Jocko Podcast 18: One Soldier’s War, Mobility Workouts, Rehearsals, BUDS Training, Compromise

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

• 0:00Jocko Willink?

  This is Jocko Podcast number 18 with Echo Charles and me Jocko Willink. Good evening Echo.

• 0:09Speaker 01

  Good evening.

• 0:14Jocko Willink?

  "He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into the abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee."

• 0:37Jocko Willink?

  So said Nietzsche.

• 0:41Jocko Willink?

  And that is really what we're dealing with here in the world, in my world.

• 0:52Jocko Willink?

  Fighting.

• 0:55Jocko Willink?

  Fighting against monsters and I'm talking about

• 1:01Jocko Willink?

  what goes on not only in the outside world and the evil that's there, but also in the world around us. And also inside your head, inside my head, there's battles.

• 1:17Jocko Willink?

  Battles that can be raging.

• 1:23Jocko Willink?

  Every minute of the day between strength and weakness, between the past and the future, between good and evil.

• 1:33Jocko Willink?

  Between light and dark, opposing forces battling against each other.

• 1:40Jocko Willink?

  And we, we all see evil. I mean, of course, there's those of us that have been to war where we see concentrated evil. But evils everywhere around us, around everyone, disease and crime and murder and abuse and loss.

• 2:04Jocko Willink?

  And there's predators out there.

• 2:08Jocko Willink?

  And there's prey. In nature and in humans. And as I've said before, there's parts of the world where we've built a nice bubble.

• 2:21Jocko Willink?

  Where we can all but remove the evil, or at least distance ourselves from it.

• 2:29Jocko Willink?

  And in doing so, we can almost, almost forget about it.

• 2:37Jocko Willink?

  Almost.

• 2:41Jocko Willink?

  But it's a thin, thin veneer.

• 2:47Jocko Willink?

  And it doesn't take much

• 2:50Jocko Willink?

  to release the demons. It doesn't take much for humanity to fall apart.

• 3:00Jocko Willink?

  And that shows itself often in war. Which is one of those things that can very quickly release the demons.

• 3:17Jocko Willink?

  There are dead soldiers, dead women, dead children. Everyone's dead. Shorn-headed boys, sometimes morose, sometimes laughing, beaten up in our barracks with broken jaws and ruptured lungs. We were herded into this war and killed by the Hundred. We didn't even know how to shoot. We couldn't kill anyone. We didn't know how. All that we were capable of was crying and dying. And die we did.

• 3:53Jocko Willink?

  We called the rebels uncle. And when our boys throats were cut, they'd beg the rebels, "Please, uncle, don't kill me. What did I ever do to you?"

• 4:05Jocko Willink?

  We so wanted to live. Get that into your heads, you fat, smug generals who sent us off to this slaughter. We hadn't yet seen life, or even tasted its scent. But we had already seen death.

• 4:21Jocko Willink?

  We knew the smell of congealed blood on the floor of a helicopter in a hundred-degree heat. Knew that the flesh of a torn-off leg turns black. And that a person can burn up entirely in lit gasoline, leaving just the bones. We knew that bodies swell up in the heat. And we listened every night to the crazed dogs howling in the ruins.

• 4:49Jocko Willink?

  Then we started to howl ourselves, because to die at the age of eighteen...

• 4:56Jocko Willink?

  is terrifying.

• 5:01Jocko Willink?

  We were betrayed by everyone, and we died in a manner befitting real cannon fodder. Silently and unfairly.

• 5:11Jocko Willink?

  By night, they kick the living crap out of us. By day, we unload corpses.

• 5:19Jocko Willink?

  I have no dreams in this tent. And no charred bodies chase me at night. I just plunge into a dark pit, where there is nothing, not even war, and I open my eyes when it gets light.

• 5:33Jocko Willink?

  A person changes very quickly in war. He may be scared by a dead body on the first day, but a week later, he can be eating from a can while leaning on human remains to be more comfortable.

• 5:52Jocko Willink?

  That's a book we're diving into right now.

• 5:57Jocko Willink?

  It's called "One Soldier's War."

• 6:01Jocko Willink?

  By Arkady Bobchenko. He was a Russian soldier. Fought in both wars in Chechnya. The first and the second. The Russians fought against the Chechen rebels.

• 6:17Jocko Willink?

  And

• 6:19Jocko Willink?

  this is actually a book that a bunch of people, after we did a short piece and talked about the war in Chechnya and the lessons learned from that war. A bunch of people hit me on Twitter and said to check out this book and I did and they were right. It's a great narrative and it shows you the impact of this war on the soldiers that fought in it. And once again,

• 6:47Jocko Willink?

  we are gonna see the veil of humanity ripped off.

• 6:54Jocko Willink?

  I think it's important first to kind of look at where these soldiers came from.

• 7:01Jocko Willink?

  Back to the book here. "You won't find any smart handsome boys in these tents. They were gotten out of the war by their rich daddies, leaving it to us ordinary folk to die in Grozny, the ones who didn't have the money to pay our way out. Heaped in these tents are the sons of laborers, teachers, peasants, and blue collar workers. Basically, all of those who were made penniless by the government's thieves thieving reforms and then left to waste away.

• 7:32Jocko Willink?

  These tents contained the ones who didn't know how to give a bribe to the right person or who thought that the army service was the duty of every man. Truth and nobility of heart are no longer virtues in our world. Those who believe in them are the first to die."

• 7:57Jocko Willink?

  Now, one thing that I'm about to get into is the the treatment of the Russian soldiers, which is absolutely just gangster. It's, it's, it's just gangster is the only way I can describe it. The way that the soldiers were treated, the way that the military was run was just by brute force within the own chain of command. So there was no escape.

• 8:25Jocko Willink?

  This is what they were dealing with. So there's an unofficial set of rules, a kind of a code of laws, which if violated incur corporal punishment. If I stuck my hands in my pockets, I'd get a thump on the head. That is the privilege of the older soldiers. A spirit, and a spirit is what they call the new soldiers, they call them spirits. A spirit should forget about his pockets entirely, otherwise they will fill them up with sand and sew them. The sand chafes the groin and two days later you have weeping sores. You can get a beating for anything at all. If a spirit doesn't show respect in his conversation with an older soldier, a granddad, he'll get beaten up.

• 9:09Jocko Willink?

  If he talks too loudly or goes about the barracks clattering his heels, he'll get beaten up. If he lies on his bed in the day, he'll get beaten up. If people back home send him good rubber slippers and he decides to wear them to the shower, he'll get beaten up and lose those slippers.

• 9:28Jocko Willink?

  And if a spirit even thinks of turning down the tops of his boots or walking around with his top button undone or if his cap is tipped back or on his head or to one side, or he doesn't do his belt up tightly enough, they'll thrash him so hard he'll forget his name. He is a spirit, the lowest dregs, and it is, and it is his job to slave until the older soldiers have been discharged.

• 9:56Jocko Willink?

  And then he goes on, so that's sort of the, that's sort of the basic military situation that they're in, and that he's raised in. And that sort of the, the garrison, meaning not the combat situation, but just the garrison, the standard Russian situation if you're a soldier. Now here's the situation he's in.

• 10:18Jocko Willink?

  But there is none of this in our regiment. All of that stuff is just child's play. It's the big leagues here. I can walk how I like and wear what I like and it doesn't bother anyone. They beat us for completely different reasons. Our older conscripts have already killed people and buried their comrades, and they don't believe they'll survive this war themselves. So beatings here are just the norm. Everyone is going to die anyway, both those doing the beating and their victims. So what's the big deal? There's the runway, two steps from here, and they keep bringing back bodies by the dozen. We'll all die here. Everybody beats everyone.

• 11:03Jocko Willink?

  The dembles with three months of service to go, the officers, the warrant officers, they get stinking drunk and then hammer the ones below them. Even the colonels beat the majors, the majors beat the lieutenants, and they all beat the privates. And the granddads beat the new recruits. No one talks to each other like human beings, they just smack each other in the mouth, because it's easier that way, quicker and simpler to understand. Because you're all going to bite it anyways, you bitches. Because there are unfed children back home, because the officer corps is addled with impoverishment and hopelessness. Because a demble has three months left. Because every second man is shell shocked, because our motherland makes us kill our own people.

• 11:47Jocko Willink?

  Our own people, who speak Russian. And we have to shoot them in the head and send their brains flying up walls, crush them with tanks and tear them to pieces. Because these people want to kill you, because your soldiers arrived yesterday straight from training, and today they are already lying open on the airstrip as lumped, lumps of charred flesh. And flies lay eggs in their open eyes. And because in a day, the company is reduced to less than a third, and God willing, you'll stay among that third. Because the one thing that everyone knows is how to get drunk and kill, kill and kill some more. Because a soldier is a stinking wretch.

• 12:29Jocko Willink?

  And a spirit doesn't have any right to live at all, and to beat him is actually to do him a favor.

• 12:36Jocko Willink?

  I'll teach you what war is about, you pricks. You can have, you can all have a smack in the mouth so you don't think life is too rosy, and thank your mother that she didn't have you six months earlier, or you'd all be dead now.

• 12:52Jocko Willink?

  Everyone hates everyone else in this regiment. The hatred and madness hang over the square like a foul, black cloud. And this cloud saturates young boys with fear, just like pieces of barbecue meat being marinated in lemon juice. Only they get stewed in fear and hatred before they get sent off to the meat grinder.

• 13:16Jocko Willink?

  It will be easy, it will be easier for us to die there.

• 13:24Jocko Willink?

  So you've got some, uh, you know, the things, the things you hear me talking about all the time? The camaraderie, the, the esprit de corps, the brotherhood, all of it's just gone. Now, you're gonna get to a point, and he does get to it, where you get to the frontline troopers when they're fighting, and they rely on each other, and they have the normal soldierly, brotherly, comrade love for each other. But as a unit, throughout the ranks, you can see, it's, it's, it's awful.

• 14:01Jocko Willink?

  And this is before we even get to the fighting.

• 14:07Jocko Willink?

  Yakovlev vanished toward evening. He wasn't the first to go missing. A couple of weeks earlier, two soldiers from the 8th Company had taken a machine gun and tried to go home.

• 14:23Jocko Willink?

  No one looked for Yakovlev.

• 14:27Jocko Willink?

  The storming of Grosny was underway and 2nd Battalion tried in vain for the 3rd day to take the cross-shaped hospital, suffering high casualties, and we were bogged down for the 3rd day at the first row of houses in the private district. The storming operation was faltering, and we didn't have time to look. They listed him as a deserter, wrote off his rifle as "lost in combat", and closed the case.

• 14:54Jocko Willink?

  It was the Oman, and this is like their, uh, sort of a special police unit that they had within the military, Oman. It was the Oman who turned up our missing man during the night, while they were mopping up in the first line. In one cottage cellar, they found a mutilated body. The rebels had slit him open like a tin of meat. Pulled out his intestines and used them to strangle him while he was still alive.

• 15:26Jocko Willink?

  On the neatly whitewashed walls above him, written in his blood, were the words "Al Akbar", "God is great".

• 15:40Jocko Willink?

  So now you get a little bit from the enemy,

• 15:44Jocko Willink?

  and we already talked about the abuse, and now we're gonna get into some, some blue on blue. Some fratricide.

• 15:54Jocko Willink?

  Half an hour later, we got shelled by self-propelled guns. I'm standing in the street with the company commander, when the first house on the right suddenly shudders and start to collapse in the center. A huge split spreads down from the 9th floor. Balconies, girders, and floor supports spew out and seem to hover in the air, turn over, and then drive themselves into ground with a thud. Small debris scatters into the yard after the heavy blocks. We don't know what's happening and squat down instinctively, crawl behind a rusty, shrapnel-riddled garage, and look all around us.

• 16:27Jocko Willink?

  Then we realize that it's friendly fire. The company commander fumbles for the headphone of the radio on my back and starts to call the battalion commander. I crawl over to the spare radio that's standing on open ground with the commander scrambling after me, still wearing the headphones. One after the other, him standing over my head and me crouched between his legs, we shout into the mouthpiece for them to cease firing. Tangled up in the wires and the headphones, we forget all about the shrapnel, all we can think about is reporting that we are here and they should halt shelling. That we must stop them from hitting our guys. Our infantrymen pour out of the house and stand dumbstruck on the porches, not knowing where to run.

• 17:11Jocko Willink?

  Huge 150 millimeter shells weighing more than 60 pounds roar through the air above us and blow up the upper floors. One blast erupts, a whole vertical section of the building vanishes, leaving just rusty steel entrails jutting from the shattered walls. Another shell flies down the middle of the yard and hits the house on the left before it explodes. Time loses meaning. We lie behind the garage, pressing ourselves into the snow. How long this lasts, I have no idea.

• 17:48Jocko Willink?

  Finally, it's over. With two seriously wounded. The shell that flew down the middle of the yard exploded right inside their headquarters while two men were there. The leg in one side of them was blown to pieces and the other had both legs torn off. Again, we run the wounded to the carrier on stretchers and load them inside. Again, they make no sound, except for when one opens his eyes and says quietly, "Get my leg."

• 18:19Jocko Willink?

  Saiji picks up the severed remnants of the leg and carries it up along beside the stretcher. Five of them carry him in pieces, four taking his torso and one his leg. They load him into the carrier. The limb is placed inside behind him.

• 18:38Jocko Willink?

  The other wounded man dies.

• 18:43Jocko Willink?

