43: Glory of the Trenches. Discipline, The Selfishness of Cowardice & Giving Up

0:00:00 - Opening 0:01:22 - "The Glory of the Trenches", by Coningsby Dawson - Book review and analysis. Leadership, discipline, cowardice, not giving up. 1:32:17 - Jocko Tea, Internet, Jocko Store, Onnit Stuff 1:59:28 - Closing 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 forty-three with Echo Charles and me Jocko Willink.

• 0:11Jocko Willink?

  All the lads have gone out to play at being soldiers far away. They won't be back for many a day and some won't be back any morning. All the lassies who laughing were when hearts were light and lads were here. They go sad-eyed wandering hither and there. They pray and watch for the morning.

• 0:39Jocko Willink?

  Every house has its vacant bed. Every night when sounds are dead, some woman yearns for the pillowed head of him who marched out in the morning.

• 0:53Jocko Willink?

  Of all the lads who've gone out to play, there's some who'll return and some who will stay. There's some will be back most any day.

• 1:06Jocko Willink?

  But some won't wake up in the morning.

• 1:12Jocko Willink?

  Good evening Echo.

• 1:14Speaker 01

  Good evening.

• 1:16Jocko Willink?

  That poem right there is called "The Lads Away", and it's from a book called "The Glory of the Trenches", by Coningsby Dawson. And I actually got this book, an original copy of this book,

• 1:36Jocko Willink?

  from a trooper, from Jesse, a trooper up from Canada. He sent me this book and like I said, it's the actual first printing, beautiful copy and it has that smell.

• 1:46Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:46Jocko Willink?

  That old book musty smell. It's one of those books where you can actually smell the age and you can smell the lessons learned and you can smell the wisdom inside of it and...

• 2:02Jocko Willink?

  It's a different view. It's a different feel. And I found it to be very fascinating. And the intro to the book is actually written by Dawson's father. So the intro to the book, you know Dawson is the guy that wrote the book. Coningsby Dawson is the guy that wrote the book. Well, his dad wrote the intro to the book. And he kind of kicks it off and here's some of the highlights of that. He says, "I've already stated the conditions under which this book of my son's was produced. He was wounded in the end of June 1917 in the fierce struggle before Lens. He was at once removed to a base hospital, later to a military hospital in London.

• 2:47Jocko Willink?

  There was in grave danger of amputation of the right arm, but this was happily avoided. As soon as he could use his hand, he was commandeered by the Lord High Commissioner of Canada to write an important paper detailing the history of the Canadian forces in France and Flanders." And he goes on to talk about how they came up with the name of the book. And they go through a couple of different titles and they settle on this title, "The Glory of the Trenches." Lastly, "We decided on 'The Glory of the Trenches' as the most expressive of his aim. He felt that a great deal too much had been said about the squalor, filth, discomfort, and suffering of the trenches."

• 3:31Jocko Willink?

  Now, clearly, that's stuff that I've talked about. And so this should tell you, that's what I'm talking about. This is a different take on World War I. Because he's saying, "Look, we've heard enough about the squalor, the filth, the discomfort. I'm going to talk about the glory of the trenches." He pointed out that a very popular war book, which we were reading, had six paragraphs in the first 60 pages, which described in unpleasant detail the verminous condition of the men, as if this were the chief thing to be remarked concerning them. He held that it was a mistake for a writer to lay too much stress on the horrors of war. The effect was bad physiologically. It frightened the parents of soldiers.

• 4:15Jocko Willink?

  It was equally bad for the enlisted man himself, for it created a false impression in his mind. We all knew that war was horrible, but as a rule, the soldier thought little of his feature in this lot."

• 4:29Jocko Willink?

  The real soldier's thoughts were concerned with other things. He was engaged in spiritual acts. And this is what I'm talking about, this is a different cut.

• 4:40Jocko Willink?

  He was accomplishing spiritual purposes, as truly as the martyr of faith and religion. He was moved by spiritual impulses. The evocation of duty, the loyal dependence of comradeship, the spirit of sacrifice, the complete surrender of the body to the will of the soul. This was the side of war which men needed most to recognize. They needed it not only because it was the true side, but because nothing else could kindle and sustain the enduring flame of heroism in men's hearts. So he's looking at this, you know, it's called The Glory of the Trenches.

• 5:20Jocko Willink?

  This, what happens in the trenches is like a, is like a religion, is like a spiritual thing. Which, another thing that drew me to this is because, you know, I talk all the time about how there's the most beautiful things in war. I mean, there's the most horrible things, but there's also these beautiful things. And so I can see he's very focused on what those things are.

• 5:42Jocko Willink?

  While some erred in exhibiting nothing but the brutalities of war, others erred by sentimentalizing war. He admitted that it was perfectly possible to paint a portrait of a soldier with an aura of a saint. But it would not be a representative portrait. It would be eclectic. The result of selection and elimination. So, he's saying like, on the one hand, you get these books that paint this crazy brutal side of war, the other side you get them painting soldiers as saints. And neither one is true, which I will totally agree with. You know, we, we do have a definite tendency to do that in literature, or people that write about war, they want to write about, you know, they make everyone look like the best guy ever. None of us are.

• 6:27Jocko Willink?

  None of us are.

• 6:30Jocko Willink?

  We all have faults. Back to the book. "The ordinary soldier is an intensely human creature, with an endearing blend of faults and virtues. The romantic method of portraying him not only misrepresented him, but its result is far less impressive than a portrait painted in the firm lines of reality."

• 6:54Jocko Willink?

  So they do all this to make the guy look like a saint, but what's real is actually more amazing. There's an austere grandeur in the reality of what he is and does, which needs no fine gilding from the sentimentalist. To depict him as Sir Galahad in holy armor is a serious offence as to exhibit him as a Caliban. Which is, it's from Shakespeare, it's from The Tempest. He's like the ultimate bad guy in the Shakespeare's play The Tempest. He's a total beast. So you can't portray the person as Galahad, you can't, you can't, you know, again portray him as a saint.

• 7:39Jocko Willink?

  "Each method fails of truth, and all that the soldier needs to be known about him, that men should honor him, is the truth."

• 7:49Jocko Willink?

  "War, a hot new air which men breathed, produced new energies and forms of thought. Men were rediscovering themselves, their own forgotten nobilities, the latent nobilities in all men.

• 8:06Jocko Willink?

  Bound together in the daily obedience of self-surrender, urged by conditions of their task to regard duty as inexorable, confronted by the pitiless destruction of the body.

• 8:21Jocko Willink?

  They were forced into recognition of the spiritual values of life." So faced with what they were facing in World War I, and we've talked about that over and over again, you're facing death. And these guys, these soldiers are forced to look at their spiritual self. In the common conventional use of the term, these men were not religious. There was much in their speech and in their conduct which would outrage the standards of narrow piousism. So, hey, these guys are not goody-two-shoes. Traditional creeds and forms of faith had scant authority for them.

• 9:01Jocko Willink?

  But they had made their own a sure faith than lives in creeds. So what they discover on the battlefield is even stronger than...

• 9:13Jocko Willink?

  Than what the, than what the churches say.

• 9:18Jocko Willink?

  It was, it was expressed not in words, but acts. They had freed their souls from the tyrannies of time and the fear of death.

• 9:35Jocko Willink?

  They had accomplished indeed, that very emancipation of the soul.

• 9:43Jocko Willink?

  Which is the essential doctrine of all religions. Which all religions urge on men, but which few men really achieve. However earnestly they profess. Forms of pious faith. That's pretty amazing. It's a pretty amazing viewpoint. That what you find out on the battlefield is spiritually, spiritually stronger. Than what you find in the church.

• 10:18Jocko Willink?

  Back to the book. This was the true glory of the trenches. They were the cavalries of a new redemption being wrought out for men by soiled, unconscious Christs. So that's what the soldiers were. Soiled, dirty, unconscious means they don't even know it. Christs.

• 10:39Jocko Willink?

  And as from that ancient cavalry with its agony of shame, torture and dereliction. There flowed a flood of light. Which made a new dawn for the world. So from these obscure crucifixions. There would come to men a new revelation of the splendor of the human soul. The true divinity that dwells in man. That God made manifest in the flesh by acts of valor. Heroism and self-sacrifice which transcend the instincts and promptings of the flesh.

• 11:19Jocko Willink?

  And bear witness to the indestructible life. Of the spirit.

• 11:29Jocko Willink?

  That's heavy.

• 11:31Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 11:31Jocko Willink?

  That's, that's just, like I said, this viewpoint is,

• 11:37Jocko Willink?

  I, I can totally understand where it's coming from. And it expresses a lot of the things that I think, I haven't thought about it to this degree, though. You know, calling, basically he's calling the deaths of soldiers on the battlefield crucifixions.

• 11:51Speaker 01

  Right.

• 11:55Jocko Willink?

  And that God has made manifest in the flesh, that these guys, when they make these sacrifices, it's like a glimpse of God. These acts of valor and heroism, and it's just very powerful. Now, that wraps up, you know, the intro's longer than that, obviously. But now we're gonna go to the book itself, which again is written by this soldier Dawson. And it actually starts with his training. So, and he was, he was from England. And he lived in Canada. And, but he ends up joining the military, because you know, Canada was a, was a supporting and helping Britain in the war. And he'd actually traveled to New York, he'd lived all over the place.

• 12:39Jocko Willink?

  And, but now he's, he's going to boot camp.

• 12:43Jocko Willink?

  And we'll take it back to the book. "When I had been medically examined, past as fit, had donned a uniform and commenced my training, I learnt what the enduring of hardship was. No experience on active service has equaled the humiliation and severity of those first months of soldiering. We were sneered at, cleaned stables, groomed horses, rode stripped saddles, stripped saddle for 12 miles at the trot, attended lectures, studied till past midnight, and were up on the first parade at 6 o'clock. No previous civilian efficiency or prominence stood us in any stead. We started robbed of all importance." I love that. "We started robbed of all importance."

• 13:27Jocko Willink?

  So you know that thing you have that's an ego? Yeah, it's gone. Just get rid of that. "And only gained a new importance by our power to hang on and develop a new efficiency as soldiers." You've heard me say that before, like when I joined the military, that's one of my favorite things about it, it was like a blank slate. Like everything you did in your past, all the, all the stuff you've been through, little trouble, things you've done, it's all gone. What matters now is what you do here.

• 13:55Jocko Willink?

  When men went sick, they were labeled scrim shankers and struck off the course. It was an offense. It was an offense to let your body interfere with your duty. If it tried to, you must ignore it. If a man caught cold in Kingston, what would he not catch in the trenches? Very many went down under physical, under the physical ordeal. Of the class that started, I don't think more than a third passed. The lukewarm soldier and the pink tea hero who simply wanted to swank a uniform were eventually choked off. It was a test of pluck, even more than of strength or intelligence.

• 14:37Jocko Willink?

  The same test that a man would be subjected to all the time at the front. In a word, it sorted out the fellows who had guts. Guts isn't a particularly polite word, but I have come increasingly to appreciate its splendid significance. The possessor of this much coveted quality is the kind of idiot who, when his legs are smitten, will fight upon his stumps. And I actually was, when I read this, I was like, man, well, is there some archaic term of idiot? Why is he using that word? And there was none. Like, he means,

• 15:18Jocko Willink?

  that's what he means. He's like a guy, and we, we say this in SEAL training, like, if you're gonna be stupid, you gotta be tough. And then that's kind of what he's saying. Like, these guys will go and they will not stop. And that's what guts is.

• 15:32Jocko Willink?

  The Tommies, and that's a slang word for the British soldiers, whom we were going to command, would be like that. If we weren't like it, we wouldn't be any good as officers. This artillery school had a violent way of sifting out a man's moral worth. You hadn't much conceit left by the end of it. So, what a, I, I can only imagine, you know, we have a very politically correct military system now and it's getting... I can't imagine what these soldiers went through. I mean, just unleashing these veterans on them, coming out and trying to get them ready for war. I bet it was brutal, and it sounds like it was brutal. And it sounds like it did a very effective job of getting rid of the weak,

• 16:16Jocko Willink?

  of making your ego completely go away, you know, getting rid of any form of conceit that you had.

• 16:25Jocko Willink?

  Now, he continues on the book, but I'm gonna move a little bit forward here to where he's moving towards the front. And we'll go back to the book. "After trudging about six miles, we arrived at the camp and found that it was out of food and that all the tents were occupied. We stretched out our sleeping bags on the ground and went to bed supperless. We'd had no food all day. Next morning, we were told that we ought to jump on an ammunition lorry if we wanted to go any further on our journey. Nobody seemed to want us particularly, and no one could give us the least information as to where our division was. It was another lesson, if that were needed, of our total unimportance." So these guys are looking to find where they're supposed to report to, so they can go fight in the war.

