506: Violence, War, and the Path to Redemption. With Clay Martin

>Join Jocko Underground< https://www.jockounderground.com/subscribe Clay Martin, former Green Beret and author, shares his journey from brutal combat in Iraq to the battles of life after war. He reveals how writing saved him, how visions of an ancestral spirit reshaped his path, and why Barbarian Spirit is a call to purpose and survival for veterans today. 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 506 with Echo Charles and me, Jocko Willink. Good evening, Echo.

• 0:04Speaker 01

  Good evening.

• 0:06Jocko Willink?

  Now, listen, I need to step out of the moment and put a little perspective to the situation. I spent my youth first as a reconnaissance Marine and then as a special forces soldier. I ended up my military life as an assaulter and sniper for third special forces group commanders in extremist force, which while it no longer exists at the time, could arguably be described as the most vicious murderous bastards on the planet. Sure, a handful of other units could vie for that title back then, but few. And while I was not their king, I did prove I could run with the pack. I've felt bones break in my hands. I've killed other humans in a significant quantity and basically led a life of violence few other

• 0:50Jocko Willink?

  humans can fathom. Never had I felt anything like this, not even close.

• 1:01Jocko Willink?

  And that right there is an excerpt from a book called Barbarian Spirit, which is written by a guy named Clay Martin, who, as you heard, served both as a Marine Corps scout sniper, reconnaissance Marine before transferring to the Army, where he was a member of the special forces. And his deployments were during periods of fierce fighting. He also served as an instructor, teaching both special operations target interdiction, which is their fancy way of saying sniper course. And he also taught advanced urban combat before he was medically retired. After retirement, he became a prolific writer, and I don't throw that phrase out easily, prolific writer. You've got to get after it if you want me

• 1:42Jocko Willink?

  to call you a prolific writer, but he certainly has. And in that voyage, he's uncovered a path that he's used to overcome some demons and now he's helping others. By guiding them down that same path and it's an honor to have him with us here tonight to share some of his experiences and lessons learned. Clay, thanks for joining us, man.

• 2:02Speaker 02

  Hey, Jocko, thanks for having me, brother. I really appreciate it. And yeah, the honor is mutual. Uh, you know, like you're a famous podcast journey, shit like that, because you're an old school SEAL and you've done some, some stuff, which I respect.

• 2:13Jocko Willink?

  I've had, uh, uh, the real old school SEALs have been on it. It's weird too, because the SEAL teams have not been around for that long. When I, when I got to SEAL Team One in 1991, I went to the 30 year. So in, at like January of 1992, I went to the 30 year anniversary of SEAL Team One. It was when it was born. It was 1962. And I was the youngest, you know, in the Marine Corps, they do the youngest and the oldest cut the cake. So we did that thing. Yeah. And it was the youngest, which was me, and the oldest, which was a guy named Double L, who is an old Vietnam UDT guy. And we did the, the cake cutting. But then fast forward, I don't know what it was. It was a few

• 2:57Jocko Willink?

  years ago, I went to the 60th anniversary of SEAL Team One. And it's just wild that the history is so short. And like guys, you have guys there that you knew that were like at SEAL Team One originally, and they're still kicking it around. So I can't say I'm an old school SEAL.

• 3:18Jocko Willink?

  Still a new guy.

• 3:19Speaker 02

  In a, in relative terms for his GWY guys.

• 3:21Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, check, check. Um, so dude, you got a lot of stuff. We got a lot of stuff to talk about today. Uh, had a really good time reading, reading your various books. Um, Concrete Jungle, uh, what's this one? Prairie Fire. And then we've got The Wrath of Wendigo. Am I saying that right? Wendigo?

• 3:40Speaker 02

  One or two is that Native American words. It can be Wendigo or it can be Windigo. I'm not, I'm not native enough to say which one's which.

• 3:45Jocko Willink?

  Right on. I think, uh, Wendigo. I think that's the way I naturally say it. So I might just stick with that one. All right. So we'll get into all that stuff. Let's get a little bit of background on you, though. Where you came from. It's funny, before we hit record, we were talking about where guys come from.

• 3:58Speaker 02

  Right.

• 4:00Jocko Willink?

  How they grew up and what kind of guys you end up with. It always brings me back to, um, you know, I had this conversation with a buddy of mine who was a emergency room doctor in Baltimore. And this was in a time, I think they were getting 17 puncture wounds on average a day from stabbings and shootings in Baltimore. Cause Baltimore is crazy. And he said that, uh, if a family, so you get all kinds of collateral damage, you know, you get people that they're not a gang member, but they're just like little Sally was sitting on the front doorstep and she took a freaking round to the head, you know, and she dies and she's 12 years old. And that happens a lot. And he, he said that basically you have, if you have a family that has,

• 4:41Jocko Willink?

  if the family's tight, this traumatic incident can actually bring them together and make them even tighter. But if there's little fractures in that family, this traumatic incident can blow up the family and just cause total destruction.

• 4:56Jocko Willink?

  And I didn't make the connection at the time, but as I, I see guys now, you know, we, when guys join the military, it's like when you go to war, if you've got some little fractures in there, well, it can, it can like make you more appreciative of life. It can make you better, but if in certain situations, you've got some little fractures, some, some things can get blown up. So, uh, let's talk about where you are, where you came from.

• 5:22Speaker 02

  Sure. No, uh, absolutely awesome. And, uh, I, I'm going to tell some things on the, on your show today that I've, I've never said before. And it's not even just because I was trying to bury him. It, it actually comes full circle with what I'm doing now with, uh, with psilocybin and these other things for these other veterans. Some of this, a lot of this actually I didn't remember until like two months ago.

• 5:41Speaker 02

  Actually, when I, back in July, when I agreed to come on the show, a lot of these things started unlocking. I've actually done probably three sessions of plant medicines in the meantime, and it's been extraordinarily weird. But I come from a little place in Texas, little tiny town, little, you know, oil patch in the Panhandle, Texas and, uh, dirt poor, uh, we were there like when the oil boom ended. So everybody's broke. Uh, especially my family was in oil and gas. Like, you know, my dad was a driller on a drilling rig for a while. Grandfather drove trucks in the oil field. So, you know, while everybody else is coming up in the country, our economy is smashed. So.

• 6:19Speaker 02

  You know, poor guys living in a trailer out in the middle of nowhere. I'm a little guy anyway. I wouldn't get any size until I'm like 20. I go to high school at four foot 11 and 95 pounds.

• 6:30Jocko Willink?

  Damn.

• 6:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:33Speaker 02

  People won't, you kind of can't believe this stuff later in life, but yeah, I'm not a big dude.

• 6:39Speaker 02

  Anyway, so things are pretty rough. It's a pretty, it's a rough area too in its own way. It's not like we're downtown Chicago or New York, something like that, but I mean, crazy stuff is happening.

• 6:49Speaker 02

  And while I'm not going to apologize for what happens, it does give me, especially now, some perspective on why my dad was the way he was. I can remember like crazy stuff when I'm like, before I can go to school, being like five or six years old. He's taking me to work with him on this drilling rig, which OSHA would like fly a black helicopter out ready to like shut you. They would, you know, they'd go get the president of Exxon for letting this happen. But it's, you know, 1985, so this is what's going on. And my dad is, he's not like, really like a tough guy. He's not like a criminal or anything like that. But he's a smart guy. That's why he's the driller. That makes him like the squad leader for this drilling rig. And his crew, roughnecks back then, they're also not like upstanding citizens. You know what I mean? Like they're in this for the money and it's a dangerous job. So people die and get hurt all the time.

• 7:34Speaker 02

  So there's a certain guy that kind of does that. He's got like, you know, Hells Angels and, you know, Mexican banditos on his crew. I can remember like going to jail to get like some of his roughnecks for work release and then we got to take them back before we go home.

• 7:48Speaker 02

  And I have also no idea why he's taking me out to work with him on this. This is like insanity that at the time seems fine. Now as a 45 year old man, I'm like, that in itself is off the chain. Anyway. So anyway, this, this goes on. Now that you can no longer drill, they're not getting for oil in Texas anymore because it's not worth the money. Economy crashes, we're broke, we're extra broke now. He's got to do some job that he hates now, you know, driving a truck. And things were never like really good at home for being like, you know, totally honest. My dad's a little bit of a psychopath anyway. He's got some violence baked in. CPS by this point has been to our house probably four or five times already. As, you know, you go to school and have bruises, like eventually things are going to come to a head.

• 8:34Speaker 02

  And it's just not a great environment. I've got two sisters, one three years older than me, one's three years younger. They're in the middle of this shit too.

• 8:45Speaker 02

  So this goes on for a while and you also like as a guy in that kind of like environment, you learn very quickly like how to lie to CPS, right? Cause CPS is not gonna actually do shit. They're gonna come to your house, they're gonna say some shit, they're not gonna do anything and you're gonna catch it a lot worse when they're gone. So this is going on till about, oh man, when the Gulf War started, 91?

• 9:05Jocko Willink?

  The first Gulf War?

• 9:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:07Jocko Willink?

  Was 1991, yeah.

• 9:08Speaker 02

  Okay, so this is where things really fall apart. My dad's just had like a midlife crisis. Alright, he's, he's an emotional, I don't know what the hell's wrong with it, but he's, he's coming apart. And the Gulf War starts, he thinks like the apocalypse is upon us, right? War in the Middle East, like, you know, this is it, this is the end times. So now he wants to start going to church all of a sudden, out of nowhere. We've, we've never had to do any shit in our lives before, now we're doing this. And we get to this church, we go back to his mom's church, which is Jehovah's Witnesses, which is a culty, crazy thing, especially in the Midwest. And the other thing about cults is they tend to attract not people that are awesome at life, alright? They, they do, they tend to attract like, you know, derelicts and

• 9:51Speaker 02

  fuckups and weak people, that's just how it is. So we start going to this church, you know, fucking welcome back with old arms or bullshit. A lot of these people have a lot of mental problems, alright? And they're trying to solve this by going to a shrink, alright? But we're in the middle of nowhere, so the nearest shrink is like Dallas, which is like a nine hour drive. So they see, they're like, okay, you're messed too, come on, jump in the van. They're going down to see this shrink, it's like this one shrink that's seen like 15 people, you know, in sequence. Psychology's also not great in the early 90s, and we're still in like some development stuff. And when they start prescribing him SSRIs of various, they're just trying stuff out. And, you know, he's gonna go see him like once every month or every two months to like, hey, these meds aren't working anywhere. Anyway, he tried lithium, Prozac, all that stuff. Anyway,

• 10:36Speaker 02

  it started making things a lot worse, alright? He is now like gone from being, you know, overly violent and a little abusive to an absolute fucking crazy person. And he's really coming unglued. And this is the, this is the core memory, actually, that ends up being what gets me to join the fucking military. Before this, you know, I'd kind of wanted to, you know, I don't know, I've watched action movies in the 80s, and I kind of wanted to be a Marine for a minute, but mostly I'd been like, you know, polish my boots and fucking walk in a parade. I didn't even know what the fuck Marines and anybody else really did. If I also want to be a stockbroker or some other be rich, you know, some bullshit. Anyway, so I don't remember exactly how this go. I do. CPS comes to the house. I'm like, uh, thirteen, twelve or thirteen.

• 11:20Speaker 02

  Uh, I don't know what the fuck happened, but next thing I know, I'm in bed.

• 11:26Speaker 02

  Like three o'clock in the morning.

• 11:29Speaker 02

  Dad comes and brings me out of bed, fucking throws me on the couch between my two sisters. He is absolutely fucking losing his shit. People think they've seen a psychotic rage before and they haven't. They they've seen somebody get angry. All right. They've seen somebody have a little bit of Roy rage and throw a fucking dumbbell or some crazy shit. But he is absolutely off the fucking rails. And what occurs to me is, uh, he's actually spinning himself up. He's gonna kill us in himself. He's fucking freaking out, bashing his own head into the fucking, uh, mantle above the fireplace. Just, you know, really, really fucking losing it.

• 12:24Jocko Willink?

  And you're thirteen years old.

• 12:25Speaker 02

  Thirteen.

• 12:26Jocko Willink?

  And so you're watching him and and so is he, this escalates or does it come out of nowhere?

• 12:31Speaker 02

  This is that in nowhere. This is just like, this is shit that will happen to.

• 12:34Jocko Willink?

  And is he yelling and screaming too?

• 12:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, slapping around, fucking freaking out.

• 12:37Jocko Willink?

  Blaming you for stuff?

• 12:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, this is, yeah, you're gonna get his fucking, you know, you're gonna get you, get you taken away from me and, you know, this is all your fault. And all this shit. And I remember actually there's a very heavy lamp next to me. And there's not some fucking heroes ending of the story. This is just how it is. And as I think he's gonna fucking kill us, all right, I realize that I have this weapon. All right, now I've got to make a fucking judgment call. As a twelve or thirteen year old kid, do I wait till his back's turned and try to fucking X him out? I'm gonna lose this fight too. I weigh ninety five pounds. He weighs two fifty. I'm gonna die if this fucking doesn't work. And I end up not having to because I don't know, the situation diffuses and he goes outside and gets his truck and fucking hauls ass. But that's the moment that I, uh, I realize like you're on your own, you know?

• 13:30Speaker 02

  You know, you're gonna, if you're gonna fucking survive in this world, you got to learn how to fucking fight and uh fight like a son of a bitch. And so that becomes my goal. Uh, I look like who's the fucking toughest gang around, you know, fucking, I don't know. We got some Mexican mafia dudes. We got some fucking other bullshit like, nope, those guys are all actually bitches. US soft guys are like the toughest, most murderous bastards that they are. I've seen all the fucking movies. Uh, so really that's what it is. Like I have to go learn the fucking murder magic from these fucking mythical fucking heroes. Uh, cause that's the only way that I'm gonna be okay. I'm gonna be able to take care of my sisters, my mom.

• 14:05Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 14:08Jocko Willink?

  Now you gotta continue through high school.

• 14:10Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 14:10Jocko Willink?

  Um, what's high school like for you? So now did you get the, did you actually make the, the, cause I remember when I was a little kid, I wanted to be some kind of commando.

• 14:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:18Jocko Willink?

  And then at one point I realized, oh, you, that's a real job.

• 14:21Speaker 02

  You could do that. Yeah.

• 14:22Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And they're gonna give me money.

• 14:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:24Jocko Willink?

  To do that job. Here's what I gotta do.

• 14:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:26Jocko Willink?

  So you realize that you're 13 years old in high school or something?

• 14:29Speaker 02

  Yeah. It's kind of, it is actually like a weirder path for me than that. Uh,

• 14:35Speaker 02

  I didn't really know about, yeah, I had seen some fucking, I didn't really understand like what it, it, it meant though, or that they would pay you. Actually, when I went to the Marine Corps, I thought you didn't, I thought it was, that's what volunteer meant. Like you just give them four years or you just, I thought this shit was free.

• 14:52Speaker 02

  That's not really a point though. I, the most important thing that happens here, and this will actually come up later in the psilocybin discussion too. I also realized this is the first time that like my, my fucking rage has like come back. I realized that someone's gotten me fucking killed. And so I, in that moment, like shut down my emotions and they will stay shut down for like fucking 25 years. Uh, because I realized that what's actually gonna happen if I really fucking come back with it, I was, I'm gonna get me and or my sister's fucking dead. So, put my head down, fucking, I'm a little tiny fucker still, go to high school.

• 15:26Speaker 02

  Dude, learned some cool stuff there. I end up in a weird way in the, the football offseason program. I'm a cross-country guy, uh, cause I'm a little more skinny and that's the only sport you can do if you fucking suck at sports. Uh, I'm no longer big enough to even pretend to play fucking basketball. Plus, they got cross-country, even has girls on it, like this is awesome, this is fucking amazing. So, you know, start running cross-country, which is cool also, cause this will be a thing that very much benefits me later.

• 15:49Speaker 02

  In the offseason, well, I had to wait for track and field season to pick up where I'm a mile, a two mile guy. I get in with the, the football guys, cause that's the only offseason that we have in this little school, alright? And football guys are fucking scary at this point, cause it's Texas, you know, you got 300 pound linebackers and shit, and, uh, you know, I'm this big. But, uh, we weirdly also, for such like a poor and, and shitty place, we have an absolutely fantastic strength and conditioning program. Uh, we'll end up with one that, like, many, many, many years later, I, uh, I will know, and I'll go to the gym with, uh, who the fuck is he?

• 16:22Speaker 02

  Who's the famous quarterback from, from, uh, New England?

• 16:26Jocko Willink?

  Uh, Tom Brady?

• 16:27Speaker 02

  Tom Brady. I'll end up, I'll, not, not with Tom Brady, but Tom Brady's backup at college.

• 16:31Jocko Willink?

  Got it.

• 16:31Speaker 02

  Alright, he's now my strength and conditioning coach, and we ended up, this isn't like five years ago. And we ended up like talking about shit, and, uh, turns out that I had a way better strength and conditioning program in high school than he did, you know? Anyway, our shit's awesome. So, what I realized now, I'm also the, the third skinniest guy there. So, I'm with the other guys that weigh under 100 pounds, and we're like, you know, the bitch into the gym, we're way down there. And, uh, nobody even pays attention to us. Uh, I will also never forget this, I have, I've never seen a weight in my life. So, I have a 95 pound bench press. It's like, you know, the bar and a couple of 10s and a 5 or some shit. But, what I realized is that if you work hard at this though, like, and it's pain, like, I, guess what, I can take some fucking pain. But if you work hard at this, like, you will get bigger and you'll get stronger very quickly.

• 17:16Speaker 02

  And, uh, as is a lot of times typical too, I'm with the guys that had no fucking work ethic. I'm having to like push them or I get the fuck out of my way, we're, we're working today. And I very rapidly started getting, you know, somewhat bigger and fucking coming up the chain. And it's, it's honestly, it's like one of the most rewarding things I've ever seen, like, if you just put effort into this shit, like, you can progress, it's, it's fucking amazing.

• 17:35Jocko Willink?

  Especially when you're 13, 14.

• 17:37Speaker 02

  Right, oh yeah, made out of HGH at that point.

• 17:43Jocko Willink?

  So anything else that happened in high school like you're so you're into weightlifting? You're running cross country, running track. Are you staying out of trouble? Are you passing school?

• 17:52Speaker 02

  Oh, fuck yeah. Yeah, no, I'm doing great at this shit. Uh, really like, I think my dad sees the threat coming too. So like he won't let me go look weights during the summer. Uh, he won't let me, you know, stay after school and look weights. We're in this like kind of fucking back and forth battle. Yeah. So I'm, I'm doing everything I can like, uh, to, to get bigger shit. Mostly though, I'm doing whatever the fuck I can do to get out of home as fast as possible. Uh, so I ended up graduating high school at 16. Uh, I managed to skip a grade and do some other shit. Uh, and I, I do that and I also, my sister has graduated a year before me. She's gone to, uh, an engineering school in New Mexico. Same thing. I scored really well on the ACTs and SATs and shit. So I got a, like a, mostly a full ride scholarship to this like top 10 engineering school. And there we go.

• 18:36Jocko Willink?

  Damn. Okay. That's pretty good focus coming from this freaking chaotic shithole you were rolling out of.

• 18:44Speaker 02

  It was rough, especially, you know.

• 18:46Jocko Willink?

  Did you see something? Was there some example that you saw? I mean, did your older sister, you saw like, okay, I see what she's doing. I can do that. Was it somebody at school or coach or something like that?

• 18:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, actually it was. Uh, so on the cross country team, there's other guy, I won't say his name because he might actually still be an active dude. I don't know. But, uh, he's just like a senior. I'm a freshman, but he is like the biggest, scariest motherfucker I've ever seen. Like he's fucking jacked, jacked and yoked and, uh, fucking fast and, you know, do his fucking hardest nails. And it's not like he's going to talk to me a lot because I'm like, you know, fucking 13, 14, but his career path is he wants to go be a SEAL. And, uh, that also makes me like starting to be like, what the fuck is a SEAL? Like, you know, cocking on the wall? Like, what the fuck is it? But, uh, anyway, no, he's badass. He wants to do this. I'm like, well, maybe this is, maybe this is something I could do too. And, uh, weirdly like he goes, he graduates and he makes it.

• 19:35Speaker 02

  I don't even know if I ever saw him again, but I knew friends of friends and he came back after buzz or whatever and he like, he done it. It's like, holy shit. Like this, this could be done. It's actually weird. I started thinking about this guy. I just listened to a podcast not too long ago about the SEAL that then became a Ford Legionnaire and shit. He was from San Diego.

• 19:51Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 19:52Speaker 02

  And he goes off on this whole thing about, you know, he's from San Diego. He played football and like, he's done all these years, never seen anybody from San Diego make it through bus. All the wrestlers and everybody has fucking tried. Somehow, our little town of 4,000 people has made him. There's another guy that graduates a year after him that also becomes a SEAL. And, you know, then a year after that, you know, with me, he's a recon Marine in a green beret.

• 20:11Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah. Something in the water.

• 20:13Speaker 02

  Something in the water. Such a tough and terrible place that you'll do anything to get out of it. I don't know.

• 20:18Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 20:21Jocko Willink?

  So now, are you, are you like 17 when you go to college then?

• 20:24Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I, I turned 17 a couple of months after I, I graduated from high school. Go to college at 17. It's, it's an adjustment. As we've also, this whole time, like my dad's like crazy control measure stuff has been like, it's been nuts. When we joined the church, he makes us, you know, call all of our friends from school and tell them like, we're not friends anymore because you're not part of the cult. And we're the only kids in this town to go to this fucking crazy ass church. It's not a fun conversation to have like 11 years. Friends are like, what, motherfucker? Like, and, you know, it takes a couple of years and then we can kind of be friends at school again, but you can't go do anything. The, the drugs are also fucking them up in this crazy way of like, now he has to keep all this. So we don't get to like really socialize with the other kids from church

• 21:09Speaker 02

  from the next town over. When we go to church, we gotta come home and, you know, I don't know. Fucking clean the barn or some dumb shit. So I'm also going to college with like absolutely no social skills. Certainly no girl skills and just a fucking mess. But now I'm basically free, for the most part.

• 21:28Jocko Willink?

  Are you living at the college?

• 21:30Speaker 02

  Yes, yes. Yeah. And it's, it's in the next state over. It's in New Mexico.

• 21:32Jocko Willink?

  Oh damn. Okay. So you're, you're free and clear.

• 21:35Speaker 02

  Kind of. Still weird shit will happen. Like, I've been there about a month and I wake up one Saturday morning and my parents are pounding on my door. Cause I'm still a minor. And like, hey, we can fucking Inspector Beric from basically. I'm like, holy shit. Holy shit. So yeah, it's crazy. It's absolutely bananas. But when I get to college, I have no intention of graduating from college. I'm like, this is, I'm gonna use this money that I'm gonna have to pay back eventually because now I'm gonna lose my scholarship. And I'm gonna get really strong and I'm gonna go do some version of commando guy stuff. I don't know which one it is. I'm talking all recruiters and do all the research. And that's what I'm gonna do.

• 22:13Speaker 02

  So that is, that is actually what I end up doing. But that's actually a weird thing that happens in there. By the end of the first semester, like, I'm obviously failing class because I barely show up. Like, I show up to the gym. I actually got two buddies that are with me. We have the, uh, really old, uh, build up to Bud's packet that you get from the Navy recruiter. Okay. Yeah, we do. We're doing that. It's awesome. Right off. Uh, you know, just, these two guys just want to do a workout, but, you know, they're my buddies, so we do all this shit.

• 22:36Speaker 02

  Going to, uh, judo and kickboxing class, which is awesome that we happen to have those at this college, uh, which is amazing. That's also awesome. If you have no idea how to fight and you came from somewhere that like, nobody else really knows how to fight, they'll kick your ass because, you know, they've had five minutes of boxing class or something. All of a sudden, I'm in this environment where it's like, I don't even have to give you money. Let me get this right. I don't even have to give you money. All right. You will teach me how to hurt people with my hands. Awesome. And then you will teach me how to kick and hit people. They're like, yeah, all you gotta do is, uh, you know, take some pain. I'm basically like conditioning my shins all day with a, with a fucking stick after I learned how to do this instead of going to engineering school.

• 23:14Speaker 02

  It is just fucking ridiculous.

• 23:17Speaker 02

  Anyway, I'm failing, so I'm gonna lose my scholarship and I'm gonna get kicked out of college. And I'm also realizing like, this is just a lot of money that I'm gonna have to pay back. So like midway through my, uh, second semester, I know, I finally call a lawyer.

• 23:31Speaker 02

  A lawyer? Yeah. Well, this is the fact that I need to know. I'm like, hey, I am a Texas resident. I'm seventeen. I graduated from high school. What is my legal status? And he's like, well, in the state of Texas, you are an emancipated adult. So you can't buy a pack of smokes. You can't buy beer, but you're also in the eyes of law, like no longer a minor and nobody can tell you what the fuck to do. So I'm like, awesome, sweet. I'm gonna drop out of college now just to save money. Uh, I'm gonna go live with my uncle in Wyoming. He was a, he's an air force dude. And he also has no, none of this crazy shit is going on. I've been like telling him over the phone. He's like, What? Fuck. So this incident happens.

• 24:12Speaker 02

  Uh, now I own shit too, so I, I'm gonna call my parents. All right, I'm gonna be like, hey, check it out, motherfucker. Like, I'm no longer a minor. I'm going to the fucking Marine Corps when I turn eighteen and uh, you, you can fuck off. Uh, and that's what's happening. So I do that and uh, I don't know, I go for a fucking walk in the, in the, in the desert after that. Well, apparently they called my older sister who's also in my same college. We're a small college too. It's not like we're going to University of Pittsburgh. She's like, you know, two buildings over in her fucking dorm room. And uh, I don't know, whatever kind of guilt trip they lay on her, she tries to kill herself. Jesus. Yeah. Fucking slice her wrists and fuck glass. All right. Fortunately, her roommate finds her, fucking fixes this fucking problem.

• 24:57Speaker 02

  All right. Uh, but this is, this is obviously not fucking good.

• 25:03Speaker 02

  So I am like, oh, fuck. You know, now I'm kinda leaving my sister out here fucking flapping too. Like, I don't know what the fuck to do. I finally end up, I call my grandmother, my mom's mom. And I just lay all this fucking shit on her. I'm like, hey, I know we haven't talked in like, you know, fuck, five years, but here's what the fuck has been going on. All this crazy shit. My sister's trying to kill herself, I don't know what the fuck to do. And I think I also called my parents at that point, like, hey, motherfucker, like, leave her out of this. So this whole thing comes un-fucking-clubed. My, my grandmother is a driven down from Oklahoma with like, one of my uncles is muscle. My parents actually have moved to Seattle now, uh, while I'm in college from Texas. So my mom's like flying in from Seattle too. And then there's this whole fucking crazy fucking family drama that happens like right there on the fucking campus of uh, of college. Yeah, it's crazy. It's fucking absolutely nuts.

• 25:47Speaker 02

  Uh, I end up leaving, I go live with my uncle. Uh, you know, he kinda helps me out with uh, you know, getting my shit together to go to the military. And then the day I turned eighteen, I joined the Marine Corps. What about your sister? What happened to your sister? My older sister, she was fine. Uh, basically, she, she hadn't cut herself bad enough to like really fuck herself up. Uh, it was more, I'm not gonna say it was like a cry for help suicide, but thank God she didn't manage to like actually. Yep. So she's fine. Uh, I, I, I've kinda laid the fucking scunion down and grandma has too, like, hey, don't ever fuck with my fucking sister again. Uh, so they just kinda started leaving her alone. And that's just kind of the way it goes. They're more concerned now about me going to the fucking military. Cause I'm also gonna get excommunicated from the church for doing this.

• 26:30Speaker 02

  That's how this shit works and I don't care. Fuck these people.

• 26:33Jocko Willink?

  Had you been to church since you've been at?

• 26:35Speaker 02

  Fuck no. No.

• 26:38Jocko Willink?

  So now it's just on them like you, they're trying to, they're trying to maintain you inside the church and when they lose you, they're gonna kind of pay for it some way.

• 26:47Speaker 02

  In some way, yeah. Well, it's gonna be embarrassing. It's gonna be fucking terribly embarrassing. It's also gonna be super embarrassing. It's not like, you know, it would actually be better for them if I like, you know, turned gay, wasn't a fucking gay parade out here at fucking San Diego. Instead of going to join the fucking killing machine, which is like the gravest of sins. So yeah, so basically they end up do leaving my, I'm now the super problem child. I've got all the fucking heat coming down, but they also can't come and get me, so.

• 27:12Jocko Willink?

  That's freaking crazy to think like a lot of parents, I mean, I would say almost all parents, if their sons join the Marine Corps, they're like, oh, hell yeah.

• 27:20Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, it'd be fucking awesome.

• 27:21Jocko Willink?

  Kids off the payroll. He's got a freaking squared away job. Like he's got health insurance for the rest of his life. We're good to go. But your parents are freaking.

• 27:29Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, they are. They are upset. Uh, if I, at any point during this, if I, if I talk to them, they're like, you can't do this. Like, oh, fuck it.

• 27:38Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah, so it is wild. And this will also be true through like, especially my first, you know, four year, three, four years of uh, military service where I'm doing some, some wild shit. Like, nobody's proud of that. You know, I got nobody to fucking tell.

• 27:53Jocko Willink?

  When you're saying you're doing wild shit, what do you mean you're doing wild shit?

• 27:56Speaker 02

  Okay, so I, I go into the, uh,

• 27:57Jocko Willink?

  What year is it?

• 27:58Speaker 02

  Uh, that's nineteen ninety-eight.

• 28:00Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 28:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. Actually end up here at, uh, MCRDC San Diego in October ninety-eight.

• 28:04Jocko Willink?

  Hell, yeah.

• 28:05Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I go to boot camp. Uh, boot camp is actually fucking easy as fuck. Like, I am loving it. Like, I'm there about three days before I realize that like the drill instructors are like, well, fuck with you at night. This is the safest I've ever felt. Like, I'm having a great time. Like, and they'll yell at you, but as long as you like follow these rules and shit like. Everybody's cool, you know? Yeah, it's fucking wild.

• 28:28Jocko Willink?

  That clean slate that you get when you join the military.

• 28:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:31Jocko Willink?

  Here, here's the things you gotta do. If you do these things, you're gonna be fine.

• 28:34Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 28:34Jocko Willink?

  And that's it. And we got you.

• 28:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, and hey, if you fuck up, here's like a little, you don't even get like your, you know, your head cut. It's just like a little punishment, teach you not to fuck up. Get back in here, okay? This is great, this is fantastic.

• 28:44Jocko Willink?

  So you're loving it from day one?

• 28:45Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, love it.

• 28:47Jocko Willink?

  And, and so you get done with boot camp? And then what, what kind of, did you sign some kind of contract?

• 28:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:53Jocko Willink?

  What was your contract for?

• 28:54Speaker 02

  Uh, infantry.

• 28:56Jocko Willink?

  Straight up.

• 28:56Speaker 02

  Hell, yeah, straight up. Hell, yeah. Yeah.

• 29:00Jocko Willink?

  Get done with boot camp, did you go through SOI out here? Did you go?

