308: You Don't Even Know How Closed Your Mind Is. On The Psychology of Military Incompetence Pt.6

0:00:00 - Opening 2:54:16 - On The Psychology of Military Incompetence 1:54:43 - How to stay on THE PATH. 2:20:07 - 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 308 with Echo Charles and me Jocko Willink. Good evening Echo.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Good evening.

• 0:06Jocko Willink?

  So tonight, at long last, we are going to wrap up what has ended up being a six-part series. I got a little out of control, didn't I?

• 0:19Speaker 01

  Well.

• 0:20Jocko Willink?

  I kinda, I kinda got a little out of control on this one.

• 0:22Speaker 01

  Well, how not to do it cannot be overstated.

• 0:25Jocko Willink?

  How not to do it cannot be overstated. Explain that.

• 0:28Speaker 01

  Means like, if there are little tips, how not to do something, let's face it, the value is, what do you call it? Infinite. It's infinite.

• 0:36Jocko Willink?

  Check. Good point. The book is called On The Psychology Of Military Incompetence. We started on 303. Podcast 303, 304, 305, 306, 307. That's a lot of podcasts. This is the, this is the winner. Most number of podcasts on a single book.

• 0:52Jocko Willink?

  If you haven't listened to those, you can go back. I can, I actually will say this, in preparing this one, if you haven't listened to those, you don't even have to go back. You can listen to this one. There might be a couple of references, but they're not super, you'll be able to get through them.

• 1:07Jocko Willink?

  And this, this section that we're about to cover kinda starts with the crux of the book, but again, when I started reading this book a couple of years ago, it was a couple, maybe it was a year ago, maybe it was a couple of years ago. Actually, I forget when, when I got this book, but I knew it was gonna take a while. I didn't know it was gonna take this long.

• 1:27Jocko Willink?

  But here we are. I apologize for taking so long.

• 1:35Jocko Willink?

  Like you said, though, there's, when you understand how not to do something, and you understand what the pitfalls are, and the mistakes you can make, and the traps, these things are all traps. They're all traps. And when you start to be able to see the traps, it's, it helps a person a lot. It doesn't make them not going, going to the traps. That's the whole point. That's one of the whole points of this book, is people know. That this is a trap and they walk right into it. They just can't even help themselves.

• 2:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:04Jocko Willink?

  Like, remember the whole name dropping thing that he talked about?

• 2:06Speaker 01

  Yes, sir.

• 2:07Jocko Willink?

  I forget which one it was, but name dropping, everybody knows it looks whack and they still do it. They can't control themselves.

• 2:13Speaker 01

  It's hard, yeah.

• 2:14Jocko Willink?

  Well, let me rephrase that. An arrogant, egotistical person that's nervous about how they look, they're gonna name drop even though they know it looks bad, even though they'll point at someone else and say, oh, listen to Carrie, name dropping over here. They'll do that and then they'll name drop.

• 2:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:29Jocko Willink?

  They'll go, hey, I see, uh, Carrie was name dropping over here. Did you see him name dropping? I was talking to Joe Rogan the other day.

• 2:36Jocko Willink?

  You know what I'm saying? That's how whack people are. That's, that's how we get stuck in lame situations.

• 2:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:43Jocko Willink?

  So, the crux of this book is actually the chapter we're gonna start with right now. Dave Burt couldn't make it, by the way.

• 2:51Speaker 01

  Good deal, Dave.

• 2:51Jocko Willink?

  Working, busy. Um, the, the chapter here is called authoritarianism. And this is kind of the crux. And this is, this is what we need to watch out for. Well, this is, this is what we need to watch out for, this authoritarian mindset. And look, do you need to watch out for it as a nation? Yes, you better, especially as things start getting imposed on your, on your life. Because that slides into authoritarianism. And that's, that's a slippery slope. And I know you that you're gonna bring up the slippery slope fallacy.

• 3:26Speaker 01

  Well.

• 3:26Jocko Willink?

  I see it in your eyes.

• 3:27Speaker 01

  Oh, no, well, again, and I'll say that I said it before, where there is such thing as a slippery slope. And there is such thing as slippery slope fallacy. They're not like, one doesn't, you know.

• 3:38Jocko Willink?

  They both exist.

• 3:39Speaker 01

  They both exist, exactly right.

• 3:41Jocko Willink?

  So authoritarianism, in our minds, we have to watch out for it. In our teams, as leaders, we have to watch out for it. And yes, as human beings, living in a, whatever country you live in, you need to watch out for that authoritarianism. Because it's a thing that, once it starts to take hold, the authoritarian, it snowballs.

• 4:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:04Jocko Willink?

  Like, I get a little bit of control. Authoritarian people, when they get a little bit of control, they want more control.

• 4:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:08Jocko Willink?

  And then they get a little bit more, they want even more. And they don't stop.

• 4:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:11Jocko Willink?

  And it's a, it's a, it's a psychopathology that they have, that they can't contain it.

• 4:20Jocko Willink?

  So here we go authoritarianism in discussing military organizations. It was suggested that a symbiotic relationship exists between certain characteristics of armed services and the private needs of the individual members. So what that's saying is when you go in the military, there's certain needs that certain people have, certain psychological needs that people have that going in the military satisfies those needs. For instance, here's a, here's an example of where this is a bad thing. I like to rule over people. I know if I become an officer in the military, I'll be able to rule over those privates.

• 4:55Jocko Willink?

  So it sort of satisfies that to me. So there's a nice relationship I have. I want to be an authoritarian. This puts me in an authoritarian position. I love it. Is this true of all military people? No, it's not. Continuing on emphasis was laid upon the central role in this relationship of anxiety, that insidious motivator of such of much human behavior. In the military mind, it was pointed out anxiety has many sources, fear of death and mutilation, fear of suppression, fear of failure and social disapproval, fear of public disgrace, and underlying all that fear of total disorder, which is inseparable product of unleashing normally tabooed instinctual forces.

• 5:41Jocko Willink?

  So if you're a person that doesn't like disorder, you look at the military and go, huh? That looks pretty good. You gotta go to bed at a certain time. All these people will listen to me. We get to follow orders. They're going to tell me what to do. Everyone's going to listen to when I tell them what to do. That's you. You're if you don't like disorder, that's a great place to be until what happens? The layer of total disorder on planet earth opens its jaws and that is combat. So now you're a person that doesn't like disorder and for your job at the moment of truth, you are thrust into the jaws of the highest level of disorder in the world. That is combat. And that's why this is, that's what this book is about.

• 6:25Jocko Willink?

  This psychology of military incompetence is because people that like order and join the military because they like order and then their actual job, look, part of their job is marching around a parade field and inspecting uniforms and keeping everything squared away. That's great. But the, when that, when that homie shows up and shit's getting crazy, they lose their minds.

• 6:46Jocko Willink?

  So when you're looking, when you're judging and you're thinking, oh, what if that bad guy be a good military officer? They're highly disciplined. They're highly disciplined. They they love, they follow orders. They're authoritarian. They they seem like they'd be great. You need to remember, what's that person gonna do when things get wild? And they're gonna get wild. Continuing on, finally, it was suggested, and you can see where this whole book, that little, that that crux, that's why I said this is the crux of the book. That crux right there is why this is so fascinating to me. Because I've seen this throughout my career. People that were squared away, people that were highly disciplined, people that were loved for things to be in order.

• 7:28Jocko Willink?

  And when things weren't going right, or things were getting wild, they'd lose their minds. And by the way, if they never got put into a situation where things got wild, they're getting promoted, by the way. They're getting promoted because they're the most ordered. They kept the tightest reins on their troops. Back to the book, finally, it was suggested that a special predisposition toward these several sorts of anxiety may be present in some people as a result of their early childhood. Again, this is where, and somebody pointed this out to me on one of the YouTube comments. The word I was looking for was psychobabble. Psychobabble. Because again, this guy was a psychologist, so he ties all this stuff into weird Freudian freaking childhood experiences. And I can't back any of that up. I don't know about any of that.

• 8:13Jocko Willink?

  What I do know is this. People have different personalities. Where those personalities came from, I don't really know, and I actually don't care. You show up to a SEAL team, your personality is that, whatever whatever your personality is. And that's, that's great, that's fine. I don't care where it came from. If you're hyper ordered and you can't stand it when things get wild, you're not going to be a good SEAL officer. Or a good SEAL leader. If you're totally rebellious and you can't fall into line ever, well, that's too far in the other direction, and now you can't control anything, you can't control yourself. So we want to find somebody that balances that dichotomy. But whether it comes from early childhood and the way you were potty trained and all this kind of psychobabble, I don't know.

• 8:58Jocko Willink?

  I don't know. We'll have to ask Jordan B. Peterson, name drop, about that one.

• 9:04Jocko Willink?

  Such people may well be drawn towards military organizations because the latter have of necessity perfected devices like bullshit and discipline and hierarchical command structures and rigid conventions which not only allow aggression without anxiety but also reduce anxiety that may have originated much earlier period of life. Okay, again, a little bit, a little bit psychoanalysis too much for me. It's sort of, it's a bummer because as I've said many times, Jordan Peterson made me start to like think maybe psychology was sort of a real thing. This is kind of drawing me back in the other direction. Oh, sorry psychologist. Somebody, somebody went, I was reading YouTube notes, no comments.

• 9:47Jocko Willink?

  And somebody was telling me that, you know, what much of what Freud said was actually right, but he's just been so

• 9:55Jocko Willink?

  like hammered by his reputation because he was a cocaine fiend and that now we kind of dis- dis- disperse or dispatch everything that he said. So maybe I was a little hard on him. I don't know. As far as I'm concerned, if you're doing a lot of cocaine like that and you're prescribing it to a bunch of people and you're lying about who's getting cured, I kind of take a lot of what you said and throw it out the window.

• 10:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, what, what's the, there's a, there's a, that's a bias too, right?

• 10:22Jocko Willink?

  Uh, cocaine addict or addiction is, yes, that's my bias. I'm biased against people that are addicted to cocaine.

• 10:27Speaker 01

  It's not, sorry, it's not a bias. It's a logical fallacy. I don't know if you're, you're committing this logical fallacy, but it's, um, it's the, I forget what it is, but the example is like, oh, why would you listen to Fred? Fred doesn't even have a job. So it's kind of like, it's like,

• 10:45Jocko Willink?

  I think I am committing that. I'm kind of like, why would you listen to Freud?

• 10:48Speaker 01

  I know.

• 10:49Jocko Willink?

  Freud's addicted to cocaine.

• 10:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, hey, look, I'm not, I'm not saying you're making the bad, bad decision or nothing like that. I'm saying from a logical standpoint, it's technically a fallacy. It's like, okay, that means if you do cocaine, everything else you say is incorrect. Is that what that means? From a logical standpoint.

• 11:05Jocko Willink?

  You're right. Okay. Well, I'll concede that per, well, that's, that's what I am conceding. Freud was right part of the time.

• 11:12Speaker 01

  Give Freud his.

• 11:13Jocko Willink?

  On some of the stuff.

• 11:16Jocko Willink?

  As he was snorting.

• 11:20Jocko Willink?

  In light of all this, it is encouraging to encounter a substantial body of research, which not only provides support for the thesis, but also fills in many of the gaps. It is that on the authoritarian personality. And then they get into this massive section about the authoritarian personality, which I'm not covering the whole thing because I've already spent six freaking podcasts on this book, which is all good. But I'm going to do a little bit of it. For the impetus behind the study of authoritarianism, we have to thank the founders and proponents of the Third Reich. They, it who was presented to the world, a phenomenon the like of which has never been seen before since the systematic bureaucratized murder of six million Jews. To the inquiring mind, antisemitism on this

• 12:05Jocko Willink?

  scale would seem to demand at the very least, some explanation for a group of researchers at Frankfurt and later at Berkeley, California. The fact that human prejudice could assume such monstrous proportions suggested the possibility of a particular personality type being implicated in the perpetration of these dark events. So basically, he's saying, look, the Nazis were psycho. Where did their personality come from? What type of people had that personality? And then he goes into a Nazi psychologist, whose name was Gench, something like that. Gench, I don't know. Sorry there, you Nazi bastard from mispronouncing your name. So

• 12:48Jocko Willink?

  he broke it down. And there was S types, which S types at the, at the high end could have something called synesthesia. Have you ever heard of synesthesia before? Synesthesia? This is a very interesting story. So synesthesia. Seth Stone, he was, could memorize any number immediately. So if he met like a female in a bar, he would say, what's your number? And they would say it. And he would immediately know it. And then he was really good at weird math problems. And, and he could memorize dates. And one day we were talking, because

• 13:28Jocko Willink?

  it was, it was enough, it was noticeable enough how good he was at it, that you think to yourself, there's something a little different. That's really weird how he could memorize this stuff. So he said to me one day, he goes, you know, this is kind of weird, but. When I see numbers, I don't see a number, I see a color. And and it has like a texture to it.

• 13:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:53Jocko Willink?

  And I was like, okay, bro.

• 13:57Jocko Willink?

  If we were to the military, I'd think you were maybe on some some LSD or whatever. So he I said, what do you mean? He says, well, for me, and he then he described the colors of each. The colors and textures of each number.

• 14:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:13Jocko Willink?

  So the only ones I remember was that zero was like hollow. He said, he said zero was hollow. It's not, it's like, it's not there. Uh, one was white. And the other one I remember is seven was yellow. And the reason I remember that one is because I have two sevens in my phone number. And when the first time I asked him what my, I said, say my phone number in colors. And he was like, you know, yellow, yellow, hollow, but blue, but I, yellow, yellow. And I have two sevens. And I said, what's, I go, seven, yellow, he goes, yeah.

• 14:45Jocko Willink?

  So it was just weird. He had no idea why this was the situation.

• 14:48Speaker 01

  Huh, that's crazy.

• 14:49Jocko Willink?

  So one day I'm in a bookstore. And this, you know, kind of day when you wouldn't just go on a website to buy your books. I'm in a bookstore and I see numbers on a cover of a book. And they're all colored and textured. And I was, I was, that's weird. And I walk over and I pick it up and I start looking through it. And it says, oh, this book is about a person that had synesthesia.

• 15:17Speaker 01

  Huh.

• 15:18Jocko Willink?

  And so it, so I look it up. Synesthesia is a thing where you have um, multiple.

• 15:28Jocko Willink?

  Multiple modes of of interpreting information.

• 15:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:34Jocko Willink?

  So for instance, numbers have colors. They can have um, letters can have colors, but that, so that's the way. That's the way Seth thought.

• 15:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:45Jocko Willink?

  And so for this Nazi, Gench, that was kind of the far end of this kind of wild, creative. Thing, this kind of wild, creative person.

• 15:58Jocko Willink?

  Here it says to have subjective experiences in one modality when receiving stimulation in another. This is the kind of wildest brain that you can get. And so this Nazi guy, this is the S type. These are people that are S types. Doesn't mean they necessarily have synesthesia, but they're leaning in that direction. And this quote has liberal in his views eccentric behavior, also weak, effeminate, and prone to heretical belief that people are largely shaped by their environment and education. Again, this is from a Nazi psychologist, which if we're not listening to Freud, we're certainly not listening to this Nazi dude. So but he's, he's breaking it down into two types, the S type, and then the other type is the J type.

• 16:39Jocko Willink?

  And according to this guy, um, the J type were quote, good types that would make good Nazis. Amongst their sterling qualities were purity in perception and the sure knowledge that human behavior is determined by blood, soil, and national tradition. Hence freaking Nazis.

• 17:02Jocko Willink?

  Uh, the J type. So the Nazi type would be a he-man, hard and tough, a man you could rely on. These qualities would, he said, have been handed down by a long line of North German ancestors. So this is what the Nazi says. And it's just, it's kind of funny because, uh, well, Seston was about as hard of a bastard as you could ever know. And certainly a he-man individual as well. And a warrior, big freaking Viking warrior. I texted his mom the other day. I was like, yeah, thanks for letting me hang out with that freaking savage Viking kid of yours. Um, so now we go to the Berkeley study. So, so we just did the Nazi

• 17:46Jocko Willink?

  study who got these two different types, the S type, which is sort of the liberal, sort of effeminate type, and then the, the J type, which is more of the conservative hardcore type. Then the American researchers later, uh,

• 18:01Jocko Willink?

  Going back to the book, also found two contrasting personality types, and these were very like those described by Janch. Needless to say, they evaluated them rather differently. The one that corresponded to the J-type, they called the authoritarian personality. Such a person was anti-Semitic, rigid, intolerant of ambiguity. Again, think about this, if you're intolerant of ambiguity, think of how you're gonna perform in combat. You're gonna be great in the military, in the, in the, in the rear of the military, cuz you're, you don't like ambiguity. As soon as you're in combat, you don't exactly know what's happening, you gotta make a decision, you're gonna hate it.

