493: Chris Cappy's Grunt Perspective From The Front Lines of Iraq and Ukraine.

>Join Jocko Underground< https://www.jockounderground.com/subscribe Chris "Cappy" Capelluto is a former US Army infantryman, Iraq veteran, and YouTube content creator. He has gained recognition for his YouTube channel, where he focuses on defense analysis, military history, and geopolitical topics. Cappy also worked as a head of video for Task & Purpose https://www.google.com/search?q=Task+%26+Purpose&sa=X&sca_esv=a89d269aec3ce157&sxsrf=AE3TifP9Vh1ZsfQqFiqHxhKs2iPdFICpPg%3A1749007991397&ved=2ahUKEwjdmqXA6taNAxWGle4BHTWeKPMQxccNegQIXBAB before launching his own channel. He's known for his unique perspective, combining his military experience with a media background 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 493 with Echo Charles and me, Jocko Willink. Good evening, Echo. Good evening.

• 0:07Jocko Willink?

  Jonathan Andrew Peble, callsign Mayhem, was killed by a Russian drone strike while fighting in Ukraine, according to a social media post from a American military expert and vlogger, Chris Capelludo.

• 0:23Jocko Willink?

  "I've just been informed, Mayhem is KIA in Ukraine. He died trying to save two of his buddies," said Capelludo, who had interviewed Peble earlier this year for his YouTube channel.

• 0:35Jocko Willink?

  "From talking to him, he was a stand-up guy, dedicated to the defense of Ukraine. He was very interested in the political side of the fight when I spoke to him, meaning he was steadfastly against Putin and his aggressive war." Peble was a US Marine Corps and Iraq War veteran, and had served as a machine gunner with the Delta Knights Unit in the International Legion under Ukraine's main intelligence directorate. After leaving the Marines, Peble worked at various jobs in different countries before arriving in Ukraine in August 2024.

• 1:14Jocko Willink?

  In an interview with Capelludo earlier this year, Peble said that he had found his purpose in Ukraine.

• 1:22Jocko Willink?

  Quote, "This is what I'm supposed to be doing. I feel at home again. Everything makes a lot more sense, even though I don't speak the language. Somehow, life makes more sense here than it did any time since I got out in 2009," end quote.

• 1:44Jocko Willink?

  And that right there is an excerpt from an article from the Kiev Post from just a few days ago, came out on 26 May 2025, reporting on yet another casualty.

• 1:58Jocko Willink?

  In that vicious war and the quotes in the article are from an interview by Chris Capelluto, who's better known as Chris Cappy, who's a former National Guard, US Army soldier, an Iraq war veteran who traveled to Ukraine as a journalist to get or try and get some ground truth on the war there. And he took the risk associated with being a war zone to do that. And he reported on his experiences and his lessons learned and what he saw. And it's an honor to have him here with us tonight to share all the lessons he's learned over

• 2:39Jocko Willink?

  the years, not only in Ukraine, but also in the Army National Guard combat in Iraq, reintegration into civilian life, a little bit of activity in the corporate world, and then his journey from a video editor to the chief creator at his own channel, which is called Cappy Army. Chris, thanks for joining us, man.

• 3:02Speaker 01

  Thank you for having me. It's good to be here.

• 3:04Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it was really, really heart wrenching to have watched your interviews with mayhem and then see you posting that. It's also a good reminder of something that I was trying to remind people of that the people that are fighting are people. They're not just soldiers. They're not just numbers. They're, they're human beings. And there's another one that is gone. So I suppose we'll get into all that stuff as we move through this podcast, but let's get a little bit of the background, a little bit of the background on Cappy,

• 3:45Jocko Willink?

  where you came from, what was going on, you're growing up, you and I are both East Coasters, where you're from Long Island, right?

• 3:51Speaker 01

  That's Long Island. Yeah, I grew up on Long Island where I get coffee and bagels.

• 3:57Jocko Willink?

  What year were you born?

• 3:58Speaker 01

  Nineteen eighty nine.

• 3:59Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 3:59Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 4:00Jocko Willink?

  So you caught the love, the last bit of that decade. What were your parents doing when you were growing up?

• 4:04Speaker 01

  My dad was a conductor on the railroad. He punched tickets. The Long Island Railroad.

• 4:09Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 4:09Speaker 01

  So from out east, Long Island, he'd take all the commuters into New York City every morning.

• 4:14Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I don't think I ever rode that because I don't think I ever had a reason to go out to Long Island from New York. But oh, well, all right.

• 4:20Speaker 01

  Yep. So he punched tickets for thirty five years or so, uh, every day, worked really, really hard. My, that was one of my earliest memories, actually, is growing up and he would take me on the train. I get to ride for free, which is pretty cool.

• 4:32Jocko Willink?

  Huge benefit.

• 4:33Speaker 01

  Get to go see the engine in the front and we'd go to the city all the time. And yeah, I just remember how hard he worked and how, you know, he's supporting my, my sister and my brother and me and yeah, really good guy.

• 4:51Jocko Willink?

  And what about your mom?

• 4:52Speaker 01

  My mom was a IRS agent for the government and she would always tell me not to tell people that. So I'm sorry, mom, that I'm telling people that you worked for the IRS. She was in IT. She wasn't auditing you, so.

• 5:04Jocko Willink?

  Did you have any, uh, military veteran like background in your family?

• 5:07Speaker 01

  So my mom's father, my grandfather was in the Korean War.

• 5:11Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 5:11Speaker 01

  He was in the second ID as an artilleryman.

• 5:13Jocko Willink?

  Check. How was his hearing?

• 5:16Speaker 01

  Shot.

• 5:16Jocko Willink?

  Just shot.

• 5:17Speaker 01

  Just completely shot. He would always yell at us until like just normal things that he was saying. Actually, he has a funny story about that. So when he was on the gun batteries and they would do fire missions all day, it got so bad that they couldn't hear the fire missions come in anymore. So what they would do is put their hand on the phone so that they could feel the vibrations of the phone ringing. Okay, there you go. All right, we got a fire mission. So absolutely deaf they were.

• 5:47Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 5:47Speaker 01

  And the VA, you know, it's not service connected. And so if he was like eighty, then they were like, okay, fine.

• 5:53Jocko Willink?

  And you said you have, uh, you have an older brother and a younger sister?

• 5:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, my really huge age gaps. So my older brother is eight years older than me and my younger sister is six years younger.

• 6:05Jocko Willink?

  Dang, that's a weird family planning or lack of planning. One of those two. It's either an interesting, I have like a really tight shock group for my first three kids and then I have one like stray round.

• 6:21Jocko Willink?

  And how was that but so that means your older older brother was babysitting you and stuff I'm assuming at some point.

• 6:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think the thing about having a big age gap between your siblings is that there's my understanding is there's like less rivalry usually because you're so far apart that it's more of sort of a mentor relationship that you'll have like my older brother and I we never really were competitive with each other like how a lot of siblings are especially guys I think at that age so I just looked up to him my whole life and always he was going through these milestones in life like it's a way to kind of look into the future eight years and see okay this is the college is gonna happen and it's gonna be like this so it really gave me an opportunity to to see what was coming and and how to kind of um navigate it and he would always give me advice as well so

• 7:11Speaker 01

  amazing I think having that even though maybe you're not quite as close because he's

• 7:18Speaker 01

  because he was so much older like by the time I was ten or eleven he's out the door he's going to college and then living around the world so

• 7:27Jocko Willink?

  What would he do in college?

• 7:28Speaker 01

  He studied computer graphics so he went straight into like the movie industry and working on um different different movies like Spider-Man and stuff and the computer effects world so

• 7:39Jocko Willink?

  Echo Charles is kind of getting curious over here he's he's a special effects curious.

• 7:44Speaker 01

  Sure, yeah, yeah, hell yeah.

• 7:46Jocko Willink?

  And then what did you do the same thing for your little sister then?

• 7:49Speaker 01

  And yeah, so I tried my best to to be a good older brother and to answer any questions that she had in the same way and again like we weren't super close because she's so much younger and I was out gone and off and traveling around the world as well but we now we live much closer to each other and we have a a good relationship and she's like another gee my both of my siblings are just geniuses when it comes to like math and science and I was like I was such a screw up in school and so she's a quantum physicist for Amazon working on quantum computings quantum computer computings there you go that's that's how that's so smart I am.

• 8:33Jocko Willink?

  So how did you end up being a screw up in uh in school then?

• 8:37Speaker 01

  I was a nightmare. They were so well behaved and I was just an absolute nightmare from like the get go. And I think part of it, like my, my parents split when I was pretty young, when I was 11. And so like the divorce, I think when you're at that age, that formative age can, you know, you want any kind of attention, negative attention, any sort of attention. So I would act out and my teachers hated me. What does act out consist of? Act out consists of the point where they're like, we're gonna, we're gonna kick you out of school. Um, you need to get your act together. You need to misbehave a lot. You need to be the class clown. You need to get into fights, but not like win the fights, like get my ass kicked. And I was bullied a lot.

• 9:21Speaker 01

  And I, um, like every time the principal would call, they'd be like, what'd you do, Chris? Everyone in the class would say, what'd you do this time? You're gonna go to the principal's office again. And I think I wanted, it was a cry for help. Yeah. Uh, but I was in all of the like special help classes, all the you need remedial training on this so bad. Like you're not, what aren't you getting? And was it just a public school? Yes, I went to, went to public school throughout. Uh huh. Did you play any sports? Baseball, which was the saving grace. Baseball is all the friends that I had growing up were a hundred percent through sports, through baseball. Also did karate, uh, shirinjiru.

• 10:03Speaker 01

  Karate when I was growing up, only made it to like green belt, but that discipline helped pull me back from the edge. So by the time I was like 16, 17, I started pulling my act together and started, um, focusing more on school and not getting in trouble so much. Did you start coming up with a plan then for like a life plan? I always knew that I wanted to do video. That was, that was about it. Like I knew I wanted to tell stories and. When you say video.

• 10:32Jocko Willink?

  Was that early enough to be like videos a thing or were you having to look at it go, I want to make movies? Cause when I was a kid, there was no such thing as video. I mean, there kind of was, but you wouldn't be going into video. You'd be going into like, I want to make a movie in Hollywood. There was no, there was nothing in between. Whereas now like you can do video, as we all know, you can do video real easy. So did you have a, was there any like actual video path that you knew about?

• 10:57Speaker 01

  The video path that I knew about was I wanted to make movies. Like I was, I was a kid that knew all the names of the actors for the Batman movies and the kids would like test me on it. They'd say, well, Chris, who was, uh, who played Batman? And who played Poison Ivy? And I didn't realize at the time they were kind of making fun of me. But, but, cause I, I've always been a little bit like socially awkward and I was, I'm like, oh yeah, I'll tell you. I'll list off all the names, like, um, just a like obsessive knowledge on movies. And, um, I wanted so badly to be a director of films.

• 11:38Speaker 01

  And my dad was really big into technology and video cameras. So he would get some of the earliest VHS giant tapes that you would load up in there. And you, um, we would like video together. We would do little, um, stop motion movies when I was growing up. And we'd like edit it in camera. So we'd make it look like this old show, Super Dave. Him and I would like recreate and he's the one that really got me into my love of video and video production and video editing. Like my dad would rip editing software off of LimeWire.

• 12:17Speaker 01

  We would pirate like, oh, I don't know if I should say that, but yeah, we, it was illegal, but we would pirate this old, this editing software. And I would teach myself how to edit when I was as young as like 10. And that's what I would do when he would pick me up and bring me over to stay with, uh, my aunt and him. And I would just edit all day, try to like, how, how do I do a green screen? How do I do this?

• 12:40Jocko Willink?

  So that's real clear, something you're obsessed with. And then you, how do you follow that path? So what's your next move after high school?

• 12:47Speaker 01

  Film school. And my dad begged me not to. He's like, learn something useful. Like, don't. And he was right. He was good advice. And so I did my first year of film school at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan. And when I was there, it just was not fulfilling. It wasn't what I needed at that point in my life. It was a lot of drinking, partying, and it wasn't, it didn't feel fulfilling.

• 13:21Jocko Willink?

  Were you drinking and partying? And then you got to a point, you're like, all right, this is not getting me anywhere?

• 13:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, because I felt like I wasn't really learning anything or developing or growing. And a lot of my life, like, the time that I would spend with my father, a lot of times was in the car. It was him driving me to karate. It was him driving me to baseball. And maybe like a weekend I would get to spend with him. And so a lot of the time that we would spend together, we'd be listening to like, talk radio, we'd be listening to Rush Limbaugh. And we would talk a lot about, like, the Iraq war as I'm growing up. And these are some of my most, I would say impactful memories with my dad is talking about how

• 14:08Speaker 01

  the war in Iraq is a good thing, and what we're doing is good. And I remember getting to college and thinking like,

• 14:15Jocko Willink?

  Real quick, so you were what, 12 on 9/11?

• 14:19Speaker 01

  I would have been 12.

• 14:20Jocko Willink?

  Something like that? What do you remember about that? Because in Long Island, that was, you could see the smoke, I'm sure.

• 14:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, you could, it was, everyone knew somebody who lost somebody. Because all of the families where I grew up on Long Island out east were commuters into the city. A lot of them worked in lower Manhattan. And my dad would normally be commuting in on the railroad. But that day, he didn't go to work. And I remember him telling me that, Ronkonkoma train station, like where he would often go and start his day, there was just for weeks afterwards, there were cars left there from the people who never came back from the city and their cars are just in the parking lot. And I remember that like image stuck with me, the thought of there's like abandoned vehicles

• 15:11Speaker 01

  in all these train stations throughout Long Island, all these people that didn't make it. And so nine 11 impacted me in the way by the time I was 18, I realized, I was like, this country has given me so much, I'm so fortunate, I'm so fortunate that I don't even, I don't have to go and fight for the country. I can go to art school, like I can screw off. And that to me felt wrong, especially because I at the time did very much believe in the fight. And I remember I had one of these moments where I was, I had two 40s duct taped

• 15:55Speaker 01

  to my hands and I was just getting annihilated.

• 15:58Jocko Willink?

  Like literally duct taped to your hands?

• 16:00Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, they call it Edward 40 hands. And I'm getting smashed.

• 16:04Speaker 02

  Also known as 80 ounces to freedom.

• 16:06Speaker 01

  You've heard of this? You've heard of this?

• 16:08Speaker 02

  I hear things, you know?

• 16:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I'm getting obliterated in this dorm room in Manhattan. And you know, you start talking as one does with your art school buddies and I'm like the only guy that is like, yeah, Iraq war is good. Everyone's like, if you think this, Chris, like what are you doing here? Getting drunk and partying? Like, why don't you go and fight for your country if you really believe that? And I remember in that moment, you get super defensive. You're like, you don't know what you're talking about. Like, well, what does it matter? I don't, it's not about that. But then I had to take a long, hard look in the mirror and think to myself like, actually, that guy's got a point. Like, what am I doing here if I believe in

• 16:53Speaker 01

  this war? And I think that this is a good thing. And I'm able bodied and like, you know, maybe I have something that I could offer to the military. And it was that moment where I realized, I'm like, I'm, I don't, I say a lot of things, but I don't actually believe the things that I say, right? Like, I must not if, you know, he has a point. And I'm thinking like, do I want to live life aligned with what I say? Should my actions be in line with the things that I say? Because otherwise, I have to completely start saying different things. I gotta start saying something else. Because otherwise, I, it's like, the word is, I think, cognitive dissonance. I had this like, really bad cognitive dissonance.

• 17:37Speaker 01

  Where I'm like, my actions are not in line with what I'm saying. And so I started looking up like, how could I serve? What are different ways to do it? Just going down the rabbit hole of like,

• 17:51Jocko Willink?

  What year was this?

• 17:53Speaker 01

  2008.

• 17:54Jocko Willink?

  Okay, so, yeah, I mean, Iraq is still going off in 2008.

• 18:00Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 18:01Jocko Willink?

  And what'd you find out? What did you, what'd you end up choosing? How'd you get to the National Guard?

• 18:07Speaker 01

  I got to the National Guard because there's a amazing historic unit in New York City, the 69th Infantry Division in New York City. They're the guys that responded to 9/11 on that day. They're the guys who then, they went to Baghdad and had like a rough tour. I think it was 2004 or 5. And I just remember like reading their story, reading their book about their deployment. And, and just like a historic unit, that whole division. And so I looked up on Google recruiters. They had a recruiter, went down to the National Guard station. Because my thought was like, oh, I'm like, I'm probably gonna hate this. And I'm gonna be terrible at it probably. So like, what's the least amount of commitment that I can do?

• 18:52Speaker 01

  Just to be completely honest, I was like, what's the least I can go in, go to war and get out and like be done? And feel like I did my part? And so the National Guard seemed like the least amount of commitment because I could go to boot camp as an 11 bra. Oh, also, the National Guard had infantry and no, the other reserves didn't. So I knew if I was gonna do the army, I wanted to do the army thing. So I remember everyone was trying to talk me out, like, don't do infantry, do like intel, do something else. But I had my heart set on being an infantryman and.

• 19:33Speaker 01

  The guard seemed like where I could go over the summer and then go back to school if I wanted to. But I ended up after boot camp, I was um, I volunteered to deploy. Cause in the guard, you can ask your captain to sign off on, hey, uh, let him transfer to the Pennsylvania National Guard, cause the striker unit's going out. So, kind of rambling, but it's uh, boot camp itself was a bit of a shock to me because I was in a unit that we had a murder in, in my, uh, in my During boot camp? Yeah. What happened?

• 20:17Speaker 01

  It was like the only murder at Benning in over, I think, decades. And there was an airborne holdover, holdover who

• 20:28Speaker 01

  he, there was a guy who was injured and back at the bay. And he's on bedrest, so he's away from the platoon. Then there's another guy who is on airborne holdover and he's going around and robbing all of the barracks while people are training. He runs into the guy who's on bedrest, guy's like, what are you doing here? Stop trying to get into these lockers. Confronts him and in that confrontation, he pulls out a knife and stabs him. Which guy? So the airborne holdover thief pulls out a knife and stabs the just injured trainee. Yeah. Like forty times.

• 21:14Speaker 01

  God. And I hear screams and my buddy hears screams in the barracks next door. So we go to check, cause we're just cleaning our weapons. And the first thing I see is he's ble- like just a pool of blood in the barracks. And this is like my third or fourth day of boot camp after 30th IG, like of actual boot camp. And I'm in shock, cause I have no real point of reference for that kind of violence or blood and

• 21:49Speaker 01

  In that moment, I realized that blood and guts and things, other people's blood and guts don't really bother me that much. Like, I didn't throw up, but I did have a moment of shock where I didn't know what to do. I didn't, I don't know anything about tourniquets or how to treat a wounded person. And so I just run to get a drill sergeant and the drill sergeant finds the murderer, beats the hell out of him. He ends up going to prison. But I, um, yeah, just eat like right off the get go. I had the, the strangest military career.

