431: You'll Get The Political Leadership You Deserve. With Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

>Join Jocko Underground< https://www.jockounderground.com/subscribe Bobby Kennedy Jr. comes from an illustrious political family. The son of Senator Robert F. Kennedy and the nephew of President John F. Kennedy, Bobby Jr. was a lifelong Democrat but became increasingly estranged from the party in the 2010s as it drifted away from its traditional values. He made his final break on October 9, 2023, when he announced his candidacy as an independent for President of the United States. 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 431 with Echo Charles and me, Jocko Willink. Good evening Echo. Good evening.

• 0:09Jocko Willink?

  We rode behind the gun carriage. Uniformed soldiers and sailors with fixed bayonets marched slowly before the caisson as rows of drummers pounded a mournful beat.

• 0:24Jocko Willink?

  The grim sea of people on Pennsylvania Avenue was utterly silent but for the occasional wail of anguish. Behind us was a long file of black limousines carrying all the other members of our clan.

• 0:40Jocko Willink?

  Behind them, the sidewalk crowds stood nine deep all the way from the White House to the Capitol Rotunda where Uncle Jack would lie in state.

• 0:53Jocko Willink?

  Mesmerized, I studied the riderless ebony funeral horse that followed the caisson with empty boots mounted backward in the stirrups. The symbol of a fallen prince looking back over his truncated life.

• 1:10Jocko Willink?

  The gelding's name, I learned, was Blackjack after General Pershing. He was tall with the fiery temper of a thoroughbred stallion and his rioting against the poor soldier who struggled to cling to his bridle earned the horse national attention over the next two days.

• 1:31Jocko Willink?

  Blackjack never stopped bucking, furiously throwing his head and dancing wildly as his sleek coat shimmered black in the cold November sunlight.

• 1:41Jocko Willink?

  I could see the Army brand on his neck.

• 1:46Jocko Willink?

  I had a million questions.

• 1:50Jocko Willink?

  Our mother told us that Jack was in heaven with God and with God's help, he would watch over us and take care of the rest of the country.

• 2:07Jocko Willink?

  More bullets reach my world. As with Uncle Jack, there were many omens. Shortly after my father announced his candidacy, Jackie confided in Arthur, "Do you know what I think will happen to Bobby?" The same thing that happened to Jack. There is so much hatred in this country, and more people hate Bobby than hated Jack.

• 2:31Jocko Willink?

  Like most children, I saw my father as invincible. But having lived through Jack's assassination and other violent deaths, I knew he was at risk.

• 2:43Jocko Willink?

  Nevertheless, I understood that violence was not going to deter him from his course. We had been raised to live life fearlessly and to fight for our principles without regard to personal danger.

• 2:59Jocko Willink?

  The bullets found him as he reached out to shake the hand of a $25 a week Mexican busboy, Juan Romero, in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel.

• 3:14Jocko Willink?

  My father died, surrounded by his fiercest supporters.

• 3:23Jocko Willink?

  We placed my father's flag draped casket in the last car of the train, resting it on velvet chairs in the dining section, high enough so that the crowds lining the tracks could view it as it passed.

• 3:38Jocko Willink?

  Two million people lined the tracks to bid my father farewell as we moved through the ghettos of Newark, Philadelphia, Wilmington, and Baltimore, and through the rolling countryside of Pennsylvania and Maryland. The morning multitudes slowed the train so that a two and a half hour trip stretched to seven hours.

• 4:02Jocko Willink?

  Among the vast crowd that lined the tracks were whites, blacks, Orthodox Jews, and Hispanics. Uniformed soldiers and Boy Scouts saluted the passing train. Cops and firefighters stood at attention alongside long-haired hippies and tie-dyed adolescents in Catholic school uniforms. Black militants sporting giant afros waved clenched fists. Catholic priests, brothers, and nuns stood with hands folded, including a half a dozen sisters perched on the bed of a yellow pickup truck. A team of little leaguers halted its game to salute us.

• 4:43Jocko Willink?

  Others, including honor guards from high schools and VFWs and American Legion halls, held flowers, or flags, or signs, reading "Goodbye Bobby, God bless the Kennedys. We will miss you Bobby. And so long Bobby." I could see onlookers crying, covering their faces, and kneeling with clasped hands. In the countryside, people held babies high in the air, and shouted, "Pray for us Bobby."

• 5:26Jocko Willink?

  And those are some excerpts from a book called "American Values", which is written by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. And this book chronicles one of America's most prominent families. A family that has served, and sacrificed, a family that has led, and followed, a family that is surrounded by both commendations and controversy.

• 6:01Jocko Willink?

  That family is the Kennedy family. And it is a privilege to have the author of that book. The son of Robert F. Kennedy, the nephew of John F. Kennedy here with us tonight. To share his experiences, his lessons learned, his values and to discuss his decision. To follow his family tradition into the political world.

• 6:33Jocko Willink?

  Robert, thank you for joining.

• 6:35Speaker 01

  Jocko, thanks for having me. I go pleasure to be with you.

• 6:41Jocko Willink?

  So I grew up in New England and I heard about your family as long as I can remember. And it's incredible to be sitting here talking to you, just knowing the lore behind your family. And, and believe me, I heard from all sides, I heard. Every bad thing that could be said about your family and every good thing that could be said about your family and everything in between. And so it's, it's definitely was very interesting to go through this book and hear your perspective. And the way things, the way things looked through your eyes, through your life and pretty amazing to, to, to. Be able to experience it through the book, what you experienced, at least to some extent.

• 7:27Jocko Willink?

  So um, let's talk a little bit about this and, and you know, it's interesting and I was kind of telling you this before we. Before we started recording, like I said, I'm from New England. And I guess I'm old enough, I'm 52 years old, but there's a lot of people that. Might not fully understand. The family itself. So a little bit about the family. So you're born 1954. Georgetown University Hospital.

• 7:54Jocko Willink?

  Your grandparents, Joseph and Rose, Rosa Kennedy, and she's the daughter of John Fitzgerald, otherwise known as Honey Fitz.

• 8:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, he was the first Irish Catholic mayor of Boston. There was actually a, he was the first Irish Catholic ghetto mayor. There was a hand-pick Irish Catholic mayor before him who was kind of a tool of the Brahmins. The Brahmins were, as you know, in New England, they're the kind of, they're the Yankee class, the original, sort of the descendants of the Puritans who run New England. They call the, the wealthy ones are called Brahmins, the poor ones are called swamp Yankees. And I know you knew a lot of them growing up in

• 8:45Speaker 01

  Maine. They run the country stores in all those towns and, and sell lobster. So, but, but my grandfather, Honey Fitz, was, he had a beautiful singing voice, and he, which is how he got the name Honey Fitz. And he was, my grandmother, my great-grandmother, Josie, whom I spent a lot of time with when I was a little kid, hated politics. And so he relied on his daughter Rose, one of his three daughters, to escort him, essentially,

• 9:27Speaker 01

  to be his escort in political events. And she was a beautiful piano player. And he would have these famous torchlight parades where he would have mules pulling a flatbed trailer. They had a piano mounted on it. She would play the piano and he would sing his favorite song, his signature song with a sweet ad line. And he'd sing these patriotic songs, and Irish songs, Italian songs, French, Canadian songs, to the crowd. And she would play, and then he would give a speech. And he was elected, he was elected mayor, he was the first mayor, he was elected to Congress. And he was kind of one of the reigning, he

• 10:11Speaker 01

  had my uncle's seat in Congress, later inherited by John Kennedy.

• 10:17Speaker 01

  And he was a reigning political patriarch, a boss in for a long time. His contemporary, my whole family came over from Ireland in eighteen forty-eight, at the height of the potato famine. And they arrived here with nothing. One of my, my great-great-grandfather was a cooper. He was a barrel maker. And then his son owned a saloon, which was one of the common things that the Irish did. The Irish came over from, from, from Ireland, where they had been a colony of the British for six hundred years.

• 11:01Speaker 01

  And they were not under, under the law, they were not allowed to practice laws or practice any profession. They weren't allowed to learn to read or write in some jurisdictions, some time periods. I had a, I actually visited my ancestral home over there and there was an article about a priest who had been hanged for teaching some of my ancestors how to read in what they call the hedge schools, these secret schools behind the hedges. And they weren't allowed to own land or participate in politics. So when they landed in the United States, they took to politics like a starving man takes to food. And they became, you know, very adept at it.

• 11:46Speaker 01

  And they took over Boston essentially. But my, my, so my great-grandfather on one side was Honey Fitz, John Fitzgerald. My great-grandfather on the other side was Patrick Kennedy. And they were both in politics. Patrick Kennedy was in the legislature. He was a political boss in Boston. And their children married. My grandfather, Joseph Kennedy, was, he won the mayor's cup for best baseball player in Boston. And he ended up going to Harvard. He was one of the first Irish Catholics to go to Harvard. He then became a bank examiner during the great, he was the youngest bank president in the country at age twenty-six.

• 12:30Speaker 01

  And during the Great Depression, or just before in the twenties, he made a huge amount of money on the stock market. He got out in nineteen twenty-nine, just before the crash. And during the depression, he was one of ten millionaires in the country. People say that he was a bootlegger. He was not. And I show that in the book and you know, all the people who've actually seriously examined that say, yeah, he had nothing to do with bootlegging.

• 12:58Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, he was, he had distribution rights for some whiskey, but that really kicked off after the, after prohibition was over, right?

• 13:05Speaker 01

  During, during prohibition, he, when they saw, you know, in prohibition was passed, I think it was the 16th amendment, 17th amendment, I forget which, but it was passed because enough states voted for it to put it in the constitution. And in order to get it out of the constitution, they had to have a certain number, I think 26 states had to vote against it. So when they got to around 25 and the other ones were about to topple, he, he went with Jimmy Roosevelt, who was FDR, Franklin Roosevelt's son, over to Scotland. And they brought one of the leading Scotch companies, Pinch, and they shipped the entire inventory to Canada

• 13:47Speaker 01

  and they put it in warehouses like two feet from the US border. So they knew that, you know, as soon as prohibition was over, they shipped it all in and they made a killing on it. And, and that was his, his only involvement with, with the liquor industry. But he was, he was the first SDC commissioner. He was the only guy from Wall Street who supported Roosevelt. So he was very powerful in the Roosevelt administration and he became the first commissioner of the Securities and Exchange Commission. He then became the ambassador to the Court of St. James, which is Great Britain. And my, my, his nine children were,

• 14:31Speaker 01

  were raised at least for those, that five year period in England. And that was right during the war and right at the beginning of the war. So they, you know, developed a lot of relationships over there. My aunt Kick, who was killed. In an airplane crash immediately after the war. I'm married into the biggest house in England, the Duke of Devonshire. She would have been the Duchess of Devonshire. Her husband was killed on the Maginot Line. I think three weeks into the war. Her brother, Joe Kennedy, my uncle, was killed during the war. After he completed all of his, he was in the Naval Air Force.

• 15:14Speaker 01

  He was, he completed, I think at that time you had to do forty two missions and then you came home, or something like that. And he committed, he completed those, he was on his way home. And they asked him to volunteer for what was essentially a suicide mission, which was flying the first flying bomb. So they had developed a remote control, the capacity to control the controls of a aircraft while it was in the air. They couldn't take it off. But you can control in the air. And so they loaded the plane with bombs.

• 15:53Speaker 01

  And they were sending it over to the submarine base in Norway, a Nazi submarine base in Norway. And it was supposed to explode on impact. But they needed a pilot to take it off. And then jump out in parachute before they hit the English Channel. And that's what he did. He volunteered for that job. There was a companion plane that was controlling it. And as soon as they turned the remote control on, the plane blew up and evaporated. And no part of him was ever found. That broke my grandfather's heart. He was kind of the golden child.

• 16:35Speaker 01

  He was the one, and my grandfather had ambitions, political ambitions for Joseph Kennedy. And his death, my grandfather never recovered from. Forty years later, if you mention his name, my grandfather would cry. And he had everything, he had every gift except for gray hair.

• 16:56Speaker 01

  He was, you know, he was good-looking, he was brilliant, he was charming, people loved him, and he, you know, he had a lot of, you know, personal courage, etc. His younger brother was Jack Kennedy, and during World War II, he served in the Pacific on the PT boats. His PT boat was cut in two by a Japanese destroyer in the Blackett Straits, near the Solomon Islands. It was a corridor known as the Tokyo Express, and his boat sunk. Two of his crew were killed, one of them was badly burned.

• 17:40Speaker 01

  He told that the burned crew member, I think about six miles, with a lanyard in his teeth, he'd been on the Harvard Swim Team, so he was a very strong swimmer, and he brought his crew to a little spit of the sand, where there were some palm trees, and they hid from the Japanese patrol boats for the next week. He was presumed dead, his family was told that he was missing, and actually presumed dead. He was hiding in that, on that spit of land, and at some point, some Solomon Island natives came by to gather coconuts, and they were climbing the coconut trees.

• 18:21Speaker 01

  My uncle came out of his hiding place, and the Solomon Islanders didn't like the Japanese, the Japanese were an occupying force. My uncle communicated with him, and then he carved his coordinates on a coconut, and the Solomon Islander put that coconut at the bottom of his canoe that was filled with coconuts, paddled about 20 miles across the Blackett Straits to the British base, and gave the coconut to the commander, and my uncle was then was rescued. And my uncle had that coconut on his desk during his entire presidency in the Oval Office, but I'll tell you something.

• 19:07Speaker 01

  At his inauguration, he invited the admiral of the Japanese fleet who had been piloting the, just commanding the destroyer that cut him in two. So I got to meet him there. But he also invited the two Solomon Islanders. And the British governor of the Solomon Islands was embarrassed by their appearance because they were barefoot, they never had shoes. They were not, I think they were wearing like loin cloths or something and they didn't speak any English. So he did not want to send them as kind of ambassadors from the Solomon Islands. So he picked two more presentable Solomon Islanders.

• 19:50Speaker 01

  And when my uncle met them, he was like, these are not the guys who rescued me. And he was furious at the British governor. Years later, my little brother Max went over with Robert Ballard, you know, the undersea explorer, who found the Titanic. And my brother was with him. They went over to find PT 109. And they found, you know, I think the engine block or something. They were not sturdy craft. And so, you know, there was not much left of it. But during that trip, he ran into the two Solomon Islanders who had rescued my uncle.

• 20:32Speaker 01

  And they were both wearing T-shirts that said, I saved John F. Kennedy. And Max says that when he met him, he fell to the ground and kissed Max's feet and he kissed his legs and he had tears coming down his face. And it was just an incredibly emotional and very, very moving moment for both of them. Anyway, funny story.

• 21:03Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's one of the many amazing stories. Um, I want to, I want to read a little bit from the book about, uh, well, about your grandfather, your grandmother, and then kind of what it was like growing up for you. My father, this is what your dad said, Robert Kennedy. My father went on to say of grandpa, what it all really adds up to is love. Not love as it is described with such facility in popular magazines, but the kind of love that is affection and respect, order, encouragement and support. He loved all of us. Our awareness of this was an incalculable source of strength. And because real love is something unselfish and involves sacrifice and giving,

• 21:44Jocko Willink?

  we could not help but profit from it. His feeling for us was not of the devouring kind, as is true in the case of many strong men. He did not visualize himself as a sun around which satellites would circle, or in the role of puppet master. He wanted us, not himself, to be the focal points. So that's a interesting, or I would say a different take than what a lot of people think. Also here, from the book, at Cape Cod, Grandma alternated her afternoon lunches and evening meals with different sets of grandchildren. It took courage to be late for a big house dinner.

• 22:25Jocko Willink?

  Like grandpa, she was prompt and rigid about decorum, elbows off the table, hair groomed, fork placed neatly next to the knife on our plate after dinner, et cetera, et cetera. Her love of learning along with her deep religious faith were principal remedies against materialism, which she declared eroded everything of value. She was an exemplar of platonic love of knowledge and beauty without the need to possess. Grandma wanted us to be well-rounded, interested in every aspect of life, including politics, music, art, science, religion, architecture, history, sports and languages. Over dinner of chipped beef, asparagus and angel food cake, she inquired

• 23:07Jocko Willink?

  about our summer reading, or instructed us on how to distinguish Doric from Ikon from I- Ironic. And Corinthian columns. She led us into discussions of topics ranging from local politics to African topography to Gaelic Renaissance. She would accost us on the compound lawn and grill us about entomology, multiplication tables, or the Stations of the Cross, or give us spot quizzes on history, astronomy, or religion.

• 23:38Speaker 01

  It was scary.

• 23:39Jocko Willink?

  That's, that's definitely.

