348: Don't Be Careful. Careful Kills. With Peter Maguire. Author, Professor, Surfer, and Black Belt.

Peter Maguire. Professor, Author, surfer, Jiu Jitsu Black Belt. 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 348 with Echo Charles and me, Jocko Willink. Good evening, Echo. Good evening. "We are turning our society upside down," one Khmer Rouge officer told a Newsweek reporter "in the weeks after the revolution. 'The people of Phnom Penh will grow rice,' he said, and almost as an afterthought, added, 'they will work or starve.'" By early May 1975, the Khmer Rouge were implementing one of the most radical political plans of the 20th century: a peasant revolution with a punitive edge. Buddhist monks were made to plow fields. Pagodas were turned into killing centers.

• 0:42Jocko Willink?

  Cham Muslims, a religious minority, were force-fed pork. Cambodia's National Library was converted into a pigsty.

• 0:52Jocko Willink?

  In Pol Pot's Democratic Campuchia, books were used to start fires. "It was more about revenge," recalled one Cambodian.

• 1:03Jocko Willink?

  All private property, even money, was abolished in this ultra-great leap forward.

• 1:11Jocko Willink?

  The early accounts of life under the Khmer Rouge came from Cambodian refugees who escaped to Thailand. At first, they sounded too bizarre to be true, as if George Orwell had written them to satirize life under a dictatorship of the proletariat, a place where parents feared their children and civilians were slaughtered in numbers and for reasons unimaginable since Stalin's Purges or Hitler's Third Reich.

• 1:38Jocko Willink?

  Survivors described a system of slave labor: communes where men, women, and children toiled like human water buffalo under the watchful eye of the mysterious and all-powerful leadership cabal known only as Angar. They lived in perpetual fear.

• 2:00Jocko Willink?

  The CIA held little hope for America's former allies and educated Cambodians. Quote, "Executions are reported widespread and in many cases, members of the entire family of former government officials or soldiers are executed along with the heads of the family." Almost all executions occur in the same manner. Several communist cadres beat the person to death with ho handles or other blunt instruments. End quote. Not only did the Khmer Rouge eliminate family life, they made sex before marriage a capital offense.

• 2:41Jocko Willink?

  Khmer Rouge survivor Yuc Chang remembered watching two young lovers beaten to death in front of his entire commune. "In a larger sense, the Khmer Rouge were threatened by all expressions of love between husband and wife, parents and children, friends and colleagues," observes Elizabeth Becker. One Khmer Rouge survivor is still haunted by his mother's final words. "You have to learn how to live without me." Lang Thirth, Khmer Rouge Minister of Culture and Social Affairs, stated, quote, "Only

• 3:21Jocko Willink?

  children can purely serve the revolution and eliminate reactionism, since they are young, obedient, loyal, and active." End quote. So, that right there is a little excerpt from a book called Facing Death in Cambodia. It's written by a man named Peter Maguire. And Peter has also written about the Nuremberg Trials, about the treatment of Nazi war criminals. But his focus has not always been on war or genocide.

• 4:04Jocko Willink?

  He actually has a pretty significant dichotomy in his life. Peter Maguire grew up a surfer in Southern California.

• 4:12Jocko Willink?

  That led to chasing the mythical endless summer that many surfers pursue. And he funded that chase by drug smuggling. Eventually, he left that life for academia, where he received his doctorate in history. Along the way, he became a jujitsu practitioner. He's a historian, an author, a defense contractor, college professor, and he's lived an extremely multifaceted life. And it is a privilege to have Peter Maguire here with us tonight to share some of his experiences and some of his lessons learned.

• 4:56Speaker 01

  Well, thank you for having me.

• 4:57Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, thanks for coming out. I guess, how did you and I originally connect?

• 5:04Speaker 01

  Surfers Journal. I interviewed you.

• 5:06Jocko Willink?

  But how did you, did you just reach out somehow?

• 5:09Speaker 01

  Through Ivan, I think.

• 5:10Jocko Willink?

  Through Ivan, man. So Ivan Trent is a, is a former SEAL. And the, the reason I knew about Ivan Trent, well, when I got to, on my first deployment, I was on my first deployment, I went to Guam and I walk in to like the headquarters area and there's a picture hanging on the wall of a guy dropping in on a giant wave, big Hawaiian wave, and it's signed, you know, it says, you know, some cool quote, Ivan Trent. And I'm like, hmm, that's interesting. Well, it's Buzzy Trent's kid and Buzzy, Buzzy Trent is one of the iconic guys that opened up big wave surfing for the world. And his son was a SEAL.

• 5:52Jocko Willink?

  And so you did an article about, how did you know Ivan?

• 5:57Speaker 01

  I knew Ivan through the combat rescue boat that I did with George Greeno. And so Ivan, our fathers surfed together in, you know, Malibu in the 50s. And so, um, yeah, and so I reached out to Ivan and he was our greatest help and a true ally and we became great friends. And I stayed with him in Virginia Beach whenever I went there and would have to do jujitsu with his son on the, on the carpet. I think his son might train here. And, uh, and then his little chihuahua dog would try to hump my leg. And yeah, so Ivan has chihuahuas.

• 6:36Jocko Willink?

  That's, uh, speaking of dichotomy, there you go. Well, let, let, let's get into it. And just let's go through kind of how you ended up here because you have been on a wild ride. I mean,

• 6:48Speaker 01

  A little bit.

• 6:49Jocko Willink?

  Relatively speaking, your life's been a wild ride. So you're born in 1964. Tell us about your, tell us about your mom and dad.

• 6:59Speaker 01

  Um, my mother was, uh, one of the first women screenwriters in, uh, in Hollywood. Joan Tewksbury, she wrote Robert Altman's Nashville, among other things. She was actually the ostrich in Mary Martin's Peter Pan on Broadway. She was, uh, a child, kind of Shirley Temple in Hollywood, grew up in Hollywood. And my father, um, was the son of a famous pilot, uh, Robert McGuire, who ran operations Magic Carpet and operations Alibaba, flying Yemenites in concentration camp survivors to Israel. So at 14, my father was a mechanic's assistant in Tel Aviv Airport.

• 7:43Speaker 01

  He was flying missions with my grandfather. He was flying at 14. I think it wasn't DC3s, but it was one of those big silver.

• 7:52Jocko Willink?

  Well, how did that, how did that happen?

• 7:55Speaker 01

  Um, my grandfather was a pilot in World War II and then Alaskan Airlines was hired to, uh, to resettle Jews in Israel. So that's originally how he got involved, but then Alaskan Airways pulled out and he set up a company called Far Eastern Air Transport. And, uh, flew a remarkable number of hours, uh, in a short amount of time. And, uh, Ben Gurion called them, uh, the Irish Moses. And the last chapter of, of Leon Yeris's Exodus is called the King Crab King. And that was my grandfather who lived at Rincon, right at the indicator.

• 8:36Speaker 01

  And so, so my dad was a real wild guy. He died about a year ago and he, so, you know, he gets, goes to Tel Aviv, his mother, their parents are divorced. She finds out that he's being raised by wolves in the Middle East. So they send him to a fancy French boarding school. He

• 8:55Jocko Willink?

  So this is your dad.

• 8:56Speaker 01

  My dad. And so then he gets to the

• 8:59Jocko Willink?

  So, so hold on. So your dad's mom realizes that your kid is, that your dad is like a feral child.

• 9:05Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 9:07Jocko Willink?

  Running missions.

• 9:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:08Jocko Willink?

  And says, we're gonna get him the hell out of there.

• 9:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:11Jocko Willink?

  We're gonna take him and send him to a French boarding school.

• 9:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so they send him there and the French couple that was supposed to be taking care of him, took the money and ran. And so he and an older kind of French nobleman whose parents had been killed in the Holocaust, said, let's not tell anybody. And so they basically ran away and spent the better part of a year riding bikes around France, going to Nice, going to the hookers, going to the whole shebang. And then he moved to California after that and there was no hope for Southern California. And so he became one of the biggest, uh, real estate developers in Los Angeles. He built Play Vista and much of the skyline and, uh,

• 9:54Speaker 01

  they called him the cat with ten lives. And so it was a boom or bust life, like, you know, up one day and then, hey, kids, we're moving and you're going back to public school. So, in my DNA, I knew the only thing that couldn't be taken away from me was an education. I knew there would be no inheritance, nothing. And he went public in, I think, two thousand eight, two thousand nine, had a billion dollars cash. And, uh, then bet it all on black and, uh,

• 10:32Speaker 01

  basically bought the Blackstone Group's real estate portfolio two weeks before the subprime crisis and lost it all. And so, uh, he passed away about a year ago and, uh, inherited a few lawsuits. And so.

• 10:49Jocko Willink?

  That's what you got out of.

• 10:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, but he was a classic guy, you know, and, and, uh, and so, you know, I just, big things were expected of you as a kid. I mean, my grandpa had, they, we always had boats and if Ventura, my grandpa lived in the Ventura Keys and if Ventura Harbor was closing out, well, that was a good day to take out the boat. Like, let's punch through. Yeah, yeah. And like, so that was not anything out of the ordinary for me. And so when I first took my job, uh, I got my PhD at Columbia. My PhD advisor was Brigadier General Telford Taylor, the Chief Prosecutor at Nuremberg. And I had friends who had set up a nonprofit

• 11:32Speaker 01

  to collect the photographs taken at Toolslang Prison, the Khmer Rouge's central torture and execution facility. Roughly 20,000 went in, roughly 20 survived. Everyone got their picture taken. So they were preserving the negatives and the photographic record. At that time, the Khmer Rouge was still a major force to be reckoned with.

• 11:56Jocko Willink?

  So this is what?

• 11:57Speaker 01

  This is 93, 94. So I go there in early 94 and it's very volatile. The UN has this incredibly absurd, um, occupation where they treat the, uh, you know, neutrality is the sacred principle. So it's the, it's the UN's model that goes wrong in the 90s. So the Khmer Rouge are a lot, you know, allowed to run in the election. They're treated, you know, there's no accountability. There's, you know, Khmer Rouge killed roughly, you know, we think 2 million out of 10 million in.

• 12:32Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's like a quarter of the population of Cambodia.

• 12:34Speaker 01

  In three years, 10 months, 20 days, most of them, you know, with a, with an aux cart, a handle, uh, axle to the back of the head. And, uh, no accountability. When the Khmer Rouge falls in early 79. Thailand, China, Singapore, the US, all back them. And so then Pol Pot at Al become freedom fighters. And so, um, so it's just too bizarre. You couldn't make it up. And so there's absolutely no accountability. And I knew from my Nuremberg researches, the only thing in that kind of situation, an unresolved conflict,

• 13:16Speaker 01

  still fighting going on, um, is historical accountability, is preserving the empirical evidence of the crimes. So that was very important to me. Also was building the chains of command from the bloodstained butcher, who's usually the scapegoat. It's easy to, to try Lindy England or these kind of people and, uh, the garden variety, you know, sort of perpetrator. But to move up to the chain, the food chain like they did at Nuremberg, to get the shot callers, policymakers. That's what I was more interested in, the senior leaders. And, um, so that was my goal. I also wanted to link them to their, uh, their masters, the Chinese government.

• 13:59Speaker 01

  Because, you know, this was, uh, a Chinese sponsored affair. Um, there were Chinese advisors throughout Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge years. And the Chinese have never copped to it. And they still, we didn't support the, the bad policies and, you know, and they, I was there when Zheng Jia main came for the first time. And we went to the press conference and, and one of my friends from the Wall Street Journal said, what about accountability? What do you say to the Cambodians? And, and he just started screaming at him and went, no! And stormed off the podium. And I went, wow, this is, this is a different kind of press, uh, conference than I've ever been to.

• 14:40Speaker 01

  Um, so that was my initial foray was, you know, with these photographs, finding the survivors. But then I was able to find the perpetrators. And I worked with, um, a pretty remarkable guy named Sak Sin, who was, uh, he said, um, uh,

• 14:58Speaker 01

  I'm remarkable survivor and I use the weapon of the mouth. And, and I said, how did you survive the Khmer Rouge? She goes, I worked harder than any man and I sang revolutionary songs louder than any man. Played the game. Yeah, and so Sock Sin was a rough guy. And he, you know, started as a pedicab driver. And one of the guards at the hotel that was the fancy hotel, the press stayed would whip him with a chain because he'd be too aggressive. So the chain that blocked the driveway, he'd whip Sock Sin with. So every time Sock Sin got a new car, he would pull it up to that same guard who'd been there for 20 years, guarding that gate, honk the horn and wave at him.

• 15:38Speaker 01

  And so Sock Sin taught me a lot about Cambodia, probably just driving around with him. I learned as much as, you know, and, and he would see two young lovers on a motorcycle. And, and he was like, I cannot look. And I'd say, why? He goes, he goes, I miss that. I, I didn't get that in my life, like too painful, too painful. And it was just amazing what those people went through. And, you know, one of my students, a professor now named So Paul Ear, his parents were sort of elite Cambodians. They pushed their Mercedes out because the Khmer Rouge came in April 17th, 1975. They said, oh, we're just leaving for a little while.

• 16:18Speaker 01

  The American bombers are coming, you know, we're just, so they're pushing their Mercedes, right? And one of the kids gets separated, never sees him again. And then the father dies, the men always die, the women survive. The Cambodian women kept that society together. Very similarly how the, the southern women did after the civil war and, but much more extreme. Anyway, they go to one of those horrible rice gulags where, you know, they're barely given enough calories to survive. And they announce, okay, any Vietnamese, we're going to allow out, but you have to take this Vietnamese language exam.

• 17:01Speaker 01

  You fail that exam, you die. And so she had had Vietnamese maids. So they coached her, got her Vietnamese back up to speed. She passed the exam. So now they go to a refugee camp in Vietnam. She finds a phone book and I don't know how, starts dialing numbers in Paris, gets a sponsor. Um, they family gets to go to Paris. She works as a seamstress. Then she finds out she has a relative in San Jose or Oakland. They come to the United States. She makes sure that she gets a fake address in the best school district in San Francisco. Makes her kids take the bus, two hours each way.

• 17:47Speaker 01

  Every one of those kids today, doctor, PhD, you know? Those are the immigrants we want, right?

• 17:55Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, no, we just, uh, we just, we just did another podcast and we were talking to, um, talking about some Vietnam, Vietnamese immigrants that came over after the war that had gotten out. And it was the same story for all of them. They'd all worked so hard.

• 18:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:13Jocko Willink?

  And all their kids ended up just, you know, doctors, uh, you know, engineers, just the whole nine yards. And because education was so highly valued for them after they were able to get out of Vietnam. And after, you know, basically everyone that they knew that stayed back was murdered.

• 18:28Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 18:29Jocko Willink?

  Um, awful, just awful how that, how that unfolded. Uh, let, let's rewind a little bit. We kind of jumped straight into Cambodia, but you took a strange path to get to Cambodia too.

• 18:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:42Jocko Willink?

  Uh, so you're born in 1964.

• 18:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:47Jocko Willink?

  That's kind of a cool time to be growing up. And you grew up where? In Malibu?

• 18:52Speaker 01

  Malibu, Pacific Palisades. Yeah, Santa Monica Canyon.

• 18:55Jocko Willink?

  So this is like 19, you're, what, what time did you start? How old were you when you started going down to Malibu by yourself and surfing all day? Which I'm sure you must have done all the time.

• 19:05Speaker 01

  Well, we had a house, um, in Carpinteria and then my grandpa lived at Rincon. So we were going to Santa Barbara pretty much.

• 19:13Jocko Willink?

  Like on the Rincon little point there?

• 19:15Speaker 01

  The cinder block wall at the indicator. And that's how I met George Guarino. You know, I was about 10 years old. And so I had a charmed life. I could go surf the Bixby Ranch and drive in. And um, the Channel Islands. And I had a very charmed, I was, you know, I was a privileged kid and uh, and you know, Malibu, I lived in the colony as a very little kid, then we moved away, but I still knew all those guys. So then I lifeguarded in Malibu Colony, which was quite a, quite an experience, but we were bad.

• 19:49Jocko Willink?

  So this is now the, so this is now what, the seventies? When do you, when did you graduate from high school?

• 19:52Speaker 01

  Uh, eighty-three. Eighty-three and I was start, like you said, going to Malibu with the older guys. Smoking weed in the back of the pickup. You know, probably thirteen.

• 20:05Jocko Willink?

  What kind of music were you listening to?

• 20:07Speaker 01

  Uh, Led Zeppelin and uh, Cream and uh, yeah, that, you know, some Eagles, but yeah. And um, but yeah, we were bad and we were like free range children. All our parents were divorced. Um, very permissive time. I mean, there was, uh, especially in Malibu bizarre, like uh, one of our friend's mothers had a primal scream room. That you like walked through a giant vagina to get into. And uh, just bizarre.

• 20:40Jocko Willink?

  Wait, what's a primal scream? You'd have to expand on this one, bro.

• 20:43Speaker 01

  You go in this.

• 20:44Jocko Willink?

  I'm not familiar.

• 20:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, you go in this room and you scream, ah, and you let it all out. And uh, and then there was, you know, there was, there was uh, orgies and this kind of stuff.

• 20:55Jocko Willink?

  So what are your parents doing at this point?

• 20:56Speaker 01

  My mom was making her way in Hollywood and my dad was.

• 21:00Jocko Willink?

  Were they together?

• 21:01Speaker 01

  No, they, that.

• 21:02Jocko Willink?

  And who are you living with?

• 21:03Speaker 01

  I lived with my mom till I was uh, about ten. And then she knew I needed a dad and uh, put me with my dad. And my dad was a hard ass. Like I was bad and uh, And he kinda, he had a thing where he would wake you up at five in the morning. And then he'd say, come downstairs, we need to talk. And, uh, and he was always the throw weight in all the union stuff in LA. Cause he owned all the buildings. So what he did with labor was how the, how the strikes went, everything, and he usually sided with labor. And so he would, um, sit you down and he would just inventory the litany of your sins. That you didn't think, you thought you were getting away with everything, right?

• 21:47Speaker 01

  And, and it was so startling. And, uh, and then he would just hand you, okay, this, uh, yeah, this address. You need to be down there tomorrow morning at five. And it was the AFL CIO Local 300.

• 22:01Jocko Willink?

  So you're going to get some.

• 22:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, Union Hall. And, uh, so he made me work as a union laborer on the high rises, but little did he know. My, my, you know, this was the punishment job and it was a graveyard shift, 11 nights to six in the morning. But I worked with all, uh, Daryl Strawberry's family. So my marijuana empire expanded exponentially because back then. The, there was green, there was green pot in the winter and brown pot in the summer and, you know, and Thai. And the inner city LA couldn't get any of it. No one dared, you know, no white boys dared go down there. And so I did. And, uh, um, I go down, I'd go to Venice.

• 22:44Speaker 01

  Cause I knew some guys from the Venice gangs through athletics. And then I would go down to Crenshaw area with those guys. And I write about that in my book, Thai Stick. And then, um, yeah, and then I got, I got busted when I was 19.

• 22:59Jocko Willink?

  So, hold on. So, so it seems like your dad, I mean, you, your dad owns all these buildings. What, what's, what's getting you to, you, you, you had to have looked at that even as a 15, 16, 17 year old and said, hey, man, my dad's doing all right. I, I can probably figure out some kind of a livelihood by working with my dad. But how do you end up getting in the pop business?

• 23:22Speaker 01

  Um, I, I don't know. I just did. It was easy. It was right in front of me. The, you know, the surfers controlled the high-end marijuana trade and so particularly the Thai trade. And so I, you know, wrote in Thai stick that the arrival of the Thai marijuana fleet marked the beginning of summer. So the older surfers that I looked up to, and I would see these guys fly into Scorpion Bay. I mean, I first went to Scorpion Bay, I think it's 79. And it was guys on the lam. I mean, it was a shady place and it was hard to get to. And so, you know, 16 years old, crossing the mountains from the, from the Sea of Cortez,

• 24:02Speaker 01

  you know, in my old man's suburban. And, um, and, you know, these guys would fly in for low tide in Cessnas and really good surfers. And then they, you know, they, they'd give us some cold beer because we didn't have ice, you know, like ice was the best commodity. And it's okay, we gotta go back to Cabo for happy hour. And, you know, and they led this charmed life, you know, oh, North Shore in the winter, Indonesia, you know, in the summer, Baja in the summer.

• 24:30Jocko Willink?

  These, so these guys were on the endless, these guys were literally on the endless summer train fueled by.

• 24:36Speaker 01

  Marijuana.

• 24:37Jocko Willink?

  Financed by pot.

• 24:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:39Jocko Willink?

  And so, so Thai pot, so you said it was green? I forget what you said. I'm not familiar with pot because I, I spent my whole life, well, I was in the military for 20 years. I grew up as like a straight edge hardcore kid. So I don't know enough about pot.

• 24:54Speaker 01

  Well, now.

• 24:55Jocko Willink?

  Educate me.

• 24:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, well, I call, I call it Frankenweed now. Like it's gone way beyond. We had the, what we called purple seedless, which was the Northern California pot.

• 25:05Jocko Willink?

  Isn't that supposed to be good? Like California?

• 25:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was the best. Now, but it's this weird GMO pot that, that's the Frankenweed. I don't like that stuff. And I don't think it's, I don't think you should be smoking it all the time. Um, so pot has, has left me, uh, you know, way behind. But anyway, so that would pretty much run out. That's, so it was a real Adam Smith supply and demand thing. So there was not unlimited amounts of good green pot all year round.

• 25:33Jocko Willink?

  So what's the brown pot?

• 25:34Speaker 01

  There would be, uh, would be Mexican Colombian inferior pot with seeds and this and that. But then the Thais were master growers and the famous Thai stick, right? And so you had pot. In the early seventies, worth $2,000 a pound. And so, one sailboat full, you're a millionaire, you know? And so, that's why so many surfers got involved in it. Because what do surfers need? They need freedom and they need time.

• 26:08Jocko Willink?

  So, one sailboat full, you're a millionaire. And this is in the seventies, so that million, you're good for life, pretty much.

• 26:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. And then, you know, then you go, I'll do another. Well, I'll do a bigger boat. Oh, you know, and then all of a sudden, you're dealing with Thai gangsters, you know, bringing it across the border in Pmax gas trucks, paying million dollar bribes. I mean, like, you know, remarkable tradecraft, actually. And then, that's where I learned a lot of tradecraft.

• 26:35Jocko Willink?

  You, you have this quote, so you wrote a book called Tie Stick. I'm gonna pull a quote from it right now.

• 26:41Jocko Willink?

  It says, "One afternoon, a long-haired, well-traveled surfer came into the surf shop, and after exchanging warm greetings and elaborate handshakes with the shopkeeper, he threw a big plastic bag filled with greenish brown plant matter onto the counter and said, 'Tie sticks, bro.' That same summer, my friend found his older neighbor's stash of tie sticks and stole one." So, it was just like, this seemed like the thing. You also had another good quote in there. "The quest for utopia turned into self-indulgence and narcissism. The beach was an escape, a constant and stable refuge during a time of uncertainty." This is like the seventies.

• 27:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. And yeah, as I said, almost all of my peers' parents were divorced. And, you know, and luckily athletics grounded me very much, right?

• 27:31Jocko Willink?

  What athletics, what were you doing?

