Jocko Underground: You Are The Average Of The People You Hang Around With - Jocko's Take | Are Some Dreams Just Impossible for "Quitters"?

You are the average of the people you hang around with. Shooting for your dreams if you have a reputation of being a quitter. Meditation. Getting a family member out of a depression. Shunned by my religious family for leaving the religion. Building team cohesion. 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.

• 0:01Jocko Willink?

  This is Jocko Underground Podcast, number 67, Echo Charles sitting across from me. So, the expression. What do they say about these expressions? The expression is, "You are the average of the five people you hang around with the most." You know that expression? Yeah. Something along those lines. There's a couple of different versions of it floating around. But, it's common. And the reason it's common is because there's some level of truth to it. I think we can agree on that. And, as I'm thinking through that. I think, I agree, there is truth to it. And you can tell.

• 0:40Jocko Willink?

  You know, what you see, remember in high school and you'd see a kid start to hang around with a new group? That he wasn't involved with before, and he starts to act like that group. Did your school have like the jocks? Yeah. The, the, whatever, burnouts, right? Yeah. You probably had surfers. Yeah. So, you, so you got these groups, and you could see a kid that was not in that group, goes in that group, and starts to become like that group. So, we've all seen that. So, there's, there is a level of truth to this statement. But, it doesn't stop there, because it's not just who we're hanging around with, but what are we allowing into our heads? Yeah.

• 1:23Jocko Willink?

  What are we allowing to get in there? Because, at a minimum. We're highly influenced. I know that's a little bit of a weird way of saying it. At a minimum, we're highly influenced. But, at a minimum. We're definitely influenced by what we allow into our heads. What kind of music we're listening to, what kind of movies we're watching, what kind of social media, which is bizarre, because you can, you can pull social media into your head all the time. And these things have a real impact on you. Music, for instance. Now, we know I'm a big music fan. I'm a big music listener. Music can reduce anxiety. Music can reduce blood pressure. These are physiological things that can happen from music.

• 2:06Jocko Willink?

  Music can reduce pain. These are physiological things that can happen. Music can improve sleep quality. Music can improve mood. Music can improve mental alertness. Music can improve memory. These are not, I'm not just saying, "Oh, I think it does." No, it does.

• 2:26Jocko Willink?

  There's also research that some music can increase aggressive thoughts. So if you listen to the kind of music I listen to. That makes sense. Maybe, maybe it can. There's, there's evidence that music encourages, certain types of music encourage crime. Right? So there's good and bad going on, kinda like fire, right? Fire can heat your house, it can burn your house to the ground. But it's something that we need to pay attention to. So, so we have to be selective

• 3:02Jocko Willink?

  as to what we allow to get in our head. And we have to be selective as to who we're gonna hang around with. And we have to be selective as to what we listen to. We have to be selective as to what we read. We have to be selective as to what we're going to allow into our heads.

• 3:19Jocko Willink?

  You gotta get rid of the junk at some point. And listen, you know, you have this argument, you can listen to, I listen to music with crazy lyrics, right? Crazy lyrics that never impacted me to do anything crazy, you know? Whether it's, uh, lyrics about, you know, antisocial lyrics, anti-government lyrics, whatever criminal, whatever it is. There's lyrics and I go, oh, I love that song. I wasn't like, hey, I'm gonna follow the political beliefs in this song, right?

• 3:54Jocko Willink?

  So, I'm not saying you gotta just not listen to anything, right? Or you gotta only listen to the stuff with a positive, but you gotta pay attention to it.

• 4:06Jocko Willink?

  The, you gotta increase the volume of constructive, pragmatic input to your brain. And you gotta limit the volume of negative, harmful, adverse things that you lie on your brain. Now, I also think this, I think if you're paying attention to it, it's not gonna have that much of an impact. So if you're listening to some mu- music that has real negative message to the lyrics, but you know that, I think you're gonna be okay. If you don't know that, or you're not paying attention to it, that's when it can catch you off guard. Same thing with social media. If you're watching social media or looking at social media with a, with a questioning eye,

• 4:44Jocko Willink?

  that's gonna be a lot better than if you're looking at it with not, an unquestioning eye.

• 4:51Jocko Willink?

  And what's really scary right now, obviously, is that algorithm. The way that thing works. It's looking to give you the short-term gratification. It's looking to put you into that echo chamber. It's. It's what we need to pay attention to. So let's take the expression of you're the average of the five people you hang around with the most, which I think we can all anecdotally prove. Just from people you've known and you've watched them change. And if we pay attention to that and we see how it works, then we see that everything we let in our brain, if you're not paying attention to it, can move you. So watch out. Watch out.

• 5:36Speaker 01

  You listen to Ozzy Osbourne, yeah?

• 5:38Jocko Willink?

  Totally.

• 5:38Speaker 01

  So did you ever? There was like this conspiracy theory.

• 5:43Jocko Willink?

