470: Don't Get Caught In The Crossfire in The Information War. With Jeremy Stern.

>Join Jocko Underground< https://www.jockounderground.com/subscribe Jeremy Stern is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Europe Center and news editor of Tablet magazine. He was previously a senior advisor in the Department of State and an explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) officer in the US Army, deploying to five countries in the Middle East and Central Asia. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, Newsweek, Foreign Policy, and the American Interest, where he was a staff writer. He studied Russian language and literature at Kenyon College and Saint Petersburg State University in Russia. 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 470 with Echo Charles and me, Jocko Willink. Good evening, Echo. Good evening. The shocking attack in southern Israel this weekend was the most deadly killing of Jews since the Holocaust. The death toll is worse than the worst day of the Yom Kippur War. It is a massacre that will transform Israel and the Middle East. The scenes of horror and bloodshed that resulted, including the murders of entire families, the kidnapping of small children, the rapes of young women, were seemingly intended to cause maximum anger and shock inside Israel. More than 150 people were seized by terrorists and taken back into Gaza where they are being

• 0:45Jocko Willink?

  held hostage. They include women, very young children, and the elderly.

• 0:53Jocko Willink?

  In the cruel logic of the region where Israel is located and has been located for several thousand years, Hamas's killing spree was not a repulsive example of the depths of human barbarism.

• 1:09Jocko Willink?

  Instead, it was considered a huge win and shredded Israel's vaunted military deterrence.

• 1:21Jocko Willink?

  And those right there are some excerpts, obviously written after the October 7th attacks, in an article written by Alana Newhouse and Jeremy Stern for Tablet Magazine. Alana Newhouse is the editor in chief of that magazine and Jeremy Stern serves as the deputy editor. And Jeremy had an interesting path through that position, serving in the army as an EOD officer, working for the State Department, and eventually becoming a journalist. And it's a privilege to have him here with us tonight to share his experiences. And lessons learned. Jeremy, thanks for joining us, man.

• 1:59Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me.

• 2:00Jocko Willink?

  Um, I guess we're going to get into a bunch of that, you know, going through your where, how you ended up as the, as the deputy editor at Tablet Magazine and some of the things that you've written about there. But, um, let's get to the beginning, the beginning of your life. It's a pretty interesting background. You were born in where? In the San Fernando Valley?

• 2:24Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 2:25Jocko Willink?

  And, yeah, Encino.

• 2:27Speaker 01

  Encino, man.

• 2:28Jocko Willink?

  And your dad, um, sounds like he's a pretty wild character.

• 2:34Speaker 01

  He is, yeah. And he, he had a pretty wild life. He, uh, he's 88 now, so he's still around. He had me late in life, but, uh, he grew up first in Rochester and then in New York City. His first job out of college was, uh, writing on Johnny Carson. Uh, he was a comedy writer and, you know, this was back in the day when I think it was a bit more cutthroat and brutal back then. So, uh,

• 2:56Jocko Willink?

  Is it not cutthroat and brutal anymore?

• 2:58Speaker 01

  Well, I think what I had in mind was, did you see the story recently? There's a, a woman, I think she might be a cast member, but she's definitely a writer on SNL. She, you know,

• 3:05Jocko Willink?

  Didn't see it.

• 3:06Speaker 01

  gave a story to the New York Times about how, uh, you know, when Elon Musk went on the show, he kind of tore apart the bit that she had written for him. And, you know, it was this big sob story about she was traumatized by the fact that he didn't think it was funny and blah, blah, blah, blah. It just, you know, I, I put that story in front of my dad and he reminded me of how he got fired from Carson, which was, you remember this woman, Sherri Lewis? You remember her? She had this sock puppet called Lamb Chop. It was a big kind of mainstay of, you know, late night TV.

• 3:33Jocko Willink?

  Is this in what years? What decades?

• 3:35Speaker 01

  This would be like the early sixties. Yeah. And, uh, anyway, you know, my dad had been on the show for a number of years and he wrote a bit for this woman. She, it was literally just a, a sock puppet that she would tell jokes with. And he got called into Carson's office and. He said, you know, what's the problem? Did I do something wrong? And he and Carson and Sherry Lewis are sitting there and they said, well, no, Tony, we love your jokes. We think they're fantastic, fantastic, but Lamb Chop has a problem with it. It's literally like a fucking sock puppet. And the sock puppet starts tearing into my dad and fires him. And Carson's like, I'm sorry, the sock puppet spoke and you're done. It was like, that's how he got, that's how he got fired.

• 4:13Jocko Willink?

  So what was next to after that?

• 4:16Speaker 01

  Oh, man, he became like an ad man in New York City. This is kind of the generation now after, you know, Don Draper and Mad Men and all that. So probably more cocaine than alcohol by that point, but still plenty of booze. Anyway, he kind of made his way around. He moved to Mexico for a while, you know, I think got into a bunch of trouble and then eventually he moved to LA.

• 4:35Jocko Willink?

  What kind of trouble did he get to in Mexico? And where in Mexico?

• 4:38Speaker 01

  So he was in Mexico City, you know, and this is like the seventies by this point. You know, I think it was like, it was a wild time. There was-

• 4:47Jocko Willink?

  Was your dad a hippie? Was he just like a rock and roller? Like, what was the deal?

• 4:51Speaker 01

  I think the sensibility was a little more rock and roll. But, you know, it was like creative advertising in the 1970s, you know, back and forth between America and Mexico. It was-

• 5:04Jocko Willink?

  Oh, so he had like a legit job down there in Mexico?

• 5:08Speaker 01

  He did, yeah. He eventually, so he worked for McCann Erickson, which was a big firm in New York, and then eventually for Shyatt Day in, in, in LA. And anyone who's seen the show Mad Men, you know, you kind of recognize those, those two agency names. And then, yeah, he eventually made it here. He, I have three half siblings. They, we all have the same dad, different mom. But, you know, eventually he got divorced and then he married the young secretary, you know, almost 20 years younger than him at his office. And that's my mom.

• 5:37Jocko Willink?

  And, and then what's your mom do when you were growing up?

• 5:40Speaker 01

  She was mostly a stay at home mom. She worked in some administrative jobs at UCLA and USC up in LA. Yeah, that was about it.

• 5:48Jocko Willink?

  And then your, what's your mom's background then? Where's she coming from?

• 5:53Speaker 01

  So she was born and raised in, in LA. Her, uh, so her parents were from Vienna, my grandparents. They were Jews in Vienna, uh, left in the late 1930s. Um, my grandmother was part of the kinder transport, you know, if you've heard of that, they, they got to England, they got out in time.

• 6:11Jocko Willink?

  Wait, so this is your mom, your, sorry, your grandma?

• 6:14Speaker 01

  This is my grandma.

• 6:15Jocko Willink?

  Was part of the kinder transport, was, was taken out of Germany.

• 6:20Speaker 01

  Correct. She had a sponsor in England, right? Who, who took her in. She was still, you know, considered at that point in, an alien from an enemy country in wartime England. Uh, and then my grandfather, this is actually kind of a crazy story. So he was more of like a street kid. He had his mom, but that was it. He didn't know who his father was. He suspected his father was probably an officer in the Imperial German Army of Wilhelm, mine Germany, who had an affair with his mother during World War One, but he never knew for sure. But all he had was his mom and he lived in a building in Vienna, uh, where, you know, there was only other Jews lived there. And, uh, Nazi police came one night, you know, this is 1938, 39, uh, took all the Jews out of the building, sent them to camps, but there was, I think, two Nazi officers who were involved in

• 7:04Speaker 01

  this raid and one of them recognized my grandfather as the friend of his little brother. He knew him from around, you know, the streets, playground, played soccer together, whatever. And so he spared him and let him go. And my grandfather also got to England.

• 7:22Jocko Willink?

  Where'd your, how old was your grandfather at this point?

• 7:24Speaker 01

  So he must have been probably about 15, 16.

• 7:28Jocko Willink?

  So where did he go?

• 7:29Speaker 01

  He, so he made it to Ilkley, uh, north of London, I think, uh, in England, again, where they kind of held all of these.

• 7:37Jocko Willink?

  But did he, did he like E and E to get there or how'd he get there?

• 7:40Speaker 01

  That I'm, I'm actually not too sure. I don't think he was part of the official kinder transport, uh, but I think, you know, he somehow made his way to first to Portugal and then to southern England and then, you know, was processed like all the other aliens were and then up to, to Ilkley. Uh, and his mother was killed in a, she was executed in a camp, uh, outside of Minsk in what's now Belarus. And that's all he knew. And then he later was permitted to join the British Army. He was in the artillery stationed in North Africa and then was part of the invasion of Italy, at the boot of Italy. So he was in the Battle of Anzio, which I think included 6,000 Allied

• 8:21Speaker 01

  troops, 4,000 casualties. So it was one of the bloodiest battles of that theater of the war. But he survived. And my grandmother spent the war building tank parts at a factory on the Isle of Man off the coast of England. And they linked up after the war in these kind of Austrian refugee circles and couldn't get a visa to come to America at the time. So they moved to Sisswa in the Dominican Republic, lived on a farm where I think my grandfather would have been happy. You know, he loved raising pigs and chickens and hanging out in the sun, which you can imagine after everything he just went through. My grandmother was more of a kind of, you know, urban, urbanite Viennese woman. And so they eventually got a visa to come to California and moved to LA. And so that's where my mom was born.

• 9:05Jocko Willink?

  And then how'd they make a living in LA?

• 9:07Speaker 01

  My grandfather, he, it was like odds and ends. He sold rack hair products at malls. He owned a wig store. He was, they were kind of part of this Austrian refugee community in LA, in the San Fernando Valley. And a lot of them ended up being pretty successful in business and whatever else. My grandfather never was, that just wasn't who he was. He was just, he was more of a kind of a mensch. He loved hanging out, like, he was a chess grandmaster. He played a lot of soccer. He loved soccer. He loved politics. He, I remember when I was a kid, like, at any given time, he had the names of every senator, sitting senator in the US Senate memorized. And he would switch out the information every time there was an election, you know. I don't even know why. I think it was just, it was something, it made him proud to, you

• 9:51Speaker 01

  know, live in a representative democracy. And he felt like he should actually know the names of all of his representatives. And so, yeah.

• 9:59Jocko Willink?

  So then is your mom, your mom's now a young lady that marries this older dude? How old, how much older did you say?

• 10:07Speaker 01

  Uh, they're 17 years apart.

• 10:09Jocko Willink?

  17 years apart and so she's, she's, is she raised like Jewish, active Jewish, practicing Jewish?

• 10:19Speaker 01

  No, it was kind of typical of their world, which was these people that had a kind of latent Jewish identity that was important to them and that they wanted to pay some attention to. But, you know, they completely stopped speaking Yiddish or German in the house with my mom and her kids. They did not observe the Sabbath. They did not believe in God. They did not talk about God. They didn't go to synagogue. They didn't send them to Jewish schools. Which, you know, again, I think was typical of a lot of the people who survived what they, what they went through. And, you know, their families were killed in the camps and all of that.

• 10:58Jocko Willink?

  It's also just, uh, you know, assimilation Americans, you know, just people come to America. It doesn't matter where you come from. There's a lot of people that, I have a friend that was, you know, his dad was, uh, his dad was Mexican and I'd always be like, oh, you know, when I first met him, we started hanging out. I was like, oh, do you speak Spanish? And he's like, no. And he, and I said, oh, your dad didn't speak Spanish to you? And he goes, no, my dad barely spoke to me because he, his dad didn't want to speak Spanish to his son. Cause he didn't want his son to speak Spanish.

• 11:25Speaker 01

  Right.

• 11:25Jocko Willink?

  He wanted his son to speak English. So he didn't speak Spanish to him. He's trying to like be American. So there's some of that too.

• 11:31Speaker 01

  That's exactly right. Yeah. I, I think that was a big thing and they sent them to, you know, these public schools that are these like assimilation factories, right? It's just like make, make everybody American as quickly as possible. And it worked, right? That's kind of the, the beauty of the, of the country.

• 11:46Jocko Willink?

  So, so now you're born, so your dad's what 50 something when you're born?

• 11:50Speaker 01

  He's 52 when I'm born.

• 11:52Jocko Willink?

  And then what's your, what do you do growing up?

• 11:55Speaker 01

  Uh, so yeah, also in the San Fernando Valley, um, you know, kind of middle-class, typical, you know, Jewish kid in LA, played a ton of sports. You know, went to basically the same school my whole life, uh, with all the same kids.

• 12:14Jocko Willink?

  What, what school was it?

• 12:15Speaker 01

  It's called Oakwood. It was, they had different campuses, but they, you know, they're, they're kindergarten to 12th grade.

• 12:22Jocko Willink?

  Is it a Jewish school?

• 12:23Speaker 01

  No, but it's just a lot of Jewish kids. Yeah.

• 12:26Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 12:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. Uh, just regular school. Um, and you know, same kind of growing up. I mean, not, you know, some sort of background awareness, uh, and pride in coming from a Jewish family, but with zero tradition or observance or anything like that, right?

• 12:45Speaker 01

  Which again is like, you know, it's, it's pretty typical, uh, but it's also typical for, you know, what eventually happened to me for, you know, the, the grandkids to become more interested in all of this than the parents. Right? Cause it's kind of like you just said, you know, so my mom was the one who was, had the direct connection to the grandparents. Who didn't want to speak the foreign language. They didn't want to talk about the past. They never talked about the past ever. Right? So for her, it was just, that was her world. As the grandkid, you're like one degree removed and you're like, what the fuck is going on there? Like, why don't, why don't they ever speak about this stuff? How come when I ask my mom questions, she doesn't know the answers, you know?

• 13:23Speaker 01

  And so, yeah, that's partly where that came from. And I wanted to go visit Vienna where they came from. I wanted to go to Israel. I got, you know, a little bit interested in it, uh, but most of that actually came later.

• 13:33Jocko Willink?

  So when you're in high school, what are you doing in high school? What are you into? You playing sports?

• 13:38Speaker 01

  I played sports for a while. Uh, I was really into it. And then, you know, kind of early high school, I ended up smoking a lot of pot. I was into girls. I hated class, you know, again.

• 13:52Jocko Willink?

  What kind of music did you listen to?

• 13:54Speaker 01

  Oh, man, everything. I was really into hip hop. I was really into kind of classic rock. You know, I guess it was all like fairly typical, like Jewish kid from LA. It was like, you know, Tupac and Biggie and Nas, you know.

• 14:11Speaker 01

  But it's, yeah, it was, I would say for a while there, I got pretty lost.

• 14:16Jocko Willink?

  Did you, did you have any plan for life?

• 14:19Speaker 01

  No, zero.

• 14:20Jocko Willink?

  Didn't know what you wanted to do?

• 14:21Speaker 01

  Totally zero. I, I, it was one of those cases where it was just like, I thought that nothing interested in me and that freaked me out, right? Once I got to a certain age.

• 14:33Jocko Willink?

  Then did you say, I better figure out something to interest me real quick?

• 14:37Speaker 01

  Honestly, the way it happened, it didn't really come together until I went to college. So I went to college in Ohio, in kind of rural Ohio.

• 14:45Jocko Willink?

  Did you have a plan going there? Were you going to study anything in particular?

• 14:49Speaker 01

  No, I, I mean, I had no idea. I thought maybe I would study English because it sounded easy. I mean, the one thing I liked doing was reading. I liked reading books. I liked particularly, I liked reading novels and reading history. That was, you know, one thing I could kind of, you know, it's how I like to spend my time, but I, I knew even then there's like, there's no future in that. There's no money in it. There's no, you know, you can't build a life on that.

• 15:12Speaker 01

  But I had to satisfy a language requirement when I was in college because I didn't get good enough grades in high school Spanish.

• 15:20Jocko Willink?

  So if you're from SoCal and you didn't roll out with the freaking Spanish.

• 15:24Speaker 01

  I know. It's fucking embarrassing.

• 15:25Jocko Willink?

  Three or whatever.

• 15:26Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 15:27Jocko Willink?

  You know, you were smoking too much dope.

• 15:29Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 15:31Jocko Willink?

  So what, what language you pick?

• 15:33Speaker 01

  So I just picked Russian, just on a whim. I was like, whatever. That sounds weird and cool. And, you know, it's super different from Spanish, which now I hate because I did so badly in it. And, and that's when it changed. I just, I, total luck of the draw, the woman who, who taught that Russian class, her name was Natalia Shansky. She was from Odessa in Ukraine. And she just became like the single biggest person in my life up until that point. Just an incredible woman, brilliant mind, amazing teacher, and she took an interest in me for whatever reason.

• 16:04Jocko Willink?

  How long did it take you to figure out that she was awesome?

• 16:07Speaker 01

  Oh, first day of class.

• 16:09Jocko Willink?