• 27:32Speaker 01

  Baseball, basketball, football, from five years old to 14 years old, every season, with the same guys, you know, Pop Warner. And, you know, we were the Palisades Dolphins. Light blue uniforms with Dolphins on our helmets, about forty blond-haired white boys. And our schedule was Watts, Crenshaw.

• 27:57Speaker 01

  And that wasn't even the bad teams, like Pico Rivera, where he's like, these Mexican teams running the wishbone, you know? And you're just like... What is this? Yeah, and we're in our dorky little, you know, Palisades Dolphins, you know? But there were some great athletes who came out of the Palisades. Steve Kerr, Jay Schrader. So it was interesting because back then LA was not segregated. So we were, you know, we were going up against the best of the blacks had to offer, the best the Mexicans had to offer. And we had a lot of mutual respect for each other through athletics.

• 28:32Jocko Willink?

  So what is it segregated now?

• 28:34Speaker 01

  Uh, I would say the LA riots changed things dramatically. And I saw with my younger half siblings, they didn't, you know, they stayed in their little, you know.

• 28:46Jocko Willink?

  Enclave.

• 28:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it, and it wasn't good, you know? And, uh, and then I, you know, then I went to private school and, and it was.

• 28:55Jocko Willink?

  So this is once you turned fourteen, fifteen or whatever?

• 28:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I was public school until seventh grade. Then I got sent to a very difficult, um, prep school, despised it, fought it every step of the way.

• 29:08Jocko Willink?

  Did you have to wear a uniform and stuff?

• 29:10Speaker 01

  No, but just had to do about four hours of homework a night. And, uh, yeah, and you know, we fought a lot in public school. I mean, back then we all went to a park after school and played sports unsupervised always. And people fought all the time and it was a very honest hierarchy. And, um, and so I had a guy try to bully me at the private school. And I was like, oh, you gotta be kidding me. And so I waited for cross country running day. So we could get the furthest possible away from the coaches and then tripped him at, from behind. And then just, just he, and he, and I let him bully me like I, I, you know, I, you know, from fighting, a lot of it's acting.

• 29:51Speaker 01

  And so I got him like, uh, like salivating and, uh, and then, you know, I, I probably hit him 15 times in the face.

• 30:00Jocko Willink?

  Damn.

• 30:00Speaker 01

  Unanswered. He didn't even put his hands up.

• 30:02Jocko Willink?

  That's a beat down.

• 30:03Speaker 01

  And then, no, no, but then he had, then he had like weird knots all over his head from that day forward. And I won't tell you his last name, but it begins with an L and his name, he became Lumpy L after that day. And then nobody bothered me at private school anymore. And then I wasn't invited back because I'd been on academic probation and was starting to turn pretty bad by about 10th grade. And um, and then I went to a very, very fancy, uh, movie star kid, very permissive, uh, very liberal school in, in Santa Monica and, uh, and that's where I really went bad.

• 30:43Speaker 01

  Because, uh, I had some, I had an old buddy from sports, whose family were all big Crips. And so he was there as the basketball ringer. So they had this ringer basketball team. And so we were involved in all kinds of, you know, selling weed, charging people to park at their own high school. Um, it wasn't pretty and, uh, I wasn't nice.

• 31:07Jocko Willink?

  And what's your, what's your dad doing during this? He's just working his ass off all the

• 31:10Speaker 01

  Working his ass off, kinda has a new family, new wife. Uh, and you know, I would, they're just like, but they would say, "Well, how's Peter doing?" And my dad'd say, "Well, there's still sand in the house, so he's alive." And, and that was about it. And so then, yeah. I, and I was the only one who didn't go to college. I moved to Australia at 18 to surf and, uh, and had an incredible time.

• 31:35Jocko Willink?

  You, you say this in, in the book, Time Sticks, "Our extreme confidence in the ocean often translated to dangerous sense of freedom and arrogance on land. At 14, I was busted by customs at Tijuana border, trying to smuggle fireworks. At 16, I was sneaking onto private government property to surf waves guarded by barbed wire fences, no trespassing signs, and men with guns. At 19, I moved to Australia and never looked back. There was very little we were not willing to do if it enabled us to surf perfect, uncrowded waves. Whether it was bringing a few cases of Canadian whiskey through this, through the surf during prohibition, poaching some illegal Mexican lobsters for mobsters in Vegas, working on the gambling boats anchored in international waters off Santa Monica Pier, or offloading,

• 32:19Jocko Willink?

  or offloading a load of Thai marijuana. California watermen had always been part of the black market. Fast money, fast money bought time and freedom." That's like a history of what surfers have been doing for the past, since, since the prohibition, crying out loud. Um.

• 32:38Jocko Willink?

  You say by 16 marijuana was my daily bread without which no surfing session was complete although there was a Western Surfing Association, a National Scholastic Surfing Association, a Christian Surfing Association, and probably even a Republican Surfing Organization. My peers and I were members of the Marijuana Surfing Association. Not all surfers smoked pot, some were adamantly opposed to it, but for us, pot and surfing went hand in hand. Not only was smoking an anesthetic for that dull life's sharp edge, it was above all an effective time killer for our endless waiting. Whether it was a swell to come, the tide to drop, or the wind to change, we always seemed to be waiting for something. You know, when, uh, one of the things that I tell people a lot, and it seems like you're

• 33:23Jocko Willink?

  just knee deep in this. When you're young, you don't connect what you're doing right now with your future. And I think that's a huge problem. It leads kids to do the wrong things because they don't recognize that, oh, what I'm doing right now, this is going to impact my future. Whether they're not thinking about their future, or they don't think they can get caught, or they think they can get away with anything, or they think they're immortal, all those things. It seems like you were just knee deep into, hey, I'm living for the moment, right now, that's it.

• 33:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, and I, it took a long time to repair the damage. Um, because I went to Australia.

• 34:02Jocko Willink?

  So, so you graduated from high school?

• 34:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:08Jocko Willink?

  And then, once you graduated from high school, now you're 18, 19 years old?

• 34:11Speaker 01

  No, no, I'm, I'm 18.

• 34:12Jocko Willink?

  So you're 18 years old, and does your dad want you to go to college? Did you get good grades?

• 34:17Speaker 01

  No, but I was always working. I always had a couple of jobs. So I was always, I had a union job, or, you know, I was, I was, I was never lazy, and I was always motivated just by not traditional things. And so I would work my ass off, and then I would sell, you know, pot on top of that. But, you know, very kind of only pot, only to adults, only large quantities, never to kids, or like a dealer. I really kind of frowned on that. And, um, and-

• 34:54Speaker 01

  Just saving all my money for the big surf trip, right? And, uh, and so I did that for about 10 months after high school. Then I, I flew to Australia and I lived at Brokenhead Point between Byron Bay and Lennox Head with a, a famous old shaper named, uh, Michael Cundith. And George Greenow was our neighbor who I knew a little bit from Santa Barbara. And it was just bliss. And, uh, I traveled all over Australia with some of the best surfers of the time. One of my best friends was a guy named Aunt Corrigan, who was the best surfer of his generation. Schoolboy cadet champ. They wanted him on the pro tour. He went to work at the pub instead. And I loved the Aussies because they didn't care.

• 35:38Speaker 01

  If you're a dick, you're a dick and they're going to call you out on it. And, you know, the pubs and the drinking and fighting and fighting and fighting. And, uh, you know, it was a wild time, the Aussies. And, uh, and I had a ball. And then I went to, uh, I went to Micronesia, I surfed Micronesia, New Caledonia, Fiji before Tavua, then French Polynesia. And then I had, um, I had a, a Tahitian girlfriend. And I thought I had died and gone to heaven. And I'm there and it just, it was too good. And then suddenly.

• 36:16Jocko Willink?

  So now are you 19 now?

• 36:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm 19.

• 36:19Jocko Willink?

  You're 19 years old. Damn, that's, you're rolling.

• 36:21Speaker 01

  And so suddenly a strange car pulls up in the driveway and I look.

• 36:26Jocko Willink?

  Okay. So you, wait a second now. You're in Tahiti at this point?

• 36:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:29Jocko Willink?

  You got a Tahitian girlfriend?

• 36:30Speaker 01

  At her house.

• 36:31Jocko Willink?

  You're surfing, living the dream.

• 36:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:35Jocko Willink?

  And you're in her house.

• 36:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. Living there, staying there.

• 36:39Jocko Willink?

  And now what do we get?

• 36:41Speaker 01

  Strange car pulls up. Fat, middle-aged Frenchman jumps out. Eyes pop this far out of his head. Knocks me out of the way. Runs straight for the bed. Rips the sheets off the bed. Starts smelling the bed like a dog. I run and grab my passport, whatever I can find and fucking leave half of my shit there and beat feet onto this street up in the hills above Papieate. And I'm just going like, but she said she loved me. So now I'm in the Quay in Papieate, I check into some dingy hotel. Turns out it has like a transvestite disco in it.

• 37:26Speaker 01

  And I was really pretty blond haired surfer back then. And you know, and I'm basically I had to barricade my door. And and then I'm like, I gotta go, I'm going back to LA. So I get back to LA after about a year away. And I I see my friends are basically sitting stoned in the same chairs I left them in a year earlier. And I had kind of a moment of satori and said like, I'm out of here. I'm never living here again. And I'm getting as far away from this fucking place as I can. And so

• 38:01Jocko Willink?

  Hold on.

• 38:04Jocko Willink?

  That's a weird thing to have because it seemed like everything was kind, I mean, other than this big French dude who kind of rolled in on your dreams. But you know, you could find another Tahitian girl or another girl or I mean,

• 38:19Speaker 01

  Not one that was sponsoring me.

• 38:21Jocko Willink?

  That's true. That's true. So he was technically sponsoring you actually. But you get back to LA. Okay. So your friends are still kind of stoned and they're surfing or whatever. But it's weird. It seems like that's an extreme viewpoint to suddenly have unless I guess the connection that I just was talking about where people don't understand that what they're doing now impacts their future. So that's probably what it was. You made this connection between, oh, the I've been gone for a year and these guys are doing the same thing. And they're going to be doing that in five years. They're going to be doing that in 10 years. Oh, what I'm doing right now is going to impact my future. So maybe you did make that connection.

• 38:58Speaker 01

  Well, also I had surfed such good waves and so many good waves. I mean, Lennox Head, back then light crowds, the Outer Reefs of Cape Byron, you know, big waves, Brokenhead Point every day so that

• 39:16Speaker 01

  I got back, I was like, okay, I'm going backwards now. Like, I've done all this. And so I found this college of small, another extreme liberal liberal arts school, Bard College. And at that time, I think there were about 750 students. And they basically took your pulse and saw that your check cleared and you could get in. And so they had an immediate decision plan. So I flew back. I'd been in LA maybe four or five days. I found out about it. I flew to New York. I got in.

• 39:48Jocko Willink?

  Was it just timing wise? It happened to be in the fall or whatever?

• 39:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, I got back in, yeah, August. Yeah, they had a, they had a rolling admittance thing. And it was basically a, almost an art school. And in a remarkable place. And it was up in the woods of New York State. And I got really into hunting and fishing. And so I just, I fished, I had a trout stream on my college campus. And I fished and hunted every single day. And I had seven weeks off for Christmas. So I'd go to the North Shore every Christmas. And then I'd go to Scorpion Bay every summer. So I'd work in the unions, make money. And then go to Scorpion Bay. So I still got to surf a lot. But I became a pretty serious student. And it was not easy because I was damaged goods.

• 40:35Speaker 01

  Cause I hadn't done shit in high school. So I was, like you said, making up for these errors. And I was there with these, you know, really privileged kids from the East Coast and like, for example, I had never, ever contemplated doing, you know, heroin or anything like that. The first time I even heard about it was on the East Coast with the most privileged children of America. And, and it was horrifying to me. And so I became a very, very serious student and, and had some incredible professors and wrote a really first rate thesis on my great grandfather's time at Nuremberg.

• 41:17Jocko Willink?

  Before we get there, it seems like you had a moment of clarity also when it came to the marijuana business. So in the, in the book, tie sticks, you say, you get pulled over.

• 41:31Jocko Willink?

  And you say, "The officer took one look at my bloodshot eyes, caught a whiff of the car's interior and asked, 'Son, are you transporting narcotics across state lines?' In that moment, under the dark desert sky, I told myself, if I got out of this jam, I would never put myself in this position again. Although I continued to smoke pot, I never trafficked again." So how, how'd you get that? How'd you get through that?

• 41:54Speaker 01

  Um, you know, tradecraft on some level. I, um, I had, uh, you know, I was like a half a pound or a quarter pound. Um, and it was vacuum bagged and wiped down with the gas or some solvent, uh, in the cushion of the driver's seat. And it was a hatchback Mustang GT. And I'd been driving straight from LA and was all the way at the border of Texas and, uh, and New Mexico. And I had two joints for the drive. And this was just for my personal consumption in college, because there was no good pot on the East Coast. And so, um, so I'm smoking my second joint and I drop it on the ground.

• 42:38Speaker 01

  I turn on the interior light. I pass a cop going about 85. I don't even see him. And I see, you know, he lights so far back, I say, "Oh, that can't be for me." And then I'm hit with a spotlight and he's on the, on the PA going, "Keep your hands on the steering wheel and pull over to the side of the road." So I, I'm rolling down both windows, the Cheech and Chong shows going on. And I take a really long time to stop. And so, and he walks up, yeah, no, he said, "Son," he said, "there's a fruity herbal aroma in the car and a brown stain on your lip." And, and I just said, "No, sir." That's all I would say, "No, sir. Okay, I'm gonna have to ask you to step out of the car."

• 43:24Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah, do I have consent to search? So I gave him the keys hoping he would open it without, and he was too smart. So he said, he made me give him consent, and then he started pulling my bags out, and one had a bunch of blocks of white surfboard wax, and up against the car, and he was sure it was like Coke or something. So then he kinda, and then, um, he's going through all my bags, and then I have these bundles of slides in brown paper with duct tape wrapped around them, up against the car. And so he gets two big buildups, two strikes, and now we're like 20 minutes into it. And he's an American Indian, and, uh, and, and then finally, he's, he's,

• 44:04Speaker 01

  you know, my, my seats are still folded down. He hasn't folded the seats up. I have surfboards, I have all kinds of conversation art. So he's asking me about this, and we, he's kinda realized, okay, this guy's not that bad. And then, and then he says, "Son, we're gonna strike a little deal." I'm going, "Oh, boy." And he goes, "You're gonna keep it under 55 while you're in New Mexico, and we're gonna call it even." And that was the hardest part, cuz I was gonna jump in his arms, "Oh, never do it again. I'm sorry, officer." And, and I really never did it again. And, uh, and that was that. Cuz I, you know, I had, I had made it over the Rubicon, you know, and I had

• 44:45Speaker 01

  turned my life around, but I almost fucked it up out of just, you know, arrogance and stupidity, you know?

• 44:52Jocko Willink?

  You track on any of the friends that you had back from that era?

• 44:55Speaker 01

  Absolutely. I'm still friends with all of them, for better or worse. Yeah, all of them. Saw him, surfed with him in Malibu yesterday. And, you know, and that, some of them have been, you know, real heavy lifters when it comes to drugs, you know, like, uh, they should take them to the Mayo Clinic and test them, cuz from crack to fentanyl to, and lost a lot of friends to fentanyl. Lost a lot of friends to opiates in the last few years.

• 45:21Jocko Willink?

  So fentanyl...

• 45:23Jocko Willink?

  Fentanyl is a fake or a man-made opioid, is that what it is?

• 45:28Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 45:30Jocko Willink?

  And it's what, a thousand times stronger than or some?

• 45:32Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 45:33Jocko Willink?

  Do you know the actual number?

• 45:34Speaker 01

  No, it depends on the ratio, but it's, it's, it's orders of magnitude. And, you know, and it, and it's, in my opinion, asymmetrical warfare against the United States by China. And so the Chinese ship the chemicals to the Mexican cartels. They make them, thanks to our porous border. It comes across. I mean, we had-

• 45:58Jocko Willink?

  Where, where do you get the, the, like, wh- wh- where's this theory come from? That the Chinese are sending the chemicals to Mexico?

• 46:05Speaker 01

  It's, it's fairly well-known, um, because they would get American medical journals that had, uh, drug recipes that were too addictive, that weren't ever approved. And, and whether it's, I don't see it as, as like Dr. Evil, you know, with his pinky in his mouth coming up. But look at the impact that it's had on America. In last year, more Americans died than, 108,000 Americans died of ODs. So that's more than Korea, Vietnam, and the war on terror combined. And nobody seems to be too up in arms about it.

• 46:44Jocko Willink?

  Is that in one year?

• 46:46Speaker 01

  One year.

• 46:47Jocko Willink?

  108,000.

• 46:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, according to the CDC. As a parent, that scares me more than anything.

• 46:52Jocko Willink?

  So the reason it scares you as a parent, because your kid can be at a party and someone says, "Hey, you wanna take some ecstasy?"

• 46:58Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 46:58Jocko Willink?

  And they take ecstasy, but it turns, turns out being fentanyl laced and they're dead.

• 47:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, and that happened in my town in North Carolina. The kid was a sports star, getting ready to go to college. You know, senior party, let's take some ecstasy and boof, dead.

• 47:12Jocko Willink?

  Happened to some Naval Academy students, right? Some Naval Academy students in Florida down there partying. I think a couple of them died, I mean, just like a horror.

• 47:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, it is, and, and to me- I mean, enforcing drug policies are difficult, but, you know, and then you look at like Purdue Pharma and how the opiate crisis came to America. And the corruption, I mean, that's at our core, that's the nation's problem now. It's just a kind of corruption I saw in Cambodia. And, you know, where Pelosi's husband's buying the stock that she's about to approve, or Hunter's laptop, or this kind of stuff. And it's a bipartisan game.

• 47:59Speaker 01

  I'm not, you know, I just, it's, you know, and like we were saying prior to the interview, everybody's in too deep with the Chinese to really call them out on anything. And our obsession with Russia is conspicuous to me compared to the blind eye we turned to China. Now with Taiwan, we're starting to firm up a little bit. But that's sleep, we're sleepwalking, basically. And we're, you know, foreign policy has public relations. And, and to have the same neoconservatives back, like you, you know, so succinctly talk about, I forget your exact phrase, but, you know, taking responsibility for your failures.

• 48:45Speaker 01

  And extreme ownership, I think. And, and we look at these foreign policy elites that have just been wrong and wrong and wrong. And I've had moments where I got to write for the big periodicals and stuff like that. But I always went too far and I always, I mean, I, I was all over Soros's guys during the 90s because they were utopians. Oh, the International Criminal Court with universal jurisdiction. It's like, well, we kind of tried that in Woodrow Wilson and it didn't work out so well. And all of those people went on to huge positions, you know, Ben Rhodes, Samantha Powers, these were cub reporters, these are my peers. And, you know, you played ball, you got tapped,

• 49:27Speaker 01

  you got pushed to the head of the class. And so I was in the, in the odd position where I was critical of the war on terror from a policy perspective and thought it could have, you know, particularly when it went to Iraq, because I had friends at the Army War College that I would call and say, "Well, really impressive guy, Lieutenant Colonel Conrad Crane, who was Petraeus's brain, really. And he was the author of the counterinsurgency manual." And, you know, and he said, "Yeah, Tom Warwick from the State Department, who I had argued with about war crime stuff, he said he wrote the whole occupation plan. They had it like eight volumes." And Rumsfeld

• 50:09Speaker 01

  said, "Warwick, State Department, chuck it." And so people on the inside were nervous and, and kind of going like, "Wow, we don't really know where this is going, but it's going." And, and, you know, like, you know, worse than a, an error is a blunder. And it's kind of blundering, and, you know.

• 50:30Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I would say worse than an error is to not assess your situation and say, "Oh, yeah, you know what? I was wrong about this, and here's the adjustments we need to make now."

• 50:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:41Jocko Willink?

  And it took so long to, for any kind of that type of recognition that it was ridiculous.

• 50:48Speaker 01

  And then Libya, and then Syria, and keep rolling, you know, and now...

• 50:51Jocko Willink?

  It'll work this time. And by the way, you know, you can go all the way back to Vietnam.

• 50:55Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 50:55Jocko Willink?

  And you can look at the, it's just the exact same thing. It's the exact same thing in Vietnam. Everything that was going on. It's like, "Oh, the generals only listen to the, the politicians only listen to the generals, and the generals only listen to themselves."

• 51:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:07Jocko Willink?

  And no, no one's actually talking to the troops on the ground that know what's happening and could actually devise a way to move forward in a positive way. Doesn't happen.

• 51:17Speaker 01

  No.

• 51:18Jocko Willink?

  Freaking ridiculous.

• 51:22Jocko Willink?

  Alright, so going back to, going back to, it's a little tangential discussion, it's all good. Uh, going back to you, so you end up in college, you go to this bard, bard college, and you're, you're having a good time, you, you enjoy it.

• 51:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:37Jocko Willink?

  And you, so talk to me about your, your master's thesis.

• 51:42Speaker 01

  Well, no, it's just undergraduate.

• 51:44Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 51:44Speaker 01

  And, and I won a bunch of awards.

• 51:47Jocko Willink?

  So what was it?

• 51:48Speaker 01

  Uh, it was on the Nuremberg trials and the secret release of the convicted Nazis to trade to get German rearmament. Basically, the Germans say, and the Germans were masterful, you know, and I mean, statecraft, come on, we're gonna beat them. And they said, oh, you have to release our prisoners of war if you want a German army. And now, you know, with the Soviet Union seeming to be menacing, um, in Europe, uh, Berlin splitting, um, and, and the Germans are pouring gas on it, you know, and so, uh, hit, one of Hitler's best spymasters on the Soviet Union, Reinhard Gallen, he took all their records on the Soviet Union, buried them, and then surrendered to the US.

• 52:32Speaker 01

  And he said, okay, you want that? You get all my guys off the war crimes list, and yeah, we'll give you all the intelligence you want on the Soviet Union. So they flew Gallen at Al to the United States, and he would, he would kind of hype up the Soviet threat to keep the Americans, um, you know, on their heels. And, um, and so the Germans masterfully manipulated us, and we wound up freeing some of the worst German war criminals, like some of the Einsatzkommandos, Einsatzgruppen, who followed the Wehrmacht and were just pure executioners. And, um, and so, um, you know, that was quite alarming. When I was younger, I was a little...

• 53:15Speaker 01

  More idealistic before I did field work and uh and so I then and it was interesting. So that that became my PhD dissertation. So then I went to Columbia to study with Brigadier General Telford Taylor, who was the chief prosecutor. Scary guy and um.

• 53:34Jocko Willink?

  Scary in what way?

• 53:36Speaker 01

  There's a well, he I think he argued, I don't know how many Supreme Court cases. There's a famous movie called The Paper Chase about law school and John Housman is this really? Yeah, he was John Housman times 10 and um and and if you went off topic talking to him, he would just close his book up and say, I see we're finished today. And that was it. You were dismissed and you know, and and old fashioned law school. You go, Jones, tell me about the Smith Act and you get two shots the whole semester. And if you blow it, that's half your grade and so.

• 54:15Jocko Willink?

  So wait, so this is Columbia Law School?

• 54:17Speaker 01

  Well, I I got my PhD in history, but I also took classes in law school and the School of International Affairs and had some incredible professors and um and it was horrible. I hated every minute of it. I'm so glad I did it now, but it was uh, you know, like being locked in a box car for four years or something.