  Some insight here, and I think this is, this is a striking, and I remember when you're a kid, you grow up, you watch war movies, you watch war documentaries, you watch WWII films, and they're all in black and white. And sometimes people think that war is black and white, because that's what you see. And he thought the same thing, and here he is. "I always used to think that war was black and white, but it's in color. It's not true what the song says, that birds don't sing and trees don't grow in war. In fact, people get killed in the midst of such vivid color,

• 19:25Jocko Willink?

  among the green foliage of the trees, under the clear blue sky. And life hums on all around, the birds brim with song, the grass blooms with brightly colored flowers. Dead people lie on the grass, and they are not a bit scary in appearance as part of this multicolored world. You can laugh and chat alongside them, humanity doesn't freeze and go crazy at the sight of a body. It's only frightening when people shoot at you. And it's very frightening that war is in color."

• 20:05Jocko Willink?

  Talking about some of the civilians, especially the mothers. The mothers have it worst of all in this war. They don't belong to either side, they get brushed off from the Russian generals, or our soldiers shoot at them. And as one priest, "We Freed From Cactivity," told me, "The Chechens take them off into the mountains and rape them, kill them, and feed their innards to their dogs." They've been betrayed by everyone, these Russian women. They die by the dozen, yet still, they wander around Chechnya with their photos, searching for their sons.

• 20:51Jocko Willink?

  And what's happening to the sons?

• 20:55Jocko Willink?

  Here's what's happening to the sons.

• 21:00Jocko Willink?

  Then the Chechen start killing our guys they took prisoner. They shout from the end of the street to get our attention and show a few soldiers, badly beaten and with their hands tied behind their backs.

• 21:13Jocko Willink?

  The Chechens laugh and shout something at us in their language, and then quickly put one of the prisoners on his side on the asphalt, pin his head with a foot, and stab him twice in the throat with a knife.

• 21:27Jocko Willink?

  The boy jerks his tied hands and whimpers, and a black trickle spreads from his slashed throat onto the road.

• 21:37Jocko Willink?

  The Chechens go back around the corner, leaving him to die on the asphalt.

• 21:44Jocko Willink?

  He lies a long time on his side without moving, and then he starts to twitch. He jerks his bound hands and tries to turn over as if he's uncomfortable. Then he falls quiet again.

• 21:58Jocko Willink?

  It is painful for him to move, and he obediently lies on his side with a gaping throat that keeps pumping a black trickle.

• 22:09Jocko Willink?

  When we think he's already dead, he starts to twitch again and tries to crawl, then goes still again.

• 22:16Jocko Willink?

  This goes on a long time, blood pours from his throat and smears across his face. His jacket has slipped down to his elbows, and when he jerks his arms, blood spurts from an artery onto his bare shoulder.

• 22:31Jocko Willink?

  "Bastards," says Murky, unable to bear it any longer. He jumps up and shouts over the buildings, "Just kill him, you fuckers! Shoot him, you bastards! Bastards!" He unslings his rifle. But Osipov and Loop manage to grab the barrel. They grip his arms and press him to the ground. Murky squats, holding his head in his hands and moaning, "Bastards, bastards, bastards," he whispers.

• 23:02Jocko Willink?

  The boy soon starts to choke. He can't breathe, and blood sprays from his mouth as he coughs. Sometimes he loses consciousness for a while and lies motionless. Then he comes to and once again tries to crawl.

• 23:19Jocko Willink?

  When he stops moving altogether, the Chechen shoot him in the back with tracer rounds.

• 23:25Jocko Willink?

  The bullets pass through his body and ricochet into the sky.

• 23:31Jocko Willink?

  They also kill the rest of the prisoners. This time, they don't appear from around the corner, all we hear are screams.

• 23:39Jocko Willink?

  Before they cut each boy's throat, they shout "Ala Akbar".

• 23:45Jocko Willink?

  We hear this several times, and an hour later, they throw the bodies out into the street.

• 23:55Jocko Willink?

  Savagery.

• 23:58Jocko Willink?

  And...

• 24:01Jocko Willink?

  Unfortunately, savagery breeds more savagery.

• 24:07Jocko Willink?

  And the downward spiral of sadism and inhumanity.

• 24:20Jocko Willink?

  Meanwhile, stories of horrors elsewhere in Chechnya kept filtering back to us. A friend of mine told me how his battalion entered some village or another. It didn't get shelled much, and was almost intact. But around the main square were large crosses upon which Russian soldiers had been crucified. They'd been nailed up by their hands, and each had a few bullet holes in his chest.

• 24:50Jocko Willink?

  They had all been castrated.

• 24:54Jocko Willink?

  The commander ordered them to do a sweep through the village. All the men who could be found were herded up into the square.

• 25:03Jocko Willink?

  They were thrown down in piles, and our soldiers started to hack them up.

• 25:08Jocko Willink?

  One guy pinned a Chechen to the ground with his foot, while another pulled off his pants, and with two or three hefty slashes severed his scrotum.

• 25:19Jocko Willink?

  The serrated blade of the knife snagged the skin and pulled the blood vessels from his body.

• 25:28Jocko Willink?

  In half a day, the whole village was castrated.

• 25:33Jocko Willink?

  Then the battalion moved out.

• 25:36Jocko Willink?

  Our dead men remained on the crosses.

• 25:43Jocko Willink?

  As I said, savagery breeds more savagery.

• 25:54Jocko Willink?

  And

• 25:57Jocko Willink?

  here's one of the worst parts, and I think this is one of the worst parts psychologically, for, for this soldier,

• 26:06Jocko Willink?

  for R. Katie, and many of the soldiers that were fighting alongside him.

• 26:15Jocko Willink?

  We don't know what we are fighting for. We have no goal, no morals, or internal justification for what we do. We are sent off to kill and to meet our deaths, but we don't know why. We just drew the short straw, happened to be born eighteen years ago, and grow up just in time for this war. And our blame ends there.

• 26:43Jocko Willink?

  The only thing we have is hope, the hope that we will survive and preserve our sense of self, and be able to remain human beings. We all feel the just of it all. We feel the injustice of it all so acutely with our eighteen years. Each one of us that survives this war will truly believe that such evil should never happen again.

• 27:12Jocko Willink?

  Every shell that hit us tore apart both the flesh and the soul. Our whole outlook on life crumbled and collapsed beneath this demonic fire. And there was nothing to fill the emptiness in it.

• 27:29Jocko Willink?

  The only thing we have left is ourselves and our brothers in arms. All we know of life is death.

• 27:42Jocko Willink?

  If anyone ever asked me, "What were you fighting for?" I will reply, "For those who clung to the ground next to me. We fought only for each other." Our entire generation may have died in Chechnya, a whole generation of Russians. Even those of us who stayed alive. Can they really be those same eighteen-year-old laughing boys who once got seen off to the army by their loved ones? No.

• 28:09Jocko Willink?

  We died.

• 28:12Jocko Willink?

  We all died in that war.

• 28:23Jocko Willink?

  Now, there's a point where

• 28:29Jocko Willink?

  where Arcady, the author, he's they're under fire. And obviously, you know, he's feeling the pressure of being under fire. And there's a sniper. And he thinks he knows where the sniper is, but he's not a hundred percent sure. He just kind of thinks, "Hey, I think I saw something," and he calls for fire. In other words, he directs heavy, heavy cannons from some armored vehicles towards that fire.

• 28:57Jocko Willink?

  And the next day, or two days later, he finds out that the what happened to the people that were killed in that was like an eight-year-old or a nine-year-old girl and her grandfather.

• 29:15Jocko Willink?

  And so here's his thoughts on that.

• 29:20Jocko Willink?

  "Yesterday, I murdered a girl. I suddenly felt sick, and there was nothing I could do about it. There was nowhere to go and beg forgiveness. I had murdered them, and it was irrevocable. Now I would be a child killer my whole life, and I'd have to live with this. Eat, drink, raise children, be happy and sad, laugh and cry, be ill, love..."

• 29:49Jocko Willink?

  And And kiss Olga.

• 29:54Jocko Willink?

  Touch this pure radiant creation with hands that had murdered. Touch her face, eyes, lips, breasts, so tender and vulnerable. And leave greasy traces of death on her clear skin. These hands, these damned hands, I should cut them off and discard them. I will never get them clean now. I stuck my hands between my knees and started to rub them on my pant legs. I understood that this was psychosis, madness, but I couldn't help it. It seemed my hands had become sticky. Like when you've eaten food in a dirty cafe under the sun.

• 30:36Jocko Willink?

  Murder had stuck to them, the vilest kind of murder.

• 30:42Jocko Willink?

  And I couldn't get it off.

• 30:49Jocko Willink?

  The next day he's in the chow hall, they're eating. And one of his buddies hands him a tin with some oatmeal in it. Here, eat this, we saved it for you.

• 31:01Jocko Willink?

  Thanks. I took the tin and absently started to wolf down the cold oatmeal. Then I stopped.

• 31:09Jocko Willink?

  Remember how the Chechens hit us yesterday? You know what? It turns out we killed a girl when we fired back, an eight-year-old girl and her grandfather.

• 31:19Jocko Willink?

  And here's the response from Oleg. It happens. Don't think about it, it'll pass. If you're going to put yourself through hell every time it happens, you'll go out of your mind. People here kill and get killed. They kill us, we kill them. I've killed too. It's just war. Our own lives aren't worth a thing here, let alone someone else's. Don't think about it, at least not until you get home. Right now, you're still too close to her. She's dead and you're alive, but you're both still rotting in one place. Only she's below ground and you're above it. And the difference between you

• 32:02Jocko Willink?

  may only be one day.

• 32:07Jocko Willink?

  Now, going to a another little section where they've gone into a place called Argon and they've got a pretty secure perimeter in an old factory. "We are halted for the fourth day in a row at the canning factory in Argon. It's the best place we've been so far during our deployment and we feel completely safe inside the fence that skirts the perimeter. The trouble with this war is that we are in a permanent state of encirclement and can expect to be shot in the back at any moment. But here, we are sheltered. We relax. April has arrived and the sun is already beating down.

• 32:52Jocko Willink?

  We rock around practically naked, wearing only our cut-off long johns and army boots. And we are alike as brothers. And brothers we are, for there's no one in the world closer than emaciated soldiers with lice-bitten armpits, sun-brown necks, and otherwise white, putrifying skin."

• 33:18Jocko Willink?

  And while he's there, he's reflecting on some of the things he's seen.

• 33:24Jocko Willink?

  And he says, "I remember the photo we found near Chateau of the little Chechen boy. He's only about seven, but he's showing off with a rifle in his hands while his mom stands alongside, beaming at her little grown-up son. How proud she is of him, so full of joy for the holy warrior who already knows how to hold a rifle.

• 33:49Jocko Willink?

  There will be even greater pride in her eyes when he severs the head of his first Russian prisoner at the age of seventeen. At twenty, he'll attack a column and kill more people, and at twenty-two, he'll run his own slave camp. Then, at twenty-five, they will hunt him down from a helicopter like a wolf, flush him into the open and fire rockets at him as he darts between shell craters, splattering his guts all over the place. Then he'll lie in a puddle and stare at the sky with half-open, lifeless eyes, now nothing more than an object of disgust as lice crawl into his beard."

• 34:29Jocko Willink?

  We've seen warriors like this, grown up from such boys, from cubs into wolves. And to think my mother would have flayed the skin from my back with a belt if I'd ever thought to pose with a weapon when I was a kid.

• 34:45Jocko Willink?

  Enough.

• 34:47Jocko Willink?

  No sense in dwelling on this now. Later. Everything later.

• 34:58Jocko Willink?

  So we kinda talked about the suffering that they, the abuse that they're taking from their own, from their own military leadership. We talked about the friendly fire situation to beyond the hardened enemy that gets raised to fight. And on top of all that, there's nature and disease that they have to deal with.

• 35:26Jocko Willink?

  My bleeding starts again, and my long johns are permanently encrusted with blood. We all have it. Your rectum swells up and protrudes out several centimeters. Half your backside hangs out and you sit resplendent like a scarlet flower.

• 35:46Jocko Willink?

  Where are we supposed to find wiping material? We strip the remaining scraps of wallpaper from the storerooms and rasp at our poor backsides, inflicting further harm on ourselves and sending blood gushing from our pants.

• 36:03Jocko Willink?

  War is not just attacks, trenches, firefights, and grenades. It's also blood and feces running down your rotting legs. It's starvation, lice, and drunken madness. It's swearing and human debasement.

• 36:21Jocko Willink?

  It's an inhuman stench and clouds of flies circling over our battalion.

• 36:29Jocko Willink?

  And as time goes on, he's sort of starting to feel like the end of the war, at least the end of his deployment is gonna come.

• 36:38Jocko Willink?

  Which

• 36:40Jocko Willink?

  starts to actually intensify the fear for him.

• 36:45Jocko Willink?

  "I live with fear constantly now. It began that day and doesn't abate. I'm scared all the time. The fear alternately turns slowly like a worm somewhere below my stomach, or floods through me with a hot flush of sweat. This is not the tension I experienced in the mountains, but pure animal fear. I can no longer sleep. I don't trust the sentries and spend most nights in the admin building, or on the parade ground. I always keep my chest harness stuffed with loaded magazines that I've traded for food and cigarettes. I have about, I have about twenty-five magazines, and it still seems too few.

• 37:28Jocko Willink?

  I also empty a few clips of bullets into my pockets and hang about a dozen grenades from my belt. It's still not enough. If they storm us, I want to be fully armed."

• 37:46Jocko Willink?

  And that's how he kind of finishes out, in that complete state of fear.

• 37:53Jocko Willink?

  And then, it's over.

• 37:58Jocko Willink?

  "The battalion leaves for where we are to be discharged. For us, the war is over." It starts to rain. The tires of the vehicles squeal on the wet asphalt, and rainbows glimmer in the spray thrown up by the wheels. I open the hatch and stick my face out under the rain. Large drops fall straight and evenly on my skin. The sun hangs heavily on the horizon, and our column casts long shadows in its rays."