• 18:39Jocko Willink?

  So, intolerant of ambiguity and hostile to people or groups racially different from himself. By the same token, the polar opposite to this type, Janch contemptible anti-type was individualistic, tolerant, democratic, unprejudiced, and egalitarian. So you got these two different personalities. The Nazis called the bad one good, and the Berkeley people called the good one bad, so you get, however you wanna break that down. Their tests provided measures of antisemitism, ethnocentrism, political and economic conservatism,

• 19:22Jocko Willink?

  and implicit anti-democratic trends or potentiality for fascism, which they called the F-scale. Like, what is your potential of becoming a fascist? This, much of which is based on by actual utterances by the Nazis measured in individuals' predisposition towards, so this is what the F-type, if you have a tendency where you could become a fascist. Conventionalism, i.e. rigid adherence to conventional, middle-class values. Authoritarian submission. A submissive, uncritical attitude toward the idealized moral authorities of the group which he identifies himself. And that's what's kinda crazy, right?

• 20:04Jocko Willink?

  You would think that authoritarians would be, you'd be hard to control, but if you're part of their, if they're part of that group, they're in the game.

• 20:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:12Jocko Willink?

  You know, so that's why I like the young, the young officer in the military that, he's totally down, he's, he's saluting with utmost vigor, because he's part of that system, and he just, he's on board, he's submissive to the system.

• 20:27Jocko Willink?

  Authoritarian aggression, i.e. a tendency to be on the lookout for and to condemn, reject, and punish people who violate conventional values. It's kind of weird how there's like, right now, you've got Antifa who's supposed to be sort of like the wild anti-fascist who's actually totally on board with what I'm saying right now as they're, they're off the charts on the F scale.

• 20:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, so like this, I don't know if this F scale would reflect this specifically or accurately, but essentially you have like two, two sides, right? One, one is real conventional, right? They're, they're probably, probably, I don't know, but they're probably going to ignore exceptions, you know, the value of exceptions and nuance and all this stuff, right? They're going to tend to ignore it, right? Then you have the other side who probably overvalue nuance and exceptions, kind of like, hey, if there's these exceptions, oh, that must be just as equal as the rule. Because, you know, you kind of look at the individual, you know? So that, that Antifa analogy is absolutely correct. They're doing the exact same thing, they're just reversed it.

• 21:32Jocko Willink?

  Flipped.

• 21:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, you gotta, you gotta kind of, I don't know, back in the day, it seems, seems like everyone was way more just in the middle.

• 21:38Jocko Willink?

  Well, balance is what we've, what we lose. And, and what you want, even on these two things. Do you want to be a fascist? No, but do you want to be crazy uncontrollable? No, you want to be balanced.

• 21:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, and even, even just valuing like the, the group and then on the other, on the other hand, valuing the individual, it's like you gotta value both of those things.

• 21:59Jocko Willink?

  About those things, yeah, 100%.

• 22:03Jocko Willink?

  Next one, anti-interception, i.e. opposition to the subjective, the imaginative, and the tender-minded.

• 22:14Jocko Willink?

  Superstition and stereotype, power and toughness, preoccupation with the dominant submission, strong, weak, leader follower dimension, identification with power figures, overemphasis on conventional attributes of the ego, exaggeration, exaggerated, exaggerated assertion of strength and toughness. So how much of that is important? Like, you know, that's putting you out there on that F scale a little bit. I'm starting to drift, man, starting to drift. Destructiveness and cynicism, generalized hostility, vilification of the human. So. You know, obviously with there, a lot of this was focused around, hey, the Nazis and where the Nazis came from. Part of that F thing is they can look at humans and be like, whatever, they don't matter.

• 23:01Jocko Willink?

  Projectivity. The belief that wild and dangerous things go on in the world, the projection outwards of unconscious emotional impulses.

• 23:11Jocko Willink?

  Puritanical. An exaggerated concern with sexual goings on.

• 23:20Jocko Willink?

  So you got these two personality types.

• 23:25Jocko Willink?

  Another little note here, these torturous machinations of the authority of the authoritarian mind ramify yet further. Because he has to deny his own shortcomings, he dare not look inward. He is fearful of insight and strenuously avoids questioning his own motives. Again. This is when people are, they're not real confident with themselves, so they project and look at everyone else. Similarly, the authoritarian personality is intolerant of ambivalence and ambiguity. We already hit that, just as he cannot harbor negative and positive feelings for the same person, but must dichotomize reality into loved people versus hated people.

• 24:08Jocko Willink?

  So that's very, that's a very, uh, that's restating what you said. Cause someone, what should you be able to do? You should be able to look at Echo and be like, you know what? I like that Echo's, you know, he's, he's pretty nice, but also he can get a little bit lazy sometimes, but overall, you know, we're good.

• 24:29Speaker 01

  Cryptic, I guess.

• 24:30Jocko Willink?

  Messages, whatever.

• 24:32Speaker 01

  Not so cryptic.

• 24:32Jocko Willink?

  Right, but for me to say, Echo's nice, but freaking he's lazy, I can't stand him, right? And then you can start looking from one individual to look to a whole group of people. As you said, and I start looking at a group of people. And just saying, well, that group of people is bad. Did I just do that with Antifa? I just kind of.

• 24:50Speaker 01

  You implied it.

• 24:51Jocko Willink?

  I implied, yeah, sorry, Antifa. I need to be a little bit more, uh, open minded to your individuals.

• 24:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're, they're one of those groups that they're, their current public facing persona, not that hot.

• 25:04Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 25:08Jocko Willink?

  There's another nine-year research that took place, published a decade after the Berkeley research, and this is something that I've been focused on a lot, and it's

• 25:21Jocko Willink?

  "The Open and Closed Mind: Centered on the Problem of an Individual's Capacity to Absorb Fresh Information. Humanity, it seems, varies considerably in this respect." And god, that is true. So this guy, his name is Rokech, Rockich, something like this, and he did this study. He started breaking down the open and the closed mind. Some people have open minds, some people have closed minds. And I actually think that this is even, kind of trumps the F, what was it, the F?

• 25:50Speaker 01

  Scale.

• 25:51Jocko Willink?

  The F scale. I think this trumps the F scale. How much can someone's mind open? How much can it close?

• 25:57Jocko Willink?

  And I've been talking a lot about this from a leadership perspective, because it is, to me, what we have to fight all the time. Our minds are constantly trying to close, and be defensive, and take care of themselves, and not allow any other ideas in. And what we have to do as people and as leaders is constantly pull your mind open, constantly accept other people's ideas. Doesn't mean you have to think that they're right, but you have to listen to them and assess them in an honest way. And what we have been doing a lot of, as a society, is just closing our minds to everyone else's ideas. And we don't want to hear what their perspective is, because we think we're right. And if you do that as a leader, you know, you come to me with a viewpoint on my plan, and I don't open my mind to your viewpoint, I'm wrong.

• 26:41Jocko Willink?

  Goes on here, "Humanity, it seems, varies considerably in this respect. At the one extreme are open minds, ready and willing to entertain new facts, even if they are incompatible with their previously held attitudes and beliefs." That's what we want. You've got to open your mind and go, "Hey, you know what? I wouldn't really expect to see those numbers, or get that feedback, but there it is. And I need to, I need to put that in my calculus." The other, at the other end of the scale are closed minds, which, as their name suggests, resolutely resist taking in anything that conflicts with their preconceptions and treasured beliefs. "Not very surprisingly, the possession of a closed mind turned out to be yet another aspect of the authoritarian personality."

• 27:26Speaker 01

  Is that? Okay, so you can always make like an analogy to weightlifting for some reason.

• 27:31Jocko Willink?

  Maybe you can, but I'm open to it. Let's hear what you got, homie.

• 27:35Speaker 01

  But like, I wonder if that's like a lazy, is, you know how like by nature, like the human body and brain is kind of late? For lack of a better term, it's lazy, it's conserving like energy all the time, you know? Like, so even like lifting weights, when you lift weights, your body's response to lifting weights is just a lazy laziness mechanism. It's your body is basically saying, oh shoot, that was kind of hard. What do we gotta do at home in the body to make it a little bit easier next time? And then it adapts and gets bigger and stronger, whatever. So it's kind of like a weird, like I said, laziness, lack of a better term, mechanism. So like when you have a closed mind, it's kind of like, hey, I already learned that. Like, don't give me some more stuff I gotta learn, you know, kind of thing. So then it's easier, like, because it's all mental, it's not physical. So you just kind of resist against it, you know?

• 28:18Jocko Willink?

  And you can see where this ties into everything that I have talked about from a leadership perspective for my entire life, which is humility. Because if you're humble, your mind is open. If you're arrogant, your mind is closed. You think you know everything, you don't need to hear anything else, you're not going to make any adaptations.

• 28:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, when you see that little system, it kind of makes sense.

• 28:39Jocko Willink?

  It makes so much sense.

• 28:40Speaker 01

  Right, especially go back to the weightlifting, like you give your body some workout. Brother, the next day, brother, you get that doms, right? You don't like that stuff. Like, I remember when I was little, I'd do some pushups, right? Thinking I'm more cool or whatever, do some, but the next day, I'm like, so I didn't know about doms that much. And, brother, that's a terrible feeling. So it's like, brother, I'm not doing that anymore. Or at the very least, in the inside of my body, my body's like, hey, we gotta do something easier or make it so it's easier next time that happens. So from a mental standpoint, it makes sense where, brother, that, what do you call it? The fucking, you call, you talked about it last, the cognitive dissonance or whatever. That is doms for your mind, essentially. Or maybe the precursor to, I don't know, it's one of those things. I'm just saying it makes sense because that hurts.

• 29:24Speaker 01

  You know, when you get that new stuff, I don't want that new stuff. I'm good with this old stuff.

• 29:28Jocko Willink?

  Closed mind.

• 29:31Jocko Willink?

  He says here, "Before leaving this section on authoritarianism, there are several other research findings which are pertinent to our present thesis. One of these shows the relationship between conformity, authoritarianism, and the tendency to yield to group pressures. An extreme example of this pattern is the phenomenon of the participation in a lynch mob, where the naturally conformist individual happily yields to group pressure for the perpetration of a criminally aggressive act which, though wholly at variance with the ethos of the wider society, accords with his own narrow self-interest." So again, it's counterintuitive to think that someone that's authoritarian is gonna

• 30:16Jocko Willink?

  be more apt to go with the group. Another finding concerns the effect of authoritarianism upon problem-solving in a group situation. And you know, I love this one because again, I'm thinking of it from a military perspective, and you start thinking, now you got this authoritarian in command, how are they at problem-solving? Well, let's go to the book. From their research, W. Haythorne and his colleagues concluded that equalitarian subjects, i.e. those low on authoritarianism, were apparently more effective in dealing with a task and problem than were authoritarian. So that open mind is way better for problem-solving. Seems obvious, but this was reflected in higher

• 31:00Jocko Willink?

  ratings of effective intelligence, leadership, and goal striving. On the sorts of leaders who emerged in the group situation, they had this to say, "Emergent leaders in the low F groups were more sensitive to others, more effective leaders, more prone to making suggestions for action subject to group sanction, and less likely to give direct orders to others." This is insane how much this matches everything I've been talking about.

• 31:32Jocko Willink?

  A conclusion, incidentally, which accords with the observation that authoritarians are less able to appreciate the effect they have upon others and may well think themselves more liked and popular than they really are. I'm chuckling as I think of my military career and people that thought that they were super popular and everyone hated them. Even people attracted to a career in an authoritarian organization, i.e. the military, have been found to prefer leaders who score low on tests of authoritarianism, presumably because authoritarians are less sensitive to the needs of others.

• 32:14Jocko Willink?

  So even when you're a, when you're kind of authoritarian yourself and you joined the military, when you get asked about what type of leader you like, guess what? You actually like less authoritarian leaders because they listen, they treat you with respect, their minds are open. So this is the best way to lead across the board.

• 32:31Speaker 01

  You know, skyscrapers here in San Diego, California, I'm sure it's like this ever. I'm not an engineer, you know that. But from what I understand, okay, so think of a tall building, right? It's tall, so that thing better be strong, right? Hold itself up. But tall buildings aren't made rigidly, they're made with a little bit of flimsiness on purpose to absorb like

• 32:58Jocko Willink?

  Movement.

• 32:59Speaker 01

  The various movements and vibrations that may or may not come about, see what I'm saying? So it's essentially the same thing. On the surface, you think, oh yeah, authoritarianism, that's the way, you can't destroy it, you can't break it or nothing like that, but probably that's not how it works. If you're too rigid, right, you're just gonna crumble when the wiggles start coming, when the earthquake starts coming, you know?

• 33:18Jocko Willink?

  Again, this is why humility is the most important aspect or characteristic for a leader, because when you're humble, you're able to move a little bit. You're able to take on new ideas, you're able to sway when the earthquake comes and make adjustments. You're not just crumbling and falling down.

• 33:36Jocko Willink?

  It cannot be stressed too strongly that in talking about authoritarianism, we have been discussing people towards one end of a continuum. This is important because this is a dichotomy. This guy couldn't quite put that, he couldn't grasp that concept like your boy right here did.

• 33:51Speaker 01

  Yes, sir.

• 33:52Jocko Willink?

  Between, because you gotta balance that dichotomy, but here's what he says. Between this end and the other can be found people with all shades of opinion on the various attitudes measured. The general point is this, when discussing authoritarianism, no value judgment is intended. Few would dispute that. In moderation, many of the traits which make up the authoritarian personality have value in society. Civilization requires that there be some repression of sex and aggression, some exercise of discipline, and a modicum of conformity and orderliness. So, he, there's part, there's aspects of that personality which are good, and that's true in the military. In fact, the military got a little bit extra. You know, because you gotta be a little bit more conformist, because you gotta get the, you know, you gotta be on board.

• 34:36Jocko Willink?

  But, but it attracts people that are too much.

• 34:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:41Jocko Willink?

  Little bit fast forward here. In other respects, however, the likelihood of above-average levels of authoritarianism in military personnel may well contribute toward incompetence, particularly when the authoritarian has reached a level of command where flexibility and an open mind are mandatory for success. To be more specific, the personality traits of authoritarianism and the associated characteristics of the closed mind and obsessive character may contribute to incompetence in the following ways. One, since authoritarians have been found to be more dishonest, more irresponsible, more untrustworthy, more socially conforming, more suspicious than non-authoritarians,

• 35:24Jocko Willink?

  they are unlikely to make successful social leaders.

• 35:29Jocko Willink?

  Authoritarians will be less likely to understand enemy intentions. I never thought of that before. Actually, here's something new for Jaco. If you're authoritarian, you're less likely to understand what the enemy's doing because you can't even understand their perspective.

• 35:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:43Jocko Willink?

  And act upon information regarding such intentions as conflict with the beliefs and preconceptions which the commander might hold.

• 35:52Speaker 01

  That makes sense. So, okay, forgive me for all the analogies, by the way. I'm just realizing like you're talking about this stuff. Yeah. Okay. So now this time is cameras.

• 36:01Jocko Willink?

  You're all for two.

• 36:02Speaker 01

  Or photograph, whatever. Not even on two for two. They were accurate. These lessons are everywhere.

• 36:07Jocko Willink?

  Perception is different amongst people.

• 36:10Speaker 01

  Well, consider a camera, right? Or a photograph or whatever, right? You have high resolution, low resolution kind of a situation. So authoritarianism seems like a low resolution scenario, way more black and white, way more like, oh yeah, like freaking either it's this way. And if it's not this way, then it's obviously the other way. But you get a high res photo. It's like, oh, that's not, that's, oh, that's just black. Obviously, no, no, no, just look closer. It's, it's kind of gray. It's actually pretty dark gray. And then even within that gray, there's darker and lighter shades of gray.

• 36:38Jocko Willink?

  Or even colors.

• 36:39Speaker 01

  Or, oh, colors, what, yeah, what have you. This one might be orange. This one might be salmon. Which is a color, by the way.

• 36:47Jocko Willink?

  Eggshell.

• 36:48Speaker 01

  Eggshell with Romalian type, by the way. What's that from?

• 36:54Speaker 01

  No, no, but see what I'm saying though, where you get a low res situation. Yeah, they like, they don't get it. They don't know. And then you said, well, they don't know what the enemy's thinking. Yeah, because they, they see black, but the enemy's not on black. They're over here on freaking eighty eight percent gray. Yeah, exactly right. So, yeah, that's just the way it's working. See what I'm saying? So you gotta be, well, I'm not saying you gotta be. I'm just saying it might be as the book is demonstrating more efficient, effective.

• 37:20Jocko Willink?

