93: American Made With American Hands. The Value of Grit and Perseverance. Pete Roberts and Origin USA.

0:00:00 - Opening. 0:06:42 - Who is Peter Roberts? 0:26:45 - Lessons and Fortitude in Career in "New Media" 1:10:23 - Building the Origin Brand. 2:16:31 - More thoughts on the struggle. 2:18:53 - Support JockoStore http://www.jockostore.com stuff, Origin Brand Apparel http://www.originmaine.com, with Jocko White Tea http://www.jockotea.com and Psychological Warfare (on iTunes) https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/psychological-warfare/id1183222322. Extreme Ownership (book) http://amzn.to/2jonHTx, The Discipline Equals Freedom Field Manual. http://amzn.to/2szgaEj 3:05:15 - Closing Gratitude. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Jocko Willink?

  This is Jocko Podcast number 93 with Echo Charles and me Jocko Willink. Good evening Echo. Good evening.

• 0:12Jocko Willink?

  I was lucky and blessed to have had the honor to serve in the United States Military during a time of war.

• 0:28Jocko Willink?

  I fought alongside US Army soldiers, sailors and Marines on violent battlefields.

• 0:39Jocko Willink?

  And I saw with my own eyes, my generation of warriors uphold the proud tradition of the American fighting man.

• 0:55Jocko Willink?

  America's military has a storied history of bravery, ingenuity and grit.

• 1:07Jocko Willink?

  But its most important tradition is the tradition of victory.

• 1:15Jocko Willink?

  America's military wins wars. It is as simple as that.

• 1:22Jocko Willink?

  If our nation deems it morally right and existentially necessary, then our military is unstoppable.

• 1:35Jocko Willink?

  Of course, and rightfully so, the credit for victory is often given to the men on the front lines.

• 1:48Jocko Willink?

  To those that are taking the fight to our nation's enemies in close combat.

• 1:57Jocko Willink?

  That credit is well deserved.

• 2:03Jocko Willink?

  But it is not the only credit that needs to be bestowed.

• 2:09Jocko Willink?

  Because it is a simple fact that many of the most critical victories in America's history were won not only on distant bloody battlefields, but were also won right here, at home.

• 2:27Jocko Willink?

  In factories, fields, and farms.

• 2:36Jocko Willink?

  You see, our ability to produce, to design, grow, build, and manufacture has been just important to our nation's victories as our ability to fight.

• 2:51Jocko Willink?

  And throughout history, when Americans marched to war, we marched wearing boots made by American hands.

• 3:04Jocko Willink?

  And we wore uniforms that were cut and sewn in factories like this one.

• 3:12Jocko Willink?

  Our body armor, helmets, and weapons have been the products of American work ethic, skill, and determination.

• 3:25Jocko Willink?

  The best planes, ships, and vehicles in the world that carry us to war and then support us on the battlefield, they only exist because Americans built them.

• 3:41Jocko Willink?

  Without the American worker, there can be no American soldier.

• 3:49Jocko Willink?

  So let us never forget

• 3:53Jocko Willink?

  that the freedom we cherish so dearly is a gift not only from our American servicemen and women,

• 4:05Jocko Willink?

  but it is also a gift from the American worker.

• 4:12Jocko Willink?

  The American worker who toils in fields, in factories, in shipyards and on job sites.

• 4:22Jocko Willink?

  The American worker who gets up day after day after day, not only to build and create products,

• 4:31Jocko Willink?

  but also to build our economy, the strongest economy in the world, which gives us unmatched influence

• 4:42Jocko Willink?

  and gives our great nation the ability to make the world a better place.

• 4:54Jocko Willink?

  With that knowledge,

• 4:59Jocko Willink?

  I could not be prouder to stand here today and be a part of this opening.

• 5:06Jocko Willink?

  I could not be prouder to be a part of this company, Origin,

• 5:12Jocko Willink?

  which like America itself,

• 5:16Jocko Willink?

  will succeed because of the power of the American worker.

• 5:22Jocko Willink?

  It will succeed because of the power of American grit.

• 5:29Jocko Willink?

  And Origin USA will succeed because of the unmatched power of the American dream.

• 5:40Jocko Willink?

  And I would like to thank all of you, especially America's workforce, for making this dream possible.

• 5:59Jocko Willink?

  And that is a speech that I gave today in a town called Farmington, Maine. And I was at the opening of the new Origin USA factory. Now, as I've been saying, we are now in league with Origin USA. And tonight, I have with me our new partner and our new friend, Pete Roberts, who, as you will see, has shown some pretty incredible fortitude in the business world

• 6:45Jocko Willink?

  and who I believe is just getting warmed up. So, Mr. Pete Roberts, founder of Origin USA, black belt in jujitsu, by the way, and also black belt in making things happen.

• 7:05Jocko Willink?

  Welcome to the show, man.

• 7:07Pete Roberts?

  Honored to be here.

• 7:11Pete Roberts?

  Everything you just said, man, just captures everything I feel in my heart and mind, for sure. Hearing that speech live was phenomenal.

• 7:21Jocko Willink?

  You know, it was awesome, walking around the factory and meeting people, uh, meeting the workers here. I mean, just, we came in and Jill, she was, she was, it's a week of vacation, what's she doing? She's in here working.

• 7:34Pete Roberts?

  She's working.

• 7:35Jocko Willink?

  And, you know, just, and I wasn't even really, didn't really know what I was gonna say, but after coming up here, meeting her, seeing the rest of the people grinding to make this happen, um, yeah, I realized that, I realized exactly what I was gonna say. I was gonna talk about the fact that, literally, men on the battlefield, you're propelled there by American workers. And that's what this, that's what this represents. And, uh, you know, we'll get into how all this kinda came together in this kinda perfect storm.

• 8:08Pete Roberts?

  Yeah.

• 8:08Jocko Willink?

  We'll get there, but we'll get there in a little while.

• 8:11Pete Roberts?

  Okay.

• 8:11Jocko Willink?

  Cause first we gotta know a little about, a bit about you. And you're crazy ass, which I say with all, you know, in the most complimentary possible way.

• 8:23Pete Roberts?

  Yeah, man.

• 8:24Jocko Willink?

  So, tell us about just growing up, like, get me from like birth to high school. What was that all about?

• 8:33Pete Roberts?

  Absolutely. So, it all started in Sparta.

• 8:41Pete Roberts?

  I'm for real.

• 8:42Jocko Willink?

  Real Spartan blood, for real.

• 8:44Pete Roberts?

  Yeah, I know my, my.

• 8:45Jocko Willink?

  What's, what's your, what's your, because Roberts isn't.

• 8:47Pete Roberts?

  No, Angelakis, I'm Greek, actually. My mom's an Angelakis, she's Greek.

• 8:52Jocko Willink?

  And she's clearly Greek, because I met her. She's Greek.

• 8:55Pete Roberts?

  And she made that baklava today?

• 8:56Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. No, I thought she might pull out a Spartan sword at some point and like attack me.

• 9:00Pete Roberts?

  Yeah.

• 9:00Jocko Willink?

  Which I was cool with, you know? Instead, she's pulled out a big thing of baklava and I ate it. It's like sugar coated lies, don't care.

• 9:09Pete Roberts?

  Did you feel guilty about it?

• 9:10Jocko Willink?

  Um, no. I wanted more.

• 9:13Pete Roberts?

  Yeah. I know you came over like, where's all the baklava?

• 9:18Pete Roberts?

  I'm like, it's gone. Then I looked over, there's six pieces left.

• 9:22Jocko Willink?

  I had four of them.

• 9:24Pete Roberts?

  That's awesome. No, I'm a, I'm a half breed. Just half Spartan. So, no, uh, yeah, man, I mean, like, the rest of America, you know, my, my grandparents immigrated from Sparta, Greece. In the early 1900s, great grand, lived to 105.

• 9:45Jocko Willink?

  Legit, credit.

• 9:46Pete Roberts?

  Yes, yes.

• 9:48Jocko Willink?

  She wasn't even on Jocko White TV.

• 9:52Pete Roberts?

  She, uh, she, no, she didn't need to be. She had the Mediterranean diet.

• 9:55Jocko Willink?

  Nice.

• 9:55Pete Roberts?

  Even my son got to meet her. She lived for a long time, but, uh, yeah, so, from a young age, I got to see the American dream from my mom's side of the family, you know, and

• 10:09Pete Roberts?

  when we were kids, uh, I was born down in Massachusetts, Gloucester, and, uh, moved up here when I was a young kid. My mom wanted to get myself and my three siblings out of Massachusetts and into the woods, just because she saw some shifts happening she didn't like. So, she brought us up here and.

• 10:33Pete Roberts?

  Said make a go of it, basically.

• 10:35Jocko Willink?

  And what, what business or whatever, what did they, what's your?

• 10:39Pete Roberts?

  Oh, I saw, I got to see my, my family build some pretty, pretty cool businesses down in Massachusetts. So being an entrepreneur was something I always admired. But didn't realize I

• 10:55Pete Roberts?

  wanted to do that until a little later in life. But my, my, my family down there. My grandfather had a sub shop, you know, super sub.

• 11:07Jocko Willink?

  For those of you, I don't know, there's, that's one of those things where they call it different things across America.

• 11:13Pete Roberts?

  Yeah.

• 11:13Jocko Willink?

  A sub in New England is the same thing as a Subway sandwich.

• 11:17Pete Roberts?

  Right, right.

• 11:17Jocko Willink?

  Uh, also in New England, you call it a grinder. Do you call it a grinder?

• 11:21Pete Roberts?

  A grinder, um, would be, I think technically.

• 11:26Pete Roberts?

  Uh, no, that's not a hot sandwich. That's hoagie.

• 11:28Jocko Willink?

  Hoagie, hoagies, or a poor boy. Yeah, that's another one. A poor, poor boy. Yeah, another, another word for it.

• 11:35Pete Roberts?

  So sub.

• 11:36Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 11:36Pete Roberts?

  Sub.

• 11:37Jocko Willink?

  So you, so granddad owned a sub shop.

• 11:39Pete Roberts?

  A few.

• 11:40Jocko Willink?

  A few sub shops.

• 11:41Pete Roberts?

  Was very successful with the sandwich making.

• 11:44Jocko Willink?

  Nice.

• 11:44Pete Roberts?

  Uh, I got, I got to see that. My cousins built a big multi, multi million dollar company. And I, and I had to watch this from away because I moved up to here to Maine when I was eight years old. So I wasn't cultured in that at all, in the business world. I didn't have anybody to teach me about business and I just got to see it and, and not be directly part of it, which I always wanted to be, you know? But I always looked up to them and, and, and whatnot and both from business perspective and athletics. You know, they were very good athletics, my family and, and my uncles and cousins and stuff, so.

• 12:24Pete Roberts?

  I looked from afar. Up here in Maine, in the woods, in an old farmhouse, down a dirt road with no neighbors. Cows in a field.

• 12:32Jocko Willink?

  Uh huh.

• 12:32Pete Roberts?

  Yeah, that's where I grew up.

• 12:33Jocko Willink?

  And then, high school, you, you said you were, I, I know you were athletic. What, how, how tall are you?

• 12:39Pete Roberts?

  Six, three and shrinking.

• 12:41Jocko Willink?

  Six, three and shrinking.

• 12:42Pete Roberts?

  Yeah, man.

• 12:42Jocko Willink?

  And what's your max, what's your, what are you walking around at right now?

• 12:46Pete Roberts?

  Right now, I can tell you exactly. Two fifty three point zero. Yes.

• 12:52Jocko Willink?

  But you played, what, what'd you play?

• 12:53Pete Roberts?

  I, I, uh, in, in high school, three sport athlete. In college, football. Uh, division one for a couple of years. Um, not the best experience of my life, learning experience, but not the best.

• 13:05Jocko Willink?

  Well, well, why wasn't it the best experience in your life?

• 13:09Pete Roberts?

  Uh, you know, I was, I was real good at it, football.

• 13:12Jocko Willink?

  Uh huh.

• 13:13Pete Roberts?

  I was not passionate about it.

• 13:15Jocko Willink?

  Oh.

• 13:15Pete Roberts?

  Um, but I still worked my ass off.

• 13:18Jocko Willink?

  Cause that's the thing, you were kinda, even though you were this big. Jock.

• 13:22Pete Roberts?

  I was.

• 13:23Jocko Willink?

  You were also. An artistic guy, right?

• 13:26Pete Roberts?

  Artsy fartsy. I was an artsy fartsy kid. I got along with everybody, the, the jocks, athletes, all the artsy kids. You know, I liked everybody. I could appreciate everybody's talents.

• 13:37Jocko Willink?

  Were you like drawing, painting, what were you doing? Everything?

• 13:40Pete Roberts?

  Yeah, drawing, painting, welding, sculpting, everything.

• 13:44Jocko Willink?

  Just doing everything.

• 13:45Pete Roberts?

  Yeah.

• 13:45Jocko Willink?

  And tackling people.

• 13:47Pete Roberts?

  Yeah. Getting tackled, played tight end.

• 13:50Jocko Willink?

  Were you more passionate about art than you were about? Football?

• 13:54Pete Roberts?

  For sure. For sure.

• 13:55Jocko Willink?

  And so you were playing football, like, i- it, was it just one of those things where you're like, hey, I'm good at it? And I'm getting a scholarship, so I'm just gonna keep doing what I'm doing?

• 14:02Pete Roberts?

  Yeah, so back in nineteen ninety seven.

• 14:06Jocko Willink?

  Burke in the dories.

• 14:07Pete Roberts?

  Yeah, oh, oh, back in the day. Yeah, no, it was, uh, back in the day, some will remember hockey fans. Maine's hockey team was phenomenal. They had the Korea. Kids on there. And they were, that, that team took gifts. And what happens when you get gifts and people find out? Sanctions. So I went into college and they had like ten scholarships. So I didn't actually have a scholarship till my second year of college. Kinda had to prove myself.

• 14:39Pete Roberts?

  And I worked my ass off and then I I fell into the politics of college football. And I saw the ugly side of the politics of college football. And.

• 14:52Jocko Willink?

  And what are you talking about? Because I'm the only guy sitting at the table that didn't apparently play college football. I was busy in the teams.

• 14:59Pete Roberts?

  Yeah.

• 14:59Jocko Willink?

  After it. What does that consist of? Like, you're trying to get to be in this certain position starting? Or is that what we're talking about?

• 15:06Pete Roberts?

  Let's say like, okay. So I was supposed to, I was supposed to start my, I redshirted my freshman, I was supposed to start. Tight end, got into a bar brawl.

• 15:18Jocko Willink?

  Mm hmm.

• 15:18Pete Roberts?

  Right? And during the summer, couldn't play the first few games. And it was me and one of, one of my friends and we're, we're both freshmen and he was a big kid, local kid. Uh, he hadn't played in the NFL.

• 15:29Jocko Willink?

  Um.

• 15:31Pete Roberts?

  And we were kind of like fighting for the first spot on the depth chart and the depth chart. If, for those of you who don't know, is like, kind of where you stand.

• 15:38Jocko Willink?

  Right.

• 15:39Pete Roberts?

  You know, you see your name on there and you see everyone else's name and you want to be the top guy, right?

• 15:45Jocko Willink?

  Did they break that out for every position?

• 15:47Pete Roberts?

  Oh, yeah.

• 15:47Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 15:48Pete Roberts?

  Oh, yeah. Every position.

• 15:50Jocko Willink?

  Check.

• 15:50Pete Roberts?

  Yeah. So a little pressure to perform. And I stayed after my freshman, I put on 27 pounds of like hard earned muscle. No illegal substances.

• 16:01Jocko Willink?

  Squats?

• 16:03Pete Roberts?

  McDonald's and squats. Maybe like, Pete, go eat some food.

• 16:08Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 16:09Pete Roberts?

  At McDonald's.

• 16:09Jocko Willink?

  So what did you, what, what, would you go from what weight to what weight?

• 16:12Pete Roberts?

  Man, I think I came into college at like two, it was like 200 and.

• 16:19Jocko Willink?

  Like 225 and you went up to?

• 16:20Pete Roberts?

  No, less.

• 16:21Jocko Willink?

  Oh, really?

• 16:22Pete Roberts?

  210 maybe.

• 16:22Jocko Willink?

  Oh dang.

• 16:23Pete Roberts?

  At high school. And then, uh, yeah, and then just earned it, earned it in the gym. I remember my tight end coach coming up to me and saying, hey, you know, Steve, Steve was his name. He's like, he's out in, uh. He's like, you're gonna be starting this first game. And I'm like, shit. I mean, I stayed, I stayed like, worked my ass off, you know, stayed during breaks and everything. I was a good athlete.

• 16:45Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And what's cool is like, that you're actually going as hard as you can. That's something you weren't even that passionate about.

• 16:51Pete Roberts?

  No, but I committed to it.

• 16:52Jocko Willink?

  You just wanted to win.

• 16:53Pete Roberts?

  Yes. Yeah, no, I.

• 16:54Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 16:55Pete Roberts?

  You look at yourself on that depth chart, even if you don't necessarily like what you're doing, you make the commitment and you drive. And I didn't want to be number two, you know, so it's super competitive college sports. So anyways, my tight end coach, like, you're starting the first game. I'm like, yes. Call all my family, call all my friends, tell them what's up, make sure everybody has tickets, yada, yada, yada. Like a day before the game, the coach comes to me and says,

• 17:27Pete Roberts?

  Pete, I gotta talk to you. And I said, okay. He's like,

• 17:32Pete Roberts?

  I just got in a huge

• 17:35Pete Roberts?

  argument with the head coach. And you will not be starting in the football game. I said, okay, why? He goes,

• 17:47Pete Roberts?

  basically told me politics.

• 17:50Pete Roberts?

  My friend, still a friend of mine, local kid, he came in on a full ride. Local kid, big kid, had probably a better frame to build on. And basically what the, even though maybe I, you know, it's college, we have different gifts.

• 18:10Pete Roberts?

  The head coach shut it down, said, nope, he's not starting. My coach is like, he should start. He's performing better. You know, he's strong in the weight room, hang clean in 300 pounds. The kid's ready to go. He should be starting. They got a huge fight, almost got fired. The coach, my, my tight end coach almost got fired. He said, you'll be playing a lot in the game though, but

• 18:33Pete Roberts?

  yeah, he'll be starting. Guess how much playing time I saw?

• 18:38Jocko Willink?

  None.

• 18:38Pete Roberts?

  Zero.

• 18:41Jocko Willink?

  So that was the first game of the season, you said?

• 18:43Pete Roberts?

  Yeah.

• 18:44Jocko Willink?

  And so then what happens? You grind out the rest of the season?

• 18:47Pete Roberts?

  Yeah, man.

• 18:47Jocko Willink?

  How's your attitude?

• 18:50Pete Roberts?

  I worked my ass off to earn.

• 18:53Jocko Willink?

  You kept grinding.

• 18:53Pete Roberts?

  To earn. Did you ever start?

• 18:57Pete Roberts?

  Here's the shitty thing.

• 18:59Jocko Willink?

  That already sounded pretty shitty, actually.

• 19:01Pete Roberts?

  It's pretty shitty, dude. Here's the shitty thing.

• 19:05Pete Roberts?

  Man, I couldn't, I'm telling you, I had football PTSD after this. I didn't watch football for 10 years. They put it on television, I'd walk out of the room. I'd just hang out, do something else. They'd be watching the games. My son loves football. My family loves football. Couldn't do it. I had like a just aversion to the sport. To make a long story short.

• 19:27Jocko Willink?

  Good, because it's been 45 minutes. We haven't even made it past.

• 19:29Pete Roberts?

  Shut up.

• 19:32Pete Roberts?

  My, my, uh, my scholarship, the money, like, like, some of the money hit your account, right? And like shit didn't kick in for like my food and everything. And like, my coach, the head coach, who was a narcissistic guy, loved coming to the weight room and just like waving his hair and, you know, one of those guys, you know, one of those guys, yeah, college, yeah, echo. He's like, I'll take care of it, Pete. It's fine. Everything's happening. Okay. Week later, coach, still this, this isn't, you know, I'm, I'm on it. I'm, I'm on it. I'm talking with the AD. It's everything's good. Week later going, coach, it's still like, man, I'm stressing. You know, like, I'm gonna have to get a job. Like, what's up with, with this? He goes, I need to talk to you in my office. I said, okay.

• 20:17Pete Roberts?

  I sit down in his office.

• 20:22Pete Roberts?

  Your scholarship money is not going to kick in.

• 20:29Pete Roberts?

  Really?

• 20:34Pete Roberts?

  I overgave.

• 20:37Pete Roberts?

  Title IX had kicked in. And he overgave. Now, is he being truthful with me? Or did he find a new recruit that was better? Did he push me out? Who knows?

• 20:54Pete Roberts?

  I don't know why, because the kid behind me ended up starting fullback the next year, right? So maybe I got pushed out. Maybe he overgave. Fact of the matter is, that bastard lied to me and didn't follow through with his word.

• 21:11Pete Roberts?

  And that will never happen again. I will never surround myself with those types of people. And that lesson I carry to this day. I think about it a lot. It's one of those

• 21:23Pete Roberts?

  moments in your life that kind of changes your life. I said, you know, I'm tell you something. I worked my balls off for you in this program. I'm ready and this is

• 21:34Pete Roberts?

  what I get. That excuse?

• 21:39Pete Roberts?

  Out. Out of the office. I grabbed my cleats, handed it to my buddy Chad Rogers and walked out the door and didn't look back. And that was that? Yep. So that was your sophomore year? Yeah, that would have been my redshirted. It was right after my sophomore year, yeah. So what are you studying at this time? Studying, uh, new media, which was really new because he, remember the internet hit in like ninety seven, ninety eight, it became hot, right? Really? There's a date on that?

• 22:11Speaker 02

  Ambiguously.

• 22:12Pete Roberts?

  You can call it ninety seven?

• 22:14Speaker 02

  That's when it became hot. Yeah, for sure. I think so.

• 22:17Pete Roberts?

  Yeah, for sure. That's when it was like the internet.

• 22:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:21Pete Roberts?

  Everybody, everybody. Was this AOL dot com?

• 22:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, Netscape Navigator.

• 22:27Pete Roberts?

  But you, you could really surf the web.

• 22:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, find websites and stuff.

• 22:31Pete Roberts?

  Yeah, and website development and flat, this flash it came out, Mac Media, all this stuff. So anyways, I was into that. I I discovered the, the computer thing and

• 22:44Pete Roberts?

  fell in love with design on the computer. And although I was a sculpture major, I used to weld up crazy looking shit. I, I actually zipped the goalpost.

• 22:58Pete Roberts?

  Dude, I did. For like my final project. You want to know what I did? I built this big frigging zipper on this like canvas and I erected it and I zipped up the goalpost. I'm talking the, the, like the, like the.

• 23:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, like a giant real zipper.

• 23:14Pete Roberts?

  A real zipper. You know, like the Dang. The, like the thing you hold the dude, it was this big. I zip my, my, my, my art teacher. They allowed you to do that? They didn't have a choice. I just went out and did it.

• 23:27Speaker 02

  Savage style.

• 23:28Pete Roberts?

  Yeah. What's that like street art?

• 23:33Pete Roberts?

  It was weird. I think I got some of that frustration out through zippering it up. I have never told anybody that. Dude, that thing, my, my, my.

• 23:41Jocko Willink?

  Wait, did you get graded on it?

• 23:42Pete Roberts?

  Yeah, dude.

• 23:43Jocko Willink?

  So how did you not tell anybody?

• 23:45Pete Roberts?

  Cause what happened was is I erected it in the practice field and my teacher, she walked over with me to look at it. And she looked at me and she goes.

• 23:54Jocko Willink?

  A plus.

• 23:55Speaker 02

  Wait, like after you did it? Like you did it and then it's like, hey, come look at this.

• 23:59Pete Roberts?

  Like, what do you think? She goes, she looked at me, she goes, she's like, what?

• 24:06Pete Roberts?

  She, she didn't think it was possible.

• 24:08Jocko Willink?

  Bro, when you said like, I zippard my goalpost, I'm sitting here thinking, what is this some slang term that I don't know about? Does that mean hang, hanging toilet paper off of it? Like, what does this mean? It means zippering, that's what it means.

• 24:20Pete Roberts?

  I wish I had a photo of it.

• 24:21Jocko Willink?

  I wish you did too.

• 24:22Pete Roberts?

  We didn't have digital cameras back then.

• 24:24Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 24:24Pete Roberts?

  Yeah, but that, that teacher was cool. She was, I don't remember her name, but she was cool.

• 24:28Jocko Willink?

  And you left it up for the practice guys when they showed up?

• 24:31Pete Roberts?

  I had to pull it down. She, she actually pulled me aside one time and she's like, you drive this class, how, what you do and how you act, everyone is gonna follow, basically. She was, she was pretty cool, but.

• 24:45Jocko Willink?

  That is a legit. I'm giving you props.

• 24:48Pete Roberts?

  Zipper that shit, done.

• 24:50Jocko Willink?

  Zipper it.

• 24:51Pete Roberts?

  You ain't, nothing's happening here.

• 24:52Jocko Willink?

  How tall is a goalpost?

• 24:53Pete Roberts?

  Man, that thing was tall.

• 24:55Jocko Willink?

  Thirty-five feet, thirty feet?

• 24:56Speaker 02

  Probably more than, like the full goal, goalpost? That depends, the practice field, it varies.

• 25:01Pete Roberts?

  Fully zippard.

• 25:04Jocko Willink?

  I am not even kidding.

• 25:06Pete Roberts?

  I put that, I put in the, in a, and I, and I built it out of like wood laminated bandsaw, like all the lugs and they had to fit together perfectly. And that whole zipper part had to zip.

• 25:16Jocko Willink?

  It was functional?

• 25:17Pete Roberts?

