Jocko Podcast - 222: Life is a Challenge. Life is Suffering. So Live With Fortitude. With Dan Crenshaw

Episode Date: March 25, 2020

0:00:00 - Opening 0:06:57 - Dan Crenshaw.  3:28:32 - Final thoughts and take-aways. 3:40:46 - How to stay on THE PATH. 3:55:59 - Closing Gratitude.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

This is Jocko podcast number 222 with Echo Charles and me Jocko Willink. Good evening, Echo. Good evening. Someone called for my Afghan interpreter, Rockman, a good man with whom we had worked with for some time. These interpreters are the unsung heroes of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They often suffer threats and ostracism for their willingness to endure the battlefield alongside us. Their motivation isn't. money there isn't enough money to make it worthwhile facing down insurgents who know where you and

your family live they are idealists they work and risk death because they believe in our common cause of freedom rockman responded to the call immediately running before me his foot fell in a particular spot just two feet away from where I stood I was looking right at him. As I later discovered, he instantly lost all his limbs in the explosion. Even though I was staring right at him, I never actually saw it happen. My experience was a series of tremendous blows and subsequent realizations. A train hit me. Ears ringing. What the fuck was that? Darkness. Something is wrong. Got hit. My legs. Reach down and see. if they're still there. They're there. I feel them. Pain everywhere, mostly my abdomen. Something shot

through it, I think. My eyes must be caked with mud. I can barely see anything. I hear groaning and screaming. Someone hit an IED. Pain everywhere but my eyes. I crawl around a little bit, mostly to see if my body still functions. My teammates make their way to me. I ask someone to pour water on my eyes to remove the dirt so I can see it doesn't work. I can only see light in some shapes must be a lot of dirt. I recognize my Corman's voice as he works on my wounds. I say, dude, don't get blown up. It sucks.

He laughs and tells me to shut up. I was conscious throughout. Our Corman stopped my bleeding, the worst of which was from my knees and wrapped up my eyes. It still did not occur to me that there was anything wrong with them. I could only hear the situation around me. My teammates calling to each other, communicating the situation with tense voices. I later found out that a foot, wearing the typical Solomon boot that we all wore, hit one of my teammates in the chest about 50 yards away.

Rockman was groaning in pain. Deep, deep pain. Most people's experience of combat wounds is, from the movies. A soldier gets hit, his guts spilling out, and he looks down at them screaming in horror. But this is not the way it is.

In reality, truly bad injuries sap your energy and prevent you from screaming. Instead, the sound of wounded man makes is a much deeper, more visceral, emanating from the depths of his being. It's a groan, a cry, a moaning that reeks of utter desperation.

It is far. worse than a scream it is true pain manifested into sound this was the sound that Rockman made it is unforgettable as the Corman tended to me and we waited for the Medivac helicopter a thought entered my head we may be in a firefight any second now Rockman was barely alive and he would later die in the hospital our EOD chief petty officer took a little frag also and would be evacuated with us All hands were needed to fight. I could hear the Medivac Helo coming in low.

This was no time to ask someone to carry me. Blown up and blind, I stood up and walked myself to it. Dave Worson, who would be killed two months later, heroically laid down cover fire for me as I boarded the helo. It was my last memory of him. Medics on board the helicopter took one look at me, laid me down, and eased me into unconsciousness. I woke up days later

Far away from Helmand Far away from Kandahar Far away from my brothers in arms Far away from the war and dust of Central Asia I was brought back into consciousness In Germany at the American Hospital Longstool A breathing tube was being

Unceremoniously ripped from my throat Rather unpleasant I opened my eyes Or thought I did And saw nothing A physician came to me and told me the truth. My right eye was gone. My left eye was so heavily damaged that there was virtually no chance I would see with it again.

My future was a future of blindness, of darkness, of no sight, no color, no visual beauty. I would never see a sunset, a friend, a loved one again. In one instant, in a fatal footfall, all that was. All that was ripped away. And that right there was an excerpt from a book called Fortitude, written by Dan Crenshaw, who is a former SEAL officer, and he's actually been on this podcast before, number 118. And the last time he was on, he was in the process of running for Congress.

