends, you know, that's, which is cool.

• 2:31:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:31:19Jocko Willink?

  And Jamie, who works at Echelon Front, her husband Flynn, who was awesome friends.

• 2:31:27Jocko Willink?

  He was awesome friends with Brendan, and as a matter of fact, they have a son named Brendan.

• 2:31:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, you know, Jamie and Flynn, a lot of the stories that are in the book, a lot of the stories that aren't in the book, you know, they were a part of it.

• 2:31:38Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:31:39Speaker 01

  They were, they were there, you know, I mean, especially in, in Amy's section, you know, Flynn and Jamie were a really integral part of, um, of that time. Yeah.

• 2:31:51Jocko Willink?

  Well, thank you for, the three of you for writing this book, for sharing the challenges that you've gone through, the triumphs, the, it's, this, I know, like I said, that the stories in this book are gonna help. They're gonna help people that are struggling when their knock at the door, whatever that knock at the door is, when it comes their way, this book will, will help them get through it. And even more important than that, thank you for the service and sacrifice of your family that you guys have made. It's obviously something that I will never forget, and nor will our great nation ever forget that. And

• 2:32:34Jocko Willink?

  Thanks for what you're doing with the Travis Manion Foundation to keep

• 2:32:40Jocko Willink?

  his legacy and his spirit and his character alive

• 2:32:46Jocko Willink?

  in order to make the world a better place, which you are doing.

• 2:32:50Speaker 01

  Thank you. Well, thanks for continuing to have the platform to share these stories. You know, it's important. So we appreciate it.

• 2:32:59Jocko Willink?

  It's an honor to be able to do it. Thank you for coming on.

• 2:33:01Speaker 01

  Thanks.

• 2:33:04Jocko Willink?

  And with that, Ryan Manion has left the building. Awesome conversation and some good advice. Actual pragmatic advice on what to do, how to help yourself, how to

• 2:33:26Jocko Willink?

  help yourself through those moments. And part of it was, part of it was goals, right? Goals with intention to keep yourself on the path.

• 2:33:41Speaker 02

  Going out for runs. I thought that was interesting. Cause every time how she would say how Tom or her dad would say, yeah, just go for a run or whatever.

• 2:33:52Speaker 02

  We kind of say that about jujitsu a lot of times. Oh, just go train jujitsu. And it's true.

• 2:33:56Jocko Willink?

  It's true.

• 2:33:57Speaker 02

  Here's the thing for, I'm not gonna, just, I mean, we just talked about it where it's true, but it's not like that antidote. You know, it is for some stuff.

• 2:34:08Jocko Willink?

  You know, I wish I would have thought of this.

• 2:34:11Jocko Willink?

  It is a little bit more of an antidote than running, in my opinion.

• 2:34:14Speaker 02

  I think so too, but.

• 2:34:17Jocko Willink?

  It's like one, it's like a couple measures of effectiveness because there's a mental aspect to it that completely covers all the mental aspects of running and then gives additional bonuses.

• 2:34:30Speaker 02

  Yeah. And then I would imagine, obviously I'm not an expert, but I would imagine that it would just be, this varies from person to person. You know, some people they'll maybe go lift weights. I remember when I was young, when I'd be mad at something and keep in mind, I'm on Kauai mad at something. So whatever that means.

• 2:34:46Jocko Willink?

  We are here wondering about that.

• 2:34:48Speaker 02

  Very mild madness sessions.

• 2:34:52Speaker 02

  I would want to go work out, like going to work out and getting under the bench. Like that would help. That would be very therapeutic. And I used to run on treadmill too. Back nut. You know, before, not anymore, but I used to run on the treble too. Same thing, very therapeutic. I thought the lifting was more therapeutic. And then jujitsu is like magnitudes.

• 2:35:14Jocko Willink?

  Top of the therapeutic pyramid in terms of physical activity.

• 2:35:18Speaker 02

  By far too, like by far, like more than one level, like two levels.

• 2:35:23Jocko Willink?

  So you're definitely recommending jujitsu as well.

• 2:35:25Speaker 02

  Recommending jujitsu, yes, for many reasons. And we've talked about it and we're going to continue to talk about jujitsu. But when you do jujitsu, you will need a uniform, you will, a gi, if you're doing gi, which we do recommend as always. What gi are you gonna get? You're gonna, I have not been getting the question, what gi should I get anymore?

