306: Don't Let Your Mind Get Stuck. Be Ready to Adjust to New Information. On The Psychology of Military Incompetence Pt.4

0:00:00 - Opening 0:02:53 - On The Psychology of Military Incompetence. 2:32:18 - How to stay on THE PATH 2:55:20 - Closing gratitude. 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 306 with Echo Charles and me Jocko Willink. Good evening, Echo. Good evening. And also joining us again tonight, Dave Berke. Good evening, Dave. Good evening. So I said this book was going to take a while. I actually said that to you a year ago that when we do this book, it's going to take a while. But we are going to continue our review of the book on the psychology of military incompetence, which we started on podcast 303, 303, 304, 305. Here we are on 306 and there's going to be more. So if you haven't listened to 303, 304, 305, go back, listen to those. And if you have listened to those, then what you heard on those was basically the setup. It was the setup.

• 0:43Jocko Willink?

  It was the background information that we have been, that we need to get into the actual theories of how psychology plays a role in military incompetence. And with that, let's, let's get back to the book. So this, this, this part of the book is called part two. And this is where we're no longer covering historical incidents or battles. Although the reason I had to read them all was because he does refer back to them quite a bit. And I will say, as I went through the, as I, as I was kind of navigating how to do this, I'm not going back as much as he is. So when he goes back, I might not cover every single one. He goes back a little bit more, but.

• 1:25Jocko Willink?

  So this part of the book is what's, what he's actually trying to figure out? How does, how does psychology play a role in incompetence? So here we go. Chapter 13, is there a case to answer? He says that now that we've completed a survey of, started recovering 100 years of military mishaps, what conclusions can be drawn regarding the incidents of military incompetence? There are a number of possible answers. Firstly, it could be argued that so-called incompetence at high levels of command is really a figment of the imagination of vindictive, inaccurate or untruthful historians. So that's one conclusion. A second conclusion might be what seems to have been military incompetence was really

• 2:07Jocko Willink?

  due to other non-military factors such as governmental stinginess, vagaries of the weather and sheer bad luck.

• 2:17Jocko Willink?

  A third conclusion might be that since every military action is an uncontrolled experiment in the sense that it can never be known what would have been the outcome had been this had decisions been different, there remains an almost unimaginable possibility that things might have been worse, that what was done did represent the least disastrous of possible courses open.

• 2:41Jocko Willink?

  So there are some different reasons why you could say, well, you know, it's not really military incompetence. It's just that historians are jerks. It's just that there's factors that no one can control and that actually these decisions that were made were good, but you know, it's just a bad situation. So these are the best things that could happen. His response to that is no one would deny there's more to the grain of truth in all these propositions. Cool. Facts do get distorted in the telling. Disasters are indeed more newsworthy than successes. Writers undoubtedly do enjoy painting the worst possible picture of their particular bet noirs. Many generals have had to contend with ineptitude, uninformed interference and the stinginess of their political masters.

• 3:25Jocko Willink?

  And of course, things could have been worse. There are counter arguments, however, because they are surrogate father figures, people are only too ready and anxious to love their admirals and generals, particularly in a time of war. We see that a lot, right? Like if someone was in the military, then they must be awesome. And in recent years, that's gotten, I would say even more prolific. If someone's a vet, then anything they say has some merit and value. And then you figure if they're a vet, whatever they say has merit and value. If they were an admiral or they were a general, then they must just be awesome. They just must be speaking the truth.

• 4:11Jocko Willink?

  Which we know not to be true. I'm gonna fast forward a little bit. Under the circumstances, this book takes the view that certain sorts of incompetence have been an enduring feature of the military scene. And that amongst the millions of officers and men who have fought heroically and efficiently, often under the most trying conditions, there have marched a small but influential number, whose ability has fallen far short of that required by the positions which they held. So again, he likes to point this out from time to time, and this is one of those times that this isn't about every military officer. And I'm not making this about every military officer. I worked for awesome military officers. Dave?

• 4:51Speaker 01

  Yeah. At every level, there are great military officers.

• 4:54Jocko Willink?

  Every level, every service, there's great military officers. But it is interesting, he says, a small but influential number. So these are people that are totally inept at being military leaders, and yet they end up in really powerful positions. He says, two questions then occur. Is there any common pattern to this incompetence? And if there is, whence does it arise? As a first step towards answering these questions, let us try and summarize the data contained in the foregoing chapters. In brief, then, military incompetence involves. One, a serious wastage of human resources and failure to observe one of the first principles

• 5:38Jocko Willink?

  of war, economy of force. This failure derives in part from an inability to make war swiftly. It also derives from certain attitudes of mind, which we shall consider presently. So that's the number one thing that's showing that someone's an inept leader is when they have massive wastage of human life. Number two, a fundamental conservatism and clinging to outworn tradition, an inability to profit from past experience, owing in part to a refusal to admit past mistakes. Gee.

• 6:21Jocko Willink?

  Do we even have to go any deeper on that one? Or is everyone just immediately understanding what's going on with that? If you can't admit your past mistakes, if you can't take ownership of your mistakes, you don't make any improvement. It also involves a failure to use or tendency to misuse available technology.

• 6:39Jocko Willink?

  This one's a massive profit from past experience. Failure to profit from past experience, you don't learn anything. Number three, a tendency to reject or ignore information which is unpalatable or which conflicts with preconceptions.

• 7:00Jocko Willink?

  Number four, a tendency to underestimate the enemy and overestimate the capabilities of one's own side.

• 7:08Jocko Willink?

  Indecisiveness. Number five, indecisiveness and a tendency to abdicate from the role of decision maker.

• 7:16Jocko Willink?

  Number six, an obstinate persistence in a given task despite strong contrary evidence.

• 7:25Jocko Willink?

  Obstinate persistence in a given task, that's when you are, this is a, I don't know if you guys have anything like this, Dave, but when you're parachuting, one of the ways that people die when parachuting is they have a problem with their main parachute and they just keep trying to fix that problem. And they get target fixation and they just, they just.

• 7:45Speaker 01

  And they never go to the reserve.

• 7:46Jocko Willink?

  They never go to the reserve.

• 7:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:48Jocko Willink?

  Can that happen in the cockpit?

• 7:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. And maybe a slightly different, different version of that is you can have a system that is a, you know, it's a critical system that you need, but it wouldn't be the difference between returning home safely and not. But you'll, you'll spend so much time trying to resolve the problem that system is causing that it can lead you to focusing on that so much that, that you stop paying attention to other things and it'll lead you to a mishap when even though it could be a real problem, it should never lead you down the path of, of crashing or losing the airplane. And what you really need to do is. Ignore is probably the wrong word, but if you can't solve this, move, move on to something else and get the airplane back safely and they'll spend, people will devote a hundred percent of their attention to that, all the way to the point that they crashed an airplane

• 8:32Speaker 01

  as a result of it, when it would, would not have caused a crash. It's kind of crazy. And that human element of the fixation, I think is the word you use, the fixation on that.

• 8:41Jocko Willink?

  You know, I was just talking about this at the muster. We are genetically programmed to, to fixate.

• 8:46Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 8:47Jocko Willink?

  Because if you're a caveman and you can't concentrate on the tiger that's, you know, prowling up on you, and you're distracted by other things, then you're going to die, right? So we're programmed to focus on what's right in front of us. That's why people so often lose strategic vision and they can't detach and they don't see what else has happened on. That's, that's why you get flanked. That's why you keep trying to fix your parachute until you hit the dirt, or why you concentrate on some instrument panel until you run out of fuel or you run into a mountain.

• 9:15Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 9:16Jocko Willink?

  What's the term when someone hits a mountain with no, like no brakes or whatever?

• 9:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. We call it CFIT, Controlled Flight Into Terrain, which means you're fully in control of the aircraft as you do it, as you hit that mountain. Because you are so fixated on something else. You know, it's not like, hey, I'm tumbling out of the sky. I'm trying to save this airplane. I hit the ground. It's like, hey, I'm flying perfectly normal flying. I might be, I'm fuck, I'm fixated on or focusing on something that's a problem, but I'm going to fully controlled level flight into the ground or into the mountain. That is totally avoidable had it not been for that fixation.

• 9:57Jocko Willink?

  How common is that?

• 9:58Speaker 01

  It's, as far as mishaps go, it's common. It's not uncommon.

• 10:02Jocko Willink?

  Well, the, the first time I, I remember hearing that was when Kobe Bryant's helicopter crashed. And I think that was because they couldn't see, right? They, they couldn't see, but there was nothing wrong with the helicopter at all. They were just flying and he obviously there, I think they were in a fog and so got disoriented and just flew just full speed, no factor into the, into the mountain.

• 10:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. And like the worst versions of that is, um, they're all terrible is I'm, I'm, I'm in a dive, like I'm in a 45 degree dive. I'm diving down towards the target, which is what you're supposed to do. You're going to get into an altitude and you're going to dive down towards the target to help, uh, refine where you're going to drop the bomb. And I'm going to focus on the display that makes sure that my targeting, my reticle, the, the aiming point is exactly where I want it. A little, little adjustment to keep, I'll keep adjusting that targeting point to be exactly where I want it. And I'll go through my minimum altitudes and I will fly straight into the ground all the while just focusing on that targeting point and I'll never try to pull up, I'll never try to recover, I'll ignore warnings that say your altitude is getting low and pilots will fly directly into the ground, working on something else in a perfectly safe, effective

• 11:08Speaker 01

  flying, no problems at all.

• 11:09Jocko Willink?

  That is literally the exact same thing that happens to guys skydiving. Well, it's a little bit different because with a guy skydiving, they're trying to fix a problem, usually. I suppose there are some cases. You know, this is why, again, referring back to the muster, I was talking about the leadership loop and the main bullet at the bottom, both for the oodle loop and the leadership loop is you can't get stuck, you can't get stuck focused on one thing. And when you do get focused on one thing, there's just, the rest of the world doesn't stop, right? Whenever you're focused in one thing in life, the rest of the world doesn't stop. The rest of the world's going to keep going. If you don't look around, it's going to be a problem. And that's what this number is, number six,

• 11:52Jocko Willink?

  an obstinate persistence in a given task despite strong contrary evidence. That was number six. Number seven, a failure to exploit a situation gained and a tendency to quote, pull punches rather than push home an attack. Number eight, a failure to make adequate reconnaissance. Number nine, a predilection for frontal assaults, often against the enemy's strongest point. And again, even, once again, at the muster, I'm trying to explain to people because you know there's people that want to, they just want to hear you say, look, someone's caused

• 12:35Jocko Willink?

  a problem, you just got to go direct. That's what everybody wants to hear. And it makes so much intuitive sense to think, you know what, I don't like Dave's plan, I just need to go tell him, Dave, I don't like your plan. And it's just so obvious that when I say, Dave, I don't like your plan, immediately, Dave is defensive. By the way, once you get defensive, you're not listening to anything else I say, and now we're not making any progress. So even though it seems like it's the most efficient thing to do, it's not. The most efficient thing to do is say, hey, Dave, I'm looking at your plan. Can you expand on a couple of these points? Because I don't think I understand them. And now his defenses are down. We're having a real conversation. My mind is actually open. It's not just a little fugazi. It's real. And we're having

• 13:20Jocko Willink?

  a real conversation. We can make progress. But the predilection for the frontal assault, both on the battlefield and in a conversation with another human being is bad. And it leads to failure. Number 10, a belief in brute force, rather than the clever ruse. So there you go. The jujitsu people just cheered. A failure to make use of surprise or deception. Jujitsu people just cheered again. This is the kind of thing, when I say that jujitsu affected my brain. These are the kind of things. Those three right there. Frontal

• 14:01Jocko Willink?

  assault's bad. That's jujitsu. Believe in clever ruse instead of brute force. That's jujitsu. Make use of surprise and deception. That's jujitsu. I had a buddy. I started, he trained jujitsu, I trained jujitsu. But he was very, he was sort of not training a lot. And this was early 90s. He trained, you know, some, you know. And I was like in my first month of training jujitsu all the time with Fabio Santos. And one day, this is my buddy Jim, I said, I told him I came back after like a month of training. I said, hey, man, here's the deal. I just, I just learned this. You can't do one move. A one

• 14:46Jocko Willink?

  move by itself doesn't work because it's too easy to defend. You gotta set people up. That's what this whole thing is. It's like a trick. It's a big trick. And about three days later, he and I were rolling. And he freaking was sinking in a choke, sinking in a choke, sinking in a choke. And I was like, dude, this guy is not going to be able to choke me. I know exactly. Boom! He unlocked me.

• 15:14Jocko Willink?

  And I was like, whole, and he, he 100%, he got it. He was like, dude, that's what you just told me. And I was like, oh my God. So,

• 15:26Jocko Willink?

  and he, you know, he got me because of that thing right there. He listened to me and this guy ended up, uh, we ended up working together a lot and actually uh, just an awesome guy. But anyways,

• 15:42Jocko Willink?

  he used that thing and set it up. That little, that little surprise, number one, it was a surprise. Number two, it was a ruse. And number three, it wasn't brute force. It was technique.

• 15:56Jocko Willink?

  Number 12. An undue readiness to find scapegoats for military setbacks. Oh, this is to use Jason Gardner's uh, term blame thrower. These are the people that get out the blame thrower. And the opposite of extreme ownership, right? I'm just gonna find who I'm gonna blame.

• 16:19Jocko Willink?

  A suppression, number 13. A suppression or distortion of news from the front usually rationalized as necessary for morale or security. Oh, you know what? That is a really nice way of saying. A suppression or distortion of news from the front usually rationalized as necessary for morale or security. What we're saying here is lying to the troops. Lying to the troops.

• 16:49Jocko Willink?

  And then number 14. This one's a little strange. A belief in mystical forces. Fate, bad luck, etc. So, there's your, there's your list of 14 things that military incompetence involves. That's from all those historical features. Those are sort of the common themes here.

• 17:13Jocko Willink?

  Fast forward a little bit. On logical, if not humanitarian grounds, the maintenance of an efficient force should be the first consideration of a military commander. Other qualities of generalship will avail him nothing if he has no one left to do the fighting. So, he's focusing on that first one, saying you should keep people alive.

• 17:31Jocko Willink?

  And this is something that, you know, sometimes people will ask us, well, you got the mission and you got the men, which one's more important? And it's very easy for me to answer that question. The people come first, because if you don't have people, you can't do any more missions. So, yes, the mission is absolute a top priority, but it's not the top priority. You've got to take care of your people. Continuing on here, excessive loss of life and high casualty figures would therefore seem like a likely indicator of military incompetence.

• 18:07Jocko Willink?

  Known cases of what seemed to be purely administrative incompetence, as for example, in what John Laffin has described as the imbecile Waltrun Expedition of 1809. Though the purpose of this expedition was to attack Antwerp, the troops were in fact kept in waiting for eight weeks on unhealthy Waltrun Island in Zealand. In the event, and owing to the procrastination of the military commander, Lord Chatham, and the naval commander, Sir Richard Straken,

• 18:44Jocko Willink?

  7,000 men died, 14,000 had their health permanently ruined, and thousands more became ill, mostly from malaria.

• 18:54Jocko Willink?

  Only 217 were killed in action.

• 18:58Jocko Willink?

  So, just in case you didn't catch that, 7,000 died from disease and

• 19:07Jocko Willink?

  just a disaster from an administrative perspective, but only 217 were killed in action. While dying men were given no attention and little to eat. As Laffin remarks, sick men were expendable.

• 19:25Jocko Willink?

  Fast forward a little bit. The second class of manpower wastage is that involving casualties from enemy action as a result of the incompetent planning of senior military commanders. The men who perished in the attack on Fort Ruyat in the Indian mutiny, the thousands of casualties from the Germans' use of gas in 1915, the 13,000 who went into captivity following the siege of Cut, and the 138,000 casualties of Singapore, the 8,500 Americans who died in the Ardennes offensive 1944, and the 17,000 British, American, and Polish who were killed, wounded, or reported missing at RNM fall into this category.

• 20:04Jocko Willink?

  So he's got these, I should have broken this out earlier. He's going through the three different types, or the different types of how you waste people's lives. The first one is just administrative. The second one is bad planning. And then the third one is the third and most costly type of manpower wastage is that resulting from a deliberate policy of attrition adopted by commanders who regarded soldiers as wholly expendable, generals for whom the conservation of human life ranked lower than in importance than various other criteria which were governing their actions.

• 20:43Jocko Willink?

  This is when your plan is, oh, a lot of people are gonna die.

• 20:53Jocko Willink?

  Fast forward a little bit, he says, "In all this, we are anticipating a theory of military incompetence rather different from that held by proponents of the so-called bloody fool theory. Perhaps we are being too complicated. Perhaps intellectual deficit could explain the data. Let us then, before considering the other factors contributing to military incompetence, first examine this older and more favored hypothesis." And so what he's saying here is, there's a lot of people that just say, "Oh, they, people make mistakes, and they make mistakes because they're dumb." They're just dumb, dumb military leaders. And that's why they make these mistakes. They're just stupid. And, well, he's gonna talk about the fact that, yeah, you can account for some of that.

• 21:32Jocko Willink?

  But a lot of times, you have very intelligent leaders making really stupid decisions. And obviously, his hypothesis is that's because of their psychological nature.

• 21:49Jocko Willink?

  So here we go into chapter 14, the intellectual ability of senior military commanders.

• 21:55Jocko Willink?

  Um, T E Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia said, I feel a fundamental crippling incurious or incuriousness about our officers, too much body and too little head.

• 22:06Jocko Willink?

  So obviously he's a military guy and he was very, very smart. But he's just saying, look, I see a lot of people that aren't, ain't too bright, too much body, too little head.

• 22:16Jocko Willink?

  What grounds are there then for the most popular explanation of military incompetence stupidity? There's, there's a suggestion that the arms force, armed forces do not attract the best brains. A call up survey in the, survey in the United States put the status of army officers below that of professors, physicians, clergymen and schoolteachers.

• 22:36Jocko Willink?

  As Morris Janowitz remarks, a liberal ideology holds that since war is essentially destructive, the best minds are attracted to more positive endeavors.

• 22:48Jocko Willink?

  Um, it's like one of those statements you go, well, you know, if you're making that statement, you would, if you're a really smart person, are you thinking, hey, what do I want to do? Do I want to go out and build the, the next great energy platform? Or do I want to go out and kill a bunch of people? You think, oh, well, maybe the people that are a little bit smarter are going to lean towards building the next great energy platform. That's the, that's the statement anyways.

• 23:14Speaker 02

  Yeah. What was the thing with like the, the atomic bomb where like the technology was like

• 23:21Speaker 02

  made for something or the, or the idea was like the technology was made for something, but then you got another group of people who are like, oh, that's cool technology. Let's use it for this automatically, you know, like for bad stuff. That's all what we always think, right? A lot of the time where it's like, oh, that's good technology.

• 23:36Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 23:37Speaker 02

  Who's going to weapon like someone's going to weaponize it, you know? It's like, that's the fear.

• 23:40Jocko Willink?

  Like you put you and me in a room. And they're like, hey, we've, we've created this thing that can create a massive amount of energy and you're, you're thinking, cool, we can power the world. And I'm thinking, cool, we can blow up our enemies.

• 23:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly.

• 23:55Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that could be. Somebody's got to think that way.

• 23:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:02Jocko Willink?

  It says here in Training for Generalship, it seems that intellectual ability has not always counted for very much. Even Hague, the educated soldier, became commander in chief of the British Army in the First World War despite a poor academic record. This Dowland Scott, this Dowell Lowland Scott, described by Duff Cooper as the dunce of the family and by Lord George as utterly stupid. So you are getting some dumb people here.

• 24:28Jocko Willink?

  Fast forward a little. Certainly a brilliant performance in military schools is no guarantee of subsequent ability. General Colly, whose succession of defeats culminated in 1881 and his own demise at Mujabah Hill, had the distinction of passing out of Snaff College with the highest marks on record. The irrelevance of early scholarship to subsequent generalship also finds support in Napoleon and Wellington, both of whom achieved very low grades at school. And in more recent times, the early academic brilliance of Lieutenant General Percival evidently availed him little at Singapore. So he's given all these other examples, right? You got Percival, who led that total disaster in Singapore, who was academically brilliant.