• 22:31Jocko Willink?

  That's so, that's a freaking crazy way to kick off boot camp. What'd they do with you guys after that?

• 22:39Speaker 01

  They gave us two days where they, they said, hey, you guys have been through something difficult. So we're gonna go easy on you for two days. Get, you know, call your fam. They gave us one phone call to call home and be like, we're okay. And then after that, they went back to normal. It was the strangest way to start the career. I, I'm like, what did I get myself into? Like, I, what am I doing? But I, I even in spite of that, I was like, I need to deploy. I had it in my head. It's like, I have to deploy.

• 23:11Jocko Willink?

  So you make it through boot camp and then you, you go right to A I T. After that?

• 23:15Speaker 01

  Yep, straight to A I T.

• 23:16Jocko Willink?

  And had you already made up your mind to volunteer for deployment or did you graduate first?

• 23:22Speaker 01

  Graduated and I was hoping that my New York unit would deploy soon. But when I got back there, they said, our deployment to Afghanistan has been canceled. We're probably not going to go for a couple of years, fortunately. And I was like, well, fortunately, that sucks. And they're like, dude, we've been there before. You do not want to go. And I was like, no, no, like, I, I do. And they're trying to talk me out of it, but my captain signed off on the transfer because we, a couple of the guys from my boot camp cycle had found out that the Pennsylvania 28th ID was deploying. So we all kind of were texting each other and fine. Like, hey, you know, this is how you can volunteer for it. They need bodies. So.

• 24:06Jocko Willink?

  And this is, is this still 2008?

• 24:08Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 24:10Jocko Willink?

  So that's, what unit did you go to in the, in the 28?

• 24:13Speaker 01

  The 56th Stryker Brigade, the first of the 111th.

• 24:17Jocko Willink?

  Got it. Cause I was in Ramadi for about, I don't know, a month with the 228 and they were just freaking outstanding. But that was one of those times where, you know, when you were sitting there looking at your brochure of the National Guard thinking, well, you know, I can kind of, I won't maybe have to go if I don't want to and I can get out of it. But like the 228 was on the ground in Ramadi for 14 straight months. And they lost almost a hundred guys. It was gnarly for, for them. So you must've had some of those guys that had been there.

• 24:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. One of the guys in my squad was on the Ramadi tour. A couple of them were in other parts of Iraq, but one in particular, really great guy. He ended up, he ended up trying to suicide by cop. Um, he had it really rough in Ramadi and he was just a really good dude. It is a good dude. And yeah, the 28th ID is an outstanding National Guard unit. Great guys. And if they had the, by the time 2009, when our deployment hit mobilization was 2008, the train up and then 2009 is when we left.

• 25:28Jocko Willink?

  How long is that train up then? Like, is it like six months?

• 25:31Speaker 01

  It's three months in Louisiana, Fort Polk. We went to in the box there.

• 25:36Jocko Willink?

  Uh huh.

• 25:37Speaker 01

  And it's, uh, just learning like how the strikers work. And I was very excited to be part of a, a striker unit. It's like the first National Guard striker unit.

• 25:48Jocko Willink?

  What was your job?

• 25:50Speaker 01

  I was a, in the fourth squad, I was in weapon squad, a, um, for the first half of the tour, I was a rifleman. Just like a kind of an AG for the 240. And then the second half of the tour, I got the 249.

• 26:04Jocko Willink?

  So when you show up at the striker, do you have? Do you have jobs specific to the striker or no? Cause they already have guys like a gunner assigned and a driver assigned and the vehicle commander. And so you're like a rifleman in the back gets on.

• 26:16Speaker 01

  I was a dismount.

• 26:16Jocko Willink?

  Check.

• 26:18Speaker 01

  Yeah. Which is what I wanted and I was learning all of that when I got there. I'm like, wait, who do infantrymen drive the vehicles? Or are there drivers for the vehicles? Like, how does squad organization work? How does this unit? How does it act? How does it actually work in practice? And since I volunteered and like caught up with the unit, they had already had, they already knew each other for years. You know, they've been training and drilling. So I was kind of like the guy from New York, the backfill. And my whole squad was made up of like backfills and dudes that had been stop lost and pulled back in or reclassed from combat engineer or my squad leader was a a Cav Scout that they reclassed.

• 27:02Speaker 01

  They were, they were just needed, they needed people with a pulse.

• 27:06Jocko Willink?

  And you're what, 19 years old?

• 27:07Speaker 01

  I was the youngest guy in my company, 19.

• 27:12Jocko Willink?

  And how's it looking as you're going, getting ready to go on deployment? Like now it's 2009, what's the, what's the action looking like over there?

• 27:19Speaker 01

  It was a transition period from basically the very, it was the end of the surge. So this, all of the, basically the benefits of the guys who had gone before me, all of the ser, the people that are part of the surge. I got to kind of reap the benefits of the work that, the hard work that all those soldiers did. Because by 2009, it's not like, like so many dudes are dead. So many bad guys have just been stacked bodies. And, but it wasn't clear that it was gonna be that way. It was, as we're going in, they're showing us these videos of, I'm sure you've done this before where you're in a briefing room and they're showing you a video of two guys getting sniped.

• 28:04Speaker 01

  And then another, like an IED going off and they use that to lure a soldier and then they snipe him. And then his buddy tries to get him, they're showing me videos of this. And I was terrified by it. Shot, I'd never seen something like that before, so I. Like, lost my nerve completely. And I, the reason, so I'm gonna tell the story, the reason I tell it is because I think it shows that people can like, overcome their fear. And fear and war is something that fascinates me and I've always, I ask people about, because it affects me so much and I am kind of the guy that's like, very afraid, but I do it anyway.

• 28:45Speaker 01

  When I saw those videos, I went to my chaplain and I said,

• 28:53Speaker 01

  in a moment of weakness, I asked the chaplain, I said, you have to get me off of this deployment. I need to leave, I'm quitting, I'm done. And other guys had done this too. And I was like, send me home. Like, I'm not going over there and getting shot in the head. And, you know, used as bait for my buddies. And this chaplain, I'll never forget, he, there are people in your life who are like, there, I think, in an important moments, and he gave me outstanding advice. He said, go back to your unit, go back to your barracks, sleep on it. And if you still feel the same way tomorrow, I will get you off of this deployment.

• 29:34Speaker 01

  And you will have no repercussions, no negative stain or anything, I'm, I have you. I'll, I'll take care of you. And I was like, okay, fine, I'll, I'll see you tomorrow. Like, great, thanks. And I went back, hung out with the guys in my squad. Really, guys, like, friend, the, my friends, and I'm like, I can't leave these dudes. I can't do this. The next morning, I went to training and I never thought about it again. He's like, the chaplain told me, he's like, you're, I think, you're gonna do this deployment, you're gonna do your commitment, and I think you're gonna be okay. And I believe that you can do this.

• 30:17Speaker 01

  And like that was exactly what I needed to hear. Cause if he'd been like, no, you can't leave. I would have just kept probably trying to leave, but him saying, you know? Yeah, we can do this. I don't know, it let me come to the answer myself.

• 30:37Jocko Willink?

  Which is always the best way, you know, from, from a leadership perspective, when people can come to the conclusion on their own. There's a thing called psychological reactants, which is like, when I tell you to do something, you don't want to do it. Just, just a normal human reaction is like, if I tell you, hey, Cappy, pick up that drink right now. There's a part of your psyche that goes, I don't want to do that. But as soon as you give someone the option of like, hey dude, you can have that if you want, you go, oh, I'm kind of thirsty, I'll drink it. That's just totally different. And that's my buddy Seth. He was in the SEAL teams with me and he would get frustrated about the Navy or whatever. And he'd say, you know, I'm, I'm going to get out, you know? And I'd say, yeah, go ahead. Yeah, I'll help you write your letter and you can, you know, you can get out.

• 31:21Jocko Willink?

  And then the next day you'd be like, no, I'm not getting out. But it was just the exact same thing. If I would have tried to negotiate with him, like, no, you need to stay in. And I know you got a kid on the way. It's going to be the same thing. Like when your kid is like five, imposing things on them is way harder in the long run than getting them to understand the why. Just like being a good leader and like, hey, this is why we're, this is why we need to make this happen is, is way better. And anytime you, you can see freedom and you have a choice in it, it's just better. I mean, anytime your, your platoon leader says, we're doing it this way. As opposed to, hey, do you guys like this plan or this plan? Like just, just two options makes you feel infinitely better than just their options. So that's a good lesson from the chaplain.

• 32:06Speaker 01

  Outstanding chaplain. Really, really like, I don't know what I would have done if it had, because I feel like there's a lot of chaplains who would not be that present of mind and that smart about it. And who'd be like, you know, like you said, try to force a thing, or it just could have been a disaster if it wasn't for, that's why I'm so fortunate that just like I've gotten lucky in life to have that chaplain there at that moment. That is pure luck.

• 32:35Jocko Willink?

  So as you're heading over, do you know where you guys are going to be stationed in Iraq?

• 32:39Speaker 01

  Changes a couple of times. They're like, we're going to be here, we're going to be there. You start getting a little bit of intelligence of, okay, we're going to be just north of Baghdad. It's a place called Mushada, which is like 15 kilometers from Camp Tajji. And it's good as a little combat outpost, but they started calling it JSS by the time we're there. Joint Security Station. We're going to be living on like a football sized field, a football field sized base. That's half Iraqi police and half American soldiers. And we're going to rotate through there and another place that's a chicken coop that they just put T walls around. So I'm like, okay, this is going to be not, uh, not the four star, not the, um,

• 33:25Speaker 01

  not the Camp Tajji where you got the Domino's pizza. But that's, I wanted to be in the suck and it was basically the guys that we replaced, the 25th ID were there for 14 months and had gone like a little bit nuts. I think they'd been a part of the solder city operation and they'd had it rough and they'd kind of cleared the way for us. By the time we were there, a lot of the bad guys are dead. And it's a lot of IEDs, it's a lot of responding to IEDs. Our main job is route clearance. We're responsible for that stretch of, um, Route Tampa between like Baghdad, like the outskirts of Baghdad and

• 34:11Speaker 01

  you know, um, up to the next checkpoint, basically. So our AO extends out to, I forget if it's the Tigris or the

• 34:18Jocko Willink?

  How many clicks was it? Like?

• 34:20Speaker 01

  Our AO?

• 34:20Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. No, like on, on, how much of ramp Route Tampa did you guys have to?

• 34:24Speaker 01

  I think

• 34:25Jocko Willink?

  Monitor?

• 34:26Speaker 01

  I think it was about, um, like 30 kilometer stretch.

• 34:30Jocko Willink?

  It's a big chunk.

• 34:31Speaker 01

  It maybe, maybe it's a little less than that.

• 34:33Jocko Willink?

  Something like that.

• 34:34Speaker 01

  But it, and then it stretches out down, um, Tarmia to, to, I think it was called Camp, uh, JSS Tarmia, which is right on the river. So that was kind of like our AO. And we would do foot patrols and raids and, um, route clearance through that kind of that AO.

• 34:53Jocko Willink?

  For route clearance, did you have like a, an MRAP or something or? Just doing a route route clearance with Humvees. What were you doing?

• 35:00Speaker 01

  Strikers.

• 35:01Jocko Willink?

  Oh, that's right. You were strikers.

• 35:02Speaker 01

  So it's we're we're doing route clearance with which strikers are perfect for that. And that's like their jam. You don't have to worry about throwing track. You don't have to worry about. Although the maintenance did end up being a nightmare for the vehicle crew. Like blown tires all the time with the air system. The thing was finicky. But and also had like no armor on the bottom.

• 35:23Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 35:25Speaker 01

  And. Yeah, so we're monitoring that route for IEDs. We we lost one soldier in my company. At the very beginning of the tour, he took he was shot in the head responding to an IED. A attack that an ambush. And after the, you know, the beginning of the tour, they did a lot of IEDs on our routes and then towards the end as well. And then in the beginning and in the middle, it's just some raids and like a blur of just boredom.

• 35:58Jocko Willink?

  How's your how's your mentality? Like when you lose one of your guys? And then what 12 hours later, eight hours later, 24 hours later, you get your gear back on to go back out? You talked about being like a person that feels fear. How did you overcome that?

• 36:16Speaker 01

  I. Think that the way I dealt with fear when I was there was that I hope that it would be quick. I just didn't want. It to be painful and maybe because. About once a week or every other week, they would kill an Iraqi police officer or an Iraqi army soldier. They mainly targeted the Iraqis and not us. And so. Every other week or so, they would we drag and my vehicle was the Kazabak vehicle. So a lot of times we got. We're got Iraqis in our vehicle with gunshots to the head with. An IED that went off right outside our base and blew the brains out the back of this.

• 36:58Speaker 01

  Wounded a couple of Iraqi police and killed, I think, two of them. And so we're.

• 37:07Speaker 01

  Helping with these wounded and

• 37:12Speaker 01

  it at the time, we made jokes about it like we laughed about it and we were because the dude's brains came out and we had two dogs on our base. So the dogs came up and started eating on the brains. So we were like, oh, it's a zombie dog. And we thought that was hilarious. And later on, I thinking back on it, I'm like, actually, that's pretty messed up. And I don't know. I don't it's so much easier when you've got your buddies with you and you're 19 and you think it's not going to happen to you. You think like you've got it's it'll happen to someone else and it always does happen to someone else. And

• 37:51Speaker 01

  I don't know, I would volunteer for like every mission. When I heard other platoons were going on raids, I would volunteer. I guess I a little bit had like a death wish a little. I don't know. I don't know what was wrong with me.

• 38:03Jocko Willink?

  And did you maintain that through the entire deployment?

• 38:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, the hard the hardest part is just being away from home, missing home. And like I I stayed. I I the hardest it's it also is frustrating when you feel like you can't do your job because they fight an asymmetric war. And I would get frustrated that they would touch off IEDs and then run away. And I would say to my my buddy Colin, really good friend of mine, like one of my best friends from the tour. I was like, dude, they're cowards. They just are hitting us and running away. Why don't they stand and fight? And he said to me, like, we drop bombs

• 38:46Speaker 01

  on them from 30,000 feet in the sky. Like, are we cowards? We fight way that unfairly and they fight unfair, too. He's like, they're not cowards. You should have some respect for them in the way that they fight. And I always remember that moment because I was like, that's a good point.

• 39:06Jocko Willink?

  And what about from like, you know, obviously, you do geopolitics now and you know, you were raised on a steady diet of Rush Limbaugh and pro-Iraq war. How was that getting sorted out in your brain during this deployment?

• 39:24Speaker 01

  I went into it very like, this is the right thing, what we're doing here. We should be in Iraq. And then

• 39:34Speaker 01

  I left not the kind of guy that's like, I'm gonna throw my medals over a fence somewhere. And I hate my service, but I think I had a bit of a reality check as far as it's not exactly what I thought it was. And it's messier than I thought. And so that led me to a place where at nineteen years old, I'm thinking, okay, if I was wrong about that, then am I wrong about everything? And I, when I got back, I had a like, an existential crisis of both my belief system being challenged and and not quite holding up to reality. So I had to

• 40:20Speaker 01

  make my way through that tunnel to the to the light at the end of it, which is I had to rebuild my belief system and find out what it is that I really truly believe in. And I feel like the way to that was for me personally, was learning as much as I could because and different perspectives and to be able to argue the different perspectives on both sides. Because then I would feel like I understood a little bit better how the world works. And

• 40:52Speaker 01

  that to me was cathartic. Big instead of just thinking one way, because growing up, you get bombarded with messages. It's like talking heads yelling at each other and they're just each saying the opposite of each other. And

• 41:12Speaker 01

  it was frustrating for me for a long period of time. So I'm like, is the war in Iraq like a terrible thing? Was it awful what we did? Then thinking like, no Saddam was a really bad person and it's good what we did. And going back and forth on it. And then at the end of the day, I'm like, I don't need to know. I don't need to to know the absolute truth of the matter. I need to just learn more about it. And that's been my goal with my YouTube channel is I want soldiers like me to have a resource that I didn't have. When I was a soldier, I couldn't type into YouTube like what's different perspectives on like?

• 41:58Speaker 01

  The war, what are? What are Sunnis and Shias? Like, I didn't know going over there. I didn't. You see guys holding hands and you're like, oh, that's different. I didn't know that that's a thing here, but that's culturally, that's how they are and and like. It would have been nice, I think, if I had had a resource that had taught me a little bit. About what to expect, a little bit more about the geopolitics of it. Soldiers don't need to get marred down in the details of all that. All the time, nobody be thinking about that when you're pulling triggers, but. I do think that it would be beneficial. For the next generation of soldiers to have a little bit more.

• 42:45Speaker 01

  Knowledge base about how the world works.

• 42:49Jocko Willink?

  So when you come home from that deployment, like what's the reintegration? I've been using that word lately, reintegration, because I think the military started using it as well, but what's the reintegration like for you? Going back into the civilian life?

• 43:03Speaker 01

  It's a rejection. It's like how when your body rejects. Like your the antigens, the antibodies fight it off. It's like. Ah, a shock to the system, especially for National Guard soldiers. We go from you're in the sandbox one day to quite literally. Legitimately, the next day you are. In college again. And it is not a good way to transition. Like the active duty guys and the way that that's the active duty has so much more difficulties in a lot of ways. But that's one of the ways that like reserves and the guard are not set up for success.

• 43:47Speaker 01

  And transition is difficult for everybody, but just a way that's kind of unique for the guard in some ways is that they don't go back to their unit with their guys in the barracks and you're with your dudes and you can kind of debrief on what you've been through and what you've seen. And my tour was by no means not crazy. It was largely boring. It's the occupation phase. It's a lot of like handing out hundred thousand dollar grants and like, you know, you got, uh, so yeah, the transition was even so just very difficult

• 44:26Speaker 01

  for to go from you're in a combat zone worrying about getting killed one day to then I'm at NYU Tisch for a film school. Surrounded by people who are not, they are not, you'll say this, they are not your military types.

• 44:43Jocko Willink?

  And so now you're, are you 20 yet?

• 44:46Speaker 01

  I would have been 20 going, turning in 21.

• 44:49Jocko Willink?

  21. And you're sitting in class all day. That's what's going on. And when you're, you're studying film at NYU. So when you're studying film at NYU, you're like watching movies and critiquing the movies. Are you breaking down like, okay, here's the angle that they used. This is this kind of shot. This is why it was cool. Is like, that what you do at film school?

• 45:08Speaker 01

  It's a lot of pretentious stuff. It's a lot of like, yeah, why are they using this Dutch angle? And let's watch this, this old 1940s film that is sucks, but we're going to pretend it's like really cool and important.