  So what'd you do first day of class that made you realize that?

• 16:12Speaker 01

  I think it was.

• 16:15Speaker 01

  You could tell how seriously she took the subject and that she didn't care. She cared enough about tests and grades and, you know, to kind of help you along in your future, but you could tell she wasn't impressed by kids who could get good grades, but still didn't have any kind of real command of the language or ability to speak or read. She really took it really, really seriously. And that just showed me kind of how much pride she had in her own profession. Right? So it wasn't even, at first, it wasn't even just that I like fell in love with Russian. It was just, she was the first person I saw where I was like, man, she figured out what she loved and she does it and she takes it seriously every day.

• 17:00Speaker 01

  And she was the same every day. She was never like tired or pissy or moody or whatever, like every single day, which I'm sure in her own life, she had all that shit, right? She had good days and bad days, but she never showed it.

• 17:14Jocko Willink?

  And was it like an immersion situation? Cause I was, I took Spanish in college and when I took Spanish in college, like you'd go in and they wouldn't speak any English to you, you know, like the whole time. And I was, by the way, I was an old, I was 28 years old when I went to college because the Navy sent me to college. So, you know, I roll in there and I was like, dude, just please just tell me in English, what page to go to and stuff like that. Was it that scenario?

• 17:45Speaker 01

  Not quite. I mean, I know the kinds of programs you're talking about. I mean, once we kind of learned the alphabet and we learned basic stuff, she would try to do it as much as possible. The, her bigger thing was pushing everybody to go to Russia and spend time there and get out of Ohio for their junior year, go spend one, two, three semesters there. That was her big thing. She was like, I'm just going to give you the building blocks, but you're going to show up there and you're, you know, even though you've taken two years of Russian, you're going to get there and you're not going to understand anything that anyone's saying.

• 18:17Speaker 01

  So even if you get A's in my class, you're not going to understand a fucking thing, but you'll have some sort of framework to, to build off of. And that's what she pushed me to do. And that's what I did. I went and lived in Russia for a little over a year.

• 18:27Jocko Willink?

  So what were you majoring in at this point?

• 18:29Speaker 01

  Russian.

• 18:30Jocko Willink?

  So you majored in Russian?

• 18:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, Russian language and literature. I took some other classes too, but that was the only thing I cared about.

• 18:36Jocko Willink?

  So you end up going to where in Russia?

• 18:39Speaker 01

  St. Petersburg.

• 18:40Jocko Willink?

  And how long, how many semesters did you do there?

• 18:42Speaker 01

  Uh, like two and a half. It was like two semesters plus a summer.

• 18:45Jocko Willink?

  So like a full year?

• 18:46Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 18:47Jocko Willink?

  One full year?

• 18:48Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 18:48Jocko Willink?

  What was the living scenario?

• 18:50Speaker 01

  I lived with this little old lady who were, uh, lived in this huge, giant Stalinist 1950s apartment complex at the edge of town on the Finnish sea. I mean, it was like way out in the boonies. Uh, and you know, Russia everywhere is like pretty fucked up and the infrastructure sucks. And like, you know, it's just kind of a slog to get through. But this was like, you know, a few degrees removed from that. And she had a son in the, in the Russian Navy who would pop in and out, you know, every once in a while. But yeah, it was, so this was a real, you know, language immersion program because she didn't speak a word of English. And they just, you know, I was what 19 and they just threw me in her apartment. It was just me and her.

• 19:31Jocko Willink?

  How long did it take you to start adapting to that lifestyle?

• 19:35Speaker 01

  It, uh, you know, I mean, there are things that are in, in Russia that are cool, you know, for, for young American, especially I think if you're a guy.

• 19:45Speaker 01

  That's kind of hard drinking. The people seem kind of rough, you know, but it's got all this incredible history. People are obsessed with, you know, literature and movies and music and then whatever else.

• 19:58Jocko Willink?

  Wrestling and weightlifting?

• 20:00Speaker 01

  Wrestling and weightlifting.

• 20:04Speaker 01

  And so that you can adapt to pretty quick. Um, this was also, you know,

• 20:08Jocko Willink?

  Is there a party scene? Cause you're 19 years old.

• 20:11Speaker 01

  Huge.

• 20:12Jocko Willink?

  And are you like the richest guy in the world because you're an American?

• 20:16Speaker 01

  Uh, no, cause I mean, you're a junior in college and you got like 14 bucks in your bank account. So I made money teaching English to Russian students. So that was how I got my, you know, my drinking money. But it's, you know, it was a different Russia, too. This was 2009, 2010. So this is when Medvedev is the president, Putin's technically the prime minister. I mean, this is all like a facade, you know, it's all fake. But it was still, you know, Putin had been in power for less than 10 years. People still had a memory of the 1990s and the total chaos and the corruption of the Yeltsin years. You know, Putin comes in in the early 2000s. American and Western petroleum engineers had gone to Russia and, you know, basically turned around the entire oil and gas industry. So they're

• 21:01Speaker 01

  getting hundreds of billions of dollars of extra revenue that they hadn't been getting throughout the Soviet Union. And so, you know, I think Putin's probably a smart guy, but anyone would have done well in that scenario. So there's a lot of extra cash flowing around that had never been there. You know, there's McDonald's and Burger King on every corner for the first time. It was just kind of a, an optimistic time before, you know, it took a turn later.

• 21:21Jocko Willink?

  And then how many, like, what's your schedule? Are you going to class there? What are you doing?

• 21:26Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah, I'd say for the first semester, you're going to class every day. And then as it wears on, you're kind of like, you know, you, you develop a close group of Russian friends and you're like, I learn more just shooting the shit with them every day than going to class. And so, you know, there's an increasing amount of goofing off and.

• 21:42Jocko Willink?

  So you had taken two years of Russian role when you got there?

• 21:45Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 21:46Jocko Willink?

  And could you understand what was happening when you got there?

• 21:48Speaker 01

  Barely.

• 21:49Jocko Willink?

  And then how long did it take before you were?

• 21:52Speaker 01

  It took a good six months.

• 21:53Jocko Willink?

  Then how long was it before you're like, yeah, I'm, I can speak this?

• 21:56Speaker 01

  Oh, man. I mean, probably about a year until I was like.

• 22:01Jocko Willink?

  Thinking in Russian?

• 22:03Speaker 01

  Think, yeah, maybe dreaming, having dreams where it's unclear in the morning when you wake up which language it was in. You know, I had friends visit me who were, you know, coming in from Ohio and I could fully translate between them and my Russian friends, totally fluent, um, could read the newspapers every day. That took like a full year.

• 22:21Jocko Willink?

  Now, as you're.

• 22:24Jocko Willink?

  You spent a year there. Did you have to go back to one more year in Ohio when you got done with?

• 22:28Speaker 01

  I did. Yeah, that's right.

• 22:29Jocko Willink?

  And then do you start seeing what your future is going to be? Do you have a plan yet?

• 22:34Speaker 01

  No, still nothing. I was like, okay, so now I've got, I like reading books and I like speaking Russian. That's it. Was it like, what the fuck am I going to do with that? Um, no, I mean, at that point I was applying to jobs at Whole Foods and I was dating a girl from New Orleans and I followed, she got a job at a, at a magazine in DC and I followed her and I was like, I'll work at the market down the street or whatever.

• 22:56Speaker 01

  But I, I eventually got a job at a magazine that existed then called The American Interest, uh, which is a quarterly political magazine.

• 23:05Jocko Willink?

  And what was your job?

• 23:06Speaker 01

  I was like a research assistant.

• 23:10Jocko Willink?

  What do you make doing that?

• 23:12Speaker 01

  Thirty thousand dollars a year.

• 23:14Jocko Willink?

  Thirty thousand dollars a year and you, you're working an eight hour day. They're saying, hey, I'm going to do a story about blah, blah, blah. Can you give me the background between this election here that took place in Russia or whatever?

• 23:23Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 23:25Jocko Willink?

  And then you sit there, give them a bunch of notes?

• 23:27Speaker 01

  Give it a bunch of notes and then, you know, like eventually you can do some of your own writing and then if that's good enough, you can impress some older people who take an interest in your future. And that's kind of what happened, but I was, I was living in DC and then partially in New York. And it was in DC when I-

• 23:43Jocko Willink?

  What was going on in New York?

• 23:45Speaker 01

  I was kind of commuting back and forth.

• 23:49Speaker 01

  But it was in DC. I met, uh, some retired army officers for the first time. I'd, you know, never met anyone in the military, really. I mean, other than my grandfather fighting in World War II, like zero military experience from anywhere in my family. But in DC, you know, you, a lot of people come through, as you know. So I met a lot of people and I found that really interesting and I liked talking to them and I was really impressed by them. And I also saw what happens to people who kind of moved to DC after college and then never left. Get a job at a think tank and work your way in and out of government and you become a lobbyist and whatever. And that actually, that was the first point, I think, that I got freaked out about what the future could look like if I didn't do something different.

• 24:34Jocko Willink?

  So how like, what kind of progress did you make in the writing world or in the research world? Like, did you ever, did you publish anything? Did you get any articles? Or were you just doing research? Thank you.

• 24:46Speaker 01

  I, I published a couple. Yeah, right. I, I published a couple of articles, I think. But the, the main thing was that I ended up developing a relationship with this guy, Walter Russell Mead. He's, so now he writes the main foreign policy column for the Wall Street Journal. He's an author and historian. He's, he's, he's a really great and brilliant guy. And so, you know, there's kind of a developing theme here of finding, identifying mentors throughout your life, right? So the first was the Russian teacher. Walter became the second. And he, so I had done just enough work to catch his attention or to, you know, allow him to take some sort of interest in me not floundering and having no future. And that ended up being a big, a big help.

• 25:28Jocko Willink?

  Now, did you, at what point did these officers encourage you to just join the army and get out of DC?

• 25:35Speaker 01

  It wasn't even that. I mean, no one kind of pushed it on me. I was just, I was impressed. You know, I think it was that background of having felt like I squandered some of my high school years, smoking dope and.

• 25:53Jocko Willink?

  Being an idiot.

• 25:53Speaker 01

  Being an idiot and chasing girls and not paying attention in class and, and all of that, given the opportunities that I had. I think it was the first time that I realized like, okay, it's not necessarily too late. Like, it's too late to relive all of that. But there are ways that you can live your life where you figure this out at, you know, at this point in what, 21, 22. So it's not necessarily too late to like, make something of myself and to go on another adventure and to do that kind of thing.

• 26:23Jocko Willink?

  The military really is a, such a nice. Place an opportunity for people to go and it's like you get a clean slate. Here's the track, get on this track, doesn't matter where you are. You're you will instantly become a respectable contributor to society. The minute you show up and you enlist, you're going to be, oh, this person's a contributing human. You can be from a degenerate to that that next day. You're a respectable human being, which is which is kind of freaking awesome, honestly, if you think about it.

• 26:57Speaker 01

  That's right. Did you always know you wanted to go in?

• 26:59Jocko Willink?

  Yes.

• 27:00Speaker 01

  And what were your reasons back then? Like, what would you have said when you were eighteen?

• 27:04Jocko Willink?

  When, see, it's I would normally throw a question back at you like when you were a little kid. What did you want to do? But it seems like you didn't want to do anything. But most people like, oh, I wanted to be a movie star or a rock star or a firefighter or a banker or a whatever. And most people have that. I literally just wanted to be a commando carrying a machine gun. So when I figured out that you could get paid money to be a commando and carry a machine gun, I was like, where do I sign up for this shit? I'm in. That's literally what I always wanted to do, you know, my my mom is like. My mom showed me this piece of paper.

• 27:45Jocko Willink?

  I filled out in like fourth or fifth grade or something and it was like, what do you want to be when you grow up? And I was like, soldier, spelled wrong, you know, something like that, because I was a little kid. So, yeah, I just always wanted to do it. And ran around the woods as a little kid playing army and just as soon as I could. You know, I played army for the next twenty years after that, which was a good time.

• 28:08Speaker 01

  But you came across a lot of people, I assume, where it was kind of like they needed a fresh start or they were running away from something.

• 28:14Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah, you know, there's

• 28:15Speaker 01

  It's kind of a common story.

• 28:16Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, very common story. That's why I brought it up, you know, I brought it up because you meet so many people in the military. It's like, oh, what were you doing? Oh, you know, I just quit college. I just got kicked out of college. I just, you know, graduated high school. I was working in a, you know, digging ditches or whatever, or I would, you know, had a DUI charge coming my way. And there's a lot of people like that. There's also people that's like, oh, well, you know, I figured I could learn a trade or whatever. You know, the Navy is, the Navy is very. Blue collar industrial work. Like if you join the Navy, you can be a diesel mechanic. You can be an aviation's mechanic. You can be a, a, a fuel guy. Like there's all these technical jobs that you can get in the Navy where they just transfer over to the civilian

• 28:58Jocko Willink?

  sector and it doesn't seem, at least when you're probably looking at the brochure for the Navy, you're like, well, I want to be a diesel mechanic and that guy looks like he's just in a shop working on a diesel engine. Okay, cool. Whereas in the army, you might see a guy, you want to be a diesel mechanic in the army. You're like, wait, why is that guy carrying a machine gun and, and he's out in the middle of desert somewhere. So that might not seem as appealing for someone that wants like a blue collar industrial job. So, but you meet a lot of people like that in the Navy and, and yeah, you just get that reset button. So I think for me, it was what I always wanted to do. And I'm very, I, you know, it's weird because I always encourage, I, I'm cautious to encourage people to join the military because I know for their first like three weeks of bootcamp, they're going

• 29:42Jocko Willink?

  to hate me because you didn't say nothing about this. But I think eventually people that do go in the military feel like they made a good move. And I, I will say, here's a question that I've gotten more confident answering over the years is people used to say, well, you know, I'm thinking about doing it, but I'm also thinking about whatever, you know, going, getting my next promotion or finishing college or starting college or getting my doctorate or getting my masters. And I'm always like, you know, you can always do that. You can always get your masters. You can always get your doctorate. You can always go and work for this finance company. I'm like, the military window is pretty closed. And I would go so far as to say, it's a lot easier to go do that when you're 18 years

• 30:26Jocko Willink?

  old than when you're 23 years old or 25 years old. Like even you're talking about going to live in St. Petersburg, Russia in an apartment. I, I'm thinking about that right now. I would rather go to bootcamp than go live with some random woman in St. Petersburg, Russia in a Stalin flat, you know, like that does not appeal to me at all. Eating Russian food, which I don't even know what that consists of. I, that's so.

• 30:52Speaker 01

  It's even worse than whatever your picture.

• 30:54Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's what I'm, that's what I'm saying. Like none of that appeals to me. If I would have done it when I was 18 or 19, like cool, you just suck it up. Kind of like you, you know, you suck up bootcamp and you suck up all the whatever junk things you have to do when you're getting indoctrinated in the military. But.

• 31:10Jocko Willink?

  I would, that's why I recommend to people now, like, yeah, if you, if you're thinking you have that itch, I would do it. And the other thing is, I meet people all the time that tell me, I wish I would have joined, I wish I would have joined, I wish I would have joined. I've met very, very few people, very few people that have told me, I wish I never would have joined. Even friends of mine that have been like wounded badly, they're never like, I wish I never would have joined. No, they're happy they joined. So I lean towards, I've been, I've gotten more confident over the years of answering the question, you know, I'm thinking about joining, during the military, should I do it? My answer's pretty much like, yes. Occasionally I'll get someone that's like, hey, I'm

• 31:54Jocko Willink?

  thirty one years old, I have a wife and three kids and a phenomenal business and I bring in six figures. And I really want to join the army. I'm like, check the reserves out. So anyways, that's how it, that's how it ends up. Yes, that's what I wanted to do. But there was, so you're looking at the world, you're meeting these officers and you realize that you've squandered much of your talent with smoking pot and chasing girls. And you decide, I'm gonna go and join the army.

• 32:26Speaker 01

  That's right. And you know, I, I had some better reasons too. Like, you know, I use authentic feelings of patriotism and where my family came from and the lives they built for me and in America. And, you know, I, there was a genuine connection to those kinds of motivations.

• 32:43Jocko Willink?

  Where were you when nine eleven happened?

• 32:46Speaker 01

  I was in seventh grade.

• 32:48Jocko Willink?

  Oh, so it's, you know, do you have, do you remember much of it?

• 32:51Speaker 01

  I remember my, so, yeah, I was, I grew up on the west coast. So this was, you know, seven o'clock in the morning or so, right?