• 2:35:41Jocko Willink?

  The word is getting out there.

• 2:35:42Speaker 02

  The word is getting out and we're going to continue to put it out. Origin gis.

• 2:35:47Jocko Willink?

  Get one of our gis. And by our gis, I mean us, all of us.

• 2:35:52Speaker 02

  The group, yep.

• 2:35:53Jocko Willink?

  Cause, cause we are part of this thing.

• 2:35:55Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:35:56Jocko Willink?

  Part of this gang and we're all using, we're all supporting. We're all on board with the program, Origin. Made in America.

• 2:36:07Speaker 02

  Yep, materials. Cause sometimes people, they say made in America technically.

• 2:36:12Jocko Willink?

  Assembled in America is what they really mean.

• 2:36:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:36:14Jocko Willink?

  We're talking made in America.

• 2:36:16Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Sewn and manufactured, grown, all the way to the raw materials, all American made stuff.

• 2:36:24Jocko Willink?

  Without compromise. Gis, you can get gis, you can get rash cards, you can get t-shirts and you can get jeans. That's right.

• 2:36:32Speaker 02

  American denim.

• 2:36:33Jocko Willink?

  Jeans made in America.

• 2:36:35Speaker 02

  And buh buh boots.

• 2:36:37Jocko Willink?

  Oh, that's right. Did you get yours yet?

• 2:36:39Speaker 02

  Yes, sir.

• 2:36:40Jocko Willink?

  How are you feeling?

• 2:36:40Speaker 02

  I feel very good about it.

• 2:36:42Jocko Willink?

  When are you wearing boots though?

• 2:36:44Speaker 02

  I don't wear boots.

• 2:36:45Jocko Willink?

  So all of a sudden you just have boots. When are you, when are you gonna wear them?

• 2:36:49Speaker 02

  I don't know, but here's, here's the, the interesting thing and this goes for pretty much anything.

• 2:36:55Speaker 02

  Flip flops.

• 2:36:56Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:57Speaker 02

  But like anything, you know, when you're excited about a new.

• 2:36:59Jocko Willink?

  That's right. I forgot that in the mainland, you guys call them flip flops.

• 2:37:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, slippers. Yeah, yeah.

• 2:37:05Speaker 02

  You know, like when you get an exciting new piece of apparel, you more, you actively look for opportunities to wear them. So you know, these boots, they're gonna get worn officially. I put them on, of course, but I'm gonna actually wear them in the field. Whatever that means in my case, you know, in some capacity.

• 2:37:24Jocko Willink?

  That means you're going to the grocery store.

• 2:37:29Jocko Willink?

  But what's cool about the boots is they're, they're not for wearing in the grocery store. I mean, you can, but they're, they're legit. Awesome work boots made in Farmington, Maine.

• 2:37:40Speaker 02

  Aesthetically.

• 2:37:43Speaker 02

  Please, I don't like to use the word pleasing, but.

• 2:37:46Jocko Willink?

  You like the way they look.

• 2:37:47Speaker 02

  They, they have legitimate aesthetics to them.

• 2:37:50Jocko Willink?

  More importantly, their functionality is good.

• 2:37:53Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:37:53Jocko Willink?

  And they're not overboard aesthetically, which would get them disapproved by me. In fact, as far as I'm concerned, they are the perfect boot.

• 2:38:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:38:01Jocko Willink?

  Actually, when you think about it, they are a boot. If you looked in the dictionary, boot, you'd see a pair of Origin boots. Like that's what you expect a pair of boots to look like.

• 2:38:11Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:38:12Jocko Willink?

  Why? Because that's how boots have been honed over centuries to get to a point where you go, okay, this is what a boot is.

• 2:38:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, the most.

• 2:38:22Jocko Willink?

  The most boot a boot can be is a boot from Origin Maine. So yeah, you can get that.

• 2:38:27Speaker 02

  Also.

• 2:38:28Jocko Willink?

  What?

• 2:38:30Speaker 02

  Supplements.

• 2:38:30Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah. Nope.