  Hold on, just to make this clear. The band Black Sabbath that Ozzy Osbourne was the lead singer of is my favorite band of all time. And I've seen them in concert. I've listened to all of their albums, especially the years with Ozzy. And I still listen to him when they had Dio. But yes, I am completely and utterly engrossed in Black Sabbath. And I have been since a young child. And yes, I remember, I think so, I think we were going with Ozzy Osbourne got sued in the eighties. He had a song called Suicide Solution. And I don't have the, I don't remember the details, but he ended up going to court.

• 6:28Jocko Willink?

  But the weird thing about the song, the song wasn't saying suicide was a solution. It was actually not about that at all. You know, the, the, one of the lyrics, the famous lyrics is, wine is fine, but whiskey's quicker. Suicide is slow with liquor. Right? So you're saying if you're drinking, you're killing himself. And look, this is coming from a guy that had drug problems and alcohol problems. So he was saying, I'm killing myself, not I should kill myself.

• 6:56Jocko Willink?

  So what you what were you gonna say before I interrupted you there?

• 6:58Speaker 01

  There was a conspiracy theory, um, and it might have just came out of this, that scenario, which I didn't know, did not know, um, that if you played, I forget, I don't know what song, if you play it backwards.

• 7:11Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's called backmasking.

• 7:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. Oh, that's what.

• 7:13Jocko Willink?

  There's all kinds, yeah, and it's not just Ozzy, there's all kinds, and the Beatles actually had that. So let me rephrase that. I'm pretty sure, because I used to play the Beatles records backwards, looking for this stuff.

• 7:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:25Jocko Willink?

  There's one that said Paul is dead, uh, stuff like that, that they backmask into the lyrics. Yep.

• 7:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, they were like, oh yeah, you play Ozzy backwards, uh, and it's like devil worship and then you end up killing yourself or something like that.

• 7:38Jocko Willink?

  I don't think, that was a rumor at, at, you know, your high school or whatever.

• 7:42Speaker 01

  It was, straight up.

• 7:43Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, but, but there, there are, but the Beatles definitely bask backmask, I'm saying definitely, I hate saying definitely, but I'm pretty sure that when I was a kid, we played, we played Beatles backwards. And you just put it on the record and you use your finger to pull, to, to rotate it backwards.

• 8:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:02Jocko Willink?

  And it would be like Paul is dead, you know, something like that, which is just random stuff to put in there. But it's called backmasking, and yes, it's a thing.

• 8:10Speaker 01

  When you play it backwards, that's.

• 8:11Jocko Willink?

  When you, when you put it in there, oh, you put some backmasking messages in there.

• 8:17Speaker 01

  Oh, when you record it or whatever. Oh, okay, damn, yeah, I didn't know that. There, there is a movie called The Gate. You ever watched that movie? But wait, but it's back in those days, by the way. Where that was one of the, like, part of the premise of the movie, like, if you played this one thing backwards, it opened the gate to hell. It's actually a pretty fun movie. Unless, um, that, so is this true about Ozzy Osbourne? Where at one of his concerts, he bit the head off of a?

• 8:40Jocko Willink?

  Yes.

• 8:40Speaker 01

  Bat, was it?

• 8:41Jocko Willink?

  Yes.

• 8:42Speaker 01

  So that's true?

• 8:42Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 8:43Speaker 01

  Oh, he was psycho then.

• 8:43Jocko Willink?

  And what it was, I, there's, there's a couple of different versions of it. And again, I apologize, my memory's, you know, filled with half of the rumors and half of the lies and half of the truth, whatever. That's three halves, I don't know how it's gonna turn out.

• 8:57Speaker 01

  Three halves.

• 8:57Jocko Willink?

  But yeah, because I heard him tell the story of, he would, they had like rubber bats or something. And he would bite the head off all along, like a big stage show, but then at some point someone threw him a real one and, and he also. In a record label meeting, bit the head off of a dove or something. I think I remember hearing that story as well. But that's a wild guy, man. That's wild times. Man, so Black Sabbath, Ozzy back in the day.

• 9:29Speaker 01

  Do you still listen to it? Ozzy has a song called Ordinary Man.

• 9:33Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 9:34Speaker 01

  It's pretty new, pretty new. When the last few is pretty solid.

• 9:38Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah. They're great. I mean, I think that Black Sabbath is the greatest rock and roll band of all time.

• 9:45Speaker 01

  What's the best song?

• 9:48Speaker 01

  Crazy Train?

• 9:48Jocko Willink?

  No, that's not even Black Sabbath. That's Ozzy. Uh, just the entire first like five albums.

• 9:55Speaker 01

  Oh damn.

• 9:56Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And there's very few bands that have made album after album after album that were all good, that were all awesome. It's like you got Black Sabbath,

• 10:08Jocko Willink?

  Led Zeppelin, ACDC, Metallica, like they made, cause a lot of bands make a good album.