  To have a more nuanced perception of what's happening.

• 37:22Speaker 01

  Some higher res.

• 37:23Jocko Willink?

  Check.

• 37:24Speaker 01

  Scenarios.

• 37:25Jocko Willink?

  In nineteen fifty four, American research showed that people with a high score on tests of authoritarianism had greater difficulty than non-authoritarians in recognizing threatening messages when these were presented visually. A year later, another study confirmed this finding with threatening words that were heard instead of seen. So, so someone that's authoritarian, they don't even, they just don't comprehend the world accurately. That is now your, your. Metaphor just became more ample in that right there. They don't, they can't see as well. They can't see as clear. They can't see the nuance. They can't see the message.

• 38:07Jocko Willink?

  Three, the inability to sacrifice cherished traditions and accept technical innovations, the history of the machine gun, the tank, and the airplane contain striking as evidence of this disability. In war, an ounce of calculation is worth a ton of intuition. It also saves many lives. Number four, the underestimation of enemy ability. Number five, and he's got whole sections about each one of these. That's why you gotta buy the book. Number five, an emphasis upon the importance of blind obedience and loyalty at the expense of initiative and innovation at lower levels of command. So that's just, if you lose that. So if you're, if you're in charge of a company of soldiers, and your focus is on getting them to be blindly obedient,

• 38:51Jocko Willink?

  because you're an authoritarian, it's bad. And you're, and you're doing it at the expense of having decentralized command.

• 38:59Jocko Willink?

  Watch out for that.

• 39:02Jocko Willink?

  Got to beware. Number six, the protection of the reputations of senior commanders and punishment of those in the lower military hierarchy. If they voice any opinion, however valuable in itself, implies criticism of those higher up. So they don't want to hear any pushback on anything. Which is, again, a stark contrast to what I encourage all the time up and down the chain of command. I want pushback from my team. If my team isn't pushing back, actually, I'm nervous. Now I think I've got blind obedience, which I don't want.

• 39:35Jocko Willink?

  Number seven, closely related to the foregoing effects of authoritarianism is an individual's propensity to blame others for their own shortcomings.

• 39:47Jocko Willink?

  This is the opposite of extreme ownership. So the opposite of extreme ownership is authoritarian and blaming other people.

• 39:56Jocko Willink?

  Wouldn't it suck if I was reading this book like right now and it just wasn't working? It was all not mashing up.

• 40:05Jocko Willink?

  All my theories were wrong.

• 40:08Jocko Willink?

  Number eight, the close relationship between authoritarianism and obsessive traits has also played a significant part in military incompetence. This is a matter which we discussed earlier. Suffice it to say that the worst excesses of bull and the clinging to an acrastic ritual have played not a not inconsiderable part in holding back the military machine. So when you are hyper obsessed OCD on little things that don't matter, this is not going to help you. Number nine, there's one trait of the authoritarian personality, which at first sight may seem to have nothing to do with military incompetence, a belief in supernatural forces.

• 40:51Jocko Willink?

  The contrary is in fact the case. As a general issue, since military decision should not be based upon a proper weighing up of facts, the introduction of metaphysical variables into decision making necessarily contributes noise which decreases the probability of decisions being correct. Correct. Concern with what the stars foretell or hopes and occasionally fears of the divine intervention constitute prejudices which can bias decisions away from realism and towards wishful fantasies. That's a weird one to me because you would think that the people that were anti authoritarianism would be more kind of superstitious, but he's, we didn't run through all the examples. Get all kinds of examples of that. All kinds of examples through that throughout history of people that are authoritarian.

• 41:36Jocko Willink?

  I mean Hitler is a good example because he was all into the occult and all that and superstitious about stuff.

• 41:44Jocko Willink?

  One of the least, number 10, one of the least attractive aspects of the authoritarian personality is his generalized hostility, what the Berkeley researchers called vilification of the human. This was a trait that which was manifested to such an extreme degree by members of the Nazi SS that they commit wholesale murder, not just without guilt or shame, but perhaps most surprisingly without the slightest evidence of revulsion.

• 42:10Jocko Willink?

  And then he says, finally, there is the fact that authoritarianism, authoritarianism itself, so damaging to military endeavor, will actually predispose an individual towards entering upon the very career wherein his restricted personality can wreak the most havoc.

• 42:28Jocko Willink?

  This is what I kind of opened up with saying today. People that have these tendencies are attracted to the military. And he gives the following case study. Case 19. Cecil, or Cecil, Cecil, yeah. I guess Cecil would be a girl's name, wouldn't it?

• 42:43Speaker 01

  Yes, sir.

• 42:43Jocko Willink?

  So Cecil is a male name.

• 42:45Speaker 01

  Yes, sir.

• 42:45Jocko Willink?

  More of a British name. We don't, I've never met an American dude named Cecil, have you?

• 42:49Speaker 01

  Yes, sir.

• 42:50Jocko Willink?

  Really?

• 42:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:51Jocko Willink?

  Okay. I have not.

• 42:53Speaker 01

  Just one.

• 42:53Jocko Willink?

  Was he from England?

• 42:54Speaker 01

  No.

• 42:55Jocko Willink?

  Canadian?

• 42:56Speaker 01

  No, black guy.

• 42:57Jocko Willink?

  Cecil.

• 42:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:58Jocko Willink?

  Okay. Here we go.

• 43:00Speaker 01

  Wait, who's Cecil Peoples?

• 43:01Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah. He's an actor.

• 43:03Speaker 01

  No, isn't that a UFC guy? Cecil Peoples? So UFC, like commentator, ref, maybe? I think he's a ref.

• 43:12Jocko Willink?

  I'm drawing a blank for some reason.

• 43:13Speaker 01

  Cecil Peoples, right? You know, Cecil Peoples, shout out.

• 43:16Jocko Willink?

  All right.

• 43:16Speaker 01

  I'm, if I, if I'm not mistaken, he's a referee.

• 43:21Jocko Willink?

  Early on? Get, get your phone and Google it, bro. Seriously. I, I kind of remember him being, yeah, you might be right.

• 43:30Speaker 01

  Might have been a judge.

• 43:32Jocko Willink?

  Maybe he was a judge. Yeah, it seemed like he had some weird background in bare-knuckle fighting or something, and then kind of got early UFC activities going.

• 43:39Speaker 01

  Cecil P E O Pope, Cecil Peoples. Cecil Peoples is a, there he is, black guy. I need support. He's a judge. Why we need to support MMA Judge Cecil Peoples?

• 43:52Jocko Willink?

  Right on. What, from what era?

• 43:56Jocko Willink?

  What was his background?

• 43:57Speaker 01

  The era that I was watching UFC, which is probably like five years ago and before.

• 44:02Jocko Willink?

  So this is the guy that you claim to know?

• 44:09Speaker 01

  I knew I worked with a guy at American movers named Cecil. Um, and then there's Cecil people.

• 44:16Jocko Willink?

  All right, check. So here's Cecil R. Who's an obsessive neurotic and I wasn't going to read this thing, but I kind of have to and I'll tell you why and we get to the end. His IQ was in the bright, normal range. Personality testing indicated that he was very dependent on his parents, but that they were seen as being emotionally remote and extremely demanding. In fantasy, he expressed strong feelings of aggression and anger. He seemed most interested in the history of wars and in playing war games. He shot darts with vigor and delight in the therapist's playroom, and if given a choice would choose war games. His parents said he refused to play with other children unless they others did exactly what they told him, what he told them to do. Cecil said, when he grew up, he wanted to be a general.

• 45:03Jocko Willink?

  So there you go. That's the kind of personality we don't want joining the military, but that is fired up to join the military.

• 45:14Jocko Willink?

  Next chapter 23, mothers of incompetence. We're going kind of heavy, not going to go too, too deep into this chapter because it going a little bit into the psychology world, which again, I think this, some of the psychology is a little bit outdated.

• 45:28Jocko Willink?

  This is coming from me and I'm no psychologist.

• 45:30Speaker 01

  Sounds like a closed mind scenario.

• 45:32Jocko Willink?

  Okay, we'll open it up. Okay, good point.

• 45:36Jocko Willink?

  You caught me. I'm busted. For the reader not previously versed in the psychology of authoritarianism, the preceding chapter may have come as something of surprise at first sight. The traits of orderlyliness, tough mindedness, obedience to authority, punitiveness, and the rest well may have seemed the very embodiment of hard hitting masculinity, ideally suited to the job of being a soldier. That is an epic statement, right? All that's exa- and that's what so many people think. So many people think that is what we're looking for in the military.

• 46:08Jocko Willink?

  Unfortunately, as represented in the authoritarian personality, they are only skin deep, a brittle crust of defenses against feelings of weakness and inadequacy. The authoritarian keeps up his spirits by whistling in the dark. He is frightened. He is the frightened child who wears the armor of a giant. His mind is a closed, is a door locked and bolted against that which he fears the most himself. I didn't get much out of that, but what I did get a lot out of, what I did get a lot out of is the fact that when you hear these personality traits, tough mindedness, obedience to authority, it sounds like that's what you want your people to be, you want to, that's what you want your soldier to be. You don't. It's not what you want. It's not what we're looking for.

• 46:54Jocko Willink?

  Fast forward a little bit. Before going on, there's one further point. It concerns the distinction that has been drawn between irrational authoritarianism, as dealt with here, and so-called rational authoritarianism. So, this is just a clarification here.

• 47:10Jocko Willink?

  "By the latter is meant the readiness to accept and obey the dictates of a rational authority." Cool. So Pete, there's, there's such a thing. He's, he's basically making a distinction here. "An irrational antipathy toward all authority is evident in some cases of student militancy may just be, may be just as neurotic, as non-adaptive, as a predisposition toward irrational authoritarianism. The common denominator of irrational authoritarianism and blind anarchy is that both states of mind are compulsive and derive from an underlying ego pathology."

• 47:49Jocko Willink?

  In fact, this distinction between rational and irrational authoritarianism has been implied throughout this book. Without the exercise, this is why I had to read this part, "Without the exercise and acceptance of rational authority, without certain minimal levels of discipline, and even without certain features of bullshit, military organizations would cease to function." This is something I have to talk about sometime with, um, with clients at Echelon Front, because decentralized command, we want to have decentralized command, decentralized command, decentralized command. We want subordinates to be able to make choices and make decisions. And occasionally I'll get a, get a, a group that's going too wild with that. And all of a sudden where nothing is centralized anymore. And I have to bring up the fact

• 48:33Jocko Willink?

  that, hey, guess what kind of uniform?

• 48:38Jocko Willink?

  Every guy in tasking to Bruiser War a matching uniform. Why? Because we couldn't have some guy that was wearing a pair of blue jeans and a sweatshirt out in Ramadi because they would look, they wouldn't look the same and therefore they get shot. What happens if I run out of bullets? Guess what? I can get bullets from someone else in because we're all using the same weapon. What about my radio? I can use my radio and I can pick up your radio and use it too. Why? Because we're using the same radio. So you have to have some level of centralization, some level of authoritarianism that we're all going to kind of be on the same page.

• 49:14Jocko Willink?

  He says then it is necessary to labor this point because of some of the semantic confusion regarding the term authoritarian. Throughout this book, it refers to irrational authoritarianism. For the so-called rational authoritarianism, we prefer the praise autocratic behavior. The terms are not synonymous, whereas the autocrat exercises tight control when the situation demands that the authoritarian is himself tightly controlled, no matter what the external situation.

• 49:40Jocko Willink?

  Little semantics there. He goes in this next chapter, "Education of the Cult of Muscular Christianity." Okay?

• 49:51Jocko Willink?

  This is where he starts talking about,

• 49:55Jocko Willink?

  you know, the British schools, how these kids were raised in sort of like this musk, what he calls muscular Christianity. Not, not kids, but some of the kids in this timeframe were raised this way. Here's, here's some of the things that are highlighted by the reasons for this stultifying educational program are no doubt many and various, but to deserve particular consideration. So this is the education program that some of these kids were subjected to. The first resides in the belief that enforced application to unpleasant, boring tasks develops character. And the second, that any truly intellectual exercise by which is meant the cultivation of independent thinking as opposed to rote learning,

• 50:39Jocko Willink?

  harms that fine sense of loyalty and obedience which shuts, which such schools strive to inculcate.

• 50:47Jocko Willink?

  To think is to question and to question is to have doubts. So he gives some examples of how these kids were raised, what they did at these schools. You know, they were playing sports, they were hazing rituals and memorizing things and it was all. I mean, this is this is true to this day, you know, we've got this sort of school system, which is meant to teach you to be a good worker. That's what it's meant to do, meant to teach you to be a good worker.

• 51:13Jocko Willink?

  They don't want, that's why they structure things. It's like, hey, some of the stuff that you learn in school has no value whatsoever. They're just trying to get you to follow the rules, do what they say. Get on board with the program, fall in line with the authoritarian rulers.

• 51:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:30Jocko Willink?

  So we gotta be careful of that.

• 51:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, sometimes you feel like they, whoever they are, are doing it on purpose. And sometimes you just feel like, but I think this is just some curriculum that like no one had the like gusto to just be like, hey, we're doing an overhaul.

• 51:47Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I think you're right. I think that at some point, like right now, let's face it, if you were to go ground zero and restart your educational system in America, it'd be totally different than it is right now.

• 51:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, it is slowly changing.

• 52:00Jocko Willink?

  It is slowly changing and I'm not even sure that the way that they're changing is the right direction. I think they're taking advantage of the fact that it might not have been the best and they're changing it to make it worse in some cases.

• 52:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, oh, yeah, yeah. I think in a, from a social standpoint, I think they might have went kind of too hard in a, in a certain direction.

• 52:16Jocko Willink?

  Kind of crazy sometimes what kids are learning in school, disturbing in some cases what kids are learning in school.

• 52:22Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, my, my only point of reference is my, the elementary schools that my kids go to.

• 52:27Jocko Willink?

  I got the full spectrum from elementary school through college.

• 52:30Speaker 01

  I know, bro.

• 52:31Jocko Willink?

  I got it all, I've seen it all.

• 52:33Speaker 01

  Do you think, um, what was I just thinking about just now?

• 52:37Jocko Willink?

  And I'm not really in support of it.

• 52:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, oh, okay. Do you think, and I don't know the answer to this, but I just, I do kind of consider the other side of this. You know how, how you just said, um, the school kind of is structured to provide or to develop good workers, right?

• 52:56Jocko Willink?

  Aren't most people workers anyway? Not necessarily. No, no. You want to know something? What I think is messed up now is I think a lot of times the school right now is to develop people to go to college and feed the academic Yeah. growth of colleges. Yeah, but even that. Hey, we're just trying to get you to get, oh, you know, it'd be good for you to get a degree in freaking basket weaving or whatever. And no one needs a degree in that. There's a lot of degrees that you get that you don't need. If you want to learn about that stuff, go read about it. Don't pay $200,000 and go into debt to learn about something that has no, it doesn't give you a skill set. That always felt like a social problem to me. Yeah. It felt like, I don't freaking know.

• 53:38Jocko Willink?

  When I was a kid, not, not, not a kid, but when I was, when I joined the military, I already, I used to use the term, I don't know if it's ever caught on, or I don't know if I've ever heard it, but educational inflation. Cause when I was a kid, if you dropped out of high school, you could still get a job and have a normal life. Then as I got to high school, it was, hey, listen, you gotta finish high school. If you don't finish high school, you can't get a job, blah, blah, blah. Then it was that I joined the military. Thank God. I joined the military, but as I joined the military, it was, hey, you know, you would need to really get your whatever, what's a two-year degree? Your, your associate, you need to get your associates, get some, you know, get some. And then it became bachelors and now you've got kids that are going to getting their masters and then their doctorate. Right.

• 54:22Jocko Willink?

  They spend, they're, they spend, they're 33 years old, 35 years old, 29 years old before they're even getting a job. And they racked up, I mean, this is all now, it's all common, like everyone's racking up three, $400,000, $200,000, $300,000 worth of debt. And the skill set that they got, in whatever degree they got, it gets them a 29,000, no, no, probably not. Probably a $38,000 a year job as a whatever in a whatever. Right? It's whereas if you would have gone to, if you would have dropped out of high school and become an apprentice welder. Right now, you'd be making a hundred and twenty eight grand a year.

• 55:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:04Jocko Willink?

  Cause you're a hard worker. And by the way, if you're smart, you start, you know, you get, you figure out that welding thing and you buy a a couple welding, a couple welding machines and you're like, you know what, I can get two guys, I can apprentice them, I can teach them, boom. You can grow, you can make stuff happen. Meanwhile, the person that has thirty eight thousand dollar a year job, they actually have no skill set.

• 55:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:26Jocko Willink?