• 29:03Speaker 02

  Yes, yeah. So I went to SOI out here. Uh, actually went to my, this, this is funny too, this is one of like three things I ended up failing in my military career. And it's, it's mostly for a certain thing of, I'm really strong when I go to boot camp. I'm running, doing, I've never carried a ruck in my life. And that is the, that's actually one of the harder things I think for your body to adjust to. So my, my shins are fucking broke off.

• 29:25Jocko Willink?

  That's weird too, because you are a runner. There is a, there's a difference, man. There's a huge difference.

• 29:30Speaker 02

  Difference, yeah. And, uh, yeah, so my shins are a little fucked up. They're not too fucked up, but, uh, there's a recon screening in between boot camp and SOI if you want to go. So, you know, I go to that one, uh, you know, do the swim and all the bullshit. But the, the ruck run, it's a five mile ruck run, it's part of the indock back then with, I think a forty pounder. I mean, it breaks me off. It's, uh, it's ugly. It's funny, uh.

• 29:51Jocko Willink?

  So did you fail it?

• 29:52Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, I failed the first one, yeah.

• 29:53Jocko Willink?

  Oh, shit.

• 29:54Speaker 02

  Yeah. It's funny, the, uh, the medic who's like, uh, I'll actually end up meeting him many, many, many years later again. He's over in the, uh, uh, one of the army special mission units now. But, uh, he is running beside me, talking to one of his friends, like having a fucking merry old time while I'm like, just dying, like, like, you know, like fucking. And, uh, that's actually kind of embarrassing too, is what happens. So go to infantry school, I'm like, I gotta get a lot fucking tougher before I can be one of these fucking dudes. And, uh, so, you know, that's cool. Yeah, that's what you do.

• 30:22Speaker 02

  Go to infantry school, no big deal. Uh, we're part of a weird program back then that they're trying to get guys away from where they're from. So my whole infantry class, they pick up a flight to Lejeune. And the guys that just graduated on the east coast, they pick up a flight to Pendleton.

• 30:35Jocko Willink?

  That's a Marine Corps activity, right?

• 30:37Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, some Marine Corps shit. Like, we didn't want this to be easy on you. Here you go.

• 30:39Jocko Willink?

  That's like the Russians did that back in the day. They would take, you would not be with people that were from your hometown.

• 30:45Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 30:46Jocko Willink?

  They wanted no, like, uh, unity with that force. They wanted unity with the Soviet Union.

• 30:50Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 30:51Jocko Willink?

  So that's what the Marine Corps was doing, too. Straight up, you're out of here, huh?

• 30:58Jocko Willink?

  Uh, so then where do you get stationed?

• 31:01Speaker 02

  Lejeune. Yeah, two eight. Yep, second battalion, eighth Marines, America's battalion.

• 31:04Jocko Willink?

  Hell, yeah.

• 31:05Speaker 02

  Hell, yeah.

• 31:05Jocko Willink?

  And then you do a workup, getting ready for deployment?

• 31:08Speaker 02

  Uh, we, uh, soon as we get there, they're actually like, hey, we're going straight to Panama, uh, in like two months. Uh, that, uh, that was when they were shutting Panama down. So it's nineteen ninety-nine now. Uh, we're gonna be one of the last guys to rotate in there. And it's pretty cool, because we're only going as like a company element. Uh, and all we're doing is like, you know, garden, Air Force and Navy's fucking weapons depots and shit, because they're pulling everything back that's important. So, you know, we don't have a whole crazy bunch of responsibility. But it's fun. It's awesome. I've never seen the jungle before, and now I'm in it with like a fucking gun. Like, this is, you know, this is cool shit, fucking grease paint. Yeah, yeah.

• 31:39Jocko Willink?

  You're gonna be watching those NOM movies, dude.

• 31:41Speaker 02

  Hell, yeah.

• 31:41Jocko Willink?

  You think you're a NOM, hundred percent?

• 31:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, a hundred percent. And we're on this Air Force base, too, which is obviously awesome, like, swimming like a mile a day, because they have a badass pool. I mean, it's great. Oh, also, you can drink in Panama.

• 31:53Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 31:54Speaker 02

  Regardless of age. So, yeah, I turn, I'm eighteen when we start. I turn nineteen down there. But you can just buy booze to PX, because it's another country. We're having, so it's, it's great. It's fantastic. Yeah.

• 32:03Jocko Willink?

  The freaking nineteen-year-old grunts fantasy.

• 32:05Speaker 02

  Hell, yeah. Exactly right. But there's a couple others. Of course, you kind of, especially like, if you're always gonna kind of gravitate towards the dudes that are like you. So I ended up gravitate towards a couple dudes that are also hard asses and like, hey, we could, you know, fucking drink a million beers, or we could drink a couple of beers and also get really hard and fucking do a bunch of gym shit. And go to the, uh, you know, recon screening, we go home.

• 32:25Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 32:26Speaker 02

  Uh, and that's, so that's kind of what we do. We work out the whole time, get all, you know, fucking yoked up. Come back, uh, one of the guys goes to a staple tune, goes to their, you know, doc, goes up to staple tune. Uh, I go to the recon screening, pass that one we ease, and I'll get some recon battalion eventually.

• 32:40Jocko Willink?

  And so when you, when you get done passing the recon screening, then do you go to the recon school in Coronado?

• 32:45Speaker 02

  No.

• 32:46Jocko Willink?

  What do you do?

• 32:46Speaker 02

  You don't go straight there. Uh, what you do, uh, the screening is just like, uh, like you're, you're good enough that we'll spend a little bit of time looking to see if you're good enough. Uh, it's like a day long. It's, it's, it's kind of tough, but it's not anything fucking crazy. For me then, you you actually get orders to the battalion at Lejeune. All right, and you show up and you're in a different status than everybody else. So in fact, the first thing you get is a rope that goes around your body. It's tied in this fucking certain way. And that rope means that anybody there can fuck with you at any time they want, regardless of their rank and regardless of your rank. And that is, that's, that's what's gonna happen. And I'm gonna put you through this and see if you're good enough to go to either ARS over at Little Creek or BR, basically BRC over at Coronado.

• 33:29Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And then how long do you spend there before you go to one of those schools?

• 33:34Speaker 02

  Uh, well, this is where things turn a little bit weird, too. So at this time, like recon battalion is is hurting for bodies. Like they're, they cannot fill it fast. There's only, they're supposed to be a battalion. We've got three platoons on the east coast.

• 33:46Jocko Willink?

  Damn.

• 33:47Speaker 02

  Yeah. And that's where that's for recon battalion. The force recon guys are attached to us, and I think they've got like two or three platoons, too. It's so fucking slim that like guys are basically in a cycle of, you know, you work up, you six months off, you work up. So they're, they're really trying to have to to get more O three twenty ones into the battalion. So this is one of those things that I'm glad it happened the way it happened because it was, it was different, but it also is gonna kind of fuck us. It's like, do you have an asterisk next year MOS? So they decide like, hey, we can't get enough fucking school slots. We're gonna run a BRC right here at Lejeune in-house. All right.

• 34:29Speaker 02

  So they they do. And the guys that ended up doing it, like, they don't want to do it either. Because now we're fucking with tradition. We're doing like, we're really coloring outside the fucking lines. So they are extra fucking brutal on us. They, they want this program to fail. All right. They, they do not want this fucking bullshit happen. But also orders are orders. So you gotta fucking, you gotta do your shit.

• 34:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, they, they, they fuck us up. They, they, we, we actually, the whole battalion has to go to Greece in the middle of this, too. So now we're in a foreign country doing a thing where they fucking want to fuck with you. And yeah, they fucking break our asses off. They, the big thing at, at BRC or ARS is called patrol week, and it's, it's like the rough equivalent of like hell week, right? It's different. It's not exactly the same thing. It was like, oh, you're gonna get fucked up and have to do stupid missions and no food, no sleep, all shit. They give us a double one. They give us 10 days instead of five. Yeah. It's, it's fucking crazy. And it does to a degree, I don't even remember how many was graduated. I want to say it had a forty. It was like six or nine. It was not many, like they fucked us up.

• 35:30Jocko Willink?

  There's, you know, I'm for the boys as much the next guy, but man, would you give, would you let the boys loose like that?

• 35:37Speaker 02

  Oh, fuck you.

• 35:41Speaker 02

  Not good. It is not good. It's funny. Actually, where I end up, uh, that's the first time I ever meet Captain as in back too.

• 35:49Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 35:49Speaker 02

  For a minute, he ends up in charge of like the fucking Ripley toons. Uh, dude's a fucking monster and he's fucking badass. He's a fucking legend and shit. He'll come out and like fight the whole fucking Rip Plas and wants, yeah, fucking great guy. And, uh, you know, I also think partially that they put him in charge of this shit for a little bit because they had to give it the air of legitimacy. Like if you're gonna do some bullshit and like, you know, we're gonna give tridance out in fucking Thailand this week instead of in Colorado, like, like you really gotta have your shit correct. All right. And you know, maybe Captain Zimbeck adds enough weight to this to make it count. Whatever. Anyway, so we graduate and they send almost all of us to, uh, to one new platoon. Now we've got four platoons on the east coast, which made a new one with some other guys. This, this also makes the transition to recon battalion like really shitty.

• 36:31Speaker 02

  Is that like the dudes that weren't there and like didn't see what the fuck happened, you know, they're, they're, they're blowing up the hallway like, hey, fuck you. You didn't ran up the, uh, lock dance monster where the fucking thing is at Little Creek. And we're like, hey, fuck you. Like we did some crazy shit. I'll fight you right now.

• 36:45Speaker 02

  We've just done this, you know, three or four, like however long it's, is ugly as fuck. And then they also flip around us from there like, hey, uh, fuck it. We decided to account for just send you fucking Little Creek. I'm like, oh, god damn it. You know, this is gonna fuck. Like we'll do it if you have to, but it's, it's fucking painful. But I end up not doing that. They're like, hey, fuck it. You know, you're a three twenty ones. But this was kind of the thing that will like kind of plague some of us. Like if somebody wants to talk shit for like the rest of our career recon, I'd be like, fuck you. Yours doesn't count.

• 37:12Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 37:16Jocko Willink?

  Oh shit, uh, so, uh, so now you're done?

• 37:21Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 37:21Jocko Willink?

  So now you're oh three twenty one?

• 37:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, now I'm cool.

• 37:23Jocko Willink?

  And, and would go to a, you go on deployment? Do a workup?

• 37:27Speaker 02

  Not a, so, uh, so we go to school phase first. Uh, that's where you're gonna get like your specialized shit that you need to do. Something, cause we don't have it built in like, like, like Buds does. We don't have dive school built in. Uh, we don't have an immediate airborne pipeline, but every platoon is supposed to have a dive team and a jump team and a, you know, fucking rucksack team. So, so we gotta get six dudes dive qualified down at, uh, Panama City. Uh, we gotta get six dudes airborne qualified. And then there's also some like other little bullshit. We gotta have a couple of snipers and we gotta have, uh, you know, whatever else. So basically they, they get the, the dream sheet of who wants to do what. Uh, I, I actually did really well at our, our, our course. I didn't, I wasn't like the fucking honor graduate, but I got a little fucking, uh, you know, most hood dude fucking award.

• 38:09Speaker 02

  They're like Lance Culver Martin, you are stupid, but goddamn you are, you know, whatever.

• 38:13Jocko Willink?

  Stupid, but Tom will take those guys through. Guys are good to go.

• 38:17Speaker 02

  Right, exactly. So, uh, anyway, we get to all pick and because I did awesome there, I pick what I want, which is Marine Scout Sniper School. Actually asked for Ranger School and Marine Scout Sniper School, but they're like, there's no fucking way you can do this. Do things back to back. So you're gonna go to airborne school and Pathfinder, and if you pass that, you go to scout sniper school.

• 38:34Jocko Willink?

  Nice.

• 38:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:35Jocko Willink?

  That, the, so you would, the, how long is that Marine Corps Scout Sniper School that you went through?

• 38:40Speaker 02

  Oh shit, man, I was, I was actually trying to remember this a couple of days ago. I wanna say it's thirteen weeks back then. I mean, it's, it's fucking ugly and, and long.

• 38:47Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that was kind of the, like our, our SEAL snipers.

• 38:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:51Jocko Willink?

  That was sort of the basis of where, when they started putting that school together, a lot of our early guys. And they went to like all kinds of different schools to put together, but, um, they're definitely, and we would send guys to that school. Just straight up.

• 39:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:02Jocko Willink?

  So that's a very respected school.

• 39:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, very much so.

• 39:06Jocko Willink?

  Did you, like, is there, what's the attrition rate in that school?

• 39:10Speaker 02

  Oh fuck, it is, it is fucking high. This, this is something that I'll have to like try to explain to like my army teammates many years later, after I've done SOTC. Cause I didn't get requalified over there. The difference between. You know, Green Berets and their sniper school, and I'm guessing it's probably this way for SEALs and their sniper school. Is in the Marine Corps, sniper school is not just like a follow-on skill where we teach you how to do shit. Because we have sniper platoons also. So it's a fucking brutal reality gut check, like we're gonna fuck with you and make sure you're a tough guy and do all kinds of like dumb shit. And just to see if you're good enough to, not just if you can shoot and be a sniper, but if like you're hard. Because it is a gatekeeping thing for their community. And so you get to skip those parts, you're like, well, you know, I got my fucking decoder ring, like, oh yeah, come in week four.

• 39:55Speaker 02

  No, you're getting fucked up too. So it's very high, I won't say it's over 50%. There's actually pictures of classes where nobody graduated. It's like the instructor standing there was fucking.

• 40:10Jocko Willink?

  Right on. And you're, did you, did you like have that urge to be a sniper when you were a kid?

• 40:17Speaker 02

  No.

• 40:17Jocko Willink?

  What made you think it was cool?

• 40:18Speaker 02

  This has kind of been the, before I've gone in, like I've read all the Carlos Hathcock books and all that shit too. And I've also looked at it as like the two most badass tough guy things you can be in the Marine Corps is a recon dude and a sniper. So if you can manage to do both of those, like you, you're good to go. Which would have been a lot easier if I could fucking shoot.

• 40:36Jocko Willink?

  Are you a shitty shot naturally?

• 40:37Speaker 02

  I am fucking terrible. I'm fucking awful. I think I'm good because, you know, I don't know, I've spent some time in my fucking 22 at the range and, you know, shooting and stuff. I walk out of bootcamp with the pizza box of shame, which in the three grades of Marine marksmanship, there's an expert, which is, you know, awesome. There's sharpshooter, and then there's the barely pass, which is the pizza box square. Everybody can see it from a mile away, like, ew. Yeah, it turns out I actually fucking suck with a rifle. Oh, fuck. So this is also a problem because this is getting in the way of the other half of the dream, right?

• 41:11Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 41:11Speaker 02

  So like, oh shit. And actually to get into our Marine Scout Sniper School as a Marine, you have to qualify consecutively two years or two times expert. Alright, so it's gonna be a little bit of a fucking problem. So good recon Marine what I do, uh, I fucking cheat my ass off. I go to the fucking rifle range of our fucking boys and the way that we used to do things like, okay, you gonna, you and me see each other. Okay. You go down to the, you go down to the pits. I can take your pencil, fucking Mark Meese, uh, don't set the fucking record or no crazy shit, but I need, I need a two twenty-five or whatever fucking pad. And, uh, so we do, we've managed to do this somehow in like six months. And that last time, you know, the fucking guys come in and they're like, dude, those last five shots, I'm not sure they hit the fucking earth.

• 41:54Speaker 02

  So, uh, I've not exactly set myself up for fucking success, right? But, uh, I do go to, go to sniper school. I, I don't even, I think I've shot a fucking rifle with a scope on it like one time before this. Uh, this is, this is not good. Uh, and I end up passing the shooting phase of Marine Scout Sniper School by my last bullet.

• 42:15Jocko Willink?

  Damn.

• 42:15Speaker 02

  Yeah. Like, like fucking for real. Like in, in the, the world of honesty, I wish somebody would go pull the fucking records. I could theoretically actually be the worst shooting Marine Scout Sniper that's ever lived.

• 42:31Speaker 02

  But it turns out I'm awesome at the other stuff though, like stalking and, you know, fucking field grabs and all this bullshit. I shoot the, uh, you know, shoot with the fucking blanks, you know, a little stock bullshit like we've all seen in the, uh, you know, Cloak President Asia movie. I shoot the NCOIC of Marine Scout Sniper School who's a fucking legend and like the baddest dude in the world is spotting people from 10 meters and get away with it. So get, get a little, get a little respect from that. Like, you know, you can't shoot for fuck, but you can get close enough to stab him. So you're good enough.

• 42:59Jocko Willink?

  So where are you in September 11th goes down?

• 43:01Speaker 02

  Oh, fuck.

• 43:03Jocko Willink?

  Cause we had to be getting closest to September 11th now?

• 43:05Speaker 02

  Real close to it. Yep. So this is actually in a lot of ways, uh, for, for pre-war shit. This is like the dream come true. I may fucking O three twenty-one with a fucking hog's tooth by my 21st birthday. Which is fucking awesome. So we actually go out to, uh, 29 Palms. That's our first thing we do as a platoon and, you know, deal with desert bullshit. I am sitting in the PX at Lejeune, getting a haircut. So we can have like our first formation after this fucking 29 Palm shit when maybe the second plane hits. The first one kinda, I, I don't even know if most people acknowledge, you know, it's an accident. We're sitting there with the fucking barber chair when the second one happens like, oh, fuck. So, you know, off we go. Finish our haircuts, get back to battalion.

• 43:45Jocko Willink?

  And you're 21 at that time?

• 43:47Speaker 02

  I'm 21. Yep.

• 43:48Jocko Willink?

  Do you have any idea like are you like oh we're going to war?

• 43:51Speaker 02

  Oh fuck yeah dude, we are, we are fucking stoked like we're mad, we're mad as fuck alright. Also we're like we are fucking going dude, this is fucking world war three, fucking Vietnam all rolled into one like we're going.

• 44:02Jocko Willink?

  And so I was like, I guess it was, uh, I was thirty I guess at the time, so I'm thirty years old, maybe thirty one. But I've been in the military for a long time.

• 44:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:11Jocko Willink?

  So I was like, where you were thinking like, oh, it's world war three, right?

• 44:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:16Jocko Willink?

  I'm like dude, just gonna like, there's gonna be a couple of strike missions, there's gonna be a couple of DAs like.

• 44:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:21Jocko Willink?

  We're gonna drop a bunch of bombs.

• 44:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:23Jocko Willink?

  Cause what was the last thing we did some, we you know, like we dropped bombs in Kosovo and shit like that.

• 44:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 44:27Jocko Willink?

  You know, like big air campaign, but no boots on the ground.

• 44:29Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 44:30Jocko Willink?

  Which honestly, I'm looking at now like, hmm, it's actually pretty cool, you know, I've been talking about this, that, what we just did in Iran.

• 44:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:38Jocko Willink?

  Uh, people like, you know, well, what is that? I'm like, that's actually a pretty legit way to run a war.

• 44:42Speaker 02

  Fucking brilliant, actually.

• 44:43Jocko Willink?

  Thirty six hours, like we all come home.

• 44:46Speaker 02

  Right.

• 44:46Jocko Willink?

  Bad guys are having problems now?

• 44:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:49Jocko Willink?

  Okay, well, that sounds like a good deal to me.

• 44:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:51Jocko Willink?

  So that, that nineties war is actually a pretty cool thing. I support the nineties war mentality.

• 44:56Speaker 02

  I, I guess I should rephrase my position. I don't think that we're gonna like, you know, be building liberty ships and throwing fuck. But I do think like, is like the Johnny Commando guys are like, we're gonna fuck everybody up. We're gonna be doing this shit for like twenty years, just fucking stabbing people in the sleepers, all kinds of awesome shit.

• 45:09Speaker 02

  But that is not what's gonna happen for us either, right then.

• 45:12Jocko Willink?

  Mm hmm. How long is it? Do you go to Afghanistan?

• 45:16Speaker 02

  No, no, no, no. So, uh, this is actually like, uh, it's, it's worth the time to tell. It's a very important story, I think, especially for like your podcast and, and talking about leadership. Stuff that you, that you cover all the time. Is I'm about to see like, some kind of crazy shit that I, I will, I will never see again.

• 45:38Speaker 02

  So this happens, you know, we, we don't go anywhere, you know, crazy shit's happening, they got like, you know, little grunts like digging in fighting positions outside the company headquarters and putting machine gun in the shit.

• 45:48Speaker 02

  All, nobody knows what the fuck is, there's like guys defending Oslo beach and shit, we're like, what the fuck? But none of this happens. Um, so a little bit of time goes by and, uh, we as Marines kind of like started getting back into like normal flow. Uh, there's probably by this point like a little bit of shit happened in Afghanistan, you know, like deltas over there and some rain, you know, some fuck shit, we're like, holy fuck, this is happening, we're, we're, we're going and what's our job gonna be? What, what the fuck are we about to go do? And a little bit more time, so we're probably mid October, it's been like a month and we we were confused basically. And we ended up doing this exercise out at the beach, the whole battalion and we're doing an amphib exercise. We have, you know, fucking boats and, you know, fucking scuba tanks and shit. And now we're really, you know, like, what the fuck?

• 46:33Speaker 02

  You know, it's Afghanistan, like, what are we doing? Uh, but we think maybe we've got some other shit going on, maybe we're building up to, you know, go hit fucking North Korea, whatever. So, uh, word comes down that, uh, his name is, I can't remember Sergeant Major Duke or Dukes, but it doesn't matter. We got this dude that for us is kind of like, like the fucking bullfrog. All right, he's like the oldest fucking guy, this fucking recon marine. Uh, he's actually a weird story because he was a Green Beret in NOM.

• 46:58Jocko Willink?

  Damn.

• 46:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, and he might have, he might have even been like battlefield commissioned and then, you know, some fucking crazy shit happened and then he became a fucking marine instead.

• 47:04Jocko Willink?

  Hey, whether it's true or not, the legend lives on, bro. He was battlefield commissioned in NOM.

• 47:10Speaker 02

  But I definitely know he wasn't, like, he came and spoke at our ball the year before this, like, I know who he is and, like, he's got, like, fucking all kinds of fucking medals and, you know, fucking Silver Star, you know, fucking crazy shit. He's out now, he's he's retired long before, uh, I show up, but he's still kind of like our fucking guy and he's, uh, he's, so he shows up on the beach and he's like, hey, guys, check it out. He's like, my new job right now is like, I'm special advisor to the commandant about, you know, fucking recon, force recon bullshit. Okay. And he's like, all right, I gotta talk to you guys, I gotta tell you what's up. It's like, what's up now is I told the commandant that, uh, that you guys are not ready. He got like a fucking pin drop on that beach, like,

• 47:53Speaker 02

  what? He's like, yeah, you know, everyone still comes to go do some crazy bullshit and, uh, you know, I just don't, you know, really have the faith in you, you guys, your fucking shit together. And so I advised him of that and, uh, you know, that's what's up. We're like,

• 48:08Speaker 02

  This is where he makes his fucking mistake though. He's like, hey, look, it was hard to take. I don't know. We're also just like, what the fuck else are we gonna do? Like, I'm fucking Snyder's fucking little assaulter fucking dudes over here, fucking, yo, got MP. He's like, so, you know, I had those probably hard, kinda hard take, but uh, he's like, I'm staying at the fucking base hotel. I'm in a room like, yo, fucking 105 dollar bullshit. He wants to come talk to me about, you know, why I think this and, you know, what my, you know, come, come and see me. Like, fuck, okay. So he, you know, fucks off back to the, back to base. I don't even know what the hell he's, he's doing something on legend that day. So we finish our lamp of shit, fucking, yeah, we go plant our little fake charges on the fucking bridge, whatever bullshit. Uh, again, we grab a couple of fucking hard ass dudes and like, this motherfucker was running the jungle in Nam at 19.

• 48:53Speaker 02

  He's gonna tell me, like, we ain't ready, like, I, I wanna know why. So it's like midnight, we go to the PX, get a case of beer, fucking, show up to the dude's room, bang on the door. He answers the door in his tighty whities, like, hey, it's our major fucking dukes, uh, I'm fucking whoever, this whoever, this whoever. You said anytime, anyplace, rock a case of beer, we wanna know why we're not ready. And he's like, you know, guys, it's kinda late, uh, maybe you can come back some other time. And that is the moment that my faith in the Marine Corps fucking shattered.

• 49:22Speaker 02

  We get back in the car and go back to our barracks and we're like,

• 49:26Speaker 02

  what just happened?

• 49:29Jocko Willink?

  Insane.

• 49:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's crazy.

• 49:32Jocko Willink?

  But you still gotta go on deployment.

• 49:34Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, I still got, you know, I still got like fucking two years left of my contract, like, we're doing this shit. So a bunch of us at that point, now the war in Afghanistan is accelerating. Uh, there's stuff going on, there's other guys going over. And, uh, you know, honest to God, we all start looking at, uh, where am I gonna go next? Cause it's not gonna be here, you know? What are the SEALs doing? Uh, what are Green Berets doing? What are fucking Rangers doing? You know, what, what, what's the, what's the checklist of, you know, how do, how do I fucking cross services?

• 49:58Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 49:59Speaker 02

  Uh, so, yeah, so this sucks.

• 50:01Jocko Willink?

  You know what's crazy is I was in Baghdad when the guys got hung from the bridge in Fallujah.

• 50:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 50:08Jocko Willink?

  And I was the SEAL platoon commander at the time and I was like, dude, we will go get him right now. And I told my task duty commander, who is a freaking aggressive, great dude.

• 50:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 50:18Jocko Willink?

  He runs up to the CJ sort of like, hey, I got guys that are loading their vehicles right now. Like we can be there in thirty minutes. And they're like, no, stand down. And Marines winning. And I was like talking to my assistant platoon commander. I'm like, hey dude, I'm, I'm going to the Marine Corps. Like I'm done with this. This is bullshit. Like I'm going to the Marine Corps and like I'm going to figure it out. And he's like, I'm in, you know? And so luckily some things happened where he, he ended up going and working with the Marines for like a couple of weeks.

• 50:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 50:49Jocko Willink?

  And, um, and that was at the end of deployment. So I went home and he stayed and worked with Marines for like a week or two.

• 50:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 50:55Jocko Willink?

  And he came back and I was like, dude, how's the Marine Corps? And he goes, we don't want to be in the Marine Corps. I was like, I go that way because he goes, it's not, it's, and look, I do love the Marine Corps. I worked with Marine Corps a ton, but yeah, uh, it's not, not it. I'm glad I ended up where I ended up.

• 51:14Speaker 02

  I, I think I want to make something very clear about my position. A lot of these stories, again, like I've, I've never told, uh, especially the one like this. I've never told them this kind of detail. I didn't want to demoralize like, you know, young Marines and shit when the fuck war's going on. Like, I don't think they're fucking awesome Johnny commando badass motherfuckers because they are, they are, they fucking are. And this was just not going to be fucking helpful. And there's a lot of awesome shit that the Marine Corps does. And yeah, for me in this one little microcosm though, like I've just gotten, you know, smacked in the fucking mouth and I'm not happy about it.

• 51:40Jocko Willink?

  Oh yeah. I mean, I got asked by Dave Portnoy, Dave Portnoy. He's like, we're at the, at the naval academy, naval, army, Navy football game.

• 51:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 51:49Jocko Willink?

  And he's like, if you had to pick one bridge, go to war. And like as he's finishing, it was like Marine Corps.

• 51:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 51:54Jocko Willink?

  Man, when you work with the Marine Corps, like the Marine Corps, they are good. They're at a high level across the board. And they can make so much stuff happen and freaking Marines are just reliable. They will get the shit done.

• 52:05Speaker 02

  Oh yeah.

• 52:06Jocko Willink?

  So. God bless Marine Corps.

• 52:08Speaker 02

  God bless, yeah.

• 52:09Jocko Willink?

  All right. Now, now, but you still, like I said, you gotta go into.

• 52:12Speaker 02

  Oh, you gotta go fucking to Plymouth, yeah. Yeah, so, uh, you know, this is two, we do a fucking, uh, oh, finish up our, our school shit. This is actually where I break my back. Uh, so my first jump out of airborne school, yo, I, I ended up going airborne school because I gotta be on the jump team. Sheer too vertebrae in the, in the fucking back on a jump when we're supposed to be on a Mew train up. We weren't even supposed to be in this fucking jump. We're trying to get our gold wings before we get out of the Marine Corps or we're releasing something. Uh, I, I am fucked up.

• 52:38Jocko Willink?

  Like just a static line jump?

• 52:40Speaker 02

  It's just, it's just static. It's out of the one that, you know, the beach all these. Okay. Like army dudes don't know, me dudes in the Navy did. When you jump over the ocean and you're headed for like, like the breeze can come up, like crazy winds come in. That's what happens. We jump out of this forty six. Winds jumped, uh, you know, some ridiculous speed and we're just.

• 52:55Jocko Willink?

  Boom.

• 52:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, a couple dudes get fucked up. I get fucked up the most though.

• 53:00Speaker 02

  But now we're in a weird spot like, oh, fuck, like, uh, I can't, we can't go tell the Mew that I just, you know, got like hurt, hurt during. So we're trying to cover this up. It's, it's kind of what it is. Like, you know, my medics like coming in my room, help me out. We don't go to the hospital because, you know, we'll see, we'll see, we'll wait and see. All right. Take this out, take this a little bit. By the time I finally do have to go to hospital, uh, it's six or eight weeks later, I get a bone scan that like, we can see two vertebrae were broken. We can't tell you when. Like you can still walk and you still fucking use all your fingers. So this could have happened when you were fucking sixteen. It could have happened fucking last week or six weeks ago. I'm like, okay. And I'm like, fuck, so we're still doing work up and finally my, my platoon sergeant comes to me because I'm, they're kind of like hiding me in the back too while they're doing some recce shit.

• 53:43Speaker 02

  And, uh, he's like, hey, look, man, and he's a, he's a legend. His dude's fucking awesome. His name is, uh, Derek Simmons. Uh, he's actually got like six combat action ribbons by, you know, two thousand and one, because he's been like fucking everything you can be in from like nineteen eighty three to fucking now. Uh, uh, he's famous for, uh, doing pull ups against Arnold Schwarzenegger with twin eighties on his back when they're still at the beach and winning.

• 54:00Jocko Willink?

  Damn.

• 54:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, he's, he's a fucking monster. He's like, check it out, dude. It's like, I broke my back one time too. And guess what? I hurt like a son of a bitch. He's like, you got two choices right now though. Uh, you can either fucking put your runner shoes on and, and show me in the next two weeks that you're fucking tough enough to still be here. Or you can get med boarded and your fucking military career is over. And I'm like, oh, fuck. I picked the running shoes. Let's fucking go. All right, it fucking hurts. Uh, you know, it's fucking, but you know, three, four months later, we're on the Mew. I'm in the mountains of Kosovo with fucking Ricky Rock. So, you know, we go on the Mew. Uh, now it's like two thousand and two. We think maybe like this is gonna be like, our Mew is gonna do like, you know, strike packages now. We're gonna, you know, fucking do some Johnny Commander shit. I don't know. But we're still going on the Mew. Hope springs eternal at that point.

• 54:45Speaker 02

  So like, well, at least we have like bullets and we're in kind of, we're not in America. Or at least somewhere that some shit could pop off.

