379: You Get To Decide Whether You Curl Up In a Ball, or Curl Your Fists To Brawl.

"Psychology for the Armed Services" Document analysis. Fight, flight, freeze. Resilience, discipline, and adapting to change. 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 379 with Echo Charles and me Jocko Willink. Good evening, Echo.

• 0:05Speaker 01

  Good evening.

• 0:06Jocko Willink?

  So, believe it or not, a little over four years ago, we did a podcast, actually, we did two podcasts from a book called Psychology for the Fighting Man. This was a book that was written in 1943. The subtitle of the book is What You Should Know About Yourself and Others.

• 0:31Jocko Willink?

  We did five hours on that book. We broke it into two podcasts. It's number 164 and 165. If you haven't listened to those two podcasts, a ton of good information in there. Well, that book, like I said, was written in 1943. A couple of years after that, the military released another book. It was in 1945, after World War II had ended. And this book was called Psychology for the Armed Services. And there was a lot of information in it that was very similar, that is very similar between the two books.

• 1:09Jocko Willink?

  But there are some highlights that were changed, you know, as they wrapped up two more years of war in World War II. And I wanted to cover just some highlights of that from this book.

• 1:25Jocko Willink?

  This book called Psychology for the Armed Services. So there you go. We're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna jump into it. Psychology for the Armed Services. It starts off in the preface saying, "Psychology has never had proper emphasis in American military development, training, and combat. Psychology is the science that asks what man is, living, breathing man, why and how he does all that he does. Hence, there is no human activity and therefore no military activity that does not come within range of its investigation and of the application of its principles. Psychology as the study of man has extensive application in every military field." So there you go. This is usable just about everywhere.

• 2:13Jocko Willink?

  Says one reason that for this failure is that the scope of psychology has not been clearly understood. This perhaps has not been entirely the fault of the services. Psychologists like military men have had to create and use a technical language. And like military men, they have become fearful of inaccuracy and misinterpretation of their special terms and turns of speech are departed from in any great degree. In any science, this attitude contributes to an underestimation of the need for keeping those men who do not speak the language of the science aware of developments within it. Okay, so cool. Here's what I want to talk about that. I have a

• 2:54Jocko Willink?

  a reference that I make a lot about people speaking Latin. So if there's something that I don't understand, for instance, I don't understand how to program a computer. So when someone knows how to program a computer, they speak Latin. I don't. When someone knows how to edit videos, they know how to speak Latin. I don't. The reason I bring this up is because back in the day, when the Bible was out, it was written in Latin. And so therefore, the people that spoke Latin, translated the Bible for the other people and they could say it said whatever they wanted it to say. The reason people get caught up in this,

• 3:36Jocko Willink?

  when I was a radio man in the SEAL teams, radios, propagation, programming of radios, the cryptological material, all those things were Latin to other people that weren't me. That means when someone said, hey, can we get this thing programmed? I could say, yeah, sure, we can do it. Or I could say, that's not possible. I could literally say those two things. So when you're in a leadership position and you don't speak whatever language it is, you better have some good relationships and you should hopefully investigate that language well enough that you can understand the broad concepts. You can tell if something is true or not. So if I say, Echo, can you do this in the video? Hey, Echo, can you

• 4:18Jocko Willink?

  make the, can you make this can of go take off like a rocket? Now, if you think that's a dumb idea, you could say, no, actually, we can't do that. And I just have to shrug my soldiers and say, okay. So if you think it's a cool idea, you're like, oh, yeah, no problem. So you speak Latin. I don't. You can interpret the Bible. I can't. You can tell me what the Bible says.

• 4:42Jocko Willink?

  That's how you end up with the Spanish Inquisition, right? Like people getting tortured to death. So be careful. And that's what they're basically saying here is that the psychologists are get scared of who's gonna understand. Is it gonna be misinterpreted? And so they just lock, they just don't say anything.

• 4:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:56Jocko Willink?

  Which is a problem.

• 4:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, and and it's. This might be a broader like way to look at it, but the same exact thing where, yeah, if they speak Latin, they have the kind of the luxury or the power to basically look out for their own interests, right? So if you're like, um, like your example of me making a video, I think it's dumb, right? That's my interest, like dumb shouldn't be done, right? It can be done. Now I can just make it look like it can't be done. That's my interest for it not to be done, right? That's my interest. So that like, um, you mentioned the, you said programming a computer, which I'm not sure if there's such thing as programming. I'm sure there is, but it's like, let's say coding a website or something like this, right? We'll say.

• 5:32Jocko Willink?

  Okay, Latin speaker.

• 5:34Speaker 01

  See what I did there? Anyway, the.

• 5:36Jocko Willink?

  Bro, but when I was a kid.

• 5:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:37Jocko Willink?

  It was called computer programming, okay?

• 5:39Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 5:40Jocko Willink?

  So you wanna go back to the eighties with the TRS eighty and a Commodore Vic twenty? That was called computer programming. So you wanna call it coding now? You wanna step up there? Call me a boomer?

• 5:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, no, you're.

• 5:52Jocko Willink?

  Got it.

• 5:52Speaker 01

  You're actually right there, of course, there is computer programming for sure. But nonetheless, let's say a website, this is more appropriate for this particular example, in my opinion, given what I know, which is not much, but either way, so website, uh, program, let's say you're, um, I'm working for you, I'm program, I'm, I'm building website for you. And you're like, hey, I need this feature, I want it to do this. Now, I know how making that, I know the process to that. So I can be like, hey, I can't do, or that can't be done, you know, that's like, oh, that involves technology that doesn't exist yet, or something like this. Or I could be like, hey, that's like, of course I could do that, but hey, just bear with me, this is gonna be a lot of work.

• 6:29Jocko Willink?

  And it's gonna be expensive.

• 6:31Speaker 01

  Kinda costly, but worth it and all this stuff. Meanwhile, like, all I gotta do is freaking, especially nowadays, I'll go chat GPT and be like, oh, here's my code, you know, twenty nine seconds and done. And I'm like, hey, that's like, and I'll slow roll it, you know, whatever. That's me speaking.

• 6:44Jocko Willink?

  Big dollars, yep.

• 6:45Speaker 01

  Exactly, right. Hundred percent. Yeah, so I can look out for my own interest, meanwhile, you're blind to it.

• 6:49Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 6:49Speaker 01

  They say that, you know, the old, uh, the classic, um, the mechanic thing, you bring your car to the mechanic.

• 6:56Jocko Willink?

  Flux capacitors, bro, bro, it's gonna cost about twenty eight hundred bucks. Yeah. We can get it done for you, hopefully.

• 7:01Speaker 01

  Bro, they.

• 7:02Jocko Willink?

  It's gonna take a while.

• 7:03Speaker 01

  They're so, uh, the ones that are, cause there's varying levels of this, right? In the mechanic shop, right? Where they, um. The good ones, well not good, the bad ones, the devious ones, they'll scare you into it. They'll be like, hey, you can let it go.

• 7:16Jocko Willink?

  Oh, no, you can let it go. Yeah, yeah, but I just wouldn't put your family in the car.

• 7:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly right. It's like, I would just, you know, you could let it go, but you just never know with these things. I'd hate to see, you know, to have you driving down the freeway and this thing go out on you, you know, at seventy-five miles per hour, like that kind of stuff, you know?

• 7:30Jocko Willink?

  Then I say, bring it.

• 7:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, what is true, yeah.

• 7:35Jocko Willink?

  So that's the idea. What they, what they were worried about, the psychologists, sometimes they, they want to keep another little, little job security too, right?

• 7:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:43Jocko Willink?

  Like, I can analyze what's making this person tick, but why would I tell you? Then you don't have me as the expert.

• 7:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:48Jocko Willink?

  What if you could just say, hey, John, if you want your website, do that. You could just click on this thing over here and open this menu and click, you know, open or whatever.

• 7:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:56Jocko Willink?

  But instead you're like, oh, I'm, I can do it for you.

• 7:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:59Jocko Willink?

  Like, uh, like Facebook, right? You get on Facebook, like, hey, Echo, I'd really like to change my profile picture.

• 8:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:06Jocko Willink?

  You could be like, okay, you know what? Why don't you send me a picture that you like and I'll try and get it uploaded in the next few days?

• 8:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 8:12Jocko Willink?

  You could just tell me, hey, there's a cool screen on the, you know, a menu on the lower right. Click upload file and you can do it. But you don't want to tell me that because you want that job security all day.

• 8:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:21Jocko Willink?

  So there you go. All right. Uh, um, they got some reasons why this happened. One of the reasons the psychology has not been fostered within the armed services between the great wars has been lack of books through which the military man might gain a clear idea of the manner in which principles of psychology apply to everything he does. They just got some reasons. And then they talk about that book that I talked about earlier. Uh, not until nineteen forty-three was any, any book written which endeavored to outline ordinary, in ordinary language, what the whole body of psychological knowledge held for the military man. And by the way, when I'm talking about the military man, I'm talking about men, women, people, human beings. Yes, they're putting it into a military context, but the reason that we talk about these things is because it transfers into

• 9:05Jocko Willink?

  all aspects of business and life. This book was psychology for the fighting man, of which several hundred thousand copies had been used in the armed services. Such a book would have been of great value throughout the years of peace, but it was a development that did not come until war had reawakened military men to the need for it and psychologists to the desirability of helping with such a project.

• 9:30Jocko Willink?

  So again, we covered that book on podcast 164, 165. And then it talks about this book, and this book is going to make you a little bit nervous. Cause it's, it's, it's going to basically say we're writing in Latin. Listen to this. The present book, which is the book we're covering today. Psychology for the armed services arose from the first book, which contained a minimum of technical explanation. Psychology for the armed services is intended as a textbook written on the college level, but also a book in which the military and naval applications of psychological principles and the basic principles themselves are more fully developed than in the earlier work, in, in the earlier work. Now, I have both these books. They're actually not as different as this homeboy makes it out to sound.

• 10:15Jocko Willink?

  This guy, Joseph I. Green, who's a Colonel in the infantry, send it infantry. But, and, and as I looked through to find some of the differences, there was a lot. There was more similarities, way more similarities than there was differences. Some of the, the topics covered in this book, in this, in this book that we're talking about right now, which is called the psychology for the armed services, the book that we're covering right now. Here's the contents of it. There's a, the use of psychology in war. There's the eye as a military instrument. I was thinking, I'm gonna get that to Huberman. He'll be interested in that. It goes in, I mean, there's 40 or 50 pages, I guess 40 pages of the eye as a military

• 10:58Jocko Willink?

  instrument, the eye as a camera, visual acuity, glare, visual, got all these things, visual adaption and night vision, color and camouflage, all that stuff is about sight. So it's literally talking about these things and we covered some of those in, in the first podcast, we're not going to cover them today. Then it goes into the ear as a military instrument, the nature of hearing, the physiology of hearing. Then it goes to smell in war. Again, this is kind of, this probably you weren't predicting these, right?

• 11:27Speaker 01

  No.

• 11:28Jocko Willink?

  Equilibrium and bodily orientation, topographical orientation. It's talking about how your mind works to remember maps and mental map making and things like that. Efficiency and fatigue. Again, we covered a bunch of these already, and they're not that much different in this book. In fact, I would venture to say the other book is the, the book, psychology for the mighty, for the fighting man, which is written in a little less Latin and a little more English, is a little better.

• 11:58Jocko Willink?

  Efficiency and fatigue, physical conditions of efficiency. There's a whole section here called the selection of men. And again, we covered on the first one, this one doesn't differ that much. Use more technical terms, but those are on podcast 164, 165. Learning talks about how we learn, how to teach army teaching, motivation and morale. Again, these are all things that were covered in English. More vernacular, common vernacular in the book, Psychology for the Fighting Man. Personal adjustment, fear and anger. This is a section here about emotion. Now we are going to touch on that one. Cause that one is a little bit, there's some, some important points that I wanted to either rehash

• 12:43Jocko Willink?

  or show the differences between, there's a thing about sex. Which I was kind of like, how does that fit in? And then you start reading it's like, oh, you've got 3,000, 5,000 or 10,000 men with no women around. What is that doing to their brains?

• 13:01Jocko Willink?

  Well, it's going to have an impact. It's got leadership and we are definitely going to touch on leadership. That's the main reason why I decided, hey, you know what? We do need to hit this book because the leadership section. And then it closes out with rumor and panic and mobs and assessing opinion and discovering facts and propaganda and psychological warfare. The main things that we're going to focus on is the, the fear and emotions and leadership. Because I think those are the, the things that actually lent some more information that was usable compared to what we covered on the first two podcasts, four years ago, when we covered those podcasts. The use of psychology in war, chapter one, war is fought by men.

• 13:43Jocko Willink?

  Modern war is fought by men and machines, a great variety of machines, but also a great variety of men with various skills and abilities. Without men, the machines are useless. Without the special skills and abilities of men for operating the machines and for performing all the other complex operations of war, the armed forces would be helpless. In other words, the army and Navy in a very serious and specific manner have to take account of human nature.

• 14:16Jocko Willink?

  So no matter what you're doing, you have to account for human nature. And we you get into a situation where you've got a bunch of machines, but you don't have people that can operate those machines and you don't account for what that does to them. And how that machine impacts them. You're going to end up in a in a situation where things don't go the way you want them to go. So we have to understand the psychology. We have to understand human nature. It goes on. In a way, a man is himself a machine. That is to say, he is a complex organism with certain properties, capacities and abilities. Some of his abilities as well as some of his deficiencies, he has inherited. For instance, no man can see as well in the dark as in daylight and every man who sees at all

• 15:00Jocko Willink?

  can see better at night after he has remained sometime in the dark. This human ability and limitation, this property of seeing of the seeing eye is inherited. Training alters the capacity only a little. There are, however, great differences in sensitivity among men. Some have much better night vision than others and should therefore be the one selected for making observations at night. The military problem here is first to know the capacities and limitation of the human eye and then to adjust the military requirements to them so as to employ the maximal visual acuity without demanding the impossible.

• 15:39Jocko Willink?

  And this is one example that they're giving. Some people can see better than others. Chuck Yeager. Unbelievable eyesight. Makes a great fighter pilot. You have somebody that can't see very well. You don't want her to be a fighter pilot. Dave Burke. Good deal, Dave. Excellent eyesight. Less important nowadays because you got radar.

• 16:03Jocko Willink?

  But back in the day, you want that eyesight.

• 16:08Jocko Willink?

  Goes on. Most human skills are, however, not inherited, but learned. That is true of all complex skills. Men differ in their aptitudes for learning, for learning in general, and also for learning particular skills. This is somebody who's asking me about skydiving the other day.

• 16:26Jocko Willink?

  And.

• 16:28Jocko Willink?

  They they were like, you know, why would someone not be a good skydiver? Well, basically, I think most humans can get to a point where they're they can do it, right?

• 16:40Speaker 01

  That was me you're talking to, by the way.

• 16:42Jocko Willink?

  Oh, okay. Some people are gonna learn it quicker than others.

• 16:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:48Jocko Willink?

  It's like surfing. There's some people you take their first day out surfing. They've never surfed before. And they can stand up their first day. They will stand up on this board and ride a wave on their first day. Some people aren't gonna be able to stand up on a board for four or five days. Almost everyone after four or five days is gonna be able to stand up and ride a wave to the beach.

• 17:06Jocko Willink?

  I don't know why that is. It's like in basic SEAL training. There's gonna be some things. Let's say when you're out on San Clemente Island, you're going through the land warfare block of training. You've got to shoot a certain qualification with a rifle. You've got to shoot shoot a certain score on targets with a pistol and rifle.

• 17:29Jocko Willink?

  Out of every hundred guys that go out there, there's gonna be one of them that just like doesn't it's gonna take them another shot. They're gonna get rolled back. Out of every hundred, maybe maybe it's three out of every hundred. Maybe it's seven. I don't know the numbers. I'm sure the the BUDs instructors could tell you, hey, it's probably this, you know, whatever, four percent. But there are going to be some people that just don't they're not gonna be good at it. And they very few people will actually get dropped from training because they couldn't fire a pistol and a rifle and get the required score after two classes. I would say that number's got to be absolutely tiny.

• 18:10Jocko Willink?

  But there are gonna be some people that are gonna basically take longer to learn. Same thing with parachuting. Same thing with something more complex like close quarters combat. There's a certain standard you have to get to when you're going through that what's now called SQT SEAL qualification training. You've got to get a certain level. You can't make mistakes. You can only make, you know, three mistakes or whatever the number is. They have a way of grading it. More people, there's probably.

• 18:39Jocko Willink?

  Seven people out of a hundred that are or three people out of a hundred. I don't know what the number is, but I um what I'm trying to say is there's some people, it's gonna take them longer to learn it. Occasionally, someone's not gonna be able to learn it.

• 18:50Jocko Willink?