• 45:24Speaker 01

  I went to Brooklyn College for a year and a half first and then transferred into NYU. And at Brooklyn College, I got, I studied the like English and studied a lot of like history. And then when I went to NYU, it was largely focused on film and acting and it was,

• 45:47Speaker 01

  I feel like a place like NYU opens up a lot of doors, gives you opportunities that would be very difficult if I had stayed at Brooklyn College. And I was pretty much a diversity hire for NYU because they were like, oh, you went to Iraq? That's a little different. We don't got one of those. Okay, we'll let him in because they had rejected me before that. So, yeah, and it was a lot of, and it was a difficult adjustment, but I knew that I had started to readjust when like I could start caring about things that were

• 46:26Speaker 01

  insignificant. Like if, like, just being able to not have that chip on my shoulder and not feel like, oh, you guys are complaining about getting up at six in the morning for class?

• 46:42Jocko Willink?

  You don't know what it's like.

• 46:45Speaker 01

  Losing that attitude is the best thing that ever happened to me to like not take myself so seriously and to not

• 46:50Jocko Willink?

  To just stop flexing.

• 46:55Speaker 01

  The victim Olympics of like, I had it tougher.

• 47:00Jocko Willink?

  And as you say, you're sitting in class all day. And at the same time, you said this like, well, what's the hardest part about that transition? Like, what? Like, okay, you're in class. Okay. So watch the movie and write your critique on it. Why is that hard?

• 47:17Speaker 01

  It doesn't feel as meaningful as being in Iraq and being in war. And so for the longest time, I just kind of would tell myself like, nothing I do ever again will be as meaningful or as important as that. And that like, I felt like I peaked. Like, I, okay, I don't necessarily want to go back to war, but like that, what else will ever?

• 47:43Speaker 01

  Sum out to that.

• 47:44Jocko Willink?

  Did you think about like going back full time military?

• 47:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. For a long time, me and my buddies, we would talk like, oh, I want to. I look up to guys like you, special forces, Navy SEALs, like I wanted to, I was thinking about, maybe I'll do the Green Berets, National Guard, the, um, what, which group is that?

• 48:03Jocko Willink?

  Nineteenth?

• 48:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:04Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 48:05Speaker 01

  Out of a.

• 48:05Jocko Willink?

  By the way, that's like the, that's like the best kept secret in the Army National Guard for sure. Like you can just become a full SF Green Beret and you're in the National Guard. That's a badass deal.

• 48:19Speaker 01

  That it, I wa- I wanted to be that bad. I've all, I wanted to and I just don't, I didn't have it in me. I didn't have the commitment. It takes a lot of commitment. I think that's why people look up to guys who are SF and the SEALs. It's because it's like, that's such a, what an accomplishment. And but my, so my experience was very, I was an average infantryman, very, you know, I shot sharpshooter, not, not expert, if I'm being honest. Uh, my PT scores were passing, but not like, I wasn't a PT stud.

• 48:58Speaker 01

  I was, I had an experience that I think probably the vast majority of people that go into the military have. It was very sort of average guy, wasn't the, I was the dude pulling security for the high speed, cool guys. And that was part of when I did, you know, created content was I wanted to tell that story. I wanted to, to make content from the perspective of the average soldier.

• 49:28Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And that, just to make sure I make this perfectly clear, like the last guest I had on the podcast, Ryan Jackson, he was like a, he was in Ramadi with us and he was a infantry, armored infantry guy. And they were doing eight hours patrolling in Tamim, which is like a horrific area of Ramadi, eight hours patrolling, eight hours sitting QRF, waiting for one of their other uh, platoons to get blown up and then eight hours to rest, refit and be ready to go out again. And that's what they did every day for, I don't know how many months, a year that they were there. And they, his company lost six guys. They had, I don't know how many dozens of guys wounded, but it was just like absolutely.

• 50:11Jocko Willink?

  An absolute grind of combat. And, you know, we're, you know, we're sitting across the table here talking and it's like, hmm, yeah, it's cool that the, the special operations guys do cool stuff and it looks cool, but that absolute grind of sustained combat. And one of the interesting things that I've talked about, which kind of brushes up against something we already discussed is like that guy and his platoon, they were going out. They were going out. They, it was on the schedule. You're going out tomorrow at this time. You know, at this time you're going out, you're going out the next day, you're going out the next day, you're going out the next day. Me and my guys?

• 50:52Jocko Willink?

  My guys went out when I wanted them to. You know what I mean? Like, it was our choice. When a target package came down, when a, when a clearance operation was happening, I had a say and a pretty significant say on what we had to do or didn't have to do. And of course, I mean, I'm bound by duty as an American fighting man, which is an extreme amount of pressure and which will, you do the right thing. But, you know, there was times, there was plenty of operations where, you know, I'd be talking with the platoon commanders and here's the, here's what is being asked of us and what do you think? And it's like, well,

• 51:35Jocko Willink?

  high, super high risk, very low possibility for reward. Well, let's not do that. Okay, fair enough. And we did that on a, you know, we did a lot of insanely risky things as well, but a lot of times it's like, yeah, let's not do that one. And so you get that mentality, you know, that you had with your chaplain, where it's like, oh, well, if you don't want to go, you don't have to. And all of a sudden it's a lot easier to go. The regular grunts don't have that choice. And special operations oftentimes we, we might not have a full choice, but we have a lot more influence over what we're going to do and what we're going to not do. And by the way, we're also going to have an influence on how we're going to do it. So that makes that type of combat stress a little bit easier.

• 52:16Jocko Willink?

  At the same time, the same exact double edged sword here is that when we go, it's because I said so. So when guys get wounded, guys get killed. It's it's I know it's because of that's the decision that I made. And so there's a little bit of a double edged sword there and you know, probably not one better than the other. It's just a different you're going to get cut a different way.

• 52:44Jocko Willink?

  So as you're as you're going to school, do you have a plan now of what you're you still going to pursue this this video? Do you still want to make films? Are you still thinking like I want to go to Hollywood and make movies? Is that what the goal is?

• 52:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's embarrassing to admit now, but I totally wanted so badly to be like a TV director or a film director. And I remember a studio asked me because my thesis film ended up doing all right. And so they

• 53:12Jocko Willink?

  What was the thesis film?

• 53:13Speaker 01

  It was about um, it was actually about at the time, there was like this Park 51, a mosque that was being built in New York City at near ground zero in real life. And so I did a movie about a soldier who is trying to deal with, what does that mean? And I was trying to explore a little bit about how I felt about the war and about this major news that was happening at the time of like, people are saying, oh, they're building like a victory mosque right on ground zero.

• 53:53Speaker 01

  And to me, I wanted to figure out how I felt about that through the film. And some big executives at a giant movie studio saw it, really liked it.

• 54:04Jocko Willink?

  How long was it?

• 54:05Speaker 01

  Twenty minutes.

• 54:06Jocko Willink?

  And was it was it a like live action or was it a documentary type?

• 54:11Speaker 01

  Yep, live action scripted story.

• 54:14Jocko Willink?

  Scripted story.

• 54:14Speaker 01

  About the soldier.

• 54:16Jocko Willink?

  Did you play yourself?

• 54:17Speaker 01

  No, I didn't. I got an actor and it's about him and a Muslim man who is involved in the mosque and and their relationship. And so the studio really liked it and reached out like, hey, do you have any other scripts? Like, we're interested. And I thought for sure.

• 54:36Jocko Willink?

  Dude, you're set. You're the next Scorsese.

• 54:38Speaker 01

  I'm like, boom, I knew it. I knew it. Like, I'm Hollywood, here I come. Sent them the script and never heard.

• 54:47Jocko Willink?

  What was the next script you sent them?

• 54:48Speaker 01

  I forget. It was something entirely different.

• 54:53Jocko Willink?

  The script.

• 54:54Speaker 01

  They want it was it was years ago. It was over 10 years ago. I forget what the script I sent them was about.

• 55:00Jocko Willink?

  Did you only take one shot, one crack at it?

• 55:02Speaker 01

  Oh, they only give you, it was like they wanted five pages from a script. So I wrote some five pages and sent it to them. You like that never happens. Very rarely do people get, uh, I forget what it's called. Like so you, you, it solicited me for material.

• 55:21Jocko Willink?

  Got it.

• 55:21Speaker 01

  Just like one in a million, especially from this place. And I thought there's, there's no way they're not going to take it. Like this is meant to be. This is just destiny.

• 55:30Jocko Willink?

  God, you're so good.

• 55:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. How am I so good? I, I mean, of course. But it was heartbreaking when like.

• 55:39Jocko Willink?

  And did you say you didn't hear back from them? They just ghosted you?

• 55:42Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. And that's what happens. Yeah. That's what happens the vast majority of the time.

• 55:47Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah.

• 55:48Speaker 01

  That is, I, I should have, I should not have thought like this. I should have taken it more in terms of like, this is a cool opportunity to even be considered. But I had gotten my hopes up and that, cause I had nothing set up. I was like, I'm unemployed. I have nothing.

• 56:02Jocko Willink?

  You're like, why would I need to get a job when I'm going to be in Hollywood making, making films?

• 56:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. And, um, but I ended up getting very lucky in a different way because I, when I was at NYU, I interned at The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. And so I got the opportunity to work full time as a production assistant at The Daily Show. And just churn out, learn how they churn out television every day, how they make an episodic content like that. It was an incredible experience being able to do that.

• 56:37Jocko Willink?

  What would your job, what did your job consist of as a production assistant?

• 56:40Speaker 01

  Oh, I was, I was cutting apples. I was going out grabbing props. I was the, I was basically a private again. Like I was.

• 56:49Jocko Willink?

  This seems real familiar.

• 56:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. Moving, I was moving things from one place to another, which is like, that's, I'm, I can do that.

• 56:56Jocko Willink?

  So a production assistant is like a gopher, kind of.

• 56:59Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 56:59Jocko Willink?

  Did you ever edit a single video or anything?

• 57:01Speaker 01

  No, no, it was like the lowest of the low, never, never wrote anything.

• 57:05Jocko Willink?

  Did anyone like? Talk to you about your future or anything like that?

• 57:10Speaker 01

  So Jon Stewart actually is extremely supportive of veterans, runs like entire programs to help bring veterans into film and TV. It's like he never talks about it. He doesn't go out and tell people about the work that he does, but he visited, visits like a lot of wounded guys at Walter Reed, just very supportive of the veteran community. And whatever I thought about like his politics, whether agree or not disagree, the guy as a leader and as a man outstanding, lives his, by his principles, which to me I've always respected. I don't care.

• 57:50Jocko Willink?

  He's been real supportive of the, of the nine 11 first responders as well.

• 57:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:55Jocko Willink?

  Seems like a good guy.

• 57:56Speaker 01

  Goes out and for, goes to Congress and like advocates for them. Yeah. Really lives by what he, the way he says he does. And really his leadership style was incredible. Like he was the first one in, in the morning at like seven in the morning and then he'd be the last one out like seven at night, pulling long days. And he knew everybody's name, the lowest person there to just really that. I've had a couple of great leaders in, in my life. My squad leader in Iraq was very squared away.

• 58:35Speaker 01

  He had been there before and he was very hard on us, but he also kept us safe and was, I thought, a very good leader. And Jon, all of the people, it, it kind of filters down from the top, like his, the way that he ran the production, all of his.

• 59:01Speaker 01

  The like executive producers and the producers below them, it kind of filters down. And they all treat people with respect. And they all, they had this amazing system of they would promote from within. So if you, the executive producers were once interns, which is not usual to see an operation run that way, but they would always promote from within and just, I really learned a lot from their, the style that they had.

• 59:30Jocko Willink?

  So did you think about trying to make that climb yourself? Like go up the chain?

• 59:34Speaker 01

  I knew that, I knew that my, I had reached the ceiling there, even as a P A. Cause I just didn't have the same worldview as them. I just think pretty differently. And even though I have, they were like a family to me and we were really great friends. I just knew I'm like, I could never write, I could never do anything creative for the show. It just wouldn't be authentic.

• 59:57Jocko Willink?

  When you, are you still in college when you're interning there or you're done with college?

• 1:00:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. So intern and then after college, production assistant, which was full time there.

• 1:00:05Jocko Willink?

  So you, you actually did do it, that job as a paid person?

• 1:00:08Speaker 01

  Mm hmm. For two years.

• 1:00:09Jocko Willink?

  For two years.

• 1:00:10Speaker 01

  The very end of John's run and then into the beginning of Trevor Noah.

• 1:00:14Jocko Willink?

  And then as you're doing that job, you know that you're kind of like going to get capped out at some point? And you start looking for a different job?

• 1:00:21Speaker 01

  Yep. So I started.

• 1:00:22Jocko Willink?

  Are you still writing screenplays or you still have like this creative thing in the back of your brain? That's wants to come out?

• 1:00:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm still hoping that like I'll be able to maybe write a script or something, figure something out to get into. I really want to do something creative and be in control of it and tell us, tell stories and connect with people that way. And I figure like I need to, I've reached kind of the, the, the end of the road here. Cause I saw where, where I would end up going and which was like, I'd probably do maybe some kind of producing or something, but not really the career. I wouldn't ever run something like that show. And so I left to go work in the tech world and to run the online marketing campaigns for IBM.

• 1:01:12Jocko Willink?

  You landed that gig. So you had two years of that PA job for real and then you got a real job at IBM. That's a pretty good step though, right?

• 1:01:19Speaker 01

  IBM Research hired me to run their like YouTube channel, which I don't, I don't know how I talked myself into that job, but they gave me the opportunity to like, you know, at the time especially YouTube's sort of new and they're like, oh, maybe this kid from like, he was, he did what at the Daily Show? Okay. Uh, he'll, maybe he could run our new media, like YouTube stuff. And, um, my grandfather, the Korean War veteran, he'd also worked at IBM for his whole career. And I think they saw that and they're very like, um, legacy type of company.

• 1:02:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so I got to like, just go there and buy tens of thousands of dollars worth of camera equipment and go out and interview all of their researchers. And there I really learned how to communicate ideas that I don't understand to a general viewership. Cause it was, I was doing videos about quantum computing at IBM and trying to explain how that works by talking to the top researchers there, interviewing them, and then condensing that message into something that I could think that I could sort of understand. And that was very beneficial for me. I didn't

• 1:02:45Speaker 01

  realize it at the time, but it would end up becoming very important.

• 1:02:49Jocko Willink?

  How was your fulfillment as a human being there? Soul crushing. Cause you just shook your head. Okay. Soul crushing.

• 1:02:59Speaker 01

  It was because I'm not a science type person. Numbers do not compute in my head. And so like hearing all this science robot stuff and AI and I'm just like, I could not, I'm sorry, I could not care less about that tech stuff. And God bless people who love that stuff. It's just like, I am interested in geopolitics and in war and things that go.

• 1:03:24Speaker 01

  But that's like my ADD cannot focus unless something is exploding somewhere. So I, it was for me not a fulfilling job. It's not, I'm not telling stories about things that I'm passionate about. And I feel like have the kind of impact on the world that I have, um, I'm passionate about.

• 1:03:46Jocko Willink?

  So what, did you come up, develop an escape plan?

• 1:03:50Speaker 01

  Essentially, my escape plan was, hey, can I work remotely for you guys? And like, I'll go out to LA, I'll leave New York and I'll go live in California. And this is kind of my last chance to do this in my life. Cause I'm, if, if this doesn't work out, like I really gotta, I gotta start a family. I gotta pull it together and maybe that dream, maybe I'll have to realize and recognize and accept that that dream is not going to happen for me. And that like, it's, I'm never really going to be successful in media. And maybe I have to accept that. And so I go out.

• 1:04:30Jocko Willink?

  Did you tell them that?

• 1:04:31Speaker 01

  No, I, I.

• 1:04:32Jocko Willink?

  You just told them I'm gonna go to California because it's some, you made up some reason.

• 1:04:36Speaker 01

  I was like, can I work remotely? And they said, yeah, sure. And.

• 1:04:41Jocko Willink?

  Was this after, was this COVID? Was this?

• 1:04:43Speaker 01

  No, it was before.

• 1:04:44Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Oh, that's pretty.

• 1:04:45Speaker 01

  Cause they, like tech companies are very, and they have offices all over the country. They've got offices out in California and I would eventually end up in going, working for the IBM Research in California. But for a period, I'm in LA and just it.

• 1:05:04Jocko Willink?

  And this is your shot at the time? This is your note, this is your going for it?

• 1:05:08Speaker 01

  I am going for broke. I'm out, I'm gonna go out there, I'm gonna do the networking. I'm gonna do all of the networking. Like I'm gonna, I'm gonna go meet other screenwriters and I'm gonna, it's Hollywood, baby. I'm gonna make it. I stay in this really crappy, roach, tiny apartment in Hollywood, West Hollywood. And I'm.

• 1:05:37Speaker 01

  Like so in over my head culturally California is very different and I didn't really understand that.

• 1:05:43Jocko Willink?

  And LA specifically.

• 1:05:45Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:05:46Jocko Willink?

  Because LA is.

• 1:05:47Speaker 01

  And Hollywood inside of LA is like.

• 1:05:50Jocko Willink?

  It's craziness.

• 1:05:51Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:05:51Jocko Willink?

  Yes.

• 1:05:52Speaker 01

  And the people there are all like me, just insanely think that they're going out there to make it like. What is wrong with you? And what and so I.

• 1:06:06Speaker 01

  I get the hell beat out of me.

• 1:06:09Jocko Willink?

  So what when you say, so what are you doing? Like, what are you proactively doing to begin your film screenwriting career?

• 1:06:17Speaker 01

  There is a website called, I'll pull up the name of it. It's like meetup, not meetup, but dude.

• 1:06:23Jocko Willink?

  Some kind of meeting up.

• 1:06:24Speaker 01

  It's like, it's like, hey, come, screenwriters come and meet at this church for and share your, your script and read some pages. And there's like 12 or 15 people and we, we go, I go there every week and do that. And I'm also, um, shooting a YouTube, like a kids YouTube channel at some off lot studio somewhere in, in Hollywood. And I'm thinking like, okay, I'll like kids YouTube stuff, like maybe I can just get some experience and I'm trying to.

• 1:06:58Jocko Willink?

  Are you working for, are you doing that yourself? You're making your own kids YouTube stuff?

• 1:07:01Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:07:01Jocko Willink?

  Or are you just somebody?

• 1:07:02Speaker 01

  There's a channel.

• 1:07:03Jocko Willink?

  Got it.

• 1:07:04Speaker 01

  There's a channel that is making kids content and.

• 1:07:08Jocko Willink?

  Are you getting paid?