• 2:38:32Speaker 02

  I was gonna say, when you're on the path, supplements, they help. They supplement the, the path, discourse, fully, 100%. But yeah, so it, look, I slipped off the train of, well, not the malt train, but.

• 2:38:45Jocko Willink?

  Cause you're right on that.

• 2:38:46Speaker 02

  Oh, man, all day, all day.

• 2:38:47Jocko Willink?

  I had, I had like an incre- my wife made me an incredible dinner yesterday. Flank steak, just all, just good to go, a nice little Caesar salad. These are like my two things, but the flank steak was just perfect. And I got done with it and I was like, yeah, that was so good. And I was like, but I want some, something. So I just got a little, I got a little scoop and a half hitter.

• 2:39:13Speaker 02

  Bro, that's not a hitter, that's a whole deal.

• 2:39:15Jocko Willink?

  I guess so.

• 2:39:16Speaker 02

  No, that's like a deal and a half is one scoop, right? Or is two scoops?

• 2:39:18Jocko Willink?

  No, one scoop is, you can have a one scoop hitter. I mean, you can have a two scoop hitter, for sure.

• 2:39:23Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 2:39:23Jocko Willink?

  But that's not really, it's a little bit more.

• 2:39:25Speaker 02

  Well, what is one serving?

• 2:39:27Jocko Willink?

  One scoop is one serving.

• 2:39:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it wasn't a hitter.

• 2:39:30Jocko Willink?

  So Mulk, what it is, is it's additional protein, but you're not gonna know. What you're gonna think is you just gotten an additional dessert.

• 2:39:35Speaker 02

  Yep, exactly right. Boom. Also, the joint warfare and krill oil, this is important. I slipped off krill oil. Here's the thing, I didn't like forget, I ran out, I forgot to get more before I ran out. It's one of those situations, again. So, and man, it's weird how...

• 2:39:55Speaker 02

  This is what Jade called it. It's a typer, typing induced tennis elbow.

• 2:40:02Jocko Willink?

  Okay, I can, that makes sense.

• 2:40:04Speaker 02

  Right. Being on the computer, whatever, and I got tennis elbow over here.

• 2:40:07Jocko Willink?

  Wow.

• 2:40:08Speaker 02

  Right when I, it was maybe like a...

• 2:40:10Jocko Willink?

  Stuff right there, boy.

• 2:40:12Speaker 02

  It wasn't very, yeah. It was like four-ish days after I got off the krill oil. Still joint warfare, I'm still in, into that, you know? Elbow cured, by the way. Um, but yeah, that, that's, that's the situation.

• 2:40:27Jocko Willink?

  I feel bad because people will ask me which one, A or B, you know, should I be on joint warfare or krill oil? Which one should it be? And I'm like, I hate answering that question because as far as I'm concerned, it's both. It's like peanut butter and jelly, right? You're not just gonna go peanut butter, you're not just gonna go jelly, you're going peanut butter and jelly. Go joint warfare and super krill.

• 2:40:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, 100%, yeah. And it, and I'm on like a pro, the program where it's like lifting like hard in this space. I'm a little bit more old school now, like I'm not as young as I used to be. None of us are technically, but...

• 2:40:59Jocko Willink?

  Oh, you're old, not just old school, but actually old.

• 2:41:03Speaker 02

  You say tomato, you know. Um, so yeah, so this it's saying a lot when I don't have the elbow thing anymore. And that was a common thing when I was lifting with no joint supplements before you did your whole thing. Um, it was a big, I just endured, just endured. Every once in a while I'll take like ibuprofen or something like that if it got real bad.

• 2:41:24Jocko Willink?

  Not good.

• 2:41:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, but otherwise I just warm up more. Now, no fact, they're gone. Aside from my, my tennis elbow. But anyway.

• 2:41:32Jocko Willink?

  Typing elbow.

• 2:41:33Speaker 02

  Typing, typing induced tennis elbow. Yeah, I was not playing tennis, unfortunately.

• 2:41:37Jocko Willink?

  Chuck.

• 2:41:38Speaker 02

  Um, nonetheless, yes. So, yes, uh, joint work for krill oil, monk, discipline.

• 2:41:44Jocko Willink?