• 17:10Jocko Willink?

  And people are like, "I got no time for you. Go figure it out." "While we were raiding on the roadside, an Australian brigade of artillery passed by. The men's faces were dreary with fatigue. The gunners were dismounted and marched as in a trance. The harness was muddy. The steel rusty. The horses lean and discouraged. We understood that they were pulling out from an offensive in which they had received a bad cutting up. To my overstrained imagination, it seemed that the men had the vision of death in their eyes. Towards the evening, the thunder of the guns had swelled into an ominous roar. We passed through villages disfigured by shellfire.

• 17:55Jocko Willink?

  Civilians became more rare and more aged. Cattle disappeared utterly from the landscape. Fields were furrowed with abandoned trenches, in front of which hung entanglements of wire. Mounted orderlies splashed along sullen roads at an impatient trot. Here and there, we came across improvised beaux-vacs of infantry.

• 18:17Jocko Willink?

  Far away against the horizon towards which we traveled, hun flares and rockets were going up. Hopeless stoicism, unutterable desolation, that was my first impression."

• 18:32Jocko Willink?

  The landscape was getting increasingly muddy. It became a sea of mud. Dispatch riders on motorbikes traveled warily, their feet dragging to save themselves from falling. Everything was splashed with filth and corruption. One marvelled at the cleanliness of the sky.

• 18:50Jocko Willink?

  Trees were blasted and seemed to be sinking out of sight in this war-created slew of despondency. We came to a brow of a hill in the valley with something that I recognised. The last time I had seen it was in an etching in a shop window in Newark, New Jersey. It was a town from the midst of whose battered ruins a splintered tower soared against the sky. Leaning far out from the tower, so that it seemed she must drop, was a statue of the Virgin with the Christ in her arms. It was a superstition with the French, and I remembered that so long as she did not fall, things would go well with the Allies.

• 19:32Jocko Willink?

  As we watched, a shell screamed over the gaping roofs and a column of smoke went up.

• 19:40Jocko Willink?

  As we entered the streets, tomies more polluted than miners crept out from the skeletons of houses. They leant listlessly against sagging doorways to watch us pass. If we asked for information as to where our division was, they shook their heads stupidly, too indifferent with weariness to reply. For the next three nights, we slept by our wits and got our food by foraging.

• 20:09Jocko Willink?

  So we know, I mean, we know this is World War I. We know it's a night, we know it's an absolute nightmare. It's an absolute nightmare. And, you know, what was surprising me, you know, this guy's an officer, and he has no idea what he's doing. He's just walking around and people are so despondent from the war that they just don't even care.

• 20:34Jocko Willink?

  Back to the book. There was a headquarters nearby whose battalion was in the line. I struck up liaison with its officers and at times went into their crowded tent, which was their mess to get warm. Runners would come there at all hours of day and night bringing messages from the front. They were usually well spent. Sometimes they gassed, but they had, but they all had the invincible determination to carry on. After they delivered their message, they would lie down in the mud and go to sleep like dogs. The moment the reply was ready, they would lurch to their feet, throwing off their weariness as if it were a thing to be conquered and despised.

• 21:15Jocko Willink?

  Go ahead and read that one again. So these guys are dog tired, they lay down in the mud, somebody's preparing a reply for these messages. And then the moment the reply was ready, they would lurch to their feet, throwing off their weariness as though it were a thing to be conquered and despised. I appreciate now as never before, I appreciated now as never before the lesson of guts that I had been taught at Kingston.

• 21:46Jocko Willink?

  The other side of the town, the ravages of the war were far more marked. All the way along the roadside were clumps of little crosses, French, English, German, planted above the hurried graves of brave fellows who had fallen. Ambulances were picking their way wearily, turning with the last night's toll of wounded. We saw newly dead men and horses pulled to one sign who had been caught in the darkness by the enemy's harassing fire. In places, in places, the country had holes the size of quarries, where mines had exploded and shells from large caliber guns had detonated. Bedlam was raging up

• 22:30Jocko Willink?

  front. Shells went screaming over us, seeking out victims in the back country. To have been there by oneself would have been most disturbing, but the men about me seemed to regard it as perfectly ordinary and normal. I steadied myself by their example.

• 22:54Jocko Willink?

  It's, it's, it's interesting because we're talking about this and it sounds like hell and they're not even in the front yet. They're not on the front lines. This is behind.

• 23:08Jocko Willink?

  That's something also we were talking about today. Like you can see these guys, whatever pain and suffering they're feeling, they're not showing it. And, and he knows he can't show it. And that kind of bolsters them all and makes them all stronger.

• 23:25Jocko Willink?

  Back to the book. About seven o'clock, as we were resting, the evening hate commenced. In those days, the evening hate was a regular habit with the Hun. He knew our country better than we did, for he had retired from it. Every evening, he used to search out all communication trenches and likely battery positions with any quantity of shells. So, seven o'clock at night, the Germans would just, they knew all the positions because they had surrendered them. So then they would just start dropping bombs, dropping artillery on the known positions that they knew. They knew where the trenches were, they built them.

• 24:08Jocko Willink?

  Horrible. His idea was to rob us of our morale. I wish he might have seen how abysmally, how much, how abysmally he failed to do it. Down our narrow valley, like a flight of arrows, the shells screamed and whistles. Where they struck, the ground looked like resurrection day, with the dead elbowing their way into daylight and forcing back the earth from their eyes.

• 24:35Jocko Willink?

  There were actually many dead men just beneath the surface, and as the ground was plowed up, the smell of corruption became distinctly unpleasant.

• 24:50Jocko Willink?

  So, these guys are buried, they're buried in whatever, four or five feet of dirt, and these shells come in and dig them up.

• 25:01Jocko Willink?

  Presently, the shells began to go dud. So imagine this, you're hearing these big explosions and then some shells hit and there's no explosion. You know what that means? It means it's gas.

• 25:15Jocko Willink?

  We realized that these were gas shells. A thin bluish vapor spread throughout the valley and breathing became oppressive. Then like stallions kicking in the stalls, the heavy guns on the ridge above us opened up. And now the friendly guns start to open up. It was fine to hear them stamping their defiance. It made one want to get grips with his aggressors. In the brief silences, one could hear our chaps laughing. So I want you to imagine this. This is awesome. You're getting shelled. You're getting crushed. There's dead bodies coming up from the soil. There's gas in the air.

• 25:55Jocko Willink?

  And, and here we go. In the brief silences, one could hear our chaps laughing. The danger seemed to fill them with a wild excitement. Every time a shell came near them and missed, they would taunt the unseen Huns for their poor gunnery. Giving what they considered necessary corrections. Five minutes more left, old cock. If you'd only dropped 50, you'd get us. So he's giving corrections to the guns. These men didn't know what fear was, or if they did, they kept it to themselves. And these were the chaps whom I was to order.

• 26:40Jocko Willink?

  So we haven't heard too much about that. And you know, Tony and Leif talked about it, you know, being, being, get shot at and being in really close calls situations and like everyone's laughing and it's, it does happen. World War I, don't hear much about it, but here you go.

• 26:57Jocko Willink?

  Unbelievable. And that's part of the way that military, that you, not just military, but any bad, you get in a bad situation? You know, a little humor goes a long, a long way. A little humor goes a long way.

• 27:10Jocko Willink?

  Back to the book. We entered a trench. And this is, by the way, this is, I'm obviously not reading the entire book. I'm going to some highlights. So there's a little bit of a skip, you know, uh, time here as they, as they move towards more towards the front. Back to the book. We entered a trench. Holes were scooped out in the side of it, just large enough to shelter a man crouching. Each hole contained a sleeping soldier who looked as dead as the occupant of a catacomb. Some of the holes had been blown in. All you saw of the late occupant was a protruding arm or leg. At best, there was a horrid similarity between the dead and the living.

• 27:53Jocko Willink?

  It seemed that the walls of the trenches had been built out of corpses. For one recognized the uniforms of French and the Huns.

• 28:06Jocko Willink?

  So you're in this trenches, but, and you're protected somewhat, but you gotta dig another hole into the wall of the trench.

• 28:13Jocko Willink?

  And some of those guys get buried and killed and the bodies are just there.

• 28:18Jocko Willink?

  Really, I mean, talk about hell, you know, hell.

• 28:26Jocko Willink?

  Back to the book. The enemy shelling was growing more intense. As was always the way on the Somme. So we're there at the Somme, the Battle of Somme. When we were bringing in our, when we were bringing out our wounded. A good many of our trenches were directly enfilade. And if you don't know what that is, enfilade is like, if you can imagine a line of people and you were shooting down the line of people. And how much more exposed you are in that situation. So picture if I told you to shoot tin, uh, some of these tin cans and I lined them up in a straight line perpendicular to you. You'd have to aim at each individual one and you might hit it, you might not. If we put them all in a big line where they're, where they're parallel to you or they're, they're,

• 29:09Jocko Willink?

  they go down the same gun target line that you have. You can, if you hit one, you might hit two, you might hit three, you might hit all of them with one shot. And so this is a bad situation to be in. You never want to have the enemy, they're basically on your flank and you're lined up for them to shoot at you. It's a, it's a nightmare.

• 29:27Jocko Willink?

  Shells burst just behind the parapet, when they didn't burst on it, when they didn't burst on it. It was about this point in my breaking in, that I received a blow to the head. And thank God for the man who invented the steel helmet, so he's getting hit with some shrapnel. Night came down, and we found that our carriage had no lights. It must have been nearing dawn, when I was awake, and again, I skipped a little bit, but here we are, obviously using a carriage.

• 29:55Jocko Willink?

  It must have been nearing dawn, when I was awakened by the distant thunder of guns. I crouched in my corner, cold and cramped, trying to visualize the terror of it. I asked myself whether I was afraid. "Not of death," I told myself, "but of being afraid, yes, most horribly." He was most horribly afraid, not of death or being wounded, he was afraid of being afraid.

• 30:31Jocko Willink?

  This first experience in no man's land did away with my last flabby fear.

• 30:37Jocko Willink?

  That if I was afraid, I would show it. One is often afraid. Any soldier who asserts the contrary may not be a liar, but he certainly does not speak the truth. Physical fear is too deeply rooted to be overcome by any amount of training. It remains, then, to train a man in spiritual pride. So that when he fears, nobody knows it.

• 31:04Jocko Willink?

  Cowardice is contagious. It has been said that no battalion is braver than its least brave member. Military courage, therefore, is a form of unselfishness.

• 31:21Jocko Willink?

  Courage is a form of unselfishness. It is practiced, that it may save the weaker men's lives and uphold their honor. The worst thing you can say of a man out on the front is, he doesn't play the game.

• 31:38Jocko Willink?

  That doesn't of necessity mean he fails to do his duty. Listen to this. That doesn't mean he fails to do his duty. What it means is that he fails to do a bit more than his duty.

• 31:51Jocko Willink?

  "When a man plays the game, he does things which it requires a braver man than himself to accomplish." "He never knows when he's done. He acknowledges no limit to his cheerfulness and strength. Whatever his rank, he holds his life less valuable than that of the humblest."

• 32:14Jocko Willink?

  "He laughs at danger, not because he does not dread it, but because he has learnt that there are ailments more terrible and less curable than death."

• 32:32Jocko Willink?

  "Ailments more terrible and less curable than death and that ailment is cowardice."

• 32:45Jocko Willink?

  "Until I became a part of the war, I was a doubter of the nobility in others and a skeptic as regards to myself. The growth of my personal vision was complete when I recognised that the capacity of heroism is latent in everybody and only awaits the bigness of the opportunity to call it out."

• 33:13Jocko Willink?

  Different take.

• 33:16Jocko Willink?

  Different take. And, and obviously, you know, uh, we've talked about World War I. And unless, I mean, obviously, he's not the only person that felt this way about things. And if he, if this wasn't at least a, a fairly normal attitude to have, there's no way that World War I could have continued on the way it did. Because people would have been saying, "No, this is ridiculous." Ridiculous. "We just lost another 80,000 casualties. We lost another 100." These are battles where tens of thousands of people were casualties in one day, in two days. So if people didn't have this kind of attitude, that this was their duty, they wouldn't have been able to maintain that type of, that type of...

• 34:02Jocko Willink?

  Pace. And.

• 34:07Jocko Willink?

  I don't even know whether to say I'm.