• 38:29Jocko Willink?

  And that's it.

• 38:31Jocko Willink?

  Peace.

• 38:33Jocko Willink?

  This warm, damp day is the last day of our war.

• 38:39Jocko Willink?

  Sheppel is dead, and so many others.

• 38:44Jocko Willink?

  I remember all of my comrades. I remember their faces, their names. At last, we have peace, boys.

• 38:55Jocko Willink?

  We waited so long for it, didn't we? We so wanted to meet it together, to go home, and not part company until the whole platoon had been to everyone else's home. And even after that, we would stay together, stay together, live as one community, always close, always there for each other.

• 39:16Jocko Willink?

  What will I do without you?

• 39:21Jocko Willink?

  You are my brothers, given to me by the war, and we shouldn't be separated.

• 39:28Jocko Willink?

  We'll always be together. We still have our whole lives ahead of us.

• 39:35Jocko Willink?

  Now,

• 39:38Jocko Willink?

  as we hear a lot about these days, the war ended.

• 39:44Jocko Willink?

  But it wasn't over. Wasn't over for these guys.

• 39:48Jocko Willink?

  And

• 39:51Jocko Willink?

  at this point, Arkady is now

• 39:56Jocko Willink?

  back in his, back in the city.

• 40:01Jocko Willink?

  And he's talking, he's walking around, and he's dealing with people. And you're gonna see here, he meets up with some other veterans, wounded veterans, that are basically on the street.

• 40:17Jocko Willink?

  About a million military personnel passed through Chechnya in the ten years after the start of the First War in 1994. That's the population of a large city. Fifty divisions of seasoned soldiers who bring their philosophy, the philosophy of war, back to civilian life with them when they return.

• 40:39Jocko Willink?

  At the age of eighteen, they'd already killed men who were sometimes older than their fathers, and saw how these grown men died from the bullets unleashed by their hands. There were no voices of authority, and there was no god either. They were ready for anything. There were no women in their world, no children, no old men, no sick people, no cripples. There were just goals. Dangerous ones, safe ones, and ones with potential. Three of them, meaning three of the veterans, three of them meet and sit in the subway near my metro station every morning. They have five medals between them.

• 41:24Jocko Willink?

  Six crutches, two artificial limbs, and one leg.

• 41:30Jocko Willink?

  And a common hatred for the whole world. They've been coming here for a few years now to sing songs, and they are always the same songs in the same order. They sing terribly, but that doesn't bother them. They hate the people they are singing for.

• 41:51Jocko Willink?

  They see the world from below, and not just because they are only have half their bodies left, but because half of their souls are gone too. They're closer to the spit-drenched asphalt than to people's faces. They no longer have the strength to get up and start a new life on plastic legs, and no longer wish to. These young men don't want to try to keep up with life anymore. All they want is for the war to last forever, and for them to be a part of it.

• 42:23Jocko Willink?

  For furnishings, one of them brought a small travel rug, a small cushion to sit on, and a tape player. When two of his comrades leave, he stays there on his own.

• 42:37Jocko Willink?

  I don't know his name and it doesn't matter. He is my brother. They all are. Brothers given to me by the war. The whole of Moscow is filled with such brothers. There's at least one in each subway. He spoke first. Where did you fight then, brother? I told him. Then he started to remember stuff. Where, when, how? He told me about getting his leg torn off when his carrier got ambushed. A shell hit the armor by his right hip. He didn't lose consciousness and he even saw his ripped off leg jerking. And the boots scraping on the rivets. I didn't ask him anything.

• 43:21Jocko Willink?

  Just listened in silence. And he calmly spoke and without any hysterics, just discussing life.

• 43:30Jocko Willink?

  I don't understand this world, these people. Why are they alive? What for? They were given life at birth and didn't have to pry it away from death. Have a good life, people. But how do they spend it? Do they want to invent a cure for AIDS and build the world's most beautiful bridge or make everyone happy? No. They want to rip everyone off, stash away as much money as they can and that's it. So many boys died, real kids, and these people here fritter their lives away as ignorly as a kitten playing with a ball and have no idea why they are alive. Pointless people.

• 44:13Jocko Willink?

  A whole world full of pointless people. A lost generation. And it's not we who are the lost generation, it's them. Those who didn't fight, they are. If their deaths could bring back just one of those boys, then I'd kill all of them without hesitation.

• 44:35Jocko Willink?

  Every single one of them is my personal enemy.

• 44:41Jocko Willink?

  He lights a new cigarette from the stub of his last and pours a fresh shot of vodka.

• 44:48Jocko Willink?

  And then he laughs evilly, and his eyes flash with hatred.

• 44:54Jocko Willink?

  You can't go on enjoying yourself while two hours flight away, people are killing each other. Children are still dying and there's starvation, and yet those people are willing to pay 700 roubles for a theater ticket. That's 2,000 for the family just to amuse themselves. You can live for two months in Chechnya on that money. I must be concussed, because I don't understand this. I just can't get my head around it. There's a war going on in their country and they don't give a damn.

• 45:25Jocko Willink?

  So in that case, why we shouldn't give a damn about them either?

• 45:30Jocko Willink?

  Not one of them should ever die without knowing what war is.

• 45:36Jocko Willink?

  I want for them too to cry out at night, and cry in their sleep, and without waking, to dive under the bed when the New Year's Eve's fireworks are exploding in the yard, and whine there from terror like we did. They are as guilty of our deaths as those who killed us, who sent us to the slaughter.

• 45:59Jocko Willink?

  Why weren't they striking in Moscow and blocking the roads when we were being killed in Grozny? Why? Why weren't they screaming and tearing their hair out when they saw on TV how dogs fed off the flesh of their boys? Why was there no revolution, uprising, or civil unrest? How could they send their sons off to this slaughter? And then go and have fun, live, drink beer, and earn money while they were dying down there?

• 46:28Jocko Willink?

  While jets were flattening the mountains and tearing apart children and women when wounded Chechen kids rotted in cellars, wrapping the stumps of their limbs in rags and infection crept across the wounds.

• 46:43Jocko Willink?

  They're also guilty of these deaths. We are here to get what's ours, and we are ready to kill.

• 46:53Jocko Willink?

  His hatred abates as suddenly as it had welled over. His eyes recede, once again, behind a film of indifference.

• 47:05Jocko Willink?

  Half-truths everywhere, half sincerity, half friendship. I can't accept that. Here in civilian life, they only have half-truths. The small measure of truth we had in war was a big lie.

• 47:22Jocko Willink?

  So many boys died, and I survived. The whole time, I used to wonder what for.

• 47:30Jocko Willink?

  They were better than I was, but I survived. Surely, this is not by pure chance.

• 47:39Jocko Willink?

  Maybe I lived so that others remember us.

• 47:46Jocko Willink?

  "I am a reminder," he says.

• 47:52Jocko Willink?

  It's...

• 47:56Jocko Willink?

  Obviously, a...

• 48:04Jocko Willink?

  You know, this is psychological damage. And this is someone that is still reeling from the war.

• 48:16Jocko Willink?

  And I can tell you, when I came home from my last deployment,

• 48:21Jocko Willink?

  you know, I didn't feel like that, but I understand what he's talking about. When I came home from my last deployment, and knowing what great sacrifices Americans were making overseas, including my friends, I remember walking around town and just looking at people, and...

• 48:42Jocko Willink?

  It is difficult to make that transition mentally, back to where people care about the stupidest things. And they're complaining about things that are just no human being should ever be given the right to complain about.

• 48:58Jocko Willink?

  And as that individual right there was saying,

• 49:03Jocko Willink?

  kind of what I say, "What are you doing with your life? What are you doing with your life?

• 49:11Jocko Willink?

  Because people have paid dearly to give you that freedom. So what are you doing with it?"

• 49:22Jocko Willink?

  And now we get the author's view.

• 49:27Jocko Willink?

  And you can kinda hear his struggle as well.

• 49:33Jocko Willink?

  No one returns from the war, ever.

• 49:39Jocko Willink?

  Mothers get back a sad semblance of their sons. Embittered, aggressive beasts hardened against the whole world and believing in nothing except death.

• 49:52Jocko Willink?

  Yesterday's soldiers are no longer belong to their parents, they belong to war. And only their body returns from the war. Their soul stays there.

• 50:05Jocko Willink?

  But the body still comes home.

• 50:09Jocko Willink?

  And the war within it dies gradually, shedding itself in layers, scale by scale.

• 50:17Jocko Willink?

  Slowly, very slowly, yesterday's soldier, sergeant, or captain transforms from a soulless dummy with empty eyes and a burned-out soul into something like a human being.

• 50:32Jocko Willink?

  The unbearable nervous tension ebbs away, the aggression simmers down, the hatred passes, the loneliness abates.

• 50:43Jocko Willink?

  It's the fear that lingers longest of all, an animal fear of death. But that too passes with time.

• 50:54Jocko Willink?

  And you start to learn to live this life again. You learn to walk without checking the ground beneath your feet for mines and tripwires and step on manholes on the road without fear and stand at your full height in the open ground.

• 51:11Jocko Willink?

  And you go shopping, talk on the phone, and sleep on a bed.

• 51:17Jocko Willink?

  You learn to take for granted the hot water in the taps, the electricity and the central heating.

• 51:25Jocko Willink?

  You no longer jump at loud noises. You start to live, at first, because that's how it's worked out. And you've stayed alive, you do it without gaining much joy from life. You look at everything as a windfall that came your way through some whim of fate. You lived your life from cover to cover in those 180 days you were there. And the remaining 50-odd years can't add anything to that time or detract from it.

• 51:58Jocko Willink?

  Then you start to get drawn into life, you get interested in this game which isn't for real.

• 52:05Jocko Willink?

  You pass yourself off as a fully-fledged member of society. And the mask of a normal person grows onto you, no longer rejected by your body. And those around you think you are just the same as everyone else.

• 52:22Jocko Willink?

  But no one knows your real face. And no one knows that you are no longer a person.

• 52:30Jocko Willink?

  Happy, laughing people walk around you, accepting you as one of their own, and no one knows where you've been.

• 52:39Jocko Willink?

  But that doesn't bother you anymore. You now remember the war as some cartoon horror movie you once saw. But you no longer recognize yourself as one of its characters. You don't tell anyone the truth anymore, you can't explain what war really is to someone who's never been there. Just as you can't explain green to a blind person. Or a man can't know what it's like to give birth, they simply don't have the necessary sensory organs.

• 53:10Jocko Willink?

  You can't explain or understand war.

• 53:14Jocko Willink?

  All you can do is experience it.

• 53:18Jocko Willink?

  You're still waiting for something all these years, God knows what though. You simply can't believe that it ends just like that without any consequences. You're probably waiting for someone to shed some light on it all. For someone to come up to you and say, "Brother, I know where you've been. I know what war is, and I know what you've been fighting for."

• 53:41Jocko Willink?

  That's very important to know why and what for. Why the brothers, the war, gave to you, had to die? Why people were killed? Why they were fired on goodwill, justice, faith, and love? Crushed children and bombed women? Why the world need to lose that girl I saw on the runway? With her smashed head and a bit of her brain lying in an ammo box next to her? Why?

• 54:12Jocko Willink?

  But no one tells you. And then you, yesterday's soldier, sergeant, or captain, start to explain it to yourself. You take a pen and paper and produce the first phrase as you start to write.

• 54:29Jocko Willink?

  You still don't know what it'll be. A short story, or a poem, or a song? The lines come with difficulty. Each letter tearing your body like a shard being pulled from a wound. You feel this pain physically as the war comes out of you and onto paper, shaking you so that you can't see the letters. You are back there again, and death once more rules everything. The room fills with moaning and fear, and once again you hear the big guns, the screams of the wounded, and people being burned alive, and the whistle of mortar shells falling towards your prone back.

• 55:11Jocko Willink?

  The dead rise from their graves and form up. A great number of them, every one who is dear to you and was killed. You can already spot the familiar faces. Igor, Vaseline, Four Eyes, the platoon commander. They lean towards you and whisper, and their whispering fills the room. "Go on, brother. Tell them how we burned in the carriers. Tell them how we cried in surrounded checkpoints in August of 1996. How we whimpered and begged them not to kill us as they pinned us to the ground with their feet and slit our throats. Tell them how boys' bodies twitch when bullets hit them. You survived only because we died there. Go on, they should know all this.

• 55:56Jocko Willink?

  No one should die before they know what war is." And tinged with blood. The written words appear one after the other. Vodka is downed by the pint while death and madness sit beside you, nudging you and correcting your pen. And there you are. Yesterday's soldier, sergeant, or captain. Concussed a hundred times, shot to pieces, patched up, reassembled, half crazed and stupefied. And you write and write and whine with helplessness and sorrow.

• 56:40Jocko Willink?

  And tears pour down your face and stick into your stubble. And you realize that you should not have returned from the war.

• 57:12Jocko Willink?

  And that is

• 57:19Jocko Willink?

  where the book closes.

• 57:24Jocko Willink?

  And those, those are the demons.

• 57:28Jocko Willink?

  Those are the demons. Why did I survive?

• 57:33Jocko Willink?

  Why not them? What about the innocents we killed? Am I good for anything else besides war?

• 57:44Jocko Willink?

  And it's not just war that brings out demons. Life does.

• 57:52Jocko Willink?

  Stress and mayhem and accidents and crime and madness and loss. Those are demons.

• 58:07Jocko Willink?

  That attack that attack your soul.

• 58:14Jocko Willink?