Well, he won and is currently a congressman serving the second congressional district of Texas in the House of Representatives. And, well, it's an honor to have Dan back with us today to share some of the lessons learned that he talks about in his new book. And once again, the name of the book is Fortitude. Dan, thanks for coming back, man. Hey, thank you for having me. Listen to you read that, I was like, maybe I should have asked you to read my book for the audio version. That was good. Well, thanks.

It's only good because the story that's being told is obviously a very powerful one. And, you know, you sent me this book, and as soon as you sent it to me, I started talking to you about, let's get you back on the podcast. Obviously, you're a busy man. Obviously, you're a busy man right now for reference. It is, what is it? It's March of 2020 in the midst of the pandemic. The coronavirus pandemic is going on around the world and around America. There's schools, and again, who knows what this will look like, looking back on it when people are listening to this in the future.

Whether if they're listening to it a month from now, a week from now, or years from now, it'll be interesting what this pandemic turns out to be. but you braved the travel. We did. We did. And we just, you know, I'm leaving off the heels of that late night vote again for, for listeners trying to put this in context and what you saw in the news. Leaving off the heels of that late night vote where, where, which was for the economic stimulus that the president supported and it was bipartisan in nature. Different from the $8 billion plus dollars that we voted on a week prior, which was. meant to combat it on a public health scale.

So, you know, I, the, it's, every, everybody agrees. I think we've, as a country and as a government, we have taken this particular pandemic more seriously than anything in the past, more than we did for Ebola or for H1N1. And I've asked that specific questions to folks like the assistant surgeon general, Admiral Red, who, who, who've worked all of these people. pandemics. And so I just hope people realize that. That's not what you hear from the media. You know, the media would tell you that it's totally unprepared. And you know, you're never going

to be perfectly prepared. I think that's a lesson you and I know pretty well. But you learn those lessons and you do better than next time. The finger pointing has been completely unnecessary, mostly dishonest and totally unhelpful. But the government has been taking it pretty seriously. and we're definitely taking it seriously in Congress. Well, I'm glad you were able to get out here. And again, I think there's no telling what this will look like in hindsight. But it's quiet around here in San Diego right now. There's just not a lot of people doing a lot of stuff.

Obviously, we're in the gym and the gym, you know, not a lot, not a ton of people coming into the gym right now. There's still people training, though. Don't worry. We're training that, Jiu-Jitsu. But, yeah, you sent me the book. you know, cracked it open, started reading it, and immediately was just, you know, getting in touch with you to see if we could get you out here on the podcast to talk about it.

And, man, you know, the stuff that you've been through and the lessons that you've taken away from it are very powerful. And, you know, that's one of the things that struck me out of the gate is that when you got wounded, you actually drew strength from very powerful place and things that you've been through. and I want to jump in and read some more of this, some more of this things that you've been through and I think a lot of people are going to be able to take a lot away from it. So I'm going back to the book. This is after you're wounded.

I fought back to another time in my life two decades earlier. The first time I ever witnessed the kind of inescapable pain that I was feeling now and the grit to overcome it was with my mother. She fought a battle so many other mothers. modern women fight, breast cancer. And she did so with endurance, grace, and optimism. Her example has never left me.

And I wasn't about to let some cheap-ass IED in the ancient killing fields of Afghanistan render me unworthy of her memory. She was only 35 years old when she was diagnosed. Same age as me as I write these words. When she got the news, it was one day before my little brother's first birthday. I was five years old. The doctors told her she might have five years. to live and they were right soon after she would be feeling the pain I was feeling now as the

cancer and chemotherapy ripped apart her body in battle she fought it for five years and when I was 10 she died if you've ever cared for a loved one in terminal decline you know what that's like there is an intensity of loss that is immeasurable words don't do it just The whole deep down in your gut feels like it will never go away as a child the intensity of the experience is made worse as grief is amplified by Incomprehension going from kindergarten to fourth grade knowing that your mother is dying That the center of a small boy's world is collapsing is an experience I wouldn't wish on anyone But from this grief came learning I got to experience the nature of a true hero and the example

She said was the most powerful fortifying and selfless thing I have ever seen including combat Buying helpless in a hospital bed I had to wonder whether my mother had asked the same desperate question I was currently asking Would I ever see my family again? I figured that if she could suffer through that question and the unknowable answer So could I my mother spent half a decade staring death in the face Burdened with caring for two small boys whom she she would not live to see grow up. She lived day to day in ever-increasing pain. The cancer afflicted her, and the cancer treatments afflicted her, too.