• 32:57Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 32:57Speaker 01

  So I, I think I remember getting in the car with this, you know, this girl who was in twelfth grade who drove, you know, a bunch of little kids to school for carpool. And we hadn't turned on the TV in my house before I'd left when I was eating breakfast or whatever. So by the time we got in her car, the first tower was already hit. And then we were in the car listening to the radio when the second tower was hit. And at that point, you know, there's kind of no cell phones at this point still. So at that point, we, she took us back to her house so, so we could just basically flip on the TV. And our parents were calling her parents and they were like, bring everybody home. So then she, you know, she rounded all the kids up and then she dropped us off one after another.

• 33:41Speaker 01

  And then I think I just spent the rest of the day watching it on TV with my parents. Where were you? So you were in the Navy?

• 33:46Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it was actually, I was going to college and I was driving to college and they're like, oh, a airplane hit. One of the world trade centers. And I was like, oh, you know, I did, I literally didn't think much of it. I figure a Cessna, you know, guy confused, foggy, whatever. And then I went to a couple of classes, I went to a class and they were like, oh no, it was a big airplane. And I was like, oh, that's freaking crazy. And then, you know, the second tower got hit and two and two, and I knew we were going to war. That's some very close juncture. And now it's now, when you, so now when you're thinking about going to the army, it's what? Two thousand and thirteen, two thousand and fourteen?

• 34:23Speaker 01

  That's right. So it's about two thousand and thirteen when I'm thinking about it. Seriously, I signed my contract in 2014. So this is in the kind of sequestration days in the kind of middle of the second Obama term. So it was actually, you know, I expected to sign the contract and two weeks later I'd ship out, but it was like eight months until I got a slot for basic, right? Cause there's just no money and there was no slots and they were trying to get rid of people, right? People were getting pink slips.

• 34:50Jocko Willink?

  And did you, did you enlist to be an officer?

• 34:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I went to-

• 34:54Jocko Willink?

  Did you get that kind of contract or whatever?

• 34:56Speaker 01

  That's right. So it was in my contract that after basic, assuming I made it through, that I would go to OCS at Fort Benning and I went to basic at Fort Benning as well.

• 35:04Jocko Willink?

  Oddly enough, I never realized that they did that until very recently, that if you, because in the, in the Navy, you don't go to Navy boot camp, you go straight to OCS. And in the Army, if you're going to be an officer, you go to boot camp first and then you go to OCS.

• 35:18Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 35:18Jocko Willink?

  I think that's actually pretty cool.

• 35:19Speaker 01

  And if you get injured or you wash out or something happens at basic, then you're enlisted for those three and a half years.

• 35:24Jocko Willink?

  What if you're just a turd?

• 35:26Speaker 01

  If you're, if you're just a turd, you become an eighty-eight Mike and you drive a truck as a private and it doesn't matter if you have a, you know, if you have a college degree or whatever.

• 35:35Jocko Willink?

  So if you're con, are you getting judged while you're in basic training?

• 35:41Speaker 01

  I mean- I guess you are, you have to be a real turd to wash out that bad.

• 35:46Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 35:47Speaker 01

  OCS is really kind of the bigger filter and some serious turds make it through there as well.

• 35:51Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 35:52Speaker 01

  It's, yeah, I mean, basic, I mean, this is 2014. By that point, it's like, I mean, everybody's getting through.

• 35:57Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Are you, when you're going through there, are you identified as an OCS?

• 36:02Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. And the drill sergeants don't like that.

• 36:04Jocko Willink?

  They don't like it?

• 36:05Speaker 01

  No, they give you a lot of shit.

• 36:06Jocko Willink?

  How many people are in your, what are you in a company with like 150 guys in your bootcamp company?

• 36:10Speaker 01

  So, no, it was more than that. So you're in a platoon with, you know, I think 39.

• 36:15Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 36:16Speaker 01

  So it's, you know.

• 36:17Jocko Willink?

  How many guys in there are going to OCS?

• 36:19Speaker 01

  Very few. So in my platoon of about 40 guys, probably five or six.

• 36:24Jocko Willink?

  Do they put you in charge of things?

• 36:26Speaker 01

  They, yeah, they mostly do. And they try to get you to kind of compete against each other and they pit you against each other to vie for the loyalty of the lower enlisted guys.

• 36:36Jocko Willink?

  Dang, mind games.

• 36:40Jocko Willink?

  So that's what happens. You end up, you enlist, you go, uh, and did you, did you do a contract to get EOD?

• 36:48Speaker 01

  No, they didn't have anything like that. The way that worked was, so you go to basic training, you go to OCS. Towards the ends of OCS, they have you ranked, I can't remember how many, I think there was about 80 people in our class. They have you literally ranked one through 80. There's a guy with his name next to the number 80. And, you know, there's a guy with his name next to number one. And, uh, they get the available slots from, you know, Army Personnel Headquarters in Fort Knox or whatever. And they say, we have 17 infantry slots, we have 100 logistics slots, we have whatever. And then you get up on a stage, uh, and you go one through 80 and you pick what you got. And there's like a, there's a board up behind you showing what's getting taken, right? So, yeah, a lot of the, uh, a lot of people wanted intelligence for whatever, you know,

• 37:32Speaker 01

  military intelligence, for whatever reason, that was like a really popular one. There was only like one or two slots.

• 37:37Speaker 01

  You know, most of the guys towards the top of the class, I would say wanted infantry. But one thing you could do is, uh, get a seat for EOD school. So it was not guaranteed even by that point. So that's what I selected. I wanted to go to EOD school.

• 37:52Jocko Willink?

  How did your Russian language, how did you not? Get put into a slot. They go, hey, we've got a fluent Russian linguist.

• 37:59Speaker 01

  He was like typical army.

• 38:01Jocko Willink?

  Just didn't care.

• 38:02Speaker 01

  Whatever. It was like, oh, you speak Russian. We can teach you Korean. Like, you know, oh, you speak Korean. We can teach you Arabic. Like, it's, you know, that kind of thing. Uh, especially at that level. You're, you're second lieutenant. They're trying to teach you basically how to spend a career in the army.

• 38:15Jocko Willink?

  How did you do in OCS?

• 38:17Speaker 01

  Uh, I did. Okay. Yeah. I was in the top, I think, 12 or 13 of the class. Yeah.

• 38:23Jocko Willink?

  Any, any thing that shocked you? Did you have any challenges with anything?

• 38:27Speaker 01

  I got like a pretty serious ankle injury and that was just kind of, I, I, the reason I think of that is because, you know, you gotta basically take a pause. While you heal up or else you're not going to pass any of the physical fitness requirements, land navigation, any of the things like that. And they basically just put you like in a cell with some other injured dudes waiting. And that's like, you have a lot of time.

• 38:51Jocko Willink?

  Are you rolled back? Are you, so it's your class moving on and now you're?

• 38:55Speaker 01

  That's right. Your class moves on. And then when you're all healed, you, you pick right back up. And that's where you just have a lot of time to think about like, what am I doing? Like, I'm sitting here. My girlfriend is back home. I'm just sitting around doing nothing. I'm not progressing in, in class. I'm not getting to, you know, D school quickly enough. So that was like a good time to just kind of take stock of everything.

• 39:16Jocko Willink?

  How did you like it when you got in the army coming from your freaking dope smoking, slack-dazical attitude?

• 39:23Speaker 01

  It was great, man. Like I, I mean, the most fun part about it was, I mean, other than the obvious, right? I think anyone who's seen a movie about the military has a sense of like, there is a fun element to basic training. But the best part was like, you know, I came from this super hippie liberal progressive dyed in the wool blue Los Angeles upbringing. And I didn't like know my own country at all. Was how I felt. And I was in a room with thirty nine, thirty eight other dudes from all over the country, mostly from pretty poor rural backgrounds, not all by any means, but a lot of them. You know, different races and religions, you know, it's kind of, it's kind of the cliche is, is accurate.

• 40:07Speaker 01

  And it was just so much fun, right? It's like you get to know everybody, everyone like, I mean, for the most part, everyone finds ways to get along, at least as, you know, as much as you need to get through the course. And like, I just loved that. It was like, it felt like, uh, you know, it was like an education in my own country that I, you know, I had, I'd never had before.

• 40:29Jocko Willink?

  So you were, you were into it?

• 40:32Speaker 01

  I loved it, yeah.

• 40:33Jocko Willink?

  Dang.

• 40:33Speaker 01

  I, I kind of hit my stride. It was, you know, I, I, I got really into fitness for the first time in my life. I, I got, you know, I loved working out like several hours a day with other friends. And I got really into like studying all the infantry doctrine and I, EOD was this thing that I heard about. The Hurt Locker came out at the time. I was like, that seems fucking cool.

• 40:54Speaker 01

  So, yeah.

• 40:54Jocko Willink?

  Was the Hurt Locker supposed to be army? Was that army?

• 40:57Speaker 01

  It was, yeah, that's right.

• 40:58Jocko Willink?

  Check. And so you saw that and you're like, yo.

• 41:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, it's a ridiculous movie, but yeah. At the time I was like, that seems cool.

• 41:04Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And but you mentioned your girlfriend, but this was actually before you left for bootcamp. You had met up or linked up with one of your old high school friends or something like that?

• 41:14Speaker 01

  This is now my wife.

• 41:15Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 41:15Speaker 01

  We, we'd known each other in high school, but she just, you know, before I went to basic, I, I guess that's the point at which I really started taking fitness seriously. And I, you know, I, I didn't know at the time, they, they get you into shape at basic training. But, you know, I, I spent, because, you know, there was eight months between when I sent, signed the contract and when I got to go to Fort Benning. I had all this time on my hands. And so I just spent a while working out and my wife heard, I think from a mutual high school friend, like, oh, Jeremy got jacked. So she just like hit me up on Facebook or whatever it was back then. And we linked up and, uh, now we have, uh, in two weeks, we'll have three kids.

• 41:50Jocko Willink?

  Nice, nice. So you get done with basic, you get done with, uh, OCS and now you go, now you go into EOD school.

• 41:59Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 42:00Jocko Willink?

  And how long is EOD school?

• 42:02Speaker 01

  So, well, I guess so after OCS, you go to Fort Lee in Virginia because EOD is technically part of the ordinance directorate, which is part of logistics. But anyway, so you go there. So even at that point, it's not guaranteed. And this was pretty fucking scary because you have to go to an EOD board. So what I selected at OCS was the right to go see the EOD board, which still reserve the right to say no. And if they said no, I would have been part of ordinance logistics, which I probably would have crushed my soul. But I was fortunate enough to make it through the board. And then after that, yeah, they send you to EOD school, which all, all the services go to the same EOD school in, in Niceville, Florida, about 45 minutes away from Pensacola.

• 42:45Jocko Willink?

  It's a Navy school, right?

• 42:47Speaker 01

  Uh, it's, it's run by the Navy. It's closest to Eglin Air Force Base. But yeah, the Navy runs the school.

• 42:52Jocko Willink?

  And how long was that school?

• 42:54Speaker 01

  Seven months. It's a long.

• 42:57Jocko Willink?

  And it's mostly academic, right?

• 43:01Speaker 01

  There's a, there's a very large academic component to it in the sense that towards the beginning, you spend a lot of time learning the history of explosives and the science behind the explosives and the development of them. You know, EOD kind of starts in, in World War II, the British invented it, right? Because they had all these time delay German bombs falling in London. They had to figure out how to defuse them and dispose of them before they blew up.

• 43:28Jocko Willink?

  So it's the beginning of the SEAL teams as well.

• 43:30Speaker 01

  Oh, is that right?

• 43:31Jocko Willink?

  Because there was an American guy, Draper, that was over there that was volunteering to do that, because he couldn't get into the American Navy because of his eyesight being too bad. And so he had volunteered and that's why he was over there doing that. And he did that job and he eventually came back to America. They let him in the Navy. He did that in Hawaii, disarmed a bomb. It's pretty, it's an amazing story, but it did start with that EOD right there.

• 43:54Speaker 01

  Insane.

• 43:54Jocko Willink?

  Yep, solving those bombs.

• 43:55Speaker 01

  Those guys are nuts. I mean, they were literally like tying ropes to fuses in, you know, 500 pound fragmentation bombs and tying the rope around their waist and like running to try to get it to pop out. Nuts.

• 44:09Jocko Willink?

  And then how was that school for you? Any, any issues at that school? Any challenges?

• 44:13Speaker 01

  I mean, it was pretty challenging. I didn't have any kind of like formal engineering background. I didn't know anything about electrical engineering or chemical engineering or anything like that. You know, let alone a lot of this hands-on explosive work, but again, it was awesome. I loved it. And that, and that one's cool because all of the, the classes are not separated by, by branch. You're, it's sailors and airmen and marines and soldiers.

• 44:35Jocko Willink?

  And enlisted and officers all together?

• 44:37Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 44:38Jocko Willink?

  How is, what's the physical part like?

• 44:41Speaker 01

  It's not.

• 44:42Jocko Willink?

  Nothing crazy?

• 44:43Speaker 01

  No, you just have to keep meeting the minimum demands of your, of your whatever branch you're in. Except if you want to, there's certain, at least in the army, there were certain elite level. Like EOD is a bit different in the Navy. Like I think it's part of, all of EOD is part of special operations. In the army, that's where their funding comes from, but there's plenty of just conventional vanilla EOD teams that attach to these brigade combat teams, you know, these giant infantry formations. If you wanted to make it into special forces or, you know, do kind of like AOB support. There was, you know, different physical fitness requirements for that.

• 45:18Jocko Willink?

  So you get done with that and then what's your first, what's your first real job?

• 45:23Speaker 01

  So I'm at Fort Hood, uh, in Colleen, Texas. And I was in XO, Company XO first, uh, and I was a platoon leader second. And then, um, November 27th is when we deployed.

• 45:40Jocko Willink?

  So you go, you show up there, your company XO, and then you get put in charge of a platoon?

• 45:45Speaker 01

  Right. It's a little backwards.

• 45:46Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that was a little backwards. And now you go on your first deployment and it's 2017, you said? What'd you guys deploy to?

• 45:53Speaker 01

  So it was a kind of rotation. So at this point, you know, this is towards this end of 2017. There's, uh, so.

• 46:01Jocko Willink?

  Mizzou, it's going on and stuff like that?

• 46:04Speaker 01

  I mean, most of the people I knew out there was, they were just like sitting around. There, there wasn't a ton. But yeah, so in Syria, there was, uh, at Al-Tomf Garrison, you know, a couple of hours from the Iraqi and Jordanian borders. There were EOD teams running soft support out there. And, you know, they were supporting these ODAs who at that point were doing mostly like capture kill missions and counter ISIS and all of that, demining. You know, getting rid of IEDs from residential areas, all that kind of stuff. So that was the only kinetic environment that was live at the time. Everything else was, uh, there was running EOD support in Saudi Arabia. So it was only, uh, two EOD teams, Army EOD teams,

• 46:47Speaker 01

  running EOD support for the US military in all of Saudi Arabia, which is like over 2 million square kilometers. So it's not enough people. Um, and there was these humanitarian demining missions in, uh, in Tajikistan. There was, um, there was some, this was actually kind of weird. We showed up in, uh, Salala in Oman, which is near the, uh, Yemeni border. And the war in Yemen was active at the time. And the Houthis in Yemen were firing these chemical rounds over the border. It was like, where the fuck are they getting these chemical rounds? So they called in EOD teams to come clean up all that. So that was kind of, and then there was, you know, the command was sitting around in Kuwait. Uh, and so we deployed as a company, but EOD teams technically, you know,

• 47:27Speaker 01

  they, they deploy as like detachments to either a special forces units or to larger infantry units. And we just all kind of rotated throughout.

• 47:35Jocko Willink?

  So what was your first gig? What was it? Which one did you do first?

• 47:38Speaker 01

  Uh, Saudi Arabia.

• 47:40Jocko Willink?

  So you're in Saudi Arabia. What's your op tempo in Saudi Arabia? I mean, this is like,

• 47:46Speaker 01

  The only

• 47:47Jocko Willink?

  That sounds like there's not much going on.

• 47:48Speaker 01

  There was not much going on. I mean, the only thing was the Houthis were firing these Birkin II ballistic missiles at the airfields. So in King Khalid, you know, some of the times they would dud fire, you know, you would go and clean them up, or you'd do the kind of post blast analysis, but it was, there was no mystery, right? It was like, we knew, we knew where they're coming from Yemen. Um, and yeah, we do kind of like bomb support stuff for the US embassy. Sometimes the SEALs, uh, who were based, I think in Bahrain, uh, they'd be training up in, uh, northern Saudi Arabia and we'd go up and do some training with them, but that was basically it.

• 48:19Jocko Willink?

  And then what, what about Syria? Did you get to go to Syria?

• 48:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, briefly, you know, it's, there was.

• 48:26Speaker 01

  The first unit that went in, everyone was TDY at that point. So people would do, there was one unit that did, or one detachment that did like 180 day rotation and then everyone else was like 30 days. And that was, you know, they had this AOB where the

• 48:38Jocko Willink?

  So you're saying your rotation was going to be 30 days?