• 1:07:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, it's not much. Some like freelance for that a couple of times. And I'm also doing some editing for, there's like some rich, really rich people in Beverly Hills that are doing their like side projects documentaries. Really terrible documentaries, but they got all this money and I'm like editing it and I'm, I'm terrible to work with. I'm just like really awful. At I, I end up getting basically, you know, not called back for all of these things.

• 1:07:36Jocko Willink?

  And that's because you want, you're like, oh, this kid's video, I could probably use this over here and add this soundtrack. And you make it into your own thing and it's a, turns into a freaking war movie.

• 1:07:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, I have, I'm terrible at working for other people sometimes in, in certain ways, and those were not good fits. And I was not a good fit for those roles. And it, it went awful and it was just devastating.

• 1:08:09Jocko Willink?

  Did you, did you, did you not think about like, just doing your own stuff? Like, I'm just gonna start making YouTube videos of the little war thing that I want to film, or the thing, whatever it is I want to film. Did you not think of doing that?

• 1:08:22Speaker 01

  I didn't, I guess, had the, like, didn't think I had the budget, or that people would want to listen, or where would I put it? And

• 1:08:35Speaker 01

  so I would do little short films and, and upload them on YouTube, but like, no one would, I wouldn't watch them.

• 1:08:43Jocko Willink?

  That's probably not the best place to start.

• 1:08:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was.

• 1:08:46Jocko Willink?

  What were your short films about? Are they still up there? Are you gonna upload them to Cappy Army? I think we all want to see them.

• 1:08:53Speaker 01

  It's like, it's like reading your diary from like, 20 years ago. Such embarrassing content. So terrible. And, uh, I didn't realize, like, I don't have a, I don't have a knack for, like, fictional stories, like, telling, like, writing character dialogue and things like that. I, I, it took me a long time to realize that I'm more interested in history and events and real life. And I so long wanted to, you know, like, growing up, Indiana Jones was like my hero. I wanted to be Indiana Jones so badly.

• 1:09:31Speaker 01

  When I was six years old, I would have the fedora hat and like the whip and like, I'd be out in the forest, like, swinging from the trees. And like, I wanted to go beat the Nazis in, in Europe and like, go on the adventures so badly. And like, I wanted to tell stories like that. But then I didn't, I ended up kind of ultimately realizing, like, I want to live that life, actually. Like, I want to go to Ukraine and I want to report from the front lines and I want to live that life and tell those stories. Instead of, like, write a character.

• 1:10:07Jocko Willink?

  How long did you keep pursuing the, the dream?

• 1:10:11Speaker 01

  It was a year and a half.

• 1:10:14Jocko Willink?

  Was there a final nail in the coffin?

• 1:10:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, I realized like I was, I was struggling a lot with, I would, I was like drinking a lot and doing a lot of drugs to fill this like emptiness in me and

• 1:10:31Jocko Willink?

  What drugs were you doing?

• 1:10:32Speaker 01

  I was doing a lot of MDMA, a lot of cocaine, a lot of ketamine, a lot of acid.

• 1:10:38Jocko Willink?

  Damn, you weren't kidding, bro.

• 1:10:41Speaker 01

  Oh, I was a mess. I was a mess. I was like, and I think it actually was the acid that made me realize like, um, that I was being very narcissistic.

• 1:10:52Jocko Willink?

  Where are you hanging out? Like, you make some friends in LA?

• 1:10:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:56Jocko Willink?

  And

• 1:10:56Speaker 01

  Other people that are like, you know, like me, like I was just bozos, like people who, and you can find them in Los Angeles without looking very hard.

• 1:11:08Jocko Willink?

  And do you all sit around like in a, in like a struggle session, kind of talking about, you know, like that I'm gonna make it, or I can't believe this didn't happen. Like, what is the vibe in that crew? Besides just doing ketamine, cocaine and acid?

• 1:11:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's a, there's a lot of that for sure. A lot of people that are bitter about not being where they want to be. And, you know, I, I was also very focused on just having fun and like, it, it was, now I realize, like such a dark, and at the time too, like, really awful point, probably the lowest point in my life. And

• 1:11:56Speaker 01

  I had, like, I really, again, had to have one of those moments where I look in the mirror and realize that, like, this is not who I want to be.

• 1:12:06Jocko Willink?

  Do you think, how much of this is like, hey, you got, you were in the military, you had a mission, you had friends, you had purpose, and then all that's gone? Is this a huge, is that the hole that's trying to fill up with what you're doing?

• 1:12:17Speaker 01

  Not having purpose is the most dangerous thing in life, especially if you have high ambitions. That's a dangerous cocktail. If you have high ambitions and you're like really Have drive and you want to be doing something. I'm the type of person like I work eighty hours a week. I work every weekend. I just go really hard at work. And if I don't have that outlet, like I sort of have a very addictive personality. So if I don't have something positive to put my energy into, like it's, I'm going to put that into something very negative. And

• 1:12:56Speaker 01

  having that addictive personality has been amazing for YouTube because I'm like addicted to, how do I, how do I get, you know, the figuring out the algorithm and making the best videos possible. But like without that, I was very self-destructive.

• 1:13:14Jocko Willink?

  So you said, I think I cut you off, but you were about to say that there was like a looking in the mirror moment. You said perhaps it was the acid and you, you just decided this is not, I'm not, not moving forward.

• 1:13:26Speaker 01

  The acid made me realize I was a super narcissistic person, like made me realize that I was very self-centered and selfish, extremely selfish person. And I guess because I've been so fortunate in my life to like, be able to work remotely for IBM, like I had a paycheck. Like, but also that's such a bad, that was such a terrible thing for me at the time because it allowed me to like be this self-destructive person and I, you know, I could still get my job done and edit a couple of videos for IBM and they were happy with like, to them it was worth my salary to this giant company.

• 1:14:08Speaker 01

  They're like, if he edits four videos a month, that's worth, you know, his like sixty thousand dollar salary. And

• 1:14:17Speaker 01

  but it, it really did make me realize that I'm like, I'm like, oh wait, things are terrible in my life and I'm not successful in Hollywood or like doing anything I want to do. Because of me, like, and no matter how many times my mom tells me that she loves me and I'm her perfect baby boy, like, I'm actually not, actually kind of a pretty bad person. And like, I didn't even know where to start to start like not being that person anymore. It was very, it was, but there was that realization, I think, where things in my life then started to become very positive. So did you, was it a real sharp turn? Were you like, I'm, I'm just, no?

• 1:15:01Speaker 01

  No, I re- I realized it, and that was a sharp moment, but it changing as a human being is very, it's like pulling teeth and it takes a long time. And it's like, okay, I'm gonna go six months without like doing any drugs. Okay, I'm gonna go a year. And like a lot of setbacks and relapses and like not beating myself up for that and just slowly like, okay, I'm going to do this a little better and I'm gonna, it's, it took years and I

• 1:15:40Speaker 01

  left IBM, got a job at Cisco and was doing marketing videos for Cisco and they gave me the opportunity to go back home, back home to New York. And that's what I needed so badly was to go back home. How did you feel when you left Hollywood and like the dream is dead? I then in that moment had a hundred percent acceptance. I said to myself, I said, okay, I tried, I did my best. I went out there. I really like I did for a period of time try and I ma- I came to accept that it would never happen for me and that I gave up completely. And it's ironic that like when you, when I had that moment of giving up and I let it go,

• 1:16:25Speaker 01

  that was when it like happened for me. I really let it go. One hundred percent. Had the acceptance of I'm going to make videos or really I when I was at Cisco at the end, I was a program manager, which was mainly spreadsheets. Like I wasn't making videos anymore and I, and I was like, Okay, this is, this is okay, and I, I can live with this. And so that was when I saw the job opening at Task and Purpose to do video production.

• 1:17:06Jocko Willink?

  And did you, how did you see it? Where was it?

• 1:17:09Speaker 01

  I, it was on.

• 1:17:10Jocko Willink?

  LinkedIn or something?

• 1:17:11Speaker 01

  It wasn't LinkedIn, it was on ZipRecruiter. And then I reached out to, I looked on LinkedIn. I stalked all the like producers and

• 1:17:24Speaker 01

  there's, um, there was a producer, Patrick Baker, who's a Marine, a rock veteran, and really amazing guy. And he, uh, I reached out to him via LinkedIn.

• 1:17:37Speaker 01

  And I said, hey, can I come in for an interview? Cause I thought it would be perfect. So I'm like, it's military stories and it's video. Like may, maybe I could do this. And it was kind of,

• 1:17:56Speaker 01

  it also, in hindsight, it feels, I was like, oh, the name is Task and Purpose. And I'm like, this is the kind of purpose that I'm looking for in my life. And, uh,

• 1:18:08Speaker 01

  went down there, met with Zach Iskall, incredible guy, who was, um, Marine in Fallujah, Marine officer, and felt immediately at home, like these, this is the community that I've been searching for, that I've been kind of running from, but like, needed so badly to be back in that community of veterans and people that I could relate to and feel like, oh, these, these are people that get me.

• 1:18:36Jocko Willink?

  How big was Task and Purpose when you showed up there? What year was it?

• 1:18:39Speaker 01

  It was 2019, right before COVID. Six, six months before COVID. And there was maybe, at the office in Manhattan, there was like,

• 1:18:51Speaker 01

  Five people.

• 1:18:52Jocko Willink?

  Okay, so it was like you were immediately a part of a small little group and you got to know everyone really quickly.

• 1:18:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:18:57Jocko Willink?

  And, and, but it, it, so it was relatively small because I remember I've kind of, you know, I mean, obviously a name like Task and Purpose gets put right into my algorithm of a military guy. And so I've always kind of, you know, paid attention to it. I saw there'd be articles that would pop up or, you know, not just, not just videos, but the articles as well. And so I've, but I, I can't really track in my mind. I didn't know how big it was or how big it wasn't, you know, it was always just kind of a part of that my algorithm.

• 1:19:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. And the writers, the article side, the dot com that you're talking about, the task and purpose dot com side, there was about, I want to say seven or eight free, uh, writers and they would write the articles and they were remote. There, there was one writer, Jared Keller, who's at the office there and the rest were kind of spread out around the country.

• 1:19:48Jocko Willink?

  So you get there, you start working and what kind of videos did you, they want you to make when you first showed up there?

• 1:19:52Speaker 01

  Originally, I don't know if you know, like the now this style where it's just kind of text on video B roll. So originally it was just they'll, they would send me, hey, put together a thing on the aircraft carrier came into dock for the day, like put some text about how this Nimitz class carrier came in and just like a one minute long thing with text and a music and some B roll.

• 1:20:16Jocko Willink?

  And were they going to put it on like Instagram?

• 1:20:18Speaker 01

  Facebook.

• 1:20:19Jocko Willink?

  Facebook.

• 1:20:19Speaker 01

  So we'll, we'll upload it on, onto Facebook and it'll, sometimes it'll be like a video version of kind of an article or it was not on camera at all. Very quickly it became on camera and Patrick Baker, just an amazing guy that told me like, be yourself, don't try to be something you're not, be honest and. He gave me the opportunity to upload anything I wanted, which is very unusual at a place. So I had the creative freedom of, hey, we'll just try this. What sticks goes on Facebook? How many likes does it get? How many views does it get? And I'm learning slowly the content world and which is very alien to me.

• 1:21:04Speaker 01

  So, but it also is very, I think it's perfect for my sensibilities because it's instant. It's like you put it up and you get instant feedback from people right away. And that felt amazing.

• 1:21:16Jocko Willink?

  What was the first video that you made where you're like, oh, try this? I'm going to be in what, when, what made you decide to get in front of the camera? And what was it about?

• 1:21:24Speaker 01

  Patrick encouraged me to get in front of the camera because I was very hesitant. I've always been behind the camera type of person and I was not a natural on camera at all. It was really, I was terrible at, I had very terrible screen presence. I had to work really hard at it. People in the comments let me know it too. Every comment was like, you really suck at this. You're like, what are you doing here? And why do you talk weird and you mispronounce every word? Who the hell is this guy? And my first reaction seeing those comments was these people don't know what they're talking about.

• 1:22:04Speaker 01

  And they're wrong and I, and, and then I had the realization that I'm like, actually, in between all the curses, there's something valuable there. They're trying to tell me something. Right. They're trying to tell me how to improve because I did, you want to know the first kind of video that I did? It was, I did a video about the striker and I was so jokey. It was very satirical and it's like a minute of mostly just jokes about the striker. And I still have this comment saved to this day. There's a comment that this guy wrote, Kevin, and it's still on the video. And he, in it, he writes, he's like, why don't you try telling us something valuable about the striker? And back then, 2019, he's like, I know nothing about the Russian BTR.

• 1:22:49Speaker 01

  Like, why don't you tell us how the, how it compares to the BTR? And I'd never, it never occurred to me that people would want to know that kind of thing. And that people are interested in that. Never crossed my mind in a million years. I thought people want to be entertained or jokey stuff. And when he said that something clicked in my brain. I was like, I'll try that. So I came back with another video where it was very informative, a couple of jokes, but like very informative about the striker and the BTR. And just 10x the views, over 100, 200,000 views. And I'll never forget that guy saved me. That guy's advice was incredible. And, and it takes,

• 1:23:32Speaker 01

  uh, I don't know what the right word is, but it takes,

• 1:23:38Speaker 01

  like not acceptance, but

• 1:23:40Jocko Willink?

  humility?

• 1:23:41Speaker 01

  Yes, that's the one.

• 1:23:43Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, for sure. Yeah. This is something that definitely like you can't. If you took all those comments 100% when people are telling you suck, and then you'd just be like, okay, this isn't for me and not do it. If you took all those comments or just blew them off, like, yeah, I'm not going to listen to them at all, then you don't make any improvement. So you have to have a balanced viewpoint of like, okay, well, you know, there's going to be some outliers. There's going to be some people that are like, I love these jokes. You're hilarious. And there's going to be some outliers that you're an idiot, but somewhere in the middle, you're going to find some common ground and, and probably that's pretty good. So I think it's kind of like I was at a soccer game the other day. San Diego Football Club. It was actually the opening season or the opening game ever there. And it came time for the National Anthem.

• 1:24:28Jocko Willink?

  And what they did was they, on the big screens, they just put the words up. And the crowd sang with no accompanying music or singer, the crowd sang the National Anthem. And what I realized is like, oh yeah, there's the, the person on my left is a terrible singer. The person on my right is a great singer. The person in the middle, me is like, me.

• 1:24:51Speaker 01

  Medium.

• 1:24:52Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, medium. But what you end up with is the crowd prevailing, the National Anthem sounded good. In fact, it sounded really good. And so that's sort of to me, you know, people will hit the notes. You can't take like the person with the bad voice or the person that's too high or too low. So it sounds like you got a couple of people that hit the notes and, and you listen to them. Yeah, that's, that's what we call humility.

• 1:25:15Jocko Willink?

  And then where did it go from there? So now you're kind of like, okay, this, the interesting thing is, you know, you looking at the feet, because I would once say, one thing I would say, we, myself and Echo Charles have not been good at is like, algorithm pursuit, or, you know, anything like that. If I would have told somebody, whatever, almost 10 years ago when we started this, like, hey, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna read out of print books, books for three hours at a time, about obscure military events that happened, and a bunch of brutality on, of people being killed and murdered and genocide, and that's what we're

• 1:25:58Jocko Willink?

  gonna do. And people will listen to it for three hours. Like, no one would have said, that sounds like a good call. But we did it. And, you know, so that's what we started with. And the only kind of track variances that we've made is just like other things that we're interested in, or whatever. So, we haven't been really good at the algorithm. Probably the closest would be this, is Echo Charles, he likes to play with, um, computer graphics. Is that the right thing? Sure. So this guy's gone a little bit crazy with, uh, thumbnails. Experimental. Experimental, you know, which is, when I look at him, I'm like, this is the dumbest thing I've ever seen. And I've told him like nine times, like, bro, stop doing this.

• 1:26:42Jocko Willink?

  And he still does it. But, we didn't, we didn't ever look at the algorithm. We didn't ever think about like, well, how did this do compared to that? We just, we just didn't do it. We just did what we were doing. So, when you tuned in, and you're like, oh, wait, this got more views than that, that's like a route that's steering you by the music of the crowd. Yes.

• 1:27:05Speaker 01

  Yes, yes. I would also say that it's a bit of a Venn diagram in that it's and it has to be an overlap between what are what are the viewers interested in in seeing and watching? And also, what am I interested in talking about and communicating? And then where there's overlap, that's the sweet spot. Because I'm not going to ever talk about or do something that I'm not interested in or doesn't excite me. I just can't. And so where there is that overlap between what resonates with them and what resonates with me, and more importantly, though, my true north has always been the more I double

• 1:27:48Speaker 01

  down on like, how am I creating value for people? And what am what information am I or insights or open source intelligence analysis am I providing in some way that is valuable? The more I create value for the viewers, the bigger this thing grows and the more successful it becomes. And if I just keep hitting that red button of like, how can I make this better for the viewer? And and it's also something that I'm excited about talking about. It just, I see it get better and better from that.

• 1:28:25Jocko Willink?

  And gain momentum.

• 1:28:26Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:28:27Jocko Willink?

  Which you clearly gained a lot of momentum, a task and purpose. Because what? They went from something like 400 subscribers on YouTube to a couple million.

• 1:28:35Speaker 01

  Yes, when I started there, there was 800 subscribers on the YouTube channel and it was, they weren't really using it or uploading to it. And I had gotten into studying military strategy a lot. And I was like, at the time, watching a ton of videos about Alexander the Great and Caesar and his campaigns and just like, how, what, like, is there a way I can apply some of these strategic lessons to like my life? And I found it fascinating, the way that people, like, if you should expand into a place where there isn't already competition or there isn't already, like, I'm not going

• 1:29:18Speaker 01

  to go and butt heads with people if I go into this, try to grow this YouTube channel that they're not, no one's using or doing anything with anyway. And so instead of trying to like, Because if you try to grow into like where people are writing the articles and stuff, that's somebody's like domain and it's going to, it's going to cause friction. But the YouTube channel, there was no, I could grow there. And so it was like a strategic decision of here's a place that I can go and not ruffle any feathers, like bother any leadership. And when I asked, I was like, hey, can I upload stuff on there? And no one was like, no, they were kind of like, the YouTube channel, that's never going to be,

• 1:30:01Speaker 01

  literally verbatim, it's never going to be successful. Go ahead, do whatever you want. So I was like, okay, I'll, I'll do that. And I uploaded some video about how I hate the M320 grenade launcher. And it was, did not get a lot of views, but it was an iterative process for me of like each video, I'm going to do it a little bit better. I'm going to learn a little bit more.

• 1:30:23Jocko Willink?

  Are you shooting them yourself?

• 1:30:25Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:30:25Jocko Willink?

  Editing, just doing a one man show?