Six rounds of chemotherapy on top of radiation treatments are a brutal experience for even the strongest constitution. Self-pity is never a useful state, but if anyone had reason to feel sorry for herself and had to complain a bit. It was my mom, but she never did. In terminal decline and in pain across five years, I never heard her complain once. I never heard her bemoan her fate.

I never saw her express self-pity. Every day she woke up was a day she was still alive and she lived. She was dying and she was grateful to not be dead yet. Every extra day was a gift where she could look her, boys in the face. Every next evening was another night she could tell us she loved us before bed. Even during her last days, when the hospital delivered her deathbed and hospice nurse to our dining room, her demeanor did not change. Susan Carroll Crenshaw was exactly the opposite of what she had

every right to be. Yeah. Yeah, it was. More for my mom than for me. I tell that story. I tell that story. because, well, the name of that chapter is perspective from darkness. And perspective, I think, is something we lack in our modern day society. We are, I think, too many people are willing to jump to this false conclusion that you've had it, the worst, that your life is worse than your ancestors or than your peers or than anybody else walking around America right now. And there's just a really, just so happens,

there's a really good chance that's not true. I'm not saying it's not true. I'm just saying there's a pretty good chance. It's probably not true. It's interesting too. I always talk about perspective from a leadership perspective,

which means, hey, if I'm looking at one of my troops, the better I understand their perspective on what I'm telling them and what their job is and what the mission is, the better I'm going to be able to lead them. And same thing with my boss.

The better I understand my boss's perspective and what the strategy look like and what's the overall thing he's trying to get accomplished, the better I understand his perspective, the better I'm going to be able to lead. And it's interesting because when you put that across society, you would think that in today's day and age with the, with social media, with the ability to absorb so many other people's perspectives, you'd think that that would open up your mind to realize that there's, you know, a lot of other people's perspectives. you'd think that that would open up your mind to realize that there's, you know, a lot of other people that that have been through much worse than than anything. I've even been close to gone through. And yet it doesn't seem to be happening that way. No, and I mean, one of the most popular stories for an American to hear, you know, is a story of overcoming adversity.

And that's a good thing. I'm glad those are still the stories that are the most popular in the American psyche. A movie about somebody who's downtrodden and overcomes it is still a good movie. But it's undeniable that there is this fragility that is infecting America. And that's why I wrote this book. And it's not a political book. It's not a seal book. It's a cultural book.

It's a cultural philosophy book. And it's simultaneously an individual kind of self-help book on just how to be mentally tougher. in your own individual life, but there are much broader cultural implications that are strewn throughout the book. It is a culture book. And because I fear that we are getting more sensitive, more prone to microaggressions

and prone to saying how offended you are and wearing that offense on your sleeve proudly. And this gets to, I think, what's the next chapter, which is who is your hero? and we've changed what we look up to. Like, we think that it's good to scream about how offended we are. Like, that's become like a moniker of a good thing. You know, it's interesting as, as, you know, before we started recording,

you know, we're just talking about kind of life in the dames. And if there's one thing that you never do in the teams ever is show anyone that you're offended by anything that you're saying to you. Because if you allow that to happen, you know, you're just going to get torn apart. Whereas it seems like, and I hadn't thought of that from that perspective, the all the rage in the public right now is if you can possibly get offended by something, then it's you're the best thing in the world if you jump up and down and point to the person that offended you and why you were offended. And the more offended you are, the better off.