• 25:11Jocko Willink?

  Napoleon and Wellington, who were great generals, who were junk at school. And another guy, General Colly, who is a disaster on the battlefield and yet had the highest marks on record. So the statement is like, hey, you could be really smart and do well. You could be really smart and do horrible. You could be moderately smart and do well. You could be moderately smart and do horrible. So I think the statement here is like, well, it's not, intellect is only part of it. Right? Intellect is only part of it.

• 25:46Jocko Willink?

  What about fighter pilots?

• 25:49Jocko Willink?

  I mean, look, so in the SEAL teams for a while, they were recruiting these really, really smart Ivy League, you know, Harvard, Yale, there was all this whole crew of officers that were coming in. They were clearly highly intellectual, smart people. And they stopped recruiting those people so heavily. And the reason they stopped recruiting those people so heavily was two reasons. One was they would do their one platoon or two platoons and get out and go to business school or whatever. And two was, they weren't that good.

• 26:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:19Jocko Willink?

  There was no, there was no correlation to someone that was really smart, to someone that was a really good leader on the battlefield.

• 26:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it's the same. I really do. I don't think, I don't think the personality profile, you know, or even just the motivational profile of, of a lot of people in the military is all that different. Certainly when I think about SEALs and pilots, and as often as you and I kind of contrast those two types of people, there's a ton of similarity there. And, you know, the different services in aviation have different sets of, of requirements. And, you know, I think the Marine Corps has the, the lowest, I guess, standard of academic excellence in terms of like what you studied and how well you did. I mean, the old joke in the Marine Corps was, you know, if you got a 2.0 in underwater basket weaving, you could be a pilot, you know, is the joke. And, you know, what they were saying really

• 27:08Speaker 01

  was, hey, you know, we don't really care what you studied. Now, you gotta have a college degree, and I think that does demonstrate some willingness and ability. And I'm not sure which is more important, to get through a, a long-term project that, hey, I'm gonna dedicate four years to getting this degree. That demonstrates, hey, you've got some planning, you've got some interest, you've got some intellect, something that's gonna reveal that you're, you are, have something that's gonna be hard to do, you're gonna be willing to do that. You're getting a 4.0, you know, in, uh, you know, aerodynamics versus a 2.0 in poli sci, we don't really care.

• 27:43Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 27:44Speaker 01

  That was kind of the Marine Corps' general, general approach. A little bit different for the other services. But I was kind of laughing and kind of thinking about this thing from a, a larger standpoint of these great military leaders that maybe didn't have the best records academically. I mean, the two thoughts that I had is, The academics in the military aren't that hard.

• 28:05Speaker 01

  You know what I mean? Like, you don't need to be a genius to get perfect scores on your tests.

• 28:11Speaker 01

  And I think the ones that don't do that well academically, that are, that still really do well, there's probably a piece in there, they're thinking like, this is dumb, this is a waste of my time. What's, what's the minimum grade requirement? Cool, I'm gonna get that. And that actually reveals some level of intelligence of, I'm not gonna waste my time and all this stuff that I don't really wanna be doing, but I'm not gonna fail either. So for, for you to sort of explain, there's some really good leaders that didn't do so hot, and then there's some guys that just were absolutely brilliant on paper that were terrible. That is not a stretch for me at all to picture that in aviation or anywhere in the military. Like, I think I know who those guys are.

• 28:49Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and really, in anything, anything, there's no, I'm trying to think of a job where the full, where, where the, the primary thing is only intelligence. Only intelligence. I'm sure there's some laboratory somewhere, or some computer programming thing where basically the smartest person is the person that we want in that job. But as soon as that person is in charge of

• 29:17Speaker 01

  People.

• 29:18Jocko Willink?

  Anyone else, or as soon, as soon as there's some level of creativity or problem solving, because there's, you just, what you want is a person that composite, has a bunch of different skills. I mean, you would think for being a pilot,

• 29:33Jocko Willink?

  there's gotta be, you know, that, that, like the spatial, like when I took the officer candidate test, and you've got to do the spatial recognition, where how far away is this, or is this aircraft, or is this bird coming to you or going away from you? You gotta tell from looking at it. Hey, obviously, someone could be really, really smart and suck at that test. Not to mention eyesight, not to mention reaction time. Like, all those different things. And then it's the same thing with leadership. You could have someone that's super articulate. There's, there's really articulate people that aren't really that smart.

• 30:07Jocko Willink?

  I mean, I served with some people like that. They're really articulate. They can put a word together. What do people call them? Well, you know, that's a skill set that like a salesperson. There's really good salespeople. They're not the smartest people in the world, but they're incredible. At their incredible conversationalists, right? But you wouldn't want to put them into a situation where they've got to stand up and talk in front of people if they don't have that skill. So just because someone is smart, that's only like one quarter of the of the of the math we got to do here.

• 30:34Speaker 01

  Totally. And when you're thinking about it from a leadership standpoint, and

• 30:41Speaker 01

  the recognition that that leadership requires a whole bunch of different things, not just being smart and taking a test, or being good at communicating. It's the recognition that it requires so many different things. None of these these profiles that he just revealed are a big shock to me. I'm like, yep, yep, yep. Those all make sense. SEALs, pilots, everyone between. And yeah, in aviation, is there a couple of things that might incline you down that path? Like, if you can naturally get a sense that they show you a diagram of an airplane descending, turning and slow, and then you have to match it up, that some people's brains maybe, oh, I can't, I can't see that as well as somebody else. Yeah, I could see that. And that's going to account for a small part of it that might be good to know. But that by itself is, it's gonna,

• 31:26Speaker 01

  it's gonna have almost no influence in the long term success of this person in his career in the military that I could identify relatively early on of what the spatial orientation of an airplane was in relationship to the ground. Do you want that? Yeah, that's a good idea. I don't want someone who gets confused by that.

• 31:40Jocko Willink?

  You don't want someone that's totally lost.

• 31:42Speaker 01

  Right.

• 31:42Jocko Willink?

  I mean, even on that test, you all you have to do is pass it.

• 31:44Speaker 01

  Right.

• 31:45Jocko Willink?

  That's all you have to do. And then, you know, if you and I were in the same thing and I was a little bit worse, I would study it more, or I'd figure it out more, or I just, after whatever, two months of looking at that stuff, we're the same.

• 31:55Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 31:55Jocko Willink?

  Because I figured out how to figure it out.

• 31:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right.

• 32:00Jocko Willink?

  Check.

• 32:03Jocko Willink?

  Fast forward a little bit. Fortunately, there are some who have seen the threat to originality and intelligent thinking.

• 32:11Jocko Willink?

  The Duke of Edinburgh felt it necessary to say, finally, as you grow older, try not to be afraid of new ideas. New or original ideas can be bad as well as good. But whereas an intelligent man with an open mind can demolish a bad idea by reasoned argument, those who allow their brains to atrophy, resort to meaningless catchphrases, to derision, and finally to anger in the face of anything new. This is, you know, this is Prince Philip. Duke of Edinburgh recently died. I don't know if you saw his funeral, but if you have any, any warm place in your

• 32:53Jocko Willink?

  heart for the Brits, which I certainly do, they, his hearse was a Land Rover, a military Land Rover that he had had some hand in designing. It was some sort of special transport and that's what they, that's what they carried his body in. But here he is, this is a, this is just an incredible thing to think about. And it's an incredible thing to be on watch for. You know, I said at the muster, I said, aim this book at yourself. And then I said, aim these things at yourself. When you hear stuff like this, when I hear stuff like this, I aim it at myself.

• 33:29Jocko Willink?

  Don't be afraid of new ideas. And this is what, an intelligent man with an open mind can demolish a bad idea by reasoned argument. And, and what I like about that is, I always say to myself, Dave, if you come to me with a plan, or you come to me with an idea, and I can't convince you that your plan isn't good, or that there's a hole in it, there's a problem, then there's, there's something going on here. Maybe it's my ego, maybe it's my emotions, maybe I just don't like you. But if I can't explain to you why your plan isn't good, and the only thing I can finally say is, you know what, we're doing it my way. The only way I can overcome you is by, you know, well, a catchphrase would be like, we've, we always done it this way.

• 34:11Jocko Willink?

  Or we need to stick with the plan, right? Those are just catchphrases, and that's what I'm going to say. Or I just say, we know Dave's always got his own freaking, Dave's always on his own freaking program. Like I can, I can ridicule you, or I can just get mad.

• 34:26Jocko Willink?

  That's what we see.

• 34:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, that third level too. I forgot what the middle one was when he talked about the meaningless catchphrase and then the third one like resorting to anger.

• 34:32Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 34:33Speaker 01

  You know, it's basically just degrees of your ego of just being out of control.

• 34:35Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 34:36Speaker 01

  Cause the first one's like, I'm just gonna try to be dismissive of you by a catchphrase of Jaco talks to me about an idea and I say something like, uh, you know, you know, here comes the new guy with a great idea.

• 34:46Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 34:47Speaker 01

  You know, like to just try to kind of push you off. And then if you persist and we kind of get to the second level and I've got some other response that isn't working at the end, all I've got left is I get mad at you.

• 34:57Speaker 01

  And if I outrank you, like the military, this whole military experiment, then I automatically win. I automatically win because I'll just shut you up because I'm now mad and I'm just gonna resort to what I got is, hey, uh, why don't you just go back to your desk and let me, let me do some, let me, let me lead for a little while here since I'm in charge.

• 35:14Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 35:14Speaker 01

  And then you just kind of walk away and that's the end of it.

• 35:16Jocko Willink?

  What you want to do is you want to be the Jeff Glover of ideas. So Jeff Glover will go out on the mat with you and you, he will let you put him in any position because he doesn't care. He knows jujitsu and he can get out of it. And if he doesn't get out of it, he's so, if you tap him out, he's like, oh yeah, that was good. Way to finish. Cause, cause you know, you started with the rear naked choke and you were able to finish it, Jaco. Good job. You know, like he doesn't care. He's, his ego is not involved at all. And he doesn't care. And most of the time, by the way, he gets out because he knows the truth. So that's why I try and be when someone confronts me with an idea, I'm stoked. Oh, oh, you, you seem to got me off balance. Awesome. Either I can recover myself because I have good information or a better perspective and we can discuss it logically and I can

• 35:59Jocko Willink?

  say, oh yeah, and I can point it out to you, or you caught me off balance because I'm wrong and I had a hole in my game and it didn't make any sense. So I'm actually happy about that.

• 36:11Jocko Willink?

  Open your mind.

• 36:14Jocko Willink?

  Uh, fast forward a little. This inbreeding of the uneducated however was resisted by, by the later Massey Committee who depressed by what they found, considered that, one, the general education of cadets should be continued. Two, few young officers showed any capacity for command. This was an assessment of what that they were doing. Three, there was too much drill, too much rigid discipline and too much cramming for marks.

• 36:43Jocko Willink?

  Number four, the instructors were mediocre and selected for prowess at games and smartness rather than for their knowledge of the subject they had to teach or their qualifications as teachers. Much the same, and again, this was an assessment, sorry, I skipped it, but this was an assessment that got done of how they were training the military, the army officers. And it says, "Much the same picture has been painted of Britannia, forerunner of the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth. Again, the emphasis was on blind obedience, sport and ceremonial, with scant regard to intellectual pursuits and little pride in knowing one's job."

• 37:27Jocko Willink?

  You know what's funny? As soon as you say something like, "There's too much drill." As soon as you say, you know, if you're, maybe you're thinking, "Hey, man, we're spending a lot of time just doing this like stupid drill stuff." There's someone that's like, "Oh, you don't understand the discipline." The people, and that's what this whole, actually, that's what this whole book is about. This whole book is about the people that when you threaten the norm and you threaten the hierarchy, you threaten the things that provide them with their security, which is rigid discipline. When you threaten those things, they get mad and they attack.

• 37:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, they get mad.

• 38:03Speaker 01

  You started this whole part and you used a word, and I think you pulled it from the book twice, and then I think you said it once, and I wrote it down, was, "All this is a feature of the system." Like, all of this is a feature. And I think he was using it initially in this part of,

• 38:19Speaker 01

  and if I'm, I'm just trying to paraphrase from what you said was, "Hey, listen, you know, the bell curve is kind of exists everywhere, but there is something a little unique about those that sort of make it to this level of senior leadership. We're talking about generals and admirals or, you know, lords or whatever. But there's something a little different about the ones that make it up to that level and how it isn't quite just the same bell curve of everybody else where you got some smart people, some, you know, middle-of-the-road folks, maybe some other folks." And what I've been trying to-

• 38:48Speaker 01

  Think in my mind about what that is, is kinda what you described is what's unique about those people. Those people have figured out how to navigate the system. This thing that we're all living in, because when you join the military, I don't care how smart you are or dumb you are. I don't care who or what you are, what rank, what service, or where you came from. At the beginning, you're just trying to figure out how the system works. And if you figure out, go, oh, this class that I'm in that Jaco's in charge of. At the end, I get my choice of assignment strictly based on my GPA. Oh, okay. Guess what a lot of folks are gonna do that figure that out? I'm gonna get, I'm just gonna worry about the grade. Oh, Jaco's got this thing for drill. It's this thing. Cool.

• 39:30Speaker 01

  And so when you say, hey, we're gonna go drill, I'm like, yeah, let's go do some more drill. Or, hey Dave, you got some free time? What do you wanna do? I think, hey boss, you know what we should do? We should go drill. And all of a sudden, I kinda start maneuvering my way through the system to appeal to what I know is what you want. And I kinda wrote down some of the words of things that are appealing. Brute force is appealing. It's appealing. It sounds cool. You know what doesn't sound cool? Deception. Like, I'm gonna, I'm gonna take an indirect approach. That, that doesn't sound cool. Caring about people doesn't sound cool. Being nice doesn't sound cool. Being an intellectual for the military, no. That, you know, blowing things up sounds cool. Being an intellectual doesn't. And if I can figure out early on, what is gonna appeal to you?

• 40:15Speaker 01

  Whoever my bosses or the school is, or the intent is. Or the system. And that's what we're talking about. This is about. The Belkers, different at the top, because they figured out how to navigate the system. What the system wants. And what the system wants is whoever's in charge, that thing that appeals to them, which is things like.

• 40:33Speaker 01

  What would you rather have? Someone who, who, um, a pragmatic thinker who's willing to, to, um, give up on its plan and go in a different direction, or someone who never gives up?

• 40:44Speaker 01

  You know, like, how many times are we gonna talk about the direct approach?

• 40:49Speaker 01

  And not forget the idea that that that sounds appealing. It sounds right. I'm just gonna come at him and tell him the truth. As opposed to, I'm gonna play the long game. I'm gonna think strategically. I'm gonna keep my ego in check. I'm gonna consider that I might be wrong. And I'm gonna move slowly in this direction until we come to the logical conclusion. Or I'm just gonna attack this target and run it over. And the ones that figure out the system and have to navigate that, it makes sense that at the top, there actually is a different bell curve of people than those of us at the beginning. Who actually, some of us don't figure out how to navigate that system.

• 41:25Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, and well, I don't know if I necessarily fully agree with you. Because I think that the system, the system, but you're gonna agree with me when I say this anyways. But look, that system, there's people that that learn how to figure out the system because they lack the ability to actually transit through the system on their own merit.

• 41:48Speaker 01

  Right.

• 41:48Jocko Willink?

  So that's one group of people. There's another group of people that travel, transit through the system and promote through the system because they're good. And as we mentioned at the beginning of this, you and I both worked for incredible officers at all levels. Incredible senior enlisted at all levels. And some of those, the people that were awesome, they made it through the system. The system worked. They didn't have to, they didn't have to play a game. They didn't have to manipulate. They did what they knew they should do and they went up through the system and they were great. But there's another group of people, that's the group of people you're talking about, that they don't have the capability, but they figure out, you know, Admiral McGuire,

• 42:29Jocko Willink?

  we were talking one day and he said, he said, you know, I think he had gone over to see some the SEALs secure, or the BUD students secure from Hell Week. And he came back, I didn't go with him for whatever reason, he came back and he says, you know,

• 42:44Jocko Willink?

  If Hell Week proves one thing, like you're, you're, you're, you're pretty tough. You know, cause he sees these guys after six days of freaking, you know, being awake and doing physical stuff. He goes, yeah, it proves one thing. You're pretty tough. And I actually said back to him, I said, you know, there's a group of people that also go, go through Hell Week and make it through Hell Week. And what it proves is that they figured out how to, how to get through. Because there's things you can do in Hell Week. And it's, it's actually a little different now. When I went through Hell Week. You, you just, if you didn't carry the head, if you didn't put your head under the freaking boat. I know this doesn't sound like that big of a deal, but you carry these freaking boats on your head for a week straight.

• 43:24Jocko Willink?

  And guys permanently lose, some guys, not all guys, some guys permanently lose their hair on the top of their head. Because it gets so, that freaking boat is just grinding on it. And, and it's, it hurts, hurts your neck, hurts your head. You have freaking scabs on the top of your head, whatever. But there's some guys that figure out how to, now you can't just take your head off the boat. But you also, you know, maybe you don't quite put as much into it. There's guys that figure out, you know, when you're carrying the boat at a low ready, which is just carrying at your side, which again, doesn't seem, seem like a big deal until they fill it with sand and water. And also it's, you know, half your back and so, so you can kinda slack off a little bit.

• 44:10Jocko Willink?

  And so there's guys that figure out where to come in on a run where they're going to get the least amount of attention. They figure out where to be in the chow hall line where no one's going to pay any attention to them. They, they, they figure out how to get through. And, and I would say Hell Week is probably a pretty small amount of those people. But you certainly would see a couple of guys and you'd go, man, how does he look fresh right now?

• 44:34Speaker 01

  Well rested.

• 44:35Jocko Willink?

  Some guys you look, oh, that guy's fresh because he's a badass. Some guys you'd be thinking, how's that dude look fresh right now? What just happened? So, yeah, in any system, there's gonna be a way to maneuver and manipulate through the system where if you don't have the chops to actually get it done, you can still get through it.

• 44:54Speaker 01

  And, yeah, obviously, I do agree with that. And I think that's why there is a little bit more of a contrast at the top than there might be elsewhere. When you're looking at the types, the different types of people, and the contrast, to his point, usually doesn't reveal itself until you get to this, and he illustrates all these catastrophic things. And you're looking back, you're thinking, how could someone be in that position, do the things that they're doing? And that's really, I think, what you're describing is, there's two different types of people that can get to that place. Now, the ones that are doing it, like you said, on their merits, they still have to be doing a good job. You can't not know how to maneuver in the system and be terrible at what you're doing. But you can find your way to kind of

• 45:36Speaker 01

  maneuver up that ladder, maneuver inside of that system, and, and be in that category of people that sometimes will go, oh, well, he's, he's a general, he must be awesome. Well, this is how this person got there, but you, you won't see that, it won't be revealed as to what this person is until it's in, he's in one of those situations. And I think that contrast that he's alluding to is like, it's a little bit different there, is more stark, because at the, at the very beginning, none of us have figured either of those things out yet. We're still figuring out, hey, what do we need to do? And how does the system work? And I, you should blend the two. I want to, I want to work inside the system. I don't want to buck against the system and be so resistant to the system that the system gets rid of me.

• 46:20Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, well, I was, I was about to say, what about those leaders that are incredible leaders, they're dynamic, they have these great personalities, they have good tactical sense, but they can't play the game at all.

• 46:29Speaker 01

  They can't play the game at all. Right.

• 46:30Jocko Willink?

  And now they didn't never get promoted.

• 46:32Speaker 01

  And they have no influence. That's right.

• 46:33Jocko Willink?

  I mean, tell me Hackworth didn't play that. Hackworth played the freaking game?

• 46:36Speaker 01

  For a long time.

• 46:37Jocko Willink?