• 10:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:18Jocko Willink?

  And then that's what they got, you know, and the other ones are okay. Sometimes the other ones aren't that good. But to come out with that many really great albums is difficult to do and not many bands have pulled that off.

• 10:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. Freaking Ozzy.

• 10:31Speaker 01

  The who you hang with or whatever and that totally makes sense where even like, you know, like you, I'll catch you talking pigeon every once in a while.

• 10:39Jocko Willink?

  Sometimes.

• 10:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. And that's just so, but it's like not even if it's, I mean, they say it's like the five.

• 10:49Speaker 01

  But even if you hang with one guy, you can, you'll probably like, if you just do a small little inventory, like you'll see like all the little things that you do like them now. Kind of a thing and vice versa. So, man, that makes total sense. A lot of people like to say the, um, you know, the cool catch phrases like, oh, show me your network and I'll show you your net worth or like that kind of stuff. Which, you know, I think I actually agree with you. I think there's some, a lot of truth to it a lot of the time, but it's, it's, you know, it depends. A lot of, a lot of the time, especially the net worth part. But yeah, that's true. So be careful, right? What you put in your head.

• 11:22Jocko Willink?

  One time I was hanging around with a guy that I knew was friends with, part of my network. But I was still in the Navy and he was rolling in like a brand new Mercedes S-Class AMG like like a $250,000 car, maybe $200,000 car.

• 11:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:44Jocko Willink?

  And I had a 1997 Dodge Grand Caravan. The window didn't work. So his net worth was

• 11:50Speaker 01

  Wasn't affecting mine, bro.

• 11:53Jocko Willink?

  You know what I'm saying?

• 11:54Speaker 01

  That can be real too, for sure.

• 11:56Jocko Willink?

  But hey, that's the way it works. But watch out.

• 11:58Speaker 01

  And the modern, um, another modern, modern issue with what you let in your head and it, you know, so essentially it's like be careful what you let in your head. It's up to you what you let in your head. Where like, and you mentioned the algorithm and I think that's a bigger thing than sometimes than what people realize because like, if you're like, okay, um, well, it depends on what you look at, but let's say you follow a certain person, right? Where you're like, oh, I like what they have to say. I don't know. Jordan Peterson or I don't know. You know, Andrew Tate is a hot one right now, whatever. So it doesn't matter who. I'm just saying like you start to, the algorithm would be like, oh, you like this guy? Oh, here's more from this guy. Here's more from this guy. And then instead of when you originally liked just what they said, you start to like the person now.

• 12:39Speaker 01

  Now it doesn't matter what they say. They can say some weird stuff and you're just like, well, I like him. So hell yeah, that's me too. You know, so you kind of sign on to all their stuff after a while. That can't happen.

• 12:49Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you better be careful of that.

• 12:50Speaker 01

  You gotta be careful like, but yeah, how are you saying if you, if you're always like, what do you call a questioning?

• 12:56Jocko Willink?

  Always question. Yep. You know what? I think, so we made an album. If you remember this, it was called Psychological Warfare.

• 13:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:04Jocko Willink?

  And that album, really a lot of people got it and still get it to this day. And what's interesting about that is that's, that's, that's doing exactly what this is talking about, putting good thoughts into your head.

• 13:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:19Jocko Willink?

  Right? I'm going to overcome this. Yeah, that's, that's, you can see why that album has been so popular because people go, oh, if you listen to that when you wake up in the morning, that's the first thing that's in your head. And then you take the whole thing like we, we talked about on the machete season. The Machete Season Podcast where they talk about the power of radio and the power of spoken word and how there's no filter, it goes right into your brain. You don't need to convert anything. And that's what psychological warfare is. It's, it's, it's help people overcome those moments of weakness and help people stay on the path. Why is that? Because they're putting something into their head that's moving them in the right direction.

• 14:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. It's like helping in the real world.

• 14:05Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. So then you gotta be careful because like you just said, you can get on the gram and be like, oh, I'm gonna go get some positivity from the gram. Next thing you know. So that is a little excerpt of what we are doing on the Jocko Underground Podcast. So if you want to continue to listen, go to Jocko Underground dot com and subscribe and we're doing this, we're doing this to mitigate our reliance on external platforms. So we are not subject to their control. And we're doing this so that we can support the Jocko Podcast, which will remain as is free for all, as long as we can keep it that way.

• 14:47Jocko Willink?

  But we, but we are doing this so we don't have to be under the control of sponsors. And we're doing it so we can give you more control, more interaction, more direct connections, better communications with us. And to do that, we are, we're building a website right now where we'll be able to utilize to strengthen this legion of troopers that are in the game with us. So thank you. It's Jocko Underground dot com. It costs eight dollars and 18 cents a month. And if you can't afford to support us, we can still support you. Just email assistance at Jocko Underground dot com and we'll get you taken care of. Until then, we will see you mobilized underground.