  Occasionally, someone's not gonna be able to learn it. So we have to take that into account, and that's exactly what they're saying here. Is that you've got to, and it goes into here, we take into account two factors. The different skills that men already have acquired and the different capacities they have for acquiring a particular, a particular skill quickly. Cause there's some people that they were already parachute qualified, like they were a free fall guy. They're not gonna have any trouble. Now, they might not, they might have been a not a naturally gifted free follower, but they've got two hundred and eighty jumps when they show up to buds. They're gonna get free, there's gonna be no problem for them. They've already done it before.

• 19:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, I remember when I asked that because parachuting, free fall, skydiving, that stuff is like, since that's real foreign to me, flying through the air and being good at it. And then maneuvering like any kind of parachute equipment and that, that's not obvious what kind of traits you need to have or not have. To be good at that. I don't even know what good looks like. I know what bad looks like, but I, I don't even, so it's like, oh, what makes you good, you know, whatever. Like, you know, in, in, in certain other, like surfing, for example, you get a kid who has good balance. Cause you, you can see kids, like this kid has good balance. This kid.

• 20:04Jocko Willink?

  Inherited ability of balance, right?

• 20:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's real obvious. Even if you don't surf, you're like, okay, if you have good balance, that's gonna help you in surfing or, you know, snowboarding, you know, as the case may or may not be. Um, but skydiving is like, bro, you don't need balance. Well, not, not in, when you look at someone skydiving, it doesn't intuitively hit you like, oh, you need balance for that. Even though you probably, I don't know, I'm assuming you probably do need.

• 20:25Jocko Willink?

  Uh, no, you don't need balance. There's this, that's what makes skydiving a weird example. Yeah. Because there's this, I think it's proprioception and then very rapid learning. Because you have to learn that, oh, when I move my arm like this, it makes me go over there. When I move my other arm like this, it makes me go over there. So you're learning very rapidly. How your body is reacting to what your body is doing.

• 20:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:47Jocko Willink?

  And therefore, if you have that ability to do that, you'll get good at it quickly.

• 20:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:53Jocko Willink?

  If you don't, it's a weird, there's a weird instinct when it comes to free falling. And that is if in a way your brain can think your s- your brain can think you're in the water.

• 21:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:05Jocko Willink?

  Cause there's no, there's no other thing to compare it to. And when you're in water, you're kind of weightless. But if you want to move over there, you kind of move that. And so you see guys skydiving, they, they swim.

• 21:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:18Jocko Willink?

  They like try and swim through the air, but it doesn't work that way at all.

• 21:22Speaker 01

  That's crazy.

• 21:23Jocko Willink?

  So, yeah, I think it has to do with proprioception and then it has to do with being able to rapidly learn what your body is doing, what the reaction is, and then making adjustments.

• 21:34Speaker 01

  Yes. And you know what, what I think, I think, I don't know, I'm not an expert, but what I think is rapidly learn and at the same time, probably equally is important. Almost it's a version of unlearning too. So like you, you mentioned like um, skydiving and swimming, right? Most people, if they know how to swim, it seems natural. They think it's almost like a language, right? Where you gotta like unlearn that language. It doesn't mean this anymore. So like you're in the pool or in the ocean or whatever, when you're swimming, when you do this thing, it, it has this result and it's automatic already, right? In your brain, you gotta unlearn that in the air, right? Just like um, so snowboarding, whatever.

• 22:13Speaker 01

  If you're not used to it, this is my experience. In the beginning, when you're not used to it and you're like, you kind of go into sort of panic mode, which is that's when you go to your natural instincts. You, you want to lean back and whatever. I'm going too fast. I want to lean back, you know, that's just the thing. But leaning back gives you less control. You can't turn. It's like, it's basically the, the exact opposite of what you want to do. To control your, your speed, your turn, whatever. But so you gotta unlearn that and it's hard to unlearn for certain people when they're so, when they learned it so, I don't know what the word would be like hardcore. They learned it so hard. It's so ingrained in them. It's harder to unlearn that kind of stuff.

• 22:46Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 22:47Speaker 01

  So it's harder to learn the, the new stuff you gotta learn.

• 22:49Jocko Willink?

  Yep. And different people will be at different capacities across the spectrum of what we're talking about. Some people, they feel that almost immediately. They go, oh, I gotta lean forward and all of a sudden they're good to go.

• 22:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:58Jocko Willink?

  Some people, they just can't. They have a different capacity for learning. And by the way, that capacity for learning in this particular case has nothing to do with your intellectual capacity. Cause there's smart people that are sky trash when it comes to skydiving, right? Or they're they're terrible doing CQC. They're the smartest person with the highest ASVAB score. Meaning they have the highest capacity for intellectual learning and they're a train wreck in the house. Or they're a train wreck in the sky. Like this happens. So there's this there's this and it talks about this. I don't know how much we're going to cover this, but in the selection of men in the other book and psychology for fighting men. It's like you could take the the most. Let's say that the person with the highest intellectual capacity.

• 23:43Jocko Willink?

  And he's going to be terrible at some jobs. For instance, jobs that don't require a lot of intellectual thought. They're going to get bored. They're not going to care. They're going to look for shortcuts. Like that's a real problem. And then you take someone that doesn't have a high intellectual capacity. They might be good at this particular job. But you put them in the job that requires a high intellectual capacity and they're going to have problems.

• 24:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's such a like genius yet simple way to put it, which to be honest, you never really thought of in these exact terms where if you're good at something, whether it be like anything requiring intellectual ability, smarts, whatever the word is, whatever the quality is, if you put them in a job that doesn't require that. They might not be that good at it.

• 24:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. So it's one of the why it's actually a fallacy. It's a cognitive bias. I forget what it you actually mentioned it a few few weeks ago. It's where it's, I think it's a form of anchoring or no, no, it's like the halo effect, I think.

• 24:36Jocko Willink?

  Halo effect.

• 24:36Speaker 01

  Where, yeah, where like

• 24:37Jocko Willink?

  They're good at this.

• 24:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, this guy has a Princeton master's degree, you know, whatever. So of course he's going to be good at everything. What's like, but it's not true. He's good at getting Princeton degrees in that subject, you know?

• 24:48Jocko Willink?

  And what's really crazy is you take a you take a guy that went to an Ivy League school who had a perfect SAT score and you put him in a SEAL platoon, he doesn't know how to interact with other people. He doesn't have good emotional IQ, right? And so he's a disaster. You know, there was a while when they were recruiting a bunch of these Ivy League guys for the SEAL Teams. This was in the nineties. And they realized after a little while, we're not getting what we want. We're getting some of what we want. Some of the guys are fantastic. We have some Ivy League officers that were great officers. We also had some Ivy League officers that were disasters. And they realized they were looking for the wrong thing. Yeah. They were looking for, oh, we'll just grade them halo effect. Oh, this person went to Harvard and got a great SAT score. They must be smart. They're going to be a great SEAL platoon leader. Nope, doesn't work that way. Sorry.

• 25:33Jocko Willink?

  And, and look, they can be great. Yeah. But it's not, it's not necessarily, and there's a decent chance that they're not good. So you gotta pay attention to these things. This is the, this is the use of psychology in war and life.

• 25:48Jocko Willink?

  Goes on here to say, since you cannot create new men for war, you have to adapt the men already available. Thus, it comes down. It does comes about that the great task of creating new forces is principally a matter of selection and training. It is necessary to choose men who already have the needed skill or else to train them. Actually, the armed forces do both. If it's, if a civilian skill like typewriting is also a military skill, men already have that ability. Type is can easily be selected. If there's not enough, you could train them. That's basically what it says there.

• 26:22Jocko Willink?

  Then it says, oh, it's basically this is what we were just talking about. For training, there are differences of aptitude among men. A mentally deficient man, although perhaps bright enough for a number of tasks necessary in the armed forces, could never learn code fast enough to make training him worthwhile. Many bright men, moreover, lack code aptitude and should not be trained when more apt men are available. Psych, psychological tests can determine what capacity a man has for learning a wide variety of tasks for learning code in particular. Selection and training go hand in hand. This is.

• 26:58Jocko Willink?

  I think this, yeah, this is talking about Morse code. I had to learn Morse code. And again, what's interesting about learning Morse code was we had to learn to send and receive Morse code. And I forget the numbers, but there was a qualification we had to get in order to pass the radioman school that I went to for being a SEAL radioman, RTO. And some guys, dude, they freaking struggled. They struggled with it. So I think everyone ended up passing, but some guys barely passed. I think they got a little extra love from freaking chief that was running the course like, all right, dude, you're close enough. If we have a thermonuclear war and the only way to transmit communication is through HF, Morse code,

• 27:43Jocko Willink?

  you're gonna die, but other than that, you'll be all right. But it's interesting. It had, in some of the guys were just like, like, there was no one that was some brilliant guy that, oh, this is easy. Some of the smart guys had a hard time. Some of the guys that were kind of rocks were like, oh, this is easy. You know what I'm saying? Like, they just happen to have, it's like tonal languages. Do you know what those are?

• 28:05Speaker 01

  Yes. Um, like, and actually, I was gonna say, like, pretty much any language scenario, like, if you have exposure to, let's say, three different languages, you don't necessarily have to talk them, but you have exposure to them constantly or whatever. The probability of you picking up, like, another language, even, they can be along the same lines, just to a small degree. You're gonna pick it up way better than the smartest of guys. Well, I mean, not every single time, but for the most part, the smartest of guys who has very little or no exposure to other languages.

• 28:37Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, totally. The tonal languages are, you hear the differences. I would love to give you a great example. I think one of them is like the word. Cow in Thai and it's like cow, cow, cow, cow. And, and they might sound the same to an American that speaks English. But for them, one means rice, one means white, one means eat, like they all mean different things. And some guys, Giff, Giff went to Thai language school. Or did he go to Thai or Vietnamese? He might've gone to Vietnamese, but he went to a tonal language school and he said some people just like they just can't hear it. They just could not hear it.

• 29:15Speaker 01

  So we, in sixth grade, I took Mandarin Chinese. And that was the deal. I was like, a lot of these words are the same words technically. But like the way, and it was an actual Chinese lady. So she was, that was her first language. So I was like, I am not going to be able to learn that. Plus I was in sixth grade. So, you know, so it's different than like Spanish. So Hawaiian, Japanese, Filipino, these are like the cultures that are in Hawaii, right? So you get different accents and then not to mention pigeon, which is like, that's an accent. So Spanish, easy. Like if you technically, if you really want a good like, uh, how should I say scaffolding for Spanish? It's basically pigeon with a rolled R. That's it.

• 29:59Speaker 01

  For, if you do a Spanish or like a Spanish accent and take off the, the Rs at the end and you replace them with A like ah.

• 30:08Speaker 01

  You got pigeon, straight up. And I'll, it's a funny example of this where you ever watch, you ever heard, uh, or seen the movie Fifty First Dates?

• 30:16Jocko Willink?

  No.

• 30:16Speaker 01

  Seen that? Okay. So it's Adam Sandler.

• 30:18Jocko Willink?

  This sounds like a romantic comedy.

• 30:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:23Speaker 01

  But Rob Schneider, you know, great American actor. Um, he, uh, he played, I forget his name on there, but he played a full on, uh, local Hawaiian guy, right? So he had to do a pigeon accent and he'd mess it up because he'd include the Rs and it just sounds like a Spanish accent. But all you gotta do is take off the R at the end, make it into A, boom, you got pigeon. See what I'm saying? It's easy to recognize when you, you're, you hear pigeon, you hear Filipino accents. You hear like all these different accents and you're like, oh, I see that one. You know, it's like way more recognizable. So it'll come way more natural.

• 30:54Jocko Willink?

  But some people have a natural ability. Now whether that's natural because they were around languages when they were little, I don't know. But by the time they're ready to be trained, some of them have that ability, some of them don't. And that's the way it is. And if you try and take someone that can't hear those different tones and you try and make them learn Mandarin Chinese, it ain't gonna happen. It ain't gonna happen. So that's what they're saying in here. Um, and they actually just say this. It does not matter whether aptitudes are inherited or learned. You have to take them as you find them. A learned civilian skill can often constitutes an aptitude for learning a military skill. For instance, civilian truck drivers have an aptitude for driving army trucks. Still need to much further training. Pretty straightforward. What's interesting about this is.

• 31:40Jocko Willink?

  This is a little bit counter to the idea, the modern idea that you can do whatever you want. Echo Charles. Like, oh, you can do anything, Echo. Like, your parents, oh, Echo, you can do anything. Hey, man. Actually, you can't learn Mandarin, right? Because you can't hear tones. Or you can, but it's gonna be a huge effort and you're never gonna be very good at it. Because there's some people that learn a language, but damn, dude, like, it is hard. And they don't sound, they still sound like a gringo, like, no matter what. So that's a reality that a lot of times people don't want to face. Like, hey, you just don't really have the capacity for this thing. And you shouldn't really be doing this, right? And you better hope that what you want to do lines up with what you can do.

• 32:24Jocko Willink?

  You know, like, Dave Burke. Good deal. Yeah. Obviously, he wanted to be a fighter pilot. And he's a humble guy, but he also quite obviously had a natural ability. He had, he, to be, to, to have achieved the level of pilot that he did. He clearly had some level of natural ability. We know he had great eyesight. But, and the weird thing is, he wasn't like, he didn't play baseball. He didn't have some big hand-eye coordination. He had a natural gift at some level to be able to fly as good as he could fly. Some feeling for that, something that you get when you move that plane around. You understand it. You're connected to it, where some people aren't.

• 33:08Jocko Willink?

  And look, and he also got maximum training, you know, being a Top Gun fighter pilot and Top Gun instructor and all those things. But he had to have some natural level to be able to make that stuff happen. And thankfully for him, luckily for him, those things lined up. You know, if he was like, oh, I really want to be a Mandarin, you know, linguist. There's a chance he couldn't have done that. He might have been like, oh, I want to be a, what's another job in the military? Oh, here's one, I want to be EOD. He might have been colorblind, and if you're colorblind, you can't be EOD. Like, that's just a disqualifier.

• 33:45Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 33:46Jocko Willink?

  So, you gotta, you gotta hope that you are lucky enough that what you want to do is what you can do. But also you gotta be savvy enough to say, you know what? I want to do that, but I can't do it. You know, I want to do that, but I actually can't do it, so I need to find something else to do.

• 34:09Jocko Willink?

  It says, "These problems concerning human abilities and aptitudes are psychological, often not always. It is the psychologist who can help armed forces find out what human abilities are needed and how to acquire them by selection and training. Psychology is the study of human nature and wars are fought by human beings." So, there you go. It goes on to say, "Psychological military problems also include the study of the other persons with whom the armed forces have to deal. The civilians on the home front who support the armed forces, the civilians of an occupied country who come in contact with soldiers and sailors, the enemy civilians, and the enemy and soldiers and sailors. Military men must know about the habits and thought, of thought and action of all these kinds of people.

• 34:50Jocko Willink?

  They are often concerned with their beliefs, their emotions, their prospective actions. The leaders use various means for assessing opinions of such social groups, and then knowing how these groups are thinking and feeling, they may try to alter their opinions using psychological warfare." There's all kinds of things that are psychological, or psychology is used for in war.

• 35:12Jocko Willink?

  As a matter, as a practical matter, the psychological business of the army and the navy with which this book is concerned breaks down into the following seven fields. Observation, performance, selection, training, personal adjustment, social relations, opinion and propaganda. And so, like I said, a lot of these we covered on podcast 164 and 165, but there was some interesting excerpts that are a little bit different. One of those sections is about emotion and specifically here, we're going to talk about fear, because I think there's some, a lot to learn when I reread this section. Fear is an unpleasant emotion. If intense, it involves presently the whole psychological, the whole physiological pattern induced by the action of the sympathetic nervous system.

• 35:56Jocko Willink?

  It differs from anger in that it is characterized by an attempt to withdraw from the scene or avoid the fearful situation. So that's what fear does. This whole sympathetic nervous system is going to do things, things are going to get released, adrenaline's going to, all those things are going to happen to try and make you avoid the fearful situation. The energy with which the sympathetic system provides the body in a fearful emergency is normally used for escape, not for attack. Fortunately, the energy can nevertheless be diverted from flight to attack. And thus, fear may come to have a military use.

• 36:37Jocko Willink?

  So you may feel fear and you can change that fear from making you want to run. You can utilize that energy. You can utilize anger. You can utilize frustration. You can actually utilize these emotions as long as you control your emotions, as long as you understand what's happening.

• 36:57Jocko Willink?

  It says, fear thrives on frustration. It persists and grows when danger impends, especially if there's nothing the fearful man can do to lessen the threat against him. Action, on the other hand, always lessens or may even abolish fear, resolving the frustration and eliminating it. Now, this is why you get freaking guys in World War I getting shell shock because there's nothing you can do about it. You're sitting in a trench waiting to get to die.

• 37:22Jocko Willink?

  Like at least when you charge, you're charging, but sitting, that's why it's called shell shock. It wasn't called attack shock because when you're attacking, you feel better. When you're sitting in a trench, waiting to die, waiting to have a freaking giant shell land on your spot and get blown to smithereens like all of your friends have been. And there's nothing you can do about it. The soldier who transforms fear into escape, rushing headlong through the woods, over fences and across gullies is usually too busy to feel afraid anymore. Others will describe him as afraid, but the emotion that started his action, the gnawing, haunting, sickening dread will itself very likely be gone.