• 34:11Jocko Willink?

  Impressed by that or disgusted by it or disturb, I didn't even not disgusted, but disturbed by it. Disturbed by it. And I'd say all the time, you know, this is the war that I, I, I would not want to fight it. Wouldn't want to fight it. Because this is, the attitude is, okay, your duty is. To go get killed when we call and it's doesn't matter how good, I say this all the time, it doesn't matter how good your tactics are, doesn't matter how good of a shooter you are, doesn't matter. How good of a leader you are. Because when we say go, you're going to get your troops, you're going to do what we say, you're going to go over the top and you're going to charge the machine guns. And guys are going to get mowed down.

• 34:55Jocko Willink?

  Now he goes into a little bit more. About.

• 35:00Jocko Willink?

  Some of the battle.

• 35:03Jocko Willink?

  Back to the book, all this April, high above the shouting of the guns are larks, the larks sang joyously. The scarlet of the poppies, the song of the larks, the lamp shining on the altar are the only external signs of the unconquerable. Happy religion which lies in the hearts of our men.

• 35:25Jocko Willink?

  Their religion is the religion of heroism. Which they have learned. In the glory of the trenches.

• 35:36Jocko Willink?

  There was a line from William, William Morris's earthly paradise, which is like a long epic poem, it's almost like a novel. Which used to haunt me. Especially in the early days when I was first experiencing what war really meant. It reads as follows. Of heaven or hell, I have no power to sing. I cannot ease the burden of your fears or make quick coming death. A little thing.

• 36:07Jocko Willink?

  It's the last line that makes me smile rather quietly or make quick coming death a little thing. I smile because the souls who wear khaki have learnt to do just that.

• 36:28Jocko Willink?

  These guys, this fear of death that people have, and this poem that says, "Hey, you can't make quick death, quick coming death, you can't make that into a little thing, it's gonna be huge and ominous." Guess what? These guys are okay with it.

• 36:46Jocko Willink?

  Back to the book. "How typical he is of the days before the war when the people had only pinpricks to endure, and consequently didn't exert themselves to be brave. A big sacrifice, which bankrupts one's life, is always more bearable than the little inevitable annoyances of sickness, disappointment, and dying in a bed. The burden of our fears has slipped from our shoulders in our attempt to do something for others. The unbelievable and long coveted miracle has happened at last to every soul who has grasped his chance of heroism. Quick

• 37:31Jocko Willink?

  coming death has become a fifth-rate calamity."

• 37:38Jocko Willink?

  Think about that. Quick coming death? Yeah, good. Whatever. Whatever. You're no big deal to me. You're a fifth-rate calamity.

• 37:49Jocko Willink?

  Back to the book. "In saying this, I do not mean to glorify war. War can never be anything but beastly and damnable. It dates back to the jungle, but there are two kinds of war.

• 38:06Jocko Willink?

  There's the kind that a highwayman wages, when he pounces from the bushes and assaults a defenseless woman. Then there's also the kind where you wage when you go to rescue her. The highwayman can't expect to come out of that fight with a loftier morality, but you can. Our chaps never wanted to fight. They hate fighting. It's that hatred of the thing they are compelled to do that makes them so terrible."

• 38:44Jocko Willink?

  He goes back and he's talking now about that wooden figure of Christ that he had seen. "The wooden Christ gazed down from them on his cross with a suffering which 2,000 years ago, he had shared.

• 38:58Jocko Willink?

  The terrible pity of his silence seemed to be telling them that they had become one with him in their final sacrifice. They hadn't lived his life, far from it, but unknowingly, they had died his death.

• 39:17Jocko Willink?

  That's a part of the glory of the trenches, that a man who has not been good can crucify himself and hang beside Christ in the end."

• 39:30Jocko Willink?

  So you go out on the battlefield and you sacrifice your life, you will, your, your, all of your sins are gone, you're washed away, and you, you hang beside Christ in the end.

• 39:50Jocko Willink?

  "God as we see him, and do we see him? I think so, but not always consciously. He moves among us in the forms of our brother men. We see him most evidently when danger is most threatening and courage is at its highest. We often don't recognize him out loud. Our chaps don't assert that they're his fellow campaigners. They're too humble-minded and inarticulate for that." So he's saying, "God's all around us. I see it in the guys. They're, they're his campaigners, but, but they don't even, they don't say that. They don't say we're doing the work of God. They don't say we're living like God, or we're living like Jesus Christ. No.

• 40:33Jocko Willink?

  They're too humble-minded and inarticulate for that. They're where they are because they want to do their bit.

• 40:42Jocko Willink?

  Their duty.

• 40:45Jocko Willink?

  Their carefully disguised instinct of honor brought them there. Doing their bit in Bible language means laying down their lives for their friends."

• 40:59Jocko Willink?

  Doing their bit that covers everything. Here's an example of how God walks among us. In one of our attacks on the Somme, all the observers up forward were uncertain as to what had happened. We didn't know whether our infantry had captured their objective, failed, or gone beyond it. The battlefield, as far as the eye could reach, was a bath of mud.

• 41:23Jocko Willink?

  It is extremely easy and the excitement of an offensive when all landmarks are blotted out for our storming parties to lose their direction. If this happens, a number of dangers may result. A battalion may find itself up in the air, which means that it failed to connect with the battalions on its left and right. Its flanks are then exposed to the enemy. It may advance too far and start digging itself in at a point where it was previously arranged that our artillery should place their protective wall of fire. We, being forward artillery observers, are the eyes of the army. It is our business to watch for such contingencies, to keep in touch with the situation as it

• 42:05Jocko Willink?

  progresses, and to send our information back as quickly as possible. We were peering through our glasses from our point of vantage when, far away in the thickest of the battle smoke, we saw a white flag waving, sending back messages. The flag waving was repeatedly desperate. It was evident that no one had replied and probably that no one had picked up the messages. A signal who was with us read the language for us. A company of infantry had advanced too far. They were, most of them wounded, very many of them dead, and were in danger of being surrounded. They asked for artillery to place a curtain of fire in front of them and for reinforcements to be sent up.

• 42:52Jocko Willink?

  So, they're in their trench, they're the artillery guys. They're looking out, they see flag, which is how they, one of the methodologies they had for signaling and communicating. You'd do these different signals and you could spell out words. And so, they're getting a signal back from this group that they might get surrounded. We need some artillery support in here.

• 43:11Jocko Willink?

  We at once phoned the orders through to our artillery and notified the infantry headquarters of the, of the division that was holding the front. But it was necessary to let those chaps know that we were aware of their predicament.

• 43:24Jocko Willink?

  They'd hang on if they knew that. Otherwise...

• 43:30Jocko Willink?

  Without orders, our signaller was getting his flags ready. He hopped, he hopped out onto the trench. He hopped out of the trench and onto the parapet. He didn't stand a 50/50 chance. The Hun was familiar with our observation station and strafed it with persistent regularity.

• 43:50Jocko Willink?

  The signaller turned to the senior officer present. "What shall I send them? Tell them their messages have been received and that help is coming." Out the chap scrambled, a flag in either hand. He was nothing but a boy. He ran crouching like a rabbit to a hump of mud where his figure would show up against the sky. His flags commenced to waving. "Messages received, help coming." They didn't see him at first. He had to repeat the words. We watched him breathlessly. We knew what would happen.

• 44:23Jocko Willink?

  At last, it did happen. A Hun observer had spotted him and flashed the target back to his guns. All about him, the mud commenced to leap up and bubble. He went on signaling the good word to those stranded men up front. "Message received, help coming." At least they'd seen him. They were signaling okay.

• 44:47Jocko Willink?

  It was at that moment that a whiz bang lifted him off his feet and landed him all of a huddle.

• 44:55Jocko Willink?

  His bit. It was what he'd volunteered to do when he came from Canada.

• 45:04Jocko Willink?

  The signal okay in the battle smoke was like a testimony to his character.

• 45:16Jocko Willink?

  So like I said, this had to be a common attitude and it's just hard for us to understand this. I mean, it's hard for me that was in the military for 20 years to understand this attitude that, you know what, it's your time to die now, step up and go pass this signaling back to them. And I'm not saying that, you know, modern military guys don't take risks. Obviously, they take enormous risks and we've got, taken drastic casualties.

• 45:41Jocko Willink?

  But it is, this is definitely a different mentality. There's no doubt about it. I mean, obviously, it's a different mentality when you're losing

• 45:49Jocko Willink?

  millions of men, millions of men.

• 46:01Jocko Willink?

  Back to the book and this is, this is fast forward a little bit to kind of just giving a little more insight about what their outlook was. Out there in France, we used to tell each other fairy tales of how we would spend the first year of life when the war was ended. One man had a baby he had never seen. Another girl whom he was anxious to marry. My dream was more prosaic, but no less ecstatic. It began and ended with a large white bed and a large white bath. For the first 365 mornings after peace had been declared, I was to be awakened by the sound of my bath being filled.

• 46:43Jocko Willink?

  Water was to be so plentiful that I could tumble off to sleep again without even troubling to turn off the tap. In France, one has to go dirty so often that the dream of always being clean seems as unrealizable as romance. Our drinking water is frequently brought up to us at the risk of men's lives. Carried through the mud and petrol cans strapped to pack horses. To use it carelessly would be like washing in men's blood.

• 47:20Jocko Willink?

  And here's another little paragraph about, again, giving some more insight.

• 47:25Jocko Willink?

  "You wouldn't think that the men who would go to war to learn how to be kind, but they do. There's no kinder creature in the whole wide world than the average Tommy. He makes a friend of any stray animal he can find. He shares his last frank with a chap who isn't his pal. He risks his life to die inconsequently to rescue anyone who's wounded. He's gone over the top with the bomb and bayonet for the express purpose of doing in the hun, but he makes a comrade of the Fritzi he captures. You'll see him coming down the battered trenches with some scarred lad of a German at his side."

• 48:14Jocko Willink?

  Now, he, as I said in the beginning of this, he gets wounded. And at this point, he's been wounded and now he's heading to Blighty, which we talked about this before on the podcast, but Blighty was slang for going back to England.

• 48:32Jocko Willink?

  Back to the book. "Never in all my fortnight's journey to Blighty did I hear a word of self-pity or complaining." So he's going with a bunch of wounded people, he's not hearing any complaining. "On the contrary, the most severely wounded men would profess themselves grateful that they'd gotten off so lightly. Since the war started, the term lightly has become exceedingly comparative. I suppose a man is justified in saying he's got off lightly when what he expected was death.

• 49:04Jocko Willink?

  I remember a big Highland officer who'd been shot in the kneecap. He'd been operated on and the kneecap had been found to be so splintered it had to be removed. Of this, he was unaware. For the first day as he lay in bed, he kept wondering aloud how long it would be before he could rejoin his battalion. Perhaps he suspected his condition and was trying to find out. All his heart seemed set at once on getting back into the fighting."

• 49:36Jocko Willink?

  Next morning, he plucked up the courage to ask the doctor and received the answer he had dreaded. Never. You won't be going back, old chap.

• 49:49Jocko Willink?

  Next time he spoke, his voice was a bit throaty. Will it stiffen?

• 49:56Jocko Willink?

  You've lost the knee joint, the doctor said, but with luck, we'll save the leg.

• 50:02Jocko Willink?

  His voice sank to a whisper. If you do, it won't be much good, will it?

• 50:09Jocko Willink?

  Not much, said the doctor. He lay for a couple hours silent, readjusting his mind to meet the new conditions.

• 50:19Jocko Willink?

  Then he commenced talking with cheerfulness about returning to his family.

• 50:25Jocko Willink?

  The habit of courage had conquered, the habit of courage which grows out of the knowledge that you let your pals down by showing cowardice.

• 50:38Jocko Willink?

  So, took him a couple hours to adjust, said, "Okay, looks like I get to go back to my family."

• 50:49Jocko Willink?

  Now we have another type of casualty here, talking about

• 50:54Jocko Willink?

  men that have had major disfigurements to their faces. And they're, they, they would wrap their whole faces up.

• 51:06Jocko Willink?

  Back to the book, "In these days that followed, I saw several of these masked men.

• 51:12Jocko Willink?

  The worst cases were not allowed to walk about. The ones I saw were invariably dressed with the most scrupulous care in the smartest uniforms. Sam Brown's, that's the belt that goes over your shoulder, polished buttons, shiny. They had hope and took a pride in themselves, a splendid sign, perhaps." You ask why the faces kept, the face cases should be kept in France, so they, the guys that had major facial disfigurement, they would stay in France.

• 51:50Jocko Willink?