  Yes.

• 25:20Speaker 02

  That's good.

• 25:21Pete Roberts?

  I love, she's like, I told my teacher when I was new, she's like, impossible to make it function.

• 25:26Jocko Willink?

  Okay, let's see. Yeah. Like I said, fortitude. I mentioned that earlier. So, and at this time, what, are you, what's like going on personally? Personal life? Didn't you with your high school sweetheart at this time?

• 25:39Pete Roberts?

  Yeah, yeah, so I, my wife, Amanda, my bride, uh, we got together and we were sixteen, fifteen, sixteen. Through, through a difficult situation.

• 25:54Pete Roberts?

  We became friends and we've been together ever since. We were drawn together by a difficult situation.

• 26:00Jocko Willink?

  And you stayed together through college?

• 26:02Pete Roberts?

  Absolutely.

• 26:05Jocko Willink?

  And she wasn't looking at you like, like, I need to get away from this guy.

• 26:07Pete Roberts?

  Yeah, the zipper guy. You know, she.

• 26:11Jocko Willink?

  She's very understanding.

• 26:13Pete Roberts?

  Apparently. Yeah. Yeah. You know, the corny line, like you complete me. Like she, I tell people like she, if my glass is a little full, she just dumps them out. And if it's running a little dry, she puts it back in. So, and she always has, you know what I mean? So she's brutally honest and.

• 26:34Pete Roberts?

  You know, just my, my soulmate.

• 26:35Jocko Willink?

  No, that's awesome that you guys were, uh, you know, I, I knew that. But it's kind of cool that you guys stayed together all that time. Now, back to your, your major and now, now you're saying you're not playing football. And now you're sitting there in college.

• 26:50Pete Roberts?

  Yep.

• 26:51Jocko Willink?

  You're studying new media, which no one knows anything about.

• 26:53Pete Roberts?

  I didn't even know anything about it.

• 26:54Jocko Willink?

  And.

• 26:55Pete Roberts?

  We actually hired the professors, my class.

• 26:58Jocko Willink?

  Really?

• 26:58Pete Roberts?

  We had a, we committee of students and we hired the freaking professors.

• 27:01Jocko Willink?

  And so, and so then you're learning how to do.

• 27:04Pete Roberts?

  What?

• 27:05Jocko Willink?

  Build websites?

• 27:06Pete Roberts?

  Yeah.

• 27:07Jocko Willink?

  Stuff like this?

• 27:07Pete Roberts?

  You're learning things like, uh, it's when all like the first software hit, you had like this Maya. And you could do 3D animation. They built like Toy Story and Maya or something. You had like.

• 27:20Pete Roberts?

  Flash, Macromedia. Remember the Flash websites, all the animation?

• 27:23Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 27:23Pete Roberts?

  Stuff like that. So we, I learned about that.

• 27:26Jocko Willink?

  So how did you make the jump from that to going into business in that arena?

• 27:33Pete Roberts?

  I was good at it and I was passionate about it. And what happened is my sophomore year after I got done playing football, I went right to a marketing agency. Sold myself on the spot and got hired on the spot. And I became their lead web developer.

• 27:50Jocko Willink?

  And you're like 19?

• 27:52Pete Roberts?

  I was 19 with blonde hair.

• 27:54Jocko Willink?

  Nice.

• 27:54Pete Roberts?

  Yep.

• 27:57Pete Roberts?

  They were like, who is this kid?

• 28:01Speaker 02

  For the record, when I was 19, I had blonde hair too.

• 28:03Pete Roberts?

  No kidding.

• 28:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, coincidentally. A lot of similarities.

• 28:06Pete Roberts?

  That's cool.

• 28:07Jocko Willink?

  Well, a lot of Hawaiians have blonde hair, so.

• 28:12Pete Roberts?

  So, 19 with blonde hair, yeah, man, I walked in and I just sold myself.

• 28:16Jocko Willink?

  Okay, so then how did that morph into your own business?

• 28:19Pete Roberts?

  Yeah, so I, I worked at that.

• 28:21Jocko Willink?

  Cause you're in a cush job, I take it, if you're the lead at 19 years old.

• 28:23Pete Roberts?

  Cush job at 200 bucks a week, buddy.

• 28:26Jocko Willink?

  Raking, which was pretty legit for you though, right?

• 28:29Pete Roberts?

  Yeah, because it was either that or the YMCA.

• 28:32Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 28:32Pete Roberts?

  You know, and I did work at the Y. But, uh, yeah, I mean, it was, I, I cut my teeth at this ad agency where I learned from this really good graphic designer, Brad, who started his career doing Paste Up. So Paste Up is like, when you're designing an ad, you actually have to take an exact, so all the little tools you use when you're in like Photoshop and other programs, those are real tools, real life tools. So he, he'd take like the knife and he'd cut around the picture and then he'd put that and then like the typography. So I cut my teeth under a real designer. Not many people get that anymore. So I learned from a master of design and...

• 29:15Jocko Willink?

  How long did you stay at that, at that agency for?

• 29:17Pete Roberts?

  I think I was there till, I was 19, 20, 21, three years, I think. And then I, then I moved back and I started my own company here.

• 29:26Jocko Willink?

  And that was just inspirado? What, what, what made you say, you know what? Cause you must have seen a pathway at the agency to, to take over or not even take over, but just to move up the chain of command and

• 29:38Pete Roberts?

  Yeah.

• 29:38Jocko Willink?

  get paid more than 200 bucks a week and all that.

• 29:40Pete Roberts?

  I did.

• 29:40Jocko Willink?

  What in your brain clicked where you're like, you know what, I'm not working for the man?

• 29:46Pete Roberts?

  Yeah, absolutely. I'll tell you that. I gotta go back to give you that though.

• 29:51Pete Roberts?

  Raking Blueberries.

• 29:53Pete Roberts?

  And throwing hay. Mm hmm. Manual labor. Throw hay for a day and get a ten dollar bill.

• 30:02Pete Roberts?

  You're gonna work very hard not to do that. Raking blueberries in Maine, which is a staple of us Mainas. That's tough work. You're bent over in the sun in the blueberry fields. And guess what you do for your first week? You earn your rake. So what does that mean? There's a different job that's worse? They give you the rake. Picking or something? And you've got to buy that. You've got to buy the rake. Oh, right. So you're in debt. You're in debt. You're starting to give you the rake and you have to work it off. How much you think that rake cost them? I'm doing the math. I'm like. With every rake. It's like, this is tough, but I like it. So when I, when I walked into my interview at this marketing agency, this kind of a pompous, you know, kid.

• 30:45Pete Roberts?

  I said, he said, what do you want to do long term, Mark? I said, starting up my own business. I'm gonna own my own business. He goes, you don't want to do that.

• 30:56Pete Roberts?

  You do not want to own your own business. You know, you don't know what it takes to survive in a world of business. And I said, okay.

• 31:07Pete Roberts?

  Proceed. Then I learned and sucked the knowledge I could, all the knowledge I could. I just sucked it and sucked it and sucked it. And then I moved home and started. And what city was that in? I started, well, I started the business out of my college apartment. It was about as big as this table. I was the man, though. I had a little, a Mac, the, um, the black one, Wall Street. Remember that one? There was a Mac called Wall Street? It, it had like a, it was black and it had like a rubber on the sides. You know what I mean? So you were the man? Yeah. That you had that? And I think that thing caused me some issues because it was very tough to have kids.

• 31:46Pete Roberts?

  I sat that thing on my lap for hours on end and I'm telling you something with radiation, man, I had to practice a lot to have kids. Practice was good, but it got a little tough when it's like, we can't have kids. So, but uh, yeah, man, I started the, the business out of my college apartment, my first insight new media marketing agency and new media company. And just started hammering and I was fearless going after accounts and clients, you know, and two years later, I find myself in Park City, Utah, sitting in the front of the president of Rozaknall Quicksilver, selling them an idea. Like Bill Gates that didn't exist yet.

• 32:27Pete Roberts?

  And telling them what I could do, and then they gave me the money to do it and then we did it. And uh, the rest is history.

• 32:34Jocko Willink?

  So, so everything.

• 32:35Pete Roberts?

  Till the recession.

• 32:35Jocko Willink?

  So, so everything was rocking and so, so did you, did you, so you were in your college apartment, but then where'd you end up?

• 32:41Pete Roberts?

  I ended up here in my hometown.

• 32:43Jocko Willink?

  And you had space, you got an office in the whole nine yards?

• 32:47Pete Roberts?

  Yeah, well, I started in a barn and it was me and another guy, my first hire, and then we moved into kind of like a, like a double wide trailer house, you know, we call it a double wide.

• 32:59Jocko Willink?

  Did it have a skirt?

• 33:01Pete Roberts?

  Yeah, oh yeah.

• 33:01Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 33:02Pete Roberts?

  Right, dude.

• 33:03Jocko Willink?

  Vinyl skirt, are you kidding me?

• 33:05Pete Roberts?

  Who doesn't have a vinyl skirt?

• 33:06Jocko Willink?

  Got to, got to keep it real.

• 33:07Pete Roberts?

  So, we went there and then we moved into a basement in town.

• 33:13Jocko Willink?

  This is like the perfect progression.

• 33:15Pete Roberts?

  Right? Yeah. And then we hired a few more and then we moved into a beautiful, we had built out a studio. Where, man, it was on, we actually designed it.

• 33:28Jocko Willink?

  Cause you were making legit money now.

• 33:30Pete Roberts?

  We were.

• 33:30Jocko Willink?

  How many employees are we talking about?

• 33:32Pete Roberts?

  I think maybe seven or something, something like that.

• 33:35Jocko Willink?

  And now you're 22?

• 33:37Pete Roberts?

  Yeah, if that, yeah, yeah, probably 22.

• 33:39Jocko Willink?

  22, 21, 22 years old.

• 33:41Pete Roberts?

  Yep.

• 33:42Jocko Willink?

  Six employees.

• 33:43Pete Roberts?

  Yeah.

• 33:43Jocko Willink?

  Custom designed office.

• 33:45Pete Roberts?

  Man, we did everything. You want to hear something? I don't even know if I should say this. Okay, you ready for this?

• 33:52Pete Roberts?

  You may have to edit this out. Alright. I handled two governor's campaigns in Maine, twenty-two years old. They wanted like the best design, the best marketing, so they came to these young'uns. And we had this one guy, Les Otten. Should maybe you not say the name? You, it was in national news, it's hard not to. You can cut it out. Understood. If it's in national news, then. No, it's, it's, oh, national news. Okay. Really nice guy, right after Obama's first term, so Les came and he wanted us to handle his campaign. And so he wanted a logo that was circular like Obama's logo.

• 34:34Pete Roberts?

  And so we did a, I designed myself, a circular logo, which green and blue, very similar feel. Not even close to the same, but it was round. And who had done a round logo at that time? Next thing I know, this thing ends up on CNN, all the national news stations, and they have like the two logos. They have Obama's logo and Les's logo. I got a, a influx of emails and phone calls, people like ripping, because remember how that first term for Obama, remember how hot that was? Yeah. Remember? But why, why were people negative? Were they were negative on you? Because they were like, we ripped it off. And I was like, really? Really? So it was round? Don't make a round logo. Yeah.

• 35:18Pete Roberts?

  Especially after the first Obama campaign. Don't use circles. Don't use circles. That's like, that's what they're saying. Don't use circles. Yeah. So anyways, it was, it was, it was an interesting time. There was a little bit of stress. Did he catch heat for it? Obviously, I guess, yeah, yeah. Because no one really cared, you know, no one even knew, they're like some, he wasn't like, oh, my ad agency made it up and I thought it was great. No, well, he, you know what, you know, kind of a little bit, he did that, but he had an advise advisor that said this is the right direction and whatnot, so. It was, it was interesting times. So what was the heat? Dude, the heat was like, national media like ripping you down, people digging down who designed it.

• 36:02Pete Roberts?

  Like the company that designed it and just like tearing you up. They found your yearbook picture or whatever. It was bad, it was a strange, it was like, it was like fifteen days of like, holy shit. Like, are we gonna, are we gonna survive this as a company? You know, and. We did.

• 36:18Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Yeah. And so you you survive that.

• 36:23Pete Roberts?

  Yeah.

• 36:23Jocko Willink?

  And and I guess your lesson is like from that, that you can survive things. You're gonna like, like it's interesting. I just caught that you said fifteen days.

• 36:31Pete Roberts?

  Yeah.

• 36:31Jocko Willink?

  Because guess what? Fifteen days, no one cared anymore. Is that pretty much?

• 36:35Pete Roberts?

  Pretty much. Yeah.

• 36:36Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. I see that a lot in the news, you know, people something will come up, people freak out about something. And I'm like, yeah, wait, oh.

• 36:42Pete Roberts?

  Yeah, wait a week.

• 36:43Jocko Willink?

  Four, four days, no one cares anymore. There's like some other meteor that hit the satellite thing or whatever.

• 36:51Pete Roberts?

  Yeah.

• 36:52Jocko Willink?

  So.

• 36:53Pete Roberts?

  You know, it was, it was interesting. You know, we were young, you know, and naive, you know, I mean, I think all entrepreneurs start out naive, honestly.

• 37:02Jocko Willink?

  And from a leadership perspective, you're in a leadership position.

• 37:05Pete Roberts?

  Yeah.

• 37:05Jocko Willink?

  Right? For the first time.

• 37:06Pete Roberts?

  Yeah.

• 37:07Jocko Willink?

  And and you have a team of six people and you're the man.

• 37:10Pete Roberts?

  Yep. And I'm trusting.

• 37:13Jocko Willink?

  You say that with a little hesitation.

• 37:15Pete Roberts?

  Yeah, I trust that people will do the right thing.

• 37:18Jocko Willink?

  Are the people that are working for you, your age, a little younger, just, just all the same, same age?

• 37:23Pete Roberts?

  Year or two difference.

• 37:24Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 37:24Pete Roberts?

  All young.

• 37:25Jocko Willink?

  So now you said recession. What happens there?

• 37:30Pete Roberts?

  Well, we were, we were kind of like booming as a company, building some incredible, we would do interactive touchscreen kiosks and all this really, really cool shit with that nobody was doing it.

• 37:43Pete Roberts?

  Recession hit.

• 37:46Pete Roberts?

  We lost sixty five percent of our business overnight. I mean, what's the first thing you cut in a recession? Advertising. You're not supposed to, but you do.

• 37:54Jocko Willink?

  The wrong move, but it's the move that everyone makes.

• 37:56Pete Roberts?

  Yeah, man. I'd probably make the same move.

• 37:58Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 37:58Pete Roberts?

  Where can we cut costs? Ad spend, right? Stop that.

• 38:05Pete Roberts?

  Anyways. The recession hit and we had built this company from like the ground up, just funneled the money back into the company, built, built, built, buy equipment, build this, do all this stuff. I'm like, oh shit. First time I thought about like, these guys bought houses here. Have families or starting families moved away.

• 38:27Jocko Willink?

  How long had the run been at this point?

• 38:29Pete Roberts?

  This had been.

• 38:30Jocko Willink?

  This is a five year run?

• 38:32Pete Roberts?

  That's a good question. When was the recession? Eight or nine? This is six, seven year run.

• 38:37Jocko Willink?

  Okay. Six, seven. So yeah, these guys had established their lives. They established their families up here.

• 38:43Pete Roberts?

  Yes.

• 38:43Jocko Willink?

  They, you were the for, the form of income. You're how they're paying their mortgage.

• 38:48Pete Roberts?

  Absolutely. And I felt that, you know? I don't know if that's weakness, but I'm sensitive to that, man. I, if I promised somebody something like, this company is your future. I mean, this company is your future. I will stop taking a paycheck and that's not the right thing to do. You gotta always pay yourself, right? I will stop taking a paycheck to make sure you get yours. And that's what I did. And what I also did is I took out a line of credit and it was the first money I had taken out from the bank ever.

• 39:22Pete Roberts?

  And I used that money to keep things going, to try to get through the recession. And I didn't want to lay anybody off.

• 39:32Pete Roberts?

  What I had them do was I had them start designing in-house.

• 39:35Jocko Willink?

  Cause by the way, the next thing that you do after you cut advertising, the biggest cost to just about any business there is is your people.

• 39:42Pete Roberts?

  People.

• 39:42Jocko Willink?

  So that's the next thing that gets cut, but you're saying you're not going to do that.

• 39:46Pete Roberts?

  And I'm, and I'm young.

• 39:47Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 39:47Pete Roberts?

  And learning about business as I go, you know? So no, I'm not going to do it. No, they, some of them bought houses and stuff, you know, like I'm not taking away their livelihood. You know, I'll find a way to just get through.

• 40:00Jocko Willink?

  Right.

• 40:00Pete Roberts?

  You know, and I, and I believe I had the fortitude to get through, you know? But, and there's the but, they didn't.

• 40:10Pete Roberts?

  And here's why, because.

• 40:14Pete Roberts?

  I had them start working on in-house projects and I was training jujitsu at the time. And so I was going to develop a platform. So that an academy could. Build a website based off of a templated system for their jujitsu school. And it was going to be badass and we had done this for like Rozak, Noll and Dean a star. We had, we were like one of the first companies to build. Online tools to build things. Makes sense? This is nineteen, early two thousands.

• 40:42Jocko Willink?

  So when you go on and you look at some product and you want to, there's a little customization that can be done to it. You guys that design things to move the mouse around and. There's a bunch of those now.

• 40:51Pete Roberts?

  There's a bunch of them. There was none of them. It was zero.

• 40:57Pete Roberts?

  And so we started building this thing and.

• 40:59Jocko Willink?

  You're, you're building this thing, but you're not being paid for it yet because eventually you're going to sell it. So you're just, that's what you mean by in-house project. You got it.

• 41:07Pete Roberts?

  Now, did jujitsu take a little bit more of my time than it should have? Yep.

• 41:13Jocko Willink?

  These things happen.

• 41:17Pete Roberts?

  Did I think about it more than anything else in the world? I did.

• 41:21Jocko Willink?

  And just real quick, how'd you get into jujitsu?

• 41:24Pete Roberts?

  Well, after football, I stopped playing football and I was like, man, I. I need to fight. Like I need to, you know, I always had this desire to fight and maybe all men have that. I don't know, but I felt like.

• 41:34Jocko Willink?

  Many.

• 41:35Pete Roberts?

  Extra, like extra, like I need to fight. So I'm like. Taekwondo. So I started. Fighting in Taekwondo and achieved that in about. Two years was like, okay. Now what? And then I found jujitsu. And I got choked out by a hundred and fifty pound kid and I was two hundred and eighty-five pounds. And I was like.

• 41:56Jocko Willink?

  That's a convincer.

• 41:58Pete Roberts?

  I'm in. Couldn't figure it out. I came at him with every bit of athleticism. The kid choked me out, almost cold. I had, what just happened? And I bought into it.

• 42:12Pete Roberts?

  So anyhow, anyways, I, I was passionate about jujitsu and I want, I had this perfect plan to build this system. And they started getting salty about it.

• 42:24Jocko Willink?

  Now is that because they felt like there wasn't income? It's because they weren't getting paid by the project, getting commissioned or something like that? What were they getting salty about?

• 42:32Pete Roberts?

  They all got salaries.

• 42:33Jocko Willink?

  So what were they getting salty about?

• 42:34Pete Roberts?

  The fact that they were working on my pet projects. Those words, my pet projects. They were also salty. I had two very young kids. And my wife in the office, but the kids were in the office and they were, you know, playing with their stuff and doing what kids do. They're being kids.

• 42:54Pete Roberts?

  My company, my office, my kids, okay?

• 43:01Pete Roberts?

  They found that a problem.

• 43:04Jocko Willink?

  So out of the, yeah. What was your relationship? Cause this, this, I'm just assuming right now that you got a bunch of people that are working for you that are around the same age as you.

• 43:13Pete Roberts?

  Yep.

• 43:13Jocko Willink?

  And so I'm guessing that you were kind of blown out with all of them.

• 43:17Pete Roberts?

  We were super bros. Super bros. Super immature.

• 43:21Jocko Willink?

  Super bros.

• 43:22Pete Roberts?

  Immature, immature kids, right? Talented, immature kids. I mean, you're talking about like, hey, let's shut it down and go snowboarding. We got two inches of pow pow on Sugarloaf. You know, and we need to hit that. And that's what we do. We just shut it down, grab the snowboard, Rozaknol would send us like $10,000 in product. We just, we just go up. We just rip, rip on the mountain. Hey man, just get the work done. You know, oh, you need, yeah, man, no worries. Just do, just make sure the work's done.

• 43:52Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 43:52Pete Roberts?

  Very loose.

• 43:53Jocko Willink?

  Super bros.

• 43:54Pete Roberts?

  Super bros.

• 43:57Jocko Willink?

  Yes.

• 43:58Pete Roberts?

  Hitting the pow pow. That's what we call it, the powder. So, yeah, man, the relationship was not a boss worker, employee relationship. It was a creative. I always wanted to, we had a foosball table and the, and the, you know, like, give me a break. I mean, this is a creative agency.

• 44:17Jocko Willink?

  Yep, yep, yep.

• 44:20Pete Roberts?

  But when shit hits the fan, the fingers go to one person. This guy, right? So. Alright, I'm ready to sustain this thing and make it happen. They weren't. So. One day. I'm in my wife's office and the whole crew gets up and hands me a paper. It's a thick paper.

• 44:43Pete Roberts?

  They're like, we'll see you on Monday to talk about this.

• 44:48Pete Roberts?

  Because they thought they weren't expendable.

• 44:51Jocko Willink?

  Okay, so they're giving you an ultimatum?

• 44:53Pete Roberts?

  Ultimatum. I was like. I turned white for a second. I was like. Okay. And they walked out.

• 45:01Jocko Willink?

  Were you, did you anticipate this at all?

• 45:04Pete Roberts?

  No, no idea. I will never be caught off guard like that again.

• 45:09Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that one's gonna sting. That one's gonna leave a mark. This is, this is mutiny, you know?

• 45:14Pete Roberts?

  It's a mutiny, straight up mutiny. Okay. My wife is an emotional being. We sat down and we read this, this paper and it was a list of demands. A list of demands about profit sharing. How the company was making all this money and it wasn't being filtered down to the employees. And.

• 45:38Pete Roberts?

  About my kids and how they cannot come into the office anymore because they make noise. A whole list of demands.

• 45:47Jocko Willink?

  They can't concentrate when they're playing foosball.

• 45:49Pete Roberts?

  Yeah, and, and, and, yeah, amongst other things. Young, stupid kids. And I was one of them.

• 45:57Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 45:59Pete Roberts?

  Cause I was naive.

• 46:02Pete Roberts?

  So we started looking at this thing and I was just like. Wow, it's like getting punched in the face.

• 46:10Pete Roberts?

  And my wife went zing and she spun up. And shoo. She's French Canadian and she's, she's, you know, yeah, anyway, she spun up.

• 46:23Pete Roberts?

  I said, okay.

• 46:23Jocko Willink?

  Does she speak French when she's angry?

• 46:25Pete Roberts?

  No, I wish that would be kinda hot. I'd be like, babe, can you speak French?

• 46:30Jocko Willink?

  Just make her mad so she can yell at you in French?

• 46:32Pete Roberts?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, no. So.

• 46:36Pete Roberts?

  So what we did is we just, we sat there and looked at each other and we're like, what? What? And I said, do they have any idea we just took out? A line of credit to support this place to get through the recession? They have any idea we don't have any work?

• 46:55Pete Roberts?

  So. What do we do? Recon. We opened up their computers, logged in and started looking for all the interaction between the staff. And wow, what they thought of me. I was sad. I was like, wow, this is sad. Made me feel like shit.

• 47:16Jocko Willink?

  What'd they think?

• 47:20Pete Roberts?

  I mean, they thought I was like some type of miser, like squirreling away cash and resources. Because I, because I was, I always. Kept a straight face, a happy personality and. They had no idea how much in the hole we were.

• 47:36Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and I can imagine that you're trying to actually protect them from the stress of business.

• 47:42Pete Roberts?

  Yes.

• 47:42Jocko Willink?

  And in doing that, you didn't communicate to them what was actually happening, which meant that they created what was happening in their own minds, which was obviously wrong.

• 47:50Pete Roberts?

  That shit. Them creating what they think reality is in their minds when they don't know all the facts.

• 47:56Jocko Willink?

  There's so many times in business when I talk to businesses and businesses are going through transitions or there's something happening. And, you know, they'll, they'll be asking like, well, do you think we should tell? You know, the, the employees what's happening?

• 48:09Pete Roberts?

  Right.

• 48:09Jocko Willink?

  And I'm like, well, you have two choices. You can tell them what's happening or they're gonna make up a story. They're gonna make up a story and it's not gonna be good. They're gonna think worst case scenario. And so the open communications that is, is how you prevent this kind of thing. And obviously you're 22 years old. That's pretty awesome that you were in the position you were in and obviously you can look back now and it's pretty simple to see what the solutions were. One of them, you were, you were thrown out with these guys too much. And this is a fine line, you know, because. You know, in a SEAL platoon, I had bros, lifetime brothers.

• 48:43Pete Roberts?

  Yeah.

• 48:44Jocko Willink?

  That were, you know, three or four ranks below me. But they were professional and they understood the line between and they understood and they respected the position. And, and then there's other guys that were, you know, that same rank, lower rank that I couldn't, I couldn't give that kind of closeness to. And so that's one of those things that, you know, we, we talk about a lot with companies is it's different for the different people in your company.

• 49:08Pete Roberts?

  Right.

• 49:08Jocko Willink?

  So I'm not saying you can't bro out with people. And also that doesn't mean you don't have awesome relationships with your people because that's what you want. You want to have awesome relationships with the people that are working for you because they're going to do that much more for you. And you can do that much more for them and it becomes a functional, winning team because everyone cares about each other.