• 38:01Jocko Willink?

  It may come again if he is stopped by an obstacle or a command, being forced to wait inactive for danger to come to him. So you get that, that fear comes up, once it's going, once you're taking action, it's kind of gone. People tell you that fear and anger are sometimes mixed. It seems much more likely that what happens is the fearful man at bay turns on his enemy to attack him. Just as the fearful animal attacks when cornered. The man who is attacking, whether he be grappling with another man with his life as the prize salute. Or shooting from a foxhole as the enemy comes across the clearing is working his sympathetic system for all it is worth,

• 38:44Jocko Willink?

  but not any longer feeling very much afraid. He is much too busy. That's funny when we had, uh, we had Mike Thornton on and I asked him, you know, he's running across to get his shot platoon leader, there's just total mayhem going on. Mike Thornton, Medal of Honor recipient, SEAL Team One. And he came on and gave us a full debrief. I was like, oh, were you scared? He's like, I was, I was busy. That's exactly what he says. His mouth may be dry, he may feel a lump in his throat still and a little bit sick in his stomach, but the sympathetic, the sympathetic system does that, does that to him. But at least you could not say whether he's afraid or angry chiefly, he is active and moved.

• 39:27Jocko Willink?

  Neither specifically afraid nor angry. Fear as distinguished from anger is often identical with anxiety. That state of depressed, unpleasant, fatigued, apprehensive worry, which frustration always produces. Fatigue always accompanies prolonged anxiety and also those early stages of fear before the sympathetic system has released enough adrenaline into the blood to abolish it. On the other hand, acute terror suddenly aroused is something more than anxiety. The terrorized person knows of what he is afraid and his sympathetic system may be energized too rapidly for him to feel fatigue. At any rate, he will not be in terror.

• 40:10Jocko Willink?

  He will not in terror be noticing fatigue. What he notices usually inhibition, inability to act, run or fight. So often terror immobilizes a man. It may of course mobilize him instead and make him run in panic. So it's pretty, it's pretty interesting that that terror is going to, I mean, uh, either freeze you up or make you mobilized. We prefer mobilized. This is fight, flight or freeze, remember? I don't know, I remember it used to be fight or flight and if someone, at some point someone added freeze. And I've seen guys freeze. I've seen guys fight.

• 40:53Jocko Willink?

  I've seen some flight can get a little bit crazy. The characteristics of fear are then unpleasantness, fatigue and the desire to escape a state of mind that ends ordinarily in getting the sympathetic system to work and sometimes invigorates action, which replaces the fear, the action of attack or escape or of doing something else either about the danger or about something that is important. A man may forget his fear when he suddenly has his wounded comrade to attend to. Forget fear through his danger is not, though his danger is not diminished. So this is again, action, taking action. I said this on, on the Huberman, when I was on Huberman's podcast, you know? I was like, oh, you're hesitant, you're scared, like action is the solution.

• 41:38Jocko Willink?

  Here you go. The army using its excellent questionnaire method, this, that's an exact quote. And I don't know if someone was just kissing ass to the person that wrote this or whatever. But it says, "The army using its excellent questionnaire method has collected from combat troops, a list of fears, a list of their felt symptoms of fear. Here is what the list with the frequencies with which the symptoms were reported." The reason I wanted to go over this is because I always talk about detaching. And I talk about knowing what your red flags are, meaning how do you know when you need to detach? And I always talk about, hey, you start to raise your voice because you're getting mad. You start to clench your fists because you're getting mad. You start to get red in the face because you're getting mad.

• 42:23Jocko Willink?

  You start to breathe harder because you're getting mad. So all those things are good to identify so that you can recognize that you're starting to lose your temper or get emotional. It says here, violent pounding of the heart, 86%. Sickening, sinking feeling in the stomach, 75%. Feeling sick in the stomach, 59%. Trembling and shaking, 56%. Cold sweat, 55%. Tense feeling in the stomach, 53%. Feeling of weakness and faintness, 51%. Vomiting, 24%. Losing control of bowels, 10%. Urinating in the pants, 10%.

• 42:56Speaker 01

  What is the percentages represent?

• 42:58Jocko Willink?

  Uh, how often people reported this? Or the, the frequencies with which the symptoms were reported. So 10% of people said they pissed their pants. 10% of people said they shit their pants. 24% of people said they threw up. We used to catch a lot of guys, uh, like insurgents or terrorists when we would hit their houses at two o'clock in the morning. There was, I would say there was more than 10% of people that pissed themselves. Maybe, but not that much, but it was pretty normal that a guy shit himself or he pissed himself. Like some Mujahideen fighter, you blast their door off their house, they're pissed in their pants.

• 43:36Speaker 01

  That's crazy.

• 43:37Jocko Willink?

  It was always kind of nasty to deal with, but.

• 43:39Speaker 01

  That makes sense.

• 43:40Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. But what's interesting about those is we gotta remember, what are those for you? You know, next time you get pissed and you lose your temper, try and reverse engineer it and figure out what you could have noticed so that you can stop it next time?

• 44:03Jocko Willink?

  Says here.

• 44:06Jocko Willink?

  It says here, mostly fear makes sense to the fearful man because he knows of what he's afraid. He knows not only that he is afraid, but that he has reason to be afraid. Sometimes he becomes anxious, however, without any assignable cause. He is scared, but he does not know. He does not know that he is. And this is something I have talked about a lot. When I would have a fighter in the UFC. And they'd be nervous and they wouldn't know what it was, but they'd feel like sick and they feel like. And it's, oh, you're, that's nerves and it's good because it's preparing you for combat. If you don't tell them that they actually think they're sick. They think there's something wrong with them. Same thing with combat. Oh, you feel, you feel like a little bit sick. You've gone to the, you know, you've hit the out, you've hit the, uh, the porta potty.

• 44:50Jocko Willink?

  Four times in the last 20 minutes. You good? Uh, yeah, and they think they feel sick, but they're really just nervous.

• 44:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:58Jocko Willink?

  They take that combat shit three times before they get in their Humvee. Cause they're nervous as hell. And so you go, hey, man, it's all good. That's just your nerves and that's a good thing. I was telling them, it's a positive thing. It means your body's getting ready for combat. So that's good.

• 45:13Jocko Willink?

  Says here, he wants to get out of fighting while his pride makes him want to fight. So he finds himself frustrated in conflict, in conflict. Too proud to admit even to himself, his desire to escape. He goes on about his work, depressed, tired, feeling sick to his stomach, not knowing the cause of his trouble. Actually, he's afraid. You do not have to know of what you are afraid in order to be afraid. Although you will seldom tell other persons about a fear that seems you have no reasonable cause. It is because action is the cure for fear that courage and fear so often go together. This is awesome. A man is afraid because he is afraid. His sympathetic nervous system is gearing him to activity. Physically, he's in good position to do something about the danger that haunts him. Shall it be escape or attack?

• 45:57Jocko Willink?

  Discipline, pride, confidence in leaders, belief in war, aims, and a host of other, of other forces. Press him on toward bravery. Thus, his heart in his throat, he stumbles into action, finds action good. Lets out a yell from his dry mouth and is soon fighting away vigorously. His mouth moist again and his fatigue gone. His fear was useful. He, it provided the energy and other things steered him to the right kind of activity. Boom. Oh, you're scared? I'm going on the attack.

• 46:34Speaker 01

  When we were, uh, kids, it was like, it was actually a mix between fear and anger. Probably some like frustration where basically you do that, you'd kind of like flip the switch where it just turns to complete aggression, right? That's like the, the process and we'd call it amping out.

• 46:54Jocko Willink?

  Oh.

• 46:54Speaker 01

  So like when you, when you.

• 46:56Jocko Willink?

  It's like Christmas Story.

• 46:57Speaker 01

  Yes, that was per- perfect example.

• 46:59Jocko Willink?

  Perfect example.

• 47:00Speaker 01

  Amping out, yeah.

• 47:00Jocko Willink?

  Rage.

• 47:01Speaker 01

  So that was like, uh, it's like an expression when we were little kids.

• 47:04Jocko Willink?

  Amping out.

• 47:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, when two people get into a fight, like there's a difference between you two guys getting in a fight and getting mad and talking trash to each other and all that. And then a guy just amping out.

• 47:13Jocko Willink?

  Like echo amped out.

• 47:15Speaker 01

  Yes, it was like, and it's a very, very, very distinct differentiator when a guy amps out and a guy just gets into a fight. Cause when you amp out, you're crying, like everything is coming out, everything. You're crying, you may or may not be yelling, uh.

• 47:30Jocko Willink?

  You're winning.

• 47:31Speaker 01

  You're, yeah.

• 47:32Jocko Willink?

  Most likely.

• 47:33Speaker 01

  You're winning. You don't know when to stop. Like, you know, just like on Christmas Story where he was beating that kid down, down. And they had to break it up or whatever. Like that's amping out. So it's like, oh, the, the version, the essentially the beginner version of taking all that negative, like the fear and all that stuff. And then like directing it, utilizing it. Amping out.

• 47:54Jocko Willink?

  There you go, man. Isn't it, isn't it incredible like how specific this is and yet how totally accurate it is? And how if you understand it, then you can recognize it in yourself and you can recognize it in others.

• 48:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:07Jocko Willink?

  Like when you see someone's afraid, the best thing you can do is tell them, hey, what's we're gonna do?

• 48:14Jocko Willink?

  Unfortunately, goes back to the book here. On the other hand, fear does not always disappear in combat, perhaps because not all combat is active. Or because activity is not strong enough to banish fear, the army has questioned combat troops as to when, when they feel the most fear. Thirty-nine percent of men reported fear as the strongest before battle. Thirty-five percent said it was strongest during battle. Sixteen percent said it was greatest, the greatest fear came for them after combat. And 10% couldn't decide.

• 48:43Jocko Willink?

  Have you ever done something when you got done, you were like, oh.

• 48:46Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 48:47Jocko Willink?

  That's the one that seems to stick out in my mind the most.

• 48:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:50Jocko Willink?

  Where I've come back from something and been like, dang.

• 48:54Speaker 01

  You ever been in, cause the, the time or one of the times that sticks up the most to me is I was a white male. North shore, Oahu.

• 49:04Jocko Willink?

  Damn.

• 49:04Speaker 01

  And it was a big day, but it was a huge day. And I went out, whatever.

• 49:09Jocko Willink?

  Sponging?

• 49:10Speaker 01

  Not just body surfing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, um, you know, grew up in the water, whatever. I'm not one of these visitors who are intimidated by this kind of stuff, but I went out there. I was like, oh yeah, it's big. It's big out there. And you gotta go with the flow where I was just focusing now. I can't catch any of these waves. They're too big. And there's too many of them coming, you know? Guys are shredding surfing outside. Um, and then I was like, okay, I'm, I'm going back in. This is not fun. You know, I'm like, all my attention and energy is going, is going to going under these waves, preparing for the next one. Yeah. It's like survive, but I wasn't scared necessarily.

• 49:43Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 49:44Speaker 01

  I was, I was more like, this is too much work and it's not fun out here, you know? It's like, it's not fun. So I went in and as I went in, that's when I was like, bruh, that was scary. Like I felt the actual fear afterwards, which in a way, when you kind of think about it, like, doesn't make that much sense. Because you'd think, oh yeah, when it hits you, that's when it's scary, right? But I guess maybe I was too focused on what I was doing to realize how in danger I probably was.

• 50:12Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. I was, I was out surfing with my son when he was a little kid. It was a big day and we were surfing this spot where if you get in the wrong spot, you're going to get slammed into a cliff and you're going to have real problems.

• 50:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:28Jocko Willink?

  And normally, as long as you catch waves and you ride, you know, you know how you ride?

• 50:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:33Jocko Willink?

  You know, across a wave, that you ride away from that area. Well, something happened where he fell or something like this. And all of a sudden, he was in the danger, complete danger zone. And I remember I had just caught a wave and rode it correctly. And so now I'm, I see him, I look back and I see him like, he, I didn't see what happened, but now he was in the zone of.

• 50:56Speaker 01

  How old was he at this time?

• 50:58Jocko Willink?

  He was probably like nine. And I look at him and I was kinda, I just was thinking to myself, this is a test. Because he has to get himself out of here. I mean, I'm gonna go, I mean, look, if he starts going in the rocks, I guess I'll go over there, but it's probably gonna be a problem for both of us then, right? And I'm just looking at him going like, is, does he, I was thinking to myself, does he know the situation he's in right now? And he just, you know, he just looked pretty normal and paddled back out and made it, it was a little bit of a struggle, but he got back out. You know, and I was kinda like, how'd you get in there? He's like, uh. He's definitely, when he got out of it, he definitely had recognized it, but he seemed pretty calm in the situation, but I think he, after he got out was like, that was sketch.

• 51:39Speaker 01

  Yeah. But that, he means that, that story.

• 51:42Jocko Willink?

  Well, one time he, well, another funny day, it was a big, even bigger day, we were in a different spot. And I caught a wave and then he caught a wave and, and then we were both trying to get back out and it was closing out. And we were inside again, up against rocks where there's no good option. And his leash broke on his board. And I saw, you know, he, and I was watching him, like, I came up and I was looking for him. And he came up and I could see as soon as he came up and he knew his leash was gone and he was just like by his own, as he used to say. He was out there and he had a look on his face like, I'm gonna need some help. And I was like, I, I, I got you.

• 52:25Speaker 01

  And you helped him?

• 52:26Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I did. Oh, yeah, for sure. Cause if I didn't help him, it could have been a problem. Uh, I also dig the hell out of my board because, well, his board, he was surfing a foam board, this one, he was a little kid, you know, he used to go out on a foam board. As you heard Josh Hall tell that story, where Josh Hall's like, gonna yell at me, cause I had a little kid out there is too dangerous. Josh Hall was gonna come and give me the business. And then he came, paddled over and he's like, I'm just gonna let this guy do what he wants. That was my intro to Josh Hall. But yeah, it was one of those. It was one of those days. A big, big, big man day. Like, there's no kids out. There are barely even men out there.

• 52:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, and that's like a, you know, it, it might sound dramatic to be like, hey, because that can be life or death. But Brad, it is.

• 53:06Jocko Willink?

  Oh, no, you can definitely.

• 53:08Speaker 01

  And you brought this up a few weeks ago where Brad, you can't fight waves. You can't fight them.

• 53:11Jocko Willink?

  You know what's sketchy when you're in big, big waves? When, you know, the water that's white, it's like whitewater? And you don't get the normal pull against it. It's just like pulling at air, you know? That's what I was thinking about when we were talking about free fall. Like, you're just going and it doesn't move you anywhere.

• 53:28Speaker 01

  Can't catch that breath. Oh, man.

• 53:30Jocko Willink?

  Check. All right. It says here, uh, let's just, I'm gonna go to this section here. So it goes into fighting fear.

• 53:39Jocko Willink?

  A great deal can be learned about fear from a study that rules for overcoming it. Here they are. Action dispels fear. It's, this is so important. That's why, like, so your kids caught in the surf zone? You know what you do? You go, hey, start paddling out. Hey, paddle, paddle south. You know, like, you give them, give them something to do. Just don't let them sit there. You know, you gotta give them something to do. Action dispels fear. In the suspense before combat, when men are ready for action and waiting for the signal, for the signal to start, fear is at its height. It will disappear for many of the men when action commences. A questionnaire given to several hundred members of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, veterans of the Spanish Civil War disclosed that 71% of these men experienced greater fear before going into action

• 54:20Jocko Willink?

  than during action, and only 15% experienced more fear during action.

• 54:29Jocko Willink?

  It says here, knowledge of the situation lessens fear. The unfamiliar is always more fearful than the familiar. You cannot even plan how to man, how to meet a strange and ill-defined danger. Men in combat should therefore be told as much about the enemy as possible, where he is likely to be met, and in what strength, what kinds of weapons he's likely to use and tactics. So people fear the unknown. Habit makes fear less effective. Fear is disorganizing. It makes men less alert, takes their attention from important matters, causes them to act for inadequate reasons. That is how panic gets started, but discipline.

• 55:12Jocko Willink?

  Yes, discipline. Discipline fortunately controls them and gets them started on the right actions. Then in action, the mind clears up and the fear disappears. Discipline is the soldier's fear friend in emergency. It carries him through when he might otherwise fail. Soldiers sometime report they are much more afraid during bombardment when on furlough in a city than when they're on the firing line. They've been trained for battle and in battle, they have their job to do. Some men yield to fear more easily than others because they have not formed the habit of suppressing emotion and acting on judgment. There are differences in the emotionality of people that depend upon their habits and training.

• 55:56Jocko Willink?