  So I think a lot of the educational system right now is a feeder program for the college system, which is gonna charge people money. And this is sort of like the housing crash too. So the housing crash came because the government was loaning money or backing up loans to people that aren't gonna be able to afford it. That was, that was what, one of the causes, one of the primary causing of the housing crash. Right now, the government backs up these loans that these people get. And so they're allowed to get loans for two hundred, three hundred thousand dollars. And they don't realize it. They should, but they don't realize that, hey, you know how long it takes to pay off a three hundred thousand dollar loan, which is, by the way, is the only loan that you can't go bankrupt from?

• 56:08Jocko Willink?

  It's gonna, and you're making thirty nine thousand dollars a year. And by the way, my, my daughter just graduated college in the spring. And a really good college and her friends are making thirty nine thousand dollars a year, forty two thousand dollars a year. Like, they're not making a lot of money. So I think a lot of the, what used to feed the workers now feeds into this into this educational nightmare of college debt and loans and all that. That's what's kind of nice about what we're doing at Origin, because at Origin, you don't need a college education, you can go get a job and get a skill.

• 56:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:45Jocko Willink?

  And have a career.

• 56:47Speaker 01

  Right.

• 56:47Jocko Willink?

  And we got people that have careers now that have learned a skill that's a highly valuable skill. And they don't have any debt because they didn't go and study basket weaving for four years at forty two thousand dollars a year.

• 57:02Speaker 01

  Basket weaving always gets a bad rap. Oh, it it almost seems like.

• 57:07Jocko Willink?

  Actually, basket weaving would be a better skill than some of the degrees that people are getting, right?

• 57:10Speaker 01

  I would say.

• 57:11Jocko Willink?

  Basket weaving would be a skill. You could sell baskets.

• 57:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, but didn't.

• 57:15Jocko Willink?

  You're right. We need to stop harassing basket weavers.

• 57:17Speaker 01

  I know, bro. It's almost like, but it feels, ah, bro, I don't know. I'm not an economist or nothing like this. You know that.

• 57:24Jocko Willink?

  Mm hmm.

• 57:25Speaker 01

  Um, it kind of seems like that there's certain times and then the education is kind of like trying to facilitate those times, right? There may be people running the education. Um, and then the times change and then the education just follows up with the with the change, but just way, way too late. Like, might even be fifty to seventy years late.

• 57:45Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah.

• 57:46Speaker 01

  And then think, so now now think about it. Consider that. So now the now it changes from like just straight up factory workers to, you know, a little bit more advanced workers types, right? So now it's like, okay, really, the change that should have been made a long time ago is for for you to be influenced to go to college, get a higher education, right? Because you have higher level jobs, generally speaking. You know, lower level jobs always going to exist and all this stuff. But just generally speaking, it's just general. So boom, now everyone should be going to college a long time ago. They should be doing that. They want to get a degree that creates way more opportunities. Back then, there's not all these crazy degrees. Like now, there's plenty of degrees. When I went to college, like they started doing this program called liberal freaking studies, right?

• 58:27Speaker 01

  Which in concept, concept, it it's it's good. The concept is good. But, bro, all you got to do is get your little degree approved and you can just study whatever you want, essentially. And be like, yeah, my degree is in this. As long as the title was approved, you can get it. It's called liberal studies, but it's and then you have a title for it. Again, you start doing it just for the sake of getting a degree, bro, when you get out of college, you know, you you could be jammed up.

• 58:52Jocko Willink?

  That's what I just said.

• 58:53Speaker 01

  Exactly right. But, okay, and that's the later part of it. But so now you have, and when I say it's a social thing, or it feels like a social thing. It's kind of like people are still stuck in that little zone that's like it is beneficial to go to college. Because there was a point where it is.

• 59:07Jocko Willink?

  They're stuck in that zone. They think they think that. They think that, oh, oh, what are you doing? I'm going to go to college because that's going to put me on the. Path.

• 59:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:13Jocko Willink?

  And they don't realize that it's not the path.

• 59:14Speaker 01

  That's not the reality right now. So much has changed. And then you have all these people who um like back in the day, you said people can drop out of high school and get a job. Because yeah, you can drop out of high school because all you have to do is know how to read and do basic arithmetic and get a job somewhere like at a factory or or at a, you know, one of the jobs that were freaking prevalent in the for those times. As times change, you need a little bit more education now for these jobs.

• 59:36Jocko Willink?

  True and untrue.

• 59:37Speaker 01

  Well, there are always exceptions.

• 59:39Jocko Willink?

  Guess what? There's, I mean, there, there is massive jobs that are, you know, carpentry, concrete.

• 59:46Speaker 01

  Yes, sir.

• 59:46Jocko Willink?

  Plumber, electrician, auto mechanic, driver, like there's all these jobs that you definitely do not need a college education to have.

• 59:55Speaker 01

  Yes, sir.

• 59:56Jocko Willink?

  You do not need it.

• 59:56Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 59:57Jocko Willink?

  And those are awesome jobs and they those those people go out and build America. But to your point.

• 1:00:05Speaker 01

  Are you talking about right now, though?

• 1:00:06Jocko Willink?

  I'm talking about right now. Those jobs fully exist, but here's here's to your point. A lot of people would say, okay. Hey, what should I do with my life? And the first nine things that come up on their list are go to college, go to college, go to college, go to college. Whereas when I was in high school, maybe the first thing would be go to college, but the second thing was like become an apprentice electrician. You know, like I took electricity in high school.

• 1:00:35Speaker 01

  And you're saying that was kind of the social kind of.

• 1:00:37Jocko Willink?

  I think that was way more normal to there wasn't, there wasn't the mandatory track to college. And I think nowadays, almost every kid is being told, go to college, go to college, go to college, instead of saying, hey, you can go and become an apprentice electrician. And that's a freaking great job and you can have a great life and you can contribute to society in a massive way, doing something you enjoy. Because look, when I was in high school, I didn't want to be looking at books. Right? I wanted, I would much rather be an electrician. Much rather be an electrician.

• 1:01:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, and and yeah, I think the zone where okay, basically break it into to these two things where the social influence like, hey, you should go to college or you should whatever, or it's okay not to go to college. You can just get a job here, whatever this that passes and changes through time. The social to me, the social part is lagging like way behind the reality of it. That's what I'm saying.

• 1:01:31Jocko Willink?

  Yes.

• 1:01:31Speaker 01

  So there was a little zone where it was the best to go to college if you had that opportunity. That was the zone right here. And right now socially, the influence is still in that zone. They're still saying it's starting to change, though. You you start to hear people being like, hey, college is a waste of money. Influential people saying that stuff. Yes, but it's I think it's still there. The reality on the streets is, bro, colleges for a handful of people, and that's it.

• 1:01:55Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I want to say, yeah, there's people out there that are actually hiring. They're not looking for college degrees.

• 1:02:00Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:02:00Jocko Willink?

  And I'm talking like, I think Peter Thiel is one of them.

• 1:02:03Speaker 01

  Oh, for.

• 1:02:03Jocko Willink?

  And he's out there saying, no, we'll test. I don't know if they got a testing program, but they're saying we just want smart people. It doesn't matter what you went to college or not.

• 1:02:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:11Jocko Willink?

  That's freaking legit.

• 1:02:12Speaker 01

  And here's how you know, here's how you can can kind of. It's kind of like a finger on the pole like this. How you can kind of tell that people are still in the zone of like college is a good thing. You can be like, oh, yeah, that guy. He has a degree from from Harvard. It's like a total appeal appeal to authority, the college being the authority, by the way. You don't even have to say what he has a degree from.

• 1:02:33Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:33Speaker 01

  You can say he has a degree from Harvard and that automatically. I'm not saying that's it, but I'm just saying that in and of itself is a point.

• 1:02:40Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:41Speaker 01

  Like a positive thing.

• 1:02:42Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:42Speaker 01

  Is what I'm saying?

• 1:02:43Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:43Speaker 01

  When we get past this zone, they'll be like, so what's it in? What's he doing?

• 1:02:47Jocko Willink?

  You know what's funny is I actually hear that right now. I'm starting to. I and people that I know for sure are starting to hear like, oh, that person has their MBA or whatever. Yeah, whatever.

• 1:02:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:58Jocko Willink?

  And so we're already getting there. It's we're not getting there, but we're moving in that direction. I hear those comments.

• 1:03:06Jocko Willink?

  Check, uh, back to education here. Finally, and perhaps the most fatal of all, the private school's ethic of honor and fair play, so admirable in itself, leads to disastrous results when mistakenly imputed to those like Hitler, who play the game by different set of rules. So these kids were told, "Hey, you gotta follow the rules and this we play with honor." And then Hitler's like, "Oh, really? Watch this."

• 1:03:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:03:31Jocko Willink?

  Um, "This particular weakness of military endeavor continued to feature in many subsequent campaigns. Indeed, is no exaggeration to say that an absence of adequate reconnaissance, the refusal to believe intelligence reports, and a general horror of spying have tended to keep our armies wrapped in cocoons of catastrophic ignorance. This fatal preference for honorable ignorance rather than useful knowledge gleaned by devious means was not confined to soldiers in the field, but as an attitude of mind permeated the highest levels of all military intelligence." So another thing, this is what these kids got educated to do. They got educated to live with honor. That means we're not gonna sneak around, we're not gonna cheat. You know,

• 1:04:13Jocko Willink?

  I had to watch out for that, you know, sometimes you'd get to like, "Well, IEDs for cowards." Like, "Okay, we get it, that's for cowards, but guess what?"

• 1:04:21Speaker 01

  What's for cowards?

• 1:04:21Jocko Willink?

  IEDs, roadside bombs, booby traps.

• 1:04:23Speaker 01

  Oh, right, right, got it, got it.

• 1:04:24Jocko Willink?

  You know, that's a coward, yeah, yeah, sure, it is. Guess what? We have to contend with it. Just because it's cowardly doesn't mean it's gonna go away, it doesn't mean it doesn't produce dead bodies and maimed bodies. Is it cowardly? Yes, it is. How do we counter it? Tell you, put some sniper overwatches on some roads and schwack some people, that's how you counter it. "Like a reformed, because enormously successful burglar, who self-righteously puts down his jemmy to take up proselytizing on the evils of crime, we took to repudiating these very traits, push cleverness, ruthlessness, and sheer naked aggression that had put us where we are." The reason that, so what he's saying is...

• 1:05:07Jocko Willink?

  You like a criminal that sort of makes it and like all of a sudden puts down his thieving tools and starts saying, you know, thieving is bad and you should live a righteous way. But he's forgetting about how he got there. And what he's, what the point he's making here is we can have a tendency to do that. Like, hey, in war, if you gotta be brutal, we're, we're on top because we were brutal. We're on top because we spied and, you know, broke shit and killed people. That's what got us here. And we can't now sit up here and say, well, that's all wrong. You gotta be careful about that.

• 1:05:45Jocko Willink?

  Now we get to part three of this book. Interestingly enough, you want to hear what quote it starts off? There's no bad regiments, only bad officers. Ah, we've heard Napoleon say it, we've heard Hackworth say it. We've heard Echelon Front say it. We, we, we know that quote is an extreme ownership. Well, it's, we use a different quote, no bad teams, only bad leaders is what we said. Did we steal it? Yes, we stole it from Hackworth. Who'd Hackworth steal it from? Field Marshal Lord Slim, who was in World War I, World War II, wounded three times. And guess what? He stole it from Napoleon. So we're stealing it, we're using it. Can't steal what's free, though, can you?

• 1:06:29Jocko Willink?

  We're attributing. Also, too much of history is written as though men had no feelings, no childhood, no bodily senses. Which is, which is something that I have tried with all my might with this podcast to make sure that history is written. And it's clear that these men had feelings, had bodily senses, had childhoods and beyond that, had hopes and dreams for the future. A lot of history's not written like that. Section here called the worst and the best. So now what he does is he starts pointing out some, and this is why I can start moving a little bit faster. I told you before we even

• 1:07:14Jocko Willink?

  started recording, like, hey, there's a big chunk of the book we're going to cover, we're going to cover in one podcast because he starts going into a lot of details and it's worth reading. You have to get the book if you want to read all these things. But he starts pointing out the worst and the best of some of these military leaders. He said this about Hitler, or does John Strausen said this about Hitler, "In a war from which so much human error had been eliminated by technological advances alone, human error was still the principal factor in determining a war's outcome." Hitler slipped not. A little bit about Hitler. Hitler's particular brand of military incompetence is precisely what one would expect. He showed a total unconcern for the physical and psychological welfare of his men and his armies. And we, man,

• 1:07:59Jocko Willink?

  when we covered Stalingrad, remember when we covered Stalingrad on this podcast? Actually, a book called Stalingrad, written by a Nazi soldier, and they were, they were listening on the radio as they were surrounded, and they were listening to Hitler talk about praising their dying to the last man. That's like insane. Number two is this imperviousness to human suffering, which resulted in such enormous wastage of his own forces, was a contributory factor in his stubborn refusal to ever relinquish gained ground. Three, from his extreme ethnocentrism

• 1:08:42Jocko Willink?

  came another well-known form of military incompetence, that which results from a gross underestimation of the enemy and in particular of the ability of civilian populations to withstand the effect of war. Yep. Thinking that your, you know, Nazi soldiers are just superior, and then you come up against the Russian civilians and they're like, what? Won't play?

• 1:09:05Jocko Willink?

  And, and thinking that they're just going to fold. Thinking that the Russians are just, the Russian civilian populace and, and even their Red Army, which is, you know, made up of, you know, peasant soldiers, they're going to fold under the might of the, of the Nazis. You might want to check yourself, homie.

• 1:09:25Jocko Willink?

  While many of Hitler's decisions were military disastrous, his underlying ego weakness and fear of criticism eventually in several other traits which are undesirable, to say the least, in a military senior commander. He promoted his aides and advisors for their sycophancy rather than their ability. Just promoting people because they sucked up to him. He refused to accept belief or even to listen to unpalatable intelligence, and when things went really wrong, he was the first to find scapegoats, the opposite of extreme ownership. Promoting people because they kissed your ass. Not listening to intel that's coming in. This is having a closed mind. Being an idiot. Like his henchmen Himmler, even Hitler could

• 1:10:07Jocko Willink?

  on occasion show that over-control of aggression, that procrastination which has incapacitated some other authoritarian military commanders. Perhaps his most disastrous decision of the war was when he halted the German advance before Dunkirk, thus allowing the British to escape. Finally, on April 22nd, 1945, Hitler failed as a military commander in a way that he had never failed before. In abdicating responsibility, he betrayed his command, and if you're a bin in leadership and duty like so. Yeah, he quit. He's the ultimate quitter. D O R'd. D O R'd, drop on request on April 22nd, 1945, and then a few days later on April 30th, killed himself. He could also commit enormous blunders,

• 1:10:52Jocko Willink?

  and these, when they occurred, seemed less a product of stupidity than of his total, sustained, all-pervasive authoritarian. So, that's an important point. Hitler made all these mistakes and did all this dumb shit, but he wasn't dumb. What was driving that? What was driving that?

• 1:11:06Speaker 01

  Ego.

• 1:11:07Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, his ego, his psychopathy, his authoritarian nature, all those things. Not stupid. So, you can be really smart and do really dumb things because you're authoritarian, because your ego is out of control, etc. Some good examples.

• 1:11:25Jocko Willink?

  General Sir James Wolfe. He was bitterly and unfashionably opposed to what he called the spirit breaking tactics of harsh punishment and drill. Was quite prepared to disobey orders if these conflicted with what he knew was right. Now, he's just going through like, these are the opposite of authoritarian. Personalities. This guy, Sir James Wolfe, I'm gonna burn through some of these. At the risk of making himself unpopular, he forced his officers to attend the. Attend to the welfare of their men, to visit their living quarters, have regard for their health and generally get to know them as fellow human beings.

• 1:11:59Jocko Willink?

  Wellington. Next guy he highlights here. Wellington did not evince signs of emotional restriction, did not remain unmoved by human suffering. Suffering, did not seek popularity, was unimpressed by bull, and did not seek scapegoats for his military setbacks. This is a good leader. He spurned the decorations of authority, large staffs, sentries, gold braids. So he didn't want to be all dressed up. Wellington's self-confidence is also reflected in his refusal to make scapegoats of others.

• 1:12:32Jocko Willink?

  Thus of the Burgos fiasco, he said, I see that a disposition already exists to blame the government for the failure of the siege of Burgos. It was entirely my own act.

• 1:12:45Jocko Willink?

  Thankfully, he didn't put that into a book and call it extreme ownership. Otherwise, I would have been kinda out of luck. Cause that's what he did, right? Here's the bad situation that unfolded during the siege and he took ownership of it. Didn't blame anybody.

• 1:13:00Jocko Willink?