  And there's a saying, and it's something like

• 58:19Jocko Willink?

  if I kill all my demons, then my angels, they die too.

• 58:31Jocko Willink?

  And I say, no.

• 58:38Jocko Willink?

  I say do not kill your demons.

• 58:43Jocko Willink?

  Instead,

• 58:46Jocko Willink?

  understand them. Know them.

• 58:52Jocko Willink?

  It's one of the oldest tenets of war. You have to know your enemy so you can defeat your enemy.

• 59:02Jocko Willink?

  And the best trick the devil can play is to make you think he's not there. And that's what these demons do. They hide. Deep.

• 59:13Jocko Willink?

  They pick away at you and they set up on you.

• 59:18Jocko Willink?

  But don't pretend that the demons aren't there. You gotta know them. You gotta understand them. Bring them in, hold them close, hold them tight.

• 59:35Jocko Willink?

  So you can control them.

• 59:39Jocko Willink?

  So you can recognize their form and their presence and their actions.

• 59:49Jocko Willink?

  And when I read about those soldiers living in the streets, barely living.

• 59:57Jocko Willink?

  Lost on alcohol and drugs, I think, at least in my mind.

• 1:00:04Jocko Willink?

  It's not because they surrendered to the demons.

• 1:00:09Jocko Willink?

  It's because they didn't see them. They didn't know that they were there. They didn't recognize them and they got ambushed. And in fighting. You know, in fighting, it's the punch that you don't see that knocks you out. And in war, it's the ambush that you don't see that kills you.

• 1:00:33Jocko Willink?

  And in your mind. It's gotta be the thoughts that you don't see, the things that you don't acknowledge, that you try to ignore, the ones that you try and say aren't there, that you don't admit to.

• 1:00:47Jocko Willink?

  Those are the ones that get you. Those are the ones that drag you down. Those are the ones that make you weaker, that control you. That pull you into a bottle of pills or of booze or into rage or depression.

• 1:01:05Jocko Willink?

  When you see an alcoholic or a drug addict,

• 1:01:10Jocko Willink?

  or someone that has something dragging them down,

• 1:01:15Jocko Willink?

  it's often because they failed to truly admit that that demon is there, and that demon has control over them.

• 1:01:25Jocko Willink?

  And they failed to recognize that they can control the demon.

• 1:01:34Jocko Willink?

  I say,

• 1:01:38Jocko Willink?

  know your enemy. Know your demons. And that way, you can control them and fight them and keep them at bay.

• 1:01:50Jocko Willink?

  And you don't need to kill them. In fact, I don't even know if you can kill them. They're part of you. They're part of what makes you, you. They're part of what makes me, me. I don't want to kill them. Because if I killed my demons,

• 1:02:10Jocko Willink?

  then maybe I kill my angels as well.

• 1:02:15Jocko Willink?

  But you need to put them in their place. You need to control them. Keep those demons in check.

• 1:02:24Jocko Willink?

  So they don't sneak up on you

• 1:02:28Jocko Willink?

  and gnash at you

• 1:02:32Jocko Willink?

  and end up controlling you.

• 1:02:37Jocko Willink?

  And there's one more piece to this.

• 1:02:41Jocko Willink?

  The stronger that you get, the weaker the demons get. The more you control them, the easier they are to control.

• 1:02:53Jocko Willink?

  It just takes that awareness and that ownership and that recognition and the mindset.

• 1:03:05Jocko Willink?

  So that you can live your life as you should in control.

• 1:03:13Jocko Willink?

  And on your terms.

• 1:03:17Jocko Willink?

  Not on the terms of the demons in your head.

• 1:03:24Jocko Willink?

  So.

• 1:03:27Jocko Willink?

  See them.

• 1:03:30Jocko Willink?

  And watch them. And control them.

• 1:03:36Jocko Willink?

  Own them.

• 1:03:40Jocko Willink?

  And then live your life.

• 1:03:54Jocko Willink?

  Now. Once again. It appears that I've gone to that dark place.

• 1:04:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, who recommended that book by the way? Do you remember?

• 1:04:07Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I'll, I'll, I'll have to figure it out. But you know, I think part of that. And you know, you and I were talking prior to this and I had to tell you.

• 1:04:19Jocko Willink?

  You know, this is part of me. I, I, I've attempted to sit down a couple of times with the big positive podcasts and I'm sure we will.

• 1:04:30Jocko Willink?

  But.

• 1:04:32Jocko Willink?

  I got some demons in there too that are talking. And this is what they're drawn to and I want to face them.

• 1:04:40Jocko Willink?

  I want to face them. I want to look at them.

• 1:04:45Jocko Willink?

  I want to go toe to toe with them.

• 1:04:50Jocko Willink?

  And another thing is, as both those soldiers said. People shouldn't get to live without knowing what war is like.

• 1:05:02Jocko Willink?

  Because until you know what war is like, or at least until you open your mind to understand what it is, where it comes from, what it does to people,

• 1:05:14Jocko Willink?

  then that's a whole, it's a whole part of humanity that you're not seeing, and it's the darkest part.

• 1:05:24Jocko Willink?

  And you've gotta recognize that, especially because if you don't recognize that that darkness is there, again, you're not gonna see the beauty you have in your own life. And you know what? That was dark, and that was deep, and you know what? In the next 10 minutes, you and I are gonna be laughing at something. We're gonna be enjoying something, we're gonna have some fun, and I think in that respect, the podcast,

• 1:05:55Jocko Willink?

  it reflects life. Because life has ups and downs, and it has misery, and it has sadness, and it also has fun, and it has laughter, and that's what reality is.

• 1:06:11Jocko Willink?

  And all those pieces, for me, the struggle, the struggle and the pain,

• 1:06:21Jocko Willink?

  that is life. That is the education, that's the reward. That experience that you get, that's what makes you better.

• 1:06:35Jocko Willink?

  And I think that's why we keep ending up here.

• 1:06:42Jocko Willink?

  But

• 1:06:45Jocko Willink?

  we don't dwell there, and I don't dwell there. And I don't think people should dwell there. That's one of the best things about recognizing when you've got these things in your head. If you try and ignore them, they stay there. When you face them, guess what? I can move on. And in 10 minutes, you and I are gonna be laughing about something. I don't know what yet. Probably at you.

• 1:07:10Jocko Willink?

  There we go. We're already there. The demon for the night has been faced, my friend.

• 1:07:16Speaker 01

  Looks like it, yeah.

• 1:07:20Jocko Willink?

  So now let's get to the, the good stuff, to the light.

• 1:07:24Speaker 01

  The internet stuff.

• 1:07:26Jocko Willink?

  The internet stuff, that's right.

• 1:07:28Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:07:28Jocko Willink?

  The interwebs.

• 1:07:30Speaker 01

  If you want to further support the podcast, you can get some shirts if you like them, if you think they're, they're cool and you'd wear them. Discipline equals freedom. Then a cool one with Jocko's head on it says good backwards when you look in the mirror.

• 1:07:43Jocko Willink?

  So, so I was talking to a, a guy and was basically saying, hey, listen, man, you know, we were going back and forth, we were texting and I forget what started it off, but it was something along the lines of, you know, you got, you know, you gotta just put your ego in check here. And he said something like, you know, we all need to put our, I said, oh no. He said, I gotta put my ego in check, ego in check. I said, we all gotta put our ego in check. I go, I gotta work on that too. Of course we always do. And he said, yeah, and I'm not the one that has a T-shirt with my face on it. And I said, yeah, you're also not the one that wrote a 300 page book about yourself and who has a podcast that's named af- that's just your name.

• 1:08:27Jocko Willink?

  So believe me, I, I, we all gotta work on it.

• 1:08:31Speaker 01

  Well, that shirt thing is different because I made the shirt.

• 1:08:33Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:34Speaker 01

  From the beginning, like that was my idea to put the shirt like that.

• 1:08:37Jocko Willink?

  And then, and then the, the bumpers, the president, but if you haven't seen those yet, Echo made Jocko 2016 bumper stickers. So.

• 1:08:46Speaker 01

  You know, I did it for the greater good.

• 1:08:48Jocko Willink?

  I guess that's a, I guess that's cool. I wonder what kind of cars are those gonna be on? Are they gonna be on, you know, Volkswagens? Are they gonna be on, uh, Mercedes? So who's gonna put those on? What are we gonna see? I think we're gonna see, I think we're gonna see Fords and Chevys.

• 1:09:04Speaker 01

  Maybe.

• 1:09:05Jocko Willink?

  For the most part.

• 1:09:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, I would say, sure. Yeah.

• 1:09:09Jocko Willink?

  I don't know. Get some European vehicles in there too. We'll see you pretty good.

• 1:09:14Speaker 01

  Nonetheless, if you want a bumper sticker on your car, whatever kind of car you got, um, you can get those at JacoStore.com as well. Um, yeah, shirts, bumper stickers, all this stuff if you want them.

• 1:09:27Jocko Willink?

  All right, let's go.

• 1:09:27Speaker 01

  Cool. First question.

• 1:09:32Speaker 01

  Jocko, as someone who has been getting after it for as long as, for a long time and has incurred injuries along the way, I see that you're a fan of mobility wad. I've been into starrett stuff for a while myself. Do you have any perspective on the difference that mobility and form can have on performance? Not just on addressing or preventing injuries?

• 1:09:55Speaker 01

  Did you encounter any material like this on your younger days, in your younger days as a SEAL? At an age when a lot of younger guys will just slam through things? As someone who is still very active in your 40s, I'm curious to, I'm curious to hear what your thoughts are versus how your 20s self was?

• 1:10:15Jocko Willink?

  Well, so the first part of the question about form and technique and mobility affecting performance, absolutely. I mean, technique is king, right? In any sport and it's funny when you break into a new sport, you realize how important technique is. Cause you think, I can do that. And then you try it and you go, oh, there's a lot of technique. Jiu Jitsu is a classic example, but any sport that you play that looks like it's not that hard. You go ahead and try it. You realize how much of us, every sport is technique. So technique is absolutely important. Mobility is also important. And uh, it being able to move well and move smoothly. You know, there's that whole, I don't know if it's a, a trend going on right now, but this idea of movement training, you know, it's the same thing, you know? How, how are you going to move well?

• 1:11:01Jocko Willink?

  How do you move your body well? So mobility is absolutely going to make you a better performer. Now, when I was younger,

• 1:11:10Jocko Willink?

  the, I mean, we just did not do this stuff. It was just merciless, no stretching, bad diet, no mobility. And when we were sore or whatever, we just, just were sore. I mean, that was it.

• 1:11:28Jocko Willink?

  And, and, and looking back, I wish we knew more of that stuff. We just didn't know it at the time. Maybe people knew it, I didn't know it. My buddies didn't know it. We just did what we did. We just worked out hard and just dealt with the pain. And when we were sore or, or had an injury, we just sucked it up and just drove through it. And I'm sure. That's not good. So I think there should definitely be a focus on this kind of stuff. Um, and it. You know, I, I think what's one of the things that's, I think, I like me, I need more focus on that. Cause I, I don't do enough. Mobility work. I don't enough stretching. Never mind. Let's mobility is like a modern, stretching.

• 1:12:10Jocko Willink?

  Right. That's actually, you know, you know, Eddie Bravo, who's a jujitsu, if you don't know who that is, jujitsu black belt. Really a creative game, but he won't give somebody their black belt unless they can do the lotus sit.

• 1:12:22Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:12:23Jocko Willink?

  Which is crazy. I mean, I can't come close to doing a lotus sit, which is when you put your feet on top of your thighs. And he's told, I've heard him talk a couple of times about, um, you know, guys that were completely inflexible, big football players. And then he's like, ah, you know, you can't get your black belt until you can do the lotus and these dudes just put their mind to it.

• 1:12:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:40Jocko Willink?

  And can do it. So just like anything else, you need to set some goals.

• 1:12:44Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:12:45Jocko Willink?

  I don't think I'm quite willing to step out onto the, I'm gonna do a lotus.

• 1:12:49Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:12:49Jocko Willink?

  But who knows? Maybe that's something I need to set in the sand and or. And make it happen. Uh, and I think though, I think things can all, people can go too far with that stuff. And I've said this before. Like some of that extreme yoga where you're just tying yourself in knots and going beyond what a human's supposed to be able to do. That's not, I don't believe that's good for you. And I have a couple of friends. I have one friend in particular that was a hardcore yoga guy. He was, he was in the SEAL teams. He got out hardcore yoga guy and. And he said it, he said, he believed it caused a lot of problems when he got older in his back and his spine and his neck and his joints. Cause you develop laxity.

• 1:13:29Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:13:29Jocko Willink?

  You know, you've developed looseness. You have a higher probability. So I think you should stretch. And be capable of the full range of motion of what a normal. Well. Oiled human should be able to do. I think once you start putting, you know, your arms, you know, backwards, upside down and behind and between your legs and then back up again, I think you're gonna have issues with that. I also think I do get some mobility from the workouts that I do from, I do deep squats, right? I go all the way down on squats. I do a lot of overhead squats. I do muscle ups. I do full range of motion pull-ups and dips. So I'm getting that movement, doing surfing, jiu-jitsu. I mean, you're constantly, you, you gotta stay, you gotta keep moving.

• 1:14:12Jocko Willink?

  You know, that's what I think you gotta do. You gotta keep moving. You gotta move in ways that are varied and, and make you move in different directions, running, swimming, surfing, jiu-jitsu. All different kinds of working out, just getting after it, basically. You know, and that's another thing that I, I did write down here as a note is, man, when I was younger, w- we just didn't tap that often in the jiu-jitsu. And, you know, you, everybody asked me, every, everybody that hits me up on Twitter and says, first day of jiu-jitsu class tomorrow, what's, what's your advice? My advice is tap early and tap often. Cause your ego, if you let your ego control the tapping mechanism, you're gonna get hurt. And it might not be instant. Like my neck is jacked up. I've had neck surgery.