• 48:41Speaker 01

  That's right. And, um, you know, by that time, it was like, they had captured a bunch of like Dishka machine guns from, you know, the Russian supported whatever forces they were fighting. They'd bring them back, we'd set up Dishka positions and

• 48:57Jocko Willink?

  So were you on like a little FOB somewhere?

• 49:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. So this is like

• 49:02Jocko Willink?

  Where, where were you?

• 49:03Speaker 01

  This is like near Altamth Garrison. So at this FOB, I was only there for like a couple of weeks. And then

• 49:11Jocko Willink?

  Were you freaking hyped to be there?

• 49:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, the only other, I mean, the, the best part of the deployment was, uh, this demining mission in Tajikistan. They had this

• 49:22Jocko Willink?

  Let's finish Syria first. So you're in Syria. Is it, does it feel like you're in the Wild West? Because I, I didn't, never went to Syria. And what was the, like, how much, how much infrastructure did the US have there?

• 49:36Speaker 01

  Uh, very little. I mean, the funny thing about this is like, at the time, Trump is president and he's trying to pull US forces out of Syria. So you'd get notifications like, we're going to blow up this AOB and we're going to get out of here. We're going to blow up the FOB and get rid of everything. Cause Trump's pulling out. And then like, he'd somehow get like vetoed by the national security brokers. He was like, all right, take it all down, we're staying.

• 49:57Jocko Willink?

  They slow rolled him.

• 49:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:00Jocko Willink?

  Insanely.

• 50:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:02Jocko Willink?

  It's crazy that that happened.

• 50:03Speaker 01

  It was crazy. And I mean, the other crazy thing is, you know, it was all these counter ISIS missions. I mean, ISIS was kind of the, you know, the opponent of the Assad regime, which just fell, right? And so a lot of what the Americans were doing there were de-confliction with the Iranian, the Iranians and the Russian air force, right? Trying to stay out of each other's way. So, you know, again, I, I, I don't want to oversell my participation in a lot of these larger events. Cause I served with guys who did, you know, some, some serious work, but There was kind of a feeling there that it was like, you know, no one feels conflicted about, you know, getting rid of ISIS, but it felt like it was kind of in the service

• 50:43Speaker 01

  of keeping the, the other bad guys, you know, in position there. Um, so yeah, there was a lot of that. But I mean, as, as a platoon leader, it was a lot of like-

• 50:53Jocko Willink?

  I just saw some meme about like, who's winning in Syria right now? The people that are supported by the Pentagon or the people that are supported by the CIA? It's like, it's freaking ridiculous.

• 51:04Speaker 01

  Have you seen that, that meme? It's like, uh, the Iron Dome missiles and the, and the rockets coming in from Gaza. It's like my tax dollars somehow also my tax dollars.

• 51:12Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's freaking crazy.

• 51:13Speaker 01

  Kind of like that.

• 51:14Jocko Willink?

  That's exactly what's happening.

• 51:16Speaker 01

  Right.

• 51:17Jocko Willink?

  But so when you're there, so the amount of infrastructure, was it like, how many people are on this little fob that you're on?

• 51:23Speaker 01

  Uh, less than 30.

• 51:25Jocko Willink?

  So less than 30 Americans?

• 51:27Speaker 01

  There's some basic workout equipment. There's these, you know, little kind of like plywood.

• 51:32Jocko Willink?

  And the ODA, this is a special forces team that's there?

• 51:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're the ones running.

• 51:36Jocko Willink?

  And they're, they've been there for months?

• 51:38Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 51:39Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 51:39Speaker 01

  And they would also rotate in and out pretty frequently.

• 51:41Jocko Willink?

  But you're coming in there just to support them?

• 51:43Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 51:44Jocko Willink?

  And hang out?

• 51:44Speaker 01

  I was there to support my EOD techs who were supporting the, the SOF team.

• 51:49Jocko Willink?

  Got it. So you show up and these guys are running stuff and you're just there happy like a little, uh, uh, war, war tourist?

• 51:58Speaker 01

  Basically. That's very accurate.

• 52:02Jocko Willink?

  Is it, uh, did you get to do anything cool at all? Besides manadishka on the, on the freaking, on the wall or anything?

• 52:10Speaker 01

  You know, it was like, there was a lot of post blast analysis, you know, when they would ever, they would get into, I mean, I think in the whole time we were there, there was one big firefight where there was, you know, they eliminated like 11 ISIS guys, captured 13. They were all wearing S vests, you know, so we'd kind of disable those, bring them back, do some post blast analysis.

• 52:32Jocko Willink?

  Did you disable them with robots? Did you, how did you disable those guys?

• 52:35Speaker 01

  No, I mean, most of those are like really rudimentary. It's like there's, you know, somewhere in the circuit, there's some deck cord and it's like bright and red and it's sticking out and you know what it is, right? And like in EOD school, they teach you all there could possibly be a wire running through the deck. Like no one does that shit. You know, it's, it's too, it's too hard. It's too complicated. Those guys would blow themselves up trying to make them. So no, it's just like you come up with some, yeah, ceramic scissors and cut the deck cord.

• 52:58Jocko Willink?

  And that's that?

• 53:00Speaker 01

  And then they had a bunch of, you know, anti-tank and anti-personnel mines buried around in the desert. But, you know, that kind of stuff too. It's like you've got an EOD team who goes and clears it first.

• 53:10Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. How hyped are you when you first like, um, defused something? Cause you went through, I'm just thinking you go through all this school. I mean, I'm just thinking about myself, like the first time I kicked in a door.

• 53:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:20Jocko Willink?

  I was like, oh, thankfully I got to kick in a door. You know what I mean? Like been training my whole life to kick in a door. And finally got to kick in a door. So the first time you get to defuse something, you must've been hyped.

• 53:31Speaker 01

  For sure. I mean, you know, it's again, I don't want to overstate my.

• 53:35Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, no, you're doing a good job of downplaying and, and, um.

• 53:39Speaker 01

  It's mostly, I mean, I'll explain why.

• 53:40Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 53:41Speaker 01

  It's mostly because, you know, so I'm a platoon leader at the time.

• 53:44Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 53:45Speaker 01

  My platoon sergeant, who to this day is one of my best friends, I'm going to his wedding.

• 53:49Jocko Willink?

  And he's running everything.

• 53:50Speaker 01

  He has been at this point, you know, on six deployments. He's lost a ton of friends, uh, you know, other people maimed in his life.

• 54:00Speaker 01

  The way we, and we did a great job together. I think we, we made a really good team. And he cared, you know, he taught me a lot about just caring for the soldiers and taking care of their, you know, promotion throughout the ranks and, and all of that. And so when it came to the actual hands-on EOD work, I was like, making sure everyone was set up for training. Everyone had, you know, everything they needed, but I followed his lead on that part of it. So when they brought me in SFS, it was like a cat bringing a mouse to its owner. It was like, hey, LT.

• 54:32Jocko Willink?

  Hey boss, we got something. Can you please defuse this?

• 54:34Speaker 01

  Right, exactly. Yeah, exactly.

• 54:35Jocko Willink?

  Perfect. Freaking awesome.

• 54:36Speaker 01

  But it's, you know, I wasn't cutting it off of a dead guy's body.

• 54:39Jocko Willink?

  Right on, right on. Uh, so then the other thing you mentioned was going to Tajikistan. What was going on there that you said was interesting?

• 54:46Speaker 01

  The reason that was cool, it was, uh, so Tajikistan in the nineties, like a lot of these other countries, after the Soviet Union had collapsed, had a big civil war and they were surrounded by other countries that had a lot of civil wars. So their borders with Uzbekistan and with Afghanistan are both kind of still covered in mines. So there was a big partner force from Afghanistan, uh, and from some other countries in the region, both military and civilian, who came out to basically get trained on humanitarian demining. So we went out there and, you know, these are mines that have been there for, you know, close to 20 years at that point. But that was like, uh, you know, that that was something like you could feel completely

• 55:27Speaker 01

  unconflicted about, right? It was like, there's a bunch of things in the ground that want to explode and kill kids, right? And so we're gonna go and get rid of as many of them as possible. And this is like, it takes decades to do this shit, right? I mean, like in Europe, they still have, you know, bombs in the forest in France and that they're never gonna get rid of. So you're never gonna get rid of everything. But that was like a cool one. It was, it was, the OSCE was kinda somehow part of it. I don't know. I never saw them. But that was an interesting one, because Tajikistan's like a freaky weird country. It's like, this tiny little Central Asian country that's sort of Russian, sort of Chinese, sort of Persian, sort of Afghan. And that was cool. And I got to, you know, work with a bunch of guys from

• 56:11Speaker 01

  Afghanistan that, you know, I never ended up going there. So that was fun.

• 56:15Jocko Willink?

  Do you, uh, like, is there, is there enough language crossover? Or no, and/or are you one of the guys that like, when you show up to a new country, you're like, I'm gonna learn this language?

• 56:24Speaker 01

  No, but a bunch of people in Tajikistan speak Russian. So this was my, it was like, oh, finally, it's useful. So that was actually cool. So I taught, you know, one part of a D-mining class to a bunch of Tajiks in Russia.

• 56:39Jocko Willink?

  SEALs are, we don't, we're not good with languages, you know, it's kind of our notoriously bad at languages. Whereas compared to the special forces, you know, they go to language school, they all go to language school, and we don't go to language school. For a little while, they, there was a while where they were sending SEALs to like, a three-month school, whatever. And it was just worthless. And I got, I was, this was before the war, in the, in the year 2000, I was over in the Persian Gulf, and we were doing counter smuggling operations against people that were smuggling stuff out of the Persian Gulf. So, we ended up tracking this Russian ship, and we ended up taking down this Russian ship. But what was crazy was,

• 57:19Speaker 01

  Wait, why?

• 57:20Jocko Willink?

  Uh, it was smuggling oil out of Iraq.

• 57:22Speaker 01

  Ah, God.

• 57:23Jocko Willink?

  And so,

• 57:24Speaker 01

  So sanctioned.

• 57:24Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I was breaking the sanctions. And so, well, but the reason I'm telling you this, because it was a Russian flagged vessel, and in my platoon, Which we had my friend Drago, who's a Polish guy that was forced to speak Russian growing up. So he spoke Russian. We had a hippie guy who went to Berkeley and studied Russian and spoke Russian. And like, I think he lived in Russia. So he was fluent Russian and my platoon commander, who went to the Naval Academy. And when he started at the Naval Academy, it was like, yeah, you know, we're Russia's the enemy. So he studied Russian. So in this one SEAL platoon of 16 dudes, we had three, like, fairly fluent Russian speakers. And it was just a miracle.

• 58:08Jocko Willink?

  So, yeah, it was one of those, one of those odd moments in time.

• 58:14Jocko Willink?

  So you're, you, when you're in Tajikistan, are you a guy that goes out and gets on that local food too?

• 58:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, I got food poisoning. I was like a little too adventurous. It's pretty good there. It's not bad. It's better than Russia somehow.

• 58:29Jocko Willink?

  I'm one of those guys like, I don't want any of the local food. I don't try and learn the language. I'm, I'm, I'm not the best at that type of thing. Like, I wouldn't have been like, when I look at the special forces mission compared to the SEAL mission, and I didn't know this at the time. I was too stupid. But I ended up in the right spot because I'm more of a like SEAL type mentality than the, than the Green Beret, um, foreign internal defense. We're going to learn the language. We're going to embed with these people. I was just like, not, not that into it. And luckily for me, I, when I flipped that coin, and really it was just because of the water.

• 59:10Jocko Willink?

  I heard the SEALs were in the water, obviously. And, and I wanted to be like a maritime type commando. So that's how I ended up doing what I was doing.

• 59:17Speaker 01

  Is this also because when you were coming up, this was pre kind of counter insurgency strategy, right? So there wasn't really this idea yet that these teams were going to be going out and living among the population and?

• 59:29Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And it was just be me, dude, you gotta remember, I was 18. Well, you know what I mean? Like, I was an idiot. And there was so much less information at the time. There was no information. So. They're just, we didn't even understand that. And even if, I mean, I didn't really start thinking about the two separate missions probably until I was a few years into actually being a SEAL, before someone explained to me, oh, well, the Green Berets all speak a language. I was like, oh, well, that's, that's cool and weird. Why would they do that? It's like, oh, well, they in bed and they live with them. And I was like, oh, and then, you know, you also start hearing

• 1:00:08Jocko Willink?

  that the SEALs in Vietnam worked with Vietnamese SEALs. So you're like, oh, so there, then it would make sense to learn that language a little bit. But still, there was also whole SEAL platoons that were just in, in, in Vietnam that were just working, you know, just unilaterally as SEALs. Whereas Green Berets, man, they were out doing awesome stuff. I mean, you know, training with the, with the, not only the South Vietnamese, but with the, the Mongs and, uh, who else? There's one other, the Monty Yards, but there's one other group, but they, they were out there training and embedded with these people. Again, awesome mission. And I look at it now and I'm like, yeah, that's freaking killer. And then not to mention the Green Berets that were in SOG,

• 1:00:50Jocko Willink?

  which were going out with Vietnamese, with South, with two Americans, maybe three Americans, with three or four South Vietnamese guys. I mean, that's epic. So, yeah, just a different mentality. And, you know, I, I also don't like blend in well. So, you know, I've never been, you know, oh, I'll grow my hair out. And now people will think I'm from, you know, Afghanistan or Iraq. It's like, no, I look like a big white dude. I look like a big American special operations dude is, is what I look like. And I got told that quite a few times. Anytime I kind of brushed up against that other type of work, guys would be like, dude, dude, you stick with what you got,

• 1:01:35Jocko Willink?

  dude, you're a good assaulter, stick with that. And then once I became an assaulter, it's like, yeah, you go ahead, be a, be an assault force commander, not a, not a, a low viz guy sneaking in the back door. It's just like, not, not my jam. And, you know, I had a guy once tell me, you know, he's talking to a group of us, like, yeah, it takes, you know, it takes like, like a year, maybe even a year and a half, 18 months to get the, to get the special operations stink off of you, meaning in order to be like in a clandestine role. And then he looked at me and he goes, not you.

• 1:02:07Jocko Willink?

  He was just like, yeah, you don't, you ain't doing this job. And I was like, cool. Fair enough. So, um, so you, so now, when you're in Tajikistan, you're on this first deployment. These, I mean, this is cool stuff you're doing.

• 1:02:20Speaker 01

  It was great.

• 1:02:21Jocko Willink?

  And you're having a good time. You still loving the army?

• 1:02:23Speaker 01

  Yes, very much.

• 1:02:25Jocko Willink?

  And so is your plan now thinking you found your, you found your gig, you found your jam in life?

• 1:02:29Speaker 01

  At that point, it was, you know, my wife, her career was taken off. She was hidden in her stride and we were just, we never saw each other. We were married by the, by the time I deployed. Uh, and I, I, I sensed that she was kind of done with me being gone that much. And, you know, there was no point in promising her that I wasn't going to leave again, right? Cause you always do. Uh, so then after those, those deployments in 2017 and 2018, uh, I got out of the army. Basically what happened was this guy, uh, Richard Grinnell, he was the US ambassador in Berlin. US ambassador to Germany, um, during the Trump administration.

• 1:03:12Speaker 01

  He'd actually called me when I was deployed. We'd come across each other, uh, when, when I was in DC. And he was hooked up with this other guy I, I mentioned earlier. He was looking for a kind of policy advisor or chief of staff type role at the embassy, who was not a career foreign service officer in the, in the state department. And I somehow got recommended to him or he, he decided he wanted to ask me to do it. Um, but at that point I was deployed, I was like, I, that sounds awesome, but I can't. Uh, so when I came back and my wife and I kind of agreed, I was, it was ready to get out of the army. I called him back. And, uh, happily at that point, he had not yet filled the position. He was already in Berlin. He made it through his confirmation hearing.

• 1:03:50Speaker 01

  And so he gave me that job. And so I, uh, they, you know, the army had to kind of like finesse this lateral transfer for me to the defense attache's office at the embassy in Berlin. But technically, you know, the day I got my discharge paperwork from the army, I on boarded with the state department and put me on a one-way play to Berlin and. My wife and I moved there.

• 1:04:14Jocko Willink?

  So your wife got to go with you?

• 1:04:15Speaker 01

  She did for a while. I mean, she would come back and forth because she worked in LA. But, uh, yeah, we got to spend a lot of time there.

• 1:04:20Jocko Willink?

  And, and had you done much work with the State Department prior to?

• 1:04:25Speaker 01

  No, I mean, I, I did EOD support for the embassy.

• 1:04:27Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 1:04:28Speaker 01

  But, you know, that was pretty irrelevant. I mean, I got to know the way they operated a little bit, but that was mostly the kind of the way the Marines ran the security situation.