• 1:30:27Speaker 01

  One man show, it was just me, a green screen and just talking at the camera. And I would type in, I'm like, how do I get better at talking on camera? I would type that into Google. I am so sort of like socially awkward and at times. And so like, I would actually type, I typed that in, it was like a WikiHow article came up. And it was like, read through your material a couple of times. And if you know your material well, you'll seem more natural and like give more inflection when you're talking, because sometimes I can be very monotone. And when you're on camera, you have to be twice as big a lot of times. So like, I'm learning these things that a lot of people, I feel like is very natural for them.

• 1:31:13Speaker 01

  But I'm like really learning, learning everything the hard way.

• 1:31:19Jocko Willink?

  Was there like a, a smash hit that kind of broke out? Was it the XM7?

• 1:31:24Speaker 01

  Mm hmm. Yeah, the XM7 was the first thing that went viral and did a million views on YouTube. And I was like, oh boy.

• 1:31:32Jocko Willink?

  What was the biggest video previous to that?

• 1:31:35Speaker 01

  There was, I was talking about maybe the striker video got like a hundred thousand or talking about other topics that maybe would get 60,000 views. And on Facebook, we had a couple of things that got millions of views on Facebook, but Facebook views are sort of not quite the same. And so like, I would do some joke stuff on there where we'd make, do humorous stuff about like, oh, the knife guy in your platoon, the guy that, because everyone has a guy in their platoon, who is the knife guy. And he's got a lot of knives. And

• 1:32:08Jocko Willink?

  I was watching that video of yours and I was like, oh, this is definitely coming up.

• 1:32:12Jocko Willink?

  As you can tell from looking at some of these, some of these knives are actually really cool. Like, uh, this is a, a World War One trench knife. That's a World War Two knife from the Pacific. And, but the whole, the reason all these knives got started was Echo Charles, he made a video that he was using knives, prop knife, was it that knife?

• 1:32:31Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:32:31Jocko Willink?

  It was, it was like fake knives, but he had them on the desk when we used to film in his living room. And so he like had this knife out from this thing, for whatever reason, just sitting there. And so then, the next time I brought like a bigger knife. And then we just escalated. Then people, once they saw that we had knives, they started sending us knives. So that's, that's how we have all these knives. I'm not a true knife guy. I only carried like one knife, pretty much my whole career. So.

• 1:32:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, the knife guy, he had a machete as well as three knives. And the joke of it was that like, you need the knife guy. Cause when you need to open MRE, or you need to, uh, cut some 550 cord, that's who's there for you. The knife guy.

• 1:33:08Jocko Willink?

  With, with, with options.

• 1:33:11Speaker 01

  Which, which one do you want, sir? And then there's also the like guy in your platoon that has a mustache. And you just riff on that. And those did, alright, but like the XM7 video on YouTube really took off. And I got, I got so much wrong about it in that video. And it, it's always just a learning process for me. It's like a, it's a communication with the viewers and they'll tell me, because there's experts out there who are like, actually, the 68 is not a, in between the 556 and the 762. It's a full powered cartridge. And these people are experts and I'm learning from them and they're learning from me, because I'll go and find some information that I dig up somewhere. And it's just this back and forth with the viewers and trying to

• 1:33:55Speaker 01

  get better at this. And, and, and I love that topic because.

• 1:34:02Speaker 01

  Back when I would, we, we would do patrols and then raids and then guard tower duty. And the guard tower duty rotations, we would sit there and shoot the shit and like, what would we talk about? We would talk about, oh, did you hear that they're gonna replace the five, five, six or it's not, it's kind of, they say that it's not powerful enough. What do you think? Oh, I don't know. You know, like you're just, these are the kind of conversations I would have with the guys. So I'm like, okay, I'll have this conversation on YouTube. And I think that's part of the reason why it resonated. There's a lot of interest in that topic. And it led to surreal moment where Sig reached out and invited me to go actually test fire it.

• 1:34:47Speaker 01

  Which was, I think when I started realizing, I'm like, oh, this is, this, is there something here? Like if this company, this corp, this giant firearms company is asking me to go and test fire this thing. I was like, this is unbelievable. That, that was one of the first just really rewarding experiences.

• 1:35:11Jocko Willink?

  Is this during COVID or is this pre-COVID still?

• 1:35:14Speaker 01

  Six months into Task and Purpose is when COVID hits.

• 1:35:18Jocko Willink?

  When did the XM seven video come out?

• 1:35:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was right around that time. It was like right before, maybe, right, maybe a month before COVID hit and the office shut down and we all moved back home. It's when I met my girlfriend Caitlin at the time, who's now my wife. We met right then. Like I met her right before Task and Purpose started. And so it's when COVID happens, we all have to go move back home. Uh, back to like this tiny apartment in Queens and I'm then shooting, I'm still doing the show, but I'm shooting it out of. My bedroom and like half the day I'm asking my, my girlfriend, I'm like, hey, can I like, I have to shoot this video.

• 1:36:05Speaker 01

  I'm putting up lights in this tiny apartment and she's putting up with it, which is amazing of her. And, um, but it just, she could tell that like, it meant everything to me to be, cause it was my connection to the community. It was my way of feeling like I'm a part of this community in the comment section, talking with people and, and seeing them get excited about learning about these topics. Like, yeah, so throughout COVID, I'm shooting the, the stuff from my, out of my place and editing it at home.

• 1:36:44Jocko Willink?

  And it's growing and growing, uh, just getting bigger and bigger and, and, um, eventually, uh, fast forward a little bit, you decide you're going to go to Ukraine.

• 1:36:54Speaker 01

  Yes. Yeah. I, when the war in Ukraine kicked off, that's when the channel changed a lot. I, I've become more in our, our withdrawal from Afghanistan. I think was when I first did a video that was about like a, a, a news or just about geopolitics and, and the politics in the world. And that video got a lot of views because my buddy Colin reached out to me during that withdrawal. And after our tour in Iraq, he deployed to Afghanistan and during that withdrawal, he reached out and he kind of

• 1:37:28Speaker 01

  was telling me how frustrated he was with what was going on and what he was seeing. A, a lot of veterans were. And I remember thinking like, these, these guys don't have a way to communicate this. These lower enlisted people can't get their voice out there. And so I've made a video trying to give them a platform and a way to get those thoughts out. And that video did very well. And then when the Ukraine war happened, I started tracking that because I wanted to give a average soldier's ground level perspective of kind of what I'm seeing, whether, what I'm, whether I'm,

• 1:38:11Speaker 01

  my thoughts are, end up being right or wrong. It's just kind of what I'm looking at and what I'm seeing in this moment. And I knew. Because it became very popular. I'm like, at some point, I'm, I know I'm in my head, like, I'm gonna have to go because I want to learn how this war is different from a coin operation, from a counter insurgency mission. What are the difference of near peer, high intensity warfare at that scale? What is the logistics of it look like? So, yeah, the the decision to go, it took about three years before I ended up getting, because I didn't want to just

• 1:38:55Speaker 01

  go recklessly and like, I'm gonna go and like, just run to the front or something. I carefully planned it out.

• 1:39:03Jocko Willink?

  Mm hmm. And then how was the trip?

• 1:39:07Speaker 01

  It was.

• 1:39:14Speaker 01

  I didn't know what to expect going into it. I thought maybe they wouldn't even let me go to the front. And that was my expectation going into it. But when I got there, ended up having drinks with some guys that were in Ukrainian intelligence and they said, "Hey, what, do you want to get out of this trip?" And I was like, "Well, it'd be good if I could go to Kursk and go into the part of Russia that you have occupied." And he just so happened to know the public affairs officer who was in charge of Kursk. And he said, "Yeah, I can get you into Kursk." And it was a very surreal

• 1:39:59Speaker 01

  moment, crossing the international border from Ukraine into Russia.

• 1:40:07Speaker 01

  I learned a lot about the logistics of the war. For me, it was kind of like, it felt like a fact finding mission. Like how when the US wants intelligence on a place, they'll send people like on a fact finding mission. Go find out, hey, what is the

• 1:40:27Speaker 01

  uh, morale of the soldiers there? Get a finger on your pulse of what the morale is like. What is it? What do they really feel? And what do they really think? And so I wanted to know if my

• 1:40:44Speaker 01

  inkling about Ukraine was accurate. I wanted to know.

• 1:40:48Jocko Willink?

  What was your inkling?

• 1:40:49Speaker 01

  Going into it, I felt like these people are fighting for their survival, for their sovereignty. I felt like the Ukrainians are fighting for their way of life and their value system. And that.

• 1:41:02Jocko Willink?

  In other words, their home.

• 1:41:05Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:41:05Jocko Willink?

  Like, to me, it's like, this is, this is my home, and this is where I live. And this is where my family lives, and this is where we've always lived, and we're not going anywhere.

• 1:41:15Speaker 01

  But not everybody thinks that. A lot of people think they're a puppet of the West, and that they're like, just forced into this. They're fighting because Washington wants them to fight. Like, and so part of why I went was I wanted to know if that, what's the truth? Is the Russian propaganda true? Is, is, am I gonna go there and it's gonna be like Iraq again? And I'm going to be disillusioned by what I see? Or am I gonna get there and is it going to turn out that these people really are who I think they are? Or is it something, is it gonna be worst case scenario where it's some kind of gray area in between? Like how Iraq was? And so.

• 1:41:55Speaker 01

  I went all along the front, to the worst parts of the front, to the most dangerous place in the world. Which at the time was. The part of Russia that Ukraine was occupying, that small sliver of territory. Like, you cannot fake the, every soldier that I met. You cannot take me on a propaganda tour along the entire front from Zaporizhzhya to Kursk. Kherson was the only part I didn't go to, all the way up to Kyiv as well. And I talked to a hundred dozens of different soldiers, from intelligence officers down to your lowest

• 1:42:34Speaker 01

  level grunt, went on drone missions, nearly got killed, got artillery fire from Russians, mortar fire from Russians, and airstrikes over us. And I can say that my fact finding mission, what I walked away from that experience was that. So I'll, I'll put it to you this way in this story.

• 1:42:59Speaker 01

  I spoke to a soldier who was, he did not want to be there. He was a Ukrainian soldier who had been fighting for like six years at that point. He had signed a three-year contract and he was forced into continuing to serve. This guy was exhausted and was talking about how he's like, I do not want to be here. I want to go home. What am I doing here? I signed up for three years. They're forcing me to be here. This is, he'd been, every night, his job is to go infiltrate to the positions and run the gauntlet of FPV drones and he's lost all, like tons of his friends.

• 1:43:39Speaker 01

  If anyone has a reason to not, you know, to say fuck Ukraine or something, he would be the person. But even these troops that are stretched to their absolute limit, even he was saying, he's like, we're fighting for our homeland. We are doing this. We doing this because we have to, because the Russians are forcing us to. So the morale that I saw was, yeah, the Ukrainians are, they're getting torn apart. They're losing, you know, and they're acknowledging that. But at the same time, they believe what they're, they believe in the fight. That was what I walked away from it from.

• 1:44:23Jocko Willink?

  I always say war is a test of wills and I guess, I guess I'm not the person that made that up or anything, but war is a test of wills, right? And it's kind of like when you watch a, a sports match, when something that you don't expect to happen, happens, like the, the, uh, the underdog wins.

• 1:44:40Jocko Willink?

  And, you know, I had a guy say to me the other day, well, there's some close sport, I think it was another soccer game. It's a close sporting event. And it was like, well, that didn't go the way I expected. And he, and he said, that's why we play, that's why they play the game. Because you don't know what's going to happen. And for me, the will of the Ukrainians is going to be stronger than the will of the Russians. That being said, if the Russians have weaker will, but they have more of it.

• 1:45:13Jocko Willink?

  Then we don't know what's gonna happen. And so unfortunately, just like an MMA fight, well, who's gonna win? Well, we think this person can win. This other person can win. We don't know. We have to play the game. And that's why this, that's why wars get fought, right? If we already knew what the outcome was gonna be, we wouldn't fight the wars. But we don't know what the outcome's gonna be. And no one knows what the outcome's gonna be.

• 1:45:36Jocko Willink?

  But that is definitely some interesting feedback to get from you for having been there and having talked to scores of soldiers on the ground. And their, their will is still strong. What about, uh, so when you talk about like the propaganda that, that we see, or whether it's propaganda or not, when, when we see, let's just not call it propaganda. I'll just call it a video of, you know, the, we've all seen dozens of these videos of the Ukrainian recruiters? I don't know recruiters going up and grabbing guys off the street, putting them in a van to take them up to the front lines. We see that as well. What is that all about?

• 1:46:18Speaker 01

  That is actually true. They're doing that. And every couple of kilometers that I drove, as you go further east, you feel the war from Kiev, you start to really feel it. And it starts to be checkpoints every couple of kilometers with SBU guys.

• 1:46:32Jocko Willink?

  Kiev's like kinda normal, right?

• 1:46:34Speaker 01

  It's like a European city.

• 1:46:35Jocko Willink?

  Full on normal.

• 1:46:36Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, we're grabbing drinks, we're, I'm learning curse words in Ukrainian. I'm hanging out with these intel guys and like, it feels like you're just chilling in Europe.

• 1:46:44Jocko Willink?

  Yep, clubs.

• 1:46:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:46:45Jocko Willink?

  Nightclubs, people living their normal lives.

• 1:46:48Speaker 01

  And then missiles too, like a missile will hit.

• 1:46:50Jocko Willink?

  Occasional missile.

• 1:46:51Speaker 01

  Yep. And so these SBU checkpoints are looking for deserters. And then you drive through a city and you see dudes getting rounded up. Like it, that's also true. And the reason for it is because they're in martial law. Like they're fighting for their existence. And yeah, there's certainly some people who are getting rounded up and don't want to fight. Absolutely. That's, that's also happening. And.

• 1:47:19Speaker 01

  I saw, I saw that as well. Yeah, it's

• 1:47:24Speaker 01

  the war there is a fight for their survival. So nobody under 65, if you're male, can even leave the country. No flights in, you gotta take a 17 hour train ride in. I mean, the country is on, it's on lockdown. And I, the way I look at it, the way I think the reason for these extreme measures.

• 1:47:47Speaker 01

  If you're Ukraine and you're taken over by Russia.

• 1:47:51Speaker 01

  The

• 1:47:53Speaker 01

  the future of your family, your children is not looking bright. Being under Russian control is not going, you're not going to have the same prosperity if you were under the EU system. There's just no way. I, I think a lot of people can agree to that. And I think that's what explains why you see. You couldn't have this war unless it was Ukrainian, a vast, some vast number of Ukrainians believing that fighting this war is for their children and for their future generations. Because you just don't get, you wouldn't be able to get hundreds of thousands of people willing to kill themselves, I don't think, or die in war. Unless something like that was at stake.

• 1:48:38Speaker 01

  The United States, our ability to influence wars, I think, is a lot lower than maybe we thought at one point. Like, we pumped billions of dollars of weapons, equipment and training into Afghanistan. And because the will wasn't there to fight against the Taliban, the country fell right away. The people felt like if they're under Taliban rule, is, they felt from their perspective, I think, it wasn't going to be a big difference on their lives. But you, what I'm trying to say is that you cannot force, I think, hundreds of thousands of people easily into a fight like that in a place like Ukraine. Maybe I'm not seeing some perspective there, but

• 1:49:24Speaker 01

  that's kind of what a working concept of what I've been thinking.

• 1:49:28Jocko Willink?

  You also got to see the weapon systems being used in different environments and what you saw in Iraq, including the strikers. The strikers, Bradleys, Abrams. Getting to, getting to see those things in this different environment and how they're being used and what this new threat of these drones.

• 1:49:49Jocko Willink?

  Is like.

• 1:49:50Speaker 01

  So I went on a drone mission with a Ukrainian vampire drone team. It's one of those, it's not a kamikaze FPV drone. It's a drone that drops mortars on the enemy, drops them, comes back, picks up another mortar, drops it on another Russian. And in that mission, I feel like this is what the US Army envisions the future of warfare is going to look like. I study the US Army transformation very closely, US Army 2030. And the way they're reorganizing all of the brigades is they're creating platoons that have this capability

• 1:50:30Speaker 01

  that are essentially going to do this mission that I went on where you're in an unarmored jeep and you drive up 10 kilometers to where the enemy is from, is the zero line. And you drop, you use your sensors to figure out where they're at and you drop effects on them. And this right now is kind of the warfare meta. So I spent an entire night in a basement getting shelled and watching this drone unit drop mortars on Russian positions.

• 1:51:06Speaker 01

  And the way that EW, electronic warfare, plays into the war at the front is very different than the GWAT. And yep, I also went and met with the Bradley units and the Stryker units out in Kursk and the Abrams units. And what I learned was how different, how difficult casualty evacuation is for all of these guys. It's when we were, when we were in Iraq, it was, if there was a casualty, we'd get them out within a matter of an hour or so.

• 1:51:47Speaker 01

  Get a helicopter come in, get out. Now, these guys are sitting there for seventeen hours with a tourniquet on. And before they can get out of there, because the whole route from where they're staying at apartment buildings to the zero line, there's about a ten, fifteen kilometer stretch at the very end, the last mile or so. That ten kilometer stretch is just lousy with drones. FPV drones are watching and they're striking, they're hitting everything on that route. So infiltrating to the positions is a nightmare. And they're dropping mines all over those routes.

• 1:52:32Speaker 01

  And it was just so different than what I saw in Iraq on just a whole nother scale. And it's interesting to see how the US military is trying to now apply those lessons.

• 1:52:50Jocko Willink?

  When you, when you mentioned like the way the US Army is planning right now and the US military at large, you think about the, the, the rapid change of technology. And, you know, I always, when I was, when I was in the military and I was coming up with plans. One of, and then when I was teaching people how to come up with plans, one of the most important things that I tried to convey to people was come up with a plan that is flexible. Like come up with a plan that if it's not, that it's not so rigid that like this is what we're doing. And that, that makes me a little nervous with the military industrial complex in America because, you know, programmatically to,

• 1:53:29Jocko Willink?

  you know, to acquire a drone in 2030, like they'll start doing that stuff now. Which means that they'll be paying some company that's going to build this drone and that's going to be available in 2030. But by, by 2026, the technology will be different and it might be totally different by that time. And so it, it makes me nervous that we're, we're leaning so far forward that we're in the front leaning rest. This is something I used to tell people, which is, Echo Charles, that's the push up position. So leaning so far forward that you're in the front leaning rest, which is not good. You want to be leaning forward a little bit. You know, one of the pieces of technology that.

• 1:54:12Jocko Willink?