• 23:41Speaker 01

  She had, yeah. She would, she'd read the papers every morning and she would also read all kinds of other reading material. If she, she saw an article or a poem, a stanza that she liked, she would clip it out and then she would pin it to her, her sweater. So she had all of these clippings, you know, flowing off her sweater. She looked like a Christmas tree and, and, and then she would go on long walks every day. She would walk probably eight miles a day. And usually she'd pick up one of the grandchildren to walk with her and, and then she'd quiz them on stuff. She'd read, read from these clippings and quizzes on French or Spanish or, you know, or American history.

• 24:27Jocko Willink?

  This is what you say about growing up that this kind of describes life as a, as a young Kennedy in this day and in that day and age. Every day we spent time on the ocean. My mother and father took us on Victura, a 26-foot wooden day sailor for a picnic lunch on one of the nearby islands, where we fished for sand sharks, scup, flounder puffers, and sea robins, gathered hermit crabs, periwinkles, and scallops, and, or dug for tasty steamers that betrayed their location on the tidal flats by squirting. With Captain Frank at the helm, we also took lunch outings on Grandpa's wooden cabin cruiser, the Marlin, crossing the Sound Monomoy or Cuttyhunk to explore the Elizabeth Islands and gorge from picnic baskets

• 25:11Jocko Willink?

  of Grandpa's favorite foods: lobsters with hot butter and lemon, corn on the cob, strawberry shortcake, Boston cream pie, baked beans, and clam chowder. We children talked and caroused up on the bow while grandpa sat astern with the grownups. Uncle Jack, my father, Teddy, my mother, Aunt Eunice, and Sarge Shriver. Gene and Steve Smith and Pat and Peter Lawford. Hyannisport was a magical paradise for me. I loved the endless palette of colors, the vivid blue sea, the vivid, the vivid blue of sea and sky, separated by rich green landscapes, peppered with roses and daffodils each in their seasons, the gleaming white houses and offshore, a panoply of brightly hued spinnakers running downwind.

• 25:56Jocko Willink?

  The ocean was always changing from blue to every shade of green to gray to and almost black to match the moods of the wind and sky. Here, surrounded by my family, I could indulge my obsession with the natural world. When I was 11, my father gave me a motorized aqua lung, a two horsepower compressor wedged in a styrofoam ring that bobbed at the ocean's surface, pumping air down a 15-foot umbilical hose into a mask, the perfect contraption for exploring the shallow waters off Hyannisport. I filled its tank with gasoline from the private gas pump adjacent to grandpa's garage and, wearing this apparatus, I swam with my little spear gun into dark caverns, the wrinkled rocks below the mile-long Hyannisport jetty.

• 26:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, that, that, that boat, the Marlin,

• 26:47Speaker 01

  was like a Hemingway-esque, you know, a cabin cruiser, mahogany. And I, I bought it in Capri and went during my honeymoon with Cheryl. We ended up staying at his house, he's a guy who owns Tom's Shoes. And, and we ended up going back on that boat every day and going to the Greek Islands. It was really like a magical, magical, you know, renewal of my youth.

• 27:20Jocko Willink?

  So that's the childhood. It's like, kind of amazing, amazing childhood.

• 27:26Speaker 01

  I was very lucky to have that. And, you know, during the White House years, every Friday afternoon, three marine helicopters would land on the football field. We had a football field in front of my grandfather's house where we would play every day. And there was a baseball field near President Kennedy's house, all these.

• 27:48Speaker 01

  All of the houses were, the properties were all attached to each other. So it was, and there's probably, even today, there's probably fifteen Kennedys-owned houses that are adjacent to each other in that town. There's a hundred and ten of us, a hundred and five of us last July 4th. They were there. My kids and all their cousins grew up kind of communally too. But when I was a kid, the US One would fly up to Hodes Air Force Base, which is on the Cape, from Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, and bring, you know, basically the whole White House. And my, and then they would get on three Marine helicopters, they'd land on the football

• 28:33Speaker 01

  field. And my father would get off, President Kennedy would get off, my uncle. My Uncle Steve Smith, who was the Chief of Staff at the White House, my Uncle Sarge Roberts, who was the Director of the Peace Corps, my Uncle Ted Kennedy, who was in the US Senate, who, you know, won Jack's seat after Jack won the presidency. And then their top aides, Dave Powers, who they call the Irish Mafia, Kenny O'Donnell. And they would all get off and spend the weekend at the Cape. And then there was people coming in, sort of celebrity guests, who they all had in their houses every week.

• 29:15Speaker 01

  Judy Garland would be there, Frank Sinatra, all kinds of, you know, people. My grandfather had owned one of the biggest studios in Hollywood, you know, in Pathé Studios, which later became RKO. And he made about a thousand films. And none of them, incidentally, very good, but they were kind of family films that, you know, for all these theaters that were popping up in every little town in the Midwest, and they needed something where there was nothing controversial happening. So, you know, my grandfather made Tarzan and all these, you know, very innocuous family films.

• 29:59Speaker 01

  But because of his contacts in Hollywood, he could get first run films and he had a theater in this basement. So all of the families would gather in that theater on Fridays and Saturday nights with their house guests and watch films. And, you know, after a day outside in the ocean, it was a very kind of magical, idyllic, idyllic childhood.

• 30:22Jocko Willink?

  And you're born in 1954, so when JFK is elected, it's 1960, so you're six, seven years old, something like that.

• 30:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:33Jocko Willink?

  I see pretty good memories of this.

• 30:34Speaker 01

  I was at the convention in 1960. I was at the convention in Los Angeles. I think there's a picture of me in that book. On the way home from the convention, we had a family airplane called the Caroline K, which my uncle used as a campaign plane. And I sat in the seat next to him during that ride. And there's a lot of us, you know, talking of pictures, I was talking intensely with each other on that plane ride. And he sent me a picture saying, and he signed saying, President gets his advice from all kinds of people. And I love Uncle Jack.

• 31:15Jocko Willink?

  And your dad was appointed as Attorney General.

• 31:20Speaker 01

  My father had been my uncle's chief counsel in the mafia hearing. I had attended the mafia hearings. I saw him grill Sam Giancana. I saw, you know, Joey Gallo. I was there when that happened. My mother would come and we'd sit in the front seat. So my father then in 1960 became the campaign manager for my uncle. And when my uncle won the presidency, he appointed my father to be Attorney General. And, you know, my father then

• 31:55Speaker 01

  You know, they then kind of got introduced. They were, he originally was really targeting the mob as Attorney General. That's what he was interested in. He, by 1962, civil rights had been their, became their biggest priority.

• 32:08Jocko Willink?

  You're a, once your, once your dad becomes Attorney General, then you guys moved to a different spot, um, called Hickory Hill.

• 32:17Speaker 01

  Well, we, we had moved there when I was two years old. So we moved there in 56.

• 32:23Jocko Willink?

  Okay. So you've been there for a while. But there's all the, all the time up in Hyannis Port was in, was in the summertime.

• 32:29Speaker 01

  That's in the summertime. But the winter, we were always in Hickory, Hickory Hill had been what was Nanny Bellum's house. It had been General McClellan's house during the Civil War. So it was, it was kind of Union Headquarters. And there was all kinds of Civil War artifacts that we could dig in the yard that my brothers and I, when we came off from school, we'd get shovels and just dig up the yard looking for stuff.

• 32:51Jocko Willink?

  Apparently the Green Berets came and, and built like a ropes course as well.

• 32:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, they, they built a ropes course, which is still there, by the way. I was there recently. And, uh, they built a really, a very dangerous ropes course. And we had a lot of people going to the emergency room. They had a, uh, they had a, they, um, they had a, a zip line. It went from the top of Hickory Hill down into a grove of pines. And there was no real way of stopping it unless somebody grabbed a tail rope on it before it hit the pine tree. And a lot of people got hurt, including Muhammad Ali, who got his face really wrecked in those pine trees.

• 33:32Jocko Willink?

  From the, from doing the zip line?

• 33:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, from doing the zip line.

• 33:36Jocko Willink?

  Okay. Uh, you also say in the book here, "At Hickory Hill, my life revolved around the seasons. In the springtime, it was rare not to come across a box turtle with its blood red eyes and brilliant patterned shell, or butterflies of a dozen species producing these explosions of colors as they danced among the wildflowers. Once teeming populations of bats, honeybees, amphibians, and flying insects have now dwindled to obscurity in Northern Virginia. But in those days, we could capture bats by lofting a bandana draped stone high into the twilight sky and netting the flying mammals as they chased the floating hanky down to the ground." Salamanders and frog eggs crowded every roadside ditch and puddle,

• 34:18Jocko Willink?

  transforming them into bubbling cauldrons thick with tiny polywogs. On weekends, I wandered nearby streams with David and Michael and my sister Carrie, searching for frogs and crayfish, snakes and mud puppies, or spent time with my little brothers digging in the yard for Civil War relics. In the summer, honeybees covered the clover in our yard, making barefoot play a hazard. David, Michael and I would capture a dozen or so in a jar, then let them go one at a time, triangulating them to track their hive, and then smoking them into sedation to get the honey without too many stings. On autumn weekends, we would often visit Camp David. While my dad conferred with Uncle Jack, we explored the mountain woodland, sometimes with Secret Service guards turning over logs and rocks, capturing red and dusky salamanders.

• 35:03Jocko Willink?

  Winter in those days still brought snow to Northern Virginia. David, Michael and I spent long days building bobsled runs on Hickory Hill, or skiing at a neighborhood neighboring farm that operated a small skeeto. We played pond hockey or practiced barrel jumping on skates, a once-popular sport that seems to have lost its mighty grip on the American imagination.

• 35:26Speaker 01

  Do you remember the days of barrel jumping?

• 35:28Jocko Willink?

  No, I never have barrels up. I'm not quite that old. I've seen pictures of it, and actually you don't skateboard.

• 35:34Speaker 01

  It was a crazy sport.

• 35:35Jocko Willink?

  What is it, you just line up barrels and jump them?

• 35:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, see how many you can jump with skates on.

• 35:40Jocko Willink?

  No wonder it didn't last very long.

• 35:44Jocko Willink?

  So, there you are, you're grown up, and again, it's a, you're, you're, like you said, it's, it's very clear in the book and you talk a lot about it, and obviously this leads to what you ended up doing in your life, but you were very obsessed with nature, spent all kinds of time in nature. And as you're living this sort of movie-like life, there's also what's going on in the rest of the world, and, and what your uncle is doing with the, in, in, as the president.

• 36:14Jocko Willink?

  1961, April, you got the Bay of Pigs happens. And you, you, the book is, has great perspective. You did obviously what you remembered, but also what you researched, what you knew, the stories that you put together. And some really interesting dynamics come out of the Bay of Pigs.

• 36:35Jocko Willink?

  Primarily, don't trust the generals, don't trust the CIA, don't trust the FBI.

• 36:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, my uncle was lied to by, you know, not only by the CIA, by the three top officials of the CIA, Alan Dulles, Charles Capella, who was the general military guy at the CIA, and Richard Bissell. And over the next year, he fired them all because of the Bay of Pigs. During the Bay of Pigs, they had lied to him, you know, Nixon had planned the Bay of Pigs. Nixon intended to be president at that time. He had planned the Bay of Pigs. And my uncle came in and said, my uncle felt very uncomfortable with it because, you know, why? He felt like

• 37:23Speaker 01

  Cuba, yeah, Cuba's a, this is before the Soviets were Cuba, you know, that rose later. But he said, yeah, we don't like the government in Cuba, but, you know, it's a little tiny island, and we don't get to choose what other people have as their government. And he also, he had grown up going back and forth to Cuba from Palm Beach. You know, they'd get on a boat and go over there and go to the casinos and stuff. And he knew that Batista was, who was, you know, who was overthrown by Castro, that Batista was a nightmare, and that the mafia, he invited the mafia into run the island, and he was oppressing, torturing people. And

• 38:03Speaker 01

  he was, he understood that Castro had been revolting against something real, and that the US was involved in that. So he had a more nuanced view of it. And he didn't think America, he didn't like communists, but he didn't think America should be telling other countries, should be bullying other countries into telling them what kind of governments they should have. And Capella and Dulles and Richard Bissell said, look, we've already armed these guys. They're trained. They've got, you know, weapons, and they're, they're dangerous. And if you keep them here, it's going to be a huge problem. You got to let them go.

• 38:44Jocko Willink?

  And these were Cuban nationals that were in America, training to go back and invade.

• 38:49Speaker 01

  Yeah. And they were all kinds of people. Some of them were, became very close to my dad, particularly one called Harry Ruiz, who was, spent a lot of time with us as kids. He went on, he had been an engineer. He had been with Castro in the Sierra Maestra. So Castro had come over in, I think, fifty-seven from Mexico. And they, actually, I talked with Castro. I spent a whole day one time, I spent a lot of time with Castro. One of the times I visited him with Cheryl and my kids, and we spent a whole day at his house, talking about everything, including the assassination, everything.

• 39:30Speaker 01

  And, you know, he's a, he's a really interesting guy. And, but, he said, he told my son, Aiden, who was then about ten years old, was asking him about, because we had, the day before, we went to the Cuban National Museum, and we visited the, the grandmother, which is the big ship, which is in the museum now. It's the, it's a cabin cruiser. I think it was like sixty-foot cabin cruiser. That, they had come over, they had gotten a hold of that. There was a bunch of revolutionaries, Cuban revolutionaries, training in Mexico. And they had all come over in fifty-seven and landed on the beach. There's sixty-three of them had been on that boat.

• 40:15Speaker 01

  My, my son, Aiden, said to him, said to Castro, "How did you decide which guys would come? Were they the ones who were most, you know, fervent about communism?" And Castro said, "No, we just brought the smallest people, because we wanted to fit as many as possible on." They were ambushed on the beach, and eleven of them made it up into the mountains of the Sierra Maestra. And from there, those eleven people created the Cuban Revolution. Three years later, they marched into Havana on New Year's Day, and, you know, and took the country. It was really an extraordinary story. And, um, and, but, one of those guys was a guy called Harry Ruiz, who was an engineer.

• 41:00Speaker 01

  He was just, he, he didn't like Batista. He wanted democracy. He had been very close to Castro. But, um, when Castro...

• 41:11Speaker 01

  Had declared that Cuba was going to be a Marxist society. He had turned against them, like many of the people who'd been in the revolution with him. And gone over to the other side, he had fled to the United States and then, you know, was part of this, this Bay of Pigs. Some of the other people were just, they were people who were involved with a mob, which was running the casinos. Or they were like bad actors from Batista's army. They were, you know, officers who were like bad guys. They were like killers, torturers, those kind of, so it was a whole mix of people. But a lot of them were very idealistic.

• 41:56Speaker 01

  My uncle didn't want any part of it. Because he thought the US cannot be involved in overthrowing the government of another country, that's not what we do as a country. So, so he was skeptical and originally their plan was to have the US Navy use amphibious vehicles to drop the men off. And he said, "We're not going to do that. The US government can't have anything to do with this." So they ended up getting a bunch of ships from United Fruit Company, which owned all the sugarcane fields in, in, that had been nationalized by Castro. They're the ones who dropped them, you know, who dumped them on the beach.

• 42:41Speaker 01

  My uncle said, "I want to make sure that you don't expect air cover from the United States military because you're not going to get it." And Dolce said, "Don't worry when we land over there." My uncle said, "How's this going to work? Because Castro has an army, 200,000 men. How are you going to get 1,200 men to overthrow him?" And they said, "We have the whole thing wired. And as soon as they land there, the nation is gonna rise up. We have people from every sector of the country who are gonna rise up and overthrow them." They were just lying to them. He also, you know, he knew a lot about military operations. And he said, "You're landing on a beach here.

• 43:25Speaker 01

  It's not like when Castro came and landed in the mountains where he could go hide. There's no place to hide here. It's a beach with a swamp." And they said, "Don't worry, we got the whole thing under control." So as soon as they landed there, and Castro met, I mean, knew they were coming, and they were dying on the beach. Dulles went back and said, "We need air cover." And my uncle said, "No." And my uncle later said, to his aides, they thought that I was a young president who would be terrified of having this, you know, this terrible failure, and would give them the air cover and send in the Essex, which was the aircraft carrier.

• 44:07Speaker 01

  And he said he wasn't gonna do it. He took public blame for the Bay of Pigs invasion. But privately, he said to his aides, "I wanna take the CIA and shatter it into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds." Then after that, he fired Bissell, Capell, and Dulles. And he tried, he wanted to appoint my father to run the CIA, 'cause he recognized the CIA was a huge problem for our country. And my grandfather said, "You can't do that. You can't have your brother as the head of the spy agency. It's got a bad look to it. The optics are all wrong."