  Number four, calm behavior lessens fear. It lessens fear in others for both fear and self-possession are contagious. Self-possession, that's a good word. Having control of yourself. For this reason, each man has a responsibility to control the signs of his own fear. And the successful leader is of course, a man who can remain calm in danger. If a soldier goes to pieces and becomes panicky, then he should, when possible, be removed from the sight of other men. Assumed calm does moreover lessen fear in the man who assumes it. He finds his pride working against his panic. If you act calm, you're gonna be calm.

• 56:41Jocko Willink?

  It's a good rule to have. Freaking out doesn't help anybody. Humor fights fear.

• 56:50Jocko Willink?

  In trying times, intense moments, a laugh can be a lifesaver. There's a story from the first world war of American troops facing an unexpected horror. They were being fired on by another battalion of their own regiment. The captain was nervous and afraid, ready to fire back on their comrades. The captain, or sorry, the men were nervous and afraid, ready to fire back on their comrades. The captain restored morale. It was unintentional, but he did it. Jackson, he called, yes, captain. Where are you? Right here across the road. Stand up so I can see you. Captain, Jackson shouted in a lull between bursts of machine gun fire. If you want to see me, you stand up.

• 57:26Jocko Willink?

  The chuckle that ran down the line restored order. Commands were given, the men crept out of the zone of fire. Six companionship decreases fear. Men should whenever possible be within sight or hearing of other men in the time of battle danger, although not bunched together so they can make a common target. The sight of another man who seems not panicky is reassuring. Dude, so, so good. Gotta watch, people wanna bunch up. I wrote about that in Leadership Strategy and Tactics, don't bunch up. We used to say that all the time in urban combat training, in land warfare training, in on the battlefield, don't bunch up. You have to say that over and over because people wanna get close to you. People wanna get close to each other. There's like a little feeling of comfort.

• 58:10Jocko Willink?

  You gotta be like, dude, back off.

• 58:14Jocko Willink?

  Knowledge of statistics helps fear. Even when casualties are heavy comparatively few men are killed, the chances that any one man will be mortally wounded in any one battle are small.

• 58:25Jocko Willink?

  In the entire allied armies, the First World War, the only one man in nine was killed or died as a result of war in all four years of fighting. I'm gonna call bullshit on that, you wanna know why? Because most people weren't on the front lines fighting.

• 58:40Jocko Willink?

  That's what we learned from the book, I Remember the Last War. That guy's like, hey, there's not many, he goes, there's, there's books about World War One, there's not about books about from the trenches because we didn't, most guys didn't make it. And so that's saying, this is, this is saying, the chances that any one man would, would be mortally wounded in one battle were small. In the entire allied armies in the First World War, only one man in nine was killed or died as a result of wounds. Okay. That's all the people. That's all the people, that's the people in the rear with the gear, it's the people in logistics, it's the people that are slogging food and ammunition up to the front lines. It's all the people that are back in England. Like in their desk.

• 59:25Jocko Willink?

  Writing up orders, it's everyone. It's like, bruh, you're kinda making this a little bit different here. Uh, number eight, religious faith diminishes fear. The men who believe in God's protection and in immortality may be greatly sustained in that period of fear before a battle. They can pray too, and for them prayer works as it has worked for so many men throughout the ages. Even the man alone in a shell hole is not alone if he feels that God is with him. All reports from the fighting fronts show that religious faith is an efficient enemy of fear. Many leaders encourage prayer before combat among their troops. Few men in foxholes say, they say are atheists. There you go. Loyalty works against fear.

• 1:00:10Jocko Willink?

  The man who lacks faith in God may nevertheless be controlled by a deep loyalty and responsibility to his comrades, to his unit, to his leader. Another important antidote for fear is belief in the cause of which he is fighting. Men must have a clear idea of what's at stake. Nearly all prudent men are afraid in the face of danger, but not so many of them are inhibited by fear or terrorized by it. Every emergency, every great danger to a group reveals many quiet heroes, and the greater the morale of the unit, the greater number of unpretentious heroes in it. Men will crawl out of foxholes under shellfire to gather up the remains of a shattered comrade because, because that is the sort of men they are.

• 1:00:52Jocko Willink?

  Affection and responsibility are not strangers to the battlefield, and they can overcome fear. Number 10, good physical condition works against fear. Tired, sleepy, hungry men are much more likely to be fearful than men in good physical condition. The tired man does not think clearly. He is prone to illogical fears, to belief and rumor than the rested man. The healthy man can do something about fear. The ill man lacks the energy to combat it. Stay in good shape, people. Knowing about fear reduces fears, and this is kind of what I already covered. So many inexperienced soldiers are afraid of being afraid. Fear itself is the great unknown of which they are fearful. And this is what I was talking about. If you don't know why you feel a little bit queasy, or why you feel nervous, or why you can't stop shaking. Then you're like, what's wrong with me? It's okay, dude.

• 1:01:36Jocko Willink?

  When soldiers know that fear in combat is natural, is highly contagious and almost inevitable, but that courage is also contagious, then part of the battle against fear is won. Now it goes into a section about anger, and again, I just want to hit this really quickly because, because it's emotion, right? And we, I often talk about you have to have control over your emotions. Anger is probably one of the more damaging emotions. Oftentimes in the civilian sector, it stems from ego. Your ego is what's driving you to become angry.

• 1:02:11Jocko Willink?

  Says here, anger like fear is emotional response to frustration. If a man feels that his freedom of thought or action is threatened, it makes him angry. And when is, when he is angry, he's likely to be aggressive, to be on the offensive. People, or sorry, place any obstacle in the path of man's strong desire and he's likely to attack it. So what's, what's interesting about this is that's all sounds good, right? Until you're in an administrative situation, you're getting angry and you're attacking people that don't deserve to be attacked. And you're making the situation worse. Fear and anger often blend. Apparent fear may mask anger, especially when fear is strong. The child may resent the order the bully has given him, but is afraid to say so, afraid to rebel. Pale and trembling, he carries out the order when he would really like to knock the bully down.

• 1:02:58Jocko Willink?

  Or apparent anger may mask fear. The commanding officer worried about the turn in battle. Afraid that the enemy will overpower his men, may bark orders, threaten, insult, and otherwise offend the men. He covers his own fears by authoritativeness, seldom realizing that he is doing so. Such a good little point. You know, when that person's losing control, I've seen this in so many examples. Cause when I was running trade at, you know, shit would be going sideways. And that officer would get mad and start yelling at people. The chief would get mad and start yelling at people. You're like, oh, here comes the breakdown. Cause he's not making good decisions, by the way.

• 1:03:39Speaker 01

  That's crazy.

• 1:03:40Jocko Willink?

  Yep. Did you see people yell in the, uh, in the nightclub industry occasionally? You had some, you were working for some chill people?

• 1:03:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, not in that capacity. No, not really.

• 1:03:50Jocko Willink?

  That's good. That's a good sign.

• 1:03:53Jocko Willink?

  Such blends of fear and anger probably occur most frequently when the situation arises anxiety, arouses anxiety. Anger like fear has the support of the sympathetic nervous system is also man's response to an emergency of any threat to a man's vital interest or attack upon them will arouse anger. Threaten or destroy a man's cherished property or his loved ones and his own pride and equally beloved self-esteem and you have almost inevitably an angry man on your hands. These are good things to pay attention to.

• 1:04:25Jocko Willink?

  Just think about when you hurt someone's self-esteem. That that can bring about anger. His anger tends to warp his judgment. Yep. For an angry man is rarely as wise as he is when he is calm.

• 1:04:38Jocko Willink?

  And his anger itself may be unreasoned.

• 1:04:42Jocko Willink?

  It has been said that a prize fighter sometimes tries to get his opponent angry so as to make him less skillful in his.

• 1:04:53Jocko Willink?

  Fighting. So there you go.

• 1:04:58Jocko Willink?

  And it goes on to say, just as all fear is not inefficient panic or terror, so not all anger is blind, useless rage or fury. Anger against the enemy aids in combat since it helps a man to take the offensive. Yet it is surprising how little soldier feels anger after the intense activity of combat has begun. There is also moreover a cool sustained anger that may motivate a man successfully for a long period of time. He resents perhaps the cruelty and injustice and originally un- unprovoked aggression of the enemy and he is determined upon vengeance. Such anger is good. Especially when combined with the peculiar kind of elation that comes from talks by able

• 1:05:39Jocko Willink?

  leaders before battle. It does not warp judgment unduly and is the cause of righteous action. Anger then. Properly aroused, directed and controlled is useful in the services. Hatred on the other hand is not useful. Hatred immobilizes since hatred is repressed anger. Hatred then is to be avoided except as it is accompanied by anger.

• 1:06:08Jocko Willink?

  So, there you go. That, that is anger. Once aroused, anger must be properly directed. You can utilize that, right? You can utilize that with your freaking workouts. You know what I'm saying? Uh, I used to do that with fighters. Like fighter would get mad because they're getting frustrated. Make him do some burpees. Like make him do something. Use that stuff. In any case, anger ought to be controlled by the angry man himself. Let him consider whether he understands fully the causes of his frustration so that he can choose the right persons for the blame. Let him not be hasty, but know what he does in anger and why he does it. All right, now we're going to get into this leadership section.

• 1:06:53Jocko Willink?

  And it says, "There's no skill that the armed forces need so badly as the capacity to lead men." This is true in any industry, by the way. They need it because it is vital to the working of the military machine and they are aware of this need because it is so inadequately supplied. There are not enough good leaders, not of men with the capacity to establish discipline, to build morale and integrate groups of men into efficient fighting machines, machines which work with little friction and stand up without breaking under the strain of combat. Now, what I love about this sentence or this whole opening here, you get the feeling that this is going to start talking about authoritarian leadership, right? Hey, we need someone that's going to put discipline, establish discipline, turn people into machines.

• 1:07:38Jocko Willink?

  That's what it's literally saying, right? That's used, even as I'm reading it, I'm like, damn, this is going to be some big trope into authoritarian leadership, which I know is wrong. So I keep reading. It says, "Through training and discipline, the army prepares its men to carry out its ultimate missions under command and according to plan." That is the military scheme. Plans can be executed by command only because there's discipline. Most persons think that commands are enforced by authority.

• 1:08:09Jocko Willink?

  But the relationship between leaders and their men is not nearly so simple. So there we go, we get saved, we get saved almost on immediately. A command to be effective requires not only discipline, but also morale, understanding and motivation. A command is not merely some words which act like a match to a fuse or a firing pin on a bullet. Command, effective command, means that the men who receive it, understand it, trust it and obey. Having been trained by leaders to understand, to trust and obey. Leaders have to do much more than issue orders. They must teach, they must inspire confidence in themselves. They must motivate action which will be carried out in spite of confusion and fear.

• 1:08:53Jocko Willink?

  Only by long, careful training can men learn to respond immediately and correctly to oral and written orders and oral commands. And only by long, careful training can men be trained to assume responsibilities of giving the orders and commands. Now we're getting close there. You know, it still talks a lot about obedience and following commands. And again, you're going to see that even though it's saying that it starts to shed light. It starts to indicate that that's not really what it's about. Command is like a motor nervous system for the army and the navy. And by the way, they keep, they keep using just the army and the navy. That's because the navy is, the Marine Corps is a part of the navy. And at this time, the air force was the army air corps. So that's why they just keep start talking about the army and the navy.

• 1:09:38Jocko Willink?

  As the nervous system carries action all the way down from the brain through the lower nerve centers to the muscles. So command proceeds from the commander in chief through the succession of commanding officers down to the soldiers and sailors who finally execute the actions. Since successful command depends on good leadership is equally true. That leadership also goes all the way down through the line, through the CEOs and NCOs. Every man from the corporal up is a leader and all the other men are least potential corporals.

• 1:10:08Jocko Willink?

  Follower ship is important too. And what it leaves out in that whole section right there is that.

• 1:10:17Jocko Willink?

  Leadership is not just down. You leadership is up too, which means I have to take input from the people on the front lines. I have to know what's happening. I have to understand what's working. They have to be able to pass that information back to me. Like the central nervous system. Let's face it, how much of your nerves are outgoing from your brain? Quite a lot of them are, but what about when you touch a hot stove? What about when you get cold? What about when you feel pain because you're getting arm locked? Right? Those things are incoming nerves. What about when it's light out? What is those things are incoming? So this is like talking about, oh, the this is only talking about one way that the nerves go. The reality, they go both directions.

• 1:11:00Jocko Willink?

  And the more going back to like the free fall example, the more sensitive you are to how these actions that you're commanding. What reactions those things cause is the better you're going to be able to lead. So we're in a little bit, you know, what I, I think they kind of have ideas of what they're trying to say, but I don't think they're already there. I don't think they're fully developed. I think they miss some of these important links. Here.

• 1:11:25Speaker 01

  And that's a actually.

• 1:11:29Speaker 01

  Huge point and especially that, that comparison analogy, right? The nervous system, you know, where you're like, hey, you know, your nervous system, sure, you're sending signals, sure. But you're getting inputs, but and when you think about it, technically, you're probably getting just as many, like literally not like one to one. As many signals back as you are sending out because like every step you take. You land on something like if you land on something soft, hard, slippery, like that's all input coming back.

• 1:11:55Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, even when I contract my arm on a curl. When I get to the top, I have to, it has to tell me that I made it to the top and now I need to stop.

• 1:12:04Speaker 01

  The whole deal.

• 1:12:05Jocko Willink?

  Everything.

• 1:12:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:06Jocko Willink?

  And so leadership is like a central nervous system, but the central nervous system goes more than just one way.

• 1:12:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, and that's even like, and we'll bring it down kind of to the ground level in a way where like, let's say your relationship with your friend, your wife will say, you know how they say, and of course, this is nothing new where it's like, communication is key or whatever. When we think about it, that's not just some trope, some thing that you say to sound good or whatever. It's true. Like the more that you, what you put out, you listen back. It's like you go back and forth, back and forth. Brother, the problem solving capability that can be developed through that kind of like honest, open communication back and forth, back and forth. Um, and thinking about it in terms of, of that, just what you said, where the nervous system is sending signals and it's receiving signals as well, equally as important.

• 1:12:51Jocko Willink?

  Yes, totally, totally. And that's why if you have, let's say in this case, husband and wife, and they don't talk, there's something comes up and they don't talk about it.

• 1:13:01Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:13:02Jocko Willink?

  And now guess what? It gets worse and it festers and now they have a real problem. Maybe they end up getting divorced. Now you might say, well, yeah, but you might argue about it. Hold on. Not if I'm talking to my wife and I actually listen to what she's saying.

• 1:13:15Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:13:16Jocko Willink?

  That's where, that's where the everything falls apart. She's talking to me, but I'm not listening and I'm just yelling back at her and now we're yelling at each other. Now we have a problem.

• 1:13:21Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:13:22Jocko Willink?

  We're not absorbing the information that's coming back in our direction.

• 1:13:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. And it's, it's especially when you think of it in terms of the maximum amount of effective communication that you can possibly send and receive, right? Where even the smallest of problems that come up, if one guy explains where, or one person explains where they were coming from, and maybe they, what expectations they had or whatever, then the other person just explains, this is before any fight, because there's no reason to fire anyone. It's a teeny tiny problem. And they, and then they say their part, open it honestly, because they're, they're not hostile at this point. They're like, well, I felt this and this person's listening to that as they're, you know? So now he, this person understands, this person understands completely, just understands like, okay, I see that. I understand. It makes sense, you know, kind of thing.

• 1:14:06Speaker 01

  But let's say, let's say one person be quiet and just whatever, doesn't say anything, whatever. And that happens. Now we have this little problem that's so easily solvable. All you gotta look, little things are easy to understand typically, but now you got a little thing that turned into. You think it's a bit, it feels like a big thing, but this is kind of really what it is. It's a bunch of little things that equal a big thing.

• 1:14:27Jocko Willink?

  And they're festering.

• 1:14:28Speaker 01

  Festering, all in the, and it takes on this life of its own. Now, when this person blows up because of all these little things, which now equals one huge, huge thing. They're gonna blow up and now it's kind of inaccurate. You know, it's not good because it took one thing to, to cause that blow up, right? So now you're like, okay, all those little things could easily have been solved over time. But now you gotta deal with them all at once, not to mention the, the added, the new attitude that from the other person's standpoint, because they don't have information, they didn't, you know, they didn't get it. Seems like real unnecessary, real mean, real this, real that, you know? So now you have that huge problem. Didn't have to be like that.

• 1:15:02Jocko Willink?

  No, no.

• 1:15:05Jocko Willink?

  Both directions. Communication's gotta go. Going on here, followership is important too. All leaders, as well as the privates, have to be led by leaders. But the dearth of followers is not so great as the dearth of leaders. Nevertheless, followership is also an art and has got to be trained. The development of morale in a unit is largely the training of followers. When you, now see, when I first saw that, I was like, oh, they're gonna talk about how a leader has to be a follower too. They didn't get, they didn't get there. They didn't say that. They talk about, hey, people gotta follow, you gotta train them to follow.

• 1:15:39Jocko Willink?