  I was not told, but I can guess, because they dread going back to England to their girls until they had got rid of their disfigurements. So for two years, through their bandages, they watched the train pull out for Blighty. While the damage which was done to them in a fragment of a second is repaired.

• 52:19Jocko Willink?

  At a base hospital, you see something which you don't see at casualty stations. Sisters, mothers, sweethearts, and wives, sitting beside the beds. They're allowed to come over from England when their man is dying. One of the wonderful things to me was to observe how these women, in the hour of their tragedy, catch this soldier's spirit. They're very quiet, very cheerful, very helpful. While, while passing through the ward, they get to know some of the other patients, and remember them. When they bring their own man flowers. Sometimes, when their own man is asleep, they slip over to other bedsides and do something kind for the solitary fellows. That's the army all over.

• 53:03Jocko Willink?

  Military discipline is based on unselfishness. These women who have been sent to see their men die, catch from them the spirit of undistressed sacrifice, and enroll themselves as soldiers. You discover the spirit of the man, when you've heard him wandering in delirium. So he's talking a little bit about the, obviously, guys that are suffering from shell shock is what they call it, what they used to call it in World War I. Guys that are having some mental issues. All night, in the shadowy ward with its hooded lamps, he would be giving orders for the comfort

• 53:48Jocko Willink?

  of his men. Sometimes he'd be proposing to go forward himself to a place where a company was having a hot time. Apparently, one of his officers was trying to dissuade him. "Danger be damned," he'd exclaim in a wonderfully strong voice. "It'll buck 'em up to see me, splendid chaps, splendid chaps."

• 54:12Jocko Willink?

  For the soldier, it seems that the war has always been and that they will never cease to being soldiers. For them, both the past and the future are utterly obliterated. They would not have it otherwise. Because they are doing their duty, they are contented. The only time the subject is ever touched on is when someone expresses the hope that it'll last long enough for them to recover from his wounds and get back to the line.

• 54:45Jocko Willink?

  That usually starts another man who will never be any good, never be any more good for the trenches, wondering whether he can get into the flying corps.

• 54:56Jocko Willink?

  The one ultimate hope of all these shattered wrecks who are being hurried to blighty, they have dreamt of is that they may see service again.

• 55:09Jocko Willink?

  And we still hear that. We still hear that to this day. We still hear that. And I heard that. You know, I talked about hearing that from Ryan Jobe, who was blind and he's back in America. He's like, "Let me come back."

• 55:25Jocko Willink?

  My first guy that I ever had get wounded bad and I went to see him in the medical outstation. And I just went down to like shake his hand and he was on morphine, you know, he'd been shot the leg. He didn't know if he's gonna lose his leg or not. And like I went down and gave, you know, I like went to shake his hand and he pulled me in and he's like, "Let me stay." And I was just like, "You, man, what an awesome brother right there." So this is not rare. This still happens and you know, you hear this all the time. And you know what? We, there's guys in the US military that go back to combat with, you know, one leg, with one hand.

• 56:09Jocko Willink?

  Uh, I mean, even Jody was like talking about, you know, when he woke up and Jody Medick, who we did the podcast with, when he woke up and he found out that they took both of his legs. He was pissed because one leg you can still go back on deployment, but two legs you can't do it. So Jody, the badass, was just like, "No, look, how am I gonna go back now?" Yeah.

• 56:36Jocko Willink?

  Some of us will be back in the fighting and jolly glad of it. Others are doomed to remain in the trenches for the rest of their lives. Not the trenches of the front line where they've been strafed by the Hun, but the trenches of physical curtailment where self pity will launch wave after wave of attack against them. It won't be easy not to get the wind up. It'll be difficult to maintain normal cheerfulness. But they're not the men they were before they went to war. Out there, they've learned something. They're game.

• 57:18Jocko Willink?

  They'll remain soldiers whatever happens.

• 57:24Jocko Willink?

  So he's talking about these guys that aren't gonna be able to make it back and he's saying it's gonna be hard for them. But he's saying that they're game and they're gonna bring it. Cause they're gonna remain soldiers regardless of what happens. Now, this is a pretty interesting piece where he goes back to New York where like I said, he had spent some time there. And he's talking a little bit about what it's like in New York. He says, "There's one person I've missed since my return to New York. I've caught glimpses of him disappearing around corners, but he dodges. I think he's a bit ashamed to meet me.

• 58:08Jocko Willink?

  That person is my old civilian self. What a full-blown egoist he used to be. How full of golden plans for his own advancement. How terrified of failure, of disease, of money losses, of death. Of all the temporary, external, non-essential things that have nothing to do with the spirit."

• 58:40Jocko Willink?

  War in itself is damnable.

• 58:46Jocko Willink?

  It's a extravagant wasteful use of resources. A misuse of accumulated brain stuff of centuries.

• 58:58Jocko Willink?

  Nevertheless, there's many a man who has no love of war, who previous to the war had cramped his soul with littleness and was chased by the bayonet of duty into the bloodstained largeness of the trenches, who has learnt to say, "Thank God for this war."

• 59:21Jocko Willink?

  He thanks God not because of the carnage, but because when the winepress of new ideals was being trodden, he was born in an age where he could do his share.

• 59:40Jocko Willink?

  Often at the front, I have thought of Christ's explanation of his own unassailable peace. An explanation given to his disciples at the Last Supper, "Be of good cheer, I have overcome the world."

• 59:55Jocko Willink?

  Overcoming the world, as I understand it, is overcoming fear.

• 1:00:02Jocko Willink?

  Fear, in its final analysis, is nothing but selfishness. A man who is afraid in the attack, isn't thinking of his pals, of his pals, and how quickly terror spreads. He isn't thinking of the glory which will accrue to his regiment or division if the attack is a success. He isn't thinking of what he can do to contribute to that success. He isn't thinking of the splendor of forcing his spirit to triumph over weariness and nerves and the abominations that the Huns are chucking at him. He's merely thinking of how he can save his worthless skin

• 1:00:44Jocko Willink?

  and conduct his entirely unimportant body to a place where there aren't any shells.

• 1:00:59Jocko Willink?

  In London, as I saw the workaday unconscious nobility of the maimed and wounded, the words "I have overcome the world" took an added depth.

• 1:01:12Jocko Willink?

  All these men have a "I have overcome the world" look in their faces.

• 1:01:18Jocko Willink?

  It is comparatively easy for a soldier with traditions and ideals to get back

• 1:01:25Jocko Willink?

  to face death calmly. To be calm in the face of life, as these chaps are, takes graver courage.

• 1:01:37Jocko Willink?

  What has happened to them? This attitude of mind, or greatness of soul, whatever you like to call it, was learnt in the trenches, where everything outward is polluted and damnable.

• 1:01:52Jocko Willink?

  Their experience at the front has given them what in the army language is known as guts. Guts, or courage, is an attitude of mind towards calamity, an attitude of mind which makes the honorable accomplishing of duty more permanently satisfying than the preservation of self.

• 1:02:15Jocko Willink?

  Like I said, when I kicked this off, this is a different, it's a powerful angle to look at these things. And I have talked about this as well, and I don't know if you... Sam Harris asked me.

• 1:02:28Jocko Willink?

  You know, I was saying that, hey, war shows you a lot of beauty, and it's where you get to see these incredible capacity of humanity. And he said, yeah, you know, you say that, but I've also heard you describe war as horrible. And, you know, I kind of gave him an answer about... You know, I asked him, I said, hey, if, if, have you ever known anybody that survived cancer? And he said, yes. And I'm like, yeah. And when they survive it, a lot of them say, "It, it opened my mind, it freed me from being afraid, and it did all these wonderful things." And I'm not, I would never wish it on anybody, but... They don't, they don't wish that it didn't happen either. They learn so much from it and that's how I feel about war and that's kind of what I read in a lot of this.

• 1:03:14Jocko Willink?

  Is Dawson saying, "Look, you are so changed by this and regardless of the horrors, the change is positive." And it opens your eyes in a way that nothing else can.

• 1:03:31Jocko Willink?

  Back to the book. That's the kind of peep at God we got on the western front. It isn't a sad peep either. When men die for something worthwhile, death loses all its terror. It's petering out in bed from sickness or old age that's so horrifying. Many a man whose cowardice is at loggerheads with his sense of duty comes to the front as a non-combatant. He compromises with his conscience and takes a bomb-proof job in some service whose place is well behind the lines. So he's saying like, "Okay, a lot of guys, they're like, "Hey, you know what? I'm kind of scared. I don't, I just want to, you know, just give me a, give me an easy job. Just, you know, I don't want to get killed."

• 1:04:16Jocko Willink?

  Back to the book. He doesn't stop there long. If he's a decent sort. Having learnt more than he ever guessed before about the brutal things that shellfire can do to you, he transfers into a fighting unit. Why? Because danger doesn't appall, it allures. It holds a challenge. It stings one's pride. It urges one to seek out ascending scales of risk just to prove to himself he isn't flabby.

• 1:04:53Jocko Willink?

  And flabby is actually another word that I looked up. There's an old, uh, kind of capture what the real meaning is and then there's the definition, another definition is lacking strength or determination.

• 1:05:07Jocko Willink?

  Now, this is, this is classic. The safe job is the only job for which there's no competition in fighting units. You have to persuade men to be grooms or cooks or batmen.

• 1:05:24Jocko Willink?

  If you're seeking volunteers for a chance at annihilation, you'll have to cast lots to avoid the offense of rejecting.

• 1:05:34Jocko Willink?

  All of this is inexplicable to civilians. And again, this is something I saw with my own two eyes and I talked about this in my retirement speech in Ramadi where I was like, okay, we need volunteers. Who wants to go over and live in this hellhole in eastern Ramadi and go out on operations where we're going to be taking casualties. It's going to be a nightmare and I can promise you nothing but blood, sweat and tears. Who, if you want to go on that op, if you want to go there, not, not for one operation, but I'm going to put you there for six months. So who, you know, if you want that, put your name on the board. Every single guy does it. Every single guy does it. And that's exact, that's exactly what he's talking about here. It's exact, as a matter of fact, I, I hooked up with this trooper down in New Zealand, Jiu

• 1:06:17Jocko Willink?

  Jitsu player and uh, we were talking, he was, he was in the, using the, um, in the commandos, in the Royal Marine commandos, forty commando and he was gonna get moved to being a cook for his, a four-year duty as a cook is what he was going to get tasked with and he got out, he got out of the Marines, got out of the Royal Marines because you know what? He said, I'm not going to be a cook, you know? I'm a, I'm a warrior. I want to go and get after it. So it's like, you see that in this modern day, you know, I'm talking about how different it was back then, but maybe it wasn't as different as I think it is.

• 1:06:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:53Jocko Willink?

  Cause we still got troopers that are just willing to step up all the time. And that's, that's one thing that's awesome. You know, again, from my experience in the, in the, in the SEAL teams, you know, when I went, when it went in, there was no war going on. I kind of thought that there was, but there wasn't. But these guys, these kids that come in now, they know where they're going. They know there's a war going on. They know they're going to get after it and they're lining up.

• 1:07:16Speaker 01

  I know, man. It's crazy how many people I see, their reason to join is to go fight these bad guys. It's not because I don't have anything better to do or not. It's like, no, I want to, I want to quit my job and go fight.

• 1:07:30Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. There's no doubt about it. No doubt about it.

• 1:07:38Jocko Willink?

  Now, I like this because we start hammering on some philosophers a little bit. No offense to Daryl Cooper and Marder Made because he's a big philosophy guy. I know where you're at, Cooper.

• 1:07:51Jocko Willink?

  I'm gonna, I'm gonna agree with Dawson on this one, so here we go. Back to the book. "If civilian philosophers fail to explain us, we can explain them.

• 1:08:01Jocko Willink?

  In their world, they are the center of their universe. They look inward instead of outward. The sun rises and sets to minister to their particular happiness. If they die, the stars would vanish. We understand. A few months ago, we too were like that.

• 1:08:27Jocko Willink?

  What makes us reckless of death is our intense gratitude that we have altered. We want to prove ourselves in excess how utterly changed

• 1:08:39Jocko Willink?

  we are from what we were.

• 1:08:43Jocko Willink?

  In his secret heart, the egoist is a self despiser.

• 1:08:51Jocko Willink?

  Can you imagine what a difference it works in a man after years of self contempt? At least for one brief moment to approve of himself? Ever since we can remember, we are chained to the prison house of our bodies. We live to feed our bodies, to clothe our bodies, to preserve our bodies, to minister to their passions.

• 1:09:16Jocko Willink?