• 44:51Speaker 01

  And he said, "It'll be like Stalin and Molotov if they were brothers." You know, they essentially were brothers. But, you know, you could turn that spy agency against the American Republic pretty easily. And you gotta make sure, you know, to have some daylight between you and the... Between the president, the executive and the spy agency, so they brought a guy called John McCone, who was a very pious Catholic, and he was a Republican conservative, and they were confident that he would end the monkey business over there. But in fact, McCone never knew what was happening there. Nobody ever told him what was really, you know, happening

• 45:35Speaker 01

  at the CIA. And, you know, the indications are Dulles continued to run it from a distance. And when my dad, when my uncle was killed in sixty-three, I came home at, the first thing my father did was to call the desk officer at the CIA and say, "Did your people do this?" That was his first instinct. The second call he made was to Harry Ruiz, this Cuban, who was at our house all the time. And he, Harry, Harry was then in Washington, DC with a famous writer who'd written a book about the Bay of Pigs, a famous American journalist. They were both in a hotel room, and my father said the same thing to him. "Did your people

• 46:20Speaker 01

  do this?" It was the Cubans, the CIA Cubans. And then, I came home, the early that I was pulled out of school, my mother picked us up. I was brought home with my brothers from Sidwell Friends. When I arrived at home, my father was walking in the lawn at Hickory Hill with John McCone. And we went down and hugged him, and McCone went back to the CIA. The CIA was only less than a mile from my house, so we rode our horses through the CIA every morning. My father took us on horseback riding, nine little kids horseback riding

• 47:00Speaker 01

  at six o'clock every morning before breakfast. And we always rode through the CIA campus. And McCone would come to our house during the springtime and summer to swim every day at four o'clock after he got out of work. My parents were close to him, and he, McCone was the first one to arrive at the house. And my father took him for a walk in the yard and said, "Did the CIA do this?" And McCone said, "No, you know, I don't know anything about it." But, so anyway, that was his first instinct. We had green berets in Dallas all the time. My grandfather, I mean, my uncle was very close to green berets. My uncle started the Navy SEALs.

• 47:44Speaker 01

  But he also, the green berets had been started earlier, but the Pentagon would not let them wear their berets. And my uncle ordered the Pentagon to change that rule. So there was this, we ended up going a lot to Fort Bragg. We saw the, you know, we ran the obstacle courses there, did the zip lines, and then they came to our house. And then one of the pastures, they created this really hairy obstacle course. And we had Cubans at our house all the time. When we rode in the morning, we would ride to the houses of some of the Cubans, because my father and my mother found homes for them when they came back to the country.

• 48:27Speaker 01

  And they made sure they got into schools, they made sure all of them could find jobs. A lot of them were put in the US military, the ones, because my father, you know, his job was to get all those Cubans out of jail. Castro captured 1,200 of them. And my father was, my uncle was heartbroken and said, no matter what the cost, we gotta get those guys out of jail. And so my father spent a year negotiating with Castro. And he sent two of his age, John Nolan and Ray, and John Donovan, who was this famous

• 49:10Speaker 01

  spy, who had been at the top of OSS. There's a movie about him. It came out last year about a deal that he made for a spy in East Berlin. But he was a famous spy. My uncle sent the two of them down to negotiate with Castro. They spent a year, every weekend in Cuba, and they went all over Cuba. They went to all, Castro would go to baseball games every weekend. And they, so they would go to the baseball games with Castro. He became very close to him. And they said that when he walked in the stadium, everybody in the stadium would jump up to their feet and cheer. And they were looking at that, and they said, this is not orchestrated. These people love him.

• 49:57Speaker 01

  And they told that to my father and my uncle and it started opening their eyes about Cuba. And the last day when my uncle's life, he had an ambassador at Verdadero Beach talking with Castro about détente and my uncle said, we don't care what kind of government you have.

• 50:19Speaker 01

  We want two things from you. One is get rid of any Soviet military in Cuba. Number two, stop your efforts to disrupt Latin American governments, Che's efforts and to disrupt the Latin American governments that were part of the Alliance for Progress. And Castro said, we need to talk, but we need to do it when Che is not around. So my uncle had an ambassador with him at Verdadero Beach the day that he was shot, talking about détente and ending the embargo.

• 50:56Jocko Willink?

  And they were making progress through that.

• 50:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:58Jocko Willink?

  You know, it's interesting. I wrote a book called Extreme Ownership and it's about when you mess up, you know, you take ownership of it. And that's an interesting fact. When your uncle, when the Bay of Pigs went down, there's some, and I forget the exact numbers, but there's some sort of, of report that came out that his, his approval numbers went up after the Bay of Pigs because he got on television and said, hey, I'm the senior guy. I'm responsible for what happened. This is my fault.

• 51:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:24Jocko Willink?

  And his, and his approval numbers actually went up when that happened.

• 51:27Speaker 01

  It was the lowest point of his presidency and he, he actually considered resigning at that time. He was absolutely heartbroken because here he was two months in office and he made this, you know, disastrous judgment call.

• 51:40Jocko Willink?

  But having been in the military, having been around politicians and, and the Pentagon, I can see how they're thinking, oh, wait, wait, listen, if we just get over there, we just, we get those guys on the ground.

• 51:52Speaker 01

  We hit the beachhead.

• 51:52Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, we hit the beachhead. Like he's going to have no choice. Of course he's going to say yes. He's going to give us air support. We get ourselves a nice little war going on here and we can, we can do whatever we want to do, whatever we need to do. You can see that. So for your uncle to say, no, it's not happening. And again, how can you portray that? You can portray that as Kennedy let those guys on the beach and didn't back them up. That's one way to portray it. The other way to portray it is, oh, Kennedy didn't get another war started. By saying, "Look, I'm not going to do this." And unfortunately, I guess they didn't have a good enough relationship to where they understood your uncle and that your uncle was not going to appease what they wanted to do.

• 52:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, and you know, they really thought he was a traitor. The Miami station particularly, which was the CIA's biggest station, it was run by a guy called Bill Harvey. And he hated my uncle after that, just despised him, and despised my father even worse. And it was the same group of people. It was David Atlee Phillips, who was the propaganda chief at the CIA. He did the 1954 coup in Guatemala where they overthrew Jacobo Benes, the greatest democratic leader in the history of Latin America. Again, it was the United Fruit. Interestingly, Dulles was the attorney for United Fruit and for Texaco.

• 53:21Speaker 01

  And so, he was overthrowing leaders, whoever screwed around with Texaco or United Fruit, when he became, he was at Sullivan Cromwell, and they were the attorneys for all these big corporations. And Ava Talbot's written, the best book on Dulles, which is riveting, is called Devil's Chessboard. And he says in that book that Dulles was incapable of distinguishing between US national interests and the mercantile interests of the corporations he had represented at Sullivan Cromwell. Well, that group of people in the Miami station were also part of this larger group with

• 54:04Speaker 01

  David Morales in Operation Phoenix, who were running the Vietnam War. The Vietnam War was completely a CIA enterprise. The CIA owned the provincial governments, and I think 60% of the provincial governments in South Vietnam.

• 54:25Speaker 01

  Were CIA agents who are actually running those provincial governments. So they were, it was their issue. Well, my uncle, they kept, they tried to get my uncle to go into Laos. And he refused and he negotiated a peace with the Soviets, which they considered treacherous. They tried to go to, get him to go into Berlin in sixty-two during the Checkpoint Charlie confrontation. And he refused. He was able to peacefully negotiate that with Khrushchev. And then they started corresponding with each other and he answered the hotline so they didn't have to go through the State Department of the CIA. They could talk directly with each other. I grew up in a house where there was a red phone.

• 55:10Speaker 01

  You know, my uncle's house. And we knew if, if we picked that up, Khrushchev would answer. Because they wanted to be able to talk directly with each other, which is what we should be doing with Putin right now. Oh, and then, and so, and then my uncle, they really wanted to go into Vietnam and he refused to send combat troops. He said, I'll send advisors. These advisors were mainly Green Berets. They were helicopter pilots, they were mechanics, sixteen thousand. It was fewer troops than he sent to get one black man, James Meredith, into Ole Miss. So that's what he had in Vietnam.

• 55:55Speaker 01

  And he heard that a Green Beret in, on October twenty-second, nineteen sixty-three, he heard that a Green Beret had been killed in Vietnam. And he asked Walt Roth, he said to Walt Roth, bring me a casualty list. Because they weren't supposed to be fighting. You know that. Their order, their rules of engagement are they don't participate in combat. But of course they do, because they can't resist it. So they, so he brought back a casualty list and seventy-five men had died over there.

• 56:30Speaker 01

  And my uncle said, that's too many. I'm pulling them all out. And that afternoon, he signed National Security Order 263, ordering all troops home from via all US military personnel out of Vietnam by 1965, with the first thousand coming home in December 63, beginning about six weeks later after the order. Well, 30 days after he signed that order, he was murdered. And then a week after that, LBJ, his successor, remanded the order. And then LBJ, after the Tokyo Gulf Institute, nine months later, sent 250,000 troops over, which they had been asking

• 57:10Speaker 01

  Jack to do, and he refused. And then it became an American war. And then, you know, Nixon came in and sent 560,000 over. 56,000 never came back, including my cousin, George Skakel, who died in the Tet Offensive. But, you know, that's, like you say, that's all mission creep.

• 57:31Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. You mentioned it quickly, but your dad and your uncle also went after the mob hard. And that was no easy task.

• 57:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, my father during part of his was shocked to learn about the mafia. And at that time, his employee, J. Edgar Hoover, was, J. Edgar Hoover was an interesting guy, right?

• 58:01Jocko Willink?

  Okay. Yes, he certainly was.

• 58:04Speaker 01

  Well, one of the things he did is he loved gambling, loved the horse, loved the track.

• 58:10Speaker 01

  And he was going to, he was going to the, he went, he took his, his partner, you know, in the modern sense, the word partner, to, on their vacations and weekends, he would take them to the, the track, the horse tracks in California, which were run by Mickey Cohen's mob. And he was getting markers from the mobsters. So his position was the mafia didn't exist. And, you know, my, he was furious at my father because my father was like obsessed with the mafia.

• 58:53Speaker 01

  My father, when I was a little kid, there was a lot of police departments that realized the mafia was running their towns. One of them was the Los Angeles Police, and they had a, you know, they had an organized crime division. The New York Police had an organized crime division, and they were infiltrating the mob, and they were, and my father would come home, he would go on raids with, of, you know, these, um, uh, card houses and gambling houses, and he would come home with these artifacts, and, you know, he gave me one night a, a pack of marked cards that they had confiscated, and, and a pair of

• 59:36Speaker 01

  red tinted glasses where, if you were wearing those glasses, you could see the patterns on the back of the cards, and if you memorized those patterns, then you knew what, you know, the cards were. But, my father was, you know, was in a war with, with Hoover during that time. And Hoover then, so, he was trying to prosecute the mafia, and, which he did. He had not only FBI, but US Marshals, and they were harassing Giancana. I think he did 650 prosecutions, including some of the guys who were involved in my uncle's death, Sam Giancana, Santos Trafficante, who was the Tampa boss, Giancana was the Chicago

• 1:00:21Speaker 01

  boss, and Carlos Marcello, who was the boss of, of New Orleans and Dallas. And Marcello was an interesting guy, he was a Tunisian, he was only about, I think he wasn't, wasn't even five foot tall, but he was absolutely homicidal. And, um, my father deported him twice. At one point, he dropped him, had an airplane bring him to Guatemala, and then a helicopter, and they dropped him in the middle of the jungle barefoot, because he was illegally in this country, you know, he was, was, was not here legally. And my

• 1:01:03Speaker 01

  father, and he was actually in trial when my uncle shot. And a lot of the people who were... involved in the assassination had deep ties to that, you know, to that New Orleans mob.

• 1:01:18Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's it's, and I usually say this when I'm reading from a book, I haven't said it yet, so I'll say it right now. There's so much detail in the book. I mean, the book is like 400 something pages long and you go into so much detail, so much research, so much memory. So get the book for these details, but that you really lay out this kind of conflict that I think a lot of people don't understand. How you have different, different departments, different organizations within the government that are at odds with each other. And like a real, like the most friendly of these is between, let's say, the army, the navy, the marine corps and the air force and they, they, they all, oh, they're trying to get a little bit more money and they're trying to get a little bit more manning.

• 1:02:02Jocko Willink?

  And so you have this sort of little rivalry where they're all competing. But it's, it's all very much in the clear. It's all very obvious to, to, to the world that this is what's going on. So, you know, they, the budgets are all in the open. But when you start talking about the FBI, you start talking about the CIA, you start talking about the marshals. And then you throw in the mob and you throw in the Cubans. It is like, it is, it is, it's mayhem. It's mayhem. And so that's what your uncle was up against and brought your brother in as well to, to go against. But it's, it's, you have all these competing and it's not really just competing for money. There also it's competing ideologies. And so you had J. Edgar Hoover, like you said, was an interesting person.

• 1:02:47Jocko Willink?

  And he's got his ideology that he's trying to protect and, and push. And that goes against what, what your uncle's trying to do in a lot of cases. And you brought up, you know, and this is a huge part of the book and a huge part of your, your family's legacy as well. And that is the, the civil rights movement that's happening. I mean, this was like. Again, it's mayhem. It's movies get made about these incidents. You talked about the Old Miss, getting James Meredith enrolled at Old Miss. What do you remember about that from a perspective of what's going on in the country? What does that look like?

• 1:03:25Speaker 01

  Well, that was all happening at Hickory Hill. So my, you know, my father would be, Hickory Hill was a satellite White House, and we had phones in every room with five lines on them, which nobody else had. I never knew anybody who had, you know, five lines on their telephone. And they were directly connected to the White House switchboard so they could literally get anybody in the country on the phone within minutes. But, and the, you know, there would be US Marshals in our home, there would be the entire civil rights staff in the White House, meeting in our living room or around the swimming pool. And having lunch and planning these actions, what are we gonna do? And I'd sit

• 1:04:06Speaker 01

  behind the couch and listen to them. My father, when important things happened, like when they integrated University of Alabama, University of Mississippi, or when they were fighting with Freedom Riders, my father would write letters to each of his kids and tell them what was happening. He also talked to us every night at the dinner table. And he'd either talk about history, he was an incredible military historian. And he would talk about the battles that changed history, you know, the Democenies and whatever, but, you know, all of these great battles. And he'd give us very, very vivid descriptions of those battles. But he also would talk about what was happening in the White House. And he,

• 1:04:47Speaker 01

  you know, I have a letter at home that says, Dear Bobby, today we nationalized the, we federalized the National Guard in Alabama, and we got six Negroes, the six Negroes into the University of Alabama. And I hope these troubles are gone when you go to college. So, you know, he wanted to keep us kind of updated, which his father had done for him on current events. And the story with my father, my dad and the civil rights movement, and my uncle, they grew up in Boston. And like you know, having grown up in New England, they're just...

• 1:05:34Speaker 01

  Civil rights was not an issue there. It wasn't even on their radar. They didn't know. People who had been, they didn't know what was happening in the South. They assumed that, you know, the blacks that they met, the very few that were in Boston and Roxbury, that, you know, their lives were much like other immigrants, you know. And, um, so they, they didn't, it just wasn't on their radar. And then during the 1960 election, um, they needed to win the South. Nixon and, you know, the South was going to be key to the election. That's why they chose Lyndon Johnson as the vice president, because that was the way to win Texas.

• 1:06:19Speaker 01

  But they were also worried about the other deep South states, which traditionally had been always voted for the Democratic Party with a solid, called the solid South. But during the Roosevelt era, whites in the South began defecting a little bit to the Republican Party and blacks started voting Democratic, some blacks, not a majority, but enough to change the elections. The few blacks who were allowed to vote, you know, they, there was a voting block. And, but the whites were more important. And the only way you could hang on to whites in the South was by expressing an antipathy

• 1:07:02Speaker 01

  for civil rights, either indirectly or through dog whistles or whatever. My, my father, who was the campaign manager, had made deals with three Southern governors, powerful governors, including Van Deveney from Georgia, that they would support JFK. And, but all of them had said, if you get involved with Martin Luther King, we're gone, we're out, because we can't stand up for, we cannot stand that, take that from our own constituents. So my father was kind of avoiding King and made sure his brother avoided King. Nixon was doing the same thing. And Nixon had been very close to King.

• 1:07:46Speaker 01

  They had a strong relationship. And Republicans had traditionally been on the side of blacks in the South since Lincoln and the Civil War. So. So in October of 1960, right before, a month before the November election, King gets arrested at a lunch counter sit-in in DeKalb County, Georgia. And he didn't even want to do it. He was pressured to do it by some young, you know, guys, radicals, John Lewis and others from the Southern Nonviolent Coordinated Committee, which is another group.