• 1:04:35Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. It's weird. I just thought of this because you and I were talking earlier about just being in the nineties and in the military in the nineties, you were mentioning that I was kind of a split career between pre-war and post-war. But pre-war, we would interact with the embassies quite a bit and we'd understand like the ambassador and the charge eight affairs. And like we, you know, kind of got to know that world. But once the war started, I didn't think about that stuff ever again. It was just off my radar.

• 1:05:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:02Jocko Willink?

  So, so I'm assuming, yeah, like you said, you had a little security, but it's, it's a whole new world. When you start doing Department of State stuff.

• 1:05:10Speaker 01

  Completely new world and, you know, all the policy issues were totally different. You know, it was, so at this time, so this is now 2019. You know, the big American priorities are, or Trump's big priorities out there were killing Nord Stream two, this gas pipeline from, from Russia to, to Germany. It was, uh, getting our NATO allies to spend 2% of their GDP on defense. It was improving NATO infrastructure, you know, these highways that cross from Western to Eastern Europe. Uh, it was getting them to kind of update their, their technology. So these were all the kind of big, I mean, really like 50,000 feet policy issues that I had, uh, barely any familiarity with.

• 1:05:51Speaker 01

  But I think the reason he identified me and the reason it ended up working out was, you know, as you can imagine, Donald Trump's political appointee to be his representative in Berlin is not always see eye to eye with the career State Department bureaucracy who's out there, right? And I think I was seeing, because I had just gotten out of the army. I was seen as kind of plausibly neutral, right? In that way, I was just out there serving my country. So to have me in the front office interfacing directly with the career bureaucracy, it, I think was helpful to kind of, you know, lubricate that relationship. And I think it ended up working out pretty well, actually, you know, it's got this building full of 1,200.

• 1:06:35Speaker 01

  You know, people who are not exactly supporters of Donald Trump.

• 1:06:38Jocko Willink?

  There's 1,200 people, department state in the embassy in Germany?

• 1:06:41Speaker 01

  Including the, uh, including some of the Ger- German civilians who do support work, yeah. I mean, they have Berlin Station there. There's, it's, it's huge. It's, I, I think it must be the biggest one.

• 1:06:53Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I was gonna say, it must be one of the biggest ones in the world.

• 1:06:55Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:06:56Jocko Willink?

  So what's your day to day like when you're doing that job?

• 1:07:00Speaker 01

  It was, you know, you'd roll up, uh, pretty early. The US Embassy in Berlin is this awesome location, right? It's right next to the Brandenburg Gate, right? Where Ronald Reagan gives the, the big tear down this wall speech. You're right there. So you, you roll up, the ambassador would come in pretty early. We would do a kind of press roundup in the morning. We'd take a look at all the German headlines. Uh, then we kind of, you know, you have a representative from all the different sections in the embassy, the political section, uh, economic section. You'd have a representative from Berlin Station. You'd have, you know, some of the kind of law enforcement guys. Everyone would go around in this kind of group sync and then from there it was like, every day was pretty different. I mean, a lot of crazy shit happened while we were there. There was a, you know, our, our big push at the beginning was to basically

• 1:07:44Speaker 01

  get the Germans to comply with US sanctions on Iran. So this is the time of like maximum sanctions against Iran. So the two things that we did that were successful, we, we got, uh, the Germans to block, uh, landing of any flights from Mahan Air, this Iranian airline. And then the other one was to recognize Hezbollah as a terrorist organization. Cause the Europeans typically split, they, they introduce this like artificial difference between the political and the military wing of Hezbollah, which allows them to conduct banking transactions with members of Hezbollah. So we, you know, by the end we convinced them to get, basically get rid of that fake, uh, distinction. But there was also, I mean, I don't know if you remember, but there was, uh, these Russian security services executed this ex Chechen general in broad daylight.

• 1:08:27Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:08:27Speaker 01

  In the Tier Garden. So that was something that happened that, you know, I mean, that was the responsibility mostly of Berlin Station to, to follow up on it.

• 1:08:37Jocko Willink?

  So what does follow up on that look like?

• 1:08:39Speaker 01

  I it's a mix of I'm probably getting in trouble if I talked about it and it was a ton of shit I didn't even know about.

• 1:08:47Speaker 01

  But, you know, so this was like, I mean, for all the like crazy shit about Trump being, you know, this is at the end of Russiagate. Right. So all the stuff in the media about Trump is a Russian agent. He's friendly to Vladimir Putin. It was we were kind of on the backside of all of that. It had kind of wound its way through Congress.

• 1:09:07Jocko Willink?

  Been insane during like prior to the end of it. If you were in the embassy in Germany and you're got all this press saying that Donald Trump is a freaking Russian agent.

• 1:09:22Speaker 01

  Right. And people in Germany.

• 1:09:23Jocko Willink?

  Disaster.

• 1:09:24Speaker 01

  It's a total disaster and people in Europe like they don't watch Fox, right? They read the New York Times or they watch MSNBC. So like to them, I mean, here. I had a lot of crazy people in my life who bought this A to Z, but at least there was like some back and forth debate is like, is this bullshit? Is it not in Germany? It was like, you couldn't find anybody who didn't believe the entire thing. And I mean, the funny thing is like, we were doing some like pretty like intense anti-Russian shit while we were there, right?

• 1:09:53Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:09:53Speaker 01

  It was it was the administration's policy. Nord Stream two was kind of the biggest part of it. Obviously, you know, trying to get NATO allies to spend more money on defense. There's only one country that's aimed at, right?

• 1:10:07Speaker 01

  And so when they they executed this guy, who I think was, you know, trying to immigrate to the US or something. You know, that was like an intense like, oh shit, the Russians think correctly, they can do anything in Germany. They can execute this guy in broad daylight, knowing there's going to be zero repercussions.

• 1:10:29Speaker 01

  So that was wild.

• 1:10:31Jocko Willink?

  So what does it look like when you have those people, those permanent kind of State Department people that are, you know, who knows when they were appointed or who knows when they got hired? How many years ago, decade ago? Is that a realistic, is that an average time? Would you say someone's been over there working at the State Department for 10 years in Berlin?

• 1:10:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, they, they rotate through. They have these three year rotations like the army or like the military. But, but once you become a subject matter expert, if you're an expert in Germany and you speak fluent German, you know, the State Department is probably correct to be like, let's just keep sending this person back to Germany. Why send them to Afghanistan at this point? You know?

• 1:11:05Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:07Speaker 01

  But you, you know, the problem there is you have a lot of people going native, right? It's like they start feeling like their job is to explain Germany to Americans, especially to the Trump administration, right? Rather than represent American interests in a foreign country.

• 1:11:25Jocko Willink?

  What was the level of hostility? So when you showed up there, it'd been what, two years that, that Trump had been, since Trump had been elected?

• 1:11:32Speaker 01

  That's right. It was a little, a little over two years.

• 1:11:35Jocko Willink?

  And what was the level? Like, could you still feel the hostility from some of the, some of the troops there?

• 1:11:42Speaker 01

  The Americans?

• 1:11:43Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:44Jocko Willink?

  I shouldn't say troops, from some of the State Department personnel?

• 1:11:47Speaker 01

  Yes. And, you know, I don't want to over generalize. There's a lot of people who are doing a great job serving their country and the foreign service and, and all that.

• 1:11:55Speaker 01

  But yeah, there was a lot of people who, you know, would, I think, encourage their German counterparts to wait out the term, right? He's going to get voted out. He's going to get put in prison. He's going to get shot, like, whatever. He's just, he's going to go away at some point. So don't trip over yourselves to meet any of these various demands that are coming out of the embassy, right? Cause he, he's going to be gone and like a traditional Democrat or maybe even a traditional Republican will, will take his place.

• 1:12:28Jocko Willink?

  What's that gonna look like this time around?

• 1:12:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, they can't, they can't act fooled or surprised this time.

• 1:12:35Jocko Willink?

  It also seems, you know, like for Trump to realize and recognize, I like, how long does it take before you go, gosh, wait a second, I put out this word a little while ago, the frontline, the frontline is not doing what I said. Wait, what's going on? Why don't they understand? Like, just the amount of time it takes to go, oh, these people are actively not carrying out the policies that I'm putting forward. It takes a little, it takes a little while. I mean, you've got a lot of stuff going on. You're the President of the United States. You've got however many embassies that are out there, how many countries, you've got all this stuff going on. And of course, you know, even the best leader, when fully supported by the, by the folks on the Trump, on the front lines,

• 1:13:16Jocko Willink?

  it still takes time to go, oh yeah, now I'm seeing these policies come into effect. Oh yeah, it's been, it's been three months. Oh yeah, we're starting to see, we're starting to get feedback. Well, those three months, you go, wait, where's the feedback? Oh, there's no feedback. Oh, because nothing changed. Oh, because they aren't doing what they're supposed to be doing. So you can imagine that the feedback loop took a while that first time around. And you know, again, his first time being president, he's looking around going, oh, you know, what's the feedback loop here? Like, wait a second, nothing's changed since I asked that to happen. Okay, what's going on? Why is it taking so long? You can just see it's, it's gonna be, uh, it was much slower last time. And this time, I think there's gonna be a lot, the feedback loop's gonna be a lot quicker. He's gonna recognize what's going on, if that kind of thing is going on.

• 1:13:57Jocko Willink?

  And even what we talked about earlier with, you know, getting orders, hey, we're gonna leave this FOB in Syria. The president has ordered us to leave the FOB. Okay, we're gonna blow everything up. Okay, cool, let's plan for it. And then it's like, well, actually, we're not going. And those kind of things, I think are gonna be a lot more difficult for, for people to get away with.

• 1:14:19Jocko Willink?

  This time around, because I think Trump is just gonna have such a much clearer understanding. I think he's putting people in place that are going to be on board out of the gate and not be a bunch of people that are gonna try and slow roll his policies.

• 1:14:34Speaker 01

  I think that's right. And, you know, with this Doge Elon initiative, you know, it's, I think the basic idea is that he or, you know, his team are gonna try to do to the US government, the federal government, what they did at Twitter, which is show up first day, fire 80% of the workforce. Everyone falls into a panic that, you know, the servers are gonna crash and nothing's gonna work. And it turns out everything works just like it did before, which means that 80% of the workforce was completely redundant, right? I think they figure it must be at least that bad in the US government. And I think the State Department is probably pretty freaked out because the Foreign Service is a prime target for like, how many people do we have chilling in Paris? Hanging out?

• 1:15:15Jocko Willink?

  Well, apparently we have 1,200 in Berlin.

• 1:15:18Speaker 01

  Right. Living in awesome apartments, hanging out, you know, like, how much work are they doing? How necessary is all of this? How much did their language training cost? Like, I think it's, you know, it could be a bloodbath.

• 1:15:31Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Yeah. All right. So how long you do that job for?

• 1:15:36Speaker 01

  That was about a year and a half.

• 1:15:38Jocko Willink?

  So you're in Berlin, which is like Cold War, you know, battleground for intelligence, for counterintelligence, for espionage, for spies. Like, when you're there, people are trying to collect on you. What, what, what did you have to be heads up on with people trying to collect on you? I'm just like, just for example, when I was in the SEAL teams in the 90s, and we'd be going to a country, and they'd give us sort of the basic like, hey, if you, if you're in a bar and this incredibly gorgeous woman comes up and starts talking to you, it's probably not your charm or good looks that are doing that. So be careful what you're saying. Like, what kind of stuff would they give you a heads up on?

• 1:16:18Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, first of all, exactly that, these guys getting honey trapped, right? So it's, it was actually a guy that we knew who, you know, he got this foreign girlfriend who, and he didn't report his contact with a foreign national. He was dating her, he was sleeping with her, she ended up. You know, reporting either accurate or fabricated charges of sexual assault and rape to the services and or sorry, I think she threatened to do that. If this guy did not cooperate with whatever the embassy somehow found out and they got rid of him. Right. So that was one.

• 1:16:52Jocko Willink?

  So that it's just, just so people know, like, as much as you watch, like, Jason Bourne.

• 1:16:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, Bourne Identity.

• 1:16:59Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, as much as you watch Jason Bourne and all of us that are in the military go, yeah, dude, whatever, such. But these things like these things are really happening like these kind of intelligence, counterintelligence, that stuff is going on. And there's a classic example right there.

• 1:17:16Speaker 01

  Right. And there was some other stuff that I heard about. There was the way the Russian security services would fuck with people who worked at the embassy. This guy who was certain he'd left a bunch of dirty dishes in his sink. He came home at the end of the workday. All the dishes were clean. Didn't think anything of it. The next day he came home, he knew he'd left his dog in the kennel. He came home, the dog was locked out on the balcony. The Russians presumably at this point were trying to get rid of this guy. They didn't want him in the country anymore. So he freaked out, reported this and the State Department got rid of him. So, you know, there's all these ways that, you know, I think they they have of letting you know that you're being watched or getting rid of you if they don't want you in the country anymore.

• 1:17:53Jocko Willink?

  It's also just important to recognize, you know, that the, well, what you mentioned earlier, the, the information warfare that's happening on all fronts at all times, you, we really, we as, as Americans, need to really pay attention to the various propaganda that's coming from various sources and how simply outstanding it is and how impactful it is and how it really truly dictates the way people think. And what you know, what you mentioned earlier about the, the, the Russiagate type stuff and where we in America.

• 1:18:32Jocko Willink?

  You know, look, you could be in America and there's still, you can probably find, well, you definitely could find people that would 100%. Well, no, actually, of course, you know, this Donald Trump was colluding with the Russians. Of course he was. We saw it on the news. We saw it for three years. You know, they didn't follow the story. It's just accepted as fact. And that's in America where there is the counter, the counter propaganda of saying what, what actually happened and explaining everything. And that's been done over and over and over and over again. And you still hear about Russian collusion and you still hear about the 2016 election being swayed by the Russians. Total fabrication. It's, it's crazy that we have to say that. But that's true. But then you point out in

• 1:19:12Jocko Willink?

  a very important fact, which is overseas, they're not getting all that counter propaganda. They're just hearing the propaganda that's being put out. And so you had the entire country of Germany and most of Europe. Oh, of course, obviously, Donald Trump is colluding with the Russians. Look at the reporting over there. And the craziest thing is that Donald Trump was harder on the Russians than any other president has been.

• 1:19:37Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, just the, you know, the, the oil and gas policy, right? Like really, really ramping up American petroleum production. What's the, you know, the primary consequence of that, other than for, you know, Americans, you know, being energy secure is that the price of petroleum goes down, which means less revenue for the Kremlin, right?

• 1:19:56Jocko Willink?

  All right. So keep that in mind, everybody. So how much longer do you do? How long did you do that job for?

• 1:20:02Speaker 01

  That was about a year and a half. And then after the pandemic started is, is when I got back to LA.

• 1:20:07Jocko Willink?

  What was, did the pandemic start while you were in Germany?

• 1:20:11Speaker 01

  I was there at the end of February.

• 1:20:13Jocko Willink?

  Okay. So you got home just before it kicked off for real?

• 1:20:16Speaker 01

  It had kind of already started because this was when like Northern Italy had completely blown up, right? And I think that was like at the beginning of February or maybe mid February. People were like dying a lot. But, you know, like public events and conferences and stuff weren't being canceled yet. So at the end, I think it was like February 20th or so, 2020, I was staying in the Bierschuh office, this really old kind of 18th or 19th century hotel in Munich. And it's for the Munich Security Conference, which is, you know, people from all over the world are coming in for, for this big security conference. It was a delegation of like 200 people from China, right? It was like, Oh, man, like, we're watching all, I mean, even back then, you know, for if you were like paying any attention, it was like, there was no mystery about like where this was coming from. It was like,

• 1:20:57Speaker 01

  oh, shit. So anyway, I, after I got home after that, my wife and I got, it was the sickest we'd ever been there.

• 1:21:02Jocko Willink?

  Were you, were you, were you already planning to leave the State Department?

• 1:21:06Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:21:07Jocko Willink?

  And what made you decide to do that? You was like, I gotta get back to America?

• 1:21:10Speaker 01

  It was, one of the other things I did while I was there is, so the ambassador at the time got tasked by Trump to do some work for the National Security Council, where he was basically negotiating some political and economic normalization agreements between Serbia and Kosovo in the Balkans. So totally separate from the Germany portfolio, but, you know, he was stationed in Berlin, not that far away. And so I was the kind of working level negotiator on all of those. And they were, at the time, the economic normalization agreements were successful. We signed them at the conference. And I was like, that, you know, put a dot on it and that's it.

• 1:21:47Jocko Willink?

  And that's because you were done being separate from your wife. You wanted to move back to, and was her career's going, what was she doing at this time?

• 1:21:53Speaker 01

  She's a TV writer. And yeah, so her career was taken off. She was writing on a bunch of shows.