  So we got the, we got the Jaco Palmer flavor, which is a 50% iced tea, 50% lemonade flavor. It's the greatest thing ever.

• 2:41:54Speaker 02

  It tastes so good.

• 2:41:55Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah, it's out. It's out. I said, I said as soon, I told, I told B little, I'm like, as soon, cause I had tried the, you know, we went through all the trials to get the right taste. When we got the right taste and I was like, run this, make it. And I said, as soon as the factory gets done making it, federal express it to my house. Cause it tastes so good.

• 2:42:20Speaker 02

  Better than Tropic Thunder, you think? Are you like currently?

• 2:42:22Jocko Willink?

  So it's an opinion, right? Yeah, yeah. So my opinion is, is yes. Right now, right now, the, uh, the powdered discipline in Jaco Palmer flavor is my favorite flavor at this time. I'm not saying I won't occasionally do a little lemon lime hitter. Or the Tropic Thunder. And don't, don't forget that we also have the cans of this one go.

• 2:42:44Speaker 02

  And that's what I'm saying, like the cans to me, I like lemon lime, fine. But the Tropic Thunder is like, there's no way I would ever, under any circumstances, grab the lemon lime one, the Tropic Thunders right there.

• 2:42:57Jocko Willink?

  Interesting.

• 2:42:57Speaker 02

  No way.

• 2:42:58Jocko Willink?

  Well, I mean, you know, I think that might be from your upbringing.

• 2:43:02Speaker 02

  Possible. Well, yeah, it's very tropical.

• 2:43:03Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:04Speaker 02

  Hawaii. Well, yeah, sure. I'm sure that.

• 2:43:06Jocko Willink?

  You know what it used to be like over there? And, and then you got, uh, Jaco White Tea as well. Organic white tea.

• 2:43:15Speaker 02

  Certified.

• 2:43:16Jocko Willink?

  It's the only organic consumable that is guaranteed to give you an 8,000 pound deadlift.

• 2:43:22Speaker 02

  So you're after it. Physically proven, by the way.

• 2:43:25Jocko Willink?

  Double blind, plastic placebo.

• 2:43:27Speaker 02

  Also, if you or when you get your copy of The Knock at the Door by Ryan Manion, Heather Kelly, and Amy Looney Heffernan.

• 2:43:39Speaker 02

  No worries, I got, I got you. You don't have to go searching, even though I'm sure that'd be easy to find regardless. But put it on jockopodcast.com under the book section. And here's another good way to support the podcast if you want to.

• 2:43:54Speaker 02

  Click there, click through there, it'll take you to Amazon. On that Amazon landing to where it lands, just save that to your favorites. If you haven't, if you've done this before August 1st.

• 2:44:05Speaker 02

  Sorry, we gotta do it again. For various reasons that we're not going to go into, but nonetheless, if you do that, then shop and do your Amazon shopping through that link. That's a good way to support this podcast. Very good way, if you want. But yeah, so yeah, it'll be on there and yeah, get it there. So we can not only support yourself, but you know, get the, get the whole book. So you can get all the details and whatnot. Also, Jaco's a store. It's called Jaco's store. Anyway, that's where you can.

• 2:44:36Jocko Willink?

  Did you see the guy that wrote on Twitter? His wife said, what do you want for your birthday? And he said Jaco has a store. It's called Jaco's store. Boom. There you go. That's all she needed to know. Cause everything that you can get there, he's down with.

• 2:44:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:44:52Jocko Willink?

  He's like, just order something from there. You can order a rash guard, you can order a T-shirt, you can order a trucker's hat. I guess if you are feeling like maybe you don't feel as cool as you want to be, you could order a flex fit hat.

• 2:45:08Speaker 02

  Sure. Oh yeah, or a lightweight hoodie.

• 2:45:11Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:45:12Speaker 02

  You know, but admit it, when you see people wearing the lightweight hoodie, it's, you're kind of getting one over, right? Not one over, but like it's winning you over.

• 2:45:21Jocko Willink?

  And I'll say probably not right now.

• 2:45:23Speaker 02

  A little bit.

• 2:45:23Jocko Willink?

  A little bit though.