• 1:08:31Speaker 01

  And he reluctantly did it, and then he got arrested. And then he's in the DeKalb County Jail at four o'clock in the morning. Cops come into this jail cell, drag him out, they don't tell him anything, they throw him in the back of the police car. They head south, he's saying where I'm going, they won't talk to him. And he said, they brought him down into what he called cracker country, a place in Georgia where you could easily lynch him and nobody would complain. So, and what they were really doing, they bring him to a state prison, and they threw him in the state prison, but they didn't tell Coretta, his wife, where he was, and she was terrified. So she called Sarge Driver, my uncle, who was always involved in the civil rights issue.

• 1:09:16Speaker 01

  And she said, "I tried to talk to Nixon, who's then Vice President, could have helped her. He won't answer my phone calls." And that destroyed King's relationship with Nixon, that incident. He calls Sarge Driver, and she says, "Can I talk to the President?" Sarge then goes into my uncle's office, and his aides are in there, in the Oval Office. And Sarge says, "I want a favor from you, I've never asked one before. Can I talk to you alone?" Because he knew the aides would not let him make this call. The aides all leave the room, and Jack then hears the story and says, "Yeah, I'll call her." So he calls Coretta.

• 1:10:00Speaker 01

  My father then, a few moments later, finds out about it. And he goes to Sarge Driver angrily, and he said, "You just lost the election." And my father then goes home. He's out of here all changing because he's getting on an airplane. And he starts thinking about it, you know, that they arrested this guy for doing nothing. And now they moved him in the middle of the night, now they might kill him. And he didn't know much about civil rights, but he hated bullies. And in fact, when he had played football for Harvard and they had gone on the road and he had learned for the first time that blacks could not stay, a black teammate of his couldn't stay in the hotel. And he had raised holy hell.

• 1:10:45Speaker 01

  And then at University of Virginia, he had invited this black statesman Ralph Bunch to speak there and he learned about the segregation laws that he could not address an integrated audience. And he raised such hell at University of Virginia. And it was the first integrated audience in the history of the state and the state institution. So he had a sort of a sense of it, he just didn't have, you know, the whole view. So on the way to the airport, he starts steaming and thinking about it. He hates bullies. He gets to the airport, he goes to a phone booth and he gets the, he gets the DeKalb County Sheriff on the line at home.

• 1:11:27Speaker 01

  And he says, this is Robert Kennedy, my brother's gonna be president in a month. If anything happens to Dr. King, we will remember who you are and you will not forget it. And then he calls the judge and says, you know, says, has a similar conversation with him and he gets Jack to call the governor. And Jack calls Van Devener and says, can you get him out of jail? And Van Devener says, I don't think I can. And Jack said, well, listen to what I'm saying. I want you to try and then I want you to tell me, call me back and tell me what you have done.

• 1:12:07Speaker 01

  And the next morning, King was released. So King never made an endorsement, but his father Daddy King spoke, I think at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church that weekend on Sunday, and he had previously endorsed Nixon, and he changed his endorsement to Kennedy, and that word spread throughout the black community. And my uncle won the black vote, and because of that, he won the presidency because it was the narrowest margin in the history of our country at that time. So I think that was one of the things that kind of cemented the relationship, and then maybe just became partners with King in the civil rights movement.

• 1:12:49Speaker 01

  They, you know, they did the 1963 March on Washington with King. They handled all the arrangements, and that was the famous speech where King says, you know, "I have a dream," you know, "I have a dream" speech. And then my father had a very close relationship with King after Jack died, and, you know, when King was killed, my father gave this impromptu speech to the, in the Black ghetto in Indianapolis, and that was the only city that didn't riot that night. And it's attributed to the speech that my father gave. And before King died, my father and King collaborated on the Poor People's Campaign,

• 1:13:33Speaker 01

  which was to summons all the poor people in our country to Washington, D.C. And when, the day that we, you know, we buried my dad, we drove past these encampments, there were 10,000 men encamped on the Mall in Washington, D.C., and who, you know, both my father and King, who had died two months before, had summons there, and now both of them were gone.

• 1:13:59Jocko Willink?

  Um.

• 1:14:02Jocko Willink?

  Rewind, just to rewind a little bit, you talked about LBJ, you talked about Vietnam. Um, one of the quotes from your uncle was in the final analysis, it's their war. And that's why he had decided to bring everyone back from there. LBJ, I don't like LBJ. Um, I guess if I'm allowed to not like someone that I've never met before. I don't like him and I also throw into that basket, um, McNamara. And in the book, you seem to shine a light, a friendlier light on McNamara than I do. It, it, it seemed like maybe McNamara, um, was trying to do his best to control LBJ and just,

• 1:14:48Jocko Willink?

  he felt like if he didn't kind of go along with what LBJ wanted, LBJ would just get rid of him and someone else would.

• 1:14:55Speaker 01

  And drop a nuke on North Vietnam.

• 1:14:57Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:58Speaker 01

  He, I mean, that's always a dilemma and you know, it's a dilemma for a lot of the people who, um, who said, who were criticized for staying with Trump, you know, then who said, no, I stayed there because it would have been so much worse or other presidents, you know?

• 1:15:17Speaker 01

  Um, so I, you know, I, I don't know, history, I think is, history judges him like you do very harshly. And I think that, did you see the movie Fog of War?

• 1:15:27Jocko Willink?

  Yes.

• 1:15:28Speaker 01

  And what, how did you think he came out of that?

• 1:15:30Jocko Willink?

  I felt the same. I really.

• 1:15:31Speaker 01

  You felt, you looked terrible.

• 1:15:33Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I, and I, I just, yeah, when I, when I look at the Vietnam War and the books I've read and, um, McNamara's, what is it McNamara's follies, I think is what he lowered the, the, the mental or the, uh, the acuity score. So you basically had people that were mentally disabled, being accepted into the military. So they could fill the slots they needed. I mean, it just, it was just a disaster across the board. And, and the fact that they knew. You know, halfway through the war and that they that they weren't gonna win and they had, they knew they weren't gonna win and they still lost another 20 or 30,000 men. So, yeah, all those things make me really.

• 1:16:13Speaker 01

  Killed a half a million of them.

• 1:16:15Jocko Willink?

  And killed a half a million of them.

• 1:16:17Speaker 01

  After, after that, because they killed a million altogether.

• 1:16:20Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and the fact that LBJ during, you know, he, his whole, his whole, you know, he was in the military, but he kind of got in as a political person and he went on one operation, flying to bomb somewhere in the plane. He got a Silver Star from this. The pilot of the plane that saved the plane didn't even get a Silver Star and he got, so I just, yeah, I have a grudge against those guys, I guess.

• 1:16:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think he came from, I think, my father and uncle brought him into the Defense Department because he was a good manager. You know, he'd been the CEO of the Ford Motor Company and he was, you know, they wanted a, they wanted some Republicans in the administration. He had been a Republican. But my father really liked him personally and I, you know, grew up with him and his kids. What I would tell you, and I wouldn't differ with your judgment about him. I think, you know, there's a lot of different ways, as you know, of judging, you know, men and character and you can never be completely sure, but there's a lot of bad evidence against him.

• 1:17:24Speaker 01

  My father thought, my father called him every single night. I think I write about this in the book. Literally every night, and my mother says before he went to bed and said, "You gotta publicly resign." And, and McNamara would keep saying to him, "I can't do it if they, if I do it, they're gonna drop a nuke on, on Hanoi." So, you know, if, so who knows?

• 1:17:51Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:55Jocko Willink?

  You also have the, um, the, the, obviously that you, you mentioned it briefly, but the, the whole thing that went, happened in Berlin and then the big Berlin speech that JFK gave.

• 1:18:08Jocko Willink?

  Freedom has many difficulties and democracy is not perfect, but we have never pu- never had to put up a wall to keep our people in.

• 1:18:16Jocko Willink?

  Then, like you, like you mentioned, um, JFK gets, or JFK gets assassinated. What, what's going on in your world when that happens? I mean, what's going on in the Kennedy family when that happens? How do, how do things change? As anybody says, what do we, does it, does it strengthen our resolve? You know, I, I, I have a friend that's a ER doctor and he always tells the story that if a family has

• 1:18:47Jocko Willink?

  problems in, and something tragic happens to the, to the, to the family, like they, someone gets killed. If the family has some fissures, it can either explode the family and they come apart, or it can actually make them tighter and stronger and strengthen their resolve. It would appear from the outside that it strengthened the resolve of the family when your uncle got killed. What did it look like from the inside?

• 1:19:09Speaker 01

  I don't know, you know, I, I'd have to think that through because I think everything was happening all at once. First of all, my father was utterly shattered. He was bereft and he was, um, you know, he was staring out into space. He was trying to do his best to be apparent to us and I think, um, the one time that he kind of escaped from, um, the very grim thoughts that he was having was when he was with us, that he would play sports, we'd play football, we'd play in the pool. He started doing a lot of wilderness trips, um.

• 1:19:51Speaker 01

  With us, we started doing a lot of like mountain climbing. He climbed Mount Kennedy, the tallest mountain climb peak in the hemisphere. He took up whitewater kayaking, which we all learned when we were very, very young. This is a time when people were not doing whitewater in our country. And then doing other kind of extreme sports. He also, he was, he went through kind of a, I think, what it was a healthy philosophical reconstruction, where he never left the Catholic Church or his faith.

• 1:20:36Speaker 01

  But he kind of had this very simplistic belief that, you know, that good was rewarded here on earth, that, you know, that good would ultimately triumph over evil and that, you know, good people got some kind of reward here on earth, a tangible reward. And his brothers shattered all that. You know, anything he believed about, you know, a beneficent universe was now gone. And he had to, he had to reconstruct a philosophy that was much more stoic in its nature.

• 1:21:18Speaker 01

  So he started looking for, you know, outside of the Catholic faith. He read Shakespeare, he read the existentialists, he read the poets, he read a lot of the Greeks. And he immersed himself in the philosophies of Stoicism. I talk a lot about, you know, my father, two weeks before he died, he gave me a book called, by Camus, called The Plague. And that book is, that book, and I've talked about this before, but that book is about a, and he said to me with kind of a special intensity, I want you to read this book.

• 1:22:03Speaker 01

  And he would tell me that about poems or books all the time. But this time, there was something about how he said it, and then he died two weeks later. And so I ended up reading that book several times to try to unlock the key. Why it was so important to him. But the book is about a doctor in a quarantine city in North Africa. That where there's an unknown plague that is ravaging the city and people are dying. It's very high infection fatality rate. Nobody knows how to treat it. Anybody who comes into contact with sick people ends up sick and almost all of them die. And it's the story of a doctor who is of a conversation that he's having with himself

• 1:22:47Speaker 01

  about whether he should leave his quarters and try to treat people. And he's almost certainly gonna die if he does that. And there's nothing really good that's gonna come of it, of course, because he doesn't know how to treat them. Nobody does. And so what's the point of doing it? Shouldn't he just take care of himself? In the end, he ends up going and doing his duty. And he consoles people, he gives them consolation, he ministers with them as he dies and, you know. And Camus was an existentialist, but he was kind of the legatee of the existentialist world of the Stoic philosophy.

• 1:23:29Speaker 01

  And the Stoics believe that, you know, that life is kind of meaningless, the universe is absurd, but that somehow through individual character and acts of courage, we can bring meaning and order to a disorderly universe. And their hero was Sisyphus. Sisyphus is cursed by the gods to push a boulder up a hill for the rest of eternity. And he's gotta push it over. His mission is to push it over that edge of the cliff. And every time he gets to the very top, he pushes it all, all day. When he gets to the top of the hill, just before it rolls over, it rolls back on him

• 1:24:13Speaker 01

  and it mangles him in some old new way every day. And then, and then it rolls all the way down to the bottom of the mountain. He has to go down there all night long. And then he comes back and pushes it up the next day. A normal person would look at that and say, this is a very miserable man. But in the view of the Stoics, Sisyphus was a happy man. And Camus wrote a book about him called Sisyphus a Smile, where you can see him smiling. Because ultimately happiness comes from doing your duty, from putting your shoulder to the wheel, from undertaking the task, the unpleasantries of life, the difficulties and challenges of life, and doing the right thing.

• 1:24:55Speaker 01

  And that's the only source of happiness and order in the universe. Everything else is just, you know, window dressing. But true happiness comes from hardship and from, you know, from pushing the, from challenging an absurd and meaningless universe through development of personal character. So, um, you know, I think my dad-

• 1:25:22Jocko Willink?

  That's a very clear explanation, as if that's what your, your father was thinking-

• 1:25:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:25:27Jocko Willink?

  -after your uncle gets killed and a few years go by and he decides that he's going to, he's gonna run for president himself. That, that actually makes perfect sense.

• 1:25:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:25:39Jocko Willink?

  Um, well, you, you, you mentioned this briefly, but I think it's actually, uh, worth reading. And that is, so, so now, fast forward a little bit, again, get the book, get all the details. But your dad's now running for president and, um, well, I'm gonna go to the book. "On April 4th, my dad was scheduled to give a campaign speech in the roughest part of Indianapolis, Black Ghetto, a place no white American politician would go as voters were sparse and safety concerns manifold. Just before he headed into the inner-city neighborhood, he learned that an assassin had murdered Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis. My father staggered in anguish at the news. 'Oh God,' he said, 'when is this violence going to stop?'

• 1:26:24Jocko Willink?

  The Indianapolis police chief warned him not to enter the neighborhood. When my father said he was going in, the captain withdrew his police escort. Most of the electrified crowd were unaware of the tragedy as he climbed on the flatbed to address them. The night was cold. I have bad news for you, for all of our fellow citizens and people who love peace all over the world, and that is that Martin Luther King was shot and killed tonight."

• 1:26:56Jocko Willink?

  The crowd gave a collective gasp of horror. Then my dad went on to speak directly for the first time about the circumstances of Jack's death. His brother was killed by a white man. Speaking from the battlefield of his own psychic struggles, with a calm but breaking voice, he urged everyone, quote, "Not to be filled with bitterness, with hatred, with a desire for revenge." "We could respond with violence and polarization," he said, "or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, "to understand and to comprehend and to replace that violence, "that stain of bloodshed that is spread across our land,

• 1:27:39Jocko Willink?

  "with an effort to understand with compassion and love."

• 1:27:46Jocko Willink?

  My dad's Indianapolis speech was not an artful, rehearsed, oratorical masterpiece. It was an anguished visceral expression of shared agony. He had never spoken about his brother's death like that before. The crowd sensed he was doing something unusual and gave them, gave him their hearts. Indianapolis was one of the few cities with large black communities that did not explode in riots that night. One hundred and nineteen other cities were not so fortunate, and President Johnson deployed seventy-five thousand soldiers to quell the violence. Casualties included two thousand five hundred injured and thirty-nine dead.

• 1:28:31Jocko Willink?

  From our boarding school in Rockville, Maryland, we watched smoke rise over the Capitol and troop trucks roll past all day.

• 1:28:48Jocko Willink?

  What the hell did that feel like in the country at the time? I, I, I, I can't imagine. It must have seemed like everything was just kind of hanging on by a thread.

• 1:29:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it was. I mean, there's a story, I think, that I wrote in there about my father toured, flew home and toured Washington DC that morning and it was just, you know, burning heaps of rubble southeast Washington and my father climbed over a big pile of a exploded building and was coming down this rubble pile and there was a black woman standing in the street looking up at him through the smoke and when she recognized him, she said, "Oh, it's you. I knew you would be here." So that was, you know, I think

• 1:29:42Speaker 01

  that that was, you know, that was the place that he began to fill in the American psyche.

• 1:29:49Jocko Willink?

  And then, I mean, you have LBJ drops out of the race and then your father gets killed. How old are you at that time?

• 1:30:06Speaker 01

  I was fourteen. I was with him. I was not with him when he was shot. My little brother David was and some of my other younger siblings were. But I, you know, he was brought to Good Samaritan Hospital. I was woken up in my bed. I was at a boarding school in Washington, outside of Washington DC. I was woken up by the priest and he said, he didn't say what had happened. He just said, "There's a car waiting for you." I was woken up maybe 5:30 in the morning. And I was taken to the, I think it's Andrews Air Force Base and then put on, with some of my siblings, the older kids who were not traveling with my father,

• 1:30:50Speaker 01

  Kathleen and Joe and myself. I'm the third of 11 kids.

• 1:30:57Speaker 01

  That we were sent out in Hubert Humphrey's plane, who was the vice president, to Los Angeles, and my father died that night, so I was with him when he died. And then we brought him back to Washington, we brought him back to New York. And it was interesting, I mean, he didn't have police protection. He didn't want protection from the LAPD because they were very racist. And in the black communities which were supporting him, they were hated. And then the Secret Service, he wasn't entitled to Secret Service that time.