  Now, we know that our bodies are mere flimsy shells in which our souls are paramount.

• 1:09:25Jocko Willink?

  We can fling them aside any minute. They become ignoble the moment the soul has departed. We have proof.

• 1:09:34Jocko Willink?

  Often, at zero hour, we have seen whole populations of cities go over the top and vanish,

• 1:09:43Jocko Willink?

  leaving behind

• 1:09:46Jocko Willink?

  their bloody rags.

• 1:09:49Jocko Willink?

  We should go mad if we did not believe in immortality. We know that the physical is not the essential part. How better can a man shake off his flesh? Than at the hour when his spirit is most shining?

• 1:10:06Jocko Willink?

  The exact day when he dies does not matter. Tomorrow or fifty years hence. The vital concern is not when, but how.

• 1:10:21Jocko Willink?

  The civilian philosopher considers what we've lost.

• 1:10:27Jocko Willink?

  He forgets that it could never have been ours for long.

• 1:10:39Jocko Willink?

  Giving up the self. You know, this is, there's some Zen, and I'm no Buddhist monk, but there's a lot of Zen philosophy in there too. You're completely surrendering yourself.

• 1:10:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:49Jocko Willink?

  And that's a powerful, powerful thing.

• 1:10:52Speaker 01

  You look like you really liked that last part there.

• 1:10:56Jocko Willink?

  It's heavy stuff.

• 1:11:00Jocko Willink?

  And here's, here, he kinda goes down the same vein because he's comparing civilian life. And so he just was talking about civilian philosophers. And now he's gonna go into just talking about the civilian, even, even how, how civilians spend their life? And how he used to spend his life.

• 1:11:18Jocko Willink?

  So here we go, back to the book. "We probably caught a train in, every morning. The same train, we went to a business where we sat at a desk. Neither the business nor the desk ever altered. We received the same strafing from the same employer, or if we were the employer, we administered the same strafing.

• 1:11:40Jocko Willink?

  We only did these things that we might eat bread. Our dreams were all selfish, of more clothes, more respect, more food, bigger houses. The least part of the day we devote to the people and the things we really cared for.

• 1:12:06Jocko Willink?

  And the people we loved, we weren't always even nice to them."

• 1:12:16Jocko Willink?

  And then he breaks and he goes into what it is being a soldier. He says, "Being a soldier is doing a man's job, doing it for someone else and unafraid to meet God."

• 1:12:35Jocko Willink?

  And now he's about to go in and discuss where this comes from.

• 1:12:42Jocko Willink?

  Nevertheless, it is true, it isn't natural to be brave. How then have multitudes of men acquired this sudden knack of courage?

• 1:12:54Jocko Willink?

  They have acquired it through discipline and training.

• 1:13:00Jocko Willink?

  When you have subjected yourself to discipline, you cease to think of yourself. You are not you, but part of a company of men. If you don't do your duty, you throw the whole machine out. You soon learn the hard lesson that every man's life and every man's service belongs to other people.

• 1:13:24Jocko Willink?

  Of this, the organization of an army is a vivid illustration. Take the infantry, for instance. They can't fight by themselves. They're dependent on the support of the artillery. The artillery, in turn, would be terribly crippled were it not for the gallantry of the air service. If the infantry collapsed, the guns have to go back. If the infantry advanced, the guns have to be pulled forward. This close interdependence of service on service, division on division, battalion on battery, follows right down through the army till it reaches the individual. So that each man feels that the day will be lost if he fails.

• 1:14:06Jocko Willink?

  His imagination becomes intrigued by the immensity of the stakes for which he plays. Any physical calamity which may happen to himself becomes trifling when compared with the disgrace he would bring upon his regiment if he were not courageous.

• 1:14:33Jocko Willink?

  Now I'm about to read a piece that's...

• 1:14:38Jocko Willink?

  It's just a story he tells. It's a story within a story.

• 1:14:43Jocko Willink?

  And we'll go right to it. "A few months ago, I was handling over... I was handing over a battery position in a fairly warm place. The major, who came up to take over from me, brought with him a subaltern and just enough men to run the guns. Within a half an hour of their arrival, a stray shell came in and caught the subaltern and five of the gun detachment. I was plain at once that the subaltern was dying. His name must have been written on the shell, as we say in France. We got a stretcher and made all haste to rush him out to a dressing station.

• 1:15:24Jocko Willink?

  Just as he was leaving, he asked to speak with his major. 'I'm sorry, sir. I didn't mean to get wounded,' he whispered. The last word he sent back from the dressing station where he died was 'Tell the major I didn't mean to do it.'"

• 1:15:41Jocko Willink?

  That's the discipline. He didn't think of himself. All he thought of was that his major would be left shorthanded.

• 1:15:53Jocko Willink?

  And he's about to tell another story that is...

• 1:16:00Jocko Willink?

  Well, I'm just gonna read it.

• 1:16:04Jocko Willink?

  "Last spring, the night before an attack, a man was brought into battalion headquarters dugout under arrest.

• 1:16:14Jocko Willink?

  The Colonel and the adjutant were busy attending the last details of their preparations. The adjutant looked up irritably. 'What is it?' The NCO of the guard answered, 'We found this man, sir, in a communication trench. His company has been in the front line for two hours. He was sitting down with his equipment thrown away and evidently has no intention of going up.'"

• 1:16:44Jocko Willink?

  The adjutant glanced coldly at the prisoner.

• 1:16:49Jocko Willink?

  "What have you to say for yourself?" So, you understand this? So, there's a, they found this soldier, he was, his troops were up, been fighting on the front line for two hours. They find him, he's got his radio strewn about, and they say, "Are you gonna go fight with your men?" And he says he's not gonna go. So, the adjutant glanced coldly at the prisoner. "What have you to say for yourself?" The man was ghastly white and shaking like an assman.

• 1:17:17Jocko Willink?

  "Sir, I'm not the man I was since I saw my best friend Jimmy with his head blown off and lying in his hands. It's kinda got me. I can't face up to it."

• 1:17:32Jocko Willink?

  The adjutant was silent for a few seconds.

• 1:17:36Jocko Willink?

  Then he said, "You have a double choice. You can either be shot up there doing your duty, or behind the lines as a coward.

• 1:17:48Jocko Willink?

  It's for you to choose. I don't care."

• 1:17:54Jocko Willink?

  The interview was ended. He turned again to the Colonel. The man slowly straightened himself, saluted like a soldier, and marched out alone to the front.

• 1:18:09Jocko Willink?

  That's what discipline does for a man who's going back on himself.

• 1:18:21Jocko Willink?

  And like I said, I'm not even, I'm not even sure how I feel about that story. I actually don't know. You know, you got a guy, and you know, Hackworth talks about this, Dick Winters talked about this, where you get guys that, they're broken.

• 1:18:37Jocko Willink?

  And you gotta give them a break. And, you know, what had this guy been through, God only knows. You know, obviously, he saw his friend get killed, I'm sure he was near death over and over again.

• 1:18:50Jocko Willink?

  And, the Colonel just says, "You either get out there and die, or you die back here as a coward."

• 1:19:00Jocko Willink?

  It's, it's...

• 1:19:04Jocko Willink?

  You know, I'm, I'm kind of...

• 1:19:07Jocko Willink?

  There's like a part of me that is, that is filled with admiration.

• 1:19:15Jocko Willink?

  Cause the guy obviously overcomes his fears and there's also a part of me that's filled with horror. Because he overcomes his fears.

• 1:19:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:19:26Jocko Willink?

  And to give that, to give that final order. And for the soldier to give that final salute.

• 1:19:40Jocko Willink?

  It's just all of it, the bravery and at the same time the callousness and at the same time the fear and at the same time the courage and the dedication to duty and yet it's dedication to madness.

• 1:20:01Jocko Willink?

  And again, it's, it's a window into human nature.

• 1:20:10Jocko Willink?

  And what people go through and what people will do and won't do and what it takes to get them there.

• 1:20:26Jocko Willink?

  Back to the book. One of the big influences that helps keep a soldier's soul sanitary is what's known in the British Army as spit and polish.

• 1:20:40Jocko Willink?

  Directly we pull out for rest, we start to working, burnishing and washing. The chaps may have shown the most brilliant courage and self-sacrificing endurance, it counts for nothing if they're untidy. The first morning, no matter what are the weather conditions, we hold an inspection. Every man has to show up with his chin shaved, haircut, leather polished and buttons shining. If he doesn't, he gets hell.

• 1:21:11Jocko Willink?

  So, I mean clearly we've talked about this since day one. The discipline and maintaining the discipline and here these guys coming off the front lines from the trenches. Alright, cool. Tomorrow morning we're having inspections, so get your gear together and polish your boots.

• 1:21:28Jocko Willink?

  Back to the book, there's a lot in it. You bring a man out from a tight corner where he's been in hourly contact with death. He's apt to think, "What's the use in taking pride in myself? I'm likely to be done in, any day. It'll all be the same if I'm dead." But if he doesn't keep clean in his body, he won't keep clean in his mind. The man who has his buttons shining brightly and his leather polished is usually the man who is brightly polished on the inside. Spit and polish teaches a man to come out of the trenches from seeing his pals killed and carry on as though nothing abnormal had happened.

• 1:22:10Jocko Willink?

  It educates him in an impersonal attitude towards calamity which makes it bearable. It forces him not to regard anything too tragically.

• 1:22:23Jocko Willink?

  If you can stand aside from yourself and poke fun at your own tragedy, and tragedy always has its humorous aspects, that helps.

• 1:22:37Jocko Willink?

  "We were sometimes, we were in the Somme for several months. The mud was up to our knees almost all the time. We were perishingly cold and very rarely dry. There was no natural cover. When we went up forward to observe, we would stand in water to our knees for 24 hours rather than go into the dugouts. They were so filled with vermin and baton flies. Wounded and strayed men often drowned on their journey back from the front line. Many of the dead never got buried. Lives couldn't be risked in carrying them out. We were so weary that the sight of those who rested forever only stirred in us a quiet envy.

• 1:23:17Jocko Willink?

  Our emotions were too exhausted for hatred. They usually are unless some new hunnishness had roused them. When we were having a bad time, we'd glance across no man's land and say, 'Poor old Fritzi, he's getting the worst of it.' That thought helps."

• 1:23:38Jocko Willink?

  And this is a piece where he talks about when somebody's not holding the line, when somebody's a quitter.

• 1:23:47Jocko Willink?

  When you come to consider it, a quitter is always a selfish man. It's selfishness that makes a man a coward or deserter. If he's in a dangerous place and runs away, all he's doing is thinking of himself.

• 1:24:06Jocko Willink?

  And he goes on to say here, "I've been supposed to have been talking about God as we see Him. I don't know whether I have. As a matter of fact, if you asked me when I was out there whether there was any religion in the trenches, I should have replied, certainly not.

• 1:24:24Jocko Willink?

  Now that I've been out of the fighting for a while, I see that there is religion there, a religion which will dominate the world when the war has ended, the religion of heroism. It's a religion in which men don't pray much. With me, before I went to the front, prayer was a habit. Out there, I lost the habit. What one was doing seemed sufficient. I got the feeling that I might be meeting God at any moment, so I didn't need to be worrying Him all the time, hanging on to spiritual telephone and feeling slighted if He didn't answer me directly when I rang Him up.

• 1:25:07Jocko Willink?

  If God was really interested in me, He didn't need constant reminding.

• 1:25:14Jocko Willink?

  When He had a world to manage, it seemed best not to interrupt Him with frivolous petitions, but to put my prayers into my work."

• 1:25:25Jocko Willink?

  That's how we all feel out there.

• 1:25:29Jocko Willink?

  I've learnt discipline and my own total unimportance. In the army, discipline gets possession of your soul. You learn to suppress yourself, to obey implicitly, to think of others before yourself. You learn to jump at an order, to forsake your own convenience at any hour of the day or night to go forward on the most lonely and dangerous errands without complaining.

• 1:25:57Jocko Willink?

  You learn to feel that there is only one thing that counts in life and only one thing you can make out of it. The spirit you have developed in encountering difficulties. Your body is nothing. It can be smashed in a minute. How frail it is, you never realize until you've seen men smashed. So you learn to tolerate the body, to despise death and to place all your reliance on courage, which, when is found at its best, is the power to endure for the sake of others.

• 1:26:46Jocko Willink?

  And he's

• 1:26:50Jocko Willink?

  closing out here.

• 1:26:54Jocko Willink?

  "The religion of the trenches is not a religion which analyzes God with impertinent speculation." So, so in this religion, in the trenches, God is not standing in some kind of authoritarian judgment.

