227: Learning for Ultimate Winning. With Dave Berke. New Marine Corps Doctrinal Publication. MCDP 7 Learning.

0:00:00 - Opening 0:03:05 - MCDP 7, Learning. USMC. 1:59:58 - How to stay on THE PATH. 2:19:24 - 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 227 with Echo Charles and me Jocko Willink. Good evening, Echo.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Good evening.

• 0:07Jocko Willink?

  And joining us tonight as well is Dave Berke. Good evening, Dave. Good evening.

• 0:17Jocko Willink?

  MARADMIN 22420.

• 0:24Jocko Willink?

  Subject Availability of MCDP7 Learning.

• 0:31Jocko Willink?

  One Purpose. The Commanding General Training and Education Command has published Marine Corps Doctrinal Publication 7. Learning dated 20 February 2020. Background. The Commandant's Planning Guidance released 17 July 2019, establishing learning, a combination of education and training, as a priority focus area to develop an intellectual edge to capitalize on the unique ethos of the Corps and its maneuver warfare mindset.

• 1:03Jocko Willink?

  On 20 February 2020, the Commandant of the Marine Corps, General David H. Berger, approved MCDP7 Learning, the first entirely new doctrinal publication released by the Marine Corps since 2001.

• 1:19Jocko Willink?

  MCDP7 Learning formalizes the philosophy, principles, concepts, and expectations of learning. MCDP7 Learning states that the Marine Corps' learning philosophy seeks to create a culture of continuous learning and professional competence that yields adaptive leaders capable of successfully conducting maneuver warfare in complex, uncertain, and chaotic environments.

• 1:47Jocko Willink?

  MCDP7 Learning has been developed to codify the Marine Corps' learning philosophy and explain why learning is essential to the profession of arms. Going forward, MCDP7 Learning will serve as a guide for a culture of continuous learning and professional competence that yields adaptive leaders who can quickly recognize changing conditions in the battle space, adapt, and make timely decisions against a thinking enemy.

• 2:20Jocko Willink?

  This publication's audience is all Marines. Coordinating instructions and initial distribution of 11,330 publication hard copies is underway. Units requiring additional print allocations must follow procedures identified in Reference A, Paragraph 4A. This MARADMIN is applicable to Marine Corps Total Force.

• 2:51Jocko Willink?

  So there you go.

• 2:53Jocko Willink?

  The Marine Corps, in case you didn't gather from that message, has a new doctrinal publication. The first one since 2001. And there was probably not too many people that were a little bit giddy and excited about it besides myself and David R. Burke.

• 3:14Jocko Willink?

  Proof! The release of this publication in its own right is proof that the Marine Corps is learning. That's a bold statement. So yeah, the Marine Corps has a new pub out. And we're gonna study it right now. So here we go. Marine Corps Doctrinal Publication 7. It's called "Learning." Here we go. And we'll start off with the forward. Department of the Navy Headquarters, United States Marine Corps. "The purpose of this publication is to describe the Marine Corps' learning philosophy and explain why learning is critically important to the profession of arms. While the concept, while many of the concepts in this publication have been passed on

• 3:56Jocko Willink?

  by Marine leaders throughout our history, this publication seeks to formalize them and provide aspirational goals." Hmm, that's a familiar subject. "Learning is an institutional priority and a professional expectation for all Marines.

• 4:13Jocko Willink?

  This mentality is key to the Marine Corps becoming a more effective learning organization." Now, you're gonna find as we run through this and the way they define learning and the way they talk about learning, obviously this doesn't only apply to the profession of arms and it obviously doesn't apply only to the Marine Corps. It applies to everybody in the world, every human being.

• 4:34Jocko Willink?

  Continuing on, the most important factor in this philosophy is the importance of continuous learning throughout our careers for warfighting. Continuous learning is essential to maneuver warfare because it enables Marines to quickly recognize changing conditions in the battle space, adapt, and make timely decisions against a thinking enemy. These skills required in war must be learned, developed, and honed over time. If neglected, they quickly atrophy. And this is one of the first things that I noticed is, they break down this thing of, when you're on the battlefield, and this is so clear, but when you're on the battlefield and the enemy's doing something, they're changing their tactics, and we've talked about that for years, what you're actually doing is you're learning what they're doing,

• 5:18Jocko Willink?

  and you're learning how you need to respond to it. So, the mindset of learning is that, we talk about adaptation a lot, well, if you can't learn, you're not going to be able to adapt to anything. Marines leverage the art and science of learning technologies and learning environments that reflect the changing operational environment to tailor learning and provide each other with constructive feedback. Leaders hold Marines to high professional standards of performance, conduct, and discipline to include learning. As Marines rise in rank and position, continuous learning and development, and developing our professional skills are a professional expectation. So you are, that's what it is.

• 6:01Jocko Willink?

  If you're in the Marine Corps, you're learning. That's the expectation. We must make the most of every learning opportunity, fostering our subordinates' learning while continuing our own. Continuous learning is important to Marines because of the fundamental nature of war and its ever-changing character. The nature of war carries a combination of fear, uncertainty, ambiguity, ambiguity, chance, horror, and above all, friction that Marines must prepare to counter. Marines must seek out education and training opportunities that stimulate these conditions. We must train how we fight.

• 6:41Jocko Willink?

  As Marines, we must understand how important learning is and be committed to the principles laid out in this publication. Our professional responsibility as Marines is to engage in continuous learning so that we may best support our fellow Marines, our Corps, and our nation. Signed, D.H. Berger, General, U.S. Marine Corps, Commandant of the Marine Corps. So that's how they kick it off. And if you haven't heard Dave and I talking about any of these other, any of the other Marine Corps manuals that we've covered, and one of the very first things that I covered on this podcast was Warfighting, which is a great publication. But the Marine Corps has a way of writing publications and a way of writing. That is awesome. They nail it.

• 7:25Jocko Willink?

  All right. So, Chapter 1 is called "The Nature of Learning." Starts off with some quotes, quotes here as a life, which, which... I really don't like, in general, I generally don't like when things start with quotes, but I think the Marine Corps gets a pass here. You know, I generally don't like when people say, even, you know, you'll hear someone give a speech, you know, a commencement address, and they'll say, "In the words of so-and-so." And you're like, "Bah." You know? They could have read that.

• 8:03Jocko Willink?

  If you got asked to do a graduate, a commencement speech, or you got asked to give a talk, they're asking you to give that talk, right? Am I wrong?

• 8:14Dave Berke?

  No, you're right.

• 8:15Jocko Willink?

  And look, I'm not saying that there's not times where quotes aren't needed. I've used them. I don't use them a lot, though, I will say that. In fact, I rarely use them. It's gonna be probably Patton or Hackworth. You're shaking your head.

• 8:27Dave Berke?

  That's what I was gonna say is, it's Al Gray and Jim Mattis.

• 8:30Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 8:31Dave Berke?

  That's, that's kind of my threshold as well.

• 8:33Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 8:34Dave Berke?

  Those are okay.

• 8:35Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, you're gonna go with, "The first one, as a lifetime serial learner, I've found that extraordinary people can do the extraordinary, who are committed to experiential learning, are intellectually curious, and possess an unquenchable desire to acquire new knowledge. This may be our only advantage in the future fight." And that's from Lorna M., I don't know how you say that last name, Maylock, I guess, but she's a general, Marine Corps.

• 9:00Jocko Willink?

  From Brooklyn, New York via Jamaica. But what I like about that is this may be our only advantage in future fight. Cause at some point, the playing fields get level. And then it's who is smarter, it's not even who is smarter, it's who can learn faster.

• 9:19Jocko Willink?

  Al Gray, 29th Commandant of the Marine Corps.

• 9:23Jocko Willink?

  Two Purple Hearts. Mustang, by the way. Camis, by the way. If you go and look at all the Marine Corps Commandants, they're all in their dress blues, except for one, Al Gray.

• 9:35Jocko Willink?

  He's in his camis, getting after it. And he says, "What you did isn't as important as what you were thinking."

• 9:48Jocko Willink?

  And how many times, when I was in charge of training, I watched somebody do something, watched some young junior officer do something. And I, and I, look, I saw what they did. And I'd say, you know, what were you thinking when you just did that? What was your, what was in your head? What were you trying to make happen? Like, I get it, I get what you did. I'm not even concerned about that. I want to know what you were thinking. Cause you might've made a, you might've made a bad decision, you might've made a bad tactical call, but if you had a good idea, then we can figure out how to teach you the tactics of getting it done. But if you were thinking something wrong, well, we have a bit, much bigger problem.

• 10:26Jocko Willink?

  And then, General Mattis. "The most important six inches on the battlefield is between your ears." Indeed. Needs no explanation. Okay, here we go, getting into it. "Warfighting is the most complex, challenging, violent, and dynamic human endeavor. The Marine Corps, as a nation's force and readiness, must have the versatility and flexibility to effectively fight and succeed in any situation and at any intensity across the full spectrum of conflict, whenever and wherever the nation calls."

• 10:59Jocko Willink?

  If you think about what that sentence says,

• 11:03Jocko Willink?

  check it out, must have the versatility and flexibility to effectively fight and succeed in any situation. And this is the part that I think is really stands out. And at any intensity, right? This is from hand to hand, bloodbath combat to non-combatant evacuation. Right? This is just, you gotta be able to do anything in the full spectrum. Continuing, to meet these demands, it is critical that Marines recognize that learning has a direct impact on warfighting. Marines who understand the key learning principles and continuously seek opportunities to develop knowledge, skills, and the proper attitudes throughout their careers

• 11:45Jocko Willink?

  will develop wisdom that enables success in battle.

• 11:53Jocko Willink?

  As Marines, we pass on our wisdom and our experiences to the next generation of Marines. For the Marine Corps to remain the United States' force in readiness, it is critical that every Marine strengthen and value learning in all facets of the Marine Corps culture, learning environments, and leadership development. Learning is a professional responsibility for all Marines at all levels.

• 12:20Jocko Willink?

  Learning is a professional responsibility for all Marines at all levels. Marines must develop the habit of continuous learning early in their careers to set conditions for success in increasing levels of responsibility.

• 12:37Jocko Willink?

  Really makes it pretty clear. That's what the Marine Corps, the Marine Corps docs, man, they nail it.

• 12:44Dave Berke?

  You talk about simple, clear, and concise comms?

• 12:46Jocko Willink?

  Yes, they got it.

• 12:47Dave Berke?

  The clear, man, it's right there. Hey, if we're gonna win wars, we gotta get smart.

• 12:51Jocko Willink?

  What I find most, or one of the most impressive things about when you read this is, when you read really any of the Marine Corps docs, pubs...

• 13:04Jocko Willink?

  A general, a colonel, a gunny sergeant, and a lance corporal Yeah. can all read this and go, okay, I, I, I get that. Yep. And I see it, right? That's what they do so well. It's just, they nail it. And the way they do that is simple, clear, and concise.

• 13:27Jocko Willink?

  First section, learning and competence. Learning is developing knowledge, skills, and attitudes through study, experience, or instruction. It is a never-ending progression that includes understanding why something is important. The intent of learning.

• 13:48Jocko Willink?

  What do you think?

• 13:51Jocko Willink?

  It's like, oh, okay, cool. So, everything that we talk about, from a decentralized command perspective, when you apply that on an individual level for learning, the exact same rules apply.

• 14:08Jocko Willink?

  Which means it is, your team has to understand why they're doing what they're doing. In this case, people have to understand why something is important. What, what do you have to understand in decentralized command? What's the commander's intent? What you have to understand here is what is the intent of the learning?

• 14:27Jocko Willink?

  It goes on. Learning is much more than gathering information or reciting facts. It includes cognitive, physical, social, emotional, ethical, and cultural components.

• 14:41Jocko Willink?

  Learning occurs in formal settings like schoolhouse or training exercise, and informal settings such as social, experiential, self-directed, and other ways outside of the classroom. The developing knowledge, skills, and attitudes interact to influence how Marines think, respond, and act. Isn't it weird to think about every single thing that you do is based on what you've learned?

• 15:09Jocko Willink?

  Now, you could take the Sam Harris approach here and say that you have no, what, free will.

• 15:13Dave Berke?

  Yes.

• 15:15Jocko Willink?

  And then you'd have to say, okay, well, if you want to take that into the philosophical world, Sam, we get it. I'm not here to argue philosophy with Sam Harris. What I am going to tell you is this, when I would see young leaders

• 15:30Jocko Willink?

  make decisions, they were making decisions based on what they learned, what they experienced. That's where it all comes from.

• 15:41Jocko Willink?

  Learning encompasses both training and education, which are equally important and complementary. A simple explanations of the difference between training and education is that training prepares Marines to deal with known factors of war, while education prepares Marines to deal with unknown factors. It's an interesting bifurcation of those two things. I mean, it's going to take me a little while to get my head around that, because I know a lot of the training that I ran, the purpose of the training was to get SEALs to learn how to deal with unknown factors.

• 16:18Jocko Willink?

  So, we may have to explore that one a little bit.

• 16:22Dave Berke?

  I don't think they're mutually exclusive, but they are different.

• 16:27Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, well, maybe we'll have to explore what, what they see as training and what they see as education when we get there. This, when I read this, I wasn't, I just, I underlined unknown factors. And I was like, yeah, of course, unknown factors. That's what we're trying to teach, teach people how to deal with unknown factors.

• 16:47Jocko Willink?

  Training, I guess, I guess where they draw the line is like, hey, here's, here's the, here's the procedures that we can teach you, right? That's your training. Learn this procedure, learn this procedure, learn this procedure. Education is how do you take those procedures that you've learned and adapt them to this random new thing that you haven't seen before? It's understandable. All right, I'll, I'll begin to wield my yield, I'll begin to yield to this, to this thought process here.

• 17:14Jocko Willink?

  Training and education are both accomplished in different ways, but they are required, working together to instill the learning that results in readiness and effectiveness. The complexity of the modern battlefield and increasing rate of change requires a highly educated force, while different education and training are inextricably linked.

• 17:35Jocko Willink?

  Education denotes study and intellectual development. Training is primarily learning by doing. Okay, so now they're laying it out a little bit. Education denotes study and intellectual development. Training is primarily learning by doing. Okay, we will not train without the presence of education. And we must not educate without the complementary execution of well-conceived training. Okay. I see where they're going. I'm not sure that I would have. I'm not sure that I would have presented this the same way. I would have to think about this.

• 18:15Jocko Willink?

  Cause training is learning by doing. Okay, I get it. You're hands-on, you're making stuff happen. And education is not, right? Education is is study and intellectual development. That's what they're saying here. Okay.

• 18:31Jocko Willink?

  Okay, I think I'm starting to grasp it a little bit better.

• 18:36Jocko Willink?

  Because, and here's how I just grasped it in my mind.

• 18:42Jocko Willink?

  The mission of both these things is to learn. Right? And both of them result in learning. And so in my mind, I was thinking, well, one is one you learn and one you don't learn. But the actual fact is both these things you're gonna learn. It's just a method of learning. One of them is one of them is study and one of them is doing.

• 19:04Dave Berke?

  Yeah, it almost seems like it's small things, but I don't think it's not. I mean, it's a big thing to understand the difference between those two is that

• 19:12Dave Berke?

  if you were just training all the time and never really getting an education on what you're doing or studying or learning the bigger picture of that, that training wouldn't be nearly as useful. You wouldn't learn as much if you weren't educating yourself while you're doing it. I know they talk more about it, but there's this idea like if I'm going to go to the rifle range and get really good at shooting the rifle, I could train on the rifle over and over and over again. I could do the same thing in an airplane. I could train over and over again. But my education comes from other components like what the aircraft that I'm fighting against could do, what my enemy is capable of, what the 3D environment might be. And that training evolves because of the education.

• 19:49Dave Berke?

  And if all I ever did was sort of think about what that looked like in three dimensional battle space and never trained for it, that education by itself, I wouldn't learn as much without doing the training with it.