• 1:21:56Jocko Willink?

  Got that sugar mama. He was like, yo, I'm going home.

• 1:21:59Speaker 01

  That's right. That's right. I was done with the, yeah, the, the government salaries.

• 1:22:03Jocko Willink?

  And was she living out in LA?

• 1:22:05Speaker 01

  She was living out in LA. And I also, you know, my dad, like I said, is much older. I saw, you know, this pandemic was coming. It was killing a lot of older people. I was like, okay, it's probably a good time to get home.

• 1:22:14Jocko Willink?

  So then what did you start doing when you got home?

• 1:22:17Speaker 01

  I did some consulting work for a little while. And then I eventually fell in with, with Tablet, who you mentioned at the beginning. So that was, you know, Tablet was a magazine that I loved as a reader. I had been reading it for a number of years. I had no interest in a career in journalism, like at all. But I just loved Tablet and I wanted to be a part of it. And at that point, I think, when I was in the army, I wrote some op-eds for the Wall Street Journal. I did like a thing for the New York Times. They just, you know, when they were looking for some kind of commentary from someone who was active in the service or a recent veteran. So I kind of grew that muscle a little bit and I liked it and I loved Tablet. And a mutual friend introduced me to the editor in chief there. And they were looking for a news editor. So I came in and I

• 1:23:02Speaker 01

  became the news editor and then eventually the deputy editor.

• 1:23:04Jocko Willink?

  Was it hard to get hired for that job with like, no experience?

• 1:23:11Jocko Willink?

  Were they just desperate? How'd you pull that off?

• 1:23:14Speaker 01

  I think, you know, I was like literate enough and I had a good enough sensibility. And, you know, I think most people in journalism, they go into it from the beginning and they never get out, right? And I guess that gives you like a good resume for getting other jobs in journalism, but it teaches you nothing about the shit you're writing about, right? You have no real experience of the world. I mean, some people do, but most don't. You have no experience of the kinds of jobs that are being done by the people you're writing about. And I think that explains a lot of the poor quality of the journalism you see out there. So I think to their credit, they thought the experiences I'd had, living in Russia, being in the army, being in the State Department, being able to write a bit, you know,

• 1:23:56Speaker 01

  that was maybe a better qualification than like having to gone to journalism school.

• 1:24:02Jocko Willink?

  What's the business model at Tablet? There's no, there's no physical copy, is there?

• 1:24:07Speaker 01

  So there's, I shouldn't announce it too soon, but there's gonna be probably at some point soon, there'll be a monthly print version.

• 1:24:17Speaker 01

  But, no Tablet, yeah, it's primarily an online magazine.

• 1:24:20Jocko Willink?

  And is it make money through online advertising?

• 1:24:23Speaker 01

  Tablet's a bit different. So like the, you know, the two basic business models you have in journalism are, on the one hand, the like ex-wife of a dead billionaire buys The Atlantic, right? Or Jeff Bezos buys The Washington Post. And there's your business model, right? There is no other business model. You lose a hundred million dollars a year, it doesn't matter.

• 1:24:45Speaker 01

  And then the other is nonprofits. So that's what Tablet is. So it has a board. Tablet itself is a nonprofit. It can spin off various for-profit, you know, enterprises, but it's, it's basically a nonprofit. So that's what's kept it kind of ad-free, which is like a much better reading experience.

• 1:25:02Jocko Willink?

  It's a much better reading experience.

• 1:25:04Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:25:04Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:06Speaker 01

  But the print edition will be a kind of way for, you know, there to be some kind of economic relationship with readers, people who want to pay extra for something special. I think that'll be cool.

• 1:25:16Jocko Willink?

  So, so what, tell us a little bit more about Tablet. Like what is the, what is the driving force behind Tablet?

• 1:25:25Speaker 01

  Tablet's a, it's a Jewish magazine that's about everything. So it started off as a little bit more of a niche product, you know, Jewish magazine in New York, writing primarily about Jewish issues. But it attracted a lot of just amazing talent that was fleeing more traditional journalism as the business model was breaking down, as it was getting politicized and whatnot. So it was actually, you know, it was attracting a lot of some of the most talented people who had been a, you know, The New Yorker and New York Times and stuff like that. And then as time went on, its remit kind of expanded to just cover all of American life from kind of a Jewish sensibility, I'd say.

• 1:26:08Speaker 01

  So at this point, it's just kind of a national American magazine that has a kind of core Jewish identity, which is what, you know, I really liked about it and a lot of people I think appreciate about Tablet. And I'd say probably over half the readership at this point is not Jewish. But it, just the fact that it has some kind of identifiable core there is attractive to people. It's not, you know, I think something like The Atlantic, The New Yorker. It's like this kind of free-floating, elite, center-left, left-wing, social game, right? Whereas Tablet, I think, has some kind of identity grounding it that, you know, even if you're not Jewish and you don't know anything about Jews and you don't care, it's kind of interesting, right?

• 1:26:53Speaker 01

  It's like the subculture in America that somehow feels authentically American.

• 1:26:57Jocko Willink?

  Now, you, we talked about your growing up, right? And as you're growing up, Judaism wasn't front and center in your life. Now, as, now you mentioned that when you were in Russia, you start thinking more about your Jewish heritage. And where did it go from there? Like, bring us along kind of your Jewish journey from, you know, you, you're in college, you don't really, you're not really thinking and, and practicing Judaism actively. Like, what, did you? Did that curiosity start to grow? Did you start to get more grounded to it? What happened?

• 1:27:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I mean, you know, my grandparents passing away, that's one thing, right? It kind of just makes you think and it's like, well, you don't want, you know, if they were Jewish, and my parents are Jewish and I'm Jewish, that means this somehow endured for thousands and thousands of years, right? Most Jews are not Jewish because they like recently converted. My, my family certainly not. So it was, you know, it kind of puts it in perspective and makes you feel small, I think in a good way. And you kind of, you know, come away with this feeling of like, it endured for all this time. Am I gonna be the one who like brings it to a halt? That would be shitty, right? So that's one. I mean, yeah, living in Russia was kind of another. So, you know, my, my family is mostly German Jews, but before that, like,

• 1:28:23Speaker 01

  you know, everybody from that part of the world had come from the Russian Empire.

• 1:28:29Speaker 01

  And Russia is one of those places where it's just like, you can see this kind of rise and fall of various incarnations of the society and the total destruction of things that, you know, used to be around in recent history. And that kind of put it on my radar too. I visited distant family I had in Israel for the first time. That was an eye opening experience. It was, you know, seeing Israel in the flesh and how different it was from the way I'd been educated about it, or the way it's portrayed in media.

• 1:29:00Jocko Willink?

  What were the differences?

• 1:29:02Speaker 01

  I mean, I think the most striking one is that, you know, people have this sense that Israel was built by people who escaped the Holocaust. So therefore it's people who are kind of central and Eastern European, people who are therefore white, right? That's the kind of image you get of Israel. You get there, it's like a fucking Middle Eastern country, right? Like, over half the people are Jews from Iraq, from Morocco, from Libya, from Syria, places like that. So that's about half the population. 20% of the population are people who fled the Soviet Union or descended from people who fled the Soviet Union. Like, I guess you could call those people white. I don't know what that means, right?

• 1:29:42Speaker 01

  And then the, the other part are the descendants of Holocaust survivors. So the first thing that strikes you when you get there is like, Israel's not like a weird disappointing Denmark, right? It's like a super overperforming Lebanon.

• 1:29:57Speaker 01

  So that was another and then, you know, I just kind of, as I grew up, I, I think I just got more interested in the tradition and the history. I never to this day developed, you know, particularly strong personal faith or, or belief, but, uh, you know, there's just a lot of kind of very interesting history and tradition there that I kind of vibed with a lot more as time went on.

• 1:30:21Jocko Willink?

  So how are you raising your kids?

• 1:30:23Speaker 01

  We're raising them Jewish. Uh, my wife was a Presbyterian minister's granddaughter. She's not Jewish at all, but she's, uh, converting and the process of converting and we send our three-year-old to a Jewish preschool and all the kids are going to be raised Jewish, but you know, we're not gonna, we're not gonna pretend to be people we're not, right? Like we're, we're not gonna turn around and make it like an extremely observant orthodox household. We're gonna do our own version of it. Um, but it's interesting, you know, it's like things that are theoretical until they become a part of your, your life, which is basically, you know, we send our, our three-year-old to the Jewish school and you always hear about, you know, these weird anti-Semitic threats that these schools get. There's an

• 1:31:07Speaker 01

  active, you know, this guy walking around with a gun. There's a bomb threat called in, like whatever. You hear it about it all the time. And it's like, when it's your kid in the school, it's like, oh man, this is a choice.

• 1:31:21Jocko Willink?

  Well, speaking about threats, um, let's talk about October 7th. What were you doing when you, when you heard about what was happening there?

• 1:31:30Speaker 01

  I was in Belgrade, Serbia, actually, reporting a different story. Um, but that was one of those, you could kind of see it unfolding on Twitter and then WhatsApp groups of, you know, people, friends I have in, in the area. And it's just, you know, like all these things. It's like we were talking about in nine 11. It's like the first things that happened, you're like, what? Like, okay, I guess there was, you know, some attack. And then it's like, oh, this seems worse than I thought. It was probably like just over the course of that, the, that first 24 hours that you're like, this is actually, the country is never going to be the same after this. This is, this is, they just lived through maybe the most momentous thing that's happened since 1948.

• 1:32:16Speaker 01

  And it was obviously horrifying to see and you know, first thing was the check that my, you know, cousins and aunts and uncles and some distant family had there were okay. They were the one cousin who ended up going into Gaza after the the war began and lost his leg. Actually, he'd only been there for 48 hours, I think. But at that point, it was just like, okay, there's like no more fucking around a tablet, right? This is like, this is our core mission is to serve readers who are interested in the truth of what's going on and and why it happened.

• 1:33:00Jocko Willink?

  So as you, as I watched it unfold, and then it was one of the most shocking things to me about watching unfold from a media perspective was how quickly you got to see the anti-Israel rhetoric start to go. I mean, it was, it was almost simultaneous. It wasn't even like, oh, it's been five days. And it was prior to any actual military reaction from Israel. Like, they were, they didn't even have things under control yet. And there

• 1:33:44Jocko Willink?

  was rhetoric going back against Israel. What what is, what does that look like from your perspective?

• 1:33:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's complicated. I mean, you're right that it was basically simultaneous. So October 7th happens, Hezbollah declares war on October 8th, right? The International Criminal Court that just issued these arrest warrants for the Israeli prime minister and the foreign, former defense minister, they date their charges of war crimes to October 8th, right? Before the war began, before Israel even went into Gaza. So those are charges of genocide, intentional famine, you know, all these kinds of things. They date it to October 8th. So it was like, it really was instantaneous.

• 1:34:32Speaker 01

  And then it went through several different forms over the last year, right? So you had the initial reaction of, you know, it didn't happen the way the Israelis said it did. You know, those women weren't really raped, those people didn't really have their heads cut off. And then, okay, you get this, you know, the IDF basically collects all of this documentary evidence, makes it available to the international media. So then it moves on to, these people had it coming, right? They were living right on the border of Gaza. They live in a country that doesn't even belong to them anyway, right? This is, Israel is a white European colonial project, right? This is legitimate, uh, this is legitimate violence visited upon them by people who are trying to take land back that is rightfully theirs.

• 1:35:16Speaker 01

  And then it spread, you know, to Columbia University, I think is where it began. And then basically college campuses all over America. And then you had a kind of European incantations of all of this. And it's been a, it's been a wild year to see, you know, there's been right, right wing and left wing versions of the kind of anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, anti-Semitic, whatever you want to call it, you know, at its more extreme versions, kind of Jew hatred.

• 1:35:48Speaker 01

  I mean, we were talking earlier about my experience in the army and how it was kind of a, an education in, in my own country. So I had joined in 2014 and that was right at the beginning of something that has kind of escalated since then, which is people warning, I see this mostly in the media and among certain people in Congress, saying that there's an increasing radicalization within the ranks, right? White supremacists and Christian nationalists in, in, in the American military. And I didn't know what to believe, you know, back in, in 2014, but everyone in my life seemed to think that was definitely true and it was, it was definitely going on. So I at least had my eyes peeled for it.

• 1:36:30Speaker 01

  Like in almost six years in the army, which is not, you know, it's not 20 years, but it's a big enough sample set, right? I came across hundreds of people, you know, deployed in five different countries. It was a part of a few different units. In six year, in almost six years, I never encountered anything you could even remotely call antisemitism, nothing, like zero. And one of the things that taught me was...

• 1:36:58Speaker 01

  That, that version of bigotry, there's something, I don't want to say un-American, because that's a, a term that, you know, politicians, I think, use too much and abuse, but it's like, non-American. There's nothing native or natural about it to the way Americans think. And in order to participate in it and to start believing in it, you almost have to be educated into it. Right? It's not something that strikes anybody who lives just off their own common sense and their own personal experience in America, as being anything other than like, deranged and demented. But I think that's why you see it kind of most prevalent on the left, on college campuses, among academics, among, you know, people

• 1:37:40Speaker 01

  in media. And then on the right, mostly these kind of, maybe, social media influencers, or, uh, you know, kind of, at the elite levels of being kind of, you know, very visible online personalities. I just, after everything we've seen the last year, it just seems even more clear to me that this is not a development that's spreading among ordinary Americans. This is really a kind of elite level fight on left and right.

• 1:38:10Jocko Willink?

  And so are they, are the, are the elite level left and right unified?

• 1:38:17Jocko Willink?

  This is, you know, something that Echo and I will sometimes talk about, you know, I'll kind of start, I'll start doing the one degree of separation, and how you can go from being like, uh, uh, let's say you're a liberal leaning left Democrat, and if you go one degree at a time, you can go all the way to, you're at the dinner table with one of your friends who's a Nazi from the conservative side, you know, like, and your friends because you both hate the Jews, or you both, you know, it's like, you can just get, you can get there. You can, if you go one degree at a time, you can get there. What does that look like, you know, when you, when you talk about the left and the right, and they both

• 1:38:56Jocko Willink?

  end up with this, or the, what do you just call them, the elite, uh, extremists left and right, and you end up with these attitudes, at some point, do they unify?

• 1:39:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, it's a good question. I think... So it's kind of complicated. So maybe to take the left-wing version first, because it's probably a bit newer and more novel. I mean, it's as old as Soviet communism, but it's not ancient, right? But it's kind of internally coherent. So I think it's kind of easy to understand, which is whatever you want to call, you know, the kind of progressive ideology of the last 10 years, right? Wokeism is how most people refer to it. It's based on this idea that,

• 1:39:53Speaker 01

  you know, basically, the sins of the past are so egregious that they have to be rectified at nearly any cost in the present, right? And that the only way to do that is to punish the descendants of the people who conceivably committed those crimes in the past, right? Broadly referred to as like white people, right? Or whatever. And that those people are the villains of history, and the people who punish them are like the heroes of history. Jews like are a special problem for this ideology.

• 1:40:34Speaker 01

  The idea of like a racial hierarchy, which kind of, you know, wokeism is like almost like a theological version of this, right? I reference Soviet communism because it's basically class struggle, except replaced with identity and racial politics. Jews are a problem for the internal coherence of this ideology, because Jews are clearly among the victims of history, right? Ghettos are invented for Jews. Concentration camps are invented for Jews. Gas chambers are invented for Jews. It would be ridiculous to try to claim that they're not among, I'm not saying more than anyone else, but just like Native

• 1:41:17Speaker 01

  Americans, like black people in various societies. Jews are among the victims of history. At least in the American context, most Jews look like white people, right? So that technically means it's possible to be white and to be a victim.

• 1:41:36Speaker 01

  And if that's true for Jews, maybe it's true for other kinds of white people. Maybe that means that referring to people as quote unquote white doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Maybe not all black people are always and primarily black. Maybe the whole woke racial hierarchy is a bunch of bullshit and people are just people and they're not defined by their race, right? So that's why I think Jews, for the left wing version of this, they have to be identified as, in America, they're white, they're oppressors, and they're supporting a foreign country that is oppressing the victims in that region, right? Otherwise, the whole thing doesn't hold together.

• 1:42:19Speaker 01

  And I think that's kind of the explanation for, or it's an explanation for what you've seen with these, the explosion of hostility to Israel and also to just American Jews on the political left. That's the left wing version of it. The right wing version of it, which maybe has a bit more in common with the ancient European, the madness of old Europe, those versions of antisemitism has a bit more in common, but it's still kind of uniquely American and of this moment. Which is, I think what you see with a lot of people on the right, who are predominantly,

• 1:43:04Speaker 01

  these are people online, very, very online.