• 1:31:41Speaker 01

  You didn't get it until after the convention. Whoever won the convention got Secret Service. The FBI, Hoover offered him FBI protection, but he thought that that's just gonna be Hoover spying on me and reporting to Johnson whatever I do, so I'm not gonna do that. So he had the Oakland Raiders, the fearsome foursome, you know, these big linemen from the Oakland Raiders who were his personal bodyguard. And then, you know, Rosie Greer, also Rayford Johnson, who was the decathlon. And then when he went on the road, he had this odd assortment of escorts.

• 1:32:19Speaker 01

  He had Black Panther Party, which was acting as his bodyguard, and the Hells Angels. And when we, which is, if you think of it today, it's weird. But I remember when we took off, they all rode their bikes out onto the runway, and they were kind of like escorting, you know, US Two, which, you know, of course today you couldn't get away with, but back then the runways were very accessible, and so you had about 100 bikers on the runway. And I don't think they'd ever understood how a plane engine worked, but when the jet took off, it blew a bunch of them off their bikes, and we were watching from the plane windows.

• 1:33:02Speaker 01

  And that was just one of these little things, vignettes, that, you know, in a very weird period. We flew him to New York and we waked him at St. Patrick's Cathedral. I remember, you know, I was one of the pallbearers who we brought him down and it was Fifth Avenue was just jammed, you know, people eight or nine foot deep for the whole length of Fifth Avenue, that part of Fifth Avenue. And we, the coffin was very heavy and we brought him down the steps there and there was a crowd of blacks who were singing the battle hymn of the republic, glory, glory, alyah.

• 1:33:44Speaker 01

  As we came out and this very, very large black woman stepped, you know, in front of the coffin as we were, we were trying to lug it down that staircase and she collapsed on the stairs and she was waving a handkerchief at the coffin saying, you know, you've done your best, you've done your best, was very, you know, emotional. And, you know, you can rest now, she was saying. And then we brought him to Penn Station and we brought him down to Penn Station to, to Union Station in Washington. And as I say in the book, it was supposed to be a two and a half hour ride, but it

• 1:34:28Speaker 01

  was seven hours because there was a couple of million people on the tracks and there was the whole panoply, the cross section of the American experience, blacks and whites, and that we were going one mile an hour. The windows were all open on the train. The people on that train, you know, Arthur Sletner later said would have made the most interesting government in American history. There were poets and economists and, you know, civil rights activists and Indian rights and Hispanic rights and, you know, some of the great musicians and poets in the world at that time. And Coretta King was on there with us and, but we were going one mile an hour or so.

• 1:35:12Speaker 01

  When we went through those train stations, we could hear people singing, you know, there were thousands of blacks who were in those train stations, they were singing that battle hymn of the republic. And then we got to Washington. President Johnson picked us up in a convoy and we went up the hill. We went, you know, past the mall where the Poor People's Campaign, there were, you know, thousands of poor men and they all came to the sidewalk and stood, you know, eight or nine deep with their heads bowed, their hats, their hats, holding their hats to their chests, just standing there silent as we drove by.

• 1:35:53Speaker 01

  And we drove up to Arlington and buried my dad next to his brother under a small stone. And then, um, four years later, I was in Boston, I was a college student and I was studying American history and politics and I came across demographic data that showed that those whites who had lined the Pennant Plain, the train tracks and they had voted strongly for my father in Pennsylvania and Delaware and New Jersey, Maryland, they had supported my dad in 1968.

• 1:36:34Speaker 01

  Four years later, in 1972, they didn't vote for George McGovern, who was completely aligned with my father on every issue, but they voted largely, almost altogether, for George Wallace, who was diametrically opposed to everything that my dad believed in. He was rampant segregation as his announcement speech that year. He had promised segregation now, segregation forever. He had stood in the schoolhouse door when my father, you know, tried to get, um, you know, Vivian Malone and five other blacks into Ole Miss. And he was a, you know, he was a bad guy. And, you know, I later got to know Wallace very well.

• 1:37:19Speaker 01

  He made a big turn in his life after he himself was shot and was paralyzed for life, but he ran for governor successfully after that a couple of times. And I knew him when I was living in Alabama. But, um, he was antithetical to everything my father believed in. And it occurred to me then...

• 1:37:42Speaker 01

  How could these same people who voted for the idealism of Robert Kennedy then go vote for the cynicism of George Wallace? And it occurred to me then, and struck me many times since, that every nation, like every individual, has a darker side and a lighter side. And that the easiest thing for political leaders to do is to appeal to our greed, to our bigotry, to our hatred, to our xenophobia, you know, to push all the alchemies of demagoguery. And that my father tried to do something different, which was to get people, to persuade people to transcend their narrow self-interest and see themselves as part of a community,

• 1:38:27Speaker 01

  to see themselves as part of a noble adventure, to find a hero in each one of us and say, "Okay, we're going to take a risk, you know, by trusting people, by being part of a community, by thinking that we're part of something that's larger than ourselves, that's worth voting our lives to, you know, making this country live up to its promises as an exemplary nation." And my dad was able to do that with people. And I think, you know, there's other politicians in our history who have done the same thing. William Jennings Bryan did that, and a lot of other ones, Lincoln. But, you know, I think that's the challenge,

• 1:39:11Speaker 01

  because the same people can go to a dark place. You know, we all have the lighter angels of light and the angels of darkness. And, you know, there's the old metaphor about each of us has a white wolf on one shoulder and a dark wolf on the other. And, you know, how do you know which one is gonna win the battle? And it's the one you feed. And, you know, if you, if you feed, feed them with good activity and good conduct and, and virtuous thoughts and, you know, then the white wolf is gonna get bigger.

• 1:39:51Speaker 01

  And if you feed them with hatred and bigotry and fear and, you know, and self-interest, the dark wolf will win. When, um, I think the same is true for our country.

• 1:40:06Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I've never heard that metaphor of the, the nation having go. I, I've wondered about that, what, what that actually was. So this traumatic period that we went through with the death of your uncle, Martin Luther King, and then your dad. And, yeah, it's like I was talking about earlier, where the family that has something bad happen to it, it can either solidify their values and make them stronger, or it can turn them to the dark side. And, yeah, that's, uh, the thing with voting for Wallace as opposed to who's, who's diametrically opposed to what your father believed in, in four years' time. That's a, that's a dramatic turn.

• 1:40:52Jocko Willink?

  I wanna go to, to the book here for a second. July 4th, 1969. "Up until that point in my life, in conformance with King Frederick II's prescription against the inebriation among falconers," which I, which I had not talked about, you were a falconer. And you had started hunting with falcons and other birds. And this guy, King Frederick the Second, had all these rules that you were following. "I had resolved to never use drugs or alcohol. In fact, I'd never even tasted coffee. However, I had recently gathered from my favorite comic book, Two Rock, Son of Stone, that hallucinogens might allow me to see dinosaurs, which I greatly desired. Jeff O'Neill assured me that this was a near certainty."

• 1:41:37Jocko Willink?

  So I swallowed the LSD, which more than delivered on his promise. Buildings melted like wax candles, trees bowed and swayed on a windless night. Bright lights with long comet tails lent Hyannis Port the cheery aura of Christmas in July. Still tripping, I rode into Hyannis with two older kids struggling and struggled in a main street diner with a plate of lively white noodles that squirmed and squeaked as I stabbed at them with my fork. I became suddenly appreciative of the impossibly complex choreography of minute movements required by my mouth and its various parts in order to chew and swallow food. Abandoning that endeavor, I looked up to see a picture hanging behind the counter

• 1:42:20Jocko Willink?

  of my father, Uncle Jack, and Jesus. All of them had their hands folded in prayer. Until that moment, everything had been a delight. My soul was happy with this strange new adventure, and I was laughing along with my friends. Now, things turned sour. I greatly admired all three of those fellows, and I doubted that any of them would have approved of my hallucinogens. Appall came over me. What was I doing? My father had practically, had been practically a teetotaler, a straight arrow. His personal life was beyond reproach. He had sacrificed his life to a higher purpose, and here I was, high on drugs.

• 1:43:03Jocko Willink?

  I left my friends and walked the three miles back to Hyannis Port swearing I would never do drugs again. By then it was morning, and I was in a funk, wondering how I was going to explain my all-night absence and cope with my exhaustion. A few blocks from my home, I ran into a group of boys who prescribed me a line of methadrin. And that snort miraculously solved all my problems for that day.

• 1:43:34Jocko Willink?

  So thus begins a period of your life with drugs.

• 1:43:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, so my, my, what they call progression was very, very fast. Within several weeks, I was shooting heroin. And I did that from when I was 15 years old to when I was 28. And, uh, and I got sober at 28. You know, virtually all that time, I was taking drugs against my own conscience. So I was trying to stop. I was constantly making vows, making efforts to stop. Um, but I couldn't do it. And, and the weird thing was, uh, for me, that I had iron self, I had iron willpower in other parts of my life. I gave up candy for Lent when I was 13 and I never ate it again till I was in college. I gave up desserts the next year.

• 1:44:26Speaker 01

  And I never, for Lent, I never had another dessert till I was in college. I was playing sports, I was playing rugby and was trying to bulk up. So I started eating desserts again. And I, I felt I could do anything with willpower. And yet this, um, compulsion was completely impervious to anything that I threw at it. I, you know, I can make a resolve and stay sober for a week, two weeks, uh, three weeks, but then I'd be doing it again. And, um, the most demoralizing feature of this illness of addiction for me was my incapacity to keep contracts with myself.

• 1:45:08Speaker 01

  I would tell myself at nine o'clock in the morning, earnestly, sincerely, honestly, I am never gonna do that again. And at four o'clock in the afternoon, I'd be doing it. It was like somebody else had stepped into my body and was now, you know, was now manipulating the gears and, and driving the rig. And I had no capacity to bind that person with anything that I said earlier. And, um,

• 1:45:37Speaker 01

  You know, I went, I, I struggled like that for 14 years. I'm not saying it was all bad. Cause I had a lot of fun during that period and I did a lot of wild things and uh, but I was always, I was always trying to stop and you know, particularly toward the end, it became, it became miserable. It's like, it's like dancing with a gorilla, you know? It's really fun and exhilarating in the beginning and then, you know, you realize that you're dancing until the gorilla tells you that he's, he's ready to stop.

• 1:46:14Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you end up, and again, a bunch of this, this is the stuff from the book. You, you get kicked out of a couple of schools. You get arrested with your cousin in 1970 for marijuana possession. You end up getting, you graduate in 1972 from high school. You go to Harvard. You graduate from Harvard. Um, you end up getting your law degree from University of Virginia. You get sworn in as the assistant district attorney for Manhattan. Uh, you get married. You fail your bar exam, which is interesting. How'd you fail your bar exam?

• 1:46:50Speaker 01

  At one point.

• 1:46:52Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 1:46:53Speaker 01

  I was 659 out of 660. You know, I, I was, you know, I was, uh, you know, I was, the weird thing about heroin for me is that I, um, it made me, I was very bad in school when I was a kid. I had ADHD and I just, it, the, the, the voice of the teachers just sounded like a foreign language to me. I couldn't understand anything. I couldn't sit still. My mind was racing all the time and I, I couldn't read, you know, I couldn't, I just could not sit still in my head or physically. I was always movement.

• 1:47:33Speaker 01

  And when I started doing narcotics, I went from the bottom of my class to the top of my class. I went from, I was either the first or second in my class at every school I went to after I started, after I started doing narcotics. And, you know, it allowed me to get into Harvard, it allowed me to flourish. And if it still worked, I'd still be doing it. You know, it stopped working for me, and it also was destroying my life in other ways.

• 1:48:03Jocko Willink?

  Well, yeah, most people don't get off that train. I mean, most people don't get off the heroin train alive, right?

• 1:48:11Speaker 01

  I don't know most, but I would, I would say that's probably a good guess. That, you know, and particularly these days, I think, you know, with the, with the advent of the, age of fentanyl, it's, you're much more likely to die than you are to get sober. And, you know, I had this, I had a, I was lucky, I was, you know, I got, I had a, I had in 1983, at the end of 1983, I had, I went to a rehab and I had a spiritual awakening

• 1:48:56Speaker 01

  that freed me from addiction. So, it was, it's almost like, for me, it was like a miracle, like almost as if I could walk on water. It would be that shocking, because I had really tried, and then suddenly it was just lifted, it was like, as if it never had happened, as if I'd never had the compulsion. And I had, I knew that I, I knew that I wanted to have a, and the only thing that was going to save me was a profound spiritual realignment, that I had to change in some fundamental way the person that I was. Because I was an addict, you know, I was a junkie.

• 1:49:35Speaker 01

  And if I didn't change in a very, very fundamental way who I was, then I was going to either be white-knuckling it for the rest of my life and fighting the impulse, which would have been a miserable existence, or I was going to find some way to make myself into a normal person, just a guy who wakes up in the morning and is not thinking of heroin all day. And cocaine. And I had, a couple of things happened to me. One is, first of all, I'd read The Lives of the Saints, because we did that every night when we were kids. So I knew that there were templates, there were examples of people who, throughout history, who had

• 1:50:17Speaker 01

  had these very decadent lives, like Saint Augustine was one, until he was thirty years old. You know, his mother was Saint Monica, and she prayed for him every day till he was thirty, and then, and he was a whore monger, he was living with prostitutes, he was a sex addict, he was, he was a total alcoholic. And at the age thirty, he transformed and became the most important figure, and one of the most important figures in the history of Christianity. Saint Francis Vissi, the same thing. He was, you know, he led a rather debauched life. He was, he was a soldier, and he was, he was, he was a party guy. He

• 1:51:01Speaker 01

  was a musician, and, you know, he was a party guy. And then he had had this spiritual transformation. Saint, Saint Paul had the same thing everybody knows at Damascus. But I also had a personal experience, because I had a friend. Two of my brothers died from this disease, David and Michael, you know, in ways that were, as a direct result ultimately of this disease. One of them had an overdose, the other in a ski accident. But, but one of them, my brother David had a friend who was one of his best friends,

• 1:51:40Speaker 01

  who had the same level of addiction that I did, and that David did, that, and took drugs with the same enthusiasm and compulsion and, you know, recklessness, and out of control. And he became a mooney. So he joined the Unification Church and became a follower of Reverend Sonny Young Moon. And he didn't want to take drugs anymore. And he would still hang out with us, but he would be chattering about his new life. And, and we could take drugs right in front of him, and he was, he was indifferent to them.

• 1:52:19Speaker 01

  And I used to think about him and I would, I think to myself when I was, when I, when I was getting sober, I think I'd, I'd rather be dead than be a moany, because that's the kind of narrow, you know, view that I had of life at that point. But I wish somehow I could distill whatever it was that gave him this imperviousness to the, to the compulsion,

• 1:52:45Speaker 01

  without turning into a religious nuisance. And, um, at the same time, I picked up this, uh, this, this book by Carl Jung. And Carl Jung was, you know, one of the fathers of modern psychiatry. Um, and he was the, he was, he was the, Freud was his mentor. But Freud wanted, Freud wanted him to be his successor, but he had a big difference with Freud. Freud was an atheist and Jung was a deeply spiritual man. His father had been a preacher. Interestingly, his father had a, never had a genuine, authentic spiritual experience

• 1:53:28Speaker 01

  and was just kind of very, very good at repeating it, wrote the shibboleths and, you know, a sort of consensual, you know, language and vernacular of religious beliefs. And he was very good at it, but he never believed it and he ended up. And meanwhile, Jung himself began having genuine spiritual experience when he was three or four years old. Um, his biography is extraordinary because he has perfect memory. And he was having dreams then that were, um, you know, very significant, but also these other spiritual things that happened to him. And I'll, I'll tell you one of the things that should I, that happened in this book. He, Jung, um...

• 1:54:15Speaker 01

  Oh, Jung spent a lot of time thinking not only about mental health, but also of how to induce profound spiritual experiences. And he, the book that I read is called Synchronicity. And synchronicity means a coincidence, essentially. It's one of these things that happens to us. Like, if you spend, if you, you're talking about somebody that you haven't thought about in 20 years, and the phone rings and it's that person on the phone. And these kind of things happen to us all the time, right? And we can either dismiss them and say, oh, that's just a coincidence. But he would put significance into them. And he thought this was a way that God broke his own rules that he set up when he put

• 1:54:59Speaker 01

  the universe in, you know, in spinning. The rules of mathematics, the rules of science, the rules of biology. And that God was, and, and the rules of chance. And God was breaking those rules to come in and kind of tap us on the shoulders, saying, you know, I'm here and I'm, I'm watching stuff. And I'm interested in you particularly. You know, I'm showing you these, these kind of little miracles where, you know, the, the rules of the universe are shattered. So, he was sitting, he ran the biggest sanitarium in Europe. And he's sitting in, in, uh, with his back to the window. And he's talking to a patient, a female patient, who's sharing a dream with him.