• 54:39Jocko Willink?

  What was your vision at that time for your life? Like, what did you see yourself doing? Did you want to go into journalism? Did you want to be a professor? What did you want to do?

• 54:47Speaker 01

  I thought I was going to go to law school and then I I got my masters in history. I wrote another thesis, another went another step further on Nuremberg. Um, and then I got into Columbia Law School Journalism School and History. And they they at that point, you're kind of a professional athlete. So you get no tuition, you get money and all that in the history. And then I kind of pitted them all against each other and I got the best deal from history. Um, and I was still not totally committed to academia. I just, you know, was getting a free PhD and I I really enjoyed it and I was going to write a book. And so I think it was journalism more moving in that direction, but.

• 55:31Speaker 01

  But I was always kind of more active person. I didn't want to just sit on the sidelines. And then the opportunity came as I finished to go to Cambodia. And it was what I wanted to do. So how'd that opportunity spring up? As I said, these two guys I grew up with in California were photographers for Agency France Press. They stumbled across the cache of negatives at Toolslang Prison. And they set up a secret darkroom and were printing them and really preserving the original negatives, the evidence of war crimes. And that I knew that's the key.

• 56:14Speaker 01

  Punishing the individuals is obviously important, but creating an empirical record of the crimes, that's what's made Holocaust revisionism so difficult. Because Nuremberg created an unassailable historical record. So that's where my mind was. I didn't think that they would ever try anybody. And in fact, they did. And I played a small role in keeping those issues alive, preserving the evidence and passing that evidence on to the Cambodian Documentation Center. Then I worked closely with them as I went further on. So what year is this now?

• 56:56Speaker 01

  So this would be 94 is my first trip. When did you, side note, when did you start training jiu-jitsu? I was training in Jeet Kune Do first with a guy named John Peretti in New York City, who was a former pro kickboxer and a real badass who fought on Indian reservations and was fighting MMA matches in the tunnels beneath Chinatown. And before the era of closed-circuit TV, he had those Asics Tiger shoes and he would sew steel toes in them. And we'd get in all kinds of fights in New York City

• 57:40Speaker 01

  and beat up bad people and he encouraged us to do that.

• 57:45Speaker 01

  And John Donahue was kind of around a bit at that time.

• 57:51Speaker 01

  And so I was, you know, I was training with Paredes, a lot of kickboxing. And he was a real, a very brilliant guy, an odd guy, very sadistic in his training. Everything was live, full contact. And he would bring in incredible fighters that he knew. He brought in a sumo wrestler, Igor Zanoviev, who fought, beat Mario Sperry. We met him when he had just come and he was fighting underground fights. A Russian fencer, who was the fastest human I've ever seen, only in one direction. And, you know, small arm stuff and all kinds of different things. And, and we were all kind of scared of wrestlers.

• 58:34Speaker 01

  And, and Paredes talked about fighting this Russian wrestler, who almost broke his neck and killed him in the first round of their challenge match. And then he knocked him out so unconscious that he thought he killed him in the second round. But that left a big mark. So, so he never, he encouraged us to finish our fights on the hardwood floor. And, and so we had no mats. And, and not many people lasted that long in that school. And, and then I heard about the Garcia brothers. The Mexican guys, the Garcia brothers. And, and that was, that was the Gracies.

• 59:15Speaker 01

  And so then I had a friend who was a college wrestler and he said, oh yeah, I'm training with, with Hicks and Gracie and on Pico.

• 59:24Jocko Willink?

  So you came back out to California?

• 59:26Speaker 01

  I come every summer.

• 59:27Jocko Willink?

  So when you spent your summer in California?

• 59:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:30Jocko Willink?

  You got to, that's the first time you went down to Pico?

• 59:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, I went first time, I think 92, I got a private. And then Hicks and said, come back, you know, come back and really train. And so then the next summer I trained, you know, three days a week in the men's, open men's daytime class. And my friend used to say it was, it was lunchtime on the prison yard. And it was, you know, we had, um,

• 59:58Jocko Willink?

  This is ninety-four, ninety-five?

• 59:59Speaker 01

  Uh, no, ninety-three.

• 1:00:00Jocko Willink?

  Ninety-three.

• 1:00:01Speaker 01

  So this was Eric Paulson.

• 1:00:03Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:03Speaker 01

  Um, John Lewis was in there as a white belt. Um, and, and as I said in the book, like, they were minor compared to like guys like you. Then there was like prison extraction unit guards that were so big. And the, the gnarliest guy was a offshore oil rig, like pull a pipe jointer guy was like three hundred pounds. And he would just grab a wrist and like peel, they just take things. And, uh, yeah, Paul Vunak was in there. Uh, and then just all the Karaoke Brazilian Rio guys coming here and coming there. And, and, and I surfed well and they knew me from surfing. So they liked that and I was a good stand-up fighter.

• 1:00:48Speaker 01

  So, and we had to do a lot of stand-up back then. And Luis Limal would put on these, these ridiculous leather boxing gloves. And, and I do my Bruce Lee stuff and they all like Hickson's kids thought it was the best, you know? And, uh, and, um, and it was a great time, you know? And, uh, and Hickson and I became good friends. Um, and not that deep, but then we both kind of had a pivotal moment in both of our lives. And it was when I was going to start in Cambodia and he was going to fight in Japan. And we would run into each other at sunrise at Malibu. And just, there's Hickson, hey Hickson. And we talked, you know, for an hour. And, and I don't think I've had

• 1:01:33Speaker 01

  any superficial conversations with Hickson in thirty years. And it's always straight to the guts of it. And then I started, you know, going to Cambodia and, uh, a lot of times I would come straight back from a gnarly trip, right to his house, always unannounced. In the same clothes I'd been wearing, smelling like wood smoke and kind of spun out on Valiums and beers and, cause you can't sleep after you get that wound up, right? And, uh, and he'd take one look at me and he'd go. Take off your boots. And he said, let's play around a little bit. And he wouldn't even let me start my show and tell.

• 1:02:15Speaker 01

  And then I'd have like a two hour private in like, street clothes. And then he'd say, okay, like, what the fuck happened to you on this one? And so, and then I would tell him these, like, these martial arts scenarios, like, fighting on motorcycles. I got attacked on motorcycles once. And, uh, and like, had a full thirty, forty mile an hour fight on motorcycles with three guys trying to pull me off. And we made them crash. And then, um, a lot of mob stuff. And as I was saying earlier-

• 1:02:45Jocko Willink?

  This is all in Cambodia?

• 1:02:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, in Cambodia. Like, in, gosh, I don't know, I think about ninety-nine. They attacked, the Cambodian government orchestrated mobs that attacked the Thai embassy. And the Thai ambassador had to escape in a speedboat. And any Thai business was ransacked by kind of government orchestrated mobs. Icons, but in plain clothes, Molotov cocktails. Um, and, and as I was saying earlier, I really began to see the mob as this like, organic organism that, you know, feeds on the sound of broken glass and the smell of, of fire. And, and they were all on motorcycles.

• 1:03:28Speaker 01

  And they would, the, the military police would come and disperse them. And then you'd hear the beep, beep, beep. And they'd all honk their horns and they'd reform up. And it went on all night and you'd hear the beep, beep, beep. And then, and this was my wife's first trip to Cambodia.

• 1:03:46Jocko Willink?

  So you were bringing your wife on these trips?

• 1:03:48Speaker 01

  Nah, this was supposed to be a mellow one.

• 1:03:50Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 1:03:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, I said, oh, no, it's mellow, it's not bad anymore. And this springs up out of nowhere. And, and this, we were in the capital this time and I was not expecting much. And, um, she goes, oh, look, fireworks. I go, those are tracers. And, uh, and so, and it was a remarkable thing. Um, you know, that really stuck with me of, of, and I, I think as a society-

• 1:04:16Speaker 01

  We're moving towards this point of, of, you know, this mob gets kind of the military police herd them down this narrow street. And so they're, they're like five abreast, all on those little motorcycles, two or three guys on the motorcycle. And they're kind of street punks, right? And there's three military policemen, all hard, old, probably former Khmer Rouge guys, dark skin, which is typically the, you know, the Khmer Rouge guys are more peasant areas. And, and they block them off and they all have AKs, old banged up AKs. And they walk up and the, the lead punk and the lead cop go nose to nose and the cop,

• 1:04:59Speaker 01

  and the punks going, and you see, and I'm on a balcony, second floor, right above it. And, uh, and the, and the lead cop plays really passive. Oh yeah, okay, man, I'm sorry. And he, and he wheels around, takes two steps back, nods to his guys, whips it around from the hip. They all open up 30 round magazines, foot over the heads of the, um, of the mob. Reload. Those guys leave their bikes, run each other over. It turns into complete Keystone Cops. They turn into the biggest bunch of cowards you've ever seen in your life. And then I went out on the balcony and started clapping.

• 1:05:42Speaker 01

  And, you know, but, um, yeah, and I just, I think, uh, yeah, it was, had a profound impact on, you know, on the mob and the cowardice of the mob when someone has the courage to stand up to the mob.

• 1:05:56Jocko Willink?

  What was the initial thread that you caught on to for going to Cambodia?

• 1:06:02Speaker 01

  Uh, was, in my mind, this was the worst unaccounted for atrocity since World War II. This was the event that, that destroyed the never again promise, that made the whole never again, we're not going to be bystanders to genocide mythical. And, and I said, how and why did this happen? And that's what made me go. That's why I wanted to start there. Then Bosnia happened.

• 1:06:33Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:34Speaker 01

  And then I'm in the foreign correspondence club, watching Rwanda. And Rwanda is just on a magnitude that, you know, is like Cambodia. And so, these things are flaring up all around us. The UN sending forces doing the same bullshit neutrality thing. You had the French Foreign Legion in Cambodia, generals Loredan and Redu, said unleash us. War is our business. We'll go fight these guys and they wouldn't take them off the leash. And both, both generals resigned. Um, you had the Aussie SAS. You had real serious guys, but they'd send the Bulgarians. They'd send, you know, I mean, the, the la- most lasting legacy of the UN in Cambodia was AIDS.

• 1:07:17Speaker 01

  Because they took soldiers from all over the world, put them all over the country. And that was their mo- and UN land cruisers that the Khmer Rouge all stole. And they would just steal them at, at um, gunpoint. And one of the guys that I hired, an ex Khmer Rouge guy, he would then sell them back to the UN. He would be the negotiator for them to buy back their own cars. And it was just weakness upon weakness.

• 1:07:42Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you, you say in, in Facing Death in Cambodia, your book, you say, I began research, I began the research that would make this book possible in 1993. I was completing my PhD dissertation at Columbia University on the Nuremberg War Crime Trials and Laws of War. The dissertation was awarded honors, but it was cold comfort. I felt hollow and fraudulent, like a boxing commentator who had never been in the ring. I was writing about modern conflict as a civilian, leading a secure life at an Ivy League university. Twenty-eight and a product of one of the softest generations in American history. What did I know about conflict resol- resolution beyond what I had read? To teach undergraduates about how the world should be without addressing the rapidity

• 1:08:24Jocko Willink?

  changing, the rapidly changing world on its own terms, was to perpetuate a familiar cycle of fraudulence.

• 1:08:34Jocko Willink?

  So you were gonna go get in it?

• 1:08:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:38Jocko Willink?

  Then, so, so as Cambodia, the first time you went to Cambodia, like, how much intel did you gather the first time you went there?

• 1:08:46Speaker 01

  Um, I saw that it was, that the UN had done nothing about accountability. I saw that the, the evidence of war crimes and genocide and all that was in the wind. That, you know, I mean, we're finding stuff, you know, from third parties. I got a bunch of material in East Germany because the East Germans came in with the Vietnamese military. So, there was no kind of, it was catch as catch can. So my main imperative initially was to preserve the historical evidence. And I was a historian with a background in war crimes. And so, you know, when I went to Telford Taylor and said, "Oh, do you think I should do this?" He looked at me like, "Were you,

• 1:09:31Speaker 01

  you know, are you stupid? What did you study all this stuff for?" And my grandfather, when I went, the pilot, when I went to tell him, "Hey, I'm gonna go to Cambodia", you know, he said, "Yeah, great. Don't be careful. Careful kills." And so, nobody in my family thought it was the least bit strange, you know? So, that, you know, my dad's half-sister, Marty Hoy, would have been the first woman to climb Everest, I think in 82. And her waist belt ended and she fell 5,000 vertical feet and they never found her body. And she was probably the greatest female mountain climber of all time. My uncle sailed like a 29-foot boat from Ventura Harbor

• 1:10:16Speaker 01

  to the Marquesas and spent like six years sailing around the world. So, we get it on us, you know? And so, I don't know, you know, it's just as normal.

• 1:10:27Jocko Willink?

  Now, at some point, um, you know, when you're working the Cambodia case, you, you, you start pulling the thread on James Clark, Lance McNamara, Mike Deeds, and Krista Lance.

• 1:10:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:39Jocko Willink?

  And that's, tell us about those guys.

• 1:10:43Speaker 01

  Well, I had friends from the marijuana trade who said, hey, these guys we knew vanished in Cambodia. And we never, we don't know what happened. See if you can find any records, see if you can find anything about them. And, um, and I found one of their pictures in the prison, white guy, you know, surfer. And, uh, and that was, you know, that was something I could identify with. Had I been 10 years older, it could have been me. I would have probably done that at that time. So that, and then I met the families, you know, and, and that, I think, and that's the thing also that leads us into the Mayagwas.

• 1:11:25Speaker 01

  I don't want to get too far ahead of myself, but nothing is more damaging and traumatizing to a family than having a family member disappear and not knowing how, what, when. Um, and not being able to tie that up and to see the, the trauma that the family goes through. Um, as a result, alcoholism, suicide, all those kinds of things, you know, really followed a lot of the Westerners who were captured by the Khmer Rouge.

• 1:11:57Jocko Willink?

  How were these guys rolled up initially?

• 1:11:59Speaker 01

  Sailboat, just got too close and, uh, those disputed islands off of Cambodia, the Vietnamese and Cambodians were always fighting over. So they had Pete, they had fa- American fast boats, they had armed fishing boats. So they were patrolling that stretch of water and, uh, and, and very vigilant about it. And so, um, yeah, so that, that was it. And they just, you know, got, got their boats, took them in, took them to Toolslang Prison, interrogated and tortured them for, you know, gosh, the, the last two who died, you know, it was days before the Vietnamese liberated Cambodia.

• 1:12:42Speaker 01

  So, you know, but they were three months or something, you know, just horrible tortures and, and rewriting their confessions over and over and over and long, 30, 40, 50 page confessions. Um, and, you know, and, and that's the thing and that's, you know, you see that at, at a certain point with torture, it doesn't work. So.

• 1:13:05Jocko Willink?

  Well, it's crazy that the that the Khmer Rouge decided to photograph everyone before they tortured and killed them.

• 1:13:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:14Jocko Willink?

  Did you ever, what compelled them to do that?

• 1:13:17Speaker 01

  They were so paranoid that they had to prove to the leadership that they were carrying out their orders. And the remarkable thing about that prison is there were roughly like 1,200 guards and staff members, something like 500 of them wound up as prisoners. One guy screamed, had a bad dream in the night and screamed, "You're CIA." One guy broke an ax handle, "You're KGB." I mean, you know, this is Stone Age Communism. And basically, they're all spying on each other, they're all snitching on each other. They would have these meetings.

• 1:13:58Speaker 01

  And, and one guy I interviewed, who was one of the head executioners named Him Hoy. And I was prepared to meet evil incarnate. And he was rumored to have killed thousands with the, with the Oxcart axle to the back of the neck. And so I said, you know, I'd been interviewing him and a couple of Marlboro Reds and Tiger Beers always kind of loosened him up a little bit. And he said, you know, I said, "How did you, how did you get it to a slink prison?" He said, "Well, I, they showed up in my village, you know, and you were drafted at gunpoint. And I ran away. And then I, they came back to my village. I ran away again. And the second time, they sent me to the front.

• 1:14:43Speaker 01

  In my first battle, I was shot in the head. And they said, "Oh, you're gonna die so over the top. You lead the charge." Gets shot a bunch more times. He recovers from that. And then during the invasion of Phnom Penh, he gets a grenade dropped on him.

• 1:15:00Speaker 01

  And I say, wow, you know, were you afraid you were gonna die? He goes, no, I was afraid that I was gonna get captured and they were gonna eat my liver in front of me. So he crawls under a house, survives that, and they say, oh, comrade hoy, you're such a valiant warrior, we have a special job for you. And they send him to a slaying. So he starts out as a low-level guard. Then his boss is accused, he becomes a prisoner. He moves up the food chain. And, and so his superiors keep getting killed. So suddenly, he's one of the head guards. He's driving the truck to the killing fields at Chungak. And, uh, you know, and I said something to the effect of like, do you feel bad about it? Or some stupid question like that? And he just looked at me, goes, it was death either way.

• 1:15:46Speaker 01

  And, uh, and, you know, and, and it was remarkable in that he, um, his whole life now is about penance. And, you know, cause I would say that these guys like, oh, do you think it's important that Pol Pot has tried? And we hold them accountable and all this rah rah, Western human rights bullshit? And they would say, no, not really at all. I think they should dig a big hole and bury all of it. Because vengeance breeds vengeance, and that's very Buddhist, right? But then they would say, what does it matter? He's, he's 70 years old, he's only gonna live 10 more years. He's coming back for 15,000 lives as a cockroach. So he's gonna get his.

• 1:16:29Speaker 01

  So their thing is, you're reincarnated as the, as the lowliest horrible creature on earth for the next 10,000 years. So anything we can do in our earthly timeframe is, is immaterial to them. So that was interesting, you know, that really, and that, the, the guy who probably had a bigger, more profound effect on me was one of the survivors, a guy named Im Chon. They kept him alive because he could carve effigies of Pol Pot.

• 1:17:02Jocko Willink?

  Sure he was a good artist.

• 1:17:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, he was a good artist.

• 1:17:04Jocko Willink?

  Figured out that he was a good artist.

• 1:17:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, and, and I, same thing, first trip, oh, isn't this great? Never again, we're gonna get you justice. And, and, and he kinda, and he cracked, and he said, you know what, I'm only talking to you because the museum director told me to. And I don't like talking to you guys. And every time I talk to you, you shorten my life. I think that they should take all this crap and dig a big hole and bury it and tear down this prison because vengeance breeds vengeance. And then I turned off my tape recorder and said, okay, I'll see you later. And I could have easily spun that and gone, you know, never again, rah rah rah, and gotten

• 1:17:49Speaker 01

  a big check from George Soros. But I really, it put me on my heels and I thought, what cold comfort that we're, we're going to come in like the white knights after the genocide and hold a couple of old guys up accountable. And at this time, you've got Rwanda going on, you've got Bosnia going on. I mean, during the former Yugoslavian war, they're indicting people with an ongoing conflict where there's massive atrocities being carried out and they're not even doing anything. Rwanda the same, East Timor, and these are just blowing up all over the place. And the UN's taking this very passive, you know, non-interventionist, even when they

• 1:18:33Speaker 01

  have forces on the ground, they don't take them off the leash. And so, the, the whole thing seemed very fraudulent to me. I went to The Hague a couple of times and, um, you know, and I, and you know, again, I call it the human rights industry. It's an industry. And when I started in the whole war crimes thing, I was one of about three people. Nobody was in this field. And then it becomes this booming industry with The Hague, with all these institutes and places at different universities. Um, and I've worked on a lot of these high-profile cases because I have subject matter expertise, but I can't take money or I'm a partisan.

• 1:19:16Speaker 01

  Um, so I've walked a strange line in my career, you know, um, where, you know, I worked on the Jose Padilla, the dirty bomber case, I worked on the David Irving case, I worked in the Camerouche case. And, you know, and I, I've sort of, you know, run afoul of everyone over the years. And it's funny because books are like children. They make their own friends. So I thought, oh, the New York Times, the polite society, they're gonna all love me. No, they hated me. And, uh, and it was the professional military and the far left. Became my best constituents, you know? And my first book-

• 1:19:56Jocko Willink?

  How was that?

• 1:19:57Speaker 01

  Um, I'd, you'd have to ask them-

• 1:20:01Jocko Willink?

  This is, this is Law and War?

• 1:20:02Speaker 01

  Law and War, yeah. Law and War is an interesting book because that took me 10 years to get published. And it got rejected by a lot of publishers. And I would get, they take your book, they send it out to the experts in the field. And I would always get one really good review and then one really bad review because basically I said, Nuremberg Trials, if anything, drew the Germans together in their defense of the Third Reich. It was the Marshall Plan, it was economic prosperity. That's what converted them to see the error of the Third Reich. And the error of the Third Reich, the key players are the children of the people who lived through the Third Reich.

• 1:20:45Speaker 01

  The 68er generation comes of age and say, Dad, what did you do in the war? So that was-

• 1:20:51Jocko Willink?

  Did you say the 68er gen-

• 1:20:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, the 68ers is, you know, like 68 was a big year of, of strife in the United States.

• 1:21:00Jocko Willink?

  Oh, so people that were born in 19-

• 1:21:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, like the kind of lefties of, yeah. And so that generation, that's when that society began to reckon with its past. It was not in the 50s. So that was a very unwelcome message. But then, a German historian, a guy by the name of Jörg Friedrich, he was one of my reviewers. And he said, oh yeah, of course, we all know this, this is, this should be published, blah, blah, blah. And then my second guy sent me the most scathing criticism of anything I've ever written. And, and I, I, and Friedrich called me, huh, McGuire, oh, great job, blah, blah. I said, it's done, I'm, they, I didn't get the contract. He said, what? And he sent, he said, send me the guy's review. So then he went-

• 1:21:47Speaker 01

  Through the guy's review and ripped it apart and got me hired by Spiegel TV in Germany. So then he introduced me to Adenauer's war crimes advisors, the German defense attorneys, Flot und Richter Otto Kronzbüller, who was Dönitz and Krupp's defense attorney. And this guy was Adenauer's special advisor on the war crime stuff. So in the treaty, restoring German sovereignty in the 50s, where they're kind of let off probation in this gigantic, thousands of page treaty, he inserts these paragraphs that invalidate all the post-war war crimes trial decisions.

• 1:22:32Speaker 01

  The legal validity is rejected. And I would, no one would ever found it out. But he said, "Look, I wrote it in invisible ink. I put the exception before the rule. No good lawyer would ever do that." And so that's, I had that in my book and that was not happily received. So, yeah, so I was, so that was a difficult, you know, 10 years knowing that you're right, but you gotta fight and fight and fight.

• 1:23:02Speaker 01

  And then the book got published and, yeah, that's the book that the military liked and the left liked. But the polite society sure didn't like it, but they didn't, they couldn't really come after me because they hadn't done the heavy lifting. Like I said, their analysis of the Nuremberg Trials never went deeper than Robert Jackson's opening address. It's this mythic myth of Nuremberg as this redemptive thing. And so, yeah.

• 1:23:31Jocko Willink?

  And then what about, what about death, facing death in Cambodia? How'd that one get received?

• 1:23:36Speaker 01

  Pretty well, actually. Yeah, that one, that one I did better, but still.

• 1:23:40Jocko Willink?

  And I mean, is the end, what's your takeaway? From, you know, vengeance breeds vendors. Is that your takeaway? From that whole thing? Hey, bury this stuff in a hole and let's move on?