• 1:14:53Jocko Willink?

  That's from Dean Lister. That's from being in a guillotines and not tapping and being in arm chokes and not tapping. That's from 20 years of not tapping to that stuff. Cause I can take a pretty good choke. So it's cool that you didn't tap and you got out. But after 20 years, guess what? You got some neck damage, son.

• 1:15:11Speaker 01

  And it's not. Did you get orig- originally in BUDs?

• 1:15:13Jocko Willink?

  I definitely, definitely BUDs had something to do with it too. But just wear and tear, but the additional wear and tear from, from jiu-jitsu definitely, you know, I think had a little something to do with it, which was all unnecessary. It was just, hey, I'm not gonna tap to this choke. It hurts my neck. I hear some noises in there, but I'm not tapping to it.

• 1:15:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:15:33Jocko Willink?

  It's not smart.

• 1:15:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, especially those neck ones. Cause there is an element of pain tolerance that can he- help you in neck stuff. But you, you get a arm bar as a new guy and then you're rolling with another guy who's kinda new, but he might know how to do the arm bar. He might be kinda spazzing, going hard and unnecessarily because he doesn't know the control yet. And if you don't tap early, that's when you're gonna get jammed up.

• 1:16:00Jocko Willink?

  Tap early and tap often, people.

• 1:16:02Speaker 01

  Or if you start tapping right when you feel the pain, that's wrong too, because a lot of times guys will put you in it and it's kind of understood that boom, you're locked in. You know, you're not going anywhere. So they kind of expect to tap. You don't tap. The guy might think, oh, I'm not doing it right or I'm not. Uh, he has more flexibility.

• 1:16:17Jocko Willink?

  He has one thought and one thought only. Crank harder.

• 1:16:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, right. Do it harder. Exactly. Especially if it has locked in. So it's like, all right. And then boom, you're hurt.

• 1:16:25Jocko Willink?

  Not good.

• 1:16:25Speaker 01

  Raw deal.

• 1:16:26Jocko Willink?

  Not good.

• 1:16:29Speaker 01

  As far as flexibility though, um, and Eddie Bravo actually said this, um, in a way where, you know, little kids, like little babies.

• 1:16:37Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 1:16:38Speaker 01

  Two years old.

• 1:16:38Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you can put their legs behind their heads. No problem.

• 1:16:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, for the most part, but they're not going to do this weird yo. You know how like some guys are, they're like double jointed or something? They won't be able to do that kind of stuff, but so put loosely, these two year olds, they have full flexibility.

• 1:16:54Jocko Willink?

  Right.

• 1:16:54Speaker 01

  And you just lose it over time as you gain muscle, you gain rigidity as you're, you know, everything gets stronger and stuff. And if you don't put your body through those motions, you just kind of lose it. So let's say if you were into stretching for the, from the beginning, genetics will play a part in

• 1:17:08Jocko Willink?

  Right.

• 1:17:08Speaker 01

  that, that, um, how stretchy you can be. But so in a way, you can get back there. You just got to work on getting back there.

• 1:17:18Jocko Willink?

  It just works like, just like anything else.

• 1:17:20Speaker 01

  Any workout, yeah. But yeah, pushing too far seems kind of weird because like, yeah, if you, let's say, I don't know, you can stretch your shoulder way behind your back, way behind your back. You don't have any really real strength there.

• 1:17:32Jocko Willink?

  No.

• 1:17:32Speaker 01

  But meanwhile, it's so easy to be back there, you know, and I don't know, does, it seems like your joints kind of get rigid for, to be stronger, right?

• 1:17:40Jocko Willink?

  I agree.

• 1:17:41Speaker 01

  It's a bone there for.

• 1:17:42Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I agree.

• 1:17:43Speaker 01

  Support. Next question.

• 1:17:49Speaker 01

  How do the seals deal with fatigue, soreness and beat down and the beat down of buds and SQT without getting injured?

• 1:17:59Jocko Willink?

  Well, you just get used to it. And again, you know, I say this all the time, BUDS and the SQT, which is the kind of the initial training after you get done with BUDS, which is the basic underwater demolition seal training. That's a short part of your career. I mean, it's literally a fraction of your career. It means nothing.

• 1:18:16Jocko Willink?

  But just like any working out, you get used to it. And if it's like when you work out, when you, if you haven't worked out for a long time, or someone that's someone that just starts working out from nowhere, never worked out before, they're gonna be sore as hell when they first work out. I just had this happen to me because I got, I want, I went on the road, I went on a road trip, multiple back to back road trips, then I went overseas, came back, when I came back, I got sick. So I was for like three weeks, I hadn't squatted heavy. At all. I had no body, all I did was body weight squats, you know, pistols, just lunges. That's how I worked my legs. There's just no weight. So you just do what you can do in a hotel room in some strange part of Europe.

• 1:19:00Jocko Willink?

  And when I came back, I was all happy and I got on that squat. Once I, then I was sick. And then once I got done being sick, I finally felt good and I got back on that squat rack. And man, my legs were destroyed. For four or five days, I'm talking, you know, having a hard time sitting down, having a hard time standing up. It was gnarly. And but, but that's just because my body just, it just wasn't, it lost that element. So of course, if you just started working out and you're walking around sore all the time, that's, that's, that's because you gotta get used to it. And in BUDS, you do get injured

• 1:19:41Jocko Willink?

  just because it's massively repetition. You know, there was a guy that we had that was a trainer, an athletic trainer for a professional sports team. And

• 1:19:51Jocko Willink?

  When he was there, there's a, there's a great example. There's something called patella femoral syndrome, which is when your patella, because of the way you're running, it rubs on your, your femur and it becomes problematic. And he, he said, in like a whole season in the NFL, or he would see maybe one of those injuries, maybe two. And you know, he'd have to figure out what it is. And when he was working in BUDS, he would literally see thirty of those a week.

• 1:20:20Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:20:21Jocko Willink?

  So you just get to see, I mean, there's more people, there's ten times the people, but it still was massive amount of injuries. And it's the same thing in the SEAL teams. In the SEAL teams, it's your shoulders, it's your backs, it's your knees, it's your ankles. You get abused. And it's, it's, it's not the working out that does it to you. It's not working out. It's carrying a guy on your shoulder over the rocky terrain out in the desert and tripping on ankle. That's what you get hurt. It's jumping over off of a wall and you land on a cinder block that breaks and you, you know, it's that's the kind of stuff. But working out doesn't really do it to you. I actually, one of the things, when, when I was a tasking to commander, we were going through land warfare training.

• 1:21:06Jocko Willink?

  And I would work out every day and I would roll with guys, like teach them some jiu jitsu and then roll with them. And I would, you know, guys are, cause you know, we're working hard during the day or during the night. And I was kind of making fun of some guys that were taking Motrin and I was like, you don't need that. You're weak and stuff like that. And sure enough, right after we got done, I got something called bursitis in my elbow because in land warfare, you're constantly getting down and as you're crawling, you're, and then I was in jiu jitsu on the mat and I just banged it a couple of times. And sure enough, my elbow swelled up and I had to take Motrin. Yeah, don't uh, don't open your mouth Jocko.

• 1:21:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:21:47Jocko Willink?

  Just keep it to yourself. Um, so you know, and again, I was, I was hammering guys, but in a joking manner. And so they hammered me right back when I had the, the Motrin pills to try and heal that up.

• 1:21:59Jocko Willink?

  But it is, like I said, it's the, it's the, the injuries come from, not from working out. In fact, I always think that the working out prevents the injuries. You know, that I think that's true with everything. I think that's true with jujitsu. I think that's true with life. You, you, you work out, you're strong, your joints are strong, you, your muscle density is better, you're, I mean, just, just work out because it'll prevent injuries more than, more than, I don't worry about, I look at working out, not as injury is going to happen. I look at working out as injury prevention. And the last thing is, you shouldn't need to like completely crush yourself every day in your workouts. I mean, you shouldn't be going to a point that you have massive muscle soreness over your whole body

• 1:22:44Jocko Willink?

  or over even body parts. You don't need to do that. You don't need to do that. You know, do you want to push yourself? Yeah, you want to push yourself, but you want to be so sore that you like can't perform your job. Uh, and also I like, you know, active rest, you know, I hardly ever just do nothing. Occasionally I will. Occasionally I'll just, man, I'm broke down.

• 1:23:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:23:07Jocko Willink?

  And just eat steak and just chill. But uh, but I like to do the active rest, you know, I like to do some kind of jog, swim, surf, whatever. And, and you know, actually jujitsu, like if I have a sore back, I love getting on the mat. It just loosens everything up, feels so good, but that's only at a certain level.

• 1:23:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:23:25Jocko Willink?

  Cause when you're a white belt or a blue belt or a purple belt, man, that, that's just a battle. You're, you're getting off the mat sore. I don't get off the mat sore from jujitsu seldom. Seldom do I get off the mat like, man, I'm tired. I mean, we trained today. I'm not, that was a no factor. You know what I mean? It was just, oh yeah, we trained.

• 1:23:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. If you get into the takedown elements though, that, that will.

• 1:23:47Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, but even the, even the, yeah, it'll be hard on your back, but even the takedown elements, you know, if you're just going to do pure takedowns. Yeah. But I mean, a takedown is going to last how long? And if your back's sore, pull guard and work something else.

• 1:23:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:24:00Jocko Willink?

  So that's it. And the bottom line is you work out, you do some of these workouts, you'll get used to it, you'll get in the zone and then you won't be so sore all the time.

• 1:24:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, that as an advocate of rest, I uh, I that's important that part where you're like, don't beat your down yourself down. Cause the exercise technically really split hairs here. The exercise doesn't make you stronger. The recovery from the exercise is when you get stronger. So yeah, that actually is a part of the whole system that makes you strong, but when you recover from that exercise, that's when you're stronger.

• 1:24:34Jocko Willink?

  I'll give you that.

• 1:24:36Speaker 01

  So yeah.

• 1:24:37Jocko Willink?

  But the workout itself is what induces the recovery. So.

• 1:24:40Speaker 01

  Sure. Yeah. So there you go. Um. You, well, I guess so. It's all kinds of different philosophies, right? Different approaches. Like you, you prefer the active rest. Um, and not going hard every day. Some people they prefer go hard every day, but then they'll have a straight up. Two, three days off completely, you know? Um, but yeah, the, you know, recovery from the exercise, that's, that's the ticket.

• 1:25:03Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And when I say go hard, I mean, like the muscular. You know, destroy, like if you can do squats until you can't walk, you can't do that all the time. And you don't need to.

• 1:25:14Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:25:15Jocko Willink?

  You need to initiate the growth. You don't need to destroy them. And, and you can do, you know, you can, but with a, with a metabolic conditioning, you really can destroy yourself a lot more often. And if you're doing it right, you shouldn't really be getting muscularly sore from your metabolic condition, if you're doing it right.

• 1:25:33Speaker 01

  Right. But then again, isn't, isn't that really a spectrum as well?

• 1:25:37Jocko Willink?

  It is a spectrum.

• 1:25:38Speaker 01

  Can be like a heavier, like quicker with.

• 1:25:41Jocko Willink?

  That's the, that's the beauty of working out. That's why you should never get bored with working out. Cause you can change it up.

• 1:25:48Jocko Willink?

  Next question.

• 1:25:51Speaker 01

  Jocko. Did you ever use jujitsu in combat? Wouldn't a striking art be better for combat situations?

• 1:26:00Jocko Willink?

  Okay, so, yes, and, uh, definitely. This is one of the things where I was actually, uh, I read things about this and people say, "Well, no, I mean, why would a SEAL ever have to use, you know, hand-to-hand combat? They have a rifle, they have a pistol, they've got buddies with them. So you, if you've, if you have to use your hand-to-hand combat, you've done something wrong.

• 1:26:24Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:26:24Jocko Willink?

  And that's actually completely wrong.

• 1:26:26Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:26:27Jocko Willink?

  Because, you know, it's very simple. You go into a room where there's people in there, and none of them are armed, and you have to get control of them. You can't just start shooting people. You're gonna have to get control of them.

• 1:26:36Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:26:37Jocko Willink?

  So, how do you get control of them? Well, a-again, how does striking give you control of someone?

• 1:26:44Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:26:44Jocko Willink?

  The answer is, it does not.

• 1:26:45Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:26:46Jocko Willink?

  Unless you have a miracle touch that you can just knock people out with one touch, and then you can handcuff them. People don't, boxers don't knock each other out consistently, you know? It's, it's very difficult to knock someone out. And so, this idea that, you know, striking is better, you absolutely have to know how to strike. But, striking is a very, a very inconsistent way to get control of somebody. Very, very inconsistent way to, of controlling people. And actually, the, the sad thing is, is that, it's, striking is the most traumatic to the, to the person that you're applying it to. And, you know, we used to do something, or we were taught something called a muzzle strike, right?

• 1:27:31Jocko Willink?

  Where you'd basically hit the person with the muzzle of your gun.

• 1:27:34Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:27:34Jocko Willink?

  And the people that were teaching it would be like, thinking that that just stopped people.

• 1:27:39Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:27:39Jocko Willink?

  Like, yo, you give them one good muzzle strike? Because it does, it seems like, you know, a muzzle is a very strong, I mean, a very small point of impact. And you think, "Oh, if I put all my force behind this small point of impact, man, that's really gonna, you know, hurt somebody and, and take them down." And I saw hundreds of muzzle strikes and they're really brutal and they what what they do is they cut you they cut you open very badly. I saw a lot of really bad cuts.