• 49:27Pete Roberts?

  Exactly.

• 49:28Jocko Willink?

  There's a dichotomy there, you know?

• 49:30Pete Roberts?

  There is.

• 49:31Jocko Willink?

  Are we being?

• 49:32Pete Roberts?

  There's a line.

• 49:33Jocko Willink?

  Are we super bros?

• 49:34Pete Roberts?

  What is that line? What is that line?

• 49:36Jocko Willink?

  And that line is the thing that you need to figure out. What makes it really hard with the relationship piece is that it's different for different people. And I had some guys that was an E5 in a SEAL platoon and I was the lieutenant and they were my total bros. And there's another guy that's an E5 and I gotta keep a little bit of distance just so they make sure that they, they stay professional.

• 49:53Pete Roberts?

  Right.

• 49:54Jocko Willink?

  And so this is, this is challenging stuff and great lessons learned for anyone running a business, especially if you're young people. But it's not just young people because I see seasoned CEOs asking these same questions.

• 50:07Pete Roberts?

  You don't learn this shit in college. I'm sorry. You know, like, being an entrepreneur, businessman or woman, whatever it's learned. You know, you may have a gift of something or accounting, you may be a good salesperson or good at marketing or something. Nobody's born with a gift of being an entrepreneur. You know, it's built, it's crafted over time and you have to fail and fall flat on your face and get punched in the face to figure it out.

• 50:34Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 50:34Pete Roberts?

  So.

• 50:35Jocko Willink?

  But what's good is unfortunately there's those, like those lessons that your parents tried to teach you, but you didn't listen to. And they go, man, I was so stupid. If you're even aware of them, and that's what's good about like someone that's hearing what you're saying right now. They they might not recognize it before. And this is a chapter in extreme ownership, right? Dichotomy of leadership and you you gotta be, you can't be so close to your people that one's more important. We go through this.

• 50:59Pete Roberts?

  Right.

• 50:59Jocko Willink?

  But the awareness of it is it gives people a percentage chance of maybe instead of falling flat on their face, maybe they just stumble and they're able to recover.

• 51:09Pete Roberts?

  Right.

• 51:09Jocko Willink?

  So this is, you know, classic.

• 51:11Pete Roberts?

  I fell flat.

• 51:12Jocko Willink?

  Yes.

• 51:13Pete Roberts?

  Dude, it hurt, dude.

• 51:15Jocko Willink?

  Okay, so what happens?

• 51:16Pete Roberts?

  So I was, I was sad, man, at first. Then I got angry. And then I got even. No, no, I basically what it was is we are not expendable. Heed these words. And these demands. And we'll talk to you Monday morning. Okay.

• 51:39Pete Roberts?

  So. What happens? We do a little recon, get into the computers, see the communication between all of them, what they thought about me, what they thought about my wife. What they thought was going on with the company. Half an hour later, I'm in my vehicle, divide and conquer. You're not gonna tell me, because in that paper it said, do not come and see us individually, do not seek us out. Do not try to separate one of us and have a conversation. And that's exactly what I did.

• 52:11Jocko Willink?

  By the way, from the employee standpoint. This is a horrible move. They are making as bad of a mistake as you were making as a leader. Because what they should have, any one of them could have done is said, Pete, bro, I gotta talk to you, man. Let me tell you what's going on.

• 52:27Pete Roberts?

  Yeah.

• 52:27Jocko Willink?

  This is what we're thinking. We don't know what's going on with the company. You got us working on these random projects that are like your projects. We should be working for other companies.

• 52:34Pete Roberts?

  Yep.

• 52:34Jocko Willink?

  Can you tell us what in God's name is going on so we can move forward? That's what one of those.

• 52:38Pete Roberts?

  Nobody was that mature.

• 52:39Jocko Willink?

  And you could have brought him into a room and said, hey, guys, I I apologize for not telling you, but let me tell you what what income we have on the in the next six months. Nothing.

• 52:48Pete Roberts?

  Nothing.

• 52:49Jocko Willink?

  So this is what we're gonna do to try and survive. You could have given the plan. They would understand why you were doing what you're doing and it would have been good. So both sides of the chain of command there are actually making grievous mistakes.

• 52:58Pete Roberts?

  Bad mistakes. My, and I learned from that, that that was, I mean, I'm a transparent person as it is. You can ask me anything you want. And I will answer it. I was just a dumb kid, though. I didn't want to show weakness to them is what I was thinking. Because I didn't want them to feel like they needed to go find another job. I didn't want them to think that. Start talking like all the company is gonna shut down. I was making my own stories. I didn't trust they would make the right decision if I told them this. So I just carried on to try to push through. And you're right, it was a mistake to not share it with them because it would have been. I was, we were bleeding as a company, but they were the blood I was trying to keep in.

• 53:40Pete Roberts?

  It would have been easier just to let them decide what they wanted to do after in hindsight, telling them where we were as a company, how the recession had affected us. But I didn't. Yeah. And so I divided and conquered. Meaning. I got in my vehicle, drive to the first one's house, knock on the door, John, we're gonna talk or you have no job. John's still with me right now. He works for Origin. Sweet. I was pissed. I was so pissed. I was crying a little bit. I was pissed. Have you ever been so pissed like you're just like?

• 54:21Pete Roberts?

  You cried? Yes. Negative. Next question.

• 54:28Pete Roberts?

  Really? I don't. Not even when you were a kid? I mean, I'm a kid. I guess, I guess. I'm talking about being a kid. Seven. I'm talking like twenty, what am I, twenty-three, twenty-four, something like that. Pissed. I was in the teams at that point. We're not crying. Okay. It's not happening.

• 54:45Pete Roberts?

  This is one tough dude.

• 54:49Pete Roberts?

  Echo, I'm having a conversation with you. I know.

• 54:54Pete Roberts?

  Have you read it so pissed you like started crying? Honestly, crying is not like anger does not lead to tears in my, in, for me. Crying is weakness leaving the body. No, seriously, like I, I, you know, if something is sad, okay, I get it. But being angry, that's, that's, okay, but you know, everyone's a little different. Kid. Yeah, yeah, no. I was a kid. You're, you're a kid. I was a kid. Yeah.

• 55:18Speaker 02

  Chuckies either.

• 55:19Pete Roberts?

  Dude, remember, I didn't have, I didn't have a mentor either. Like when I was a kid, I didn't have a, I had, I had one mentor, my friend, my, my buddy's father. Cause it was a single, single mom who was, yeah, it just, we, as kids, we, a lot of the time we raised ourselves. I didn't have a mentor. I didn't have like a father figure around all the time to see how to, so I just, I, I worked off of pure drive and emotion.

• 55:44Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Yeah. And again, I'm not trying to be a jerk.

• 55:47Pete Roberts?

  No.

• 55:47Jocko Willink?

  I'm having fun with it.

• 55:48Pete Roberts?

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 55:49Jocko Willink?

  But, so you're so, you're so pissed.

• 55:52Pete Roberts?

  So pissed.

• 55:52Jocko Willink?

  You've got freaking tears in your eyes.

• 55:54Pete Roberts?

  Yeah.

• 55:55Jocko Willink?

  And you go to John.

• 55:56Pete Roberts?

  Like you fucking, you want this job or not? Cause if you say no, you're not talking to me, you do not have a job. And you've got a new house.

• 56:06Jocko Willink?

  Okay. So he had.

• 56:07Pete Roberts?

  He's in the car.

• 56:08Jocko Willink?

  Okay. One down.

• 56:10Pete Roberts?

  One down.

• 56:11Jocko Willink?

  One in the game. Still one in the game. Got it.

• 56:13Pete Roberts?

  As I drove to the others' houses, they either didn't answer the door and hid, or answered the door and said, I can't talk to you and closed it.

• 56:23Jocko Willink?

  Okay, these are kids. You know, like that's what a kid does.

• 56:26Pete Roberts?

  These are kids.

• 56:27Jocko Willink?

  Which is, which is a message to everybody.

• 56:29Pete Roberts?

  Yeah.

• 56:30Jocko Willink?

  When you don't want to talk to somebody, y- y- you're not solving anything. You know what I mean?

• 56:35Pete Roberts?

  Yes.

• 56:36Jocko Willink?

  Now, now, I'm not saying that there's some times where I'm so mad at you that I'm like, Pete, come back tomorrow, bro. Cause right now it ain't gonna go good.

• 56:44Pete Roberts?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 56:44Jocko Willink?

  I'm so mad I could cry.

• 56:45Pete Roberts?

  Yeah.

• 56:46Jocko Willink?

  Or something like that.

• 56:48Pete Roberts?

  Sounds really sensitive, man. Would you actually do that? That is weak.

• 56:51Jocko Willink?

  But that is, that, the, the point is though, seriously, if there's, if there's a problem and you're not gonna talk about it, you're gonna sound like that kid right there that answers, I can't, I can't talk to you right now, and shuts the door. That's, that's not a way to get anything solved. Are there times where you need a little bit of distance?

• 57:07Pete Roberts?

  Yeah.

• 57:08Jocko Willink?

  Because people are hot-headed? Yes, that happens.

• 57:10Pete Roberts?

  As long as you know you're gonna, you both know that it's solvable. You know, like, I feel like with respect to business and stuff like, like if you're working with a client, you may like bang heads with a client. And be like, all right, listen, we need to, we need to shut this down and discuss it like in 48 hours. That's learned over time, not when you're a kid. You just want to get after like, ah.

• 57:36Jocko Willink?

  And even your approach was super hardcore. And this is again, you know, people.

• 57:41Pete Roberts?

  A little bit aggressive.

• 57:42Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, people, people want to hear me say like, that's right. You go in there and you say you either talk to me now or you don't have a job.

• 57:49Pete Roberts?

  Yeah, I was already bleeding though. So was that the right choice?

• 57:53Jocko Willink?

  I don't know, but the, the, the approach for me would be like, um, hey, let me explain to you what's going on. And then you can think more about your decision because right now I'm telling you what you've decided and what you've presented to me is so far off base. That if this is what you want to make your decision based on, I'm telling you what I'm going to have to do is let you go. Yep. Because I haven't told you yet, but we don't have any money and I'm paying you out of my own pocket.

• 58:19Pete Roberts?

  Right.

• 58:20Jocko Willink?

  So if you don't like that and you don't want me to pay you out of my own pocket anymore, I'm actually good with that. But if you want to have a job and you want to try and make this thing work, let's have a conversation.

• 58:28Pete Roberts?

  And that's close to exactly what I would say now.

• 58:32Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, exactly. A hundred percent. The reason I'm making this point is because I had a guy hit me up on social media the other day.

• 58:37Pete Roberts?

  Yeah.

• 58:38Jocko Willink?

  He asked a legit question and, and he pre prefaced the question. He says, I'm a very direct guy like you, meaning he's direct like me. Okay. And he says, and I give feedback and it makes people mad and rubs them the wrong way.

• 58:53Jocko Willink?

  And, and I'm just, you know, I wrote back, I go, look, man, I'm direct on Twitter, which is a hundred and forty characters. And I'm, I'm answering seven hundred and twenty questions in, you know, rapid fire. And, and so, yeah, I'm direct when someone says, what is your, I, what is your average, uh, daily diet consists of steak? Next word, you know what I mean?

• 59:13Pete Roberts?

  Yeah, you're direct, you're not an asshole.

• 59:16Jocko Willink?

  But when I, but that's, and it's also like, I'm having fun. Like that's, that's the fun part of, you know, interacting with people through social media. That's not how I'm treating another human being face to face in a real relationship when we're trying to build something. Then I'm using tact, I'm using maneuvering, I'm manipulating the situation, I'm setting things up, I'm being the most tactful person. In fact, not only am I not going to rub them the wrong way, I'm going to rub them in a very nice way. So they feel good about the conversation that we had.

• 59:44Pete Roberts?

  Disarm them and have a real conversation.

• 59:46Jocko Willink?

  The, the point is, is that, you know, you're, you, like you said, the, what my little quote was, is what you would say now. Back then, you're young. You're bleeding.

• 59:57Pete Roberts?

  I'm bleeding.

• 59:58Jocko Willink?

  You're pissed off.

• 59:59Pete Roberts?

  Yeah.

• 59:59Jocko Willink?

  And you say, you know what?

• 1:00:00Pete Roberts?

  My wife nagging at me about finances.

• 1:00:02Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:03Pete Roberts?

  You know how that all builds. Two young kids, don't sleep through the night. You know, it's, it gets, it gets tricky and you're trying to maintain this.

• 1:00:12Jocko Willink?

  So, so just FYI, that, what you just said? You, you just said, you know how it is? And to be honest with you, I don't know how that is. Because I was in the military, I got a paycheck every two weeks.

• 1:00:23Pete Roberts?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:23Jocko Willink?

  I had kids, I had health insurance taken care of, I had a house taken care of. It's, it's a huge, it's, it's, it's, it's actually a feeling I don't know. Um, so I, yeah, don't know that feeling. I'm, I can only imagine. I can only imagine what I would be thinking? If I was in your shoes at 22 years old with a wife, two screaming kids, and I don't have any money. So, yeah, check.

• 1:00:50Pete Roberts?

  Okay.

• 1:00:50Jocko Willink?

  Get some.

• 1:00:52Pete Roberts?

  I will tell you about that feeling. It's a feeling I'm never gonna go back to.

• 1:00:57Pete Roberts?

  As we, as I divided and conquered, it did not go my way.

• 1:01:05Pete Roberts?

  So.

• 1:01:06Jocko Willink?

  Meaning that the people were saying?

• 1:01:08Pete Roberts?

  They can't talk or they hid.

• 1:01:09Jocko Willink?

  They can't talk to you.

• 1:01:10Pete Roberts?

  They went, they left their house, their homes, whatever.

• 1:01:15Pete Roberts?

  So I made a decision what to do. I told, talked to my wife. She's like, what are we gonna do? I said, well? I said, they all think they're expendable. Except? They're not. Because there's not a person in this world?

• 1:01:33Pete Roberts?

  That is so good. They can't be replaced, right?

• 1:01:37Jocko Willink?

  You got it, got it.

• 1:01:38Pete Roberts?

  They think they're not expendable. There's not a person in this world that is so good at their job, they can't be replaced.

• 1:01:45Jocko Willink?

  Did you hear that echo?

• 1:01:46Pete Roberts?

  Yes, sir.

• 1:01:46Jocko Willink?

  Just, just saying.

• 1:01:48Pete Roberts?

  Almost none, but yeah, you're right, you're right. There's a lot of talented people in the world.

• 1:01:55Pete Roberts?

  So what did I do? Hefty trash bags. Get some.

• 1:02:02Pete Roberts?

  I went up to that studio and I scraped their desks individually into trash bags and it felt good. I didn't even mean to say that like, but it felt good. Yeah. I literally just scraped it, tied it up, went to the next one. My wife just pushed it all into the bag. This is good. Therapy. Yep. We dragged all the shit. I didn't care what was in the bag. I don't care what they had on their desks. My property.

• 1:02:32Pete Roberts?

  Your shit. In the trash bags. Didn't organize nothing, just scraped. Dragged them down the stairs. Gently? Cause I'm getting a feeling this was not a gentle. Dragged them down the stairs. We were in this, this like studio, you know, third floor studio that we had built out for us. Beautiful. Right.

• 1:02:57Pete Roberts?

  That Monday morning. The art director who I cut my teeth with. Came down. He lived in Bangor, Maine. We say Bangor. Came down and we were sitting there. And it was glass, like the glass and. It's like you could see through it being inside, but from the outside you can't.

• 1:03:18Pete Roberts?

  They all got out of the same vehicle, kind of giggling and chuckling like they own me. They own this company. And they walked in the door and then we were sitting there with the trash bags and they went from.

• 1:03:35Pete Roberts?

  Giddy.

• 1:03:37Pete Roberts?

  To guilty, to sadness and their faces turned white.

• 1:03:43Pete Roberts?

  There's your shit. Take it.

• 1:03:48Pete Roberts?

  And that was it. Done.

• 1:03:52Pete Roberts?

  That was tough.

• 1:03:56Pete Roberts?

  I said a few words.

• 1:03:59Pete Roberts?

  But I was not going to be held hostage to this situation.

• 1:04:09Pete Roberts?

  In business, I say you've got like forty years of being a maker. I did a speech recently at an innovation, I wrote a speech for an innovation expo. Zero to twenty, you're learning. Twenty to sixty, you're doing. And sixty to eighty, hopefully you're enjoying the fruits of your labor. Anything good in life takes ten years. So my first ten years had passed, but I still had thirty to go. And so I knew I wasn't done.

• 1:04:43Pete Roberts?

  But the pain of the situation and the, in the experience, I grew exponentially overnight.

• 1:04:54Pete Roberts?

  We had salvaged a small part of the company, which was this, was this, we called it webware. Right? It was like online software, like everything is now, like the cloud. Yeah. But there was no cloud. There was this system. I was able to salvage that because it had like a, a cool little customer base of some high-end customers and they paid monthly. It was just like reoccurring payments, right? Just to use it.

• 1:05:22Pete Roberts?

  And so I found a buyer for it and the negotiation took a long time.

• 1:05:29Pete Roberts?

  And in that long time, we had no income, no money. And so what did I do? I started selling shit. Dirt bikes, four-wheelers, snowmobiles. Every non-essential item I owned got sold. Trying to maintain keeping my home, right? Which we had built, my wife and I, in the forest. Which was our dream home, just a tiny little fifteen hundred square foot timber frame.

• 1:06:02Pete Roberts?

  Borrowing money from family. And in in our parents. And them knowing the situation we're in, so them actually just like. Giving us food or whatever. That whole time I had to maintain like this super composure to try and sell this thing. All this shit happening in the background.

• 1:06:27Pete Roberts?

  And I think it was like eight months. And I finally sold it. Two hundred thousand dollars, I think it was. Which.

• 1:06:40Pete Roberts?

  Was cheap. For what we had built. Mm hmm. Extremely cheap. But I was in a position where. We had nothing left. Had freaking nothing left. You know?

• 1:06:57Pete Roberts?

  It was super. Super challenging and I could have easily easily turned to. Substance abuse, which I didn't. I've never been into substances.

• 1:07:09Pete Roberts?

  I could have easily just. Fell off the deep end and felt like a failure. Which I knew I wasn't.

• 1:07:19Pete Roberts?

  My wife wanted me to go find a job. She's like. That's what I was about to say. I can't do this. Normal, normal, hey, you go get a nine to five. Actually, I can't do this. I can't do this, Pete. I can't do this.

• 1:07:32Pete Roberts?

  During that eight month stint, you've got to figure something. I said, babe.

• 1:07:38Pete Roberts?

  I will find a way to make this work. And I believe everything happens for a reason.

• 1:07:47Pete Roberts?

  It happened for a reason. And I just kept that in the back of my head.

• 1:07:52Pete Roberts?

  And I pushed and pushed and pushed forward. And it wasn't freaking easy. Like it was super, super hard, like on us.

• 1:08:05Pete Roberts?

  But she stood by me.

• 1:08:08Pete Roberts?

  Unwavering. She stood by me. Never once did she want to leave. Did she?

• 1:08:20Pete Roberts?

  Not believe in me?

• 1:08:24Pete Roberts?

  Or not trust me? Which is what I needed? And like I said earlier about filling the glass back up. It was empty. It was bone friggin dry. Bone dry. And she just put a little bit back in. And we kept moving and kept chugging.

• 1:08:44Jocko Willink?

  Now during that time period where you're looking to sell the old company. Are you hatching plans? Or is you gotta be a hundred percent focused on just selling this company?

• 1:08:55Pete Roberts?

  My creativity dove to the bottom of the ocean. Done. I was, I don't.

• 1:09:04Pete Roberts?

  I've never experienced depression. You know? But I, I, I get it.

• 1:09:11Pete Roberts?

  I felt a little bit like a failure.

• 1:09:17Pete Roberts?

  I felt a little bit like a failure. But I knew I wasn't. So every time I had a negative thought, I would just push through it. I just pushed through the thought and what got me through a lot of that was training jujitsu. Where I could expel my energy and use my creativity, which I thought I had lost in jujitsu. It's a very creative sport, art.

• 1:09:44Pete Roberts?

  And that kind of kept me.

• 1:09:47Pete Roberts?

  I guess it kept those endorphins flowing so I could maintain some stability.

• 1:09:54Jocko Willink?

  But tactically, your focus is.

• 1:09:57Pete Roberts?

  Sell.

• 1:09:58Jocko Willink?

  It's gotta, gotta maintain this, make it look good, let's show them the numbers that are coming in for our few clients and what the projections could be. That's all you're doing.

• 1:10:05Pete Roberts?

  Yep.

• 1:10:06Jocko Willink?

  That's all you're doing. And you're, you're thinking when you sell that thing, you're gonna have enough and you'll figure it out later, but you're not worried about it right now.

• 1:10:12Pete Roberts?

  Exactly.

• 1:10:14Jocko Willink?

  So you make the sale.

• 1:10:16Pete Roberts?

  I make the sale for the first year, we get a monthly check. Oh, it's like five grand a month or something. Not the full amount, just like five grand a month. So during that time, I decided to just take 12 months and figure out what comes next. And in that 12 months, I traveled around the country, training jujitsu and filming a thing we call BJJ Weekly. Because that's what I was passionate about. And so we travel around and film technique and train and all this stuff. It was like an excuse to train jujitsu. That's it. This newsletter and

• 1:11:01Pete Roberts?

  after that 12 months and traveling around, it just struck me what I wanted to do. Years earlier, I had designed this logo for a Yi brand. Off the cuff, came to me, I get my ideas in the morning. One morning, I sat down and just boom, done. Five minutes, you know? Sometimes you can have a client come in, we used to, and I'd spend 100 hours on the frigging logo, you know? People don't realize how much logos cost. And sometimes you just nail it, like 10 minutes, done, finished. It's just, it's just like getting hit by lightning, just boom, done. And that's what happened with this Origin thing.

• 1:11:45Pete Roberts?

  I wanted to start a brand because what I had done, what I had learned in over that year of driving around and training and reconnecting with myself and my family was that I loved building brands and products. I loved taking something from nothing, like a drawing, and making it into something. And I had an aversion to the screen.

• 1:12:18Pete Roberts?

  And in that space because of the new media thing, I was always on a screen. And I, I, I just, I told the man, I, I need to like, do something physically, like have something physical. I need to have a physical thing to do. Cause I was an art major and I'm an artist and I zip up goalposts. I needed a thing to do so. In jujitsu, I had seen that the, the uniform like hadn't changed. I don't know. They've been wearing Komodos for a thousand years, but you know, judo, you know, hundreds of years. Jujitsu, a hundred years in Brazil, same thing, same, same damn thing. Hundred percent cotton uniform. This is what you wear. And I was like, why?

• 1:13:02Pete Roberts?

  Why do you wear that? You got Under Armour with like, wicking stuff and you've got air helmets instead of leather helmets and you know, just all these innovations in other sports and jujitsu had shit. We had nothing. Like wearing a bunch of just straight cotton balls and you know, sweaty soaked in ghee that stretches and stinks bad. It sucked and so to start, I was like, okay, I gotta start. I gotta start.

• 1:13:32Jocko Willink?

  Meaning you, you now have the vision. You, you see that ghee's haven't progressed.

• 1:13:36Pete Roberts?

  Right.

• 1:13:36Jocko Willink?

  You know that they can be made better.

• 1:13:38Pete Roberts?

  Yep.

• 1:13:39Jocko Willink?

  But you, but you don't actually, and so you say, okay, I want to make the best ghee in the world.

• 1:13:44Pete Roberts?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:44Jocko Willink?

  That's, that's the vision.

• 1:13:45Pete Roberts?

  Yes, it is.

• 1:13:46Jocko Willink?

  And you have to start somewhere.

• 1:13:48Pete Roberts?

  You gotta start somewhere. So I, I didn't know anything about textiles, but I knew about design and I knew about the human body and you know, how the human body worked. And, and in, in college sports, you learn about that a lot, you know, mechanics, mechanics of the body and they, they retrain you how to run in college. Like they, you all run the same. You do exercises. So you're all striking, forward striking with your foot. You all run the same.

• 1:14:15Pete Roberts?

  And so I designed like a gi pants and it was like the cowboy cut because I knew that in jujitsu when you're like you're squatting a lot and on your knees and the material pulled up your up your leg but pulled down your butt. So you're like got plumber's crack, which sucks. So I designed like so the knee pads came up to your hips. So when you squatted, it would pull from your hips. Right. Instead of a cross to the top of your leg. And did did some cool innovations like that. And then I was like, all right, time to go. So we launched a gi at we we we we imported this gi from Pakistan, one gi. I was in the basement of my house.

• 1:14:59Pete Roberts?

  And I was like, we're gonna start this brand. So I in the basement sucked. Here comes a gi. We shot a photo. We saw some photos off it and I launched it through BJJ Weekly. And boom, forty grand. I was like, wow. But you didn't have any gees. No. None. No gees. But I wanted to prove that we could do something different. And I trusted I could make it happen. No, we didn't have any gees.

• 1:15:33Pete Roberts?

  There's like two hundred gees sold. I've got something here. I've got something good here.

• 1:15:42Pete Roberts?

  And I knew a new adventure was gonna start. And my wife spun up. In a positive way? No.

• 1:15:53Pete Roberts?

  She just like,

• 1:15:56Pete Roberts?

  what are you doing? I'm like, I'm starting a gi brand.

• 1:16:00Pete Roberts?

  And she like got sick, like I don't know, she might have had an anxiety attack at first, like you you you can't do this again. You can't, you know, you can't start another company, you know, it's like just and I used this word lightly, being around a war hero like you. No warrior here, I promise you that. PTSD of business. Right. That's a real thing. Like she she had she had like PTSD of business because of what we had gone through and selling everything and the feeling you get that you keep you get you keep this feeling. For me, I used it for drive. For her, she used it for.