  Um, we used was we bef- when we got Humvees, which we didn't train with Humvees at all prior to September 11th, like, and actually, it wasn't until we got to Iraq that we really started to just, okay, this is our, this is the new normal for us. In fact, it's funny, when I was in the 90s and in the SEAL teams and we would train to go hit a target and we would take a vehicle to get there, we would call it a helo truck because in no one's wildest imagination, would you drive a vehicle to a target? Like, it just, you just use helicopters, of course. And, and so, using vehicles was just something we didn't even think was real. But then by the time we got to Iraq, and now we needed GPSs. And so, we were buying commercial off-the-shelf GPSs and marrying them

• 1:54:56Jocko Willink?

  up with our laptops and putting, uh, I forget the name of the program, but there was a commercial off-the-shelf program that we could download our imagery and we put the GPS and it worked really well. And then we were able to adapt very quickly. Meanwhile, programmatically, eventually, came the Blue Force trackers and we got them. It's weird because that's actually one of the things that went from conventionals to special operations. Instead of, a lot of things go from special operations to conventionals. This was kind of the opposite for us anyways. Then we got these big systems. But it worries me when we start talking about the future of warfare, that we go so, we lean so far forward, that we're in the leaning rest and we're developing things that are going to be OBE, which is the old term, overcome by events. Like, it's not going

• 1:55:41Jocko Willink?

  to matter anymore. And right now, you know, you go from using radio waves to using fiber optics to control air, uh, drones, but they might be using, you know, light messages or something else in, in the near future. And all of a sudden, we've invested a bunch of money, but it doesn't matter anymore. That's one thing that, you know, I've watched the, the videos that you put out. One thing that struck me was the- They're not committed to any piece of technology to a point where they're not going to be able to pivot. And so when, when something's working, like for instance, the EW, right? There's electronic warfare, they put up jammers. When the jammers are actually defeating the drones, okay, cool. We got this other technology we'll bring. If, if that would

• 1:56:23Jocko Willink?

  have been America, we'd have $10 billion worth of radio controlled drones that would now be totally obsolete and we wouldn't be able to pivot quickly enough. And that's one thing that impressed me about what's, what's happening in that war on really on both sides is that they're both adapting very quickly, very rapidly, and they're able to make technological changes in, in a manner that they're keeping up with each other and trying to out sprint each other. Is that what it looked like on the ground?

• 1:56:48Speaker 01

  Yes. One, one of the big examples of that that sticks out to me is when I was there, every single car had a little like antenna piece on the top. Every single one. They're all EW, all jammers. And I asked the interpreter that was with me, they got my fixer, the guy who's like my guy the entire time. And he said, like, they weren't there four months ago. And then suddenly they were everywhere. Every, every single car had them. And they're adapting with these off the shelf solutions instead of a long procurement, military industrial kerfuffle that lasts 10 years. And that's what the army's transformation in contact,

• 1:57:32Speaker 01

  the TIC program is all about. They're trying to copy that procurement process where they're hoping to, we're going to buy this off the shelf drone solution and we're going to use that for a bit and then maybe we'll use a different one. But yeah, they're, one of the things they talked about with EW was like they have this giant problem where

• 1:57:55Speaker 01

  Every infantry commander on the zero line has an EW system and how do you get them to turn it off? How do you get, if someone radioed you and was like, turn off your EW so that we can fire a HIMARS rocket at the enemy through your sector? But you're gonna have to basically turn off your force field. Yep, you're gonna suck it up for 18 minutes or something. And one of your guys might get killed. But it's for the greater good. And so there's this debate about should we be able to turn it off for them? Do you want to take that power away from your commanders though?

• 1:58:33Speaker 01

  And then also, cause I think in a structure that's more top down, like in Russia, you might see something like that in their military. But the way that NATO and America fights, it kinda goes against our decentralized, give lower, give them the initiative. Don't be able to just turn off their EW even though it means you can't do that HIMARS strike. So these are things that they told me that they're working through. It's like, what is the right way to do that? There's also, they can't fly their drones over, like when I first got to that drone mission, we couldn't launch the drone because friendly EW was jamming our drone.

• 1:59:17Speaker 01

  And so they had to call up a bunch of different commanders in the area and be like, hey, can you turn it off? And they figured it out. But yeah, these, these are the, what really interests me is the future of doctrine. What, what lessons are we taking from the war in Ukraine that is right and wrong? And to your point, I do think they're kind of in the front leaning rest. And another way to put it would be that they're like, they're kind of like all chips in, they're doing a big gamble. And if it, if it works, amazing. And if it doesn't work, it's a big, huge risk. Cause they're, they're going back to what you're talking about where they're getting rid of all the strikers

• 1:59:59Speaker 01

  and getting rid of all the Bradleys out of at least the infantry brigade combat teams. And they're pulling them to division. And all the guys now are gonna have infantry squad vehicles, unarmored. You know, like recon vehicles. And.

• 2:00:18Speaker 01

  Again, they're, they're gonna be going with like, you're not gonna go to the objective in a vehicle. You're gonna go on foot, but you're gonna take that unarmored vehicle close to it. So yeah, I don't, you know, if that ends up not working out, well, you've just put a bunch of dudes in an unarmored vehicle. Who are gonna get cooked. So like, I don't know what the right answer is. It's something that I'm tracking and it's interesting to see. It's the biggest transformation. The army's gone through probably since the eighties.

• 2:00:48Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, the, uh, the other thing that you can't predict the outcome of is. You ever trained jujitsu before?

• 2:00:55Speaker 01

  Not, I did karate, shirinjroo, like judo.

• 2:00:58Jocko Willink?

  So in jujitsu, there's, there's, uh, you know, you're trying to break people's arms. You're trying to get them in submission holds. And generally speaking, especially in the nineties, it was all like arm locks, shoulder locks and chokes. Well, uh, in the early two thousands, there was people, Dean Lister, uh, who started attacking the legs. And like, was really good at doing knee locks, ankle locks. And leg locks, right? And so all of a sudden it was like, it was literally like a different game. And then a group of people, Donna and her death squad, kind of caught on to this and they started really focusing on leg locks.

• 2:01:38Jocko Willink?

  And for a while, and I experienced this, it would seem like, oh, the game has changed. Like the game has changed and people were saying that, people were saying the game has changed. But I had an experience a long time ago where I was good with leg locks because I've been training with this guy Dean Lister for a long time. And some other people that were another little, uh, node of leg lockers in the world, they came and trained with us. And I already knew leg locks. They only knew leg locks, kind of like that was their whole game. And so when they tried to leg lock me, I'd just defend and get on top and then beat them with the rest of the stuff. So eventually what I'm saying is eventually the leg locks became neutralized. And now leg locks didn't change the game. They're just part of the game.

• 2:02:20Jocko Willink?

  And so sure, are there things that truly change the game? Of course there are. But then it's hard to predict, is this a game changer? Or is this just another part of the game that we're gonna learn how to play? And all of a sudden, we're gonna figure out that there's some system that we come up with, you know, some command drone that goes up into the sky can, you know, goes up there and flies around, shoots down all the other drones, like who knows? But we don't know. And all of a sudden it'll become, well, you gotta have that. It's kind of like in Iraq. I mean, When you were running jammers, right, on your vehicles, we were running jammers and we had to do the same thing, like we're gonna talk to the AC 130, stop, turn off the jammers, make comms, turn jammers back on. And there's things that they just become part of the game.

• 2:03:01Jocko Willink?

  And it's hard to tell if something is gonna truly change the game, or if it's gonna be something that we're gonna have to adapt to, or we're gonna have to adapt to it. Once we've adapted to it, now we're back to just what you said, we're going from armored vehicles, and heavier and heavier, now we're going lighter and lighter again. It's the same thing that happened in hockey. In hockey, they started bringing these monster players in, that were getting bigger and bigger and bigger and stronger, and they're six foot five and they're 240 pounds. And the whole league was dominated by these type of players for a few years. And then all of a sudden, they brought in like that little guy. And the little guy was like, oh, he can move faster than these people and react quicker. And so he could maneuver.

• 2:03:42Jocko Willink?

  And now you've got, the team has to be mixed. So the huge guys was a kind of a game changer for a minute, but then it's like, no, it's just part of the game. And there's times you gotta use the big guys, time you use the little guys. So it's, it's gonna be interesting to see how all that unfolds. And how quickly it unfolds.

• 2:04:00Speaker 01

  It's a perfect analogy. And what you're talking about is, should we be preparing, should we be setting up our entire army, all of our procurement, the way we organize our soldiers, the equipment that we, everything is based now on that we're gonna be fighting a contested environment. And if we end up going into this, and like, that could be a way to lose 100,000 guys, is to build our whole force around, hey, we're gonna, we're planning to fight in a contested environment, and so you're gonna fight in a contested environment. Or should we be building the force to, we're gonna go in with bombers and just, we're gonna never even have to deal with this bullshit that Ukrainian forces are dealing with. I

• 2:04:43Speaker 01

  mean, we're talking about a force that is way, many times less well-funded, trained and equipped. So are we necessarily taking the right lessons from it? Maybe, maybe there's something that the US Army commanders are seeing on the ground that a lot of other people aren't, or they, I know they have this whole unit whose job it is to take the data from Ukraine and crunch it.

• 2:05:09Speaker 01

  They, whatever it is, they seem convinced that it's not just a meta, that it's not just a

• 2:05:18Speaker 01

  move that can be countered. They believe that it's the future of warfare and that it's a fundamental shift. Whereas like the machine gun changed warfare. It's a paradigm shift is the way they're treating it. They're treating it, you know, there's maybe been five or six paradigm shifts in all of history of warfare. And they are treating this as if it is one. So.

• 2:05:42Jocko Willink?

  It certainly looks like one from the outside. That, that's for sure.

• 2:05:48Jocko Willink?

  It looks like, you know, again, watching your videos and watching all the stuff that's going on in Ukraine is a, it's a total nightmare. To, you know, and, and how much could it escalate? And, and again, maybe it's like, um, hopefully, you know, people will talk about the, the drone versus drone and the robot versus robot warfare. Like, I'm all in for that. Like, let's, we'll see who can build better drones and better robots and let them fight and die. Let them get blown up and mutilated and we can figure out who, who, who's the better robot builders.

• 2:06:22Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, there's another, like, I was, uh, in the nineties and I was, I got put in this project and this project was run by Admiral McRaven, um, who's a great guy. And he was, he had this foresight of the military and of the SEAL teams where it's like, um, hey, listen. Our, our specialties are direct action and special reconnaissance. That's what the SEAL teams are supposed to do primarily. Well, we've got, uh, satellites and drones and UAVs were kind of starting to come out, but you know, he even saw the future of like, hey, in a few years, doing a reconnaissance when we've got satellites and we've got drones, we're not going to be able to do those.

• 2:07:06Jocko Willink?

  They're not, they're not going to need to do those. And the other one is direct action missions. Why would we send a SEAL platoon in to do a direct action mission somewhere where we can hit them with a T-LAM that's down to one meter accuracy? So. We need to move on to the next generation of warfare. And so we started doing all these different types of things. They were all kind of low visibility operations and interfering with, you know, infrastructure. And so we did some really cool stuff. It was great. And that was in the nineties. And then fast forward, you know, I went on with my career and he went on with his career. And fast forward a few years and I'm in Baghdad. And we were literally doing like a direct action mission every night.

• 2:07:49Jocko Willink?

  And he showed up and I was actually literally with my assault force in my compound, getting ready to roll out to do my umpteenth freaking direct action mission. And he was in town, he was in town with the unit he was with. And he came down to like, see what we were doing. And I saw him and I was like, hey, sir, how you doing? And he's like, oh, good to see you, John Coe. And I said, hey, you remember when we told, when you told us we'd never do a direct action mission again? And we both laughed because, you know, it's just one of those things where clearly, um, neither one of us could have predicted the future that we were gonna, all of us, everyone in the US military was gonna be boots on the ground, kicking indoors over and over and over again.

• 2:08:32Jocko Willink?

  So that's another one of those things where it's, you know, it made such sense at the time. And, and then you look at it and you go, huh, well, I guess we were just completely wrong.

• 2:08:43Speaker 01

  The thing that I do not envy or wish, want to be in the position of is procurement. They basically have to try to see the future. Their job is to try to predict what the future will be in 10 years. And sometimes they get it right, and sometimes they get it wrong. They got it right with the, I think the Bradley turned out to be an outstanding piece of equipment, the Abrams killer, the Apache. But then you look at some of their other guesses, the M10 Booker just got canceled, the light tank, it's like.

• 2:09:23Speaker 01

  It's and sometimes they kind of just have to put money into that system so that the system's there. It's like you have to create more of this equipment because if you let that assembly line die, it's very difficult to kick it back up again. So I I personally feel like I don't know if they're going in the right direction or not. And sometimes you only tell in hindsight, like with the Gulf War, when they went through and they network centric warfare and land, air battle turned out in that case to be very effective.

• 2:09:58Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And to me, this this boils down to something that we talked about earlier is just humility. And and humility then allows you to be flexible because if you're if you're not humble enough to say, hey, there's a decent chance that this could be the way, but there's also a decent chance that it's not. So let's let's keep a flexible, open mind and take iterative steps in directions and try and cover as many bases as we can without over committing anywhere.

• 2:10:25Speaker 01

  But here's, I think, what I here's here's what I think the army's perspective is, is that I think that they're gearing up for they're like, the greatest threat to us is China. And if we don't radically shift the way that we are organized, you know, okay, let's say we get it wrong and like it's a turns out we need to be a counter terror. We need to go back to that. It'll be much easier to do that than it would be to really organize ourselves in a way where we can deter China. And that's they've every system that they're procuring and setting up. It's all just based around how do we account for the fact that we're going to be outnumbered many times over in the Pacific and fighting from these little islands. There there it seems to me that they're like

• 2:11:12Speaker 01

  doubling down on that. It also in terms of the way our alliances are set up. They're like, we are gonna let Europe have to invest more in their defense and we're gonna tell our allies that they need to step up to the plate in Africa and in Europe. And we're not going to be there anymore because, I mean, it seems to me that they're just saying we need to have everything ready to go for the Pacific.

• 2:11:39Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Yeah. And I guess the way that you would flush that out from a planning standpoint is to say that's like our worst case scenario, right? And as long as we're prepared for the worst case scenario, we can adapt from there. Yeah. So yeah, that's, I think, a As it should be, right? We need to be prepared for this worst case scenario over here. And meanwhile, that will give us the flexibility to do other things because if we're prepared for this worst case scenario, we have to do something less than that, we can manage. Yeah.

• 2:12:08Jocko Willink?

  How about the Foreign Legion? I know you spent some time with the Foreign Legion and I mentioned

• 2:12:14Jocko Willink?

  Jonathan Mayhem Peble at the beginning. How were those guys doing?

• 2:12:22Speaker 01

  I'm glad that you brought that up because that's actually been the thing that's been weighing on me and been on my mind. And I know that that video meant a lot to him and he was very proud of being interviewed in that video and seen by I think over 2 million people around that. And I, his father reached out to me and emailed me just last week and said how he was very proud of that video and

• 2:12:51Speaker 01

  I'm in contact with sending him the footage now and I'm just glad that I got to highlight who he was, what he believed in, what he was fighting for and the sacrifice that he made.

• 2:13:07Speaker 01

  John, Jonathan,

• 2:13:10Speaker 01

  guy was, he's a char, he was a character. He was so animated and when I immediately started talking to him, I could just tell that he's a character and has a lot of personality and very forward with his thoughts and beliefs. He was willing to go on camera and speak with me, which meant a lot. And we stayed in touch on Instagram, actually. We would talk and I'd ask for like, hey, how you doing? Updates. He would tell me that he was volunteering for more units that were in an assault position. He really wanted to be in the fight. He was doing what he wanted to do.

• 2:13:50Speaker 01

  And it shocked me when I found that out and I saw it was going around on Russian channels. They were using photographs from our interview and saying like this American got killed and

• 2:14:04Speaker 01

  he's only one of 40 American veterans who are veteran of Iraq or Afghanistan, who have been killed in Ukraine. He's one of 40. He was a veteran of Fallujah and

• 2:14:18Speaker 01

  I'm just happy that I can, I'm just happy that I can highlight him and that he, and that he liked, wanted that. I don't know, it's, it's been bothering me a bit because there was also the guy, the Bradley guys that I interviewed are also MIA, I heard, and it's,

• 2:14:41Speaker 01

  uh, it's sad for me, difficult, and I feel like, I don't know why, because I, I only knew him very briefly. But I just, I don't know, he's something we, we clicked and got along well.

• 2:14:58Jocko Willink?

  And, and one of the things that he was saying, it sort of was kind of heartbreaking was like, he felt like, um, you know, what, fighting in Iraq was maybe not justified, not the right thing to do. And he felt, for lack of a better word, I don't think he used this word, but guilty felt like there was some kind of guilty conscience about what he had done in Iraq. And now to sort of sort out his karma in the world. He was doing a good thing here by fighting in Ukraine, which he believed was the right thing to do and was a just cause.

• 2:15:35Jocko Willink?

  How'd that land with you and your experiences?

• 2:15:38Speaker 01

  When, when he said that, it crystallized things for me. It, I was, I realized I'm like, in a way, I was also trying to close a chapter of my life and close, get some closure on feelings that were sort of unclear for me about how I felt about the war in Ukraine or in Iraq. And then

• 2:16:01Speaker 01

  the war in Ukraine sort of was the fight that we, I think, kind of all wanted the war in Iraq and Afghanistan to be. He felt like he was protecting people that were being invaded against and in some way finding, um,

• 2:16:18Speaker 01

  what's the word, finding a...

• 2:16:24Speaker 01

  He was looking for closure on that chapter.

• 2:16:31Speaker 01

  He.

• 2:16:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:16:37Speaker 01

  It's difficult. Hearing from his father and his friends and his family and all the people that he's had a positive impact on in his life.

• 2:16:51Speaker 01

  And the scale of the losses there is just, I guess it shouldn't surprise me, but.

• 2:17:01Jocko Willink?

  I was watching another video from the Azov YouTube and there was another former marine veteran, a guy, call sign was Uno. And he had one eye and he lost one of his eyes in some kind of an incident in the Marine Corps. He didn't mention what it was. But he said something that landed pretty hard on me. When you talk about the level of devastation and the number of casualties. He said something along the lines of the GWOT veterans saw combat. This is war.

• 2:17:40Jocko Willink?

  And, you know, again, when you see what it's like over there and especially the pictures of the frontline. And this, this kind of reminded me of, and part of the piece that you did reminded me of some of the guys that I've had on that were in Vietnam, but they were Vietnamese. They were Vietnamese, you know, South Vietnamese Army Special Operations guys. And they would go and hit a target at, you know, two o'clock in the afternoon. Kill a bunch of Viet Cong or kill a bunch of North Vietnamese, come home, clean up or go back to base, clean up and then go have dinner with their wife. And they did this for 10 years. And so that's another thing that I saw.

• 2:18:23Jocko Willink?