• 54:52Speaker 02

  But mostly nothing does. You know, we, we fucking dick around on the Mew. It ends up becoming like the longest Mew of, of all time. If I'm not mistaken, it's like nine, 10 months. And, uh, yeah, so.

• 55:05Speaker 02

  Eventually we're, we're, oh, we all get stop loss too. Like they had to extend the Mew, so we had to stop loss on us. And we're like, fuck. Were you, were, were you in the med? Where were you? We were in the med and then we kept going through the suit. We went through the suit, it was like fucking six, seven times. So we'll go down to the Red Sea and we'll go over Djibouti and then we're fucking, fucking around in the Persian Gulf. And then we'll go, they, they just really can't decide what the fuck to do with us. So you're going freaking crazy. Oh yeah, we're fucking losing our shit. We are fucking losing our shit. Uh, and then we also can see like fucking Fox News on the ship. Like they're doing the, the buildup for Iraq and like everybody should fucking first bar div fucking here and fucking L A R. And like Vermont, I don't even, it was a long time. A long time. Yeah. And we're like, you know, we're like, fuck. And then you're also trapped in the decision cycle. Like, let's say the Mew gets home.

• 55:50Speaker 02

  Can I immediately reenlist for first war recon and fucking land in fucking Kuwait two weeks later? Like, I don't know. Uh, or is this the time to cross services? This is grunt math right here, bro. This is grunt math. Like, how do I get to war, bro? Like, are, are they, are we really going Iraq or is this bullshit? And I'm gonna reenlist in the Marine Corps and get fucked for another four years. Like, ah, son of a bitch. Uh, but we end up getting extended and we're out there. Oh, and this is, this is the fucking, this is the brutal part of this shit. So same gunny that was our gunny that had, uh, you know, fucking six combat action ribbons, like every fucking thing. He's like, when we go on the Mew, he's like, hey, check it out, guys. I need to tell you some, some fucking terrible shit that may happen. He's like, when we went to Desert Storm, and he's like, I went, that's number four right here.

• 56:31Speaker 02

  He's like, there was a Mew that sat on the coast of Iraq and never stepped foot on land. And those motherfuckers were not happy.

• 56:44Speaker 02

  And that could be us. I'm like, fuck.

• 56:47Speaker 02

  So we are in the, we are in the fucking middle of the Persian Gulf doing Gator Squares when uh, when O A F kicks off. And uh, we're like, oh my god. Like, it's not quite that I can go up to the flight deck with binos and see the fucking war taking place, but you know, it feels.

• 57:01Jocko Willink?

  Might as well.

• 57:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, might as well. Uh, we, we go so fucking crazy actually that is uh, like they turn around, they're like, okay, fuck it, Mew's headed home. Uh, there's like four or five of us are like down in the well deck having like a deep plotting session.

• 57:12Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, we're going to U A.

• 57:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, we're, we're taking a fucking Zode off the side of the ship. Like, we can calculate the fucking gas. We got a GPS, we know where the fuck we are. And there's actually a pretty proud tradition anyway in the Marine Corps of like dudes going U A to go to war. Like some of the more famous dudes are like written books, like stowed away on a plane to go to fucking Korea, you know, like they're in Pearl Harbor guarding some bullshit. And next thing you know, the fucking chosen. And the, the tradition has always been too, like if you manage to do, you can manage to get there.

• 57:35Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you're kind of cleared.

• 57:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, they're like, okay, fuck it. We'll be able to say after the war and then, you know, then they don't. They're like, all right, high five. That was actually awesome. He's a badass.

• 57:46Speaker 02

  So uh, you know, we're, we're fucking trying to figure this out and I like, are we really gonna do this? Cause if we get caught in this process too, like we're gonna get U C M G S or they're gonna, they're gonna, they're gonna fucking pound us and probably never go to another branch of service either. Uh, but before we can make a decision, I don't remember, I don't remember exactly what day, but uh, Nazaria had started happening, all right? And, and Nazaria is a fucking meat grinder. Like dudes are getting fucked up down there, like uh, like crazy shit's happening. The advance kind of stops and uh, I guess, and uh, they come back over the fucking one M C and they're like, uh, fuck this, the fucking reserves got called in. That's us. Yay. So off we go. Now we're, we're headed to the war.

• 58:27Jocko Willink?

  Hell yeah.

• 58:27Speaker 02

  Finally.

• 58:29Jocko Willink?

  And where'd you guys land? Where'd they put you?

• 58:31Speaker 02

  Uh, first thing, we, we end up in, you know, Kuwait doing some bullshit. Uh, they can't really figure out what the fuck to do with this because a Mew is actually a very under strength thing too. You know, you got like four tanks and like five artillery pieces and you know, not enough trucks, definitely not enough helicopters. So mostly now we're still like fucking, like, cause they can't decide what the fuck to do with this. We changed commands like six times one day, like uh, task force zero, uh, one M F, no, fucking go with these army fucks, terror again, like what are we gonna do? We end up.

• 58:56Jocko Willink?

  Military leadership.

• 58:58Speaker 02

  Especially way OF1 is chaos, bro. They got like.

• 59:01Jocko Willink?

  No one knew anything.

• 59:01Speaker 02

  Yards full of trucks. They're just like repairing and like, I don't even give a fuck if you sign for it. And we're like, you need a Humvee, take a Humvee. If one's fixed. So, yeah, it mostly ends up being like total bullshit, though. So we end up by Alcoot Gardens crossroads with like us, like company of grunts, a couple of tanks and I don't know the fucking other infantry guys go somewhere else. The other guys go somewhere else. Uh, and this is, this is like, this is like leadership, fucking real shit that happened in number two. Uh, cause this, this one, this one took a long time to sort out. This is like the, uh, the final death blow of any, any thought of still being in the fucking Marine Corps.

• 59:36Speaker 02

  So our, our legendary platoon sergeant has also gone home. Not because we were going to war, but because like a week or two before this kicked off, like he has some fucking family shit. I don't think his mom's dying or some bullshit. So I can't, I can't be mad at him. Uh, really. We needed him, but fucking also it'd be seventh tour. Like he, somebody else needs him too. So now instead of a gunny, we've got like an E5 who's, who's not exactly a strong dude anyway, as like our acting platoon sergeant. All right. And there's a difference between like a gunny standing up to a captain and be like, hey, no, that ain't gonna fucking happen. And, uh, you know, six year sergeant standing up to a fucking captain. That is, it's, it can be very, it's a very different dynamic. So.

• 1:00:13Speaker 02

  I'm, I'm definitely gonna say this part of that fucking say his name, but we're there for a while and we're doing, you know, basically just some bullshit. We're like, we're doing like night patrols for the grunts out in the fucking, but you know, no- nothing, not what the fuck we're supposed to be doing. Nobody's letting us have a raid. Cause we're, you were named SPF too. We, we got all these fucking CQB skulls and shit. So, uh, finally like we, we like force a confrontation as you can, you know, a way with like the captain, our captain, like dude. What are we fucking doing? I will never forget this. All right. Now he's pissed at us. He actually pulls his little cap and mardle off his fucking armor and throws them in the fucking dirt. And he's like.

• 1:00:51Speaker 02

  I don't agree with this war and this is stupid and I'm not getting any of you killed for, you know, some fucking dumbass objective that doesn't matter. And we're like.

• 1:01:03Speaker 02

  You gotta be, you gotta be fucking shooting me. This is another thing that like I've never said out loud just because so many other fucking marine officers are awesome. You know, fucking Sean Tosh is doing his bullshit right there. Fucking third LAR is down at the fucking carburetor gab doing fucking all kinds of fucking awesome shit. This is the first time that I'm like, you know, I'm seeing fucking cowardice out of our officer corps. What I think is cowardice, maybe in retrospect, he's got a little bit of a moral point, but at the time it feels like fucking cowardice. It feels like he is a fucking coward and he's now using that to shield us from anything that we could fucking do.

• 1:01:34Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And the thing, the thing that really hurts about that is like, if we, so we're not going to do this, but someone else is going to go to it.

• 1:01:41Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, you're exactly right. Yeah, 100%.

• 1:01:42Jocko Willink?

  Like you can not agree with the war, but I don't, there's other Marines that are going to have to go do this shit that we're not doing right now.

• 1:01:47Speaker 02

  Exactly right.

• 1:01:48Jocko Willink?

  That's not, that shit don't work.

• 1:01:50Speaker 02

  No, that is fucking bullshit.

• 1:01:51Jocko Willink?

  That's, that shit don't work right there.

• 1:01:52Speaker 02

  No, no, it's fucking awful. And this, this feels like a fucking huge, like personal stain on our honor too. You know, when this all fucking said and done, and it's also one of those things even you look back on like, you know, fuck, should I, should I have taken that to another level? Should I have gone and found like, I don't know who the fuck, that fucking new command or some bullshit. But really, you know, at the time, the calculus is probably right too. Like it's fucking Marine Corps. They're, they're not probably going to believe a sergeant over a captain. And that's a hell of a fucking accusation to make if you can't back it up, if you got no fucking proof. But it does, it hurts. I mean, it hurts fucking bad.

• 1:02:30Jocko Willink?

  Did you guys do anything good? Did you guys, you know, did you, do you have some good experiences at least over there?

• 1:02:36Speaker 02

  Kind of.

• 1:02:36Jocko Willink?

  Or was it just like, like, you always felt like you were a little bit on the outside of where it was happening?

• 1:02:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, we go, we go on to be in, you know, dry holes, fuck bullshit. It basically ends up being like, basically really, like I come back with all the bullets I left with. Like, we don't even have fucking combat action weapons and we shouldn't because we didn't fucking earn them. But yeah, it's, it's incredibly shitty. And we're there the shortest amount of time of any unit anyway. Like, I mean, we spent like six, seven weeks in Iraq, maybe. Yeah, we were literally the first guys on, that actually makes it worse because we were the first guys on the Lejeune. So they got the fucking band, like all these fucking Johnny War Hero coming in, we're like, oh, like god damn it, like fuck, yeah.

• 1:03:19Jocko Willink?

  Did you, was that the moment you made up your mind you were gonna leave the Marine Corps?

• 1:03:24Speaker 02

  I'd already made up my mind, that fucking solidified it. I mean, this was so, this was so bad. This is real shit, man. Like, the, the thirty day flight or drive home on the fucking USS Nassau, I'm like, I was gonna go in the fucking world that could eat by nineteen eleven. Like, this is so fucking humiliating. Like, this is so fucking bad. Uh, yeah, it's, it's fucking, it's a, it's a hard thing to describe, like, how, how much, something like that happening. It, it would even be different, like, if, like, if, you know, I was a bitch, like, oh, fuck, if I can't fight, well, fuck me, I should go sell insurance or some bullshit. When somebody else is, like, fucking dishonored you by their bullshit, like, that is fucking a real heart attack. Uh, basically, it keeps me going, there's like, I will redeem this at, at any fucking price, fucking any fucking where. I gotta, I gotta, I gotta, I gotta pull a legion, like, somebody's gonna be fucking dealt with.

• 1:04:08Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, there's something about, it's, it's, it's really hard to explain, but man, there's something about, uh, young men wanting to go to war.

• 1:04:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:04:16Jocko Willink?

  And it's like wanting to breathe.

• 1:04:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:04:19Jocko Willink?

  You know, it's like, dude, like, I need oxygen.

• 1:04:22Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:04:22Jocko Willink?

  And when you're seeing that shit from the, the outside looking at it, it's just like, the guys will do anything. Like you, like you pointed out, guys would go UA and freaking break rules to go and fight. You know, that's what people are doing.

• 1:04:34Speaker 02

  This is something I don't think people understand about, like, the, the, like, the fucking real, real warrior cast. And this will be put to me by, uh, by SF one officer many years later, and he was right. He's like, there's two kind of guys that end up fucking SF. Uh, there's guys that came here for the, uh, you know, the fucking hat and the tab and the fucking groupies and they wanna go, you know, tell girls they're fucking cool, I fucking commando shit and chase some pussy. And there's the guys that if I told them right now, uh, either the Hawaiian drop girls over there and I got a bag full of coke, or we can go on a fucking patrol and then these fucking shitty swamp and it's gonna rain and be cold and fucking piss and there's like a four percent chance we're gonna make contact with the enemy. Those guys are the fuck, the guys that would pick that. It's not even guaranteed, but there's a fucking chance. Young guys, the, the warrior guys, they really, they wanna, they wanna fight when they wanna fuck, which is a lot.

• 1:05:17Jocko Willink?

  So you're you're driving home and or you're sailing home.

• 1:05:22Speaker 02

  Fucking NASA.

• 1:05:23Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:05:24Jocko Willink?

  And you get home and how's the transition? Is it hard to do?

• 1:05:28Speaker 02

  Oh, it's fucking lightning fast. So for those of us that were stop lost in Marine Corps, like you got two weeks, you're fucking out of here. Like fucking get all your shit done. Uh, turned out one of the dudes in our platoon, his brother had been a recon Marine also, but he's a recruiter in the West Virginia National Guard. Like a fucking CIA, you know, sergeant major recruiter at this point. And there's a National Guard reserve battalion up there. So yeah, we make the fucking link up. Uh, you know, he walks us right in and we go straight to the, uh, the SF, uh, guard unit there.

• 1:05:55Jocko Willink?

  That that SFR guard unit is like the best.

• 1:05:59Speaker 02

  It is awesome. It's it's fucking amazing. It's it's funny because, uh, I'll end up talking with some other buddies that are like reserve SEALs after this and I can see strength, the way you guys do it, where you have to be active duty first and then you can be a reserve SEAL because then we got the National Guard SF is inverse. Like you can be a fucking nobody.

• 1:06:16Jocko Willink?

  Freaking crazy.

• 1:06:16Speaker 02

  Fucking nuts. The thing that makes it really weird then is you can end up with some guys that are kind of fucking questionable. But you also, it's like some of the most badass awesome motherfuckers you've ever met. Cause they know how to do shit from their real job too. Yeah. So it is, it's great. There's there's strengths.

• 1:06:29Jocko Willink?

  I think it's cool. I mean, they go through the program, they go through the school. Like it's yeah, there's no such thing in the SEAL teams. You have to be an active duty SEAL, which is probably puts you at like around eight years.

• 1:06:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:06:38Jocko Willink?

  And then if you get out, you can be in the reserve SEAL team. So Q course.

• 1:06:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:06:44Jocko Willink?

  You're you're freaking ready for that.

• 1:06:46Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Dude, I've been Jack and Steel and running a fucking treadmill for nine months, mad as fuck. So yeah. I got I got a fucking five hundred pound bench press. Like, yeah, we're ready for this shit.

• 1:07:00Jocko Willink?

  Did you have to go to, did you have to go to any kind of like army? Like, welcome to the army?

• 1:07:05Speaker 02

  No, no, no, no.

• 1:07:06Jocko Willink?

  Or is it just like, does someone teach you how to put your uniform on and that's that? We're good. Like now you're in the army?

• 1:07:13Speaker 02

  It's it's really cool. Like the only good thing about going to Marine boot camps is it casts for everybody's. So they they won't make you go back. So no, like I'm literally a sergeant, uh, with they give me a fucking uniform and you know, go to select. The first time I put my army uniform on is like, I don't know, four or five months later, I'm going to my staff sergeant board. I have no fucking idea how to put, I don't even know what the fucking stripes mean and shit. Uh, I show up to my promotion board, my, uh, little airborne flash on upside down.

• 1:07:39Speaker 02

  But it's also an SFR. They don't care. They're like, fucking, who are you? Like, oh, you done this shit? Like, all right, fuck it. Yeah.

• 1:07:46Jocko Willink?

  Any, uh, any challenges or anything going through the Q course?

• 1:07:50Speaker 02

  No, and, and this is, this is kind of fucking cheating the system too in the, in this regard. Cause guys have asked me later, like, what was, what was tougher, what was harder? It's really kind of not fair to, uh, to talk about how tough your second time you succeeded at it. Your special operations thing is, cause you already know a lot of the, the games. All right. You already have mental toughness. You already know a lot of shit can be done. It does make it significantly easier. Yeah. Yeah. So it's fucking, it's fucking child's play. Uh, it's funny cause also all this other bullshit that's happened with the recon community. They, they have now shattered the recon community, like 70% of recon Marines left. Everybody like, fuck this, we're out of here. There's like 10 recon Marines.

• 1:08:29Jocko Willink?

  This was at that time?

• 1:08:30Speaker 02

  Yes. Like as soon as Iraq was over. Yeah. Anybody that got fucked, anybody that, that, that thought like the grass is greener somewhere else is fucking gone. It is a lot. It is a huge percentage. There's like, uh, you know, 10, 15 recon Marines in my SF selection class.

• 1:08:45Jocko Willink?

  Damn.

• 1:08:46Speaker 02

  Like dudes, I haven't seen in years, like, you know, fucking saw this guy back in like, you know, 1999 at the PX or some shit. Like, what are you fucking doing here? How about you?

• 1:08:54Jocko Willink?

  We're in the army now.

• 1:08:57Speaker 02

  I'll end up on an OD8 later with like three or four recon Marines on it. Yeah, it's crazy. Uh, so yeah, you know, Q course is, is honestly, it's, you know, again, I've done most of this shit. It's long, but it's no big deal.

• 1:09:08Jocko Willink?

  Yep. And then you get to a national guard, you go to the national guard SF unit, do you go on deployment?

• 1:09:12Speaker 02

  Oh yeah, straight to it. Actually, we, uh, me and my guys, we got to skip graduation and we got a little ceremonial dinner or whatever bullshit. Cause our battalion was deploying and we were like, hey, can we, can we skip this and fucking go fight? All right, hell yeah. So yeah, go straight to, uh, back to Iraq, uh, 2006, uh, with the, with the national guard SF.

• 1:09:28Jocko Willink?

  Where were you?

• 1:09:29Speaker 02

  I spent a little bit of time, we were attached to 10th group. So I spent a little bit of time in, in Baghdad on a 10th group team. And then I went down to, uh, DeWine, that was my house.

• 1:09:37Jocko Willink?

  So what year, what months was this in 2006?

• 1:09:42Speaker 02

  It was early January, February.

• 1:09:44Jocko Willink?

  January, February.

• 1:09:44Speaker 02

  Somewhere in, somewhere in there.

• 1:09:46Jocko Willink?

  So was Colonel Tovo in charge of?

• 1:09:47Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Hell, yeah. He was. Yeah. Hell, yeah.

• 1:09:49Jocko Willink?

  He was great.

• 1:09:50Speaker 02

  Yeah. No, Tovo was awesome.

• 1:09:50Jocko Willink?

  Cause he was, he was, you know, I ended up working for him in 2006 as well. And he was freaking, he was great.

• 1:09:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:09:56Jocko Willink?

  He ended up like, I think he ended up a three star general or something.

• 1:09:59Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. This was 2006. Yeah, I was there with you.

• 1:10:01Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:01Speaker 02

  Where the fuck you were at? I was down, uh, south in DeWine, yeah, which is, uh, right next to.

• 1:10:05Jocko Willink?

  It's south of Baghdad, right?

• 1:10:07Speaker 02

  South of Baghdad and it's kind of between Al Qut, I'd heard the east and, uh, Karbala to the west.

• 1:10:12Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 1:10:13Speaker 02

  Was it Karbala? Yeah, Karbala.

• 1:10:15Jocko Willink?

  So you show up there and what are you guys doing?

• 1:10:18Speaker 02

  Oh, man, fuck.

• 1:10:21Speaker 02

  So I'll end up getting sent to a, uh, like a long hair team, like a, like a six man split team. Uh, you know, so I show up. They're like, hey, this is what you're doing. You gotta get attached to these tense group, uh, guys for minutes. They can tell you what to do. You're there to like, grow your hair out, grow a beard, dye them both black. Don't ever put a uniform again the whole time you're in a fucking country. Uh, where's your civvies at? I'm like, I didn't bring any, like the first time we brought like, you know, Finn's new D T vests to Iraq, which we didn't need. This time I brought like all kinds of armor and shit. They're like, we don't need any of that. Cause you're gonna have to do this other, you know, fucking bullshit. Uh, like fuck, okay. So that's what we end up doing. They, I trained with them for a little bit and I go down to my team. It says, uh, down in southern Iraq and well, we're, let me be careful how I phrase this, uh, just cause this is.

• 1:11:02Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:03Speaker 02

  I forget who I'm talking to. We're doing open, open shit. We're gonna end up doing a lot of like running around in, uh, you know, Adidas tracksuits and shit.

• 1:11:09Jocko Willink?

  Sure.

• 1:11:09Speaker 02

  Um, and this is also kind of a cultural thing with, uh, with Tenth Group. Well, I mean, every, every group's got their own strengths and shit, but, uh, Tenth Group really doesn't like their intel guy nerds getting mixed up in like some fucking street fires and shit. Cause then people know who you are. So, we're gonna, we're gonna chafe at the, at the bit for, uh, for Tenth Group for a while too on this shit. But, uh, yeah.

• 1:11:29Jocko Willink?

  Good deployment?

• 1:11:30Speaker 02

  Pretty decent. You know, it, it's not like the fucking coolest deployment in the world. Uh, I do learn how to do some awesome shit. Uh, all this intel stuff, which, you know, you hate when you're a young guy. You just wanna, you know, fucking breach the door and fucking have a 60. You do need to know how to do this other shit too. It's, it's not as fun, uh, but it's like necessary life skills and, you know, building all these target packets and. Doing you honestly, some pretty weird shit. You're out there in fucking taxi cabs with fucking hodgepodge on and shit, but uh it's not the coolest, uh but it's it's all right. Uh while we're down there though, like southern Iraq is it's not, it's not like as bad as like Baghdad. It's not like fucking Ramadi, but it is sort of pick up in violence. Especially at that point, they're funneling

• 1:12:13Speaker 02

  dudes through like the Iranian fucks are coming over here to like, you know, teach them how to lob mortars at somebody and shit and like basically fight some incompetent nerds because it's awesome like a NATO base and they'll send them north after they're trained up to to fight the battles of Baghdad and shit. So uh so she does heating up a little bit and I kind of in a weird way, I actually hope to listen to this. We're gonna have to fight like 10 groups bullshit too, because uh again, they they want things very regiment. Culturally 10th group is also like the Berlin Brigade still like they're doing cloak and dagger shit against KGB. That's that's what actually gets that rocks off. Uh which is fine, man. You know, it's awesome. Uh but we we can't get any help. All right. We're we're starting to catch more and more fucking heat and more and more, you know, bombs on the base and shit or, you know, indirect. And uh so we kind of have to, you know, bad news bears it

• 1:12:57Speaker 02

  a little bit in that in that SF uh strength way. So we go over to the Iraqi army units next to us. We built us a little mic force, uh totally off the books. All right. Building a kill house that uh, you know, fucking uh they call this the the boxes full of sand.

• 1:13:11Jocko Willink?

  Oh, uh.

• 1:13:12Speaker 02

  Hesko.

• 1:13:13Jocko Willink?

  Heskos.

• 1:13:13Speaker 02

  Yeah. Building a kill house and heskos. So now we've got what we're actually supposed to be doing, which is intel nerd stuff. And uh, you know, we got a little Iraqi.

• 1:13:20Jocko Willink?

  Get a little assault. Oh, Iraqi.

• 1:13:22Speaker 02

  Well, we have those, but over here we got an assault section. We got a mic force. All right. And just weird shit keeps happening. Like we keep randomly stumbling into like guys that are important. Like uh we got a call one time. We're like, hey, yeah, we just happened to be out on this uh presence patrol and this guy, you know, like, I don't know, two o'clock, some some fucking, it's not like he's, you know, it's our cow, but some some guy that somebody wants came through and so we snagged him. So can you like come get him? They're like, yeah, that that's a rant. That's it's very lucky that you guys were there, wasn't it? Like, yeah.

• 1:13:51Jocko Willink?

  Serendipity, man.

• 1:13:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, serendipity. And uh we started doing some stuff like that. Uh but it's not, it's not like a great tour, you know, we we mixed up. We get some fights and shit.

• 1:13:59Jocko Willink?

  How long are you there for?

• 1:14:01Speaker 02

  I wanna say nine months. I mean, I feel like it's a pretty long, eight, nine months. It was pretty, it was pretty good. I wanna say it went into like September. It was pretty, it was pretty long deployment for, for, for like an S.

• 1:14:08Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, for sure. No, you, we were there though. You were there almost the entire time while I was there. I stayed, I left in October 21st, but I got there like April, like April, April 1st or something like that. So you were there the whole time.

• 1:14:20Speaker 02

  Yeah. Oh, and you remember 2006, man? There was some, there was some stuff starting to really pop off. It was when the golden, golden mosque got blown up right before that.

• 1:14:28Jocko Willink?

  I didn't know, I wasn't tracking what was going on in the rest of the country. I was like in Ramadi, in like, cause my first deployment was, we were, we were in Baghdad and we traveled all over the place. We hit targets everywhere. But my second deployment, I never left Baghdad. I, I'm sorry, I never left Ramadi. Like, I think I flew one time to Balad, like a meeting.

• 1:14:46Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:14:46Jocko Willink?

  What, like very early in deployment and then I never left again. So I didn't know what the hell was going on in the rest of the country barely. It was just like scraps.

• 1:14:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:14:54Jocko Willink?

  Uh, okay. So you come home from that and this is when you switched over to active duty?

• 1:14:57Speaker 02

  Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So, uh, actually this is, this is kind of a, this is kind of a weird thing. This actually plays a, a part later too. So we're having to, we're having to like basically make a bullshit down there and, uh, our, our Mike Force finally tells us they wanna go get this like really bad dude. Uh, and we wanted to get this really bad dude too, but we gotta like, again, do some crafty boy shit to do it. Well, so because I mean, I follow like Iraqi intelligence and, uh, we went out, out in broad daylight with like us and like Tony Hadji is trying to get this real bad dude that, uh, turns out knew we were coming. Uh, because Iraqi intelligence is not awesome at keeping secrets. Fucking huge ass gunfight. All right. We are getting the shit kicked out of us. There are a lot of these dudes fucking there waiting for us.

• 1:15:41Speaker 02

  And the only thing we've been able to like cower together for help is the, uh, the NATO base. It's like, and it's all like the eastern, it's not even like anybody. It's not like the Dutch or there. It's like all the eastern Europeans that like only wanna hang out and, uh, so we're supposed to have like a fucking hind gunship in support, which is insane if you watch.

• 1:15:54Jocko Willink?

  Legitimately a hind?

• 1:15:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. Polacks are flying. And, uh, yeah. Also, if you grew up in like action movies, you're like, this is the most crazy shit that's ever happened. But, uh, unlike what a hind gunship should do, like it comes fucking flying and it helps us and it takes a couple AK 47 rounds and turns out it goes home. We're like, yeah, it's fucking terrible. So it doesn't happen that we fight, it's fucking crazy, but a couple of the, maybe a couple of weeks later when we're trying to do our rip with fifth group, there's only three of us left down there then. Our mighty force goes out to, to fucking do something else. We don't have any help now because we don't even have a way to support them. And they get fucking overrun and captured and all the ones that fucking didn't die in the fight and get executed in front of the local J. Chalmani mosque. Yeah, it's fucking hard to take. That's fucking hard to take. There's some other shit goes along that story, but it's not important.

• 1:16:38Jocko Willink?

  So you guys weren't, you had no one with them when they went out to do a hit?

• 1:16:41Speaker 02

  They, they were like, hey, we got, we're going to do this. We're like, motherfucker, there is three of us left. Like, we can't, like, we literally cannot leave this fucking firebase. And as they go doing it, we, we actually do end up leaving the firebase, go try to help them. We gotta like cobble together a coalition. We got some Navy EOD guys and whoever else we can find is there. They're calling us now on their cell phones. Like, hell, fuck, we're getting our asses kicked. We get the rest of the little eighth Iraqi, but we can't get there. We don't get there in time. Like, it's, it's trying to like put together QRF like way too fucking late and it just doesn't work.

• 1:17:11Speaker 02

  And it's brutal. That's hard to say.

• 1:17:12Jocko Willink?

  That's like, that's like as you're leaving.

• 1:17:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's like, like three days before going to play home.

• 1:17:17Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's not a good.

• 1:17:18Speaker 02

  No, it's hard.

• 1:17:19Jocko Willink?

  Not a good way to end deployment.

• 1:17:20Speaker 02

  No, it's fucking, it's, it's rough. It's one of like the kind of maybe uniquely weird ways that like enlisted Green Berets at least kind of do feel like the same bird of command guys that, you know, American officers do. Cause it's not quite the same thing, but still those are my fucking guys, you know, like I fucking trained them and like I was proud of them and fucking held their hand and all this bullshit. And then I, you know, kind of let them get fucking executed and that's, it doesn't feel very good either.

• 1:17:42Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's fucking terrible.

• 1:17:43Speaker 02

  Sucks.

• 1:17:48Jocko Willink?

  So now you get home.

• 1:17:49Speaker 02

  Yep. Get home. I've actually, I took some pretty good rattles on that one too. I got knocked out by a rocket like a couple of days before the bullshit happened. We're in this fucking crazy fight with all kinds of explosion and shit. My head is, is a little, it's, we don't really know about TBI as much then either. I'm actually fucked up and I just don't know it. But anyway, fuck it. I'm going to act. So I'm not, I'm sure I'm not going to tell them I come back like. Remember all the, I don't know if you guys had the same ones, it's the questions when you get back from deployment on the sheet, they're like, did you fire your personal weapon? You see any dead bodies? You get hit in the head, you know, whatever, like, you know, yes, no, yes, whatever, whatever like fucking justifies my CIB, but also like, no, I don't want to see a shrink. I don't want to see a neurologist. Like, I want to go back, back to fucking active duty. That's what I've seen now too, like.

• 1:18:34Speaker 02

  Third group is there and the fifth group is, the fifth group ends up fucking coming in. And these dudes are fucking awesome. I'm like, fuck yeah, dude. I want to go to like an active, I want to go to one of these two active duty groups. Uh, cause these fuckers are, are getting it fucking done. And so that's it. When you, when you're in the national guard and you've been like deployed like that, you can just basically your battalion commander sign a thing at the end, like I want to go to active and uh, you know, he'll sign off on it.

• 1:18:57Jocko Willink?

  Boom, you're done.

• 1:18:58Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:18:58Jocko Willink?

  That's freaking epic.

• 1:18:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:19:00Jocko Willink?

  And so that's where you end up going to third group.

• 1:19:02Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I gotta go through, we call it the uh, ascension progress, ascension or recession, some bullshit like that. Basically still the, the active army that will not let you back as an 18 series guy until you go back to SWIC. And they gotta do, you gotta do like a, this is make sure that like, you're not like a, a total fucking chucklehead. Cause you gotta remember, we got guys that like got their tab in like 1985 that God bless them, like they're showing back up to like national guard units. So like, I've been, you know, fucking selling cars for 30 years, but I'm fucking getting it on. Here we go. All right. And that's fine for like a national guard. You can't have that dude fucking like, you know, the junior Bravo on a fucking teammate third group. Like you, you can't. There's a different, different kind of mentality. So maybe you gotta go back SWIC, do like a PT test, do a bunch of other bullshit, do RUC test.