• 1:16:43Pete Roberts?

  I don't ever want to feel that again. That makes me like ill. For me, it was like, I'm never gonna feel that again. I'm gonna make sure I never feel that again. And I'm gonna do something about it. So I did it anyways. Started a company, Origin, and

• 1:17:04Pete Roberts?

  that's when it began, 2011. Ten or two thousand eleven.

• 1:17:10Jocko Willink?

  So, how do you start it? So you got one gi, you sold forty grand worth of one gi that you didn't have.

• 1:17:18Pete Roberts?

  Right.

• 1:17:18Jocko Willink?

  What, what, what do you do next? And did you know at this point you wanted to make them in America? Had you figured that part out yet?

• 1:17:24Pete Roberts?

  No, no, I, I, I, let me take that back.

• 1:17:27Jocko Willink?

  You figured you'd make them in America?

• 1:17:28Pete Roberts?

  I wanted to make them in America. And so I started like calling all the factories in, in Maine like, hey, you know, you guys sew stuff? Yeah, cool. Can you sew this? No. Okay.

• 1:17:42Jocko Willink?

  For those people that don't know, Maine has traditionally had a lot of industry up here, manufacturing.

• 1:17:49Pete Roberts?

  Big time.

• 1:17:49Jocko Willink?

  Especially when we, when we were kids.

• 1:17:51Pete Roberts?

  Yes.

• 1:17:52Jocko Willink?

  Uh, you know, big brands up here that build a lot, you build all kinds of stuff.

• 1:17:56Pete Roberts?

  Bass shoe, ten minutes away, sold out. Dexter shoe, Hayden shoe, Lou Hayden. You know, San Antonio shoe passed away. And huge companies, uh, LL Bean. New Balance, twenty minutes away. So Rich Heritage Manufacturing.

• 1:18:15Pete Roberts?

  But apparel in Maine, a little different. We made shoes and we wove fabric and stuff like that. But apparel wasn't, wasn't the norm. So

• 1:18:27Pete Roberts?

  what I did is we were in that basement and we're like, okay.

• 1:18:30Jocko Willink?

  And I just gotta make this note that all those, a lot of those companies that you're talking about that had built all this stuff here for all those years, a lot of them had left.

• 1:18:37Pete Roberts?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:38Jocko Willink?

  So that, that's the

• 1:18:39Pete Roberts?

  All, I, all of them.

• 1:18:41Jocko Willink?

  Situation.

• 1:18:41Pete Roberts?

  Except all of them had left. Uh, LL Bean, they still make some stuff here. The rest, left, gone. So.

• 1:18:50Jocko Willink?

  New Balance still makes some stuff here too.

• 1:18:51Pete Roberts?

  Yeah, New Balance does. Oh yeah, for sure. Yeah, New Balance is awesome. Uh, so.

• 1:18:58Pete Roberts?

  I was like, okay. We're gonna make a belt. That's what we're gonna do. We're gonna make a belt. A jujitsu belt? Yeah. Yeah. So. There was this guy in Lewiston who ran this company. And I called him up and like, I need some sewing machines. And he's like, okay, well, why don't you stop by? And Lewiston, Maine, one of the manufacturing hubs of Maine at one time. Walked in and he's like, what do you need? I was like. This is what I want to make. It's a belt for martial arts. He's like, okay. And I said, I just need some a machine to do that. And like, I got 500 bucks cash I can spend on it. Can you give me something to practice with? And so he sold me a machine.

• 1:19:43Pete Roberts?

  Showed me how to thread the bobbin, showed me where it went, pull through the needle. And I'm like, okay, okay. We filmed it. So we knew how to do it. So we're like filming him doing this. And like, okay. So we took the sewing machine and then I put it in my basement next to the desk and I'm like, yeah.

• 1:19:59Pete Roberts?

  Sewing machine. And my wife was just like.

• 1:20:05Pete Roberts?

  Shaking her head. Luckily, luckily, we had sold a preorder. So we had sold $40,000 in ghee's that didn't exist. So she had gotten off my back. A little bit.

• 1:20:18Pete Roberts?

  So that machinery sat there and. As we looked at trying to like make this ghee. And I didn't say, oh, we're gonna make a ghee in America. I just said, right, we're gonna make a ghee. We're gonna change. The ghee. We're gonna change the ghee first. So we in we started. The import game. Everybody else is doing it. Everybody's telling me manufacturing's dead. I did a few phone calls. Pretty much everybody's like, yeah, you can't really do that. And so I was like, okay, you know. And the whole time I'm thinking like. Something's not right. Here that I can't do this. And I just couldn't put my finger on what it was. So I imported.

• 1:21:01Pete Roberts?

  You know, in 2011 and uh, May, we started in 2011 and into 2012.

• 1:21:09Pete Roberts?

  Did a few batches, did the whole, hey, limited edition batch thing, geez, but we promoted it with the innovations we had. It was still shit. You know, when it comes right down to it.

• 1:21:21Speaker 02

  What the gi was?

• 1:21:21Pete Roberts?

  Yeah, man, it was still shit. It's still using old textiles that have existed.

• 1:21:26Speaker 02

  So you design, you said you imported one from Pakistan?

• 1:21:30Pete Roberts?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:31Speaker 02

  And then what did you do, like cut it up and redesign it or something? Or did you send the design to them and they?

• 1:21:36Pete Roberts?

  So I, I designed like everything in Illustrator, like a tech pack, like I want this here, I want the knee pads here, they gotta fall here, the, you know, belt loops because I don't want to untie the, all this stuff and, and then they.

• 1:21:47Speaker 02

  And they send it?

• 1:21:48Pete Roberts?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:48Speaker 02

  Done?

• 1:21:48Pete Roberts?

  Yep.

• 1:21:49Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:21:49Pete Roberts?

  Finished. So. You know, you know, in Pakistan. Um, they're like the manufacturing, for martial arts, it's like the manufacturing hub in this little city called Salekhat.

• 1:22:02Pete Roberts?

  They're actually like, almost like migrant workers, there's a ton of factories, jujitsu factories. But the workers are the same.

• 1:22:09Speaker 02

  All the same guys in there?

• 1:22:10Pete Roberts?

  Yeah, all the same guys.

• 1:22:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:22:11Pete Roberts?

  Or whatever.

• 1:22:12Speaker 02

  They rotate around.

• 1:22:12Pete Roberts?

  Oh, they.

• 1:22:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:22:13Pete Roberts?

  Hey, we got a contractor over here, we're gonna make.

• 1:22:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, let's go make them.

• 1:22:16Pete Roberts?

  Geez, a good bunch of guys show up there, they work for pennies and.

• 1:22:20Speaker 02

  Pennies.

• 1:22:20Pete Roberts?

  Yep. Yep. So. We did the importing thing and. We started to grow rapidly, we started to make money. And at that point, my other business, I was making kind of that monthly income and then I got kind of like a chunk of money, like a hundred grand. I was like, all right, cool. I can like take a deep breath and really. Push this thing. And so I pushed it and. We started selling more and more. Then I came out with this really cool backpack called a Mundial backpack, Munjal backpack, technical backpack, and we sold a ton of them, thousand of them.

• 1:22:59Pete Roberts?

  And then we came out with this product for grip training, we weren't patenting anything, we were just, I was like, boom, because that's what I did, like, once I got on the rolls, like, design this, design this, and we were just selling, selling, selling.

• 1:23:13Pete Roberts?

  And during this time, I was also competing, you know, cause

• 1:23:19Pete Roberts?

  a male.

• 1:23:21Jocko Willink?

  It's jujitsu.

• 1:23:22Pete Roberts?

  It's jujitsu and you want to test yourself against the best in the world. So I was training hard. I had ended up winning the, the, um, let me, let me digress for a sec. I had seen another company release a product for grip training that looked exactly like ours.

• 1:23:41Jocko Willink?

  What was the product though? Was it your grip training?

• 1:23:43Pete Roberts?

  Yeah, it's called an orang hang. So it's you, it's like the gi and then collar.

• 1:23:49Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:50Pete Roberts?

  Yeah. It was cool. It was awesome. And I was like, those bastards ripped us off. And I wasn't thinking my manufacturer or anything, but I'm just like, man, another company ripped us off. I should have patented that, you know, blah, blah, blah. Okay. So I was competing. I ended up going to Canada. I won the world pro trials. I was a brown belt at the time, won the world pro trials in the black belt division. Cause they, you know, they, they put the divisions together as, you know, for, that was in 2012. Now they, I think they separated them now again, but. So I got to go over to Abu Dhabi and compete in the world pro and as a brown belt in that black belt division.

• 1:24:34Pete Roberts?

  I'm sitting there before my match and I'm supposed to fight, uh, Shangji Hiberro and the quarterfinals of the open division.

• 1:24:42Jocko Willink?

  Sweet.

• 1:24:44Pete Roberts?

  And I, I, I'm going to say this. It was bad seeding, like the seeding of the brackets was not good.

• 1:24:55Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 1:24:56Pete Roberts?

  Um, like I had in my bracket, a guy from Brazil, JT Torres, uh, Shangji, and maybe Andre Galván. And so JT didn't want to fight. So he, so I fought the other kid from Brazil. And he was much smaller and I was athletic and good and I, I ended up winning. And then JT just kind of like, didn't want to fight. So then he coached me against Shangji. We had a war. It was good, man. I had a last couple of seconds, man. It was very close. Um, the problem was.

• 1:25:32Jocko Willink?

  Don't know Shangji is multiple time world champion. One of the best of all time. In jujitsu.

• 1:25:39Pete Roberts?

  Big time. Awesome guy too.

• 1:25:41Jocko Willink?

  Awesome guy.

• 1:25:41Pete Roberts?

  Awesome guy. So, but the seating was bad like Lovato wasn't in it like there was a couple of other guys. I don't know, just if my division could have been tougher and I would have gotten my ass kicked a lot earlier. Okay? So, but we had a war and it was awesome. And maybe I would have won if I had worked harder. Or maybe I would have won if that girl from Poland didn't walk by me right before the match with an Origin gi on and a different logo on the back.

• 1:26:17Pete Roberts?

  And what was on my-

• 1:26:18Jocko Willink?

  So your cut of a gi, like the gi that you designed?

• 1:26:21Pete Roberts?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:22Jocko Willink?

  And you see a girl from Poland who's competing, she walks by?

• 1:26:26Pete Roberts?

  Yeah, it was, it was actually, uh, it was, it was, uh, the pants, yeah, it was the pants. There's a logo, a different logo on the back, but our whole thing.

• 1:26:35Jocko Willink?

  Your design?

• 1:26:36Pete Roberts?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:36Jocko Willink?

  But different logo?

• 1:26:38Pete Roberts?

  Yep. I knew it was my manufacturer and then everything clicked. They ripped off the orangutan grip trainers. Okay, okay. But what am I to do because I'm locked into these guys now?

• 1:26:55Pete Roberts?

  So I had to strategize. So I went out and lost in the quarterfinals. Got on an airplane, worst freaking flight of my life.

• 1:27:08Pete Roberts?

  Cause I'm an ADHD kid and I can't be stuck in a freaking seat for 14 hours. That sucks.

• 1:27:17Pete Roberts?

  And on the ride back, I was talking to JT, who I'd become good friends with. He was kinda like in a tricky position in life. He was still with his instructor in Maryland. And just didn't know kind of what to do. He wasn't progressing and he was telling me like, man, I gotta, I've gotta get, like, I have to do a full workout before I can actually train with the guys. Cause he was so good, he just wasn't getting it, you know? And you know, the Mecca of Jiu Jitsu, you know, is California.

• 1:27:49Pete Roberts?

  Ultimately. So far as to say San Diego. San Diego.

• 1:27:52Jocko Willink?

  That's where he went.

• 1:27:52Pete Roberts?

  San Diego, that's where he went. So he was figuring his whole thing out. SoCal for sure. SoCal, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He was figuring his whole thing out. And alls I'm thinking about is like this problem. I'm like, man, I think I'm gonna build a factory. We're on the airplane. I was like, he was looking at me like, oh, yeah. I'm gonna build a factory. Screw this shit.

• 1:28:17Pete Roberts?

  This is bullshit. I said, I'm not competing anymore. I'm done. And alls he wanted to do is win the world championship. So we kinda like helped each other a little bit in that plane ride back like kinda you know, bouncing ideas off each other. Decompression. Yeah. Decompression. So. I, I got back and.

• 1:28:38Pete Roberts?

  I Skyped my manufacturer.

• 1:28:42Pete Roberts?

  And. I was like.

• 1:28:46Pete Roberts?

  Over Skype, I'm like. This is bullshit. You freaking. I didn't say that. So you fucking ripped off our intellectual property and sold it to other brands.

• 1:29:02Pete Roberts?

  And he said. Business is business. Dang. You ever have a defining moment in your life where you just turn on and you're like, yep, done? I knew at that moment what we were gonna do. Like.

• 1:29:19Pete Roberts?

  It was clear. It became clear. And I knew the challenge in front of me and I knew it was insane and I knew it couldn't be done and I was like, it's happening.

• 1:29:31Pete Roberts?

  Props. It's so, so, uh.

• 1:29:36Pete Roberts?

  I gotta tell you a little bit of what happened right after. Right after that, I went out to the world championships. To compete, cuz I had already signed up.

• 1:29:48Pete Roberts?

  And that was gonna be my year.

• 1:29:52Pete Roberts?

  We were there and there was this brand there.

• 1:29:57Pete Roberts?

  And I walked up and I walked by and I, I did a double take. I was like. What? And I looked to the right and there's our Mundial Technical Backpack, right there.

• 1:30:08Pete Roberts?

  Button with red. And their logo on it.

• 1:30:13Pete Roberts?

  I went up to the guy and I was like, dude, I said, got any original ideas? And everybody there is a badass, except for this guy who doesn't do jujitsu, who does nothing, right? Just some chubby dude who wants to capitalize on the success of combat sports and jujitsu's growth in California. And I'm not going to name the company. And I was like, that is weak? I said, in bullshit.

• 1:30:44Pete Roberts?

  I said, get some original friggin ideas. I went down, walked down myself and the deco, our business partner. And, and he, his wife and my wife were down there. And I told my wife, in spin, did she ever?

• 1:31:04Pete Roberts?

  She went up there and she flipped out on the guy.

• 1:31:09Jocko Willink?

  Amanda bringing it.

• 1:31:10Pete Roberts?

  She's bringing it five, two, one hundred and three pounds. A fury.

• 1:31:16Jocko Willink?

  French Canadian fury.

• 1:31:18Pete Roberts?

  Done. It was awesome.

• 1:31:22Pete Roberts?

  We flew back and, and the picture was already clear. This was just like added motivation. Just added motivation. I called one of my buddies, Tim, and, and John was already working for me from my last business.

• 1:31:38Jocko Willink?

  The Soul Survivor.

• 1:31:39Pete Roberts?

  The Soul Survivor moved back to Farmington.

• 1:31:44Pete Roberts?

  What we did is we grabbed that, like, that tape you put around trees when you want to, flag trees to cut Maine, you got to flag the trees to cut. And we kind of, I'm like, all right, John, I have seven acres of property, which is, okay, listen, seven acres is not a lot of property in Maine. You can buy property in Maine for $500 an acre in some places, private sale. So let's just make that clear. Seven acres is not a lot.

• 1:32:09Pete Roberts?

  But we have seven acres of land in the woods. And so I like flagged out, I'm like, we're gonna build a factory here. We just flagged it out like this.

• 1:32:20Jocko Willink?

  And this is based on the architectural design that your engineer had put through for your factory?

• 1:32:24Pete Roberts?

  Yeah, right.

• 1:32:27Jocko Willink?

  So you're just like, I think a factory should be about this big. This looks like a factory's eyes. That's so awesome.

• 1:32:34Pete Roberts?

  I called a buddy and he brought his chainsaw over and I was like, all right, let's just do it. And we just, just started cutting trees. My father-in-law came over with a chipper. We chipped it out. Okay, we stumped it, we pulled the stumps out. We're pretty resourceful up in here. And you ever heard of Yankee ingenuity, that term? For sure, that happens. So what did we do? We cleared it. We did a little bit of earthwork. I got on the compactor and compacted all the sand and poured a slab. Had, had some, some guy, some company, uh, saw out a bunch of eastern white pine.

• 1:33:17Pete Roberts?

  And had my buddy build, build a barn, factory barn. And we just spent, I don't know, eight, 16, eight, I don't know how many hours we slept, zero hours. Around the clock, we just built this thing from the ground up. Myself, my brother, friends, family. And we just, we did it, we built it. Then we stuck a sewing machine in there.

• 1:33:40Jocko Willink?

  That sewing machine that you had.

• 1:33:42Pete Roberts?

  Yeah, we're like, what are we doing? And that's where it began. And, and we, you know, the thing is, is like, if you, listen, I'm, I'm all for planning. I, I, I like to plan the, what's gonna happen. And then I like to, like you say, execute it. I like to execute that plan, but do it. And I like to lead the plan. And I'm, I'm shitty when it comes to like, I'm always making sure everybody's living up to their expectations, like as part of the plan. If they bought into it, you better fully bought into it. There's no room for like slacking. Like if I'm working till midnight, you're working till midnight.

• 1:34:24Pete Roberts?

  Right? You're not leaving. So that's what we did. And I'm a pusher too, like a push, push, push. Like to see how much I can get out of somebody to push them to their potential. And see where their breaking point is. So I can learn about the person, but also get the best out of them. So we did it. We built a factory and

• 1:34:48Pete Roberts?

  that's where it started.

• 1:34:49Jocko Willink?

  So then comes what? What's next? Sewing machines?

• 1:34:53Pete Roberts?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:53Jocko Willink?

  And

• 1:34:53Pete Roberts?

  Sewing machines.

• 1:34:54Jocko Willink?

  And some

• 1:34:55Pete Roberts?

  And

• 1:34:55Jocko Willink?

  You started looking for staff that knew how to sew.

• 1:34:57Pete Roberts?

  Yeah, exactly. So we didn't have any lights yet. We had one sewing machine and we just like, okay, this is how we're this is how you sew. And I found this old timer, Bill, who came down and he's like explaining the different types. He's been in the business for forty years fixing sewing machines. And he's just like, you know, in his accent, he's like, oh, you got the, you got a single needle machine and a double needle and you've got the locking stitch and a chain stitch and you know, all this stuff. And I'm just like, whoa. And so I just absorb, got, became completely absorbed in that, right? Learning about sewing machines. I learned how to, how to run them, how to fix them, what they were good for, the different types of feeding,

• 1:35:41Pete Roberts?

  you know, all, all, everything about sewing machines. I was like, cool. I know about sewing machines. Now we need some fabric.

• 1:35:49Pete Roberts?

  So I started looking for fabric. Guess what?

• 1:35:54Pete Roberts?

  They don't make fabric

• 1:35:57Pete Roberts?

  in the United States. They don't make fabric that we needed in Mexico. They don't make fabric in Canada. Shit, they don't make fabric for jujitsu gees. And I was like, what are we gonna do?

• 1:36:13Pete Roberts?

  What would you do?

• 1:36:16Pete Roberts?

  You just built a factory and you have all these sewing machines. And what would you do?

• 1:36:24Jocko Willink?

  So, so your only option at this point is gotta order the material from overseas.

• 1:36:28Pete Roberts?

  Order the material from overseas. You got it. That's what you're gonna do, right? I was like, screw that. And so I started looking for like weaving. And so I just, you know, was looking for weaving like, hey, hey, hey, you guys weave, can you weave some fabric for us? Yeah, a hundred thousand yards, you know, 12 bucks a yard. No. So.

• 1:36:50Pete Roberts?

  I'm just looking, looking, looking, looking.

• 1:36:53Jocko Willink?

  And did you ever order any material?

• 1:36:55Pete Roberts?

  I did.

• 1:36:55Jocko Willink?

  Okay, cuz you, you, you had to sell gis. I mean, you had to make some money.

• 1:36:59Pete Roberts?

  We've got investment into this thing now.

• 1:37:00Jocko Willink?

  Right.

• 1:37:01Pete Roberts?

  And I didn't, I had, I didn't take a paycheck for like the first two years of business. I didn't take a paycheck, maybe three. I didn't pay myself once. Every dime I just dumped back in, dumped back in, dumped back in.

• 1:37:17Pete Roberts?

  Weaving was impossible, right? You're not gonna freaking weave material. So I, I did, I imported material for that first year and

• 1:37:29Pete Roberts?

  we, we figured out how to make a gi. And it was a pain in the ass. And that first week.

• 1:37:37Pete Roberts?

  We finished the week. And I called the Deco and I said, we made five pairs of pants this week.

• 1:37:49Pete Roberts?

  And he's like.

• 1:37:50Jocko Willink?

  Not really high productions.

• 1:37:52Pete Roberts?

  Dude, I was just like, what am I doing? And I kinda started.

• 1:37:56Jocko Willink?

  You were telling that story, you like legit were questioning.

• 1:37:59Pete Roberts?

  Oh, I spiraled down?

• 1:38:00Jocko Willink?

  Like, oh my God, you know, you thought you were gonna make 200 gis in a week and you, or gi pants in a week and you make five.

• 1:38:07Pete Roberts?

  Five, five pairs of pants.

• 1:38:11Pete Roberts?

  I was just mind boggling, mind boggling. And Jill was my first teacher. She's still with us today, the one you were talking about earlier.

• 1:38:21Pete Roberts?

  Dude, I did not know what to do. I was truly at a loss for... I didn't have anybody to like, teach me about how to manufacture, like, how you should set this up. I, I, cause the knowledge had disappeared out of the state. It was gone. The folks that used to do that stuff, either they passed, or they're, they moved on, they're snowbirds, they moved to Florida, whatever, they weren't around.

• 1:38:51Pete Roberts?

  So I had a lot of late nights by myself in my basement

• 1:38:59Pete Roberts?

  with a glass of whiskey.

• 1:39:06Pete Roberts?

  I started to have that feeling come back of that like, failure feeling. And

• 1:39:16Pete Roberts?

  I didn't know what to do. I was like,

• 1:39:21Pete Roberts?

  what did I get myself into? You know, like, what? What are you doing? Like, how do you? What am I doing?

• 1:39:34Pete Roberts?

  And then I figured like,

• 1:39:37Pete Roberts?

  I cannot

• 1:39:40Pete Roberts?

  basically like, I can't do this alone type of situation.

• 1:39:46Pete Roberts?

  And in a conversation with my father-in-law, I was like, Joe, man, I need to talk to somebody who's like, been there and done that, like, done, built something from nothing. And he's like, Pete, he's like, I've got a friend that he did some work for and it's bulldozer. My father-in-law's a heavy mechanic, repair, uh, heavy machinery mechanic.

• 1:40:05Pete Roberts?

  And so we made a phone call to this guy, John, I'll leave his last name out.

• 1:40:10Pete Roberts?

  And John said, yeah, I'll meet with Pete. He said, here's the date and time, meet me at my lake house. So I showed up at his lake house and I sat down and he shook my hand and he said, let me tell you something.

• 1:40:27Pete Roberts?

  You're not fucking special. I'm already Pete down.

• 1:40:32Pete Roberts?

  Just, and I'm using his words. You're not fucking special. Your ideas aren't special and nobody gives a shit.

• 1:40:43Pete Roberts?

  I was like, okay.

• 1:40:45Jocko Willink?

  Motivational speaker, getting after it.

• 1:40:47Pete Roberts?

  That's true.

• 1:40:48Jocko Willink?

  Nobody gives a shit.

• 1:40:49Pete Roberts?

  Yep.

• 1:40:49Jocko Willink?

  I said, reality check.

• 1:40:51Pete Roberts?

  Yeah, I was like, oh shit.

• 1:40:55Pete Roberts?

  He goes, what's your problem? I said, man, I, I, we need money to like, he's like, no, you don't.

• 1:41:04Pete Roberts?

  I said, no, we need, we need, we need money to, to like, do this, to like, learn how to do this and build this and like, make this happen. I need money, the capital.

• 1:41:14Pete Roberts?

  He goes, Pete.

• 1:41:16Jocko Willink?

  Were you in the back of your mind thinking you had good capital investor right here, is a big guy at the lake house? And maybe this guy's gonna throw G's at you?

• 1:41:24Pete Roberts?

  No, no, I wasn't there for financial, a financial, uh, I wasn't looking.

• 1:41:32Jocko Willink?

  But that was the solution that you saw?

• 1:41:34Pete Roberts?

  That's the only solution.

• 1:41:36Jocko Willink?

  You just thought, I need money for this thing.

• 1:41:37Pete Roberts?

  Only solution.

• 1:41:38Jocko Willink?

  Got it.

• 1:41:40Pete Roberts?

  I need money. And as he kind of like beat me down. And this guy ran like a 50, ah, I think they're a hundred million dollar company now. At that point, it was $50 million. And he was kind of retired and doing his thing and giving his time to me for free to help another kid from industry main succeed.

• 1:42:06Pete Roberts?

  He basically educated me and two hours educated me. And I walked away from that meeting like with a plan, a plan of action.

• 1:42:19Jocko Willink?

  What was like, what was the, the big takeaways?

• 1:42:22Pete Roberts?

  He told me I need to basically find out who I was and do a, a personality profile.

• 1:42:31Pete Roberts?

  And he goes, you're probably, what did he say?

• 1:42:37Pete Roberts?

  An INFJ, something like that. He like guessed it.

• 1:42:42Pete Roberts?

  Um, or an EJ, I'm not even exactly sure what it was. So I did my personality profile to find out my strengths and weaknesses and it was spot on. I was like, holy shit, this is kind of like crazy. And, uh,

• 1:42:57Pete Roberts?

  then he told me, you're not all in.