• 1:43:09Speaker 01

  These are people who talk about Jews controlling American foreign policy, Jews controlling the banking system, Jews assigning minders to every individual member of Congress to make sure that they vote the right way, right? This is stuff that's like kind of old Tsarist Russian propaganda, right? I think what makes it a bit new and a bit unique to our country is that you also often find this kind of stuff grouped together with a resurgence of like National Enquirer level stupid conspiracy theories that have nothing to do with Jews, right? Did the aliens build the pyramids? Does the deep state control your mind?

• 1:43:55Speaker 01

  Is Goldman Sachs funneling fentanyl across the border in order to get people to vote a certain way, right? It's, it's all of this kind of demonstrably nonsense conspiracy theorizing, rather than, you know, the kind of more elevated version of asking good questions about things that are genuinely uncertain, right? And I think what unites both the Jew hatred and the nonsense about aliens building the pyramids is what they both do is they serve to undermine our collective attachment to reality, right?

• 1:44:34Speaker 01

  Another big kind of, you know, theory on this end has been really questioning the legacy of World War II. Were the Allies actually the bad guys? Did Hitler actually want peace? Did the Jews force Roosevelt and Churchill into fighting a genocidal war? Again, the details of that I think are uninteresting, right? World War II is probably actually the most covered subject in world history, right? Anyone who wants to learn about it can access any number of books or documentaries or whatever. The thing that's interesting about it is that it's part of this process of undermining our attachment to our own collective past as Americans, right?

• 1:45:18Speaker 01

  It's, it's severing a lot of our connections to our ancestors and to our sense that what they did was good, right? And so what does this have to do with theories about Jews controlling the world and your mind and being responsible for why your life sucks, right? What does that have in common with the other nonsense theories? I think it all serves to demoralize otherwise right people.

• 1:45:46Speaker 01

  Right? Who would have otherwise felt like it's within their power to do something about their life. I would actually say it's the opposite of what this podcast, of what your podcast does, Jocko, right? As I understand it, a lot of it is about is instilling a sense of agency into, you know, maybe primarily young men, not only, there's millions of people who listen, but to take one core audience, right? It's giving young men a sense that there's actually something they can do about the quality of their life, right? And maybe also about the circumstances of their community or the future of their country, right? It's within their power to do something about that. Both theories about Jews controlling the world and your life

• 1:46:30Speaker 01

  and the government and all of that, and these things about like, you know, did the aliens bill, write the constitution, or whatever other nonsense, all it, what all of those do is take any agency away from you, right? There's nothing you can do. It's the deep state. It's aliens, it's Jews, right? And so I think this is kind of the right wing version of the explosion of antisemitism, right? It's an explanation for a sense of collective failure, which is why I think the right wing version actually kind of has more in common with the versions of antisemitism you see like in Pakistan, right? It's like, oh, it's like, it's the Jews who did this, right?

• 1:47:13Speaker 01

  The left wing version is maybe a little more specific to contemporary left wing politics in America.

• 1:47:20Jocko Willink?

  So what, when you look at Israel right now, and the situation that they're in, and from a, from a media perspective, what, what, you know, for lack of a better words, I know I put out and talked about very early on, that the way that they handled the media and the propaganda. And the information war after the attacks on October 7th was going to be so critical. And like, and I'll tell you one example, one of them was like the, I think it was, it's a Twitter

• 1:48:01Jocko Willink?

  channel, but it was either IDF, it was IDF something, you know, whether it was the IDF air IDF ground, I forget what it was, but they were just throwing up like, oh, we're, we're hitting this building, hitting this building, hitting this building. And I, I said, I said on a podcast like, that's not the call. That is not the call. And I know that that's the call. If you're an Israeli person, or you're a Jewish person that's looking at what's happening in Israel, what I want to see as, as an Israeli or as a Jew, sitting in wherever I am, whether I'm in Israel or whether I'm in another part of the world, I want to watch that all day long. But that wasn't the call. The call

• 1:48:40Jocko Willink?

  was, how can you put out, you know, what, what they're trying to do from a humanitarian perspective? What they're trying to do from a, from preventing civilian casualties perspective? That's what they needed to focus on. And quite honestly, they, they did shift that. They did shift that pretty quickly, from like a, what looked like vengeance Twitter into, okay, we're, we're trying to do some humanitarian things here. But I think that was a critical piece, you know, and, and right out of the gate, you know, one of the first things that I said after October 7th was, there's nothing more that Hamas wants than for, for Palestinian people to get killed. They want as

• 1:49:24Jocko Willink?

  many Palestinian people to get killed as they possibly, as can possibly get killed. And the younger and the more innocent people get killed, the more happy Hamas is going to be. And so, there's, there was a, a part of me that, you know, thought the best move for Israel would have been like, okay, we've secured our border, I'll stop, we're going to sit here and we're going to let the world absorb before we do anything. We're going to let the world absorb what happened. We're going to show the world what happened. And I also realize, and I said this as well, if I'm an Israeli,

• 1:49:57Jocko Willink?

  And that happened to my family, we're not sitting, we're, we're gonna go, we're, we're gonna go take action, we're gonna find the people that did this. And that was almost a, a foregone conclusion. You know, you can't go in and murder and rape 1,300 people and have those families annihilated like that and expect, expect those relatives and those countrymen, fellow countrymen to sit back and not do anything. So it was almost like a foregone conclusion. I had the thought that, you know, in a perfect world, the maximum restraint would have, it probably would have been better

• 1:50:40Jocko Willink?

  in the long run to be, I still think that right now, I think it would have been better in the long run, but I also knew it's not going to happen. Um, so from a information operations perspective, what are your, what are your thoughts as you look at the situation that's going on as it, as it continues to unfold?

• 1:50:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, Israel's never been good at PR. I would say Jews as a people are terrible at public relations is, uh, if you haven't noticed. I think there was maybe two forces undermining whatever incipient hope there would have been for the kind of information response that you just described. One is what we talked about earlier, which is on October 8th, they were being blamed, they felt that they were being blamed by the world for what had just happened to them. And that doesn't rob them of the agency to have, you know, been able to take the high road and be above

• 1:51:37Speaker 01

  that, but it did serve to undermine any forces in Israeli politics that would have pushed for more restraint, right? Because the people who were for a kind of maximum punishment in Gaza could point to the response, the international response to October 7th and say, this is the response when we haven't fired a single shot yet. What do you think all of that restraint is going to accomplish, right? So that was one. I think the other was that, you know, Israel's relationship with, with America is, and with Washington DC in, in particular is, you know, obviously a very important one.

• 1:52:16Speaker 01

  And I think what they saw was that they had tolerated Hamas in Gaza on their on their border and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon on their northern border for decades, right, for a very long time.

• 1:52:35Speaker 01

  And they saw the ways that the Americans handled Iraq and Afghanistan. And I think in their opinion, I'm referring to them as if Israel is a unitary country, right? It's an extremely politically fractured country. There's people with every opinion under the sun, but just, you know, to try to steelman that argument.

• 1:52:58Jocko Willink?

  The most like liberal people lived right on the border with Gaza. Is that a, is that a, I've heard that stereotype?

• 1:53:05Speaker 01

  There were these kibbutzes that were among the ones that were slaughtered on October 7th, which were populated by Israelis who were, it was a, it was kind of a statement they were making about their optimism about their ability to live just on the other side of the fence with Palestinians, right? It was an expression of hope for the future as opposed to retreating to Tel Aviv on the Mediterranean Sea, far away from any border, right? That's right. So I think they saw the various American and coalition failures as they saw in Afghanistan and Iraq.

• 1:53:45Speaker 01

  And I think the way a lot of them would describe it would be an aversion to achieving clear military victory, right? The phrase I've heard them use is like, "American manage the war." I think they saw a lot of this the year before, by the way, in Ukraine, right? In the year and a half before, this way of like, providing the Ukrainians with enough weapons and enough capabilities to survive, but not enough to actually win a battlefield victory. They saw this as kind of, this was the maximum kind of support that Israel was going to get from the United States and thus from the world, right? And given the way that October 7th changed the country, I don't think that they were,

• 1:54:29Speaker 01

  they were, they felt they even had the political support from a country that, by the way, you know, the day before on October 6th, there were these massive anti-government protests, trying to get the Netanyahu cabinet to fall. People were protesting these judicial reforms. So it was a big, very active liberal movement in the country that was totally swatted down by the events of October 7th. October 7th guaranteed that those people had lost all political cachet, right? And the country became unified around the goal of no longer living with Hamas and Hezbollah, but actually achieving a decisive military victory, right?

• 1:55:13Speaker 01

  Which they knew at that point, no one was going to support them in doing, but it was something they felt like they had to do. So I think maybe that was another factor contributing to the marginalization of any voices in Israel that would have otherwise called for more restraint. There was just enormous popular support for, we're not, we don't want to go back to October 6th, right? We need to live in a totally new security situation.

• 1:55:37Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And even if you're not going to show more restraint, you should propagate that you're showing more restraint. That's my point. Like, the propaganda was not as good as it could have been. The information operations, not even propaganda, like, the information operations could have been better.

• 1:55:55Speaker 01

  They're exceptionally bad at that.

• 1:55:56Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. So where do you see it? So where do you see it right now?

• 1:56:03Speaker 01

  It seems that, you know, at this point, it would be very, very difficult for Hamas and Hezbollah both to reconstruct themselves into a serious security threat anytime soon. They're not decisively defeated in either Gaza or Lebanon, but it would take quite a lot, right? Especially, I think, with the Trump administration coming in, you know, the basic source of financial and military support for both Hamas and Hezbollah has been Iran for years, right? And I think...

• 1:56:34Speaker 01

  You know, there's going to be a lot of unpredictable things about the second Trump term, but I think one thing you can kind of guarantee is the policy of maximum pressure on Iran is going to come back. So the Iranians are going to have less money for their forces, right? I think another thing we saw unfold in Syria this week is, you know, people had been referring to Hezbollah as Iran's kind of strategic depth in the region, right? I think what happened this week is we saw it was actually their only capable, really, really capable fighting force. The IRGC, whose, you know, expeditionary forces have been in Syria for a while, just completely fell apart, right? So I think they've been

• 1:57:11Speaker 01

  exposed as pretty hollow. So I think, you know, Israel has achieved a real security, they've reached the real security goal that they've had for a very long time, which was to eliminate these various threats on the borders. Will they be able to actually shape that into a better political outcome than they've seen in the last several decades? That's definitely to be seen, but they, they don't have a very good history of being able to influence anything remotely like that.

• 1:57:41Jocko Willink?

  What are they going to do with Gaza?

• 1:57:46Speaker 01

  First of all, I have no idea. But when you talk to people in Israel, I think there's a feeling that, you know, they very much like some of the Arab countries that they've been improving relations with and cooperating with in the last several years after the Abraham Accords, to come in and pay for the reconstruction and take some maybe political ownership of what goes on there. I, I doubt that will happen, right? I don't think the Saudis are, you know, jonesing to get into Gaza and be responsible for, for everything that happens. So that I really don't know. I mean, I think they just, at this point, there are probably limited objectives are to create like, you know, multi-kilometer buffer zones where

• 1:58:30Speaker 01

  just no people live, right? No buildings are built, no tunnels are built, no weapons can be smuggled in without their surveillance networks being aware of it. And to just push those people further back. This is, it's, that's not a pretty picture, right? But I don't, I'm not aware of any better solution that they've come up with so far.

• 1:58:57Jocko Willink?

  Syria.

• 1:59:01Jocko Willink?

  Interesting to watch that thing fall apart so quickly.

• 1:59:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, I.

• 1:59:09Speaker 01

  I mean, one of the interesting things, right, is from.

• 1:59:14Speaker 01

  You know, like, why were the Iranians and the Russians in Syria in the first place, right? I mean, I'm curious for your take on this, like. The story back when this happened, right, was the Americans were negotiating the JCPOA, what became the Iran deal back in like 2014. And they depended, obviously, both on the Iranian government and also the Russian government for the success of those negotiations. And, you know, I've heard people explain that that's the reason the American response to the initial Russian invasion of Ukraine and annexation of Crimea in 2014 was so weak. And also why the Americans were happy to let the Russians back into the Eastern Mediterranean, where they hadn't been since midway through the Cold War.

• 1:59:58Speaker 01

  And also to cooperate a bit with the Iranians there, not cooperate, but de-conflict, get it out of each other's way, we're all trying to get rid of ISIS here, right?

• 2:00:08Speaker 01

  So, I mean, part of the collapse in Syria has been like the collapse of that understanding, right? And so what's interesting, I think it's kind of propitious for Trump, is he's coming into office with, I think, more leverage, again, on the Russians and the Iranians than he would have had two weeks ago, right? Because now he can actually force some pretty tough terms on the Russians, for example, by not allowing them to return to their bases in Syria if they come to terms with him in Ukraine.

• 2:00:39Speaker 01

  But it's, it's really interesting. I mean, Syria is so complicated.

• 2:00:44Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, no, I agree. I think it's, I think it's actually very good for Trump right now going in. He's going to be able to use that as a negotiation tactic for sure. And it's going to hopefully help give him some leverage in Ukraine.

• 2:00:58Jocko Willink?

  I guess we'll uh I guess time will tell um hey at also at tablet you guys talk about some like you said it's about the world and one of the one of the articles that you wrote um that really seemed to get a lot of traction didn't have anything to do with uh well had very little to do I should say I guess they had a little to do with war but uh this guy Palmer lucky how'd you how'd you stumble onto that guy?

• 2:01:29Speaker 01

  I think I started hearing about and roll when I was deployed so this is like 2017 2018 you first started hearing about this new defense technology company in Southern California that was using this new AI powered software system to power all of its autonomous weapon systems and you know this is a full six to seven years before the introduction of chat GPT so at this point AI wasn't like a silly buzzword that everyone was using it was kind of like oh is this real you know um and the cool thing about them I remember kind of tracking at the time was

• 2:02:04Speaker 01

  you know traditional defense contractors like Lockheed Martin or Raytheon or whatever they they they work on these cost plus contracting models so basically the government decides what they want them to build they come up with all the specifications and then they pay them the costs of their time and their materials plus a fixed percentage fee on top right this is why these companies tend to make a lot of money with the longer they take and roll was kind of taking an opposite more kind of traditional business approach which was they were developing all of these weapon systems themselves and then once they were ready they would sell them off the shelf to the government I was like that's kind of cool like that I mean that's interesting right because they wouldn't talk about any of their new capabilities until they'd already proven it

• 2:02:46Speaker 01

  uh anyway that's how it first got on my radar but then I the more I learned about them it was you know the founder was this guy Palmer lucky was the same guy who invented the Oculus that guy like you know and he kind of

• 2:02:58Jocko Willink?

  in a trailer in his parents driveway or something

• 2:03:00Speaker 01

  that's right yeah he was 19 years old he's living in a trailer in his parents driveway and he's just this kind of authentic engineering genius right um and he's kind of got like a uniform right he's he wears like Hawaiian shirts and cargo shorts and flip flops and he's got a goatee and he's got a mullet and it's like he's just like a really wacky figure but I was like I can't believe that guy is the one who's Building these drones that are being deployed in Ukraine and everywhere else. So yeah, I just got, I got interested in him and I reached out to his team at Anduril and ended up getting to spend some time with him and wrote an article about kind of his life so far. He's only about 30 years old.

• 2:03:40Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, 30 years old. He sold, he sold his first company there to Facebook for $2 billion, which is, I could, I could parlay that into a good time right there, Echo Charles, let me tell you. And, and are you going to expand on that? Anything, anything else going to come with that, with that?

• 2:03:58Speaker 01

  Maybe the, the piece went, you know, kind of unusually gangbusters. I mean, which I was glad to see, right? It was like, I, to realize that your own interest in something super specific and relatively unknown, totally catches fire in other people's imagination too. So that was cool to see. And yeah, so I mean, people have reached out about a film adaptation and a book adaptation. And so we'll see. The, the book I think is the one that's more likely to happen and kind of a more of like a history of the development and the kind of the, the decline and fall and then the revival of the defense industry in California.

• 2:04:39Jocko Willink?

  And you'll tie him and that company into it?

• 2:04:42Speaker 01

  He's such an interesting character that I think it's, you know, it's more interesting to follow him than it is to follow, you know, something amorphous like the defense industry.

• 2:04:54Speaker 01

  I hope he'll figure prominently.

• 2:04:55Jocko Willink?

  It is, it is, I mean, he's, he is a movie. I mean, he really is a movie. Just everything about him lives, or he doesn't live in, but he's got the, well, he's got the largest collection of video games in the world or something like that.

• 2:05:07Speaker 01

  He does, and he keeps it buried 200 feet underground in a decommissioned Titan or Atlas Air Force nuclear missile base. I mean, he's, yeah, he's kind of endlessly

• 2:05:17Jocko Willink?