• 1:28:05Speaker 01

  With what like a

• 1:28:06Jocko Willink?

  With a rifle, with a rifle. And uh but they seldom did they actually knock the person out.

• 1:28:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:28:14Jocko Willink?

  So what do you do then? You muzzle strike them again. And then what do you do after that? You muzzle strike them again. What do you do? So you end up just

• 1:28:21Speaker 01

  Just beating them up.

• 1:28:21Jocko Willink?

  Beating them.

• 1:28:22Speaker 01

  Dang.

• 1:28:22Jocko Willink?

  But it's but it's a but it's a harsh beating because you you're using a uh you know, a pretty sharp muzzle of a weapon, which is cutting them open. So it's it it's it's not the best. Whereas if someone can get control of somebody in a grappling type scenario, get control of them. You know, clinch with them, take them down quickly. You can get control of them very quick quickly and they feel it. And they resist less because they kind of feel owned.

• 1:28:49Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:28:49Jocko Willink?

  And they also don't feel like you're hurting them. Whereas when you're striking them in the face, man. What's your natural answer reaction if I strike you in the face? You're gonna put your hands up. Well, if you put your hands up, maybe you're trying to attack me. Now I gotta hit you even harder. So it's a it's kind of a kind of a bad deal. So yeah, and then once you get a person on the ground, obviously, the more you know, the better you're gonna do. And that's why you know, it's good. It's good to have that well roundedness. But you definitely want to use, you know, you definitely want to have a good ground game. You want to have good striking too, of course. And but the jujitsu and the ground, the ground game is very important because you've got to control people. And in a combat situation, everybody you come up against is not a combatant.

• 1:29:31Jocko Willink?

  And they still need to get controlled. And some people, you can just motion to them to get down and that's great. And then you can tell them to lay down and that's great. And you can have your interpreter tell them to put their hands behind their back and then that's great. Or you can say that, you know, you can learn a few phrases, which we always did. We always knew a few phrases to tell them to you know, get down, show me your hands or whatever. But then you get the person that maybe they don't respond to what you're saying. And why aren't they responding? And this is something I see, you know, in some of these police videos.

• 1:30:00Jocko Willink?

  When I yell at you. You know. Get down, get down. Well, you might be scared. You might not know what I'm talking about. You might have headphones on. You might be deaf. You might just be frozen with fear.

• 1:30:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:30:12Jocko Willink?

  You might be a bad guy. You might be getting ready to run. All those different things. But if you're not doing what I tell you to do, I gotta get you to the ground. So how am I gonna do that? And again. I can walk up and take a swing at you, but I, I, you know, I've been punched in the face many, many times. Haven't been knocked out, but twice.

• 1:30:35Jocko Willink?

  So. All the times I've been punched in the face. You know, many, many times. I don't know how many, but many, many times. It's hard to knock someone out. So if you think, cause you walk over and strike someone, you're gonna knock them out, then you're gonna have control, but it's just not true. It's just a fallacy. So you're gonna have to know some, and the, the thing, this all goes back to this, you know, this case, and I forget what the case was, but. Somebody got choked years ago, like in the seventies. By a police officer, and I think they died or whatever, but they banned choking. They banned choking. From most police forces. So that's why these guys, what do they do? They pull out their batons and start beating people. That was a big, big thing with Rodney King. You know, why didn't someone just go and put this guy to sleep?

• 1:31:17Jocko Willink?

  And he'd have no marks on his body, would, you know, he'd be okay. You could bring him back to the jail cell. He's not gonna have contusions. He's not gonna have the crap beat down. He have no permanent damage whatsoever. But it wasn't allowed. Because of the. Because of the political situation that had happened years before. You weren't allowed to teach someone how to choke someone and put them to sleep completely. Incapacitate them.

• 1:31:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:31:41Jocko Willink?

  I mean, the chokehold is a beautifully powerful thing. And when you have, when you have, I mean, you saw the Rodney King tape. I mean, there's, I don't know how many cops there were, but there's multiple cops beating him. That's a classic example of what I'm saying. Just because you strike someone doesn't, even with a billy club, doesn't mean they're gonna stop.

• 1:31:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:31:59Jocko Willink?

  Whereas when you put a chokehold on somebody, they are going to sleep.

• 1:32:03Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:32:04Jocko Willink?

  They, they are going to sleep. One hundred percent.

• 1:32:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:32:07Jocko Willink?

  And when you have three cops. Going against one guy, someone's gonna get a chokehold on.

• 1:32:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:32:13Jocko Willink?

  You know? And, and despite what they did to Rodney King, beating him, he wasn't stopping. And so, yeah, it's one of those things. I really hope that the uh, that the law enforcement gets the ability to use, to, to train better, to use chokeholds, to use other forms of grappling, because it is absolutely superior from a law enforcement perspective and from a, and from, even from, like I said, from a military perspective, when you go into a room and there's noncombatants in there that you have to get control over, you don't want to start beating people.

• 1:32:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:32:45Jocko Willink?

  You want to use the minimum required force. And yet, when people aren't compliant, you have to be able to do something.

• 1:32:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:32:53Jocko Willink?

  So.

• 1:32:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, the, the minimum required force, that essentially makes striking obsolete if you're trying to approach it that way, or if that's the regulation, you know?

• 1:33:05Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, even if it's not the regulation, if you're, if you're a human,

• 1:33:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:33:10Jocko Willink?

  and you've got a woman that is scared, or doesn't speak your language, or is petrified, or whatever the case may be, your answer is to strike her in the face?

• 1:33:20Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:33:20Jocko Willink?

  And what is, by the way, what does her husband do when you strike her in the face?

• 1:33:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:33:25Jocko Willink?

  As opposed to if you come over, you put your hands on, or you gently push her to the ground, you feel some resistance, maybe you have to do some sort of manipulation of a joint to get to control, but that is so much more mild than a muzzle strike to the face.

• 1:33:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, and if you know what to do, if you know jujitsu.

• 1:33:41Jocko Willink?

  It's a no brainer.

• 1:33:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it's, it's not hard to do to people. And e- even, and you'll see sometimes, um, when, when someone's trying to get, you know, gain control, and they'll put their arm behind their back, like chicken wing situation. They'll do it all hard, like real hard, because they kind of got to add that element of pain, so the guy will kind of quote unquote, know. Uh, most jujitsu stuff, you don't have to put that pain, it's just that controlling, like you just can't, that's why a lot of people were talking about this today, how a lot of people, after they get their first time in jujitsu or something, or early on in jujitsu, a guy will tap them out, and they'll have this thing in their mind, like, oh, I just have to go harder, you know, I, I, I can just, I can. Gain some kind of control, I just gotta go harder, but it could because it's not a hard thing.

• 1:34:23Speaker 01

  It's not a like aggressive feeling to get controlled like that. You're just simply controlled.

• 1:34:30Jocko Willink?

  And you know, this ties so much to life. Because we talk about, I mean, you hear me talk about this all the time. And I was going back and forth with somebody on Twitter the other day about, I'm like, you gotta use the indirect approach with people.

• 1:34:43Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:34:44Jocko Willink?

  So picture this, next time you're dealing with a person that's combative. And I mean, now I'm talking about verbally combative or or their their ideas are combative against your combatives. Is the first thing you wanna do, go up and punch them in the face or muzzle strike them?

• 1:34:59Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:34:59Jocko Willink?

  Cause what is their reaction gonna be? What their reaction is gonna be immediately be defensive. You don't wanna put people in that predicament. You wanna use the jujitsu on them. You wanna, you wanna get them feeling comfortable. I mean, when, when you're going to sleep, you, when somebody puts a chokehold on you, you're done. I mean, you're just going to sleep. You sneak in behind, so, so don't get this idea that when you're dealing with people in a confrontation, not only physically, but a verbal or a mental confrontation. And I'm not even talking about a confrontation in, you know, yelling in the street. I'm talking about in the office.

• 1:35:34Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:35:35Jocko Willink?

  I'm talking about dealing with one of your subordinates. I'm talking about dealing with your boss or whoever. Think about using, instead of thinking about, hey, I'm gonna, you know, smash this person in the face and that's gonna bring me the win. No, it's not. Generally, it is not. Generally, what brings you the win is, okay, hey, what's, what's going on? Let's sneak in there, let's get inside their head, let's, let's not aggravate the situation.

• 1:35:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:36:00Jocko Willink?

  Let's bring the situation towards a better area where we can use our control.

• 1:36:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, you won't get the win. You'll get a fight.

• 1:36:11Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah, you'll definitely get a fight.

• 1:36:13Speaker 01

  Even though that's not the goal, yeah, you be, i- if they are combative and your answer is to be more combative. You know, and of course their answer, you know, their answer is gonna be, yeah, even more combative. So, yeah, then, then you got yourself a fight. Um, Hannah and them, Gracie's, they're doing good stuff with law enforcement. Using jujitsu and actual police tactics. So it comes from, you know, it's in context.

• 1:36:33Jocko Willink?

  And you know what, if you're, if you're a police officer out there or you're in law enforcement. And you know, Hanner, that's great. Guess what? There's a jujitsu studio everywhere in the country right now. Go train some jujitsu. Just go start training. No big deal. Just go start training.

• 1:36:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I have a, I have a friend, um, Craig, he's from, from, from Hawaii. He, um,

• 1:36:58Speaker 01

  good cop. You see him on Facebook. I all like repost stuff, stuff sometimes. So like, he'll come down to the skate park, whether, you know, he got called or whatever.

• 1:37:05Jocko Willink?

  I saw that. You posted that.

• 1:37:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, and he'll, he'll, yeah. He'll do some skating or he'll race him or whatever. But he's, he's a jujitsu guy. I think he's a purple or brown belt.

• 1:37:14Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, so he has the confidence.

• 1:37:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, man.

• 1:37:16Jocko Willink?

  That's what it is. He has the confidence.

• 1:37:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:37:18Jocko Willink?

  That's awesome.

• 1:37:20Speaker 01

  Yep. Can be, be a good guy, you know? Good guy with the power.

• 1:37:27Speaker 01

  Next question. Jocko, how did you prepare for BUDS specifically? And where were you physically wise within your class?

• 1:37:38Jocko Willink?

  It must be a physical night around here. A physical activity night. That's what the questions are tonight. It seems like. So how did I prepare for BUDS? Well, again, you gotta go back. This is now nineteen eighty-nine, nineteen ninety. And how did I prepare for BUDS back then? Well, we didn't know anything. I didn't know anything. There was no media. There was no internet. There was nothing. There wasn't even any books. So what did, what did I do? And it wasn't even a we. It was just an I because I was alone. I didn't know any SEALs. I didn't know any of them in, in any kind of special operations at all. So you're just young and stupid and just, okay, so I just looked at it and said,

• 1:38:23Jocko Willink?

  it appears that SEAL training is a bunch of running and swimming and pushing, push-ups and pull-ups and rope climbs and dips.

• 1:38:35Jocko Willink?

  Looks to me like in the pictures that the recruiter showed me, they were wearing boots and and fatigues. So what did I do? Went to the Army Navy store, bought a couple pair of fatigue pants, bought a couple pairs of jungle boots. That looked like what I saw in the recruiting office and I just ran with boots on. I swam. I did pull-ups, push-ups and dips. That's what I did to get ready for it. There was no periodization and there wasn't any plan. There was no, I wasn't doing the WOD, you know, there was no workout of the day. I just ran and swam and did pull-ups, push-ups and dips and I did them a lot. And, and, and actually,

• 1:39:19Jocko Willink?

  I did them a lot, but I didn't even know what I was capable of or what even a person was capable of. Cause back then you could look up on the internet and say like, what's good? As far as pull-ups go.

• 1:39:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:39:31Jocko Willink?

  You, I had no idea. You know, so I think I could do eighteen.

• 1:39:36Speaker 01

  That's solid.

• 1:39:36Jocko Willink?

  No, it's not. Not when you're going to SEAL training. But you know, you just had no idea. I just said, okay, that's, and I didn't know how to do, get to be able to do more. I mean, I just did a bunch.

• 1:39:48Speaker 01

  Doesn't that, doesn't that work though? I mean, didn't that work?

• 1:39:51Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, it did. Yeah. I mean, you do a bunch of pull-ups. Yeah, you do a bunch of pull-ups and you get better at pull-ups. You do a bunch of dips, you get better at dips. You do a bunch of push-ups, you get better at push-ups. And luckily I ran with boots on. That's some, one thing that got a lot of guys had trouble with. I think nowadays they use these, they're almost like tennis shoes. The, the boots that they run with are like really light, athletic in buds. They're really light, athletic kind of boots, but back in the day, they were straight, just hardcore jungle boots and, and a lot of guys had problems, shin splints, uh, stress fractures and all that. And I was good to go because I was used to running in boots because I was a knucklehead. And then the other part of the question physically, where was I in my class? I was about in the middle of the pack.

• 1:40:29Jocko Willink?

  That's where I was. I was not the fastest. I was not the fastest runner, not the fastest swimmer. I wasn't the fastest at the obstacle course. I actually failed to run. When I decided in my ultimate brilliance, that I would just pace myself for this run. And uh, failed to run. Missed the time because the, the, the, the The run was supposed to be four miles, but back in those days, there was no supervision on the instructors. Like limited supervision, I should say. And so the runs would be four point three miles, four point six miles, four point two miles, three point eight miles. You just didn't really know and it was fine. I mean, that's the way it should be.

• 1:41:12Jocko Willink?

  And and actually weren't allowed to wear a watch. So you had no idea what you're doing. So I just said, oh, I'm gonna pace myself and keep a good steady pace. And uh, I failed. And so from then on, there's only one way I ran. It was as hard as I could. It's literally as hard as when they blew the whistle to go, I just ran as hard as I could until the thing was over.