• 1:43:02Pete Roberts?

  You don't really want to win at this. I was like, no, I do. Then go all in. How much do you believe in it? Cause there's a million frigging people like you. He said, there's a million people like you and a million great ideas. And less than 1% are willing to go and chase it and go all in and do it.

• 1:43:29Pete Roberts?

  Are you one of those people? And if you are, solve the money problem and solve the rest of the problems.

• 1:43:39Pete Roberts?

  The next day I was at the bank signing my home away with my wife by my side.

• 1:43:46Jocko Willink?

  She was stoked.

• 1:43:47Pete Roberts?

  For a $200,000 loan. That was tough for her.

• 1:43:53Jocko Willink?

  Two things, uh, as you were saying them, there's a big difference.

• 1:43:58Jocko Willink?

  You put them together, which is when you put them together, it makes sense, but chasing your goals, chasing your dream and being all in.

• 1:44:07Pete Roberts?

  It's not even the same.

• 1:44:08Jocko Willink?

  Not the same things. Now, if you're all in and then you have to chase it, you don't even know what else to do besides chase it.

• 1:44:14Pete Roberts?

  Right.

• 1:44:14Jocko Willink?

  But I think some people, they, they chase it, but they're running like half speed.

• 1:44:18Pete Roberts?

  Yep. And I was a half speed.

• 1:44:19Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. It's awesome.

• 1:44:22Pete Roberts?

  You, you gotta be uncomfortable. That's basically what I took away from that. And he's the one that told me, he said, Pete, how old are you?

• 1:44:30Pete Roberts?

  I said, I'm 30. What's your problem?

• 1:44:35Pete Roberts?

  I said,

• 1:44:36Jocko Willink?

  We're gonna get John on the podcast at some point.

• 1:44:38Pete Roberts?

  I'm stuck. Yeah. I said, I'm stuck. He goes,

• 1:44:45Pete Roberts?

  You got three more chances. He's like, I'm sixty. You got three more chances. He's like, if you believe in it, and he's the one that told me, everything in life, everything great takes ten years to build. Go build it. And be committed, because it's gonna take ten years to build it. But if you believe in it, you have to go all in. And if you gotta put up your house, put up your house. You'll work your way out of it.

• 1:45:15Pete Roberts?

  Eventually. So that's what I did. I followed his advice and I went all in. He also told me, the moment you stop growing, you die. He said, if you stop growing, you will die. The moment you wanna do something different than what you're doing, the moment your mind wanders to wanting to be somewhere else, your business also dies.

• 1:45:48Pete Roberts?

  And you need to recognize that.

• 1:45:51Pete Roberts?

  And that first meeting with him was just, I just changed my, changed my game. And when I signed my name on that loan, when I signed my home to the bank to receive that check,

• 1:46:09Pete Roberts?

  I was laser focused. It's like being in the woods on an early morning hunt. When it's dark and the sun is coming up and the, and the, and the, and the leaves go

• 1:46:21Pete Roberts?

  right, as the sun hits the leaves, hits the trees.

• 1:46:25Pete Roberts?

  And you're waiting, right, for the deer, for whatever you're hunting. That's what I felt like about business. The same feeling you get from that, I felt. Laser focused. And it's like, everything just opened up. Like, my mind opened, like, the synapses connected and I was like, a new, a new entrepreneur. I was like, new.

• 1:46:51Pete Roberts?

  And that's what I mean by like, you can't, you're always born an entrepreneur. You're not born an entrepreneur. You need to get punched in the face. And John punched me right in the nose. It was awesome.

• 1:47:07Jocko Willink?

  So the next step is you order some material, but that's not your long-term plan.

• 1:47:13Pete Roberts?

  Right.

• 1:47:13Jocko Willink?

  And, and the next thing you do is you go, we gotta make this material.

• 1:47:17Pete Roberts?

  We gotta make the material. We gotta make the material.

• 1:47:21Pete Roberts?

  I had called every used textile company in the United States, every used textile company to try and find this machinery. We had to weave our own fabric. It wasn't a sustainable model without weaving our own fabric.

• 1:47:42Pete Roberts?

  They're all like, it's just not gonna happen. I'm like, what is it to get set up?

• 1:47:48Pete Roberts?

  Million dollars, right? 750 grand.

• 1:47:54Jocko Willink?

  This is to buy a brand new loom.

• 1:47:55Pete Roberts?

  This is to buy looms.

• 1:47:56Jocko Willink?

  Get the operational experience in there. They're gonna send you from the factory after they build this loom. They'll send you a guy that's gonna help you run it, get it all set up. We just need a million dollars.

• 1:48:04Pete Roberts?

  Yeah, exactly. It's like, it's just not gonna happen. So I was like, okay. In business, it's like boxing, like, it's like jujitsu. It's all about the angles. You know, and people get so stuck on like one angle. They can only see that one angle. And I just had to like, I had to step to the side and I had to see this angle.

• 1:48:30Pete Roberts?

  I knew Maine had a heritage in weaving. I knew there was weaving here at one point. And so I went back to that same old timer in Lewiston, Maine, who had sold me my first sewing machine. And I sat in his office and I said, you know where there are any looms?

• 1:48:50Pete Roberts?

  He's like, what do you mean? I'm like, a weaving loom? Like to weave fabric? He goes, get in my truck.

• 1:49:01Pete Roberts?

  I get in his truck. We drive up one street and get out and there's this massive building. It's like, I think total square footage was like 1.5 million square feet, mostly abandoned. A few businesses in the front that they've refurbished. And there's a museum there.

• 1:49:24Pete Roberts?

  And then walks in, he introduces me to this woman, Rachel. And he says, Rachel, this is Pete. He's looking for a loom.

• 1:49:34Pete Roberts?

  And she goes, well. Follow me. She made me sign a release. We went up these stairs and into this old Mill five. And the floorboards, the windows were all broken, the sawtooth building, you know, the sawtooth mill buildings, the windows were all broken. The wood was all punky and like, like all bent up and splintered. You had like, watch where you're walking.

• 1:49:59Pete Roberts?

  And there's this big, green nasty thing sitting in the middle of floor. Right there in this whole place. And we walk over to it. She's like. I need to get rid of this.

• 1:50:13Pete Roberts?

  And I'm like, this is a loom?

• 1:50:16Pete Roberts?

  She's like, yep. Said, holy shit.

• 1:50:23Pete Roberts?

  Where's the rest of them?

• 1:50:27Pete Roberts?

  They shipped them overseas. A company in India bought us, bought, bought out the mill and they shipped everything overseas. And she goes. I kept this one. I kept it here because I wanted to put it in the museum so we didn't lose our heritage.

• 1:50:43Pete Roberts?

  I said, can I buy it? And she said, yep. I said, how much? She said, 3,000 bucks. I said, okay, done. Man, and this is like, I just want to point this out. The, the, the, the floor is all broken, the windows are broken and the loom is like rusty, right? Oh dude, it's terrible. This thing is not like this, this thing is disaster. When's the last time it was used? How many years ago? Oh. Eighties? It was, it's an 83, it's like a 1983. I don't know when the last time it was used, but it hadn't been, had any love for a long, long time. Most of the parts were stripped off of it. It was like a frame, just like an infrastructure.

• 1:51:25Pete Roberts?

  I said, okay, I'm, I'll buy it. I'm going to buy this loom.

• 1:51:33Pete Roberts?

  Yeah, so you've got to be a little bit naive to be in business and think you can accomplish anything, that's the bottom line and I'm I was pretty, pretty driven and naive to think that we could weave fabric. But I believed we could.

• 1:51:54Pete Roberts?

  So she sold me it. And then I called my father-in-law and I said, I got a loom. It's on the third floor of this old mill in Lewiston, Maine. And we need to get it out. And I got a quote on moving it and it was twenty-five thousand dollars to move it. And I'm like, we're gonna move it. And he's like,

• 1:52:16Pete Roberts?

  okay. So I got a bunch of friends. We went up there, took nine guys, eight hours to move it from the middle of the floor to the edge of the building.

• 1:52:30Pete Roberts?

  And we

• 1:52:32Pete Roberts?

  had another friend who had a crane and we ended up getting it out and onto a trailer and put it in the factory. And then we were like, what are we doing, dude?

• 1:52:45Pete Roberts?

  And it was awesome. It was awesome. So that's where it started.

• 1:52:52Pete Roberts?

  You know, it's, I always believe like,

• 1:52:57Pete Roberts?

  if it was done, it can be done. Like, if it, if, if, you know, in Maine, we have this thing like, Maine at one point was ninety percent fields. How to become ninety percent fields, you know, a hundred years ago? Hands in daylight, hands in daylight, right? How were these mill buildings built? Hands in daylight, that's it. These people, they got after it. I mean, why? Because if you don't, you die. That's it, you're gonna die. So you've got to farm, you've got to know how to build a house, you got to know how to start a fire. Like, that culture of New England is still rich. You know, it's still passed down. We burn wood, everybody burns wood.

• 1:53:42Pete Roberts?

  We build our own shit, you know, houses, everything. That's what we do. Why is everybody saying, we can't manufacture, we can't weave, we can't cut and sew? That's bullshit. If they did it, we can do it, because they did it with a lot less.

• 1:54:01Pete Roberts?

  I found a guy, Lenny. When that mill shut down, he had a contract to go over to Pakistan, Pakistan, of all places,

• 1:54:15Pete Roberts?

  to teach them how to run the looms that were purchased.

• 1:54:22Pete Roberts?

  And a month later, it was nine eleven. And he didn't go, and he stayed here. Thank God, because

• 1:54:32Pete Roberts?

  he's the last. He's like the last one left that can actually get this thing going and make it work again.

• 1:54:44Pete Roberts?

  I asked Lenny, how many people know what you know? He said, a whole bunch. I said, well, what's a whole bunch? He's like, like, five.

• 1:54:56Pete Roberts?

  So he, Lenny passed his knowledge on us, weaving and you know, pattern making for textiles and all this stuff.

• 1:55:07Pete Roberts?

  And that's a whole nother story, maybe for a different time. But we started weaving fabric.

• 1:55:14Pete Roberts?

  And we became vertically integrated and we started making the product from raw cotton from Tennessee.

• 1:55:18Jocko Willink?

  What did it feel like the first time that thing created, created like fabric? He must have been.

• 1:55:23Pete Roberts?

  Dude, we freaked out. We were just like, he's just like, uh, we had the, we had like the pa- like we had to make pearl weave. And so we did, we made pearl weave, we like took the pearl weave apart that was, uh, like from the imported fabric is like, um, we just picked it apart and Lenny looked at it and figured out what size thread, you know, yarns and the weight and everything. So we just recreated it. And he turned it on for the first time. You know how, how long it took to clean that thing? Forty man hours to clean it. Like it just, it needed cleaning. Before we did anything cleaning, then we had to buy it all the parts or have it machined and just to get it going in. He turned it on for the first time. And it was like.

• 1:56:12Pete Roberts?

  And I looked at John, my employee John Lenny, and I said, "Holy shit."

• 1:56:20Pete Roberts?

  And then

• 1:56:22Pete Roberts?

  and there it comes and it's just and there's the pearl weave coming off the loom. Man, it was so exciting. I was like, "Nobody's ever done this." "Nobody's ever done this." And it was, I was super proud. I was like, "We're, we're friggin' doing it." "We are doing it." And then we announced it to the world. We thought. "We still got a lot of work to do." But, uh, now we announced it to the jujitsu world.

• 1:56:54Pete Roberts?

  That's it, man.

• 1:56:54Jocko Willink?

  And that was it.

• 1:56:55Pete Roberts?

  I don't even want to tell you the challenges after weaving. How do you color this stuff? How do you do this? I mean, there's so much.

• 1:57:01Jocko Willink?

  Like, I was telling you before, when, when I was in the SEAL teams in the early 90s, we didn't have the, the, the custom gear, right? You couldn't buy this stuff on the internet from these tactical companies, right? So we, we made stuff. And we had, we had parachute riggers, which are the people that pack parachutes. But in a parachute loft, you've got a nice medium duty and sometimes a heavy duty sewing machine. And so we would make our own gear. And, and us guys, like, we would kind of get into it a little bit. And I, you know, I had a lot of SEALs would have their own, you know, sewing machines. And, you know, you'd make gear and some people would be good at it. Some people would get really good at it. And I was not one of those people.

• 1:57:42Jocko Willink?

  And it, because, you know, there's these little threads and you gotta get these things working right. You put it through the thimble and through the whatever. It's all this stuff. It's all this stuff. Yeah. And so, and every time I'd like start sewing, it would just, you know, fall apart, like bird's nest and just mayhem. And when I see like the loom with it looks like

• 1:58:04Pete Roberts?

  Stress you out.

• 1:58:05Jocko Willink?

  One billion threads coming through these little things. And, and they're flowing through and then you look on the other side and all that craziness. There's like these Hundreds of thousands, it looks like little pins that are moving and things that are pulling apart.

• 1:58:19Pete Roberts?

  It's crazy.

• 1:58:20Jocko Willink?

  And then it comes out the other side and you see this pattern.

• 1:58:22Pete Roberts?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:23Jocko Willink?

  And it makes me, it actually does stress me out. I see it, I go, man, I can't be in here for too long. Cause I'm freaking out just thinking, if I get too close to these things.

• 1:58:32Pete Roberts?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:58:32Jocko Willink?

  My, my presence will cause disturbances in the force and things will go wrong. I'm not allowed to be in there for very long. Cause I'm like, I'm not, I'm, I've got, I've got an issue. You know, a subliminal issue with threads. And so I keep, I even today, I was like keeping a little distance.

• 1:58:51Pete Roberts?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:51Jocko Willink?

  From the machines. I don't want to foul them up. You guys have the magic.

• 1:58:54Pete Roberts?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:56Jocko Willink?

  Like stayed away from that. But yeah, to see that and, and to even imagine it like, you know, again, as a novice person, working with a sewing machine as a young kid. The, how hard it was for me to do it. And then like I was watching Jill, the other wham, wham, wham, just hammering. You're just, it's like such a good craft, such a good skill to have. And, and just to see the loom and all those different parts, you're saying yourself, well, for one thing. Like good luck. Like somebody wants to do what we're doing.

• 1:59:24Pete Roberts?

  Oh, go.

• 1:59:25Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:26Pete Roberts?

  Do it.

• 1:59:26Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Have fun with that one. Not happening.

• 1:59:29Pete Roberts?

  Not happening.

• 1:59:29Jocko Willink?

  By the way, we bought the last loom. So you're screwed.

• 1:59:33Pete Roberts?

  Yeah, you're screwed. Yeah, absolutely. And, and the last bit of knowledge which exists, which exists.

• 1:59:40Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Man. And so then, you know, you, you take and you start weaving it and now you're starting to sell gees. And how's the business going now? Now you're able to put on something made in the USA.

• 1:59:52Pete Roberts?

  Hundred percent.

• 1:59:52Jocko Willink?

  And that's from the dirt to the shirt.

• 1:59:55Pete Roberts?

  Yeah, man. Rod, rod ready, dirt to shirt, right? I mean.

• 2:00:00Jocko Willink?

  Because.

• 2:00:00Pete Roberts?

  Field to finish.

• 2:00:02Jocko Willink?

  Because the cotton is coming from.

• 2:00:05Pete Roberts?

  Tennessee Delta region.

• 2:00:06Jocko Willink?

  Tennessee.

• 2:00:07Pete Roberts?

  Spun in the Carolinas and shipped up to us.

• 2:00:10Jocko Willink?

  That's like the, that's old school.

• 2:00:12Pete Roberts?

  Frigging right, it is.

• 2:00:13Jocko Willink?

  The way it's supposed to work.

• 2:00:14Pete Roberts?

  That's old school. Making shit, you know? I mean.

• 2:00:21Pete Roberts?

  I talked today a little bit at our grand opening about like Mainers.

• 2:00:28Pete Roberts?

  Generations of folks that put their hands on something. Right? They're makers. They need to make something and they're trying to cross train these people to type on a computer, you know, do mundane office type of tasks, filing papers, answering the phone and call centers.

• 2:00:54Pete Roberts?

  These people want to make shit. We're known in Maine for being some of the best crafts people in the world. The products that come from Maine are some of the best products in the world.

• 2:01:08Pete Roberts?

  And to be part of resurrecting that heritage is it's incredible, you know, and it is our ultimate mission, you know, to resurrect our heritage in manufacturing and build old world level quality products. And stand behind it.

• 2:01:32Pete Roberts?

  Stitch. Every stitch, every, every yarn in the weave. And that's what we're all about. And that's what Origin stands for.

• 2:01:44Pete Roberts?

  With a little bit more modern look and feel.

• 2:01:49Pete Roberts?

  But sourcing and manufacturing 100% in the US. And I, we won't compromise on that ever. Like other companies do when they get greedy. And they say, well, it's time to look at the numbers. It's time to increase the margins and we got to import some of this stuff. Nope. We're just not doing it.

• 2:02:16Pete Roberts?

  It's just not happening.

• 2:02:18Jocko Willink?

  I was in at Bath Iron Works for the christening of the USS Michael Monsour, obviously named after Michael Monsour. And it was awesome for me, you know, I enlisted in the Navy from that down in Portland. And to come back 26 years later and see what you're talking about. What I knew existed in New England, in Maine, and, and seeing the pride that these, you know, shipbuilders, the ironworkers, that the pride that they took in that ship,

• 2:03:00Jocko Willink?

  named after a saint of a human being. And, you know, that's one of the things that I tied to origin. Cause I knew what you were doing up here. Yeah. And, um, you know, to kind of get to how we ended up joining forces. It's funny because you, you know, you were just some guy, you know, some crazy guy up in Maine, in my opinion, that I'd, I'd seen a couple of your videos and I've seen it. I see a dude, you know, you have the video that shows you pulling this freaking loom out of this factory. And I'm just thinking to myself, this guy is insane and I think I like him.

• 2:03:42Jocko Willink?

  And, and, and I had actually, the funny thing is for my gym in San Diego, Victory MMA, I wanted to make jujitsu gees in America. And so I was like, okay, this, I, I looked around, I find one guy that's doing it. It's you. We, like three or four years ago, we went back and forth on email. And, you know, nothing ever came of it because I was busy, you were busy and just nothing happened. But I always just remembered, hey, you know what? This guy up in Maine, he's, he's, he's doing what, he's doing it the right way. And what happened was the way we actually got connected was I was on a Facebook Live, just talking to people. And someone says, what kind of gi should I get?

• 2:04:24Jocko Willink?

  And I just rattled off. I go, hey, man, if you're gonna, if you need a gi, you're starting jujitsu, or you're good at jujitsu, or you just want a good gi, I go, get a gi from Origin, OriginMaine.com. I go, get a gi from there. I go, this crazy guy up there, he fixed a loom. I can't say it without laughing because he's so crazy. I'm like, he took a loom out of a, out of a broken factory, and he refurbished that thing with his team, and they built, you know, they're doing it. They're building it. So if you need a gi, I said, I've tried to talk to this guy, because I had, I had reached out to you a couple of times through various, even since the time I asked for, for gi's. I'd said, sent you an email or something. And I said, you know, I'm trying to talk to him. If anybody knows this guy, his name is Pete. I go, tell him I said, what's up?

• 2:05:06Jocko Willink?

  And this, this awesome woman that listens to podcasts, her name is Sarah Armstrong, and she's super squared away, you know, professional with a, with a big company. And she, you know, she had communicated me with the various things over the, over the past year that I've been doing the, the podcast and whatnot. And for, she said, oh, I'll take that for action. And she,

• 2:05:30Pete Roberts?

  Contacted me.

• 2:05:30Jocko Willink?

  She contacted you.

• 2:05:31Pete Roberts?

  She called me.

• 2:05:33Jocko Willink?

  It's, what'd she say?

• 2:05:37Pete Roberts?

  She just said, you, basically, she's like, have you heard of this guy, Jocko Willink? And dude, I'm sorry, I had my head up my ass for the last five years trying to build this factory.

• 2:05:47Jocko Willink?

  No factor.

• 2:05:48Pete Roberts?

  And I was like,

• 2:05:49Jocko Willink?

  You're like, who?

• 2:05:49Pete Roberts?

  No. And then, so, you know, what do I do? I dig. I'm like, holy shit. I'm like, this guy is making some waves. This is awesome. And so, I did a little recon, and then I reached out to you after that.

• 2:06:08Jocko Willink?

  And, and what's awesome is, like, I had no idea what we were gonna do.

• 2:06:12Pete Roberts?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:14Jocko Willink?

  You know, we went back and forth a couple of times on email, and then finally, you're like, hey, man, let's, let's just go to Skype, right? Let's do Skype. Because we'd been, today, you know, do you want to do something? You're like, I want to do something. What do you want to do? I'm like, well, let's, you know, figure it out. Send me an email about this. You're like, how about we do a Skype call? So, I, I have my meetings like scheduled, and I'm working all day.

• 2:06:34Pete Roberts?

  Sure.

• 2:06:34Jocko Willink?

  And I blocked. Two hours. I'm like, you know what? This is probably gonna take a while to get this conversation going. About two hours where we're just gonna get on Skype and make this happen. We'll figure out what we can do. So we end up talking on Skype for four hours.

• 2:06:49Pete Roberts?

  Talking, laughing.

• 2:06:51Jocko Willink?

  Talking, laughing.

• 2:06:52Pete Roberts?

  Yelling.

• 2:06:52Jocko Willink?

  Yelling, laughing more.

• 2:06:54Pete Roberts?

  Laughing more.

• 2:06:55Jocko Willink?

  After I got off, my wife goes, "It sounded like you were talking to you."

• 2:07:00Pete Roberts?

  That's not good.

• 2:07:02Jocko Willink?

  She was a little scared. And, uh, and it was just, you know, it was, it was awesome. For me, it was, you know, the things that I believe in a- as an American, as a person, as a New Englander. It was like you had the thing that I didn't have, right? Like, you know, for instance, we're, we're, we're making things, we're building things, but we don't have vertical integration. We don't, we didn't, we weren't, we weren't doing it the way I wanna get it done. And so, you know, I'm saying, hey, like, let's join forces.

• 2:07:36Pete Roberts?

  Yeah, absolutely. And from my perspective, of course, I was like, "This dude is for real." I was like, I would've told my wife, I was like, "Man, this guy, he's, he's, he's on another level." And we, we had been like looking for somebody. I remember talking with the deco and it's like, in jujitsu, it's like, uh, you've got all these world champs and then you have like the flavor of the month guys with like the fancy jujitsu stuff. And we just, it just was never part of our plan to sponsor jujitsu world champions, right? Because what we were trying to build is like much bigger than that. It's like, man, we've been talking for like a year, like we need to, we need to find somebody or partner somebody with somebody that like

• 2:08:22Pete Roberts?

  represents origin through and through

• 2:08:27Pete Roberts?

  in multiple ways.

• 2:08:30Pete Roberts?

  This is impossible. We will not find this person. It's not possible.

• 2:08:37Pete Roberts?

  And then we talked.

• 2:08:39Jocko Willink?

  You, you, we were talking earlier today. This was, this was classic because I didn't remember this. So for those of you that know anything about negotiation, whether you're negotiating a car purchase or whatever, one of the things, one of the tactics of negotiation is you don't give a number first. So if I want, if, if Echo wants to buy these sunglasses, he, and he says, how much are these? I don't say they're 10 bucks because what if he was willing to pay 20?

• 2:09:07Pete Roberts?

  Right.

• 2:09:07Jocko Willink?

  So, so, you know, if, if he says, how much of these I go, well, you know, what are you willing to pay for them? And then he should say, well, you know, I don't know. What are they worth to you? And so Pete and I had the textbook.

• 2:09:17Pete Roberts?

  It was, it was more than that though, because it was, it was the strategies is like, what do you got to do? Well, you've got to, you've got to devalue or show value. So going back and forth, well, yeah, well, yeah, yeah, but you know, it's like, you know, back and forth, battle, battle, battle.

• 2:09:34Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:34Pete Roberts?

  And then I caved.

• 2:09:35Jocko Willink?

  And so, so we were trying to figure out the value of whatever, of something. And, and I'm like, well, you know, like, you know, just give, I mean, what if you had to, what would you, what would you say a number would be for that? And, and he's, you know, he's gives me X and, and I didn't remember doing this, but he told me that. And then I remembered, as he says, you know, the value is probably X. And I went, you're weak. Broken. We both started laughing and staring at him because we've been playing the game for like so long. And it was like, actually that is what like both, I think both of us realized, like we were just, let, let's just get it. Let's do this. But actually, you know, I'm busy, you're busy.

• 2:10:12Pete Roberts?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:13Jocko Willink?

  And so we, and we actually, we both definitely got along. We, we, I mean, I think both of us felt really solid about the other person, but we didn't quite figure out how to, we couldn't figure out how to make this work.

• 2:10:27Pete Roberts?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:28Jocko Willink?

  Right? You know, he's got something that he's put years of blood, sweat and tears into. I've got something that I've been doing my, my, my life has been to get to here. And so we just couldn't quite figure out how this was going to work. So we just, you know, we kept in touch, a little bit of conversation over the next, um, you know, couple of months. And then I knew I was going to Maine.

• 2:10:50Pete Roberts?

  Yeah. You, you, you, you kept, I gotta ask you something now.

• 2:10:53Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:54Pete Roberts?

  Do you, you knew you were coming to Maine. I knew you were coming to Maine. Neither of us, like, we didn't text back and forth until the last minute because I knew the date you were coming to Maine.

• 2:11:05Pete Roberts?

  Did you, were you planning on a meeting when you came to Maine, the whole time?

• 2:11:12Jocko Willink?

  I definitely knew we needed to meet.

• 2:11:13Pete Roberts?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:15Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:16Pete Roberts?