• 2:45:24Speaker 02

  It looks good this way is what I'm saying. Functional, functional, lightly functional and a slightly aesthetic. I dig it. Nonetheless, yeah, if you want to represent while you're on the path, Jaco's store.com, that's where you get the stuff.

• 2:45:36Jocko Willink?

  You can also subscribe to this podcast, which is a good idea if you haven't yet, which Echo doesn't think you have. Maybe that's because Echo is the type of person that is listening to something for years and doesn't hit subscribe. And so he doesn't think you will. You can be like Echo and hit subscribe now, or maybe if you're like me, you already hit subscribe.

• 2:45:57Speaker 02

  So you know what's interesting about that? This is obviously not the first time you said that Echo doesn't think that you subscribe. Because technically that's not true. That's not how it went down.

• 2:46:08Jocko Willink?

  I was not aware of that. I believed my own propaganda.

• 2:46:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. So if you probably just misremembered it, and then again, I could be wrong right now too. And maybe I missed, didn't remember correctly, but what it was, was I was saying, you don't have to tell people to subscribe. Because they're either going to subscribe if they want to or not. You don't be like, hey, subscribe. And they'll be like, oh my gosh, I totally forgot to subscribe. It's kind of like an obvious thing. That was my contention anyway. So that's more accurate. But additionally,

• 2:46:40Speaker 02

  today, you put a lot of things on me, didn't, what would you say that I called it the gram? That whole line of whatever word you're saying. That was interesting.

• 2:46:51Jocko Willink?

  You're saying I'm not taking ownership of things.

• 2:46:53Speaker 02

  Oh yeah, that's true too. Yeah.

• 2:46:55Jocko Willink?

  Which is interesting. But I'm just, I'm actually, it's nothing to take ownership. I'm not blaming you for calling it the gram. I'm just stating that you call it the gram.

• 2:47:04Speaker 02

  Even though I don't.

• 2:47:09Jocko Willink?

  It's almost time for me to, to read some reviews aloud again. Done that before. But yeah, so leave some reviews. If you leave a review that's shockingly creative and good, then you know, maybe I'll just retweet it or something or read it. And I also want to do the, I also want to read YouTube comments aloud.

• 2:47:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, we should do like, what, there's a show like, I don't know, I forget if it's like Conan over Brian or someone.

• 2:47:38Jocko Willink?

  Read mean tweets.

• 2:47:39Speaker 02

  Mean tweets, yeah, yeah, that, you should do that with the, with the, and not necessarily mean ones, because mean ones, people can be lame.

• 2:47:46Jocko Willink?

  Well, yeah, I'm not gonna be like, and this guy said that.

• 2:47:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:47:49Jocko Willink?

  You know.

• 2:47:49Speaker 02

  But here's the.

• 2:47:50Jocko Willink?

  Because people cry during mean tweets, or I've seen some people crying when they're reading mean tweets.

• 2:47:55Speaker 02

  Like really crying?

• 2:47:55Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, like legitimately, like, like, you know, like to show the power of internet bullying or whatever.

• 2:48:01Speaker 02

  Oh, okay, I get it.

• 2:48:02Jocko Willink?

  So you're not gonna get me there.

• 2:48:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, but what I would wonder is, obviously, yeah, you're not gonna start crying, but if you say, yeah, I'm gonna read it, then people would be like, ooh, let me make a mean one, and then sometimes, if someone's intention.

• 2:48:16Jocko Willink?

  Hey, if you're, if you're gonna try and be mean to me through comments, because you want to have a negative impact on me, I hate to break the news to you, you're not executing well, because I don't care.

• 2:48:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, actually.

• 2:48:28Jocko Willink?

  If you want to write something cool, and you want me to see it and be like, oh, awesome, then that, then you're being effective.

• 2:48:35Speaker 02

  Yes, no, well, but this, though, is what you're saying, like, if you, if we decide for you to read mean comments.

• 2:48:46Speaker 02

  People, someone might be motivated to be like, ooh, let me see if I can get a zinger in there.

• 2:48:52Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:48:53Speaker 02

  And then it's just sort of whack, because for a mean comment to be funny, it has to be funny first, then mean second.

• 2:48:59Jocko Willink?

  Here's the, here's the really, here's the really kind of just thing that shuts that idea down, to, to, to read a mean, like a truly mean comment, it's not even, it's not funny. You know what I mean? If you make a funny comment.