  Don't really love that. When you come right down to the bottom of the matter, leadership and followership are complementary. Now we get a little bit more. The men with good morale accept leadership and make it effective. The leader, on the other hand, has not only to give effective direction to morale, but he is also the most potent influence in building up morale. He has to both build it and use it. What then, may we ask, is leadership and what is followership? Little section here, leading and being led. Accepting leadership is easy and natural for most Americans.

• 1:16:12Jocko Willink?

  Okay. We're not a hundred percent sure on that one. By the way, you know, I was gonna say like, oh, different now. No, this is America. And these Americans that we're talking to, like, these are the same Americans that. You know, this is the Revolutionary War. Americans said, we're not paying an extra two cents for tea. Screw you, we'll fight. We'll give up everything and just fight for our freedom. So, accepting leadership is easy and natural for most Americans. Now, he says this, or the book says this. That is because they've been taught from early childhood to obey commands and to accede to requests. If you should stop a stranger on the street, point to the top of a building and say to him, "Look", the chances are that he will stop and look.

• 1:16:58Jocko Willink?

  That's pretty accurate. This is especially true if you say it in a voice of command, with a matter of authority, in a manner of authority. Such immediate unquestioned acceptance of command is called suggestion. A great deal of leadership depends on suggestion.

• 1:17:15Jocko Willink?

  And then it goes into this thing, which I'm not going to go through, because it starts talking about the extreme form of suggestion is hypnosis. And I think we'd have to do like a whole thing, because I need to get some kind of a professional hypnotist or something. Because I don't understand it very well, seems weird to me. Like, you can tell me I'm gonna act like a chicken or whatever, and then I actually act like it. Have you ever been hypnotized?

• 1:17:35Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:17:36Jocko Willink?

  Have you been to a hypnotism show?

• 1:17:37Speaker 01

  I've been to a show, I've been the subject, actually, I'm sorry, I wasn't the subject, I was assisting with the subject.

• 1:17:43Jocko Willink?

  It's like real, right?

• 1:17:45Speaker 01

  Okay, so, there's varying levels of like, the whole gig, the whole deal. Where, on a, this is from what I understand, on a scientific level, like the real deal, that certain people, it's a spectrum of people that are what's called suggestible. Yeah, so you get highly suggestible people, you can hypnotize them, where they can act like a chicken, where they'll feel actual feelings, pain, whatever, itchiness or whatever. And then there's people who, like, it just doesn't affect them.

• 1:18:18Jocko Willink?

  So, that's what it kind of says too. And then it gets into this here, it says, "The problem of leadership is the problem of social ascendance and submission." If we use these words in their technical senses, in every social relation between two people, there has to be a certain amount of adjustment. The most natural adjustment is for one person to assume leadership and the other followership. There are many different degrees of ascendance and submission in different people, and even in the same person in different situations. Take people as you find them. This is a very interesting idea. Basically, you know what I say a lot is subordinate your ego? That's what he's talking about here, like, well, that's what they're talking about here.

• 1:19:03Jocko Willink?

  Submission is like, I'm gonna subordinate my ego and listen to Echo. But they also have a different thing, which is ascendance, which is I'm gonna rise up and you will subordinate your ego to me. That sounds real harsh when I say it, but as we get in, it's a, it's a, it's an important thing that we should be able to do. I think this is gonna be accurate, you'll see as we read through it.

• 1:19:25Jocko Willink?

  Take people as you find them, and some are much more ready to lead than others, more ready to assert themselves, to suggest to others what they should do. It is an interesting fact, however, that, and a good omen for the need of the armed forces, that submissive persons can more readily learn to be ascendant than ascendant persons can learn to be submissive. At least that's true in America. Both of these traits, of course, have great military, what's, it's so, if I'm an ascendant type personality, it's harder for me to be submissive. If I'm a, if you're a submissive type personality, it's easier to teach you, hey, you can be ascendant too.

• 1:20:03Speaker 01

  And ascendant means essentially like being able to kind of step up.

• 1:20:07Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay. Ascendant means I'm gonna step up, but as we talk about all the time, if I lack humility, then I'm like, I'm not gonna listen to Echo, that's exactly what they're, look, I'll lead Echo. You wanna put me in charge, I got this, but wait, you want me to work for Echo? Not doing that.

• 1:20:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:20:21Jocko Willink?

  So it's, it's exactly, but if you, if you're in a submissive type personality, and they're like, hey, Echo, you know, we gotta put you, we want you running this program with Jaco, you're like, oh, okay. Whereas if you had an ascendant type person, hey, we want you to be under Jocko. You have to do that.

• 1:20:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:20:37Jocko Willink?

  So that's a pretty good point.

• 1:20:39Speaker 01

  That's interesting. I never, I don't know. I never thought of that. I never like that. I wouldn't have known the answer. Like if that was a multiple choice question, like, oh, what do you think is harder statistically or whatever, you know, whatever this is based on? What's harder? The guy to step up and lead if he's a quiet, submissive type or ascendant? I, I would not have known the answer. Yeah.

• 1:20:58Jocko Willink?

  Even from all the things that we've talked about in this podcast for the past seven years, you wouldn't have said, hey, as you, oh, you got arrogant Fred over here? And you say, hey, arrogant Fred, I want you to, you know, work for Jessica.

• 1:21:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:21:14Jocko Willink?

  He's like, no way I'm doing that. Whereas if you take humble Fred and you're like, hey Fred, we want you to lead this. We think you have the potential. He goes, okay, I can do that.

• 1:21:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I would say this. That's a good question. And I thought about that, but I, I just, I thought I'm kind of around people who know the game a lot right now. So they know to, you know, subordinate their ego. I don't know what the real world out there kind of looks like. It feels like each of them, like if one was harder than the other, no matter what the answer was, I would be like, okay, that makes sense. That makes sense. But for to find out that answer, it's like, huh, that's, that's interesting that that is distinctly the case.

• 1:21:53Jocko Willink?

  Makes total sense to me.

• 1:21:57Jocko Willink?

  Accepting the role of being led is discipline. Interesting use. While ascendant men do not accept discipline easily, they can nevertheless learn to accept it. And fortunately, it is not so difficult for men to be submissive in new situations where they lack a feeling of competence. That makes total sense. So it's easier if I show up and I'm going to be on the computer programming team. I'm not rolling in there like, all right, guys, listen up. Nope. I'm going to be, I'm going to be this submissive. I'm not going to be ascendant in that situation. I don't have any competence there. Then if ever they accept without difficulty, control by others who are competent, by men whose right to leadership is clear to them.

• 1:22:41Jocko Willink?

  So when I see someone that knows what they're doing, that's why competence is very important. That's why, you know, I, I went like one of the first times I talked to the troops at Trade at to the, to the guys. And I rolled in there and I had just had like a little notebook and I had six bullet points I was gonna talk about. And like we walked out and one of my buddies is like, dude, you're freaking squared away. I was like, what do you mean? He goes, dude, you just rolled in there and just put out word. And I was like, I was like, well, thanks, man. He goes, yeah, like I see you. You just have your notebook. You're just ready. And and it's like that little thing, that little thing is like, oh, he's competent. You know, like this is a little thing like, oh, I'm, yeah, I got some stuff to say. Here's what I'm, I'm not saying I know everything. But hey, here's some points. Here's what I'm looking at, but whatever. He's like, you're so freaking squared away, you know?

• 1:23:26Jocko Willink?

  And it's always nice, right? He was excited about it.

• 1:23:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:23:30Jocko Willink?

  So competence goes a long way.

• 1:23:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. I like the expression, put out word, by the way.

• 1:23:35Jocko Willink?

  Put out word. That's a big expression in the military. Now, here we get to some good stuff. In America, the best leadership assumes the democratic character rather than the character of unilateral suggestion. The leader does not demand obedience without explanation. If he is in a position to let his followers see the reason for his decision. So now we're getting into whether you, you know that somebody was like, hey, hold on a second, dude, that don't make sense. They're starting to put out some good word here. Nor does he arbitrarily make demands upon the followers as to the details of the action. Rather, he invites initiative, encourages cooperation instead of sub-operation, sets a problem,

• 1:24:17Jocko Willink?

  exhibits means for its solution in as far as they are known to him, and asks his subordinates to carry on from there. So it's like, hey, here's the mission. How do you guys want to get it done?

• 1:24:27Jocko Willink?

  Quite properly, he accepts advice from his subordinates, although he never transfers to them responsibility for his decisions. Perfect. This is perfect. We're nailing this. That means if I'm in charge and I'm like, Echo, how do you want to get this done? And you say, I want to attack from the west and then the attack fails. Like, oh, it was Echo's idea. No. Hey, it was my decision. That's what we did. It was a failure. It's on me. That principle works excellent in industry, works excellently in industry as well as with the direction of children. And there is increasing evidence that it works in the army and navy too. Well, thank you.

• 1:25:03Jocko Willink?

  Opposed to such democratic leadership is authoritarian leadership where the leader commands arbitrarily and the follower under threat of punishment if he fails executes the command without participation in the decisions or the exercise of initiative and carrying them out. Boom authoritarian leadership sucks. There is no doubt that discipline can be enforced this way as indeed it has been most cruelly enforced by the Gestapo in German concentration camps. There men, their men came ultimately to accept the Gestapo's point of view about the propriety of their own submissiveness. This kind of discipline however secures obedience, but not achievement for it is based on fear, not loyalty. The Germans do not use it in their

• 1:25:47Jocko Willink?

  armed forces. And we've gone through German armed forces manuals that clearly point this out. In the army, they expect leaders to encourage the soldiers to participate in solving problems, to use initiative in their accomplishment of their missions. To a certain degree, the German officer is asked to fraternize with his men in order to maintain morale and initiative in them, even though he must at no time break down their sense of his superiority and responsibility, nor their reliance on him for the ultimate decisions.

• 1:26:22Jocko Willink?

  So they, they definitely recognized in writing this that this authoritarian thing, that this imposed discipline was not the deal. It's not good. Did he say they encourage fraternization? Yep, like hey, you gotta get to know your people. You gotta let them come up with initiative. You gotta let them come up with problem solving. He says, "To a certain degree, the German officer is asked to fraternize with his men in order to maintain morale and initiative in them." That's what we're doing.

• 1:26:55Jocko Willink?

  So the good soldier or sailor accepts leadership in part by discipline. This means that the relation of the ascendance of the leader and the submission of the followers established that instantaneous obedience is thus always obtained even when the reasons for such obedience cannot be disclosed immediately. So, look, you and I have a relationship and we're working together and most of the time I'm telling you what's going on, but then all of a sudden I'm like, Echo, you need to get to my house now. You're like, Cole, I'll be there. That's not the norm. It's a lot of leadership capital I'm spending. Like if I just text you, hey, come to my house now. Hey, meet me at the studio in 15 minutes. Like, maybe I didn't have time to explain that we got a, you know, a news crew coming in and they want it, well, they want to meet with you or whatever. I didn't have time to tell you all that. It's going to cost me some leadership capital. That's not the optimal way to do it.

• 1:27:41Jocko Willink?

  The follower must have habits of attention and obedience. These habits must moreover be firmly rooted in his nervous system. They must have, they must become second nature to him. How are such habits formed? By motivation and practice, by practice, because this is a rough way to do this. By practice, you teach a dog to salivate when a dinner bell is rung for him, provided he really wants food. You simply always ring the bell before you give him food. At first, the bell means nothing to him and his saliva does not begin to flow until he sees food, but after many repetitions, this is the Pavlov's dog thing. That new relationship will not keep for life, but it will continue as long as the bell actually leads to what he expects. So as long as you continue giving food after you ring the bell. So it's basically saying like a little bit of Pavlovian training for your dogs.

• 1:28:23Speaker 01

  Classical conditioning.

• 1:28:24Jocko Willink?

  E-dogs, classical conditioning. Discipline that arises through drill and practice comes about in the same manner through the building of habits. And it goes into this pretty interesting thing. You know, you, you know, you see in the movies a lot when, when the military command is giving attention, right? You heard that, right?

• 1:28:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, no doubt about it.

• 1:28:43Jocko Willink?

  It just talks about how that is this fundamental thing that you learn and it's basic to discipline. Because when that happens, like the leader's going to say something, like it's a, it's a basic form of attention. And what happens is eventually you get to a point where that's not even being said anymore, but when the leader walks in, people are quiet. They're like waiting for the word.

• 1:29:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, uh, I've heard the expression ten hut, I think they say.

• 1:29:09Jocko Willink?

  Just a modified version.

• 1:29:10Speaker 01

  It's the same thing. Okay, got it.

• 1:29:12Jocko Willink?

  But I gotta say that when I got to.

• 1:29:17Jocko Willink?

  I don't know where this came from.

• 1:29:20Jocko Willink?

  But it's awesome. In the SEAL teams, you don't say attention on deck, which is what you say when the commanding officer comes on a ship.

• 1:29:26Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:29:26Jocko Willink?

  They just, they say on your feet. And then eventually it just became feet. So like the commanding officer will be like, feet! And everyone just stand up. Pretty cool.

• 1:29:34Speaker 01

  That is cool.

• 1:29:35Jocko Willink?

  Pretty cool. Your feet. Yep.

• 1:29:38Jocko Willink?

  So, discipline is calculated to ensure this preliminary attention by placing certain restrictions on behavior whenever an officer is present and appears to be on the scene.

• 1:29:49Jocko Willink?

  When the habit has become second nature, then it is part of the soldiers or sailors standard equipment. It can be taken for granted and be presumed when active thought needs to be given to something less routine. So, this is just like something you learn.

• 1:30:01Jocko Willink?

  When the boss shows up, you're gonna be quiet. And then it goes through this. Again and again, military success turns out to depend on good leadership. No kidding. No wonder leadership is considered important when good leaders are so hard to find and takes a longer train. Another thing which the follower contributes to the success of the leadership is his pride. A man who is praised can be more easily led than one who is blamed. When the leader criticizes, he will usually speak impersonally condemning poor work, not the man, leaving the man's pride untouched, letting pride work to make him do better job next time.

• 1:30:39Jocko Willink?

  The leader therefore tries to develop each man's belief in his own indispensability in the unit as he can do in the course of training by making special assignments to particular men. This is that whole thing I wrote about leadership strategy and tactics where I told all my guys they were the most important person in the platoon. And they were. It's not a lie. When there's a freaking wounded guy, the corpsman's most important. When we need fire support, the radioman's most important. When we're on patrol, the point man's most important. We get a gunfight, machine gunner's most important. I'm telling them all that. They're the most important guy in the platoon. We get into the attributes of leadership.

• 1:31:13Jocko Willink?

  And this is where they start to recover a little bit, or at least go further and more positively. There have been studies in of leadership in civilian life among children's group and in industry. In these studies, the authoritarian attitude of the leader has been contrasted with the democratic attitude. Authoritarian leaders have been retrained as democratic leaders with great success and greatly improved results in the effect of their leadership. Boom, I should just end the podcast right there. Authoritarian leadership doesn't work. And it gives some really good examples. It gives one about a foreman dealing with some union folks. Here it says this, "In a study of garment workers in a southern factory, the foreman had the job of training beginners.

• 1:31:58Jocko Willink?

  These foremen received eight hours of training from a psychologist in methods of increasing personal contact with the workers and of changing their attitude toward their men from an aggressive, high-pressure authoritarianism to a friendly and encouraging leadership. In this relation, the worker came to feel that the foreman was his friend and was working for him as well as for the management. The result of this democratic relationship was a definite increase in morale as well as an increase in productivity. Presently, beginners were able to learn in one week, which had previously taken five. This experiment shows that important changes in the ability to exercise leadership can be procured by even a little training of leaders." Just teaching people to be cool.

• 1:32:44Jocko Willink?

  Good leadership never creates slaves. It establishes the feeling of responsibility and initiative in those who are led. See, this is nailing it now. See, you probably had a couple of different people in the room. There was that one freaking jackass that was like, "You people need to just listen to me. If I'm outranking them, they should just lock it up and do what I say." There was an asshole like that in the room when they were writing this stuff. But luckily, the good leaders were able to put these sentences and these paragraphs in here. "Out of such attitudes come the best morale, the quickest learning, the most effective action." A subordinate does not need to feel inferior when his superior makes him feel that he's contributing

• 1:33:24Jocko Willink?

  voluntarily to the success of a common enterprise. In fact, the leader himself succeeds only when he assumes the role of commanding servant to his men and to the whole military enterprise. So that idea of servant leadership, and I forget who wrote a book about it, but there's a big popular book, servant leadership. Here we are in 1945. The commanding servant. And we covered a podcast on serve to lead, about the British leadership methodologies. Same thing. This is not a new idea. When you're in charge, you're not in charge. You're a servant to your men.

• 1:34:05Jocko Willink?

  What makes a good leader then?

• 1:34:09Jocko Willink?

  This is, I was a little nervous. It says, number one, authority.

• 1:34:14Jocko Willink?