• 1:55:43Speaker 01

  And he was very big on dreams. And the dream is about, the central fulcrum of the dream is a scarab beetle. And, which is a creature that has these profound kind of spiritual significance. It's, it's very common iconography on the, on the tombs, the hieroglyphics, on the obelis in the tombs of Egypt. But it's almost unknown in Northern Europe where he was. He was in Zurich in Switzerland. Or, and so he's talking to her and she's telling him about this scarab beetle dream. And he's hearing this ping, ping, ping on the window behind him. And he doesn't, it's irritating him, but he doesn't want to turn his attention away from his patient.

• 1:56:28Speaker 01

  So, he just, he's, he maintains his posture for a while. But then it became so exasperating to him that he finally, he gets up and he throws the window open and a scarab beetle flies in and lands in his palm. And he turns to her and says, "Is this what you were talking about?" So, and those kind of things happen to him all the time. In his biography, which is called Dreams, Memories, and something else, which is, if anybody wants to read about Jung, they should read his biography. They should not read Synchronicity, which was the one that was much more difficult to read. But, um, uh, so he, he, he saw these as divine interventions.

• 1:57:11Speaker 01

  And what he tried to do is to, he tried to reproduce that phenomena in a clinical setting. So he would put one guy in one room, another guy in another room, and he'd have them flip cards. And he, and then guess what the other guy had flipped. And he believed that if he could beat the laws of percentages, laws of chance, the laws of mathematics, that way he would have proven the existence of a supernatural force. Because this was beyond the laws of nature. And if you could beat the laws of nature, then you could say, "There's something out there that we cannot explain through the laws of nature."

• 1:57:53Speaker 01

  And that that was the first, um, step in proving the existence of a God, which he was, you know, he was a very spiritual man, but he was also a very faithful scientist. So he's trying to use these tools to prove the existence of God. Well, he fails. He can't do it. And he says in the book that he, he could not use empirical tools or scientific tools to demonstrate the existence of God. But he then said, as he said, having seen tens of thousands of patients come through his sanitarium, that he could prove that people who believed in God got better faster and that their, their recovery was more durable than people who did not.

• 1:58:37Speaker 01

  And that statement had a profound impact on me, much more profound than if he had said, and he had proved the existence of God, which I would not have believed, right? But what he was saying is, it's irrelevant if there's a God up there. If, if you believe in Him, your chance of getting sober...

• 1:58:58Speaker 01

  Are much higher than if you don't believe. And for me, you know, I had already made a vow to myself that I was gonna do anything that improved even 1% my chances of staying sober. So, you know, I made an intellectual decision. I'm gonna start believing in God. And then I confronted, you know, the universal dilemma, which is how do you start believing in something that you can't see or smell or touch or taste or hear or acquire with your senses? And the, um, and Jung answers that question. He says, "Fake it till you make it." Act as if that the compliance will precede the evidence.

• 1:59:40Speaker 01

  That once you start complying and living like you're somebody who believes, pretending you believe, you actually start seeing evidence that will put that supposition beyond any reasonable doubt. So, and that's what I did. I started, I just said, "Okay, I'm gonna pretend there's a God up there and he's looking at me the whole time." And that everything that I do is, um, is kind of a moral choice, has a moral dimension to it. And I began, uh, breaking my, and then I had to behave myself even when I didn't have an audience, you know? And, uh, even when I didn't have eyewitnesses.

• 2:00:24Speaker 01

  So, I started, um, I started breaking my day down into about 40 different decisions. And each one has a moral implication. Do I, when the alarm goes off in the morning, do I get out of bed immediately or do I lie in bed for another 15 minutes with my invalid thoughts? Do I, uh, do I hang up the towels when I go to bed? Do I make my bed? That's the most important thing, every day. Even when I'm staying at a hotel now, I make my bed, which is ridiculous. It's crazy to do that, but I do it because it's part of building character, which is what we're doing here. We're not here to build a pile for ourselves and whoever dies with the most stuff wins.

• 2:01:07Speaker 01

  You know, we're here to build character, which is the only thing that is enduring, that's durable, that will survive our, our own lives.

• 2:01:16Speaker 01

  And, uh, and so, and you do that by making the bed even when you don't need to, you know, uh, by, by doing the right thing even when somebody is not looking at you. So do I put the water in the ice tray before I put the ice tray back in the freezer? Do I, you know, when I reach into my closet and I pull out a pair of blue jeans and all those little wire hangers fall on the floor of the closet, do I go in there and say, because what I used to do is say, hey, I got a lot to do today. I am too important for that job. That's somebody else's job. And I'd shut the closet door and I left a lot of those closed closets all day long, you know, for other people to do, right?

• 2:01:57Speaker 01

  And, um, so, so I, now I go in there and I hang them all up, even if I'm in a rush. Um, when I, I, do I put the shopping cart backwards supposed to go, you know? And I remember when I first got sober, I was, I was, my, my life got very, very small, which is what happens. You get isolated, you get small from addiction. And when I got sober, my life started getting big very quickly. And, um, and I was, I was running through National Airport and I was late for a plane. It was mission critical, like the, I don't even remember what it was, but the apocalypse was gonna happen if I didn't make that plane. And I was late and was already gonna miss it.

• 2:02:41Speaker 01

  And as I was running, I was putting a piece of dentine in my mouth and I wrapped the, the wrapper up and I was running and I threw the wrapper and into a garbage can and make a perfect arc right into the center, swish of a can. But I noticed through that corner of my eye that it must've hit something in there and jumped back out. I was like, well, that's God's fault, cause I made the shot, right? So I kept running. But then I got about 40 or 50 feet down that, you know, that, down that, uh, terminal and it just started eating at me.

• 2:03:18Speaker 01

  And I put on the brakes and I went back and put that little piece of garbage back in the can and I still made my plane. But the most important thing that day was, you know, that I did was to do that. That little task is the most important thing I did on that day because it, it, the whole challenge with life and sobriety, but also life is how do we stay in that posture of surrender, of humility, you know? How do we stay there even when the cash and prizes are flowing in and people are telling you how great you are and you got everything going for you? And that's when I want to say to God, thank you, God, I got it from here, you know, and take the wheel and drive the car off the cliff again.

• 2:04:02Speaker 01

  You know what I mean?

• 2:04:07Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, gotta watch out for that one. How, how long did the spiritual awakening take? Like, how long were you in rehab for?

• 2:04:14Speaker 01

  Within, I, I had it from when I made that decision. I'll tell you what happened to me. I went out, I finished that book and by the time I finished that book, I had made a decision. I'm gonna turn my life over to God. Okay, whatever that means, however I find him. And so I had made that decision. And then that, I closed that book and I go to out, you know, these rehabs, they have a lot of volleyball and we went out to play volleyball. And during that volleyball game, a, a ball, somebody hit a ball on a, you know, very, very powerful punch and went way up in the air and then it came down and it hit the top

• 2:04:58Speaker 01

  of the post with the net was tied. And it started up again and I said out loud, so everybody heard me, I said, that ball's gonna get hit by a Mack truck. Oh, and the ball goes up again on this kind of errant flight. It lands right dead on the center of a chain link fence and it topples over the other side onto a driveway and, and, and it rolls down the grade about only forty or fifty feet into the middle of a thoroughfare. And a big eighteen wheeled diesel with a bulldog on the, on the, on the hood comes and pops and it goes bang, you know, a big resounding pop.

• 2:05:40Speaker 01

  And everybody there just looked at me and said, how did you know that? It was just a moment, but I was like, okay, this is, you know, and I had just finished that book about synchronicity. So I said, I felt like, you know, I was being tapped on the shoulder and I said, I can either just say that was a coincidence and walk away, or I can see God in it and I can be grateful and thankful and joyful, you know, that I, um, you know, that I got to see it so soon, you know? And that, and now I see those things every day of my life. I, I rely on them. And as long as I stay in that posture of surrender, you know, I, I have miracles in my life all the time.

• 2:06:25Speaker 01

  And it's like, you know, my life before I figured this all out was all activity and no progress. You know, I had a lot of ambition. I was like a big truck, you know, that is, has lift headers and the pipes that are spitting fire and smoke and the engine revving and the wheels spinning, stuck in a ditch going nowhere, but a lot of energy going into it and a lot of activity, you know, getting stuff right to the, into the coal mine and never getting across. And all of that, and now, and when you, when you connect to that higher vibrations, to

• 2:07:05Speaker 01

  that spiritual side, then, you know, it's almost like, like you can put down the oars and hoist the sails and that you're being propelled. And it's, it's like judo because, you know, the effort, if you apply the effort toward your spiritual condition, then it pays off in all these other ways that it, that just don't, in the reality that we live in, they don't seem connected, but they are. You know, if you, if you can stay in that high vibration. Um, just good things happen.

• 2:07:43Jocko Willink?

  So you get sober and then you kind of.

• 2:07:46Speaker 01

  Let me give you another metaphor just one thing that just occurred to me. When I was a kid, sometimes I'd pick a flower. Like a rose that was still in the bud and then try to unfold it.

• 2:08:02Speaker 01

  And it never looks right, you know, and a lot of times you have to just learn to be still.

• 2:08:09Speaker 01

  You do your job, which is watering the flower. But otherwise you leave it alone. And, you know, I remember when I got out of the rehab, I read a a line from Isaiah that said, be still and know that I am God. And that had a huge impact on me of learning to be still is so much because my life before was including drugs, it's about, you know, feeling discomfort and then having to fix it somehow. And, you know, growing up is about learning to live with this discomfort and just experience it like dark clouds on the horizon that it's going to come through and that you just have to experience it and let it keep flowing and there's nothing to do about it.

• 2:08:53Speaker 01

  You know, and and learning that, learning to be still, learning to be indifferent to pain, learning to be indifferent to pleasure, to desire. Now, those should be ultimately the ambition of an enlightened, you know, of a spiritual enlightenment.

• 2:09:14Jocko Willink?

  Now, your next phase in life, which is a long phase, is this environmental war you go on or environmental support and trying to clean up the Hudson. It starts with the Hudson River Fisherman's Association, which eventually became River Keepers, which became all kinds of keepers in a variety of different things across the world.

• 2:09:38Jocko Willink?

  I mean, the, the amount of work that you did in that is epic, epic amount of work. And you talked about this when you were on Joe Rogan's podcast, you, you went into significant amount of detail. And by the way, if anyone hasn't listened to that podcast, on, on the podcast when you were on with, with Joe Rogan, and also when you were on with the All In Podcast, you really, you really kind of laid out your history when it comes to the environmental piece, with the, the whole vaccine piece, you, you go into incredible depth on those. So that's a great, I don't want to have to have you rehash all that stuff right now.

• 2:10:13Jocko Willink?

  But that's what you do for the next, well, I mean, I guess it's the next like 20 years, uh, basically, actually more than 20 years. Almost 40. Yeah, 40 years of these lawsuits, you, you're a lawyer, you end up in these incredible legal battles, protecting the environment, going after big companies and industries that are destroying the environment. And, and that's what you're focused on for years and years and years, you know, you sued Monsanto. And I just, I, it's too many to name, there's too many to name.

• 2:10:47Jocko Willink?

  2020 comes around, uh, and actually COVID hits, I gotta, I gotta, if you go and look at your Wikipedia page, which I got a good kick out of, um, your Wikipedia page says,

• 2:11:03Jocko Willink?

  quote, "Known for advocating anti-vaccine misinformation and public health conspiracy theories." So that's just part of it.

• 2:11:15Jocko Willink?

  And what's really crazy, and I mean, of course, uh, Joe Rogan has talked about this a lot, the kind of things that people were being banned from Twitter for saying have now been completely proven to be true. There's all kinds of things like that. You wrote a book, uh, The Real Anthony Fauci, about Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the global war on democracy and public health. You wrote another book called The Wuhan Cover Up. So you've written these books. You were crusading against those, you know, this sort of just vaccination for, and again, I want to point out the fact that you're not anti-vax, you, there's all kinds of vaccines that you support, there's just vaccines that you don't support.

• 2:12:02Jocko Willink?

  23, April 19th, 2023, you decide that you're gonna run as, uh, run for president. And, and to the best of what I can suss out right now, you, you go back to this Albert Camus theory of you gotta do your duty. Is that a, a good assessment?

• 2:12:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, that's kind of a good summary of, of, you know, those years and, you know, I, um, I hit a place where, uh, all the signs were telling me that this is something, this is the place that I can be most effective in my life. So I, you know, I had, uh, toyed with the idea of running for political office earlier in my life. Uh, and then 90, when it would have been when Hillary was, um, well, it would have been around 2006 when Hillary, uh, was appointed to the Secretary

• 2:13:04Speaker 01

  of State under Obama. What year would that have been? Anyway, that, when she was, um, I thought about running for the Senate seat, which my dad's seat. In New York State, my numbers were better than anybody else in the state. And a lot of people had polled me then and my, I had very, you know, I was working on the Hudson. I was, uh, on TV all the time. I was, you know, people really had affection for my dad, who had been Senator from New York. So it would have been a kind of an easy run for me to run for United States Senator of New York. And I was gonna do that the year that Hillary ran, but I had family issues that time that

• 2:13:45Speaker 01

  kept me from doing that. And then, um, and so I helped Hillary take that seat. I did advertisements for her. I did a lot of work for her.

• 2:13:56Speaker 01

  And then when she left to go to the State Department, David Patterson, who was the governor of New York, called me and offered me the job. He got to appoint her replacement. So he said, I want you to do it. And I said, give me 24 hours to think about it. And I had some of the same family issues at that time that made me just say no. And at that point, that would have been the easiest way to political office, just an appointment without ever having to run. But I, at that point, I kind of was, I, any thought of ever running for political office was, you know, I felt like I was too old. Because, not that I lacked energy,

• 2:14:40Speaker 01

  but you have to be, particularly the US Senate, you don't get a chairmanship of a committee till you've been there for three terms, which is like 18 years. You have to be there for a long time before you get any power. And, and so it's really a young man's, you know, game, or young woman, you know, you, you need to get in there a little earlier in life if you're going to be effective at it. And I didn't need the attention. You know, a lot of people may run and just say, I'll use a bully pulpit. But I, I already had, you know, as many microphones as I want. I could go on TV anytime I wanted. So I didn't need attention. And I didn't, you know, I'd been in politics, political.

• 2:15:24Speaker 01

  I, I could call any politician American, they'd answer the phone. I could call the president, get him on the phone. I could call virtually any business leader and get him on the phone. So being in the Senate was not going to add to my life, my effectiveness. And it caused a lot of misery because you have to go and live in Washington. And my family was in New York. And, you know, and I was happy doing what I'm doing. I was effective at it. It was fun. It's fun going for me. I love being in a fistfight. And, you know, I was in every fistfight at that time, whether, you know, name a corporation that was polluting and I, I've sued them.

• 2:16:07Speaker 01

  I brought over 500 lawsuits, successful lawsuits. You know, I've lost plenty too. But, you know, if you're not, people who say they've never lost a lawsuit are not taking difficult ones, and I was taking anything, you know, I was trying to figure out a way to sue anybody who messed with the environment. And I tried a lot of novel stuff that didn't work, but I tried, mostly I was successful. And, um, so I, you know, and I was having fun and I got to do what I wanted to do. I didn't have, you know, press questioning me and I had a wild life. You know, I was, you know, I, I was a heroin addict. I, I rode freight trains across the, across the country and been, you know, I'd been arrested.

• 2:16:52Speaker 01

  I, I had all kinds of stuff that, you know, I'm not, I didn't want to explain to people.

• 2:17:02Speaker 01

  So, you know, I was happy and I didn't have to explain to anybody about my personal conduct, you know, and, and so anyway, I had, it was off the shelf for me. And I started thinking, when I saw the censorship, which I never believed the Democratic Party, you know, moving to censor political opponents and everybody being okay with it.

• 2:17:29Speaker 01

  I saw this explosion of chronic disease in our country that was just being covered up. You know, diabetes today, we spend more on diabetes than, um, than we do for our national defense. This is crazy. When I was a kid, a, uh, a typical pediatrician would see one diabetes case in his career. And today, one out of every three people who walk into his office, kids is prediabetic, diabetic, and nobody's explaining this to us. When, in my generation, 70-year-old men, autism rates are one in 10,000 today, right

• 2:18:08Speaker 01

  now, one in 10,000. In my kids' generation, one in every 34 kids, one in every 22 boys, and nobody's explaining this. Why did food allergies just appear? Why did I not know a single person? I had 11 siblings, 70 cousins. I knew nobody with a peanut allergy when I was growing up. Why do five of my seven kids have food allergies? Why, you know, why does this entire generation have autoimmune disease? Why are we the sickest nation on the planet? Why do we have the highest COVID death rates? We had 16% of the COVID deaths. We only have 4% of the world's population. Somebody needs to explain that. Why are people getting awards for this?