  As usual, after a battle, his mood was set by the losses, not the glory. On the morning after the siege. Another Wellington showed himself to his deeply astonished staff. He visited the dead. And on seeing so many of his finest men destroyed, he broke down and wept.

• 1:13:20Jocko Willink?

  That's not authoritarian.

• 1:13:23Jocko Willink?

  Finally, he displayed an open. An open mind to new ideas, quick to innovate and see advantages in the progress of technology. He was remarkably laissez faire regarding the dress of his soldiers.

• 1:13:38Jocko Willink?

  Thirdly, he did not commit that cardinal error of so many military incompetence. Underestimation of the enemy. He took infinite pains in military planning, left nothing to chance, selected officers for their efficiency. Always did recon. So you can see what he's getting at here. Shaka. The Zulu king.

• 1:13:58Jocko Willink?

  Of his generalship, it has been written, Shaka's particular genius lay in his meticulous, personal attention to detail and sheer hard work. If at all possible, he always insisted on inspecting everything himself. In every one of his critical battles, he insisted on personal reconnoitering the ground and the disposition of enemy forces. He invariably checked all reports by procuring collateral evidence. Shaka could also be humane. He talks about Shaka actually

• 1:14:28Jocko Willink?

  being pretty brutal to his men, which I don't. I was a little bit thinking, well, why are you trying to give this guy as this great example? Those who hesitated to follow his example in painful initiation were instantly clubbed to death. Seems a little authoritarian to me, bro. Dixon, where are you at? I mean, we're cutting some slack here. So here's the deal.

• 1:14:49Jocko Willink?

  Another example of his flexibility and refusal to dominate by tradition was Shaka's banning of sandals for his fighting men. By making them run barefoot, a considerable and by no means popular break with tradition. He invested his army, the speed of movement far in excess of that achieved by his enemies. The displeasure he incurred through this innovation was hardly reduced by an order to his warriors that they should harden their feet on the parade ground strewn with thorns. Those who hesitated to follow in his example in this painful tradition were instantly clubbed to death. Seems a little authoritarian there, bro.

• 1:15:23Jocko Willink?

  But then it says that Shaka could also be humane as well as.

• 1:15:28Jocko Willink?

  punitive in caring for his army to ensure that his fighting men were kept warm well rested and well fed and orderly was provided for every three soldiers under his command no battle was fought without adequate supplies of food water and bark dressings being assembled at strategic points beforehand it can be summed up as autocratic totally non-authoritarian high in achievement motivation and yet capable of great warmth and sympathy according to Ritter this guy that wrote about him he was highly emotional and sentimental behind a facade of iron self-discipline the fact that he was the finest composer of songs the leading dancer and wittiest punster suggests an artist who would naturally have a highly strong nature and more sensitive than the common run of the youngie race

• 1:16:14Jocko Willink?

  so there's Shaka Napoleon

• 1:16:18Jocko Willink?

  the evidence suggests that though he was ambitious ruthless devious unscrupulous grandiose despotic Machiavellian dictatorial and autocratic he was not authoritarian again this is where he's getting into some semantics here that's kind of like

• 1:16:35Jocko Willink?

  Napoleon could be the reverse of extra punitive the fault he argued lay not so much with the men as with himself so he when things were didn't go the way he wanted he often said it was his fault cool I think he's stretching man on Napoleon a little bit I because I think it's a scale right and and Napoleon I think had an open mind when it came to combat you know but I think he was an egomaniac I mean we have a free what's that Napoleon complex right like you're all little and you want trying to be big stern and imperious to in his business hours Napoleon was all ease and sunshine to his intimates they admired his pleasant wit his unaffected gate he is rich and

• 1:17:18Jocko Willink?

  brilliant handing of moral and political themes so you're trying to make him out to be a little less authoritarian than he was in my opinion

• 1:17:25Speaker 01

  but some of these guy even the guy Shaka Zulu he was maybe he was Authoritarian in certain ways.

• 1:17:33Jocko Willink?

  That's what I just said.

• 1:17:34Speaker 01

  And super whatever in other ways.

• 1:17:36Jocko Willink?

  And it kind of find struck a balance.

• 1:17:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, so like back to Shaka, he would be not, what is the one, what's the opposite authoritarian? Authoritarian liberal, whatever.

• 1:17:48Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, anti authoritarian.

• 1:17:49Speaker 01

  He was anti, except when it came to those feet, man. Those feet got it, you know, like you gotta like how you guys say you gotta hold the line on some stuff. You know, those radios, you gotta know how to program your radios.

• 1:17:59Jocko Willink?

  It's true.

• 1:18:00Speaker 01

  But the patches, let's slide a little bit. So Shaka was like that with a lot of stuff.

• 1:18:04Jocko Willink?

  So me and Shaka kinda keeping it real.

• 1:18:06Speaker 01

  Kind of keeping it real, kind of keeping it real, you know? But that's how, right? That's the dichotomy.

• 1:18:11Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's the dichotomy. And I think that's, he's trying to point out some of that dichotomy. I think he's leaning to try and show these good leaders as being less authoritarian.

• 1:18:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. Because Napoleon, I mean, sure, you know? Hitler, Napoleon, these guys like, yeah, they lost and they lost huge and they're bad. But they did some effective stuff.

• 1:18:32Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah, well, Napoleon is, I mean, Napoleon won a lot. And Hitler won a lot too, man.

• 1:18:37Speaker 01

  That's what I'm saying.

• 1:18:38Jocko Willink?

  I mean, Blitzkrieg kicking it off, took over giant swaths of Europe. Napoleon did the same thing. So there was definitely some, they did some shit that was, that they won.

• 1:18:50Speaker 01

  It was effective.

• 1:18:51Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And by the way, there's other people that were totally authoritarian that did authoritarian shit and law and also won.

• 1:18:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:18:59Jocko Willink?

  The Crimean war, right? With the Brits, the Brits were doing the dumbest, most horrible authoritarian ego driven moves and getting guys killed by the bushel. And yet they still were able to win.

• 1:19:16Jocko Willink?

  This is a little bit more about Napoleon, finally, like many of the other commanders on our list. Napoleon was without that vanity. This like struck me, bro. Without that vanity, which betokens a weak ego, was notoriously careless about his dress, had a wide range of intellectual interests and promoted his subordinates on the basis of their efficiency. Okay, so that's cool. Makes sense. Nor did he display the debilitating over control of aggression, which is on occasions paralyzed warlike behavior of less successful commanders. Nelson.

• 1:19:47Jocko Willink?

  Nelson did not display a compulsive concern with ordi-liness of his dress, was anxious to give pleasure to everyone about him, distinguishing each turn by some act of kindness, and chiefly those who seemed to require it the most. Nelson seems like he's just a really good guy. Any residual doubts one might have regarding Nelson's freedom from the crippling effects of weak ego should be resolved by considering his most famous characteristic disobedience. Possessing boundless moral courage, he was himself prepared to disobey if he thought it to the advantage of his country. And often he was right. Nelson was in fact always urging others, even allies, superiors, and officials of the army to disregard their

• 1:20:27Jocko Willink?

  orders if necessary in what he thought was to be the general interest of the cause. This is one of the best quotes on decentralized command I have ever heard in my life. So this is Nelson. Nelson's own view of this matter was uncomplicated. As he said to the Duke of Clarence, "To serve my king and to destroy the French, I consider as the great order of all, from which little ones spring. And if one of these little ones militate against

• 1:21:06Jocko Willink?

  it, for who can exactly tell at a distance, I go back and obey the great order and object." End quote. That's a beautiful understanding of decentralized command. Here's what we're trying to get done. And there's a bunch of different ways you can get it done. If I'm telling you to do something but it doesn't quite make sense in supporting the strategic goal, don't do it. Do something else. So that's a non-authoritarian mindset, which is good to go. T. Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia, of his generalship, Liddell Hart wrote, "Lawrence can bear comparison with Marlborough or Napoleon in that vital faculty of generalship. The power of grasping instantly the picture of the ground and situation of relating the

• 1:21:51Jocko Willink?

  one to the other and the local to the general." Oh, he was able to see what was happening, not just what's happening right there, but see it in the big picture. He was able to detach, take a step back, look around. I think strategic Liddell Hart considered that Lawrence also showed the same profound, quote, "profound understanding of human nature." The same power of commanding affection while commanding energy and the same consummate blend of diplomacy with strategy. Had a cool head. Liddell Hart also considered that Lawrence, the most widely read of generals was more was more steeped in knowledge of war than any other generals of the last war.

• 1:22:29Jocko Willink?

  In personality, this one read a little bit more because, well, because of this in personality, Lawrence is probably the least authoritarian senior commander the world has ever known. He was totally without personal ambition, refused promotion, honors and awards for himself and deplored the pomp, vanities and ritualized bowing and scraping which one associates with the power structure of the hierarchical command systems. We like this guy, right? Out of the gate, you're like, yeah, we're down with this guy.

• 1:23:02Jocko Willink?

  The fact that he could renounce his name for that of Ross and later Shaw and happily resume his role of a lowly ranker after achieving worldwide fame indicates a degree of self-effacement quite unique amongst military men.

• 1:23:18Jocko Willink?

  Contrary to a characteristic predisposition of authoritarian individuals, Lawrence disliked interfering with other men's freedom.

• 1:23:29Jocko Willink?

  You can't impose on other people, you shouldn't impose on other people, you shouldn't mess with their freedom. He disliked giving orders and in fact exercised effective command largely through the tendering of advice.

• 1:23:45Jocko Willink?

  Have you ever, have you ever heard Leif Babin explain how many times I gave him a direct order?

• 1:23:49Speaker 01

  Oh, yes, I have, I have heard him.

• 1:23:51Jocko Willink?

  What's the number?

• 1:23:52Speaker 01

  Zero.

• 1:23:52Jocko Willink?

  Zero times.

• 1:23:57Jocko Willink?

  That this advice was acted upon suggests that by his personality, he achieved a level of leadership rarely attained by military commanders. He himself was prepared to obey foolish orders, but disliked passing these on to others. As Liddell Hart remarks, in war, such orders are often the result of useless sacrifice of men's lives. In peace, they often contribute to the sterilization of men's reason. Oh, that's a good one. You bark orders, you make people do what you want them, what you want them to do, you're going to sterilize their brain.

• 1:24:30Jocko Willink?

  Lawrence was a great respecter of reason and considered that the possession of knowledge was of primary importance for a military leader. In his opinion, quote, "The perfect general would know everything in heaven and earth," end quote. By the same token, this most open-minded of men deplored the closed and vacuous minds of his military compatriots, men who displayed a, quote, "fundamental crippling incuriousness." So there you go. T.E. Lawrence.

• 1:25:03Jocko Willink?

  We got Slim who this thing kicked off with. General Slim, "Like so many generals when plans have gone wrong," oh, he's taking a little bit of ownership here. "Like so many generals," this is a quote, "when so many generals, like so many generals, when plans have gone wrong, I could find plenty of excuses, but only one reason: myself. When two courses of action were open to me, I had not chosen, as a good commander should, the boulder. I had taken counsel of my fears," Patton reference. There is no evidence here of that telltale defense projection, and even though he had ample opportunity for making scapegoats of those subordinates who had given the advice which generated failure. So you got another

• 1:25:44Jocko Willink?

  guy, Slim. Had he written a book and taken, you know, given it a cool title like Extreme Ownership, we'd be in a different spot right now.

• 1:25:56Jocko Willink?

  Taken into account with other traits, his warmth towards his family, his absence of rigidity, his parsimony with the lives of his men, his ability to improvise, his popularity with the troops, and relative lack of concern regarding his popularity with his equals, it should come as no surprise to learn that the chivalrous, autocratic, and most efficient of generals enjoyed a happy childhood, apparently unmarred by those stresses and strains which may weaken the ego and stunt the personality. He kind, and I've been skipping these parts a little bit. I guess I'm being a little bit biased, but I'm skipping a lot of the psychoanalysis, because, you know, that, and I'm just giving you that little taste of them. If you want to get some of that, you gotta kind of get into it here a little bit. And this next section is Exceptions to the Rule. Got a little

• 1:26:40Jocko Willink?

  quote here from Rommel. "One must not judge everyone in the world by his qualities as a soldier, otherwise we should have no civilization." That's Rommel to his son. Interesting.

• 1:26:52Jocko Willink?

  Incompetence is not confined to those who were extreme in their ineptitude, but may operate along a line of a continuum of military excellence from worst to the best senior commanders. And military shortcomings of Montgomery, Kitchener, and Hague and their positions along a dimension of authoritarianism are perfectly correlated. So, this is what you were saying earlier.

• 1:27:19Jocko Willink?

  It's not like, oh, this is a, you're either authoritarian or you're not. You could be anywhere on this spectrum. And as we have been discussing, you want to have some level of authoritarianism. You just don't want too much. It's got to be a balance. But some people can be, oh, they're a little bit in the red. Right? Some people full green. Maybe some, some people too much green. They don't even make it. But I think in the military, people that are far green don't even join the military.

• 1:27:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:27:44Jocko Willink?

  Right? We got to remember that people are not even in there.

• 1:27:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:27:46Jocko Willink?

  So you already have a composite of people that are a little bit, at least in the middle, maybe a little bit orange, some people leaning in the red. But it's a, it's a continuum.

• 1:27:58Jocko Willink?

  Talking about Montgomery, and again, you, you got to get, if you want the details of this, read, get the book. It's not my purpose to debate Montgomery's greatness. Suffice it to say that while not without blemishes, he was in the main a highly competent commander, and as such, needs to be considered in present context. Does he or does he not support the hypothesis that competence depends upon an absence of authoritarianism and its associated traits? So, so that's what we're really hearing there is that the more authoritarian you are, the worse you're going to be. Unless you have zero authoritarianism. And he points out some things that makes him not authoritarianistic. Here's Montgomery lacked those obsessive traits which tend to accompany authoritarianism.

• 1:28:40Jocko Willink?

  He's not particularly mean or particularly obstinate and judging from his own dress and lenient attitude towards that of his troops. He did not harbor any compulsive urge for a bull. In this, as in other matters, his approach was essentially realistic.

• 1:28:54Jocko Willink?

  Seems that whatever else he may be, Montgomery does not evince a well documented signs of authoritarianism. And yet, even in this case, there remains the undisputable fact that for all his greatness as a military commander, Montgomery did have serious shortcomings which could not be attributed to a lack of professional ability. So Montgomery did some jacked up things and we covered it in one of the earlier podcasts. We also covered it on a podcast not about this book.

• 1:29:22Jocko Willink?

  These lapses were an inability to get along with many of his military colleagues like Kitchener. He had a knack of making himself enormously unpopular with his contemporaries and preferred the company of younger, more junior officers. It was a bad sign. I was talking about this on the academy the other day. Extreme ownership.com. Somebody was talking about they can't get along. If you're not getting along with people, you're doing a bad job. What's wrong with you? Why aren't you getting along with people? You should be getting along with people. It's part of your job. Build relationships. What's happening with you? Montgomery's second shortcoming was that he sometimes allowed his own desire for personal glory to influence planning. A military plan tainted by an attempt to satisfy the commander's ego is unlikely to be the best plan.

• 1:30:06Jocko Willink?

  An irrelevant factor has been introduced into the calculation. Clearly that's jacked up. Montgomery's next shortcoming presents something of a paradox. It concerns a matter of communication. For a man who is adept at simplifying the apparently complex, whose ability to extract the essentials from a host of irrelevant factors was second to none, who could communicate his intentions and issue orders to his subordinates with a lucidity that left no room for misinterpretation? And who could write his memoirs with such a style that puts most generals to shame? It is extraordinary that he should have been almost incapable of explaining himself to those above him in the chain of command. Kind of crazy. Got a whole big explanation on Montgomery and where some of that stuff came from. Fast forward a little bit to Kitchener.

• 1:30:51Jocko Willink?

  Kitchener, who became Secretary of State in the First World War, had, according to Philip Magnus, two basic attributes, an unparalleled thoroughness and an unparalleled drive. He was an individualist of great conceptions, whose hard and selfish nature was capable at times of kindness, sympathy, and even affection. These traits, his excessive drive, Lord Curzon once described Kitchener as this molten mass of devouring energy. His individualism and his refusal to conform the originality of his thinking and the occasional flashes of underlying warmth and generosity are hard to reconcile with the notion of authoritarianism. So he's got Montgomery who has some authoritarianism. Kitchener's a little bit more authoritarianism.

• 1:31:36Jocko Willink?

  And as we push through his authoritarianism from Kitchener, for all his greatness, Kitchener seems to have been a victim of the repressive forces implanted in him as a child. Presumably as a marionette of his father. Then psychoanalytics going on.

• 1:31:51Jocko Willink?