  The leader starts out with authority. The military and naval systems give it to him. His uniform gives it to him. Authority is essential to discipline. It forms the background of all leadership. You're like, oh damn, this is not what Jaco talks about. It's definitely not what I believe in. And then it says, yet,

• 1:34:31Jocko Willink?

  most of the power that the leader needs in order to lead well is not given to him. He wins it for himself. He must win the respect and loyalty of his men so that they trust his judgment. He must lead, not drive them. He must build up their morale. Such powers depend on his own attributes, not on anything that goes ready-made with his rank. So they took back everything they said.

• 1:34:57Jocko Willink?

  Personal characteristics and attitudes.

• 1:35:01Jocko Willink?

  Good leader must be competent, which I pointed out a little earlier. He must know his stuff. Industry must work hard. Right? The men must feel that the leader shares the hardships with them. The leader must be decisive, confident. Must have a decisive, confident manner. The leader must always be ready to accept responsibility. Yeah, we're talking about extreme ownership.

• 1:35:30Jocko Willink?

  Soldiers and sailors are ready to be commanded, but they have to know what it is they have to do. The leader has to decide this. Not all those decisions have been made quickly, have to be made quickly. Often he can ponder the best course of action. He can take advice even from subordinates, but he must keep for himself all responsibility for his judgment. He cannot shift that to others.

• 1:35:51Jocko Willink?

  Often he has to make a decision, either after consideration and advice, or immediately in emergency, on insufficient evidence. He must learn, therefore, that good judgment is not tested by its success. Often, the best judgment on evidence at hand leads to action that fails when a different judgment might have succeeded. The leader must keep reminding himself of this truth, nor must he blame himself when the best possible judgment under the circumstances proves to have been the wrong one. This is why I wrote a book called Leadership Strategy and Tactics and talked about the iterative decision-making process, because if you don't have all the information, make a small decision and be ready to make adjustments.

• 1:36:35Jocko Willink?

  That's the, that's the move. Very seldom do you have to figure everything out in one shot and just make the call. You don't normally need to do that. You make a little call and you can make adjustments.

• 1:36:48Jocko Willink?

  Closely related to acceptance of responsibility is self-possession. The leader must be a man who can keep his head in emergencies. He must be able to control fear in his men, the gnawing fear that grows out of inaction in the presence of danger.

• 1:37:02Jocko Willink?

  Can he joke when he himself is frightened? He must be able to control frenzy, the wild, pointless, inefficient, and often foolhardy action that may take hold of panicky men. He must be able to keep his head to let his sense of responsibility put him above fear and panic, or at least must not show fear that fear grips him.

• 1:37:25Jocko Willink?

  Some men find they have this self-possession when they meet an emergency. Some acquire it through training and handling an emergencies and repeated experience with confusion and danger. There are doubtless many who cannot learn it. And they should be chosen, not be chosen to lead. So there you go. You have a little limiting capacity. You freak out all the time. Bro, you shouldn't freak out. You should train to not freak out. You should train to not freak out with everything that you do. When you're driving, when your printer breaks, when your kids do something stupid, when you do something stupid, like, you should train to not freak out. You shouldn't use freak out words. You shouldn't use words that are freaked out.

• 1:38:02Speaker 01

  What's a freak out word?

• 1:38:03Jocko Willink?

  Uh catastrophic.

• 1:38:08Jocko Willink?

  That's a freak out word.

• 1:38:09Speaker 01

  That is a freak out word, isn't it?

• 1:38:10Jocko Willink?

  Like failure. Like those kind of words. I don't say those kind of words. You know what, you know what would have to be happening for me to say something that's catastrophic? Uh burning fire in the skies with metal aliens attacking us. And even then I'd be kind of fired up.

• 1:38:29Speaker 01

  There's no reason to say it. It seems like, I don't, uh, look, my, my catastrophic scenario experience is very limited. Very little. Pretty much zero. But I even with my imagination, I'm thinking, hey, in a catastrophic situation, aliens, what have you, can I imagine Jaco saying, this is catastrophic? No.

• 1:38:54Jocko Willink?

  Not really, yeah.

• 1:38:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. Some catastrophic language.

• 1:38:57Jocko Willink?

  I mean, Jamie has told me some things where it's like gonna be a bad day for, or like a bad situation. Like maybe there's money and, you know, I've always been, okay, Roger that, you know, that my Roger, that's the best, um, the best term to use.

• 1:39:11Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 1:39:11Jocko Willink?

  In those, in catastrophic situations, but there's a, you're just not gonna be, remember we had a, a question on the underground? The guy said he had a catastrophic injury.

• 1:39:19Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:39:20Jocko Willink?

  And my immediate thought was like, oh, this guy's paralyzed from the neck down. This guy's lost a couple limbs. It turned out, what did he have? Like a broken finger or something?

• 1:39:28Speaker 01

  No, no, mine was a torn.

• 1:39:30Jocko Willink?

  Yours was yours.

• 1:39:30Speaker 01

  It was a peck. It was a peck, I think, if I'm not mistaken.

• 1:39:33Jocko Willink?

  Maybe it was a peck. Maybe it was a torn peck. But you know, for him, it was catastrophic. And I, as soon as I was like, oh, you got a torn peck? Like you can get surgery and get that fixed and carry on with the rest of your life? Like, hey, bro, that's not catastrophic. It seems catastrophic in your head. Go tell that to freaking Rob Jones. And he's like, what are you talking about catastrophic? I have no legs and I'm over here running thirty one marathons. What? Like, what's your problem?

• 1:39:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, so the deal, I mean, okay, so what, what, how did you say it? You said, don't use, what kind of language?

• 1:40:05Jocko Willink?

  Don't use panic.

• 1:40:07Speaker 01

  Extreme panic language. Panic language, yeah.

• 1:40:09Jocko Willink?

  It just sounds bad.

• 1:40:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, so catastrophic actually technically doesn't necessarily have to be a panic language, but it, that's a example of something you would use in, in panic language.

• 1:40:19Jocko Willink?

  No. I'm saying, don't use that language unless you can verifiably say that something is catastrophic.

• 1:40:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:40:28Jocko Willink?

  Like, if you were in charge of Silicon Valley Bank right now.

• 1:40:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:40:32Jocko Willink?

  You could be like, we've had a catastrophic situation. We just went BK.

• 1:40:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, but even that, I mean, I'm assuming if you said it the way you just said it, that's technically not panic language. You're just stating kind of a fact.

• 1:40:45Jocko Willink?

  Okay, but on whatever day it was, and you're talking to your, you know, the rest of your executive team and you're like, hey, this is a catastrophic situation. We've got to run. People are, there's a run on our bank right now and we are not gonna, we need to salvage what we can because we're going down.

• 1:41:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:41:01Jocko Willink?

  That, that would be a situation where you'd say, yep, this is a catastrophic situation. You know, uh, FTX, the, the crypto guy, right? That guy, I don't know what he was thinking because he just seems like he's out of touch with reality.

• 1:41:17Jocko Willink?

  Sam Bankman Freed. Right?

• 1:41:20Speaker 01

  Hell, yeah.

• 1:41:21Jocko Willink?

  See, he didn't, he, he, I don't, I don't think he actually recognized. I don't know. I'd, I'd have to dig more into the case.

• 1:41:28Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:41:28Jocko Willink?

  But he just seemed like he just was lost.

• 1:41:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:41:31Jocko Willink?

  And, and just super aloof and arrogant and thinking, you know, when people think they're super smart?

• 1:41:36Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:41:36Jocko Willink?

  And they think they can outsmart people. I think he's been like that for his whole life.

• 1:41:39Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:41:40Jocko Willink?

  And he's been building upon that and he's been getting away with it for a long time.

• 1:41:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:41:43Jocko Willink?

  So I think this was just another little thing that he was gonna scam his way out of in his mind. So he might not have even recognized it was catastrophic.

• 1:41:49Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, huh? Yeah. So yeah, seems like that could be the case, yes.

• 1:41:53Jocko Willink?

  I mean, he didn't really recognize that he was a dork.

• 1:41:58Speaker 01

  But it makes sense though, I made back to the original point where it's like, hey, don't use, um, was it panic language?

• 1:42:06Jocko Willink?

  Bro, don't do that.

• 1:42:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. So it's less about necessarily the, the actual words, but like under panicky situations, there's a bunch of words that, hey, man, let's not do it like that.

• 1:42:16Jocko Willink?

  It is about the actual words though. Like it is about, it's about the words, it's about the behavior. That behavior, those words are, are panicked behavior. Right? If you start using words like that, then it's a problem. And P, and by the way, now people, it's now it turns into the, the boy that cried wolf, right?

• 1:42:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:42:35Jocko Willink?

  Where when something really bad does happen, like it's, no one really is paying attention to you because you've been saying, saying that the sky is falling or saying that the wolf is attacking for the past, for previous parts of your life. And now you say something's a real problem. And it's like, oh. I mean catastrophic is catastrophic is a, is an, to me is like, first of all imminent.

• 1:42:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:42:59Jocko Willink?

  Right? Imminent situation. Cause I can get out of all kinds of stuff, right?

• 1:43:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:43:03Jocko Willink?

  Well, you know, I'm going to get out, I'm going to figure something out. We're going to make maneuvers. That's what we do. We're going to figure things out.

• 1:43:09Speaker 01

  What about the word critical?

• 1:43:12Jocko Willink?

  That's, that's, that's a stepstone, right? That's a stepstone towards catastrophic.

• 1:43:19Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:43:19Jocko Willink?

  Most, most cases not necessary.

• 1:43:22Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah. That's why I kind of thought of it. Cause you're like, when you made the boy who cries, cries wolf analogy. That's true. That's, and actually that's probably in, in my experience, which is almost none. The most common scenario of why this panicky or catastrophic type language can be so, um, like detrimental because you know how, I think you just said it today where if everything is a, an emergency, then nothing's an emergency or something like that.

• 1:43:52Jocko Willink?

  I'm, I'm sure I have said that. I'm certainly, that's a very common phrase, right?

• 1:43:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:43:57Jocko Willink?

  If, if everything's an emergency, nothing's an emergency. If everything's a priority, nothing's a priority.

• 1:44:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:44:01Jocko Willink?

  So like, stop.

• 1:44:03Speaker 01

  If everything's special.

• 1:44:04Jocko Willink?

  If everything's special, nothing's special. If everything's catastrophic, nothing's catastrophic.

• 1:44:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:44:08Jocko Willink?

  The only thing that's catastrophic is your, your leadership ability was to go downhill. So you gotta be careful about this. Right? You gotta be careful about this cuz then you end up, people just kinda shrug their shoulders and like, oh, Jaco's running around like a chicken with his head cut off. Man, we used to have some leaders like in the SEAL teams where you, they would panic about stuff. You know, dumb stuff and they're freaking out and you're like, dude, like, no one is listening to you right now. Stop, stop, stop. Just try and be relaxed. Try and

• 1:44:47Jocko Willink?

  self-possess. The leader is a man who can keep his head on in emergencies. If you can't keep your head on when there's like a a DV, distinguished visitor showing up, like in the, in the SEAL teams, like a DV might be showing up. That's the, the expression? Yep, a DV, like a distinguished visitor. So it might be a four-star general, might be a three-star admiral, might be a member of Congress, might be the Vice President or President of the United States. DV, DV showing up. And what do you do? Freak out, lose your mind? It's like, dude, what is wrong with you?

• 1:45:21Jocko Willink?

  And, and by the way, there's people that DV is like in Captain Insano comes out, right? Yeah. Whereas, you know, just like, oh, we got a message from the CO, he wants this. Like, dude, hey, man, commanding officer wants something, let's just get it for him. We don't know, you freak out. What are we doing?

• 1:45:40Jocko Willink?

  So let's maintain self-possession. I don't, you, I've never used this expression before, self-possession, but I like it. Yeah. A leader must have integrity and let his men see that he has it. Sincerity builds morale. Hypocrisy gets found out and destroys morale. The leader must play no favorites and let his men see that he plays none. Men of the armed forces want leaders who do not save the dirty work for fellows they don't like.

• 1:46:07Jocko Willink?

  Leader must work as hard as the men. Again, that's a leadership strategy and tactics. Finally, the leader must have teaching ability. This is a very interesting one. So when I don't, I don't say, maybe I need to add it to the list. The leader must have teaching ability. Soldiers and sailors have to learn in order to succeed. They know this and want a man who can teach them what to do and teach them to do it well. It's a very good point that I like. The leader's relations to his men, of course, and this is again where we get back into like, I'm like, thank you. You know, you could see that there were some different people in the rooms, you know? Colonel Pogue is in there with Colonel Hackworth. And Colonel Pogue's putting out some bad word. But then Colonel Hackworth comes in and says, of course,

• 1:46:53Jocko Willink?

  all of the leader's personal qualities have to do with his relations to his men. For leadership is that relationship. The leader must know his men, understand them, be loyal to them and proud of them. Must work with them and for them. There are, however, many other special rules which help in their relationship. And then it goes into using personal recognition, using praise, doing good credit, you know, how to give criticism properly. They talk a lot about giving criticism to the job, not the man. So if Echo's video is substandard, I don't say, Echo, you messed up this video. I say, hey, Echo, I think this video could be better. I'm not attacking you, I'm attacking the video. Just a good, good little point to remember.

• 1:47:37Jocko Willink?

  Uh, the men, and this is another where we, you know, Colonel, Colonel Hackworth, Colonel Combat will say, because Hackworth wasn't in the army yet in 1945. He was just getting in the army in 1945, I believe, maybe 1946. So Colonel Combat versus Colonel Pogue. Colonel Combat says, "The men need to know the reasons for what they do, whatever, whenever the leader knows the reasons himself, and such knowledge is consistent with military requirements. The need in maneuvers to know what it's all about." Sorry, they need in maneuvers to know what it's all about. See, people are supposed to know what's going on. They are not machines. Even though this whole book started off saying men are machines, they are not machines. They can think too, and like to know that their leader believes they can think.

• 1:48:22Jocko Willink?

  Soldiers and sailors are interested in a long time strategy, as well as immediate objectives. Many are concerned with the remote ideology of the war. All are vitally concerned with today's problems. These principles hold both in training and in combat. So yes, freaking men are supposed to know what's going on.

• 1:48:41Jocko Willink?

  Military leaders should train his men to expect surprises and reverses. Good, good call. The leader should have in mind the effects of mental strain upon his men. He should encourage his men in all devices that will help them to stand up mentally in combat. He should encourage religious faith in those who are to use it. He may even good naturedly encourage superstition. By not poking fun at it, and those men who find security from danger in that fashion. You got that lucky, uh, rabbit's foot. Cool.

• 1:49:11Jocko Willink?

  It is especially important that the leader should teach his men the right attitude toward death. He must speak to them as if the important thing were to live for the day. He must keep telling them that death itself matters much less than how you die. If you die, let your death count for something. He must teach respect for the dead. When affection for a comrade continues after death, a soldier fears his own death less. I was trying to think, oh, how's this relate to like a business failure? What's your attitude towards failure? Like if you're a sales guy and I'm like, hey dude, you go out there, go hard. You get some door slammed in your face, right on. You know what I mean?

• 1:49:55Jocko Willink?

  Like that kind of attitude towards failure. In times of danger or fear, the leader must plan activity. We know that already from that other chapter. Offense is the best defense in the realm of the mind as well as in grand strategy. The leader should try and give his men the attitude of perpetual offense. A good leader adapts his commands to his subordinates. He needs to have constantly in mind that particular men whose action he requires. The principle holds for the corporal and his squad, for the colonel and his staff. A few succinct words of command will do for one man, more elaborate explanation is needed for another. So you have to talk to people differently.

• 1:50:40Jocko Willink?

  And I might have to address Echo in a different way than I talk to Leif. Cause Echo might not care what the details are and Leif needs to know some details of what's going on. And a good leader keeps his immediate subordinates from feeling isolated from him. He keeps contact, be he corporal or colonel. His men depend on him and must know that he has not forgotten them and their mission. He makes himself available to listen to their personal problems and advises them to the best of his ability. So know your men. And then it goes into the leader as a symbol. Although the leader takes account of all these personal relationships between him and his men and uses them as motives in building morale and accomplishing missions, he is

• 1:51:21Jocko Willink?

  to men, he is to his men in the last analysis, a symbol rather than another man. He represents to them the authority to which they are willing, if they have good morale, to admit, to submit.

• 1:51:35Jocko Willink?

  Any final admonition to a leader should be, do not let your men down.

• 1:51:45Jocko Willink?

  If a man complains, do not tell him you don't like the service any more than he does. Such remarks destroy the man's confidence in his leader and discourage him from striving for advancement. The leader's rights to personal satisfaction are less than his men's.

• 1:52:04Jocko Willink?

  So your right to personal satisfaction as a leader is less than your men's. For the men depend on him to be what they think their leader should be. They want, they want to be proud of him and they may have to accept, and he may have to accept loneliness and many other discomforts in order to give them what they have a right to demand of him. He must find his satisfaction in his own pride as a successful leader.

• 1:52:31Jocko Willink?

  So there's the qualities of a leader. This section is called selection of leaders.