  You know, from, from the Ukrainians, it's like you're going to fight. So it's almost like the American World War II, which is, you know, when you're going to go home, when we win. Like there's no other way. And this is something I've kind of had a project in the back of my mind for a long time of, you know, why we've lost wars. And how we've lost wars, you know, because we won World War One, World War Two. What do you give Korea? Maybe a draw. But you go to Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, and in my mind,

• 2:18:57Jocko Willink?

  one of the big, biggest, if not the biggest reason why we lost those wars is because we didn't need to win. And when you don't need to win, at the end of the day, you look around and you go, wait a second, why, why, why are we here? Now, the Ukrainians are in a position where they need to win. And I quite frankly, feel that the Russians are in a position where they don't need to win. They can settle. So that aspect seems, I think will come into play.

• 2:19:31Speaker 01

  Absolutely. The, what you set the goal to be for your win and loss in those instances, we didn't achieve our objectives and it wasn't clear what our objectives kind of were. And I think that for me with Iraq, the gray area is kind of like, we just, it wasn't clear what the objective was. And then we went back and we beat ISIS later on. It was pretty clear what the objective was. We accomplished it. We did it. Wham bam, thank you, man. But if you have an objective like in, that's not achievable.

• 2:20:09Speaker 01

  People say we won all the battles and that's true, but if you don't achieve your political objectives, then what was, like, that's the point of using force in war, kind of anyway. So.

• 2:20:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, I would agree with that.

• 2:20:30Jocko Willink?

  What's, uh, are you, you think you'll go back to Ukraine?

• 2:20:33Speaker 01

  No, no, I especially not. I found out that I was going to be a father. Though I had already made, booked all the travel, made all the plans, and then that's right when I found out I was going to be a father. And that was weighing on me the entire time I was there. I was like, this, I hope I'm not doing something that's really awful and selfish by going here. And I, but part of me was like, I want to do this to show my family that you can be courageous and stand up for what is right and. It um, so I won't be going back to Ukraine. I do plan on doing more on the ground reporting, potentially in the border, talking um with police that are fighting the cartel throughout

• 2:21:17Speaker 01

  the country, uh possibly going to Mexico, but my days of frontline reporting are probably done.

• 2:21:25Jocko Willink?

  How many days were you there for?

• 2:21:27Speaker 01

  For two weeks and we went there. We did not stop. We stayed up like thirty six hours, many days, so that we could travel the entire front and go on those missions in each place. And it was, it, it felt like a day.

• 2:21:43Jocko Willink?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:21:45Jocko Willink?

  So when you got done with that, at what point did you start to look at branching out from task and purpose?

• 2:21:54Speaker 01

  When I got back from that experience and put all those videos together and I, I knew that my contract was up, like I had, I had signed a three year contract with them. And I knew, I'm like, my contract is ending three months after I get back home. And I knew I was gonna have to make a decision. And I think the time in Ukraine crystallized and made it clear what the decision had to be, especially once I saw what their offer was. And then I was like, okay, I know what I need to do.

• 2:22:26Jocko Willink?

  You thought your ass was worth a lot more than whatever they offered you?

• 2:22:30Speaker 01

  I, and more than that, I was like, because money, I've never, I didn't get into video for money. I didn't want to be a TV director or do any of that for money. Like, it's just, I have always felt like I don't have a choice. It's the only thing I want to do or know how to do. And leaving task and purpose was like, I don't have a choice. I have to leave for a number of reasons. One being, I can't keep pumping out two videos every week for the rest of my life. Especially if I have a child on the way. And like, I'm not. I felt like I wasn't going to be able to be there for my, my kid. If I'm li- I'm doing, I was in the world that I was in there, that I had created for myself, really.

• 2:23:11Speaker 01

  But I had, that was the agreement, like two videos a week. And I'm like, I want, if I want to creatively be able to, to do what I want to do with this and what I know could potentially be the future of this thing, I'm going to need full control over it. I'm going to need to incentivize my team the way that I see fit. And I knew, I'm like, this, doing it this way is going to be a race to the bottom. And it felt like I'm just going to be chasing growth for the sake of growth. And I don't care how many subscribers I have. I just want to talk to the people that, uh, you know, this group of people.

• 2:23:52Speaker 01

  And I don't want to open it up to this group of people, just so that there's more people. And so that's kind of what, what walked me to the decision ultimately of like, I have to leave.

• 2:24:04Jocko Willink?

  And, and a bunch of guys left with you, a bunch of like your team.

• 2:24:08Speaker 01

  Once they heard that I was leaving, they reached out to me and asked if they could join me at Cappy Army. And which just was really blew me away because I can't do it without, I could not do it without my team. I was like, I don't know what I'm going to do without these guys. Cause they, the, the people that I work with have made me so much better over the years. And the relationship that I have with them is so key and important to the success of the channel. My creative producer, head creative producer, Mike, Mike, Michaelides is just

• 2:24:45Speaker 01

  a wizard with video editing and producing and Diego Esatuno, outstanding researcher. And Armando Duarte Galan, another, just these guys.

• 2:25:01Speaker 01

  Help me take in hundreds and hundreds of pages of boring documents and then we look at it together and we bounce ideas off each other and turn it into something that's entertaining and easy to digest and I just I'm very grateful for my team.

• 2:25:17Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, uh, really like what you guys are doing right now. It seems to be a good, um, it seems like you're doing a outstanding job of distilling down information in a balanced way, uh, that is easy to understand. You could do it in 15 or 20 minutes and you could get a pretty good, you know, picture. You probably get, you know, it's one of those things when I went to college. Did I tell you about college? Yeah. When I went to college, like I was, I was already in the military. So I was like a 28 year old man. And so to me it was like, oh, I need to get, I need to be like the best, right? And so I'm in there and to get like a 90 or a 93 on a test would take two hours of studying, maybe

• 2:26:02Jocko Willink?

  three, but to get a hundred would take me like eight hours or 10 hours. And I was an idiot and did the 10 hours. But the vast majority of the information, you know, you could get pretty quickly. And so I think that anybody that dives into your videos and, and watches them, you're going to get a really like 90% of the pertinent information that's going to be there. And you're going to get that in 20 minutes where you guys are going to spend a hundred hours putting that stuff together. So, uh, some of the videos that you put out, you, you, um, invasion evidence, uh, about China invading Taiwan.

• 2:26:41Jocko Willink?

  Again, this is a huge, um, debate on when this is going to happen. Uh, and you presented, you know, evidence, uh, I've been asked that question a bunch of times. I've, I don't know if my viewpoint is changing very much. It's definitely not solid. Uh, but one of the things, the last time I got asked this, I was like, well, if I was China, I wouldn't do anything right now. I would just wait to watch America continue to crumble. That was with the last administration where it looked like, you know, America is, we had all this. And now the new administration is, uh, in America is not quite sitting back and allowing things to happen as much. So maybe their attitude is going to change. Maybe China's attitude will change. I don't know. Uh, but certainly from a, like the

• 2:27:25Jocko Willink?

  weapons systems and those giant freaking landing.

• 2:27:30Jocko Willink?

  What do you even call those?

• 2:27:31Speaker 01

  Invasion barges?

• 2:27:33Jocko Willink?

  Invasion barges, bridges, like Death Stars? I don't know, but they're savage.

• 2:27:40Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, so you guys, you did that one. I think you did the one on the Chinese Command Center, which is what, five times bigger than the Pentagon?

• 2:27:48Speaker 01

  Yep, 10 times bigger than the Pentagon.

• 2:27:50Jocko Willink?

  10 times bigger than the Pentagon.

• 2:27:51Speaker 01

  And it's also a giant underground part of it to avoid nuclear blasts. Yeah, China is 1,000% preparing, but we don't know if they're doing it as, you know, you never know. Are they deterring us? And that's what I love about the new channels. I have time to like interview. I spoke with a former CIA officer and just pick his brain on like, how does the US assess it? Because that's the multi-billion dollar question is what is China's intention? And anyone who says they know doesn't really know. And it's a flip of the coin and they may or may, they have a 50% chance of being right, but it's a fascinating question.

• 2:28:31Jocko Willink?

  And of course, the drama with the XM7 continues.

• 2:28:36Speaker 01

  Yes, the, the, it came out that, so I had gotten, I put out a video a while ago talking about all this great soldier feedback and that's what was in all these publications. And then I got, there was somebody posted and they were like, Chris cut out all of my negative feedback. And I was like, I didn't see any of that. I didn't, if, if I'd seen that, I would have reported on it, but no one reported. So it turned out somewhere along the line between the PAO and the publications, who knows what happened, but these soldiers' positive feedback was delivered, but their negative feedback on the rifle was lost in the sauce, shall we say?

• 2:29:17Speaker 01

  And so I could, I could understand the frustration that that soldier probably felt, and that's very understandable. And so I wanted to give a voice to those troops who were sounding the other side of the argument, which was that the rifle is giant, heavy recoil, big recoil, and like, not what they want.

• 2:29:46Jocko Willink?

  Guns is right up there with like religion, diet working out and martial arts, by the way. Martial arts seems to be settling down a little bit now because like you, there's not too many people that are just like committed to, you know, ninjitsu or something. Everyone's like, yeah, it's MMA and MMA is basically wrestling, boxing, Muay Thai and Jiu Jitsu. That's basically what it is. But man, back in the day, man, people were crazy about that. Guns is the same thing. And what's, what's interesting? So you did a piece on the scar, right? Did you do a piece on the scar? So I was actually around for the process. I never deployed with the scar. The guys maybe like right after I retired or actually right before I retired, guys were deploying with this car.

• 2:30:28Jocko Willink?

  But it was so funny to watch them coming up with that thing and like, like reciprocating, reciprocating charging handle. Like no one ever talked about that. And that all of a sudden was like this big deal. And I was, you know, I was as into guns as any normal SEAL, which is a pretty high level of being into guns, but wasn't like the full-fledged, I wasn't a sniper. I wasn't like a full-fledged gun nut. I wasn't, uh, building guns on my own or anything like that. But you know, look, I, that was my primary tool for my adult life was a rifle, a battle rifle. But to watch, and what was funny about it was, well, not funny, it's actually sad,

• 2:31:12Jocko Willink?

  is it, it's, it's almost like the story of the Pontiac Aztec. Do you know the story of the Pontiac Aztec? Well, the story of the Pontiac Aztec, it was designed by committee and it was like, well, we should have this kind of hatchback and we should put this kind. And you end up with this thing that just doesn't look right. And that kind of, you could see that not completely happening with that weapon system. And from all I know, the guys that use the scar, they really liked the scar. And especially once they got rid of the reciprocating charging handle, then everyone was kind of really into it. And then I guess the program, which you explained in the, in the video, why it kind of went away.

• 2:31:50Jocko Willink?

  But you have that weapon, you have the H and K four 16, which everybody loves. Like there's no one that doesn't love the H and K four 16. And I'm sure someone in America could have done something very similar to a four 16 if we didn't want to just straight up use the H and K one or something like that. And then you have this new XM seven, which is, seems to be. It's a real radical departure, you know, uh, different ammunition. It's huge. We had this weapon we got issued. It was an H and K. And I, by the way, H and K, I was in, I'm an old guy and we actually used the MP5 like a lot in the nineties. Before we realized that you have to fight people on the way to the building.

• 2:32:36Jocko Willink?

  Cause once you're in the building, the MP5 is cool, relatively speaking, I guess, maybe not as cool as an M4 at this juncture, but at the time, it seemed like, man, that MP5 could kill paper targets as good as anything, right? And it was quiet and it was small and it, everyone shot like, dude, you have an MP5. Everyone is a sniper at, you know, 20 or 30 yards. It is just an awesome weapon. And so I love H and K, but then they came out with, I think it was actually called the SOCOM. It was this pistol. And it, you know, it had all these requirements to it. It had to be suppressed. It had to have this, had this caliber. And you know, there's, there's guys in the SEAL teams that like nine millimeter, nine millimeter versus 45. Is like, you know, religion, like depending on which side you're on, like you, what kind of pussy are you carrying a nine mil?

• 2:33:21Jocko Willink?

  Or whatever, just though that, that attitude, but SOCOM made this, or H and K made this SOCOM pistol. And it was, it was freaking huge. It was absolutely huge. And so like, we got issued it and I don't think I ever saw anyone actually carry one. And so when you, when people like, like, oh, it's a little bit bigger. You'll get used to it. Or it's a little bit heavier. It's a little bit longer. Like, mm, I don't know. Now, all that being said, when I got to the teams, carrying an M14 was 100% like acceptable slash a little bit encouraged, like an M14. And I had guys in Ramadi that carried an M14, what they modified it to be called an EBR. Have you ever heard of that?

• 2:34:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yep. The M14 with like the skeleton.

• 2:34:06Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. So guys carried that and loved it. And so it's, but watching, you know, watching what's happening around right now with the XM7 and you're reporting on it. I got to see some of the behind the scenes on that with, uh, with the scar and. It's one of those, it's one of those minefields where everybody has an opinion. And generally speaking, they're right. Because if you're getting in this kind of fight in this kind of terrain, yeah, that XM7, I'd take that thing all day. But if you're getting this other kind of fight in this other kind of terrain, I'd, there's no way I'm bringing that thing with me. And, and they're all valid points. So I kind of go back to what I was saying earlier. It's like, hmm, what can you come up with for a system that's flexible?

• 2:34:51Jocko Willink?

  And, and can be adapted to many different missions?

• 2:34:55Speaker 01

  This comes a little bit back to the point of the army is preparing for the worst case scenario. And their argument to steelmen, their argument about why they're, and they're going full steam ahead on even despite the captain Trent's, um, like white paper about how it's garbage trash and this and that. The army, I think just last week, they removed the X from the nomenclature of it. It's now the M7 and it's, I believe, you know,

• 2:35:24Jocko Willink?

  It's coming.

• 2:35:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. Whether you like it or not, it's coming. But those M4s, those M16s, I think they're always going to be in the arsenal. It's not as though they can't switch back to them if, God forbid, really, really we botched it and we want to go backwards. The HK416, that's essentially what the Marines use now with the M27IAR. That's basically, that's essentially a HK416. There's going to be plenty of those in the inventory. The theory of what the army is seeing is that they believe that to have overmatch in a case where they're outnumbered, that they're going to need the M7's range

• 2:36:07Speaker 01

  to defeat China, I think is what they're looking at is like, how do we account for this vast gulf in us being outnumbered? We're going to have way less soldiers. Okay, we need something that can hit them before they can even range us. And the way we're going to do that is now, in the past, the biggest downside to the full battle rifle was that we didn't have sensors that could see the enemy out that far. Now the argument is, well, we'll have drones that can see them at that distance. So you'll be able to pick those targets up at 700 meters with your drone and then shoot them with the M7 before they can even see you and with a round that can go through their body armor.

• 2:36:50Speaker 01

  They're going to have a what's called the SRSS grenade launcher, which is essentially a grenade launching rifle that shoots a 30 mil grenade. That's very similar to the XM25 Punisher. It's a program that I'm sure you've seen. They've been trying to do this for 30 years. So they're claiming that you'll have one of those in each squad, and that will reduce the amount of ammo that you need to spend suppressing the enemy. Because now you'll airburst rounds over, blow up that bunker, that trench, with the grenade launcher and its airbursting ammo, programmable airbursting ammo. So it's part, it's a holistic approach that the army is betting on. But again, it's, it's a big risky bet.

• 2:37:34Speaker 01

  Some of this, these complaints about the weapon system could come down to like, well, is it what you want to take to the range? And is it perfect for home defense? No, but does it fit into the system of systems that the army is aiming to have? They're, they're hoping that these weapon systems complement each other. The M250, the M7, and that they hit, because China, they fire a round that's very similar to the 556. And militaries often end up copying what the US military does. So when the US military switched to a round similar to the 556,

• 2:38:16Speaker 01

  we saw a lot of forces copied them and even copied kind of the way the AR ergonomics of it for the rail system. So are they going to get it right again? I don't, I don't know.

• 2:38:30Jocko Willink?

  And also the, let me think about the M4 compared to the M16. Like, there are so many small iterative modifications and the guys from, a lot of guys, I won't say all guys, because I have friends that were in Vietnam that loved the M16. And, and the Kar-15 that used that.

• 2:38:51Jocko Willink?

  In the mid 90s, people didn't like the M16 anymore. And then we had what? I think we had the M16A2 and then there was like, I had something else. And before the M4, there was some, one more that I'm forgetting right now.

• 2:39:05Jocko Willink?

  Anyways, but by the time we got to like, the M4 and we were using it all the time, like that, there'd been enough little changes to that weapon that that's a freaking solid weapon now. And like, like I said, Vietnam guys didn't like that weapon. A lot of guys, a lot of Vietnam guys, because it would malfunction all the time. You had to be super delicate with it and all these things and it was. So I guess we're gonna find out.

• 2:39:30Jocko Willink?

  All right, all men, uh, what, what's next? What's next for you?

• 2:39:34Speaker 01

  What's next is I'm hoping to do more on the ground reporting. I want to meet with SWAT teams. I want to meet with

• 2:39:45Speaker 01

  security forces in the United States. Maybe talk to the soldiers who have been stationed on the southern border. I'm hoping to, to, because for me, that's always the most rewarding is, because then I kind of really, I see with my own eyes. And reporting from a desk is also rewarding, but yeah, I'm hoping to do more of that in the future. That's what Cappy Army is, is pushing towards.

• 2:40:07Jocko Willink?

  Awesome, man. Uh, does that get us up to speed?

• 2:40:10Speaker 01

  Sure does.

• 2:40:11Jocko Willink?

  Get us up to present day?

• 2:40:14Jocko Willink?

  Where can people find you? So you got, you got Patreon, right? And that's patreon.com slash Chris Cappy. And then thankfully you have YouTube, Instagram and Twitter, Twitter, which are all at Cappy Army. And then there's one more thing that I'm not too familiar with, but it is.

• 2:40:31Speaker 01

  Pepperbox.

• 2:40:32Jocko Willink?

  Pepperbox. Alright, so what's the deal with Pepperbox? How do people get there?

• 2:40:35Speaker 01

  Pepperbox is some of the content that I'm actually most proud of, but I can't put it on YouTube. Because if you were to show this kind of nasty war footage on there, and I understand it's totally reasonable that you don't want advertising on that kind of content. But there should be a place, I think, where you can go and see the realities of war for what it is and see why, why this is something that we need to avoid. If we can avoid war, then the seeing, I think more people who see that. Because if you watch the History Channel, you watch a lot of YouTube, it gets sanitized and it almost becomes turned into. It it gets rid of basically the teeth of it.

• 2:41:18Speaker 01

  And then so on Pepperbox, we're able to show the the actual horrors of war.