• 1:41:30Speaker 01

  Wait, so why'd you fail though? Like, did you just pace yourself too slowly? Or did you pace yourself and then shoot, you started gassing anyway?

• 1:41:37Jocko Willink?

  No, I paced myself and it wasn't fast enough. That's it. I faced myself and it wasn't fast enough. I just came and I was, I was right behind the cutoff point, you know? They're like boom, and the guy ahead of me gets through and he, you know, one guy ahead of me gets turned away like, no, you failed. Damn. So I never paced myself again. All I could do to sprint, that's, that's the way a lot of the evolutions were for me. I had to just go as hard as I could. Cause I wasn't the best at any of it. And

• 1:42:08Jocko Willink?

  the only thing I was maybe a little bit better at was anything I've talked about this before, anything that I had to carry weight like a rucksack. I was a little bit better at than normal, not definitely not stellar, but um, but you know, I had a, I had an N C L, NCAA water polo champion in my buds class. And I had a Olympic alternate gymnast in my buds class. And both those guys were stud athletes. I mean, they're both. I mean, those are some of the top, top athletes in the world. I mean, if you win the NCAA championships of water polo and you're an Olympic alternate gymnast. You know, you're just a specimen. And both those guys quit.

• 1:42:52Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And there I was, Joe average. But uh, yeah.

• 1:42:59Jocko Willink?

  The bottom line is though, you get to the, you get to the SEAL teams, no one cares about BUDs. No one cares about that stuff. It's a baseline of training and that's it. That's why I don't talk about it that often. It's like, who cares?

• 1:43:12Speaker 01

  And BUDs did, was there like people who'd um, like let's say I was really good at running miles, you know? Was there people who would be, you could tell they were showing off to be like first, you know?

• 1:43:22Jocko Willink?

  No, everyone's trying to win. Everyone's trying to go first. And if you, if you ran track or cross country, you were gonna be fine in BUDs for running. Unless you got stress fractures.

• 1:43:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:43:33Jocko Willink?

  If you swam or you played water polo or whatever, you were gonna be fine in the running. So, if you did some kind of high school sport that was related to those two, you were gonna be pretty good to go.

• 1:43:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, but were they like, oh, so when you say they were trying to win, they're trying to be first?

• 1:43:48Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, of course. Everyone's trying to win. Yeah, this, this, I mean, right? Aren't you? I am.

• 1:43:55Speaker 01

  It seems like, I, yeah.

• 1:43:57Jocko Willink?

  I tried.

• 1:44:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, I guess. Yeah, you're in that situation, right? Do your best, win, be the guy, the man.

• 1:44:07Speaker 01

  Next question.

• 1:44:09Jocko Willink?

  Let's do it.

• 1:44:10Speaker 01

  One of the most powerful tools I've used as a military leader is rehearsals. I would love to hear your thoughts on rehearsals.

• 1:44:19Jocko Willink?

  So rehearsals, and this is actually shocking that I've never talked about rehearsals.

• 1:44:23Speaker 01

  Rehearsals like what? Like, oh, we're gonna do this, like a practice, like a dress rehearsal?

• 1:44:27Jocko Willink?

  Yes, gotcha. And they're totally critical. And one of the biggest parts of preparing for an operation correctly. You know, we used to have this, they used to say one-third planning, one-third gear prep, and one-third rehearsals. That's how you're supposed to spend your time. And it's, it's a, it's a rule that gets violated very often because people spend too much time planning and not enough time rehearsing. So, we would always, I would always try and push the rehearsals as much as possible. And I would be, when I was a, when I was in charge of troops, I would try and push rehearsals. And then when I was training troops, I would try and get them to rehearse. But it's hard. Like I said, people get drawn into the planning piece.

• 1:45:13Jocko Willink?

  But a plan without rehearsal is not a plan, really. So, you know, definitely.

• 1:45:20Jocko Willink?

  Use the rehearsals, rehearse as much as you can, be hard on yourself during rehearsals, rehearse contingencies. That's something we used to do that I was pretty intent on was rehearsing the contingency. So what could go wrong here? What could go different at the target area? What's a different alternate route that we might have to hit the target from? And just, just go through a couple of those contingencies. And actually, when you do that, make sure you, if you rehearse a couple of contingencies, if you rehearse your, your main plan, let's say you walk through it three times, then you rehearse two or three contingencies, go back and do the main plan two more times. Just so that's what they leave with. You want that in their heads, they, you want that in their heads because otherwise there'll be a little bit of confusion.

• 1:46:03Jocko Willink?

  But you definitely want to rehearse some contingencies as well. And we also would rehearse the things that were, the things that happened all the time. So even, you know, a good example was, was like our breach team, which is the team that kind of goes in to blow up a door so you can get in the building and they have their little procedures. We'd heard that breach, breach team would rehearse over and over and over again. So that they're really just smooth and good and they don't have to talk and they can do things very quickly. And, and you know, the way we got into vehicles and out of vehicles, we always rehearse that, even though we'd rehearsed it, by, I mean, by the end of deployment, you've rehearsed that hundreds of times and you still go, all right, hey, dismount the vehicles and, and get in formation. Because it's just another

• 1:46:48Jocko Willink?

  time, more muscle memory for everybody. And you could do it with all the, all the stuff that you do in the field, you know, whether you're calling in a helicopter for a casualty evacuation, how you're going to set up that landing zone, you rehearse that a few times, just do it, you know, a couple of times before you roll out on an operation. That way, when it happens, everybody knows what to do. And this obviously translates.

• 1:47:11Jocko Willink?

  Directly to everything else. I mean, especially in business. I mean, we we work with construction companies and you know, I talk a lot of times talk about safety with construction companies because they lose lives, they lose money, they lose jobs because they have if they have safety incidences. And how do they handle when they happen? What do you do? So, you know, rehearsing the emergency procedures of when something happens, rehearsing the setup before you start a certain type of, you know, construction operation. That's good. Even with the sales world, like when I, when I, you know, a lot of teams that every business has, well, just about every business has some sort of sales force in it, right? Where that are trying to sell things. And how do you rehearse for them? Well,

• 1:47:55Jocko Willink?

  you you do some role playing where, you know, somebody gets on and plays the super hard client, you know, somebody gets on and complains. How do you lay, let's rehearse, let's, how are you going to talk through when somebody calls up to complain? And in two or three iterations, people will improve on how they handle complaints and how they handle a super hard client, how they overcome some objections. But you do that through rehearsal and it makes you just makes you better. You know, it's um, you know, that the, I mean, another rehearsal would be like a, we work with the gas oil industry. So how are they going to handle when there's a leak? How are they going to handle when there's some kind of a ecological problem or a fire? What are you going to do? You know, oh, you're going to dial this number? Okay, let's check that that number

• 1:48:39Jocko Willink?

  might works. How long has that number been in this little pamphlet that's been sitting by the phone? You know, when's the last time that got checked out? Uh, where's, where is the communications nodes? What if they get hit? What's the alternative plan? So just, yeah, rehearsals are awesome. The finance world, we see it as well. What kind, what if there's a drastic downturn in the market or a drastic upturn? Do you have a rehearsed plan of what you're going to do, who you're going to contact? If you have decisions to make, triggers have been hit, just rehearse that stuff. Just rehearse it. So everybody knows. And it's very, very helpful. I know when I was in charge of training, I had a very uh,

• 1:49:21Jocko Willink?

  Very squared away and fired up, uh, Corman, who's our medical support. And he just, you know, I, I talked about rehearsals one time or whatever. And he came to me and said, hey, we're going to rehearse all of our casualty evacuations for all of our different training sites. So, and he did, and he'd come back and he'd find, you know, hey, guess what? This is what I found on this one. The life flight that we were supposed to call didn't exist anymore. They went out of business or they changed their number, whatever. Or this LZ that we were planning on using has a house on it now. You know, and so he found real stuff. And you know what? This particular guy, great guy, he, in that time, he got all those casualty evacuation plans squared away.

• 1:50:00Jocko Willink?

  And in that, in that year, we actually did two real casualty evacuations from training sites for real critical injuries. And both of them went super smooth, all because of his efforts. And they ran full rehearsals, full rehearsals. And so just, just that kind of thing. Those things save lives for sure. Just doing those full rehearsals. So yes, rehearse, rehearse and rehearse in anything that you're doing, because it'll make you better.

• 1:50:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, especially where you, I would think that anytime you're in a situation where being on the spot is a big factor, you know, where, where you have to make a decision quick. You know, you don't have a day or two days to, you know, analyze and make a decision. Feel like that would, rehearsal would be a critical part of preparing for something like that.

• 1:50:51Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And you can do that with the decision making. Sure. You can set up all kinds of rehearsals for decision, for decision making in whatever industry you're in. Just, but what I like to do is make those decisions critical, make those challenging, so that you're putting somebody on the spot, you're putting a leader in the spot. And I'll tell you what, one thing that's very cool about this, and this is something you could carry over to everything you do. It goes to decentralized command. It goes to instilling initiative in people. You run rehearsals where the only solution is to.

• 1:51:24Jocko Willink?

  Go outside the box of the plan. Oh, during the rehearsal. During the rehearsal. Or rehearsal where the only solution is to disobey what the order is. Oh dang, yeah. And, and the reason I'm bringing this up specifically is because you're talking about rehearsing when there's decisions that need, need to be made. So this is going a little bit from rehearsal, almost into a training scenario, right? So we're getting away from rehearsal where you're rehearsing a specific operation into a training scenario. Where what you're trying to do in training is you're trying to get people to think. You're trying to get people to think on their own and that is the most beautiful thing that you want as a leader is you want all your people thinking. And you want them to be able to think with a completely open mind, a mind that's been completely freed from constraints.

• 1:52:07Jocko Willink?

  And the way that you do that, one of the ways that you do that, one of the methodologies you can use to do that is everybody's got their box, right? That they're stuck in. So you formulate a problem that the only way that they're going to solve the problem is to get outside of that box. And you know, one of the, one of the best ones is you put somebody in a situation where you put parameters on them. And you say, hey, no matter what, you're not allowed to go across this line. And then you put them in a situation where they have to cross that line. And the only way they're going to win is to cross that line. And then they come back and they say, well, you did, told me not to cross that line. You know what? I didn't tell you to get all your guys killed. Or I didn't tell you to, to not make that investment, even in this critical situation.

• 1:52:49Jocko Willink?

  Or I didn't tell you not to do that if we had an ecological disaster that was going on, right? So you need to train people to use common sense. That's what you want to train them to do. And it's very hard, you'd be surprised at how, at how constrained people's brains get. Mind, yours, everybody, we get stuck. And so it's great to do drilling and training where you are actually opening up the mind and freeing the mind from any kind of constraint. Where you can see things from varied perspectives that are different from your own. And you can see outlets and solutions that you would never have seen if you trap yourself inside your box.

• 1:53:32Jocko Willink?

  And those are the kind of training scenarios that are outstanding. And those are the kind of training scenarios that make people. Better leaders and better decision makers. Because the key thing that they learn how to do is they learn how to detach. Even at that moment, we talk about it all the time. But if you can't detach from that situation and you can't detach far enough away from the picture to see that the only way you're gonna solve this problem is by going across that line that you were told not to go across. If you can't make that detachment, you're never gonna cross that line. You're never gonna open your mind. You're never gonna see that solution. And that is a horrible trap to be stuck in.

• 1:54:14Speaker 01

  The movie Boiler Room where they during the training, they give them a, you know, it's a sales thing.

• 1:54:19Jocko Willink?

  Right.

• 1:54:19Speaker 01

  They even this index, all these index cards with rebuttals, right? Like, oh, my wife won't let me buy this.

• 1:54:25Jocko Willink?

  Right, right.

• 1:54:26Speaker 01

  You know?

• 1:54:26Jocko Willink?

  Oh, your wife runs your family?

• 1:54:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:54:28Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 1:54:29Speaker 01

  Ever see that movie Boiler Room?

• 1:54:30Jocko Willink?

  I have seen it. I have seen it.

• 1:54:31Speaker 01

  Dope.

• 1:54:32Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, there's some good, good training in there on how to overcome those objections and people become better at. And the more, the more you give them to chew on, the better they'll get at it. It's the same thing where you're trying to give people the tools.

• 1:54:47Jocko Willink?

  But you know, I wanna go into that scenario and I wanna ask them a question when I'm training them that they've never, I wanna give them objection that they've never heard before. Let them think on their feet. Let them see, let them step back and say, hey, you know what? This one's not on the cards. Where am I gonna go with it?

• 1:54:59Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah, the card seems like that that would fall within rehearsal.

• 1:55:02Jocko Willink?

  Right, right, right.

• 1:55:03Speaker 01

  I mean, it's expanded rehearsal.

• 1:55:05Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I bet you they get ninety-five percent.

• 1:55:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:55:08Jocko Willink?

  Of the, of the common objections that you get. You know, you talk to a car salesman, they hear X amount of objections. You talk to a, a phone salesman or an internet salesman or a, you know, whoever calls you up on the phone, they hear the same, the, the solar people, right? The solar people call you all the time or the power company calls you with this or the cable company, the other cable company calls you with their offer. They hear the same objections all the time. You know what I mean? So they train for those, for sure.

• 1:55:36Speaker 01

  Bro, I was coming out of, I was coming out of Vons and they were like, hey, you know, hey. Come here, I got some, check this out, it's um, the ones where you can do, sponsor child, one of those kinds of things, right? So, I was like, hey, you know, yeah, you know, we, we, we donate, but we like to research and look into, and before I could really finish the sentence, I was gonna say, we, I like to look into all the programs that we donate to, or think, or consider donating to, before I could finish this, or right when I finished the sentence, he was like, "A lot of people are concerned about where the money goes," and all this stuff, and he knew everything, I was like, "Oh, these guys are getting advanced."