• 1:52:37Jocko Willink?

  It has been said that there can be no rigid system of selection of leaders because good leaders differ so much from each other in personality that there would be, that there would seem to be many different patterns of personality, each of which would succeed as a leader. Such a statement means, however, little more than that a few qualities are essential and the best leaders are still not perfect. So cool. Very hard to judge who's going to be a good leader. Must also be remembered that qualities of good leaders will vary to some extent with the character of the men to be led and the nature of the job. A good leader of college students or a good labor leader might not fit the military requirements. A good leader of a unit of one armies in one of the army service corps would not necessarily be a

• 1:53:20Jocko Willink?

  good leader of combat troops. Honestly, I kind of disagree with that.

• 1:53:26Jocko Willink?

  I kind of, I think that if someone truly is a very good leader, then they will be adaptable. The problem is there's very few very good leaders. So for instance, and so I guess I do agree with it. I said I didn't agree with it, but I do. You know, some, some companies, while they're in the startup phase, they need that cowboy guy that's making things happen, making deals. But then by the time it's time to go public, they need to get rid of that guy. He's a freaking, he's a liability, right? This happens. Uber, that's what happened with Uber. You had the leader of Uber and he was kind of like a cowboy making things happen, making deals, like doing things that were out, you know, illegal outside, but he was making it happen.

• 1:54:10Jocko Willink?

  But by the time they were going public, they're like, hey dude, you got to go, right? But the problem is that he didn't adapt properly. He didn't say, okay, I see, I gotta play a different game now.

• 1:54:21Speaker 01

  Why is that? Cause like the, this, the state, the current state, whatever that state may be, or whatever that current might mean. Like the, the company or the group or the organization is gonna behave in different ways throughout different phases, kind of a thing?

• 1:54:36Jocko Willink?

  The, I mean, especially the leader has to lead in a different way. Like when you, when you got a startup, when you start Uber or whatever, you got like 17 people that work for you. You know them all. You can like give them direct guidance every single day. When you have a thousand people, all of a sudden it's like, hey, you need to be a much more, much more versed, well-versed in decentralized command. You need to give, you need to give more simple, clear, concise direction. Like all those things come into play. You need to utilize the laws of combat more efficiently. When you're in charge of seven people, the laws of combat, you can kind of get away with stuff. You don't really need decentralized command. You can give complex orders because you can straighten people out. You can handle a bunch of priorities because you're not that big yet.

• 1:55:18Jocko Willink?

  The, the more people you lead and the bigger your operation, the better you better get at the four laws of combat leadership.

• 1:55:27Jocko Willink?

  And there's certain levels of, for instance, with the Uber thing, like professionalism.

• 1:55:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:55:32Jocko Willink?

  Like you can't, you can't be the same guy. And if, and if you're a really good leader, that's why I say I disagree with it. Because if you're a really good leader, you go, okay, time for me to be more professional, time for me to wear a suit. When I go to Wall Street, meet with bankers or whatever, instead of be like, oh, I wear a hoodie. You know what I mean? Like that kind of thing?

• 1:55:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, that makes sense.

• 1:55:49Jocko Willink?

  You have to grow up, even in a SEAL platoon.

• 1:55:52Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:55:53Jocko Willink?

  Like, as I went up the ranks, I had to adjust myself. And be like, I can't be doing that anymore.

• 1:56:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:56:00Jocko Willink?

  You know, and it was sometimes I'd be like, ooh, I shouldn't have said that. You know, because when you're an E5 and the E5 mafia and somebody screws up, you're like, hey, you freaking jackass.

• 1:56:10Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:56:11Jocko Willink?

  But when you're the platoon commander and someone messes up and you say, hey, you freaking jackass, it carries a lot more weight. You made him look bad in front of everybody. Like it's a, it's a problem. You gotta, you gotta become more mature.

• 1:56:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:56:21Jocko Willink?

  You know, not even necessarily more mature, but you gotta mature as a leader. And in the SEAL platoon, yes, that means you gotta become more mature.

• 1:56:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense, actually. Even, even like on a social level, you can kind of almost feel that play itself out where you can be with you and your two best friends. Hanging out, you can be swearing, you can say offensive stuff or whatever. But then what if you got you, your two best friends, maybe they're neighbors, maybe they, you know, and the group starts to get bigger.

• 1:56:45Jocko Willink?

  Oh, you're like, your best friend's wives are over now.

• 1:56:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:56:48Jocko Willink?

  And you're over there dropping F-bombs? Like, it's a problem.

• 1:56:50Speaker 01

  Exactly right. So yeah, you kind of gotta narrow it down. And that's a perfect way to put it. You gotta be more mature where everyone will accept your, the word you put out. It'll land on people, the more people, better. So ultimately you can have the correct influence on the correct amount of people, which is now bigger.

• 1:57:09Jocko Willink?

  Yep. That's the way it works. You gotta grow. So a good leader, and, and just like in a SEAL platoon, like in certain combat situations, you kind of want a guy that's a little bit more. Raw. But if that guy can then walk in to brief the general and be squared away, that's what we're looking for. If he walks in there and is like, hey, general, I'll tell you what's up, like you, oh, go record, go record me talking to my platoon. And then record me talking to the general. I'm the same person, but the language that I'm using is different. The, even the physical sort of gesturing I'm going to use is different. Like you, you're going to have to be able to play both those roles.

• 1:57:51Jocko Willink?

  And I'm not saying like, oh, you walk in front of the general and you turn into a totally different person and you're kissing ass or you are not. You know, if I'm saying to the boys, hey, we're to go freaking kill everybody. And I walk into the general and say, hey, we're really wanna, are looking forward to winning the hearts and minds. Like that's a different message. But if I say, hey, boys, we're going to go out and kill people and I tell the general, hey, listen, sir, we're going to be out there, we're going to eliminate the enemy wherever we find them. We're going to be on, on, you know, doing as much as we possibly can to interdict them. I'm saying the same exact thing.

• 1:58:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:58:21Jocko Willink?

  But I'm being professional.

• 1:58:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:58:24Jocko Willink?

  So now moving on, in combat, the best you can hope for is a versatile leader who can adjust himself somewhat to different kinds of men. This is what I just said. No leader can be for perfection for all educated and uneducated men will need different qualities for their leaders, strong, athletic, outspoken. Men and weak, sensitive, quiet men ideally should have different sorts of leaders to whom, now see, this is where I disagree. Like if you're a good leader, you can talk to the, what do they call them? Strong, athletic, outspoken men, and you can also talk to the weak, sensitive, quiet men. And by the way, you're going to end up on a SEAL platoon with both those kinds, maybe not weak, but sensitive, quiet guys for sure.

• 1:59:00Jocko Willink?

  The Germans have tried to test for initiative and responsibility by giving men actual military problems to solve in spite of inadequate resources. They want to see whether the men will give up, come back for help, or solve the problem in some special way. If you are given the materials to build a bridge across the stream and there is not enough materials, if the timbers are the wrong size or do not fit together, what will you do? You can cut down some trees to supplement the insufficient timbers or tie parts together when there are not enough spikes. There are possibilities in such procedure, but leadership is something greater than ingenuity in meeting emergencies. So that, even that doesn't answer the question.

• 1:59:37Jocko Willink?

  And then it says this, "The consequence of all this is that leadership can best be judged by actual performance under the conditions and with the kind of group in question." This is why I had the best job when I was running Trade Ed, because I got to put guys in the actual situation they were going to be in.

• 1:59:51Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:59:52Jocko Willink?

  And then you put them through judgment. It talks about how you judge people, how you would, how you would select leaders. You'd have to use judges, put them in the actual scenario, the type that they were going to be in, that the judges had to be competent, that's better to have multiple judges instead of just one. So it goes through that whole thing. And then we get into, "After the selection of leader gets to training of leaders, are leaders born or made, obviously both, a man who combines the intelligence and ambition necessary for him to be a competent and resourceful leader, with great interest in the welfare of his immediate associates, has the first requisites of being a good leader? Are intelligence, ambition, and human interest inborn or learned?" It depends on how you define these terms. And it goes to talk about some of the stuff we were talking about earlier.

• 2:00:37Jocko Willink?

  "The brightest of men are not able to exercise their intelligence when they are overfatigued, undernourished, in want of oxygen, fevered, or drunk. And they cannot make wise decisions if they are without experience in any given situation." And it says, "Most psychologists use the word intelligence to refer to the native or inborn capacity for learning and for adapting to the environment. Intelligence, in this sense, cannot be learned. It is inherited. But what a man does with his inherited intelligence, the extent to which a man is ambitious, or the extent to which he is interested in his fellows, depends on how he was brought up

• 2:01:18Jocko Willink?

  and even upon his environment at the present time." So you've got a certain level, this is, this is exactly what I talk about, leadership strategy and tactics. You get a certain level of blessing. You've got that, you've got that certain, certain level of natural gifts, natural talents in every category of being a leader. And then you've got to try and improve them. "Certainly, there are great differences in aptitude for leadership among men as they enter the Army or Navy. The question of whether these differences are the result of heredity or are the effects of early training and environment has no practical importance in the selection of men for training as officers." They don't even care!

• 2:01:58Jocko Willink?

  Leadership improves the experience. That's factual in most cases. Because you could get negative experience and you can become a worse leader, right? Leadership can be learned. Given some aptitude and enough motivation. That's totally true. Competence can be acquired with intelligence, motivation and practice. That's true.

• 2:02:21Jocko Willink?

  Interest in other men can be increased by motivation. And that means that the man who wants to become a good leader can make his men a special object of study. Teaching ability and clarity and confidence of command follow along. As soon as the would be leader has his attention fixed on what his men are getting from him instead of what he thinks he is giving to them.

• 2:02:45Jocko Willink?

  Civilian studies on training leaders in industry and in dealing with children all show that it is possible to learn by voluntary effort to take the followers' point of view and see from their angle and so to become more effective leaders. Boom. Hoo ya. Totally awesome statement. You can learn how to take other people's perspective and you understand the perspective of the people that you're leading, you will do a better job.

• 2:03:17Jocko Willink?

  Even decisiveness can be learned. If the would be leader cannot make up his mind quickly, let him make it up slowly, taking advice. Then when he has made his decision, let him announce it decisively and let him stick to it. I have a big question mark next to that because if the leader makes a bad call, he shouldn't stick to it.

• 2:03:35Jocko Willink?

  But you can get better at making decisions. I mean, when you, when we put guys through trade at, put them through land warfare, you would see them be a disaster in the beginning, couldn't make decisions. And then they start to learn how to make decisions and then they'd be good at it. It's freaking awesome. That's how I know this stuff can be taught because I taught it.

• 2:03:55Jocko Willink?

  The would be leader has best pattern himself on some skilled leader whom he knows well and admires. Yes, absolutely.

• 2:04:04Jocko Willink?

  He will be surprised to find how many of the accomplished leaders attributes he can copy. When he cannot copy the habits of thought, he may at least be able to imitate the manner and behavior of his model. Then appropriate appropriate habits though of thought may follow later. So you like basically act like that guy and then eventually hopefully you can become that guy. Are leaders bored or made? All leaders are made.

• 2:04:32Jocko Willink?

  Makes you think, oh, wait a second. And then it says, whether the aptitude upon which they build is inborn or learned cannot be said. Not all grown men have it. Okay, true. But those that have what leadership takes, even though they have never led can learn to lead. Yes, I agree 100%. Here, as everywhere else among military skills, the two keys to the creation of successful ability must be employed. Selection and training. Select potential trainers and lead them. There you go. And we're going to close this one out right now. The kind of a closing chapter, the use of psychology in war, but it's kind of just a good way to sum up what we've talked about today.

• 2:05:14Jocko Willink?

  Psychology is the study of acting man, of human thinking and behaving and of the underlying causes and conditions of man's thought and conduct. Thus, it is concerned with perceiving, feeling, learning, remembering, thinking and acting. And all and also with all of those social relations between men. How they feel about one another and act towards you towards one another. The armed forces are organized bodies of men. To make military organizations efficient, you have therefore to know about the capacities and limitations of men. About differences among men and how one man can be best at one job while another is best at a different job.

• 2:05:58Jocko Willink?

  And about the ability of men to have their abilities changed by training. You have also to know about men's motives and their personalities, about their adjustment in novel situations. About how they learn to like to do what they have to do. About how they about how and why they break down when adjustment is impossible.

• 2:06:22Jocko Willink?

  And you need to know about their social relations in leadership and followership in panic and accepting and spreading rumor.

• 2:06:31Jocko Willink?

  All that

• 2:06:33Jocko Willink?

  is psychology which the military man needs.

• 2:06:41Jocko Willink?

  And there you have it.

• 2:06:43Jocko Willink?

  Thinking about thinking.

• 2:06:46Jocko Willink?

  About what we're thinking. About what our boss is thinking, about what our team is thinking. That is psychology, which yes, the military man needs, but I'll tell you what, all human beings interacting with other human beings. We all need more understanding. So there you go.

• 2:07:09Jocko Willink?

  Echo Charles.

• 2:07:10Speaker 01

  Yes, sir.

• 2:07:10Jocko Willink?

  Speaking of need.

• 2:07:12Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:07:13Jocko Willink?

  We need to fuel ourselves.

• 2:07:14Speaker 01

  We do.

• 2:07:14Jocko Willink?

  We need to get fuel in ourselves. And that's why we have Jaco Fuel. What do you got? I'm fueled up right now.

• 2:07:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:07:23Jocko Willink?

  As a matter of fact.

• 2:07:23Speaker 01

  I'm with you. So yes, Jaco Fuel, okay, now did we shift a paradigm?

• 2:07:31Jocko Willink?

  Yes.

• 2:07:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. So yeah, so if you talk about energy drinks, we shifted that. Energy drinks are no longer unhealthy. Well, as far as we're concerned.

• 2:07:39Jocko Willink?

  Ours are not unhealthy.

• 2:07:41Speaker 01

  Not unhealthy, actually completely healthy. I gave one to a, we had a uh, we're doing some improvements at our house. The contractors came by. Super nice guy. So I offered him one. He was like, oh, man, I, I, I like, I like energy drinks. He's like, he looked at it. He said, Jaco, oh, I love Jaco. I was like, well, the good news about this energy drink, regardless of how much you love or don't love Jaco. That's the case, may or may not be. This energy drink is good for you.

• 2:08:07Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 2:08:07Speaker 01

  See what I'm saying? He was reading it. Yeah, he was down for the cause.

• 2:08:10Jocko Willink?

  Yep. Well, that's good. And I would say I'm kind of good for you too. Like that guy, that contractor.

• 2:08:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:08:15Jocko Willink?

  I think I'm actually pretty good for him too.

• 2:08:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:08:17Jocko Willink?

  You know?

• 2:08:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, the whole deal.

• 2:08:19Jocko Willink?

  I'm not throwing anything negative out there for him.

• 2:08:20Speaker 01

  No.

• 2:08:21Jocko Willink?

  He's not listening to me thinking, oh, I think I can skate on work.

• 2:08:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:08:24Jocko Willink?

  He's not thinking, oh, it doesn't matter if I'm healthy. He's not thinking, oh, if I'm going to be running some other people on my team, maybe I should be an authoritarian leader that barks or he's not saying any of that. So I think I'm good for him and I think my drink is good for him.

• 2:08:35Speaker 01

  I think you're correct. It's not like he came over, said he loves Jaco because you ran him into a ditch somewhere.

• 2:08:41Jocko Willink?

  There you go.

• 2:08:41Speaker 01

  See what I'm saying? You're obviously doing great work out here. I agree.

• 2:08:44Jocko Willink?

  Oh, that's a little bit extreme.

• 2:08:45Speaker 01

  I agree.

• 2:08:46Jocko Willink?

  Appreciate it.

• 2:08:46Speaker 01

  I agree.

• 2:08:47Jocko Willink?

  Thank you.

• 2:08:47Speaker 01

  Nonetheless, look, no more unhealthy energy drinks. No more, uh, shabby tasting energy drinks. Boom, got you. All good, all good. Good for you. Good for performance mentally and physically. Boom, we got protein as well.

• 2:08:59Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:00Speaker 01

  Ready to drink. Hey, look, we've been kinda, um, not neglecting, but we haven't been talking about the actual milk. Milk, the clean, great tasting, the pow pow.

• 2:09:08Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:09:11Jocko Willink?

  The pow pow. See, now you know. Now that you're a snowboarder, you know, now you know about that pow pow.

• 2:09:17Speaker 01

  All day. So, keep in mind, that is still a massive, massive option. But, yes, if you're interested in, in maybe saving some time, uh, having improved, convenient scenario with that same good taste.

• 2:09:29Jocko Willink?

  I'll be honest with you, man. Sometimes I just need to like something that I wanna taste something sweet and I don't want to mix up a whole milk and have it in the fridge. Get that little RTD hitter.

• 2:09:40Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:09:40Jocko Willink?

  They're just cold. They're just on the rocks, as they say, like cold.

• 2:09:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:09:43Jocko Willink?

  Cold in the fridge, just ready to roll.