  He played the game like massively, massively, and he loved it. He wasn't even playing the game. He was in the game. He was the, he was the freaking player. And he's an example of a guy that he played the system, he got those jobs, he did those things, but he also was highly skilled as a leader.

• 46:55Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 46:55Jocko Willink?

  And there's plenty of people that would have done, and there's plenty of people that did the exact same thing as Hackworth, minus the leadership capability.

• 47:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:04Jocko Willink?

  There was a hard job. What would you call it? Hard fill billet, right?

• 47:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:07Jocko Willink?

  In the SEAL teams, we had the same thing. You get a hard fill billet somewhere. After you do your hard fill billet, they literally will give you any job you want. Well, cool. Hey, I'm not getting promoted on that, but I'm gonna jump on that hard fill billet. Get done with that, they send you overseas unaccompanied for two years, boom. And you come back. Now, there's some guys that do that because they're freaking good team players. And they're, you know what? I don't want someone else to have to do this. You know what? My kid's just left for college. I'm gonna be, I don't have anything to worry about for two years. Boom, I'm gonna go take this hard fill billet, take one for the team. There's some people that do it for that reason.

• 47:41Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 47:42Jocko Willink?

  There's some people do it because they're going, I can get promoted next after this.

• 47:45Speaker 01

  Get my check in the block. And that piece, when you talk about the leadership, all I'm thinking is, he actually cares about the people.

• 47:51Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 47:51Speaker 01

  He actually cares about the people around him. And so that maneuver to gain the influence is by design to be able to help people.

• 48:01Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 48:02Speaker 01

  Because he knows there's features in the system, he's gotta protect them from.

• 48:05Jocko Willink?

  Yes. It's all about the intent.

• 48:08Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 48:09Jocko Willink?

  And although you can smell intent, the system has a much harder time smelling intent. The system has a much harder time smelling intent. Look, they look at Dave Berke and they look at Jaco, and they both went overseas, took a hard fill billet. Jaco was doing it because he wanted to get promoted. Dave was doing it because he had, you know, his kids had just left for college, and so he felt like it was a good time, and he could take the strain off of someone else that might have kids still at home. What do they see on the paper? They don't see any of that.

• 48:38Speaker 01

  They can't see that.

• 48:38Jocko Willink?

  They can't see that intent. They can't see it. If they knew us, they could smell it.

• 48:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:43Jocko Willink?

  But they don't get close enough on the promotion board.

• 48:45Speaker 01

  Some people around you know.

• 48:46Jocko Willink?

  People around you know, for sure.

• 48:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:49Jocko Willink?

  Fast forward a little bit. General Robert E. Lee admitted that, "The greatest mistake of my life was taking a military education."

• 48:58Jocko Willink?

  And General Stillwell said, "It is common knowledge that an army officer has a one-track mind that he is personally interested in stirring up wars so that he can get a promotion and be decorated, and that he has an extraordinarily limited education with no appreciation of the finer things in life." That's a heavy statement. Again, are there some guys like that? Absolutely. That's not the majority, for sure. Fast forward a little bit more. "The saddest feature of anti-intellectualism is that it often reflects an actual suppression of the intellectual activity rather than any lack of ability. This is suggested by the rapidity with which so many military men rush into print as soon as they have retired." This is talking about people writing books.

• 49:42Jocko Willink?

  Evidently, there was something waiting to get out. Unfortunately, as Liddell Hart points out, "A lifetime of having to curb the expression of original thought culminates so often in there being nothing left to express." So, this is talking about, I mean, this guy's writing this book in 1976, so he's talking about guys in World War I, World War II. As soon as they get out of the military, they write these books. A guy like B. H. Liddell Hart, he writes books because he had all this stuff penned up, and he also got out early because he had so much stuff penned out, penned up inside of his head. This guy's saying, a lot of times, by the time they get out, there's no freaking creative thought left, there's no new ideas left.

• 50:23Jocko Willink?

  "Research on the relationship between mental activity and cerebral blood flow adds to point that the old belief that the brain, like muscle, atrophies from prolonged disuse. But perhaps this touches upon the real cause of military incompetence: age. Since traditionally promotion is dependent upon seniority, commanders, generals, and above have tended to be old, and since thinking, memory, intelligence, and special senses all deteriorate with age, then maybe bad generals are just old generals." Again, he's making an argument. Well, maybe these guys are just old, maybe that's our problem. Another contribution to the incompetence tied up with age was the unhelpful tendency

• 51:05Jocko Willink?

  to sack, forcibly retire, or otherwise curtail the promotion of those young officers who unwisely failed to conceal their lights beneath bushels of conformity. So, real quick on the getting old part, this is something that I was, and I think I talked about it on the Academy. I heard that interview with Kasparov, the chess player, and the interviewer acts, actually, I think it was Lex Friedman. Lex asked him, maybe it was Lex, I think Lex asked him, not in a direct way, but basically, could you beat Magnus Carlsen, who's right now like this phenom? And Kasparov said, no.

• 51:49Jocko Willink?

  And of the part of the, part of the answer, which is what I talked about on the Academy, was part of the reason is because Magnus has got to see everything that Kasparov did and study him, it's like Jiu-Jitsu guys now, they're like, you know, you got to, it took you seven years to figure out the 50/50 position. I got to learn that in 20 minutes on YouTube, right? So I can start building off that immediately. And that's the same thing with Kasparov, is that, is that Magnus Carlsen has seen all of his moves and everyone else's moves and studied them in books. So he's already building off of a taller platform. But also Kasparov said, I think Kasparov was like 55, 60, something like this, maybe a little bit older, he's like, yeah, well, I'm older now. And that brain ain't working as good.

• 52:34Jocko Willink?

  So that, which really surprised me, because I didn't understand that. I thought, hey, you get older, you get smarter. And once you reach a certain point, now you're heading in the other direction. So that's what he's bringing up, and he's saying, hey, could that be part of it?

• 52:51Jocko Willink?

  He says, "Such was the case of Major General JFC Fuller. On December 13th, 1933, Fuller, one of the most intellectually gifted men ever to serve in the British Army, was placed on the retired list. This waste of talent resulted from the prejudice aroused by his fully borne-out prophecies and the fact that he had dared to criticize those less gifted than him." Now, let's think about that. We could be mad at the military for kicking him out, but guess what he didn't do?

• 53:20Speaker 01

  Play the game?

• 53:20Jocko Willink?

  He didn't play the game.

• 53:21Speaker 01

  He's also criticizing people. He's probably telling them that they're dumb.

• 53:23Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah. He didn't play the game properly. So if he would have played the game a little bit, and not been a prophet, as B H Liddell Hart said, instead been a leader, maybe he could have slowly got some senior officer to understand and make it his idea, and all of a sudden, his ideas are getting pushed forward by the seniority. Instead, he gets put on the freaking retired list.

• 53:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. And this, this thing that you've, you've mentioned in the past probably isn't exactly a fit here, but that idea of, hey, if you're so smart, why aren't you winning? You know, like-

• 53:52Jocko Willink?

  What a freaking great quote.

• 53:54Speaker 01

  Just, yeah, just this idea of, of if, if you're as smart as you think you are, why can't you figure out how to maneuver through this, this labyrinth of chaos that's, you know?

• 54:03Jocko Willink?

  Which, by the way, if you're so smart, how hard can it be?

• 54:06Speaker 01

  How hard could it be?

• 54:06Jocko Willink?

  You haven't figured this out yet?

• 54:07Speaker 01

  Right.

• 54:08Jocko Willink?

  You haven't figured this out yet. That question, which I originally asked myself when I was like an E4 in the SEAL teams, when I wasn't getting promoted and other guys were, was, hey, wait a second. If you're so smart freaking there, Rambo, why aren't you getting promoted? Why aren't you winning? What's wrong with you?

• 54:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:23Jocko Willink?

  You idiot. But that's one of my favorite questions to ask people. Hey, because they'll be telling me this, and this, and this, and this, and this complaint, and this other complaint, and how this is messed up, and the other thing's messed up. And it's like, if you, if you are so smart, if you're so freaking smart, why haven't you just maneuvered through the system?

• 54:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:41Jocko Willink?

  What's wrong with you?

• 54:45Jocko Willink?

  And by the way, um, Fuller, like, they were gonna bring him back in, and they offered him something, and the other guys, I mean, he's just like, made it, made it too hard on himself, man. Smartest, what did they, what did he just say? One of the most intellectually gifted men ever to serve in the British Army.

• 55:04Jocko Willink?

  But he wasn't quite winning, was he? Because he got freaking put on the retired list. And, and look, maybe there was some situation where they were asking him to do, you know, hey, we don't want to see another people. But even if that happens, what do you do? You say, okay, cool. How can I rephrase this? How can I adjust my message? What people can I make allies? If you're so freaking smart, then go win.

• 55:27Jocko Willink?

  Fast forward to yet another way in which age determines incompetence is through the voluntary resignation of intelligent young officers. According to Janowitz, a study of US Army lieutenants suggests that the brighter ones resign as soon as they have completed their obligatory service while those less well-equipped remain. That's again, is that all across the board? Absolutely not. And there's freaking incredible officers that are smarter than any civilian out there that stay in the military and they do 20, 30, 40 years for sure. And there's also some guys that are going, you know, I got my paycheck coming in every two weeks, kind of regardless of what I do. I'm gonna stick it out.

• 56:09Speaker 01

  And there's a little joke in the military too, that that at each level you you move up that's that there's some some truth to it, which is, hey, you got promoted. Yeah, all the good guys got out. Yeah, that's why I got promoted, you know. Hey, hey, Dave, you made major. Yeah, all the best captains left. So the Marine Corps had no choice. So the joke about that is, you know, there's absolutely some truth of, oh, I'm glad these two guys bailed because I would have been competing with them and I don't know if I would have made the cut if they stuck around. Yeah, but they're left with me, so I'm gonna I'm gonna get that promotion.

• 56:38Jocko Willink?

  Yep, there's absolutely some level of truth to that. Someone that looks around the military, you know, one of the one of the things that made me,

• 56:48Jocko Willink?

  one of the one of the things that had a little bit of a influence on my decision to retire was it's a communist environment, right? It's a communist environment. You you're getting the same promotion rate. I mean, what, did you get advanced early a couple of times?

• 57:05Speaker 01

  No, no early promotions in the Marine Corps.

• 57:08Jocko Willink?

  So so that that that says, right, so it doesn't matter what you do. So you were you were an F-18 pilot, you were a Top Gun instructor, you're all these things. And how how much faster do you advance than someone that was, you know, running whatever freaking supply depot in the middle of nowhere? How much earlier did you get advanced?

• 57:29Speaker 02

  Zero days.

• 57:29Jocko Willink?

  Zero days. Zero days. So I got advanced early one time, which is, which was like, I only know of one other person. I only know of one person that got promoted early twice. There's probably more, but one of, I know one other person that got advanced early. He got advanced early twice, and that's Delta Charlie, by the way. Yeah, Delta Charlie. Talk about playing the game, DC. He was maneuvering. Um, and awesome. But so, so I'm looking around and look, was I the best guy? Absolutely not. But I looked around some guys, I said, wait a second. Of all the stuff I've done, I've been going on back to back deployments, doing whatever I can do, doing a good job

• 58:14Jocko Willink?

  in combat, doing a good job, just doing, just doing a good job, right? Look, I wasn't the best, but I wasn't doing bad. But then I'd look at some other knucklehead that was actually doing bad, who had a bad reputation, you know, some knucklehead that wasn't even in the game. And guess what? He's getting promoted. Oh, I got promoted one year ahead of that boy. And by the way, a bunch of other great guys that I knew are getting promoted at the same time as him. I was like, man, that is freaking not right. It wasn't as much of a meritocracy as it should have been, and that bummed me out. It bummed me out. Cause I was looking at probably another seven years before I would have been in charge of something again. Which is a long time to be waiting to get in charge. What are you chuckling that out over there, Echo Charles?

• 58:57Speaker 02

  No, every time you say it, uh, that bummed me out. For some reason, that's always been funny to me.

• 59:02Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Yeah, it did though. It bummed me out.

• 59:05Speaker 02

  Bummed out. Sorry, bro.

• 59:07Jocko Willink?

  This thing's not bum you out?

• 59:09Speaker 02

  They do, but that expression is funny, especially when you say it.

• 59:13Jocko Willink?

  Check. Uh, it's a little bit of a communist system. It's a little bit of a socialist system where if you stay in and you check the boxes, whether you check those boxes with freaking big, giant checks, or you check them with a little nick mark, it doesn't matter. You checked it, you're good, you're good.

• 59:34Jocko Willink?

  Notwithstanding these considerations, age is far from being a complete explanation of military incompetence, for there have been plenty of old generals and some remarkably inept young ones. Or sorry, there's been plenty of able old generals and some remarkably inept young ones. So he's saying, look, even though old people might have a harder time, there's been freaking incredible generals that were super old, and there's been young generals that were idiots. So that argument doesn't really hold. As Vax noted, the generals of 80, generals who were sick of body and even in mind have won important victories. So there you go. Age, you can't put all this stuff on age. But let us look at another

• 1:00:13Jocko Willink?

  aspect of what appears to be intellectual incompetence, the urge to pontificate. In accordance with the principle that nature abhors a vacuum, ignorance tends to evoke pontification in those that wish to conceal their lack of knowledge, or for whom ignorance of the facts means that they feel free to express strongly held beliefs of a contrary nature. This is an interesting one, and it really, if you, you ever seen the movie The Sixth Sense? I know you have, Echo. You seen it, Dave? I have. And you know, when you get to the end, you look back and you see all the things are obvious. This one right here, when I read this, I was like, oh, man, this is good. You look back at your career and you think of all these people that like to pontificate,

• 1:00:57Jocko Willink?

  and you think, I knew that guy was an idiot. Wouldn't shut up. Right? Wouldn't shut up. Wait, what is pontificate? Talking. Oh, talking. Carrying on and talking, especially things that you don't really know too much about.

• 1:01:11Speaker 01

  It's also not a compliment. Like, if somebody like, hey, what's like working with Jaco? And I'm like, he likes to pontificate a lot. That's not it. That's not me saying he's a big thinker. It's me like, the dude likes to hear himself talk. He wastes a lot of time thinking out loud, and it's all at the end, you look back, like, that was a complete waste of time. So it's not a good thing.

• 1:01:27Jocko Willink?

  I'd say, maybe the expression, hot air. Right? Oh, that guy's filled with a lot of hot air. This is a nice way of saying, that guy's filled with a lot of, oh, it's not even a nice way of saying, as Dave just pointed out. You don't say someone, hey, Jaco did a great job pontificating at the muster. You wouldn't say that.

• 1:01:42Speaker 01

  There's usually some timing associated with it, too. That he wants to chime in, like, we need to go step out. And he's like, hey. And he wants to start talking, and we're forced to sit here and listen to him. And it's not just what he's saying, it's also the time at which he's saying it, and you're just thinking, dude. Okay, I guess we're gonna sit here and listen to him talk.

• 1:01:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, okay. I always thought it was like, kind of thinking and talking, but in a good way. I thought it was like, hey, let's get to the bottom of this, let's explore it, you know? But maybe, okay, I get it now.

• 1:02:16Jocko Willink?

  So with pontification, in a calling where the accuracy of communication may be a matter of life or death, the predisposition to pontificate is a dangerous liability. By the way, we have something called the second law of combat leadership. It's simple. The subtitle of that is "simple, clear, concise communication." So pontification is the opposite of that, oddly enough. Unfortunately, such a predisposition will be the strongest in those like headmasters, judges, prison governors, and senior military commanders, who for too long have been in a position to lord over their fellow men.

• 1:02:57Jocko Willink?

  Unfortunately, such a predisposition will also be strongest in authoritarian organizations, where the preservation of apparent omniscience by those above may be deemed more important than the truth. So this is that senior leader that, basically, no one will tell them to be quiet. And you know what's even worse than that? People sit there with a big smile on their face, nodding their heads, cuz you know, "Oh, Chocolat's talking. Oh, yes, boss. That sounds great, boss. Please tell us more." It's all a lie. They're really thinking, "Shut up, dude." That's what's going on.

• 1:03:36Speaker 01

  Yeah. And some of those people are going, "Oh, if I ever get to that, this is how I'm gonna get to that spot. I'm gonna do that. I'm gonna follow, like, that's what I do. That's, that's how the system rewards me, or I can navigate in that system is, I can do the same thing. It's gonna be awesome. I can't wait till I'm in charge."

• 1:03:54Jocko Willink?

  People have to listen to me.

• 1:03:55Speaker 01

  Listen to me. I can't wait.

• 1:03:58Jocko Willink?

  I, I know this.

• 1:04:03Jocko Willink?

  Because we sit here and talk for hours at a time as our freaking job, not only here, but at Echelon Front, that's our actual job is to talk to people. I mean, at Echelon Front, actually, our job a lot is to listen as well. But you know, people might get the impression that, oh, you know, Jocko, like at the muster, when I'm on, guess what, I'm on stage, I'm talking. That's what we're doing. Come to an Echelon Front meeting, you know, see who's talking, like, see how much I'm talking, right? It's come to a tasking to Bruiser meeting, see how much I'm talking. Come to a SEAL Team 7 Echo platoon meeting when I was a platoon commander. Am I the one that's talking the whole time? Absolutely not. So although we talk a lot here,

• 1:04:44Jocko Willink?

  this is not the norm. But the important thing about pontification is that though an intellectual exercise, its origins are emotional. Closely allied to pontification and no less hazardous is cognitive dissonance. Now, just, just to, just to talk about dissonance, just the word, it means, technically, what it means is an inharmonious sound. That's technically what it means. It's, it's sounds that don't match together. So like, if you play piano, there's certain, there's certain keys of the piano you can hit at the same time and you go,

• 1:05:27Jocko Willink?

  right? Guitar, you can hit certain strings and certainly you go, doesn't sound right. That's because they don't match because they're incongruent. They're in disagreement. Those noises are in disagreement. So cognitive dissonance means that you have things in your head that don't agree. There's things in your head that don't agree. And it's what people do and how people handle things in their head that don't agree. This is the important part. Because with any situation that you have, there's gonna be different sides to every argument. There's gonna be different sides. There's gonna be, if we're gonna go attack a target, part of your brain should be saying like, okay, this looks like something we can get done. Part of it is saying, okay, there's, looks like there's a lot of risks as well. You've got two different things in your head, two different incongruent thoughts, congruent

• 1:06:12Jocko Willink?

  thoughts in your head. They, they're not the same. So, so cognitive dissonance means I have two things in my head that don't match. How do you handle it? That's the question. How do you handle it? Uh, this uncomfortable mental state arises when a person possesses knowledge or beliefs which conflict with a decision he has made. So that's going even one step further. I've made a decision. And now I'm getting some different information. The following hypothetical situation should make the matter plain. A heavy smoker experiences dissonance because the knowledge that he smokes is inconsistent with the knowledge that smoking causes cancer. Since he finds it impossible to give up cigarettes, he tries to reduce dissonance.

• 1:06:57Jocko Willink?

  By concentrating on justifications for smoking and ignoring evidence for its risks. He may tell himself that the revenue from tobacco helps the government, that it keeps his weight down, and that it is a manly, sociable habit. At the same time, he may well refrain from reading the latest report on the relationship between smoking and lung cancer. If, on the other hand, he cannot avoid being confronted by tiresome statistics, he may well strive to reduce dissonance by telling himself and others that the correlation between smoking and cancer could just as well be taken to signify that people who are going to get cancer anyway tend to smoke in order to ward off the disease. So you're just telling yourself lies to try and to try and even out that disagreement in your own head.

• 1:07:41Jocko Willink?

  Since it was first propounded by Festinger in 1957, dissonance theory has given rise to a large number of empirical studies. Through the, though the precise nature of the underlying psychological processes is far from clear, there are certain conclusions which could have serious implications for military decision making. They may be summarized by saying that, quote, "Once the decision has been made and the person is committed to a given course of action, the psychological situation changes decisively. There is less emphasis on objectivity and there is more partiality and bias in the way in which the

• 1:08:21Jocko Willink?

  person views and evaluates the alternatives," end quote. In other words, decision making may well be followed by a period of mental activity that could be described as, at the very least, somewhat one-sided.