• 1:19:44Speaker 02

  Uh, gotta go see a shrink, uh, again, make sure you're not fucking crazy. And then they'll, they'll let you back. So it takes a little while. It takes, you know, four or five months, but yeah. Uh, I ended up going to a third group.

• 1:19:53Jocko Willink?

  And then right into a team and it's like workup cycle. We're getting ready to go.

• 1:19:57Speaker 02

  Yeah. No, uh, it is a, actually being, uh, being really, again, just weird coincidences in terms of events. Uh, my, what's now my ex-wife, uh, works at the special warfare center for us at BRAG. And so, so I ended up knowing a bunch of like support dudes and shit that are at third group. And as well as, I know teammates from, or team guys from like being in the Q course, but through my wife and like her shit, like I know a bunch of fucking support guys and shit too. So I go with my orders to check in the third group and uh, this dude that I know is sitting at like the S1 clerk table. He's like, Uh, hey man, the next like six, 18 echoes that check in here going to SigDet.

• 1:20:33Speaker 02

  Which is like, uh, it's this comms thing where like you're gonna stay here and monitor radio traffic for you. I'm like, oh shit. So, yeah, I go home, like, cause I've got like 30 days to actually check in. I'm like, oh shit, alright, gotta fucking make sure there's a Q course graduation between now and then. But I, you know, another little twist of fate happens, uh, where I've just bought a new house in Fayetteville, uh, the neighbor across the street is a, is a captain in third group and he's the fucking SIF. So, I don't know, I bump into him, like, going along, like, hey dude, I gotta fucking figure something out. And he's like, hey, you know, we're, we're actually hurting down at the fucking, uh, SIF for bodies. And it's kind of this like weird, like, if we say we want you, can kind of, it can, you know, kind of override some other bullshit at the group level. So, yeah.

• 1:21:14Speaker 02

  So, that's what I do. He gets me an interview and I go down and I interview with the, the fuck SIF guys. It's fucking totally cool. And, uh, yeah, they're, they, they'll take me basically because I've got, they need to bring the snipers. I'm a morning sniper already. I've, I've got an aptitude for it, but they're like, okay, check it out. This is like being a new guy all over and they're like, you have to pass two, to be in the sniper section, you're gonna have to pass Sephardic and Sodik. And if you fail in one of those, you fucking add a unit. Cause that's how it works down there. So, yeah. So, you know, back into the fucking grinder a little bit.

• 1:21:47Jocko Willink?

  And so you, did you go to those two schools immediately?

• 1:21:49Speaker 02

  Almost immediately, yeah. Yeah, I go to, I, I get very lucky with that too.

• 1:21:54Speaker 02

  Do a little bit of a train up at Sepholic, which is like our, you know, group level CQB course, uh, learn how to shoot pistol a little bit better. And, uh, for Sephardic, back then there's a shoot in test. Alright. So, when you show up, like day one, there's like a pistol test.

• 1:22:07Jocko Willink?

  Are you sweating every, every shooting test?

• 1:22:12Speaker 02

  No, actually a piece of magic happened here now that is, that has made me an awesome shooter. It's a, it's a twist of fate thing. Did you ever hear the name Todd Hodnett?

• 1:22:20Jocko Willink?

  No.

• 1:22:20Speaker 02

  Okay. He was this guy. He's a, he's a civilian. He's never been in the military in his fucking life. But, uh, basically started winning all these like precision rifle contests back around like, I don't know, like 2004, 2005 and people like, where the fuck did this guy? He's just like showed up one day, just kicked him in his ass. And, uh, the military knows, like, you know, like, Delta's already had a contract with another shit. And, uh, we, so the, like, the minute I walk into the SIF and get my, you know, locker, like, we're going to this Hodnett guy's shit. And, uh, I'm, I'm actually sweating even having to go to a sniper team. Cause like, I know I saw a fucking sniper. I'm like, fuck. Damn it, like fuck, like I wanted to go to the assault, like I can at least hit you with a hammer, man. I can run around fast, like I can, you know, fucking carry heavy shit like. Uh, I, I, I'm not good at this though.

• 1:23:04Speaker 02

  Wait, I'm not gonna tell my fucking team this, cause like, I'm either gonna be in the sift or the fucking sig dead. And like, yeah, I, I will drag fucking anchor chain around my neck for the next fucking 10 years while I'll do that. So we go to hide in that dude shit. And I'm also thinking like, man, this is a fucking civilian, like what the fuck do you know about a sniper rifle? Goddamn, I got a fucking hogs dude, man, I'm fucking, fucking eighty-five, forty-one Joe, like, they couldn't teach me either, but what the fuck does this guy know? Uh, but it turns out he's got, he does have like the magic. He is like, uh, one of those like, once in a generation guys that is going to like dynamically change the way every, everything does with a sniper. Not just us either, fucking marine seal everywhere. He's gonna advance precision rifle shooting like fucking fifty years in like three years.

• 1:23:47Speaker 02

  The big thing that changes things for me is he's like, hey, man, is it, he kind of talks like a dumbass cowboy from Texas. It's like, uh, most people have ever taught you to shoot a precision rifle, you get really relaxed and fucking, you gotta breathe, like relax and fucking, you know, pretend you don't know when the trigger is gonna go off. And I will actually figure out the psychological for this reason for this many years later, it doesn't work for a lot of people. As like, all right, poor fucking kids again, we're playing the, the don't flinch game. You know, like, I can raise my hand and if you flinch, I get to hit you twice, but if you don't flinch, how many times did you not flinch?

• 1:24:20Jocko Willink?

  I don't know.

• 1:24:21Speaker 02

  Like zero, right? Cause it's a million reflex, like, you know, if I act like I'm gonna fucking hit you.

• 1:24:25Jocko Willink?

  Check, check.

• 1:24:27Speaker 02

  It's the same thing with a fucking rifle. I, it doesn't matter how much you will yourself not to have recoil, like it's some like tiny subconscious level, like your body is still gonna make a twitch. I, you can override that by doing this. Alright, so he basically shows us in like the first five minutes where he's coarse, like if you pushing to ground with your toes and like flex your leg muscles and lay into your fucking rifle, he calls it loading the bipod.

• 1:24:50Speaker 02

  You'll be able to shoot like a totally different way. And this absolutely, this is like a magic trick that in like five seconds has made me infinitely better. Not just made me infinitely better, like as soon as we start shooting it like that, I'm kicking everybody's fucking ass. Like, like I'm concerned that I'm gonna get fired on like the fucking third day of this. But instead I'm actually kicking the shit out of all these fucking experienced snipers and they're like, goddamn, you Marine boys can shoot. And I'm like, fucking ain't right.

• 1:25:15Jocko Willink?

  That's freaking epic.

• 1:25:16Speaker 02

  I'm not gonna tell them for like years later, you know, I actually sucked. But, uh, you know, I'm not terrible with a pistol or a carbine though. I'm not great, but I'm not fucking terrible. Uh, but yeah, there's a shoot in thing. So yeah, I get to go to Sephardic, uh, managed to pass that. Like a week later, they just started having a shoot in for Sodik too. So there's another shooting test. My teams are just like, hey, man, you can go fucking Halo school or if you can go past this, uh, fucking shooting and you'll basically steal somebody's slot. Cause they can't, uh, you can get Sodik right now too. And I'm like, fuck, take that one.

• 1:25:43Jocko Willink?

  Damn.

• 1:25:44Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I did, uh, it's funny, something like the instructors, cause these, but these things both happened at the same compound on Bragg's called Outrange 37. When I walk, so I'm parking there for like the, you know, 20th week in a row, walk past one of the Sephardic instructors and he's like, hold on. Like, what are you doing on my side? And he's like, motherfucker, if you get Sephardic and Sodik, which is like two of the most prestigious schools in SF in the same single period, like, I don't know, I'm gonna fucking key your car or something like, like, like no fucking new guy.

• 1:26:11Jocko Willink?

  Does not everyone go through the, the CQC school?

• 1:26:14Speaker 02

  Not that one. No. That one is a very specific course that you must go through to be in a CIF.

• 1:26:22Jocko Willink?

  Got it.

• 1:26:23Speaker 02

  And it's got a high ass attrition rate too. It's like a, you know, probably 50, 60% attrition rate too. Uh, and it's like, if you get that one, like you are fucking ominous, ominous, like awesome CQB.

• 1:26:33Jocko Willink?

  Check. All right. So now you're in the team, you're in the CIF team, in the CIF company, I guess?

• 1:26:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:26:39Jocko Willink?

  And, uh, when do you guys rack to go on deployment?

• 1:26:42Speaker 02

  Fuck, they're, our Advon is already there by the time I graduate Sodik.

• 1:26:46Jocko Willink?

  Bro.

• 1:26:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's fucking wild. And like, two or three of my teammates are in Sodik with me because they're getting called up to. They're overhand. They came from the assault side to the sniper side. Uh, so, yeah, we're, we're like, like, I want to say it was like a week after we graduate. We're with the main body, fucking boom, boom, right back to it.

• 1:27:05Jocko Willink?

  And where'd you go?

• 1:27:07Speaker 02

  That time we went to Baghdad. Uh, so we got the ICTF though.

• 1:27:10Jocko Willink?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:27:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, so we're doing, so this is like a total change in combat for me. Uh, this, this shit's gonna get fucking crazy. My teammates don't even really know me either because like, I haven't met most of them. Like, the two guys I'm sitting with and like, fucking wondering, who the fuck is this guy? Who gave him a fucking gun?

• 1:27:29Speaker 02

  But, you know, if we're being like totally honest, like, I've been like the badass where I was before, right? We didn't do anything, we wasn't fucking recon, but yeah, fucking, I'm the tough guy. Like, I'm the aggressive dude. I'm the guy that gotta fucking pull by the fucking leash. Same thing on like my 19th trip team. I ended up like one other dude there that's like fucking totally badass, awesome dude. Uh, but for the most part, like, I am the aggressive fucking fighting motherfucker. The team's gotta like grab by the fucking collar, like, stop, like, it's too far. These dudes are fucking animals. I don't, we hadn't even like really done our, our changeover with whoever we were replacing, which I think was the first group SIF. We're still on, uh, we're still like living like the fucking transient barracks. And, uh, but our command's like, hey, fuck it, let's get this fucking done.

• 1:28:12Jocko Willink?

  Is this now oh seven?

• 1:28:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's oh seven. This is like, uh, in July or August of oh seven. Yeah, we still haven't done, you know, full fucking Riptola and like, we're fucking doing missions. Like, we're doing crazy fucking shit. And, uh, first night we go out with these guys. Nobody has like serviced, uh, from this kind of task force has serviced the target in Karbala in like, I don't know, like three or four months. Uh, our, our commander has to be a fucking awesome dude. It's like, oh, really? So they can fuck around in Karbala? Let's fucking get them. And, uh, so they send the fucking boys down there and, uh, it is, it is fucking insane. It's, at this point, this night is gonna be like right up there with like the craziest fucking combat shit I've ever seen. It is fucking bananas. We got two troops of. I C T F running all over the fucking place. Uh, our XO has decided to go with us.

• 1:28:56Jocko Willink?

  What was it? What was the target? Was it the multiple buildings? Was it one building? Was it one dude? Was it multiple dudes?

• 1:29:02Speaker 02

  Man, I don't even remember. I, I want to say it was like one dude, but it was like obvious that like he was going to have some, some fucking dudes with him because he was, he was, you know, important. He wasn't like, you know, again, he wasn't like the fucking match, but he's going to be important. He's going to have some bodyguards and shit. And, uh, yeah, I don't remember exactly what it was, but it had to have been at least two buildings. They sent like a fucking lot of us.

• 1:29:26Speaker 02

  Our, uh,

• 1:29:26Jocko Willink?

  So you guys are rolling up. Oddly enough, in oh six, my original deployment,

• 1:29:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:29:32Jocko Willink?

  I was supposed to go to Baghdad and take over I C T F.

• 1:29:34Speaker 02

  Oh, no shit. Okay. Yeah.

• 1:29:35Jocko Willink?

  I went on pre-deployment, uh, site survey, P D S. That's what we call it in the Navy. Went there, rolled out with the I C T F.

• 1:29:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:29:43Jocko Willink?

  Like hit targets.

• 1:29:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:29:45Jocko Willink?

  Saw them in action.

• 1:29:46Speaker 02

  You know, they're talking about, yeah.

• 1:29:46Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. They were, you know, so it was, it was very, I, I was very familiar with what was going on. And then we come back to America and then like a couple of weeks before we went on deployment, they're like, yeah, you're not going to work with the I C T F. You're going to Ramadi. We're like, awesome.

• 1:29:57Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, awesome.

• 1:29:58Jocko Willink?

  So, yeah, the I C T F.

• 1:30:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:30:00Jocko Willink?

  You know, for people that don't know, it's the Iraqi counterterrorism force, but they were like the most highly trained Iraqi soldiers.

• 1:30:05Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 1:30:06Jocko Willink?

  The most highly vetted Iraqi soldiers and they had American like weapons.

• 1:30:10Speaker 02

  Guns.

• 1:30:11Jocko Willink?

  Night visions, the whole nine yards. So it's, it's the best group of Iraqis that you can have.

• 1:30:15Speaker 02

  Oh, they're fucking amazing. I really like in a lot of ways for like the, uh, you know, for like us, for like Green Berets, like, you know, train up a four and fours. They're probably like the success of the entire G W A. Like they are fucking badass. Uh, and I'm also very lucky because I didn't have to build it. Like I, you know, I got,

• 1:30:30Jocko Willink?

  You just got to show up and run it.

• 1:30:32Speaker 02

  I, I came on the tail end when these guys have done all this fucking hard work and you can imagine making Iraqis good at fucking C G, like good at C G B. Like it's crazy. But I get to show up right for the fucking glory moment. It's like, Awesome. Anyway, so, uh, so yeah, they are badass though. And as we go to Carbala, it is.

• 1:30:47Jocko Willink?

  So you guys are doing, um, vehicle mounted, I'm sure.

• 1:30:50Speaker 02

  No, we flew in.

• 1:30:50Jocko Willink?

  You flew in?

• 1:30:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, we flew in that one.

• 1:30:52Jocko Willink?

  Damn dude. I never did a helicopter mission in my life.

• 1:30:56Speaker 02

  No, what?

• 1:30:56Jocko Willink?

  Isn't that lame?

• 1:30:57Speaker 02

  No fucking way, dude, really?

• 1:30:58Jocko Willink?

  All vehicle, that's, I, actually, I don't think it's, I think it's awesome.

• 1:31:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, you do whatever you do, yeah.

• 1:31:02Jocko Willink?

  Free getting all, all vehicles all the time, get them.

• 1:31:04Speaker 02

  Oh dude, you can carry so much shit, so much guns, so much cool shit. I, I much prefer it. That's like one of those things that like doing a helicopter raid is awesome, like the first time you do it and then, then after you're done, you're like, okay, let's just drive everywhere now.

• 1:31:17Jocko Willink?

  Just weird, it's weird how, you know, like, cause I also, I never went to Afghanistan.

• 1:31:20Speaker 02

  Me neither.

• 1:31:20Jocko Willink?

  Afghanistan, I never flew like all everywhere over there. A lot of guys did. Alright, so you guys fly down.

• 1:31:25Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:31:26Jocko Willink?

  To Carbala.

• 1:31:26Speaker 02

  Yep, fly down. Uh, XO goes with us.

• 1:31:28Jocko Willink?

  Did you land on the X? Like land on the target or offset by like a little bit or?

• 1:31:32Speaker 02

  No, uh, so me and the snipers land in the soccer field behind, we actually land, land on a soccer field right behind it. Uh, rest of the dudes rope in, uh, for the assault side. Uh, there's, yeah, there's a shitload of hell, there's a shitload of dudes. This is also like the biggest element I've ever fought with. So I'm, I'm kinda confused actually. I'm used to like six guys, like there's like, fucking six O D A or three O D As and like a hundred fucking, it's crazy.

• 1:31:55Jocko Willink?

  Hell yeah.

• 1:31:56Speaker 02

  Fucking absolutely awesome. And, uh, Kent Solheim is our XO. Uh, he actually goes with us this night. Uh, cause he, he's just gotten tasked to be the XO, which he knows means he's gonna like be in the jock and this dude, and he's like, like one more fucking night of glory, which is awesome. Cause Kent's like a badass dude. He's teaching at West Point now. Uh, but, uh, yeah, he, he gets shot through both fucking femurs, like pretty early and he's out in the fucking tree, like just straight gunning people down and like, fucking somebody jumps out, blasts him through both legs and once through the back, like under the plate. He's fucked up. Yeah. Uh, this LZ is hot, is a motherfucker. Uh, they bring in a fucking, he's just dropping one, it's, it's fucking chaos. And, uh, they can't even get the helicopters back in to get us because like it's, it's too, it, this is actually how you know something is really hot in the army.

• 1:32:40Speaker 02

  If, uh, if like an SF captain and officer is like really fucked up and might fucking die, cause he is fucked up. And they still won't bring a helicopter in, like the risk is too high. Uh, so we gotta fight out of Carbala. Uh, medics.

• 1:32:54Jocko Willink?

  Wish you had vehicles now.

• 1:32:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, you fucking right.

• 1:32:56Jocko Willink?

  I'm saying.

• 1:32:58Speaker 02

  No shit. No shit. No shit. Medics didn't do some awesome, one of them gets sober started, he runs out and fucking grabs them and fucking patches both legs up, I mean fucking awesome shit. Uh, they actually had to bring our own, our commando QRF to get us another LZ like somewhere fucking five circles over here. And uh, you know, get on uh, all this crazy shit and like we get back from this and uh, like everybody else is like, okay, well fuck, you gotta find a new XO. Like, well, you're just, they're just like, this is normal shit for them. And I'm the fucking new guy like.

• 1:33:27Speaker 02

  This is actually the first time in my life, like I realized like, uh, these guys are like playing on like a fucking other level and I'm gonna have to fucking run to keep up. And I'm comfortable with that, that sounds awesome. Uh, but these dudes are bad as fuck. And uh, no, it was great. It was fantastic.

• 1:33:41Jocko Willink?

  So what's your op tempo like?

• 1:33:44Speaker 02

  So, so fucking high that it's actually, it's actually like hard to believe. And it, sometimes like I look back on them and I, I actually went, I'm like, did this? Was it really this fucking crazy? And even like sometimes like other SF guys that weren't that kind of task force are like, ain't no fucking way. You kind of, kind of, kind of talk like the boys from like, uh, oh seven, from like SIFs or Delta.

• 1:34:06Speaker 02

  It's like, three, four targets a night. Uh, it's oftentimes like seven days a week. Uh, it's sometimes it'll be like, go chase some shit like all fucking night long and we're like, out of charges, fucking out of shotgun. So just, we, we do a thing called a block party, which where you hit every house on a block at once. If we, like if somebody keeps slipping the fucking net, like we're gonna get crazy. Sometimes doing fucking daylight hits. Uh, I mean, it's, it is incredibly intense. It's, it's a level of intensity that, I mean, it really is like hard to believe. I look back on like, how in the fuck did we do this shit like? Every night. It's not like there's not occasional, you know, breaks. I mean, there was actually a brownout for like three, four, the whole country shut down.

• 1:34:47Speaker 02

  I mean, my teammate, Alan Shabro, like played all the way through Halo three that night, or that, those days, like there's some.

• 1:34:52Jocko Willink?

  Is that the jujitsu guy, Al?

• 1:34:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:34:55Jocko Willink?

  I know him, yeah.

• 1:34:55Speaker 02

  Oh shit.

• 1:34:56Jocko Willink?

  He's like traveling around the world right now.

• 1:34:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, he's, he's a, uh.

• 1:34:58Jocko Willink?

  Runs a We Defy.

• 1:34:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:35:00Jocko Willink?

  Which is a really cool organization.

• 1:35:01Speaker 02

  He's, he's over like fucking Vietnam, right?

• 1:35:02Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's supposed to come on the podcast and he's like, I'm here for three days. I'm like, cool, I'm not. But yeah, we just, we just like missed each other a bunch of times.

• 1:35:09Speaker 02

  When you get Alan on, uh, yeah, he actually gonna be my teammate.

• 1:35:12Jocko Willink?

  Oh, nice.

• 1:35:13Speaker 02

  He hasn't been to like a Sfart or anything yet, but he shows up as like a attachment to the fucking SIF. And I see this big scary looking motherfucker. You can tell a lot about a dude like how he's gonna do in like gunfights. He's big and yoked. Uh, he's like, yeah, you know, I'm fucking ninja fighter too. I, you know, black belt. You're just like, oh, fuck, come here. We're gonna talk to the team sergeant. And, uh, so he ends up being attached to our team. It's like one of our machine gunners, which is awesome. Dude, that's a fucking great job to be like, hey, sorry, you can't go in the house. But here's your 50 cal. Like, oh, well, oh, shit. Well, that's heartbreaking. Yeah. Stay out here and fucking anyway. Yeah, no, it's great. And you should talk to Alan. He's a great dude.

• 1:35:47Jocko Willink?

  So, so you're op tempo. What's the, what's the, uh, are you guys taking a lot of casualties? Or you like lost your captain or your captain got wounded?

• 1:35:56Speaker 02

  Well, it's our XO. He's not even my captain. Yeah, he just joined us as a attachment that night and he got fucking shot up for his troubles. Yeah, we, we are getting, we're getting fucking chewed up. Cause this is also, this is oh seven, man. The fight is, is real. There's fucking IEDs everywhere. There's, there's crazy shit. And, uh, that's like one of those times too, when like, I don't think anybody thought Iraq was, it was just, it was fucking insane. Uh, I don't know what anybody at the unit actually ever figured this out, but I sat down and calculated it one night. We, we had like a one third casualty rate, which is fucking crazy for a troop. Uh, we had dudes, uh, wounded like two and three times. There's this one dude, uh, his name, I won't say his last name, fucking awesome guy. He was a, uh, fenster in college.

• 1:36:38Speaker 02

  He gets three legitimate purple hearts in the course of like four weeks, like, like, and just keeps going because he's a fucking badass. But, uh, finally on the third one, they're like, the commander is like, you know what? Just, I know you don't want to, but I'm, I'm making you go home. Like you're gonna escort these guys that got fucking wounded yesterday at the same time to Germany. So nobody steals their shit. But you got multiple guys have like two from, you know, across the, the fucking trip. Yeah. We, I mean, we were fucked up. We were, we were fucking bleeding.

• 1:37:07Jocko Willink?

  And you lose ICTF guys as well.

• 1:37:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, they're getting, they're getting hurt. They're getting fucking chewed up. Uh, it is so fucking bad at the end that they, they did. They had to fly our, uh, Sfale Committee, which is our, our, our little in-group door kicking school. Cause you had to be Sfart qualified to go in the house, but they ended up having to fly them over to backfill us because there were, there were not enough of us to just keep going. I mean, at the end of this trip, like we'll, we'll have like three jobs instead of one. My senior will be like, you know, lead nav, lead sniper, and also, you know, in charge of like putting diesel in the Humvees like,

• 1:37:41Speaker 02

  but yeah, it's pretty crazy.

• 1:37:43Jocko Willink?

  Were you, did you serve as both a sniper and as an assaulter?

• 1:37:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's how we-

• 1:37:47Jocko Willink?

  Depending on the night?

• 1:37:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's how we do it for our, uh, for our staff anyway. Usually you're supposed to be an assaulter first and then go to the sniper so that you can do both jobs. And what we end up doing most of the time is, uh, we're hitting so many targets that like, yeah, we'll be the assault guys for this target, for the smallest target over here. And then after we're done, we'll send, uh, we'll actually more like designate marshmen and snipers and we'll go protect the roof while the assault guys do all the fucking SSC and shit.

• 1:38:13Jocko Willink?

  Kind of, kind of like living the dream.

• 1:38:16Speaker 02

  Oh dude, it is, it's, it's actually, it's absolutely awesome. It's so amazing. So, uh, this is kind of something that my, my senior or the Bravo that's my, my senior sniper has, has pioneered. He's like, hey, we get these, uh, Everly stock fucking bags, right? From, uh, the company over in Idaho. And we stick our fucking SR25s in those and we carry these fucking little guns that we got both. Uh, we had to carry a little more weight. But we can assault and fucking snipe and, uh, do both these things at the same time. And we are gonna fucking get some shit done. And we do it. It's fucking awesome. We're killing so many fucking people that like, uh, sometimes the assaulter is totally, so we started calling them up. We call our buddy like, hey man, okay, come here.

• 1:38:53Speaker 02

  All right. Here, you want your SR25? Like, now get behind the scope and see how far you can see. Like, you guys can see like 600 yards with these things or fucking, yo, it's, it's still like some fucking 2007 bullshit, but. Yeah. So, uh, yeah, we're having a great time. It is, it is absolutely fantastic.

• 1:39:08Jocko Willink?

  And how long is this deployment?

• 1:39:09Speaker 02

  It's a short one. It's like four months. Uh, at that point, three, four, yeah, I think it was four months. So we're doing short tours at this point. Uh, yeah, I end up, I, I fucking shred my shoulder on this one too. Uh, same thing. Like I didn't go home because, uh, you know, fucking boys, we're, we're fucking hurting. Probably ended up doing a lot more damage to this fucking thing just because I stayed in the, in the fucking fight. Uh, so I'm fucked up when we get home. Uh, gotta go and get this fucking hospi- get this worked on.

• 1:39:35Jocko Willink?

  Did you need surgery?

• 1:39:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:39:37Jocko Willink?

  Sure.

• 1:39:37Speaker 02

  Yeah. So they put it back together the first time. It pretty much takes me out of the 2008 fight. Uh, something went wrong, so they got a fucking cut on it again.

• 1:39:49Speaker 02

  The next year, fucking kind of worked through that.

• 1:39:53Speaker 02

  The docs end up telling me, I can't remember if they told me this then or then when I retired, but they're like, hey, man, you got a limited number of times in your life you can let your hands over your head. So, you know, use them well. Like, damn, yeah, fuck, yeah. Uh, anyway, but, uh, yeah, that was, that was, that was the fucking tour.

• 1:40:09Jocko Willink?

  So, did you get to do another deployment after that or were you too banged up?

• 1:40:13Speaker 02

  No, uh, it wasn't even that I was too banged up either, cause like, you know, at this point, I'm gonna, I'm gonna keep fuck going as long as I can. Like, fuck what the fucking doctor said. Uh, but I can't go on the 2008 trip. Uh, and then the boys come back, we get a new, new commander and he's, he's, he's kind of shit, they were being honest. He, he don't really deploy, so he started trying to get us into some other bullshit, like go to, I don't fucking Pakistan and train the Pakistani counterterrorism guys, some bullshit. But, uh, it, it, what, what the fuck else happened then? Oh, yeah. So I'm like, fuck this and go to a SMU selection, uh, somehow train up enough to fucking get to go to that. It didn't work out for me. Um, yeah, we get back, get on a fucking awesome team, uh, probably the most stacked team I've ever been on.

• 1:40:55Speaker 02

  And we end up going, uh, we're, we're fucking Blackwater doing a train up to do some bullshit. And, uh, we go to a fucking bar, cause the chief's going away. Our, that's our warrant officer, not a chief like yours. But, uh, our warrant officer is, he's finally getting promoted off the fucking team. He's been there forever. He's an awesome guy. Uh, so we go out, you know, drinking and shit one night. And in that way that, you know, sometimes just bad shit happens. We got a, a really fucking young dude with us. He's like, like 25, 26, x-rayed, but awesome guy. Uh, he fought with us in '07, uh, but he looks pretty, he's, he's, you know, fucking looks like he's somebody you could kick shit out of. He's a fucking, met that biker, decided they're gonna fucking jump him.

• 1:41:36Speaker 02

  And, uh, well, there was a fucking whole split team there and we kicked the fucking shit out of these guys. Uh, he's got, a lot of these dudes are in the hospital, like it's, it's not great. Uh, the thing that we fail at is we do not eat and eat well enough. Uh, you know, shit happens, get picked up at the fucking county line by the cops and the, and the fucking big white van. And next thing I know, we're in fucking jail, uh, shit's not, shit's not going great.

• 1:41:59Speaker 02

  Security clearance is suspended. Yeah, commands like they're wanting to fucking book at us, they're not happy. Uh, actually, it's kind of shitty, nobody ever even asks what fucking happens. They're just like, fuck you guys, this is what's going on. Uh, can't even be in this building anymore if you don't have clearance, so fucking handing all of our shit. And, uh, gets into the fucking schoolhouse. To teach.

• 1:42:20Jocko Willink?

  Damn.

• 1:42:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, it sucked.

• 1:42:22Jocko Willink?

  How about you guys? Did you fuck up those dudes?

• 1:42:26Speaker 02

  Pretty good.

• 1:42:27Jocko Willink?

  Hospitalized?

• 1:42:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, someone went to hospital. Yeah, there was some, there was some bad shit, but what nobody ever asked is, uh, you know, why? Well, it was fucking twenty of them. All right, fuck six of us. I threw them, jumped my fucking guy. You're gonna have to fight fucking savage. Like, you got a number like that, especially dudes that are on crank and shit. Like, you're gonna have to fuck, come with it. And, you know, also for being totally fucking honest by that point in the fucking war, like if, like if some fucking fist fighting bullshit happens, like, you, you're probably gonna start going a little further with it than you should have, but, uh, yeah, we did fuck them up pretty bad, but, oh, well, shit happens.

• 1:42:58Jocko Willink?

  And, like, no one was like, hey, dude, all right, look, like, here's your rehab program. Let's get you to the schoolhouse for a little while. We'll get you straightened out.

• 1:43:07Speaker 02

  Nope.

• 1:43:07Jocko Willink?

  We'll get you security.

• 1:43:10Speaker 02

  They're, they're coming at us with UCMJ. Uh, we're also under, like, you know, felony fucking assault and diamond by the civilian world. Uh, these fucking assholes launched a civil suit. They thought we were Blackwater guys, so they launched a civil suit too, so they think they're gonna get some contract money out of us. And then we, uh, they also give us a GOMAR, which is a general officer's memorandum of record, which is basically like a, it's a thing that they can do that's not technically UCMJ, but it goes in your book that says like, you know, hey, Clay is a fucking asshole and never promoted him.

• 1:43:39Speaker 02

  And even when you hire, you can't fight that one. Like, that one just sticks no matter what. Uh, we're fortunate, we don't get our tabs revoked, uh, and I was spending like a year and a half at the schoolhouse, uh, teaching, finally beat all the civilian charges and shit, because, again, these motherfuckers started it, and, uh, that's, you know, you know, you're not gonna go to jail for that. Uh, but, yeah, I mean, damage, security measures were steer, restored, but, you know, damage is done by then.

• 1:44:04Jocko Willink?

  And when you say damage is done, wha- what do you mean? Like, bro, like? I was a leader, a leader in the teams and like you have guys that get in fights sometimes.

• 1:44:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:44:15Jocko Willink?

  It sucks and you have to keep them out of it, but like, okay, they're going to pay their dues. Maybe they get busted down, maybe they get, you know, sent to the schoolhouse or whatever. And then you go, okay, cool. You're done. You understand you can't do that shit anymore?

• 1:44:26Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:44:26Jocko Willink?

  That was a big mistake that you made. You know that? You're not going to do it again? Cool. Come back over here. We're going to put you back to work. We got shit we gotta do.

• 1:44:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:44:33Jocko Willink?