  He's like, you were icing me.

• 2:11:19Jocko Willink?

  You put me on ice, dude.

• 2:11:22Pete Roberts?

  I thought I was putting you on ice.

• 2:11:25Jocko Willink?

  We were both on ice.

• 2:11:26Pete Roberts?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:28Jocko Willink?

  So that was, that was like the meeting. Awesome. We, we met up in Portland. We had dinner. We actually both brought our wives and I, my wife is always too busy to do anything business-wise with me. So she was super stoked to even be around and meet Amanda and everything. And, you know, you, we, we sat there. Our wives don't even know what they were doing because you and I were just

• 2:11:52Jocko Willink?

  and, and at the end of the night, we figured out and we shook hands and I knew right there we were good. We, we crafted a deal that was awesome.

• 2:12:00Pete Roberts?

  Yep.

• 2:12:01Jocko Willink?

  It was awesome for both of us. It was awesome for everything that both of us want to achieve. And it turned into not even both of us, it just turned into us.

• 2:12:10Pete Roberts?

  Exactly.

• 2:12:11Jocko Willink?

  And that was awesome.

• 2:12:12Pete Roberts?

  And I think one of the best like lessons learned from, for me, what is just an incredible opportunity, that's how I see opportunity in crafting a deal, is making sure that you're both getting what you want and you're both a little bit uncomfortable. So that you continue to

• 2:12:38Pete Roberts?

  feel a little bit of the struggle to make sure you can take it over the goal line. You're too comfortable, you become complacent. Bite off a little more than you can chew and you're going to be chewing for much longer. So that's, it was important. It was awesome.

• 2:12:57Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And so just so everyone knows, I mean, I've been saying it, like, we're partners, you know? We're, we're partners with, with the podcast and what, what Echo and I have been doing for the last couple of years. And what Orgy has been doing for the last five years, seven years.

• 2:13:14Pete Roberts?

  Five.

• 2:13:15Jocko Willink?

  Five years.

• 2:13:16Pete Roberts?

  Eleven, six years, yeah.

• 2:13:17Jocko Willink?

  Six years. And, and at the end of the night, when we got done eating our steaks in Portland, Maine, we shook hands and, and this whole You know, you've described it as like a perfect storm, which is what it feels like to me.

• 2:13:31Pete Roberts?

  It is. Hey, man, I was born in Gloucester.

• 2:13:32Jocko Willink?

  There you go.

• 2:13:33Pete Roberts?

  It is the perfect storm.

• 2:13:34Jocko Willink?

  There you go.

• 2:13:35Pete Roberts?

  We got, we are the perfect storm.

• 2:13:37Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Um, and, and so that's what's going on is that, you know, now we've got uh, this and we join forces and uh, that we, we both complement each other's, you know, in, in terms of our business, we complement each other's weaknesses. In terms of our personalities, we, we complement each other's weaknesses and we're, and the best part about it is the whole time that we're doing it, we're actually laughing our asses off at each other and having a great time, which is, which is what it's all about. So that's where we're at. That's why we're here, by the way.

• 2:14:12Pete Roberts?

  Yeah, that's why we're here, by the way.

• 2:14:13Jocko Willink?

  In Farmington, Maine, in the origin factory, 20,000 square feet. We're going to end up with how many employees in here? In a year, how many employees are we going to have in here?

• 2:14:24Pete Roberts?

  Oh, probably in a year. I don't know, 30, 40, 50, I mean, somewhere in there, you know, between 30 and 50. That's in a year, but remember, this is a start. We're starting.

• 2:14:38Jocko Willink?

  And so in five years, we're going to have a lot of people.

• 2:14:40Pete Roberts?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:14:42Jocko Willink?

  Where, and people ask, what are you going to make?

• 2:14:44Pete Roberts?

  Everything.

• 2:14:45Jocko Willink?

  And I say, we're going to make everything. Everything that I use in my life, I want it made here in America. From the shorts to the hats, everything. And that's what we're going to do. Beanie's.

• 2:15:04Jocko Willink?

  Uh, pants, pants. You know what? I was at a store the other day, uh, you know, like a hardware store, but a big one, where they sell work clothes. And, and I said to myself, you know, let's just, because obviously I'm thinking about this all the time now. You know, it's hard, hard to look at work clothes and you say, of course, American workers, they would want to wear American made clothes. Where are these clothes made? They're not made here. They're not made in America. They're not made by American hands. Um, so I, I think we're going to be in a take no prisoners scenario. And we're going to

• 2:15:37Pete Roberts?

  get after it.

• 2:15:38Jocko Willink?

  We're not just going to take no prisoners.

• 2:15:41Pete Roberts?

  We are going to chase the big dogs.

• 2:15:45Pete Roberts?

  Look out, look out, listen and look out. And that's not, that's not like an ego thing. That's the truth.

• 2:15:53Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:54Pete Roberts?

  Listen and look out.

• 2:15:56Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And like I said today, when, when you, when you rekindle the fire.

• 2:16:01Pete Roberts?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:02Jocko Willink?

  Of manufacturing and you rekindle, I mean, just talking, talking to the employees here.

• 2:16:10Jocko Willink?

  This is what they want to do.

• 2:16:11Pete Roberts?

  A hundred percent.

• 2:16:12Jocko Willink?

  And this is what they're made to do.

• 2:16:14Pete Roberts?

  That's right.

• 2:16:14Jocko Willink?

  And like you said, they want to take these things and build them with their hands.

• 2:16:17Pete Roberts?

  You've got it.

• 2:16:18Jocko Willink?

  And that opportunity's been taken away in the last 25 years and we're bringing it back. And that is awesome.

• 2:16:25Pete Roberts?

  Appreciate that. Glad to have you as part of it.

• 2:16:29Jocko Willink?

  Awesome. Uh. That's what we did. Echo Charles.

• 2:16:33Speaker 02

  Right on.

• 2:16:34Jocko Willink?

  My brother.

• 2:16:37Jocko Willink?

  Speaking of what we do.

• 2:16:39Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 2:16:40Jocko Willink?

  Why don't you do what you do?

• 2:16:43Speaker 02

  I have a question.

• 2:16:44Jocko Willink?

  After you ask the question.

• 2:16:47Speaker 02

  Do you find it poetic that the Origin logo is that circle? Remember when you were getting shit from the politician guy?

• 2:16:59Pete Roberts?

  That's funny. I've never thought about that.

• 2:17:01Speaker 02

  And now you have an Origin logo that's a circle.

• 2:17:05Pete Roberts?

  It is.

• 2:17:06Speaker 02

  So that kind of in and of itself is like a circle.

• 2:17:08Pete Roberts?

  Yeah, it's actually, it is a wave. It's a, it's actually like a rip curl wave. Is that what that logo is the? It's the flow.

• 2:17:17Pete Roberts?

  The jujitsu flow, the surf flow, the snow, it's a wave is what that is and it's breaking.

• 2:17:23Speaker 02

  Symbolic is what it'd call it. I was gonna say ironic, but that's not ironic, right?

• 2:17:27Pete Roberts?

  Symbolic.

• 2:17:27Speaker 02

  Symbolic.

• 2:17:28Pete Roberts?

  We'll go with symbolic.

• 2:17:29Speaker 02

  So yeah.

• 2:17:30Jocko Willink?

  And no one even remembers that. I don't even remember who that politician was.

• 2:17:34Pete Roberts?

  Doesn't even matter.

• 2:17:34Jocko Willink?

  Nope. They're gonna know that Origin symbol.

• 2:17:36Pete Roberts?

  That's right.

• 2:17:39Speaker 02

  In the industry, or we call that layers.

• 2:17:43Speaker 02

  True story. Anyway, speaking of layers.

• 2:17:45Pete Roberts?

  Got it.

• 2:17:45Speaker 02

  And support, by the way.

• 2:17:49Speaker 02

  Support this podcast and yourself.

• 2:17:52Speaker 02

  originmaine.com

• 2:17:53Pete Roberts?

  speak of the devil that's how you could support

• 2:17:57Speaker 02

  yeah so

• 2:17:58Pete Roberts?

  good to know

• 2:17:59Speaker 02

  what do we got gees so that's the thing from the beginning people ask what's the gi to get

• 2:18:05Pete Roberts?

  we know

• 2:18:06Speaker 02

  we know now

• 2:18:06Pete Roberts?

  hundred percent

• 2:18:07Speaker 02

  hundred percent now hundred percent you know you have like a hierarchy you know only has one gi now but you have multiple selections though

• 2:18:15Pete Roberts?

  yeah

• 2:18:16Speaker 02

  so that's the thing so yeah boom hierarchy

• 2:18:17Pete Roberts?

  yeah we're we're about to like blow up our manufacturing um in this new factory again grand opening today lots of product coming right on the gi side of stuff ramping things up over the next what timeframe

• 2:18:33Pete Roberts?

  we've started ramping uh over the next four to four to eight weeks let's say we're gonna be hiring another sixteen people we put another loom in the factory so there's three looms now and we're gonna be weaving ninjas like like for reals like I I don't I didn't want to elaborate it just come come to Maine and see yeah anytime in the factory come and check it out I like it

• 2:19:01Speaker 02

  when are these shorts coming out that I'm wearing

• 2:19:03Pete Roberts?

  oh boy

• 2:19:04Speaker 02

  because they're straight up my best shorts now hundred percent yeah

• 2:19:09Pete Roberts?

  we're gonna make it happen

• 2:19:12Pete Roberts?

  made you want some dates

• 2:19:14Speaker 02

  yeah no well hey I get that all the time hey when is the you know XYZ coming out hey so now it's on you little bit you know but yeah these are straight up the best shorts

• 2:19:22Pete Roberts?

  well it's not actually that hard for you because people say when's that next oh you're talking about the the the gear side the merch

• 2:19:29Speaker 02

  yeah

• 2:19:29Pete Roberts?

  the merchandise

• 2:19:30Speaker 02

  and and I do believe that it might be a little bit more work on Pete's and compared to on my end

• 2:19:36Pete Roberts?

  little bit

• 2:19:36Speaker 02

  but hey you know

• 2:19:37Pete Roberts?

  I don't know from a from a if you go from like the level that you're currently cruising at

• 2:19:42Speaker 02

  yeah

• 2:19:43Pete Roberts?

  maybe you both have to travel the same distance

• 2:19:47Pete Roberts?

  to get the work done relatively speaking

• 2:19:50Speaker 02

  I think you're right and yeah but not just gees right

• 2:19:53Pete Roberts?

  no no we all sorts of you know apparel everything is yeah like our t-shirts are knit like we have a partner that knits knits all the fabric like six hours away or something Everything's, everything's sourced and made here, you know, we make all our own compression apparel like cut and sew and sublimate, dye sublimation, everything.

• 2:20:13Jocko Willink?

  You say compression apparel?

• 2:20:14Pete Roberts?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:15Jocko Willink?

  I still call it a rash guard.

• 2:20:16Pete Roberts?

  It's a rash guard.

• 2:20:17Jocko Willink?

  I know, I'm just, just.

• 2:20:18Pete Roberts?

  You know why I say compression apparel?

• 2:20:19Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, because I know it's not just a rash guard, because rash guard is for surfing.

• 2:20:22Pete Roberts?

  Right.

• 2:20:23Jocko Willink?

  But.

• 2:20:23Pete Roberts?

  But, but like the, like, like the.

• 2:20:25Speaker 02

  Pants and.

• 2:20:25Jocko Willink?

  Don't we still call it in the jujitsu community, don't we still say, yeah, I got a new rash guard?

• 2:20:30Pete Roberts?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:20:31Jocko Willink?

  We still say that. I'm just making sure, because I wasn't like hearing someone at the gym saying like, did you check out this new compression?

• 2:20:37Speaker 02

  But in the weight room, there is, they do say that.

• 2:20:40Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, because I, right, I see like in football.

• 2:20:42Speaker 02

  Football, yeah.

• 2:20:43Jocko Willink?

  Like you'll see some company that's advertising compression gear.

• 2:20:47Pete Roberts?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:20:48Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, exactly. And I'm like, oh, you mean a rash guard?

• 2:20:50Pete Roberts?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:51Jocko Willink?

  Try your marketing employee on me.

• 2:20:52Pete Roberts?

  You gotta remember like every textile is different than what you're used to, like, like the warp wick we use, our, our textile for the rash guard or tights or whatever else. It's different and.

• 2:21:05Jocko Willink?

  You just called them tights.

• 2:21:06Pete Roberts?

  I did because spats, I have no idea what a spat is, I'm sorry.

• 2:21:09Jocko Willink?

  No, I was just gonna say, out in California, it's definitely called spats.

• 2:21:13Speaker 02

  That's 1000%.

• 2:21:14Jocko Willink?

  And I don't even know where that word comes from.

• 2:21:15Speaker 02

  Bro, spat, I knew spats is when you tape your ankles.

• 2:21:19Pete Roberts?

  It's a spat around the cleat.

• 2:21:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:21:21Pete Roberts?

  You spat your, you spat your leg.

• 2:21:22Speaker 02

  Why do they even call that?

• 2:21:23Jocko Willink?

  So I bet you, I bet you, wait, did the spats go down your leg like tights and then around your foot?

• 2:21:29Speaker 02

  It was just tape over, you know, you tape your ankles, but instead of your ankles under your socks or whatever, you tape.

• 2:21:35Pete Roberts?

  Tape over everything.

• 2:21:35Speaker 02

  Over your shoe, over everything.

• 2:21:37Pete Roberts?

  Which I, trainers stopped doing because.

• 2:21:39Jocko Willink?

  So why don't we call them compression pants?

• 2:21:41Speaker 02

  I thought it looked cool.

• 2:21:42Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, compression pants. I'm gonna be, you know, earlier we got kind of like wrapped around or we got sidetracked about me being sensitive about something or not being sensitive. Tights.

• 2:21:54Speaker 02

  You're not down for tights?

• 2:21:54Jocko Willink?

  As a dude, right?

• 2:21:56Pete Roberts?

  You don't wear tights.

• 2:21:56Jocko Willink?

  We're not wearing tights, not happening.

• 2:21:58Pete Roberts?

  Compression pants.

• 2:21:58Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, compression pants.

• 2:22:00Pete Roberts?

  That sounds good.

• 2:22:00Jocko Willink?

  Compression shirt, see, there you go, compression shirt, compression, and rash pants, rash guard pants, that doesn't make sense either, does it? Even though they do prevent rashes, if you surf.

• 2:22:09Pete Roberts?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:09Speaker 02

  Or do jujitsu mat burn on your knees?

• 2:22:12Jocko Willink?

  You know why people, you know why a lot of people wear compression pants and compression shirts in jujitsu? Prevention of the diseases, the funk, right? They don't want the hing horn, right? They don't want that, they don't want ringworm, they don't want, you know, whatever, MRSA, and so people wear that and. The people that I know that wear it, they they seem to believe in it.

• 2:22:36Pete Roberts?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:22:36Jocko Willink?

  Just the level of, it's not like, uh, like the, what's the sun protection rating?

• 2:22:41Pete Roberts?

  SPF.

• 2:22:42Jocko Willink?

  SPF fifty?

• 2:22:42Pete Roberts?

  Or, yeah, so UPF, UPF, right?

• 2:22:45Jocko Willink?

  UPF fifty, there's no anti-ringworm percentage rating, right?

• 2:22:50Pete Roberts?

  Right.

• 2:22:51Speaker 02

  It's just a general antimicrobial.

• 2:22:53Jocko Willink?

  Right.

• 2:22:54Speaker 02

  Problem, like.

• 2:22:54Jocko Willink?

  But, but that keeps it from growing in the material. What I'm saying is, if you wear, like, a compression shirt and compression pants.

• 2:23:05Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 2:23:05Jocko Willink?

  Then you're not rubbing your skin against some savage that came into the gym with ringworm.

• 2:23:10Speaker 02

  Right, right, right.

• 2:23:11Jocko Willink?

  So you have less percentage.

• 2:23:12Speaker 02

  Rolling with him too, by the way.

• 2:23:13Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, or rolling.

• 2:23:14Speaker 02

  Put a triangle on his ringworm on his neck or something like this.

• 2:23:17Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:18Speaker 02

  You don't need that.

• 2:23:18Jocko Willink?

  So, that's a good reason to wear compression gear.

• 2:23:23Speaker 02

  Rash guards.

• 2:23:24Jocko Willink?

  Across the board.

• 2:23:24Pete Roberts?

  And the rash guards, like they're, now, they're not like the rash guards you're used to. The ones you put on and then they untuck and then you tuck them in, they untuck and you tuck them in. They're designed to stay tucked in, so you put them on and the way the fibers flex and bend with your body. It's not your mother's or grandmother's rash guard.

• 2:23:45Speaker 02

  So when, when you say tucked in, because you don't really tuck in a rash guard, right? Or do you?

• 2:23:51Jocko Willink?

  You're talking about under the gi?

• 2:23:52Pete Roberts?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:53Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 2:23:53Pete Roberts?

  Oh, under the gi.

• 2:23:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's a, that's a whole new world right there.

• 2:23:56Pete Roberts?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:57Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah. Some places make you wear rash guard under your gi.

• 2:23:59Speaker 02

  Oh, okay. Yeah.

• 2:24:01Pete Roberts?

  I think, I think it's good to have a rash guard on your gi.

• 2:24:03Jocko Willink?

  I know a lot of people think that.

• 2:24:04Pete Roberts?

  It's not traditional, I mean.

• 2:24:06Jocko Willink?

  Amish tradish.

• 2:24:07Pete Roberts?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:07Jocko Willink?

  In that one.

• 2:24:08Speaker 02

  Why do you like it?

• 2:24:10Pete Roberts?

  I like the barrier. I like the, I like the gi.

• 2:24:13Speaker 02

  From rash or the?

• 2:24:14Pete Roberts?

  I like the barrier, um, between the, the, the fabric and the skin. I like the compression, because you compress your muscle, you get more use out of it.

• 2:24:24Jocko Willink?

  You're straight performance.

• 2:24:25Pete Roberts?

  Performance, yep.

• 2:24:26Jocko Willink?

  Got it.

• 2:24:27Pete Roberts?

  Absolutely. The gi slides a little bit better on a rash guard than it does your skin once it's all sweaty up and sticky.

• 2:24:32Speaker 02

  Right, right.

• 2:24:33Pete Roberts?

  So, that's why I use it.

• 2:24:35Jocko Willink?

  And I'm a hairy Greek dude. Nobody wants a chest hair on their face.

• 2:24:39Pete Roberts?

  That's right.

• 2:24:40Speaker 02

  They don't want that deep.

• 2:24:41Jocko Willink?

  You know, Nareet would be happy if we all wore rash guards. She's, um. Our black belt at our gym, female. And, and she is still a girl. So things like chest hairs.

• 2:24:55Pete Roberts?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:56Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, she's not happy about those things. She begs me to wear, you know, something under my gi- she's so far failed.

• 2:25:04Pete Roberts?

  She failed on my part.

• 2:25:05Jocko Willink?

  Oh, man. But, um, you know, the other thing is, you, we didn't talk about OriginMaine.com as supplements.

• 2:25:13Pete Roberts?

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 2:25:14Jocko Willink?

  So.

• 2:25:15Pete Roberts?

  On the body and in your body.

• 2:25:16Jocko Willink?

  There you go.

• 2:25:17Pete Roberts?

  That's it.

• 2:25:18Jocko Willink?

  There you go.

• 2:25:19Pete Roberts?

  We're gonna put everything you need on your body and everything you need in your body.

• 2:25:23Speaker 02

  Krill oil?

• 2:25:24Pete Roberts?

  Yep.

• 2:25:24Speaker 02

  Really, that's the, that's the one.

• 2:25:26Jocko Willink?

  Now.

• 2:25:26Pete Roberts?

  It's krill oil and then a super krill oil.

• 2:25:28Jocko Willink?

  One of the things that, um, you know, you'll be happy to know that Pete and I, we like to make things happen. And, you know, obviously I'm a big fan of krill oil, for instance. So, you know, I was, I used to be a fan of white tea. A big fan. And I drank it a lot. And eventually I said, you know what I need? Is Jocko white tea.

• 2:25:51Jocko Willink?

  And so I had a similar thing happen.

• 2:25:53Pete Roberts?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:53Jocko Willink?

  With krill oil. I, I wanna have krill oil. Good krill oil. So you know what we're making?

• 2:25:59Pete Roberts?

  Good krill oil.

• 2:26:00Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Actually, we like to call it Jocko.

• 2:26:03Pete Roberts?

  Super krill.

• 2:26:05Jocko Willink?

  So Jocko super krill. We're, we're making that awesome quality.

• 2:26:11Jocko Willink?

  On top of that, we got a little, again, little ju- we need joint maintenance, right? We need joint maintenance. When we are active, when we're training jiu-jitsu, when we're jacking big steel. We are tendons and everything get a little bit sore, sore. We might not admit to it in public, just like we wouldn't admit to crying.

• 2:26:32Pete Roberts?

  Right.

• 2:26:33Jocko Willink?

  On a public situation.

• 2:26:35Pete Roberts?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:35Jocko Willink?

  Ever.

• 2:26:35Pete Roberts?

  I'm comfortable with my masculinity.

• 2:26:37Jocko Willink?

  You must be. Cause I'm over here holding, like, no, don't cry.

• 2:26:40Pete Roberts?

  Don't cry. My wife says, Pete, you, the only time you cry is babies and belts. When someone gets promoted and someone has a kid.

• 2:26:49Speaker 02

  What about weddings?

• 2:26:51Pete Roberts?

  No. No, funerals and weddings, no.

• 2:26:53Jocko Willink?

  So we got another, another thing we're coming out with. It's a. Jocko joint warfare for your joints go to war against the pain.

• 2:27:06Pete Roberts?

  Inflammation.

• 2:27:07Jocko Willink?

  Go to lubrication. Degeneration. All that stuff, all enemies. Yeah, and I've been kicking it for since we since we originally formulated. And I got the samples. I went on it hardcore and it's legit, legit across the board.

• 2:27:25Pete Roberts?

  I about that. I have like bad back from sports and stuff herniated disc bulging disc didn't get surgery. Severe arthritis. I can train seven days a week if I wanted to. As a matter of fact, we have our immersion camp this week. Train every day, every day. That's it.

• 2:27:48Jocko Willink?

  Joint warfare.

• 2:27:49Pete Roberts?

  Yep.

• 2:27:49Jocko Willink?

  Keeping it real. So that stuff. We it's being manufactured. We I've been on the samples for what a month and a half. Um, and now it's been being manufactured.

• 2:28:03Jocko Willink?

  In America, check and.

• 2:28:05Pete Roberts?

  Very close by.

• 2:28:07Jocko Willink?

  Right.

• 2:28:07Pete Roberts?

  By a partner.

• 2:28:08Jocko Willink?

  Right. And and so it's gonna be on the website now. Preorder it and that way we can get a get a feel for how much because we've got a bunch coming. We need to figure out how much of a bunch is that actually means.

• 2:28:20Pete Roberts?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:21Jocko Willink?

  So kind of like with Jocko white tea. I didn't do that. I just said, oh, there's Jocko white tea for sale. It was gone.

• 2:28:26Pete Roberts?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:27Jocko Willink?

  And then I ordered some more and and then that was gone and people were really getting angry because when you, you know, when you have Jocko white tea. And then you don't have it. All of a sudden, you know, you things start going sideways.

• 2:28:38Pete Roberts?

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 2:28:39Jocko Willink?

  So you gotta get that back straight up. So anyways, you can check those things out. Origin main.com. They'll be there. Joint warfare. You like that, don't you? I do. Yeah, yeah, it's good. There's a there's a layer on there. Yeah. That's deep. Deep layers.

• 2:28:53Pete Roberts?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:28:55Jocko Willink?

  The one person that's gonna get this layer is Dean Lister. Yep.

• 2:28:59Pete Roberts?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:59Jocko Willink?

  Yep. Trebouget. I'll leave it at that. Oh, trebouget. Trebouget. Well, you know, trebouget, right? Yeah, yeah.

• 2:29:05Pete Roberts?

  Lot of moving parts in a trebouget.

• 2:29:07Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:07Pete Roberts?

  Gotta keep them greased.

• 2:29:09Jocko Willink?

  Gotta keep that joint. It's true. Also, speaking of jacking steel.

• 2:29:15Speaker 02

  Kettlebells. So when we came here, we're in Maine right now, if people haven't gathered that already. Up in camp, no big weight room, kinda. There's a little fitness center there. Yeah, first night we get here, one guy's like, hey, I brought my Onnit kettlebell.

• 2:29:31Jocko Willink?

  Oh, who was that? Yeah. John.

• 2:29:35Speaker 02

  John, yes.

• 2:29:36Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it was John.

• 2:29:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:29:37Jocko Willink?

  Nice, yeah.

• 2:29:37Speaker 02

  Onnit kettlebell, the gorilla, the ones I just ordered, by the way.

• 2:29:40Jocko Willink?

  Legit.

• 2:29:41Speaker 02

  They're shipped, they're on the way, tracking. Anyway, yeah, that's the good ones. You do kettlebells?

• 2:29:47Jocko Willink?

  I don't.

• 2:29:47Speaker 02

  You stopped lifting though?

• 2:29:48Jocko Willink?

  Oh, that's right.

• 2:29:49Pete Roberts?

  I stopped, I did, I stopped lifting.

• 2:29:50Jocko Willink?

  Too massive.

• 2:29:52Speaker 02

  Well, kettlebells?

• 2:29:53Jocko Willink?

  Too massive. And I'm gonna bring this up because we talked about this pre-recording. Uh, so you weigh 253 right now, as we talked about, you used to weigh 285. And I asked this question, and this is a good question that everybody should kinda hear the answer to. Could the 250 thou- 250 pound Pete beat the 285 pound Pete in a grappling match? And your answer was?