• 19:58Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, no, I, I, yeah, I'm, I'm seeing it. I'm seeing it. Continuing on, Marines must always seek better ways to learn throughout the entire continuum of the training, of training and education. Throughout this publication, the term "learning" is emphasized. Training and education are you specifically referring to one or the other? Learning is the overall intended outcome of both training and education. So, there you go. Interestingly, that must have, that must have been a little clogged thing in my brain from when I read this. Marines continuously learn to be ready for the constantly changing and increasing demands of warfare and the range of missions.

• 20:41Jocko Willink?

  As Marine Corps doctrinal publication 6, Command and Control, explains, "We earn the trust of others by demonstrating competence, a sense of responsibility, loyalty, and self-discipline." We just talked about that on the last podcast, right? The number one way to, to earn trust is competence, do your job.

• 21:01Dave Berke?

  Think about that. We earn the trust of others by our own self-discipline.

• 21:05Jocko Willink?

  Competence is having sufficient knowledge, judgment, and skills to perform a particular duty, job, or function. Marines improve competencies through formal and informal learning opportunities that develop the required knowledge, skills, and attitudes. Marines learn to address complex problems and develop teamwork wherever they may be, whether in garrison-deployed or in formal, formal learning centers. Learning enables Marines to think critically, develop judgment, and cultivate a bias for action.

• 21:40Jocko Willink?

  Without waiting to be told what to do. The learning enables Marines to think critically, develop judgment, and cultivate a bias for action without waiting to be told what to do. That is such the opposite of what people think that the military is. They, everyone thinks it's to be told what to do. And here they're, the actual words are, "Don't wait to be told what to do." Those are the actual words, a bias for action. "A Marine with knowledge and skills who lacks judgment requires close supervision, which may not be possible in combat conditions, hence decentralized command. Our Marine Corps ethos demands competence, responsibility, loyalty, and self-discipline as military professionals charged with defense of the nation.

• 22:23Jocko Willink?

  Learning prepares Marines to exercise initiative within the commander's intent, constantly seeking to improve developmental agility and deal with changing situations."

• 22:36Dave Berke?

  Whoever was the guy writing this went out of his way to not just say "discipline." Because I always think military, that's actually not what it is. It's that's, that's, that by itself is not enough.

• 22:47Jocko Willink?

  Yep, he's, he's making it perfectly clear to everyone that we're not going to impose discipline on you, you need self-discipline. That's what you need.

• 22:58Jocko Willink?

  Decentralized command.

• 23:02Jocko Willink?

  Next section, "The Role of Learning in Warfighting." Maneuver warfare requires intelligent leaders at all levels who possess a bias for intelligent action. Oh, he just threw a little change at you. Intelligent action, not just action. Because we don't want you just to take action, we want you to do something smart. "Success in land warfare depends on Marines developing an intellectual edge to accurately recognize cues, make sense of the information, and respond effectively. This intellectual edge is based on developed knowledge and experience that allows Marines to shape conditions and events to their advantage. Developing fundamental cognitive competencies such as problem framing, mental imaging, critical thinking, analysis, synthesis, reasoning, and problem solving enables Marines to make effective decisions more quickly

• 23:47Jocko Willink?

  in time-constrained, operational environments when they often have incomplete, inaccurate, or even contradictory information."

• 23:59Jocko Willink?

  There you go. And this is one of those, when I was reading this sentence yesterday, you were editing some of my work, uh, maybe a couple of weeks ago. And you said, hey, you know, this sentence that you wrote here, a lot in your, you used a lot of words here. Think about it. Maybe you could tighten this up. And I read it and I was like, nah, I'm not tightening that. I said, you remember that one sentence? You said, yeah. And I said, I said, I'm not changing it. And when I read this sentence, I thought about that. I was like, well, could we have kind of made this a little bit more concise? But then I read it again and I thought to myself, no, this, every one of these words.

• 24:39Dave Berke?

  What would you take out?

• 24:40Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. What are you going to take out? What are you going to take out where you don't lose some level of meaning? And you know, this, this kind of sentence right here, you know, if you're a young Marine out there that's, that's reading this for the first time, you're going, wait a second. I didn't, you know, they didn't cover this in, in, in, you know, junior, junior high school English, right? So you have to break it down a little bit. You have to go, what are they talking about? Develop, developing fundamental cognitive competencies. Okay. What does that mean? That means I, I need to be able to think about these things. Okay. What do I need to be able to think about? I need to think about problem framing. What does that mean? It means assessing, looking at things in a certain way. Mental imaging. Okay. What do I see in those things? Critical thinking. All right. Now I need to think about them.

• 25:26Jocko Willink?

  I need to analyze those things. I need to synthesize. I need to take all those things and put them together. I need to reason through them and then I need to problem solve.

• 25:34Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 25:36Jocko Willink?

  So that's, there's a lot going on there.

• 25:37Dave Berke?

  Yeah. And those aren't just synonyms to just repeat yourself. Those are different things.

• 25:40Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 25:41Dave Berke?

  And I was, I wrote, I got notes all throughout this thing. But obviously the Marine Corps, the title of this section is the role of learning in warfighting. Well, that's, that's cool because this is the Marine Corps. We're about warfighting. If you take out the word Marine and take out the word warfighting, this is describing life. Like you want to talk about how is this applicable to my world? Uh, I have to make decisions when I don't have, when I have incomplete, inaccurate or contradictory information. When don't you have that? Warfighting, it's a no brainer, but it's actually true everywhere. I mean, this thing is, it's written so clearly for any situation.

• 26:13Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 26:16Jocko Willink?

  A central tenet of maneuver warfare is attacking the enemy's ability to make decisions and shift the mental aspects of warfare to the Marines' advantage. In short, Marines develop an intellectual edge by learning cognitive skills and competencies that enable them to move through the observe, orient, decide, and act cycle, often referred to as the OODA loop, more quickly and effectively than the enemy. The warfighter who recognizes what is happening, adapts the situation, and then makes effective decisions in the shortest amount of time will typically have an advantage. The OODA loop decision-making cycle is even more important in preparation for future conflicts because as new technologies emerge, the rate of change will continue to increase.

• 26:57Jocko Willink?

  Therefore, Marines must continuously improve their knowledge and skills by leveraging technology, but never depend upon technology alone as the solution.

• 27:08Jocko Willink?

  We're back to Colonel Boyd.

• 27:12Jocko Willink?

  Marines should observe their environment to recognize key cues, synthesize these cues to orient, and quickly make sense of the information in order to decide and act. And then Marines will start the cycle again as they observe the effects of their actions. So, you ever play chess?

• 27:32Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 27:33Jocko Willink?

  Are you good?

• 27:34Dave Berke?

  No, but I can play.

• 27:36Jocko Willink?

  Okay, so, so you think you can take me?

• 27:40Dave Berke?

  No.

• 27:41Jocko Willink?

  Okay, check. You probably could.

• 27:42Dave Berke?

  I don't know how good a chess player you are.

• 27:44Jocko Willink?

  I don't play chess.

• 27:46Dave Berke?

  Okay.

• 27:46Jocko Willink?

  So, I know how to play it, but I don't play it. But, I understand, I understand the game. So, one thing that's interesting about the game is, and there's a great documentary about the current world champion in chess, and I forget his last name, his first name is Magnus.

• 28:06Dave Berke?

  Yeah, I watched it. I know what you're talking about.

• 28:08Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah. So, what's cool is, and what I learned from watching that documentary, is that when you're a good chess player, you're seeing patterns. You're just seeing chunks of the board, and you can take all those pieces that are there and you understand the whole thing.

• 28:24Jocko Willink?

  And then the better you are, the more chunks you understand and the more you understand how they're going to play out. And it's the same thing now when you take that and you look at, you know, if you look at jujitsu, like I see where your arm is and I know what that indicates the three possibilities that you have. And one of those possibilities isn't really a possibility because you also have your leg over here. So that means two possibilities. And so you can see these chunks, you can see things and you can, you can react to it. And then as you get good at reacting to seeing these chunks and get good at reacting to pattern recognition, what makes it so, what happens is you see pattern, you get pattern recognition. And what makes it easy, isn't that you, it's not that I see a pattern and I see a pattern and I see a pattern and I know what to do and I know what to do

• 29:09Jocko Willink?

  and to do. That's easy. That's like level one. That's your white belt thought process. But what makes it easy, when you're operating a high level, is you see the chunks, you see the patterns that you've, that you recognize and you know what to do. But then you see a small outlier and you're able to recognize it. If you didn't know those patterns, you wouldn't have recognized that outlier at all. As soon as you see that outlier, because all those chunks, those other pieces are where they are, you go, oh, outlier, I understand how that outlier fits into this whole picture and I can solve that problem. I can solve it a thousand times faster than someone that has to take all the different chunks and all these different things and put them together. So when we're training Marines or we're training

• 29:51Jocko Willink?

  humans, what we're trying to get good at is that whole process right there. And when I see something, I go, oh, this is what's happening. Okay, I see that. Yep, I'm going to do this. And I see that I'm going to do this. Oh, here, out of the five things that took me no thought whatsoever, I can solve those without even thinking, I know what to do. And then there's this one outlier thing that I see and I go, oh, that wait, that's different. And if I had to deal, if I had to deal with each of those five chunks in an individual basis and solve each one of those problems, I wouldn't even notice that outlier. I wouldn't even see it. But when I see it, when I recognize everything and I have pattern recognition on five things, or four out of five things, that one thing that I don't recognize, I can focus my efforts on it and I can get it solved. And that's

• 30:33Jocko Willink?

  what you're trying to train leaders to do, is recognize, even, you know, even when we talk about dealing with people, right? Dealing with, you know, you're in a leadership position. Here's the nine different types of, you know, if you and I, if I say I gotta go talk to this guy who's, you know, you know, has a bad temper and you and I will role play it. And there's eight things that we'll cover and I'll be like, yep, if he does this, you do that. If he does that, I'll do that. And then when I walk in and confront you about this or talk to you about this, seven of those things that you throw at me, I'm already ready for it. And that means when you hit me with the one that I didn't expect, it's cool because I can just go, okay, I see what he's, I see, I see where he is. I see what's happening. I have the other parts handled and I can just focus on this one little thing right now.

• 31:15Jocko Willink?

  Which is, I see what's happening. He's really committed to this part of his plan. Okay, cool. Hey, you know what? I think that one part of your plan, I think that's actually one of, one of the better plans I've seen. And all of a sudden I solve that thing, which if I went in that room without recognizing the other patterns, I never would have even seen that outlier.

• 31:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:35Jocko Willink?

  That's a really complex thing that I just tried to explain. How did I do? Echo, did I do it?

• 31:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, pretty good. Not that.

• 31:43Speaker 01

  Maybe this is just to maybe add to it, but yeah, so you have the eight scenarios and you know, nine scenarios out of the 10 or whatever that you know, the one that you don't necessarily know.

• 31:55Speaker 01

  If you're thorough with the nine that you know, you know why you have the solutions, like the solutions are the solutions for these nine that you do know for reasons. Right? So you know about all those reasons. So when that 10th one comes out, you don't know the solution, but you know all the reasoning behind the other solutions and you apply those, that reasoning.

• 32:11Jocko Willink?

  Yes.

• 32:11Speaker 01

  See what I'm saying? So yes, I, I dig it.

• 32:16Jocko Willink?

  You're, you're talking about running, they, they reference this Oodle Loop, which they do, the Marine Corps uses, I mean, Boyd basically drove maneuver warfare for the Marine Corps with that concept, but you're really talking about running Oodle Loop with all these different Oodle Loops at the same time. And the real key is to find the one where the point of friction really is. And that's why if you and I are playing this linear game, just you against me and this one thing.

• 32:40Dave Berke?

  It doesn't really make a difference. But if I'm running seven or eight and I recognize that this is the one where the friction really is and you don't even, you have no clue it's even there, I'm not even worried about the other ones. Now, I need to keep up with those things. I can't ignore them. But I'm gonna solve this thing and I'll be making decisions to maneuver this place where I want it and you won't even know that it's happening. That's how come when you said, "Are you gonna beat me in chess?" I'm like, "Well, if you actually know how to play chess, I don't, I'm not gonna beat you." Because I'm actually sort of still just playing checkers.

• 33:06Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 33:06Dave Berke?

  But you are off here solving this other problem that I'm not even paying attention to and you might have eight, nine, 10 multiple oodle loops at the same time of get all these different things, but only you have to figure out the one that matters. And if I don't know what you're doing, I'm not even competing with you.

• 33:19Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 33:19Dave Berke?

  I'm losing and I don't even know it.

• 33:21Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Yeah. And, and, and as I was talking about with you the other day.

• 33:24Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 33:25Jocko Willink?

  I'm running oodle loops on top. I'm running oodle loops with oodle loops inside it.

• 33:29Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 33:29Jocko Willink?

  So it's like, here's four or five things that are going on, but there's a bigger thing that's going on outside of that. We got oodle loops going on inside of oodle loops and, and you can't do none of these things. You can't deal with the seven oodle loops going on at the same time and identify the other one. You can't do oodle loops within oodle loops if you get caught up in those loops yourself. You gotta be able to detach, step back. And the more that you train to do that, the easier it becomes to recognize these things, these outliers, and you're able to focus your mind where you need to focus it and make decisions properly.

• 34:03Dave Berke?

  Yep. And sometimes those cues are, are miniscule and subtle and you can almost unidentifiable, but if you've done it enough.

• 34:13Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah. If you have done it a lot, the more you do it, these things, these little tiny unnoticed things start to just look like just giant red flags.

• 34:25Dave Berke?

  Slow motion.

• 34:26Jocko Willink?

  So easy to see and you go, "Oh, there's the flank coming at me." Yep.

• 34:31Dave Berke?

  Yeah, I remember. Top Gun, you do a lot of one against one, a lot of BFM. It kind of feels somewhat two dimensional linear. It kind of is, but there's a million little cues that takes a lot of experience. And I remember fighting with someone and, and probably halfway through the fight and debriefing, kind of recognizing this is the place here where I knew that these other things were no longer going to happen and this was going to happen. I maneuvered here. That's how I got behind you and killed you. And it's like, how did you, how did you know this was going to happen here? When I was, you know, five moves previous on the chessboard. I'm like, well, looking across the horizon, your leading edge flaps are kind of dug in a little bit lower than normal, which means you were at least between, I don't know, 220 and 240 knots. Let's go to your tape and

• 35:11Dave Berke?

  it's 237 knots. And he's like, how, and like, look, I'm not smarter than you, but I have seen that and I've looked for that. And I noticed you're, you're three degrees above the horizon, which means you're going a little bit slower, which means you don't have these options anymore. I don't have to worry about you going up. And so I'm making these decisions based on what, and he doesn't even know those things are happening. And it's like you said, those cues, but after a while, those cues become so easy to see.

• 35:36Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, there's four or five oodle loops that are going. You can, you can throw them all, throw four of them away. The fifth one, you go, oh yeah, here's where he's going next. Got it. And I'm going to be right here waiting for him.

• 35:44Dave Berke?

  Totally.

• 35:45Jocko Willink?

  Good luck.

• 35:45Dave Berke?

  I'm going to start maneuvering on this chessboard. You don't even know what's happening. And then you're going to make your move like I'm already set up to defeat you.

• 35:50Jocko Willink?

  I'm waiting here for you.

• 35:50Dave Berke?

  Totally.

• 35:54Jocko Willink?