• 1:23:53Speaker 01

  No, definitely not. But I think what, what really came home for me was that you have to talk to the culture that, that survived this, that endured this. You can't come from the high and parachute down from the Hague. And that's what they did in Cambodia. And so when they finally, you know, they, they took more time to try four 80-year-old Khmer Rouge leaders than it took to try thousands of war criminals after World War II. And, and, you know, I don't know how many millions they spent. The numbers are impossible to tell. And, and they got involved in what I call therapeutic legalism,

• 1:24:36Speaker 01

  which is, we need closure and healing. And, and you can't ask a court to do that. And then they point to Nuremberg and say, "Look, look, Nuremberg did that," which is a myth. And so to ask a court to do anything more than punish the guilty and exonerate the innocent is too much. And so, all of this, you know, therapeutic legalism, and you burden it with, with victims' units and all this kind of emotional stuff. And that's the world we live in now. Where, you know, this, these notions of comfort and safety and I, um, I have a very, uh, kind of different view of it. And I believe that,

• 1:25:21Speaker 01

  that freedom isn't safe. You know, the lamb's freedom's safe. If you want this kind of timid, little bleeding freedom. But the lion's freedom is, is a bold thing. And if the lion breaks its leg, the hyenas get it. And that's the game, you know? So you don't get it both ways. And I don't, and I'm very uncomfortable with the direction American society is going now with, you know, this note. And that's why I don't teach anymore. Because, and I love teaching. It was very fun. But it turned into this notions of, oh, well, you know, you know, I don't feel safe. I don't feel comfortable. I can't teach the Holocaust and Khmer Rouge and you be comfortable? What is that?

• 1:26:03Speaker 01

  So I'm very Socratic in the way I taught, in that, you know, you don't raise your hand. I call on you. And, uh, and you know, and that's keeps them reading and keeps them on their toes. And, uh, I would walk in when I taught at Columbia with three by five cards. And, um, I'd, I'd say, okay, take one, pass it down and they'd kind of be giggling. And then I'd say, fold it in half and they go, oh, it's arts and crafts. I go, write your name on it. I can't be bothered to remember your name. Smith, why are you here? Uh, Smith, stock tips, sports scores, talk and just boom, fast and make them all talk.

• 1:26:42Speaker 01

  And just like you dealt with in BUDS, by the end of that first class, they were bound together as a unit in terror. And, uh, and then, and then, you know, but then once that class was over, they go, but Professor McGuire. I go, no, it's Peter. Said, that was a fucking show. I said, you call on me anytime you need a letter of recommendation, anything, you know, you survive, man. I'm yours for the rest of your life and, and I'm still in touch with a lot of those students and they've done incredibly well. And I also, also taught jujitsu while I taught history and I'd say, any of you don't like your grade?

• 1:27:23Speaker 01

  You can come to the jujitsu class and you can settle it with me on the mat. How's that sound?

• 1:27:30Jocko Willink?

  Hey, uh, when you look at, uh, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, when you look at the Nazis, Nazis had like a ramp up period, you know, it took 1933, you could see it brewing. There was this sort of slower boil as the things started to transform. But the Khmer Rouge was like overnight madness and madness at a level that's it's.

• 1:28:03Speaker 01

  It's it's it's it's actual insanity. Well, it was class resentment that was stoked. And so you had an incredibly corrupt. You had the crazy King Xi Anuk, who was, you know, just this kind of wild playboy. Um, and incredible decadent corruption of the elites. Um, and the peasantry resenting them already. Leading really hard lives, you know, when you go up in the Cambodian provinces. A day seems like a week and it's hot and it's just, it's a hard, hard life. And, um, and so, you know, they're seeing these very westernized, you know,

• 1:28:48Speaker 01

  decadent elites in the city and then you have Pol Pot, Ing Suri, Qusum Pan. And these are all sore bone educated. Um, so, and they bring the latest trendy Marxist theories and, uh, and particularly Mao. And, and the Cultural Revolution becomes, you know, the model. And they want the, the blank slate, clean peasants. Year zero. Yeah, they want people, you know, most of the elites were, you know, real, you know, peasants with, you know, no education, nothing. And they would get them away from their parents and reshape them. And, um, and, and that's what they did and they did it very quickly.

• 1:29:32Speaker 01

  And they did it with great Chinese support. And denial on the Western left who were, who were, you know, Noam Chomsky in particular. Um, that, you know, would deny the atrocities and cast a shadow of doubt over what was going on when it was pretty clear what was going on. And then, uh, It was a very shameful period and then it was shameful afterwards when everybody knew and propped them up in the name of Cold War geopolitics. And so, um, yeah, and then, I mean, so you have in, you know, in 79, you have the Vietnamese knock out the Khmer Rouge, then the Chinese knock, take a run at the Vietnamese and they

• 1:30:16Speaker 01

  have a nasty little, you know, border war for a minute there. And then they come to a truce and basically the Chinese are like, you are not to talk about the genocide, okay? And, uh, and they gave the, they did a lot better than people thought they would, the Vietnamese. Vietnamese are, are pretty fierce. And, um, and so, yeah, and so that, that was, that was how those, the, you know, those Cold War geopolitics, you know, shaped things up.

• 1:30:45Jocko Willink?

  All right. So when did, when did, uh, when did Facing Death in Cambodia actually come out?

• 1:30:53Speaker 01

  2005.

• 1:30:54Jocko Willink?

  Oh, so that, you were working on that for, you were working on that book for 10 years?

• 1:30:57Speaker 01

  10 years, usually.

• 1:30:58Jocko Willink?

  You're, you're not a fast writer.

• 1:31:01Speaker 01

  No, no, I'm very fast, but, uh, I had to let the events play out. Hickson's book took me six months.

• 1:31:07Jocko Willink?

  Okay, there you go. Um, so, so that means where were you, you were in Cambodia when 9/11 happened?

• 1:31:14Speaker 01

  I was.

• 1:31:15Jocko Willink?

  And how, what, what was that like?

• 1:31:17Speaker 01

  Um, it was surreal. Uh, my buddy Luke Hunt, who had just come from Afghanistan and I think he had interviewed Mullah Omar and we were at the Foreign Correspondence Club. It was late and, uh, and he, he's Aussie and he runs up the stairs, "World War III started, World War III started." And I was like, "Oh, get out of here." And, and I was kind of in denial and I said, "Oh, you know, it's just some drunken assesna, ah." And so I had a room I would keep at the Foreign Correspondence Club. So me and another reporter and Luke went down and were drinking beer and watching the thing and all of a sudden the second plane flew in. And I went, "What the fuck?"

• 1:32:02Speaker 01

  And then, then...

• 1:32:05Speaker 01

  The only thing I was right about was when all of a sudden the whole screen went gray. And I was like, it pancaked. And I knew that from construction because I'd seen controlled, I'd seen buildings collapse and things like that. Because, you know, I've been around construction my whole life and so that, uh, that's when it got real. My wife was in New York City and, uh, so it was impossible to get in touch with her and, uh, we were on the Upper West Side, so we weren't quite near it. But, um, yeah, that was, then I, it took me a long time to get back and I was stuck over there and, uh, yeah, it was, it was, uh, surreal.

• 1:32:49Jocko Willink?

  Okay, and so this book comes out 2005, Facing Death in Cambodia. That's received better than Law & War.

• 1:32:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:33:00Jocko Willink?

  And then in the meantime, you're working on this, uh, on the Greeno Advanced Rescue Craft.

• 1:33:07Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:33:07Jocko Willink?

  So George Greeno, who's like a, a legendary kind of iconic surf, surfer, shaper. He's kind of credited for the modern surfing fin.

• 1:33:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:33:20Jocko Willink?

  Uh, how did you, how'd you know him?

• 1:33:22Speaker 01

  Um, when I lived in Australia, uh, and then-

• 1:33:25Jocko Willink?

  That's right, you lived, lived next door neighbor or something?

• 1:33:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, and then I would come, uh, often from Cambodia to, uh, Australia. And so it was like, the PTSD cure was being afraid of, uh, getting eaten by, I mean, getting, you know, killed by the Khmer Rouge. And then you go surf these outer reefs with George Greeno and have to worry about getting eaten by great white sharks. And there were so many sharks there at that, and there still are, it's actually much worse now. And then, and I had grown up on boats and George always had these incredible skiffs. And he had one, a 12 foot boat. He's an amazing fisherman. He caught a 12 foot and a 13 foot tiger shark

• 1:34:11Speaker 01

  on hand lines off his 12 foot boat.

• 1:34:15Speaker 01

  Cut both heads off with a serrated bread knife, brought them both in and you know, before it was, before sharks became the new dolphin, we regularly fished for sharks and didn't feel really bad about it. But, uh, but anyway, um, so I, I fished with George a fair bit and, and I was living on the North Shore. I had been a lifeguard and I was having to make a lot of rescues in Moklaia. And the North Shore guy who does all the sleds and rescue stuff taught me how to drive a jet ski. And I was like, these things suck. And then I had friends in the teams and they were telling me about, all you gotta do is

• 1:34:56Speaker 01

  make this one Yamaha SUV that we want, cause it's stable. Just splash a mold off it. And of course, that would have been too easy. I don't do anything easy. I always have to reinvent the wheel. So I called George, "Hey George, you still got the mold for the 12 footer?" "Yeah, yeah, I do. Okay. Let's, let's make a jet boat." And so, in the dirt under George's house, um, me and my old right-hand man from Cambodia, um, cut the jet ski up and married it to his 12 footer and the first one came out of the mold, perfect. And then we canceled,

• 1:35:32Speaker 01

  um, we canceled a, a military program and that really, I didn't understand military contracting, things like that. And then, then we were a big threat and military industrial complex stuff and, and it wasn't fun anymore.

• 1:35:51Jocko Willink?

  The Military Industrial Conference will, uh, will eat you alive.

• 1:35:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. And Ivan was a great ally and we, the teams loved the boat. The PJs actually became our best, um, our best clients. Cause it was, you know, C130 droppable.

• 1:36:06Jocko Willink?

  So did you actually start manufacturing them?

• 1:36:07Speaker 01

  Oh yeah. Yeah. We sold, I think about 30 to the PJs, but then they made us, they didn't let us cut up Yamaha jet skis anymore that were perfect with perfect wiring harnesses and gauges and all that. So we had to cob a crappy engine that they made us use and wiring harnesses and steering and all that. And just, it was like death by a thousand cuts with nav sea engineers and, uh, And it was no longer fun at all, but um, but I managed to get through it and came in on time and on budget and delivered the boats and then sold my company to a company called Maritime Applied Physics and now it's probably the best unmanned craft out there and it's got a Volvo

• 1:36:51Speaker 01

  Penta and it's super badass goes like 50 knots.

• 1:36:55Jocko Willink?

  Now, was, was the James Clark, Lance McNair, Mike Deeds, Krista Lance, those guys, those surfers, guys that were captured off of Cambodia and imprisoned and killed, was that sort of the first thing that, that, that the thread that led you to writing tie stick?

• 1:37:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And so I found out about that and I got more information and I was at Scorpion Bay and which is kind of like a, you know, a smuggler's retirement home now and um, and, and it was unbelievable. Oh yeah, I knew him and you know, all these people, I knew him, I knew him. And then they kept saying, you need to talk to Mike Ritter, you need to talk to Mike Ritter, you need to talk to Mike Ritter. And, and I finally met Mike Ritter and he had been a, a big smuggler in Thailand. And what he didn't tell me was that he had been contracted to supply their load. And so he

• 1:37:54Jocko Willink?

  So he had been contracted?

• 1:37:56Speaker 01

  To, to bring them their load of pot.

• 1:37:59Jocko Willink?

  From?

• 1:38:00Speaker 01

  From Thailand. Yeah, from Trot.

• 1:38:02Jocko Willink?

  So those guys were on a boat sailing to Thailand.

• 1:38:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:38:05Jocko Willink?

  They were gonna link up.

• 1:38:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:38:07Jocko Willink?

  And Mike Ritter was gonna give them a load of pot.

• 1:38:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:38:10Jocko Willink?

  Bring wherever, probably back to the States.

• 1:38:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. And Ritter was a surfer from Santa Barbara and he would go on a Thai fishing boat with, you know, usually no compass. They'd give them the crappiest boat they had because they didn't want to get it seized and he'd have one of those trifle log spinners and you know, just old fashioned navigating and he'd bring the pot out and you know, pirates and I mean, that's, that period of time is the worst period of piracy in world history.

• 1:38:39Jocko Willink?

  This is what years?

• 1:38:40Speaker 01

  This is in the seventies.

• 1:38:41Jocko Willink?

  Late seventies?

• 1:38:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, so

• 1:38:42Jocko Willink?

  Well, mid to late seventies.

• 1:38:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, Vietnam falls in 75. So you have all those Vietnamese going Out to sea with all their worldly possessions, usually in women's jewelry. That's how they carry their wealth. So you had the most feral, brutal pirates you could ever imagine. So that was a very dangerous piece of water. And, uh, and so that's what Ritter was doing for, for many, many years and living in Thailand. And he was one of the first guys to surf Garajagan, one of the first guys to surf Bali. So you had a bunch of smugglers in Bali in the off season. And basically Garajagan was founded by pot smugglers.

• 1:39:22Speaker 01

  And so they were the ones who really were the first to really kind of explore the Indonesian archipelago. And, um, and that was, you know, Ritter was one of them. And so then I trained him as a historian. And then he started interviewing his sources of old retired smugglers. And we made sure we interviewed people who'd been busted. So there was at that time, no double jeopardy. And then things got a little wobbly after nine 11 and, uh, and, um, and then I was going to find the old Khmer Rouge guys and, you know, different, you know, people on that side, law enforcement, confidential informants.

• 1:40:03Speaker 01

  Um, there were a lot of old US intelligence guys involved because, you know, they had, they had the knowledge of Thailand. And they had the insurgent areas of Thailand was where all the pot was grown. So they had worked those insurgent areas during the Vietnam war.

• 1:40:19Jocko Willink?

  How long did it take you to write Thai Stick?

• 1:40:21Speaker 01

  10 years. But that was a thousand hours of interviews we did. Yeah.

• 1:40:28Jocko Willink?

  What do you think the value of the trade, the pot trade coming out of, that the surfers brought into America?

• 1:40:36Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, at that time it was great, but, but ultimately it's, it's basic Adam Smith economics.

• 1:40:44Speaker 01

  It becomes too expensive to transport it. The loads get too big. I mean, we're talking about like 20, 30 ton loads. And then it drives the industry to the United States. California is growing the best pot in the world. So people are like, why don't we just grow it in Mendocino? You know, Trinity or one of those counties. And so, so there's no, the money's gone. And so that's ultimately what happens in 88. That's where there's, there's a bunch of huge busts. And the, the biggest guys kind of go down and then nobody wants to bother with it.

• 1:41:24Jocko Willink?

  And that's it. It just implodes.

• 1:41:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

• 1:41:28Jocko Willink?

  Now, at some point during this, you, you, you got another book that you're working on right now.

• 1:41:36Jocko Willink?

  Well, I guess before we get to that, you got, you did write, end up writing Breathe. You wrote the Hickson book.

• 1:41:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:41:43Jocko Willink?

  And you kind of, kind of got into that a little bit. But what was the, what was the spark? How'd you convince Hickson that he needed to write a book?

• 1:41:49Speaker 01

  Um, we had been talking about it for a long, long time. And he and I talk a lot. And, and like I said, and then it's never light. And, uh, and there's a lot of stuff I know that he doesn't know. And there's a lot of stuff that he knows that I don't know. And we always were friends. And I was a jujitsu skeptic. I was not.

• 1:42:12Jocko Willink?

  For how many minutes?

• 1:42:14Speaker 01

  Well, I wasn't, it wasn't that it didn't work in a one-on-one situation. But, but in the worlds I was in, I loved it as an exercise thing. I loved it for the friends I made by going and beating these terrifying guys. And then being nice and not humiliating them and making them into students. And made some of my best friends around. I mean, I fought guys in West Australia, Canada, Maine, Cambodia, always with the like, well, that wouldn't work on me. And you know how it goes from there. And, uh,

• 1:42:47Jocko Willink?

  The skeptic for three minutes.

• 1:42:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I was like John the Baptist of jujitsu for a minute there because I was just had done it early. But I didn't like gees. And I didn't, you know, there were just pieces of it I didn't like. I liked striking. I was confident striking. I had some very patented entries that were kind of like,

• 1:43:11Speaker 01

  You know, I don't have a politically correct way to say it, but um, the lunging special needs person and uh,

• 1:43:19Jocko Willink?

  Like the drunken monkey.

• 1:43:21Speaker 01

  Exactly. Just like, what? No, it was what, what, what? And then close the distance. And so, you know, so I, I, you know, again, and I would throw this stuff at Hickson. Ah, come on Hickson. Like, yeah, yeah. Try to, yeah, try to disarm me with this knife. Like, cause I learned the fencing from the Russian guys and they're so fast. You're not, they're not doing this. They're doing that. And uh, so, you know, we really kind of explored this stuff for a long, long time and in a very honest way. And we're really good friends through a lot, through his son's death. And you know, I knew his son well. And uh, and so, um, yeah, he just finally, I think the COVID year, everybody thinks we're going slow and that's how we got going.

• 1:44:07Jocko Willink?

  Well, I mean, that was a, that's a fantastic book. And you hit the New York Times bestseller list.

• 1:44:11Speaker 01

  Yep. Yep.

• 1:44:13Jocko Willink?

  Whether they liked it or not.

• 1:44:15Speaker 01

  No, Hickson.

• 1:44:16Jocko Willink?

  Hickson did.

• 1:44:17Speaker 01

  Boy, we got the worst review I've ever had in my life in Publishers Weekly. And it was, you know, toxic masculinity gone wrong. And it was classic. I loved it. And oh, yeah, it was bad.

• 1:44:31Jocko Willink?

  I wrote a novel called Final Spin and Publishers Weekly gave me a great review. And it was pretty awesome. And my, my editor like sent it to me. He goes, I can't believe this. They compared me to David Mamet. And just like, oh, this would be no bop. And my, my publisher was like, dude, this is insane that they gave you this incredible review. And I was like, well, it's not that insane, bro. It's an awesome book. But uh, but yeah, the, the thing, the thing that was cool about it was, I know that Publishers Weekly, they don't play around. Like if they're coming at you, they have no problem just trashing your book if they don't like it. So they didn't like breathe.

• 1:45:12Speaker 01

  Oh, I hated it, but it was great. And there was like, nobody should be interested in this book. There's only martial arts deviants or something to that effect. And uh, and then it was bestseller a week later.

• 1:45:27Jocko Willink?

  Tell us a little bit, you, you mentioned this quickly, you got the fainting robin foundation, which is a nonprofit that you have, the title, the name of the foundation comes from an Emily Dickinson poem, um, which is if I can stop one heart from breaking, I shall not live in vain. If I can ease one life, the aching, or cool one pain, or help one fainting robin unto his nest again, I shall not live in vain. Meaning that if you can help someone that's really not in a position to help themselves, that's going to be a positive thing.

• 1:45:59Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 1:46:00Jocko Willink?

  What, what, what inspired that from you?

• 1:46:02Speaker 01

  Um, I was watching my professions disappear, journalism, number one. Um, the internet really killed a lot of, of our careers. You know, we went from, you know, getting paid per word, royalties every time something was published, to flat rates and just it goes on the internet, it's gone forever.

• 1:46:26Jocko Willink?

  Um, well, I mean, I kind of look at like that's, cause I'm on the other side, right? I'm like the, I'm from the people.

• 1:46:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:46:34Jocko Willink?

  You know, we have a podcast. I remember I went to, we'd, we'd had this podcast for maybe six months or something and I went and got interviewed on NPR. And, uh, so I roll into this NPR interview is in New York City. I go into a full on studio. There's six or seven people behind the glass pane. There's two people in the room. Then there's the person that's interviewed. It's massive, like this massive production. I mean, as you can see, like this is the, we're sitting in our, in our recording studio right now, which is literally a converted closet. This used to be the maintenance closet at Victory MMA and Fitness. We eventually made it a little bit bigger than it used to be. But I go in there and so then I go, you know, like how many people listen to, you know,

• 1:47:18Jocko Willink?

  how many, what's the audience of your show? Cause I was talking to the guy a little bit afterwards and he gave me some number and it was some. Not big number. And I was like, dang, here's me and Echo Charles with a thousand dollars worth, literally a thousand dollars worth of equipment. How much you spend when you first bought the gear?

• 1:47:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, one thousand dollars.

• 1:47:36Jocko Willink?

  A thousand dollars worth of equipment. And our audience was at least twenty, literally twenty times as big as theirs.

• 1:47:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:47:42Jocko Willink?

  And I'm thinking, this is kind of awesome.

• 1:47:44Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:47:45Jocko Willink?

  Here's these people, they went to school and they got promotion and they're paying, they're paying people to listen to advertisements going out and all this stuff, all this hype. And we're sitting in here in a closet with a thousand dollars worth of equipment. Our audience is at least twenty times bigger than theirs. So I support the downfall of journalism.

• 1:48:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:48:06Jocko Willink?

  So tell me your take. What am I missing?

• 1:48:07Speaker 01

  Well, it, it, as much journalism, it's academia. And because I was also a professor and that.

• 1:48:15Jocko Willink?

  Are you going to make me attack the academic profession now?

• 1:48:17Speaker 01

  Oh, let's go.

• 1:48:18Jocko Willink?

  I'm mad as well.

• 1:48:19Speaker 01

  I'm happy to help. But no, that, you know, I basically was making less money as a professor with three, two books, three books, Ivy League PhD than I made as a construction labor without a high school diploma at seventeen years old, without adjusting anything for inflation. And so what we've seen in academia is that the money's gone to middle management. So every special interest group now has a commissar that they go to who advocates for them. And the student is a customer now. So that's completely.

• 1:48:58Jocko Willink?

  Explain to me the commissar in the middle here. How, how's that taking money out of this professor's pockets?

• 1:49:02Speaker 01

  Well, because professor salaries have dropped, ten years disappeared to make way for this managerial class.

• 1:49:11Jocko Willink?

  Oh, got it.

• 1:49:11Speaker 01

  And so the managerial class, you know, will typically, when I first started, I would be the assistant dean for a semester. It was always a professor. Now you have people who are neither scholars nor teachers. And this is this, you know, I have a PhD in education.

• 1:49:33Speaker 01

  Come on, you know, you can teach or you can't teach. I can't teach you how to teach. And it's as much an art as it is a science and uh, and it's depressing frankly, and I don't want to be around it. It's, it's not,

• 1:49:50Speaker 01

  there's just, there would, yeah, that's a whole, that's a whole big ball of wax, but um.

• 1:49:56Jocko Willink?

  I was going to college, I went to college when I was 28 years old because I had been in the military and the military sent me to college and I was going to the University of San Diego. And I was in class, I had an English professor, super nice professor, super cool, I was an English major. And she said at the beginning of one of these classes, so I'd been in the Navy, I had listened to Navy when I was 18 years old and so I'd been in the Navy for 10 years at that time. And the professor, you know, was kind of saying, hey, listen, you know, here I am, I'm a tenured professor. I, I have a PhD in literature, blah, blah, blah, blah. I went to this school and that school. And she goes, and yet I can't afford a house in San Diego.

• 1:50:35Jocko Willink?