• 2:49:14Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:49:14Jocko Willink?

  Like the person that got a picture of me, and it says, uh. Feeling cute might go to the ice or whatever like hey man that's just funny man you know full credit to that one

• 2:49:26Speaker 02

  Yeah cuz it's a modeling picture

• 2:49:28Jocko Willink?

  That was Evil Echo Charles that pictured that

• 2:49:30Speaker 02

  Oh yeah

• 2:49:30Jocko Willink?

  Evil Echo Charles posted that but yes so that picture was taken about three seconds before cuz this photographer this is a legit photographer was taking pictures of me and they're like

• 2:49:43Speaker 02

  Photo shoot you were modeling

• 2:49:45Jocko Willink?

  Yeah no they were taking pictures of me

• 2:49:47Speaker 02

  Oh

• 2:49:47Jocko Willink?

  That wasn't my but anyways they're like I'm like just they're like we'll just walk around and act natural and so I'm like walking around and I'm like looking I'm looking in the in this in this pit right where that fence is and then I I look at them and then and then they're like taking a bunch of pictures and then they started giving me direction

• 2:50:06Speaker 02

  Yeah that's modeling by the way

• 2:50:07Jocko Willink?

  They're like they're like wait can you look over there and then look at us real quick

• 2:50:11Speaker 02

  Give me attitude

• 2:50:12Jocko Willink?

  And then I was like no I'm not doing that this is this is not me and I'm not doing it but that picture was the one picture that they got right before they started giving me directions and I and I told them negative not happening but even that picture looks lame

• 2:50:26Speaker 02

  Hey man that's debatable you know maybe you know it looked cute might delete it later

• 2:50:30Jocko Willink?

  Hey bottom line leave some reviews you know we have fun with them we appreciate cool reviews so that'd be awesome and don't forget about the Warrior Kid podcast

• 2:50:40Jocko Willink?

  which I know I owe more of this is starting to sound really bad

• 2:50:43Speaker 02

  Yeah a little bit I guess

• 2:50:45Jocko Willink?

  Maybe we should release that one in the bank

• 2:50:47Speaker 02

  Sure

• 2:50:48Jocko Willink?

  Okay um yeah so Warrior Kid podcast and don't forget about the Warrior Kid soap from Irishoaksranch.com where young Aiden is making soap so that you and we all can stake clean

• 2:51:01Speaker 02

  Stake clean of course also YouTube channel we have a YouTube channel video version of this podcast and excerpts a lot of excerpts on there get a little you know chopped up here's the thing about YouTube is what I heard when I learned people now People now are going to YouTube more for a little bit longer videos than before. Remember the trend was like, oh yeah, minute and a half. It's like you gotta keep their attention on the internet and stuff. That was kind of the thing, right? So apparently the new emergent status is the people, we like the longer form stuff. We're beginning to like.

• 2:51:38Jocko Willink?

  You're just catching on to that over there?

• 2:51:40Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:51:41Jocko Willink?

  Isn't this like, we've been making three hour podcasts for years, bro?

• 2:51:44Speaker 02

  Yes, but remember with the three hour podcast, well, no, no, no. Okay, three hour podcast, that's audio, right? We're talking audio long form.

• 2:51:52Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 2:51:53Speaker 02

  But yes, there is video.

• 2:51:54Jocko Willink?

  We have, we have a five hour and 25 minute long podcast with Sean Parnell.

• 2:51:58Speaker 02

  Yes, but as far as the trend goes, people like it generally speaking more now.

• 2:52:04Jocko Willink?

  So people outside of the people that listen to this podcast are starting to like, okay.

• 2:52:08Speaker 02

  Just, yeah, in general.

• 2:52:09Jocko Willink?

  So what's your point?

• 2:52:10Speaker 02

  The details of this. So some of the excerpts are kind of long, like five minutes, eight minutes, sometimes 12 minutes.

• 2:52:16Jocko Willink?

  Right, right. So the times that I was telling you, can you please make an excerpt that's not 27 minutes long? You're saying I was wrong.