  Next, through progressive learning and experience, Marines at all levels develop a bias for action enabled by adaptive, rapid decision-making. The more Marines learn and exercise this bias for action, the better it becomes. Once again, the more Marines learn and exercise this bias for action, the better it becomes. And this is something that, you know, on EF online, last week, a guy said, hey, I'm not an aggressive leader. You know, what, what do I do? I'm not an aggressive leader. How do, how do I get better? And I said, well, first of all, and I laid out the whole thing, like when you're talking to, and we ended up covering a similar question on the podcast, which is like, hey, aggressive doesn't mean loud and in your face. It doesn't mean getting crazy. Aggressive means you're

• 36:39Jocko Willink?

  making, you're taking action. It's aggressively pursuing action. And one of the things that I use is people say, how can I train someone to be more aggressive? It's real easy. You put them in situations where if they're not aggressive, they die. Or whatever metaphorical world you live in, hey, if you don't call the client, the client's gonna blow up and you're gonna lose the deal. If you don't solve this problem with your electrical system, that electrical system's gonna fail and it's gonna be a disaster. So what you learn to do is go, okay, I'm not 100% sure what to do, but I'm gonna do something right now and make something happen. And you must, I mean, this was super easy for me because I would put an element out in the field. There's, you know, there's some seals assaulting a target.

• 37:22Jocko Willink?

  And as they're assaulting the target, you know, they'll have a single shooter in an outlying building. And they learn real quick, if they do nothing, cool. That guy's gonna get his friends and he's gonna kick their ass. And if they do something aggressive, they'll get that problem solved before it even really becomes a problem. So you can learn a bias for action and that's how you learn it. And by the way, sometimes you do something aggressive and it doesn't work out the way you want it to. You're playing, you're playing a little bit, there's a gambling, right? There's an odds, there's odds to be played. And we covered this a couple podcasts ago. You're playing the odds, right? And odds are, seven out of 10 times, your aggressive move is gonna be the right move.

• 38:07Jocko Willink?

  Three out of 10 times, maybe it wasn't the best move, but you gotta play the odds. And that's also why we do iterative decision making, just because I'm doing something aggressive doesn't mean that I go all in and sacrifice everything else. No, I make a small move in the direction that I think is right aggressively. And then I read my feedback loop off of that.

• 38:27Jocko Willink?

  Continuing, although war games or training exercises approximate the conditions of war, Marines cannot fully replicate the dangers, complexities, emotions and friction of actual combat. Marines experience a variety of training situations that approximate combat situations so that learned experiences can be remembered and applied during the stresses and friction of combat. Through both direct and indirect experiences, Marines develop a realistic appreciation for what is possible in combat and what is not. So one of the things that I used to tell guys, one of the failings of training, for me, when I was training, when I was running training, was we had paintball, we had laser guns to simulate. One thing that I could not simulate... Is fear of death.

• 39:12Jocko Willink?

  Because I couldn't do it with my trade at role players. Because they'd be like, hey, we're gonna die, we're gonna get some in. And that's a little bit more realistic because you could say, hey, these are jihadists and they don't care if they die. Cool. But the SEALs. To say like, you know, there's a down man in the middle of the street. And it in one second, there's four SEALs running out to save him. When those rounds are hitting, it's gonna take a moment. You know, it's gonna take some cover fire, it's gonna take a moment. So that's the one thing I would have a hard time simulating is, hey, you're gonna be afraid. And even if you're not afraid. Two of the guys, three of the guys that are with you.

• 39:53Jocko Willink?

  Are gonna be afraid, are not gonna wanna step into that alleyway, are not gonna step away into the street or whatever. And so you gotta calculate for that. So I would try and get people to behave as if, you know, you do this, you die.

• 40:07Dave Berke?

  When I read this, I was thinking of a story you've told me, you tell the story a lot. Is a story about Stoner in his first combat mission. And you go through the story, what happens in the guy after, I think it was the battalion commander that he was working is like, man.

• 40:21Jocko Willink?

  He was a mid-team leader, he was a mid-team major. He was a major in the mid-team. Which, by the way, just real quick, mid-team, that meant he had been, you know, in in Ramadi for five months getting in gunfights, but yeah.

• 40:35Dave Berke?

  Totally. And just the point where he's like, hey, man. Obviously, you've been in a ton of these experiences and kinda, and you're like, actually, Seth was like, no, that was my first time. But even like, I was even looking at the little things, like the training approximates combat situations. They were smart enough to not say replicates or is, it's not the same. But it's just enough to get you to be prepared for what you're gonna see. And actually, if you do it well, you can't make it perfect, but if you do it well, that's exactly how people respond in that most chaotic thing, which was exactly what happened to Stoner.

• 41:04Jocko Willink?

  Yep, yeah, it's, and I would have guys all the time come back and say, oh, yeah, thanks for the training because it was as good as it gets.

• 41:10Dave Berke?

  Totally.

• 41:13Jocko Willink?

  Fast forward a little bit. Marines need to develop the memory skills. Because Marines, as human beings, increasingly tend to digitally store and search for information, rather than committing information to short-term or long-term memory. Marines cannot always rely on technologies or on being able to digitally search for information during combat, due to many reasons such as time constraints, lack of network access, or the need to minimize electronic signatures. Therefore Marines at all levels need to train their minds to memorize and recall important information, to reflect upon that knowledge, to develop understanding, and to frequently exercise these skills through training, so that information can be recalled instinctively during combat.

• 41:57Jocko Willink?

  And I forgot to mention that, yes, I am skipping forward through some of this information. But, you know, it's just because we're not gonna, we're gonna try not to do a 17-hour podcast on this one manual.

• 42:08Dave Berke?

  I was wondering how you're gonna not read the whole part.

• 42:11Jocko Willink?

  I was wondering it too, especially in the opening, when you're just going, okay, this whole thing, this whole thing is good. Next section, key principles of learning. The first learning principle is know yourself and seek self-improvement. A Marine's mindset, values, ethics, and experiences impact his or her learning decisions and actions. Once again, sorry, Sam Harris. We do have free will, or at least Marines on the battlefield, Sam Harris, have free will to make decisions and take actions based on the impact of their learning.

• 42:51Jocko Willink?

  Based on their mindset, based on their values, based on their ethics, based on their experiences. Fast forward a little bit. When Marines are aware of how perspectives and experiences shape their thinking, they can better identify assumptions, biases, and other factors that influence learning. Previous experiences are valuable for many reasons, such as providing personalized references to integrate new knowledge, skills, and experience into memory. Marines learn and fight effectively despite friction, which has been described as the force in war that makes the apparently easy so difficult.

• 43:27Jocko Willink?

  Learning is not always easy. A lack of self-awareness, emotional regulation, humility, time management, or biases can cause friction that makes learning more difficult. Yeah, check it out. If you're not self-aware, if you can't regulate your emotions, if you're not humble, if you don't have good time management, or if you have biases, it's gonna be hard to learn.

• 43:50Speaker 01

  Which are all natural things, by the way.

• 43:52Jocko Willink?

  Which are all natural things, which are all things that we kind of every... By natural, I assume you mean like that's where we tend.

• 44:00Speaker 01

  Yes, sir.

• 44:01Jocko Willink?

  We tend to lack self-awareness. We tend to not be able to control our emotions. We tend to lack humility. We tend not to be able to do time management. We tend to have biases.

• 44:10Speaker 01

  Big time.

• 44:11Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I think you are correct, Echo Charles. Marines overcome this friction and seek self-improvement by better understanding themselves, particularly how our values, ethics, and perspectives influence learning. And now I think it's important to remember that when we're talking about learning in that context right there, we're not talking about, hey, what I learned from this class or this training. It's what am I learning on the battlefield? What am I seeing? And how are my biases negatively impacting how I'm able to take on this new information and adapt to it? Because that's what happens. You know, you have this idea in your head of how things should be. And therefore, when the enemy does something you don't expect, you don't accept it.

• 44:55Jocko Willink?

  You act like it happened a different way. They couldn't... they just got lucky. You make excuses for yourself. You make excuses for the enemy. They got lucky. They can't do that again. Those are your biases, preventing you from learning. I mean, we must have... We did that like crazy in Iraq. We, as a country.

• 45:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:17Jocko Willink?

  Right? Oh, they can't be... This can't be an organized campaign. Oh, so just... there's just some rabble-rousers out there. Like, we just wouldn't accept it. This isn't an insurgency. These are just some outpockets, outlawing of some disgruntled folks around here. Fast forward a year and a half, two years, we got a full-fledged insurgency on our hands.

• 45:34Speaker 01

  What's a rabble-rouser?

• 45:36Jocko Willink?

  Something that just causes problems.

• 45:41Jocko Willink?

  Second principle, the second learning principle is be ready and willing to learn. You wouldn't think you'd have to say that.

• 45:51Dave Berke?

  Yeah, but you do. Without a doubt, even that first one of know yourself and seek self-improvement. It seems like that would be a natural, natural tendency to do that. It's actually not. Your ego at some point gets like, you don't need to keep learning. You don't need to get better. You don't need to improve. And the reason it's in there is that not only is it natural, like you were saying, that is an overwhelmingly powerful force, your own ego telling you, bro, you've got this thing figured out.

• 46:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, you don't know yourself.

• 46:22Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 46:23Speaker 01

  Who, who knows me better than myself?

• 46:25Jocko Willink?

  Who's over there quoting Sun Tzu, out of war, echo Charles?

• 46:29Speaker 01

  No, well, I'm just saying, you said it in there. So you ever seen yourself, well, you're probably different, but us normal people, we sometimes will see ourselves on camera or hear our own voice on in a recording and be like, oh my gosh, I can't believe I sound like that. Meanwhile, you know who listens to your voice 100% of the time? You. Yet you still don't really know yourself because when you see it, kind of, you know, detached from you doing it in the moment, it seems different for some reason. Isn't that weird? So we kind of don't know ourselves, I think.

• 47:02Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I would say there's very few people that when they hear themselves, they go, yep, that's what I sound like.

• 47:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, especially at first. After a while, you know, yeah, you get used to it or whatever, but

• 47:12Speaker 01

  at the end of the day, that's a common thing, I think, for people where they either see themselves and or they hear themselves and they're like, they're like, oh, and they're for some reason moved by it in one way or another. You know, like they haven't been with themselves their whole life kind of thing. You know, like it's some kind of weird surprise or something like that. So it's kind of like, no, you don't really know yourself. I think you, for the most part, anyway, like you experience little, little slivers of yourself while you're behaving and then you kind of paint your own picture. Like, oh, I just said that I must have sounded real cool saying that. Meanwhile, you hear it played back. You're like, dang, I didn't sound cool at all.

• 47:48Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, the, those are, those are valid. You know what's interesting about this section right here? So we, I start off, I say, now, you know, this is, this is the, what's good about the Marine Corps is, you know, this, they can, a Lance Corporal can read this, and, and a gunny sergeant can read this, and a Colonel can read this. And they all can like, understand it. Here's what's interesting about this. This section right here, believe it or not, in my humble opinion, is actually aimed at the Colonel. Because the Lance Corporal's like, hey, bro, I'm here to learn. I got, my mind is wide open. It's the Colonel and the gunny, or the master guns, that's like, I already got this. Or, already have this. Depending if it's the gunny, or, or the Colonel, right? Because, the minute that you think

• 48:32Jocko Willink?

  you know everything, is the minute that you are not ready and willing to learn, and that's when you're going backwards. So this section right here, they actually aimed this section point blank, at this, the senior people, that think they know everything. Because those, those young kids, man, they're ready to learn. They, they're not sitting there going, I already know this. I mean, it's like a new guy in a SEAL platoon. That guy's, that kid's ready to learn. But, once you're a senior enlisted guy, or you're a more senior officer, all of a sudden, you know anything. You know everything. Marines have the professional responsibility to learn throughout their careers, and should always seek opportunities to learn. Marines must take an active role in learning, be

• 49:14Jocko Willink?

  intellectually curious, and look for new ways to adapt when they have learned to other, to adapt what they learned to other relevant situations. There are many factors that indicate a person's willingness and readiness to learn, such as physical, behavioral, societal, emotional, and cognitive skills. Additionally, humility, courage, integrity, perseverance, motivation, and discipline are other key qualities that affect the learning readiness. What's the number one? Humility. Interesting courage is number two. Why is that? Cause what kind of person just says, you know, I already got this. Right? Or they don't have the courage to raise their hand. That's what I should have said. The person that is not humble says, you know, I already got this.

• 49:54Jocko Willink?

  The person that lacks courage won't go, hey, you know what? Hey boss, you know what? I don't, I don't really understand this. Can you, can you, can you tell me this again? That takes courage. You're in a group of people, raise your hand. Man, when I was going to college and I was a 20 whatever year old man going to college with a bunch of 18 year olds. I had, I had a preponderance of moral courage. Sitting in front of the classroom, I'd be like, professor, I don't understand that. Can you go over that again? And it made me so much, do so much better because you know, I guarantee there's kids in the back of the class, they don't understand something. They're not going to say anything and look stupid. I didn't care. So you gotta have that courage, integrity, perseverance, motivation and discipline. Starts with humility, ends with discipline. I like this book.

• 50:35Jocko Willink?

  Marines increase their learning readiness by having courage, perseverance and discipline to continuously seek new professional knowledge, skills and experiences. A Marine's learning can be facilitated by developing an awareness and understanding of one's own thought processes. Marines sharpen their intellect by studying how to think better than applying these skills to improve as learners, leaders and decision makers.

• 50:59Jocko Willink?

  The third principle is to understand why you are learning. And this is what's key. What you can take away from this, hey, look, apply this to yourself for sure. Apply it to your kids. Apply it to your students. Apply it to the people that you work with. You want to make sure everyone understands why they're learning, especially the kids. Like yeah, for you, absolutely apply it. But as an instructor, you can, you can reverse engineer this as an instructor and you lead with why something is important to know.

• 51:28Jocko Willink?

  And that will help people open their brains.

• 51:32Jocko Willink?

  When Marines understand why they are learning concepts and skills, they better understand the importance of learning to the mission and are more motivated to learn. By understanding the context of learning, Marines are better able to apply concepts and skills to new situations, increasing their competence and adaptability. Unknowns, uncertainty, and disorder will never be eliminated in battle. Information may be unclear, misinterpreted, influenced by the enemy, or communication systems may fail. When Marines understand why they are learning, it enables them to focus on learning the known and adapting to the familiar and adapting to the unfamiliar more quickly and effectively than the enemy.

• 52:11Jocko Willink?

  That's the outlier thing we just talked about.

• 52:12Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 52:14Jocko Willink?

  I see all the things that you're doing. I see the nine pattern recognitions. There's the one outlier, I'm on it. Outlearning the enemy therefore is key to outfighting the enemy.

• 52:27Dave Berke?

  That's a big deal. Outlearning the enemy is the key to outfighting, not the brute force, not getting bigger equipment or stronger things. It's outlearning him. That's how you're gonna win.

• 52:38Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and when you start to look at learning as a skill that's required for battle, you start to look at it differently.

• 52:44Dave Berke?

  Yes, totally.

• 52:46Jocko Willink?

  And then you could start breaking down, well, how am I gonna go about learning? Right? What am I paying attention to? How do I assess things that I'm hearing? How do I assemble all that knowledge together? There's a lot that goes into it.

• 53:02Dave Berke?

  Dude, there's a ton. And if, and I wasn't around when somebody decided we need to put a doctrinal pub around learning for the Marine Corps. But A, it's a really good idea. And it probably came from someone who was like me, that as a second lieutenant, who had a pile of things that I was supposed to learn when I got to the basic school and they gave me all these same pubs, warfighting, tactics, strategy. And learning to me was, I'm gonna read this and find the answers in these books so I can take the test and pass and be really good. And I'm gonna learn what the answers are, which is totally wrong, totally different. And the sooner the force at any organization figures out how to crack the code and getting people to actually wanna do this for their own self-interest.

• 53:47Dave Berke?

  The better. And I'm sure that that's the driver behind this is a generation of people going, I'm learning what the answers are. And that is not learning. That is not, that is not an effective way to do it. And that's part of the reason why Mattis is so credible. Because the things he talks about more than anything, he doesn't talk about combat nearly as much as he talks about all the preparation he did and all the things that he read. And that's what people figured out about Mattis is what made him brilliant, was how much he read and studied.

• 54:14Jocko Willink?

  And each time he read and studied, he got a little bit of pattern recognition, understood things better.