  Do you get none of that?

• 1:44:34Speaker 02

  No, well, because some other shit happens initially there too. So a couple of guys recover from this that were not at the school with me. Just now they go back to teams, but they won't let me leave the CQB course because I had to find somebody to fucking replace me. Basically you need another guy that has this CQB qualification to be able to teach this, you know, sub CQB qualification. So it's my fucking turn to go back to a team, but I keep getting fucked out of that because they, I don't know, some fucking enlisted bullshit, but they won't find a fucking guy. The, the fucking one that really fucking hurt me here was, uh, teams are now coming through because when you're teaching stuff, it gets entire ODAs that show up. And like every other class or something, some ODA team sergeant is like, hey, man, fucking, I'll trade fucking, what's it nice for you?

• 1:45:18Speaker 02

  Like you're fucking awesome at this shit. You want to go? Like, hell yeah, let's go, fucking go. I'm supposed to go to my guy, uh, that I do from the SIF for, he was a warrant officer, Mike Duskin's team. Mike is like a fucking legend of SF. This dude is fucking awesome. He's fucking like six foot, he's so goddamn big that he can't go to Halo school. Like he, like a square shoot cannot support it. He's like fucking six foot seven, like three 20 of like fucking twisted steel.

• 1:45:43Speaker 02

  One time like the fucking New York Jets came out to the Sifert or some bullshit to, uh, to like, you know, see a mod demo and they saw Mike and were like, you play any ball? And you're like, fuck you guys. I'm going to kill some fucking half hands. Anyway, I'm supposed to go to fucking Mike's team, like all the handshake deal gets fucking made and like the last minute, like the, uh, the fucking, I don't know, some fucking asshole on the sergeant major mafia like pulls a rug and I don't get to go. And, uh, Mike gets killed, uh, in Afghanistan, uh, just like fucking month into the fucking trip. And I'm like, fuck. And right before this.

• 1:46:19Speaker 02

  I guess right around the same time that maybe it was right before, I think it was right before. Uh, I've gone in now, I'm also fucked up, like physically, like my shit's a fucking mess. Next fucking slipped disc, all this shit. I'm, I'm having to go in once in a while to get fucking pain meds, uh, not from like the group doctors, but from like the army doctors. Cause that's where like the, you know, narcotics and fucking oxygen shit is. So I go in there one day and this was, uh, fucking 2012. This is right when Obama was kinda doing that. You remember that purge? I don't know if it happened in the Navy, I know it happened in the Army and Marine Corps. There was like a purge of dudes on the medical side. They had, at Bragg, they had like, guys like going through medical records of everybody, trying to find people to disqualify them. Uh, to get, to get fucking rid of them.

• 1:47:00Speaker 02

  Uh, so I'm gonna get my fucking shit. They're like, holy fuck, you should have been out like a long time ago. You're getting med boarded. I'm like, fuck you say, like, I'll fight that shit. At a, a couple of weeks later, that's when Mike gets fucking killed and they're, they're pushing this med board shit and I'm fine. Like, you know what? Fuck it, you know, this is it, you know, fucking, that's it, fucking done.

• 1:47:22Jocko Willink?

  How long was it from med board, you're done till you're out of the army?

• 1:47:26Speaker 02

  Oh, like fucking nine months. It was fast. Yeah, it was real fast.

• 1:47:30Jocko Willink?

  And what are you doing in the meantime? You keep, keep, uh, keep teaching at the school?

• 1:47:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm still teaching at school. Uh, I can't, I can't even really put armor on anymore. So I'll teach like the marksmanship phase, but, uh, somebody else has to fucking go in the house with the shit. Uh, yeah, do that until the, the fucking process finishes.

• 1:47:47Jocko Willink?

  And then how were you, once you retired, how'd that work out for you?

• 1:47:51Speaker 02

  Fuck me dude, holy shit.

• 1:47:54Speaker 02

  I was a fucking disaster. Alright. Among like the many things that go wrong when you get medically retired, like one, you weren't like financially setting yourself up for this. You like had another five years. So I got like a fucking, you know, brand new F-150 with all the leather seats and fucking whatever bullshit and fucking thousand dollar truck payment. I haven't like, you know, really prepared for an outside thing, uh, so I don't know what the fuck I'm gonna do either. And, uh, yeah, I don't know how to deal with like money and like fucking business. I, I have actually no idea what the fuck I'm supposed to do when I grow up.

• 1:48:28Jocko Willink?

  All this grown up shit.

• 1:48:31Speaker 02

  It's a lot better when somebody just gave me like bullets and you know you can fucking you know have an omelet at the chow hall if you want like okay like I like I can live with that. Uh so yeah, it kinda kinda just fucking comes apart actually. Uh and you know also like if you're this is something that I I've heard now from a lot of the just like medically retired like when you've done a job for your entire life and involves like your body and like being tough and fucking performance you see this actually from like NFL guys and shit like that too when they get like fucked up and they can't play anymore. When somebody tells you that like well your shit's fucking broken and you can't do this like it's it like fucks you up on like a different level you're like that was my identity and like what am I now and I don't know.

• 1:49:15Speaker 02

  So yeah, so.

• 1:49:17Jocko Willink?

  Talk like where are you living you live in an apartment you're you're married at the time right you got any kids?

• 1:49:21Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:49:21Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 1:49:22Speaker 02

  Thank God.

• 1:49:22Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. So you're married you wait you live in an apartment somewhere?

• 1:49:25Speaker 02

  No I got a house.

• 1:49:26Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 1:49:26Speaker 02

  I got a house in Fayetteville cuz it's funny my uh my ex-wife was uh also fucking captain alright so we're making fucking good money like I got like a nice house like nice shit. I'm fucking E7 with like.

• 1:49:37Jocko Willink?

  Freaking officer.

• 1:49:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:49:39Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:40Speaker 02

  Yeah exactly right and plus you got all the special duty pay like demo pay halo all this shit.

• 1:49:48Speaker 02

  So yes now I'm out and I have absolutely fucking no I had no idea what the fuck to do with myself. Uh ex-wife is like absolutely fucking freaking out like you're gonna fucking go get a job at UPS or some shit like you can't just sit at home and turn into a fucking alcoholic and uh I also freak out a little bit on that one like I I'm also I've lost this idea like fucking bitch I was writing a fucking skids of fucking helicopter go kill people fucking two years ago now fucking I don't know I'm not going to I'm not fucking loading boxes on the plane to UPS. Uh so I start going a little bit fucking crazy like okay what what am I qualified to do like be fucking arms dealer uh like a legit one but you know I got you know I got buddies in the fucking business like alright fucking you know whatever whatever this is.

• 1:50:30Speaker 02

  Uh you know do some little you know bullshit contractor stuff but uh mostly what I do is fucking fall apart. Uh cuz this is also I can see with retrospect being in the army and being commando fucking Johnny is the only glue that has kept all of my fucking terrible childhood like in one piece okay so now I am fucking absolutely losing my shit.

• 1:50:58Speaker 02

  Also, I don't know if it was like this for you when you got out, but for me, it was, it was also, it was like hitting puberty again. Like in this, in this context of like, you know, emotions and fucking shit that you can't fucking handle. Uh, see, I never expected to live to thirty. Oh, fuck, that was, that was, there were people dying and shit like, fucking shit was crazy back in the early part of the war. All of a sudden, like, uh, you know, you're gonna live through this, like, probably potentially a long time, like, fuck, fucking survivor's guilt, like, why fucking these guys die and I didn't, uh, what the fuck am I? Uh, and also like the, the fucking, like the real hormonal shit, like, just starts coming out of fucking the woodwork. I am like coming fucking apart. I'm fucking, I'm a crazy person all day long, every day.

• 1:51:40Jocko Willink?

  So what is that, what does that mean? Like, are you drinking all day?

• 1:51:43Speaker 02

  No, well, I'm

• 1:51:45Jocko Willink?

  Are you angry? You pissed off? You smashing shit?

• 1:51:47Speaker 02

  No, no, I'm, I'm drinking a bottle of booze every night, but not, not all day. Uh, mostly what it is, this is where it becomes like this, right? Mostly it becomes like a, like a, like a sexual thing, we're being totally honest. Like, uh, I, it's like I'm being fifteen again, except now I got grown man muscles and a grown man fucking paycheck. And I actually ended up having this conversation with my ex-wife, uh, cause I'm like, I'm going down to Florida all the time to do, uh, like arms dealer shit. I'm also shooting competitively at this time. I'm in the company that I was doing it for, I was doing this while I was teaching CQB too, you know, keep your skills up. It's based out of Florida. And I tell my ex-wife, I'm like, hey, look, uh, I don't know if you've ever been to Florida too, cause it's, it's, it's a weird place down there. I'm like, they're fucking grown ass women fucking throwing themselves at me all day long, cause if they're over thirty-five, they can't get a date in Florida, cause that's how weird that place is.

• 1:52:33Speaker 02

  It really is, it's fucking true. Hey, everybody's beautiful and made from, uh, you know, Miami fucking plastic surgeons. Like the, the cougars down there, like rolling packs, you're like, holy fuck, like this shit's crazy. Uh, so that, that becomes the expression for me. I gotta be fucking five, six, roll for like, I'm, I'm doing all kinds of fucking terrible shit, which, and I don't even try to hide it very well. So of course that marriage goes up in fucking smoke. I'm divorced, I don't give a fuck, like, uh, I I do this all in like a really shitty way too like it's it's nothing is good.

• 1:53:06Speaker 02

  I'm also like in a weird way like like suicidal like not like you know I'm gonna fucking spark my head up but kind of you'll have those thought or I'll have those thoughts like. Oh fuck man that was it you know I I I played my my quarters in the fuck machine like what am I gonna do now I go sell Kraft macaroni and cheese I don't give a fuck about any shit. Maybe this is just where I ended. Uh I'll see it another way that uh that I see with a lot of guys later is uh. There'd be a legend of SF like not too long before this uh that OD's on heroin six months after he retires.

• 1:53:37Speaker 02

  I I'll I'll see this not heroin but this similar type of of thing happen to me we're like I'll just do crazy fucking shit because I I kinda wanna die. But not enough to like off myself but you know fucking drink a fifth of Jack Daniels and go drive a goddamn uh car around the mountains as fast as I can like trying to break the fucking record knowing. It's it's intentionally doing like fuck it whatever. So uh yeah I spent this couple of years just I mean a fucking mess.

• 1:54:05Speaker 02

  What pulls you out of it?

• 1:54:10Speaker 02

  Finally through like a weird twist of fate. Uh I go I go TJ contract in Oakland which gives me you know a good chunk of money in my in my pocket for a little bit. And I uh end up uh. Two for a gun company going to fucking Idaho. And I met who is now my wife uh there alright and she's fucking awesome uh. But uh she's also putting up like absolutely none of my fucking bullshit.

• 1:54:39Speaker 02

  Like like like fucking none of it. Uh you know she's fucking gangster as fuck uh. And like as I am interacting with her in this this fucking way I'm like oh this is the fucking one like this is this is it uh. Like I gotta go home clean up all this other bullshit though cuz I got. All kinds of fucking messes at home like, you know, fucking five, six girlfriends, different styles, all this fucking terrible shit.

• 1:54:59Jocko Willink?

  Were you living in Fayetteville still?

• 1:55:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, uh, I'm north there in Stanford. I'm like, I got like a room at like a flop house with like a buddy that owns a fucking ammo company.

• 1:55:09Jocko Willink?

  Disaster.

• 1:55:10Speaker 02

  Disaster, yeah. Yeah, when I've left my house, I left with like all my guns and ammo and like, you know, fucking two pairs of underwear and a t-shirt, you know, my shit is fucked, baby. She'll eventually like, like, I've got like a mattress on the floor, like a tough box with a lamp on it. Yeah, she's like, what the fuck? But yeah, a fucking total mess.

• 1:55:28Jocko Willink?

  Uh huh.

• 1:55:29Speaker 02

  Uh, so now I, I have something now that I had to fucking unfuck my life for. As I, she ain't gonna put up no bullshit either, like, like you're gonna have to fucking come correct if you wanna fucking play with me, like, okay. Uh, so I do, I go home and fucking clean up all my messes, uh, fucking X out all these fucking, you know, silly bitches, throw my shit in the fucking truck and, uh, drive to Idaho.

• 1:55:50Jocko Willink?

  God's country.

• 1:55:52Speaker 02

  God's country.

• 1:55:53Jocko Willink?

  And what'd you do once you got up there? Like, what were you doing for work?

• 1:55:56Speaker 02

  Nothing. I still had a pile of money from this contract shit, so, you know, I can kinda relax for a minute. And, uh, this is maybe also the first time I, I like take a fucking breather, like, maybe we should plan something.

• 1:56:06Jocko Willink?

  Turns out I'm gonna be around a little while, a little longer than I thought I was gonna be around for. Right? You started to develop in this fob of this Ford operating base a little bit.

• 1:56:16Speaker 02

  Right. Exactly, fucking right.

• 1:56:19Jocko Willink?

  And then, so what's, what's next?

• 1:56:22Speaker 02

  Oh, so, uh,

• 1:56:25Jocko Willink?

  So you moved to Idaho?

• 1:56:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:56:27Jocko Willink?

  You're up there, what are you doing? Take a little time off?

• 1:56:29Speaker 02

  Take a little time off, uh, very, very quickly, uh, she's pregnant with my son. Uh, so, yeah. And I've also stepped into, in a lot of ways, like, a cluster fuck of a different sort. Because, uh, she has three daughters.

• 1:56:44Jocko Willink?

  True.

• 1:56:45Speaker 02

  That are teenagers.

• 1:56:46Jocko Willink?

  True, check.

• 1:56:47Speaker 02

  I have like, uh, zero seconds as a fucking parent. So, this fucking shit is at, well, actually, she comes, she comes to North Carolina to drive back with me with my, you know, like, one pickup load of, of shit that I own. And, uh, while we're gone, uh, the youngest one, the fucking fifteen year old, like, runs away from home and is like doing all kinds of fucking crazy criminal shit.

• 1:57:10Speaker 02

  So grandma was watching me at toilet, toilet was fucking terrible. So like, we're like three days away, Carrie's like, you gotta drive faster because this just happened and like, yeah, we gotta fucking deal with this. I'm like, okay. So Carrie is also, we're getting to know each other at this point and she's not ever had any like really great relationships. She's been with like a lot of dudes that are like fucking, you know, useless, fucking retards, or they got, they got no fucking skin in the game. They're not really like in it to fucking win it. You know, nobody's like ever really like fucking stepped up for her before. Uh, well, that's one thing I'm gonna get at. Here we go. So we get back, uh, fucking, like basically developed this network across Boise through all like the fucking criminal underground. I'm like hunting for these fucking kids and fucking running people around all night.

• 1:57:55Speaker 02

  Doing all this crazy shit and get the fucking kid back and uh, she ends up having to go to fucking juvie though, because like some, some bad crime has been committed in the meantime. Uh, yeah, Carrie's pregnant and uh, you know, we get married and uh, yeah, we're just kind of relaxed for a minute and like figure out like what the fuck do you want to do when you grow up?

• 1:58:14Jocko Willink?

  Well, the good, I always tell, when you guys ask me, you're like, who, what do you do when you get out? What do you, what do you gotta watch out for? Well, hey, how do you avoid like going down the spiral? And I'm always like, you gotta find a new mission. You gotta find a new mission. You gotta find a new mission. And it's like, here you were doing all this crazy shit, dumb shit, but then you meet this girl and it's like, oh, now I got a mission. Like now I got a new mission. Like I'm, I'm gonna take care of this girl. I'm gonna step up, be a man and get after it.

• 1:58:34Speaker 02

  Hundred percent true.

• 1:58:35Jocko Willink?

  And there you go.

• 1:58:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:58:37Jocko Willink?

  Including doing some freaking underground networking. Greater Idaho, freaking recover.

• 1:58:46Jocko Willink?

  So then when did the writing start?

• 1:58:48Speaker 02

  Okay. So as this is, so now I'm also like, I can't do like contractor shit. I'm like, I'm not gonna raise like my son. And plus, you know, we've got teenage, we gotta still take care of them. Like I gotta find something else to do that, that is uh, for money. And you'll probably didn't even actually get a retirement check, but I want more money or a little bit more. So it's, it's funny. I actually do end up stacking boxes at FedEx, fucking loading the box, fucking playing for a minute. But I get a job because of my competitive shooting background stuff. Uh, with this, like basically online magazine about guns called Guns America Digest. And you know, they'll fucking pay me to review guns and uh, I've, I've tried to get a real job in Boise and I've tried to, you know,

• 1:59:30Speaker 02

  I've, I've worked for FedEx, I've done all this shit and none of this shit's fucking working, uh, really. So I'm like, okay, fuck it. I'll do this writing thing. I'll see if it made good at. And it turns out that, yeah, I can write really fast, at least, and write pretty fucking well. Uh, I can sure fuck take pictures and I can fucking shoot a gun. So this works out. Uh, I do that for a while. It starts getting really fucking old too, though. As, uh, I don't know about like how you are with guns, but I'm with guns like as a fucking tool. I gotta go fuck what gun it is like. Okay, fucking carry Glock for the next hundred years. Like, oh, you can't have a Glock anymore. What we have here, fucking some other bullshit. Like, I don't, I don't fucking care about guns. As long as I have one, like, that's my tool, like, it's fine. So I'm not, like, into this gun shit either, you know?

• 2:00:11Speaker 02

  I'm fucking covering like fifteen ARs a year in, uh, in this fucking magazine, like, god damn it. Like, they all have mag pull furniture in the black. Like, I don't give a fuck. So, uh, one day I sit down, I'm like, how many words did I write last month about, you know, fucking stupid guns? It's, it's a lot. It's like forty thousand or something. Like, how long is a novel? I don't know, fifty thousand, like, lightbulb. I'm like,

• 2:00:35Speaker 02

  well, fuck it. I'm at least gonna try this other thing. I'm gonna try to write books and see if I can. And, uh, maybe that will be, you know, a little more creative and expressive than, uh, writing about fucking guns.

• 2:00:47Jocko Willink?

  So you start hammering.

• 2:00:48Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:00:48Jocko Willink?

  What was your methodology for writing?

• 2:00:51Speaker 02

  So, this is a funny thing. A lot of the other, like, gun reporters and shit, like, they're trying to write a book. Well, this is the kind of shit that we'll talk about when we go to, like, a conference. Or we go to, we all go to Smith and Wesson to see the new gun. Well, when it's over, we're not talking about the fucking gun. We're talking about writing a new show. Like, what kind of typewriter do you have, man? I'm a fucking badass, dude. What did you jock with? You with Microsoft Word? Are you a fucking Apache open source? Like, you know, some crazy shit. So, uh, one of them turns me on to, man, I hate to give this guy any critics, he's such a fucking weirdo now, but he is an awesome writer. Uh, Stephen King's On Writing, which is a great book for learning how to write. And it could actually really be boiled down to like fucking three things. Uh, use the least amount of words possible. I don't write a fucking full description of a bunch of bullshit. Uh, and the method is, sit the fuck down at the typewriter and write.

• 2:01:35Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's the method.

• 2:01:36Speaker 02

  That's it. That's how it works. Uh, so I take this to fucking heart and, uh, it turns out that it works really well for me.

• 2:01:42Jocko Willink?

  So you wrote a couple. Was it, was it two novels you wrote out of the gate?

• 2:01:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, wrote two novels out of the gate. Uh, Fuck, I can't remember their names right now. Give me a second. My brain's fucking partially switched off. Last of the war.

• 2:01:54Jocko Willink?

  Last of the war.

• 2:01:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, sort of, sort of caliphate.

• 2:01:56Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:56Speaker 02

  So when you write your first novel, you, you learn a lot, write your first novel. I wrote the first one from like a first person perspective and I wrote it in like a very limited uh, setting. Like it was kind of stuck in a way of like you had to be right here. And but it was over, I'm like, fuck, that was hard because you, we can't, we can't have this segue where we went to Paris or, you know, there's only one character, so there's not a lot of dialogue. Uh, but it turned out that writing books actually was really fucking easy. Uh, that first one I wrote in thirty days. Uh, and I wrote it at night between, after my wife went to bed between like ten, four in the morning. Uh, it's funny, like she, a couple of times, like she would wake up in the middle of the night, come down and like shack up me. The last time, like, what the fuck are you doing? She's like, I can't see you for walking, watching porn in the basement. Like, god damn it. Like, no, look at this fucking outline. This is beautiful.

• 2:02:39Jocko Willink?

  Look at my craft.

• 2:02:41Speaker 02

  Right, right. But, uh, I mean, I can see why. She's like, that's the craziest shit I've ever fucking heard. You can't just stay up all night and write novels. But you can. So, yeah, fucking hammer that one out. Uh, like I said, it takes like, like a month and, uh, self-publish it and, uh, you know, had like moderate success. It was, it was good.

• 2:02:58Jocko Willink?

  When you say moderate success, what do you mean?

• 2:03:00Speaker 02

  I mean, you know, it's not like I was gonna be on the fucking New York Times bestseller list or any shit, but it, it made money.

• 2:03:04Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:04Speaker 02

  Like, I sold enough copies that like, you know, I get a, I get a check for some money from Amazon. I'm like, hell yeah, dog.

• 2:03:10Jocko Willink?

  I got this.

• 2:03:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, like, hey, this is awesome. The nice thing about books too is residual. That's for life. You know? Yeah. So, uh,

• 2:03:18Jocko Willink?

  And then from those novels, you get into, uh, kind of like a little bit more talking about, well, I guess the thing I was gonna say survival, but yeah, and I was like, well, is it really survival? But then I looked at the name of the book. It's like,

• 2:03:29Speaker 02

  Survival.

• 2:03:29Jocko Willink?

  Urban survival. Uh, and, and, uh, you get into these books, um, which are like, like a little bit more, I guess they're not, they're, well, they're definitely nonfiction because they're talking about like,

• 2:03:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:03:39Jocko Willink?

  One's a guidebook for surviving a civil war. The other one's, uh, guide to urban survival.

• 2:03:43Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:03:44Jocko Willink?

  And what was your thought behind these things? This is now twenty twenty when you're writing these things.

• 2:03:50Speaker 02

  Twenty nineteen.

• 2:03:51Jocko Willink?

  Twenty nineteen?

• 2:03:52Speaker 02

  Twenty nineteen and twenty twenty. Yeah. So, as you like decide that you're a writer for a living, like you're trying to discover like how, what's your fucking method? Uh, so like I said, with the first one, first, okay, like, okay, there was, there was shit about that that I didn't like. So, next one, next one. I'm gonna write a bunch of characters in a bunch of fucking different places.

• 2:04:11Speaker 02

  It turns out that's really easy too, because I base all the characters on my ex teammates. Like, I'll change their names, but you know, that way I'll get to think about like, hey, what the fuck would Jocko do? It's also funny when you're a real boy and you're writing like a Commando Johnny novel. You actually have to nurture friends because all of them are actually like, know how to do all the shit if they're 20, they fucking blow up every year. You gotta be like, oh, and then we had to go get Bill that could, you know, actually put the fucking deck, you know, shut the fuck, yeah. Anyway, so I write that one. At that point too, I get enough success that I get a literary agent. Like, so, you know, I got contract and he's trying to shop around to like the, uh, the fucking big boy companies. And this is where you learn how the book business works and the way that book business works is fucking terrible.

• 2:04:51Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, the publishing world is very strange. Well, you're lucky, you're lucky you're living in, we're living in a time where you don't need those people if you don't want them.

• 2:04:58Speaker 02

  No, you don't.

• 2:04:59Jocko Willink?

  You can go ahead and just publish stuff yourself. They're not getting any of your money. You'll get it all.

• 2:05:03Speaker 02

  You will get it all.

• 2:05:03Jocko Willink?

  Amazon's gonna get their cut.

• 2:05:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. But hey, that, that cut is a lot less. Amazon is a way better deal for, I'll end up meeting some cool people later, like I like Tucker Max, who's, you know, hugely successful author. And he'd be like, yeah, unless somebody offers you like a half a million dollar advance, like you tell the traditional public companies to go fuck themselves. Like, this is the way it's done. So, uh, anyway. So I've got an agent now, so he's got control of the books. All right. But I'm still having to do the, uh, the gun bullshit because this isn't making enough money. All right. But, uh, I end up writing a series of like really successful articles about urban survival. I don't even know why I got in this fucking kick of urban survival, but I, you know, I did used to teach it. I was tied to advance urban combat. Uh, so I just like go down the rabbit hole and day like, what would I do? Like, if, like she got real fucking, like fucking zombies, you know, whatever, fucking, you know,

• 2:05:50Speaker 02

  Mad Max world and there's fucking biker gangs with fucking Uzis, you know, whatever. And I write this series of articles. And it is, it like breaks out of like gun world and like it's very fucking popular. People are like, holy shit. And the company's like, can you keep writing this fucking bullshit? Because like people are eating this shit up. And I'm like, oh, fuck, like this is the key. All right. We'll try nonfiction then. Like, uh, I'll write. Also, I moved to Oregon at this point. Okay? Oregon is a weird fucking place. Like when you're not in like Portland, when you're like outside of Oregon. Uh, you know, it's

• 2:06:22Jocko Willink?

  Isn't Portland a weird place too?

• 2:06:24Speaker 02

  Probably. I've never, I've never stepped foot in the motherfucker. I don't know, but

• 2:06:27Jocko Willink?

  That's where they had the freaking, the, what was the autonic, all the, the, the autonomic zone? What was it?

• 2:06:36Speaker 02

  We would know the Chaz was in Seattle.

• 2:06:37Jocko Willink?

  Oh, that was in Seattle?

• 2:06:38Speaker 02

  Which is just as weird, yeah. But Portland might as well be the fucking Chaz. It's, it's a whole different fucked up shit. Uh, but Oregon, the state is weird in it like a different way. Alright, so Oregon's home or Portland's home of like Antifa and all this shit. Like this is the spiritual home of it. But there's a re, there's kind of a fucking reason. Cause when you get into rural Oregon, you will see shit go the other way. Uh, Oregon is the only place I've ever seen where like dudes are like flying like swastikas from their trucks. Like, like fucking, like

• 2:07:05Jocko Willink?

  Straight up.

• 2:07:05Speaker 02

  Like, like stickers too. Like they're going to work this way. And there's the Antifa guys are like, it's like, it's like war, kind of war in the streets in like a way that like, Kind of makes Crips and Bloods look like fucking nothing. I'm like, holy fuck. And these are like, I'm like, holy, like no wonder fucking Portland's so fucked up. Like, Like I've been to like Alabama, Mississippi. I've never seen any shit like this in my fucking life.

• 2:07:27Jocko Willink?

  Oh shit.

• 2:07:27Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I kind of look at this like this is, there's a potential here of conflict that is like sectarian as Iraq was like, like if this ever like really like these motherfuckers are going to kill each other to like the, there's no reconciling this, right? So that's what starts me in the rabbit. Unless we're thinking about like, hey, what the fuck would I do if like this kind of shit like kicked off? And I don't want to be on either side. I want to fucking protect my fucking bullshit over here and let these guys kill each other. Uh, so that's where I started with the, uh, with this book. And, uh, kind of twist of fate. I, I finish it or I get it. It's all the way finished. Get my agent to like start shopping it around. So now I've got an agent. I had to play it this way. Alright, he has control. Alright, he says where it gets published and somebody's got to buy it from a publishing company.

• 2:08:11Speaker 02

  And so this is like, uh, oh shit. So it's like December of like 2019. Nobody wants a fucking survival book. Alright, all the fucking public are like, no, that's fucking stupid. Like nobody wants your bullshit. Uh, you know,

• 2:08:25Jocko Willink?

  There's no conceivable way that any of this could ever happen.

• 2:08:28Speaker 02

  There's absolutely no market for this.

• 2:08:30Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:31Speaker 02

  So, uh,

• 2:08:32Jocko Willink?

  What do you think? There's going to be some kind of a global pandemic that shuts the entire country down? What are you talking about here?

• 2:08:39Speaker 02

  So I've got it and it's like eighty percent finished and I'm not even working anymore. Cause I'm like, I'm disappointed that it hasn't sold and I can't self-publish it either at this point. Cause I got this fucking agent. Yeah. So twist of fucking fate. Uh, my contract with that agent comes up like June 1st of 2020. So like the pandemic has like already been going on and uh, that's when the riots start. That's when the summer of love kicks off, right? Fucking there's the George Floyd shit and everybody's going fuck bananas. And like the fucking hour at midnight when my contract ends with that agent, I'm like on Amazon self-publish like print. In fact, the first one doesn't even have like a real code. It's got like

• 2:09:20Speaker 02

  a fucking white sheet with, you know, Microsoft word writing of this bullshit and uh, fucking throwing on social media and it takes off. All right. It sells like incredibly fucking well. Uh, I get, yeah, I'm, I'm making like a good fucking amount of money, which is important because uh, my fucking house burned down in uh, January 2020. From what? Did a random house fire or was it a forest fire or some shit? No, uh, random house fire. Uh, we're out of town. We're in fucking Oregon. We were having some problems with this house. Like I was suing the dude that fucking sold to me cause they like concealed some structural bullshit that fucking wasn't right. Uh, I don't know. It's a fucking small mountain town. It's in Idaho city, Idaho, which is uh, way outside of Boise, town of like 400 people. Uh, next thing I know, I go to town, my fucking house

• 2:10:01Speaker 02

  burns down. And then they say that they're not gonna pay for the lawsuit. Fucking amazing. Uh, so this is all fucking bad shit. We're living in a, we're living now in a fucking rental house in Boise with like, you know, whatever bullshit we had on our fucking backs. Uh, this is gonna end up being a fucking pain in the ass too. There's uh, there's, there's some sketchy shit with this fucking fire. Uh, and basically I, I have, the only thing that is even ever gonna be remotely a save is I'm, I'm double insured. All right. That's because I have fucking TBI. So I'm paying USAA who's been like my guys for, you know, fucking 20 years, uh, house insurance and my wife. Is paying AMIG, uh, which has been hurt insurance company for like 20 years.

• 2:10:44Speaker 02

  Fucking the way it works when you're double insured is you don't get paid twice. Uh, you each company is responsible for half. AMIG will eventually like three years later pay out their half. Uh, fucking USA's ratchet bastards though never pay shit. Alright, so yeah, so it's fucking June 1st, 2020. We're fucking broke. We got nothing. Uh, but I had a fucking, uh, computer like cloud. No, I didn't even have a computer cloud backup. I had sent a copy of this to one of my buddies, like an email to like, you know, read over like, hey, is this any good? And I remember that and I call him like, dude, please fucking tell me you're still got this motherfucking manuscript. And he's like, yep, here you go. Wham. Finish it up. It sells incredibly fucking well. That's actually the thing that saves us is I don't know. I mean, like fucking a hundred grand off his book or some shit in like fucking six months.

• 2:11:28Speaker 02

  Cause it's the time too, right? Like fucking.

• 2:11:30Jocko Willink?

  Perfect time.

• 2:11:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, covid is fucking bananas. Uh, so while that's going on, real quick, uh, flip it over and write the other one, write Prairie Fire, which is kind of the, uh, the second half of it. Cause it's about how to do shit like an urban environment or a rural environment. And, uh, yeah.

• 2:11:44Jocko Willink?