• 2:52:23Speaker 02

  Well, not to split hairs, I'm not saying you were wrong then. I'm saying that no longer applies as far as like what you might want. Nonetheless, there's some excerpts on there on our YouTube channel.

• 2:52:38Jocko Willink?

  If you want something shorter than that, you can go to Psychological Warfare, which is available on iTunes and all MP3 platforms, which is me giving some short, maybe minute, minute and a half, maybe two minutes at the longest, audio advice of how to stay on the path.

• 2:52:54Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:52:55Jocko Willink?

  And it's not just advice, it's actual mechanical tool that will keep you on the path.

• 2:53:00Speaker 02

  Very true, very effective too.

• 2:53:02Jocko Willink?

  It's like you're, you could go to a therapist to try and get you to not eat a donut, or you could just press play.

• 2:53:10Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:53:10Jocko Willink?

  Boom. And you won't eat a donut. The sugar coated lies. Uh, flip side canvas, if you need some visual representation of the path, you go to flipsidecanvas.com, owned by my brother Dakota Meyer.

• 2:53:25Jocko Willink?

  You can get discipline equals freedom. You can get good. You can get whatever you want. Actually, let Dakota know what you think would be cool and he'll make it. Flipsidecanvas.com.

• 2:53:37Speaker 02

  Dakota Meyer has a helicopter.

• 2:53:38Jocko Willink?

  Yes, he does.

• 2:53:40Speaker 02

  Did you say that you did ride in that?

• 2:53:41Jocko Willink?

  No, I'm not.

• 2:53:42Speaker 02

  You're not, yeah, okay. Yeah, I was gonna make a video of like myself or you. And be like, hey, like Dakota, I see Dakota Meyer's helicopter. It's like so cool. So we decided to get our own. And then we'd get it. And then we'd either like, or you'd get in there and you'd take off and then you'd like crash it or something. Or before you get in and catches on fire or something, you know, kind of like you want to copy people, but you're, you know, you failed at it or something.

• 2:54:12Jocko Willink?

  So are we having a meeting right now about creative ideas?

• 2:54:15Speaker 02

  Actually, technically, I wanted to say it out loud just to see your reaction, to see where I need to spin this idea, you know?

• 2:54:22Jocko Willink?

  Why don't you spin that idea into the dirt? Right along with the helicopter. All right. So that's that. Also, we got some books. Obviously, the book The Knock at the Door, right here, Ryan Manion, Heather Kelly, Amy Looney Heffernan. And get the book. Comes out November 5th. But order it right now. It'll ship and you'll get it early. Also, Leadership Strategy and Tactics Field Manual. Just got approval from the Department of the Defense, Department of Defense, which took a long time, but they just gave me approval to publish it. Made it through the declassification process.

• 2:55:07Jocko Willink?

  So we're good to go preorder that now. It will be out in January. And believe me when I tell you, you want that first edition.

• 2:55:18Jocko Willink?

  And we got the Warrior Kid books. There's three of them. Where There's a Will, Mark's Mission, and the first one, Way of the Warrior Kid. Get those. Don't forget about Mikey and the Dragons. For every kid that you know, between the ages of zero and 100, get a Mikey and the Dragons. You know how many people have told me they cried when they read the letter?

• 2:55:39Speaker 02

  Yes, or no, I don't know how many, but that doesn't surprise me because remember, I think I told you this. I think I told you this. Yeah, when I played the video. That part for some reason, when he's like, you, you're like, to my son and it, you know, and especially if you have kids, you're like, oh, man, you know, you're sending your kid off into the crazy world, you know, kind of on his own. It's like, man, it kind of like, yeah, I dig it, man. I understand.

• 2:56:04Jocko Willink?

  So get that book for everybody that you know. Don't forget about the Discipline Equals Freedom Field Manual. If you want to know my personal operating system for mental and physical health. That's it. The Discipline Equals Freedom Field Manual. The audio version is available as an MP3 wherever you get your MP3s. And also, we have Extreme Ownership and The Dichotomy of Leadership, which I wrote with my brother Leif Babin.

• 2:56:31Jocko Willink?