  But what were those traits regardless of where they came from? His aloofness, his unpopularity with many of his fellow officers, his failure to work as part of a team. And most damaging of all, his latter day indecisiveness and hesitancy in directing Gallipoli campaign must be ascribed to defects of the personality rather than intellect. And again, it's just interesting to point out that authoritarianism, you'd think that makes people make calls. But it actually freaks them out in these pressure situations because they don't want to get. They don't, they don't, they don't handle failure. They don't know what to do and they just, they don't want to do anything. Back off. Whereas somebody that's a little less authoritarian is like, okay, you know what? We've got to make a call. Here, this is what we're doing.

• 1:32:34Jocko Willink?

  Now we get to Hague. In trying to answer the question whether the recurring features of military incompetence derived from aspects of the authoritarian personality, even in a commander who ultimately emerged victorious, one cannot do better than consider the case of Douglas Hague, commander in chief of the British armies on the Western Front between 1915 and 1918.

• 1:32:54Jocko Willink?

  Judging from the war of words which has raged between his detractors and devotees, there was never a more controversial military commander. Here's some quotes. Hague, Britain's number one war criminal. Expected Germans to advance in this attack and at the same time, slow, at the same slow pace of his own clumsily planned results. Another quote, he seemed to be most highly equipped thinker in the British Army. That's totally different quote. Another quote, Hague perhaps failed to see that a dead man cannot advance and that to replace him is only to provide another corpse. Here's another quote, it is indeed strange that the man whose stubbornness in the offensive had all but ruined us on the Somme should from August 1918 onwards have been, become the driving force of the allied armies.

• 1:33:39Jocko Willink?

  That is crazy. You freaking conduct this horrible operation. So many people die and you just continue being in charge and directing operations. Hague was unimaginative. Maybe he was competent according to his lights, but these were dim. Confidence of divine approval appeared to satisfy him. Nothing can excuse the casualties of the Somme and Passchendaele.

• 1:34:02Jocko Willink?

  World War I, freaking nightmare. So what's up with his personality? Did Haig evince those character traits that are associated with authoritarianism? He certainly had most of them. For start, he was conservative, conventional, and in his attitude toward the French, ethnocentric. His diary and dispatches suggest he was unemotional and totally anti-introceptive, i.e. not able, not one to reflect upon his own motives. He was manifestly lacking in compassion towards his fellow men. It's just so important as you hear these things, just to think, what do you think a military commander should be like? And what should a military commander actually be like?

• 1:34:43Jocko Willink?

  He was a confirmed believer in the direction of events by supernatural powers, and reserved to the point of being verbally almost inarticulate. Haig also betrayed that triad of traits which, according to contemporary research, defines the obsessive character and correlated, and is correlated with authoritarianism. He was obstinate, orderly, and mean.

• 1:35:09Jocko Willink?

  About his obstinacy, little further need to be said. From the beginning to the end, his handling of the Third Ypres betokened an obstinacy of statuesque proportions. This guy was just stubborn, never changed his mind. We're sticking with the plan. For the second trait, in his dress, habits, and appearance, Haig was immaculate, orderly, and quite probably the cleanest man on the Western Front. A contemporary of, of his at Clifton remembered him particularly for his cleanliness, a remarkable attribute to be recalled of a fellow schoolboy. And, for an example of his love of bull, there is this excerpt from a cavalryman, cavalryman's letter. Quote, "He had a personal escort consisting of a full troop of his own regiment. They were easily the smartest thing in France, not a buckle out of place,

• 1:35:53Jocko Willink?

  stripes of gold for the NCOs, silver, great silver skull and crossbones." End quote. Other writers have commented on his meticulous attention to minute detail, and his habit of planning each day according to a set pattern.

• 1:36:13Jocko Willink?

  So there you go. And he breaks out basically saying Montgomery, out of those three was the best and had the least authoritarian nature. Kitchener, little bit more authoritarian, little bit worse performance, and then finally you get to Hague, total authoritarian attitude, and well, the worst example and the worst leader. And now we're getting to the, uh, the final chapter of this book. Six podcast deeps, by the way.

• 1:36:44Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:36:45Jocko Willink?

  I went hard in the paint. Retreat, this one's called. Hail, ye indomitable heroes, hail, despite all of your generals, ye prevail. That's from a Landor, who wrote a poem about the Crimean heroes, and I just was talking about this, right? The Brits won. The Brits and their allies beat the Russians despite their shitty leadership.

• 1:37:15Jocko Willink?

  Uh, Clausewitz, this difficulty in seeing things correctly, which is one of the greatest sources of friction in war, makes things appear quite different from what was expected.

• 1:37:28Jocko Willink?

  Good job, Clausewitz. You know what you better learn how to do if you want to see things correctly? You better learn to detach. You better learn to take a step back. You better learn to put your ego in check. You better learn to get control over your emotions. So you're not seeing through an egotistical or emotional lens.

• 1:37:45Jocko Willink?

  It is not the intention to leave a comparable impression of generalship, but rather to show that the nature of interspecies, in that, that the nature of interspecies aggression predisposes the leaders of armies and navies to certain sorts of error.

• 1:38:04Jocko Willink?

  So he's saying, look, when you start fighting and killing each other, it leads to certain types of error, just in its own right. Then he says, "Far from diminishing the stature of senior military commanders, the existence of this predisposition makes the performance of the majority of soldiers and sailors doubly credible." So it's so, there's so much natural disaster about to happen, that when someone does a good job, you should get double credit, two gold stars, for being able to pull it off, when there's all this, all this natural gravity towards chaos, mayhem, destruction, ego,

• 1:38:46Jocko Willink?

  authoritarian personalities, like all that stuff is going on, and yet, some people, most military people, from the bottom to the top, do a good job and overcome that. So you should get double the credit.

• 1:39:00Jocko Willink?

  The theory, and this is all kind of a conclusion here, the theory advanced in this book starts from the position that by its very nature, military incompetence cannot be attributed to the dullness of intellect. We've hammered that point home, there is, it seems, a reoccurring pattern to military mishaps, which defies any explanation in terms of the bloody fool theory. So these people aren't stupid.

• 1:39:20Jocko Willink?

  It is, in its stead, is tentatively suggested that the syndrome occurs through the enormous difficulties of professionalizing the instinctual activity of intraspecies aggression. This professionalism entails the growth of militarism, that collection of rules and conventions whereby hostility is controlled and anxiety reduced. So you've got this system set up to put command in place, to reduce anxiety, to overcome some natural instincts, that's what the military is set up to do. Not surprisingly, a military career attracts a minority of people with these sort of anxieties

• 1:40:04Jocko Willink?

  within a military organization. Their neurotic needs are gratified. They, for their part, help to reinforce those very aspects of militarism which are so congealed to their requirements. In return, as it were, for fitting in so well, they may rise to positions of considerable power. Once there, however, they become incapacitated by the very characteristics which hasten their ascent. You come in, you're authoritarian, you love it. You come in because you're authoritarian, and you want to fit into that. Then you get in there, and you're gratified because that, and you're advanced because you're authoritarian. And if you make it all the way up the chain of command, the very authoritarian traits that you have are actually a disaster.

• 1:40:44Jocko Willink?

  So this is a horrible thing. And it took me six podcasts to get that out.

• 1:40:52Jocko Willink?

  So much for a theory based on past history. Has it? And he kind of goes like, hey, look, I've showed you all these examples, which this book, 450 pages of this book, is examples. And but he says, so much for this theory based on a past history. Has it any relevance for the future? Since armies and navies have changed out of all recognition, perhaps the sorts, the sorts of military incompetence described in these pages are no longer likely to occur.

• 1:41:19Jocko Willink?

  In fact, the evidence suggests this to be a forlorn hope. So this shit still happens. Some of the same sorts of mistakes occur now as the as blighted the lives of soldiers 100 years ago. In Vietnam, in three weeks in 1968, the Tet Offensive alone cost the Americans 500 dead and the South Vietnamese 165,000 dead with 2 million refugees. Why did it happen? One reason was the inability to respond to unexpected military intelligence.

• 1:41:49Jocko Willink?

  Fast forward a little bit, any doubts as to whether the three factors of remote control? He goes into a thing explaining how some of the changes that have taken place. One of them is remote control, meaning we now have radios, we can micromanage people out on the battlefield, we make these big swollen staffs and, and all kinds of weaponry. Like, has this helped? Now, do we have multiple people on a staff? Maybe they can help sort through some of these people that are incompetent? Or we have the power to like, see what's happening on the battlefield? Maybe we can make adjustments through remote control?

• 1:42:22Jocko Willink?

  And we've got all these resources and weapons, maybe that helps? So here's what he said, "Doesn't help." And he says, "Any doubts to whether these three factors from remote control, swollen staffs and a wealth of resources make for incompetence are removed by the contemplation of Vietnam? In this most ill-conceived and horrible of wars, there was the commander-in-chief, Lyndon Johnson, aided by his advisers, dreaming up policies and even selecting targets at a nice, safe distance of 12,000 miles. And there was the man on the spot, General Wes Moreland, a by no means unintelligent military commander, but bemused by the sheer weight of destructive energy and aggressive notions supplied by his president.

• 1:43:03Jocko Willink?

  Together, the Machiavellian mind of the one, coupled with the traditional military mind of the other, produced a pattern of martial lunacy, so abject and appalling that it eventually did for both of them."

• 1:43:18Jocko Willink?

  Like the Boer leaders, a half-century earlier, earlier, the versatile General Giap, this is the Vietnamese, North Vietnamese commander, and his commander-in-chief, a little old man with a wispy beard, Ho Chi Minh, made a huge professionally-trained and over-equipped army of their enemies look utterly ridiculous and their leaders helplessly irate, unfettered by traditional militarism, lacking in excess of brute force, and without an obsession with capturing real estate, Ho and Giap relied on poor men's strategy. Surprise, deception, and the ability to melt away. They relied on the fact that Wes Moreland would expand, expend his energies, swatting wherever they had last been, heard of, while they got ready to sting him somewhere else.

• 1:44:07Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and it's one of the most fascinating thing and when we covered um General Mao's like Little Red Book, one thing that's so fascinating about this is what the communists do to win wars is utilize decentralized command and they do it great and then for the way they run their government, they decide to make it authoritarian and centralized, which is crazy, which is crazy. And that's exactly what that spells out right there. When we're in battle, decentralized command, make things happen, small units out there acting independently with freedom and then what for the government, guess what, we're gonna lock it all down. You're gonna obey, obey, obey.

• 1:44:48Jocko Willink?

  This brings up yet another hazard of modern war, government by committee. Take the decision to invade Cuba with a group of Cuban exiles, Bay of Pigs. In approving the CIA plan, Kennedy and his advisors made six assumptions, each was wrong. They assumed that no one would guess the US government was responsible for the invasion. In their contempt for the Cuban Air Force, they assumed it would be annihilated before the invasion began. They assumed that the small invasion force led by unpopular ex-officers from the Batista regime would be more than a match for Castro's quote "weak" army of 20,000 well-equipped Cuban troops. They assumed that the invasion would touch off a general revolt behind Castro's line. They assumed that even if unsuccessful in their primary objective, the exile forces,

• 1:45:31Jocko Willink?

  the exile force could hole up in Cuba and reinforce anti-Castro guerrillas. That's their plan. Do assumption, assumption, assumption, assumption. In the event that each assumption proved a gross, in the event, each assumption proved a gross miscalculation, nothing went as planned, nobody believed the CIA cover story. The ships carrying reserve ammunition for the invasion force failed to arrive, two were sunk and two fled. By the second day and the invaders were surrounded by Castro's army and by the third day, they were either dead or behind bars. Seven months later, the United States recovered what was left of their invasion force for a ransom priced to Castro of $53 million. Kennedy was stricken. "How could I have been so stupid as to let them go ahead?" he asked.

• 1:46:15Jocko Willink?

  As Sorensen wrote, "His anguish was doubly deepened by the knowledge that the rest of the world was asking the same question." Arthur Schlesinger Jr. noted that Kennedy would sometimes refer incredulously to the Bay of Pigs, "Wondering how a rational and responsible government could have become involved in so an ill-starred adventure."

• 1:46:39Jocko Willink?

  Sunday, December 7th, 1941, had been set aside by Admiral Kimmel, Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet, for a friendly game of golf with his colleague, General Short. Ninety-six of the ships of the American fleet slept at anchor in the harbor. American planes stood wingtip to wingtip on the tarmac. American servicemen were off-duty, enjoying weekend leave. By the end of the day, Pearl Harbor, with its ships, planes, and military installations, had been reduced to smoking ruins. Two thousand servicemen had been killed, and many more wounded or missing. By the end of the day, Kimmel was offering to resign. Later, he was court-martialed, reprimanded, and demoted to a position where he was never again required to make decisions of any consequence. Pearl Harbor, like the Bay of Pigs, confirmed once again that military incompetence is

• 1:47:24Jocko Willink?

  more often a product of personality characteristics than of intellectual shortcomings.

• 1:47:33Jocko Willink?

  For these American disasters show very clearly that even combined intellects and specialized knowledge of highly intelligent and dedicated men are no proof against decisions so totally unrealistic and subsequently to tax the credulity of even those who had made them. Far from diminishing the chances of ineptitude, the group actually accentuates the effects of those very traits which may lead to incompetence in individual commanders.

• 1:48:08Jocko Willink?

  So you get, you get a group together and you'd think that this would kinda cancel out and I'd say, "Hey Echo, I don't know if that's a good idea." No, it actually gets worse. It turns into group think. The symptoms of this process, which Janis terms group think include: 1. An illusion of invulnerability that becomes shared by most members of the group.

• 1:48:30Jocko Willink?

  2. Collective attempts to ignore or rationalize away items of information which might otherwise lead the group to reconsider shaky but cherished assumptions. 3. An unquestioned belief in the group's inherent morality, thus enabling members to overlook ethical consequences of their decision. 4. Stereotyping the enemy as either too evil for negotiation or too stupid and feeble to be a threat.

• 1:49:01Jocko Willink?

  You can see, you can like hear this happening in the room, right? You can hear the discussions happening. A shared illusion of unanimity in a majority viewpoint augmented by the false assumption that silence means consent.

• 1:49:17Jocko Willink?

  And 6. Self-appointed mind guards to protect the group from adverse information that might shatter complacency about the effectiveness and morality of their decisions.

• 1:49:33Jocko Willink?

  So that's what happens when you put a bunch of people that have these tendencies into a group together, it gets worse.

• 1:49:45Jocko Willink?

  And this is the last thing I'm gonna read from the book here. Finally, "It is worth noting that the personality-determined malaise of group think produces once again those four most frequently occurring symptoms of past military incompetence: wastage of manpower, overconfidence, underestimation of the enemy, and ignoring of intelligence reports. These, it seems, are the enduring hazards of professionalizing violence."

• 1:50:25Jocko Willink?

  And I can tell you, these are not only the hazards of professionalizing violence. These are the enduring hazards for us as human beings, as leaders, that we can all fall into. And as you pointed out, this book is a, is a big warning of what not to do. I gotta, I said it was the last thing I'm gonna read, but there's a, this guy's funny. And I did a bad job of relaying some of his humor. Here's the afterword of this book. And this is the last thing I'm gonna read from this book after six podcasts. He says, this is so British. He says, lest the reader should have doubted my qualifications to write this book. Let me assure him that I have marked authoritarian traits.

• 1:51:11Jocko Willink?

  A weak ego, fear of failure motivation, and no illusions about the fact that I would have made a grossly incompetent general. It takes one to know one. And that was from the author in 1975. A little bit of humor. And you know, he says it takes one to know one.

• 1:51:31Jocko Willink?

  But that's unfortunately not true. It's unfortunately not true. If you think you're incompetent,

• 1:51:41Jocko Willink?

  there's a better chance that you're not incompetent. You can see where I'm going with this. If you think you're incompetent, there's a, there's a better chance that you're not incompetent. Because if you think you're incompetent, you're, you're actually humble. And you're thinking, ooh, you know, I don't, man, I need, I need to listen to what other people have to say. I, I need to check myself. I need to learn. I need to open my mind and see what other information I can gather. Cause I gather because I, I feel like I might be incompetent. So if you feel, it's kind of when people ask me about the imposter syndrome.

• 1:52:12Jocko Willink?

  What about imposter syndrome? Good. That means you're actually thinking, man, do I even believe, need to be? I always had that. I always felt like, hey, man, if I'm, I need to be making decisions. I better do my homework. I better think this through. I better pay attention.

• 1:52:26Jocko Willink?

  So if you think you're incompetent, you probably aren't.

• 1:52:30Jocko Willink?