• 1:27:09Jocko Willink?

  "It isn't a religion which takes up much of His time. It's a religion which teaches men to carry on stoutly and to say, 'I've tried to do my bit as best I know how.'"

• 1:27:27Jocko Willink?

  "That's the simple religion of the trenches, as I have learnt it, a religion not without glory.

• 1:27:35Jocko Willink?

  To carry on as bravely as you know how and to trust God without worrying Him."

• 1:27:45Jocko Willink?

  And the last line I'll read from the glory of the trenches. Dawson says, "It's funny.

• 1:27:54Jocko Willink?

  You go away to the most damnable undertaking ever invented.

• 1:28:02Jocko Willink?

  And you come back cleaner in spirit."

• 1:28:16Jocko Willink?

  And, again, I will tell you that, from my perspective, and from what I've been through, which, by the way, I want to say that what I've been through in my military career is absolutely nothing. Nothing compared to what a soldier in World War I lived through. But what I did go through, I will say this, I don't think war took anything away from me, or impacted me in a negative way.

• 1:28:53Jocko Willink?

  I think war made me better.

• 1:28:59Jocko Willink?

  I think war made me a better man, a better person.

• 1:29:06Jocko Willink?

  And, in the words of Dawson, "I think it absolutely cleaned my spirit."

• 1:29:18Jocko Willink?

  And I am,

• 1:29:22Jocko Willink?

  I am thankful for that. And I guess, that the question becomes, how can we clean our spirits without war?

• 1:29:34Jocko Willink?

  How can we do that? And I think the answer, again, and this is something that I, something that I think,

• 1:29:42Jocko Willink?

  is that it comes from discipline. That's what I talk about all the time. It's about setting aside comfort, setting aside weakness, setting aside fear, and having the discipline to endure.

• 1:29:56Jocko Willink?

  Endure

• 1:29:59Jocko Willink?

  the challenges and the hardship and the pain in order to become better.

• 1:30:10Jocko Willink?

  To, to suffer the glory of the discipline.

• 1:30:19Jocko Willink?

  To become stronger and faster and smarter and better.

• 1:30:28Jocko Willink?

  And, and now from a leadership perspective is to then put, to put others before yourself.

• 1:30:41Jocko Willink?

  To try and do some good in the world for others, to lead them down the right path. Not, not for you, but for them.

• 1:30:56Jocko Willink?

  And while war certainly taught me those things and ingrained those things into my mind if they weren't already there. I don't think you need to go to war to learn them.

• 1:31:15Jocko Willink?

  But I do think that you have to discipline yourself. You have to get outside your comfort zone and you have to push yourself beyond what you thought you could ever do. To get, to get that glimpse of the truth and to get that glimpse

• 1:31:42Jocko Willink?

  of the glory in the trenches.

• 1:31:56Jocko Willink?

  Heavy one.

• 1:31:59Jocko Willink?

  And again, thanks to Jesse for sending me this book. Outstanding old copy, printed in 1918. And I actually typed it all out, so I didn't have to mess up this beautiful book. I learned a lot from it, so I appreciate it.

• 1:32:23Jocko Willink?

  And Echo Charles.

• 1:32:26Speaker 01

  Hi.

• 1:32:28Jocko Willink?

  Save me and talk.

• 1:32:33Jocko Willink?

  Talk about something.

• 1:32:35Speaker 01

  More light hearted.

• 1:32:36Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, but like for instance, people just listen to this and maybe they want to listen to more of it.

• 1:32:43Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:32:43Jocko Willink?

  How could they help that occur in the world?

• 1:32:46Speaker 01

  Help move that process along.

• 1:32:47Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:48Speaker 01

  We could, or we could just talk about Jocko White Tea for like 10 minutes.

• 1:32:52Jocko Willink?

  We could definitely talk about Jocko White Tea.

• 1:32:54Speaker 01

  I wasn't really that into, oh, actually I was, I'm into tea every once in a while.

• 1:32:59Jocko Willink?

  I actually noticed that a lot of the tea from the office is now missing.

• 1:33:04Speaker 01

  You know how like, you're like, ah, you know, it's a mellow night, I should just call it and go to bed or something. Then I'd make like, you know, what's the mellow one? Chamomile, I don't know, whatever. Yeah, I'm not into tea, like I said. So I was like, alright, well, hey, you know, Jocko Tea, it's cool. I'm cool, I think I am.

• 1:33:24Jocko Willink?

  How's that working out when you're trying to go to sleep?

• 1:33:27Speaker 01

  No, but I didn't, it was like a random Saturday and I was like, hey, I'm gonna do like how you do, put it on ice and see if I can't get my refresh on, you know, outside or whatever. And so I put it in, I put in this tin cup, oh, it was nice, man. I was like, ooh, I think I might be into tea a little bit. Sarah comes out, she has hers too, it was nice, it was cool, man.

• 1:33:48Jocko Willink?

  We are going through it very quickly because they're, the whole family is getting after it right now. My younger kids. But yeah, and you know what's awesome? I don't know if you've, go, go on to amazon.com and read the reviews that people are writing. I'm actually gonna, I'm gonna have to bring out some of those and read them.

• 1:34:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:34:08Jocko Willink?

  Because they're awesome. They're funny as hell and they're great. So everyone that's writing reviews for Jocko Tea, Jocko White Tea, I appreciate it. It's awesome. And, and gotten a lot of good feedback as well about, you know, everyone likes, it tastes great and it makes you feel. Real good.

• 1:34:28Speaker 01

  Yup.

• 1:34:28Jocko Willink?

  Makes you feel it's a little glory, a little glory in a cup, a little glory in a iced tea.

• 1:34:33Speaker 01

  So I was, I was looking over like the instructions. So let me, just in case you don't, you didn't, you don't read the instructions, I think they're pretty straightforward. I think if you've ever had tea.

• 1:34:42Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:43Speaker 01

  People know. But if you took the time to read the instructions, this is what you would, would read. Brewing instructions, boil eight ounces of water, pour water over one bag of Jocko white tea. Brew for three to five minutes. Enjoy over, or enjoy hot or over ice. Get after it. So get after it is part of the instructions.

• 1:35:05Jocko Willink?

  And what's funny is people are, are, it's, it's real. Like you, you will really like have to get after it when you get done.

• 1:35:12Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:35:13Jocko Willink?

  And so that's what, and that's what's funny is people are saying it's real, it's real. It's real. There's, there's some real stuff in there. And when you get it in your brain, you'll be like, oh, I'm gonna go knock out some projects, maybe do a little met con, maybe go get on the mat, whatever. You know, it's just good.

• 1:35:30Speaker 01

  Or I might just cruise by the pool.

• 1:35:32Jocko Willink?

  No, we don't do that. That's not getting after it.

• 1:35:35Speaker 01

  That makes one of us. Cause I was, I was getting after it in the pool, how about that?

• 1:35:39Jocko Willink?

  Well, I guess you're approved, approved.

• 1:35:41Speaker 01

  No, it's good, man. Um, um, like I said, it may be even more into tea. Cause there's like, you know, it's like you get into, or I did, I'm not gonna say this is what happens, but I'm saying you're like, okay, I like this tea. I like the brand, you know?

• 1:35:56Jocko Willink?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:35:56Speaker 01

  So you, and then you appreciate the experience when, when it goes down, you know, you're more familiar with it now. Now when I see people drinking tea, I'm like, yeah.

• 1:36:02Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and some people have been like, well, some people emailed and said, well, is it really like Jocko made this tea? Um, really? Yeah.

• 1:36:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:36:11Jocko Willink?

  It took like, it took a few months to make, cause they kept, I'd send back, oh no, make it a little bit more of this, a little bit less of that. And eventually when I got the, the right combination.

• 1:36:20Speaker 01

  Dang.

• 1:36:21Jocko Willink?

  Then it was, okay. And well, they're like, okay, well for marketing, what do you want to do? And I go, oh, it's, oh, here's the marketing. I'm, I'm Mr. Marketing over here. Put it in a black box. Oh, what should we call it? Oh, I think of a good original title, Jocko tea. How's that?

• 1:36:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:36:36Jocko Willink?

  Okay, so we got Jocko white tea, good.

• 1:36:38Speaker 01

  There it is.

• 1:36:38Jocko Willink?

  And that's my marketing strategy.

• 1:36:43Speaker 01

  Hey, hey, yeah, man. No, I like it.

• 1:36:46Jocko Willink?

  What you should do is maybe hire a marketing company to come in and do an assessment of our customers. Guess what? Our customers are out to kick ass. They don't want all this crap. They want something that's gonna make them crush the world. And so, there you go. We don't need to put any, you know, images of whatever on it.

• 1:37:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, doing some kind of demographic studies on what kind of interests and, you know, who's the target market.

• 1:37:11Jocko Willink?

  The target market, I don't care. I know who the target market is. The target market is my people out there that are getting after it. There's the target market.

• 1:37:19Speaker 01

  Yep, there you go.

• 1:37:20Jocko Willink?

  I just hope, you know what, I just thought, I hope this doesn't fall into the wrong hands.

• 1:37:25Jocko Willink?

  What if criminal, criminally minded people, or people that are, um, you know, have evil thoughts? Maybe if they start drinking white tea, we might be in trouble.

• 1:37:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:37:34Jocko Willink?

  We might have to bolster up and drink more white tea.

• 1:37:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, or they could switch over to the old discipline equals freedom kind of situation and, you know, I'm just saying theoretically, that could be something.

• 1:37:43Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:44Speaker 01

  Nah, you did good. This is good, man. It looks good.

• 1:37:47Jocko Willink?

  Yep, yep. And it tastes good.

• 1:37:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:37:50Jocko Willink?

  Alright, cool. Jocko White Tea. You can order on amazon.com. After you click through.

• 1:37:55Speaker 01

  Click through, yeah, yeah.

• 1:37:57Jocko Willink?

  Which, you know what, there's a whole tale behind the click through right now.

• 1:38:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, it's kinda.

• 1:38:02Jocko Willink?

  And we have to make sure, because that's one of the main ways to support the podcast, is to click through. But if in the past you saved, oh, first of all, if you had the Trooper Tool, the Trooper Tool is null and void. We got shut down by Amazon. It was.

• 1:38:16Speaker 01

  Let's just say they didn't really like it that much.

• 1:38:18Jocko Willink?

  They didn't like it that much, because I've been proven wrong in the world. This is one of the times I've been wrong. There is such a thing as getting after it too much.

• 1:38:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:38:26Jocko Willink?

  And apparently, we were getting after it. Troopers were getting after it too much with the Trooper Tool. So they shut down the Trooper Tool. Okay, so if you still have the Trooper Tool, I don't know if it still works. But if you still have it and you think you're using it, you're not, you're not supporting the podcast. So what you have to do, and also if you have your old link saved, that would click you into, uh, Amazon, and you thought, oh, I just use this and I'll just save the, what's that called, a favorite? If you made it a favorite before, if you bookmarked it. Then you gotta erase that bookmark. You gotta go back to jocko podcast.com or back to jocko store.com. And you've got to make a new bookmark that has the new click through to Amazon. So we can get Amazon back in the game, supporting the podcast.

• 1:39:09Jocko Willink?

  Again, it's not costing you anything. All it's gonna cost you is that short period of time to click through. And that way we can support the podcast. That way we can buy more knives for the table.

• 1:39:18Speaker 01

  Yep. Yep.

• 1:39:20Jocko Willink?

  And that's what we're looking to do.

• 1:39:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. And Amazon's not mad at us. They were just like, hey, the trooper tools too heavy. It's too heavy.

• 1:39:28Jocko Willink?

  It's like when, uh, what was it? What was that book we just did where the Germans were mad that the Americans were getting after it too much? Yeah. Yeah. This is unethical. Like theoretically from Amazon's perspective, like the, like the Nazis. They thought, man, these guys are getting after it too much.

• 1:39:44Speaker 01

  This trooper tool thing is too much.

• 1:39:46Jocko Willink?

  So there's no more trooper tool. Go save a new bookmark, Chibohha, from, from jocko podcast.com or from

• 1:39:56Speaker 01

  The Jocko.

• 1:39:57Jocko Willink?

  The jocko store.com. Alright, so that's good.

• 1:39:59Speaker 01

  That was, man, that was a really good analogy right there, by the way. The, the German.

• 1:40:03Jocko Willink?

  The Nazis?

• 1:40:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's good.

• 1:40:05Jocko Willink?

  I'm not trying to say, I'm not trying to say it was fascist in what Amazon did.