  Which you can take the lessons that we learned in combat and apply them to your business, your family, and your life. Echelon Front, that's my leadership consultancy and what we do is solve problems through leadership. No matter what problems you have in an organization, the problems guaranteed are leadership problems. Go to echelonfront.com for details. And if you want to get someone from Echelon Front to come and speak to your organization, don't go through a speaker's agency. Just go to echelonfront.com. That's what you do. Otherwise, there's a middleman, and the middleman will make things annoying.

• 2:57:15Jocko Willink?

  So just go to echelonfront.com. We have EF Online where you can

• 2:57:24Jocko Willink?

  You can receive leadership training without us actually being there. We had a, I was working with a company. When I got done talking with his executives, he came up to me and said, I want you to talk to and teach and train every employee I have at this company. I said, cool. How many employees do you have? Hundred and sixty seven thousand, I think was the number. There was one that was eighty seven thousand. The biggest one was a hundred and sixty seven. Anyways, global company. And I said, okay, let me get back to you on that. So anyways, how do you do that? Obviously, we can't clone our instructors at Echelon Front, but we can put them on interactive, high-speed, online leadership training. That's what EFonline.com is.

• 2:58:05Jocko Willink?

  So check that out. If you do want to come and see us live, go to extremeownership.com to find out when we do our leadership training event, which is called The Muster. The next one is in December 4th and 5th in Sydney, Australia. We will not be going back to Sydney, Australia for a long, long, long, long time. We're not going to Brisbane. We're not going to Perth. We're going to Sydney. If you're in Australia, come see us in Sydney. I apologize, but that's just, we're not a rock and roll band. We're not on tour. We actually have a bunch of work to do outside of the muster. So we can't do musters all the time. So, yeah, if you want to come, go to extremeownership.com.

• 2:58:45Jocko Willink?

  Check for the dates for America in 2020 will be coming out soon. If you want to come and check us out, go to extremeownership.com. And EF Overwatch, right now, we are taking trained

• 2:58:59Jocko Willink?

  leadership experts from special operations, from combat aviation, and we are placing them into companies that need leadership inside their organization. The type of leadership that understands the principles of combat leadership that we teach inside of our company, Echelon Front. The, the things, the principles from Extreme Ownership, the principles from the dichotomy of leadership. So go to EFOverwatch.com if you need leaders in your company. And if you want to continue to communicate with us, we're on the interwebs.

• 2:59:40Jocko Willink?

  We're on Twitter, Instagram, and we are on, we're on that old Facebook.

• 2:59:49Jocko Willink?

  For the Travis Manion Foundation, they are on the interwebs at travismannion.org. They're on Twitter at TM Foundation. Instagram is Travis Manion Foundation and Facebook is at Travis Manion Foundation. They also have a YouTube channel, which is called Travis Manion Foundation. There's videos, uh, there's, I guess there's two of me on there. I know I did one, but there's two, there's a bunch of other really great stories on there to hear and to watch. And if you want to talk to, well, us, Echo is at Echo Charles and I am at Jocko Willink. And thanks once again to Ryan Manion for everything that she has done and is doing.

• 3:00:31Jocko Willink?

  And to her co-authors and her friends, Amy Looney Hefferman and Heather Kelly for writing this book, The Knock on the Door, which I know is going to help so many people. And of course, thank you to the true heroes that they knew and they loved. Travis Manion, Brendan Looney, Robert Kelly, who willingly went forward into harm's way and laid down their lives on the altar of freedom, giving us this precious gift that we must never take for granted.

• 3:01:16Jocko Willink?

  We must live to make them proud, follow their example and be grateful for their service and sacrifice, just as we must be thankful to all of our armed services for what they do every day and the efforts they put forth to protect our freedoms. And to our police and law enforcement and firefighters and paramedics and EMTs and dispatchers and correctional officers and border patrol and secret service and all the first responders. You also make sacrifices every day to protect our way of life. So thank you to you all as well and to everyone else out there.

• 3:02:00Jocko Willink?

  Just remember that life is short and life is precious and it will come to an end. You are not guaranteed tomorrow.

• 3:02:14Jocko Willink?

  So don't wait. Don't wait to do the things you want to do and don't wait to become the person you want to become. Don't wait. Go out there today.

• 3:02:29Jocko Willink?

  And get after it.

• 3:02:32Jocko Willink?

  Until next time. This is Echo and Jaco. Out.