• 2:41:26Speaker 02

  Um, Echo Charles. Yeah. You have any questions? Do you have, um, have you thought about like the in the future, whatever, doing going back to like movies or kind of narrative stuff like that?

• 2:41:38Speaker 01

  I've thought about it and I've had a couple of some directors of movies reach out to me and ask like to work on scripts with them and stuff and I kind of just, I feel like that would maybe maybe be like taking a step backwards and chasing after something that maybe I didn't really want all along.

• 2:42:00Speaker 02

  I feel like, well, everybody's different or whatever, but you know how, okay, I think, let me offer this as like a thought thing. So you know how in the beginning, and I forget what outfit it was with where you said it just wasn't a fit? Because of like, a lot of the time, like when you create something or whatever, it comes from like your personality. So if let's say a kid's show wanted you to produce something for them and then it'll come from your personality. Deep down. So sometimes it won't be a fit because your personality, the way you express yourself and what you express yourself with isn't in line with kid's stuff, we'll say. But the more experience you have, you know, with this like real stuff and the more ingrained this stuff becomes like

• 2:42:45Speaker 02

  in you and in your kind of your core or whatever. It'll formulate like a more authentic, more kind of in a way structured expression for any creative stuff in the future, you know, so it could actually add to that. Because a lot of times I think I'm not alone with, or you're not alone with like a lot of these, especially when it comes to video like, oh, I want to make a movie or a show or, you know, my own creative thing, you know? And a lot of time, it could be.

• 2:43:15Speaker 02

  The reason that it's not successful is because you don't have enough experience in life. You know, you're like, oh, I seen this show and that show and that I can do that. And you go in there and you're like, oh, I can't because you don't have the experience, you know? And I'm not necessarily talking about movie making experience. I'm saying like life experience, you know? So it might even be like an asset. This part of it isn't necessarily a step forward versus a step back necessarily. As far as like how you said, like it's a step backwards or whatever. It might be just part of one big process. You see what I'm saying?

• 2:43:44Speaker 01

  It would be amazing if it was something, if I could.

• 2:43:49Speaker 01

  There, there are opportunities there and I think under the right conditions, like you're saying, it could be really cool. It could be fun. There, there is opportunities there. I, what, what I, what I know I don't want to do is like give up what I'm creating on YouTube right now and that, that weekly format that we're now doing. If I can find a way to keep that and then also maybe there's some other opportunities, that would be, that'd be awesome.

• 2:44:19Speaker 02

  Good to meet you.

• 2:44:20Jocko Willink?

  Counsel from Echo Charles.

• 2:44:22Speaker 02

  Hey man, I'm just saying, these are all things to think about as a creative person, especially with video, because video is not like one thing, especially nowadays. And I think that it'll just continue with that. There's so many forms of it. Like you ever watch like the stuff that kids watch on YouTube?

• 2:44:38Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:44:39Speaker 02

  You're kind of like, bro, what even is this? It barely makes even sense. Meanwhile, they're just like, this is my jam. I want more of this, you know?

• 2:44:46Speaker 01

  Watch one episode of Skibidi Toilet and then you will be entrenched in like, wait, is this irony? Are they watching this ironically or are they watching this sincerely? And we're both?

• 2:44:59Speaker 02

  Both probably, probably, yeah. And then even just some thing like we probably have like, how old are you, like 35?

• 2:45:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:45:06Speaker 02

  Ish. We probably have these things given just what we're used to. So we probably have these blinders on that we can't see certain things. Like it's like a filter, we filter out certain things because we think it's kind of irrelevant to the entertainment, you know, process or whatever for us. And kids or just we'll say new eyeballs and stuff, they don't have it. So they appreciate it for everything that it's worth. And then they, they formulate through time their own filters. You see what I'm saying? So it's like, bro, you just never know, bro. And, and you add in your experience with it. Who knows what kind of video you can come up with, you know?

• 2:45:39Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you, it's interesting now that you've mentioned this.

• 2:45:44Jocko Willink?

  So a little while ago, again, my kids are young adults, right? So they're, they're not quite like pure meme culture like a 14 year old right now, but like you've got a 15 year old and a 20 year old or whatever, they're, they're, they're in the game for sure. They're on the grid. But what, now that you mentioned this, like, there's, if you, if I were to see a meme, or what's it, what's the difference between a meme and like a TikTok video?

• 2:46:12Speaker 02

  I don't, I don't know.

• 2:46:13Jocko Willink?

  Like a short video, right? A short video. Okay. So if I would see a reel, if I was to see a reel, like a year ago, that I would have just like that my, one of my kids sent me and I would just like look at it and just be literally no understanding, just why did you send this to me? Like they might as well sent me, you know, Chinese characters on a page and I would have just looked at it the same way. And now, once you kind of get a little bit in the game and now they'll send something, I'll be like, oh, it's funny. Like it's actually, sometimes like a laugh out loud funny, something that I literally would not have comprehended, almost like another language. Two years ago.

• 2:46:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:46:50Jocko Willink?

  Cause I had to kind of, you know, get in the game.

• 2:46:53Speaker 02

  Big time.

• 2:46:53Jocko Willink?

  Myself.

• 2:46:54Speaker 02

  You're correct.

• 2:46:55Jocko Willink?

  So it's a pretty good point you got there, Echo Charles. Might be some things to bring to the table.

• 2:47:01Jocko Willink?

  Jack, any other questions, Echo?

• 2:47:02Speaker 02

  No.

• 2:47:04Jocko Willink?

  Cappy, you got anything, any closing comments?

• 2:47:06Speaker 01

  That's all I've got. I had, I had a blast. Thank you so much for inviting me to do this.

• 2:47:11Jocko Willink?

  Well, thanks for coming on, man. Thanks for joining us. It's great stories and of course, thanks for, thanks for serving your country. Stepping out and, and holding the line when the country needed you to do it. And, and thanks for what you're doing today. You know, trying to provide people with a better understanding of the world. The world's a complex place and I think you're doing a great job. Helping people understand what's going on. So thanks for what you did and thanks for what you're doing. Appreciate it.

• 2:47:41Jocko Willink?

  And with that, Chris Cappy has left the building. And Chris has been getting after it, getting after all kinds of things over the years. And now he's in a stable position, stepping up his game, taking risks, making things happen. So good to sit down and talk with him. And look, we get a step up our game too. Am I wrong?

• 2:48:05Speaker 02

  You were correct, actually.

• 2:48:06Jocko Willink?

  So we're training. Jiu Jitsu. We're lifting, we're reading, we're studying, we're resting.

• 2:48:15Speaker 02

  We are resting.

• 2:48:16Jocko Willink?

  So a little thing happened. I got, I got mandatory rest.

• 2:48:22Jocko Willink?

  Or involuntary rest, involuntary rest. So I, look, I've had a little bit of a, look, I don't like to talk about things. I like to give weaknesses away, but I had an elbow issue.

• 2:48:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:48:33Jocko Willink?

  Like tendonitis in my elbow for a couple of months. You know what I'm saying? And every time I would train the jiu jitsu or do pull ups, pull ups would just inflame it. Like it would hurt way worse and then jiu jitsu would not help at all. We'll say, but I went on a road trip, road trip. And there was no pull up bar. And I thought normally I would, normally I'd bring rings with me. So I'd be like, all right, cool. No pull up bar, no factor, hang the rings up somewhere and we'll get them done. But I was like, you know what? I'm not going to, because I knew that I was hurting myself. So I went on a trip, I was gone for four days, no pull ups. And the, the previous, I'd done pull ups two days prior to leaving.

• 2:49:18Jocko Willink?

  So I actually went like, I believe it was six straight days with no pull ups, which is, I haven't done that in a long time.

• 2:49:26Jocko Willink?

  Arm's good to go.

• 2:49:27Speaker 02

  Healed.

• 2:49:28Jocko Willink?

  Kinda. I can feel a little bit, but it's pretty much healed.

• 2:49:32Speaker 02

  So dare I say it, it recovered.

• 2:49:34Jocko Willink?

  Yep. So rest is part of the program. Look, and look, do I gotta admit something right now? This is not my area of expertise. Rest is not, but that's why I have you, man. That's why I have you. You're here to help me get rested properly.

• 2:49:48Speaker 02

  If it helps you, don't call it rest, call it recovery.

• 2:49:52Jocko Willink?

  Okay. Okay. Well, I've been recovered. And another thing, so that's what we're doing. We're lifting, we're running, we're sprinting, we're doing road work, we're training. We're resting when needed.

• 2:50:04Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:50:05Jocko Willink?

  Hopefully at an appropriate level, but we also need fuel.

• 2:50:08Speaker 02

  Oh yeah, it's part of the trifecta.

• 2:50:10Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:50:11Speaker 02

  Exercise, recovery, fuel.

• 2:50:14Jocko Willink?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:50:14Speaker 02

  Fit.

• 2:50:15Jocko Willink?

  Let me, look, you helping me with my rest?

• 2:50:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:50:18Jocko Willink?

  Let me help you with your fuel.

• 2:50:19Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 2:50:20Jocko Willink?

  Jocko Fuel dot com.

• 2:50:20Speaker 02

  There you go.

• 2:50:21Jocko Willink?

  Go check it out. Hey, go check out Jocko Fuel dot com. Get the real goods. Again, I know it sounds crazy. There's counterfeit Jocko Fuel out there. Which is crazy to think about and we're on it. We're tracking people down. We're going to war. Well, look, we got, you think we don't have friends in law enforcement? Oh, we got friends in law enforcement. We got friends at all levels of law enforcement.

• 2:50:40Speaker 02

  I understand.

• 2:50:41Jocko Willink?

  And, and things are getting handled, but Jocko Fuel dot com. You don't have to worry about that. We also have deals there on Jocko Fuel dot com. Free shipping over 99 bucks. We got everything that you want. It's all in stock. So check that out. And we got subscriptions. So like up to 20% off when you subscribe to something and then you're not going to miss it. Cause you don't want to miss out on your joint warfare. You don't want to miss out on your time war. You don't want to miss out on your super krill and you definitely don't want to get done with a rib eye steak. And then realize that you don't have any milk for dessert. You know what? Don't let that happen. So go to Jocko Fuel dot com and subscribe. And if you don't do that, if you want to get it just down at the shop, down the street, cool, go to Walmart.

• 2:51:24Jocko Willink?

  Go to Wawa, go to vitamin shop, go to GNC. Military commissars, if you're in the military, we got you covered. Hanford Dash Stores in Maryland, Wakeford, ShopRite, HEB down in Texas, building Jocko Fuel walls. Meyer up in the Midwest, building Jocko Fuel aisles. Wegmans Jocko Fuel pallets, Harris Teeter, getting after it. Publix down in Florida. Hey, everyone in Florida, thank you for taking care of yourself and getting some Jocko Fuel. We're there. Also Lifetime Fitness Shields and small gyms everywhere. If there's not Jocko Fuel in your gym where you train or where you go to do yoga or where you go to do jujitsu or where you go to do Pilates or where you go to do, uh, uh, biking, what's that biking called? SoulCycle.

• 2:52:08Speaker 02

  Cycle cycling.

• 2:52:09Jocko Willink?

  If you don't have, look, if you don't have, uh, Jocko Fuel there, email J F sales at Jocko Fuel dot com and we'll get you covered. Also, originusa.com. This is where you can get t-shirts, hoodies, boots.

• 2:52:24Jocko Willink?

  Flip flops are being experimented with, right? And slippers, we call them.

• 2:52:27Speaker 02

  Yes, good, so good.

• 2:52:28Jocko Willink?

  I, I have a pair that's being delivered today for the T and E process, test and evaluation. We'll see. You know what? I could wear them for a little bit, then I can turn them over to you.

• 2:52:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, please.

• 2:52:37Jocko Willink?

  Good. Because you do bring a level of expertise in the slippers region.

• 2:52:41Speaker 02

  I love.

• 2:52:43Jocko Willink?

  Anything that you want. And listen, this stuff isn't made in China by slave labor. It's not made in a sweatshop. In fact, it's made by Americans here in America with a hundred percent American made materials. Oh, what about the tariff? We don't care about the tariff. Good. Tariff, tariff those people that are trying to sell communist made gear.

• 2:53:05Jocko Willink?

  Tariff them. But you can't tariff Origin USA because we're a hundred percent made in America. Check that out. OriginUSA.com.

• 2:53:13Speaker 02

  Yep, it's true. Also, if you've noticed me, Chaco, other people wearing shirts that say good on them, right? Big letters. Or discipline equals freedom, which is another one. Maybe even on TV, on the news sometimes. I've seen it on the news before. Anyway, you see these people wearing these shirts that say this, discipline equals freedom. Good. Get after it. Stand by to get some. And you're wondering where you can get it. This is where you can get it. Don't worry, I got you. ChacoStore.com. Uh, there's also hoodies on there. If you want some hoodies for, you know, for colder weather or whatever. Some hats on there, socks on there. I'm gonna flex on them.

• 2:53:52Jocko Willink?

  I don't know what those look like, by the way.

• 2:53:53Speaker 02

  Well, go to ChacoStore.com, click on accessories. You see them right there. Two, two, uh, two types, by the way. You want the long ones, the ones that go up to your knee? Right, got you. You want the, what do you call the other one? Six inch crew? Crew socks. You want those ones? Got you too. Right, good ones.

• 2:54:11Jocko Willink?

  They say discipline equals freedom on them?

• 2:54:13Speaker 02

  Discipline equals freedom. Yep, it's true. You want to flex on them at the airport?

• 2:54:17Jocko Willink?

  Discipline pens.

• 2:54:18Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. All day. Um, but yeah, uh, everything, uh, is on there. Uh, also the shirt locker subscription scenario. You know, you ever seen these guys, uh, rolling around with a shirt that says, uh, sugar coated lies? Actually, it looks like a Krispy Kreme shirt, but you look close and it says, wait a second, it says sugar coated lies on it. It's from the Shirt Locker, by the way. Last year, one of the one of the favorites on there. Anyway, there's a lot of different designs that do represent the same deal. This one equals freedom in a way, one way or another, but just a little bit more creative design. It's called the Shirt Locker. You get a new one every month. It's a subscription scenario.

• 2:54:54Jocko Willink?

  I like it.

• 2:54:54Speaker 02

  That too is on jocko's store.com.

• 2:54:56Jocko Willink?

  Hey, I mentioned ribeyes. You want to get your ribeyes. You want to get you want to get your ribeye and whatever other steak cut you like. Personally, I'm a ribeye guy. Primalbeef.com, coloradocraftbeef.com. These are the steaks from good people, great companies, amazing steaks. Now, uh, protocol wise, I've been using the Sean Glass technique for the ribeye. Three, three, two, two, three minutes, one side, three minutes, the other side, two minutes back, two minutes back, and you're good. Pull it right off.

• 2:55:28Speaker 02

  Medium heat, high heat.

• 2:55:29Jocko Willink?

  Like a medium leaning, leaning towards a little bit warmer, a little bit hotter. I like that little bit of a little bit of a crust activity. And by the way, salt, pepper, that's it. No barbecue sauce, no Uncle Phil's barbecue or anything like this. And look, I'm a fan of Phil's barbecue, but not like, not going to take corn syrup. Cause you ever look at a barbecue sauce, it's just corn syrup. It's like corn syrup, pepper and paprika, and that's a barbecue sauce. No, you don't need it. Salt, pepper, three, three, two, two. Get your steak on. Primalbeef.com, coloradocraftbeef.com, the best. Also subscribe to the podcast, also jockounderground.com.

• 2:56:12Jocko Willink?

  Also YouTube channel. We got a bunch of them. Check those out. Psychological Warfare. If you don't have that yet, might want to go check that out. It's been out for a while.

• 2:56:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's a fundamental one. The psychological warfare. You need that little boost. Yeah, that's good.

• 2:56:25Jocko Willink?

  He used to say it was a hundred percent guaranteed. It's still got a hundred percent guarantee rate.

• 2:56:29Speaker 02

  Two hundred percent guaranteed now.

• 2:56:30Jocko Willink?

  It went up. It went up, boys. Uh, books. Need to Lead. You heard of that book?

• 2:56:36Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:56:37Jocko Willink?

  Who's it written by?

• 2:56:37Speaker 02

  Good deal, Dave Burke.

• 2:56:38Jocko Willink?

  Good deal. Good deal, Dave. Okay. Dave Burke. Check that one out. You can preorder it right now. Comes out October 21st.

• 2:56:46Jocko Willink?

  Final Spin, Discipline Equals Freedom Field Manual, Way of the Warrior Kid books, check those out. And of course, you've got Extreme Ownership Dichotomy Leadership, books that I wrote with my brother Leif Babin, who I also have a leadership consultancy with. We solve problems through leadership. It is called Echelon Front. If you need help inside your organization, go to echelonfront.com. If you want to come to one of our events, go to echelonfront.com. If you need to square away your team, go to echelonfront.com. You can come to one of our events. We can come to you, or if necessary, we have extremeownership.com, which is an online leadership training academy, and we can help teach you the skills of leadership,

• 2:57:32Jocko Willink?

  the skills of leadership that you need in every interaction that you have with people. It will make you better. So go to extremeownership.com for that. And 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 an amazing charity organization that helps so many of our veterans and their families. If you want to donate, or you want to get involved, go to AmericasMightyWarriors.org. Also, check out HeroesAndHorses.org, Micah Fink, helping our veterans up there in the mountains find their soul and be reborn. And then you've got Jimmy May's organization, BeyondTheBrotherhood.org, helping SEALs get reintegrated into the civilian

• 2:58:16Jocko Willink?

  world. And if you want to connect with us, for Chris Cappy, check him out on Patreon, patreon.com/ChrisCappy. He's also YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter, @CappyArmy. And then for us, you can check me out at Jaco.com and on social media, I'm at Jocko Willink, Echo's at Echo Charles. Just be careful of that algorithm. It'll get you. Thanks once again to Chris Capaludo, Chris Cappy, for joining us, for sharing your lessons learned. Thanks for your, thanks for your service in the Army, and thanks for what you're doing today to continue to help people to better understand the world. Thanks to all of our military personnel

• 2:59:01Jocko Willink?

  around the world right now.

• 2:59:05Jocko Willink?

  Fighting to protect their homeland, fighting to protect freedom and standing in the breach against tyranny. Also, thanks to our police, law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, ENTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, border patrol, secret services, well as all other first responders. Thank you for protecting us here at home and to everyone else out there. You know, nothing's going to be given to you. Nothing's going to just be given to you. It's not going to happen. It might happen, rarely, but don't count on it. No one is going to make things happen for you. Like Chris Cappy, you have to make things happen. And when you do these things, there's going to be risk.

• 2:59:48Jocko Willink?

  But without risk, there's no reward. So, don't wait any longer. Instead, get up and go get after it. And that's all I've got for tonight. And until next time, this is Echo and Jocko out.