• 1:08:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:41Jocko Willink?

  Dude, you, I would, like, I got halfway into that sentence and you were just shaking your head because you know you've seen this happen.

• 1:08:47Speaker 01

  Totally. And he, you know, he, you did that list earlier and I, the one that I was coming back to as you're talking about, and the hard part about is you can, you can, I know what he's gonna say before he's even saying it. Now, you know what's coming when he's describing this is, here's the plan, Jaco's down in the front, sends me a report, go, hey, boss, things are a mess, things are a mess down here. And I'm like, no, they're not.

• 1:09:05Jocko Willink?

  They're not that bad.

• 1:09:06Speaker 01

  They're not that bad. We're fine. We need to, we're just gonna keep doing this. You're like, hey, listen, it's gotten much worse. And rationalization, all those words, but the, the, the willingness to just ignore the truth because it is inconvenient with the conclusion I've already drawn and how quickly I can go. You know what? His feedback is, you know, it's based on what he's seeing. It's not really, he doesn't know what's going on. He doesn't have the big picture. So we're just gonna keep going.

• 1:09:34Jocko Willink?

  Plus Jaco's kind of emotional.

• 1:09:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:35Jocko Willink?

  Plus he's, he's, you know, it just started. He doesn't have that much combat experience. He's getting shot at. Yeah, sure, he's freaking out, but this is.

• 1:09:41Speaker 01

  He doesn't see what I'm trying to do.

• 1:09:42Jocko Willink?

  I mean, you just rationalize that shit all day long.

• 1:09:44Speaker 01

  All day, all day.

• 1:09:46Jocko Willink?

  You know, the, here's another thing you were talking about, like, who do you, like, what is it? What is the, the cool military leader? What do we think of? Here's one.

• 1:09:57Jocko Willink?

  Would you say, I'm gonna promote this guy who has a lot of self doubt? Right? We're not promoting that guy. But what's interesting is, I am so filled with self doubt that when I come up with a plan and Dave Berke sends a report back from the front line, he's like, hey, Jaco, we got heavy resistance. I'm like, okay, I must have been wrong.

• 1:10:15Speaker 01

  I'm missing something.

• 1:10:16Jocko Willink?

  I'm missing something. Does this mean I'm not gonna freaking push forward? No, it doesn't mean that, but it means I'm, I'm actually doing the opposite of this, this trying to balance out the dissidents. I'm paying more attention because I think I might be wrong.

• 1:10:30Speaker 01

  The irony in that, in that truth, the irony is, is how you've described you having a reputation of being so decisive in your time in the teams was based on that, that belief that you could be wrong, which is why you've made these incremental decisions that didn't over commit to the end, was actually driven by what you just described as, you know, you, the term self doubt doesn't have like this positive, you know, connotation, but it's like, oh, hey, I bet you there's a bunch of things I don't know. So you know what I shouldn't do? Over commit, which was based on you having a reputation of being decisive, which people can equate to, um, the opposite of self doubt. I'm so secure in my, my decision-making process that I know the outcome and this is

• 1:11:14Speaker 01

  the course that we're going on. It's exactly opposite of what you're doing, which was the incremental piece and go, hey, I got some feedback. Yeah, boss, here's some feedback. This was, this blew up in our face. We ran into a brick wall. Uh, three vehicles are down and we can't keep, keep going. And you're gonna go, oh, we need to do something different right now as opposed to, hey, just keep going. We're, we're, we're sticking to the plan.

• 1:11:35Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And that's true, not only on the battlefield, but it's also true in a conversation with another human being. It's also true when I say, hey, Dave, you know, what's your plan with this client? Or, or here's how I think we should approach this client. I'm not saying this is how we should approach the client. I'm like, hey, I got an idea of what we could do with this client. What do you think? It's having a freaking open mind is what it is. And the minute, you know, I, I said that a while ago, like our minds, people's minds, they're, they're either opening or closing. And we can have some control over that. You can control whether you leave your mind open or whether you let your mind close. Well, at least I think, but let me, let me rephrase that. I think people have the ability to control whether they open their mind, but they don't have

• 1:12:19Jocko Willink?

  as much control over, if you're not conscious about it, your mind just closes up. And oftentimes we're looking, our cognitive bias is to just close that mind. I don't want to hear what Dave has to say. So I think what we have to do is you have to form a habit of trying to keep your mind open, prying it open. And I had to, okay, this is going back to the muster, you know, went back to that old conversation. How often do I have to admit that I'm wrong? And you know, I asked the entire crowd at their muster, how often do you think I have to admit that I'm wrong? And everyone thinks I'm humble and they go, all the time. Yeah, probably 10 times a day you admit that I'm wrong. And I'm like, no, almost never. I almost never admit that I'm wrong. Why do I almost never admit that I'm wrong? Cause I never go into a conversation telling everyone that I'm right. Or even thinking that I'm right.

• 1:13:03Jocko Willink?

  So therefore I don't go in the, in the conversation saying, Dave, we need to do this with the client. And then Dave goes, well, actually I talked to the client. Here's what's going on. Here's what they actually need. And I have to go, damn it, I was wrong. No, instead I say, hey, Dave, here's what I'm thinking. What do you think?

• 1:13:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:17Jocko Willink?

  That's one example of a hundred conversations that I have where I could go in there and try and be right. But instead I go in there with an open mind instead of a closed mind.

• 1:13:29Speaker 01

  It's so counterintuitive to think the connection between never being wrong. Or never having to, or rarely having to admit that you're wrong, isn't because you're right all the time. It's because you never entrench yourself in a position and you know, the saying could be, could be said for why you and I. Uh, whatever the better word is for argue for disagree. Like how often you and Doc would disagree on, on, on a plan. It's like, well, almost never like, oh, you must be perfectly on a line and everything. No, I just, I haven't predetermined the next 37 steps that we're going to do. Neither is he and we'll move and I'll do it his way. Sometimes we'll do it my, we'll get somebody else's input and none of us are committed to an outcome. And the reason why we're disagree, we, we don't disagree on what we should do is that neither one of us come in with the conclusion of what we should do.

• 1:14:12Speaker 01

  And how counterintuitive that is, is, is the idea that the more committed you are, the less you will, um, the less you'll admit that you're wrong. And the exact opposite is true. It's the reason I have to admit that I'm wrong very often. It's because I don't walk in thinking that I'm right.

• 1:14:28Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And actually you and I are very committed to an outcome. We're committed to having the best possible outcome we can have. Uh, with, with nothing to do with which outcome or which course, you know, how we get there. It's like, oh, this is the best possible outcome. Dave came up with a way to make this the best outcome, possible outcome. That sounds awesome. I'm in.

• 1:14:46Speaker 01

  We'll do that.

• 1:14:46Jocko Willink?

  All day long.

• 1:14:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:51Jocko Willink?

  Fast forward a little bit. By the way, get the book. I haven't said that yet today. So we're skipping all kinds of stuff, but there's so much information in this book. Those commanders with weak egos, with over strong needs for approval, and the most closed minds will be the very ones least able to tolerate the nagging doubts of cognitive dissidence. In other words, it will be the, it will be the least rational, who are the most likely to reduce dissidence by ignoring unpalatable intelligence.

• 1:15:29Jocko Willink?

  So the person, the, the, the person who can't tolerate those doubts will just shut them out, which is a horrible thing.

• 1:15:41Jocko Willink?

  Uh, fast forward a little bit. No better example is this than afforded by Townsend's occupational cuts since the advance up the tigris was totally unjustified by the facts of which he was fully aware. His dissidence when disaster struck must have been extreme and to a man of his egotistical nature depending, demanding of instant resolution. So again, in the face of much contrary evidence, he withdrew into cut. The wiser and possible course of retreating to Bosra would have been a greater admission of the lack of justification for his previous decision. By the same token, once inside cut, nothing would budge him because to break out, even to assist those who had been sent to release him would have emphasized his lack of justification for being there in the first place. In short, an inability to admit one has been in the wrong will be greater

• 1:16:26Jocko Willink?

  the more wrong one has been. And the more wrong one has been, the more bizarre will be the subsequent attempts to justify the unjustifiable. This is when people, this is when you're looking at people and they just seem like they're freaking crazy.

• 1:16:41Jocko Willink?

  We can now see the relationship between pontification and cognitive dissidence. Pontification is one of the ways in which people try to resolve their dissidence.

• 1:16:52Jocko Willink?

  Or sorry, dissonance. But there is another aspect of decision making, no less hazardous. It is, it's riskiness. Research has shown that people vary in the degree to which they adjust the riskiness of their decisions to the realities of the external situations. Individuals who become anxious under conditions of stress or who are prone to be defensive and deny anything that threatens their self esteem tend to be bad at judging whether the risks they take or the caution they display are justified by the possible outcomes of their decisions. For example, they might well adopt the same degree of caution

• 1:17:36Jocko Willink?

  whether placing a small bet, getting married, or starting a nuclear war. There is a sad irony about this state of affairs for it means that those people who are most sensitive to the success or failure of a decision will be the very ones who make the biggest mistakes. Conversely, less anxious individuals will act more rationally because they are able to devote greater attention to the realities with which they are confronted. So when you got people that are nervous about decision making, they're nervous about failing, they're nervous about, oh, I better win this. It's like what you see happen in sports, right?

• 1:18:20Jocko Willink?

  Basketball teams up by 10, 12 points, they're doing good. They go up by 20 points, they start hitting three pointers. There's no pressure anymore. They're just like letting it fly. That's when they do their best. So someone that can go into a situation and say, yep, there's some risks here, but I'm not worried if I look stupid, whatever, I'm doing the best I can, cool. And then you look at the rational situation. If you're in there like, oh, my God, I'm gonna look like such an idiot if I don't get this right. This is gonna be horrible. Guess where your focus is? It's not on the realities of the situation. It's not on rationalizing a good decision. It's just focused on how bad you're gonna look if you screw it up. So you make a bad decision.

• 1:18:59Speaker 01

  So you're more likely to screw it up. It's crazy.

• 1:19:04Jocko Willink?

  Uh, one psychologist has said, under stress, men are more likely to act irrationally, to strike out blindly, or even to freeze into stupid immobility.

• 1:19:15Jocko Willink?

  That's what stress does to people. I've seen it. You know, when you see that, I've seen it in like acute cases where someone's stressed out in combat and they kind of lock up and you gotta kind of shake them out of it. I've also seen it on, if you look at it broadly over a full deployment and you see people that you, that are usually pretty solid and they start either getting angry, they start lashing out, they start making dumb decisions. You know, like, mm, this stress is getting to you, man. That's what's going on. You gotta back them off a little bit.

• 1:19:47Jocko Willink?

  But why should anxious and defensive individuals, those who are, those who have the most to lose, act more irrationally than those less afflicted, afflicted by neurosis? Two reasons have been advanced. The first has been well stated by Deutsch, some guy, I don't know who it is. Didn't look it up, sorry. Nervousness. The need to respond quickly because of the fear one will lose either the desire or ability to respond enhances the likelihood that a response will be triggered off by an insufficient stimulus and thus makes for instability. You know, it's a freaking, um, good example of that. Uh, someone, you put someone in like

• 1:20:27Jocko Willink?

  a, a shooter situation with simunition and you're like, all right, go in the house. If they've never done it before and they're super nervous, they're freaking shooting the first person that they see, whether they hold the weapon or not, right? They're gonna be quick to respond with fear because they're nervous. And the more you train them to that, the better they'll get. Uh, the second reason why a proportion of, of people will make irrational decisions whose riskiness is unrelated to reality is because being neurotic, they will strive to maintain an image of themselves as either quote, bold and daring, end quote, or quote, as careful and judicious decision makers, end quote. And the urge to sustain their particular conceit will take precedence over the need to behave realistically.

• 1:21:16Jocko Willink?

  So luckily for me, like you were talking Dave about me making small decisions. Luckily, I figured that out because I like being a person that's known as decisive. But luckily, I figured out I could look and appear and be decisive by making small decisions. So I didn't have to try and figure everything out, everything at once, which is what I recommend to people do.

• 1:21:36Jocko Willink?

  Um, he closes out this chapter saying, since, since decision making is by definition, a cognitive process. Then obviously the oldest theory is, is in one sense, a truism. But it, but, but it by no means follows that the simple hypothesis of low intelligence fits the bill. Again, this whole chapter is about intelligence. So he's saying, listen.

• 1:21:59Jocko Willink?

  Decision making is about how fast you can think and your cognitive capability, but it doesn't cover everything. On the contrary, by looking further into the nature of decision making process, we are compelled to entertain another rather different possibility, namely that the apparent intellectual failings of some military commanders are due not to lack of intelligence, but to their feelings. Cognitive dissonance, pontification, denial, risk taking and anti intellectualism are all in reality more concerned with emotion than with intelligence. Which I, I mean, that, well, it's another, another thing we say at the mustard. Who here has made a great decision when they were super emotional?

• 1:22:44Jocko Willink?

  No one raises their hand. That's why we teach people to detach from their emotions so that you can make good decisions. Do you detach 100%? No, but you need to detach so that they're not driving your decision making process. The susceptibility to cognitive dissonance, dissonance, the tendency to pontificate and the inability to adjust the riskiness of decisions to the real situation are a product of such neurotic disabilities as extreme anxiety under stress, low self-esteem, nervousness, the need for approval and general defensiveness. These, it seems, over and above his level of intelligence are the factors which interfere with what a man decides to do given, in a given situation.

• 1:23:29Jocko Willink?

  Think he made a pretty good case for that. Not about how smart you are. It does, smart plays some role. I mean, obviously if you're an idiot, you can make a bunch of bad decisions. But that's not the, that's not the major number in this equation. Most people are making bad decisions based on their emotions, based on their feelings, based on their psychology.

• 1:23:51Jocko Willink?

  And this whole thing ties into Dave, this is what you were getting at earlier. You got about a whole chapter here talking about what you, what you started, the road you started to go down. This chapter is called Military Organizations. And it says Military Organizations make for military incompetence in two ways. Directly, by forcing their members to act in a fashion that is not always conducive to military success. And indirectly, by attracting, selecting, and promoting a minority of people with particular defects of intellect and personality. So this is what you were talking about. Yeah. How the system will set up to promote, and this is going one step further. You talked about how the system can promote people, they can figure out how their way to get through it. It also can attract people like this. Yeah. People that are looking for a system that they can figure out how to get through.

• 1:24:35Jocko Willink?

  The root cause of all this is that since men are not by nature all that well-equipped for aggression on a grand scale, they have had to develop a complex of rules, conventions, and ways of thinking which in the course of time ossify into outmoded tradition, curious ritual, inappropriate dogma, and that bane of some military organizations' irrelevant bullshit. Which we had a conversation on here about chicken shit, chicken shit and bullshit. I think chicken shit is the term that's used nowadays. He's using the term bullshit. And he actually throughout this calls it bull. I think I'm gonna call it bullshit most of the time. He calls it bullshit here. But this idea of bullshit, chicken shit stuff that you're polishing your belt buckle, you're polishing your boots, you're doing all these things, these things in the military, they're

• 1:25:20Jocko Willink?

  either called chicken shit or bullshit. But those things are a huge part of some military organizations. And as we're gonna find, there's some reasons for it, but there's also when it gets out of hand. Uh, fast forward a little bit, broadly speaking, human activities may be regarded as falling into one or the other of two main groups. Those which are directly instinctual and those which are not. So we all got some things that we instinctively wanna do. Into the first, which involves what have been succinctly described as the three Fs. Feeding, fighting, and reproduction.

• 1:25:55Jocko Willink?

  Fall such robust pastimes as pugilism, professional pie eating, prostitution, and soldiering. So, look, we got these three Fs, feeding, fighting, and reproduction. And from that, we get things like boxing, we get things like professional pie eating in chefs and restaurants. We also get prostitution. We also get soldiering. Those are all kind of, you can marry those up from where those came from. Into the second group fall all those other vocations which though sometimes subserving the basic drives do not have as their end product, the original consumatory response.

• 1:26:37Jocko Willink?

  Besides this most important difference, the instinctual vocations have three other characteristics which differentiate them from those in the second category. They may involve unlearned patterns of behavior, are motivated by crude if powerful emotions, fear, lust, and rage, and are designed to culminate in an unlearned response of a distinctly physical kind. So those are the three Fs, right? You got powerful emotions tied to them, fear, lust, and rage, and where they get you is something physical. You're eating, you're fighting, or you're reproducing.

• 1:27:21Jocko Willink?

  He goes into prostitution a little bit. "Prostitution is easy because the transformation of an unlearned drive into a money-making career is more a matter of realizing a potential than seriously modifying nature." And he goes into this thing about this guy who interviewed prostitutes, and this one prostitute said, "I'd been working in a factory for five years before I realized I was sitting on a fortune all the time."

• 1:27:47Jocko Willink?

  I kinda had to throw that quote in there. It goes on down the same path, talking about a professional soldier. The original purpose of intraspecies aggression is not destruction, but distribution. So, why do, why do people fight? Why do animals fight? Cause we got, you gotta freaking stay away from me a little bit. You can't get too close to me, not too close to my resources, not too close to my woman. Like you need to get your own activities going. This is my AO, this is my area of operations. In lower forms of life, the instinct of aggression is controlled by a language of signs and counter signs, so that everyone remains spread out with a minimum amount of bloodshed.

• 1:28:27Jocko Willink?

  Moreover, those animals best equipped to do each other an injury are also those with the most effective controls against so doing. A dog tactless enough to encroach upon a rival's territory may become involved in a noisy scuffle, but has only to drop his tail, roll over and urinate to terminate the attack upon his person. Right? So that's what animals do. And even, you know, going out elk hunting, the elk, they fight hard and occasionally they do kill each other. But most of the time, they just, hey, man, like I'm dominant, you go away. And the guy's like, cool. So that's the way it's supposed to be. You're supposed to be able to sort of surrender, back up, give some space and that makes sense. So that's the difference.

• 1:29:10Jocko Willink?

  The point that he's trying to bear here is, hey, a prostitute, she's still doing something that just makes sense on an instinctual level, right? Whereas humans with war, things all of a sudden aren't so instinctual anymore. Because now, look, if it was in caveman days and you came into my territory, I'd probably beat you up and you'd run away. And I'm not going to waste any energy trying to go catch you. I don't care, you just stay away from me. Well, when we get to war now, it's a lot different. So he goes into that a little bit. Humans, they have made up for a lack of natural weapons by acquiring some far more deadly artificial ones, right? We don't have horns on our head.

• 1:29:54Jocko Willink?

  We don't have big teeth where we can rip each other apart. Sure, we can choke each other if we have jiu jitsu. But we don't have these things, so we make other weapons, right? Clubs, spears, knives, guns, missiles.

• 1:30:11Jocko Willink?

  Yet other difficulties, and this is where, this is where you're gonna take everything we just talked about, and now we're gonna take it into this military context. And this is something that I have talked about before. I've talked about the difference of decentralized command and when you have centralized command. And the fact that when decentralized command started to come to fruition is when you didn't have conscripts anymore. You didn't have, you had people that you could say, alright, here's what we're trying to make happen. Go make it happen. You didn't have to say, this is what you need to go, go do, go do it. And if you don't do it, I'm gonna shoot you. That's a different type of discipline. It's imposed discipline versus uh, unit discipline.

• 1:30:58Jocko Willink?

  So, we're gonna get into that a little bit here. Yet other difficulties have been posed by the sheer size of human warring groups. With the transition from small parties of hostile tribesmen to large mercenary armies came problems of motivation and control. Right? So if you, if there was just the five of us and our clan, and we were just defending, I didn't need to motivate Echo to do his job. If he didn't do his job, we were all gonna get overrun and we're all gonna die. So there was no real reason for me to have to impose discipline on you. We just had it. We just, we knew that we had to fight together. We knew if we got overrun, they were gonna come and take our food and take our women, and that was game over for us. So, there wasn't any real need to, to quote motivate you. But, things are bigger now.

