Standard Directive 015: Fear The Nuclear Whimper

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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?

  When I was a kid, in the 70s and 80s, there was fear of nuclear destruction and death. And there was TV shows about it that came out, that everyone would watch, the whole world, the whole country would watch these TV shows about a nuclear holocaust. And that freaked a lot of people out. Because at that time, it was us against the Soviet Union, and we were both packed to the teeth with nuclear weapons. And one misunderstanding, you know, the fear was one misunderstanding, one skirmish that goes sideways,

• 0:44Jocko Willink?

  one mistake by some private in a missile silo, and the missiles fly, and it's over just like that. They had us pretty scared in the 70s and 80s. But there was another campaign that actually scared me even more as a kid. There was a commercial, and I don't know if it was a commercial, I can't really remember clearly whether it was a commercial or print ads, but it said something along the lines of, "The fear isn't that we go out with a bang, but with a whimper." And this is actually taken from a poem by T. S. Eliot, a poem called "Hollow Men",

• 1:27Jocko Willink?

  that says, "This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper." And the implication was that we wouldn't die from nuclear war. The implication was that we would die and ruin the world from some slow leak from a faulty nuclear reactor. And the radiation would slowly seep into the air and the ground and the water, and over time, we would all be exposed to these small deadly levels of radiation, and slowly but painfully, with a whimper, we would fade away.

• 2:11Jocko Willink?

  Well, that idea still scares me today. Not the idea of a nuclear catastrophe, but of slow death, of the decay that occurs when we let ourselves succumb to weakness and gluttony and lack of discipline.

• 2:36Jocko Willink?

  And listen, over time,

• 2:39Jocko Willink?

  we're gonna get older, we're gonna get more frail, we're gonna get less capable, and we're gonna die. Right? That's what's gonna happen.

• 2:49Jocko Willink?

  But

• 2:51Jocko Willink?

  what I worry about is how we add to that. We add to that downward slide with a donut here and a donut there and a missed workout over there. And maybe we didn't need to work out today, so we put it off to tomorrow. And then we slowly submit.

• 3:13Jocko Willink?

  Not with a bang, but with a whimper. We give up.

• 3:20Jocko Willink?

  That scares me. So I say, no. Fight it. Gotta fight it. And like I said, time is gonna win in the end. There's no escaping that. But don't go out with a whimper.

• 3:35Jocko Willink?

  Stand up. Grab your battle axe and go to war.