  But if you've been listening to these six straight podcasts and you've been thinking that this book is about all the incompetent leaders around you, that's a little warning sign. Be careful because if you are in that mindset where you think, man, I can't believe how jacked up all these other leaders are, but not you. Red flag. Because chances are, this is about you. And look, here's the other red flag. It's a scale, right? You brought that up. It's a, it's a, it's a continuum. And so we, all of us, even if you feel like you're pretty competent, you are under threat of being dragged to incompetency.

• 1:53:14Jocko Willink?

  So all these little, this book is just a warning sign after a warning sign after a warning sign. And by the way, it's nothing new. There's almost nothing new. There's one thing that I said, that's a new thought to me. I forget what it was. But in these 400 pages and whatever, we just did 12, 15 hours worth of podcasts. It's all, it's a rehash. It's a reinforcement of information that I already knew, that we already knew, that we talk about all the time, that we've seen in a bunch of other situations. It's a rehash, but we're all getting, you can, we can all get pulled over there. We can get pulled towards that authoritarian mindset. Cause you know why we get pulled towards the authoritarian mindset? We get pulled towards that authoritarian mindset because it seems easier.

• 1:53:58Jocko Willink?

  It seems easier to say, shut up and do what I told you to do. It seems easier to say, you know what? I'm not going to listen to that piece of information. It seems easier to do that. It seems like the right move. It seems easier to say, you know what? The competitor is never going to be able to do what we're doing. It seems easier and it's not. So you gotta get watched. You gotta watch out. You gotta pay attention. You gotta be careful. We all have to be on guard. Incompetence, incompetence is out there sort of ready to attack. It's ready to attack. And if you're not on guard, it'll grab you, it'll pull you down and you'll be making bad decisions and getting people killed or ruining your business or ruining your marriage or ruining your life through incompetence. So we have to pay attention.

• 1:54:44Jocko Willink?

  You gotta be careful. Uh, we gotta stay on the path.

• 1:54:47Speaker 01

  Yes, sir.

• 1:54:49Speaker 01

  The path.

• 1:54:50Jocko Willink?

  Speaking of which, you know. What do you got for us? How do you advise? We, we, we avoid incompetence.

• 1:54:57Speaker 01

  Avoid incompetence.

• 1:54:58Jocko Willink?

  Mental incompetence, leadership incompetence, physical incompetence. We don't want to have that. What do you got for us? Echo Charles?

• 1:55:05Speaker 01

  That was the, uh, what do you call the Dunning Kruger effect, right? That you kind of referred to where the, then the, it takes one to know and that's not necessarily true.

• 1:55:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, that it's feels like when you, you think you know everything. It's like, it's easy to know everything when you think there's only like three or four things to know. But then.

• 1:55:26Jocko Willink?

  When you start jujitsu and you're like, man, once I know how to stop that arm lock, I'll be good.

• 1:55:30Speaker 01

  Kind of be, yeah.

• 1:55:31Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Cause you got arm locked three times.

• 1:55:33Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:55:34Jocko Willink?

  By some random, you know, blue belt and you're like, oh dude, I'm gonna stop that. And then you get choked.

• 1:55:38Speaker 01

  Figured it out.

• 1:55:39Jocko Willink?

  Then you learn how to stop the choke, then you get heel hooked.

• 1:55:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, Dave.

• 1:55:41Jocko Willink?

  You learn how to stop that heel hook. Yeah, just goes on.

• 1:55:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:55:44Jocko Willink?

  Doesn't stop.

• 1:55:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, so the guy.

• 1:55:46Jocko Willink?

  Well, actually it does stop after like you get heel hooked, arm locked, Ezekiel choked, freaking, then you go, oh, there's a lot more. I don't know what I'm doing.

• 1:55:53Speaker 01

  Yes. So.

• 1:55:54Jocko Willink?

  Takes a minute to convince you of that.

• 1:55:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. So that's when you kind of, when the, it's all the Dunning Kruger effect. It's, it's essentially like, yeah, when you think you, people who are like so confident, they're the ones that know less than the people who are like not confident at all. Because they know how much there is not to know almost, you know, they have a grasp on it or whatever. Yeah. Dave, good deal, Dave, said something, I forget his exact words, but I wish I remembered it. It was something like, oh yeah, there, when he's talking about jujitsu, he was like, um, yeah, it's, it's almost like you get, you, you learn, what did he say? It's, it's almost like you get worse over time because yesterday there was only three things I didn't know. Like now, there's like 40 things I don't know, kind of thing.

• 1:56:34Jocko Willink?

  Tomorrow, there's a thousand things.

• 1:56:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:56:36Jocko Willink?

  The day that you start to look, start to feel okay is when you go, oh, there's an infinite number of things I don't know.

• 1:56:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:56:42Jocko Willink?

  I just don't know anything.

• 1:56:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:56:45Jocko Willink?

  Well, so we want to know stuff.

• 1:56:47Speaker 01

  Hey, complacency, right? Complacency, that's one of the deals. It's like your whole brain and body, but brain trying to.

• 1:56:56Speaker 01

  Trying to like be lazy. For lack of a better term, like I said before, trying to save energy, trying to save work. Like, what are you gonna do, more work or less work?

• 1:57:07Jocko Willink?

  Yup.

• 1:57:08Speaker 01

  See what I'm saying? It's like a Rubik's Cube. You're, are you good at Rubik's Cube?

• 1:57:12Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:13Speaker 01

  You are?

• 1:57:14Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:14Speaker 01

  You know the formula?

• 1:57:15Jocko Willink?

  Yep, I know, I know all the algorithms to get the sides turned up, right?

• 1:57:19Speaker 01

  That's good. Well, let's say you didn't. Well, actually.

• 1:57:21Jocko Willink?

  I'm just kidding, Ryan, I do Rubik's.

• 1:57:25Speaker 01

  That kind of surprised me when I was like, damn, okay, all right. That's like if you said you knew how to play the piano.

• 1:57:30Jocko Willink?

  But it is an algorithm.

• 1:57:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:57:32Jocko Willink?

  How to do stuff.

• 1:57:33Speaker 01

  It's like a little language, for sure.

• 1:57:34Jocko Willink?

  Little, um, steps.

• 1:57:35Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, exactly right. Like, yeah, it's a little formula, for sure. Um, but whether you know the formula or not, I would imagine that, let's say you got that thing figured out, right? But then, on one side, you got that one freaking different color on the side, just the one. You know, that's not just one move, that's like, you know, eighteen hundred moves you gotta do.

• 1:57:57Jocko Willink?

  No, not, there's like.

• 1:57:58Speaker 01

  Oh, you know the formula now?

• 1:57:59Jocko Willink?

  It was like thirteen moves, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Left, left, up, two, two, four.

• 1:58:03Speaker 01

  I would imagine it'd be like multiples of four for some reason. I don't know why I think that, but.

• 1:58:08Jocko Willink?

  Could be right, could be wrong. Here's the deal, let me ask you this. What, you know, I was the kid in, when Rubik's Cube came out, it took me like no less than, you know, fifteen minutes to figure out how to break that thing apart and reassemble it in the correct order.

• 1:58:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, and, and then, actually, that's smart to do. In a couple, it's creative, put it this way.

• 1:58:27Jocko Willink?

  That's the thing.

• 1:58:27Speaker 01

  Well, yours, yours might, I'm not saying you were creative, because I don't know, but you seem like the type, you didn't do it out of creativity, you did it just out of like brute fucking Jaco-ness.

• 1:58:39Speaker 01

  But when you break that.

• 1:58:40Jocko Willink?

  I cannot deny that I miss brute Jaco.

• 1:58:43Speaker 01

  Just like, hey, I'm gonna solve this problem the most direct way I can. But if you look at those Rubik's Cube, you take it all apart. It, the last pieces, those center pieces, kinda tell a little bit of a story.

• 1:58:56Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:56Speaker 01

  See what I'm saying?

• 1:58:57Jocko Willink?

  They're stuck there.

• 1:58:58Speaker 01

  Well, no, I think you can take him out.

• 1:58:59Jocko Willink?

  You could pop him out, but then why would you do that?

• 1:59:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, it would make less sense. Exactly right. That's what I'm saying. It take, it tells a little story there. So you're like, oh, I see, you know, then maybe, I don't know. I don't know what you'd do to then, put them, put them back together. Here's another way to do it. There are, all the colors are little stickers.

• 1:59:16Jocko Willink?

  Oh, God.

• 1:59:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. Less brute way of doing it, a little bit more sophisticated is what I'm saying.

• 1:59:21Jocko Willink?

  I don't know, till you got like glue all over your freaking hands.

• 1:59:24Speaker 01

  I didn't, I didn't say it was perfect. I didn't say it was perfect. Either way, that's the frustration. You got it all figured out.

• 1:59:30Jocko Willink?

  Rubik's cubes in seconds, by the way.

• 1:59:33Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Bro, you, you ever seen those freaking, so Rubik's cube is what? It's nine on each side, right? Bro, you ever seen those ones with like freaking like sixty-four squares on each side or whatever?

• 1:59:44Jocko Willink?

  I have not seen that.

• 1:59:45Speaker 01

  They're nuts. And guys will do them too, in like a time lapse or whatever. Nonetheless, you see my point?

• 1:59:51Jocko Willink?

  No, I have no idea what your point is.

• 1:59:53Speaker 01

  Where you think you got, you think you got things figured out in life, right? Then you get this, this one lone idea that kinda jams up your whole way of thinking. Just that one. It's way easier to take off that sticker. Or maybe just turn it to the side where you can't see that thing. See what I'm saying? It's way easier.

• 2:00:10Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 2:00:11Speaker 01

  Save way, way more energy. But the reality is, the correct thing to do is, bro, you gotta know that algorithm, the formula. It's gonna take some steps and take some more work, but at the end of the day, you're gonna have it correct. That's what I think.

• 2:00:23Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 2:00:24Speaker 01

  See what I'm saying?

• 2:00:24Jocko Willink?

  Yes, a hundred percent, bro.

• 2:00:26Speaker 01

  And that's the way you gotta think in a way. So.

• 2:00:28Jocko Willink?

  Amazing.

• 2:00:28Speaker 01

  Like, see, even, even your attitude right now is telling me that you're, you might be feeling the effects of the, the, the, what do you call it? Well, how'd you put it? Like slipping off the path.

• 2:00:39Jocko Willink?

  My mind is so close to your freaking metaphors right now. It's ridiculous.

• 2:00:44Speaker 01

  Anyway, we're working out. It's squat season. By the way, I heard apparently it's squat season. So we're, so we're, we're on the path of staying there. Hey, look, the beginning of squat season, the beginning of any physical related season. If there's any more than squat season, it's gonna be painful, especially in the beginning. If you go snowboarding, the first day of snowboarding season, that day, you're gonna have doms. You'll be sore. See what I'm saying? Anyway, my point, my point is you're gonna need some supplementation here and there, you know? It's no problem. We got some for you. Jaco has some for you. Jaco Fuel.

• 2:01:18Jocko Willink?

  That was a long rant.

• 2:01:20Speaker 01

  Let's start with the energy drinks. See, this is, this is, this is not seasonal. This is year round. Energy drink. See what I'm saying? But not the traditional energy drink. This is a health, healthy energy drink. Energy, health drink, whatever you want to call it. All upside, no downside. All healthy for you. You'll be healthier after you drink one or two. See what I'm saying?

• 2:01:41Jocko Willink?

  Yep. Uh, by the way, there's a new pre-workout.

• 2:01:44Speaker 01

  Yes, sir.

• 2:01:45Jocko Willink?

  Powder formula, which JP Denell did two dry scoops. And did the chaser of the sour apple sniper. But I did, I was talking to my daughter today and she just did her first experience on the new powder. The new go powder. And while I was talking to her, she was on the roller. Getting that C2, getting that pull on, pulling some chain out. Get that chain out.

• 2:02:15Speaker 01

  Yes, sir.

• 2:02:16Jocko Willink?

  And she was saying, as she in between breaths, that I wasn't even gonna row today. But I took the go. It freaking hit.

• 2:02:27Speaker 01

  And that is a real thing.

• 2:02:29Jocko Willink?

  That's a real thing.

• 2:02:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, and I was, and I mentioned this before offline, where I'm no stranger to the jittery pre-workout powders. Like I'm, I'm, I'm not scared of that kind of stuff. And in fact, you get the jitters or whatever, all that stuff. To me, that's no factor. And in fact, when you're like tired and the jitters hit you, I'd rather have jitters and then be fired up to work out than not have jitters and not be fired up. Right? So I'm like, I'm no, I'm not, I'm not scared of that kind of stuff. Right?

• 2:02:56Jocko Willink?

  Are jitters necessary though? That's the thing. That seems like we've discovered that we don't need them.

• 2:03:01Speaker 01

  I didn't even think about that stuff. To me, that's just what the pre-workout was. Good. I'll take all of it. Whatever, whatever. But it is and I realize this because I heard people say like, oh yeah, you drink this like tea. They'd say this about some teas like, yeah, you're up, but you're, but it's like a smooth or whatever. The smoothness or whatever. I'm like, cool, man. Smoothness. All good. Whatever. It just wasn't part of my world. Until I got the experience. So the pre-workout, I took it. My cool. The thing is I haven't been doing pre-workout for years now. So I took this one. I was like, cool. No jitters. So I'm thinking, hmm, maybe Jaco was just sort of scared of the pre-workout experience. I get it, you know, a little bit more mild. I get it, man. I get it. But when you start warming up, that's when you feel it, like that when everything starts flowing.

• 2:03:45Speaker 01

  It's like it connects your brain to your freaking body more or something. That's no, no, no, an in, an in-body experience. Nonetheless.

• 2:03:57Speaker 01

  What I'm saying is what your daughter was talking about, I understand and it's true. And yeah, I think it reeval, I had to reevaluate my whole standard of the pre-workout because I knew like the pre-workouts that I was taking, that's not good. That's why I stopped.

• 2:04:12Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:12Speaker 01

  Because I'm like, cool, it's working, but probably I know I'm jamming myself up my heart. I don't know what I'm jamming up on the inside, but I'm jamming something up. Um, and yeah, man, now, now I know the new standard. See what I'm saying?

• 2:04:25Jocko Willink?

  So you can get that. You can get your super hard workouts with a little extra kick.

• 2:04:31Speaker 01

  Yes, sir.

• 2:04:31Jocko Willink?

  Which might mean you need to protect yourself from a joint perspective a little bit more. Let's go joint warfare. Let's go super krill.

• 2:04:38Speaker 01

  That's true.

• 2:04:39Jocko Willink?

  Might as well, might as well keep your immunity in check because we're, we're starting to work hard, getting like, uh, uh, needing recovery. What? Maybe the immune system's taking a little hit. We'll get a little boost from some Cold War, some vitamin D three. Kind of got you covered.

• 2:04:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, when you kind of like go down the list, you kind of like, it's a whole system, really. And it's, and it's not the kind of like, uh, like, I don't want to say useless because I don't want to like put, put that kind of stigma on other types of supplements, but it's like a whole system to, to stay very solidly like on the path.

• 2:05:15Jocko Willink?

  And then you get on them because we know we're kind of in squat season, apparently. But then, and then you can be in squat season, which means you might want to get on board the milk train.

• 2:05:24Speaker 01

  Yes, sir.

• 2:05:25Jocko Willink?

  Cause you're going to need to he-build.

• 2:05:27Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:05:28Jocko Willink?

  From your activities.

• 2:05:29Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:05:30Jocko Willink?

  Squativities.

• 2:05:31Speaker 01

  So I

• 2:05:33Speaker 01

  squat activities. Hell, yeah. I ate two steaks the other day.

• 2:05:38Jocko Willink?

  Concurrently, like why?

• 2:05:39Speaker 01

  In one meal, in one meal, two steaks brown rice.

• 2:05:42Jocko Willink?

  Because why wouldn't you just have one big steak?

• 2:05:45Speaker 01

  Uh, they were two medium steaks.

• 2:05:47Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 2:05:48Speaker 01

  I don't know, that's the size you buy at the store.

• 2:05:49Jocko Willink?

  Okay, okay, okay, got it, got it, yeah.

• 2:05:51Speaker 01

  I mean, maybe I could have went to the, what do you got, the butcher?

• 2:05:54Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:54Speaker 01

  You know, and give me, that didn't happen.

• 2:05:57Jocko Willink?

  Right, how many ounces were you thinking?

• 2:05:59Speaker 01

  Uh, what's the medium, regular one? You know, you have the thin one, the ribeyes, right? You have the thin ribeyes, then you have the super, those super fat ones that you get from the guy behind the counter, and then you have the regular medium ones, right?

• 2:06:10Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, two of those.