• 54:19Dave Berke?

  Got a little smarter.

• 54:20Jocko Willink?

  Got a little bit smarter. Learned.

• 54:22Dave Berke?

  Yes.

• 54:25Dave Berke?

  Second Lieutenant Burke didn't learn nearly as much as he should have.

• 54:29Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you know, and that's one of the things, you know, on the Thread Podcast, you know, I talk about the fact that everything's connected. And when things aren't, when you don't make the connections between things, it'd be like if you started taking jiu-jitsu and people are like, okay, this is the arm lock. You're going to learn that in the arm lock room. And then you go into another room with another instructor and they teach you the triangle. And then you go to another room with another instructor and they teach you the sweep. All those things by themselves, they're not meaningless, but they have

• 54:59Dave Berke?

  Low value.

• 55:00Jocko Willink?

  Very low value comparatively speaking. So that was the original idea of the Thread Podcast was, listen, people don't connect everything and everything's connected.

• 55:17Jocko Willink?

  Connect things. The fourth learning principle is to provide and receive constructive feedback. One cannot learn without feedback. It is critical to learning and developing adaptability. There are two sources of feedback. Intrinsic sources, i.e. internal, and extrinsic sources, i.e. external. For example, a Marine's own perception that he or she jerked the trigger when shooting a rifle, then adjusting the trigger pull on the next shot would be an example of intrinsic feedback. In this same example, extrinsic feedback would be a marksmanship instructor, marksmanship instructor identifying their error to the Marine, then demonstrating the proper trigger pull. Both intrinsic and extrinsic feedback are important for learning and developing adaptability.

• 56:01Jocko Willink?

  Adaptability is the quality of being able to adjust to new conditions. Marines develop adaptability when they examine a situation, recognize what is happening, and adjust their response to the new conditions. The process of learning is itself a form of adaptive behavior and is essential element of combat effectiveness.

• 56:26Jocko Willink?

  Check. The final principle is that learning is purpose driven to develop professional competence. Learning has specific goals and measurable objectives to gauge progress toward developing competencies. Marine learning is team oriented, so that Marines develop the skills and connections to fight collectively.

• 56:52Jocko Willink?

  Additionally, Marines study history and world events to be more prepared to respond to new challenges such as the increase in globalization and competition for resources. Effective warfighters adapt to fluid changes and circumstances in order to deal with complex problems and to proactively shape events for advantage.

• 57:12Jocko Willink?

  Marines sometimes conceptualize the enemy and/or adversary as a single person or group of people, but should be viewed as a complex, complex system.

• 57:24Jocko Willink?

  So, uh, obviously Marines study history and world events. And that's, that's, you know, one of the most awesome things that happens to me when I travel and meet Marines around the country and around the world is a lot of Marines listen to this podcast so that they have a better understanding of war in context of history. And so by listening, they're, they're fulfilling, you know, at least in some part fulfilling this. And what's really cool is when someone sends me, you know, a picture of 12 books from the podcast that they ordered and read, and now they have an even more in-depth knowledge of things.

• 58:11Dave Berke?

  There's a lot in here, man. This idea of adapting to fluid changes and circumstances in order to deal with complex problems and proactively shape events for an advantage. That's the core of every question we've been asked at Echelon Front for the last month. In this complex fluid environment that nobody anticipated and nobody expected to happen. And what are they going to do to proactively shape the outcome rather than just be a victim of it on how this thing plays out? What do I need to do to shape the outcome? What do I need to take control of? And if you don't have a long history of learning how to deal with these type of settings, you're gonna have a really hard time.

• 58:50Jocko Willink?

  And it's nice to bring that word "shape" in as opposed to what can I do to control the outcome? Because that's why, you can't control the outcome. The outcome is gonna come. How can you shape it?

• 59:02Dave Berke?

  To your advantage, absolutely.

• 59:06Jocko Willink?

  Next section, the human dimension and science of learning. Conflict is a human phenomenon. Understanding human nature helps Marines to understand conflict.

• 59:23Jocko Willink?

  Marines prepare for the complexities of each conflict by studying social, economic, political, cultural, environmental, interpersonal, and intrapersonal factors. You gotta know human beings. How many times have I said that on this podcast? Echo Charles, I want a number.

• 59:38Dave Berke?

  Eighty-six thousand, seven hundred and one times.

• 59:41Jocko Willink?

  These factors often exert a greater influence on the character and outcome of war than do factors such as the size of the enemy formations and their equipment.

• 59:54Jocko Willink?

  So, all these things. Human nature has a bigger influence oftentimes than the size of the enemy formations or their equipment. We're talking about just human nature.

• 1:00:03Dave Berke?

  And that's why leadership is always the most important thing. Leadership is a human endeavor. You can have the best and the most equipment in the world, and if you have bad leadership, if you don't understand your people, you're going to lose. You're going to lose against the person who is better led and better understands the human components that you're dealing with. That's really the comment you made earlier, like, those are human things. Yeah, I even wrote that down. Leadership is also a human endeavor.

• 1:00:30Jocko Willink?

  Marines, go.

• 1:00:31Dave Berke?

  I was gonna say, I even wrote down, "This is huge," and underlined that last comment.

• 1:00:38Jocko Willink?

  Marines learn as much as possible about the different human factors, cultures, perspectives, and ideas that impact operations. Developing self-awareness of the personal factors that can detract from learning, such as hubris, ego, bias, enables Marines to overcome friction. Marines strive to view situations and information objectively and unemotionally, provide candid feedback to each other, and learn to overcome or mitigate factors that negatively impact preparedness.

• 1:01:08Jocko Willink?

  Yes. Yes, yes, and yes. Ego, bias.

• 1:01:17Jocko Willink?

  Bring us down.

• 1:01:24Jocko Willink?

  Marines strive to view situations and information objectively and unemotionally,

• 1:01:30Jocko Willink?

  and provide candid feedback to each other, and learn to overcome or mitigate factors that negatively impact preparedness. Reason I'm rehashing that one is because sometimes people utilize the candid feedback thing, but they forget about ego and hubris

• 1:01:50Jocko Willink?

  of the other person. So, when they, "I'm just gonna give you some candid feedback there, Echo Charles." What I forget about is that you have an ego. And so, by giving you this candid feedback that you're not really prepared to receive, you're gonna get defensive the whole nine yards, you're not gonna make any changes. Whereas if I can find a way to use maneuver warfare around that ego, and provide you with feedback that somehow comes from your own brain because a seed's been planted by me, it's gonna be better off.

• 1:02:22Jocko Willink?

  We'll throw a little bone to the Marine Corps on that one. Just a little, just take your thought process a little bit further on that one. Yes, Dave, a little bit more, just can we go a little bit?

• 1:02:33Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:34Jocko Willink?

  Can we apply what we're talking about just a little bit more and be a little bit, a little bit better? Candid feedback is awesome when there is this level of relationships and ego, egos have been put in check, it works and we strive for that. It's hard to achieve. It's hard to achieve.

• 1:02:59Dave Berke?

  Yeah, unemotional, unemotional candid feedback. Cause how many people do you know really are geared to absorb candid feedback in an unemotional manner? Especially after something like preparation for.

• 1:03:11Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Uh, when I wrote about that in leadership strategy and tactics, like I tried to, I tried to help the person on the receiving end. Right? I'm like, listen, when you, when somebody gives you criticism, even if it's coming from someone that you think has no business giving you any feedback whatsoever. Listen to them.

• 1:03:29Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:30Jocko Willink?

  And absorb what they say and see if you can apply it to make yourself better. And that right there, that little learning to do that as a human being, if you could learn to do that as a human being, your life is going to be a thousand, a thousand times better than it would if you never get over that hump of, hey, I don't like this guy, so I'm not going to listen to what he has to say. Whereas someone that's just open, just says, you know what? And this is to your point, Dave, how many people have I met in my entire life?

• 1:03:57Jocko Willink?

  That were just, oh, hit me with some more candid feedback so I can just.

• 1:04:02Dave Berke?

  Yeah, get better.

• 1:04:03Jocko Willink?

  Do they exist? Sure. Do we get to a point? Do, do sometimes people, you know, uh, I have a relationship with someone or, you know, someone else putting someone through training. I could just tell like I'm, I'm saying something, they're getting out their notebook. They're like, hey, I got it. You know, you know, that's a great point. Thank you. Sure, that happens for sure.

• 1:04:20Jocko Willink?

  Doesn't happen all the time. Doesn't happen most of the time.

• 1:04:24Dave Berke?

  Does it say unemotional candid feedback?

• 1:04:26Jocko Willink?

  Yes.

• 1:04:26Dave Berke?

  Did you say that? Okay.

• 1:04:27Jocko Willink?

  It says, Marines strive to view situations and information objectively and unemotionally.

• 1:04:33Jocko Willink?

  Provide candid feedback to each other and learn to overcome or mitigate factors that negatively impact preparedness.

• 1:04:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I guess overall is provide and accept. Unemotional. So even the unemotional kind of feedback that my that um, so you know how in a typical situation, I don't know typical, what I don't even know what that even means, but a situation where you're like, hey, candid feedback and the guy kind of takes it as a as a the the golden pass to just just basically hit him as hard as he can like, yeah, this method was straight up dog shit. You know, like, that's not unemotional. That's emotional feedback right there. See what I'm saying? Like, it's on the other side. It's on the negative emotion rather than, oh, you know, you could have done better. You know, it's, I mean, maybe that's candid, but it's

• 1:05:19Jocko Willink?

  You're right. And so I'm gonna take this one more, one more step for for the next release of this, when we're gonna talk about this.

• 1:05:25Speaker 01

  The revise.

• 1:05:26Jocko Willink?

  When they revise this, when we talk about candid feedback, we also need to talk about human nature. Right? Because human nature is, I bristle at candid feedback. And like I said, are there people that don't? And and the goal here, the ideal goal is like, hey, I'm a Marine, you're a Marine. I'm gonna give you some candid feedback. You're gonna take it on board. We're gonna move forward. I get it, man. I love that. I wish that the way the world works. We have to remember human nature. We have to remember that human nature.

• 1:05:55Jocko Willink?

  It provides a level of resistance against candid feedback. I'm so I'm sorry.

• 1:06:00Dave Berke?

  Yeah, and they and they they touch on it. They kind of talk about it a little bit, but they don't really get to the core of here's the real barrier you're gonna get when you're dealing with this. Now, the good news is that anybody listening to this podcast has already listened to the previous podcast. And if you're gonna be an eminently qualified human, the way you're gonna deal with this, when they're talking about viewing feedback objectively and emotionally, the real scenario is, is I'm in charge of this mission. I build the plan. This is all the stuff that I'm the leader that I come back and then Jaco, my instructor, comes back and destroys in what gives me feedback. Now, what he should be able to do is tell me all these things and me go, dude, those are all really good points. I'm gonna incorporate all those in the next mission brief. I'm gonna build this into my plan next time. We're gonna go get better. But what I do

• 1:06:41Dave Berke?

  is I come show up ready for that feedback to defend what I did, because that was my plan. I was the mission commander, and I can't be unemotional and detached, but I should be. So if you're listening to this, your job is to take all the feedback you get, even from the people that you cannot stand. In an unemotional and objective fashion. We got a question just last week. What do I do with the perennial complainer on my team that is constantly complaining about everything? You know what the answer is? Listen to him. Cause it might actually have some feedback for you. The problem isn't that he's a perennial complainer. The problem is that you don't want to hear him. But the almost exact opposite is true is when you are providing feedback. If you go in with the assumption that that person will be just like you and unemotional and prepared.

• 1:07:25Dave Berke?

  You're also going to be ineffective that you have to make the exact opposite approach, which is you're going to be dealing with nothing but their ego. And you know, if it turns out that I'm debriefing Jaco and he's totally in the game. Then, then, then that's, then we're good. Then we represent, I don't know, 5% or 10% of the interactions, if you're lucky that you're going to get. But over time, if you actually take, if people see you as a leader, taking other people's feedback, when they appear to be not credible and not good people to take feedback from, and you're willing to listen to them. You actually can influence other people doing that. Takes time. What they don't talk about in here is when you decide to go do that, here's all the barriers are going to be in place

• 1:08:06Dave Berke?

  with this plan of, hey, man, I'm just going to come through the front door here, Jaco, and give you some, some candid feedback. If you're just going to take it, it's good to go.

• 1:08:12Jocko Willink?

  Again, look, look, Marine Corps. We get the ideal. I would love, I would love if that was the way the world works. Unfortunately, we have to deal with human nature. That's what we have to deal with, just like you have to deal with it in combat. You have to deal, deal with it in a debrief. So be ready for it. Control what you can control. Learn from it. All right. Violence and danger will always be parts of war. Learning to fight in dangerous conditions despite fear and uncertainty is key to warfighting. Marines of all ranks must understand how the body and mind respond to fear and stress so that they better control their responses in any situation, including combat. Marines learn how to effectively control stress reactions and fight dangerous conditions

• 1:08:57Jocko Willink?

  through realistic training, increasing self-awareness, understanding the attributes of war, and increasing mental and physical resilience. For example, Marines learn breathing techniques during marksmanship training to better control how the body's nervous system responds to stress in order to shoot more accurately. The breathing techniques help Marines to control their heart rate, respiration, attention, and muscular stress, and muscles under stress, which then increases the accuracy of fire.

• 1:09:25Jocko Willink?

  Combat can challenge unit cohesion and present Marines with a variety of moral and ethical dilemmas. Marines develop strong mental, moral, spiritual, and ethical understanding because they are as important as physical skills when operating in the violence of combat.

• 1:09:43Jocko Willink?

  And it's interesting too, and I thought they were going to make this connection and maybe I forgot, maybe they make it later, but I don't think they do. But you and I made it on the last podcast talking about the, you know, the code book. The breathing techniques help Marines to control their heart rate, respiration, attention, muscles under stress, and then increase their accuracy of their fire.

• 1:10:03Jocko Willink?

  That's cool. It doesn't only apply to shooting your rifle. It applies to everything that you're going to do, whether you're dealing with somebody that's combative and you've got to put hands on them, whether you're dealing with your boss that's yelling at you, or whether you're dealing with your six-year-old kid that just threw a temper tantrum. All those things can come into play.

• 1:10:24Jocko Willink?

  The science of learning encompasses many disciplines such as neuroscience, psychology, and andragogy, which is adult learning. The human brain is a constantly reorganizing system capable of being shaped and reshaped across an entire lifespan. Each new learning event impacts the brain regardless of the Marines' age, rank, or level of experience. Therefore, Marines should understand that challenging experiences enhance the brain and better hone their warfighting capability. Science has also identified that individuals and teams have differences in the way they learn with varying sensory preferences for learning, competencies, and strengths. So that's something you hear about, you know, people learn in different ways.

• 1:11:09Jocko Willink?

  But the sentence before that one?

• 1:11:12Jocko Willink?

  "Challenging experiences enhance the brain and better hone their warfighting capability." We want to do things that are hard. We need to do things that are hard.

• 1:11:25Jocko Willink?

  "Adult learning involves adapting or modifying the prior relevant information to specific situation or problem that the Marine seeks to resolve."

• 1:11:36Jocko Willink?

  You're taking what you know and applying it to new situations. An effective way that Marines can accelerate their learning is by indirectly learning from others through vicarious experience. Vicarious experiences are relevant learning opportunities that each Marine obtains by observing, reading, and studying what others have experienced. There is no excuse for not learning from others.

• 1:12:01Jocko Willink?

  Each Marine must learn how to learn, both independently and collectively in teams. Social and interpersonal factors such as effective communication, group cohesion, and trust all influence learning.

• 1:12:16Jocko Willink?

  I'm gonna read that one again. "Social and interpersonal factors such as effective communication, group cohesion, and trust all influence learning." When these factors are positive, they facilitate learning process, facilitate the learning process and create strong relationships. This is the thing that I've gone over a bunch of times recently is like, "Hey, why was I able to like,

• 1:12:36Jocko Willink?

  rip apart a young lieutenant in a debrief? It's because he trusted me." And we had, we had that. The strong relationship. And therefore I can say, "I can get candid."