  And so I'm sitting in the front row, which I always did. I sat in the front row of every class, just looking at the professors, just like no one else cared. I would line up my pens. Like in case I had a pen go down, I would be ready with a secondary. And so I'm sitting there in the front row and I would, I would over, I, I guess I was being a little bit abrasive, a little bit abrasive. But the, but the teachers usually loved me because I was like the, I would the most fully engaged student they probably ever had in their lives. So I'm sitting in the front row, she gets done with her tirade and I just raised my hand, you know, straight up in the air and she's like, and this, when I went to college was the only place in my life that they called me John because that's what was on the roster because my real name is John. So they called me John, I never corrected them because I didn't care. So she, she says, you know, yes, John. And I said, how, how long did you go to school for?

• 1:51:19Jocko Willink?

  And she goes, well, it was total, I think it was the total was 10 years, you know, to get her, you know, this, this, this. I said, and how much did that cost you? And she said, you know, whatever it was, $380,000 or something like this. And I said, well, hey, I said, I enlisted in the US Navy when I got done with high school. And I've been working that whole time and I have not one house in San Diego, but two.

• 1:51:47Jocko Willink?

  She was so, she was so frustrated with that statement, but it's kind of true because you know, she literally spent two, that was what my first two houses in San Diego cost. I guess they cost a little bit more than that, but that was around what the first two houses I bought in San Diego. So, you know, that academic thing and I mean, the academic world just seems to be, have gone, it's gone insane. Am I wrong?

• 1:52:12Speaker 01

  Absolutely right. And, and the thing is, and I've seen this for a long time and spoken out against it for a long time. I'm a first amendment absolutist. I believe anything short of that is sophistry, that this group gets this level and you, you know, and then we come back to, to comfort and safety and psychic damage and this and that. And oh, you're, you can't, you know, criticize this group because of the psychic damage you're inflicting in this and that. Once you go down that road, you're, you're in sophistry lane and I don't want to play that

• 1:52:49Speaker 01

  game. And so, um, yeah, it's just everyone, my friends who are still in academia walk on eggshells and you know, they have to watch out for the cultural commissars because you know, then you have this kind of, uh, Star Chamber courts where the student goes to one of the many deans and says that he looked at me in a way that made me uncomfortable. And my response to me, you were born uncomfortable. I can't help you with that. And your level of comfort and my level of comfort aren't the same. Um, so then the professor is accused without a hearing,

• 1:53:32Speaker 01

  without knowing who his accuser is. Uh, so there's no due process. I mean, one of the cases my foundation looked into was an anatomy professor named Michael Shively. He had taught for 30 years at Utah Valley University. The president of the university's son, um, university's, uh, what was it nephew? Kind of instigated a crusade against him because he was, um, his classes were too hard. He didn't put things up on the right, um, you know, uh, blackboard, you know, sort of computer thing and, um, and they couldn't really get him on anything. And again, he didn't know who he was accused by.

• 1:54:17Speaker 01

  He didn't know what he was accused of. And after about six months, he started losing his mind and he blew his brains out. And, uh, and then the family sued the university. Uh, it came out that it was, you know, that the president of the university intervened on behalf of her nephew. Um, it went all the way to the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals. Now their attorney is going for a writ of cert to try to get the Supreme Court to take it up. Um, but these are increasingly common situations where you are accused of something and you don't get to defend yourself. You don't know who your accuser is. And this is a real violation of due process. And, uh, I mean, I had a situation where I had a female student come and say, oh, well,

• 1:55:02Speaker 01

  I was, uh, I was, uh, I couldn't do, I've been missing the classes or something because I was sexually assaulted. I said, okay, that's very serious. I said, let's, I know the US attorney and like, let's do it, you know? If you, you gotta think this through. If you wanna, you know, go really do this, you go to the US attorney. You don't go or with the DA in town. You don't go to some academic bureaucrat that will pollute the case if you wanna go after this guy. Well, I'm not sure, I'm not sure. I said, well, look, you think about it. Let's talk about it tomorrow. I go to the head of my department. I say, hey, this happened?

• 1:55:43Speaker 01

  I told her she needs to go to the authorities if she's serious about it. She said, no, no, no, she has to go to the Title IX group and the this, which is an in-house university judiciary. And I said, no, I don't, I don't agree and I'm, I'm not gonna do that. And I'm on one semester contract, so what do you got on me? And I liked my department head and I didn't, you know, wanna make trouble for her. But then I met with the student the next day, I said, okay, come on, let's get into the brass tacks of this because if you do go down this road of litigation and all that, you're gonna get your pass pulled out, it's gonna be serious. And I said, was there alcohol involved? Yeah. Um, okay.

• 1:56:27Speaker 01

  And so anyway, turns out she drank too much, passed out on a couch at a friend's, woke up and there was one of the roommates had come in and was standing over her. And, and, you know, that could have ended this guy's career, it could have been incredibly problematic and he wouldn't have known what he was accused of, by who.

• 1:56:46Jocko Willink?

  Oh, that was the extent of what had happened.

• 1:56:48Speaker 01

  That was what had happened. And so, you know, again, these things need to be heard out. You can't just take, you know, every man is guilty, every woman is always right. Life is more complex than that. I mean, I saw professors that married students that are still married. So I don't have a kind of childlike view of life. I treated my students as adults and I talked to them like adults and I talked to them about their futures and, you know, I would say, every student would have to come and meet me in my office and people would say, oh, don't ever close your door with a female student. So why?

• 1:57:30Speaker 01

  I'm, you know, I'm married, I'm not, like, your students are like your kids. And, uh, and I would say, what's your major?

• 1:57:41Speaker 01

  What are you, um, what's your major? What do you want to do? What do your parents want you to do? And how much student debt do you have? Almost every one of those kids would say, no one's ever asked me that in my career. Thank you so much. No one, they've tried to sell them into a new program. Oh, we got this new graduate certificate. And I was like, a what? A certificate? I said, is that a master's? No, it's a certificate. I said, that's a fucking scam. And, uh, and so, and I said, are they paying for you to get this certificate? Oh, no, I gotta pay. I said, well, is the professor that's telling you to do it in charge of this certificate program? Hey, how'd you know? I was like, man, you're getting hustled.

• 1:58:26Speaker 01

  And, uh, and so it's a business now. And because the universities are competing with each other, you know, to get students, they're spending huge amounts of money on gyms and vegan food bars. And, you know, uh, just really ancillary stuff.

• 1:58:45Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. You know, when, when I look at it, i- if you can get, if you're gonna learn something of value, if you're gonna be actually educated, great, knowledge is power. And you can, if you can go to, go to some event or some school or some university, and you're gonna learn something, you're gonna walk out of there and say, oh, I know how to do this thing now. More power to you. Great. But yeah, if you're in there and you're spending money on something that has no value other than the paper that it's printed on, then it's, it's kind of worthless. And I don't know that, I, I, I think that a lot of times, the way the, what, what people are taught isn't really a usable skill.

• 1:59:28Jocko Willink?

  And especially the way it's taught, isn't really a usable skill. And I mean, this happens with leadership, you know, a lot of, there's, there's universities that offer some kind of leadership training, but it's not actually leadership training. They don't learn any leadership from it. They learn some weird abstract theory about leadership, but they don't know how, they don't learn how to lead. It's like if you went to college to play a guitar, to play guitar. And they never gave you a guitar to play. You wouldn't know how to play when you got done. You'd be able to talk about it a little bit, but you wouldn't be able to do it. And I see a lot of programs that are set up like that where they're teaching you a lot about the guitar. And you learn some theory about the guitar. And you know what a guitar looks like, but you don't know how to play that guitar. And so basically what you learned has almost no value.

• 2:00:13Jocko Willink?

  So, you know, for leadership, for me, you know, the reason I know this is because I teach leadership. And we teach leadership to people that have gone through big programs. And they don't, they'll tell us like, oh, I learned more in the three days I just spent with your company about leadership infinitely more. So not even close to what I learned in my two-year, you know, master's degree or in my MBA. They, they just don't, they're not doing it in the same way. So, and I think that that's kind of become the standard.

• 2:00:38Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 2:00:39Jocko Willink?

  The standard is, oh, well, we can teach you about the guitar and we can teach you about the music theory and they can teach you a bunch of different guitars. We're gonna have a bunch of different guitarists come and talk to you. We're gonna have the best, we're gonna have Eric Clapton come and talk to you and Tony Iommi. It's gonna be great. And, and that is cool. Sounds cool, right? But you still don't know how to play guitar.

• 2:00:59Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:01:00Jocko Willink?

  So we like to get them playing that guitar.

• 2:01:02Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 2:01:02Jocko Willink?

  Get on that git box.

• 2:01:04Speaker 01

  But you're playing a high stakes game in your view of leadership, that there's actually something on the table.

• 2:01:13Jocko Willink?

  Well, yeah, but I mean, I teach businesses. I mean, the vast majority of clients I have now are, look, we teach law enforcement. We teach military, absolutely. But we mostly teach businesses.

• 2:01:25Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 2:01:25Jocko Willink?

  Business leaders. Now, business leaders actually do have something real at stake. They got jobs, they got capital, they got safety. There's for sure. This is all really important stuff. But it is derived from the highest of consequences.

• 2:01:40Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 2:01:41Jocko Willink?

  Without question. And so because of all these changes, good and bad. Maybe mostly bad, some definitely good because like I said, it's good that Echo Charles and I could sit in this room with a thousand dollars worth of equipment and talk to way more people than NPR.

• 2:01:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:02:00Jocko Willink?

  In a lot of cases. You made the fainting Robin Foundation, so the, the, the mission is to help out people that need it.

• 2:02:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it grew like it started out professors, journalists and, and journalists pushing the envelope, right? The real guys like Ed Villemey, who, you know, was British newsman of the year, testified in the Hague, found the Serb camps in Bosnia. The people that are outliers that are, you know, coming into the later parts of their career and, you know, have really put it all out there.

• 2:02:38Jocko Willink?

  Isn't it kind of cool now that you can do that with no, without being part of the mainstream media at all? I mean, there's, there's plenty of people out there that are publishing. I mean, I know you have a Substack.

• 2:02:48Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 2:02:49Jocko Willink?

  Stubstack.

• 2:02:49Speaker 01

  I love Stubstack.

• 2:02:50Jocko Willink?

  You know, that's a way that you can go and you can get published and you can publish your stuff and you can get out there and you don't have to worry about the mainstream.

• 2:02:55Speaker 01

  And say whatever you want.

• 2:02:56Jocko Willink?

  You can say whatever you want.

• 2:02:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. But then it grew into helping those who can't help themselves, like a lot of veteran outreach. Your generation of veterans did more heavy lifting than, you know, really any generation, I would say in American history with the multiple tours with.

• 2:03:18Speaker 01

  A lot was asked of you and I am living in North Carolina, there's a lot of veterans and having a hard time finding their way after their, their time in the service, many of them and simple things, helping them find jobs, helping them do things like that, more complex things, getting them off SSRIs and the, you know, meds and stuff like that.

• 2:03:41Jocko Willink?

  They're giving out those things like candy, aren't they? You see this track in this most recent stuff that they're saying that depression isn't from a chemical imbalance anymore?

• 2:03:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, it doesn't work.

• 2:03:49Jocko Willink?

  This is like a big lie.

• 2:03:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:03:51Jocko Willink?

  Like a 30 year lie. Have you heard this Echo Charles? So they used to say, oh, you're depressed? Okay, it's because you have a chemical imbalance in your head. Take these drugs and it'll make you feel better.

• 2:03:59Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:04:00Jocko Willink?

  And now they're saying, actually, no, it's not a chemical imbalance. It's just like how you're feeling and drugs aren't going to help you in that, in the way that we were saying they were. Which is really freaking disturbing.

• 2:04:11Speaker 01

  Very.

• 2:04:11Jocko Willink?

  This is horrible.

• 2:04:12Speaker 01

  And particularly the side effects. Um, that's very disturbing.

• 2:04:17Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, the side effects are crazy and the side effects too, that even when you read the fine print about what it's gonna do to you, there's finer print that says like, oh, and by the way, if you come off this at this rate or you mix this with that, it's gonna make you have literal suicidal ideations. Like, it's crazy.

• 2:04:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, it is. And that, I'm, and Hickson and I have been talking a lot about that and, uh, and finding, you know, natural ways. And I've been, this is some of the things I've been doing. But also doing kind of more direct action stuff, like a woman, uh, friend of a friend in Santa Barbara's sister was murdered in Cambodia. We launched an investigation and it took us about eight years, but captured the guy. Um, another guy, the old pot smuggler who did a double life, uh, got double life and a billion dollar fine, was a big smuggler, but all pot. And, um, and he did, yeah, 27 years for a conspiracy, was not part of what, and I, you know, I read these things all the time.

• 2:05:21Jocko Willink?

  A drug conspiracy?

• 2:05:22Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, yeah. And, uh, he got out, he got a presidential pardon last year and we were lobbying for that. Um, so things kind of, I'm almost like the last resort when everything, every other, uh, avenue has failed. They wind up at my doorstep and I can't take all of them. I mean, I basically work from my kitchen table with no office and, but it is remarkable what you can do through persistence and, uh, and I have persistence.

• 2:05:54Jocko Willink?

  You're a, you're a one book a, book a decade writer. You got definite persistence. So there's a, we got this thread of your, of your writing. And it's the thread that you pull through. So, you know, you had the Nuremberg trials, this thread kind of leads to war crimes. This war crimes thread leads to Cambodia. The Cambodia thread, you, you find the surfers that got rolled up and tortured and killed. That thread leads to tie sticks. There's another thread that, that is something that you're working on now. And that's the Battle of Koteang, which happened.

• 2:06:31Jocko Willink?

  At the end of the Vietnam War and the Khmer Rouge seized a US merchant ship, the May Guiz. And this this this whole thing unfolds so that so the Marines go, they recapture the ship, but they also assault the island. There's a little island where it looked like the the crew of the of the May Guiz had been taken. And so the Marines do an assault on this island. Well, the the island is it's run by the Khmer Rouge. There's Khmer Rouge elements on there.

• 2:07:07Jocko Willink?

  The the they didn't know it. The Marines didn't know it at the time, but the crew wasn't on that island at all. And they'd actually been released and returned, but they didn't know they're already in the air. They go and assault this this island. And I'm actually gonna you you gave me like a kind of sort of a draft, your proposal, you're working on it. But let me just read a little chunk of this. This is your latest project. It's going to be called Left Behind. And again, the thread is, how did you get onto this story? You met someone that was on con you met a Cambodian Khmer Rouge that was on Cotang Island and fought against the Marines?

• 2:07:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 2:07:47Jocko Willink?

  This is what opens up this story for you. And you also started hearing about you were you were tracking on the Americans that were in S21, the prison.

• 2:07:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:07:57Jocko Willink?

  And you were hearing that there might have been other Americans and where were these other Americans? And so you pulled the thread on this?

• 2:08:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:08:03Jocko Willink?

  Let me go to this little section here. From his trench near the east beach, M Som, and this is the this is the Cambodian soldier that you met.

• 2:08:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:08:13Jocko Willink?

  So, or sorry, Khmer Rouge soldier.

• 2:08:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, one of a number.

• 2:08:18Jocko Willink?

  M Som watched knife 23, that's a helicopter, the next chopper attempting to land fly straight toward him. This one had a big propeller on top and a small one for steering, said Som. He shouldered his rocket and waited until it was 50 meters away and in his crosshairs. I aimed for the head and hit the tail, he recalled. The helicopter's tail broke off with an audible snap, and now the rudderless HH-53 shuddered, spun, and crash-landed on the beach. All 25 Americans onboard were able to escape from the wreckage and find cover. Soldiers in stretchy robes jumped down, said some. There was exchange of fire. Now, due to clouds of thick dust and smoke from the gunfire, the Khmer Rouge commander

• 2:09:02Jocko Willink?

  could not even see the beach and took a moment to pray to Buddha for help. I had been fighting all my life, but the fighting on Koh Tang was really terrifying. The initial assault on the island had been a debacle. In less than one hour, the US had lost three helicopters and 11 men. The young Marines who had been training in Okinawa less than 48 hours earlier were now experiencing combat for the first time all alone. At 7:00, at only 7:20 a.m., the longest day of their lives was just beginning. Unbeknownst to the Americans and Cambodians now fighting on Koh Tang, minutes before Knife 21 landed on the island, Khmer Rouge radioed, announced that they had freed the May Guaz and her crew.

• 2:09:47Jocko Willink?

  Even worse, the prisoners were not and had never been on the island. Al Bailey was standing waist-deep in a Khmer Rouge latrine, almost out of ammunition, fighting for his life. He was happy to see Jolly Green 43, the big Sikorsky HH-53 search-and-rescue helicopter, approach the land. The young Marine was even happier when he saw his 6'2", 250-pound Sergeant Fofo Sergeant T. And you say that, uh, to, uh, to, to Telly. Sergeant Sergeant T. Tutteli. Walked onto the beach with mortar rounds exploding around him like a comic book superhero.

• 2:10:31Jocko Willink?

  Sergeant T. stepped out of the helicopter and was like, "Let me get this shit under control." It was a walk in the park to him. He was ready to conduct business, recalled Bailey. He was like a pissed-off parent who had just found someone had abused his kids. Born and raised in American Samoa.

• 2:10:51Jocko Willink?

  Man, how do you say his first name? Fofo. Okay, just leaving it. You got the full name here. Fofo Matugali, something like, Tulagali.

• 2:11:02Jocko Willink?

  Tuatelli, better known as Fofo, moved to Hawaii at 10 and joined the Marines at 18. He spent his first tour in 1967 as a scout sniper hunting Viet Cong in the jungle. During his second tour, he fought in Chu Li, Khe Son, and the Battle of Huay, and was awarded two Presidential Unit Citations for Extraordinary Heroism and a Bronze Star. After Tuatelli's request for a third tour was denied, he became a platoon sergeant with 2nd Battalion, 9th Marines, and had been training Al Bailey's squad when he received word that training was over and that he would be leading them into combat for the first time. Although the soft-spoken Samoan treated his men well, he'd made quite an impression on his charges in Okinawa

• 2:11:45Jocko Willink?

  when he broke up a fight between a black and a white Marine by placing each of them in headlocks. He shouted, "Marines don't fight Marines." Fofo smashed their heads together and knocked them both unconscious. "Nobody," and I mean nobody, ever challenged him, said Bailey. This man had killed a rack of Vietnamese. You could see it in his demeanor, the way he carried himself. When Sergeant T spotted his Marines clumped together on the west beach, he ran toward them shouting, "What the fuck are you guys doing? Calm the hell down and listen." Fofo worked his way up and down their line, giving orders and words of encouragement. Finally, he turned to Bailey and said, "Only fire when the helicopter comes in. Don't waste ammo. Watch the trail.

• 2:12:28Jocko Willink?

  Any of these bastards cross the trail, blow their ass away." Then he grabbed his M16 and said, "I'm gonna take care of this machine gun problem. No shooting until I get back," and vanished into the jungle. Fofo walked carefully under the canopy until he heard an incoming American helicopter. Then he stopped and listened. The Samoan saw some branches move. Then he spotted two bare-chested Cambodians with red chequered scarves around their heads, adjusting a big gun. When they began firing at the helicopter, he shouldered his weapon, but could not get a clear shot because of the foliage. So he walked all the way to the edge of the machine gun nest and opened fire.

• 2:13:07Jocko Willink?

  By the time Fofo had emptied his one magazine, one magazine, one Khmer Rouge soldier lay dead, and another was wounded but still alive. Rather than reload, the Marine picked up a nearby machete, hacked the wounded man until he stopped moving, then grabbed their AK-47s, cigarettes, canteens, and sandals. As he worked his way back toward the west beach, he saw another occupied bunker, opened fire, and ran towards it. By the time the Samoan reached it, the bunker was empty, but a fire was still burning, a pot of rice cooking, and there was a fresh blood trail leading into the jungle.

• 2:13:50Jocko Willink?

  So, this is some serious scrapping that these guys are going through, and

• 2:13:58Jocko Willink?

  just going through some of the events that took place. By 0700, there was 109 Marines on the island. Three of the helos, there was eight helos used in the assault, three of them were destroyed, on the insert.

• 2:14:13Jocko Willink?

  Between 0900 and 1000, 100 additional Marines had been landed on the island. Nine had been wounded, and those guys had been evacuated, which meant there was about 225 Marines on the island. They make, they're fighting throughout the day, they make multiple attempts to extract the Marines. They drop at 1800 at night, they drop a freaking Blue 82, massive bomb. They call it a daisy cutter. I mean, it's just a massive bomb. It creates a mushroom cloud. It's huge.

• 2:14:46Jocko Willink?

  After dark, they finally start to get extracted. They're loading helos under fire. They leave dead behind. They also leave with a false head count, meaning they think that they have everyone, but they don't. They finally get back on the ships, you know, and now they do a head count of a legit head count, and they figure out that they're missing Lance Corporal Joseph Hargrove, PFC Gary Hall, and Private Danny Marshall.

• 2:15:16Jocko Willink?

  And then they received a radio transmission from those guys. Like one of the aircraft circling overhead receives a radio transmission saying, hey, swim to sea and we'll, we'll get you. And they respond, only one of us, only one of the Marines could swim effectively enough to actually swim to sea. And, and these guys get declared missing in action.

• 2:15:40Jocko Willink?

  On July 21st, 1976, those were changed to killed in action.

• 2:15:46Jocko Willink?

  The way it turned out, Joseph Hargrove was captured pretty quickly. He had a leg wound and then a week later, and you go through the details, e- even in this, I don't want to, you know, I obviously are going to put a whole book together on this that we'll have to, we'll have to cover on the podcast and I, and I hope we can get Fofo in here to get it done. That's the plan.

• 2:16:08Jocko Willink?

  You know, cause I, I know there's, and you, you talk about it here, but he was, he, he received the Navy Cross. Is that correct?

• 2:16:14Speaker 01

  No, he didn't. He got, uh, uh, it was interesting because on, it's the Marine. It, it was a very lower medal and I had a general look at the whole paperwork and the Secretary of the Navy had signed it. And he said, the only reason the Secretary of the Navy would have ever even seen this was, uh, because he was either up for the Navy Cross or the Congressional Medal. So one of the, uh, one of the lieutenants got the Navy Cross for doing nothing close to what Fofo Tetele had done. Um, and, and even one of the things I've been trying to do is get them the Vietnam Service Medal.

• 2:16:58Speaker 01

  And Tulsi Gabbard and Mark Meadows had tried to do it in 2016 and, um, the official government position was, well, you know, the, uh, the Vietnam War ended when the Paris Peace Agreement was signed in 1973. So this isn't the Vietnam War.

• 2:17:17Speaker 01

  I mean, their names are on the wall. So it's, it's a very strange case. And I think there's institutional embarrassment. As I demonstrate there, there's also knowledge that those men were left behind. And I think what's motivated me on this case is, is how heavily that's weighed on those Marines and those who knew that and were ordered not to talk about it as well. And so I spoke at their reunion this, last May. And, you know, this is something that, you know, many of these guys have been back to Cambodia. They've met with M. Som. They pleaded with him, where are their bodies?