  The dude's 30, Echo Charles. Yeah. He's really into anime. Like, he's a character.

• 2:05:25Speaker 01

  And I think it was, I don't think it was before it was published, but at least since the piece has been published, his, now his second company. So he sold the Oculus to Facebook for $2 billion and now Anduril, the defense technology company is now valued at about $14 billion.

• 2:05:41Jocko Willink?

  It's impressive. Uh, so what else you got going on? You got the, you could do a podcast with Walter Russell Mead, who you mentioned earlier.

• 2:05:49Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 2:05:50Jocko Willink?

  Uh, the podcast is called What Really Matters? You guys do a little, you guys do a little kind of review of the weekly news. You kind of hit him with the things and he, he gives you his feedback on it.

• 2:06:00Speaker 01

  That's right. It's a 30 minutes, short, quick hit podcast, news and history. Basically, you know, the, the, if, if it's providing a public service, it's basically, you know, kind of helping you understand what news actually matters in the long run, historical sense and what you can basically ignore because it's empty calories and nonsense.

• 2:06:17Jocko Willink?

  And then what else? Anything else to get us up to speed?

• 2:06:21Speaker 01

  Got a piece coming out, uh, pretty soon, maybe by the time this episode comes out about, uh, it's a long profile of Amos Hochstein. He's the senior White House diplomat, uh, in Lebanon. He's the guy who brokered the ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon, uh, two weeks ago.

• 2:06:35Jocko Willink?

  What's his background? What's going to make it interesting?

• 2:06:37Speaker 01

  Uh, it's super interesting. This guy, uh, he's American, American parents, American grandparents, but grew up in Jerusalem, served in the IDF, moved to the US, uh, became a congressional staffer in the 1990s, kind of traditional democratic foreign policy circles. He then becomes a lobbyist for some extremely unsavory African dictators, including Gaddafi, uh, and Equatorial Guinea. He then joins the Obama administration and eventually becomes the kind of senior energy diplomat in the Obama administration and gets kind of stuck in the middle of the story of the Biden, uh, family's involvement in the Ukrainian national gas sector.

• 2:07:23Speaker 01

  Then he, uh, comes out of government, joins the board of NAFTA gas. So he's in, he's kind of directly involved in Ukrainian gas. And then he gets hired again by the Biden administration and he's supposed to be just be like the energy guy. And he somehow parlay's this all into this gig where he's the chief diplomat in Lebanon. And he, his kind of novel, uh, contribution or invention is he figures out a way to interact directly with Hezbollah. And so it's like he kind of circumvents American laws about having direct contact with him. So obviously the interesting thing being the guy who figured out how to negotiate directly with Hezbollah. Is a Jewish IDF veteran from Jerusalem. Right. So how did the story of how did they come to trust him so much?

• 2:08:08Jocko Willink?

  Interesting stuff. Um, right on. So does that get us up to speed?

• 2:08:13Speaker 01

  I think so. Check out Tablet Mag.

• 2:08:15Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Um, you're on Twitter, Twitter X, Jeremy Stern LA. Uh, you're the editor at Tablet Mag, Tablet Mag.com. Uh, special thanks to Maggie Phillips. Um, she's a freelance writer. She's a former tablet journalism fellow. She happens to be the daughter of a guy by the name of General Sean McFarland, who, uh, was my leader and, uh, I admire him greatly and a friend of mine from the Battle of Ramadi. And, um, she connected us.

• 2:08:46Speaker 01

  One of the best people you'll ever meet.

• 2:08:48Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Um, so thanks to Maggie. Appreciate it. Um, Echo, you got any questions? Uh, how's your Russian now?

• 2:08:58Speaker 01

  It's not as good as it was the day I left, but it's not bad. I'm, I'm instilling a bit of it in my son. I'm teaching him some words.

• 2:09:04Jocko Willink?

  There you go. That's all I got. Right on Jeremy. Any, any final thoughts?

• 2:09:09Speaker 01

  That's it. Thanks for having me. It's been a pleasure.

• 2:09:10Jocko Willink?

  Right on, man. Well, uh, thanks for joining us. Thanks for your service in the army, obviously, protecting our nation. Thanks for your service in the State Department. I think you're the first State Department person we've had on here, working on the diplomatic front. And, uh, thanks for what you continue to do today to get good information out to the world. Much appreciated. Thank you.

• 2:09:30Jocko Willink?

  And with that, Jeremy Stern has left the building. Obviously, um, some turmoil in the world right now. Uh, which means gotta make sure your own personal world is squared away.

• 2:09:47Jocko Willink?

  I recommend you do that by working out, by lifting, by training the jujitsu. Always helps. And if you're gonna do that, you're gonna need fuel, good fuel, clean fuel. We recommend Jocko Fuel. Hey, check it out, Jocko Fuel. Go to Jocko Fuel.com. You can get protein. You can get hydration. You can get energy drinks. You can get supplements for your joints, for your health. You can get whatever you need to put in your body. Go to Jocko Fuel.com. Check it all out. The best tasting and the best.

• 2:10:20Jocko Willink?

  Results that you will get from supplementation.

• 2:10:23Speaker 02

  Very effective.

• 2:10:24Jocko Willink?

  So you can get it Wawa, you can get it Walmart. You can get it at GNC Vitamin Shop, Afees, Military Commissaries, Dash Stores, Wake Fern, Shop Right, HEB down in Texas, Meyer up in the Midwest, Wegmans, Harris Teeter, Lifetime Fitness, Shields, small gyms everywhere, no matter where you're at, you can get the goods. If you want to sell this stuff, email [email protected]. Check it out. Get stronger, get smarter, get healthier, get better. Jocko Fuel, get some.

• 2:10:57Speaker 02

  Stu, also shout out to freaking Cold War, by the way.

• 2:11:02Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah. It's a winner.

• 2:11:04Speaker 02

  Two incidents in the past one week. You know the kind where the sickness is coming? It's coming already. Like, cause there's two phases or three if you count the actual sickness.

• 2:11:11Jocko Willink?

  Sickness have the foothold?

• 2:11:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:11:13Jocko Willink?

  Like you can feel it?

• 2:11:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:11:15Jocko Willink?

  Or it's around you?

• 2:11:16Speaker 02

  There's two levels of foothold. So you know, the first one is like, wait, is that a sickness or do it? Did I just inhale some dust? Like, what is it? That's the first little, and that's like, okay, you know?

• 2:11:24Jocko Willink?

  But when that comes, Cold War.

• 2:11:26Speaker 02

  Cold War all day.

• 2:11:27Jocko Willink?

  Oh, like big time.

• 2:11:28Speaker 02

  So the second foothold is like, oh, Brad, it's coming. You've already accepted it fully as fact that I am getting sick right now, you know? And then you get sick, right?

• 2:11:36Jocko Willink?

  That's not even a foothold. That's like an assault. Assault has begun.

• 2:11:39Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 2:11:40Jocko Willink?

  Okay, so we're talking foothold, you can go, go, go Cold War.

• 2:11:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:11:44Jocko Willink?

  But then, once the assault's underway, go Cold War.

• 2:11:46Speaker 02

  You already thought, or you even heard the thump. You heard that already.

• 2:11:50Jocko Willink?

  Man, look at you with the mortar sounds.

• 2:11:53Speaker 02

  But two incidents where I had that already. I was getting sick, literally. And Cold War, I take three, by the way. And I eat like a banana, like a fruit with it. I don't know why. Maybe it's just the tradition. But nonetheless, two different instances, sickness gone.

• 2:12:07Jocko Willink?

  Bro, when I, when I feel that, either one, I start jacking Cold War.

• 2:12:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:12:13Jocko Willink?

  I'll have like, three in the morning, I'll have three in mid-morning. I'll like, go crazy.

• 2:12:19Speaker 02

  Yeah. Oh, yeah. And yeah, but yeah, two, two instances where I was deep into the, like, beginning parts of the assault, reversed both times.

• 2:12:28Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:29Speaker 02

  Boom, back in the game.

• 2:12:30Jocko Willink?

  And you watch family members going, dropping down. It's chaos out there.

• 2:12:34Speaker 02

  Bro, my kids take Cold War. Same deal. They know the protocol.

• 2:12:37Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:12:37Speaker 02

  Hundred percent. Oh, yeah.

• 2:12:38Jocko Willink?

  Dude, it's good.

• 2:12:39Speaker 02

  Very reliable. Yep.

• 2:12:40Jocko Willink?

  So check it out. We got what you need. jockofuel.com. Check it out. Also, if you're training jujitsu, if you're working out, if you're working. If you're hunting, if you're cruising, no matter what you're doing, you should do it with American-made clothing. And in all those categories, we got you covered at originusa.com. Doesn't matter what you're doing, you can represent. Wear clothing that is 100% made in America from American-made materials. Go to originusa.com.

• 2:13:15Jocko Willink?

  And get some.

• 2:13:16Speaker 02

  That's true. Also, Jocko's store called Jocko's store, this is where you can buy your shirts, hats, hoodies, apparel, merch, if you will, and represent discipline equals freedom. Good. You know, these types of standby to get some. It's a good one. Going to represent that. Also on Jocko's store, there's a shirt locker, subscription shirts every month, new design every month, a little bit outside of the box as far as designs go, but still representation across the board. Trust me.

• 2:13:42Jocko Willink?

  You gonna make one about that video that you just put up?

• 2:13:45Speaker 02

  What the?

• 2:13:45Jocko Willink?

  You just show up?

• 2:13:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, the abuse that I just took, you know, no, hey, one never know.

• 2:13:52Jocko Willink?

  Okay, we're gonna find out about that one.

• 2:13:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, but yeah, if you like, go to Jocko's store.com, you can, you know, kind of browse there, check out something, like something, get something. Also known as defcore.com, by the way. I'm saying that's the, that's the OG, like, if you know, you know scenario, but it's also those defcore.com. Anyway, yeah, you like something, get some.

• 2:14:10Jocko Willink?

  Check it out. Subscribe to the podcast. Subscribe to Jocko Underground.com. Check out our YouTube channels. There's the Jocko Podcast Official. There's Jocko Podcast Clips. Cause Echo Charles made a clip.

• 2:14:24Speaker 02

  Amen.

• 2:14:25Jocko Willink?

  Need a place to put it. Jocko Fuel has one. Put one up with Chris Pratt. Did you watch that one?

• 2:14:30Speaker 02

  Yeah. Wait, the realistic, how realistic? Yeah, that one actually, I liked that one more than I thought I would like it. It was very, it was very well done.

• 2:14:38Jocko Willink?

  What did you like about it?

• 2:14:39Speaker 02

  Just the interaction was good. The, it was relevant. Cause that stuff like where I kind of wondered too, like, oh, how good was he really looking? Cause he looks good to me. They all, you know, for the most part.

• 2:14:50Jocko Willink?

  I could tell, you could tell, it was very nice. Cause when we went to film Warrior Kid and there's combat scenes in Warrior Kid and like Chris didn't need to get trained. He's, he know what's up. So that was, that made things a lot easier. Yeah. And you know, so yeah, so check that out. Jocko Fuel YouTube channel and also Origin USA YouTube channel. Check those out. Psychological Warfare, flipsidecanvas.com. Dakota Meyer, making cool stuff to hang on your wall. Bunch of books. I've written a bunch of books. Wrote a book called Leadership Strategy and Tactics. A lot of people keep that one on their desk, by the way, because it's just a reference. Oh, like I'm having this issue. Boom. Open it up. Problem solved. I'm having another issue. Boom. Open it up. Problem solved. Leadership Strategy and Tactics. I wrote an expanded edition. That's available.

• 2:15:34Jocko Willink?

  Written a bunch of other books. Written a bunch of kids books.

• 2:15:39Jocko Willink?

  Some of those kid books are getting turned into a movie.

• 2:15:41Speaker 02

  I hear a good thing.

• 2:15:42Jocko Willink?

  You don't have to wait for the movie, even though the movie's going to be worth waiting for. Way the Warrior Kid, one, two, three, four, and five. Don't forget about Mikey and the Dragons. Don't forget about Extreme Ownership: Dichotomy of Leadership. About Face by Hackworth. Bunch of, bunch of cool books. Check them out. Echelon Front, we have a leadership consultancy. We solve problems through leadership. Go to echelonfront.com for details there. Also,

• 2:16:07Jocko Willink?

  we have live events. We have the Dallas muster, which is already taking place and it's sold out. And all the musters that we do sell out. So if you want to go, San Diego, February 23rd through 25th. San Antonio, April 29th through May 1st. Sign up, register early. They'll sell. Wibbons Assembly be coming up at some point. Check those out. ExtremeOwnership.com is another website that we have where you can learn the leadership principles that we teach in an online academy. It's amazing what you can learn online. You're pretty good at music, or not music, but video editing? Pretty good at that?

• 2:16:47Speaker 02

  I try my best.

• 2:16:48Jocko Willink?

  Did you go to college for that?

• 2:16:49Speaker 02

  No.

• 2:16:50Jocko Willink?

  Did you learn it online?

• 2:16:51Speaker 02

  Learned it online.

• 2:16:52Jocko Willink?

  So you watch, go watch. What's your most profound and impactful video that you have made? As far as, uh, let's say, which shows off your editing and CGI skills?

• 2:17:03Speaker 02

  Hmm. Oh, well, that's a, yeah, uh, I don't know. I don't know.

• 2:17:10Speaker 02

  Put it this way, for the time, it was like Warpath, I think, maybe. First was like, that good video was like, kind of fun. Yeah, not in depth.

• 2:17:18Jocko Willink?

  But, but, but if we want to see like now, you do CGI, you do all this other stuff now.

• 2:17:22Speaker 02

  CGI, if you went to Instagram and looked at the third measure stuff, that's like more CGI, but it's a very specific kind of CGI. Actually, you know what? I have that third measure video, the one about the robots taking over the world that has never been published yet. The one like you're in it. Wait. I think you're in it. I forget. But yeah, but it's mixed with real live footage and stuff. It's actually pretty good.

• 2:17:47Jocko Willink?

  Does Rana shoot somebody with a daisy?

• 2:17:48Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:17:48Jocko Willink?

  You didn't never post that one?

• 2:17:49Speaker 02

  Never posted it.

• 2:17:50Jocko Willink?

  How come?

• 2:17:51Speaker 02

  Cause I want, I wanted to do like a final scene where it's like either part of a dream or part of a something, or maybe some campaign or something, but.

• 2:18:00Jocko Willink?

  Let's just get it out. Alright, well, check that out. You can learn, you can learn through online sources. And if you check out extremeownership.com, you can learn the leadership lessons that we learned on the battlefield. You can apply them to every aspect of your life. So go to extremeownership.com for that. And if you want to help service members, active and retired, you want to help their families, you want to help Gold Star families, check out Mark Lee's mom, Mama Lee. She started an amazing charity organization. It's called America's Mighty Warriors. And if you go to AmericasMightyWarriors.org, you can donate or you can get involved. Also, heroesandhorses.org, Micah Fink up there in Montana. And then Jimmy May's organization, beyondthebrotherhood.org. Check all those out. Great organizations.

• 2:18:42Jocko Willink?

  If you want to connect with us, for Jeremy Stern, he's got his podcast, which is called What Really Matters. He's on Twitter X, at Jeremy Stern L A. And he can also be found at TabletMag.com. And for us, you can find my stuff at Jaco.com, on social media, at Jocko Willink, and Echo's also on social media, at Echo Charles. Just be careful when you get on there. Just be careful. Watch your back. Cause if you don't watch your back, next thing you know, 20 minutes went by. 27 minutes went by.

• 2:19:21Jocko Willink?

  You could have learned a new guitar chord. You could have, you could have done, what? Probably 250 burpees?

• 2:19:31Speaker 02

  In 20 minutes?

• 2:19:32Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, maybe even 300.

• 2:19:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, man. Sure.

• 2:19:35Jocko Willink?

  So do that. Don't let the social media get you. Thanks once again to Jeremy Stern for joining us, sharing your lessons. Thanks for your service in the Army and the State Department, and thanks for what you continue to do to inform the masses. And thanks to all our men and women out there in uniform. With a special salute to the EOD techs from every service. Thanks for what you do to keep us safe. And also thanks to our police, law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, Border Patrol, Secret Service, as well as all other first responders. Thanks for your sacrifice to keep us safe here at home.

• 2:20:12Jocko Willink?

  And everyone else out there.

• 2:20:15Jocko Willink?

  The world's a chaotic place. It's a chaotic place.

• 2:20:20Jocko Willink?

  And you should look at it. You should study it. You should do your best to understand it.

• 2:20:26Jocko Willink?

  You should be careful though, that you don't get caught up in it. You don't get caught up in the propaganda. You don't get caught in the crossfire of the information wars. Stay detached, stay objective, and keep getting after it. And until next time, this is Echo and Jocko. Out.