  There you go. Um, you get a pretty cool section in here in concrete jungle. You go like this whole martial arts thing, which of course I freaking queued into.

• 2:11:53Speaker 02

  Hell yeah.

• 2:11:53Jocko Willink?

  Chapter six ninja fighting 101, nunchucks and throwing stars. But it's great. You know, you kind of break down a bunch of different, uh, a bunch of different martial arts. What's good? What's bad? Muay Thai, boxing, of course, judo, uh, Brazilian jiu jitsu. And then you get into the bad. What else you got there? Oh, you got wrestling, obviously.

• 2:12:14Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:12:15Jocko Willink?

  Uh, MMA and shoe fighting. And then you go into the bad and it's, yeah, good stuff. And you know, that's one chapter, but there's a bunch of chapters and about all kinds of different things. That's good shit to know.

• 2:12:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, it is, man. And it's, uh, you, it's something that like I haven't learned until a lot later in life too. One known how to fight with your hands is important for one. Alright, that's that's number one. But the other thing is, like, we can do shit in the military where we can, like, build aggression and all with, like, guns. We have unlimited ammo and we can do fucking crazy shit. For a normal dude, though, like, the best way to build, like, some fucking, like, warrior spirit and, uh, and all this other shit is is fighting. It's it's great for soldiers and shit, too. But it's, I think it's more important, actually, for civilian people. Not even that they should ever fucking fight without a weapon. But when you're comfortable with a fucking grown ass man that can whip your ass whipping your ass, alright? Or you know, as when you're fucking new jujitsu and like some big or even small dude that really knows the fuck he's doing.

• 2:13:10Speaker 02

  He's just gonna hold you on the floor, which is very uncomfortable. Getting through that discomfort is actually more valuable than knowing how to do an arm bar. Being able to, like, survive or knowing that you can take a hit or knowing that, you know, I didn't just die because somebody pressed their sweaty fucking chest on my mouth for an hour.

• 2:13:25Jocko Willink?

  That's one of the biggest self-defense things I want to talk about jujitsu is like, if you're a female.

• 2:13:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:13:31Jocko Willink?

  And you've never had someone just grab and like grind on you.

• 2:13:34Speaker 02

  Oh, fuck, yeah.

• 2:13:35Jocko Willink?

  You're not, you're not even gonna get psychologically, you're not gonna get through that if it's happening to you the first time in a traumatic incident.

• 2:13:42Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:13:42Jocko Willink?

  Whereas, like, if you do jujitsu, someone grabs you and you're just like, oh, this is what I do every single day. Like, you don't have to, there's no psychological, like, chaos going on in your head. You're just like, oh, this is what you're, this is what we're doing, you know, no factor.

• 2:13:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:13:55Jocko Willink?

  And the other thing, uh, we were talking about this a little bit before we went, uh, before we hit record today, but like, and I kind of picked this up reading Barbarian Spirit, but I've been talking for years, like, hey, man, there's like just things that you are supposed to be doing, right?

• 2:14:12Speaker 02

  As a, as a person, right?

• 2:14:14Jocko Willink?

  Whether you're a man or a woman, there's certain things you're supposed to be doing. And and we already talked about this today, like, there's something. I said, oh, you know, young men want to go to war. It's like, that's not, and I'm not saying every single one. No, but I'll tell you what, most of them, like most of the kids I knew growing up and, and that's like in your blood. It's in your blood to want to do that. And so why in God's name? Like after I trained jujitsu for six months, let's say, I can pretty much beat anybody, you know, on the street. If I get into an encounter, why, why the hell would I keep doing it for 30 years? Well, I'll tell you why. Cause like, there is something in my blood that makes me want to do that. There's some part of my nature that wants to fight other people. Yeah.

• 2:14:58Jocko Willink?

  And you can't legally go out and fight other people all the time. I'll tell you what, you can go on the mat every single day and you can go hard. And you're going to get beat a bunch and you're going to beat people and it's in your blood. Yeah. And it's good to get that out of your system. It's like good to let that thing, like put water on that thing and let it grow. Yeah. And if you don't, I don't know where that go. I don't know what happens to that. I don't know what happens to that, to that urge. Right. If you don't gratify it. Yeah. What happens to it? I don't know, but I don't think it's good. No, I think it dies. I think you, you try and suppress it or something or yeah, I don't know what happens to it, but I don't think it's good. Yeah. So, so listening to your blood a little bit, listening to your human instincts of what you want to do.

• 2:15:39Jocko Willink?

  And I mean, you know, I get a lot of times people ask me like, uh, you know, I'm thinking about going to military, but I'm also thinking about going to college. And it's like, cool. You can go to college at any time in your life, but you're 18 years old. Like that military thing is going to tick off pretty quick. And I've had zero people. I better, I, there's no people that I can think of off the top of my head. That say, I was in the military. I regret that I was in the military. No. And I'm talking about guys that have lost both legs, both legs, both arms. Like look at Travis Mills, like what a beast. He's not, he doesn't break down and say, Hey, you know, I really wish I wouldn't have joined. No, he's like, I'm, I'd do it again. Yeah. So that's, there's something going on in your, in your DNA. Right.

• 2:16:24Jocko Willink?

  That, that wants to do this kind of shit. Right. So. Do this kind of shit.

• 2:16:29Speaker 02

  No, yeah, no, absolutely. Man, I stand by it too, is like, uh, like the value in jujitsu or MMA or any of that bullshit is still not even really the fighting part of it. Like, you should know that, it's awesome. Realistically, you should be fighting with weapons anytime you can, but you're not always gonna be able to, one. The other thing is, it's not, as I said, it's really not about the fighting. It's about, uh, like for dudes that are older. They've never done this shit when they're young. All right. Give the courage to like, go in the fuck of jujitsu and get the absolute shit kicked out of you by some fucking 20 year old. All right, he's gonna embarrass the fuck out of you. It's gonna suck. All right. It's gonna suck for quite a while, too. All right. It's gonna be like fucking six months where you can beat up the other. You're gonna hope a new guy shows up in six months, you can rough him up a little bit. But that's, that's good for you.

• 2:17:12Jocko Willink?

  Humbling, man.

• 2:17:14Speaker 02

  It's humbling. It shows courage. It's humbling. All right. It also gives you something to work towards. It really like drags when you're fucking, you know, you're working, you wanna come up and, uh, yeah, it's just, it's all around great. I, I really can't think of a lot else that's gonna help like a guy that's older that is kinda, kinda live like a bitch made life. Like, cause you do, it, it, it does, it takes something fucking cowboy up for that shit.

• 2:17:33Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:17:34Speaker 02

  It's funny, I'm, uh, dude, I'm a 20 year white belt. Like, uh, cause I will not go back for three or four years and I'll go back for, you know, fuck, I've never been great at consistency. But I did go to the Gracie Academies the first time in, uh, fucking Tacoma? In like 1998. Anyway, got the shit beat out of me by some little tiny, I wish I knew who it was, some little tiny motherfucker with a black belt. He was like fucking 65, kicked deep. I was the judo guy, so I was like roughing up some of the, and this little dude, like, hey man, fucking, let me show you some shit, fucking beat the fucking, he wasn't even breathing hard, it was fucking funny shit. Anyway, I will continue, I'll, I'll go back, uh, sometimes in that, you know, it's now even it takes a little bit of fucking courage to step in again, cause like, goddamn, I'm fucking old and out of shape and I'm still a fucking 20 year old.

• 2:18:15Speaker 02

  I'll get roughed up by some fucking blue belts, I don't give a fuck. It's good to just show that you'll show up to yourself sometimes. And I do need, I do need to catch myself on some consistency, cause my boys need to start doing this shit too, so.

• 2:18:26Jocko Willink?

  For sure.

• 2:18:27Speaker 02

  I'm kind of at a turning point.

• 2:18:28Jocko Willink?

  How old are the boys right now?

• 2:18:29Speaker 02

  Uh, one of them turned nine yesterday.

• 2:18:31Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:18:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, and the other one's a fucking seven.

• 2:18:33Jocko Willink?

  Hundred percent.

• 2:18:34Speaker 02

  But, uh, I'm definitely at a point of like, I'm fucking my own life right now, so, you know, we'll get to that shit.

• 2:18:38Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah. Uh, so you get done with those books and then, then there's this book, uh, which I mentioned earlier on, it's called The Wrath of Windigo and-

• 2:18:47Jocko Willink?

  I was like, wait, do, do, because this is a spoiler alert type of thing because it's a, it's a novel.

• 2:18:52Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:18:52Jocko Willink?

  So, um, but I want to talk about a little bit. It's like, the scene is, I guess it's dystopian in a way, maybe. But there's an insurgency in America against like the evil elite elected and unelected bureaucrats and oligarchs that now run America. This is like a alternate history type thing.

• 2:19:18Speaker 02

  That shit could never happen. So it's a good thing it's fiction.

• 2:19:22Jocko Willink?

  And then there's this insurgency that happens and there's a breakaway part of the country, which is Cascadia.

• 2:19:29Speaker 02

  Cascadia, yeah.

• 2:19:30Jocko Willink?

  Which actually Cascadia is a real term.

• 2:19:32Speaker 02

  It's a real term for the Pacific Northwest.

• 2:19:33Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, the Pacific Northwest. And there was these people up there living in Cascadia and the, the novel centers around this guy Eric Hanson. And he's like a general of the insurgency and, and he's captured. And that's the way the story unfolds is that he gets captured and he gets interrogated and he kind of tells the history of the insurgency.

• 2:19:57Jocko Willink?

  And while it's a novel, it's also like an instruction manual on how to conduct said insurgency. You know, going through.

• 2:20:05Speaker 02

  I, I never saw that part of it myself.

• 2:20:09Jocko Willink?

  So like the decentralized wolf lodges and like how to fight with sabotage and hit and run and terrain exploitation and ace metro warfare. It's like goes over all those things. And also the, the wendigo, which is actually a, like a Native American.

• 2:20:25Speaker 02

  Mythical creature.

• 2:20:26Jocko Willink?

  Mythical creature. And the basic, tell me if I got this right. The concept is, uh, this guy Ton, T O N N.

• 2:20:34Speaker 02

  T O N N.

• 2:20:35Jocko Willink?

  He, he's the leader. He's like the original founder of the insurgency.

• 2:20:38Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:20:39Jocko Willink?

  And at one point, he does like the sweat lodge type scenario and he sees the wendigo. And, and freaking like enslaves him, kind of takes his.

• 2:20:50Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:20:50Jocko Willink?

  Takes his. Nightmarish uh uh personality and says, we're gonna use this because we have to.

• 2:20:58Speaker 02

  I'm bending you to my will.

• 2:21:00Jocko Willink?

  Yes, yes.

• 2:21:04Jocko Willink?

  Be the reason the forest is haunted is one of those things in there. So that's so that that's what happens in the book again, I realized when I was thinking about what I was gonna say about it is like, there's a story arc that you have to read the book.

• 2:21:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:21:18Jocko Willink?

  And as I was reading the book, I was like, oh damn, what's gonna happen because you know, you want to know what's gonna happen. You want to see how it unfolds. So great read. There's an audio book version of it too. And actually I listened to the audio book. I didn't read this book. I listened to the audio book. A lot of times with novels, I'll just listen to.

• 2:21:34Speaker 02

  I totally agree. Yeah, me too.

• 2:21:35Jocko Willink?

  Um, so there's that. So that comes out. Uh, how did that land in the world?

• 2:21:43Speaker 02

  Man, this is, uh, this is, this is where we have to go down a little bit of a fucking woo woo path if you wish, because it's, it's, it's, this is really what happens.

• 2:21:52Speaker 02

  Uh, and this is kinda where we get into some like, like some fucking crazy shit for being just real with each other. So I, I should mention that especially because it really church shit, like the whole time I fight the war, I'm a fucking atheist, like fuck everybody, fuck all, you know, God didn't come help me from my childhood. I'm mad about shit. All right.

• 2:22:08Jocko Willink?

  And this is when you're growing. This is like, this is your, your attitude towards religion with any army you're growing up.

• 2:22:14Speaker 02

  Yes. Yep. Yep. I'm fighting these fucking Arabs with their crazy, you know, I, I'm not a believer in any kind of fruitcake shit. I'm a, I'm very much like a biological evolved guy. Like I, we got one shot at this. I guess I'm spending my fucking run around the desert like an idiot.

• 2:22:29Speaker 02

  But you know, this is it. When we die, we die, we're dust, all this shit. Nothing I see over there or nothing I see, not even the birth of my children makes me believe anything else. Uh, not even fucking close.

• 2:22:41Speaker 02

  But some weird shit starts coming down the pike. I'm gonna say, man, about like, like 2017, 2018. And it's not even in here. It's just like, I'm watching the shit that's happening to Trump, uh, with his first, uh, uh, presidency.

• 2:22:57Speaker 02

  And there starts to be like shit that like, I can't explain because again, like you don't know how much of this like crazy shit is like pizza gate and all, but when you start looking and you start seeing like, hey, these guys really are collecting all these like weird fucking paintings and like, there starts to be this like fucking recurring theme. And it just kinda starts coming to me like, I, I don't know, I still don't know whether the, at this point, like, I don't know if the devil is real. Like, I don't know if any of these fucking evil spirits are real ghost spirits and all the bullshit. But I do know that these fucking assholes believe in them. Alright, and because of that, I feel like, hey, learn some fucking mythology, uh, you know, figure out what, what do their signs and symbols mean, what does it take, you know, what's it gonna take to flip our people around and like, you know, fuck these dudes up?

• 2:23:42Speaker 02

  If, if it comes to it, but I'm still not like, uh, you know, I, I, I'm a fucking mercenary for the good guys at this point, like, you know what? I'm, I'm still not going to church, but, uh, I will fuck these guys up just because they're evil. If it comes to it, everybody fucking calm down with the fucking FBI right now. Oh, gotta go. Anyway. So I'm not like a believer believer at this point, uh, at all. Windigo actually comes to me in a complete novel, like, all at one time. Uh, and it's mostly like sitting outside my fucking house in the, in the woods, up in the fucking mountains, uh, you know, having a little couple dope beverages. But I don't smoke weed, I don't do any drugs, I don't do any of this other shit. But it is cycling in my head and it just, it, it wants me to write it and I don't want to and it's eventually some like,

• 2:24:27Speaker 02

  kinda weird shit starts happening to me when I'm like, no, fuck you, I won't, I won't write this fucking book. Cause it, the other thing about it is, I know the story front to back in here already and it sounds too fucking crazy. Like, it sounds like some shit that like, uh, the secret service is gonna give me a talking to about, right? There's some, there's some nutbar shit that goes on in there. Um, and basically what, what finally triggers it to, to you're gonna, I will, I will do this, I'll, I'll fucking bend the knee, I'll write you a goddamn book.

• 2:24:52Speaker 02

  One day I say, I'm not going to, I say it out loud, I'm like, I am not writing this book. And, uh, so I started building the deck for my wife. Alright, and, uh, next thing I know, like, I never hold a drill like this. Like, uh, you know, normally a, a drill, I get the trigger shit there.

• 2:25:08Speaker 02

  I hold it, I'm holding it like this, and I'm in the middle of this process. All right, and my oldest son at this point is not like an affectionate child. He's, he's kinda like one of those ages where he's like, he doesn't wanna be touched or hugged or kissed or anything. But he runs across the fucking yard to give me a hug, which is completely fucking out of character for him at this, at this point while I'm holding this drill. Like this with the bit pointed out. And before I can fucking do something, it stabs him in the face. All right, almost, it gets him right here by the fucking, it almost gets his eye, I'm like, holy fuck, I fucking. Take him to hospital, uh, got very lucky, it was just, it didn't like go through, it, it hurt him, but you know, there's still a little scar there, but it didn't like, uh, you know, I'm like, holy fuck. Also at this point, like I'm learning of like fucking mythology shit, I think it's weird that it was almost his eyeball. It was a fucking, it was the one eyed fucking king, I'm like, oh shit.

• 2:25:54Speaker 02

  So I'm like, I already feel some like woo woo fucking shit going on there, I'm like, okay, kids go to bed, like. I go to my toolbox and I grab a flashlight, uh, with an LED bulb, but. It's like a fucking surefire too, it's not like some Chinese bullshit. And I turn that flashlight on and the fucking bulb pops. Which is, basically never happens to LED lights, like you could run them for like a million hours, I'm like. Now I'm getting, I'm getting like a little bit scared actually, so I fucking pick up a different one.

• 2:26:22Speaker 02

  And I pick it up, actually take the batteries out, put it in this one, turn that one on and the fucking bulb pops.

• 2:26:29Speaker 02

  I put all that shit, all that batteries, all that box away. And I go get a fucking third one, and I hit the button and it pops too, I'm like, okay, like fuck it, all right, you know what, I will write your fucking book, I'll do what you want. And so I do, uh, I write this book and it flows out of me and like, it, it does, this is the only book I've ever written that it doesn't feel like I wrote it, it feels like I channeled it. Uh, and that's. I don't know, it's also the best book I've ever written, that guy's awesome. Who the spear guy is fucking, that guy's, that guy's legit. But uh, that's how this one comes about.

• 2:26:58Jocko Willink?

  And then we get into this, uh, this latest book, which is called Barbarian, Barbarian Spirit. And, um, I guess, I guess, let me just start with, this is from the barbarianspirit.com website. The demon of suicide is running rampant in our society, increasing by up to 52% in certain age groups since the year 2000. It is the second leading cause of death in veterans under 45 with 140,000 veteran suicides since 2001. You read that correctly. Double the war dead from Vietnam or over one third of World War II killed in action. Suicide is a crafty way of decreasing our numbers and strength before the final day while demoralizing those that remain. This is not an analogy. One of

• 2:27:41Jocko Willink?

  the few cases of demonic exorcism in the Bible itself shows what? Demons cast out of a man, allowed to possess a herd of pigs, immediately forces the swine to drown themselves.

• 2:27:59Jocko Willink?

  All right. So, um, and we're going to get to the Barbarian Spirit website and this, uh, religion and whatnot. But I want to get just, we, you know, we kind of touched on some of this stuff here, but I want to kind of set the, set the scene for you. This is reading from the book by Barbarian Spirit. You say, "I was very torn on the decision to try a psychedelic. I did hours of research. I looked for anomalies like sudden death. I basically looked for any excuse I could find not to use this drug. Even after I finally settled on magic mushrooms and procured a stash, they sat in my basement for over a year. The fear was real. I should also point out here, after I got them, I asked my experts a gaggle of questions. I interrogated one of them for hours, secretly looking for a flaw and a reason not to. I listened to people on YouTube that are very

• 2:28:43Jocko Willink?

  anti-mushroom for reasons like it opens a door to the demonic, or mushrooms thrive on death. They are a thing of death and they are not your friend."

• 2:28:53Jocko Willink?

  Eventually, I decided it was time, not necessarily even for the spiritual reasons. I was still a bit skeptical about that, but I had some problems. Nothing else seemed to touch. The brain therapy I got before did help with the fog. I had felt on and off for years. I did feel like I gained back 20 IQ points and my focus was better, but I still had bouts of depression. I still had trouble finding any kind of motivation and I still didn't feel right. By the summer of 2023, I was ready to try anything. Finally concluding that any possible risk outweighed continuing to feel less than whole. It was time to cowboy up.

• 2:29:35Jocko Willink?

  So even though you kind of squared your shit away somewhat, now you gotta, you know, you got your wife.

• 2:29:39Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:29:39Jocko Willink?

  You got kids. Was your second son in on scene?

• 2:29:42Speaker 02

  Yes, yeah, cuz he's, he's only two years younger than the big one.

• 2:29:44Jocko Willink?

  Okay, so you had two boys, but you're still like.

• 2:29:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:29:48Jocko Willink?

  So some shit's not right.

• 2:29:49Speaker 02

  So basically, I'm like doing this on fucking sure willpower and discipline now. All right, I'm, I'm, you know, going, I'm doing stuff to get us money. All right, I'm trying to, you know, be a good example for my kids and like workouts like a little longer to fucking, you know, fucking raise them. But I'm, I'm still a fucking mess. Like I, I've got the brain fog, all right. I, I've got no motivation for the drive for the gym. I, when I do go like I, I'd never get any gains cuz it turns out that when I finally go to do this other bullshit, I, I've got testosterone at like a, a count of like 173.

• 2:30:17Jocko Willink?

  True.

• 2:30:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, this isn't a big operation. A lot of dudes are really fucked up in the endocrine system from either the war or whatever. Uh, so I'm, I'm basically just like tooth and claw, just barely living and not very well, but you know, enough time to like play. I, I know I'm fucked up though. Like I, I know that like I've got to do something to, you know, get some energy back, get some drive and, and you know, all this shit. And that is around the time I first started hearing about psychedelics as a therapy, which. I thought sounded like total bullshit anymore. It sounds like some hippie fucking peace and love like, oh yeah, you just, you know, fucking see the fairies and you know. I'm like, no, man, there ain't no fucking way that works. But I finally, I get, that's exactly what I get desperate enough like, you know, I'll try some fucking crazy shit.

• 2:31:02Speaker 02

  The brain thing that I had before was called a transcranial magnetic stimulation. And this, this is a thing they're doing for veterans now, and they basically shock your brain with magnets and shit. Uh, it, it did help a little bit, but it didn't help enough. Like, I'm like, you know, I, I don't even need to feel like I'm 25. I need to feel like I'm 35. Something though, so I can get through this. And, uh, it ended up that I had a bunch of clients, uh, from this book, I, that basically pulled me out of retirement of like teaching pistol and shit. They were, they were Bitcoin dudes, so they're already like kind of free thinking, fucking those kind of dudes. And they were big into psychedelics, because they're big in programming and a bunch of other weird jobs where you wouldn't think psychedelics are the thing.

• 2:31:43Speaker 02

  Uh, but still they're always talking about this shit. And they're like, no, look, man, like some of them had even like donated money to, uh, some of the other veteran, uh, organizations that use these as, as therapeutics down in Mexico, uh, for, for guys. And they're like, it's not like they ever tried to push them on me, but if I ask them, they're like, oh yeah, man, fucking that shit will fucking totally help your ass. Like it'll be fucking magic. I'm like, but I'm a Nancy Reagan kid too, man. Like dude, I have a fucking dare t-shirt probably still from, you know, like I grew up in this shit. And especially stuff you hear about psychedelics is even the after school specials in 1987, it's, it's all bad. Like you'll cut your fucking face off with a razor blades and there's spiders and shit. You melt your brain and you'll be like a, you know, retard down by the fucking railroad tracks. Uh, so I am, I am scared of it.

• 2:32:25Speaker 02

  Uh, and it's, it's also true. Like you're probably scared of it too, a little bit. Cause if you don't know how it works. My, my, my biggest thought and like my guys that were mentor, like never reconciled this point because they, they, they don't really understand. But this has come up a lot of times with other veterans when I, I talk to them. I'm also like a fucking mass murderer, man. Like, like I, I can do and have done like some fucking killing and shit. If I put a hallucinogenic on board and I think that we're fucking, you know, back at Fallujah or some bullshit, this could get real squarely. All right. And like, why like, ain't nobody fucking stopping me either for like a long time.

• 2:33:03Speaker 02

  Like, am I gonna wake up in the bushes with an empty plate carrier? Like, that's gonna be bad, right? So it is, it's scary. It's scary for a lot of reasons. There's also a very real fear amongst like, you know, our, our kind of dudes. Like, what if this fucking takes my edge off? Right? You know, I'm this fucking guy and I can do all this fucking terrible crazy shit to protect my fucking babies right now if I need to. Like, you know, fucking, fucking kill this fucking county with a fucking axe if I have to. What if this makes me like a little bitch? This is one of the funniest, I have a dude I know that's a fifth group battalion commander that got into space. And this was his biggest concern because he's a fucking monster. He's like, that's what he said, what if you turn me into a little, you know, fucking fairy fuck? Like, like, I wake up tomorrow and like, I'm a pacifist, like, that would suck, dude, fucking. These are, these are things that like, we're scared about.

• 2:33:47Jocko Willink?

  No, I've, I've, people would try and get me because I've never like, done any drugs. Yeah. And I've got, like, I mean, I live in Southern California.

• 2:33:54Speaker 02

  Right. I live in Ocean Beach in Southern California. There's a lot of drugs. There's a lot of people, there's like, normal people like, that have every job you can imagine and they smoke dope all day long. Oh, no. And I mean, I've literally had the conversation with people like, dude, dude, just like, take your edge off a little bit. And I've been like, that is the last thing I want. Get away from me.

• 2:34:12Jocko Willink?

  Right. Right. So that's a real fear. Like you said.

• 2:34:16Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Hell, yeah. And I have the, like, I have the fear of, of, well, like, like, I feel good, you know, like, and my life is great, you know? Because I'm like, oh, like, I don't want to, I don't want to, like, mess up the system. The thing I told Echo, told you before we started, is like, I'm driving around the highway at 80 miles an hour, there's no traffic. I'm listening to some good music.

• 2:34:39Jocko Willink?

  I'm not gonna pull that car over and just disassemble the engine and put it back together like that seems like a high risk to me but uh but that's me you know and I do know a lot of people that have made some serious progress

• 2:34:50Speaker 02

  Yeah

• 2:34:51Jocko Willink?

  through these uh through these whatever they're called

• 2:34:55Speaker 02

  substances

• 2:34:56Jocko Willink?

  journeys

• 2:34:56Speaker 02

  these journeys

• 2:34:57Jocko Willink?

  yeah so you make the decision that you're gonna do it

• 2:35:01Speaker 02

  Yep yeah and like I said it's I I'm not believing anybody to be bullshit either about you know fucking spiritual journey like I'm with the opinion like this is probably all bullshit uh you probably see some of course it's hallucinogenic you're gonna see some crazy shit but that's your subconscious you know fucking make your shit up fucking whatever and uh but if it will help alright if it will help with like the the brain fog and if it if it will actually do the other shit that's supposed to be the end of your system like fine I'm going to fucking movie I don't care if it's a scary movie I don't care if I gotta you know Freddy Krueger for fucking fifteen hours I don't give a fuck alright I I want or I'm going to try this for the the health reason alright and it also sounds crazy for me to like we're gonna do some drugs for our health like

• 2:35:42Speaker 02

  fucking what button this is what I'm gonna do so uh so and also I don't want to tell my wife that I'm doing this because uh I'm kind of still like a mess too kind of like some like like paranoid not really paranoid but kind of like a so paranoia I guess is the right word and kind of some like isolation and like I you know I don't I don't trust a bunch of people and uh anyway I don't want to tell her that I'm doing this because she has a she has a negative opinion of these kinds of things uh from her youth fuck Oprah's dad is not watching this whatever fuck

• 2:36:14Speaker 02

  fuck it we're gonna tell this story anyway my wife has done a like a fair amount of these things frying which is the word I just learned from my EC like recreationally like well she's very young alright so and people that do this shit like for fun it's a totally different thing than people that do this I will come to find out for uh for these like like spiritual or health reasons or something like that so anyway waiting my wife to go to bed which is uh almost never happens she goes first alright I'm scared fucking shitless these mushrooms so I'm doing all this shit like we're in school like rubbing them on the inside of my arm like four hours before make sure I don't get a rash like I like the day or you know a couple hours where I take like a little bite and like swish it around my mouth and fucking spit it out to see if it's poison you know I'm gonna die

• 2:36:55Speaker 02

  Um, and I also, because of the hallucinogenic effect potentially, I don't want to be like in the house with my, uh, your wife and kids. Cause you know, I was doing what the fuck's gonna happen? Like, you know, we're gonna start, you know, throwing dishes across the living room. You know, am I gonna get fucking crazy? Uh, so I'm gonna lock myself in the garage, which is like a detached garage. I got a little fucking nest of, uh, lawn furniture, fucking cushions and shit. And, uh, I, I get my, uh, my stuff out. All right, here we go. And I actually divide it in half too. Cause I'm like, you're supposed, if, if you're looking for this for like the, the health thing, you're supposed to get to like a, a certain point, which is like between four and five grams, where you can actually reboot your brains, what they call it. There's a, there's actually a, a

• 2:37:37Speaker 02

  another word for it. They call it the, uh, fuck, I don't remember.

• 2:37:41Speaker 01

  Like the hero dose or something?

• 2:37:42Speaker 02

  It's the heroic dose, but it, there's a certain piece in your brain that's like hitting the reset. And there's a, there's a big word. I think it's in the books more, but it's, uh, this is what you, you have to get above this certain threshold to get that to, to work. Uh, so I'm like, but I'm gonna take half of this first, just like see how it does for me. Uh, you know, make sure that like, I don't completely fucking come unglued. So, uh, so I take like my two grams or two and a half grams. And, uh, it's also a weird thing because, uh, like psilocybin, mushroom, it'd take a long time to kick in. It could take like an hour. It can take up to two hours, but it usually takes like an hour. Um, so yeah, so I take my stuff and, uh, hang out for a little bit and then I start fucking kind of feeling kind of good. I'm like, okay, this is all right. Lay down my little fucking nest of, uh, nest of bullshit. And, uh,

• 2:38:29Speaker 02

  I, I wish you had a picture of this yet. Yeah. You know, just fucking lawn chairs and like a poncho liners, some bullshit. Fucking, what are my sandbag kettlebells for a pillow? Um, so it, it starts kicking in and I, I start seeing what I think I'm gonna see, what I think I'm gonna see. Cause I, I never thought of this as like a spiritual journey in the slightest. All right. I just start seeing some, you know, random, you know, crazy fucking bullshit, like a fucking train with wings flying through the, you know, just dumb shit. And this goes on for a little bit and uh sometimes it's like mushrooms now are like talking to me, which also can be just like some totally subconscious shit, you know, like of course mushrooms are talking to you like, oh, nice fuck, of course they're. And it's like, okay, uh, you know, you, you like, it's like, we're boys, right? Are we cool? I'm like, yeah.

• 2:39:13Speaker 02

  Oh yeah, this is fun. They're like, okay.

• 2:39:15Jocko Willink?

  Wait, so the mushrooms are talking to you like inside your own head?

• 2:39:18Speaker 02

  Inside your own head, yes.

• 2:39:19Jocko Willink?

  Yes.

• 2:39:20Speaker 01

  Is it like, is it like words or is it just like, like you just understand it?

• 2:39:25Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 2:39:29Speaker 02

  I feel like it is words, maybe, and maybe that's just the way like I see it, cause a lot of, you can see different things from, from these things. I feel like it is words, it's, but I am, it's not like I'm verbally hearing with the way, it is just all in here. Uh, anyway, they're, uh, you know, they're like, hey, you know, like, are we cool? Um, and also like, I, I have no idea how to do this shit either, like, I don't know if you're supposed to have like a fucking ritual or fucking, so I've kind of made some shit of like,

• 2:39:55Speaker 02

  like I was telling you before we were on the show, like, I've never been into Viking shit in my fucking life. Like I thought Vikings were like undisciplined fucking retards. And, uh, you know, if I'm gonna do something militarily, like I want to be like a legionnaire or like a fucking samurai or somebody that, you know, actually gets their haircut and shines their boots and that's some, you know, fucking drunken idiot on a ship. But, uh,

• 2:40:15Speaker 02

  so, uh, anyway, so like, but from this, I, I've learned a little bit of Viking shit. So like, I've drawn like a, you know, warding circle of ruins on this. I don't know what the fuck I'm doing. Like, I feel like you gotta have a ritual. You can't just eat some mushrooms. That's fucking retarded.