• 1:12:49Dave Berke?

  That's why I caught myself in the last example. I was giving this example where you were gonna come in and rip apart my debrief, and I caught myself, I'm like, "Oh, I'm actually going on the assumption when I say that, that we have such a good relationship that I realize that what you're doing is actually trying to help me as opposed to coming in here and, you know, being a tyrant to tear my plan apart." Was because of exactly that. When, when, when the environment is positive, you can come in and you can rip that thing to shreds as you need to, to shreds. And all of it is for me to get better. And I look at every single thing and instead of go, "Man, I really wish you could kinda be nicer when you say that." I don't even think about that. I just look for the things that you're saying, which actually is a massive time saver and allows you to be more effective and more efficient because you're not worried about those other things.

• 1:13:32Dave Berke?

  But like you said before, the problem with that is you can't take that for granted. That, that's actually really, really hard to get. And, and a lot of times people are like, "Hey, I'm just trying to help you out, man. I'm just trying to help you here." Like, "Yeah." But if they don't hear you, it doesn't matter. You're not effective.

• 1:13:48Jocko Willink?

  Yep. And the efficiency thing, again, I've been talking about this lately. It's like, the efficiency thing of like, "Well, look, wouldn't it just be easier if I could just tell Dave, 'Hey, Dave, here's where you screwed up in that brief and you did these three things wrong.'" That's obviously more efficient. And I'm a matter of fact kinda guy, and people should just kinda get on board. And like, hmm, it would be more efficient if Dave listened to anything I said, if he made any adjustments. But the problem is he doesn't adjust anything. He just puts up his defenses. And so it's efficient in delivery. It's completely inefficient in absorption.

• 1:14:19Dave Berke?

  Totally.

• 1:14:20Jocko Willink?

  Doesn't work.

• 1:14:20Dave Berke?

  It's not effective. Period.

• 1:14:23Jocko Willink?

  Marines should actively seek to understand human and environmental factors that influence learning while avoiding thoughts and behaviors that can negatively affect learning and cohesion.

• 1:14:34Jocko Willink?

  Next section, problem solving is a warfighting capability. Time spent learning how to effectively think and solve problems is time well invested. Marines must build the skills to recognize potential problems, reason and critically and think critically. Reasoning is the process of thinking about something in a logical way to form a conclusion or judgment. Critical thinking is the reflective part of that reasoning. Critical thinking skills include inference, evaluation, interpretation, and explanation. Developing these skills enables Marines to understand not only the information presented, but also its potential implications and secondary effects. And this is one of those things where when you are, when you're in a leadership

• 1:15:18Jocko Willink?

  position, being able to do this quickly, being able to look at like a problem and a solution and two or three solutions and being able to figure out what's going to happen if I imply this one, this one, and this one, and see, hey, this one will solve it quick, but I got then I'm going to have to deal with this giant mess that I just created. Cool, I'm going with option B. That's the difference between, you know, the white belt, the blue belt leader. The blue belt leader is like, okay, I see the immediate solution that I could do, but I see that after effects are worse, so I'm going with plan B.

• 1:15:44Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:48Jocko Willink?

  Through reasoning and critical thinking, Marines explore, question, and understand the key factors affecting the situation, which then enables Marines to do better, to develop better courses of action. And again, the more experience you have doing this, the quicker you'll be able to recognize the patterns of these things. And you know, I'm sitting here thinking as, you know, from a leadership perspective, you know, you and I and rest of the guys at Echelon Front, working with companies, it's a classic example of, well, hey, we've got this problem. Here's how I'm going to solve it.

• 1:16:20Jocko Willink?

  And we all look at that problem and go, okay, I, I see what you're saying. And I see that that seems like the direct, most direct, efficient way to solve this problem. Here's the nine after effects that are going to make this just a complete gut check.

• 1:16:32Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:33Jocko Willink?

  Cause you're not thinking through, you know, you, well, as a white belt leader, you're not seeing this or as an emotional leader or whatever.

• 1:16:43Jocko Willink?

  Skipping ahead a little bit, quickly recognizing and addressing potential problems enables Marines to better deal with disruption and respond to changes in the enemy situation. Again, pattern recognition.

• 1:16:59Jocko Willink?

  Responding to those problems. The future battlespace will contain increasingly difficult problems that do not necessarily have a right answer.

• 1:17:11Jocko Willink?

  Therefore Marines skills to observe objectively, reason effectively and take decisive action and then adjust as needed, remain key elements of success.

• 1:17:24Dave Berke?

  I mean, that's, that's right out of what you talk about the iterative decision making. And it's, it's not just action, it's still decisive action, default aggressive action, but just far enough for you to figure out and get the feedback of, do I need to keep going? Do I need to maneuver? Do I need to back up? And the connection of those two, which is decisive action and then adjust as needed. That, that is the connection that is so hard that people don't, don't make sometimes.

• 1:17:50Jocko Willink?

  Get that feedback loop going.

• 1:17:51Dave Berke?

  Get that feedback.

• 1:17:52Jocko Willink?

  I like the, um, not right answer. I remember hearing about the German war problems, war game problems that the only, the only solution, the only solution that would work or, or the only options that would work were, were not, you know, you were told not to do. So, hey, don't go past this limit of advance. The only way you're going to get out of this is go past that limit of advance. So they're trying to get, they're trying to get the Germans who are, you know, have a propensity to follow rules. And so they're trying to get them, hey, here's the rule. We, in order to get this done, you're going to need to break this rule. What are you going to do? And, but they don't tell them that. They just watch them and they just see them sit at a limited advance and get killed. In this scenario.

• 1:18:38Jocko Willink?

  The mind as a weapon.

• 1:18:42Jocko Willink?

  The philosophy of maneuver warfare guides much of what Marines do. And that right there is like, let's just have a podcast about that. In fact, I guess we do have a podcast about that. It's this podcast. The philosophy of maneuver warfare guides much of what Marines do. It is their way of thinking about and preparing for war with the intended purpose of taking decisive action against the enemy at the least cost to themselves. By the way, this is, this is maneuver warfare is the reason I kind of, as a younger leader in the teams, the reason I started to grasp onto it and understand it was because of jiu-jitsu. Because what's jiu-jitsu? Jiu-jitsu is maneuver warfare. That's all it is. It's maneuver warfare. It's decisive action against the enemy with the least cost to yourself. That's what jiu-jitsu is.

• 1:19:28Jocko Willink?

  Marines study and apply maneuver warfare in order to better exploit advantages in multiple domains and create rapidly unfolding situations in the battle that overwhelm the enemy. Maneuver warfare requires that Marines develop the, oh, by the way, also that what I just read, jiu-jitsu. Right? Create rapidly unfolding situations that overwhelm the enemy like, oh, I'm across, oh, I'm moving here. Oh, you're caught.

• 1:19:54Jocko Willink?

  Maneuver warfare requires that Marines develop the temperance to persevere amidst uncertainty and the mental agility to succeed in fluid and chaotic situations. Additionally, it requires being able to understand the dynamic and complex situation from multiple perspectives to determine how to exploit an advantage.

• 1:20:15Jocko Willink?

  Decentralized execution within the commander's intent is central to maneuver warfare. This requires that each Marine understand the situation and execute actions to support and achieve that intent. So.

• 1:20:33Jocko Willink?

  Decentralized command. That's why.

• 1:20:38Jocko Willink?

  Regardless of technology and equipment, Marines are ready to fight and win. Therefore, it is essential that Marines develop and maintain an intellectual edge over any enemy by developing their minds, just as they would prepare any other weapon system for battle. This intellectual edge must come from self-discipline, study, and deliberate practice as Marines to build competencies in the profession of arms as individuals, teams, units, and magtavs.

• 1:21:11Jocko Willink?

  Once again, they're talking about self-discipline, they're kind of highlighting that, that that's what we're talking about.

• 1:21:24Jocko Willink?

  The last part, I think it's the last part of this section. Continuous learners, developing the mind as a weapon is a career-long process. Marines are continuous learners. They pursue mastery in the profession of arms, recognizing that the achievement of mastery is a journey, not a destination. As adult learners, Marines recognize that they are responsible for their own learning outcomes, actions, and decisions. As adult learners, Marines need to know why content is relevant during both training and educational activities. Marines perceive learning as a progression of goals to build competencies, not a single discrete goal.

• 1:22:05Jocko Willink?

  Hence, the analogy of the arm bar in one room, the triangle in the other room. No, it's all together. It's not a single goal. It's all together. Therefore, Marines benefit most from information and learning activities presented in the context of real-life situations or task-specific problems.

• 1:22:26Jocko Willink?

  To become better warfighters, Marines continuously gather information and engage in activities that test their assumptions, develop new knowledge, increase critical thinking and reasoning, and build deeper understanding. Instead of simply asking what happened in a battle, Marines should always ask and seek to better understand. Why the events happened and consequently what to apply for for future situations. Marines must learn about a broad range of topics and skills through professional reading, experience, experiential learning and deliberate practice. Marines must also approach each event and interaction as a learning opportunity. There is no, there is always something to learn, even if that's something is what not to do in the future.

• 1:23:09Jocko Willink?

  As continuous learners, Marines actively seek, apply and share lessons learned to develop themselves and other Marines in the profession of arms.

• 1:23:20Jocko Willink?

  And it's, you know, it's interesting that in the, in the, in the, in the EQH book, in the evaluation in the code, you know, we've got this whole section on improving your mental capability and how that's so important. And that's the same thing that the Marines are saying here. Conclusion of this first section, they say Marines adapt to every tool that they have, weapons, equipment and their minds to succeed and win in every climb in place. Marines must develop and demonstrate brilliance in the basic fundamental skills combined with the mental agility to adapt to whatever situation they face. Say that again, Marines must develop and demonstrate brilliance

• 1:24:04Jocko Willink?

  in the basic fundamental skills combined with the mental agility to adapt to whatever situation they face. So different from that stereotypical vision of a Marine that you are just gonna obey orders, do as you're told.

• 1:24:24Speaker 01

  Follow orders or people die.

• 1:24:27Jocko Willink?

  Oh, there you go.

• 1:24:27Speaker 01

  Few good men.

• 1:24:29Jocko Willink?

  Speaking of quotes.

• 1:24:34Jocko Willink?

  All right, so that wraps up the first chapter and right now I'm.

• 1:24:39Jocko Willink?

  I'm assessing that we're only gonna make it through two chapters of this thing. So we'll do one more chapter right now and then we'll, we'll save the next one for the next podcast. Chapter two, the culture of learning starts off with a quote.

• 1:24:52Jocko Willink?

  Humility engenders learning because it beats back the arrogance that puts blinders on.

• 1:25:00Jocko Willink?

  It leaves you open for truths to reveal themselves. You don't stand in your own way.

• 1:25:07Jocko Willink?

  Do you know how you can tell when someone is truly humble? I believe there's one simple test because they consistently observe and listen.

• 1:25:18Jocko Willink?

  The humble improve. Because they consistently observe and listen, the humble improve. They don't assume I know the way. And who's that a quote from? Winton Marsalis.

• 1:25:36Jocko Willink?

  Jazz musician, trumpet player.

• 1:25:41Jocko Willink?

  Interesting, right? It's interesting that the United States Marine Corps took a trumpet jazz playing musician. But his quote on humility is.

• 1:25:54Jocko Willink?

  And you know. It's interesting.

• 1:26:00Jocko Willink?

  If we hadn't written Extreme Ownership with a chapter called Check Your Ego and Stay Humble. It's like, I'd be thinking about doing that right now.

• 1:26:10Jocko Willink?

  There are no secrets to success. Is the result of preparation, hard work and learning from failure. That's Colin Powell. And thanks to my reading, I have never been caught flat footed by any situation, never at a loss for how any problem has been addressed successfully or unsuccessfully before. It doesn't give me all the answers, but it lights what is often a dark path ahead. And that is General Mattis. So.

• 1:26:38Jocko Willink?

  Ideas and methods can have more significant impact on warfighting than weapon systems, technology, or organizational structures.

• 1:26:48Jocko Willink?

  This, this, speaking of music, right?

• 1:26:52Jocko Willink?

  The guitar, the, the guitar technology that you have, the music school that you went through, none of that can compare to like, good ideas.

• 1:27:03Jocko Willink?

  This is an underrated, an underrated

• 1:27:10Jocko Willink?

  thought that I have.

• 1:27:12Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:27:13Jocko Willink?

  I always talk about this. I say, listen, you can go to a guitar center and you can put a sign up and you can say, hey, if you can play these songs, you can pick the most technical songs you know. Most underrated analogy, you can pick the most technical songs, you'd say, if you can play these songs, contact me immediately. And I'll, you know, I'll give you whatever, I'll put you on this record and you'll get hundreds of people that will be like, I can play all those songs, note for note, I got them. But all those people can't make a hit song. Cause they don't have the creativity, they don't have the ideas in their head.

• 1:27:49Jocko Willink?

  So they're saying the same thing here. No, no matter what your guitar is, no matter what technology you have, your ideas can have more significant impact on warfighting than any of those things. So the Marine Corps learning culture fosters the attributes that every Marine needs to pursue, such as adaptability, creativity, critical thinking, active listening, and bias for action. You know, there's some, there's some, there's some horses that get beat real hard in this book. Like they get beat. One of them is bias for action. You gotta remember, we're not covering the whole book right now. I mean, I'm skipping chunks and bias for actions all throughout this book.

• 1:28:28Jocko Willink?

  What did I call that in Extreme Ownership? Default aggressive.

• 1:28:33Jocko Willink?

  That's gotta be your default mode. Organizational culture. The Marine Corps' culture values action. Again, there's that horse getting another crack in the jaw. Responsibility, ownership, adaptability and problem solving. Therefore, the Marines' learning process.

• 1:28:54Jocko Willink?

  And culture, develop and exercise these values. Oh, and I've got a little note here. And this is just like the way that the Marines roll. So, listen to this sentence. Listen to these two sentences. The Marine Corps' culture values action, responsibility, adaptability, and problem solving. Therefore, Marines' learning processes and culture develop and exercise these values. What's cool about the Marine Corps is they're not saying this is what the Marine Corps should aspire to, or this is what the Marine Corps should do. They say this is what the Marine Corps does. Like, it's not even, it's not even a question. That's what the Marine Corps does.

• 1:29:34Jocko Willink?

  The Marine Corps' hierarchical command structure and process may at times be perceived as an obstacle to adaptability and learning. Although both are essential for the proper exercise of command and control, Marines must ensure that they do not set conditions for unintended negative effects on learning that could negatively impact warfighting, such as discouraging Marines' initiative feedback or problem solving. Huge, huge. What happens when the dichotomy of chain of command goes too far? Now we have people that aren't giving feedback anymore. So, we need to make sure it doesn't set those conditions.

• 1:30:15Jocko Willink?

  And again, I think it's really important that we think about learning. We're thinking about it from the perspective of, I'm learning what the enemy is doing, and it's how I'm gonna defeat the enemy. It's not like effects, not like negative effect on learning the proper technique for cleaning this weapon. We're talking about learning how to beat the enemy actively while that fight is happening.

• 1:30:45Jocko Willink?

  Skipping ahead a little bit. Leaders at all levels are charged with creating an environment where continuous learning becomes the standard. Leaders serve as positive examples of a disciplined approach to learning, while also providing their Marines with constructive feedback.

• 1:31:01Jocko Willink?

  Leaders of Marines must dedicate time and effort to learning and prioritize mental fitness as much as physical fitness. Dang.

• 1:31:13Jocko Willink?

  Dang.

• 1:31:15Jocko Willink?

