Jocko Underground: The Value of Cadence. Worthless? Or Useful? | How Civilians Can Be Prepared for War

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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 the Jocko Underground Podcast number 158 with Echo Charles sitting across from me. EC as they say. It's weird because I don't even say that for somebody that only say it. I only say it here.

• 0:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:12Jocko Willink?

  It's not like I see you and I'm like EC, what up?

• 0:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, every once in a while.

• 0:16Jocko Willink?

  Okay. Well, it's something that I don't really recognize. Nonetheless, EC is here. Echo Charles, we're going to get some question, questions from the people and we will provide courses of action or answers to the best of our ability. Let's get to it.

• 0:33Speaker 01

  All right, first question, hi. You used to be in the Canadian Armed Forces as an infantry reservist. I was quite disappointed to notice that in our army, there are no sing, there, there was no singing going on in boot camp. I was getting all fired up as a teen, uh, singing some US MC marching song. It seems from an outside point of view that it's a big part of the spirit of your military culture. What is your view on the marching cadence songs for Navy SEALs and in the US military culture in general?

• 1:05Jocko Willink?

  So what's interesting is we, when I went through SEAL training, we did sing cadences. And what's funny, they weren't, they weren't motivational. Most of them weren't motivational at all. They were just funny. They were like rude. No, they were rude, kind of, you know, disgusting, like little, just immature boy humor. Basically, a lot of them were kind of like that. And so we, there was a couple of them. One thing that was cool was that when you, when you would go to PT. So you'd have a couple of official PTs a week, like where you go into the grinder, if you've ever heard the term grinder.

• 1:48Jocko Willink?

  It's the big area where they have these little fins on the ground, like painted on the ground. And that's where you stand. And then you would do PT there.

• 1:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:59Jocko Willink?

  And, but when you'd run to the grinder, there was a cool cadence that you would sing when you came in there. And that was cool. And. All the classes could kind of hear you when you were singing the cadence, you know, all loud and fired up, right? So that was cool. That one was kind of quote unquote motivational to go in there. But most of them were just funny, just most of the cadences. And we, we had a bunch of songs too. You would sing songs just when you're getting tortured. You're just saying like these crazy funny songs about being a frogman and you know, they all had to do with just craziness.

• 2:32Speaker 01

  How do you learn these songs?

• 2:33Jocko Willink?

  They just get passed down, passed down.

• 2:35Speaker 01

  Cause I remember, um, not McFarlane, it was, um, Admiral McRaven. He had a speech and he talked about, they started singing the songs, singing songs when they're in the cold mud. And I always wonder like, what songs are they singing? Cause how can you choose a song that they all know that, you know, because everyone jumped in the song?

• 2:54Jocko Willink?

  So it's like, okay. They're all memorized. You're, you learn them.

• 2:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, I understand.

• 2:59Jocko Willink?

  But like one of them, one of them would start off, drink, drink, drink, drink, drunk, drunk, drunk, drunk, drunk last night and drunk the night before. Gonna get drunk like we never did before. Like that was the song.

• 3:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's funny.

• 3:10Jocko Willink?

  And it goes on and on to tell these crazy tales of being drunk frogmen, right?

• 3:16Jocko Willink?

  So that's what it was like. There was no like, I'm struggling on this run, but I'm getting, no, that didn't exist. And what's interesting is I don't think they even sing any of these songs anymore in BUDS. Partially because I think they were not politically correct. You know, you can imagine when the song starts off, drink, drink, drink, drink, drunk, drunk, drunk, drunk, drunk the night before or drunk last night, drunk the night before. You know, it's not gonna, it's not a song about going to church.

• 3:42Speaker 01

  No.

• 3:42Jocko Willink?

  You see what I'm saying? So they were all politically totally incorrect. And I think that's why they stopped them. I, I guess, but I don't know. I don't know what happened, but they don't, I don't think they sing them much anymore. Now, when I got to airborne school, cause I went from BUDS to basic army airborne school. And they sang cadences there and those were pretty cool. Like more like, you know, kind of uh, air, air, uh, C130 rolling down the strip. Airborne daddy gonna take a little trip, stand up, hook up, shuffle to the door, jump right out and a counter for it. So you play, you know, army, you know, like singing some army cadence, fine.

• 4:23Jocko Willink?

  The best cadences that I sang was when I went to the, when I went to officer candidate school. Officer candidate school has Marine Corps drill instructors and they, they got it on. They got some good ass cadences where you're like, and one of the, one of the best cadence memories I have was we were down at Pensacola, Florida, going through officer candidate school. And we were running in the morning, you know, four thirty in the morning or something. We're running on a long run, which long run there is probably like a few, like maybe four or five miles, something like that. We're on this run and we go through the, like the officer's housing area on this run where the officers are.