• 1:31:43Jocko Willink?

  Since the history of warfare is largely that of many who, though through poverty or the press gang, were forced to take up arms for a cause which few could even comprehend, the evoking and direction of aggression called for special measures. So, once we have an army where Echo doesn't really quite sure why the hell, he knew when it was our cave, our little area, and we were defending our, our tribe, he understood that. But once he's like, all of a sudden he's in a foreign country, and I'm giving him a, a, a musket.

• 1:32:17Jocko Willink?

  And I'm saying, okay, dude, we're gonna fight. He's kind of thinking, wait a second, I don't even live anywhere near here. So now we need to come up with some special measures to get Echo to direct his aggression towards the enemy. How do we do that? These included devices to ensure group cohesion, to incite hostility, to enforce obedience, and to suppress mutiny. Because once again, I put, I take Echo on a ship, give him a sword and be like, okay, dude, we're gonna go and fight these people you've never seen before. They're not close to your family, they're not close to your area of operations. And not only do I need to get you to hate them, I need to make sure you don't freaking just turn that sword on me and cut my head off. Because it doesn't make

• 1:32:58Jocko Willink?

  any sense, right? It doesn't make any sense to Echo Charles, who's got his tribe. Doesn't make any sense for you to go to some other place and fight. So how are we gonna make that happen? Well, we gotta make group cohesion, we gotta incite hostility against the enemy, we gotta enforce obedience, and make sure we don't have a mutiny. They also included means whereby the intentions of leaders could be translated into a concerted action by followers. In short, it called for two other components of militarism. Firstly, a system of rewards and punishment of rank, medals, battle emblems, and prize money. That's what's gonna dangle in front of you,

• 1:33:38Jocko Willink?

  carrot. Of confidential reports, court marshals, and the lash. There's the stick. Don't do what I tell you, I'm gonna court martial you, I'm gonna whip you, whatever. And secondly, a system of orders and over learned, learned drills whereby complex patterns of behavior could be set in motion by the briefest of instructions. So I'm actually gonna train you. I like how Echo Charles has become my soldier today. Right? You like that? I'm gonna train you. So I gotta end up with a pattern of behavior that becomes instilled in you.

• 1:34:15Jocko Willink?

  No less important for a theory of military incompetence is the means whereby militarism is administered and its continuity insured. Originally, so now we're gonna get into this. Originally, since combat was largely a matter of brute force, we must suppose that the strongest came to the top. In fighting, as in prostitution, vital statistics gained the day, a sort of natural selection according to the criteria that were essentially physical. But in the course of time, the growing number of personnel involved and improvements in technique required some revision of earlier criteria. A distinction became necessary between organizers and the organized between the brains and the brawn.

• 1:34:55Jocko Willink?

  So now, just the fact that Echo's the biggest, strongest guy, doesn't necessarily mean that's gonna make the difference in the battle, because we got a bunch of people. And if I can organize more people against, or if the enemy organizes five people just to fight Echo, Echo's going down. So I need to get some people to support Echo. Now we got a freaking army.

• 1:35:16Jocko Willink?

  To this end, civil government might have been expected to construct armies in which the dichotomies, in which such dichotomies obtained. One might have expected that officers would have been chosen for their brains and the hierarchy of command based upon merit and professional expertise. So, Echo, you and I, we're on the same tribe, we form an army, we take all the big guys, and we're putting you guys in the front lines? That makes sense, right? Because you're the, you're the ones that are gonna crush the enemy. We're also gonna take our smartest dude and be like, "Hey, you're really good at organizing people, you got a loud voice, you come up with good plans, cool. Dave, you're gonna run this battalion over here." And Dave's like, "Cool, got it." That's the way we should do it. Dave's proved himself, he's smart, right?

• 1:36:00Jocko Willink?

  So that's what we're doing, that's what we think we're doing, that's what makes sense to do. Right? That clearly makes sense. However, for example...

• 1:36:10Jocko Willink?

  In Britain, civil government did nothing of the kind. By methods of purchase and nomination, the control of the army was given over to men who, with nothing to gain from revolution, would remain the loyal, apolitical supporters of the existing regime. Professional ability, energy, and dedication to the job counted for little. So that's not how they selected. They didn't say, "Hey, who's better at decision-making?" You know? Echo, "You know what? You're gonna be frontlines." Dave, "You know, you got those quick thoughts? We're putting you in command." What'd the British do? No. You know what they said? "Who's gonna be loyal? Who can pay the most? We'll put you in command." By the way, so check this out.

• 1:36:52Jocko Willink?

  How does that, how does that, how does that work? Dave, you have money to buy a commission. What do you think of the system? What do you think of it?

• 1:37:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, I like this.

• 1:37:07Jocko Willink?

  You like the system? And you want to, importantly, you want to maintain the system.

• 1:37:11Speaker 01

  Yes, absolutely.

• 1:37:12Jocko Willink?

  Echo, you're kinda broke. Right?

• 1:37:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:37:15Jocko Willink?

  You don't, you don't really like the system, because you haven't been able to succeed in it. You probably want to change the system. So you know what? I'm not putting you in charge. I'm gonna put the guy in charge that's succeeded in the system, that wants the status quo. He wants to protect. He's gonna fight, and he's gonna use you to fight, to protect what he's already got: status and money. That's the dynamic. That's what he, that's what he means when he says, "Men who, with nothing to gain from revolution, would remain loyal." Dave's gonna remain loyal. He can pay for this. The reason he can pay for this is because he's done alright in the system.

• 1:37:54Speaker 01

  How do I benefit from a revolution here? I don't want that at all.

• 1:37:58Jocko Willink?

  No, not at all. So you're willing to, so once I give you a position and I give you authority, you can actually use your authority now to maintain the status quo, which is what you want. And by the way, you can also impose your status quo. Because if you guys go take over another chunk of land, guess who's gonna get it? Not Echo. He fought for it, but Dave's gonna get it. And maybe we'll give Dave, maybe we'll give Echo a little sliver of, you know, maybe you get some, a little bit of, a little bit of gold in your, a little bit of booty for you, but Dave's gonna get the land.

• 1:38:29Jocko Willink?

  So we'll keep you a little bit happy, but Dave wants us to succeed and Dave's willing to sacrifice a bunch of you, a bunch of echoes for this situation.

• 1:38:40Jocko Willink?

  Um, fast forward a little bit, the essential nature of militarism should now be clear. We see it as an ever increasing web of rules, restrictions, and constraints presided over by an elite, one of whose motives was to preserve the status quo, exactly what I just said. How do I keep Echo in line? Here's the rules. Here's your uniform. Here's what you gotta do. If you step out of line, guess what's gonna happen? You're getting, you're getting the lash. You're getting punished. You're getting no pay. You're getting bread and water. So that's what we set up.

• 1:39:12Jocko Willink?

  Um, but this incompetence is augmented by another factor, namely the characteristics of some of those attracted to milit- to the military.

• 1:39:22Jocko Willink?

  Let us examine this hypothesis. By modern standards and viewed from the outside, the nature of militarism may not seem very attractive, including as it does, a number of attributes which are positively repellent to those who value freedom, egalitarianism, and, and creative as opposed to destructive ends. So, so if you think about what the military is, hey, you're gonna go, you're gonna follow orders, you're gonna have to dress the way you get told to dress, you're gonna have to cut your hair the way you'd get told to cut your hair, you have to wake up when they tell you to wake up, you're gonna go to bed when they tell you to go to bed. Like, if you're a person that values personal freedom, why are you going in there? Why is that happening? If you wanna create things in, in the world, why are you going in the military? You go

• 1:40:07Jocko Willink?

  in the military to destroy things. There was a guy, uh, SEAL Team One, he was a Vietnam guy, and he said, I joined the, he said, when he left SEAL Team One, he said, I joined the Navy in nineteen, whatever it was, I joined the Navy in nineteen sixty-eight so I could kill people for my country. I was like, yes. But right? That's, that, that's attracting a certain person, type of person, not someone that wants to create, someone that wants to destroy.

• 1:40:34Jocko Willink?

  He said, "Why then do people join the army? And are there some characteristics of the military which have a positively magnetic attraction for those whose subsequent performance may be deemed incompetent?" So who are we bringing in here? He makes a comparison to Alcoholics Anonymous. He says Alcoholics Anonymous can attract people. "An individual with particular problems of a psychological kind may be expected to gravitate towards a group which he recognizes not only as containing fellow sufferers, but also as having developed effective ways of dealing with special needs of its members.

• 1:41:15Jocko Willink?

  The therapeutic gain from such behavior during the Second World War has been noted by Robert Holt. He wrote, "It was a common clinical observation during the war that military service was an unusually good environment for men who lacked inner controls. The combination of absolute security, a strong institutional parent substitute, on whom one could lean unobtrusively, and socially approved outlets for aggression provided a form of social control that allowed impulses to be expressed in acceptable ways."

• 1:41:53Jocko Willink?

  By the way, when you join the SEAL teams, you're joining the SEAL teams so you can kill people. Or at a very minimum, you're joining the SEAL teams knowing that you may have to kill people. If you're gonna join the SEAL teams, you're gonna go all through that, all that, there's gotta be some actual, in my opinion, desire to kill people. That's what you wanna do. Right? Dave, you didn't go in the Marine Corps thinking, "Hey, I'd like to fly a jet." No, you wanna fly a jet. Right? That's what you wanna do. This is an acceptable way that you can go fly a jet. Did you wanna get in a dogfight?

• 1:42:29Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:42:31Jocko Willink?

  And what's the outcome of a dogfight?

• 1:42:33Speaker 01

  You either win or you lose.

• 1:42:34Jocko Willink?

  And what happens to the loser?

• 1:42:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:42:38Jocko Willink?

  The loser dies.

• 1:42:38Speaker 01

  Loser dies.

• 1:42:39Jocko Willink?

  The loser dies. So here, all these military people are signing up for their aggression to be expressed in an acceptable way.

• 1:42:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, surrounded by surrounded by people who see it the same way.

• 1:42:52Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, well, that's the thing. You look at Alcoholics Anonymous and go, well, you know, these other these other people deal with. And you look at the military, like, well, I kind of want

• 1:42:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:42:59Jocko Willink?

  That sounds like a cool way to go.

• 1:43:01Speaker 01

  I also understand why you feel the way you do, why you think the way you do. And that scene that he set with that, you can see, it's so easy to see that connection.

• 1:43:10Jocko Willink?

  So easy to see that connection.

• 1:43:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:43:13Jocko Willink?

  He says, even a troop of baboons contrives a rigid dominance hierarchy where each male knows its place. It's kind of like the military. It's very nice. Get in there. And you can see when some people in the military, when they when they're that baboon that gets their spot in the hierarchy, and they want to flex it on everybody. Oh, you can see those people all day long. And again, is this everyone in the military? Absolutely not. It's absolutely not.

• 1:43:37Speaker 01

  No, but there's a piece of that formalization of that hierarchy. And in the military, I'm sure it's the same way with you, that there is still an unspoken hierarchy. There is a there's a pecking order that isn't written down. You know, there's a roster that we don't write on the board and go, okay, you know, Jaco's one, Echo's two, Dave's three. It doesn't say that, but everybody kind of knows.

• 1:43:59Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah, there's definitely.

• 1:44:00Speaker 01

  And if it's not pure, there's at least some groups, some category, like a couple guys here, a couple guys here, and everybody knows it. And but the system can offset that a little bit by creating, well, it utilizes that that deliberate hierarchy, which means like, maybe, maybe Dave's like, seven, kind of sucks. But I do whatever I can do, I maneuver, and I'd actually I get promoted, or I get a task, or I get actually some deliberate hierarchical authority.

• 1:44:31Jocko Willink?

  Right.

• 1:44:31Speaker 01

  And now I can kind of like

• 1:44:33Jocko Willink?

  Now you're number one.

• 1:44:34Speaker 01

  exact revenge.

• 1:44:35Jocko Willink?

  You can impose that.

• 1:44:36Speaker 01

  Yes, yes. Because I, hey, hey, I, we all know where I was, but that was unwritten, but I'm in charge now.

• 1:44:40Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:41Speaker 01

  And then the psychology of that power, which sort of

• 1:44:45Speaker 01

  Fixes the problem with the unspoken hierarchy, even the things that, you know, in that, you know, those baboons don't have a chart, they just know. And there's nothing that number seven's gonna do to go, "Well, I got a formal piece over here that sort of allows me to impose my will on you." And, I mean, I've been writing things down, self-esteem, ego, the 20 different versions of that word that he's used so far in this book, which all comes down to the insecurity, all those different words that he's using. The military delivers some authority for the people that have that, that is kind of undeniable in the system. And again, not everybody, just like you said, this is not everybody, but it is there.

• 1:45:21Jocko Willink?

  It is there. There's, there's nothing worse than when somebody who thinks they should be in charge actually gets in charge. Those people are the worst. The people that sit there and think, "They're just, they're just fuming, they're thinking, "I should be, I could do such a much better job," and what their thoughts are. And when they actually get put in charge, they're a freaking disaster, they're a nightmare. Oh, that they become the head baboon. "At a human level, armies resemble the authoritarian family group. Just as the ethos of an upper-class Victorian family totally forbade any show of aggression

• 1:46:05Jocko Willink?

  by the child toward its parents, but encouraged organized aggression towards contemporaries in such school pursuits as boxing and sanctioned bullying, so in the army, the slightest hint of insubordination, i.e. aggression directed towards a superior, is severely punished, while aggression towards the enemy is encouraged and rewarded." Gotta set that up, gotta keep it under control. From a psychological point of view, therefore, militarism strives to maintain that paradoxical state of affairs where feeling angry... may well be totally split off from aggression. One in which a soldier is required to suppress his aggression towards his superiors,

• 1:46:50Jocko Willink?

  whom he may loathe while venting it upon a hypothetical enemy towards whom he well, may well entertain no hostile feelings.

• 1:47:02Jocko Willink?

  This, the classic example of this unorthodox behavior occurred on Christmas Day, 1914, when British and German troops joined together for, um, convivialities in no man's land. This guy's vocabulary is very impressive, by the way. Needless to say, these reprehensible flickerings of humanity were quickly stamped out by the generals on both sides. We all, we all know what happened. The Germans and the Brits were like, we're not fighting anymore. Went and played, went and played soccer. And the generals like, no, you will bomb them. Yeah, Roger that.

• 1:47:35Jocko Willink?

  It is just because the business of a soldier is destruction and violence that need to take general precautions against disorder becomes so pressing.

• 1:47:46Jocko Willink?

  Cause you really, you got a bunch of freaking, you're, you're, you're training people to be aggressive and you gotta somehow make sure they don't point that aggression at you. The aspects in question may be assumed under the general, if faintly impolite heading of bullshit. So important is this curious phenomenon that it deserves a section to itself. So now we have a chapter that's called bullshit, which I already mentioned. This is the little stupid things that you're doing.

• 1:48:13Jocko Willink?

  So this is covered in this next section, this next chapter, which is entitled bullshit, chicken shit, whatever. Um, according to Eric Partridge, the word was coined by Australian soldiers in 1916 coming from a country whose armed forces have always been relatively free of, from this element of militarism. They were evidently so struck by the excessive spit and polish of the British Army that they felt moved to give it a label.

• 1:48:40Jocko Willink?

  Going a little further back, it is possible that the expression has its origin in a bull. The false hairpiece worn by women between 1690 and 1770. This would be consistent with the fact that modern dictionaries define bull as, quote, "a ludicrous jest, a self-contradictory statement to cheat, empty talk, absurd fussiness over dress", end quote. Whatever its etymological significance, such definitions certainly capture the military nature of bull. One of the most astonishing, apparently irrational, and yet significant aspects of militarism. One which connotes an attitude of mind, a pattern of behavior, as, and, an end product.

• 1:49:25Jocko Willink?

  As implied by the old jingle, quote, "If it moves, salute it. If it doesn't move, pick it up. If you can't pick it up, paint it", end quote.

• 1:49:37Jocko Willink?

  The phenomenon involves ritualistic observance of the dominance, submission, relate, relationships of the military hierarchy, extreme orderliness, and a preoccupation with outward appearances. This is what we call chicken shit. This is why, uh, the term "painting rocks" comes from the Marine Corps, right?

• 1:49:56Speaker 01

  I think so. I mean, I've heard that term a thousand times. I can't say that I know for sure, but I think that's right.

• 1:50:01Jocko Willink?

  I, I can, I can definitely say I have seen way more white painted rocks on Marine Corps bases than any other base.

• 1:50:09Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:50:10Jocko Willink?

  Right?

• 1:50:11Speaker 02

  What does that mean?

• 1:50:11Jocko Willink?

  They means that if, they'll take rocks and paint them white and like put in places.

• 1:50:15Speaker 02

  Bullshit, like that's bullshit job.

• 1:50:17Jocko Willink?

  I bet you K-Dog's painted some rock. K-Dog, you painted some rocks before? K-Dog's not as dead. Old boy's painted some rocks, bro. He's painted some rocks. So, uh,

• 1:50:27Jocko Willink?

  in, in the military manifestations of bull range from such minor apparent absurdities as the polishing of the backs of cap badges. So what that means echoes, you're polishing something that's never going to be seen, but someone's going to inspect it. It can't be seen, but you're gonna do it. The blanking of trees for a forthcoming general, general's inspection. I'd look. up Blanco in because I didn't know what it was so Blanco was a like a powdered paint that they used to issue so you could camouflage things but eventually of course took it to the extreme and now we want all the trees trees to be the same color so we're gonna mix this powdered paint which is a military thing and we're gonna paint the trees so they're all gonna

• 1:51:08Jocko Willink?

  be whatever gray that's the kind of that's chicken shit stuff going on right there uh besides its emphasis on appearance and its constraining aspects of bullshit also involves a compulsive concern with cleanliness in this respect alone it may achieve impressive levels of irrationality to make to make it white webbing equipment might be boiled almost to the point of destruction while the blankets that one sleeps that that the owner sleeps in stay unwashed for weeks there are of course good arguments for bullshit so here's some reasons why it exists some of the positive reasons it ensures a level of ordiness orderliness cleanliness discipline personal pride obedience and morale which so it seems could not be reached in any

• 1:51:51Jocko Willink?

  other means i.e. by reasoned as opposed to compulsive behavior by the same token it achieves a level of uniformity that makes for a solid area and group cohesiveness so there's some good reasons for it however the case against it is also strong it is time wasting excruciatingly boring for all those with more than the most mediocre intellect and a poor substitute for thought since it aims to govern behavior by a set of rules and defines a rigid program for different occasions it cannot meet the unanticipated event so you're getting trained not to think you went to did you go to OCS yeah okay when I went to Navy OCS the belt buckles that we got we had to polish the coating off there's a coating that comes on the belt buckles echo Charles

• 1:52:36Jocko Willink?

  that keeps it shiny no matter what like you can it's gonna keep shiny you actually polish that off yeah so that it can get eroded so that you have to polish it more

• 1:52:51Jocko Willink?

  That's some chicken shit, some bullshit right there, Holmes.

• 1:52:54Speaker 01

  We had anodized and non-anodized. Anodized is the permanent thing that like is always brass or shiny. You are not allowed to, you have anodized gear. So all of your stuff, your belt buckles, everything, none of it could be anodized. That was reserved for like some other people. And so you had to buy the unanodized and then shine it to make it look like it was.

• 1:53:17Jocko Willink?

  Yes.

• 1:53:17Speaker 01

  Good use of time.

• 1:53:18Jocko Willink?

  Wait, we had to manually unanodize the freaking belt buckles.

• 1:53:22Speaker 01

  A next level, it's.

• 1:53:23Jocko Willink?

  You could see it slowly coming off. You'd be sitting there with a cotton swab and just hours. See, even Echo's confused by this.

• 1:53:31Speaker 02

  That's kind of nonsense.

• 1:53:32Jocko Willink?

  It's total nonsense.

• 1:53:33Speaker 01

  It's called brass.