• 2:30:16Pete Roberts?

  A hundred percent.

• 2:30:17Jocko Willink?

  The smaller guy wins.

• 2:30:19Pete Roberts?

  Yes.

• 2:30:19Jocko Willink?

  Why is that?

• 2:30:21Pete Roberts?

  I mean, lots of reasons. You're more flexible, more flexible, better positioning, better escapes because there's less mass, burning less oxygen because you have less muscle mass. And for me, I would wear the 285 version of myself out. So it's, I stopped, and I love lifting weights. I love lifting weights, but for me, jiu-jitsu fulfills the void because it is resistance.

• 2:30:51Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:51Pete Roberts?

  You're always working. I never feel out of shape. Well, unless I have too many whoopee pies, but.

• 2:30:57Jocko Willink?

  Do you do anything to work out besides jiu-jitsu?

• 2:31:00Pete Roberts?

  No.

• 2:31:00Jocko Willink?

  Do you run? Do you sprint?

• 2:31:01Pete Roberts?

  No.

• 2:31:03Jocko Willink?

  Dang.

• 2:31:03Pete Roberts?

  Just pure jiu-jitsu. I do.

• 2:31:06Jocko Willink?

  Dean Lister tells me that when Dean Lister doesn't want to work out, doesn't want to do any, you know, sprints, he's like, I get it from Jiu Jitsu Choco. That's my best thing. So now you're supporting his argument. Now I gotta, now I gotta deal with that. Well, Pete Roberts said, you know.

• 2:31:23Pete Roberts?

  We'll, we'll talk about someday how Jiu Jitsu makes you unathletic.

• 2:31:27Jocko Willink?

  Oh, really?

• 2:31:28Pete Roberts?

  That's a whole nother talk.

• 2:31:29Jocko Willink?

  Interesting.

• 2:31:30Pete Roberts?

  And I have facts on why it makes you unathletic. But it keeps you, it keeps your body together, your core together, your muscles strong.

• 2:31:40Jocko Willink?

  So what does it do to make you unathletic? It's slow movement?

• 2:31:43Pete Roberts?

  You slow, you start, when you start Jiu Jitsu, your body slows down, your mind slows down, your muscles slow down. Whatever you had for fast twitch turns to slow twitch because you're pulling and tugging and you're moving slow. I used to be able to dunk a basketball, every dunk. I can't touch the rim now.

• 2:31:58Jocko Willink?

  I think we need to, I will go ahead and defend the Jiu Jitsu over here on my side of the table. Because if you continue to do cleans and you continue to squat.

• 2:32:13Pete Roberts?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:13Jocko Willink?

  And you continue to do sprints and mobility drills and agility drills, you can keep that athleticism.

• 2:32:21Pete Roberts?

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

• 2:32:23Jocko Willink?

  Check.

• 2:32:23Pete Roberts?

  That's what I did, that's what I did when I competed. I had a strength and conditioning coach. Sprint, lift, push, pull.

• 2:32:30Speaker 02

  So I guess big picture is one of those deals where it kind of confirms the idea that you don't have to be athletic to do good in Jiu Jitsu, generally speaking. But if you want to do some kind of athletic competition, including but not limited to Jiu Jitsu, it helps to be athletic.

• 2:32:47Jocko Willink?

  Jackson Steel.

• 2:32:48Speaker 02

  Yeah. I'm kind of glad that you kind of hit him with that because when I said I stopped doing like legs and stuff like that, I got a lot of crap for it.

• 2:32:56Pete Roberts?

  You know, I, I, I. I did a lot of squats in college.

• 2:33:01Jocko Willink?

  Well, yeah, you played college football. Hell, yeah.

• 2:33:04Pete Roberts?

  I I'm scared of them. I like hack squats. Hack squats, man, for sure.

• 2:33:09Jocko Willink?

  You got bad knees or something? Bad back?

• 2:33:11Pete Roberts?

  Bad back, yeah. Dude, my back. Yeah. The last time I squatted and I hit the floor, right? Of course, bad back. Bad back from years of major.

• 2:33:22Jocko Willink?

  And and personal question. Does your ego not allow you to get in there and do a hundred and eighty-five pounds for some higher reps?

• 2:33:32Pete Roberts?

  Nope. I do that a hundred percent.

• 2:33:34Jocko Willink?

  But you still don't like it?

• 2:33:35Pete Roberts?

  I do hack squats. I still don't.

• 2:33:37Jocko Willink?

  Right on.

• 2:33:37Pete Roberts?

  I still don't like it, but I mean, it's.

• 2:33:42Pete Roberts?

  Steel is great.

• 2:33:44Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:44Pete Roberts?

  That's the bottom line.

• 2:33:45Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:45Pete Roberts?

  It is great.

• 2:33:48Pete Roberts?

  I just get it through jiu-jitsu, man. I push. I do, you know, every time I step on the mats, it's six, ten-minute rounds, and I've trained through the break. So I'm doing twelve-minute rounds.

• 2:33:55Jocko Willink?

  Nice.

• 2:33:55Pete Roberts?

  I make sure to get six.

• 2:33:58Pete Roberts?

  And I get it as as things free up and my son wants to lift as he starts the summer, I'll get in with him. And we'll we'll press some iron.

• 2:34:08Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That sounded pretty, pretty fired up, didn't it?

• 2:34:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, look, he wants to go lift right now. Look at him.

• 2:34:14Jocko Willink?

  You want to go lift right now? Press some iron.

• 2:34:17Speaker 02

  But kettlebells don't get you that be. I mean, I'm sure under certain circumstances they will, but.

• 2:34:22Jocko Willink?

  But they do get you athletic.

• 2:34:24Speaker 02

  I think so. Yeah.

• 2:34:25Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, because you're like a hang clean. You like hang clean them, right?

• 2:34:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:34:28Jocko Willink?

  The jump, the snap. And the other big thing is when you, like for a kettlebell snatch, it's a swinging motion. And when it gets to the top, you have to stop it.

• 2:34:37Pete Roberts?

  Right.

• 2:34:38Jocko Willink?

  Because otherwise you're going to rip your shoulder out. So you have to use all this, whatever that kind of muscle, what is it? Echo-centric or something? What is it? Concentric? Whatever you gotta do to to to stop it at the top.

• 2:34:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:34:48Jocko Willink?

  You you gotta stop it. So it's using all these muscles to make that thing happen.

• 2:34:52Pete Roberts?

  That's cool.

• 2:34:53Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 2:34:54Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:55Pete Roberts?

  I'm gonna do it.

• 2:34:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's cool.

• 2:34:57Pete Roberts?

  I'm gonna try.

• 2:34:57Speaker 02

  It'll get fun.

• 2:34:58Pete Roberts?

  Might as well.

• 2:34:58Speaker 02

  It'll get fun.

• 2:34:59Pete Roberts?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:59Speaker 02

  Like when you start getting like the balance and then, you know, it's like there's some momentum, you gotta create momentum, then you gotta balance the moment. It's like all this stuff.

• 2:35:05Pete Roberts?

  Remember in college, they said the, the true, uh, true test of how strong somebody is, is a hang clean.

• 2:35:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:35:14Pete Roberts?

  They said you could bench a lot, you could squat a lot.

• 2:35:16Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. There's, there's a lot of people.

• 2:35:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:35:18Jocko Willink?

  There's a lot of things that you could say that, like for instance, you know what's a good one, overhead squat.

• 2:35:22Pete Roberts?

  Oh, you know.

• 2:35:23Jocko Willink?

  Like overhead squat is.

• 2:35:24Pete Roberts?

  Back, core.

• 2:35:25Jocko Willink?

  If you got a guy that can do massive, like big weight and, or, or medium weight, high reps, overhead squat, that's legit too.

• 2:35:32Pete Roberts?

  Yeah, but on a hang clean, you gotta use your speed also, it's speedy.

• 2:35:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's like explosive.

• 2:35:38Jocko Willink?

  So you could just go straight to the snatch, right?

• 2:35:39Pete Roberts?

  Yeah, right.

• 2:35:40Speaker 02

  But then again, the snatch, you need the, the balance at the top, that's coordination, then you need, you know, all these other things.

• 2:35:46Pete Roberts?

  So.

• 2:35:46Speaker 02

  So, and it depends on what you mean by strong too. So you know how like, I guess, you know, in, in certain circles, they call strength, power and strength and power are two different things. And it's like, okay, so what are you talking about? So I dig it and I agree actually, but.

• 2:35:58Pete Roberts?

  This is also 20 years ago.

• 2:36:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, exactly, right? Even another point to consider.

• 2:36:03Jocko Willink?

  I think that's a really good metric.

• 2:36:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, I agree.

• 2:36:06Jocko Willink?

  You said hang clean, right?

• 2:36:07Pete Roberts?

  Hang clean, knees to shoulders.

• 2:36:09Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, the solid metric, for sure.

• 2:36:12Speaker 02

  Deadlift, another solid metric, by the way.

• 2:36:14Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, but. Raw strength, right?

• 2:36:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cause consider, remember by like, when you're a kid or maybe old school kind of philosophy, it's like, hey, you know, you get the old timer and he's like, how strong are you? And you're like real strong, we're so, okay, pick that up, you know what I mean? Okay, you can't pick it up, you're weak, you can, you're strong.

• 2:36:33Pete Roberts?

  And he comes and picks it up.

• 2:36:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then, and then the, the step two is pick it up over your head.

• 2:36:38Pete Roberts?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:38Jocko Willink?

  You got deadlift, you deadlift?

• 2:36:39Pete Roberts?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:40Jocko Willink?

  Wow, yeah.

• 2:36:41Speaker 02

  I don't.

• 2:36:42Pete Roberts?

  No.

• 2:36:43Speaker 02

  Just kidding, yeah.

• 2:36:43Jocko Willink?

  Dude, don't you, let's not do this again. Anyway.

• 2:36:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, it's good. Yeah. But don't get too nuts with that, though. Who was that? I was just talking to somebody there.

• 2:36:54Jocko Willink?

  Squats and deadlifts.

• 2:36:56Speaker 02

  It was Ed.

• 2:36:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, he was like, you know, my back and stuff. I was like, bro, don't get crazy with deadlifts.

• 2:37:01Jocko Willink?

  No, but you can talk to plenty of people that say, oh, I had a bad back and I deadlifted and now it's healed.

• 2:37:08Speaker 02

  Right, right.

• 2:37:08Jocko Willink?

  Plenty of people that say that. Absolutely.

• 2:37:10Speaker 02

  Don't get crazy with them because it'll just give you good general strength. Like, your, your back's bad because a lot of times anyway, even just anywhere in your cores, because when you have like some core thing or your back or something, when you do stuff, you adjust to not use it, you know?

• 2:37:23Jocko Willink?

  And that's when you get too.

• 2:37:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, because you don't use it anymore. So now when you do something, you're grabbing the cranberry juice from this side, you're gonna put it over here.

• 2:37:30Jocko Willink?

  You had it on the floor.

• 2:37:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, you're like, how did I do that?

• 2:37:33Jocko Willink?

  I didn't even want cranberry juice. That's, that's the worst. That's sugar in a bottle, bro. You shouldn't be, that's your body's way of telling you, don't want that cranberry juice.

• 2:37:43Speaker 02

  Hey, man, I dig it. Maybe you're grabbing it from here, putting it in the trash can or something like this, you know?

• 2:37:47Jocko Willink?

  We like that.

• 2:37:48Speaker 02

  I'm just saying, that's why, though. So you go deadlift, not heavy, not crazy, just like, your body's like, like any lifting, it's like your body just getting used to it. So boom, you're used to picking stuff up now.

• 2:37:57Jocko Willink?

  Wanna try it?

• 2:37:58Speaker 02

  Do it.

• 2:37:59Jocko Willink?

  I like it.

• 2:37:59Speaker 02

  Try the kettlebells, too. And if you want the cool ones, and when I say cool, it's like you look at them and they're cool.

• 2:38:05Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:05Speaker 02

  Like, irrefutably cool on it. That's the ones, the gorilla one. Actually, don't do the gorilla ones first. Do the chimp one first.

• 2:38:12Jocko Willink?

  Yeah? What is it about me that I'm straight to zombies?

• 2:38:16Speaker 02

  You're just super strong.

• 2:38:18Jocko Willink?

  No, no, zombies have the same categories.

• 2:38:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:38:21Jocko Willink?

  And I forget what they're all called. But like, when I looked at the, the legend versus the gorilla.

• 2:38:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:38:27Jocko Willink?

  Ones or the primate ones to, to the zombies. I wanted the ones that look crazy and evil.

• 2:38:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:38:33Jocko Willink?

  I guess that's no big surprise. Alright, I answer my own question.

• 2:38:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think we both, we all here collectively know why you want the zombies. Technically, it's so, but that brings up a good point, in my opinion. All the different categories. Primal bells, that's the, the chimp, the, you know, all the things, different zombies, all zombies, legends, werewolf.

• 2:38:53Jocko Willink?

  Cyclops.

• 2:38:54Speaker 02

  Cyclops, like all the legends. So boom, pick your category, but that's the cool ones. I recommend.

• 2:38:59Jocko Willink?

  What else?

• 2:39:00Speaker 02

  Check them out. Hey, man. Jump ropes, all kinds. Actually, it's kind of good, you go in there and they have all kinds of workout stuff, like stuff, you know how, bro, you know how when you get into a workout, maybe not you, you're not like this, but. Like I got into the kettlebells and it became fun, you know, you know how like,

• 2:39:17Jocko Willink?

  If something becomes fun for me, I stop doing it and do something that sucks.

• 2:39:20Speaker 02

  Well dang, this is more boring, more psychologically challenging. But they got all kinds. They have like the maces and you know, all the workout stuff or whatever. Anyway, that's a good one. On it.com slash Jocko. Check out that stuff and man, get after it. Even if you're getting bored, man, you got some interesting stuff to work out with. Highly recommend.

• 2:39:38Jocko Willink?

  Awesome.

• 2:39:39Speaker 02

  Also, if you like these books, Pete didn't write a book. Wait, have you written a book before?

• 2:39:47Speaker 02

  I wouldn't be surprised.

• 2:39:48Jocko Willink?

  I wrote a long ass paper.

• 2:39:51Jocko Willink?

  When I couldn't sleep over the last year, but.

• 2:39:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:39:54Jocko Willink?

  Called a book.

• 2:39:55Speaker 02

  So yeah, a little bit different, but anyway, a lot of times Jocko will review books on this podcast. People like to get them. If you're one of those people out there, go to the website, JacoPodcast.com section, books from the podcast, click through there to get the books. That's a good way to support. Takes you to Amazon or if you're doing any other shopping, do it through there.

• 2:40:17Speaker 02

  Big support, small action, small action, big reaction.

• 2:40:20Jocko Willink?

  Nice.

• 2:40:21Speaker 02

  Also, subscribe to the podcast.

• 2:40:26Speaker 02

  Google Play.

• 2:40:27Jocko Willink?

  We still feel the need to say that.

• 2:40:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:40:29Jocko Willink?

  Because what? Some people aren't subscribed?

• 2:40:33Speaker 02

  In the event of, yeah, you know, it's, I guess it's just our guess, my guess, there's probably hypo- hypothesis, speaking is my hypothesis is what I'm saying. There's probably a marginal group who's like, hey, who's Jocko? I heard him on Joe Rogan, or I don't know, I seen him on whatever. Then I go, I'm gonna listen to the podcast. I was like, okay, cool. I'll listen to, let me listen to another one. Okay, cool. Maybe I'm not down, you know, he's kind of weird.

• 2:41:02Jocko Willink?

  Or just maybe they don't understand, like, oh, I can subscribe to this? Like I can just get, it'll, it'll tell me when it's coming.

• 2:41:10Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:41:10Jocko Willink?

  Cause a lot of people don't listen to podcasts.

• 2:41:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:41:13Jocko Willink?

  I got, I got a question for you about that. Have you thought about?

• 2:41:17Pete Roberts?

  Cause you, this is number 90.

• 2:41:19Jocko Willink?

  Yes.

• 2:41:19Pete Roberts?

  Have you thought about breaking the podcasts into categories to speak to your audience? Because you cover such a broad audience.

• 2:41:28Jocko Willink?

  Um, when you say breaking them, you mean.

• 2:41:29Pete Roberts?

  Just another section, like.

• 2:41:32Jocko Willink?

  Cutting them up?

• 2:41:33Pete Roberts?

  No, no, no. The full podcast, but like where you're covering books, where you're talking about business, where you're interviewing somebody, breaking them up that way.

• 2:41:42Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, they are.

• 2:41:43Pete Roberts?

  Cause it's not, it's not linear, right? You don't have to listen from one, right up to nine.

• 2:41:48Jocko Willink?

  I recommend when someone says, hey, you know, I just heard your podcast. I heard, I heard, I just listened to that podcast you just put out. I want to listen to the rest of them. Should I go backwards? Should I go forwards? And I tell people, start at one. And, and most of the people that I talk to that are into the podcast, they're like, that's the right advice. Tell people, start at one.

• 2:42:09Pete Roberts?

  If I said, Jocko, I want to listen to your real business related podcasts. I couldn't, could I do that or no?

• 2:42:17Jocko Willink?

  What we are going to do, and I have this in the background going, it's something that I've been trying to get done for a while. Is we're going to kind of archive where you're going to be able to maybe figure out, oh, I want to listen to business.

• 2:42:29Pete Roberts?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:29Jocko Willink?

  Boom. And here's a podcast, here's a section. Now, whether or not we like chop them up and put them into one group, um, not yet, not yet.

• 2:42:38Pete Roberts?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:39Jocko Willink?

  Not yet.

• 2:42:39Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, it, you're, yeah, it's not organized, we'll say, but you know, it's one of those things you got to manually look, you know? Cause it'll say what it's about. In fact, the podcast, it's straight up by timestamp.

• 2:42:50Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:50Speaker 02

  Like boom, what we're talking about, you know?

• 2:42:52Jocko Willink?

  I saw that.

• 2:42:53Speaker 02

  So you can kind of do it that way, but no, not organized. Like if, if you're, and it makes sense though, because if we're talking about a book and people like, oh, I love World War II. Love it.

• 2:43:02Pete Roberts?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:43:02Speaker 02

  And boom.

• 2:43:03Pete Roberts?

  There's 10 podcasts in World War II.

• 2:43:04Speaker 02

  Yeah. And they can just get after it and then maybe, you know.

• 2:43:08Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, man.

• 2:43:08Pete Roberts?

  Just an idea.

• 2:43:09Jocko Willink?

  Good idea.

• 2:43:10Speaker 02

  Pete is in the house. Big time. But yeah, subscribe. That's a good one. If you haven't already, how about that? If you haven't already, subscribe. That's a good one. Also YouTube, subscribe to that one.

• 2:43:19Pete Roberts?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:20Speaker 02

  That one's a little bit more like makes sense to be like, hey, subscribe.

• 2:43:24Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And the big thing that you might not know is if you're not subscribed to YouTube, there could be things that are not in the podcast.

• 2:43:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:43:32Jocko Willink?

  So let's say you like the podcast, you're listening to it and you go, yeah, well, I've heard all the podcasts. I don't need to get YouTube. You're wrong.

• 2:43:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:43:38Jocko Willink?

  Because there could be things released.

• 2:43:41Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 2:43:41Jocko Willink?

  Into the YouTube that have not been released.

• 2:43:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:43:46Jocko Willink?

  For instance, deleted scenes.

• 2:43:48Speaker 02

  Deleted scenes.

• 2:43:49Jocko Willink?

  Which is us talking off the record about things like people that have certain, you know.

• 2:43:54Speaker 02

  What?

• 2:43:55Jocko Willink?

  Issues.

• 2:43:55Speaker 02

  What kind of issues, bro? What kind of issues?

• 2:43:57Jocko Willink?

  Uh, nothing, bro. Lack of squatting issues.

• 2:44:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, bro. See? Yeah. And I said, I stopped squatting because of, actually, technically, the story goes, I stopped squatting because my wife said, hey, your legs are like real big and it looks weird.

• 2:44:13Jocko Willink?

  That's funny because my wife said, you're starting to get an old man butt.

• 2:44:17Speaker 02

  Damn.

• 2:44:18Jocko Willink?

  Cold blooded.

• 2:44:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, I had some kind of the same thing.

• 2:44:21Jocko Willink?

  What does that even mean? I don't know, dude. Dang. I don't like it, though. I don't even know what it means and I don't like it. Dude, I'm squatting. You need to get on the squat. I'm squatting.

• 2:44:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. Or what? Like kettlebell swings? Boom.

• 2:44:32Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's what they say.

• 2:44:33Speaker 02

  The regular one?

• 2:44:34Jocko Willink?

  They say that the, the, the regular or the Russian kettlebell swings.

• 2:44:38Speaker 02

  Posterior chain.

• 2:44:39Jocko Willink?

  I knew you were coming. I knew you were coming with that.

• 2:44:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, I learned that, all that stuff. Either way, yeah, the deleted scenes, that's what he was giving me shit about because I stopped squatting. Actually, I didn't stop squatting. I stopped squatting like hardcore legs. You know what I'm saying?

• 2:44:53Jocko Willink?

  You stopped squatting.

• 2:44:56Jocko Willink?

  The point is, is you stopped squatting.

• 2:44:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, I know, bro. Anyway, yeah, deleted scenes are on there. Uh, excerpts too, you know? Like, let's say you were like, hey, I liked that part. And people still email me about that, by the way. Where they're like, hey, what was that part? Or what episode was that from? That part where whatever. So instead of having to scour. See what I'm saying? Just share the excerpts, easy to find. So yeah, that's the good. Subscribe to YouTube. Also, Jocko has a store. It's called Jocko Store. jockostore.com. Guess what's on there?

• 2:45:28Jocko Willink?

  Everything.

• 2:45:31Speaker 02

  Potentially everything, but as of right now, there's some shirts on there. Women's stuff on there, patches on there. Um, you know, you can put them on your hat interchangeable Velcro patches, if you will. Rash Guards.

• 2:45:44Jocko Willink?

  Awesome.

• 2:45:46Speaker 02

  So now they have two options, huh?

• 2:45:48Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:45:48Speaker 02

  Jocko Rash Guards, get after it, Trooper Darkness Rash Guards and Origin Rash Guards.

• 2:45:55Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:45:55Speaker 02

  Just like that, the selection just vastly widened, yeah.

• 2:45:58Jocko Willink?

  And eventually they're gonna be, and this will be, will, it'll all be.

• 2:46:03Speaker 02

  Kind of melt together as one big vast, um, option.

• 2:46:07Jocko Willink?

  Place to just go and.

• 2:46:08Pete Roberts?

  This is really gonna be a melting pot of awesomeness.

• 2:46:12Jocko Willink?

  Yes, indeed.

• 2:46:13Speaker 02

  Yeah. But yeah.

• 2:46:14Jocko Willink?

  Simple. Indeed.

• 2:46:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, all that. So, and some hoodies on there.

• 2:46:20Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:21Speaker 02

  I think we should consult.

• 2:46:23Jocko Willink?

  No, you, he, I'm gonna tell you. I already know what he's gonna say. He's from Hawaii.

• 2:46:28Pete Roberts?

  What, you want a lightweight hoodie?

• 2:46:29Jocko Willink?

  No, he, so he made hoodies and I'm from New England. And so I was like, oh, you make a hoodie, you can wear it in like a full-fledged Arctic storm.

• 2:46:36Pete Roberts?

  Yeah, you better have a heavyweight cotton hoodie.

• 2:46:38Jocko Willink?

  So his, his hoodies are, are, are light. They're, they're cool for SoCal.

• 2:46:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:46:43Jocko Willink?

  They're good for Hawaii, if you even have hoodies in Hawaii.

• 2:46:45Speaker 02

  They're like a fall hoodie, I guess. And even that's like my guess. I don't know. That's why I'm saying we should consult. I mean, his is like, his consultation things, when I consult him, like, hey, it's, it's like mixed in with a scolding. So, you know, I get the scolding first, then the info like maybe so.

• 2:47:04Pete Roberts?

  I wanna make a really, really badass, flat-locked hoodie.

• 2:47:08Jocko Willink?

  Let's do it.

• 2:47:09Speaker 02

  What is a flat lock?

• 2:47:10Jocko Willink?

  Wait, wait a second.

• 2:47:11Pete Roberts?

  Flat-seamed hoodie.

• 2:47:12Jocko Willink?

  How could we possibly do that? What, where are we gonna get someone that knows how to make flat-locked, awesome badass hoodies? Oh, wait, we're sitting in a factory.

• 2:47:21Pete Roberts?

  That's right. Where we can make it happen.

• 2:47:25Jocko Willink?

  There you go. That's good stuff.

• 2:47:27Speaker 02

  Also, psychological warfare. Previously, a few minutes ago, we talked about joint warfare for.

• 2:47:35Speaker 02

  Joint degeneration, inflammation, all that stuff. Overall, we'll generally, generally speaking.

• 2:47:41Pete Roberts?

  Supplementation for your body.

• 2:47:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:47:43Pete Roberts?

  Sometimes you need supplementation for your mind, don't you?

• 2:47:45Speaker 02

  For your mind, yes, full on. So in your campaign against weakness, psychological weakness, you know, you're trying to get up every day, right? Stick to the diet.

• 2:47:55Pete Roberts?

  Can that help me with eating multiple whoopee pies?

• 2:47:59Speaker 02

  Yes, yes.

• 2:48:00Pete Roberts?

  Yes.

• 2:48:01Speaker 02

  Actually, there's a specific track for that.

• 2:48:04Pete Roberts?

  Man, I'm definitely interested in that because that's been my one struggle as a human.

• 2:48:09Speaker 02

  What is a whoopee pie?

• 2:48:10Pete Roberts?

  A whoopee pie is like cake and.

• 2:48:14Speaker 02

  With cream, right? Yes, I say, yes.