• 1:40:09Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:40:09Jocko Willink?

  Because it wasn't. We, you know what? They're, they're, it's a great, it actually really is truly a great program. It really is a great program. It's very supportive of us and it's cool for Amazon because people are ordering stuff through Amazon. I love buying stuff and doing it through our, our website. Makes me feel good. It's like another excuse to just buy more books. I'm buying books at a ridiculous rate right now. It's actually, it's almost embarrassing how many books I'm buying right now because everybody recommends me a book. And I used to say, well, maybe I'll take a look at it. I don't have time to do that anymore. Now I just order it.

• 1:40:39Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:40:40Jocko Willink?

  Just bring it to me. Amazon, I want it today.

• 1:40:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

• 1:40:44Jocko Willink?

  How cool is that? Amazon Prime, same day delivery. Bring me my books. I'm getting some. You know what else is cool is, so I was gonna mark up. The book, The Glory of the trenches. But I didn't want to mark it up, obviously, because it's an old, beautiful copy. So I bought a new one. Okay, now, when you, when you buy these certain books from Amazon. They're, they print them immediately.

• 1:41:08Speaker 01

  Oh, right, right, yeah.

• 1:41:09Jocko Willink?

  And so this book got printed on the 22nd of September. For me, and then I just ordered it so I could mark this one up.

• 1:41:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:41:16Jocko Willink?

  It didn't arrive before I went on my trip, so I did it on another copy. So anyways, um, yeah, they, they will print a lot of these books that we're bringing out that are rare books, that are old books, that are out of print books, they just reprint them.

• 1:41:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:41:28Jocko Willink?

  So you, you can get a book printed, they'll bring it, the, the ones out here on the, on the west coast are printed in San Bernardino, California, San Burdo.

• 1:41:36Speaker 01

  There you go, and what, you order it, they drive it down that day, boom.

• 1:41:39Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I don't know what, man, I don't know, it's awesome.

• 1:41:42Speaker 01

  Something, yeah, it's a good deal, but yeah, yeah, if you, if, if you want to support this podcast in that way.

• 1:41:48Jocko Willink?

  Which is a great way, and we, hey, really appreciate it, that's awesome stuff, it's, it's, it definitely helps us do what we do.

• 1:41:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, thanks. Uh, but yeah, it's on jocko story.com and jocko podcast.com, click through.

• 1:42:05Jocko Willink?

  What other ways can people support this podcast?

• 1:42:08Speaker 01

  Well, obviously, the, the obvious way is subscribe to it on, on, um, on iTunes. Right, if you haven't already, and then, and also the YouTube. Again, and I say this all the time, I'm putting more videos on there, it's cool because I'll put little excerpts, you know, where. Because people on Twitter and stuff, they'll be like, hey, uh, can you just isolate this one excerpt of, you know, the Mark Lee speech, that, you know, just random ones, they'll say. Or they'll be like, hey, release this excerpt, I want to make a, a video. You know, and you can get the videos from YouTube and stuff. So they'll be like, hey, episode, I don't know, 40, you know, the last closing thing, I, anyway, so.

• 1:42:48Speaker 01

  I'll put stuff, not just excerpts, but other videos, other than the whole episode of the podcast.

• 1:42:55Jocko Willink?

  And when, a lot of times when you do those, sometimes they're just excerpts, but sometimes there's other things happening in those.

• 1:43:02Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:43:03Jocko Willink?

  I mean, sometimes you make full new video, like the good video, like the where does this one come from?

• 1:43:09Speaker 01

  Yes, yes.

• 1:43:10Jocko Willink?

  And I think just I'll speak for the voice of everyone else, myself included, and everyone else that's listening to this podcast that's not named Echo. I think we all want to see more videos. That's me.

• 1:43:22Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:43:22Jocko Willink?

  And I'm trying to, you know, I'm trying to make that hint to you. I think I've been making it to you for a while. I know it's hard work.

• 1:43:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're.

• 1:43:29Jocko Willink?

  But, um, you know, we're just trying to let you know, we here on, you know, the listeners and the and the troopers here, we all want to see a little bit more activity.

• 1:43:38Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:43:38Jocko Willink?

  And, uh, and I think I personally think that the more people are subscribing to YouTube, the more the more motivated you're gonna get.

• 1:43:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yep.

• 1:43:47Jocko Willink?

  And I hate to see you relying on motivation.

• 1:43:49Speaker 01

  No, no, no.

• 1:43:50Jocko Willink?

  Because I know I rely on a discipline and I wish you were like, hey, you know what my discipline is? I'm making, you know, one video every two weeks, but I haven't seen that kind of discipline yet, really, from you.

• 1:44:04Speaker 01

  There you go. All right. Well, hey, we're one step closer.

• 1:44:06Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:06Speaker 01

  And, you know, expect it, maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but I'm on it. I'm on it.

• 1:44:13Jocko Willink?

  Oh, I like that.

• 1:44:14Speaker 01

  Speaking of being on it.

• 1:44:15Jocko Willink?

  Oh, look what you did there. Nicely done. Nicely done. You get the credit.

• 1:44:22Speaker 01

  Okay, so on it, this is supplements. We all know that. A lot of people, a lot of people don't think that I work out just because they don't, they don't see me. They hear my voice. So like, oh, Echo, obviously doesn't work out. But Jocko obviously works out. Jocko does take supplements. So people are like, oh.

• 1:44:39Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:39Speaker 01

  What does Jocko take?

• 1:44:41Jocko Willink?

  Jocko takes krill oil. Jocko takes Strong Bone. And Jocko takes Alpha Brainy.

• 1:44:50Speaker 01

  There you go. Is Strong Bone is from on it?

• 1:44:52Jocko Willink?

  From on it, yeah, yeah.

• 1:44:54Speaker 01

  Alright, there you go. So yeah, these are actual supplements. I take the exact same thing. Not the Strongbow, except for the Strongbow.

• 1:44:59Jocko Willink?

  Hmm, I left one out.

• 1:45:01Speaker 01

  What?

• 1:45:02Jocko Willink?

  Shroom Tech.

• 1:45:03Speaker 01

  Shroom? Ah, you take Shroom Tech. Okay, there you go.

• 1:45:06Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, Shroom Tech is, is, is good. And I, I actually, we trained today. It's Sunday. We trained today. We trained today hard. I did not take Shroom Tech today.

• 1:45:15Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:45:16Jocko Willink?

  And I didn't feel like I brought my A-game the way I wanted to. So.

• 1:45:21Speaker 01

  It's too bad.

• 1:45:22Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:22Speaker 01

  Nonetheless.

• 1:45:23Jocko Willink?

  Apparently it was good enough, but you know.

• 1:45:27Speaker 01

  Alright.

• 1:45:27Jocko Willink?

  But I felt, you know, like I was breathing harder.

• 1:45:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:45:32Jocko Willink?

  Good rolls today.

• 1:45:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, good.

• 1:45:34Jocko Willink?

  Taylor.

• 1:45:35Speaker 01

  For sure. Yeah, he's, when does he compete?

• 1:45:38Jocko Willink?

  Uh, I don't know. Yeah, yeah, that's right. He's competing somewhere, yeah.

• 1:45:41Speaker 01

  He's good, man. Yeah, this early on too? Even if he wasn't this early on.

• 1:45:46Jocko Willink?

  Hmm.

• 1:45:47Speaker 01

  Anyway, we'll talk about Taylor, uh, soon.

• 1:45:49Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 1:45:50Speaker 01

  Even more.

• 1:45:51Jocko Willink?

  Taylor, oh, soon.

• 1:45:52Speaker 01

  Um, but yeah, get, okay, Onnit has the best supplements. We all know that. All legit, because a lot of supplements straight up don't work. They, some supplements rely on the placebo effect. Literally rely on that. Like, that's its effectiveness. That's why it's effective, because of placebo, placebo effect. Not Onnit. You can find out about this stuff on the website. But if you want 10% off those supplements that you're gonna get

• 1:46:17Speaker 01

  on it.com slash Jocko, 10% off. Boom.

• 1:46:20Jocko Willink?

  I like it.

• 1:46:22Speaker 01

  So yeah, do that, man. Support yourself at the same time.

• 1:46:26Speaker 01

  That's what I like to think.

• 1:46:27Jocko Willink?

  And then how about those, uh, how about the Jocko store?

• 1:46:31Speaker 01

  Jocko store has some new items. So, okay, this is weird. If you look on Instagram, you posted a picture today.

• 1:46:37Jocko Willink?

  I did. I did, yes. Now, today is relative, because when this podcast comes out, it won't be today.

• 1:46:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:46:44Jocko Willink?

  It'll be some other time.

• 1:46:45Speaker 01

  The October 2nd?

• 1:46:47Jocko Willink?

  Oh, people are gonna track the date? Okay.

• 1:46:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's my dad's birthday, by the way, today.

• 1:46:52Jocko Willink?

  Happy birthday, Echo's father.

• 1:46:53Speaker 01

  Happy birthday, DC.

• 1:46:57Speaker 01

  William Charles Jr.

• 1:46:58Jocko Willink?

  Bravo Charlie.

• 1:46:59Speaker 01

  Goes by B C on Koi. Happy birthday dad. Love you. Um, so on my dad's birthday, Jocko posted a picture on Instagram, October 2nd. And one of the comments, I just read it. A little while ago. Um, it says, hey, where do I get that good shirt? Or where do I get a Jocko shirt?

• 1:47:17Jocko Willink?

  Oh.

• 1:47:18Speaker 01

  That's an interesting question, right?

• 1:47:20Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:21Speaker 01

  Because.

• 1:47:22Jocko Willink?

  There's only one place in the world you can get that shirt.

• 1:47:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I, and we say it a lot, but nonetheless, that no one's obligated to listen to me talk about Jocko's story. Really?

• 1:47:31Jocko Willink?

  Do people fast forward when they get to you talking about stuff?

• 1:47:33Speaker 01

  I would, I'm not surprised. If people do, I'm not surprised.

• 1:47:36Jocko Willink?

  Are they missing some nuggets?

• 1:47:38Speaker 01

  They are missing some information.

• 1:47:39Jocko Willink?

  I think they're missing some information. I think they're missing some good times too.

• 1:47:42Speaker 01

  Potentially, sure. Yes. So.

• 1:47:46Jocko Willink?

  How are they gonna know it was B C's birthday to Dan?

• 1:47:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:47:50Jocko Willink?

  They're not gonna know that.

• 1:47:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, great point. Yeah.

• 1:47:52Jocko Willink?

  They're not gonna know that.

• 1:47:54Speaker 01

  So I would say so don't fast forward through these, but do what you like, you know? What if you're on your way to go do some pull-ups or something and you're like, the book's done. We're done with the book.

• 1:48:05Jocko Willink?

  Hmm.

• 1:48:06Speaker 01

  Time to do some pull-ups.

• 1:48:09Speaker 01

  Then that'd be cool.

• 1:48:10Jocko Willink?

  You know what's weird though? When you listen to other podcasts? Well, specifically, like if you listen to Joe Rogan's podcast, which I, which I do. Sometimes they're just straight talking.

• 1:48:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:48:21Jocko Willink?

  I mean, which is, which is what we're doing right now.

• 1:48:24Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:48:24Jocko Willink?

  We are talking about, it is enclosed around some subject matter, because we're talking about ways to support the podcast.

• 1:48:32Jocko Willink?

  So, yeah, but it's still, like I said, there's some nuggets in there.

• 1:48:35Speaker 01

  Sure. Yeah.

• 1:48:36Jocko Willink?

  That are important.

• 1:48:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:48:38Jocko Willink?

  And even if they're not important, what's funny is, even if they're not important.

• 1:48:42Speaker 01

  They're in there, right?

• 1:48:43Jocko Willink?

  They're the, they're the, this is what I think is cool, is when I, when I go, I like travel a lot. And I've been traveling a lot and I'm starting to meet just like. Troopers everywhere.

• 1:48:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:48:53Jocko Willink?

  Everywhere. I was all over the world, all the way from New Zealand to the east coast, up and down the east coast. I meet, meet, meet and troopers everywhere. And when I meet people, all of a sudden, it's like, it's like friends that you have inside jokes with. So like everybody I meet, you know, they make cracks about this and you know about that. And it's all from the podcast.

• 1:49:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:49:12Jocko Willink?

  So that's kind of cool is not just, hey, get on here and get educated about life, leadership, business, war. You know what? Let's have some inside jokes that we can laugh at each other at when, when I show up at, you know, your, your, wherever you work to do some work myself.

• 1:49:30Speaker 01

  Yep. Yeah. When people come to the gym, they'll tell me, good evening, even if it's daytime.