• 1:56:12Jocko Willink?

  Slick.

• 1:56:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, man, that's how he's prepared, he rehearsed.

• 1:56:15Jocko Willink?

  Good for him.

• 1:56:16Speaker 01

  He was trained. Next question.

• 1:56:20Speaker 01

  Jocko, for the podcast, what's your opinion on calisthenics versus weights?

• 1:56:28Jocko Willink?

  Again, for me, both. I like them both. You know, with calisthenics, you get that endurance, strength, you get some flexibility and some mobility out of it. They're pretty natural movements, right? They're pretty natural movements, they're things that you're doing with your human body. So they're gonna be more natural. Weights obviously make you stronger, more explosive. At a certain point, they also can be more injury inducing. And a- at another point, they're also less injury inducing. So, there's a certain point where if you have an injury in your shoulder, and you normally would do handstand pushups,

• 1:57:12Jocko Willink?

  which means you're lifting up 230 pounds, well, eh, with weight training, you could lift up 40 pounds if you want to, right? So, so there's, it goes both ways, where sometimes calisthenics might be the more injury inducing thing, and sometimes weight training might be the more injury inducing things. That's why you gotta balance the two of them, you know, and for instance, when I, if I, like, I hurt my ankle. Couple of months ago and I could not put any weight on the squat bar. So I was just doing, you know, pistols and and you know, air squats, jumps and box jumps, you know, I was using things that didn't have any weight because I could do all that. But the minute I put weight on my back,

• 1:57:55Jocko Willink?

  you know, anything above body weight, it started to hurt. And so I just needed to let that thing heal. And I used the calisthenics to get me there. And then the same exact opposite, I had a, my shoulder was tweaked six months ago and I was having a hard time doing handstand pushups because it was just the wrong angle. And so I was just using, just using, I was doing press with a lighter weight than my body weight in order to keep the blood moving in order, in order to keep the, in order to keep the system moving. Because that's what I think you gotta do. So I think you gotta be, you gotta find a balance of both, which means, which means I'm not great at either one of them. I'm not going to win in any weightlifting competitions and I'm not going to win in a

• 1:58:39Jocko Willink?

  gymnastics competition either. And there are some guys, especially now, I mean, there's some guys that are getting in sick shape. Um, you know, you watch the guys in the CrossFit Games right now. They're savages and they're doing both the calisthenics and the weightlifting. And actually, I was reading something about it the other day and it's becoming more weightlifting focused, you know, whether it's Olympic. What is? CrossFit. Okay. I shouldn't say it's getting that more focused, but if you want to win the CrossFit Games, you gotta be able to lift some heavyweights. You gotta be able to deadlift a lot, snatch a lot,

• 1:59:19Jocko Willink?

  clean and jerk a lot. And if you can deadlift a lot, clean and jerk a lot, and snatch a lot, you're going to be able to do, and at least you practice the other movements, the muscle up, the pull ups, you're gonna, you're gonna be much more apt to be able to do those things than the other way around. So.

• 1:59:39Jocko Willink?

  I mean, it's for somebody that can do a body weight snatch is more likely to be able to do fifty pull-ups in a row than somebody that's able to do fifty pull-ups in a row and that's their focus in life is able to automatically do a body weight snatch. I mean, that's just the reality of it. That's what I think right now. But the bottom line is on those, I use both of them. I like to try and find that balance and I think I use both of them according to what my body prescribes me.

• 2:00:15Jocko Willink?

  And a lot of this stuff, I'm putting the ebook together, the fitness ebook. So I got some folks that are helping me out with it and they're gonna, they're gonna, you know, I'm gonna put these, these things into the fitness ebook at some point. I don't know when it's gonna get out. This stuff takes a long, you don't think it's gonna take long. But it does.

• 2:00:39Speaker 01

  This, um, the calisthenics versus weights, um, it depends fully on what result you want.

• 2:00:48Jocko Willink?

  Uh, that is true.

• 2:00:49Speaker 01

  So and, and I think a lot of times you speak kind of from the same, you know, with the same results in mind, but like if you want to put on muscle mass, it's real cut and dry that weight is gonna, you know, is gonna help you. And you know what's in my opinion, interesting with, um, like calisthenics, let's say, um, body weight squats, right? Anything where you're pushing your own body through space, not necessarily with the weight, but as far as that exercise has more neuromuscular activation. So if you do squats rather than leg press, that has more neuromuscular activation.

• 2:01:28Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah, but I mean.

• 2:01:30Speaker 01

  I'm just saying that the the

• 2:01:32Jocko Willink?

  Wait, but you're talking about also weighted squats.

• 2:01:36Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly.

• 2:01:37Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, for sure.

• 2:01:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, so basically what I'm saying is it's kinda in a way.

• 2:01:40Jocko Willink?

  I haven't used any kind of like weightlifting machine and I don't remember how long.

• 2:01:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, so like curls, you know how you always do curls all the time, like if you did um.

• 2:01:53Speaker 01

  Close.

• 2:01:53Jocko Willink?

  Somebody said the other day, somebody posted a picture of some of the bumper stickers on their squat rack. And somebody said, we need to make a bumper sticker that said like, this is a no curling area, which I got a, which I got a big kick out of. And you know what, though, I will say this, that being said, I don't think I've said that this.

• 2:02:12Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 2:02:12Jocko Willink?

  I'll tell you what, I have a bicep that's been a little bit bothersome, you know, it's got a little tweak in it.

• 2:02:17Speaker 01

  Been like that for a while.

• 2:02:18Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's been like that for a while.

• 2:02:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:02:20Jocko Willink?

  And I actually will now do some curls.

• 2:02:24Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:02:24Jocko Willink?

  To get, just to get that full range of motion with some weight on it. And I feel like that is, I feel like I should have kept doing curls and maybe I injured my bicep a little bit from the lack of some focused training around it. I could be wrong, I could be wrong, but I feel suspect of my training methodology. Cause I, I hadn't done curls in a long, long time. Cause you know, you're thinking, hey, why would I do curls when I can do cleans? Right?

• 2:02:51Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 2:02:52Jocko Willink?

  That, that's, that's sort of a, that's my mentality. But now I think, you know what? Do cleans and then do some curls too.

• 2:02:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:02:59Jocko Willink?

  You know, work the bicep and the same thing with the, with the, with the triceps. And the same thing with all these, you know, movements that I kind of tend to blow off. Because they're not full body, multi-joint movements, which is sort of the gospel of strength and conditioning. Um, you know, I want to do squats, I want to do deadlifts, I want to do clean jerks, I want to do these movements where I'm using my whole body. But I think, you know what, why not accent those with some, a little bit more focused? Just for the, the additional work on a focused area.

• 2:03:34Jocko Willink?

  And the benefit that that gives you of strength in that specific spot. So.

• 2:03:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:03:39Jocko Willink?

  I'm sure I'd love to hear some opinions about that on, you know, some of you get some feedback to me and tell me I'm either an idiot.

• 2:03:47Speaker 01

  Not idiot.

• 2:03:48Jocko Willink?

  Or that those are correct. And if it's, I hope I hear it's correct because I'll do it more than I do right now.

• 2:03:53Speaker 01

  What, like curls and stuff?

• 2:03:54Jocko Willink?

  Just, just, just more folk, some focused body part exercises.

• 2:03:57Speaker 01

  Well, again, and I think this is really important and of course, you're working out for you, of course. I mean, that's just the nature of working out. You can't, and someone else can't get your results from your working out.

• 2:04:09Jocko Willink?

  Right.

• 2:04:10Speaker 01

  So, again, like I said, it depends on what you want out of working out.

• 2:04:15Jocko Willink?

  True.

• 2:04:15Speaker 01

  So you know how you just said like, that's the gospel of, of strength and conditioning. It's not a full body weight. So you prefer these things. That's not everybody, you know? So, so if, let's say someone who's, you know, he's worked in an office or whatever, he wants to lose some weight. Or he's kind of a, you know, more of a skinny person and he wants to put on muscle mass for a bu- a bunch of reasons. He wants to get stronger. He wants to be able to like push.

• 2:04:36Jocko Willink?

  But both those people should do squat and deadlift.

• 2:04:38Speaker 01

  Sure. Yeah. Agreed. Agreed. But if you want to put on muscle mass, like in your shoulders or your arms, both, everything, you, you do these other things, curls.

• 2:04:48Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:49Speaker 01

  You know, not everyone's for that, but that's not to say that that's not a beneficial type of workout.

• 2:04:55Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's a reality.

• 2:04:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:04:57Jocko Willink?

  Not a reality that I choose to participate in.

• 2:04:59Speaker 01

  But you're already kind of, you know, you have muscle mass. So it's easy, you know?

• 2:05:04Speaker 01

  Just say.

• 2:05:04Jocko Willink?

  Check.

• 2:05:05Speaker 01

  Yes, don't hate on the bodybuilding program.

• 2:05:07Jocko Willink?

  No, not, there's no hate coming from me. Not much anyways.

• 2:05:12Speaker 01

  Alright, cool. Last question. I'm gonna write my ebook on don't hate on the bodybuilding. Help me write it.

• 2:05:19Jocko Willink?

  I want a copy.

• 2:05:21Speaker 01

  Jocko,

• 2:05:23Speaker 01

  do you ever compromise? And if so, when?

• 2:05:31Jocko Willink?

  When you're dealing with other people in dynamic situations and relationships and deals, you're trying to make things happen, of course, yes.

• 2:05:44Jocko Willink?

  In fact, I mean, in many aspects, leadership is really all about compromise. About finding the common ground between different teams and merging different approaches to the same problem. And bridging these personalities of the people that don't get along with each other or that you might not get along with.

• 2:06:10Jocko Willink?

  Reaching agreements and different courses of actions, all these things, they all require compromise.

• 2:06:22Jocko Willink?

  And actually, in many cases, the failure to compromise is a failure to succeed. That's just the way it is.

• 2:06:34Jocko Willink?

  But those, of course, those are all external compromises with other people, other human beings, that have their own personalities and egos and issues.

• 2:06:51Jocko Willink?

  And you as a person, or I, I have to work with them. I have to make some compromises with them.

• 2:07:02Jocko Willink?

  Because they're not me.

• 2:07:06Jocko Willink?

  But internally, it's different.

• 2:07:12Jocko Willink?

  I mean, with myself, I have to hold the line.

• 2:07:18Jocko Willink?

  And there's areas within myself where I cannot compromise.

• 2:07:24Jocko Willink?

  I'm going to work hard. I'm going to train hard. I'm going to try and improve myself.

• 2:07:33Jocko Willink?

  I'm gonna own my mistakes. I'm gonna confront them.

• 2:07:41Jocko Willink?

  I'm gonna face my demons.

• 2:07:47Jocko Willink?

  And I'm not gonna give up, or give out, or give in. I'm gonna stand.

• 2:07:55Jocko Willink?

  And I'm gonna maintain my personal self-discipline.

• 2:08:04Jocko Willink?

  And do my utmost

• 2:08:09Jocko Willink?

  to live a life that is worthy

• 2:08:14Jocko Willink?

  of the sacrifices

• 2:08:18Jocko Willink?

  that were made for me and for us.

• 2:08:24Jocko Willink?

  And on those points,

• 2:08:29Jocko Willink?

  there will be no compromise.

• 2:08:35Jocko Willink?

  Not now.

• 2:08:38Jocko Willink?

  Not ever.

• 2:08:47Jocko Willink?

  And I think that's all I've got for tonight. So, thanks to all YouTubers out there for tuning in and listening. And thanks for, thanks for gutting it out when it gets dark here and we start talking about the horror.

• 2:09:11Jocko Willink?

  The horror tonight in One Soldier's War. And when we did it with The Forgotten Highlander, and we did it with Machete Season. I know it's hard to listen to.

• 2:09:24Jocko Willink?

  But I'll tell you.

• 2:09:28Jocko Willink?

  Doesn't it just make the sunrise in the morning that much more glorious?

• 2:09:36Jocko Willink?

  When the light comes into your world.

• 2:09:41Jocko Willink?

  So thanks for connecting with us through the interweb. The, this book was actually from people on Twitter. So you all made me smarter and made me better and gave me a different perspective. So thank you for doing that. Thanks for supporting the podcast, listening, downloading, subscribing, reviewing. And if you want to support this podcast, you can get some supplements from Jacofuel.com. You can get some gear and clothing from OriginUSA.com. You can get a bunch of cool t-shirts and whatnot from Jacostore.com. And you can check out my leadership consulting company at Echelonfront.com. And everything is available at Jaco.com.

• 2:10:26Jocko Willink?

  And if you, if you dug this, or you dig this, and you want to kind of see this stuff that, that I talk about in a documented form, you can check out the book Extreme Ownership. That was written by myself and Leif Babin, my brother from the SEAL Teams. And that's available in hardcover, Kindle or audio, the audio book. Leif and I actually read the chapters that we wrote. So if you, if you like listening to this, maybe you'll like listening to that. Check it out. And as always, all you troopers out there in the field, out there battling demons.

• 2:11:08Jocko Willink?

  Be they fear, or guilt, or alcohol, or sugar, or ego, or anger, or procrastination, or whatever form of weakness you are up against.

• 2:11:24Jocko Willink?

  Fight those demons. Take the fight to them. Stand up, face them, and get after it.

• 2:11:35Jocko Willink?

  Until next time, this is Jocko and Echo.

• 2:11:41Jocko Willink?

  Out.