• 2:18:51Speaker 01

  And the intensity of the, you know, of the cover up of why nobody's talking about it. And then, you know, I saw the Ukraine war and the Democrats and Republican parties become the parties of war. And nobody's asking the questions like with Iraq. You know, nobody asks, why are we at war in Iraq? Saddam Hussein didn't bomb the World Trade Center. He didn't have weapons of mass destruction. You know, what, you know, why are we in another country's business? And why we spent $8 trillion over there and, you know, destroying the one country? That was the bulwark to Iran. And now Iraq is a proxy of Iran, you know? And, and that's why this attack on Israel happened because we destroyed the one, you

• 2:19:35Speaker 01

  know, obstacle between, uh, between the mullahs in Iran and the hegemony across the Mideast. They had Israel's one and Saddam was the other. And Saddam had a country that was fully functioning, had electricity, 100% of the population. It had, you know, it's better operated than any country in the Mideast. It had been our ally for many years. Saddam was not a good guy. He was a horrible, you know, tyrant and torturer and murderer. But so is MSB. So are, you know, a lot of them, right? And, uh, and, you know, what were we doing? No, why was not, why was the press not asking question, real questions about it?

• 2:20:20Speaker 01

  You know, the lessons we were supposed to have learned from Vietnam about not getting into wars of choice. So I saw all this stuff happening and, uh,

• 2:20:33Speaker 01

  I felt like I was in a unique position to be able to stop it. And to be able to change the direction of the country. And then I saw the Democratic Party go to war against the American middle class. You know, and there's a whole generation, my kids' generation, none of them are going to get into a home. There's something wrong with that. And, you know, we've spent eight trillion dollars on wars since 2020. And we've killed millions of people and all unnecessary. And we're less safe. And we're here, Americans are less safe abroad, where our country is depleted in power. We got a $34 trillion debt. It's gone up another trillion dollars in the last 100 days.

• 2:21:16Speaker 01

  To service that debt, we now pay more than we do for our military. Within five years, half of every dollar that's collected will go to service the debt. 10 years, it could be 100%. And, you know, that's not tenable. And nobody's talking about this. Nobody's trying to do anything about it. So I just felt like, okay, you know, I'm going to start talking about this stuff and the best. The only way to fix it is to run myself. So that's why, you know, that's what led me to this place.

• 2:21:52Jocko Willink?

  And obviously, the Democratic nomination didn't work out. They're, speaking of mafia.

• 2:21:57Speaker 01

  Right? I was at a spit tank.

• 2:22:00Jocko Willink?

  I mean, uh, yeah, well, I got a friend named Tulsi Gabbard, and they kind of did the same type of thing for her, to her.

• 2:22:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, they did the same to Tulsi. They did the same to Bernie Sanders.

• 2:22:12Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. So that's a little mafia scenario. So now you're running as an independent.

• 2:22:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:22:19Jocko Willink?

  Now, what, how does this, how do you win?

• 2:22:23Speaker 01

  Well, the first challenge, I'm gonna, the first challenge is getting a VP, because I can't get signatures in half the states without having a vice president. So, you know, they don't, the other parties don't have to get vice presidents till August, but I have to get one now. And there's a lot of advantages they have. They don't have to collect signatures. I have to collect a million signatures. They're automatically on the ballot. They get Secret Service, I don't, you know, because the president decided that he didn't want me to have it. And, and so I have to spend a lot of money on that. So those are all challenges. I'm gonna, I'm gonna announce a VP within two weeks.

• 2:23:07Speaker 01

  On the 26th of March, in Oakland, we will announce a VP. Within, we then can start collecting signatures in about half the states, and we will complete those states within six weeks. And I'll get on the ballot everywhere. And then, you know, my big challenge, I'm beating President Trump and President Biden in Americans who are under 45 years old. So I'm beating them in all young people. I'm beating them among independents. And independents, for the first time, are the biggest demographic in this country.

• 2:23:48Speaker 01

  So this is the first election in history where self-identified independents are, registered independents are more, are a larger part of the, they're Democrats, Republicans. The independents, now 43% of the voting voters, 27 are Democrats, 27 are Republicans. So it's huge. And I beat President Trump and President Biden among independents. I'm tied, a three-way tie, with Hispanic voters.

• 2:24:17Speaker 01

  And my popularity with Hispanics is getting higher all the time. I'm the most popular candidate, highest favorability rating by far. I have a 52% favorability rating. I'm, I'm, I think 20 points in the black. In other words, 20, 20 points net favorability. So when you measure my unfavorability, favorability, nobody else is even, I think, five points. I'm 15 points ahead of anybody in favorability. The one demographic that is a challenge for me is baby boomers. And if you think about it, they should be, I should be most popular with them because they're the only ones who remember Camelot and they

• 2:25:02Speaker 01

  lived through the Kennedy era. I also was really popular with them when I was the environmental champion. But they get their news from ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, and MSNBC, and the New York Times and Washington Post. And, you know, if I was living in that ecosystem, I'd have a really bad opinion of myself. So my, I asked my, my son Connor, who incidentally was in Ukraine, fought in Ukraine for a special forces unit, he joined the Foreign Legion, and fought for three months during the Kharkiv offensive. And thank God, he made it out

• 2:25:45Speaker 01

  alive. But I asked him the other day, he's very well informed, you know, he, he reads everything, he listens to podcasts. I said to him, have you ever listened to a, or have you ever seen an evening news show on TV? And he said, no, never. You have a whole generation of kids who is getting there, who are getting their news from, you know, places like this, from podcasts. And those guys are on my side, and they're supporting me. So my big challenge is breaking through the baby boomers.

• 2:26:20Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that is, that is a very strange place to be where the generation that should know you the best is, is not on board. And yeah, you're right. It's because they're, they're not on board with the new forms of media, and they're being fed whatever's

• 2:26:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. So to them, I'm a wacko, anti-science, anti-vaxxer, crazy person, conspiracy theorist.

• 2:26:42Jocko Willink?

  Check, check and check. Well, you know, I would, I would advise people, you, you just did a, a state of the Union, or I think you called it, uh, how I see the state of the Union, or the state of our Union, something along those lines. It's on your YouTube page. That's a really good piece to go check out. You, like I said, you were on the All In Podcast, you've been on Rogan's Podcast, you've been on Theo Von's Podcast, a couple of times, and they put his back up because they took him down for a while. And so there's so much information out there about you, and I would recommend people go and listen to those because they can learn more about you. Clearly, the books that you've written,

• 2:27:23Jocko Willink?

  there's great information. The book that I covered today, American Values, fantastic book to read. And then, like I said, the Wuhan cover up, and then the, the real Anthony Fauci, those books are, are filled with information that you might wanna, you might wanna check out if you, if you don't understand these things, or if you have questions. So I think that's a, probably gets us to a pretty good spot. Does that, does that get us up to speed?

• 2:27:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:27:49Jocko Willink?

  Um, people can find you, kennedy24.com. You're on Instagram, you're on what I call Twitter X.

• 2:27:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a good thing. Cause there's no way to talk about it, if you don't call it Twitter or tweeting.

• 2:28:03Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, so Instagram, Twitter X, and Facebook, you're at Robert F. Kennedy Jr. You've got a YouTube channel, which is at Team Kennedy 24. Echo Charles, do you have any questions?

• 2:28:17Speaker 02

  Uh, no questions. Just I did notice that you're in a lot better shape than most politicians, I know. Is that like, are we working out every day?

• 2:28:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm at the gym every day.

• 2:28:27Jocko Willink?

  You haven't seen, there's a video of him at, uh, you remember we were up at, at Venice Beach recently? Muscle Beach?

• 2:28:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:28:33Jocko Willink?

  He's up there at Muscle Beach.

• 2:28:34Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:28:34Jocko Willink?

  No shirt.

• 2:28:35Speaker 02

  Doing it.

• 2:28:35Jocko Willink?

  Getting after it.

• 2:28:36Speaker 02

  That makes perfect sense to me. Yes. Good to meet you.

• 2:28:39Speaker 01

  Uh, good to meet you too. Um, we gotta get on the ballot and in California right now. People can go, we need 75,000 people to sign up for our political party, which is We the People, and they can go to kennedy.com or kennedy24.com slash California. And we need 75,000 to sign up, and then we're on the ballot there.

• 2:29:01Jocko Willink?

  Okay, well, I'm sure we can definitely make that happen. Any, Robert, any other closing thoughts you want to cover?

• 2:29:07Speaker 01

  No, I, you know, I just want to thank you for your service.

• 2:29:12Speaker 01

  And, you know, we talked beforehand that I had represented a lot of the SEALs during COVID on who were noncompliant with some of the mandates. And anyway, it's a, it's a real honor to be with you. And, you know, thanks for, you know, for everything that you've done for our country.

• 2:29:30Jocko Willink?

  Well, I appreciate it. And, um, well, thanks for your service and the sacrifice of your family, um, especially your Uncle Joe, who, who gave his life and your Uncle Jack and your father, both them served in the Navy, all, all three of them actually served in the Navy and, and gave their lives for our country. So, thank you for what you've done, your family's done. Thank you for what you've done for our environment. And thank you for what you are trying to do today to help fulfill the true promise of America. Thank you.

• 2:30:04Speaker 01

  Thank you very much, Jocko. Thank you, Echo.

• 2:30:07Jocko Willink?

  Sure. And with that, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Has left the building. Echo Charles?

• 2:30:15Speaker 02

  Yes, sir.

• 2:30:16Jocko Willink?

  How was that for a historical review?

• 2:30:21Speaker 02

  Good. Yeah. Good. Yeah. So, a lot of us on Kauai, if you grew up on Kauai, you're not quite as privy to all that, you know, like a lot of this was probably a lot more familiar just from general knowledge to you than it was for me. So, yes, to kind of, in a way, go down memory lane. And in my case, get privy to all the, you know, all the back info. Very helpful.

• 2:30:45Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's definitely interesting. And yeah, you're right. For me, and I told, mentioned this at the beginning of the podcast, growing up in New England, you're going to hear about the Kennedys.

• 2:30:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:30:53Jocko Willink?

  And you're going to hear, like I said, you're going to hear the good, you're going to hear the horrible and everything in between. The, the Catholics that I knew from Massachusetts, these people, I mean, they love, the entire Kennedy family can do no wrong.

• 2:31:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:31:12Jocko Willink?

  Uh, the Protestants that I knew.

• 2:31:16Jocko Willink?

  Growing up, others, other than the spectrum.

• 2:31:19Speaker 02

  Other deal can do no right.

• 2:31:21Jocko Willink?

  The conservative Republicans, bro, like.

• 2:31:23Speaker 02

  Not even close.

• 2:31:24Jocko Willink?

  No, and it's, it's so interesting because now we're so much more aware of how things are, like how the media, media manipulates things.

• 2:31:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:31:37Jocko Willink?

  There's so much, we could be unpacking the entire media view of the Kennedy family. You could just unpack it for years. It would take years.

• 2:31:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:31:49Jocko Willink?

  Of, you know, what the, what the conservatives would put out about them, what the, what the Democrats would put out about them, what the liberals would put out about, everybody's got their gonna, they're gonna spin it.

• 2:32:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:32:03Jocko Willink?

  And so it's, it's a very difficult to look at and figure it all out.

• 2:32:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, the red, I always thought that the, a red, big red flag as far as like convincing someone about someone, you know, like who, if someone's gonna say something about someone else, like the, a big red flag was always if it was like a name calling, like he's a XYZ, he's a Nazi, he's a whatever, he hates this, like all reading their mind and stuff like, or, uh, he's anti, um, well, actually anti can be accurate sometimes, but just the whole name calling in general, which is just all, it's pretty much all the time now. You can notice it when you're really looking for it. It's like, bro, it's just name calling. In time, this name calling.

• 2:32:42Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:43Speaker 02

  I feel like, oh, no, no, no, yeah, yeah, you suspect, because there's probably like way more to it. In fact, I would say that might even be an indicator.

• 2:32:50Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Yeah. And what, what I guess, I guess the way I look at things in general is, it's, I talk about this a lot at Ashland Front as well. You wanna, you wanna look at a, you wanna look at a target? If you're going after a target, if you're assaulting a target, you wanna see it from as many different perspectives as you can. And so it's the same thing when you're looking at an issue or you're looking at a political figure, you wanna see that political figure from as many different perspectives as you can, because what you see or what this other person sees, if you only listen to what one other person says about, about a topic or an issue. You're only gonna see that one perspective. You have to see things from as many different perspectives as you can. And you have to keep an open mind when you do that.

• 2:33:32Jocko Willink?

  So when you're reading something about a particular topic, you need to do with an open mind. Then, and then when you read the counter argument, you need to read that one with an open mind. And what you're gonna end up with is not some solid 100% like, okay, well, this is what I now believe. What you end up with is a, a broad picture of the possibilities that could encompass this particular issue. Could be this, could be that. And you've got to be aware of all those things. Which is, which is a very different approach to take. Because most people, especially if you go on to online social media, everybody's an expert about everything.

• 2:34:16Jocko Willink?

  And when they make a statement, they're making the statement of what they believe to be the capital T, truth, capital T. Like, the thing is, boom, and they're gonna say it. Instead of saying, well, that's an interesting perspective. I, I will put that into my calculus of how I view this particular issue. People don't do that. So, this was, for me, it's good to hear a first person account of a lot of this stuff. And a very well researched book. And even then you go, okay, well, there's, there's his perspective. There's gonna be other perspectives that we could come up with and go, oh, there's a counter to that. Oh, here's another view of, and we didn't get, there's, there's,

• 2:35:00Jocko Willink?

  one of the things that I always heard about the Bay of Pigs was, and it's very similar to what he's saying. That's why I didn't think it was worth bringing up, but is that the Cubans that were saying, hey, don't worry. When we get to Cuba, when, when the freedom forces get to Cuba.

• 2:35:22Jocko Willink?

  There's gonna be, all the Cubans are gonna be on our side. Well, all the Cubans that were saying that were in America. That's why they were saying it. And all the Cubans that didn't think that were in Cuba. And so when you went down there, you're like, oh, we thought everyone's gonna be on our side. Oh, no, no. That's what you think. So I always heard that. Now you take Dulles and you put, you know, what Robert said today is like, oh, their spin was like, hey, listen, we just don't want to tell, we'll tell them that everyone's gonna be on our side and we'll get, we'll just start a little war here and we'll be able to beat them. So it'll be okay.

• 2:35:52Speaker 02

  No fun. Yeah.

• 2:35:53Jocko Willink?

  And so, yeah, very interesting to hear all these different perspectives and, and learn more in an open-minded way. So that's what we're doing. We're also, you noticed that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is in pretty good shape. What is he, 69 years old?

• 2:36:10Speaker 02

  Seventy.

• 2:36:11Jocko Willink?

  Seventy years old.

• 2:36:11Speaker 02

  Wait, unless he didn't have his birthday.

• 2:36:13Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Yeah. So he's something like that.

• 2:36:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:36:16Jocko Willink?

  Pretty good shape.

• 2:36:17Speaker 02

  Just rolling around. So, yeah, you know how like, okay, so I was, I was going over this with my daughter. And she was like, what did she say? She goes, oh, yeah, you get shorter when you get older or whatever. And I was like, yeah. But, and we were talking about someone in our family, one of the elders of our extended family, we'll say. And he goes, oh, yeah, she walks around like, she, it's almost like she's trying to be short. You know how people, you know, older people, they start hunching over. I was like, yeah, that's true. I was like, yeah, well, you figure, you know, your, your muscles and your structures, they get fatigued, right? And like, if you notice older people, even if they're not that old or whatever, they'll start walking super flat on their feet, you know? And then younger people, they got this hop, this pop in their step, you know, little pep. But it's all, it's like a physical, like, bounciness in their steps. And she's like, yeah, that's true. That's true.

• 2:37:04Speaker 02

  RFK popping his step, 70 years old, where we at? And I noticed, and then when, after we went over that, I started really just paying attention and being like, man, that can kind of add um, youthfulness just to your whole appearance. If you got that pop in your step. I think on some people, they just have it naturally when you stay active, you know? And I think he was one of those guys. But it felt like.

• 2:37:24Jocko Willink?

  He put down that go, didn't he? And he was hyped in the break. He said he's gonna have to put a seat, you said, you said, hey, you want another, you want another one? He goes, no, I already need to feel like I need a seatbelt on. So that's what we're doing. We're staying in shape. We're keeping that pop in the step.

• 2:37:40Speaker 02

  Yes, sir.

• 2:37:41Jocko Willink?

  How are we gonna do that? We're gonna work out. We're gonna, we're gonna get after it. Jacofuel.com. Fuel your workouts.