• 2:40:28Speaker 02

  So I sort of see shit. I take the, it's like, are we friends? Like, are we cool? And I was like, okay. It's like, well, if you want to really do this, like, you're gonna have to like, take the rest. I'm like, okay, that's fine. We eat the rest of these, we eat the other half. It's like, and you have to, you know, leave your warding circles. You're going to go like fucking lay down in bed and be comfy. I'm like, oh shit, like, uh, like, I don't know who the fuck I'm talking to now, but, uh, it seems like the guy that tells you to put your gun down is probably not your friend. Like, maybe you want to think about that one. Uh, but whatever, I, I feel like you've, I feel like I, I'm gonna trust this. I also feel like if, if I didn't need to trust this, well, fucking kick this guy's ass and then come back to the fucking warding circle, be like, well, that's fucking stupid.

• 2:41:05Speaker 02

  So eat the rest of them. All right. Now shit's like, like coming on, uh, cause it doesn't take another hour for that second half to kick in. Like it, it's, we're escalating.

• 2:41:16Speaker 02

  So I go upstairs to my, my guest room and, uh, you know, fucking hop in bed. At this point, like I don't need clothes anymore. This is just kind of how fucking mushroom make you feel and uh.

• 2:41:25Jocko Willink?

  We're streaking.

• 2:41:26Speaker 02

  Streaking.

• 2:41:28Jocko Willink?

  Sorry, I didn't mean to ruin your spiritual journey with a Will Ferrell joke.

• 2:41:32Speaker 02

  It's fucking right, don't know. And uh, get in bed and uh, I, I have like the fucking craziest, deepest fucking spiritual experience that I've ever fucking had. Uh, man, actually, yo, how much do you want me to go with that fucking shit? I mean, it's kind of part of the story. It's kind of not important to it's, you know, it's in the fucking book.

• 2:41:56Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I mean, some, some highlights of it. There's like this golden city that you go into.

• 2:42:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:42:01Jocko Willink?

  You end up facing these evil kind of demonic things that you're killing with a sword.

• 2:42:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:42:06Jocko Willink?

  And you actually use the word smashing.

• 2:42:08Speaker 02

  Smashing, yes.

• 2:42:09Jocko Willink?

  Um, and then, then we get to this bear and this wolf thing.

• 2:42:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:42:13Jocko Willink?

  Which I think you should probably talk about a little bit.

• 2:42:15Speaker 02

  No, okay. So this is fucking super important. Uh, so yeah, so

• 2:42:21Speaker 02

  when I lay down, all right, I start feeling like I start seeing shit. All right. I start seeing shit like hyper fucking clear, which is actually kind of, this does not happen to everyone with psilocybe, but even with that kind of dose. A lot of people will never get through like seeing funny colors and like the psychedelic patterns. That's what I will over time come to call the veil. All right. You can take a lot of, of these kinds of drugs and never get through that veil. A lot of people won't. Recreationists, a lot of times won't. If you're serious though, and you're like on a journey and like you have taken this with purpose and focus and you're trying to go somewhere. You will pass through that veil and what's on the other side of that veil. Well, it varies for everyone, but for me, it's, it's fucking crystal clear. I'm in this fucking city.

• 2:43:03Speaker 02

  And I, now I'm like immediately getting down, I'm talking to somebody and they, this really is worth it. They're like fucking, all right. Hey, check it out. Uh, here's your sword and like, oh, fuck. Well, I didn't know I had a sword, but I guess I do. And uh, there's all the, there's supposed to be all these statues, big statues of like monsters and fucking, I, I know what they are too. Cause I've, I've researched a lot of shit, but like there's a Moloch and ball and all that shit. And uh, I'm just like running on fucking insane. I see these things, I want to hit them like, so I fucking smash them. It's not like cutting either, cause they're like a, a clay or a stone statues and fucking smashing with this thing. And uh, I'm getting pissed off because there's no fucking blood. Like I want to kill somebody too. Like I'm, I'm feeling this like, or these bad guys. Like there would be some fucking bad shit here. I don't want to represent, I don't want to paper target on the range. Like I want fucking Bin Laden or whatever. So uh.

• 2:43:50Speaker 02

  So this goes off a little bit and I, you know, I guess that was some kind of testing bullshit. And it's like, okay, and I, this will be another thing that's consistently weird for me with, with suicide. But it usually gives me three trips instead of one. It's like a play in three acts. So I'll go into the, what I call the spirit realm, which is where we pass with the veil, we say all crazy bullshit. I'll wake up and when I go outside and like take a piss, drink some water, have like a 30 minute break, you know? And you're still, there's still shit happening. You're not seeing things anymore. This is more like a, this is more like a reflection time. And then when that 30 minutes is over, it'd be like, okay, time for, you know, part two. And I'll go back in, lay down and, and see the second act where, but I don't know any of this shit at the time.

• 2:44:33Speaker 02

  Uh, so I, I come to and like, I'm back in my, you know, guest room with, you know, fucking pillows with doilies on them and shit. You know, fucking lace curtains, like there is no terrible shit. And I don't even, I, I think I look at my, I'm carrying my phone, I look at the clock and it's only been like, you know, hour and a half, two hours. I'm like, oh, fuck, man. I always heard that these mushroom things took like eight hours. Like, you know, this is fucking over. Like vision's still like a little distorted, but like it's no different than really like being really fucking drunk or something. Like, okay, fucking, all right. Uh, I guess I'll go outside, you know? I don't know. I want to see some night air and fucking take a piss or something. So I can go downstairs, still naked, fucking, I, I high enough that that's not a big deal.

• 2:45:13Speaker 02

  I, I live in town too. It's not like, you know, I've got neighbors on four sides and shit. And something is like compelling me to, to go out and not have clothes on. And there's also still like a little part of me that's rational. It's like, man, this is fucking like, no, dude, I don't want to get like arrested for, you know, indecent exposure or some bullshit, fucking two o'clock. My wife's not gonna be happy that happens. Walk out of the house, walk under the shadow of my fucking tree. And, and another kind of like weird coincidence thing that has happened is I wanted to do this the night before, but my wife stayed up late and I was tired, so I would have been early. This night, like she never goes to bed early. Oh, she would have been like nine o'clock. So I got fucking all the night in the world. It's also, what the fuck is it? It's the fucking super blue moon that won't happen again for like fucking 25 years.

• 2:45:57Speaker 02

  And it's fucking reaching its apex, all right? Which when this first happened, I was like, you know, fuck it, whatever. It's a fucking full moon. I go, fuck. Now I'm gonna know why. Oh, as I walk out, under the shadow of the fucking tree, all right, I step into the fucking moonlight. And

• 2:46:13Speaker 02

  This is still like really difficult to like fucking put into words because it's so fucking crazy. But as like my body passes in the fucking moonlight, I feel like something fucking like awakened me. And it is like a fucking animal and uh I know exactly what the fuck it is and it's the fucking wolf spirit and I am like freaking out a little bit. This I'm also at this point, I got at least have enough like Judeo-Christian fucking background to be like, am I possessed? Like, am I being possessed like right at this fucking moment and kind of actually? So I am like, holy shit, and I take a couple more steps in the fucking moonlight. And I'm also freaking out because I've never been this fucking high in my life. My if when my eyes are closed, I can feel like my body turning into this fucking werewolf.

• 2:46:58Speaker 02

  I but when I open my eyes, like force my real eyes open, I can see that my hands are still my hands. I don't have any fucking claws. I don't have this fucking snout and fucking teeth. But if I if I blink, close them a little bit, I'm back to that thing. So it's like both things are happening at once. Um rational mind is like, oh, holy fuck, like this is fucking crazy as fuck. Uh I know where all the werewolf fucking legend that will come from right now. And I feel this like ungodly like fucking power coming with this and that's what I mean when I say in the book like, look, I've done some fucking crazy shit. All right, I've assaulted on fucking Adderall, uh because like we've been up so many days, they gave us some fucking Go pills. Uh and that's pretty fucking intense, pretty fucking crazy, right?

• 2:47:38Speaker 02

  Nothing has ever been like this that I've ever fucking felt in my life. It is just like fucking raw fury. And uh it feels actually fucking amazing and wonderful too, like like it feels like, you know, if fucking Chuck Odell and fucking Randy Couture and their fucking prime walk through the back gate right now, I would fucking beat them to death like I whipped their fucking ass, all right? You know, it's that kind of like primal fucking rage. And uh I I'm I kind of fight it actually for a little bit because I'm like, oh, fuck, man, I don't need to be possessed by the this is where I go, you fucking rip the neighbor's throats out with my teeth like this is not good. And uh finally, well, fuck it, this is what's happening. And I let it fucking like take over like it is is fucking so amazing. It's fucking so fucking good.

• 2:48:20Speaker 02

  And uh now I'm like literally like on all fours, fucking feeling like some kind of fucking monster, like howling at the moon, fucking growling. And uh this goes on for a little bit and then I fucking.

• 2:48:35Speaker 02

  Kind of come back to, but I'm, it's still like half and half like me in this fucking wolf fucking shit. And I'm actually standing like, I can tell from my rational, I'm standing like a fucking werewolf, but I'm standing like a fucking werewolf in a fucking movie. Which still is my natural, but it feels like I have all this other shit too. And, you know, so I'm kind of freaking out still a little bit, but I'm also like, this is, this is pretty fucking cool. Like, you know, I like being this guy, actually. This is awesome. And I still don't really know what the fuck has happened, but I, you know, I kind of do. So it's like, you know, the fucking mushroom talking again is like, you know, okay, like time to go back inside.

• 2:49:19Speaker 02

  Okay. Well, as long as I'm in control of this motherfucker, I'm not going to fucking see my kids like this motherfucker. And it's like, it's fucking fine. Just go. So I'm like walking back through my house and like, I don't know.

• 2:49:30Speaker 02

  It again feels like there's some like really weird like fucking primal, like I'll see shadows in my kitchen, I'll be fucking growl at them and shit like a fucking total fruitcake. And it's, it's, it's not even something I control. It's just like, it is like a dog. It's like fucking, you know, instinctive and like, oh, fuck. All right. So go back upstairs, go to bed.

• 2:49:48Speaker 02

  Lay down, fuck, like, okay, fucking sleep, fucking. And so I go tumble back into the, the spirit realm real fucking fast. And it's like, the voice is like, okay, you know, this is, this is fucking what you think it is. This is the fucking, you know, Olfenor spirit. Uh, this is the fucking, you know, the wolf spirit that's, that's been around forever. Uh, and like, you want to keep this, like, you know, there's fucking price. This is also where it's like a Judeo-Christian guy or any kind of fucking, uh, you're like, hold up bitch. Like, like we do not sell our souls. We do not make fucking deals over here. And I tell them that and they're like, no, no, no, no, it's fine. Uh, it's, it's just pain. Like, you know, you gotta take that fucking pain to fucking prove you can bond with this fucking thing. Oh, fucking pain. That's easy. That's a fucking simple currency to fucking take.

• 2:50:33Speaker 02

  So it was like, all right, well, you said, you said, go for it. Here we go. And it feels like, like hundreds of years passed. I'm just getting fucked up. It's like, there's other shit tell me at the same time, like, you gotta feel every death of every other fucking, you know, wolf spirit that's ever fucking died. Cause we're not actually immortal, like we will fucking die. So I tumble through like thousands and thousands of years, getting, you know, fucking stabbed and shot and fucking arm fricked off. I see all these other fucking, especially from Europe, things that I've never seen before too. Like I had no idea there were Roman formations with fucking wolf heads. There were, especially in the early days of Republic. At one point, standard bearers also wore wolf skins instead of bears or lions. Uh, the Celts had some. I, I see a bunch of crazy shit that I'll like decipher later. It's like, oh, fuck, there were other legends around these fucking things.

• 2:51:19Speaker 02

  So this goes on. It fucking hurts too. It, it feels like real of like these injuries and also like your muscles are fucking like very tensing. Th- th- this can be called also a psychosomatic response. This is one of the things you actually want from dudes when they have a bunch of fucking trauma with the, uh, with the, the drugs. Cause this is actually somehow your body releases that is doing these things. You can, you can throw up, you can shit, uh, you can cry, or you can do fucking weird fucking muscle shit. And all of those things are like psychosomatic release. All those things are actually helping you heal and, and get rid of this fucking garbage.

• 2:51:51Speaker 02

  So this goes on for a long time. I'm fucking tired as fuck. Like it was over fucking, finally I get killed for the fucking length of fucking head cut off or some shit. It's like, okay, fucking, you're right. I'm, I'm panting. I'm like in bed, like sweating, like fucked up, tired, fucking all this shit. And, uh, it's like, okay, uh, you're done. Except for one thing. I'm like, okay. It's like, uh, you know, the bear is going to challenge for his fucking right for you being in its cult. I'm like, oh, fuck.

• 2:52:13Jocko Willink?

  The right for what?

• 2:52:14Speaker 02

  The right to be in its cult.

• 2:52:15Jocko Willink?

  Got it.

• 2:52:16Speaker 02

  So, uh, I look over and here comes a giant fucking bear. You know, to be perfectly honest too, I didn't know enough about Norse shit to even really know that there was a wolf cult. The, the Ulfhegnar instead of the Berserkers. Uh, and the wolf being of the Ulfhegnar, the bear being of the Berserker cult. So this fucking big ass bear coming over. I'm like, oh shit, like I'm fucking tired. I don't want to fight a goddamn bear right now. And, uh, I don't have to cause fucking Wolf Spirit takes, it takes over and just fucking grabs this thing and fucking rips this fucking top jaw off of its fucking body and fucking throws it on the fucking floor. I'm like, uh, fuck. And the spirit or the, the voice like, okay, don't worry, bear's not really dead. Just, uh, you know, you're, you're, you're on fucking team wolf, but, uh, you can, you know, call on the bear too, if you need to. I'm like, okay, let's fucking make total sense, man. It's great.

• 2:53:02Speaker 02

  Fucking perfectly fucking logical. And yeah, it was it was incredibly fucking weird experience.

• 2:53:10Jocko Willink?

  Now, what's the next day feel like or like whatever, three days later or whatever like.

• 2:53:13Speaker 02

  Oh shit. So this is kind of like the end of like the, you know, tripping journey, journeying balls, tripping balls down there, journeying balls fucking experience. I go downstairs like I'm really awake now. I'm coming off or out of this and I'm like hungry. I want some fucking like steak and fucking red meat. I feel great. I feel fucking more amazing than I've ever felt in my fucking life. Uh, it just feels fucking wonderful. And I'm also like, nobody has ever fucking told me about having a first trip like this. Uh, I'm, I'm a little bit fucking freaking out. Uh, I'm waiting on like a, a, a Christian enough hour of like, you know, seven a.m. to come so that I can call one of my guys that has experienced this and be like, yo dude, what? Is this, is this how it goes? This what happens to everybody? It's not. Uh, but yeah, no, it's, it's great. It's, uh, it's amazing. I feel like,

• 2:53:58Speaker 02

  I don't know. It feels like one, my brain did reboot. I feel like a new person after this. I've even like, you know, three, four days later where it's all the way over. I feel like I have like leveled up as a human being and I've gotten rid of all this fucking garbage and all the shit that used to bother me.

• 2:54:12Jocko Willink?

  There's some, something in that first, uh, journey that you went on where you say you learned three words, but you don't write them in the book. Like, what's that all about? Is it like foreign words or something like that?

• 2:54:23Speaker 02

  Yes, it is. So one of the other things that it's kind of fucking me about while I'm on this fucking first journey is it knows that I'm the skeptical type of person. Uh, even like the, uh, the shit that I said I didn't know about, like the Roman formations and the, uh, the Celts, like, when this is all going to be over, I could reasonably go and be like, you know what? Maybe I learned that when I was, you know, fucking 12 years old in the fucking picture book. Uh, maybe I learned this other fucking thing. It knows I'm going to rationalize my, my journey, knows I'm going to try to find a logical solution that so that I can write off the, the spiritual aspects of this. So when it's leaving the, the fucking big owl gives me, uh, these three words. Uh, and so I go to try to, once I'm, I'm done, all right, I try to, you know, go

• 2:55:03Speaker 02

  Google it and like, they don't have any fucking answers. They don't, they don't mean anything. So the, the one, I, I have a buddy that's, his wife is from Norway. And I actually know what language these words, I know they're fucking Old Norse. Or something, Old Norse or Germanic or, or Old Germanic or Icelandic, there's something from this fucking region. This is the same like mythology that it's shown me as this is going on. And it's, it's kind of been telling me too, like this is, you know, this is fucking Odin speaking kind of shit. So I call my buddy who's wife from Norway. I'm like, hey, man, uh, I need to know what this fucking word means. I know what it means, but I want to know what it means. He's like, okay, let me ask my wife. And he's like, she's like, well, it means fucking absolutely not. It's a nonsense word that means nothing.

• 2:55:44Speaker 02

  But it like kind of piqued her curiosity. So she called her mom and piqued her curiosity, you know, either. So they called grandma back in fucking Norway. And grandma knew exactly what the fuck it meant because Norway, Norwegian is a language that has changed a lot, even like the last 40 to 50 years. All right. And it's, it's not even as close to Old Norse to you, but the old people, their language is a little bit closer. All right. And that is exactly what it means. It means fucking wolf shirt. And uh, she's like grandma wants to know how the fuck you know it because almost, you know, nobody else on the fucking planet knows this word. And so that's, that freaks me out, dude. Now I'm like, all right. There's like, uh, there's like no denying that that word came from somewhere else that was not me.

• 2:56:27Jocko Willink?

  All right, um, we gotta read a little section of the book right now. As a professional soldier, I would have found the image of a Berserker laughable, mostly because in common understanding, it fits so easily into the box of, then I'll just get really mad and go into a rage, see red or some other amateur bullshit. A common bit of wisdom from people that think they can street fight, which will get you hurt or killed in real, real fast as tactics go. If you face anyone with skills, there are very complex relationship between aggression and expertise.

• 2:56:57Jocko Willink?

  Tiny bit of history, but important, the Western ideal of soldiers has been disciplined, cold, rational automatons for a very, very long time. Even back to ancient Sparta, that was what they wanted. Spartans put anger and fear in the same box and train their soldiers to never show either. And they were kind of right, but kind of wrong. Anger can be used to mask fear and one doesn't know how long that facade will hold up. I believe the Spartans therefore just tried to excise both. Odd as it may sound, they didn't really give much of a shit about personal martial ability either. All they really wanted was a soldier that could stand in the phalanx and coldly but steadily grind forward forever. I'm not disputing prowess or that it worked or personal Spartan bravery.

• 2:57:42Jocko Willink?

  Merely pointing out what they thought of as an ideal. Romans were masked Purdue Spartans, so pretty much the same concept. And I think we can say the same for Pike squares and all the phalanx style warfare afterward after. The same applied when guns became king. It was far more important than anything else that your soldiers stand in formation and do the right steps. Iron discipline, which does mean the negation of emotions, all of them. This is the Western goal which armies have strived for for the last hundred years, arguably for the last thousand years. Kill who we tell you to kill, but only when we say so. Stop as soon as we say stop and in between times act like an automaton on parade. So calm is perhaps the greatest example of this.

• 2:58:26Jocko Willink?

  They select and build for for this from day one. In those types of places, there will be no praise. There will be no rousing speeches from leadership. There will only be a target and an expected outcome. You will never hear that you did a good job, not no matter how difficult the task might have been. You only hear about it if you fuck up and you won't hear that more than a few times before you are gone. More than anyone else, SoCal would be happy happy if they had robots. If they could make capable men, put them on ice between jobs, they would do so. Now, the irony here is that it's recruitment practices often draw the most naturally aggressive men to start with. It spends an awful lot of money tamping that instinct down and very rarely rewards it.

• 2:59:11Jocko Willink?

  It might praise that aggression on rare occasion, throw out a few medals to the boys, but by and large it seeks to leash it. I've seen that mask slip a few times, but largely it holds. There is a term you should familiarize yourself with if you haven't. Industrial psychology. This is the science of extracting the maximum amount of value for the minimum amount of input from the worker. It has a military parallel in use for a long time now and building on what has was already known in ages prior. The problem with this approach is that it blunts your emotions on every level. Between the cold discipline and inputs, which is hidden behind a guise of professionalism and burying friends hand over fist, you end up with all your emotions

• 2:59:54Jocko Willink?

  locked in a little box, which has a very negative effect on your other normal human relationships. It makes them extremely difficult. For about two years prior to this vision, I had been doing work to unlock my emotions for the sake of my children and my relationship with my wife. And along that path, I started to wonder if we had gone gotten it wrong. Would we as special operation ninjas have been more effective if we had more emotional investment? Sure, we did some good work, but if we had been able to tap into fury a little bit more, would we have been even better? So when you add later in the book, I wanted to make sure I made this point. You talk

• 3:00:35Jocko Willink?

  about like, you realize like, that is something it would be good to tap into sometimes, but you have to balance it out. Yes, yes, yes. It actually reminded me of a story. My buddy Stoner, who was one of my platoon commanders, and he, like, we were doing immediate action trials out in the desert. He's a, he's, he did one deployment as a SEAL at this point. Now he's with me and he's a platoon commander. And like, he's not being aggressive, like, in this training. Like, you gotta, you know, you're out in the desert, you want some people to do some shit. You gotta make them do some shit. You know, hey, we need two guys. Like, you gotta, you gotta. And I'm like, bro, you need to, like, be aggressive. And he's like, what do you mean? I'm like, you gotta,

• 3:01:18Jocko Willink?

  you gotta, like, find a little bit of that rage to make shit happen. And he's like, really? And I go, yeah. And he did. You know, he's like, okay, cool. Yeah. Like, if you got two guys in a fire team that aren't, like, responding, you need to go make sure they freaking respond. You need to make it happen. So that kind of reminded me of that. You know, you got, he was told for many years, like, hey, no emotions, no emotions, no emotions, no emotions. And I was like, no, bro. You need to let those things out sometimes. Right, right, yeah. So there's where we're at.

• 3:01:48Jocko Willink?

  So that's your first experience with this?

• 3:01:50Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 3:01:51Jocko Willink?

  Then you do. Their second one is like, would this be considered like a bad trip?

• 3:01:57Speaker 02

  Man, I'll tell you.

• 3:02:00Jocko Willink?

  From the book you you described, I landed in a new place, one of pure horror. It was a catacomb of broken bones, skulls and fire as far as the eye could see.

• 3:02:08Speaker 02

  It was real bad. It was real bad. I will tell you straight up from the from like the the hippies and like the therapists and the fucking people that are like into this shit for like, uh, like even the guys who do this is like a therapeutic for a different way. Some of them that I know that are like, motherfucker, you have always had bad trips. Everything that happens to you is a bad trip. I don't see it that way at all. And actually, most of like the like the fucking like the badass dudes that I take on these journeys, they're the same way. Anything that we say to like somebody out there is a bad trip. For us, it doesn't really feel that way though. But it'd be the same if we get in a fucking gunfight in the parking lot way to lunch, like, we're still gonna buy tacos. If we had like some.

• 3:02:43Jocko Willink?

  Tell some good stories.

• 3:02:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. Can I borrow a mag? You know, I'm empty. If somebody that's never been any kind of shit is with us, like, they're gonna be freaked the fuck out. All right, they're not having a good day. So, but yes, the second one probably even for me could be described as a bad trip.

• 3:02:59Speaker 02

  And this is, this is something that I I now especially see with retrospect is happening to me. I'm having probably a very unique experience with suicide because it's all building towards something. I don't know what the fuck that's gonna be until like way, way, way later. But I wouldn't even say that it's necessarily testing me. It's conditioning me that these are the kind of things that can happen. Because eventually it's gonna.

• 3:03:20Jocko Willink?

  What was the time length between the first one and the second one? It's like a couple of months or something like that?

• 3:03:24Speaker 02

  No, not even that long. Probably probably month. Because this is one thing that's true from the first one too. I have so much fucking respect for this thing after I do it. Like, um, this is, this is fucking amazing. Like, I will never do this again though, until like I feel like the omens ask me to because because I respect it. Like, I I'm appreciative as well as like, I know this shit is fucking powerful as fuck. If it wants to take me to a real scary place, that's where we're going. So it's about a month later and it starts calling back to me. And one of the other things that is weird about me is I will end up doing like a lot of these things in like a relatively short period. And that's not right usually for a lot of people. A lot of people will go like six months between a journey. Because that's what they that's what they need, or that's what it tells them to do.

• 3:04:08Speaker 02

  Some people will do this like once a year. Alright, it'll take years to get through all the but hey, you know, you you do kind of what it it wants you to do if you're really listening. For me, it's like a month. So I'm like, hey, cool. Awesome. Let's do this again.

• 3:04:21Jocko Willink?

  So you're slaying demons in this one.

• 3:04:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:04:24Jocko Willink?

  And demon interrogations like you're.

• 3:04:27Speaker 02

  Yeah. Okay, this one is fucking completely insane.

• 3:04:32Speaker 02

  When you're gonna go in the second time, you don't know what the like, I'm like, cause this if I do this again, will it be an exact repeat of the first time? Will it be the same world, but it continues? Like, I had no fucking idea. So what happens is it calls me, I eat the stuff, and I go into like a totally different place. And, you know, I'm not, it's not like I'm in chapter two and like I'm still the fucking wolf guy or any bullshit like that. So I'm confused, like, where the fuck am I?

• 3:04:55Jocko Willink?

  Totally different book.

• 3:04:57Speaker 02

  Totally different book.

• 3:04:57Jocko Willink?

  Got it.

• 3:04:59Speaker 02

  And and that's what it starts out as like I I get attacked by all these fucking demon-y things. I had actually gone in here to ask a very specific question. Now I'm getting fucking jumped. And I'm actually a little bit scared because like, I don't know, this is my second time. I don't know what the fuck I'm doing in here. So I'm getting my fucking ass kicked. I I fucking summon a shield and a fucking spear, but I'm taking like damage like these things are fucking hurting me like I'm fucking hitting me through this shield in the in that world. It's hard enough that like I feel it in the real world, like it feels like fucking impacts on me. It'll bounce me in and out of the fucking realm. It's it's like getting hit by like a dude that knows how to hit you. I'm like, fuck. So I'm doing this fucking shit. I'm like basically running from these things because I'm getting there's a lot of them getting the fucking ass kicked off me.

• 3:05:40Speaker 02

  And something happens and the fucking wolf guy just like fucking jumps in and takes over. And it it was actually an ambush. Alright, I I needed to know this. The thing that I wanted to know could only come from in the spirit realm terms, something that's on the other side. It's not going to show up if there's like a fucking badass with all of his friends, you know, waiting with fucking guns. So basically, it let me use myself and like my my human aura as bait. And then when the thing showed up, they had to fucking answer. It force fed in the fucking QRF and showed me how to handle these things. And it was, it was, you know, it was like, okay, yeah, I took over, grabbed the thing like, all right, well, here's how you interrogate things in spirit realm, fucking fuck this dude up, you know?

• 3:06:25Speaker 02

  And showed me what I would, what I needed to know.

• 3:06:29Jocko Willink?

  Cool, uh, kind of takeaway here, you say, the sacrifice of old was effective, but the new way was a method of extracting more soul over a longer time. Screens, particularly phones, cost you your life. Your life force, time, they are form of sacrificing small bits of your life to the dark gods. You even bow your head in supplication to them as you willfully carve away grains of your soul to whatever gave us this technology. Multiplied by billions, that is stronger magic than cutting the hearts out of a few hundred per day. And those soul grains feed the dust storm that will eventually destroy us.

• 3:07:13Jocko Willink?

  This is the grease of Ragnarok, Armageddon and Cali Yuga. Combined with other mechanisms, this is how they gain power to destroy our civilizations.

• 3:07:25Jocko Willink?

  Your phone is a demon.

• 3:07:27Speaker 02

  It is. This is fucking wild shit, right?

• 3:07:30Jocko Willink?

  It's wild shit.

• 3:07:31Speaker 02

  But think about this, this is, uh, this is a theory. I do believe that the technology for the most part and fuck man, a lot of these dudes like, uh, came up with like touchscreens from doing psychedelics. All right. They, they learned how to do that shit on the other side. I walk, look at like, uh, Steve Jobs or Tim Cook or any, a lot of these other inventors, where they got their shit from? Where they got the idea from that made them, you know, the bazillion fucking dollars? A lot of it came from these drugs, right? So you don't necessarily know where the fuck you're gonna land when you take these things. All right. And whoever is guiding you also has an influence on that. Uh, and there's, there's shit that goes on over there that we, none of us will ever like really, truly, fully understand.

• 3:08:12Speaker 02

  But this is what it tells me like directly and you gotta think about, it is weird, is it not? The way that we bow our heads to our fucking phones?

• 3:08:19Jocko Willink?

  Disturbing.

• 3:08:19Speaker 02

  It is very fucking disturbing. It's, it's some weird shit.

• 3:08:25Jocko Willink?

  Um, third experience seems like a little bit more of a minor experience. This was like a little Q and A going on with the wolf. You join the wolf spirit and you figure out that if you need the fury, you can summon it. Uh, but you still get to drive. It's like, that's where you feel in that third one.

• 3:08:45Speaker 02

  This is kind of weird with this. It's like, okay, Leo, look, fucking, I had to jump in and take over last time because you know, you're still fucking new guy in the spirit realm and uh, yeah, we were getting fucked up. So, which is totally cool. It was, it was a conversation like if you're, you know, senior assaulter jumped in and fucking helped you, but you were the new, you know, you're not a dick. You helped me. Thanks, bro. So it tells me it's like, okay, you had to do this is one time, but you know, you're in charge. You're not being like possessed and fucking taken over by this other shit. Uh, yeah, you can call on this though, when you need it. And it's fucking weird. Uh, I don't, I don't remember if I put this in the book or not, but this is, is, is real shit. Like, uh, like when I'm in like danger now in like the real world, like if you know, a fucking hobo hops out of the fucking thing and fucking comes out with a fucking ice pick. This comes online. It's, it's,

• 3:09:29Speaker 02

  it's fucking weird as shit, but it's all this. I don't know if it actually works. I don't know if I can actually pick up heavier shit or, or hit harder or not, but it feels like it. It feels like this fucking shit has, has come on board. And, uh, it's, it's pretty fucking weird, but it, it's cool. I got, like, I like it. Like, I'm scared to shit when there's a fucking wolf demon driving the ship. Like, okay.

• 3:09:50Jocko Willink?

  But you're good.

• 3:09:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, you're totally good. Yeah.

• 3:09:53Jocko Willink?

  Uh, fourth experience. This is like, uh, again, there's like a, a Q and A going on. Do you seek knowledge or do you seek the truth? You respond, I seek the truth. And then there's like, you get this term animal magic.

• 3:10:09Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 3:10:09Jocko Willink?

  What's the animal magic all about?