  You know what, one of my next missions, and I guess we're kind of, we might be on it. It's probably going on right now, right? But systematic learning, and it's again, it kind of goes back like the idea of the thread. You should be able to just pick up and learn things in a cohesive manner. And there's, and I get that there's, there's some part of learning things in a non cohesive manner that forces you to learn how to put them into a cohesive manner. So there's something to that and I get it. But you should be able to at least take different subjects and get them close enough to each other so that people can easily make those connections. And then maybe you learn how to spread those things apart a little further.

• 1:31:58Jocko Willink?

  So people have to think even more to get those connections to come. But we make it so hard to learn. So many different subjects that we just don't connect. We don't bring any cohesion to. We don't act, we act as if science, history, literature, poetry, art. We act as if they're these separate things.

• 1:32:24Jocko Willink?

  And they're not. And the better you understand each one of those things, and then the better you understand how they fit together, the better you understand them all, and the better you understand them all, the better you understand human nature and people. The better you understand people, the better you can take all this, all the things that you deal with in life and put them into context and do something and shape the outcome of your life.

• 1:32:54Jocko Willink?

  So we need to prioritize mental fitness. And again, it's interesting, we, we wrote the code and, and the evaluation and the protocols before this book came out, but we made number one, the number one thing you need to take care of is physical fitness. And number two is mental fitness.

• 1:33:14Jocko Willink?

  And the reason we prioritized them like that is because if you don't have a body, you don't have a mind.

• 1:33:22Jocko Willink?

  I don't think anyone can argue with that.

• 1:33:25Jocko Willink?

  Continuing on, integrating learning activities into physical training events when Marines are both mentally and physically challenged encourages deep learning and facilitates the recall of lessons learned during combat situations.

• 1:33:41Jocko Willink?

  Awesome.

• 1:33:43Jocko Willink?

  As part of the learning experience, leaders must foster an environment that appropriately tolerates mistakes, errors, and challenges to existing ideas. Challenging ideas and making mistakes are part of the learning process. Boom.

• 1:34:01Jocko Willink?

  Challenging ideas and making mistakes are part of the learning process. If you're not encouraging your subordinates to challenge your ideas. Man, I love it when people challenge my ideas. And actually, I love it.

• 1:34:17Jocko Willink?

  I love it. And it's not because I want to, and it's not because I have an opportunity to like beat them or show them that I know what's up. I like it because I know I'm gonna learn something.

• 1:34:30Jocko Willink?

  I'll learn from their challenge. Their challenge is gonna either break through my position and I'm gonna realize that they're right, or it's gonna make me patch a hole in my position that was a vulnerability. That now we can utilize this idea and it's gonna be stronger.

• 1:34:50Jocko Willink?

  Challenging ideas in a respectful and constructive way contributes to improved learning for both subordinates and leaders. Now, they threw that in there thankfully. Yeah.

• 1:35:00Jocko Willink?

  Yes. And in leadership strategy and tactics, I actually tell you how to say these words correctly. Cause it's not easy. Yeah, like, I like to speak the truth. I'm a straight shooter, I'm gonna come right at you, like, hey, this is how I am. So I'm gonna challenge you, my boss, in a way that totally undermines the relationship we have. And I just tell you how screwed up you are and how wrong. And you're the problem because you won't listen to me. That's gonna work out well. That's not gonna work out well, that's right, yeah. But I'm the guy that speaks the truth. You know, bosses don't wanna hear it. People don't like that. Yeah, bosses just doesn't wanna hear it. You can't handle the truth. There, we going there?

• 1:35:41Jocko Willink?

  Leaders should permit ideas to be challenged in discussion and planning up to the point where the leader makes a decision.

• 1:35:49Jocko Willink?

  Leaders should not automatically interpret a subordinate challenging an idea or providing feedback as challenging their authority. Cha-ching.

• 1:35:56Dave Berke?

  Yeah, so they cover it both.

• 1:35:58Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 1:35:58Dave Berke?

  You need to challenge it in a respectful way. And oh, by the way, you need to listen to it as if it's not an attack on your authority.

• 1:36:04Jocko Willink?

  But I said in Leadership Strategy and Tactics, people usually think their idea is the best idea. It's just, it's just kind of the way it is, right?

• 1:36:13Dave Berke?

  Totally.

• 1:36:14Jocko Willink?

  And you know what? You can actually program yourself to not be that way. And I think I've done a pretty good job of that. Actually, I usually think like, okay, my idea is out there, but it's not necessarily right. And I'm, I want to hear other people's ideas.

• 1:36:28Dave Berke?

  You can totally train to that. You can totally teach yourself to do that. And the, the, the thing that makes that easier over time is you actually start to win more.

• 1:36:35Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:36:36Dave Berke?

  Your life gets better. Like, oh, this was a really big, a big stretch for my ego to start to tolerate that. I'm like, oh, oh, my life is a hundred times better now than it was. This isn't that hard. Hey, you got feedback for me? Dude, bring it on.

• 1:36:46Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:46Dave Berke?

  Cause I bet you my life gets better if I listen to your feedback.

• 1:36:51Jocko Willink?

  The leader's authority gives him or her the responsibility to make decisions, but it does not mean that the leaders have to develop all of the ideas themselves. Leadership Strategy and Tactics.

• 1:37:00Dave Berke?

  Weird.

• 1:37:04Jocko Willink?

  By the way, yeah, whoever authored this thing, legit nicely done. Appreciate the, appreciate it.

• 1:37:12Jocko Willink?

  Subordinates need to be willing to admit mistakes, ask questions and seek corrective feedback. Naturally, a subordinate, a subordinate's willingness to admit mistakes depends on the commander's willingness to tolerate them.

• 1:37:26Dave Berke?

  Dude.

• 1:37:27Jocko Willink?

  And what's good about that, well, I would, you know, a little adjustment there. A subordinate's willingness to admit mistakes, but also a subordinate's willingness to make mistakes or take risks that will result in mistakes depends on the commander's willingness to tolerate. So if you've got a person that never tolerates any mistakes, guess what? No one's going to do anything for them.

• 1:37:47Speaker 01

  That's like one of the major criticisms of like the educa- the traditional educational process, like that, uh, the, the low tolerance for mistakes. So like you take a quiz, it's probably different now, I don't know, it's been a long time since I've been in high school. But you know, when you take a test or a quiz, right? Let's say you have 10, uh, questions, right? You get five of them wrong, that's a F. Straight up F.

• 1:38:10Jocko Willink?

  Fifty, yep.

• 1:38:11Speaker 01

  Oh yeah. So let's say you have four quizzes through the course of the year, right? If you got an F, that it factors into your final grade, no matter if you got those questions right later or not. You could learn 100% of the material perfectly, but if you got an F on one of those quizzes, your grade might not be 100%. See what I'm saying? So if you make a mistake, even if you correct the mistake, you still get punished for it. See what I'm saying? You could know the correct answer to the mistake that you made thoroughly through and through, you still get punished.

• 1:38:42Jocko Willink?

  I, I see your point. However, I think there's, there's other things that are being trained, right? Like you need to prepare and study and be ready, right?

• 1:38:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:38:52Jocko Willink?

  And life doesn't always give you a second, third and fourth chance to square yourself away from your fitty.

• 1:38:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, but, uh, maybe that's what's high school is for, maybe not, but.

• 1:39:03Jocko Willink?

  So I guess you're arguing, underst- wha- wha- wha- what I don't like about what I just said is that I'm clearly thinking of it from like a, well, I actually don't, not that I don't like what I just said. Well, you could, you could argue, well, hey Jaco, so you just want people learning and studying for grades to get an A on a grade? And that's not, that, that's not what I want. But there is a fact of when you go to school, you're learning, okay, I gotta do certain things, I gotta do certain things I don't wanna do and I gotta do them on time. Those are important lessons to learn.

• 1:39:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:39:35Jocko Willink?

  About life.

• 1:39:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, so what you're, you're.

• 1:39:38Jocko Willink?

  Unless you wanna throw it at me that school has develops that we could break children mentally and train them to be factory workers, which is also true.

• 1:39:46Speaker 01

  That is one of the criticisms or the reason for the, you know, the whole, um, you know what I actually, uh, picked up on right now?

• 1:39:53Jocko Willink?

  What?

• 1:39:53Speaker 01

  It's nothing new really, what you just did. You just responded to that, what I just said, with extreme ownership, with extreme responsibility. You know, you're, I said, this is a major criticism of the school system. And you essentially said in so many words, hey, don't blame the school system. You take responsibility for going to school. That's essentially what you said back to me.

• 1:40:14Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 1:40:15Speaker 01

  Interesting. Doesn't make what I said any less true.

• 1:40:17Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:17Speaker 01

  But you, you were like, okay, cool. You know, so what are you gonna do about it, kind of thing? You better, you know, you better study hard, you better work hard, kind of thing. See what I'm saying?

• 1:40:26Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and that's the point, that's the point is what are we trying to do with school, right? Is it, there's a bunch of things that are going on with school. And maybe if we clarified those things more, you could understand. Because do you want the person to learn education, right? Do you want them to get smarter? Do you want them to get knowledge? Yes. Do you want them to learn about how to live their life? Yes.

• 1:40:46Jocko Willink?

  And how do you balance those things correctly?

• 1:40:49Speaker 01

  The, I think not to go too deep into the school system or nothing like that. But I think that saying that or feeling that like, hey, it teaches you to do this and do this on top of like the math that I'm, that you're learning in the class. I think that's sort of like a, like a wiggly, like, not excuse, but it's like, they'll just throw that in as like part of it.

• 1:41:12Jocko Willink?

  I guess what it needs is a clear definition of the mission of the school. Yeah, we had a clear definition of the mission of the school.

• 1:41:17Speaker 01

  And as a high school kid or whatever, you go in the class, in math class? What are we learning in math class? You tell me, what are we learning in math class? Math, right? I didn't know we're gonna learn all these other life lessons that no one says, by the way. You see what I'm saying?

• 1:41:31Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:31Speaker 01

  So it's like, okay.

• 1:41:32Jocko Willink?

  So maybe if they clarified the mission.

• 1:41:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:41:34Jocko Willink?

  And said, hey, this isn't, isn't just about learning math. This is about learning how to operate with other people. This is learning about how to learn time management. It's one of the things you're about to learn. If you got told that, you'd probably be, oh, okay, I get it.

• 1:41:45Speaker 01

  If that was part of the curriculum, not if you got told that. Cause I don't know, some people say that all the time, but then it's like, well, the rest of the stuff going on doesn't support what you're saying right now, but whatever. But yeah, if that was part of the curriculum, oh yeah, a hundred percent, a hundred percent.

• 1:42:01Jocko Willink?

  Check. All right. Back to the book. Marines will learn from their mistakes when they receive constructive corrective feedback. By the way, I'll do a little additive to that statement. Marines will not learn from their mistakes if they are offended by that constructive corrective feedback.

• 1:42:22Dave Berke?

  The easiest hedge against the potential of some of your guys on your team in the Marine Corps or anywhere else of having a problem with that is to actually take ownership of the mistakes that they make. And I just wrote down like, hey, the ultimate form of tolerating other people's mistakes, which is really what this is about, is you want to let your people make mistakes. Because it's actually good, it's learning, it's a way is to take responsibility for that is to, when you're setting up the debrief, rather than go, hey, Corporal Willink, here's 37 things you screwed up on this mission that we did, as opposed to, hey, let's talk about these things. Here's all the things that happened here. Here's all the things that I'm going to do differently next time to put you in a position to be successful. So he's actually not afraid like, oh, my boss,

• 1:43:07Dave Berke?

  my boss thinks this was his mistake? So even inside this thing, this idea of, he said, you're tolerating your, your willingness to tolerate your subordinates mistakes. Well, anybody who listens to this podcast should know that that actually shouldn't be that hard at this point, because any mistake your subordinates make is actually whose, whose fault is that really? The machine gunners? I know we've used that example a thousand times. And if you want to breed the idea that making those mistakes is okay, there's a really easy formula to making that happen. And it'll just make them admit it more and actually come with better creative solutions to that. So they make them less overtime.

• 1:43:37Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And those are things, leadership strategy and tactics. I actually wrote down what to say and what not to say.

• 1:43:44Dave Berke?

  Yeah, there's a protocol.

• 1:43:45Jocko Willink?

  Instead of saying this, say that. And by the way, one of the reasons that leadership strategy and tactics that I, I went down that road is because, and I was saying this to a, a group the other day on EF Online. And it's one of these things where it's,

• 1:44:07Jocko Willink?

  here's the deal. I've been doing this for a long time. So when I tell someone, hey, what you need to do is take, you know, go in there and use a flanking maneuver and set them up with this and plant the idea in your head and they'll be good. Then I have to be careful with that because I'm good at it. Like I'm good. I did it when I was at E5 with my two commander. I did it when I was, you know, I did it through the chain. I did. I've done it a million times. So when some client says, hey, how do I handle this person that, you know, is is complaining, right? Or, or is objecting to the way we're doing things? How do I handle that? And I say, oh, you could do this. I have to say, and listen, you need to be tactful when you do it.

• 1:44:51Jocko Willink?

  You need to think about it from their perspective because sometimes people hear, oh, you need to go talk to him about it. Okay, got it. Boom. They're rolling into the office. Hey, I need to talk to you about X, Y, and Z. No, I didn't mean that.

• 1:45:04Jocko Willink?

  So that's why I like leadership strategy and tactics. Like here's how you actually say this. The machine gunner made a mistake. It's not, hey, Echo, you shot outside of your field of fire. It's, hey, Echo, I don't think I did a good job explaining what your field of fire was because you just got danger close to the other squad. That's my fault. You go.

• 1:45:26Jocko Willink?

  There you go. Boom.

• 1:45:29Jocko Willink?

  Next, a critical element of learning from mistakes is embracing an appropriate level of risk. Combat is inherently dangerous and risky. However, the greatest mistake in combat could be an unwillingness to act from a fear of risk or failure to adapt to the changing situation.

• 1:45:48Jocko Willink?

  So how do you get good at doing? How do you get good at figuring out what the appropriate level of risk is? It's by making mistakes. So if you don't make mistakes in training, when the time comes in combat and you're unwilling to even try anything, either out of fear or risk of failure or risk of getting yelled at or failure to adapt because you've never done it before. Like the time when you're a squad leader and you're like looking around and someone says, hey, man, just go for it. You go for it and you like things turn out, maybe they turn out okay, maybe they turn out bad. But either way, you go, okay, well, I kind of did it. And then you realize, you know what? Next time I do it, I need to do it a little bit faster, but I need to, I need to, you know, keep the squad more, more, more distance between each other.

• 1:46:29Jocko Willink?

  Okay, cool. You learned a little something. Now, next time you make an aggressive move, you got this little more dispersion in your squad and everyone stays alive and it's cool. Again, this is training. So that way, by the time you get in a point in combat where you need to take some initiative, you've done it before. You do not want anyone on your subordinate team to the first time they show, have to show any initiative, is in a combat situation, or is in a business meeting, or isn't a, with a client that's real. That's not the first time you want to see them take initiative.

• 1:47:00Jocko Willink?

  Have them take initiative in some controlled environments to kick it off.

• 1:47:07Jocko Willink?

  Continuing on.

• 1:47:10Jocko Willink?

  Therefore, Marines should only take reasonable risks during training and learn to adapt to the changing situation, which is what I just said. All Marines, regardless of position or rank, must discuss what led to mistakes, take corrective action, and learn from them. You got a debrief. Learning from mistakes is key to Marines, learning to act decisively and effectively while taking prudent risk, which is everything I just said. There's a little section in here, which I've been skipping some of these sections, but I'm going to hit this one. This is the Battle of Bella Wood. Captain John W. Thomason Jr., who earned the Navy Cross during his service with 1st Battalion, 5th Marines, wrote about the 4th Marine Brigade. And he says platoons were formed, and I'm skipping ahead a little bit, but he says,

• 1:47:55Jocko Willink?