• 2:18:02Speaker 01

  And, you know, and I, they, they've sent the POW MIA guys from Camp Smith there to do the, the mitochondria DNA. And it's, you know, I think that the Ford administration acted very badly. I think that they already had it planted on the New York Times as America is back. And that was, that was, you know, the height of our impotence. So this is May 15th, 1975. This is two weeks after the fall of Saigon.

• 2:18:35Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's one thing that makes it so. And, and again, that you've got some of the details even that, that I read here, just you, you're used to this kind of incompetence in Vietnam now by, you know, the generals, the politicians, McNamara, LBJ. Like, you're just used to this disgusting lack of ability to make decisions and lead and not be influenced just by raw politics on a daily basis. Just disgusting.

• 2:19:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:19:06Jocko Willink?

  And then, but what's interesting about this, this is like one incident. And since it's a little bit separated and you got a different administration, you go, oh, it's the same incompetence. And you just see these decisions getting made and these cover-ups are happening. It's just gross.

• 2:19:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:19:23Jocko Willink?

  It's gross. And of course, it's the freaking men on the ground, the Marines that pay the, pay the ultimate price for these horrible decisions. I mean, you got a section in there about the SEAL commander.

• 2:19:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, amazing guy.

• 2:19:33Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Who's like, this is total bullshit. He's calling it, good for him.

• 2:19:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, Tom Coulter, and he basically, you know, faced down the Admiral and said, "Okay, I'm gonna leave room on the front of my Zodiac for you and your officers, and you can go on that island with me." And they were not honest with him either. And they said, "Oh, we wanna drop leaflets." And this is kind of, you know, they had the lithographer aboard, um, one of the Navy ships, print 10,000 cards, Cambodian, French, and English, saying, "Bring all the Americans to the helicopter wreckage, including the dead ones." So that does lead you to believe they knew that these guys were behind, I, I left behind. I have no doubt they knew.

• 2:20:20Speaker 01

  And, um, and again, it was already on the cover of the New York Times. And the press attempt, and you know, the pictures of Kissinger and Rumsfeld, and Ford in tuxedos, smoking cigars, and you know, it's, it's the carelessness of the human material, you know? That's the part, to me, that's so galling. And I, um, you know, as the war on terror, you know, kind of pushed forward, I'd see it more and more, just badly-used people, lives destroyed unnecessarily. I mean, war is war, but, you know, there's a kind of carelessness that only people who risk nothing, who are never gonna be near it, who have never felt the hard hand of it,

• 2:21:03Speaker 01

  or seen the aftermath of it, that, that they can, they can entertain these fantasies, and do it without remorse, and do it over and over again.

• 2:21:13Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I mean, you found out, um, through your interviews, Joseph Hargrove, like I said, was captured with a leg wound, and executed pretty quickly.

• 2:21:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:21:22Jocko Willink?

  But it was a week later.

• 2:21:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:21:24Jocko Willink?

  That they captured Gary Hall and Danny Marshall. So those guys were on the island. You got massive American forces around there, that could have done any number of things to try and get those guys out. And they just got.

• 2:21:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, and they want, and so you had the Marine officers want volunteered to go back. The SEALs wanted to go back. I think the PJs had gone back to Thailand, but the Wayne Fisk unbelievable PJ was on the Sante raid. And, you know, the Apollo missions, I mean, he, um, you know, you had all the, all the, the people ready to do the heavy lifting without any qualms about doing it and, uh, and they just steamed away and left them, you know, left them behind, gone and, you know, and that's, uh, they were stealing rice from the Khmer Rouge. And so basically they finally saw boot prints going into their kitchen because every day the Khmer Rouge guys, hey, why'd you eat the leftover rice?

• 2:22:21Speaker 01

  I didn't eat the leftover rice. No, you did, you know, so they're fighting about this. And then they get, they go to Am Som and they, the same accounts of the rice missing, uh, is happening over and over. So then they say, okay, there's still two guys here, so let's set up an ambush. They capture them coming at night to get the rice. And they're at this point so physically beaten down, they don't even bother to tie them up. And in fact, according to Khmer Rouge, they made them rice and made them food and they just waited for their orders and then they sent them to the mainland. Then they were put in a prison. Then they were probably interrogated and, and executed.

• 2:23:04Jocko Willink?

  So where's, what's the status of this book right now?

• 2:23:08Speaker 01

  Um, uh, you know, probably 10 years, you know, it's been more than 10 years. Um, it's, uh, it's a hard sell and it's funny that's like, oh, you know, we don't want another book about the Vietnam War. That's what my agent was saying. And I said, look, this isn't, this is about, this is about, you know, leave no man behind. This is as old as warfare. This is, uh, a much bigger kind of theme. So we'll see, I'll, I'll peck away at it and, um, but yeah, there's not much interest in the Vietnam War. Not that much interest in this subject.

• 2:23:43Jocko Willink?

  What's causing, what's causing the lack of interest in the Vietnam War?

• 2:23:46Speaker 01

  I think there were too many books, uh, initially, there was just a big spate of books. And it's just publishing now, you know, publishing isn't.

• 2:23:56Speaker 01

  Doing that well and everybody's nervous, the economy's going funny.

• 2:23:59Jocko Willink?

  It's just like. Well, that's one of the reasons for that is because you can publish a book with no.

• 2:24:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:24:03Jocko Willink?

  By yourself.

• 2:24:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:24:04Jocko Willink?

  You know, Echo Charles could publish a book in a week.

• 2:24:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:24:08Jocko Willink?

  You could literally publish a book in a week.

• 2:24:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:24:09Jocko Willink?

  And it could be available on Amazon and it could have, which is eighty-five percent of book sales are Amazon.

• 2:24:16Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 2:24:16Jocko Willink?

  Right now, anyway. So, so Echo Charles could write a book about, uh, bicep curls.

• 2:24:22Speaker 01

  Yes, sir.

• 2:24:23Jocko Willink?

  And since that's your area of expertise and he could have it published immediately.

• 2:24:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:24:28Jocko Willink?

  And he could have access to eighty-five percent of the market.

• 2:24:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:24:32Jocko Willink?

  Which is a pretty unbelievable thing.

• 2:24:35Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 2:24:35Jocko Willink?

  And so, yes, the publishers are definitely scared about that.

• 2:24:39Speaker 01

  But I need to go back. I gotta go back to Cambodia and do some more interviews and, um.

• 2:24:45Jocko Willink?

  Would you, if you're gonna make, you've made that much effort, you've made this much effort now, you're gonna make some more effort. If, if your publisher doesn't want to publish it, what are you gonna do? You're gonna publish it yourself?

• 2:24:54Speaker 01

  Sure, eventually, but, uh, you know, I, I have like three jobs, so it's, you know, it's, uh, I have to write a lot of stuff to pay the bills and then I, um.

• 2:25:05Jocko Willink?

  What do you normally write to pay the bills?

• 2:25:08Speaker 01

  A lot of ghostwriting, some screenwriting, um, yeah.

• 2:25:13Jocko Willink?

  Have you written any screenplays that we've seen?

• 2:25:15Speaker 01

  No, not yet, nothing, you know, it's Hollywood where everything almost always happens. Uh, I wrote, I co-wrote the screenplay for the Hickson movie and, um.

• 2:25:26Jocko Willink?

  Is that coming?

• 2:25:27Speaker 01

  That's battling with Netflix because now Netflix is all, you know, taking on water and they're all panicking and, um, I wrote a couple of pilots for the Tie Stick TV series. I wrote a really.

• 2:25:40Jocko Willink?

  Kelly Slater buy the, the rights to Tie Stick?

• 2:25:43Speaker 01

  He did, but then he fumbled them and, uh, yeah, he had a deal with Sony and then it's just Hollywood and it's, it's just, it makes the DOD seem positively efficient.

• 2:25:56Jocko Willink?

  Same thing is going on though, too, with like Hollywood, because if you want to, you could make a movie and you can post it on YouTube and see what happens.

• 2:26:04Speaker 01

  Well, and the thing is, like, the Hickson movie is remarkable because it starts with Maeda. So it starts in eighteen ninety in Japan and Maeda is an unbelievable guy. I mean, he's prize fighting all over Europe. He comes to the United States like in the twenties. He's prize fighting in the South. He's, he's going to West Point. Yeah, and, and then he fights like one of the gangs in New York guys in Brooklyn. And, and then he goes to Cuba and then I think, we think he's the guy who invented the Mexican wrestling mask because no one would fight him.

• 2:26:44Speaker 01

  And then he winds up in Brazil with the, meets the Gracies and then that's where the second part of the story goes. And Jose Padilla, who did Narcos, who's from Rio, grew up, you know, around Hickson and the Gracies is the director. So it ain't rocket science.

• 2:27:00Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's a no brainer.

• 2:27:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, and you're kind of like, so I, I think you're right. I mean, I, that's what I told Jose Padilla, the director. I was like, go get some private equity people. I mean, this isn't that tough a business case to make. Like, come on.

• 2:27:14Jocko Willink?

  And that's not, not like a crazy special effects movie or anything either. Like, it's not going to be a huge budget film.

• 2:27:21Speaker 01

  It's big, like, you know, you got some great fights. You know, you have like Helio fighting.

• 2:27:26Jocko Willink?

  Kamura?

• 2:27:28Speaker 01

  Uh, no, Kamura, but you also have, uh, the, the Black Panther, his former student. Pantera, you know, the three hour, forty eight minute fight and, uh, and just classic stories that Hickson talks about like as his childhood. And, um, and so all that's in there and it's just, you know, you could see it. Rio in the seventies and, you know.

• 2:27:50Jocko Willink?

  Surfing.

• 2:27:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:27:51Jocko Willink?

  Drugs, rock and roll.

• 2:27:53Speaker 01

  Beating up.

• 2:27:54Jocko Willink?

  Street fights.

• 2:27:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, and so, uh.

• 2:27:56Jocko Willink?

  What's not to like?

• 2:27:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, so they'll, I don't know. I just like, when I write something for Hollywood, I write it and I forget about it. And my mom, luckily, I grew up around this and I grew, you know, I grew up on the set of Robert Altman movies and Altman was all in. Altman was putting his house on the line to pay for that movie. And there was none of this committee decision, like the greatest oxymoron I've ever seen is what they call in Hollywood, a creative executive. And, um, and so you go to these meetings about meetings and, uh, and everybody has, and then I get in trouble because I'm not. Nice enough or whatever. And then I'm not really allowed to go to meetings anymore.

• 2:28:40Speaker 01

  And, um, but the best meeting we had was we went into Ted Sarandos, owner of Netflix's office. And my co-author, Mike Ritter, glassed like a half a pound of weed in a 1970s single fin pin tail. And we had the tie stick cover on top of it. And I pulled out a rubber mallet and a chisel, ripped the deck off of it and put a half a pound of weed in an abalone shell and pushed it to Ted Sarandos. I go, there it is. It's all yours, Ted. And he's like,

• 2:29:13Speaker 01

  and I was like, nope, I'm not taking it back. Leave it in your commissary, whatever. And so I left him a bunch of weed at Netflix.

• 2:29:23Jocko Willink?

  Oh, well, hopefully some of those things get eventually made, man. Sounds like good stuff.

• 2:29:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:29:28Jocko Willink?

  Uh, that kind of has us up to date.

• 2:29:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:29:30Jocko Willink?

  We made it. We made it through your life to this point. Um, what, do we miss anything?

• 2:29:36Speaker 01

  No, I don't, I mean, yeah, but no, I think we got most of the sailing points there.

• 2:29:42Jocko Willink?

  High points.

• 2:29:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:29:43Jocko Willink?

  Uh, people can find you at faintingrobin.org if they want to support that. You've got your Substack, which is petermcguire.substack.com.

• 2:29:54Speaker 01

  Sour Milk.

• 2:29:55Jocko Willink?

  And it's Peter Maguire's Sour Milk. What's the, what's the title about? Why is it called Sour Milk?

• 2:30:01Speaker 01

  Cause I'm Sour Milk. I'm a 57 year old white guy.

• 2:30:06Jocko Willink?

  Uh, you got your books, Law and Order, or sorry, Law and War, Facing Death in Cambodia, Tie Stick, and then the book that I covered on podcasts, 293, I think, with Hicks and Gracie. The book is called Breathe. I wrote the foreword.

• 2:30:20Speaker 01

  And you did a great job. And that was the best interview anybody did on that whole book tour.

• 2:30:24Jocko Willink?

  Oh, well, I appreciate it. It was an absolute honor to be able to write that foreword. Um, when you hit me up, I was like, you know, can you said, can you write a foreword? I was like, let me think about that for, yes, I can.

• 2:30:37Speaker 01

  Well, thank you.

• 2:30:38Jocko Willink?

  Uh, yeah, that's just a great book. And, and now you're working on a follow on book with Hixson?

• 2:30:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:30:44Jocko Willink?

  And what's the, what's the premise of the follow on book with Hixson?

• 2:30:46Speaker 01

  Uh, it's called Invisible Jiu-Jitsu and it's.

• 2:30:49Jocko Willink?

  Invisible Jiu-Jitsu.

• 2:30:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. And it's. There's a lot about jujitsu and fighting, but there's also a lot about life and a lot about people dealing with problems and, you know, similar to the things you talk about and how the answer can't be found in a pill or a shrink and that, you know, you, you kind of have to, you, you know, there's sections on strategy, there's sections on things Hickson talks about generally, but then I make him, you know, delve into in much greater detail. And so I think people will find it very useful for their daily lives, trying to get people kind of back in their bodies and out of their heads. And

• 2:31:33Speaker 01

  I think there's really something to that. And we've been teaching a lot of really civilian unathletic people, really, really basic jujitsu and how someone's walking into you, what do you do? You know, do you let them close the distance? Do you, so kind of coming back to the old self-defense jujitsu at a very fundamental level. And, uh, and I have all these kind of out of shape civilian students I've been testing it on and they come every week and they love it, even though they go drink 20 beers afterwards and get even more out of shape. But, um, but now they want to roll and they're rolling and I got to be careful that they don't get hurt because they're not in the best shape. But you really

• 2:32:15Speaker 01

  see the change on them as we've all seen with jujitsu. It does change people.

• 2:32:19Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I think the one thing with Hickson is like jujitsu is so much a part of him that there's, you, you kind of have to tease it out of him. It's like the water, this is the water that he lives in, right? And so you ask him how the water tastes, like that fish story, right? How's, how's the water? They're like, what, what's water?

• 2:32:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:32:39Jocko Willink?

  So you're, you pulling out, because my, I, I connected so many things in my life because of jujitsu. It, it made all the, all the pictures start to become assimilated into the same world. And that was hu, absolutely huge for me. And so I think that, you know, if you pull those strings on, on Hickson where he can talk about. He makes a decision in life without thinking about it because that's just who he is. But if you start saying, hey, why'd you make that decision? Why would you do it that way? And then you can, he'll start to see and you'll start to see and we'll all start to see. That's the jujitsu.

• 2:33:17Speaker 01

  Well, like he talks about acceptance, you know, and he'll use these words and you'll think it's kind of a new age thing. Acceptance and forgiveness. And I'll say, what do you mean acceptance? He goes, well, when Finaki broke my orbital bones in my eye socket, I had to accept the fact that I couldn't see and I was going to have to fight him blind. And I was figuring out how I was going to fight him blind and I had a plan. But then I got a little bit of vision back and I took him down and, you know, broke his knee and then choked him unconscious. And so, so it's funny because like you said, to kind of force him to really elaborate on some of this stuff. Um, the well is deep.

• 2:34:00Jocko Willink?

  No doubt. Awesome, man. Uh, Echo, any questions?

• 2:34:05Speaker 02

  So you have your black belt?

• 2:34:06Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:34:07Speaker 02

  When did that happen?

• 2:34:08Speaker 01

  Uh, after 30 years I got it. I don't know, two months ago or something.

• 2:34:13Jocko Willink?

  Oh, you just got your black belt?

• 2:34:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, I have my black belt in Jeet Kune Do, but yeah, I was a purple belt, I think for like 17 years.

• 2:34:20Jocko Willink?

  Damn.

• 2:34:21Speaker 01

  Well, I only would take belts from Hickson. So, and I didn't, I'm not out here all the time, so.

• 2:34:28Jocko Willink?

  Dude, you're a black belt snob. Listen to this guy. He's like, I'll only take a black belt from Hickson, crazy. That's it.

• 2:34:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:34:33Speaker 02

  It does make sense though, because you started with Hickson and then, you know, like all your knowledge and stuff like that. It's like from Hickson and then what? Some other guy kind of slides in. He's like, you know.

• 2:34:44Speaker 01

  I trained with Henzo too, but you know, it just was different, you know, Hickson's Hickson. I, Donahue, I trained with a lot.

• 2:34:51Jocko Willink?

  How much did you train with Henzo?

• 2:34:53Speaker 01

  Not much because I was a daytime guy. So I trained with Donahue and John was a white belt. I met him when he was a white belt. I was a professor at Columbia when he was a graduate student. And so

• 2:35:05Jocko Willink?

  So you guys knew each other?

• 2:35:06Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:35:06Jocko Willink?

  You guys were bros back in the day.

• 2:35:07Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. And he would kind of ramp me up for Cambodia, you know? So I'd just like take these horrible Donner beatings for a month so that nothing was really that bad in Cambodia, the Legionnaires and stuff that didn't know jujitsu. So

• 2:35:22Jocko Willink?

  How many hours? So were you there when he quit being whatever he was being at Columbia? And he just did jujitsu all day?

• 2:35:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And, um, yeah, and he, I was getting threatened by the Serbs and I was putting on this conference and I had all these big, uh, Richard Goldstone, the chief prosecutor in The Hague and this and that. And so John Donner and Peretti, my old kickboxing coach, came as the undercover security and just shadowed these two Serbs the whole time. It was pretty funny. But, um, yeah, John Donner actually came to my wedding and wore a three-piece suit. He did not wear Lycra.

• 2:35:58Jocko Willink?

  Did he have a, did he have a butt pack on?

• 2:36:01Speaker 01

  No, Donner was, uh, he was, he's a classic guy and, uh, we had a lot of fun and, uh, yeah, he was, I could, I could really plum the depths of my cynicism with Donner.

• 2:36:17Jocko Willink?

  Well, he's been awesome to watch him and his team. Um, man, they're just dominating in jujitsu. It's freaking awesome to watch.

• 2:36:23Speaker 01

  Well, he's, I mean, he's a really sharp guy and, um, and, you know, on some level, I think they saw my acad- he saw my academic career and was like, no way, man.

• 2:36:37Jocko Willink?

  I'm just gonna teach you jujitsu, homie.

• 2:36:39Speaker 01

  No, I remember Henzo and Henzo and Donner came to one of my classes at Columbia and I was teaching about Japan and the Samurai and this and that. And a student go, um, I don't think it's appropriate for you to, to get into these cul- these cultural stereotypes about the Japanese warrior culture. They had almost 20 years of Weimar-like democracy. Just burying my head in my hands. And, uh, I think that was probably the day Donner decided he wasn't gonna become a professor. Yeah.

• 2:37:11Jocko Willink?

  Well, he's a professor of jujitsu, that's for damn sure.

• 2:37:14Speaker 01

  He is.

• 2:37:14Jocko Willink?

  It's kind of wild. You, you've heard the story that like, you, you know, Dean Lister is, obviously? And he, he had that conversation with Dean and it's kind of like this mythical thing now, right? It's a little bit of a mythical thing that Dean said. You know, Dean was catching guys and Dean tells it super humble. You know, I was doing okay with my leg locks, training with some of the students, which means people were, he was tapping people out. I can tell you that right now because he's tapped me out one million times. And I've seen it. We used to do, you know, dojo storms and all that stuff. And even just tournaments, he would just foot lock, leg lock, everybody. And win by other methods because his whole game of jujitsu. But it's kind of wild, you know, like Donahue was asking him like, you know, or said something like, you know, you spend a lot of time on the, you know,

• 2:37:59Jocko Willink?

  going for people's legs and Dean Lister said, "Why would you ignore 50% of the human body?" And that's become this thing. But it's, if you think about the, the sharpness of, of Donahue to hear that and go, "Hmm, that's a really good point."

• 2:38:19Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:38:19Jocko Willink?

  That's a really good point. And Dean was, you know, Dean, it wasn't like, if you have the idea that Dean was, had a couple of foot locks in his game and that's what, no, Dean was way deep into, heel hooks, foot locks, he was way deep into that stuff. I mean, so far deep into it that people have only caught up. I think it's been now, it's about a year and a half when Dean, I would ask Dean like, "Hey, have you seen anything you didn't know yet?" And it was like a year and a half. He was like, "Yeah, now they're starting to do things that I don't know." But that was a long time where Dean was just way above everybody else. But it is amazing that Donahue heard that, saw what he did and said, "Oh yeah, there's something going on here." And of course, now we have Pete the Greek.

• 2:39:03Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, well, he's a wrist locker and he says, "Why would you ignore 5% of the human?"

• 2:39:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Well, I trained with LaBelle also.

• 2:39:10Jocko Willink?

  Oh, hell, yeah.

• 2:39:11Speaker 01

  And so I trained.

• 2:39:12Jocko Willink?

  I met him a few times.

• 2:39:13Speaker 01

  And he's scary. And, uh, and so.

• 2:39:16Jocko Willink?

  I have his book, you know, he's got a big book about.

• 2:39:18Speaker 01

  Pro wrestling finishing holds, that one?

• 2:39:20Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I guess it is. He has more than one. I got a big giant book by Judo G LaBelle. And it's all these crazy finishing holds. It also got like weird, like you have a cane and how you can choke him with a cane and all this other stuff.

• 2:39:33Speaker 01

  Well, I grew up watching him, uh, Lucha Libre, hey, ka, hey, television, La Hunkles. And, uh, you know, that was wrestling at the Olympic and Gene's brother was the announcer. And then Gene was the hangman. Gene was like three different masked guys. And, uh, and then, you know, when you train with him, he goes into character. You know, gets you in some horrible weird neck twist and be like, who's the most beautiful man in the world? And, um, yeah, he's a scary guy.

• 2:40:03Jocko Willink?

  He, I mean, Judo Gene LaBelle, he has to be one of the premier guys. And, and for whatever reason, it like, didn't make it out. You know, like the Gracies did the most incredible job of marketing Jiu Jitsu by creating the UFC.

• 2:40:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:40:20Jocko Willink?

  And Gene LaBelle had some, some MMA fights.

• 2:40:23Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:40:23Jocko Willink?

  And he refed, what was the big fight? He refed.

• 2:40:25Speaker 01

  Anoki and Ali.

• 2:40:26Jocko Willink?

  Yes, right. Anoki. Now, he refereed that fight.

• 2:40:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:40:29Jocko Willink?

  But again, it wasn't quite, it didn't quite get over the hump. And maybe UFC wouldn't have made it over the hump because, you know, the Fertitta brothers, and it was banned everywhere and it got, eventually got picked up. But man, Judo Gene LaBelle, he, he was a legit submission grappler before that was even a thing.

• 2:40:47Speaker 01

  Well, he was AAU wrestling champ.

• 2:40:49Jocko Willink?

  God, what a beast.

• 2:40:50Speaker 01

  He was all Japan Judo champ at some point.

• 2:40:55Jocko Willink?

  First American.

• 2:40:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. And his mom, I think, owned the Olympic auditorium or ran it, something like that. So he grew up training with like Ed Strangler Lewis.

• 2:41:06Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, the legit catch wrestlers.