• 1:53:33Jocko Willink?

  Oh, brass. Oh, yeah, you definitely use brass. That's what got it off.

• 1:53:37Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:53:39Jocko Willink?

  Like any compulsive symptom bullshit and its cousins, ritual, dogma, and superstition have put themselves so far beyond reason thought that they can, that they create resistance to change and the acceptance of new ideas. Take military drill. This starts as a skill adapted to a reality situation, right? We used to have to do close order drill for combat. It develops into a rigid pattern of behavior by becoming automatic, takes the load off of memory. So you drill that, and we still do this today. You do, you don't call it military drill, but when you're doing immediate action drills with your weapon, you're learning how to rap, tack, and bang. You're learning how to solve problems without having to think about them.

• 1:54:18Jocko Willink?

  Takes the load off the memory. Once learned, it is, it is directed by processes of which we are scarcely conscious and which leave the limited channel capacity of conscious experience mercifully free to deal with other more pressing events. That's why you can reload your weapon without having to think about it. And that way you can figure out where I'm going to maneuver my element to less, next. That's drill. That's good. It is drill in such a sense which ensures that most motorists let off the handbrake before engaging the clutch and that most speakers construct their sentences according to the rules of language, right? We don't have to think about that. Military drill started in this way. The devices which could eventually weld together a group of uneducated peasants into a single corporate machine.

• 1:55:04Jocko Willink?

  That did what it was told. This was all good, except for one thing. Ritualization implying the tendency to transform means to an ends. Thus, the battle drill of one error becomes the ceremonial drill of another. What started out as a functionally useful maneuver becomes a highly stereotyped pattern of movements on the barrack square. In itself, this may no be bad. This may be no bad thing. So this is where these things come from. That's where they came from. When you see the people doing the close order drill, like the Marine Corps Silent Drill Team, it used to have a purpose. And it's not a bad thing necessarily. Ceremonial ceremonial can be pleasing to the eye and anodyne for taxpayers and even on occasions a device for raising charitable funds.

• 1:55:48Speaker 01

  Dude, you're talking about the Blue Angels.

• 1:55:49Jocko Willink?

  A hundred percent.

• 1:55:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. And and I mean that in like you described in a good way.

• 1:55:55Jocko Willink?

  Right, right. It's a good way. It's and it's based on at one point, hey, we're gonna fly together. My wingman's gonna be a, you know, whatever, very close to me.

• 1:56:03Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:56:03Jocko Willink?

  But now we're gonna take, what is there, seven of them flying at the time? Six. Now we're gonna take six aircraft. We'll be three inches from each other. And it's taken to the extreme and it has some benefits. Gonna recruit people. It's gonna be the taxpayers can see that we've got something and we can raise money. So it's a positive thing. But unfortunately ceremonial drill, like other forms of bullshit, is addictive. And by being so usurps the time and energy which should be devoted to other more adaptive pastimes. It then becomes a substitute for doing something else as when the conservative element in the Brigade of Guards resisted the adopting of new battle drill because it would interfere with their existing ceremonial procedures.

• 1:56:45Jocko Willink?

  So now we're starting to say, hey, we can't do that because that's not how we do our ceremonial stuff. Fast forward a little bit. As a factor in fighting efficiency, bull has also been unhelpful in the Navy. If we were, if we assume that one of the main purposes of a Navy is to defeat the enemy and that is, in the past anyway, achieved by shellfire, it might be supposed that much time would have been spent on practicing gunnery. But in the British Navy, in the years before the First World War, ship commanders were actively discouraged from gunnery practice because the smoke might mark the paintwork and soil the gleaming decks.

• 1:57:23Jocko Willink?

  The price for this was paid at Jutland. Did you, when did you came in the Marine Corps in what, 1994?

• 1:57:31Speaker 01

  Commission 94, yeah.

• 1:57:32Jocko Willink?

  Commission 94? Did you starch your cammies?

• 1:57:36Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. I got into the era of starch. I started before we, we obviously don't do that anymore. I have to go back in the memory banks. Yes, totally.

• 1:57:47Jocko Willink?

  We starched our freaking cammies in the SEAL teams for almost my entire career. You had a pair of starched cammies.

• 1:57:54Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:57:54Jocko Willink?

  And I remember when the Marine Corps, at one point, they stopped starching. I was like, they are so freaking squared away.

• 1:58:00Speaker 01

  Yes. And I remember that time. I mean, you had your set of starched inspection-ready cammies. And when you brought them in, they would ask you the level of starch that you wanted.

• 1:58:08Jocko Willink?

  Yes. And you'd say, galactic.

• 1:58:12Jocko Willink?

  I don't want to be able to move. I want this to be body armor. I had starched cammies that would stop a freaking 762 by 39.

• 1:58:20Speaker 01

  About that when you said it, because we went away from it, you know, sort of pre, pre-war.

• 1:58:24Jocko Willink?

  Right. It was pre-war.

• 1:58:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I was fortunate enough.

• 1:58:27Jocko Willink?

  That's even more impressive.

• 1:58:28Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:58:29Jocko Willink?

  I could see him doing it after September 11th, maybe two years later, be like, all right, we gotta freaking stop these. No, you actually did it before the war started, which shows you somebody, this is why we know we have some good officers out there.

• 1:58:39Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:58:39Jocko Willink?

  Because somebody looked in and said, wait, why am I seeing this freaking Lance Corporal over here, this starched set of cammies?

• 1:58:45Speaker 01

  And not to like overdo it on this, but that piece you said is actually really important. And using that example is a good example, because the new cammies the Marine Corps got, not only were they not starched, they were designed to be washed and not even ironed.

• 1:58:56Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 1:58:57Speaker 01

  Which was somebody going, hey, ironing your cammies is dumb. And it takes a long time. And we're going down the path of we're going to start measuring Marines based on how well they iron their cammies, which is a skill that I don't care about.

• 1:59:12Jocko Willink?

  Yes.

• 1:59:12Speaker 01

  And so it wasn't just no more starches. You could take them out of the wash and flat, you know, you know, slap them out and put them on. And they weren't wrinkled. They didn't look like crap. And it is an example of what you just described. It's like, there are actually some good people going, this is stupid. This is chicken shit, and we're not doing this.

• 1:59:27Jocko Willink?

  Yes, that is outstanding. There needs to be a chicken shit review board. If I was benevolent dictator of America, I would have a chicken shit review board for each branch of the service. And then I'd have a chief chicken shit review board officer, who would be like a Mustang freaking UDT guy from NOM.

• 1:59:46Jocko Willink?

  Also, when I came in the Marine Corps, there was no name tags. Did you, were you in that air? I was. Yeah, so you were just, you were just Staff Sergeant. What, what was your name? My name is Staff Sergeant. You can just call me Staff Sergeant. That was, that was freaking outstanding. That was pretty cool.

• 2:00:05Jocko Willink?

  Fast forward a little bit. Now that we've touched upon some of the more obvious manifestations of the phenomenon, let us examine its deeper causes and relevance to the central thesis of this book. Okay, so why, where's this check and check come from? For a start, it seems to be a natural product of authoritarian hierarchical structured organizations. Secondly, though its outward and visible signs are manifold, they have three common denominators. The first is constraint.

• 2:00:30Jocko Willink?

  We're trying to constrain people. The second is deception, which sounds a little bit weird. And the third is substitution for thought. The deception part is like, oh, we can have you doing this instead of doing something else.

• 2:00:45Jocko Willink?

  The constraint is we're going to control you and the substitution for thought is we don't want you thinking. Fast forward a little bit here. Perhaps the single most important feature of Bull is its capacity to allay anxiety. So, and I'm just gonna get into it. At a conscious rational level, orderliness, cleanliness, punctuality, and discipline clearly make for efficiency. The knowledge that one belongs to an organization which puts a premium on these laudable traits that one's rifle will fire and there is a key for the bully beef tin obviously makes for confidence. So, these are really positive things about, about this level of discipline.

• 2:01:30Jocko Willink?

  At a conscious rational level, therefore, even those aspects of Bull, which reflect the grossest exaggeration of these traits, must seem like steps in the right direction. This confidence, of course, may be, may be displaced. That a commander insists upon meticulous attention to detail down to the last shining button is no guarantee that his strategical thinking is anything other than puerile.

• 2:01:55Jocko Willink?

  Indeed, he could well be unwittingly substituting a lesser for a more important area of generalship. That's the substituting part. Look, as we were saying earlier, Dave, I might not be the sharpest tool in the shed, but if I can polish this belt buckle and I can put on this uniform and I can get my platoon to do all that correctly, I'm gonna look good. Nevertheless, there are good grounds for believing that those situations in which bullshit flourishes are ones in which it reduces anxiety because orderliness is fairly vital to survival. Again, the imposed uniformity, which is part and parcel of the bullshit, obviously makes

• 2:02:39Jocko Willink?

  for group cohesiveness and that we're all in it together feeling, which combats fear. We must suppose too, that the heightened conformity which it imposes will, like other forms of perceived conformity, encourage people through a diffusion of responsibility to perform acts which they might otherwise avoid. So, we've built a team and we've used this to build a team, which is okay. I have a common bond with people that went through OCS that we sat around and policies. It's a real thing. Yet another useful feature of bullshit, and so it has been said, is its role as a distractor and time filler. According to this theory, a mind preoccupied with buttons and toe caps has little room for gloomy forebodings. The point is well made by A.B.

• 2:03:23Jocko Willink?

  Campbell when writing of Naval Customs, quote, "It is the guiding principle of naval service that the ship's company should be constantly employed, and this is the reason, apart from the necessity for scrupulous cleanliness, why there is so much scrubbing of decks and polishing of bright work." This is making people have dumb shit to do, because we want the troops to be busy. In the same context, this writer compares naval and civilian routine. There's a reason I read this whole section. It is safe to say that there are many jobs, many shore job routine. routines which destroy initiative this also applies to many factory workers but is

• 2:04:02Jocko Willink?

  not so in the Navy a routine job builds up a blue jackets character as to why the end quote as to why the naval and civilian characters should require such dramatically different treatments Campbell refers to the moments of danger which occur for the former but not the later ladder this begs of course several questions so he's saying this this writer is saying that in the Navy all this bullshit work builds character but for in the civilian world they don't need it they don't need it and it hurts their initiative the reason that it's okay is because in the Navy you got to face all these threats danger and he says it confuses

• 2:04:47Jocko Willink?

  loss of initiative and blind obedience with the building of character and makes the unwarranted assumption that naval ratings face greater danger than many civilians including merchant seamen steeplejacks racing motorists mountain climbers single-handed yachtman coal miners matadors not one of whom has to fortify his character by polishing grass or scrubbing wood

• 2:05:08Jocko Willink?

  it would perhaps be truer to say that since the imposing of bull upon troops serves to reduce initiative it will thereby increase the feeling of dependency which they have toward their superiors this in turn will increase their obedience and loyalty so we're getting a little brainwashing going on you do what I tell you to do you do it over and over again you become dependent on me telling you what to do and that's what I want I don't want to have any initiative I don't want you thinking for yourself I just want you doing what I tell you to do that's why when I am a tyrannical leader or author authoritarian leader I'm super concerned about your freaking buttons

• 2:05:52Jocko Willink?

  Finally, at a conscious, rational level, there are aspects of Bull which may well help combat social anxieties in military men. Gorgeous uniforms, martial music, prancing horses, and even being saluted are obviously balm to tender egos, and by promoting soldierly pride do much to offset the hostility and ridicule to which the military are, from time to time, subjected to by those in other walks of life.

• 2:06:21Jocko Willink?

  But there is another less obvious reason for Bull, namely that it serves to reduce deeper-seated feelings of anxiety which may well have their origins in events unrelated to here and now, of which the subject remains blissfully unaware. This is where he starts getting a little psychological, it's a psychological reference there, that we have things in our subconscious that make us act a certain way. And one of the things he's saying is people that, people that like things to be super orderly, super orderly, they don't like change, they don't like when bad things happen, they don't like when things that you can't control, they don't like those things. And we're gonna get to this, but what kind of person do you want in the military? Someone that can't handle change and unexpected things? This is the wrong person. So if you're a person that looks at the military and goes, damn, I want a uniform, I can just wear what they tell me to wear, I can polish it, and nothing

• 2:07:05Jocko Willink?

  changes, and that's what I want? That's great. On the parade field, it sucks in combat.

• 2:07:13Jocko Willink?

  The most extreme examples of this phenomenon occur in obsessive-compulsive neurosis, a condition which the patient feels compelled to follow a pattern of ritualistic thoughts and acts, that these often include such bizarre symptoms as compulsive handwashing, this is OCD, a preoccupation with timing and counting, recurrent ruminative ideas, stereotyped verbal utterings, and always standing with one toes absolutely in line, has obvious significance for more military versions of the malaise.

• 2:07:42Jocko Willink?

  You remember a while ago talking about the degrees of insane, right? Everyone's, everyone's insane because everyone's reality is a little bit different. Well, everyone has different degrees of how OCD they are. And everyone has some level. Maybe some people are not, you know, point zero one, but you've got a spectrum. And the, the case here is that if you look at the military and you see people that are all uniform and you see that everything's clean, you look at that as a type of environment I might want to go into because I'm kind of like that. And that's how you end up with people in this zone. What do you got?

• 2:08:18Speaker 01

  I wrote it down. I was like, this guy is such a good, I hear he called it balm to the tender ego. Like it's such a great, it's such great medicine for that, like, oh, buttons are shiny. Boots are lined up on the line perfectly. Height order. Everything is how I want it. And that, that is such good medicine for me, you know, for my tendencies where they came from. And then just like you said is, and I made the reference of the Blue Angels from a, from a, they're literally called the flight demonstration team. But if you had the mindset that this is a reflection of combat, if this is a reflection of the challenges you're going to face in the real world. I mean, the disconnect there seemed like it'd be so obvious, but all those stories

• 2:09:02Speaker 01

  that he's telling in the first three sections we did of this, with these people going, oh, I, my, we close order drill, we have the best close order drill platoon, we're going to be the best platoon in combat. Dude.

• 2:09:15Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:16Speaker 01

  It's the, I wish that the disconnect was talking about something else, but the end state of all this is real people die at the end of all these stories, which is the worst part about it. And then, and then the ultimate manifestation of that is, is World War One of like, we're going to get online, just like we did on the parade deck. We're literally going to get in a line and move in, in a line.

• 2:09:40Speaker 01

  It's crazy. I guess insane maybe is a better word.

• 2:09:43Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:47Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, speaking of the degrees of which your OCD, he says, uh, such symptoms are not, of course, confined to the chronic sick. So you don't necessarily have to have some big issue. Milder forms may well occur in normal population during times of stress, bead counting, foot tapping, and the mouthing of dogma, like the compulsion to make things clean and tidy during periods of menstruation, well-known palatists for the stressed psyche. So this is something that you, you see people doing when they're stressed. They'll say the Lord's Prayer or whatever, except for Rose, Thug Rose. Remember when she fought for the first time against, uh, that Chinese girl, what's her name? If you know it. And the, oh no, it was against Johanna.

• 2:10:32Jocko Willink?

  It was against Johanna. And so Johanna, Dave was like, just on a tear, destroying everyone. And she had this super hostile, aggressive attitude, just, you know, getting people's faces. Now she'd been crushing people and she fought Thug Rose and they squared off in the face off. And, and Johanna's getting all crazy, making the mean face and everything. And Thug Rose is just, just straight, normal face, just saying the Lord's Prayer. Freaky looking.

• 2:11:04Jocko Willink?

  Thug Rose?

• 2:11:08Jocko Willink?

  He says, uh, let us not beat around the bush. At the risk of offending those with delicate susceptibilities, or tho- or who themselves have problems in these areas, it must be said that they involve four matters of primary importance in every human life, sex, elimination, eating, and death. These are things that cause us, uh, concern.

• 2:11:30Jocko Willink?

  The greatest anxieties concern death and unconstrained disorder. Since the two are inextricably related, a defense against one is a defense against the other also. This is perhaps the crux of the origins of bullshit. So we're afraid to die. Death is a form of disorder, so we want to get everything in order. Let us approach this from another standpoint. Whenever, whatever its particular form of bullshit results in a state of affairs, which is opposed to what many people would regard as a primary source of delight. The natural diversity of nature. Towards such diversity, it's in, it is implacably hostile. It is no exaggeration to say that this, uh, this aspect of militarism is dedicated

• 2:12:14Jocko Willink?

  to the ironing out of differences. The efficiency with which it destroys variety imposes uniformity is matched only by its demand for conformity. So we are going against nature when you're making everything the same. And nature's death is part of nature. Uh, this is against uniqueness. Uniqueness has market value. Not for nothing does current advertising for the quote best car in the world make only one specific claim that no two Rolls Royces are alike. So there's, we're, we're devaluing uniqueness. But Bull inverts these values. It worships homogeneity and frowns on deviance. Whether it's toe caps, buttons, or dressing by the left, hair length, kit inspection,

• 2:12:56Jocko Willink?

  or marching feet, the quintessence, the quintessence of perfection resides in conformity to a regulation. Pattern. This conformity is the product of constraint. It seems that since Bull is primarily concerned with substituting pattern for randomness, it evidently reduces anxiety by the reduction of uncertainty. So there's a whole idea psychologically that we just want to make things more certain, less random. How do we do that? Well, we, we just make everything the same. If I'm a person that is, has anxiety and fear of the unknown, what am I going to do? I'm going to start trying to make everything the same. That's cool.

• 2:13:40Jocko Willink?

  If you're on the parade field, that type of personality is actually awesome. If you're on the parade field, that type of personality that doesn't want anything to be shocking is a nightmare on the battlefield.

• 2:13:54Jocko Willink?

  Anyone who doubts the soothing effects of bowl has only to consider two other situations of frightening uncertainty, marriage and death. Few who have played even a minor role in these events would deny the emotional support that comes from the time honored ritual of weddings and funerals. I never thought of that before. There's a reason you gotta do this this way. Here it is. Let's face it, if you didn't set that day on the wedding, if you didn't set that day and have a bunch of people invited and there wasn't a thing going on, you'd probably get 50% less weddings because people are freaking out, right? They're like, I'm not going through with this. Two overlapping theories can be invoked. The argument is simple, living organisms are complex patterns which persist for a time within the essential disorder from which they came and to which they will with equal uncertainty return.

• 2:14:39Jocko Willink?

  So you live, you're nothing, and then these random freaking biological components fall into a pattern for a certain period of time, and then they all break apart and you're dead. Which is a really bizarre way of him saying what I just said. I think he gets an F on simplicity on that one. Whether it is a single cell, the integrated systems of the total organism, or the external social order, there exist regulators, controls, and constraints whose function it is to preserve the pattern, to keep it from, to keep this from that, to maintain purity and separateness. This holds as true for biological process as it does for the construction of an urban sewage system. You have to put controls around things.

• 2:15:24Jocko Willink?

  Indeed, life can be construed as a fight for orderliness, in the course of which much behavior, both voluntary and involuntary, both external and internal, is directed to this end. Laws and rules of hygiene, prophylaxis, antibodies, rejection mechanisms, adrenaline secretion, and New Year's resolutions are just some of the devices which aim to stem the perpetual drift toward disorder. So that's what life is. You have to stay in order to stay alive. And you do, like, you work out to keep everything in order. You try and eat right to keep everything in order. You make New Year's resolutions to try and keep everything in order. You clean your teeth to try and keep everything in order. It's a fight.

• 2:16:09Jocko Willink?

  It's a fight to keep things in order. It is, of course, a losing battle. As Oscar Wilde said, "Good intentions are useless attempts to meddle with the laws of nature."

• 2:16:21Jocko Willink?