• 5:04Jocko Willink?

  And they literally have signs that say, you know, no cadence. And our drill instructor was fired up about something. And so he's like, he's like singing cadence that's saying like, we're going to sing cadence. And then he starts going, you know, get out of the rack. And we're like, get out of the rack. And he starts saying it louder and louder. And we're, so we're basically at the top of our lungs going, get out of the rack and get out of the rack, get out of the rack. And as we're jogging by all these people's houses, probably so annoying to them, but at the time I thought it was cool. Right now I'm thinking, man, could you just be quiet? Like if I was living in one of those houses. But you could, I bet you, there's a chance he got in some kind of trouble for that, but he was fired up, you know?

• 5:46Jocko Willink?

  So there were some drill instructors when I was at officer candidate school that sang some freaking legit hardcore cadences. We had, we did have some cadences that were hardcore and buds too, that were just like, but most of them were just kind of funny. Once you get to a SEAL team, there's no more cadence. Like I don't, there was no cadences in the SEAL teams. You don't really even run, you don't run in formation in the SEAL teams. You just run. It's a race. You're not singing cadence when you're racing your friends. Like everything's just a race. There's no motivation. There's no like hoo ya, there's no like yelling, there's no yelling in PT, no one's like, come on dude, or come on, get down. Like that doesn't happen at all in the SEAL teams.

• 6:29Jocko Willink?

  Now, if you're a new guy and you're weak, you will get probably some kind of hazing. You might get like literally yelled at, but um, yeah, no cadence in the SEAL teams at all. So when he says, what is your view on the marching cadence songs for Navy SEALs? There aren't any. Once you're in the SEAL teams, there, there aren't any. At least I never heard any.

• 6:51Jocko Willink?

  Even you know occasionally like at a at a reunion or something, someone might reach back into the freaking well and break out. Like I was at, I was at a bar, like a Coronado bar and some of the old timers were breaking out some old bud songs and it was like, hey, I got some Vietnam guys singing, I'm joining in, that's what we're doing. But other than that, there was no cadences in the SEAL teams themselves, only in basic SEAL training. Uh, my view of US military culture, cadences, I think it's cool. I like it. I like it. I think it's cool. And the Marine Corps drill

• 7:31Jocko Willink?

  instructors that I had at OCS salute because they were legit and they had some really good cadences. They had some really good cadence. What is the color? The color is blue. Shows the world that we are true. What is the color? The color is red. Shows the world the blood we shed. Like they had some cadences that you'd be pretty fired up. I would be fired up for. Uh, right on down the line. So that's my opinion. I, I was never, you know, it's funny is I would like, you know, you'd have guys sing cadences in your class. I would occasionally sing a cadence and I would, I would

• 8:11Jocko Willink?

  do funny cadences too. Like, uh, yeah, now that I'm thinking back to it, I would do funny cadences and some of the cadences I would do is I would just make noises because sometimes, you know, cadence just sounds like noise. So I would just be like, and everybody would be, and I would just do that, you know, just kind of like joking about the whole thing. Everything's a big joke as BTF Tony once said. So there you go. That's my opinion.

• 8:37Speaker 01

  Is there a, is there a practical value for that? Did you find?

• 8:42Jocko Willink?

  There's a practical value in that you stay in step. So one of the most common in SEAL training, left, left, left, right, left, left, left, left, right, left. Uh, I don't even remember the rest of it, but you're just telling like, so everyone's in the same, so you're not tripping over each other.

• 9:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, I feel like there's like, cause in football, we did that too. Literally my first year of football at ten, eleven years old, all the way up to to college. But we do it only in that that initial warm up lap that we like slowly run around everything.

• 9:15Jocko Willink?

  Now, okay, that reminds me, I sang cadences with my children.

• 9:22Jocko Willink?

  Like if there was a something going on, we we spent a lot of time camping as kids. We would do beach camping, which is pretty much for me would be like putting my children through buds. So we would, I would run down the beach with them and call cadence with all these little girls, like little girls and little boys just singing cadence. About killing bad guys.

• 9:43Jocko Willink?

  I got in trouble in high school for singing cadence. Now that I think of it, I was on the soccer team, got in trouble for singing cadence about Ho Chi Minh as a son of a bitch.

• 9:53Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, there you go. You can't, you can't do that. I'm like Ho Chi Minh is a son of a bitch. Yeah, fucking communist.