• 2:41:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. The catches, catch can guys. So he didn't know anything but like, you know, real nasty, old fashioned submission grappling. And, um, and yeah, and then you, I got to go to his cabin at high elevation and you show up there at like 10 at night. And uh

• 2:41:27Jocko Willink?

  Where was it, a big bear or something?

• 2:41:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, and you trained till like 3:00 in the morning. And it was me, Peretti, and John Lewis. And uh, and, and we walk in and his wife says, "Oh, hi, boys," and da-da-da. And John Lewis is so nervous, he goes, "Uh, it's ni- nice to know you." And then, and there's a loft, and we hear this booming voice from the loft. "How you know it's nice to know her? You just met her." And so, but he actually surfed uh, with Lord Tally Ho Blyers, who was the old announcer for pro surfing, who was a wrestler in Hawaii. So, and Tally Ho Blyers took him to Makaha, like, on a big day, and like, LeBelle got his front teeth knocked out. And Gene was terrified of surfing.

• 2:42:13Speaker 01

  And so, like, and I was surfing a lot of big waves then, and I must have had a picture or something. So I wound up at his kitchen table, like, talking to him about surfing for hours, and uh, and he was very close to the Machados. And uh, I think, you know, Jean Jacques Machado is one of the guys who's impressed me as much as anyone, other than Hickson.

• 2:42:32Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:33Speaker 01

  And I've been able to train with him the last few years. Um, and that's been great. And he's, he's a really nice guy, and that's a book I'd like to write.

• 2:42:43Jocko Willink?

  What about Jean Jacques?

• 2:42:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, because being born with-

• 2:42:46Jocko Willink?

  Or Judo Gene LeBelle?

• 2:42:47Speaker 01

  Uh, both, but, but I think Gene's a little more, plays it close to the vest. Um, but Jean Jacques, born with one hand, and becoming, you know, one of the best of all time, and turning a handicap into an advantage, is uh, it's a remarkable story. And he, and again, he's a, a great teacher.

• 2:43:06Jocko Willink?

  Did you run into the Armenian crew?

• 2:43:08Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, go-kart.

• 2:43:09Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:43:11Jocko Willink?

  This is like a whole timeline-

• 2:43:13Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:43:14Jocko Willink?

  -for me and Dean, and we were going up there, and like, those guys were, we, we did matches in these underground places. There was one place called Neutral Grounds, it was in some terrible part of uh, uh, LA, and like, there was pit bulls everywhere, and there was no, like, it was just, just mayhem.

• 2:43:32Speaker 01

  But it's hard to explain that to people that didn't live through that, the pre-Cambian times.

• 2:43:38Jocko Willink?

  I thought Dean killed an Armenian one time, like, this guy- These guys would not tap.

• 2:43:43Speaker 01

  No.

• 2:43:44Jocko Willink?

  I mean, they were, it was a life or death scenario for them.

• 2:43:47Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:43:48Jocko Willink?

  And they were, I mean, obviously tough as hell. And, and they, you know, they, they also knew, they were also foot locking and knee locking.

• 2:43:55Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:43:56Jocko Willink?

  They, they were all linked in with Judo Jean LaBelle. So there's some mayhem going up there.

• 2:44:00Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:44:00Jocko Willink?

  Some awesome times.

• 2:44:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:44:01Jocko Willink?

  There were some, there were some definite chaos between jujitsu and I guess sambo maybe?

• 2:44:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:44:10Jocko Willink?

  At jujitsu tournaments.

• 2:44:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:44:12Jocko Willink?

  And it would be mayhem. But it was fun. It was a good way to start to learn things.

• 2:44:18Speaker 01

  Everybody got a lot better fast.

• 2:44:19Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, no doubt about it. And now it's like, you, you gotta just have an open mind with everything.

• 2:44:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:44:24Jocko Willink?

  You know, you gotta keep that mind open.

• 2:44:28Jocko Willink?

  Anyways, man.

• 2:44:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, a few more things.

• 2:44:30Jocko Willink?

  Oh, we got more questions from Echo Charles.

• 2:44:32Speaker 02

  Rewind back to Tahiti, right? You were talking about the guy who kind of came in. Who, who was, who was that guy? Her husband?

• 2:44:37Speaker 01

  The sugar daddy.

• 2:44:38Speaker 02

  Oh, a sugar daddy.

• 2:44:39Speaker 01

  From Paris. Landed from Paris.

• 2:44:41Speaker 02

  Brutal.

• 2:44:42Speaker 01

  Showed up unannounced.

• 2:44:43Jocko Willink?

  And starts smelling the sheets.

• 2:44:45Speaker 02

  No, bro.

• 2:44:46Jocko Willink?

  Damn.

• 2:44:46Speaker 02

  So you were just out at that point?

• 2:44:48Speaker 01

  Passport, where is it? Yeah.

• 2:44:50Speaker 02

  Where is it?

• 2:44:52Jocko Willink?

  That's probably the most, everything you've done, that might've been the closest to death you've been.

• 2:44:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, I know, right? And then back to your weed selling days.

• 2:44:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:45:00Speaker 02

  You said you didn't like to do the small stuff.

• 2:45:01Speaker 01

  No.

• 2:45:02Speaker 02

  Only do like bigger, like what, how does that work? Where would you get it from or whatever?

• 2:45:06Speaker 01

  From the older guys who were smuggling it.

• 2:45:08Speaker 02

  Okay, so you had to deal with like the, the older guys.

• 2:45:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, but they were guys I knew from surfing. It was very small, closed loop. It wasn't.

• 2:45:16Speaker 02

  And they would what? Sell it to you?

• 2:45:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:45:18Speaker 02

  And you'd sell it to someone else?

• 2:45:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:45:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, basic.

• 2:45:20Speaker 01

  And it didn't want exposure, didn't want, you know, people coming to my house or whatever. It was just, go to McDonald's and bring in the duffel bag and they leave with the duffel bag or, you know, usually. But the Crenshaw stuff was, you'd sit on the front porch and, you know, that was a trip. Like, that was a whole nother world.

• 2:45:39Jocko Willink?

  Well, well, what was going on there?

• 2:45:41Speaker 01

  Well, that was, um.

• 2:45:44Speaker 01

  It was just out in the open, you know, and, and I had a, I had a white Mustang GT. And when that white Mustang GT pulled up, like line would form and people coming from all walks of life, all ages, everything. And, uh, and I remember once these cars came screeching up and I was like, oh man, it's a drive by. And, uh, and they get out and they just robbed the Crenshaw High School marching band. And so they have

• 2:46:17Jocko Willink?

  Sounds like a great take.

• 2:46:18Speaker 01

  So they have

• 2:46:19Jocko Willink?

  They got a trombone.

• 2:46:20Speaker 01

  And so they're trying to run up on, on the porch of the house where I am to stash the stuff. And my buddy's mom comes out, no, no, no, they're not putting that here. So I was like, get that shit out of here. So then there's like 10 guys walking down the street with like Crenshaw Cougars, big drums, two, some stuff. Like, oh man. Yeah. So I, I, uh, the truth is always stranger than fiction. You know, it really is. And it's just, you know, yeah.

• 2:46:51Jocko Willink?

  How much money you, when you went on your eight or nine month trip to Australia and, and Southeast Asia and whatnot, how much money do you think you had in your, how much money did you have in your bank account when you rolled out?

• 2:47:02Speaker 01

  Uh, probably like 20 grand or something.

• 2:47:05Jocko Willink?

  That's like more than enough.

• 2:47:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:47:07Jocko Willink?

  Live forever on

• 2:47:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. And my rent in Australia was, it was like 300 Australian a month, right across the street from a little grass trail to Broken Head Point. And, uh, you know, go to the pub and, uh, you know, play pool in the afternoons. And yeah, it was great. And, uh, yeah. And then the, the banquet for the surf contests, I was in a few surf contests, always had to culminate with a giant Wild Wild West fight. And, uh, and the Bondi guys were real badasses. So Ant and the Bondi guys would come up and it was, the big one was the Sky Easter classic. And so we were all in that. And then, then some guys from Malibu came.

• 2:47:50Speaker 01

  And they started slam dancing at the, at the awards banquet and the Aussies thought they were fighting and it turns into the gnarliest Wild Wild West brawl you've ever seen. And um, yeah, and, and one of the Americans got his lips split a little bit and you know, it's just comes with the turf. And uh, yeah, no, I love the Aussies. Uh, yeah, I still, I'm still friends with all those guys.

• 2:48:16Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I was lucky enough to go down there for a bit and um, it was one of the places where I was like, man, I went to damn Noosa.

• 2:48:24Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:48:25Jocko Willink?

  What the, that place is ridiculous.

• 2:48:27Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. No, no, but see, then I started going to West Australia and that's gnarly. And so by then I was pretty good in jujitsu and they called me the human knot. And um, and my friends, it's like four brothers and they're the best guys at Margaret River. So I would stay with them, but I would first have to line them all up on the lawn and beat all of them just to get it over with. And I would also have a mouthpiece with me anytime I went out. And so, and they worked, these are hard guys. They worked all day on the blacktop, shoveling blacktop. And uh, and the father was a treasure hunter, deep sea diver, and they were also commercial fishermen. And they come home in their little council worker outfits

• 2:49:12Speaker 01

  with the short shorts. And the one brother who was the wimpiest one, but he was the natural in jujitsu. So suddenly he's whipping the brothers who've been kicking his ass his whole life. And he's like, and he's really looks scared. I go, what's wrong, Jay? He goes, well, cousin Dave's a bit crook with you. And I'm like, fucking cousin Dave? I don't know your cousin Dave. I go, what are you talking about? He goes, well, I've gone and shown him that choke. And he said, no, sepo choke's gonna work on me. So I've gone and shown him, but, but I forgot to tell him to tap me leg. And he's gone unconscious on the job site. And so then I'd go to these parties and like cousin Dave wanted to give me the king hit, which is the sucker punch. So you're having to like always keep your

• 2:49:56Speaker 01

  back to the wall and watch out for cousin Dave. So, and then there was gentleman's night at the Margaret Rivers Board Riders Club, which was um, You know, an endless glass of beer for three hours, then the fully naked strippers, and then the motorcycle club crashed that party to fight with the surfers. Then, then I- And this was like a normal Wednesday night? No, this is a big event, you know, yeah. And so, no, so we're there and, you know, stumbled drunk in true Australian fashion, and the whole front window shatters. And they go, "The bikies are here, the bikies are here." So they spill out, and there's some fighting with the motorcycle guys.

• 2:50:39Speaker 01

  And then I'm thinking like, I can't really stay vertical, but if I jog slow, it's a lot better. So I'm kind of jogging slow. And, uh, and, and then, and then I see a cop, and I'm like, oh man, I gotta, that cop's gonna get me for public drunkenness or something. And then I kind of get lost. And now I'm in West Australia. It's like two in the morning, and then I sort of get my bearings again. I'm like, okay, and I can see where I'm staying, and I'm going down the main drag of Margaret River. And, uh, there was like a crazy Australian Vietnam vet who lived in the park. And all he did was march with this big staff on his head, and do pushups and bodyweight exercises, and he was a monster.

• 2:51:20Speaker 01

  And, and I'm lurking in the shadows, and I hear this, "I see you. I see you, scaredy cat. Come on, scaredy cat, come out and fly." And, uh, and I go down one block, and there's like three blocks to my place where I'm staying. I put my mouthpiece in, and I just start running. And I'm like, okay, it's football time. And he didn't do anything. But then I wake up the next day. I'm so hungover, and my, my wife says, "Oh, let's go have breakfast." I say, "Okay, yeah." God, you're married at this point? Yeah. So- Jack. My wife's gnarly. And, uh, and so I take like two steps and run back, throw up. And I say, "I just gotta go to the beach and get in the water, and I'll be better." Like, just let me get in the water. So you go to Margaret River,

• 2:52:05Speaker 01

  you gotta go down this long staircase, then there's a big beach with some rocks. And I'm with, walking with my wife, and I get halfway down the beach, and I'm like- And my wife just peels off like she's never seen me in my life. There's like one twig I'm trying to hide under and puke and all the Aussies are up on the thing, watching the whole thing. And that's when they're like, ah, that pipe's a top plug. And that's like Australia. You have to do that, you know?

• 2:52:32Jocko Willink?

  What year did you get married?

• 2:52:34Speaker 01

  Uh, 2000.

• 2:52:38Jocko Willink?

  Wait a second. So this was.

• 2:52:40Speaker 01

  I wasn't married yet.

• 2:52:41Jocko Willink?

  You wasn't married yet, but it was you. She became your wife.

• 2:52:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was her. That was.

• 2:52:48Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that was your courting process.

• 2:52:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, and a little time in Upwedge Island at the lobster camp. She liked that a lot.

• 2:52:55Jocko Willink?

  Where's she from originally?

• 2:52:57Speaker 01

  South. Uh, she's from Virginia and Florida, but a real southerner.

• 2:53:02Jocko Willink?

  Where did, when did you meet her?

• 2:53:04Speaker 01

  Uh, blind date in New York City.

• 2:53:08Speaker 01

  In 95, I think, something like that.

• 2:53:11Jocko Willink?

  Again, how was she, what was she doing down in Australia? This shit was happening in Australia like

• 2:53:15Speaker 01

  I took her down there.

• 2:53:16Jocko Willink?

  95?

• 2:53:17Speaker 01

  No, no, this would, this would have been about probably 97 or eight or somewhere around then.

• 2:53:24Jocko Willink?

  Oh, so you were actually a grown man doing this shit?

• 2:53:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:53:29Jocko Willink?

  I thought this was when you were 18.

• 2:53:30Speaker 01

  No, no, but, but in Australia, you say, oh, well, that was back then. Everybody's old now. And these guys all have kids and all that. And then.

• 2:53:38Jocko Willink?

  But they're still down the pub.

• 2:53:39Speaker 01

  Oh, no. And then the two brothers that night went home and got in a fistfight with each other on the way home. And then they had to drive like four hours to Perth in the car, one with a black eye, them not talking and the kids in the back. And yeah, it's the Aussie way.

• 2:53:54Jocko Willink?

  That's how we roll, I guess. Um, awesome, man.

• 2:53:58Speaker 01

  Oh, thank you.

• 2:54:00Jocko Willink?

  Uh, appreciate you coming on. Uh, thanks for, thanks for joining us. Thanks for sharing your experiences.

• 2:54:06Jocko Willink?

  I'd say thanks for reminding us that life's a story and, and in order to write it, you gotta go live it.

• 2:54:13Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:54:13Jocko Willink?

  So good lesson for all of us.

• 2:54:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:54:15Jocko Willink?

  Go out there and live. Thanks for joining us, man.

• 2:54:17Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 2:54:20Jocko Willink?

  And with that, Peter Maguire has left the building.

• 2:54:24Jocko Willink?

  Echo Charles surfing, jujitsu, academia, genocide, lot going on in there.

• 2:54:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:54:33Jocko Willink?

  Definitely an interesting path. And, and it's a good thing to remember that when you're on a path, you can step off that path and go in a different direction.

• 2:54:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:54:44Jocko Willink?

  You know, this isn't, I'm not talking about the, I'm not talking about the path, right? Capital T, capital P.

• 2:54:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, we don't want to.

• 2:54:51Jocko Willink?

  Let's say you could be going down one lane of the road and you could get off and go down a different lane. And it was kind of hard to convey this, but a lot of this stuff was happening in, in Peter's life was happening at the same time. He's doing jujitsu, he's going to Cambodia, he's writing about this, he's still a professor, like he did a lot. A lot of this stuff was, he was living, it was happening parallel in his life. So that is definitely something to remember. It, it, you, sometimes I think people feel stuck in a rut.

• 2:55:23Jocko Willink?

  And, and the reason they feel stuck in a rut is because they're staying in the rut that they're in. And, and you don't have to sacrifice everything to go and, you know, put another toe in the water over here, test the waters over there. You know, you can, you can go and try jujitsu class, you can go and take a guitar class, you can go and do some research about something that you don't know much about, you can go and interview people, that's, what does it cost to interview somebody? It doesn't cost anything, go learn.

• 2:55:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:55:49Jocko Willink?

  Lot of opportunity out there.

• 2:55:51Speaker 02

  Man, I was, so surfing is one of those things, jujitsu is like this too, but surfing is a big one and you see, you know, you see movies about this or whatever, right? The, the even idea of the endless summer, right? Where you're chasing like, essentially you're chasing waves, right?

• 2:56:04Jocko Willink?

  You can go ahead and say it.

• 2:56:06Speaker 02

  What?

• 2:56:06Jocko Willink?

  Point break.

• 2:56:07Speaker 02

  Point break, okay, so that's what I, that's what I, uh, basically compared in my mind, right? Cause point break is essentially parts of it anyway.

• 2:56:15Jocko Willink?

  Right, they were robbing banks instead of smuggling drugs, but.

• 2:56:18Speaker 02

  Exactly, right.

• 2:56:19Jocko Willink?

  You know?

• 2:56:19Speaker 02

  But it's the same gig, you know, where it's like, I'm just gonna make as much money as I can, as fast as I can, so I don't have to work, right?

• 2:56:26Jocko Willink?

  Right.

• 2:56:26Speaker 02

  Uh, even though he was working other jobs, but still the idea is there where they'll rob all the banks and do all this and then just surf and skydive and stuff. The, the rest of the time and that's kind of the dream, right?

• 2:56:36Jocko Willink?

  Or you could just join the teams.

• 2:56:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, but here's, here's, here's the point with that and actually you're right though, you're right, where. If you go around the world chasing waves where you you'll just by incident, find yourself in different interesting situations where you'll learn new things, meet new people, have all these like varying levels of craziness experiences. And then that builds on itself, right? You know, you know how you like one experience with this experience put together? It's like, oh, that's also and jiu jitsu is like that as well. Where but most people don't travel around just doing jiu jitsu. Sometimes you do.

• 2:57:11Jocko Willink?

  Sometimes you do.

• 2:57:11Speaker 02

  And actually, I had that experience on a small degree when I was traveling around.

• 2:57:15Jocko Willink?

  Doing filming.

• 2:57:16Speaker 02

  Jiu jitsu, but I was I would train too. So that's how I met at that time, all the main guys and they'd be like, yeah, come train. Cause I'd be purple belt and brown belt. So it's like the perfect guy for them to train with because I'm usually their size or whatever.

• 2:57:31Speaker 02

  Not good enough, you know, so it's easy to it's kind of they can beat me up at the same time. And then give me the experience of their gym and all this stuff. It's like hospitality thing. It was perfect. And so I got to train freaking everybody.

• 2:57:43Jocko Willink?

  That is a good thing.

• 2:57:44Speaker 02

  And then you get all these experiences and now you know them. Oh, you know how he knew all these people? You're like Eric Paulson, you know, like all these people and he knew them all, but it's because of that same concept. Where he's like, he's going around chasing waves, you know, oh, uh, Hickson's here. Okay, I'll take a jiu jitsu class or whatever and I'm gonna meet this guy. Now I know this guy, you know?

• 2:58:03Jocko Willink?

  It's kind of crazy how many like that for one level of connection to John Donahue. And then John Donahue to Dean Lister, then we got Judo Gene LaBelle, you got Eric Paul, like all these are. These guys are the premier people that brought the sport to what it is, you know? I I mean, I I mean, obviously you've got Hickson and Horian and Aleo, like for sure. But then you have all like the second gen people that were coming up and it's just, it's just interesting how it's all connected. And it seems, I guess it seems it more interesting to me because jiu jitsu is such a big part of my world, you know? Takes up a big part of my world, takes up a big part of your world. And I but still like the connection between.

• 2:58:49Jocko Willink?

  Like John Donahue, Henzo Gracie, Hickson Gracie, Peter Maguire, Gene LaBelle, like it's just wildness. It's wildness. So, uh, I say, you know, I, I heard this some expression about like, if you want to be a writer, well, what's the best thing you do if you want to be a writer? Go live. That's a great advice. You want to be a writer? Go live. Somebody asked me yesterday, where was I? Oh yeah. When we were up yesterday, I got asked, um, you know, oh, did you always want to be a writer? I'm like, nope. Now, now I've written, I think 11 books, but I didn't quote, like, I was like, oh, I'm going to be a writer.

• 2:59:31Jocko Willink?

  I just was going to be a commando and then happened to start writing, but that's a good, it's not a bad. And I'm not saying you have to be a commando, but maybe you're going to be of a damn jujitsu player, or maybe you're going to be a surfer, or maybe you're going to be anything. Go out and be something. You have something to write about at least. Take a little bit of risk too. What was the quote he said about being careful?

• 2:59:54Speaker 02

  Careful gets you killed.

• 2:59:56Jocko Willink?

  Careful gets you killed? Yeah.

• 2:59:58Speaker 02

  Yeah. Careful kills. Yeah.

• 2:59:59Jocko Willink?

  Careful kills, but also careful prevents life, prevents living. And look, I'm not saying obviously go out and do dumb shit, but don't, but don't let caution guide your every move where you don't take, we just gotta take risks if you're going to be out there getting after it. Now, look, does it, is it smart to smuggle pot? No, it's not. But is it smart to, hey, I don't have too much money, but I got enough money to get down the, you know, down to Indonesia. I'm going to go surfing. Oh, cool. You know, don't do dummy legal shit, but man, roll the dice a little bit. Go get after it a little bit.

• 3:00:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:00:36Jocko Willink?

  It's going to be good for you.

• 3:00:37Speaker 02

  Yeah. It's almost like within a certain, certain threshold. It's like you, you, that's the best thing you can actually do for yourself within reason. So if you would look at it and be like, hey, this is dumb. This is a dumb move. You know, illegal stuff mainly like falls within that category or whatever.

• 3:00:56Speaker 02

  Then, okay, that exclude that. Everything else should kind of be in play in a way when you think about it. Seriously.

• 3:01:03Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:01:03Speaker 02

  Does and between the and of course, on on one superficial and you got a cool story. That's on the super. But like all the stuff you learn, whether you're successful or not, it's like, brother, the stuff you learn, you'd be surprised how valuable that ends up becoming.

• 3:01:15Jocko Willink?

  Yep. Go get some experience. Go live a little bit. That's the recommendation. But the other thing is to remember is it's not too, you know, you can be, I'm fifty. I still need to go out there and get after a little bit more. I need to take a little bit more chances in the world.

• 3:01:28Speaker 02

  I will say, and maybe maybe you disagree, but I would say it gets harder and harder, though, as you get a, you know, take on more fixed responsibilities.

• 3:01:38Jocko Willink?

  That is true. That's a hundred percent true from a financial thing, but I'm not even talking. And also, in other ways, it comes easier. Because now you got money. Like, remember when you had no money?

• 3:01:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:01:47Jocko Willink?

  And you, you know, you were working as a whatever.

• 3:01:51Speaker 02

  I almost feel like, and maybe I guess it depends on the circumstance, but I almost feel like when you have no money, it kind of pushes you to have to do more stuff. You know, so if you have money, I'll just pay for it. I'll just whatever, whatever, whatever, kind of a thing where it's like, things will come a lot easier. And I thought about this too, where you know how like when you think back to the times when you don't make any money, it's like, what was the difference?

• 3:02:12Jocko Willink?

  The twenty years I was in the Navy.

• 3:02:16Speaker 02

  But think about it, there are certain parts of life.

• 3:02:18Jocko Willink?