  Bullshit represents an extreme manifestation of a general and necessary propensity on the part of living systems to resist randomness. This would account for the fact that the satorial aspects of the syndrome are concerned with removing dirt, with maintaining separateness, with keeping green, green and white, white, with preserving the status quo, keeping hair short, brass shiny rifles clean, and with maintaining uniformity by written orders, shouted commands, and other behavioral constraints. But, like waking consciousness in contrast to the dream and normality in contrast to psychosis, bullshit makes its effect by constraint upon the creativity of thought. He just said all

• 2:17:06Jocko Willink?

  that other stuff that I just said for that. I'm sorry it took a little longer. I should've skipped a little bit more. But, all that stuff of trying to maintain order is negatively impacting creativity. That's what it's doing. And the more you focus on that stuff, the less creative you're gonna be. Bullshit may be regarded as an organization's response to the threat of its disintegration. Right? So if you're in the military and you don't keep order, there's actually a threat of your organization falling apart. In the military, this threat has two sources: the external enemy and the aggressive impulses of its own members. In either case, the greater

• 2:17:48Jocko Willink?

  the threat, the greater the constraints. Which means, when you had conscripts that you were trying to get to fight, you had to freaking tighten those people up. You had to keep it super rigid. You get into special operations, that's probably the least rigid. Because everyone volunteered three or four times to get to that point where now, "Hey, I wanna be here." So there's much less constraints.

• 2:18:15Jocko Willink?

  So that's where we're at. Now, at this point Dixon, who wrote this book, goes into a bit of, he goes, he goes down some Freud activities here, Sigmund Freud, which is,

• 2:18:28Jocko Willink?

  if you don't know anything about Freud, Freud was a cocaine addict, I mean, to say the least. He was kind of a liar and a bit of a quack.

• 2:18:38Jocko Willink?

  He, he basically spewed out all kinds of crazy theories. And, and, and a majority of them, I don't know if I'm out of line saying this, but I'm pretty sure, I don't think I am, a majority of them were wrong. A majority of them were just batshit crazy, like just weird theories that he thought up, but so, a- and I would tell you that Dixon, well, this is again, he wrote this in 1976, this hadn't progressed, people didn't have as much knowledge, Freud had more, people hadn't understood how, what a freaking disaster Freud was. But he, but Freud did, just like a broken clock is right twice a day, Freud did come up with

• 2:19:21Jocko Willink?

  some concepts that are, that are still used. And one of them is just that we have a subconscious. Now, what Freud thought was that our subconscious was, was basically built before the age of five, based on your erogenous zones and all this weird stuff, right? And that you, you, just weird, just weird stuff.

• 2:19:42Jocko Willink?

  But you do have a subconscious and it does drive things. It's not based on the way you were potty trained, which a lot of this Freud stuff is based on weird, um, I think that dude had some issues, had some serious issues. You know what, I need to get Daryl Cooper on, we need to do a freaking Freud breakdown with Daryl Cooper and see what's up. But the bottom line is this guy's a cocaine addict, he's a, a bit of a quack, but some of his, some of his theories were correct. And then on top of that, Regardless of where people develop their personality, we all know that people have personalities. And you know, like one of those personalities is comes to the word comes directly from Freud,

• 2:20:24Jocko Willink?

  which is like an anal retentive personality. What we all know that type of personality. It's a type of personality. Does it develop from where someone was how someone is potty trained? No, actually, that's not where it develops from. It develops from a whole bunch of different things and a bunch of different people from a different, different backgrounds can end up with that type of personality. So he was wrong about where these things came from, but there are certain personalities that people have. And some of these things are reflected. We have to deal with. And is someone that's anal retentive going to be more apt to look at the military and think to themselves, that looks like my kind of scene? Absolutely.

• 2:21:04Jocko Willink?

  Is someone that's listening to rock and roll and their bed's not made and they're, they're they got crap on their floor? Is that the type of person that's like, I'd really like to join the military? It's not, right? It's not. Echo Charles, you weren't like, oh, man, you know what? I'm kind of cruising over here. I'm kind of getting up around the crack of 10:30 in the morning. Maybe the military is my route, right?

• 2:21:26Speaker 02

  That's funny you said that because I remember back when my friends were joining the military. And you know, military is always an option, kind of floating around when you're young or whatever. The one thing that stood out to me was like having to wake up at a certain time. It's weird. Yeah.

• 2:21:42Jocko Willink?

  Oh, check. So you got, so he starts focusing on this type of personality. I'm going to fast forward through some of the Freudian weirdo crap that he talks about a little bit. He doesn't go, he's it's only a few pages, but he says, it does not need any vast stretch of the imagination to see more than a passing similarity between these obsessive traits and the practice of bullshit. But Bull also has a two-pronged purpose to combat dirt and prevent illegitimate outbursts of aggression, aggression that is towards the superiors.

• 2:22:15Jocko Willink?

  And potentially dangerous towards parent figures, right? So that's what that's one of the reasons we impose these things is to keep people in check. At this stage in the argument, it is necessary to issue a caution. We are not saying that military organizations are hotbeds of obsessional neurosis, nor that those given to bullshit are necessarily manifesting compulsive symptoms. On the contrary, all that we have tried to show is that the anxiety reducing, aggression controlling and tenacious nature of bullshit comes at least partly

• 2:22:51Jocko Willink?

  explicable, so that you can, you can get it, you can kind of reason with it. And it's not all bad. And hey, I was freaking very, I mean, I was very into, you gotta look squared away. My boots were always highly polished. My uniform was always starched, even my freaking cami uniform. That's the way I was. You know, to ask you to Bruiser, if you, here, here's an interesting dichotomy. Once you left our base, our little compound over there, which was originally called Shark Base and then called Camp, Camp Markley. If you went off that base, you were in a squared away uniform. When you were on that base, I didn't give a shit what you wore. You could wear a freaking whatever, flip flops and a pair of surf shorts. I did not care.

• 2:23:33Jocko Willink?

  So I wasn't like, if you, you know, I wasn't a militant. I wasn't obsessive about it, but I understood the value of it in certain situations.

• 2:23:42Jocko Willink?

  Research has shown not only that psychological arousal is decreased by ritual, but also that under threatening conditions, normal individuals like compulsive, behave like compulsive neurotics. This is when you see people freaking out a little bit and they start doing weird, you know, start focusing on some little thing because they're freaking out about what's going on around them.

• 2:24:05Jocko Willink?

  Since military organizations represent par excellence outlets for, and consequently defenses against aggression and disorder, they will tend to attract people who have some difficulty in reconciling these conflicting needs. People who overvalue aggression, order and obedience, no doubt.

• 2:24:22Jocko Willink?

  This conclusion is supported by the finding that patients suffering from obsessional neurosis show improvement during military service. So if you've got a little bit of that activity in your brain, you're probably going to do pretty good. Then he's got this whole flow chart set up.

• 2:24:39Jocko Willink?

  Get the book so you can see it, but you got combat and combat causes a bunch of anxiety, death, disorder, social disapproval, fear of being called a coward, fear of your own aggressive impulses. That's what combat inflicts on you. So how do you deal with that? How do you deal with that? Well, one way to deal with it is bullshit, like chicken shit. Hey, polish your boots, dogma, ritual, codes of honor. So we put these codes in place to sort of defend against all this anxiety. What does that result in? Rigidity, conformity, traditionalism, over obedience, aversion to progress, and that all those things attract people with personal anxieties about dirt,

• 2:25:23Jocko Willink?

  aggression, disobedience. Right? That's where it gets you.

• 2:25:29Jocko Willink?

  And what does that do? Increases military incompetence, which by the way, then increases the combat scenarios that you're in, which is a freaking nightmare. If the, if, if the other thing it does is it attracts these people, attracts these people that have, you know, that are, they care about appearance, promotional prospects, disapproval of those higher in their military hierarchy, they're scared of that.

• 2:26:00Jocko Willink?

  So this is just this, this horrible cycle that we end up in, where the anxiety creates this, this freaking bullshit and this ritual and rigidity and conformity. And those things actually create you to perform worse in combat, which means all those things get worse and you end up in a horrible cycle.

• 2:26:22Jocko Willink?

  As opposed to someone that's like, hey, now's not the time for that. We gotta go fight. We gotta, that you can actually break out of this cycle.

• 2:26:28Speaker 01

  Dude, it's so hard to listen to him explain this, even just something as simple as the word dirt. Like, the idea that, and he did it well. Like, you get dirt in your rifle, can't you shoot a rifle? That's the problem. So, we need to be able to respond to dirt, but the response of, oh, I want people that don't want dirt, so I'm gonna create a scenario by which it repels the dirt, it doesn't allow the dirt into my system, is actually not what you want. You want someone that goes, yeah, it's gonna get dirty here, and, and we're not gonna react to the dirt by creating a system that doesn't let the dirt in. We're actually gonna create a system where things get dirty, like, no worries. We can, we can, we can deal with that. Not by repelling the dirt, but by accepting the fact that it's gonna get dirty, and we're gonna clean and deal with those things.

• 2:27:11Speaker 01

  But, just the way he paints that picture of that, that cycle of the psychology of, do you want someone who doesn't like dirt, or someone who does like it, to be able to deal with it? And the irony that's inside that is what it attracts is the person that can't handle it, which is the thing that's gonna get you killed.

• 2:27:29Jocko Willink?

  Yes.

• 2:27:29Speaker 01

  God, it's hard to listen to.

• 2:27:31Jocko Willink?

  It is. Just to, just to use these words again, so there's, there's a dichotomy of leadership, right? And everything has to be balanced.

• 2:27:37Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:27:38Jocko Willink?

  And yet, when you think of these words, you think of a military stereotype, rigidity, conformity, traditionalism, obedience. Those are military characteristics, and they are good.

• 2:27:52Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:27:53Jocko Willink?

  They are good. You've gotta be, you've gotta have some level of rigidity. You've gotta wanna conform with what's happening. You've gotta be into those traditions. You've gotta be obedient. Those, those are totally awesome military qualities. And you also gotta be able to buck all of those qualities in order to survive.

• 2:28:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:28:13Jocko Willink?

  In order to truly excel. So, even these, these, these characteristics that he's talking about.

• 2:28:21Jocko Willink?

  You can see that anyone that has those is going to be attracted to the military in some level, or I'd say most people that have some of those characteristics are going to be attracted to the military. Well, the problem comes when you have a lot of people like that attracted. And even bigger problem comes is when people are getting promoted based on those things, and they're not getting promoted based on creativity. They're not getting promoted based on not being a yes man. They're not getting promoted based on new ideas. That's not, none of that is happening. You're getting, oh, you're more obedient, so you're going to get promoted. Hey, if you are going into combat, do you want to work for someone that has been promoted

• 2:29:02Jocko Willink?

  for 19 years because they've been obedient and rigid and conformed? Hell, no. Hell, no.

• 2:29:10Speaker 01

  And inside the reaction to the dichotomy you just described is the less balanced you are with that reaction, the more extreme your reaction is, the worse things are going to be. And if the system reinforces it and the person goes in that direction, that the inability to react to the dichotomy by being balanced is...

• 2:29:28Jocko Willink?

  Yep. Look, do we want someone that, you know, will never conform? No, you don't want someone that's never going to conform. Do we want someone that just can't obey? No, we don't want anyone like that. We're not saying that. But man, you don't want to go to the extreme, or it's going to suck. All right, one last thing before we close this section out. He says, in other words, this is basically what you and I were just saying, Dave. In other words, those very characteristics which are demanded by war, the ability to tolerate uncertainty, spontaneity of thought and action, having an open mind to the receipt of novel and perhaps threatening information, are the antithesis of those possessed by people attracted

• 2:30:13Jocko Willink?

  to the controls and orderliness of militarism.

• 2:30:19Jocko Willink?

  That's exactly what you and I were just saying. And um, that statement is important to remember. It's important to remember, you know, that the best qualities for

• 2:30:34Jocko Willink?

  good performance in war and therefore good performance in business and life are the ones that we talk about here all the time. What he just mentioned, the ability to tolerate uncertainty, spontaneity of thought and action, having an open mind.

• 2:30:49Jocko Willink?

  Open to new ideas, even threatening ideas, having an open mind to threatening ideas. You know how many discussions I've had where I won in the initial conversation in the first four sentences? Because when Dave came to me and said, I think we should do this a different way. And I said, oh, sounds like you fought this through. What do you want to do? Do you know how many times I've just had a immediate victory? Immediate victory and by victory, I mean all of a sudden Dave's not coming on the offense. He's opening his mind. We're going to be able to come to a positive net outcome. Because when he came to me with, I don't like the way we're doing this. And instead of me saying, that's because you don't understand what's happening.

• 2:31:34Jocko Willink?

  And all of a sudden we're arguing and instead I say, oh, really? Please, please tell me what you think we should do. Oh, it's so easy.

• 2:31:43Speaker 01

  Well, how critical is it that you just, when you define the winning is getting the out, the right outcome? Not winning the argument. I won because I want the outcome to be right.

• 2:31:53Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I won because we figured out the best way to do this. And it wasn't Dave's way and it wasn't my way either. We actually compromised and figured out the best way to make this happen. Right, freaking ridiculous. Those are the qualities we should want. Those are the qualities we should strive for so we can be better leaders and better people. We'll continue this book next time. For now, Echo, speaking of getting better.

• 2:32:20Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:32:22Jocko Willink?

  You got any um, ways that we can get better?

• 2:32:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:32:25Jocko Willink?

  Speaking of which, Dave, I know you've got some stuff to do.

• 2:32:28Speaker 01

  I do.

• 2:32:29Jocko Willink?

  Why don't you kick on out of here, man?

• 2:32:30Speaker 01

  Right on.

• 2:32:32Jocko Willink?

  And with that, Dave Berke had to go, obviously, busy. And well, nonetheless, we're here, we are trying to get better. So what do you got, Echo Charles?

• 2:32:47Speaker 01

  Uh, well.

• 2:32:49Speaker 02

  I could go into the whole intelligence thing, but in the sake of saving time,

• 2:32:57Speaker 02

  let's just think of the smart thing to do on this path that we're on to improve ourselves. We're working out, we're reading. So through these workouts and trying to improve ourselves physically and mentally, we might need some help, some supplementation that provides benefits. Do we all need help? Maybe, maybe not.

• 2:33:15Jocko Willink?

  I'm gonna say I haven't met people that didn't need, okay, they might not have needed help, but who does not voluntarily accept some beneficial things?

• 2:33:30Speaker 02

  Hey, we're all gonna benefit from benefits. So one of those benefits that we can have is from a new energy drink that we have. Jaco, Discipline Go. Healthy, not unhealthy. So usual legacy energy drinks, they're unhealthy. They provide a good front end benefit, but they're not healthy back end detriment. This one, healthy and tastes good and gives you energy, all upside.

• 2:33:55Jocko Willink?

  You know what else provides like a front side kinda up feel-good moment?

• 2:34:02Jocko Willink?

  Like, like the legacy energy drinks? Crystal Methan.

• 2:34:07Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 2:34:08Jocko Willink?

  I'm just saying.

• 2:34:09Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:34:10Jocko Willink?

  The legacy energy drinks, think about what they do. They get, they make you feel good for a very short period of time and then they kill you.

• 2:34:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:34:20Jocko Willink?

  Which is what a traditional legacy crap energy drink is going to do. Make you feel good for a little bit and then over time you die.

• 2:34:32Speaker 02

  Yep, it's true.

• 2:34:33Jocko Willink?

  Whereas miraculously, miraculously, we have made something that gives you all the upside of an energy drink, meaning you will feel energized, but later you won't be coming down with multiple diseases.

• 2:34:55Jocko Willink?

  caused by this thing that you put into your body. In fact, the opposite is true. You will be more healthy when you get done drinking one of these than you were before you drink it. Think about that.

• 2:35:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:35:05Jocko Willink?

  There's no one else that's gonna say that. Cause they can't. Cause they didn't go to the degree that we went to to make sure we were making something good for you.

• 2:35:13Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah, man. Yeah, it's one of those no brainers for sure. And it tastes good. Bunch of different flavors. Mango is the best, in my opinion, not Jock's opinion, but an opinion is one of these things that, you know.

• 2:35:27Jocko Willink?

  My, okay, my favorite is Jaco Palmer, which is like the, it's like an Arnold Palmer.

• 2:35:32Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 2:35:34Jocko Willink?

  I would not, I don't, I love it. I love it. And it's number probably like five or six of the rankings, the sales rankings.

• 2:35:44Speaker 02

  Oh, right.

• 2:35:44Jocko Willink?

  I don't know why people don't love it so much.

• 2:35:46Speaker 02

  Because.

• 2:35:47Jocko Willink?

  Arnold Palmer is popular. You can go, let me put it this way. You can go to a restaurant tonight and you can order an Arnold Palmer because people drink Arnold Palmer's and it's a normal flavor for people to want.

• 2:35:58Speaker 02

  Wait, but is that a?

• 2:35:59Jocko Willink?

  Can you go to a restaurant tonight and get mango drink? The answer is no.

• 2:36:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, probably not.

• 2:36:03Jocko Willink?

  So why is that? Why is, why is mango, which it is more popular than Jaco Palmer?

• 2:36:09Speaker 02

  Well, it depends. So, wait, is Arnold Palmer an alcoholic drink?

• 2:36:12Jocko Willink?

  No. It's half iced tea, half lemonade.

• 2:36:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, I guess. I mean, I don't know. I mean, it seems, I have no idea.

• 2:36:19Jocko Willink?

  Here's the thing, here's there's, we've been trying to figure that. I've been trying to figure that out. Part of the reason I think is because I called it Jaco Palmer, which is like an inside joke that only I got.

• 2:36:28Jocko Willink?

  I don't think people understand Jaco Palmer is kind of a joke about Arnold Palmer.

• 2:36:31Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 2:36:32Jocko Willink?

  And we didn't even spell it like Arnold Palmer. We abbreviated it so I don't get sued.

• 2:36:37Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:36:38Jocko Willink?

  Right?

• 2:36:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, maybe.

• 2:36:39Jocko Willink?

  Can't be jacking a dude's name and just putting it on your can.

• 2:36:42Speaker 02

  No, no.

• 2:36:43Jocko Willink?

  So we called it Jaco Palmer, P O M R, and it. So we're probably gonna put it, we're gonna, we're gonna make it more obvious as to what it is.

• 2:36:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:36:51Jocko Willink?

  Cause like I said, I'm not rolling into a restaurant tonight with my wife for dinner and ordering a mango drink of any kind.

• 2:36:58Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:36:59Jocko Willink?

  But I am ordering a, uh, Arnold Palmer, possibly.

• 2:37:03Speaker 02

  Right, but I guess, and not to go too deep into it, what it like, it's not like you're gonna have a discipline go with dinner. Most of the time, see what I'm saying? It's like they're just different contexts of when you do, so if I go to the store randomly, I need a snack, I might get one of those little mango smoothies. I'll be like, oh dang, that's cause mango tastes good. You see what I'm saying? Sure, that's like a.

• 2:37:24Jocko Willink?

  This is a drink, bro.

• 2:37:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm saying they're all drinks and they're all dr- drinking.

• 2:37:29Jocko Willink?

  Smoothie, one to drink.

• 2:37:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, but yeah, I guess no one really drinks mango juice on a regular basis, but.

• 2:37:35Jocko Willink?

  No mango soda.

• 2:37:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, but there's smoothie, there's like ice cream, there's like frozen yogurt, there's like mango's a good flavor.

• 2:37:43Jocko Willink?

  There's pistachio ice cream too, but I'm not getting a pistachio soda.

• 2:37:47Speaker 02

  But pistachios are good flavor in general, you see what I'm saying? And that's, that's my whole point. It's under, it depends on the context and what you're, you're experiencing the flavor. See what I'm saying? Hey, look, I like Jaco Palmer. I do. I like mango better, of course. But either way, it doesn't matter because each person's opinion is individualized to them. Doesn't matter. You could like Jaco Palmer level, literally level 10. Like the, it cannot get any better. It has no bearing on my influence or my opinion on what I like.

• 2:38:16Jocko Willink?

  Well, that's where I'm at, level 10. And if you wanna get some, get some.

• 2:38:20Speaker 02

  Yep. So yeah, the, again, different flavors. Get the one you want. Try them all. That's what I would say. Cause the mango seems more risky, cause it's exotic. Orange, not so much. See what I'm saying?

• 2:38:32Jocko Willink?