  "Platoons were formed in four waves." And he goes into it talking about how they had maps, and how they had a plan, and how they were basically using what they had learned from the French. And so he says, "Platoons were formed in four waves, the attack formation taught by the French, a formation proved in trench warfare where there was a short way to go, and you calculated on losing the first three waves and getting the fourth one to the objective."

• 1:48:22Jocko Willink?

  That's what they got taught. Hey,

• 1:48:25Jocko Willink?

  you're going to take four waves of people, the first three, they're all going to die, and then the fourth one will get through. And then it's, then he says, "After the first engagement, the Marines never used it again." "It was a formation that simply accepted casualties, was not adapted for open warfare, and left formations rushing across open ground incredibly vulnerable. It did not take the Marines long to learn better and to adapt their tactics founded on sound basics learned during their training."

• 1:49:04Jocko Willink?

  There's uh, anything else on that?

• 1:49:06Dave Berke?

  I, I knew you were gonna, I knew that you were gonna talk about that, just because of how often you and I have talked about World War I. And you, you hit that over and over again of all the wars, like that's the one you look at and like, what? What was going on there? What was going on there from a leadership standpoint? And, and honestly, my favorite line is, "After the first engagement, the Marines never use it again." One time they looked around like, "We're not doing this anymore." And there, there's kind of a stunning piece on leadership of what, what was everybody else, and they'd been doing it for years when the Marines showed up. Uh, a- a- anyway, I, I, I just knew that given how much we've talked about it, that,

• 1:49:46Dave Berke?

  that comment there is actually a really important comment that they saw it once, and they recognized right away, "This is wrong and we need to adapt right now." You don't need to do this five, six, seven, eight, 10 times to realize this is a bad, bad plan.

• 1:49:58Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, the, the, um, when I had Dean Ladd on,

• 1:50:05Jocko Willink?

  Tarawa, right? And he, one, one of the things that he pointed out was when they were in, I think, New Zealand, so in between,

• 1:50:15Jocko Willink?

  in between islands storming in the Pacific, they were saying that, you know, one thing that they noticed about the Japanese was that the Japanese didn't adapt. They didn't change anything. They would do the same thing, like not only from a, not only from a tactical perspective of like, "Oh, we're gonna rush you, and if we don't get through today, we're gonna rush you tomorrow from the same position." But not only that, but then, and you could see some changes in the way they defended the islands, like sometimes they'd let the Marines come ashore, and then they'd kind of set them up, and sometimes they wouldn't let them come ashore. So they would make these small changes, but for the most part, it was like, "We knew what the Japanese were gonna do, and they weren't gonna change how they were doing things." And, you know, I was talking to Leif about it, and Leif's like, "Yeah, it's kind of hard to pass on lessons learned when everyone is dead."

• 1:51:01Jocko Willink?

  Which is what was going on with the Japanese, right? "Oh, you wanna defend this island? Cool. Well, you know what lessons are getting to the next island? None of them, cuz you're all dead." You know, we, the, the only people that survive are 14 Korean slaves. That's who survives. Everyone else dies. But the, the fact that in this situation, yeah, and, and that is absolutely, you know, World War I just sickens me.

• 1:51:26Dave Berke?

  Totally.

• 1:51:26Jocko Willink?

  And, you know, all war is awful, but that war and the leadership in that war, to just Roger that, yep, Roger that, Roger that, Roger that. All right. Section here, areas of responsibility. There are four functional areas of responsibility in the culture of learning as shown in the following figure, and there's the other little figure here and it's got some circles that, that the smallest circle is Marine, meaning the individual Marine. And then the instructor, and then the commander or leader, and then the Marine Corps as an entire institution. So it goes like this.

• 1:52:08Jocko Willink?

  First is, it is each individual's Marines responsibility to progress in his or own, his or her own self-education and build a bias for intelligent action. There's incumbent upon every single Marine is to learn everything that you can and build a bias for intelligent action. There, there's another little whip on that horse. I think they're making it perfectly clear to every Marine that what we want you to do is take action, doing something smart, go. It reminds me, I used to tell these, these, these young fire team leaders or these TU

• 1:52:50Jocko Willink?

  commanders, I'd like get them together and I'd be like, hey, TU commander, imagine if every one of your, you have eight fire teams. Imagine if each one of your fire teams was doing something smart in support of what you were trying to make happen. How hard would your job be? And you'd be like, not hard. And I'd be like, yeah, check. I'd be like, fire team leaders, do you hear that? This guy wants you to do stuff. He wants you to make something happen. Make something happen. Do us all a favor and make something happen. I'm tired of watching you guys sit around trying to form a perimeter, being directed by the task unit commander himself on how to form a perimeter. For the love of God, would you take up a security position?

• 1:53:30Jocko Willink?

  Second, within formal schools, instructors should be selected based upon their potential to become effective teachers, facilitators, mentors, and it goes into some of that. Third, leaders at all levels are responsible for setting the conditions within the unit for the subordinates, professional, military, learning and development. In the teams, those two are probably opposite, like, I don't know if it's opposite, but there's no doubt that in the SEAL teams, the leader of a platoon, like the leader in the platoon commander, the platoon chief, or the task unit commander, and the task unit senior enlisted advisor, they are way more responsible than some instructor that you had anywhere along the way. I don't know if you could make that statement about the Marine Corps?

• 1:54:15Dave Berke?

  I think there's that hierarchical component that I think just sits inside it. And I think a lot of ways, it's sort of this connection of, that's something that's very easily digestible for the lowest level of Marine to recognize where they fit in the big picture. But the bigger thing that's happening there is that that sort of comes full circle. When the Marine Corps as an institution has this obligation to facilitate that, that goes back and affects the individual Marine. And that your individual role actually plays, we talk about this all the time, you can play an outsized influence on the entire organization if you were doing something that's making you better, which is making your team better. And then each role in leadership has an obligation to facilitate that, and then it comes right back to the individual.

• 1:54:55Jocko Willink?

  Whenever I talk about training with a company, I'm always, maybe you can help me with my own quote, but it's something along the lines of, training is the solemn duty of the leaders inside of a unit.

• 1:55:06Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:07Jocko Willink?

  It's not the responsibility of the trainer, it's not the responsibility of the instructor, it's not the responsibility of the schoolhouse. If you work for me, I'm responsible for making sure you're trained. And I can use those assets however I see fit, but I'm responsible for it.

• 1:55:17Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:21Jocko Willink?

  And then finally, the Marine Corps as an institution demonstrates a focus and commitment to encouraging career-long learning by continuously refining learning methods and providing resources and opportunities for professional development.

• 1:55:35Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:36Jocko Willink?

  That's the way the Marine Corps rolls. Professional expectations, next section. Marines are expected to have initiative, self-discipline, and motivation to actively engage in learning opportunities on their own. Wouldn't that be nice if that was a universal truth about humans? Right? If we just said, "Humans are expected to have initiative, self-discipline, and motivation to actively engage in learning opportunities on their own." Marines must take ownership of personal learning by creating specific professional goals. Again, the evaluation that we wrote.

• 1:56:21Jocko Willink?

  "After assessing progress, Marines may adjust their goals so that they remain challenging. Conversely, if a Marine struggles to attain a goal by the date established, the goal may need to be adjusted to include additional interim steps, feedback, or a modified timeline." Establishing clear, short, mid, and long-term goals enables the Marines to plan a clear path forward toward professional development. And again, this is sort of the reason why we put together the code and the evaluation and the protocols for everything that just got just written right there.

• 1:56:56Dave Berke?

  Yeah, that paragraph to me was huge. I highlighted the whole thing. I wrote the word "dude" and underlined it. I'm like, "Dude, this is ridiculous." And then I wrote down, "This is why we did that ranking scale on the 'I'm a qualified human being.' If you're doing this thing and it's easy, guess what? You need to ramp it up because this is no longer your baseline. This is too easy for you, so you need to make that more challenging. And if not, you got to go back. But you need initiative, self-discipline, motivation, and ownership."

• 1:57:23Jocko Willink?

  These are all, I'm in concurrence with all these items.

• 1:57:30Dave Berke?

  I'm telling you, I know, I don't know these guys, but I know who these guys are that wrote this book. I know who these guys are.

• 1:57:36Jocko Willink?

  Uh...

• 1:57:41Jocko Willink?

  Skipping ahead a little bit, "Learning is also a process of professional growth. Marines demonstrate motivation and professionalism by cultivating a growth mindset. Individuals with a growth mindset believe that effort and learning can change one's qualities, leading to development and success."

• 1:58:01Jocko Willink?

  Marines with a growth mindset understand that they have control over their individual learning, and that the additional effort pays off in developing the knowledge and skills to improve. Conversely, individuals with a fixed mindset believe that their qualities are innate, and are interested in feedback only to confirm their abilities, avoiding feedback that indicates any perceived weaknesses.

• 1:58:29Jocko Willink?

  Avoiding feedback and having a fixed mindset leads to stagnation.

• 1:58:43Jocko Willink?

  And they wrap this chapter up. I mean, we could talk about intrinsic motivation is driven by perceived internal rewards. That is, one is driven to engage in a behavior because it is satisfying. Leaders can cultivate this type of motivation within Marines by supporting the growth mindset, and individual Marines can sustain it throughout their careers. In this way, the Marine Corps culture of learning encourages commanders, leaders, instructors, teams, and individuals to all support intrinsic motivation for learning and self-improvement.

• 1:59:17Jocko Willink?

  And the conclusion, they say, "The Marine Corps culture supports continuous career-long learning."

• 1:59:25Jocko Willink?

  All Marines can facilitate learning. As Marines develop in their careers, the responsibility to facilitate learning also increases. Marine Corps culture embraces learning as fundamental to Marine readiness, to be the first to fight. Learning is essential to any profession, but it is particularly important to the Marines' profession of arms, where the cost of not learning, the cost of not learning are so steep.

• 1:59:53Jocko Willink?

  So that's chapter two. We're two hours deep right now. And in order to not make a five hour podcast, we will save the next for the next podcast.

• 2:00:09Jocko Willink?

  So I guess echo Charles. Since we are, you know, going to try to continue to learn, continue to make continuous improvement.

• 2:00:23Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:00:26Jocko Willink?

  I don't know if there's any way that, anything that you recommend we learn, perhaps?

• 2:00:31Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 2:00:31Jocko Willink?

  That could move us in the right direction.

• 2:00:35Speaker 01

  I recommend that we learn jujitsu. One of the many recommendations. I recommend we stay on the path. This is a real general way of putting it. So we're going to learn jujitsu. We're going to stay in shape. If not get in shape. We're going to stay functional and healthy. Functional, maybe that's a played out, not played out, but that's maybe an overused word. We're going to say capable. How about that? Dave Berke, good?

• 2:00:59Jocko Willink?

  I'm good with functional.

• 2:01:00Speaker 01

  Functional. I like capable.

• 2:01:02Jocko Willink?

  I like capable.

• 2:01:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:01:03Jocko Willink?

  If you like capable, why did you say functional and then like deride it? And then now you're calling it capable?

• 2:01:09Speaker 01

  I'm putting a what do you call a fine point on it, like sharpening it like functional is like, sure. Yes, functional. But let me get more specific capable.

• 2:01:19Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 2:01:19Speaker 01

  Even though that's pretty general.

• 2:01:22Speaker 01

  But to do these things, we're going to need, we're going to want certain tools. Okay. So for jujitsu, we need a gi rash guard. Boom. Where do we get the gi? I think we all know, all know best gi in the world. Factually, Origin. Origin main.com is where you can look at all this stuff now.

• 2:01:40Speaker 01

  Can we get gees at origin right this moment on? In April 2020.

• 2:01:47Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:47Speaker 01

  Can we?

• 2:01:48Jocko Willink?

  There are some geez still a bit, but look, we've done a little. We've had to make some adjustments to what we're doing in Maine because America needed certain items to get through the COVID-19 pandemic. So we had to adjust, make some adjustments and start making face coverings, which we are doing at a rapid pace, probably between five and 7,000 a day. The demand signal is very high. And so we are trying to get America what they need on those. And look, they're not N95 masks, but which we don't have the capability of making, which is why we weren't making any masks. But when the government and the CDC recommended face coverings for everyone, we started making face covering. So that's what we're doing right now.

• 2:02:35Jocko Willink?

  As soon as we push through this and as soon really as other manufacturers pick up the slack.

• 2:02:42Jocko Willink?

  Because we were able to move very quickly because we have the entire, you know, supply chain right there. We have the skills and capability.

• 2:02:49Speaker 01

  Capability all day.

• 2:02:51Jocko Willink?

  You know, we got crafts people up there that can go, oh, you want me to sew that? Cool. We can make that happen. Pete can design it. Okay, done. Pattern makers can make the patterns. Like we can get it done. And, and that, that went, the original death masks was Friday we're talking about. Monday they're getting produced. There's not.

• 2:03:13Jocko Willink?

  I don't think there's any businesses in the world that could do what Origin just did right there.

• 2:03:17Speaker 01

  Very rare.

• 2:03:18Jocko Willink?

  On, on, I'm gonna say that again, on Friday, we're making rash guards. On Monday morning, full production of face coverings.

• 2:03:28Jocko Willink?

  So, hey, look, but as soon as, just as we pivoted quickly into that, as soon as the, as soon as some other manufacturers get caught up and people, and the, and the demand gets met, we'll be right back to doing what we, doing what we do, which is make stuff, make apparel. So jujitsu apparel, rash guards, gees, jeans, t-shirts, boots. We'll be right back on all that stuff. So, you know, just be on standby.

• 2:03:55Speaker 01

  Standby. Yeah. Good stuff for there. Again, originmaine.com. Also at Origin.

• 2:04:02Dave Berke?

  Jaco fuel. So this will keep us capable, keep us in the game. Look after our joints when we're lifting. It's a big deal. That's what I'm saying. So joint warfare, super krill oil. Some antioxidants in there, by the way. Also milk, additional protein, protein supplementation.

• 2:04:20Jocko Willink?

  Are you still on the strawberry milk chain?

• 2:04:23Dave Berke?

  Yes.

• 2:04:23Jocko Willink?

  Really?

• 2:04:26Dave Berke?

  Yes.

• 2:04:26Jocko Willink?

  How much, how much milk do you, do you have one a day?

• 2:04:28Dave Berke?

  One a day.

• 2:04:30Jocko Willink?

  Sometimes two?

• 2:04:32Dave Berke?

  On, on some rare occasion, I will have a-

• 2:04:34Jocko Willink?

  How many scoops per, per?

• 2:04:36Dave Berke?

  Dude, I'm a, I'm a one scoop, milk, shake it in the bottle guy. I don't do any other weird stuff or things, but there are times, and I'm not going to lie to you, I've got a little extra time with my wife, maybe watching TV a little bit on like a Saturday night more than I have in the past because of what's going on. And I need a little, you know what? I need straight up need dessert. And I will just go back to the milk train for that. So that's my dessert, Saturday nights. I've had maybe a little extra these days, but during the day dude, SOP for me is like, I will do milk.

• 2:05:09Jocko Willink?

  And what discipline in the can is your preferred flavor?

• 2:05:13Dave Berke?

  Discipline in the can, Dax Savage, without question. Now, the other two are fine, but given the choice, and I, I'm lucky enough to be one of those people that I, I have a choice. I have options. Dakota Meyer crushed it. Dax Savage is my thing.

• 2:05:26Jocko Willink?

  Interesting. How, how, how often do you drink one of those?

• 2:05:29Dave Berke?

  One a day.

• 2:05:30Jocko Willink?

  What time?

• 2:05:33Dave Berke?

  Usually just a little bit after lunch. So another thing is I'm sitting at my desk longer during the day than I ever really have because usually several days a week, I'm traveling, I'm in a hotel, I'm with a client, I'm on a plane. And now I'm like up in the morning, work out, get ready, and I sit down at my desk and sometimes I'm, I'm sitting, literally sitting at my desk, sometimes like six, seven, eight hours straight, which I have, I typically don't do.

• 2:05:55Jocko Willink?

  Not, not, not normal.