• 10:00Speaker 01

  Well, hey, man, you know, I agree for sure. Um, I think there's, I think it's not really about that. But the, the, the actual practical, isn't it to build like, this is what it felt like when I was.

• 10:13Jocko Willink?

  Oh camaraderie.

• 10:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 10:15Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's fun. Yeah, it's cool. Yeah.

• 10:18Speaker 01

  I was like, um, so, okay, in football, real quick, when I was, because in college, it was, it was the same thing, but it's a little bit different. I'd already been on teams and whatever. But as a kid, I first joined football and we do this first lap. And before the, in the beginning of the season, or kind of before the season starts, they just give you a helmet. They don't, you don't have pads and stuff. So we run this lap, we all get our helmets, right? It's the first real team uniform element that you get the helmet and we're the claw rams. So I got the ram horns or whatever. I remember this is the coolest shit ever. So we run our lap and yeah, they do the cadence, but it's a cadence that everyone like, no one knew it, no one taught it, but everyone, the other guys that had been there.

• 10:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, you just like listen, repeat. Yeah, exactly. But this wasn't a repeat one. This was like, ah, if I remember correctly, he was like, is like, we are the Rams. The one guy would say, we are the, and then the rest of us would be like the mighty, mighty Rams. And they'd be everywhere they know, people want to know, you know, so it was like a kind of a, a song, you know, kind of a thing. And I remember thinking, I didn't know the words, but everyone else kind of knew the words. I was like, oh, I'm part of a team. This is freaking sick, you know, and we'd all just run in step like in that little perfect little group or whatever. And I remember, yeah, bro, I felt it. You felt it. Yeah.

• 11:28Jocko Willink?

  You were eleven. Saying like, it's cool.

• 11:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 11:32Jocko Willink?

  But yeah.

• 11:34Speaker 01

  But I would think, bro, I'm, I'm joined the United States Navy to become a United States Navy SEAL. And we're in basic training, whatever, like this is all new to me, we'll say, and boom, that cadence starts freaking sounding off, bro. I'm kinda in the same mindset as when I was 11.

• 11:53Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, but you're not, you're now 23 or whatever.

• 11:56Speaker 01

  I don't think that, well, then again, I don't know.

• 11:57Jocko Willink?

  You just reminded me, I went through Navy Boot Camp too, which I forgot about, and there was some kind of cadence in there as well, but I don't remember much about it. Like you had to be in step, you marched in Navy Boot Camp. There was a Ranger cadence that I heard one time and it is, it is like the most over the top killing cadence. And the, the chorus was just ching, cha-ching, cha-ching. I, and I'm sure someone listening to this will remember it and be like, yeah, that was a gnarly cadence. It was about just killing and murdering everybody.

• 12:31Speaker 01

  There you go. I'm telling you, man.

• 12:33Jocko Willink?

  But, but SEAL teams was a bunch, look, were there some serious ones? There were a few, but not, not, most of them were funny. That's what I remember the most. Most of them were just funny.

• 12:46Speaker 01

  This is what I suspect. I think that it probably builds cohesion even like on a subconscious level because, and then even all you gotta do is kinda test your own brain and be like, is there an element of pride that of or with knowing the words to any of it? No matter how just funny they are or whatever, what, you know, like, is there an element of pride that you feel?

• 13:09Jocko Willink?

  There's certainly an element of unity. And hey, I get it, man. I get it. There's, it's fired up, even with like little kids running down the beach and they're calling cadence, like that's cool.

• 13:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:18Jocko Willink?

  It's cool to have a unified crew.

• 13:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 13:21Jocko Willink?

  And, and it was fun in Buzz, you have a unified crew. But what's funny in Buzz is that you have a unified crew and you're making fun of them. So that is a little excerpt of what we are doing on the Jocko Underground Podcast. So if you want to continue to listen. Go to jockounderground.com and subscribe and we're doing this, we're doing this to mitigate our reliance on external platforms. So we are not subject to their control and we are doing this so that we can support the Jocko Podcast, which will remain as is free for all as long as we can keep it that way. But we, but we are doing this so we don't have to be under the

• 14:04Jocko Willink?

  control of sponsors and we're doing it so we can give you more control, more interaction, more direct connections, better communications with us. And to do that, we are, we're building a website right now where we'll be able to utilize to strengthen this legion of troopers that are in the game with us. So thank you. It's jockounderground.com. It costs $8.18 a month. And if you can't afford to support us, we can still support you. Just email [email protected] and we'll get you taken care of. Until then, we will see you mobilized underground.