• 2:48:16Pete Roberts?

  I'm trying not to sound like a Fig Newton commercial because it kicks Fig Newton's ass.

• 2:48:20Jocko Willink?

  Fig Newton is like, if you put those two next to each other, they're in different planets.

• 2:48:23Pete Roberts?

  Exactly.

• 2:48:24Speaker 02

  I thought Fig Newtons were healthy, though.

• 2:48:26Jocko Willink?

  Allegedly. They're actually just a big giant block of sugar.

• 2:48:29Pete Roberts?

  Fig and cake.

• 2:48:30Jocko Willink?

  Which is pretty much what a whoopee pie is, which is why my homie over here.

• 2:48:33Pete Roberts?

  Yeah. You got a kid, you know, I'm a single parent family, four kids. We were fighting over the food in the house, dude. I've never broken out of that.

• 2:48:40Speaker 02

  And the whoopee pie was.

• 2:48:41Pete Roberts?

  You need to break me.

• 2:48:42Jocko Willink?

  We can, we can, we can introduce you to a track called Sugar Coated Lies.

• 2:48:48Pete Roberts?

  Really?

• 2:48:49Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:48:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:48:50Pete Roberts?

  I'd be very interested in that.

• 2:48:51Jocko Willink?

  We'll get you on the Sugar Coated Lies.

• 2:48:53Pete Roberts?

  I'm weak there.

• 2:48:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, and you'd think it'd be like Jocko yelling at you like, don't, whatever. But it's a pragmatic explanation of what your mind is doing right now and what it shouldn't be doing and what it should be doing. Then you'd be like, oh, okay.

• 2:49:06Pete Roberts?

  And psychological warfare, that can help with that.

• 2:49:09Speaker 02

  Oh, big time. Basically, it's like.

• 2:49:11Jocko Willink?

  Did you mention that it's an album?

• 2:49:12Speaker 02

  It's an, oh, yeah, yeah.

• 2:49:14Jocko Willink?

  It's an album.

• 2:49:15Speaker 02

  With tracks.

• 2:49:16Pete Roberts?

  On iTunes.

• 2:49:17Speaker 02

  Jocko tracks, iTunes, Amazon Music, like all these things. Yeah.

• 2:49:21Jocko Willink?

  MP3. And you know what? You, you're probably sitting here thinking like, okay, that, that's a neat little idea that, you know, Echo came up with and made Jocko do this and, oh, cool. That album, number one spoken word album on iTunes, four?

• 2:49:39Speaker 02

  I don't know. I lost.

• 2:49:40Jocko Willink?

  Like thirty eight straight weeks.

• 2:49:42Pete Roberts?

  Are you kidding me?

• 2:49:42Jocko Willink?

  Number one.

• 2:49:43Pete Roberts?

  That's yeah.

• 2:49:44Jocko Willink?

  Badass.

• 2:49:45Speaker 02

  No big deal, you know?

• 2:49:46Jocko Willink?

  Oh shit.

• 2:49:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:49:47Jocko Willink?

  I didn't know that.

• 2:49:47Speaker 02

  Awesome.

• 2:49:48Jocko Willink?

  And I will say that when Echo is like, dude, you just gotta, you know, just, just, you know, these things that I'm asking you about, you gotta just like, you know,

• 2:49:56Pete Roberts?

  hammer it.

• 2:49:56Jocko Willink?

  And I'll just record.

• 2:49:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's basically like, okay, so I used to have this thing, used to not anymore, have this thing where, you know, when you're like, okay, I'm, I'm working out this day, this day, you know, I'm just do this day, work on this day. And when it comes time to workout and I have a gym at my house now, so I'm like, ah, maybe I'll, I'll do it. I meant to do it at noon. I'm gonna do it tonight. I don't feel like doing it right. I'm gonna do it tonight.

• 2:50:16Jocko Willink?

  And then.

• 2:50:17Pete Roberts?

  No accountability.

• 2:50:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:50:18Pete Roberts?

  Nobody's watching.

• 2:50:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:50:19Pete Roberts?

  You can do what you want.

• 2:50:21Speaker 02

  Yeah. When I feel like a little bit more, drink some coffee, whatever. It's right outside, you know, kind of thing.

• 2:50:26Pete Roberts?

  Totally get it.

• 2:50:26Speaker 02

  Yeah. And that, that, that night turns into, hey, I'll do it tomorrow. So you basically turn a workout day into a rest day.

• 2:50:33Pete Roberts?

  And this helped you turn on your motivation to get it done?

• 2:50:36Speaker 02

  Yeah. And it's, again, it's not like a motivational thing. It's like, okay, this is, it's Jocko saying it. So, okay, there's that, but it's like, it's saying, okay, this is what's going on right now. This is what you're thinking right now. This is what you shouldn't be thinking right now. This is what you should be thinking right now. Okay. There you go. Go.

• 2:50:52Pete Roberts?

  Gotcha.

• 2:50:53Jocko Willink?

  It's like, oh, man. The thing that I find about him is because it is me talking.

• 2:50:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:50:57Jocko Willink?

  I, I find it, they're, they're very, um, very tight arguments.

• 2:51:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:51:04Jocko Willink?

  Get done listening and you go, you know what? Man, I still find a little hole in his argument, you know? I think there's one sugar coat, at least one whoopee pie is not gonna be happy. No, you're like, you know what? This is a big deal.

• 2:51:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:51:14Jocko Willink?

  And I'm setting the whoopee pie aside.

• 2:51:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:51:16Jocko Willink?

  You know, you might be the ultimate test case.

• 2:51:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:51:18Pete Roberts?

  I will be the ultimate. I don't care. I don't care who's around me. And if like, I get that craving for sugar. We were traveling the other day. What'd I get? Sweet tea?

• 2:51:29Jocko Willink?

  Oh dang.

• 2:51:30Pete Roberts?

  Why?

• 2:51:31Jocko Willink?

  Sugar.

• 2:51:32Pete Roberts?

  Sugar.

• 2:51:32Speaker 02

  But keep in mind.

• 2:51:34Pete Roberts?

  Baklava.

• 2:51:35Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:35Pete Roberts?

  Bro. I'm gonna ruin you.

• 2:51:37Jocko Willink?

  No, your mom is.

• 2:51:38Pete Roberts?

  I know. I can't.

• 2:51:39Jocko Willink?

  That's what I'm saying. She's like, you know, you're like, hey, you want to try these things? And I, I know what it is. And and you said, man, you gotta try this baklava. My mom.

• 2:51:47Pete Roberts?

  It's the best.

• 2:51:48Jocko Willink?

  Bro, I know it's sweet, right? And you go, yeah, yeah, it is. And I go.

• 2:51:51Pete Roberts?

  You've never had Spartan baklava?

• 2:51:53Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I was like, you know, you know, no big deal. And and you know, we've been lately been saying like, you know, the discipline won't allow it. That's the latest kind of between, between when we, when we, you know, maybe see each other, maybe taking a path that we shouldn't be taking, or going off the path and onto the path of weakness. You know, I might be like, hey, I go, you know, that's cool and everything, but the bit, the discipline won't allow that.

• 2:52:14Pete Roberts?

  Oh, man.

• 2:52:14Jocko Willink?

  So.

• 2:52:15Pete Roberts?

  That's awesome.

• 2:52:15Jocko Willink?

  You know, yesterday, you know, you're dangling this c- custom homemade baklava.

• 2:52:22Pete Roberts?

  And my mom's there.

• 2:52:23Jocko Willink?

  And your mom's there, factually, like, and I know, I can see her. She looks like she arrived from Greece three days ago to make the baklava for me.

• 2:52:34Jocko Willink?

  And I'm like, OK, I'll have one, right? So I had one yesterday. And then the discipline wouldn't allow anymore. Today? I had nine of them. I didn't have nine. I had three of them today. I had three of them. Sugar coated lies, baklava. Get some.

• 2:52:49Pete Roberts?

  My mom's is gonna get called to make baklava.

• 2:52:52Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. We'll be selling Origin baklava pretty soon.

• 2:52:55Pete Roberts?

  We got the maple syrup going.

• 2:52:58Speaker 02

  But yeah, but keep in mind, though, with these tracks, you gotta be on that path, though. It's not like you're like, hey, I eat too much. Let me listen to this track. It's not that. It's like, OK, my plan is to straight up clean up my whole shit. Like, my, my plan is.

• 2:53:11Pete Roberts?

  So you've already found a bit of motivation.

• 2:53:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, you're motivated. You're on the path already, but it's on the weakness moments, the moments of weakness. You're like, OK, I'm gonna, I'm gonna rest today. I'm gonna, you know, whatever. It's that kind. But yeah, man, that's a good one.

• 2:53:24Pete Roberts?

  I do.

• 2:53:25Jocko Willink?

  We all do. We all do. That's, that's probably why a lot of people get that album.

• 2:53:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:53:30Jocko Willink?

  With tracks.

• 2:53:31Pete Roberts?

  You know what I do? I'm like. You rationalize. I used to do? No, no. What I would do is this. I'd be like, especially when I was training for competition.

• 2:53:39Jocko Willink?

  I'm going to eat this wolfie pie. I would eat it and I would run two miles.

• 2:53:44Pete Roberts?

  Yeah.

• 2:53:45Jocko Willink?

  I was.

• 2:53:45Pete Roberts?

  You'd earn it.

• 2:53:46Jocko Willink?

  Friggin right.

• 2:53:47Pete Roberts?

  Yeah.

• 2:53:47Jocko Willink?

  Earn it.

• 2:53:48Pete Roberts?

  Friggin right.

• 2:53:48Jocko Willink?

  I do that too.

• 2:53:49Pete Roberts?

  Like, yeah.

• 2:53:50Jocko Willink?

  Like, it, normally I try and preempt weakness with hardcore exercise.

• 2:53:55Pete Roberts?

  Yeah, you pay first.

• 2:53:56Jocko Willink?

  Which by the way, often mitigates.

• 2:53:58Pete Roberts?

  Yeah, it takes a day.

• 2:53:59Jocko Willink?

  Like, oh, I want to have a mint chocolate chip milkshake. Cool. I can have a mint chocolate chip milkshake as soon as I do thirty cleaning jerks.

• 2:54:06Pete Roberts?

  Okay.

• 2:54:07Jocko Willink?

  Without putting the bar down.

• 2:54:08Pete Roberts?

  I can do that.

• 2:54:09Jocko Willink?

  And, and that's cool. But then, by the time you get done, you're like, you know what? I don't even want that thing.

• 2:54:14Pete Roberts?

  Yeah.

• 2:54:14Jocko Willink?

  I infused my brain with discipline.

• 2:54:16Pete Roberts?

  Right.

• 2:54:16Jocko Willink?

  From the bar. It went from the bar into my hands and into my brain.

• 2:54:21Pete Roberts?

  Yeah, that's a great idea.

• 2:54:23Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Even in the simplest one is burpees. Yeah, burpees. Like, okay, you know what? I can have this if I do a hundred burpees.

• 2:54:29Pete Roberts?

  Hmm.

• 2:54:30Jocko Willink?

  That takes less than ten minutes. We had this thing the other day and I talked about it. My freezer in my house broke and so we had, I have an RV and our frozen food was in the RV refrigerator.

• 2:54:43Pete Roberts?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:54:44Jocko Willink?

  And I wanted some ice cream. And then I was like, ah, you know, it's all the way up in the thing. And I said to myself, God, what a lazy loser. You don't even deserve ice cream. I didn't have it.

• 2:54:53Pete Roberts?

  Yeah.

• 2:54:53Jocko Willink?

  Cause I said, you're a pathetic, if you're actually questioning whether it's worth it, God, go walk all the way. You don't need this at all in any way, shape or form. If you were thinking it wasn't worth twenty-seven steps to get to the RV, grab the mint chocolate chip Breyer's ice cream. Bring it back down, scoop it into a bowl, let it melt a little bit and then just sit there and get after it.

• 2:55:12Pete Roberts?

  Bro.

• 2:55:15Pete Roberts?

  The best.

• 2:55:16Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, so good.

• 2:55:18Pete Roberts?

  Do you like a little melt to the ice cream? Just a little melt. I don't like it solid.

• 2:55:21Jocko Willink?

  Have you ever heard the term Gaines Bowl?

• 2:55:24Pete Roberts?

  No.

• 2:55:24Jocko Willink?

  Have you ever heard that term?

• 2:55:25Pete Roberts?

  No.

• 2:55:25Jocko Willink?

  Gaines, Gaines Bowl. Uh, it's, it's, you, you basically take ice cream and you put.

• 2:55:32Jocko Willink?

  Milk in it and you stir it around.

• 2:55:34Pete Roberts?

  Yeah, that's what I did.

• 2:55:35Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, Gaines Bowl.

• 2:55:36Pete Roberts?

  That's what I do.

• 2:55:36Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:55:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, okay. Let's, let's all detach right now and consider what we're talking about right now. The pleasures of Gaines Bowl.

• 2:55:45Pete Roberts?

  The problem is.

• 2:55:45Speaker 02

  Mint chocolate chip ice cream.

• 2:55:47Pete Roberts?

  I would walk barefoot in two feet of snow to that frigging RV.

• 2:55:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:55:51Pete Roberts?

  That's my problem.

• 2:55:52Jocko Willink?

  Look at this guy.

• 2:55:53Speaker 02

  No, he was that in that case.

• 2:55:54Pete Roberts?

  I don't even know if I compliment that or is that a negative or positive?

• 2:55:57Speaker 02

  No, yours is worse. It's weird because you have a better result, but your discord or your, your path is worse. Cause he was like, hey, I'm going to be weak.

• 2:56:05Pete Roberts?

  I have discipline to eat it.

• 2:56:06Speaker 02

  Too weak to be weak. That was him that day.

• 2:56:09Pete Roberts?

  Yeah.

• 2:56:09Speaker 02

  But you could, that's rationalized because the end, you know, the means and the end situation.

• 2:56:14Jocko Willink?

  Thing is, I actually embarrassed myself.

• 2:56:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:56:16Jocko Willink?

  That's what it was. I just humiliated myself and I said, I can't believe I'm even questioning the fact if I would take 27 steps to my RV to get the ice cream. The fact that I'm even thinking that way.

• 2:56:26Pete Roberts?

  I don't deserve.

• 2:56:28Jocko Willink?

  I should haze myself, right? This is ridiculous and pathetic and just stop. And so, yeah, I didn't get the ice cream that night, but the mint chocolate chip ice cream for sure is, is a real thing. And it's even.

• 2:56:43Pete Roberts?

  It's my favorite flavor.

• 2:56:45Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I don't even understand other flavors. Although when I was in Montana.

• 2:56:49Pete Roberts?

  Moose tracks.

• 2:56:50Jocko Willink?

  Moose tracks.

• 2:56:51Pete Roberts?

  Moose tracks.

• 2:56:52Jocko Willink?

  Moose tracks. That's the other, that's the other.

• 2:56:55Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 2:56:55Pete Roberts?

  I'm not gonna.

• 2:56:56Speaker 02

  No, I understand and I saw it and I dig it, but it's just, it's very surprising that you're talking about this right now.

• 2:57:02Pete Roberts?

  You, you can close.

• 2:57:03Speaker 02

  I dig it, by the way.

• 2:57:04Pete Roberts?

  You can close the moose track with a scoop of mint chocolate chip.

• 2:57:08Jocko Willink?

  I've never done that. That sounds deranged.

• 2:57:11Pete Roberts?

  It's like it would push me over the edge mentally.

• 2:57:14Jocko Willink?

  Cheese and wine, grapes, cheese. Just close it. Just a finishing touch.

• 2:57:19Speaker 02

  Is that what we should do? Is that what we should do now?

• 2:57:22Jocko Willink?

  One of my buddies in the, in the cheese is, is an awesome guy, badass wrestler, wrestled, was a champion wrestler in college and was on the Olympic team. Didn't compete for a variety of reasons that I won't talk about. But he was friends with Dan Severn. You remember Danny Severn?

• 2:57:41Pete Roberts?

  Oh, yeah, yeah. Early UFC.

• 2:57:42Jocko Willink?

  And so, and so I don't know why this just came to my mind. Oh, I know why it did. So he would say, they knew each other. They were friends. And whenever he'd see Danny Severn, Danny Severn was a heavyweight. And this buddy of mine was cutting weight, you know, he was a big guy. He was like, whatever, like 200 pounds being to cut to 190, whatever. And he would call Dan Severn a pot liquor. Meaning like, meaning like you're, you're just, you're a guy that's over there. You're eating everything and when you get done eating, you're licking the pot. Picture you with the smile you got on your face. You are a straight up pot liquor. You get to the end of that bowl, you're like, oh, I'm getting the, the rest of this mint chocolate chip ice cream is getting into my belly now.

• 2:58:24Pete Roberts?

  My, my, my kids have followed the path of my wife.

• 2:58:32Pete Roberts?

  And they'll come up to me when I'm eating junk food and they'll be like, dad, you got moobs.

• 2:58:39Pete Roberts?

  Dad, and they'll just grab that fat out of my guts. You don't need that. Oh, they're brutal.

• 2:58:44Speaker 02

  That's kind of a psychological warfare situation.

• 2:58:46Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it is. I'm surprised you're not sometimes like 84 pounds.

• 2:58:50Pete Roberts?

  I should be, huh?

• 2:58:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. It's scarred mentally. Actually, what do we say? That's the freedom part. The thing is you gotta be on the path.

• 2:58:58Pete Roberts?

  Right.

• 2:58:59Speaker 02

  So like, yeah, you know how they say discipline equals freedom, right? So, you know, you grab the ice cream.

• 2:59:04Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. I had to pull that one.

• 2:59:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:59:06Jocko Willink?

  For the first time I was at a, I was at a little like family get together and there was, it was a birthday party for a friend of the family, blah, blah, blah. And there was a grandmother there. So a grandmother of one of these kids had a birthday party, blah, blah, blah. So, and she's a, a German woman. And, you know, she kind of knows what's going on a little bit with the game, with what's going on with everything. And so I'm sitting there and there's, there's like a, um, you know, straight up, this is rough. You know, the ice cream cakes? And then you can get a mint chocolate.

• 2:59:36Pete Roberts?

  Do I know the ice cream cakes?

• 2:59:38Jocko Willink?

  So the cake is a mint chocolate chip ice cream cake.

• 2:59:40Pete Roberts?

  Talking to a fat kid.

• 2:59:41Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. So I'm talking to a pot liquor. So, so I'm like, okay, you know what? I'm gonna get some of that mint chocolate chip ice cream. It's got those, I don't even know what it is, those little black, like crumb things that.

• 2:59:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, like an Oreo or something.

• 2:59:54Jocko Willink?

  Something like that. That's in there too. We're talking, this is a situation needs to be, you know, we need, we need to get in on this thing real quick. And it's a little bit melted, so it's soft. So anyways, I'm cutting a piece of the cake. Not a big piece, not a small piece, but you know, like a medium piece, get it on my plate, stick my fork in it. And this woman, this German woman who's super cool. She's like, I thought you were about the discipline. And I was like dang and she called me out and I looked at her and I said, you know what? I have the discipline and that allows me to have freedom sometimes to eat mint chocolate chip ice cream cakes, which I'm about to do. Thank you.

• 3:00:33Speaker 02

  That's what you say. This is the freedom part, but like I said, you gotta be on the path. You gotta be in the game. You can't just be like, this is the freedom part every single day.

• 3:00:41Jocko Willink?

  No.

• 3:00:41Speaker 02

  Doesn't work like that.

• 3:00:42Jocko Willink?

  That way. Um, also Jocka White Tea, you can get that. You know what it does? If you're gonna start deadlifting again, you, you should get, drink a little bit more Jocka White Tea because it will increase your deadlift to 8,000 pounds. And this is proven, proven across the board. I'm on it. Everyone. Uh, books. I got some books if you want to get them. Extreme Ownership, book about leadership, book about combat leadership. You can get that. You can get it for yourself and you can get it for your team and you can get it for above and below you in the chain of command. It's gonna make your life easier when everyone's on board.

• 3:01:22Jocko Willink?

  If you got kids or you know kids, you can pick them up a book called Way of the Warrior Kid. And what that's gonna do is gonna lay out a path, actually.

• 3:01:33Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 3:01:33Jocko Willink?

  A path.

• 3:01:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:01:35Jocko Willink?

  That a kid who, who doesn't have a path, most kids don't have a path. The book will give them the path and the path leads them to being stronger, smarter and better.

• 3:01:48Jocko Willink?

  So.

• 3:01:48Pete Roberts?

  My daughter read it. She loved it.

• 3:01:50Jocko Willink?

  That is awesome.

• 3:01:51Pete Roberts?

  And she is

• 3:01:54Pete Roberts?

  an individual. And she speaks her mind. And I was like, Chloe, no, really? What did you think? She goes, I love that book. And she came up and she wanted you to sign it. And she wanted me to get her copy back at home today. Wish I failed that.

• 3:02:09Jocko Willink?

  We'll get it tomorrow or something?

• 3:02:10Pete Roberts?

  Yeah, we'll get it tomorrow.

• 3:02:11Jocko Willink?

  Awesome. Uh, that's, yeah, I appreciate it. And, and yeah, straight up like when you ask kids, how did you like it? Which I always ask kids how they like it. And, because you know, kids, like you said, kids are gonna tell you the truth. Yeah, oh yeah. And so, so far, I have not had a kid go, eh, marginal. Marginal. You know, eh, marginal. You know, all right, you kind of missed the mark, but you know, yeah, entertaining, not that, but you know, whatever. They should make that shit into a movie or something. Oh, they're gonna make it into a movie. Um, also, another book coming out, October 17th, Discipline Equals Freedom Field Manual. That will also show you the path.

• 3:02:51Jocko Willink?

  It's gonna show you the, it's gonna show you one path. The path of discipline. Grab that book.

• 3:03:01Jocko Willink?

  If you need help with your business, uh, I have a business called Echelon Front with my brother Leif Babin. And he was, we worked together in the SEAL Teams, Battle of Ramadi. We took the lessons that we learned. We wrote that book, Extreme Ownership. And the reason we wrote that book, Extreme Ownership, was because we had people that we were consulting asking us to write down the lessons learned. So there it is. If you want us to come work with you, it's Leif Babin, me, JP Denell, Dave Burke, you know who they are. Email us, [email protected]. Also, if you want to communicate with us, you can do that. We

• 3:03:44Jocko Willink?

  can all be found on something that we talked about earlier tonight, the interwebs.

• 3:03:52Jocko Willink?

  Twitter, Instagram, and that's Facey Boy. Echo is at Echo Charles. Pete is...

• 3:04:08Jocko Willink?

  At Origin, we're talking Instagram or we're talking Twitter?

• 3:04:12Pete Roberts?

  Instagram, where are you at?

• 3:04:13Jocko Willink?

  At Origin USA.

• 3:04:15Pete Roberts?

  Twitter, where are you at?

• 3:04:17Jocko Willink?

  At OriginBJJ, as in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu.

• 3:04:21Pete Roberts?

  Awesome. I am at Jocko Willink. If you want to hit us up, you can hit us there. Echo any clothing thoughts? Clothing, clothing thoughts? We've got a lot of clothing thoughts in here. Closing thoughts?

• 3:04:34Speaker 02

  Nope, that's it. Pete the man. Great to finally meet you in person.

• 3:04:38Pete Roberts?

  I appreciate that.

• 3:04:39Speaker 02

  Right on.

• 3:04:40Pete Roberts?

  Thank you, guys. Man, I'm honored to be at the table with you both and

• 3:04:48Pete Roberts?

  just mad respect for everything you guys do.

• 3:04:51Speaker 02

  Likewise.

• 3:04:51Pete Roberts?

  And just glad to be here with you and experience this. Also, I want to thank my wife Amanda for putting up with my crazy shit and midnight ideas and allowing me the flexibility to live this life, which is important in a relationship, and my kids, Keegan and Chloe,

• 3:05:15Pete Roberts?

  who are the ones I work for every day, day in and day out, that family.

• 3:05:23Pete Roberts?

  Good things coming.

• 3:05:25Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Well, for me, you know, I wish I would have met you 20 years ago. For whatever reason, I didn't. I wish I would have met you 10 years ago. For whatever reason, I didn't. Met you six months ago. And just looking at what you've done, I'm telling you, and if I haven't made it perfectly clear today, what you've done to this point already is incredible. I don't, I don't even, it's the possibilities of you pulling off what you've already pulled off is incredible. And what's, what's cool is it's like when, when a, when a space shuttle takes off, the hardest part of the journey is that first part, getting, breaking away from gravity of Earth.

• 3:06:09Jocko Willink?

  And what you've already done, you've cleared the gravity of Earth and now you're on track and it's, You know, just nothing but respect for what you did. I know that you have used your hands to make this happen, your mind to make this happen, and I just respect everything you've done so far. Talking to the team here and the attitude that they have, everybody has that attitude. And, and just for me to come in and be a part of that is just outstanding. I look forward to being a part of this team. I look forward to getting to know the team when I can come up here, which is hard, but to see the people on this team is, is phenomenal,

• 3:06:50Jocko Willink?

  and I can't wait to see where it goes. So, thanks for coming on, and this is guaranteed to not be the last time.

• 3:07:00Jocko Willink?

  And of course, to the military folks overseas right now, thanks for allowing us to make this podcast. We could not make this podcast without your service and sacrifice to the police and all law enforcement, to firefighters, EMTs, and other first responders. Again, you allow us to make this podcast, and we are thankful for it. And finally, and of

• 3:07:39Jocko Willink?

  course, to the working class of America. Thanks for doing what you do, day after day, working, sweating, bleeding, building calluses while you build our great country. Thank you for holding the line, and thank you for getting after it. So, until next time, this is Pete Roberts, and Echo, and Jocko. Out.