• 2:05:56Dave Berke?

  Not normal. Nope. But we're on, we're on webinars, we're on podcasts, we're, we're in the game and I'm at my computer, at that chair and- These I say ready to deploy, ready to drink cans. There's a Dax Savage. I get up, lunch, come upstairs. I don't usually eat a lunch. I don't really have like a meal for lunch. I will have a Dax Savage shortly after lunchtime.

• 2:06:17Jocko Willink?

  What do you feel when you crap, when you, once you've digested it, what do you feel?

• 2:06:23Dave Berke?

  I feel good. What it really does for me is if I don't take it, I catch myself like not, I catch myself mid, early afternoon, want not, wanting to not do what I'm doing. Now I have a little breather, I take a little, I'm gonna push away and I'm like, no, I'm not, I do not have time to do that. I take that, it's kind of almost like science at this point. I take that little hitter and I'm in the game and I can push through whatever that normally would be the, hey, why don't you step away and kind of get some fresh air? Like, yeah, I'd love to. I would love to go do that. Throw the football with my kids and I try to do that sometimes. But right now, dude, April 20th, 2020, dude, we are grinding. Like, we are grinding at our desks. That's what we're doing. This is the key.

• 2:07:03Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I notice I, I will, so I'll get up, I'll have, I'll work out, I'll lift, I'll have a handful of macadamia nuts or something. So now it's, you know, you know, eight o'clock, nine o'clock in the morning is when I start feeling a little hunger. And, you know, now when I'm sitting through my morning calls, whatever, talking to clients, I'm, I'm on the, I'm on the, um, just discipline powder, right? Jaco Palmer. I'm just, I'm just kind of sipping, that's just kind of going through, it's just kind of getting on step. And then, like, same thing around lunchtime. And usually, you know, whatever, I'll have a little gap and I'm like, okay, I got,

• 2:07:44Jocko Willink?

  I got an hour here, I got two hours here. And I'll go, I'm gonna write, you know, I'm writing a book right now. So I'll be like, cool. But, but probably as I know, I see that window approaching, same thing, I'll be like, well, maybe it'd be a good time to check social media. Or maybe it'd be a good time to just turn my brain off. And you can feel that gravitational pull, right? So I go, oh, you know what? Crack it open 20 minutes, whatever 30 minutes prior, drink it. And what's cool is I, it just happens and I get down and start hammering and then a little while I'm like, oh, what just happened? Cause you get that little, little hitter.

• 2:08:25Jocko Willink?

  Uh, so we got that, uh, by the way, that's disciplined go in a can, disciplined go or disciplined powder form. That was the original.

• 2:08:34Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:35Jocko Willink?

  And the Jaco Palmer.

• 2:08:37Dave Berke?

  Dude, I went away from powder when the cans came out and when Jaco Palmer came out, I went back to the powder.

• 2:08:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, I stayed with the powder for a long time. Still going powder all day, every day.

• 2:08:50Jocko Willink?

  All day, every day.

• 2:08:51Speaker 01

  Maybe not all day, but that's, that's more of an expression.

• 2:08:54Jocko Willink?

  I stopped, I, I won't have, um, any discipline go in the can. After two o'clock in the afternoon, three o'clock in the afternoon, cause then I'll just be, I'll be, I'll be, I won't be able to sleep. You know, so a little cautious about that.

• 2:09:11Speaker 01

  Very true. Also Warrior Kid Molk as well. Supplemental dessert like protein. That's for the younger ones.

• 2:09:18Jocko Willink?

  A lot of kids at home all day right now.

• 2:09:19Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:09:20Jocko Willink?

  They want a little bit of that, they want something that tastes good.

• 2:09:23Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:09:23Jocko Willink?

  Get them some of that Warrior Kid Molk. They think you're hooking them up.

• 2:09:27Speaker 01

  You are in a way.

• 2:09:29Jocko Willink?

  And you are in many ways. From a taste perspective, you can get this stuff at Vitamin Shoppe too. Some of the Vitamin Shops, if they're open, they got the full lineup.

• 2:09:41Dave Berke?

  Cold War Man. I talked about it last time. I'm on the Cold War.

• 2:09:45Jocko Willink?

  You're on the Cold War train.

• 2:09:46Dave Berke?

  I'm on the Cold War tank. Is that what?

• 2:09:49Jocko Willink?

  How about you're in the tank, in the Cold War tank? You got armor.

• 2:09:54Speaker 01

  The tank of.

• 2:09:54Jocko Willink?

  Immune armor system.

• 2:09:56Dave Berke?

  That, that Cold War is in my repertoire. That's wake up in the morning.

• 2:10:01Jocko Willink?

  How many you take in the morning? I take two in the morning, two at night. What are you doing?

• 2:10:04Dave Berke?

  I take two in the morning and that's all I take. I wonder if I need to take some more.

• 2:10:08Jocko Willink?

  I don't know. You're looking kinda like.

• 2:10:09Dave Berke?

  I don't know. I feel pretty good.

• 2:10:11Jocko Willink?

  Kind of exposed.

• 2:10:14Dave Berke?

  Cold War's, Cold War's in the game right now.

• 2:10:16Jocko Willink?

  Check.

• 2:10:17Speaker 01

  Yes. So all these things, origin, main.com. Also Jaco IT on there. That's some good stuff. Certified organic too.

• 2:10:25Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it is indeed.

• 2:10:28Speaker 01

  For the organic folks.

• 2:10:30Jocko Willink?

  That's the refreshing.

• 2:10:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, big day.

• 2:10:33Jocko Willink?

  Just refreshing.

• 2:10:34Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Also, Jaco has a store. It's called Jaco Store. So you go to JacoStore.com and this is where we can get our representative apparel. When we're representing on the path while we're learning, is what I'm saying. While we're improving ourselves.

• 2:10:52Jocko Willink?

  Learning.

• 2:10:53Speaker 01

  In quarantine or not, see, we have a new shirt. It's not that new, but we have a shirt. If you want to represent while on the path in quarantine, represent the quarantine scenario. It's what we've been doing. Varying levels of approval from Jaco on this one. It's a controversial shirt is what it is.

• 2:11:14Jocko Willink?

  Sometimes decentralized command, you know, sometimes it goes too far. People start doing things below the chain of command. They're not running their approval.

• 2:11:21Speaker 01

  Above the chain.

• 2:11:22Jocko Willink?

  And things are just happening.

• 2:11:25Jocko Willink?

  Unapproved things are happening.

• 2:11:26Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. So I'm below the chain.

• 2:11:28Jocko Willink?

  Yes.

• 2:11:28Speaker 01

  You're up the chain.

• 2:11:29Jocko Willink?

  Yes.

• 2:11:29Speaker 01

  I run it up.

• 2:11:30Jocko Willink?

  Yes.

• 2:11:31Speaker 01

  And...

• 2:11:31Jocko Willink?

  What happens? You want to tell the story. We can tell the story or we can just move on.

• 2:11:35Dave Berke?

  Yeah, I don't think what you described is exactly what happened. This was a flat out denial. This is like a rejection of a plan. I'm like, we're doing it anyway.

• 2:11:42Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was thinking maybe I wasn't clear enough. Apparently.

• 2:11:47Speaker 01

  No, no.

• 2:11:47Jocko Willink?

  I mean, I reread the text. I'm like, no, it doesn't get any more clear than that.

• 2:11:52Speaker 01

  Well, in this case, the people are, the people essentially, what do you call that? When you kind of, when you, when you, you don't overthrow them, but you see what I'm saying? You know, one like the one government official is like, brrr. And then the people are like, well, you know, I don't know if we accept that, if we like it, you know? So the people.

• 2:12:11Jocko Willink?

  So there's a rebellion, a mutiny run by Echo Charles.

• 2:12:14Speaker 01

  We moved forward and took smart action, as it were. Anyway, go to JacoStore.com, look for the quarantine shirt. If you like it, go ahead, get it, represent, represent while you're doing our social distancing, stopping this whole thing. See what I'm saying? Because really, that's what it is. You understand, also discipline equals freedom on there as well, t-shirt.

• 2:12:34Jocko Willink?

  Discipline equals freedom, flags in the little box.

• 2:12:38Speaker 01

  Yes. Oh yeah.

• 2:12:40Jocko Willink?

  Warrior kid, flags in the box, warrior kid deck of cards with the little workouts they can do while they're in quarantine or not.

• 2:12:50Speaker 01

  We call that PE, homeschool PE.

• 2:12:52Jocko Willink?

  Yes, physical education.

• 2:12:53Speaker 01

  It's a game too, by the way, so it's like way more fun than doing shuttle runs all day. Anyway, some hoodies on there, some hats, some good stuff. Anyway, go on there if you like something, get something. Jaco store.com also.

• 2:13:10Speaker 01

  Subscribe to this podcast if you haven't already. Very important, kinda important. How about this, if you want to subscribe, subscribe. If you don't want to subscribe, don't subscribe.

• 2:13:20Jocko Willink?

  Here's what's more important than that. We got some other podcasts. One podcast is called The Thread. It is about history and the world and how everything ties together in the world. That's with Daryl Cooper of Mardi Gras. We got the Grounded Podcast, which is about jujitsu. We got Warrior Kid Podcast, which is for your warrior kids. We also have Warrior Kid Soap.

• 2:13:43Jocko Willink?

  At Irish Oaks Ranch dot com, Young Aiden.

• 2:13:49Jocko Willink?

  Building an empire.

• 2:13:50Speaker 01

  Doing good work, very good work.

• 2:13:52Jocko Willink?

  Making soap so that people can

• 2:13:57Jocko Willink?

  stay clean.

• 2:13:59Speaker 01

  It's true. Also YouTube.

• 2:14:01Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:02Speaker 01

  We do have a YouTube channel.

• 2:14:03Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, we do, which Echo is quite proud of.

• 2:14:05Speaker 01

  It's a good channel.

• 2:14:06Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, he thinks it's good.

• 2:14:07Speaker 01

  As far as channels go.

• 2:14:09Jocko Willink?

  He makes videos where things explode.

• 2:14:11Speaker 01

  We make videos.

• 2:14:12Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, he makes videos where things explode. Sometimes way too many things explode.

• 2:14:17Speaker 01

  Sometimes too little.

• 2:14:18Jocko Willink?

  Sometimes a message could be perfectly clear, but it just seems to be, need to be accented with explosions and fires.

• 2:14:26Speaker 01

  Sometimes, yeah.

• 2:14:27Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, so YouTube channel. Also, you can watch this whole podcast on there.

• 2:14:33Jocko Willink?

  And enhanced videos. We also have Psychological Warfare, which is

• 2:14:41Jocko Willink?

  Little psychological hitter, if you need it to go into your ears. We have flip side canvas, which is visual hitters for your eyes. Flipsidecanvas.com. We also have some books. We got a book called The Code, The Evaluation and the Protocols. That book is available right now. It was on the last podcast, something to guide you through life. We have leadership strategy and tactics. We have Way of the Warrior Kid, one, two, and three. We have Mikey and the Dragons. We have Discipline Equals Freedom Field Manual. We have Extreme Ownership, and we have the dichotomy of leadership. Check out any and all of those books. They're all linked, by the way. They're linked on JacoPodcast.com.

• 2:15:25Jocko Willink?

  So you can get them delivered. We have Echelon Front Leadership Consultancy, which is what Dave talked about earlier. You want to know what we're doing all day right now? That's what we're doing. We are talking to our clients. 20, 30, 40 people in a meeting, four people in a meeting, one person in a meeting, face to face. Is it legal, Dave Berke, to say, I was on a Zoom meeting with a client face to face?

• 2:15:54Dave Berke?

  Yes.

• 2:15:54Jocko Willink?

  Cause it's almost more face to face than when you're face to face.

• 2:15:59Dave Berke?

  You're actually closer than normally would be where they'd be 30 feet away, sitting in some sort of classroom type scenario.

• 2:16:06Jocko Willink?

  Right.

• 2:16:07Dave Berke?

  You were face to face and you were live.

• 2:16:09Jocko Willink?

  So we have adjusted our methodology at Echelon Front where we no longer, well, we will eventually go back and work face to face, literally. But right now, we are finding that the impact of this online virtual training is awesome. It allows us to have more interactions, closer interactions, more continuous interactions with the clients. So if you need help in your business, aligning your leadership, go to echelonfront.com for details. We also have EF Online. Speaking of revamping, look, for a long time EF Online was a static.

• 2:16:50Jocko Willink?

  But as static courses that you could go on there and take and they were static. They were, they were interactive and you would run through scenarios, but it was pre-existing classes. So we've blown this thing wide open. We got live video webinars. We got Q and As going on. We got, we got immediate action drills on there. I got leadership primers. Just totally revamped that. We also changed the whole pricing structure. It used to be like you're going to pay to take a class, almost like you were going to college for a semester and you're going to learn these things. Now it's like, oh, way cheaper subscription model, or you can pay at once, but it's like boom, come in and you're part of the gang and you're interacting with me. You're interacting with Dave. You're interacting with JP, Leif,

• 2:17:33Jocko Willink?

  Mike Schrulli, the whole crew. That's what we're doing. We're on there. So Jason Gardner, you've heard Jason Gardner on the podcast? You want to talk to him? Cool. Go to EF Online. You'll talk to him. You will talk to him. As, as, as Dave just said, you'll be five inches away from his face. So that's what we're doing there. EFonline.com. Check that out. We've got the musters. The, the Orlando muster was canceled. Phoenix, this is our leadership seminar, leadership event. Orlando is canceled. We got Phoenix in September 16th and 17th. We got Dallas, December 3rd and 4th. Check extremeownership.com. Everything that we've done is sold out. We were going to do three. Now we're only doing two. So

• 2:18:17Jocko Willink?

  they're going to sell out even quicker. A bunch of people are already going and moved their, their reservations. So if you want to come, extremeownership.com for that. And then there's EF Overwatch, where we take executive leadership from the military and place them into the civilian sector. And then EFLegion.com. These are frontline leaders that are being placed into civilian companies. If you're, and let me tell you, if you're a vet right now, there's a lot of companies that are out there hiring. Go to EFLegion.com and just enter yourself in there. So you get looked at. So people can see that you're available for employment. We got a high demand signal from our companies that we work with

• 2:18:59Jocko Willink?

  that are reaching out, looking for squared away veterans that understand the principles we talk about. So go to EFLegion.com and enroll yourself. And if you haven't had enough of my tyrannical utterances.

• 2:19:16Jocko Willink?

  Or Echo's delirious theories, or Dave's over-articulated speeches.

• 2:19:23Jocko Willink?

  Then you can locate us on the interwebs, on Twitter, on Instagram, and on Dine Freezy Bon.

• 2:19:32Jocko Willink?

  Dave is at David R Burke, Echo is at Echo Charles, and I am at Jocko Willink. And to all you out there in uniforms, serving now, or if you've ever served in the Army, Navy, Air Force, or of course, the Marine Corps. And we salute you and your service and sacrifice for freedom and to the police, law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, Border Patrol, and Secret Service. All you first responders, thank you for your service here at home, taking care of us, and to the doctors, nurses, and medical personnel that are in the fight right now, battling against disease and despair.

• 2:20:13Jocko Willink?

  Thank you for your brave hearts and your benevolent hearts.

• 2:20:21Jocko Willink?

  And to everyone else out there, just remember what the Marine Corps teaches us, that combat is a combination of fear, uncertainty, ambiguity, chance, horror, and friction, and life is much the same.

• 2:20:39Jocko Willink?

  Continuous learning is essential because it allows you to recognize change, adapt to it, and make decisions that lead to victory. And failing to learn simply means failing.

• 2:20:56Jocko Willink?

  To win, you have to learn. So read, study, get experience, listen, and live with a bias toward action.

• 2:21:08Jocko Willink?

  And a mind that is desperate to learn.

• 2:21:13Jocko Willink?

  And then, well, go out there and get after it. Until next time, this is Dave and Echo and Jaco. Out.