• 1:49:34Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:49:35Speaker 01

  Good evening.

• 1:49:35Jocko Willink?

  At least, um, a quarter of the reviews for Jocko White Tea. Start off with good evening, Echo.

• 1:49:45Speaker 01

  Yes. Good evening.

• 1:49:48Jocko Willink?

  Uh, I don't even know what started that. I mean, obviously I said it.

• 1:49:52Speaker 01

  I think you started it.

• 1:49:53Jocko Willink?

  No, I absolutely started it, but, but at some point, I mean, I, I don't know how else to introduce you.

• 1:50:00Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:50:00Jocko Willink?

  Other than to say, good evening.

• 1:50:02Speaker 01

  Yeah. You just kept, you sort of just kept doing it.

• 1:50:05Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Yeah. And you, your response is now standard too.

• 1:50:09Speaker 01

  Well, what else would we say, you know?

• 1:50:11Jocko Willink?

  I guess you don't, can't say much.

• 1:50:13Speaker 01

  Evening. It's not, how's it? Hey, man.

• 1:50:15Jocko Willink?

  Uh, you could say, how's it?

• 1:50:17Speaker 01

  I'm gonna, I'm gonna stick with good evening. I think.

• 1:50:19Jocko Willink?

  I like that.

• 1:50:19Speaker 01

  There it is. But to answer that question, let's say, let's say someone else had that question. Where do I get a Jocko shirt? I'll tell you where you get a Jocko shirt.

• 1:50:30Speaker 01

  Jocko store.com.

• 1:50:31Jocko Willink?

  That's again, love the marketing on that title for that website.

• 1:50:36Speaker 01

  Creative on that one. It's a store from Jocko. It's online.com. Jocko store.com. Yes, we have shirts there. Uh, we have travel mugs, you know, the kind you can, you, you bring with you. They're not the.

• 1:50:50Jocko Willink?

  Oh, that's the kind you can put your Jocko white tee.

• 1:50:52Speaker 01

  Sure. Yeah. If you choose to. Yes, exactly. And, uh, some, some bumper stickers that are kind of cool. They're on Jocko store.com as well. Um, there's some other sticks on there. Cool. We have patches. Okay. Here's the thing about the patch, about patches. Someone online said, "Hey, get the Velcro patches." And, ah, man, I'm just not as familiar with the Velcro patches. We already had these other two patches. One is the Jiu-Jitsu patch. The other one is the Jiu-Jitsu patch, but it's all-purpose patch. You know, you can iron it on, but you sew it on. It's four inches by three inches. The Velcro patch, I'm like, "That's a good idea. The Velcro patch, let me get the same thing." Four, it's four by three. It's a Velcro patch. So it's cool for that, but you explain to me, those Velcro patches are interchangeable.

• 1:51:36Speaker 01

  The standard is three by two, three across. So just understand the Velcro patch currently, right now, is four by three.

• 1:51:44Jocko Willink?

  Did you get two by three ones ordered?

• 1:51:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I gotta, you know, I didn't finalize it, but they come in pretty quick. So just know, just be aware of the dimensions of the patch. If you want to do the interchangeable one, I guess technically you could put the four by three, but we're not doing that. Well, I'll get the two by three.

• 1:52:01Jocko Willink?

  Don't encourage that.

• 1:52:04Jocko Willink?

  Please.

• 1:52:05Speaker 01

  Nonetheless, they're on Jocko's store as well. Um, the Jiu-Jitsu patches there too, like I said. Rash guards are there, big time, all on the Jocko's store. Some are on backorder, but they're there in full effect for sure, and they're good.

• 1:52:25Speaker 01

  Five emails today saying they felt the 19% increase in performance, allegedly.

• 1:52:34Jocko Willink?

  There's no alleged about it. How can you say that's alleged when people factually felt the difference?

• 1:52:39Speaker 01

  Oh, well, that, it's just what...

• 1:52:41Jocko Willink?

  Could be a skeptic, brother.

• 1:52:42Speaker 01

  No, it's what they said. I wasn't there to witness it, you know?

• 1:52:45Jocko Willink?

  But why are they gonna tell you they had a 19% improvement if they did not?

• 1:52:48Speaker 01

  They alleged it, that it was an allegation.

• 1:52:51Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I don't support you on that.

• 1:52:52Speaker 01

  Technically.

• 1:52:53Jocko Willink?

  We're falling out of grace here, man. When somebody tells me they got 19% improvement with the rash guard.

• 1:52:58Speaker 01

  It's a fact.

• 1:52:59Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Why would they lie to you?

• 1:53:00Speaker 01

  I can do, yeah, you're right.

• 1:53:02Jocko Willink?

  Otherwise, they'd be saying, "Hey, give me my money back. I didn't get a 19% performance increase."

• 1:53:05Speaker 01

  Good, that's two very good points.

• 1:53:09Speaker 01

  And we have women's tank tops. Hey, I understand. It's fall, we're going into winter soon. Tank tops.

• 1:53:18Jocko Willink?

  Southern hemisphere people.

• 1:53:20Speaker 01

  Sure. Yeah, the west. Yeah.

• 1:53:22Jocko Willink?

  Cause it's summer down there. It's going to be summertime soon down in uh, down in New Zealand and Australia.

• 1:53:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:53:27Jocko Willink?

  And South America.

• 1:53:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and the Hawaii people as well. From Kauai, we don't know about that kind. And that's what you're, what you're saying. You don't understand what a hoodie is.

• 1:53:37Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:38Speaker 01

  From Kauai, like, we, we kinda, we know what a hoodie is.

• 1:53:41Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, but you don't know what it is.

• 1:53:42Speaker 01

  We don't know. Yeah.

• 1:53:43Jocko Willink?

  So we're making hoodies?

• 1:53:44Speaker 01

  Yes. So I made, we made it with consultation from Jocko and, and some New England people. We got hoodies on the way as well. And women's t-shirts as well.

• 1:53:58Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I was explaining to Echo that in New England, like a hoodie is, is like, something you wear every single day for nine months out of the year. You wear a hoodie. Yeah. Oh, I'm waking up and putting on a hoodie.

• 1:54:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:54:13Jocko Willink?

  That's what you do.

• 1:54:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:54:15Jocko Willink?

  So we gotta make, so we're gonna make them awesome. So that people will be fired up.

• 1:54:19Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:54:20Jocko Willink?

  And representing with their hoodie. And they'll be toasty warm.

• 1:54:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. What's interesting, for lack of a better term, my wife is one of those hoodie people. You know, the kind where she wears a hoodie every single day, even when it's not cold.

• 1:54:34Jocko Willink?

  Hmm.

• 1:54:35Speaker 01

  She'll be like, oh, it's like a comfort zone thing, you know?

• 1:54:37Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:37Speaker 01

  She has a bunch of them. Like, I don't even know how many. She even took Greg Train's victory hoodie.

• 1:54:45Jocko Willink?

  Oh.

• 1:54:45Speaker 01

  And she uses that one. That was like one of her many, anyway.

• 1:54:48Jocko Willink?

  That's a good hood. That was, those are good hoodies.

• 1:54:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, I agree. So, um, yeah, so there it is. We're gonna have that coming out. That should be within the next two to three weeks. I think that's a fair amount of time to say and be accurate. Um, so yeah, there it is. JacoStore.com. In the event of you wanting to support this podcast in that way, get some stuff. Get one thing, two things, whatever you want.

• 1:55:11Jocko Willink?

  Once again, appreciate all that support. Yeah, also, if you want, if you don't have a book that was written by a guy named Leif Babin, my brother and myself, we wrote a book called Extreme Ownership. If you want to pick it up, you can pick it up. You can get it on Amazon or anywhere else that they sell books. And we get so much good feedback on it. It's awesome. Appreciate all the positive feedback. You know, people read it and they say, this really helped me, you know, not just with the way I'm doing my business, but like with the normal stuff in life. And the other cool thing is when people buy it for their team.

• 1:55:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:55:46Jocko Willink?

  Or they even buy it for the boss sometimes. So pick up Extreme Ownership. We did the audio too. If you want to read it, if you don't want to read it because you don't have time, you just want to listen to it while you're in the, in the traffic jam, then just buy the audio book and you'll be good to go. So appreciate that. And then also if you dig that Extreme Ownership, you dig that concept, you can come out to a little something we're having here in Southern California, in San Diego called The Muster, the Extreme Ownership Muster. We're going to be talking about leadership. We're going to be talking about how to take the lessons that we learned in combat, which have been proven in combat, and how you can apply those same lessons doing leadership in business, leadership in life.

• 1:56:26Jocko Willink?

  So we got a bunch of you are coming to this and it's awesome. So, and I had somebody email me the other day and it said, said, hey, listen, I just wanted to let you know I'm coming to the muster, but in, in the event I don't get to meet you there, then, you know, I just want to let you know I really appreciate, you know, the podcast and the book and all that. And I didn't even respond yet. I don't think because I get a lot of emails. But let me tell you something. If you come to the muster, we're hanging out. It's not going to be one of these gigs where, you know, I'm back in the green room waiting to go out, um, getting in character. Well, no, I, this is my character and I won't be backstage. I'll be in, I'll be sitting at a table with you.

• 1:57:07Jocko Willink?

  I'll be talking, I'll be, and Lace can be doing the same thing. So that's one of the major differentiators we want to have in this thing. Is that because, you know, Leif and I go to these events all the time because we speak at them, that, you know, leadership events and conferences and all that. The biggest differentiator that we want to make is we want to be, we want to have the contact. We want to have the face to face. So if you're coming, not, not only are you going to meet me, we're going to kick it. We're going to be hanging out. We're going to be having dinner, lunch. We're going to be going over problems. We're going to be talking about solutions. So don't think that I'm going to be, um, and that, and that Leif is going to be all hiding in the background. No, we're going to be there. I'll be meeting you. We'll be doing a workout. Also, some people want to train, if you train that jujitsu and you come out here.

• 1:57:49Jocko Willink?

  Come out here a little bit early, or stay a little bit late, and we're gonna go to the gym. We're gonna go to Victory MMA, and you can challenge Echo Charles to a death match. We'll be there, we'll be there Roland. So, you know, if you, if you stay, if you stay Friday, if you stay Saturday, if you stay Sunday, I will be there Friday night, I'll be there Saturday day, I'll be there Sunday day, and we'll be getting it on. So, come on out for that, for that muster, and that'll be, that'll be awesome. Also, if you can't come out to muster, but you just wanna kinda kick it and keep these things going on, and you wanna join the crew, then all you gotta do is get on social media.

• 1:58:34Jocko Willink?

  Which, which, I, I didn't really understand social media a year ago, you know? I didn't know what it was all about. But now what I know is I get to talk to people, and I get to, get to grow my knowledge from other people who, who can communicate things, who ask really good questions that I got to get research or I know an answer to, and then they ask me something else, and so, so that's awesome. And funny, bunch of people post all kinds of funny stuff, so I'm getting entertained. And we're getting, you know, a crew, and having a bunch of people there that are like-minded, and is, is, is fun to have, and so I appreciate it. If you wanna find us on social media, Echo is, by the way, he's at Echo Charles, and that's on Instagram, that's on Twitter, that's on Daff Facebooky,

• 1:59:20Jocko Willink?

  and I, and I am also on social media, and I am at Jocko Willink on Twitter, on Instagram, on the Facebooky, I'm also there. And, I guess, that's about it for this week. We don't think we have time for the Q and A, we'll push that. And, in the meantime, you know, again...

• 1:59:51Jocko Willink?

  I know we got a, I'm meeting people all over the place. And thank, thank you all for supporting this podcast. Thank you all for doing what you do. Meeting firefighters, working with firefighters, meeting police officers, working with police officers. The military folks that are emailing me, the guys that are overseas right now fighting terror. Thank all of you, all you uniformed folks for what you do, for holding the line overseas and here at home. And for everybody else that I'm meeting, I'm meeting people from all kinds of businesses. All of you have goals, you're trying to make things happen, you're trying, you're not calling, you're not calling us up. You're not calling Leif and I up unless you're trying to dominate. So we love the fact that we get to go to places where you got people that are out there trying to kick ass, trying to crush it.

• 2:00:36Jocko Willink?

  And that's what propels America and keeps our country strong, keeps our country free. So thank you for what you're doing in all those jobs, all you in the workforce. It's awesome. We appreciate it. And there's one thing we want back from you and as we want to make sure that you keep getting after it.

• 2:00:56Jocko Willink?

  And so until next time. This is Echo and Jocko. Out.