• 2:09:46Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, ready to roll. The, the pow pow. Yep. That's what it's called now, by the way.

• 2:09:50Jocko Willink?

  If you get the milk powders, henceforth only referred to as the milk pow pow.

• 2:09:55Speaker 01

  Yep. The, that's when you're in the mood to like really kinda elaborate on some gourmet milk shakes. Which, hey, there is a time for that. Trust me. Oh, yeah. Boom. Perfect, uh, perfect amount of protein, whatever you choose. A perfect type of protein and it tastes super, super good.

• 2:10:11Jocko Willink?

  So, there you go. Go to jockofuel.com. You can get all this. You can get vitamin D3. You can join Warfarin Krill Oil, Super Krill. Cold War, just, you can get the goods, man. jockofuel.com. You can also get it at Wawa. You can get it at the Vitamin Shop, Military Commissaries, Hanaford, Dash Stores in Maryland, Wake Fern, ShopRite, HEB, Meyer. We be rocking in those stores. Hey, everybody that goes to HEB and Meyer, thank you. Thank you. You're, you're just making winners. And hey, if you go to these other stores, these other stores, especially the convenience stores, that's a battlefield. It's a battlefield in those convenience stores. There's big giant corporations and you know who I'm talking about.

• 2:10:52Jocko Willink?

  They pay millions of dollars to, when they saw a threat, as soon as they saw a threat, as soon as they saw the market share disappearing. Oh, it wasn't disappearing. As soon as they saw frac, portions of their market share getting pulled, they went on the offense and they got thermonuclear weapons called millions and millions and millions of dollars. So, when you roll into Wawa. Go and clean the shelves. Go let them know what's up. Let them know that we're here. And we don't care. Oh, you moved us down a shelf, take it out of high level. That's the kind of stuff they do. They do that kind of stuff. It's a battlefield, man. But Wawa is great. They brought us in there. But look, they're running a business too.

• 2:11:36Jocko Willink?

  So if you go into Wawa, if you go into one of these convenience stores, roll in there, get some. Don't get tricked into buying, you know, the poison. You don't want to let that happen. So there you go. Everyone out there, when you roll into these stores, we appreciate it. It's a, it's a, it makes our job easier. And it allows us to further expand. You're helping the people that don't have this stuff available right now, right? California is rough, man. Convenience in California is rough. It's a, there's a whole thing I'd have to talk through, but there's just a lot of disparate companies out here. It's not like one unified.

• 2:12:15Jocko Willink?

  Not like there's a unified chain, like this is the one that even the, the ones that you might think of off the top of your head. A lot of those are owned by very small franchisees that only have one or two stores and it's just, we're working on it. Out here on the west coast, we're working on it. Uh, but everyone that's in the Midwest, in Texas, that you're making it easier for everybody, for us to get this everybody. So thank you. Thank you for the support. And the stuff is clean, man. And by the way, I, I forgot to tell you, I forgot to bring them, but we have milk cookies, right? I, I, I just had back to back milk cookies before I came here, back to back. And, and the first one, I just had it and I was like, damn, bro.

• 2:13:00Jocko Willink?

  So they're good to go. They're good to go. I knew they were going to be good to go when Freya, my oldest daughter, she sent me a text like, milk cookies? I hadn't had one yet. She's like, milk cookies, GTG, GTG, good to go. So anyways, I had two before I came here. The first one, normal, dry, we'll say. The next one, I straight poured a glass of milk. There's a chocolate chip cookie, bro. I dipped it like I was drinking a, like I was eating a freaking whatever, Toll House. Only Toll House, you got downside. You're like, oh, can I have a Toll House and some type two diabetes, please? Oh, can I? Yes, no, no. My body said no. Then you crack open that milk cookie.

• 2:13:44Jocko Willink?

  So good.

• 2:13:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:13:45Jocko Willink?

  So good. And I put it, I dipped it in milk. Like I was in the next level. You know what you're having a, I don't want to say like an out of body experience, but when you're just, when you're like, you have a paradigm shift.

• 2:13:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:13:58Jocko Willink?

  You already brought this up, so I'm allowed to say a darky word. I had a paradigm shift where I was like, wait a second, I'm literally having a chocolate chip cookie right now. With milk.

• 2:14:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:14:09Jocko Willink?

  By the way, and I'm completely no downside.

• 2:14:14Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:14:15Jocko Willink?

  I'm getting stronger as I eat a chocolate chip cookie. That's a paradigm shift in the world, right? That's Nobel Prize. That's Nobel Prize, right?

• 2:14:23Speaker 01

  Um, yep, I can't refute that.

• 2:14:25Jocko Willink?

  Is it not?

• 2:14:26Speaker 01

  It is.

• 2:14:26Jocko Willink?

  Like I'm eating a chocolate chip cookie with milk and I'm getting stronger, smarter, faster, better, more healthy.

• 2:14:33Speaker 01

  Good for you.

• 2:14:34Jocko Willink?

  Good for you.

• 2:14:35Speaker 01

  Straight up.

• 2:14:35Jocko Willink?

  So is that not Nobel Prize? I don't know who runs that thing, right? Let's talk to him.

• 2:14:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:14:40Jocko Willink?

  Let's at least get it out there.

• 2:14:41Speaker 01

  See what up.

• 2:14:42Jocko Willink?

  See what up.

• 2:14:43Speaker 01

  I understand. And I feel the same exact way. And I'm with you with the milk thing. Like there's, there, I think I'm to the point in my life, thankfully, where.

• 2:14:52Jocko Willink?

  I'm gonna have one bef- when I get home right now, I'm having milk and cookies.

• 2:14:56Speaker 01

  You're thinking about it.

• 2:14:57Jocko Willink?

  Milk and milk cookies.

• 2:14:58Speaker 01

  Well, thankfully, um, you know, I don't have to enjoy cookies without milk right now. So milk is a necessary part of the cookie experience. So yes, milk, cookie, milk. Hey, look, if you're lactose intolerant, right? Get the lactose free.

• 2:15:13Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:13Speaker 01

  That's no problem.

• 2:15:14Jocko Willink?

  No problem.

• 2:15:15Speaker 01

  No problem.

• 2:15:15Jocko Willink?

  No problem with that.

• 2:15:16Speaker 01

  Still on the path on that one. And yes, you get to enjoy your milk and cookies.

• 2:15:20Jocko Willink?

  It is, it, it, I had a, it was a moment, like to eat the first one and be like, wait a second, and then just break out. You know, he got the, uh, the cups in your house that have like a wider mouth, like they're bigger.

• 2:15:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, Sam Harris gave us some good ones.

• 2:15:36Jocko Willink?

  Did he?

• 2:15:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, the, the waking up ones, they're, they're big. Oh, yeah. All day. I know. Cause I, I literally, the last milk I had was in one of those cups.

• 2:15:44Jocko Willink?

  Well, there you go. I broke out one of those, except for mine wasn't a Sam Harris one. Mine said, get after it. I think you might know what the one I'm talking about. So there you go. Milk and milk cookies. Uh, you can order those. I think those are only right now at jockofood.com. So go get some of those. They're freaking outstanding. And you can, you can, you can have a cookie and get stronger.

• 2:16:04Jocko Willink?

  And look, I'm sure someone's listening right now. That's part of the Nobel Prize thing. Let me know. Just let me know when, when you want me to show up. The team will bring the team in. Cause look, I don't get all the credit, right?

• 2:16:15Speaker 01

  No.

• 2:16:16Jocko Willink?

  I get the credit. It's not me.

• 2:16:17Speaker 01

  No.

• 2:16:17Jocko Willink?

  It's the team.

• 2:16:18Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 2:16:19Jocko Willink?

  But as the face of the, you know, the cookie, maybe I get the Nobel Prize for it.

• 2:16:23Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 2:16:23Jocko Willink?

  Nah, I'd pass it on to the troops. The troops are getting it, but someone deserves it. Alright, cool.

• 2:16:28Speaker 01

  You're so humble.

• 2:16:29Jocko Willink?

  Also, originusa.com. If you need jeans, if you need boots, if you need a jujitsu gi, which you do, if you're not training jujitsu, you should be. If you need hunt gear, go to originusa.com and get some American made gear. That's what you want. You don't want to support communism. You don't want to support tyranny and oppression. You want to pay for slave labor.

• 2:16:59Jocko Willink?

  You don't want that to happen. You want the highest quality. The quality's good, man. Clean right now. We're just getting better all the time. We're constantly looking and improving everything that we're doing. So, originusa.com. Get yourself some American made everything.

• 2:17:16Speaker 01

  It's interesting because the, there is this distinct difference and it seems obvious, but maybe not from moment to moment. But when you get a pair of jeans or whatever, something that's made where the person who physically made it, the person who designed it, the person who physically made it, like put it under the sewing machine and physically made it, when they care about every single one that they make, like I care about this one. I'm not punching the clock. I'm not surviving so I don't get whipped or whatever.

• 2:17:44Jocko Willink?

  Right.

• 2:17:44Speaker 01

  You know, I, I care about this pair of jeans or about this boot. Like man, if I, if I even mess up that one stitch, I care about that. Let me redo that one. So it's perfect. The, the jeans that you get, they're going to be way different.

• 2:17:57Jocko Willink?

  You know, we talked, the, the, I kind of breezed over it, but like the superstition thing that he talked about, like, hey, if you've got people that are superstition, don't make fun of it, support it. Well, there's some kind of like, what's the reality behind that? What is, what is the reality behind there's a little bit of a, of a curse? When you get a, when you get a, a pair of jeans from a sweatshop? That people were, were, were harmed, that the environment was harmed to make. You, look.

• 2:18:25Jocko Willink?

  You may not feel that, but you might.

• 2:18:27Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 2:18:28Jocko Willink?

  And now, if you put on a pair of Origin jeans, you put those on and you know that those things were made by freedom. Right? And all of a sudden, you know you've done something positive for the universe and the universe probably knows that too.

• 2:18:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure does. True story.

• 2:18:41Jocko Willink?

  There you go, man. Get that karma. Good karma.

• 2:18:44Speaker 01

  Good karma.

• 2:18:44Jocko Willink?

  Right? Is that a thing?

• 2:18:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a thing.

• 2:18:47Jocko Willink?

  I think it is.

• 2:18:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, yeah, if I, if I don't know you and I give you, and I'm in a bad mood and I give you the stink eye.

• 2:18:55Jocko Willink?

  Hmm.

• 2:18:56Speaker 01

  Intuitively, the chance of you giving me the stink eye back, pretty high.

• 2:19:00Jocko Willink?

  Hmm.

• 2:19:01Speaker 01

  So it works in a nutshell.

• 2:19:02Jocko Willink?

  Hmm. I always think of it from like a leadership perspective.

• 2:19:06Speaker 01

  I don't doubt that at all.

• 2:19:07Jocko Willink?

  Like, oh, you go around treating people bad.

• 2:19:11Jocko Willink?

  Karma?

• 2:19:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:19:12Jocko Willink?

  Is gonna come back and get you.

• 2:19:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:19:14Jocko Willink?

  You go around treating the environment bad, karma's gonna come back. You go around treating your employees bad, karma's gonna come back and get you. That's what's gonna happen.

• 2:19:21Speaker 01

  My dad had a saying. He said, he wouldn't say it all the time, but every once in a while, he'd say, he would say, bad things happen to bad people. So, and usually under these circumstances, when you just, you know, like, look, we all have that little evil man inside of us even as little kids where it's like, hey, you wanna get over or you wanna like,

• 2:19:40Speaker 01

  it, it takes a lot of work to exercise the high road or something like this, right? Where, so you know, you're gonna do the, you know, you're gonna seek revenge or you're gonna, you know, bully your little brother as a case maybe.

• 2:19:50Jocko Willink?

  Hmm.

• 2:19:51Speaker 01

  And sometimes you gotta get reminded that, hey, like, that, that short-term gratification from your little evil deed that you think is like harmless or whatever in the grand scheme of things, is what the grand scheme of things says. Bad things happen to bad people. Just don't forget that.

• 2:20:06Jocko Willink?

  BC, BC has spoken.

• 2:20:08Speaker 01

  Put in outward.

• 2:20:09Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 2:20:09Speaker 01

  As we might say. Nonetheless, yes, it's true. It's, it's a very, uh, uh, it's a thing for sure. Also, Jafar's store, you wanna represent? We're all on this path together. You know, varying places in the world, whatever, but we're on the same path.

• 2:20:22Jocko Willink?

  Hmm.

• 2:20:23Speaker 01

  Varying versions of the path, varying speeds on the path, but we're all on the path. If you wanna represent on this path.

• 2:20:31Speaker 01

  Where you can get your shirts and hoodies and teats, uh, hats and whatnot. Choco store.

• 2:20:36Jocko Willink?

  There's a new shirt you've been telling me about for the shirt locker.

• 2:20:39Speaker 01

  Shirt locker. Yes. Yeah. Should I reveal it?

• 2:20:42Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, reveal.

• 2:20:42Speaker 01

  Okay, so it is a shirt. Here's the story behind it. Typically, all the shirts from the, okay, there's a shirt locker. That's the subscription scenario. You get a new shirt every month. So here's the thing, and I usually just say, okay, the designs are, whatever I say about the designs, they're cool. But what I don't always say is, all designs have a story behind them, all of them, every single one. We call them layers. This one, this particular shirt is a shirt, it's, uh, it's pretty simple. It has the, you know, the logo, the, you know, the representative stuff. But on the bottom of the front, upside down, there's a passage, if you will, written, says, what are you doing right now? So it's upside down at the bottom of your shirt. So if you're sitting down especially, and you, you're looking around and you look down,

• 2:21:26Speaker 01

  it's gonna, that message is gonna be loud and clear just for you. What are you doing right now? Especially if you're sitting.

• 2:21:31Jocko Willink?

  Sounds like you're watching Netflix.

• 2:21:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, sitting down somewhere. Exactly. So just a little reminder, some of us, we like that prompt, you know, it helps.

• 2:21:38Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, there you go.

• 2:21:39Speaker 01

  But yeah, if you, yeah, if you want to, uh, check all this stuff out, you like something, get something, it's on choco store.com.

• 2:21:44Jocko Willink?

  There you go. Subscribe to the podcast, subscribe to choco underground.com, subscribe to our YouTube channel, get psychological warfare. Check out Origin USA's YouTube channel, check out Juggle Fuel's YouTube channel, YouTube channels going on. Flipsidecanvas.com, Dakota Meyer, making cool stuff to hang on your wall. I've written a bunch of books. A novel, Final Spin, a bunch of leadership books, a bunch of kids books, six kids books. Did you know that? Six children's books, more coming. Mikey and the Dragons, All the Way, the Warrior Kid books, there you go. About Face by Hackworth, check that book out. I wrote the foreword to the new version of it, which is an honor to be able to do that.

• 2:22:25Jocko Willink?

  And then, of course, Extreme Ownership and the Dichotomy Leadership, wrote with Leif Babin, Leif Babin and I also have a leadership consultancy. We solve problems through leadership. Go to Islamfront.com.

• 2:22:37Jocko Willink?

  For details, if you want us to come and help your business, if you want to come to one of our live events, check that out. We also have an online training platform. The demand signal for leadership training is so high, we couldn't meet it. So we made a online training academy for leadership and life. Go to extremeownership.com. If you want to take ownership of your life, if you want to take ownership of your world, if you want to take ownership of your business, we will teach you. Extremeownership.com. Also, if you want to help service members, active and retired, you want to help their families, you want to help Gold Star families, check out Mama Lee's, Mark Lee's mom, Mama Lee. She's got a charity organization, does unbelievable

• 2:23:17Jocko Willink?

  work. Go to AmericasMightyWarriors.org if you want to donate or you want to get involved. And don't forget about HeroesAndHorses.org. We got Micah Fink, right now, no one's heard from him for 72 days. We got one satellite transponder that said, he is alive, he is doing well, and he is now dressed in a mountain lion's skin, and he is making progress out in the wilderness. If you want to connect with us, Echo's at Echo Charles on the social media. I'm at Jocko Willink. But just be advised, algorithms looking to grab you. So don't let it happen. Also, thanks to the folks out there in the ultimate leadership position, those in

• 2:24:02Jocko Willink?

  the military around the world facing the toughest challenges and moving forward toward those challenges to protect us in this world. And the same goes to our police, law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, Border Patrol, Secret Service, all first responders. You all step up to face challenges every day and lead. So we thank you for keeping us safe. And everyone else out there, pretty early on in this book today, we covered the fact that fear and anger and frustration and any emotion can be diverted from flight to attack.

• 2:24:45Jocko Willink?

  And it gets diverted by you. You're the one that gets to divert it. You get to decide whether you run or whether you fight. You get to decide to decide whether you curl up in a ball or you curl your fist to brawl.

• 2:25:01Jocko Willink?

  Whether you surrender or decide to go and conquer. That is your decision.

• 2:25:08Jocko Willink?

  And I recommend you make the decision to get up and get after it. And until next time, this is Echo and Jaco out.