• 2:06:10Speaker 01

  Two of the mediums, yes, yes, which was a lot normally and just have one. So I'm like, cool, I needed some additional protein, that's why. Came home late, didn't eat all day, I was only having one meal, so I needed to double up on the protein, had to.

• 2:06:23Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:06:23Speaker 01

  See what I'm saying? Brown rice, but can't be doing that every day, see what I'm saying? I'm just saying it's not convenient.

• 2:06:29Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and also, let's face it, when you get done, you still, or at least I, even with Los Dos Ribeyes?

• 2:06:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:06:37Jocko Willink?

  I can still get done with two ribeyes, marbled, tasty, ah, good to go.

• 2:06:42Speaker 01

  Marbled to perfection.

• 2:06:43Jocko Willink?

  And you can still get done, I can still get done and want to have dessert.

• 2:06:47Speaker 01

  Yes, sir.

• 2:06:48Jocko Willink?

  Now, what am I gonna have for dessert? Could I have something that is, negates my physical progress? I could, or I could just have milk.

• 2:06:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's one more step forward even.

• 2:07:00Jocko Willink?

  Oh, man, so good, once it hits the lips, bro.

• 2:07:06Jocko Willink?

  It's so good.

• 2:07:07Speaker 01

  Thank you, Jaco, for the lips thing.

• 2:07:10Jocko Willink?

  Uh, that's from a movie, you should have picked up on that, you not pick up on that?

• 2:07:13Speaker 01

  No, bro, all I got is the imagery of your lips.

• 2:07:17Jocko Willink?

  That's, uh, Frank the Tank, man, in, what movie is it, K-Dog?

• 2:07:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, Old School.

• 2:07:22Jocko Willink?

  Old School, yeah, he's talking about beer, like a beer funnel, what is it called, a beer funnel, is that right?

• 2:07:27Speaker 01

  Beer.

• 2:07:28Jocko Willink?

  Beer bong, yeah, beer bong. It's so good, once it hits the lip, that's kinda like milk, it's the same feeling. It's so good, once it hits the lips, you just.

• 2:07:37Speaker 01

  Yes, sir, same thing, I understand fully. Uh, you ever eat, uh, bison ribeye, did I ask you that already?

• 2:07:43Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:07:43Speaker 01

  Bro, I think that's the new thing, get a grass-fed bison ribeye, smaller, but, bro, it's kinda legit.

• 2:07:49Jocko Willink?

  Well, actually, the thing, you know, over at other people's houses right now is actually elk.

• 2:07:57Speaker 01

  Alright, alright.

• 2:07:58Jocko Willink?

  That's right.

• 2:07:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, elk is good.

• 2:08:00Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, out there just. You know, you know exactly where it came from.

• 2:08:05Speaker 01

  Just elk in it up.

• 2:08:06Jocko Willink?

  Yup.

• 2:08:07Speaker 01

  Alright.

• 2:08:07Jocko Willink?

  You were there at the moment of truth.

• 2:08:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, did it. Good, good. Yes. So, in the event of you not having elk in your freezer, as the case may be, uh, from your hunt, as the case may be, or double ribeyes at any given moment, or bison steak.

• 2:08:25Jocko Willink?

  Right.

• 2:08:26Speaker 01

  You want some additional protein, milk train all day.

• 2:08:28Jocko Willink?

  Milk train. Hey, you can get all this stuff at jockofuel.com. If you subscribe to it, the shipping's free. You can get the drinks at Wawa. You can get all, all of it at Vitamin Shop. We appreciate those, those stores carrying this stuff, cause look, you might want to roll in there.

• 2:08:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:08:44Jocko Willink?

  Roll in there. Roll in a Wawa. Get yourself a hoagie and a go.

• 2:08:50Speaker 01

  I didn't really know what a hoagie was, by the way.

• 2:08:52Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:52Speaker 01

  Is that a east coast thing or what?

• 2:08:53Jocko Willink?

  Yes, yes. There's a whole bunch of names for that particular subway sandwich.

• 2:08:58Speaker 01

  Sub sandwich.

• 2:08:59Jocko Willink?

  Sub sandwich. What, you know what we used to call it where I'm from, grinder. Have you ever heard that before? It would be called a grinder. My wife, who's from England, would call it a bap. B A P.

• 2:09:11Speaker 01

  I for sure have not heard that.

• 2:09:12Jocko Willink?

  Yup, so. There's some other ones I think we're missing. Oh, poor boy, po boy.

• 2:09:16Speaker 01

  Poor, po boy.

• 2:09:17Jocko Willink?

  Po boy. That's another one. So there's, there's some names out there.

• 2:09:19Speaker 01

  Alright, hoagie.

• 2:09:20Jocko Willink?

  Uh, yup.

• 2:09:21Speaker 01

  All day.

• 2:09:21Jocko Willink?

  Meanwhile.

• 2:09:22Speaker 01

  Also, also, Origin USA, this is American made stuff. Look, you get, look, our health is together. We know that already. We're staying on the path. It's not, don't get complacent on the path. We're staying on the path, right?

• 2:09:32Jocko Willink?

  Yup.

• 2:09:33Speaker 01

  Look, you want, as far as apparel goes, we all wear clothes, hopefully. Well, maybe, we wear clothes. We'll say that. Let's just say that. Look, we want some, uh, iconic, American made attire, denim jeans. Boots. Some shirts. Some other leather wallets, belts, this kind of stuff. What if it was all made in America?

• 2:09:56Jocko Willink?

  Oh, it is. Origin USA, by the way, but you want that bison steak? Cool. How about the bison boots?

• 2:10:02Speaker 01

  Boom, boom, there you go. Oh, yeah. Made in America.

• 2:10:05Jocko Willink?

  Supple leather. Have you ever heard me use the term supple before?

• 2:10:07Speaker 01

  I think I did one, one time and it was very uncomfortable.

• 2:10:10Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I'm going to use it again right now, describing some bison boots, which are supple.

• 2:10:15Speaker 01

  Alright, there you go. You heard it here, bro. But yes, but everything made in America, from the, from the materials, the raw materials, grown in America, everything, all the way up to the jeans you're wearing on your.

• 2:10:27Jocko Willink?

  And so you're good 24 hours a day because you got also because we're training jujitsu. You got your jujutsu gi, you got a rift gi, you're never going to get another kind of gi again.

• 2:10:36Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. So the whole system is accounted for right here. Seems like it's true. OriginUSA.com also Jaco's store. So now you want to go into straight up representing on the path. Like a choice, a conscious choice to represent.

• 2:10:52Jocko Willink?

  Right. Is there a psychological hit that you get when you were a little kid? You got new sneakers, running a little bit faster.

• 2:11:01Speaker 01

  Yes, sir.

• 2:11:01Jocko Willink?

  Where on the path, we put on a freaking T-shirt that says discipline equals freedom. Do we go a little bit harder in the paint?

• 2:11:09Speaker 01

  Yes, we do. And here's the thing, that sounds like, oh, that's kind of like funny or whatever. But it's absolutely true. And here's the thing, do an experiment, a scientific experiment. Wear a shirt or hoodie or whatever says discipline equals freedom. Look in the mirror and eat a cookie. See how, I'm not saying you're not going to be able to eat the cookies. I'm not saying that.

• 2:11:27Jocko Willink?

  It's going to be harder for sure.

• 2:11:29Speaker 01

  Way harder. Yes. Oh, yeah. So now if you're just in your everyday life, but you're representing. But the chances of you slipping off the path, even for that moment.

• 2:11:38Jocko Willink?

  I actually feel bad. We haven't put this word out before because this is important.

• 2:11:43Jocko Willink?

  It is kind of important.

• 2:11:44Speaker 01

  It is. Yes, sir. It's true. It's absolutely true. So it just sort of applies. Like if you're just representing in general, in general, it's just that much more efficient way of staying on the path. That's what I'm saying. And let's face it, you see somebody else representing, you're representing this. The cohesion, bro.

• 2:11:58Jocko Willink?

  Now we're even stronger together.

• 2:12:00Speaker 01

  Together. Also, the shirt locker, this is a part of Jaco's store. It's a part. Choose to sign up for shirt locker, you get a new shirt every month with, did you change the word? Creative designs? You said something.

• 2:12:12Jocko Willink?

  Well, now they're actually badass because the new one that just came out is, and it's new. It's like a new scenario. It's a tank.

• 2:12:23Jocko Willink?

  There's kettlebells flying off, which I noticed.

• 2:12:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, you did run into the kettlebell.

• 2:12:27Jocko Willink?

  There's kettlebells like flying through the air. I'm riding this tank sort of in a aggressive hostile kind of way, wearing a Defqor t-shirt, t-shirt, which I'm wearing right now, by the way. Maybe I just dismounted my tank and showed up here to do this podcast.

• 2:12:40Speaker 01

  Two machine guns.

• 2:12:41Jocko Willink?

  Two machine guns.

• 2:12:42Speaker 01

  And the tank is an M1 Abrams tank, by the way. So yeah, very good depiction.

• 2:12:49Jocko Willink?

  But it looks like a comic book thing. That's what made it. It's kind of a dope thing.

• 2:12:52Speaker 01

  Yep, it's true.

• 2:12:52Jocko Willink?

  I commend your, your, uh, your work there. Commended.

• 2:12:56Speaker 01

  The, um, the bad news is that was last month's shirt. Or this past month's shirt. The good news is when you're signed up for shirt longer, I don't care if you sign up next year, you can still get that shirt if you want. You have access to that shirt if you, if you signed up. So boom, no worries. Anyway. Yeah. JacoStore.com. You want to represent? Boom. That's where you can get the stuff to represent.

• 2:13:19Jocko Willink?

  Speaking of subscrib. Subscribe to this podcast. Don't forget about Unraveling Podcast, Grounded Podcast, Warrior Kid Podcast. I got asked by kids at Jaco Live, which by the way, is Jaco Live in Austin. Saturday night. Austin, Texas, November 20th. So if you want to come to that and ask me questions or hang out or listen to me talk, come check that out. But also Warrior Kid Podcast. We also have Jaco Underground, which again, we, we have contingency plans. We were recently, we were recently shadow banned. Shadow banned. Yep, we got shadow banned on Instagram. You know, people going, why? Why'd you get shadow banned?

• 2:14:02Jocko Willink?

  That's the problem. We don't know why. We have some suspicions. We're going to talk about it on the Underground. I'm going to explain the reasons why I think the shadow ban might have come. I've been on shadow banned now, apparently. We have information.

• 2:14:19Jocko Willink?

  We do have information. We've got troopers in, in. Let's just say we have place access, something we call access and placement. We have people, so we will hopefully not let that happen again, but look, it can happen. And that's why we made Jaco Underground in case mayhem happens, in case we get locked down. We don't control these platforms that you're listening to this on. We do control Jaco Underground.com. If you want to help support us, it costs $8.18 a month because we appreciate that support to have that contingency plan set up. We make an extra podcast, Jaco Underground. We talk about other subjects adjacent to this.

• 2:14:59Jocko Willink?

  The one that's about to come out is actually explaining why I think we, why I think I got shadow banned and a little behind the information. So you can check that out if you want. Go to Jaco Underground.com. If you can't afford it, we still want, we're still like, you're still with us. If you can't afford that $8.18 a month, just email [email protected] and we'll get you access to it. We have a YouTube channel.

• 2:15:23Jocko Willink?

  You can subscribe to that, subscribe to Origin USA YouTube channel for some behind the scenes. We got an album called Psychological Warfare. If you need a little help in a moment of weakness.

• 2:15:35Jocko Willink?

  And look, we could make an album where you have a moment of weakness and we press the track. And it's Echo talking about a Rubik's Cube for 15 minutes with no logical meaning behind it.

• 2:15:47Speaker 01

  That part's incorrect. Very much logic, yes.

• 2:15:49Jocko Willink?

  But we did, we didn't do that. Maybe we'll do that at some point. People that, people that have more time to overcome their weakness. But if you want to get that, go to wherever you get MP3s, you can get Psychological Warfare. I am the artist. Cause it says artist's name.

• 2:16:06Speaker 01

  Jaco.

• 2:16:06Jocko Willink?

  Jaco. So there you go. Flipside Canvas.

• 2:16:11Jocko Willink?

  Dakota Meyer making just awesome stuff. He started a distribution company, by the way, is in, in Texas. I'm investing in his beverage distribution company. He started going out proactively delivering Jaco Go to various stores. And now he's got people ordering it.

• 2:16:27Speaker 01

  Bro, that's an anti authoritarianistic mind.

• 2:16:31Jocko Willink?

  Freaking Dakota Meyer. He's gonna make things happen. He doesn't, whatever. Who's in, what, there's someone in the way? Cool. I just outmaneuvered them. Oh, there's some distribution company that didn't want to make the connection? Oh, cool. Dakota Meyer is just in a truck. Making it happen. I think he signed up forty stores right now.

• 2:16:50Speaker 01

  My man.

• 2:16:51Jocko Willink?

  Well, hey, hey, what's going on? Oh, I'll figure this out, make it happen.

• 2:16:57Jocko Willink?

  So there you go. He's also got, he's also selling stuff to hang on your wall. Flipsidecanvas.com. Go and order something cool there. Got some books, Final Spin.

• 2:17:07Jocko Willink?

  It's out right now. It's, we don't even know what it is. Novel, poem. We know that it brings tears to JP Denell. JP Denell crying in the flame, crying in public.

• 2:17:19Jocko Willink?

  Check that out. Leadership Strategy Tactics Field Manual, Code Evaluation Protocol, Discipline with Freedom Field Manual. Way the Warrior Kid, one, two, three, four. Get the freaking books for your kids, or kids as you know.

• 2:17:30Jocko Willink?

  It's sort of. If you have the ability to get those books for some kid that you know, and you don't, you are, you're not a good person. You're not a good person. If you know a kid and you don't get them those books, you're not, you're hurting those kids. This is factual. So, whatever. I know I've, I've met some really cool people lately. I met someone down at the muster, jiu-jitsu. Jiu-jitsu player. He's like, oh yeah, I carry, I carry Way the Warrior Kid in my bag. Any kid that I meet, they're getting it. He's just helping kids worldwide. So, do that. Put it in your bag, carry it around. You see a kid, you go, hey kid, here you go.

• 2:18:15Jocko Willink?

  Imagine that. You can influence the rest of someone's life by doing that. So, Way the Warrior Kid, one, two, three. Mike and the Dragons. Apparently the best, uh, what age group is that? Little kids. What do you call them? Little kids.

• 2:18:29Speaker 01

  Like post-tot, I don't know. I don't know what they're called.

• 2:18:31Jocko Willink?

  That age group, picture book level. Yeah. Yep. Mike and the Dragons. Get your kids, get kids to overcome fear.

• 2:18:41Jocko Willink?

  Hackworth About Face. Wrote the foreword to that. It was an honor. And then, of course, Extreme Ownership and the Dichotomy of Leadership. And we have Echelon Front Leadership Consultancy. Myself and my brother Leif Babin. We started that. Now we got a big bunch of team, a big team of people. And what we do is solve problems through leadership. The solution is leadership. Whatever's going on in your organization, the solution is leadership. Go to echelonfront.com for details on that. You can also check out some of our live events. The muster, field training exercises. EF Battlefield. Next muster is Dallas, Texas, March 24th and 25th. We got Jaco live in Austin. Saturday night. November 20th.

• 2:19:26Jocko Willink?

  Come and check it out. We have online training. Extreme Ownership Academy. You do not learn any of this stuff overnight. You have to train in it, just like jujitsu, just like playing guitar, just like shooting basketball. You need to train continually. Go to extremeownership.com to get your leadership skills honed. And if you want to help service members, active and retired, their families, Gold Star families, Mark Lee's mom, Mama Lee. She's got a charity organization. If you want to donate or you want to get involved, go to AmericasMightyWarriors.org. And if you want more of my excruciating explanations,

• 2:20:06Jocko Willink?

  or you need more of Echo's convoluted connections to Rubik's Cube. Well, Echo is at Echo Charles. I am at Jocko Willink. And to all the troops out there around the world, standing watch, keeping us safe. Thank you for your service and sacrifice. And to our police and law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, Border Patrol, Secret Service, and all first responders. Thank you for your service here at home to keep us safe. And everyone else out there, maybe asked yourself that question if you are possibly incompetent. And I hope you're not. But how do you avoid being incompetent?

• 2:20:50Jocko Willink?

  Number one lesson from this book, it's something that we talk about all the time. Be humble. Listen. Don't think you know everything.

• 2:21:00Jocko Willink?

  Because you don't.

• 2:21:03Jocko Willink?

  Be humble, keep an open mind. The thing that traps your mind. The thing that traps your mind. Is your mind.

• 2:21:15Jocko Willink?

  So pry it open. Keep it open. And go get after it. And until next time, this is Echo and Jaco. Out.