• 3:10:11Speaker 02

  The animal magic is, it's telling me where we, we gained this, this power of the bear or the wolf or whoever our fucking spirit guide is. And it goes into this fucking long story about some incredible like the time ago, a hundred thousand years or some shit. We as men have to go to war against the fucking wolves because they're eating our fucking kids and we're trying to domesticate animals and they're fucking our shit up or they're eating all the game in the fucking forest and we had to go fucking fight them because it's survival to finish this point and we gotta, we're gonna do it and fuck it wipe them out. So we get the upper hand because we have, you know, figured out how to use spears and fucking clubs and shit and we're fucking these guys up and we get to a point where

• 3:10:52Speaker 02

  we can decisively win. We could exterminate them, but instead we're like, you know what, man? Like you guys are fucking hard though. You guys are pretty cool.

• 3:11:00Jocko Willink?

  Respect.

• 3:11:01Speaker 02

  Respect. Yeah. Like you guys got some shit going on that like we could use. Like you smell like a motherfucker and you know, your fucking fur is awesome in the fucking snow. So we'll make a deal. If you'll, if you'll fucking make the deal with us. Like, like you be, you know, like our fucking dudes. You be like our fucking dogs and you know, you be on fucking security and bark when you're fucking crazy shit. We'll just sleep by the fire. We'll get some fucking raw meat and we won't go to fucking war again. And that's, so that was, that was just our, our deal. What happened to us immediately after that with our shamans and shit when we went to the fucking spirit realm, the wolves gave us fucking something back. They gave us this like animal fury that we can fucking call on. If we can figure out how to fucking tie it to us and that also makes us fucking way

• 3:11:44Speaker 02

  better warriors and innocents. It makes us fucking able to do some fucking crazy shit if we need to.

• 3:11:51Jocko Willink?

  There's some good highlight. I had to tag some highlights. I'm not, hey, obviously I'm not reading the whole book. Get the book. But some of the good stuff that I just wanted to hit some highlights. Quote, "We've learned to pass our knowledge across the bridge of blood." And again, I was kind of, this is something that cued into it. I was like, oh, this stuff that I think is very instinctual for us. It's like, where's that come from? Oh, yeah. That's where, that's what you refer to as the bridge of blood. What we learn now is easier for our following progeny to grasp. So things that you know how to do that seem easy to you. It's like, oh, where's that come from? Oh, yeah. It comes from, you know, your ancestors.

• 3:12:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:12:29Jocko Willink?

  Kings and leaders are also fine, are also necessary at times, but the warrior caste should never be fully loyal to them.

• 3:12:39Jocko Willink?

  Protect the woman and child. That's just like the underlying, what'd you call it, the prime directive?

• 3:12:45Speaker 02

  This is the prime directive. That's the only thing he ever said to me as a, as the fucking hard and fast rule. That's the one that is not flexible. That is, that is the only fucking rule that there is. And really, when you think about that and you think about it long enough, that does cover everything. That covers your entire fucking society.

• 3:13:01Jocko Willink?

  Protect the women and child.

• 3:13:02Speaker 02

  You don't let there be a fucking OnlyFans fucking server and fucking bullshit, alright? Because that's not protecting women and fucking children, alright? You don't let fucking criminals run amok in your fucking society because that's not protecting your fucking women and children. You don't cheat on your fucking wife and, you know, go fuck a bunch of 20 year olds we brought back from a fucking raid. Because that is not protecting the fucking family unit. That, when you get into it, that is the only thing that you need to know.

• 3:13:25Jocko Willink?

  Another one, the will matters most. Of course, I had to throw that in there. You get this one, and again, you make this, this link between modern times and these spiritual journeys you take. This one says, quote, "I saw a gamer's chair for what it is. It is designed like a throne as mockery, a false throne for a false king. Video games are to adventure what porn is to sex. A cheap substitute designed to keep you from pursuing real experiences. The gamer's throne lets them feel like he's growing in power while he weakens his body and services to the synthetic ordeal. An entity watches cackling from the other side of the screen."

• 3:14:07Speaker 02

  Some dark shit in it. That one was, that was a piece of this vision that actually, it, it, that really made me like fucking stop. I was like, holy shit. Because like all these, all these other things, like something taken in moderation is never bad. Like, fuck, 2007, playing fucking Halo with my fucking boys on X, whatever, we're relaxing. But when it becomes like your life, and it is, especially, especially designed like fucking thousand dollar gamer chairs on this fucking silly shit. This has become an acceptable lifestyle.

• 3:14:35Jocko Willink?

  So you don't have to get up.

• 3:14:37Speaker 02

  So you don't have to get up. It's, it's perfectly aligned your body to stay there all fucking day. It is, it's fucking insane. And this is, this is some of the shit that is weakening and crushing our fucking society. What percentage of men can't even like go in the military right now because their bodies won't take like day one of base training? It's a lot, it's, it's fucking crazy. And it was like 60, 70%.

• 3:14:56Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and that goes, again, what I was talking about earlier, like if that's where you end up, you're suppressing what you know.

• 3:15:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:15:04Jocko Willink?

  What your blood and your, your DNA wants you to do. You do a good breakdown of Thor, Tyr, and Loki in there, which was, you know, always fun for me to read. You get, you know, your final experience, I think, you know, your, oh, your final, like, big experience that you talk about in the book is like, it makes you sick. It makes you purge.

• 3:15:21Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 3:15:22Jocko Willink?

  And you get to a point where, like, okay, you're not learning anything else from

• 3:15:27Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 3:15:28Jocko Willink?

  doing it again. So it's like you were, okay, we, I got what I needed.

• 3:15:31Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 3:15:32Jocko Willink?

  Um, so that's what the book is about. Uh, and that book turned into now, is the word church the right, is that the right

• 3:15:42Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 3:15:42Jocko Willink?

  term?

• 3:15:42Speaker 02

  It's, it's the legal term that we're gonna use in the United States.

• 3:15:45Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 3:15:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, we, we call it a faith-based, it's a, it's a church.

• 3:15:49Jocko Willink?

  What would you say, faith-based what?

• 3:15:51Speaker 02

  Uh, faith-based organization, but church is fine. Legally, we are incorporated as a church. I mean, that's all, that's the word that we had to use in the legal US system too. So church is good.

• 3:15:59Jocko Willink?

  And you are a priest?

• 3:16:01Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 3:16:01Jocko Willink?

  At the church. The church is the, uh, the path of the barbarian spirit, and you can go to barbarianspirit.com. Um, so you, what, what's the, what's the goal of this, uh, this faith-based organization?

• 3:16:16Speaker 02

  Sure. So, uh, thing, this was all the shit that I had to do to write the book, and that was what happened with the last one where I got sick. It was like, okay, you're done learning now, write this book and put this out. And that was like, uh, a year ago, maybe a year and some change. So I didn't really know what the fuck I was supposed to do next, especially after I wrote the book. Like, I put it out there. Uh, it's not like it changed the world or anything. And I'm kind of in, in this limbo place of like, what, what am I supposed to do? What am I supposed to be doing? I'm supposed to be telling people about this experience. All right, but there's a limit to how much I can do with that, you know, like, I fucking run around the street, like, read my book, like, it's not like I'm really a fucking idiot with a book.

• 3:16:54Speaker 02

  So I walked down a bunch of, uh, paths, you know, I don't know, fucking talk about it on some podcasts, and it doesn't get all, like, a whole lot of fucking traction, though. So I'm still also, in, in my time, when it calls me, I'm still going on these, these journeys, all right? I'm learning, like, more shit, but nothing happens that's like fucking crazy again. Uh, I learned how to use another sacrament that we use at the church, MDMA, uh, which Is you know ecstasy in the party scene, but it actually has an incredible use in this this other world as well. There's whole like therapy systems are built around MDMA. It does a different thing than psilocybin does. So I keep doing this stuff for a while and finally I have another vision that's like pretty fucking crazy.

• 3:17:35Speaker 02

  On the psilocybin. It's like, and this is actually where it names me fucking priest. Like the time where it's like, okay, you you are the fucking priest. That's gonna be your role. And I'm like, okay, well, fucking neat. We don't have a congregation or fucking church, so what the fuck am I gonna do with the priest stuff?

• 3:17:50Speaker 02

  But it shows me the secondary vision and it's uh it's I go in and it's like, okay, you know, I'm fucking big badass dude in the fucking spirit world now. Cause I've done this bunch. I've lifted a bunch of spirit weights, right? I'm fucking beefy. And uh fucking the all father is like, alright, you see that guy over there? Like, that's the demon of suicide. Like, and he's fucking your brothers up. Like, you know, you will go get him? I'm like, okay. Okay, we'll cut this guy's fucking head off real quick. So I go fuck this dude up and it turns out fucking I get close to him and this fucking minotaur jumps out, giant fucking minotaur. Alright, and I can't fight him. He kicks my fucking ass. Like, fuck. So go all through these fucking, it's a long fucking story of processes and fucking trying to, I keep resurrecting and trying different tactics.

• 3:18:29Speaker 02

  And uh finally what I gotta do is fucking spawn ten more of me. Uh so now I'm like the fucking Spartan guy in the back and like, okay, you take the fucking net and go around and do this. Fucking Jocko, you got this fucking, you know, spear and shield, you fucking shoot some arrows at him. And we fuck this dude up. And uh wake up from this, I go outside and that was going to explain to me what the fuck just happened. It's like you have to found a church, alright? And you have to do it in this way because this is the way that you can do it legally in the United States. That minotaur is actually not a bad guy. Uh he's the DEA, alright? He is supposed to fucking protect, he he was spawned by goodness to protect people from like fucking fentanyl and heroin and all that fucking crazy bullshit. But the fucking bad elements also convinced him to prevent us from having MDMA and mushrooms and LSD

• 3:19:15Speaker 02

  and ayahuasca and uh ivigane. And these things that are very useful, alright? So basically, he's protecting the demon of suicide while the demon of suicide runs around and fucks your brothers up. Makes them fucking kill themselves. You have to find a way to fucking beat this guy, alright? And the way that you're gonna do that is this church, alright? Because putting yourself, if I say that I'm a therapist and I run a therapy program, well, that is illegal in the United States with these substances.

• 3:19:42Speaker 02

  However, there is a very incredibly fucking narrow window of protected religious activity where I can do this, alright? I can use these sacraments and I can perform these fucking rituals for our, our soft brothers, alright? I can bring them into my fucking place totally fucking legally, everything's fucking cool. Walk them into the spirit realm because I can actually go into their fucking dreams, which is one of the weird things that I can fucking do, alright? And I can help them exorcise this demon of suicide, this demon of depression and all this fucking bullshit and make them fucking better.

• 3:20:18Jocko Willink?

  And that's the mission?

• 3:20:20Speaker 02

  That is the fucking mission.

• 3:20:21Jocko Willink?

  What is it, what is, uh, logistically, what does that look like? So you, I know on the website, you talk a little bit about what you're trying to do. You gotta raise money so that you can build, and what, you got some land in the Ozarks, is that right?

• 3:20:31Speaker 02

  Yeah. So original plan, we bought some land in the Ozarks, original plan is to put it there. Is there's a bunch of like weird shit that goes along with, uh, especially like using this substance like a ritual method. Being away from electricity is a huge one, alright? I, I've done this both like in the fucking woods and I've done this like in my fucking house. Even being away from electrical fields at all, like kind of enhances the fucking process. Um, the ritual stuff is important because especially like fucking soft dudes like us, alright? Where'd you do all your like really hard shit at? Like in the fucking ocean or in the fucking woods with it? No technology, no night vision, you know, with a fucking rubber duck because when you're a tired ass loser, it's no big deal. We have a connection to nature that like almost nobody else in the fucking world does. Uh, the more that we can get our guys into a natural environment, no electricity.

• 3:21:18Speaker 02

  Kind of feeling also, this goes back to like the blood bridge too. The further we can take this back as far as fuel goes into like how it would have been a fucking thousand years ago. Tents instead of buildings. Fire instead of, you know, fucking electrical lights. All this shit kind of helps, right? Because a lot of dudes, it takes a lot for them to like suspend disbelief. And what I need them to do is suspend disbelief just long enough that we can get across this fucking threshold. Because then they're gonna be good. They're gonna be able to handle all this fucking shit. So, we're in the, we're in the building process right now and it's, uh, it's not cheap, but it's definitely not the most expensive thing in the world either. Basically, we need the capacity to, you know, build like a, a fucking tent year thingy that we can use for like the temple.

• 3:22:02Speaker 02

  A lot of times these things are better done, or you're gonna be able to go deeper if you go by yourself. So it's, it's kind of a catch 22, alright? Your first experience, at least the first few hours of it, you want to have a guide there, alright? Also, you know, legitimately, they should be. I was, I was fucking scared the first time too. Just going in there by yourself is, is kind of fucking scary, alright? But if I can, you'll walk you in there, show you that everything's fine, like, oh, hey, look, man, you can fuck these dudes up. Here, fucking spawn a fucking weapon, whatever you need to do. A lot of guys then, they want to be able to go to their own private space, alright? Where they can really fucking let go. And if they gotta do some fucking crazy shit, they wouldn't do it. You're probably just like, you'll fucking cry or shit out the door, some fucking crazy shit.

• 3:22:46Speaker 02

  It's just gonna help them get to where they need to be faster. I also need to be close enough though, that as the guy supervising, I can still walk by and like, look in and be like, Make sure everything's cool. You joking on your own vomit? No, you're good, okay. So, uh, so that's where we're at right now. We're trying to build this. Uh, we're also trying to get, you know, some money in the bank for it. One thing I know about like myself, like when I was a real fucking mess. Uh, when they did the, the brain magnet shit for me, a charity did that, alright? And I had to take a couple of steps before I was even willing to ask the charity if I could go. And if it had been like three grand that I had to come up with out of my, my own pocket, I wouldn't have done it. I, not because I didn't feel like, uh, you know, not because it's even a high price, but because like, when you're that banged up, like you're not gonna spend money on making yourself feel better.

• 3:23:31Speaker 02

  That's where you feel like, oh, fucking robbing my kids to help me with some fucking bullshit brain stuff. So we want it for, you know, the fucking boys to be completely fucking free. I'd be completely like, hey, you know, you fucking call, fucking show us that you're one of the fucking boys and you're fucked up. Like, here's a plane ticket, bring your ass out here and we'll fucking square you away.

• 3:23:48Jocko Willink?

  That's what the goal is. And you want to be able to get, what, twenty veterans a month?

• 3:23:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, ideal for me is twenty. I can only really handle like ten at a time by myself. There comes a point where you just can't, you know, even ten's like, it's on the upside of it. And as far as like how many times a month, like, I can go on a journey twice is really about it. That it's gonna be, you know, like, good, without, you know, start to pay a price for it.

• 3:24:17Jocko Willink?

  So that's the plan?

• 3:24:18Speaker 02

  That's the plan.

• 3:24:20Jocko Willink?

  Does that get us up to speed? What else?

• 3:24:22Speaker 02

  Pretty much, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, we, uh, we may actually fraggo the plan to Arkansas. Uh, we're looking really hard at moving back to Idaho because that's where our grandchildren live and most of the shit. Uh, so we may end up putting it up there instead, uh, but, you know, fuck, we'll figure it out. Uh, we're only a couple of months into this, so we had to figure out that's even, you know, legitimately possible. The other thing I really like about moving it up there is that if we do this in Arkansas or the Ozarks, there has to be air conditioning, right? Because I need people to be comfortable when they're doing this stuff. So, six months out of the year, you're gonna have to have some fucking air. If you move it somewhere into the north where, you know, the environment's a little bit more fucking forgiving, alright,

• 3:25:06Speaker 02

  you can do this all summer long with nothing, and in the winters you're gonna have fires, which actually is more, it, it, it helps you with that fucking primitive feel, so it's good.

• 3:25:17Jocko Willink?

  Right on. So, um, people want to find you. It's barbarianspirit.com.

• 3:25:22Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 3:25:23Jocko Willink?

  You're on Twitter, X, at wayoftheirs?

• 3:25:28Speaker 02

  Way off the rez.

• 3:25:29Jocko Willink?

  Way off the rez, dude. I've been, I've been saying that thing for a long, for a long, I was just way off theirs. I was like, what does he mean by like, oh?

• 3:25:36Speaker 02

  My first company was called Off the Res. It references the old counterterrorism term, Off the Restoration.

• 3:25:40Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:25:41Speaker 02

  Uh, so when they nuked that account, I came back as way off the rez.

• 3:25:43Jocko Willink?

  Way off the rez. There you go. And Instagram, you're at Clay Martin Actual.

• 3:25:51Jocko Willink?

  Echo Charles, you got any questions?

• 3:25:52Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, if we can rewind, are you, are you at liberty to say how you found your stepdaughter that time? Oh, yeah, fucking looking for, like, how I don't get like, how do you?

• 3:26:02Speaker 02

  Oh, man.

• 3:26:04Speaker 02

  This is the thing that the people like really like misconceptualize about like, you know, fucking soft dudes and green berets shit like that we're badass because like we have guns will fucking come through your front door.

• 3:26:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, like you ever watch Rambo Last Blood?

• 3:26:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:26:15Speaker 01

  You ever watch that? That's what I envy. You ever watch that?

• 3:26:18Speaker 02

  Actually, I don't.

• 3:26:19Speaker 01

  That's what I envisioned.

• 3:26:20Speaker 02

  I don't know if I saw the last one, but I've seen like the first four.

• 3:26:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was way, I think.

• 3:26:25Jocko Willink?

  The one that came out?

• 3:26:26Speaker 01

  Five.

• 3:26:26Jocko Willink?

  The one that just came out?

• 3:26:27Speaker 01

  The fifth one.

• 3:26:28Jocko Willink?

  The last?

• 3:26:28Speaker 01

  The last blood, bro.

• 3:26:29Jocko Willink?

  Where he's got a fifty cal?

• 3:26:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:26:31Jocko Willink?

  In a house? And he's like mowing people down?

• 3:26:34Speaker 01

  Is it in a house? Well, no, he goes and finds his like.

• 3:26:37Jocko Willink?

  Is it in America?

• 3:26:37Speaker 01

  He goes down to Mexico to find his kidnapped daughter.

• 3:26:40Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 3:26:40Speaker 01

  Or not daughter, I think it's like the niece or something.

• 3:26:42Speaker 02

  Niece or something, okay. Well, this is actually what makes us dangerous. It's not that, you know, we fucking come through your house with a fucking pistol or fucking machine gun. Uh, it's not that we can shoot you from really long as a fucking rifle. It's that we will.

• 3:26:52Speaker 01

  I feel like that's, that is.

• 3:26:54Speaker 02

  That's pretty dangerous.

• 3:26:55Speaker 01

  Very much what one of the many things.

• 3:26:57Speaker 02

  Like the more dangerous shit that we can do, though, is we can show up with very limited resources and and make friends with people and talk to people and fucking get people to ally with us because we understand them and we fucking hypothetically figure out what makes them fucking tick. And next thing you know, we've got like a little fucking network or a little fucking army of all kinds of motherfuckers that are helping us. All right. So even if it's a. I've lived in Boise for zero minutes when I needed to do this. And next thing you know, I got a fucking network through the fucking trailer parks and all kinds of other fucking criminal fucks that I bought like a twelve pack or a fucking, you know, box of smokes or some bullshit. And yeah, by the end of, you know, fucking two weeks, like, I don't got a whole fucking rat line and intelligence network.

• 3:27:34Speaker 01

  So where was she?

• 3:27:36Speaker 02

  I had some fucking dickheads out. She was running between multiple different places, but, uh, you know, eventually got the, you know, fucking hit a couple of dry holes and they found the right target.

• 3:27:42Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 3:27:43Speaker 02

  That's like back in the day, right?

• 3:27:45Speaker 01

  There you go. And then was she, when you found her, was she like, oh, okay, I'll go home with you? Or was she like resistant? Like, what was the whole?

• 3:27:51Speaker 02

  No, I mean, I didn't handle the action pieces of this myself either because this is America. Yeah, I was when I showed up and, you know, fucking observed what we call cops.

• 3:27:59Speaker 01

  Oh, right, right.

• 3:27:59Speaker 02

  Yeah. So the cops arrested fucking everybody. They arrested these fucking shitbag parents who were actually harboring like, you know, fucking ten, fifteen runaways. Uh, yeah, like all kinds of crazy shit going on.

• 3:28:11Speaker 02

  Maybe not some less good shit that somebody should have fucking died of or whatever. When her shit went down, but uh, yeah. So yeah, it was pretty, pretty fucking, it was pretty fucking bananas though.

• 3:28:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:28:22Speaker 02

  It's funny, actually of all the people that ever asked me locally, like her family shit, like had this happen. The only guy that asked the right questions was her nephew that's a lawyer. He's like, fuck all the action Johnny shit. He's like, I want to know how the fuck you figured this out when you don't know anybody. Mystique magic.

• 3:28:39Speaker 01

  Right on. So we got her. She's back.

• 3:28:41Speaker 02

  No, she's great. Yep, yep.

• 3:28:43Speaker 01

  Right on.

• 3:28:43Jocko Willink?

  What else, Echo Charles?

• 3:28:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's it. Good to meet you, sir.

• 3:28:47Speaker 02

  Good to meet you too, brother.

• 3:28:49Jocko Willink?

  Clay, any, uh, any final thoughts, brother?

• 3:28:52Speaker 02

  Man, this is the big thing, I think, for, uh, for the veteran community. Uh, and especially like the warfighters, like the, the fucking grunts, like the fucking EOD, the guys that got blown up and got fucking hurt and shit like that. It doesn't fucking matter if you come do it with me, uh, as long as you do it with somebody fucking competent. Don't be afraid of these substances, these fucking sacraments is something that will help you. Uh, they are fucking amazing. Uh, you don't have to take my fucking word for it. You can look up the, the science and the white papers behind it where it's like, uh, like seventy-five, eighty percent of people, uh, so- suicide, but especially turns suicidal thought off like a light switch. It one shots it. Uh, you can read a fantastic book, uh, by somebody else, uh, called A Dose of Hope, which is all about how MDMA is used on a therapeutic and how it, it helped him.

• 3:29:36Speaker 02

  Uh, and he went through some fucking crazy shit and this like basically totally scored his life away. Uh, so yeah, so, so look at it as an option. Don't go to like a, a house party or ask some, you know, weirdo chucklehead that, uh, does this for fun because they don't understand. It's a completely different thing. And for that matter, even if you use these substances as a young guy to like party or something like that, it is a completely different experience when you use it either ritually or as a therapeutic. So, uh, so don't just discount it because you've done it before when you were, you know, sixteen and home alone.

• 3:30:12Jocko Willink?

  Well, man, uh, thanks for coming out. Appreciate it. Thanks for, uh, thanks for sharing your lessons learned. Obviously thanks for your service in the Marine Corps and in the Army and, uh, thanks for taking the fight to the enemy aggressively when you got the chance. And thanks for what you're doing today to continue to help our, our brothers through what they're going through, man. Appreciate it.

• 3:30:33Speaker 02

  Thank you, brother. Thanks again for having me. This has been absolutely fantastic and, uh, yeah, I can't wait to see where this goes.

• 3:30:38Jocko Willink?

  Right on, bro. Thank you.

• 3:30:41Jocko Willink?

  And with that, Clay Martin has left the building. Clearly talking about getting your mind right, getting your body right, getting your spirit right. We can focus on the body. We know that one's pretty straightforward.

• 3:30:55Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 3:30:56Jocko Willink?

  You know, what are we doing? Working out, etc. You might want to check out Jocko Fuel.com. You might want to get some strawberry milk.

• 3:31:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:31:05Jocko Willink?

  I know you do the strawberry milk, but you add what a banana?

• 3:31:09Speaker 01

  Banana.

• 3:31:10Jocko Willink?

  What's the deal with that?

• 3:31:10Speaker 01

  Here's, well, because recently I revisited the, usually I have the RTDs. It's part of, it's on rotation. Banana chocolate, that's the normal, but I have, I had some strawberry, so decided to revisit that strawberry. You add the banana, it enhances the strawberry flavor. It does. I put half a banana, by the way. But, oh yeah, roll that back in, revisit that one.

• 3:31:33Jocko Willink?

  So there you go. Get yourself some milk so you can be strong physically and healthier and all that. Jocko Fuel.com. You can also, hey, also Hy-Vee. You ever heard of Hy-Vee?

• 3:31:43Speaker 01

  Hy-Vee?

• 3:31:44Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Another place you can get it. Walmart, Wawa, you guys know the deal.

• 3:31:48Speaker 01

  Where is Hy-Vee?

• 3:31:49Jocko Willink?

  Like middle of the country.

• 3:31:50Speaker 01

  Okay. Yeah, hell yeah.

• 3:31:52Jocko Willink?

  So, there you go. Check out Jocko Fuel.com, also OriginUSA.com. You know, t-shirts.

• 3:32:00Jocko Willink?

  They seem like no big deal, but they kind of are a big deal because we're wearing t-shirts a lot.

• 3:32:03Speaker 01

  We are.

• 3:32:04Jocko Willink?

  Check out the core tee, just standard, you can get graphics on them, but you can also just get a t-shirt.

• 3:32:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:32:10Jocko Willink?

  And just wear it.

• 3:32:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, fully.

• 3:32:12Jocko Willink?

  Made in America 100%.

• 3:32:14Speaker 01

  Yep. The thing that one of the very small handful of important elements of a t-shirt is the fit.

• 3:32:23Jocko Willink?

  Well, that's a huge piece.

• 3:32:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, like even people were not like over indexing on aesthetics and fashion or whatever. I don't think they realize how important the fit is. You know, people, they'll have their, their favorite t-shirt. It'd be like 30 years old sometimes.

• 3:32:38Jocko Willink?

  Oh, I've got some of those.

• 3:32:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, but it's your favorite. Yeah, yeah, but I'm just saying for example, you know, in principle.

• 3:32:45Speaker 01

  And it's because of the fit, no matter how old, no matter how outdated the design is, no matter how much it's kind of falling apart. See how those things become secondary if it fits right? That's one of the strong elements of the core T-shirt I've noticed.

• 3:33:00Jocko Willink?

  The core T-shirt from Origin USA. Now, it didn't fit good. It was made in America.

• 3:33:04Speaker 01

  Yes, sir.

• 3:33:04Jocko Willink?

  No, nope. 100% communist free. 100% slavery free. OriginUSA.com. Check it out.

• 3:33:13Speaker 01

  It's true. Also, we're representing on the path, you know?

• 3:33:18Speaker 01

  We got shirts on there too, by the way. Also, very much focused on fit. In fact, I had many people tell me, "These are the best fitting shirts ever." Miha, guy we both know and love, you know, smart guy sometimes.

• 3:33:31Jocko Willink?

  Don't use the L-word around me.

• 3:33:34Speaker 01

  Some of us know him, some of us know and love him. Anyway, smart guy, he mentioned to me, he had one of the old school back to the book shirts. He said, "It was my favorite shirt because of the fit." It's not like back to the book is some groundbreaking message I need to wear on my back.

• 3:33:50Jocko Willink?

  Let's face it, it's kind of cool though.

• 3:33:52Speaker 01

  It's cool, it's cool, but let's face it, that's not the front running element is what I'm saying. It's the fit. Anyway, he got it thrown, he got it thrown away on accident, unfortunate incident, but nonetheless, a whole nother story. Nonetheless, Jocko's store, so we can get discipline equals freedom. Good, stand by to get some, get after, these are all shirts. The way we represent on the path, that's how, that's how you can do it. Indexing hardcore on the fit. Also, on Jocko's store, I'm not, I'll get to the shirt locker one sec. On Jocko's store, new shirt, good, third edition.

• 3:34:23Jocko Willink?

  That's not a new shirt. We've always had a good shirt.

• 3:34:25Speaker 01

  Yes, we have. And then we had another one, a new one. Now we got a new new. See what I'm saying?

• 3:34:31Jocko Willink?

  3.0.

• 3:34:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, 3.0. It's only been like four years since the last one. But anyway, it's a good one. Check it out. We just released it yesterday. So people, if you're on the email list, you would have known this. See what I'm saying? So if you want to know about new shirts, sign up for the email list. Super simple.

• 3:34:45Jocko Willink?

  What if we hate spam?

• 3:34:47Speaker 01

  Amen, no factor, because I don't spam at all. It's all relevant stuff, 100%. Okay, I mentioned the shirt locker. Shirt locker is a new design every month. Subscription scenario. New design is out as of three days ago. The first of every month, new design, uh, switches over. I'll give you, actually, I think I already told you what it was. No, I give you a hint.

• 3:35:08Jocko Willink?

  There's runes involved. I like that. Speaking of runes, uh, Dave Burke has a new book coming out. Good deal. The book is called The Need to Lead. Preorder it now, get the first edition. And speaking of runes, Clay Martin has a few books Barbarian Spirit Wrath of the Wendigo. And he was saying it the other way. He was saying it. Wendigo. Wendigo. Like, when to go? Now. I have an answer to that question. When to go? Freaking now. Wrath of the Wendigo, Concrete Jungle, and then Prairie Fire. Of course, we have Echelon Front. We have a leadership consultancy and we solve problems through leadership. If you want to come to one of our events, make sure you, make sure you go online and check it out. So we can, you can actually go because

• 3:35:53Jocko Willink?

  these events sell out. Uh, we have the muster coming up in December. So it's in Orlando, I believe. Yeah, yeah. So come and check it out. Echelonfront.com. Also Extreme Ownership, our online training academy. You can learn to lead through an online academy and you can learn skills that you need, we all need. We don't always have them. We're not born with them. You need to learn them. Check out extremeownership.com for that. And if you want to help service members, active and retired, you want to help their families, Gold Star families, check out Mark Lee's mom, Mama Lee. She's got an amazing charity organization. If you want to donate or you want to get involved, go to Americas Mighty

• 3:36:34Jocko Willink?

  Warriors.org. Also check out Heroes and Horses.org and Jimmy May's organization, Beyond the Brotherhood.org. Check those out. If you want to connect with us for Clay, go to BarbarianSpirit.com and then Twitter X, Way Off the Res, not Way of Theirs, which is what I thought it was. Way Off the Res, Way Off The, The, and then Res, R E S. And then on Instagram, he's Clay Martin Actual. For us, you can check out Jaco.com. You can check out on social media. I'm at Jocko Willink, Echoes at Echo Charles. Just be careful. Don't submit and bow your head to the demons that are in your phone.

• 3:37:16Jocko Willink?

  We do not recommend that. It'll wreck your life, steal your soul. Once again, thanks Clay Martin for joining us. Thanks for sharing your lessons learned. And most important, thanks for what you did overseas to prosecute our nation's enemies. Thanks for what you're doing right now to try and help our veterans. Thanks to all our uniformed personnel around the world right now with a solemn salute to our brothers in the special forces. It was an honor to serve with you all. Also, thanks to our police, law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, border patrol, secret service, as well as all other first responders. Thank you for your service, keeping us safe on the home front. And everyone else out there, here's a little something to keep in mind from Clay's book, The Barbarian Spirit. We, we, he mentioned it for a second.

• 3:38:01Jocko Willink?

  The quote is, "Anything that wants you to put down your weapon is not your friend." Now, that doesn't only apply to actual weapons, I'm here to tell you. It applies to everything that's out there that's trying to make you weaker, trying to make you dumber, trying to make you less capable, trying to make you less healthy. These things are your enemy. That phone, that junk food, those temptations. Those are not your friends. Those are your enemies. Do not surrender to them. Ever. And that's all I've got for tonight. Until next time, this is Echo and Jocko out.