• 2:37:48Jocko Willink?

  jogofuel.com. We got everything that you need. We got a clean energy drink. By the way, his assistant there, Stephanie, or maybe she's not assistant. I don't know. She's his chief of staff. Let's say she, she was like, oh, I'm an ingredient reader and I go read up.

• 2:38:04Speaker 02

  I noticed that. I noticed your confidence.

• 2:38:07Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I was like, read up. And she said, I can't eat natural sweeteners. I go, there's none in there. She goes, oh, monk fruit. Okay. Yeah. She was fired up. So very cool. Yep. That's what we're doing. Clean energy, clean protein, joint warfare for your joints, super krill. We got it all going on. We got it all going on. Greens.

• 2:38:27Speaker 02

  Oh, by the way, my mom came in, uh, visited for a few days or whatever.

• 2:38:31Jocko Willink?

  Greens that she steal from?

• 2:38:32Speaker 02

  No, she didn't steal any greens, but she mentioned the greens. She mentioned it again. She told the exact same story, you know, and you know how like when you tell a story that you heard from somebody and then, then after a while you're like, I hope I told that story completely accurate. But it was the exact same story, word for word. She's like, I've been into greens since I was freaking a kid and all this stuff. And you just accept the fact that greens just don't taste good. This just, it's just part of the healthy lifestyles. Like you gotta eat some stuff that doesn't taste good. That's how it is. But these greens, they actually taste good. And I was really surprised.

• 2:39:03Jocko Willink?

  She's in the game. jogofuel.com. Go get yourself some good fuel for your system. Also, you can get it at Wawa, Vitamin Shoppe, GNC, Military Commercearies, Afees, Hanford Dash Stores in Maryland, Wake Fern, ShopRite, HEB, Down in Tahoz, yo, Meyer, Harris Teeter, Lifetime Fitness, Shields, small gyms everywhere, Jiu Jitsu gyms, CrossFit gyms, powerlifting gyms. If you want to get jogofuel to your clients, email [email protected]. jogofuel.com. Go get some. Also, you're going to be training subject. Also, you're going to be training some Jiu Jitsu. And, you know, we talked about, and this was, there's so many categories we could have gone down.

• 2:39:45Jocko Willink?

  But, you know, RFK Junior has been in a crusade for the environment. And I was going to start talking about the environment, start talking about clothing manufacturing. Start talking about what clothing manufacturing in other countries does to the environment. See, we have environmental laws. Some of them are attributed to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. There are environmental laws that are in place in America so that we have to take care of an environment, as we should. So when we make clothes in America at originusa.com, at Origin USA, when we make clothes here, we protect the environment. Not like what they're doing overseas. When there's no rules, no laws, the only law overseas that they have is the lowest possible price,

• 2:40:30Jocko Willink?

  which means we're going to destroy the environment. So, don't get your clothes from a chemical-spewing, environment-destroying, slave-labor-owning company. Get your clothing from originusa.com. Jeans, boots, jiu-jitsu gi's, jiu-jitsu rash guards, t-shirts, joggers.

• 2:40:59Speaker 02

  Yes, sir.

• 2:41:02Jocko Willink?

  Jackets, hunt gear. Did you get a puffy jacket yet?

• 2:41:06Speaker 02

  No. Oh, I got a big box from Origin.

• 2:41:09Jocko Willink?

  Oh, you didn't open it?

• 2:41:10Speaker 02

  That I haven't fully explored, and it's big, so...

• 2:41:12Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we got everything. You don't need to go to www.destraytheenvironment.com or www.slavelabor.com. Don't go to those. Go to www原生USA.com and invest in freedom. That's another thing he talked about today. Look, we are... Well, I don't know if we talked, we didn't talk about it on the podcast, but bringing manufacturing back to America. Look, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wants to do that. I want to do that. He's running for president. I'm building companies that manufacture here in America. That's what we're doing.

• 2:41:58Jocko Willink?

  You want to support it? So there you go. OriginUSA.com.

• 2:42:03Speaker 02

  Very true. Also Jocko Store called JacoStore.com, also known as Defcore.com. Anyway, you, anyway, you want to, you want to, if you want a shirt, hat, hoodie, all this stuff with discipline equals freedom. Good, you know, all these things that, that are representative of the path is where you can get it.

• 2:42:22Speaker 02

  I'm telling you, it's, it's, it's good stuff. So one of, actually I told you my mom was visiting. And it was my mom's friend's like son or brother.

• 2:42:34Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 2:42:35Speaker 02

  And they had met or whatever and they're in the game, we'll say, and they're like, hey, then the guy was like, hey, the men, they do good work or whatever. The discipline equals freedom shirt, man, they do good work because it's the, my favorite shirt. Not only because it says discipline equals freedom, but how it fits. See what I'm saying? That's that quality stuff right there. Don't worry, I got you. Anyway, you want to represent, that's where you go. That's where you get it. Shirt locker.

• 2:42:57Jocko Willink?

  Let's talk about it.

• 2:42:59Speaker 02

  New design every month. People have been liking and giving me feedback on the latest one, sugar coated lies. Here's the thing, what we, what we don't realize that sugar coated lies is one of the OG OG sayings.

• 2:43:11Speaker 02

  And it's in reference to donuts and how donuts trick you. And

• 2:43:16Jocko Willink?

  They're lies.

• 2:43:17Speaker 02

  They're lies and you say, hey, your willpower is, is not going to be defeated by a donut.

• 2:43:25Jocko Willink?

  I would hope not.

• 2:43:26Speaker 02

  I hope not. Right. That was the whole message right there. But yeah, in, in the event of, you know, some newcomers who maybe missed that OG saying, that's what it is. That's the explanation.

• 2:43:35Jocko Willink?

  It's in, in this book, he talks about the whole, and he mentioned it today. Where he's basically like taking, when he's addicted, he's taking orders from this other

• 2:43:47Speaker 02

  That's real.

• 2:43:47Jocko Willink?

  That's real. So sometimes that other thing is heroin. I hope it's not. Sometimes it's a donut.

• 2:43:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:43:53Jocko Willink?

  It shouldn't be a donut dude, shouldn't be heroin either.

• 2:43:55Speaker 02

  No.

• 2:43:56Jocko Willink?

  But give yourself orders. You're the general. You're in charge.

• 2:43:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:43:59Jocko Willink?

  Don't listen to that guy over there.

• 2:44:00Speaker 02

  That's funny, cause like it kinda does. And you know how like when you're, you know how they say, and there's all these different behavior like helpers, right? Behavior modification like helpers where it's like they'll say, hey, don't do, just don't do this. If you, hey, look, if you have a problem with donuts, right? The kind where if you see a donut, it's really, really hard for you to resist the donut, then don't keep them in the house. Like that's like, and it's helper.

• 2:44:22Jocko Willink?

  I agree.

• 2:44:22Speaker 02

  And here's the thing, that, that works for a reason, or actually for a few reasons, whatever. So you can literally, and so one of them is don't go shopping when you're hungry. Like that's the old school one, right? Bro, I'm telling you, if you have like, let's say this affinity and this love in your heart for the taste of donuts. And you're not, and you're full, you just ate dinner, you know, had a milk and you're kinda like, kinda, kinda full, like right after. And then you go shopping and see the donuts, but it's like, whatever.

• 2:44:49Jocko Willink?

  I think it's good. If we're gonna go extreme here, I'm gonna say like, have a good day, like workout in the morning, early. Get a run in, get some jujitsu done, go home, eat.

• 2:45:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:45:00Jocko Willink?

  A lot, by the way, steak, milk, greens, creatine, like, and then go shopping.

• 2:45:08Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:45:08Jocko Willink?

  Cause you'll be like, just overflowing with discipline.

• 2:45:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know what I mean? And that's just one part of it. So you don't even have any like desire really, you know? And if you do, like just because of the, the, what do you call you, how much you like it or whatever, it's not at its full peak. In fact, it's at its lowest peak.

• 2:45:25Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:45:25Speaker 02

  So now you just got this, like for you to do that is, it's almost impossible to just betray your whole self like that, you know?

• 2:45:31Jocko Willink?

  You're not getting donuts.

• 2:45:32Speaker 02

  You're not getting donuts.

• 2:45:33Jocko Willink?

  So.

• 2:45:33Speaker 02

  Nonetheless, this shirt, this, this current shirt from the shirt locker is just a small little reminder. That a donut is not stronger than your will.

• 2:45:43Jocko Willink?

  There you go. Hey, uh, here's another thing, another little tie in. Robert F Kennedy Jr. Talks about. Uh, factory farming and factory processing of meat like big giant corporations. We don't like that. Not good for you, not good for the country, not good for the environment, not good for anything. That's why if you want some steak, which you should, by the way, get your steak from primalbeef.com or from coloradocraftbeef.com. These are small, nice little farms. Where we have control over the whole process.

• 2:46:26Jocko Willink?

  So go to primalbeef.com or coloradocraftbeef.com and check it out. Get yourself some good steak that supports America. Supports America, supports the small ranches out there, the small farmers. That's what we're doing.

• 2:46:45Jocko Willink?

  So check it out. Coloradocraftbeef.com. They got, they got meat sticks, by the way, at coloradocraftbeef.com. They send you any?

• 2:46:51Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:46:52Jocko Willink?

  Okay, yeah, they're really good. They are. Let's face it, they're like, kind of replace in general speak for general person, they replace a Snickers bar.

• 2:47:06Jocko Willink?

  You know what I'm saying? They replace a Snickers bar. Cause you could be, you know, how, look, when you, when you, when you want a Snickers bar. You're not, you don't want a steak, right? You just want a snack, right? A little something. Sure. Well, Snickers bar is about the same as a, a meat stick from coloradocraftbeef.

• 2:47:25Speaker 02

  So is it the same, you think? Or would you say just in the, cause it fills that snacky?

• 2:47:31Jocko Willink?

  It's a snack thing. It tastes good. It's gratifying. Cause a Snickers bar is gratifying. Now, it's not gonna be, a Snickers bar isn't as gratifying for as long. Because it's just like sugar. And so you get, you burn through that pretty quick.

• 2:47:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:47:42Jocko Willink?

  Those beef sticks, dude, they're freaking, they, they are gratifying for, for an extended period of time.

• 2:47:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:47:48Jocko Willink?

  Like they, they make you feel. Satiated.

• 2:47:53Speaker 02

  Sir, so it's like, uh, what's the slogan freaking Colorado craft beef sticks satisfies you?

• 2:47:59Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. They try and say Snickers satisfy you, but let's face it, Snickers satisfies you for about a half an hour.

• 2:48:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, it doesn't makes you want more Snickers.

• 2:48:06Jocko Willink?

  This is what I noticed about Colorado craft beef sticks is if you like, sometimes I'll, cause you know me, you know, my, oh, my eating habits, you know, like I don't really like to have a big lunch, but sometimes I'm hungry because I lifted and I ran. Maybe I even surfed. So, but I'm a little bit more hungry and so maybe the handful of nuts or bowl of nuts that I might have doesn't do it. Then I have one of those beef sticks. And all of a sudden, I'm, I'm kind of like not hungry for a long time.

• 2:48:38Speaker 02

  GTG.

• 2:48:38Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, which is pretty awesome. So check those out and also subscribe to the podcast and also go to jockounderground.com. You know, we're talking about, uh,

• 2:48:49Jocko Willink?

  Theo Von's podcast. Dude, they, they took his podcast down when he had Robert F Kennedy Jr. On.

• 2:48:55Speaker 02

  Why?

• 2:48:56Jocko Willink?

  I think they were talking about the vaccine. They were talking about COVID. I don't know what they were talking. I forget.

• 2:49:00Speaker 02

  Who took it down YouTube?

• 2:49:01Jocko Willink?

  YouTube amongst others. I don't really know, but listen, that's why we have the jockounderground.com. So we won't have that happen on that channel. So if something's going to get taken down, not going to get taken down from there because the only people that could take it down from there is Echo Charles. So it ain't coming down and that's why we have it and look, it costs $8.18 a month. If you want to support it. If you can't afford that and you still want to have freedom, just email [email protected] will take care of you. We just want to make sure that information, that there's freedom of speech. And on that platform, it's guaranteed. It's a hundred percent guaranteed. So there you go. Also YouTube, subscribe to that. Also psychological warfare, also flip side canvas books.

• 2:49:46Jocko Willink?

  Uh, covered today, Robert F Kennedy Jr., American values. He also wrote the real Dr. Fauci. He also wrote the Wu, the Wuhan cover up. Check those out. I've written a bunch of books. So if you want to get the books that I've written, you can check those out as well, especially the kids books. Get the kids books. The kids need these books. You should be able to square yourself away, whoever you are, but your kids, those kids, your neighbors, your, your niece, your nephew, the kid around the block, they might not be able to do that. They need more guidance than you. Getting these kids books, they will help them immensely. Also, we have a leadership consultancy. We solve problems through leadership. Go to Echelonfront.com for details. We actually have a battlefield coming up in Gettysburg.

• 2:50:31Jocko Willink?

  And there's another thing in the book. Talk about touring these battlefields, these Civil War battlefields. If you want to learn about leadership, it is outstanding to go to those battlefields and check it out and learn the lessons from the battlefield. I'll be there. Leif will be there. We'll walk around. JD will be there. Jason Garner will be there. We'll be getting after it. So if you want to go to those, check out Echelonfront.com, go to events. Also, we have an online training academy because leadership is integral in every part of your life. When you talk to your kids, when you talk to your wife, when you talk to your subordinates, when you talk to your peers, when you talk to your friends, when you talk to your boss,

• 2:51:14Jocko Willink?

  leadership, that's what all that is. And you need to go to the gym every day to stay in shape and you need to go and work every day to maintain and sustain and improve your leadership. So go to extremeownership.com, take some of our courses. There's free courses on there. You can take, just go take those. Just go take those. At a minimum, go take those. The framework of extreme ownership, go take that course. Learn how to take extreme ownership. That's what we're doing. And there's a couple of other courses on there for free. Check those out. 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 Mark Lee's mom, Mama Lee. She's got a charity

• 2:51:54Jocko Willink?

  organization. If you want to donate or you want to get involved, go to AmericasMightyWarriors.org. Also, check out HeroesandHorses.org. Also, Jimmy May has got an organization called BeyondTheBrotherhood.org. Check all those out. And if you want to connect with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., if you want to support him, go to Kennedy24.com/California if you want to register and he's, he's 75,000 of those. So get on there, make that happen. Also, he's on Instagram, Twitter, Twitter X, Facebook, at Robert F. Kennedy Jr. And he's on YouTube, at Team Kennedy24. Go check out his State of Our Union, if you want to get a feel for what he's thinking and where he's

• 2:52:37Jocko Willink?

  at. If you want to connect with me, I'm at Jaco.com. I'm also on social media. I'm at Jaco Willink. Echoes on social media.

• 2:52:49Jocko Willink?

  He's at Echo Charles. Third Measure is on social media.

• 2:52:53Speaker 02

  Bang, Third Measure made the cut.

• 2:52:55Jocko Willink?

  They made the cut. At Third, Three R D Measure. That's where it's at. If you want to see some scraps. Right?

• 2:53:06Speaker 02

  Sure. We call them scraps. Yeah, scraps, some, uh, eh, post-apocalyptic possibilities.

• 2:53:15Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 2:53:17Speaker 02

  Kind of a thing.

• 2:53:17Jocko Willink?

  Any fourth coming? Anything we need to know about?

• 2:53:20Speaker 02

  Nope. Nothing you need to know about at this time.

• 2:53:22Jocko Willink?

  Hey, if you do go there, don't, don't do an infinite, uh, scroll.

• 2:53:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:53:29Jocko Willink?

  Infinite scroll through your life. Addictive. It's addictive. Don't let that happen. Watch out for the algorithm. And of course, we get to talk about elections and presidents and democracy only because of our brave men and women in uniform. So thanks to all of you that are out there in uniform right now, protecting our freedom and our democracy and our way of life. And also thanks to our police, law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, Border Patrol, Secret Service, as well as all other first responders. Thanks to you as well. You keep us safe here at home. And everyone else out there, I'm going to leave you with a quote

• 2:54:14Jocko Willink?

  from John F. Kennedy, who was a lieutenant in the Navy. He was also President of the United States. And he said, quote, "In a democracy, every citizen, regardless of his interest in politics, holds office. Every one of us is in a position of responsibility. And in the final analysis, the kind of government we get depends upon how we fulfill those responsibilities. We, the people, are the boss. And we will get the kind of political leadership, be it good or bad, that we demand and we deserve." End quote.

• 2:55:04Jocko Willink?

  That's it. We are responsible. It's on us.

• 2:55:12Jocko Willink?

  So pay attention.

• 2:55:15Jocko Willink?

  And until next time, this is Echo and Jocko out.