  Funny I say that, but you know what? I, at the time, and you've heard me say this, like, I was the richest guy in the world. Me and my friends in the days, we thought that we were the richest guys in the world. We had so much money, young, single team guy. Dude, E five frogman, get some.

• 3:02:30Speaker 02

  In your position too, you get a lot of stuff paid for, right? By the, you know, like.

• 3:02:35Jocko Willink?

  Well, wet suits, right?

• 3:02:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, like a lot of the front.

• 3:02:38Jocko Willink?

  Parachutes.

• 3:02:39Speaker 02

  Bruh.

• 3:02:39Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:02:39Speaker 02

  And that's a huge deal. Guns, ammo?

• 3:02:41Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. What people would want to spend money on?

• 3:02:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:02:44Jocko Willink?

  You get a batteries, toilet paper.

• 3:02:46Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. So that's literally

• 3:02:50Jocko Willink?

  My buddy had a freaking went to his house. You know, like the big industrial toilet paper rolls that are like a foot across. That's what they had in the SEAL teams and this dude had it at his house. I was like, bro, you're a savage. Wasn't even gonna pay for his own toilet paper. Take it a freaking roll of that roll probably lasts like six months.

• 3:03:09Speaker 02

  Here's the thing.

• 3:03:09Jocko Willink?

  To a year.

• 3:03:10Speaker 02

  Here's the thing, and actually which is part of the point.

• 3:03:13Jocko Willink?

  Fraud, waste and abuse, by the way. Fraud, waste and abuse.

• 3:03:16Speaker 02

  Is tho- those things in life cost money. And if you don't have a lot of money, like certain parts, little, little tiny parts of life that all are, and there's a lot of them too, a lot of them, every day, all day. Those little parts of life are hard. It's like, they're so hard that you're taking toilet paper from the team.

• 3:03:33Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:03:33Speaker 02

  You know?

• 3:03:34Jocko Willink?

  Guys, batteries.

• 3:03:35Speaker 02

  Batteries.

• 3:03:36Jocko Willink?

  There's kind of an unlimited supply of batteries in the SEAL teams.

• 3:03:39Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:03:40Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah. Any kind of riggers tape? Like what, what do you call it? Gaff tape?

• 3:03:45Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 3:03:45Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that stuff. You go to a guy's, you go to a team guy's house, there's a freaking pretty good, there's a box of riggers tape just in case. Some 550 cord, some one inch tubular nylon.

• 3:03:56Speaker 02

  Yep. So think about this. Let's say, let's say you don't get free riggers tape and toilet paper. And hotels, places to stay, like these are things that like

• 3:04:07Jocko Willink?

  Per diem.

• 3:04:07Speaker 02

  If you have, if you have money or you get that stuff free, it's kind of like, it makes it things so much easier, but it keeps you in a little bit more of a box than if you didn't. So let's say this, I'm a jujitsu bum, surf bum, whatever. I don't have like, I don't sell weed, I don't rob banks. I have normal, I have to get a normal job. I don't have that much money, but I want to go to Australia. First off, I'm not flying first class in this cozy thing and no one bothering me. I'm, I might even ride in the cargo part and then have a good story or whatever. But in, you being coach or whatever, you're gonna meet some weird dude or maybe, you know, or maybe some weird girl or something like this, right? Then you go to Australia and now you gotta search for a place to stay. It's not taking care of.

• 3:04:47Jocko Willink?

  Many adventures.

• 3:04:47Speaker 02

  You know, exactly, right? Many adventures. Cause you gotta, you gotta like make do, you gotta struggle for everything and, and it becomes more of a thing. If you have money, you're just like, yeah, you probably don't even book it. You're like, hey, can you just book me in that hotel? Just choose the nicest one or kind of a thing. So you don't have a story behind that. You're safe in the hotel. You're safe in your box. See what I'm saying? If you'd have money, you're out there earning every little teeny tiny thing. So you have way more of a, um, experience. See what I'm saying?

• 3:05:13Jocko Willink?

  Embrace it.

• 3:05:14Speaker 02

  Risky too.

• 3:05:15Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. All right. Well, hey, take some chances. Go out there. Um, if you want to support the podcasts, you want to support yourself, you want to get stronger, faster, better, smarter. Get yourself some Jocko Fuel, new flavors.

• 3:05:29Speaker 02

  Indiscipline go.

• 3:05:29Jocko Willink?

  Discipline go. New flavors. Get yourself some milk. I need some milk right now.

• 3:05:34Speaker 02

  Bro, and how's this? And I'm with you. Right. And you know how like, you know, kind of when you get, you know, when you get hungry? And then like even like a normal chocolate bar or something seems like, oh, like, wait, you know, just when you get real hungry. Bro, I, I mixed banana milk and chocolate milk and I put some chocolate milk in it. Just because you know how everything sounds good to you is what I'm saying. So I was like, oh yeah, put some banana in there, whatever. And probably it was really, really good. I don't know if it's because I was so hungry or because that could be a banana chocolate is good. Wait, it was a chocolate peanut butter. So that made sense. Think about it. You, you chop up a banana, put some peanut butter on it. I mean, in real life, not milk. And then put a little bit of chocolate on there. Come on, brother. It's good. It's good. It's the same flavor is what I'm saying.

• 3:06:17Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:06:17Speaker 02

  So, yeah.

• 3:06:18Jocko Willink?

  Get yourself some milk. That way you do. It's just so good. Especially like, like I'm saying right now. So it's pretty standard that when, that we are here, when we're recording, I haven't eaten. So have you eaten today?

• 3:06:33Speaker 02

  No.

• 3:06:33Jocko Willink?

  So we're both on a fast right now.

• 3:06:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, it all sounds good.

• 3:06:36Jocko Willink?

  I'm gonna break a fast with like some mixed nuts and some milk when I get done with this little scenario. So I recommend you do the same thing. Get yourself some milk. Get yourself some discipline go. And you can all that at jockofuel.com. You can also get it at, we get the drinks at Wawa. We got the ready to drink coming. Ready to drink protein all the way.

• 3:06:56Speaker 02

  Like a date or anything on that?

• 3:06:58Jocko Willink?

  August, by the end of August, it'll be in Wawa. It'll be, we, we're not able to make enough of it yet to get it everywhere. But we'll get it out there. I'll let you know where it's at.

• 3:07:10Jocko Willink?

  Be able to order it. I can tell you that from jockofuel.com. You can get stuff at Vitamin Shoppe as well. We get it HEB down in Texas. We're going into some other I they're putting a list together. Because there's a we're in a bunch of different stores now, thousands and thousands of stores. So I'll I'll get a list together. So I can tell everyone where to go and hit it. Yeah. So there you go. OriginUSA.com. If you need Jiu Jitsu gear, you go. Look, if you're not doing Jiu Jitsu right now, come on.

• 3:07:39Speaker 02

  Let's go.

• 3:07:40Jocko Willink?

  Let's just get in the game. Get yourself a gi. Go to OriginUSA.com. Get American made gi. Don't get someone. Don't get a gi that's made by someone that's basically in a prison camp.

• 3:07:50Speaker 02

  Bro, have you ever?

• 3:07:51Jocko Willink?

  Bad call.

• 3:07:52Speaker 02

  Have you ever been at home or wherever wherever you go? And just thought to yourself, I wish I was like doing Jiu Jitsu right now.

• 3:08:01Jocko Willink?

  Yes.

• 3:08:02Speaker 02

  And not the kind where it's like, oh, I wish I was doing something else. Hmm. Jiu Jitsu sounds fun. So that I'm you like the feeling of man, I wish I was actually like doing Jiu Jitsu with someone right now.

• 3:08:11Jocko Willink?

  You know what? I had the feeling, similar feeling, but like so Dean's had an injured hand because he broke his hand for like a couple of months, right? And you know, so whenever we're training, there's a little bit of a little bit of hold back, right? A little bit of, oh, hey, you know, hey, switch arms. Hey, switch positions. Hey, oh, hold on. You know, that kind of hurt that kind of thing. And like the other day, we actually like he I had forgotten he'd hurt his hand because he's been hit. He's had it all taped up, you know? So when you're rolling, you just see this taped up thing. And then I was gone for a little few days. I come back. He didn't put the tape on because it's healing. And we were just rolling. And when we got done, he said something like, you know, my hand felt pretty good today. I was like, oh, I didn't even remember it. But

• 3:08:55Jocko Willink?

  the roll was so fun because it was like the limits were off.

• 3:08:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:08:59Jocko Willink?

  And it was just like felt so good.

• 3:09:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:09:02Jocko Willink?

  So yes, sometimes you got to train that Jiu Jitsu.

• 3:09:04Speaker 02

  Yes. Yeah, fully. Ever? And this is not a judgmental thing by any means. But you ever um, you ever think about yourself before you knew jujitsu and be like, man, I felt like that was almost like an empty shell version of myself. You ever think that?

• 3:09:20Jocko Willink?

  You feel like you were not enlightened.

• 3:09:22Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 3:09:23Jocko Willink?

  You feel like there was just a whole thing. It was all, a lot, a lot of it too is like a lie. What's, there's another word. What is the word like the Buddhist used? To say is an illusion. You were in, I was a little bit of an illusion because there's a lot of things that you think that are wrong.

• 3:09:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:09:38Jocko Willink?

  Just, it, it just a straight up even, even just the pragmatic things like, I think I can beat this person up. And you don't know jujitsu. You think that, but it's an illusion.

• 3:09:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:09:49Jocko Willink?

  Because you may or may, I sure you might be able to, but you also might not be able to.

• 3:09:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:09:53Jocko Willink?

  So there's a whole illusion to your life when you're not doing jujitsu. And that's a problem.

• 3:09:58Speaker 02

  Yes, and this is, you're actually su- cor- absolutely correct and you're, you know more about what I was just said than I do, actually. Because now that you say that, I remember, yes, that's correct. Because I was a bouncer in Hawaii before I started jujitsu.

• 3:10:11Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah. You thought you were the bad.

• 3:10:13Speaker 02

  And I, I didn't ever really thought I was bad because I worked with a bunch of big someone guys. So I did not think I was badass. But yeah, probably, yeah, probably related to him. But I didn't think I was a badass in that group, but compared to the patrons that would act up and stuff, I did. But I think of myself back then, I was like, almost like there was this big part of my brain that was just empty, not knowing, unknowing, you know? So yes, not enlightened, exactly right.

• 3:10:37Jocko Willink?

  Did you see they're making, apparently they're making a remake of Roadhouse?

• 3:10:41Speaker 02

  Yes. Yes.

• 3:10:42Jocko Willink?

  You're fired up for that? That pisses me off. It doesn't piss me off, but I'm, I just, I know it's gonna be lame.

• 3:10:47Speaker 02

  Well, it's Conor McGregor. So.

• 3:10:49Jocko Willink?

  What, what, what? Who's Conor McGregor?

• 3:10:51Speaker 02

  Conor McGregor.

• 3:10:52Jocko Willink?

  He's, he's in it?

• 3:10:53Speaker 02

  He's slated, given what I've been sent. You know what's funny? You're the third person now to, to bring, actually.

• 3:10:58Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah. Because everybody knows you're into it.

• 3:11:00Speaker 02

  They've been sending me this stuff and.

• 3:11:02Jocko Willink?

  So Conor McGregor's gonna be in it? Playing what role?

• 3:11:04Speaker 02

  Well, the online stuff that people sent me um, had a picture of Conor McGregor to be in Roadhouse, the remake.

• 3:11:12Jocko Willink?

  That's different. He's gonna be in it. He's gonna have a bit role. That's cool.

• 3:11:15Speaker 02

  No, I think he's the guy. But I don't know. I didn't, I didn't read it.

• 3:11:17Jocko Willink?

  He's Dalton?

• 3:11:19Speaker 02

  That's what I think.

• 3:11:20Jocko Willink?

  No.

• 3:11:21Speaker 02

  I don't know. I didn't look into it.

• 3:11:22Jocko Willink?

  They can't do that, bro.

• 3:11:23Speaker 02

  A bunch of people just been sending it to me and then people have been bringing it up to me.

• 3:11:27Jocko Willink?

  There's a lot of roles that Conor McGregor would be awesome at. Dalton's not one of them, in my opinion.

• 3:11:31Speaker 02

  I don't know.

• 3:11:32Jocko Willink?

  You think so?

• 3:11:32Speaker 02

  I don't. I have no idea.

• 3:11:34Jocko Willink?

  I think he'd be better as the, as the protagonist in that.

• 3:11:37Speaker 02

  The protagonist.

• 3:11:38Jocko Willink?

  Or sorry, the antagonist. Yeah.

• 3:11:39Speaker 02

  Ooh, yeah.

• 3:11:40Jocko Willink?

  I think he'd be a better bad guy.

• 3:11:41Speaker 02

  The dude that gets his throat ripped out. Remember that OG one?

• 3:11:44Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, like something like this.

• 3:11:45Speaker 02

  Well, well, here's the thing. So my fantasy of a Roadhouse remake would be a super dark and gritty one. Not like kinda cheesy, like real dark with drugs and like a real explicit. That was my OG fantasy. Then I found out later that Ronda Rousey in her heyday was slated as Dalton, as a remake of Roadhouse, where, you know, it's a woman protagonist. That's what I, that's the intel I got. That's back in the day, it was a long time ago. And then, yes, recently, maybe that's why, because my vision of Roadhouse was more like an actual fighter guy.

• 3:12:23Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:12:23Speaker 02

  And maybe it was just embedded in my brain. And you don't see women bouncers. So it's like, that's, I think, a big time of a mistake when you're trying to sell a certain story. And it's like, okay, let's put like a different person in that role that's like, brother, that's not that realistic as a woman bouncer. They're so rare. So unless it's about the rarity of women bouncers, cool, but it's like, it's not as believable, you know? You know how like you get like a, um, like a, like if you got a ninja, we'll say, but the ninja is a 10-year-old boy. It's like, mm, I see what you're doing, but it's like, bruh, ninjas aren't 10-year-old boys typically. Ninja is like a trained, decades of training guy. That's who we're gonna believe. You see what I'm saying?

• 3:13:05Speaker 02

  Anyway, so when I saw Conor McGregor, I was like, hey, I feel like that's viable. That's what I thought.

• 3:13:10Jocko Willink?

  I think, character-wise, I think he would have more fun. Playing like a bad guy.

• 3:13:16Speaker 02

  I think you're right. I think you're.

• 3:13:18Jocko Willink?

  The antagonist cuz even though he's good, he's that good at talking smack. He's kinda good. He's kinda good at being a bad guy in MMA. But also has like the good side, right? They love him. He's not just a pure heel. You know what they term heel is right from wrestling like like jail son and was dude. He was, you know, bad guy, bro. And he was so good at it. And and Connor plays that role a little bit. But he's not, but he still does it with like a nice side and he has a lot of, you know, a lot of positivity to him. And so if he was allowed to just go off and just be bad, he'd have a good time with it.

• 3:14:00Speaker 02

  Well, here's the thing, and and I didn't realize this until it was actually like told to me where the I felt it, but I never knew this as a specific thing. So the best bad guys in history are guys that we like. Like guys who we were like, hey, sure, he's a bad guy, but oh, I kinda wanna be like him. And that always has to have a positive element to it like Darth Vader. Like they're they're usually like guys who are like, sure, they're all, you know.

• 3:14:25Jocko Willink?

  You just gave you just gave me a list of one.

• 3:14:30Jocko Willink?

  You started counting your fingers too, like you're gonna have at least five. Give me a list of one and it's ringing Darth Vader. Good job.

• 3:14:38Speaker 02

  He was the first guy that came out. All right. Well, you tell me who who is who's like an iconic bad guy.

• 3:14:44Jocko Willink?

  Anton Sugar.

• 3:14:46Speaker 02

  Okay. Oh, yeah. Okay. So stoicism is stoic dude, right? In touch with or able to control his emotions, super successful. Like there's all these elements of him that are like, and then there's one or two really, I mean, they're significant, but this is usually just one or two bad elements of them. And in fact, you get bad guys who some some movies they do on purpose and they do it well. Where if they want you to really not like a bad guy, like they'll make him like kinda weasely or someone who like eh, you wouldn't wanna like listen to or hang out with. In fact, you'd really rather be quiet and not show up to the party kind of a thing. But usually the good bad guys, you're like, ooh, as long as he liked me, I would like to hang out with that guy. Or be like that guy, when you think about it. So you get a Conor McGregor as the bad guy.

• 3:15:31Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:15:32Speaker 02

  Perfect. And you said Chael Sonnen. Chael Sonnen, yeah, he is a little bit more on the like antagonistic side for sure. But he has a lot of those elements. He's smart, he's funny, like, right? You kind of like him.

• 3:15:43Jocko Willink?

  Dude, some of the Chael Sonnen, uh, like smack talking, I don't know, it entered the algorithm. It entered my algorithm.

• 3:15:50Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:15:51Jocko Willink?

  And dude, he was fricking epic, man. He was, he was just epic as smack talker. And just, I think he might be the king.

• 3:16:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:16:00Jocko Willink?

  I think he might actually be the, the, the best smack talker of all time.

• 3:16:04Speaker 02

  I dig it.

• 3:16:06Jocko Willink?

  God, fourth round, fifth round, fifth round. He talked the biggest smack to Anderson Silva.

• 3:16:13Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:16:14Jocko Willink?

  And, and he was in the fifth round and there was a minute left, man. And he got caught.

• 3:16:19Speaker 02

  Brutal.

• 3:16:20Jocko Willink?

  That was savage.

• 3:16:21Speaker 02

  That was savage.

• 3:16:22Jocko Willink?

  That was a, that was hard. Well, for, I was rooting, you know, for him.

• 3:16:27Speaker 02

  What, what was his nickname? The American Bad Guy Inc. or something?

• 3:16:32Jocko Willink?

  Well, Bad Guy Inc. is like his, uh, video channel. He's got a YouTube channel. And he, he talks, you know, about MMA and stuff like that.

• 3:16:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:16:41Jocko Willink?

  But, uh, he would say he's a gangster from West Lynn, Oregon.

• 3:16:44Speaker 02

  Yay.

• 3:16:46Jocko Willink?

  He's like, I'm an American, I'm a gangster. He's frigging legit.

• 3:16:49Speaker 02

  It's so funny. I've been to his house before.

• 3:16:51Jocko Willink?

  Oh, really?

• 3:16:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, for, for interview stuff.

• 3:16:53Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 3:16:54Speaker 02

  So, um, and this was back in the day.

• 3:16:56Jocko Willink?

  So you know Chael?

• 3:16:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, a little bit.

• 3:16:57Jocko Willink?

  You guys go way back.

• 3:16:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, like when I last, like, for example, last time I saw him, a different thing. We remembered each other for sure, but I don't, you know, I don't have a month's be down, nothing like this. But yes, I've been to his house. When I went to it, it was just me. And yeah, that's a real nice place he lives in. That whole neighborhood's super nice.

• 3:17:14Jocko Willink?

  What, West Lynn, Oregon?

• 3:17:15Speaker 02

  West Lynn, Oregon.

• 3:17:16Jocko Willink?

  He's a gangster from West Lynn, Oregon.

• 3:17:18Speaker 02

  West Lynn, Oregon, yep.

• 3:17:19Jocko Willink?

  I salute that.

• 3:17:23Jocko Willink?

  So there you go. Hey, if you want to get into jujitsu, go to jocko store.com. Go to jocko store.com. Get yourself some cool t-shirts to wear.

• 3:17:30Speaker 02

  Yep, represent.

• 3:17:31Jocko Willink?

  Represent.

• 3:17:32Speaker 02

  Standard issue is out.

• 3:17:34Jocko Willink?

  Oh, the standard issue.

• 3:17:35Speaker 02

  Discipline equals freedom.

• 3:17:37Jocko Willink?

  People asked, what's the layer? See if you can figure out what the layers are. You gotta look at them kind of comprehensively. There's four of them, four versions. Each one is a little bit different. There are, yeah, see if you can figure out those layers.

• 3:17:52Speaker 02

  It's good. Yeah, a lot of cool other stuff on that too.

• 3:17:54Jocko Willink?

  Uh, jocko underground.com. YouTube, we got a YouTube channel. We got psychological warfare. We got flip side canvas Dakota Meyer making cool stuff to hang on your wall. Bunch of books. Hey, here's the books from Peter Maguire breath, which is, or sorry, breathe with, with Hicks and Gracie. Uh, tie stick law and war facing death in Cambodia. So check those out. Check out only cry for the living by Holly McKay. I was telling Peter about her. I'm like, dude, this girl risked this woman, this girl insulting.

• 3:18:26Speaker 02

  I don't think so. Just like his boy insulting.

• 3:18:29Jocko Willink?

  Okay, this woman risked her life to write the book only cry for the living. So check out that book. If you want to know what war, what war is like from both sides while it's happening. Get yourself that book. I, I mentioned my book, final spin. Publishers Weekly gave me a good review. Thank you, Publishers Weekly. Hey, Publishers Weekly, you didn't like breathe?

• 3:18:54Jocko Willink?

  That's a bummer. It's a good book. Check it out. Uh, I've written a bunch of other books about leadership. I've written a bunch of kids books. Get the kids book for kids, you know? It's going to help them. It's going to make the world a better place. Echelon Front, we solve problems through leadership. If you want to check out or if you need help with leadership at your organization, go to echelonfront.com. Come to one of our events. Next one is Atlanta. We have the muster. Everything we do sells out. That's going to sell out too. So if you want to come, go to echelonfront.com. Get the details there. Extreme ownership.com. We have an online training academy. Where you can be a part of what we teach. You can learn it. You can train it all the time. We have live interaction.

• 3:19:36Jocko Willink?

  We have courses that are set up extreme ownership.com. Also, if you want to help service members, active and retired. You want to help out their families, Gold Star families, Markley, Markley's mom.

• 3:19:49Jocko Willink?

  She's got a charity organization. If you want to donate or you want to get involved, you want to help out our veterans and their families, go to Americas Mighty Warriors.org. Also, Heroes and Horses.org. We got Micah Fink up there taking guys and recreating their brains and bodies and spirits in the woods on horses and ice baths. So there you go. And if you want to check us out on social media, on Twitter, on the Gram, on the Facebook. Echo's at Echo Charles. I'm at Jocko Willink. Of course, beware of the algorithm because it's looking to suck you in. It's looking to grab a hold of your brain. That's what they did to

• 3:20:30Jocko Willink?

  me. They got me watching these Chael Sonnen smack talk videos and now I'm now they're just loading them up for me. And I'm like, what do he says on this one? Click. Watch out. Watch out for the algorithm. It'll grab you. Thanks for listening. Thanks for supporting the cause. We, we would not be here without you listening and supporting. So thank you. We would also not be here if it wasn't for the military doing what the military does. So thanks to all military members, past, present, and future. Thank you for protecting our freedom and our way of life. And also thank you to our police and law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, Border Patrol, Secret Service, all the first responders. Thank

• 3:21:15Jocko Willink?

  you for doing what you do to keep us safe here on the home front. And to everyone else out there.

• 3:21:24Jocko Willink?

  Listening to someone like Peter Maguire is a great reminder for all of us that there is so much going on in the world. So much to do. So much to experience. And for Peter, that meant surfing and jujitsu and reading and writing and traveling and maybe some smuggling and some studying and some teaching and so much more. There's so much going on in the world. There's experiences waiting to be experienced. There's sights waiting to be seen. And there's life waiting to be lived. So go live it. And until next time, this is Echo and Jaco. Out.