  True.

• 2:38:32Speaker 02

  So you might be like, oh, that's a safe one, you know?

• 2:38:35Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:35Speaker 02

  But hey man, with great risks come great rewards, as a wise man once said.

• 2:38:40Jocko Willink?

  Possibly.

• 2:38:41Speaker 02

  Also, on this path, you wanna look out after your joints and immunity, joint warfare, super krill oil. Vitamin D3, Cold War, these are all immunity and joint protective supplements.

• 2:38:53Jocko Willink?

  Don't forget about the milk. Don't forget about the milk, which is a dessert. It's a dessert that is also good for you. Again, there's not too many desserts that you can eat. You can relish the flavor and the, and the texture. And the whole thing from a, from a like a taste perspective, but there's more than that. The whole thing, the whole consumption. You can relish and when you get done, you're stronger. You're better.

• 2:39:24Speaker 02

  The whole experience.

• 2:39:24Jocko Willink?

  The whole experience.

• 2:39:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:39:26Jocko Willink?

  It's not like when you go down the freaking, you go down to a to the local ice cream store and you order a mint chocolate chip milkshake and they make it, right? And it's good. Get a good experience.

• 2:39:37Speaker 02

  We're not mad at that.

• 2:39:38Jocko Willink?

  And then when you get done, you know what just happened? Yeah, you poisoned yourself.

• 2:39:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:39:44Jocko Willink?

  That's what happened.

• 2:39:45Speaker 02

  You pay a bit of a price.

• 2:39:46Jocko Willink?

  You're paying a big price.

• 2:39:47Speaker 02

  And you for sure can't do it again the next day and the next day and the next day.

• 2:39:50Jocko Willink?

  Oh, you definitely can't do that. Don't do that.

• 2:39:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, don't do that.

• 2:39:52Jocko Willink?

  Don't do that because there's something called type two diabetes, which you're working on.

• 2:39:57Speaker 02

  It's true.

• 2:39:58Jocko Willink?

  You're, you're in route.

• 2:39:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:40:00Jocko Willink?

  You're in route.

• 2:40:00Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:40:01Jocko Willink?

  If that's what we're doing, if that's what we're doing every day.

• 2:40:03Speaker 02

  It's true.

• 2:40:04Jocko Willink?

  All kinds of heart disease. You've got problems.

• 2:40:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:40:07Jocko Willink?

  Don't do that.

• 2:40:08Speaker 02

  Yeah. So you kind of gotta

• 2:40:09Jocko Willink?

  Stay away from that one.

• 2:40:10Speaker 02

  Play this weird balancing like game.

• 2:40:12Jocko Willink?

  There's no reason to balance, right?

• 2:40:14Speaker 02

  You have to.

• 2:40:14Jocko Willink?

  You can go, you can get milk. You can get done with your dinner. You have that sweet tooth, which is fine, normal. But you can follow that sweet tooth right to the milk container.

• 2:40:28Speaker 02

  And you're gonna play any, you don't have to play any balancing game. You just go.

• 2:40:31Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:32Speaker 02

  As much milk as you want.

• 2:40:33Jocko Willink?

  Much.

• 2:40:33Speaker 02

  Straight up. You want five scoops of milk? Good.

• 2:40:37Jocko Willink?

  Gonna be thick.

• 2:40:37Speaker 02

  Oh, it's gonna be thick unless you add some more milk.

• 2:40:40Jocko Willink?

  Have you gone five scoops of milk? The most I've ever gone is three scoops of milk.

• 2:40:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, three is my max.

• 2:40:45Jocko Willink?

  Five would be.

• 2:40:46Speaker 02

  You're going hard.

• 2:40:47Jocko Willink?

  But you know, if they're, if you're there.

• 2:40:49Speaker 02

  Bro, up to you.

• 2:40:50Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:50Speaker 02

  Get it.

• 2:40:51Jocko Willink?

  You call it.

• 2:40:51Speaker 02

  You hit it, man. Get it. Five scoops of milk. That's a hundred grams of protein.

• 2:40:55Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:55Speaker 02

  Hundred something.

• 2:40:56Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Hey, you can get all this stuff at jockofuel.com. If you want to get free shipping, which look, the reason this isn't a, hey, order now and get free shipping. That's not what we're doing. Here's what we're doing. We're competing with. One of the biggest companies in the world who offers you free shipping. Cool. They got a big log, uh, uh, algorithm that's figuring this stuff out. And they got all this mass scale and all these things going on. They're trying to get your information. They're trying to get you into the zone where they can own you, which is understandable. We get it. We want you to have an option to still get free shipping and not end with the matrix. So you go to jog fuel.com, stay out the matrix.

• 2:41:37Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:41:37Jocko Willink?

  And, and if you subscribe to one of these items, which you should, cause then you'll be able to get it with free shipping. There you go. Jocko fuel.com. You can also get the, get it at the vitamin shop.

• 2:41:49Jocko Willink?

  You can get the drinks, the energy drinks at Wawa on the east coast. We're working on some other convenience stores right now. Sorry, west coast. But the convenience terrain, little bit rough, little bit rough. The way it's split up and what's where. So we're working it.

• 2:42:05Speaker 02

  But if you've got a vitamin shop near you or where you are, they have work, whatever, grab it from there.

• 2:42:11Jocko Willink?

  Oh, for sure. A hundred percent.

• 2:42:13Speaker 02

  Hundred percent.

• 2:42:14Jocko Willink?

  There you go. Check it out.

• 2:42:16Speaker 02

  It's good. Also jujitsu, we're doing jujitsu to know jujitsu or to not know jujitsu. Which one is more beneficial?

• 2:42:25Jocko Willink?

  We want to know jujitsu.

• 2:42:26Speaker 02

  Yes, sir. We do. I don't, I don't care if you know one day of jujitsu. It's better than zero days of jujitsu. Anyway, when you do jujitsu, you're gonna need a gi.

• 2:42:33Jocko Willink?

  Yep. Hey, I can only train jujitsu one day a week. So I'm not going to train is not the answer.

• 2:42:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's true.

• 2:42:40Jocko Willink?

  The answer is I can only train jujitsu once a month, so I'm doing it once a month. That's the answer. You get the chance to train jujitsu, train jujitsu. That's what we're doing.

• 2:42:48Speaker 02

  It's true. So when you get your gi, you get the best gi that you possibly can. Made in America, by the way, in Origin gi, go to originusa.com for these things. You get rash guards on there as well. Some hoodies on there also from Origin USA, American made denim. Jeans. Got my Delta sixty-eight jeans. My favorite jeans. Of all time, by the way.

• 2:43:11Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and FYI, Leif hit me up too, because he got, he got a pair of Delta sixty-eights. And we recut the Delta sixty-eights, probably like, I don't know, six months or something like that. And to provide more comfort.

• 2:43:27Speaker 02

  I dig it, yeah.

• 2:43:28Jocko Willink?

  So, Delta sixty-eights, the best, most comfortable things that you can put on your legs.

• 2:43:33Speaker 02

  And they look good, too, by the way. So here, and you know, maybe you care about this. Maybe you don't, but here's the thing, factually, this is what happened. So put mine on. I had an event to go to called The Muster. Might have heard of it. Wore the Delta sixty-eight Origin jeans to The Muster. They're pretty new, too. And I wore a white t-shirt. My wife likes me in a white t-shirt. Don't ask why. It's just how it is. Let's just know that.

• 2:43:58Jocko Willink?

  These are all things I do not care about.

• 2:44:00Speaker 02

  Yes, but the concept, the underlying concept, I think most of us, it has some value. So she was like, hey, you're looking really nice.

• 2:44:12Speaker 02

  So you gotta know, bro.

• 2:44:13Jocko Willink?

  Delta sixty-eight.

• 2:44:14Speaker 02

  Hey, functional, made in America, look good, um, you know, durable, all this stuff.

• 2:44:19Jocko Willink?

  Get these jeans and Echo Charles's wife will think you look good.

• 2:44:22Speaker 02

  No, she'll probably won't look at you at all. Hopefully, I won't look at you. But she thinks I look good. So maybe if you're married or have a girlfriend or boyfriend or whatever, they'll think you look good in them, too. They look good.

• 2:44:34Jocko Willink?

  We got workwear coming out, by the way. If you don't know that, we got workwear coming out. So you, when you're out there on the construction site, you're out there as a lineman, you're out there on the farm, whatever you're doing, you're working, we got workwear coming, which is made in America.

• 2:44:52Speaker 02

  But for real, made in America.

• 2:44:54Jocko Willink?

  For real, made in America. Every ounce of that thing, every rivet, every, every thread, made in America.

• 2:45:00Speaker 02

  Even the thread itself, made in America.

• 2:45:02Jocko Willink?

  We're making workwear for workers. For American workers, made by American workers. That's what we're doing.

• 2:45:10Speaker 02

  Yes, sir. OriginUSA.com. Also, if you want to get a shirt, or hat, or hoodie, that says, "Discipline equals freedom," or you want to represent this path in any way, go to JacoStore.com. That's where you can get this stuff. Some good stuff on there, some new stuff on there. Some jujitsu stuff on there. Section, you know, where look, if you do jujitsu, and you kind of want to represent the path, and jujitsu, kind of a hybrid representation scenario, you can do that now.

• 2:45:42Jocko Willink?

  You know what's cool? I noticed at the muster, we have a jujitsu night, the second night, we do jujitsu, introduction to jujitsu, and there's more people now, there used to be almost no one did jujitsu. And now, majority of people have done jujitsu. So, we're getting in the right direction.

• 2:46:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:46:02Jocko Willink?

  We want everyone to do jujitsu. We could keep it a secret, right? That's a, that's a kind of an ego thing, right? If I don't tell anyone about this, I'm just gonna be the baddest man on the block.

• 2:46:13Speaker 02

  Just so much more superior.

• 2:46:14Jocko Willink?

  I'm so much more superior. That's a, that's a dork move.

• 2:46:19Speaker 02

  Dorky ass move.

• 2:46:20Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, cuz actually, no, you know what? I don't think that's, that's not qualified as a dork move. That's an ego move. That's just pure ego. I'm gonna, I'm not gonna teach you anything.

• 2:46:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:46:29Jocko Willink?

  I'm, I'm just gonna keep this special thing, this superpower, to myself.

• 2:46:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:46:33Jocko Willink?

  It's kind of surprising that the Gracies, I think the Gracies did it right. Because I think that as they broke it out, then they started promoting it, and teaching it, and spreading the word. I think if they would have failed to do that, they would have been five years behind. It would have taken an extra five years for people to start kind of figuring it out on their own. Just from videos, and UFC, and all those things, but...

• 2:47:01Jocko Willink?

  It just would have been bad. They did the right thing. When it was time to bring it out, they brought it out and started teaching it to people.

• 2:47:07Speaker 02

  Well, actually, kind of in a way, do you want better? Probably not even five years when you think about it. Because you said, because you just said they, they, they might figure it out because of videos in UFC or whatever. The whole existence of UFC is because of Horion Gracie. So it's, they wouldn't have had the UFC. UFC straight up wouldn't exist. Because that's all it was, essentially, demonstration, demonstration of how effective Jiu Jitsu is in a real fight. It's essentially what UFC One was. So, man, that wouldn't exist. No one would do it. It'd be probably relegated to little secret sex in like Brazil, little secret dojos doing their secret art, just rolling everybody up.

• 2:47:46Jocko Willink?

  It's there for everyone to get into. And if you want to get a T-shirt that talks, you know, represents, shows that you're on the Jiu Jitsu path.

• 2:47:54Speaker 02

  Yep. Bunch of stuff on there. We have a subscription situation as well called the Shirt Locker. It's a new creative. I was at the muster. You might have heard of it. And every once in a while, well, let's face it, every day I was wearing a different shirt from the Shirt Locker. Every single shirt that I wore, someone asked, hey, where did you get that shirt? Including people who weren't even there for the muster. Like, where'd you get that shirt? The support Sog? That was a good one. A lot of people asked about that one. It's a good one. Nonetheless, good shirts on there. So yeah, you get a new shirt every month. Creative designs, kind of new, new designs, creative, outside of the box designs, but relative and very awesome. Good feedback on that one.

• 2:48:39Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Also, if you're going to subscribe to things, you might as well subscribe to this podcast right here. Leave a review and all that stuff. Also, we have a couple of other podcasts. We have Jaco Unraveling with myself and Daryl Cooper, DC. We have the Grounded Podcast. We have the Warrior Kid Podcast. We have the Jaco Underground, JacoUnderground.com, where we have an alternate universe, where in the event of tyrannical.

• 2:49:08Jocko Willink?

  Activities in this country and no one knows what to do. We'll be able to tell you what to do. We'll be there. We'll be on the underground jocko underground.com. We made it so we'd have an alternate platform in case something happens with this platform. And because we did that, it costs money to do that. And if you want to support that, it costs you eight, eight dollars and eighteen cents a month. And in order to give you something back for that in the immediate, we do another little podcast on there. We talk about some, we do some Q and A. We talk about some alternate things. So if you want to subscribe to that, do it. We appreciate it. Also, if you can't afford it, we understand. Things are tough out there right now. If you can't afford that eight dollars and eighteen cents a month,

• 2:49:50Jocko Willink?

  just email assistance at jocko underground.com and we will take care of you. And we also have a YouTube channel where we make videos. I'm sort of the brains behind them and I'm sort of the person that thinks of the ideas and then Echo is the technical guy that does the falls, the mechanics of making them.

• 2:50:09Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 2:50:09Jocko Willink?

  If you want to subscribe to that.

• 2:50:11Speaker 02

  Yes, sir.

• 2:50:12Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah. That bothers you, bro.

• 2:50:13Speaker 02

  No, no, no, no, no.

• 2:50:16Jocko Willink?

  It so bothers you.

• 2:50:18Speaker 02

  Actually, more than it bothers me, you're just really, really happy about it. That's more the contrast, you know?

• 2:50:24Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you take this video stuff real.

• 2:50:26Speaker 02

  Not, bro, you know, it's just, it's just a thing, you know, it's just a thing.

• 2:50:30Jocko Willink?

  I didn't realize how much of a world the video thing is like there's some.

• 2:50:34Speaker 02

  What do you mean?

• 2:50:35Jocko Willink?

  I mean, it's like, uh, it's its own little thing, right? It's own little, it's own little ecosystem.

• 2:50:40Speaker 02

  What?

• 2:50:40Jocko Willink?

  That you're in.

• 2:50:42Speaker 02

  Oh, like the industry or whatever, the circles or whatever?

• 2:50:45Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's there. You kind of size each other up and so.

• 2:50:50Speaker 02

  I don't know if I size people up, but I don't.

• 2:50:52Jocko Willink?

  You size up their cameras.

• 2:50:53Speaker 02

  Oh, yes, I definitely size up.

• 2:50:55Jocko Willink?

  You size up their videos.

• 2:50:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, they're creative field, I guess.

• 2:51:00Jocko Willink?

  Are you trying to act like you, you, you don't, I'll be, I might say something like, oh, yeah, I saw this video. It looked pretty cool. You're like, oh, I sent it to you and you'll be like, um, you know, I don't know what their aspect ratio was or whatever. I'm like, okay, bro.

• 2:51:16Speaker 02

  The framerate is all off on that one. Uh, hey, look, you might be right. I don't know.

• 2:51:21Jocko Willink?

  If you want to check out Echo Charles's expert video production. Then you can check out our YouTube channel.

• 2:51:27Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 2:51:27Jocko Willink?

  Jocko Podcast. Hey, Origin has a cool one too, Origin USA. If you want to see what's going on up there. You can check that out.

• 2:51:35Speaker 02

  Also Psychological Warfare. If you want to hear, no, no, no, not if you want to hear, if you're struggling to get past the moment of weakness and you need to hear someone with integrity named Jaco tell you why, hey, this moment of weakness is fleeting and it's insignificant. If you want to hear that in whatever way, Psychological Warfare, boom, get down. It's an album with tracks of him helping you pass these moments. They suck. We all have them.

• 2:52:04Jocko Willink?

  Don't forget about flipsidecanvas.com where Dakota Myers selling cool stuff to hang on your wall that's also made in America. Got a bunch of books, new book coming out called Final Spin. You better order it now if you want that first edition. Look, that's what you gotta do to support. There's, what's the publisher thinking? They're thinking, well, you know, Jaco, you're really not a novelist. You've written some, you've written some nonfiction, but you know, you're not really a novelist. I don't know. We, we, we shouldn't really make too many of these. Well, then the first reviews came in and they were like, damn.

• 2:52:33Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:52:35Jocko Willink?

  So anyways, if you want to check that out, if you want to order that first edition, if you want to support the cause, you want other people to get this message.

• 2:52:42Jocko Willink?

  Check out Final Spin. It's available now for preorder. It'll be, it'll be to you uh, in a week, by the way. It's coming out November 9th. So check that out. Leadership Strategy and Tactics Field Manual, The Code, The Evaluations of Protocol, Discipline and Growth Freedom Field Manual. Way the Warrior Kid, one, two, three, and four. So many people at the muster came up and said, thanks for writing that book. Mike and the Dragon, same thing. If you've got kids or you know kids, get them, get the freaking kids those books.

• 2:53:06Jocko Willink?

  Get the, get, get the kids that you know. Actually, one jujitsu guy, he's an instructor, Black Belch. He said he just carries Warrior Kid in his bag. He meets a kid, he's like, here you go. Here you go. Can you imagine the impact that can have? If I would have got that book, I would be, I would be ruler of the world right now.

• 2:53:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:53:27Jocko Willink?

  And a benevolent ruler of the world. I'd be nice.

• 2:53:29Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 2:53:30Jocko Willink?

  I wouldn't be a bully. I'd be a warrior kid. So get Warrior Kid for your kids, for all kids. About Face by Hackworth. And then of course, Extreme Ownership and the Decade Decade of Leadership that I wrote with my brother, Leif Babin.

• 2:53:44Jocko Willink?

  Also, Echelon Front, speaking of Leif Babin, we have a leadership consultancy. We solve problems through leadership. No matter what's going on in your company, you think you've got issues, you think you've got problems, things are going wrong, things are going sideways, guess what? Leadership is the solution. Go to echelonfront.com to see how we can help you solve your problems, whether it's us coming directly to you to consult, whether it's you coming to the muster, whether it's our field training exercises, EF Battlefield. We've got all kinds of things that we do to help you get through your situations utilizing leadership. And that includes, we have an online training program, an online leadership training program, Extreme Ownership Academy.

• 2:54:27Jocko Willink?

  This is where you can learn to lead and you can stay ahead of the game and you can practice and you can rehearse and you can take courses and you can come on live and ask me questions. You don't learn leadership in one day. It doesn't work. You need to constantly train, just like you go to the gym, just like you do jujitsu. ExtremeOwnership.com if you want to check that out. And if you want to help service members, active and retired service members, if you want to help the families, if you want to help Gold Star families, you can check out Mark Lee's mom, Mama Lee, she's got a charity organization. And if you want to donate or you want to get involved, go to AmericasMightyWarriors.org.

• 2:55:08Jocko Willink?

  And if you want more of my pea-brained pontifications, or you need more of Echo's ridiculous ramblings, or Dave's enthusiastic extras, you can find us on the interwebs, on Twitter, on the Gram, and on the Facebook. Dave is at David Arbark, Echo is at Echo Charles, and I am at Jocko Willink. And thanks to everyone out there, worldwide in the military, standing the watch to keep us safe. Thank you. Also, thanks to our police and law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, Border Patrol, Secret Service, and all first responders. Thank you for standing the watch here on the home front to keep us safe.

• 2:55:53Jocko Willink?

  And to everyone else out there, keep an open mind.

• 2:56:00Jocko Willink?

  Free your mind. Don't think you have to control everything because you can't. You're not going to be able to put everything in perfect order. That is not possible. Instead, be ready to shift, be ready to change, be ready to adapt, be ready to adjust to new environments and new information. Don't let your mind get stuck. Don't let it get trapped. Instead, free your mind. Free your mind. And until next time, this is Echo and Jaco, out.