The aggrieved victim status is supreme these days. And that's a, and that's more of a serious. problem than I think most Americans are giving it credit for. It's a really bad thing because you're changing our heroes. And when I say heroes, I want to be more specific, and I outlined this in the book in greater detail. I don't mean like Jocko is my hero. I don't actually, and I personally when people ask me about who I look up to and my heroes, I will tell them attributes of people that I think are respectable. I don't think you should have one person that you look up to. I don't think that's totally healthy. And that's not what I'm talking about in the book. I'm talking

about hero archetypes. You know, and an archetype is a, is a, is a broader set of ideas or attributes that we sort of, that we sort of recognize collectively. Okay. It's, it's more of a psychological term than anything else. And there are certain hero archetypes, you know, like the Navy seals have a hero archetype. And we write about that in our, in our seal ethos. It's such a beautifully written ethos. And I have the entire thing written in the book because it perfectly demonstrates what we believe we should be. Not what we should do, but what we should be. And that's a really interesting thing. And I, and I note that you look at a corporate ethos. And if you go to people like corporations' websites and you read them, they're usually something like,

we want to be the number one manufacturer on the West Coast. It's like, that's not who you want to be. that's just something you want to do. If you write out an ethos of who you want to be, you can reach that level of elitism. You can surpass mediocrity. So that's important. The important thing is that we have societal hero archetypes that we look up to. Jesus is a hero archetype.

Superman is a hero archetype. Real characters, too. You know, I put, and I could name a thousand, you know, Rosa Parks. Ronald Reagan. All of these people embody certain attributes that the American people think this is good. Okay? And we generally agree on these things.

I tell a whole story in the book about when I was at Disney World or was it Disney, it was Disney World. And I was at the Star Wars Land. And I was watching this really cool thing happen where they let these kids do Jedi training. And of course, like in typical Disney fashion, everything is really well run. The actors are absolutely amazing. and they're teaching these kids, you know, how to work their swords and all that. But they're also teaching them really cool things like just little Jedi lessons.

Like, will you let your emotions be driven by hate and anger? You know, like really simple lessons, because we look up to the Jedi as like a hero archetype. And so there are certain things that are just viewed as good. But that's changing. And I find that to be an extremely dangerous thing. because we're elevating the aggrieved victim, the person who talks about being offended the most and who screams the loudest.

We're elevating that person to a higher level in our society. And that's dangerous. You're flipping cultural norms on their head. And you do that at your own peril. You know, and cultural foundations based in thousands of years of trial and error and wisdom, those are important. They're more important than people realize.

And like, that's frankly what the first, I guess that particular chapter is about the perspectives chapter you know they're all related of course but the the perspective's chapter and the reason I bring up my mom and the reason I tell that story and then subsequent stories of other guys that we've lost is because you need to it's healthy to go through life thinking you know what somebody has had it harder than me and I'd like to live up to their memory I'd like to live up to that hero attributes. the hero or the hero archetype of my mother. And I'm not lying.

She never complained. She just, she never did. And if she did, I didn't hear it as a kid. And so when you're living in blindness and not sure whether you will see again, it's healthy to have that in your head. And I'm,

you know, I say, you don't have to experience a bomb in your face to get some perspective. But you can read about it. And it's like you said earlier, in a world where we're so. connected and we can see everybody else's story of hardship, you would think that we would have more perspective.

But it seems that the opposite is true. And the first step to reversing that trend, I think, is to at least realize it. Yeah, we recently had on Rose Schindler, who was Auschwitz survivor. And I got many, many, many messages and comments coming back saying, yeah, I'll put myself in check, you know, I don't have it that bad. So, and you know, we've had many people on here that have been through some really hellacious things, whether it's prisoner war camps, just devastating situations. And it is.

It's, it's, if they weren't hearing it here, I get the feeling sometimes that if people weren't hearing it here, they wouldn't be hearing it. They wouldn't be hearing it. You know, they'd just be thinking that everyone is living better than they are and they're the ones that are in the worst possible situation in the world. We've got, yeah, and that's a, you know, I don't want to bring it too much to politics, but it is, it is one reason that we, that we have lurched into this conversation about socialism, because fundamentally socialism is, is an ideology that pits people against each other.

You have to believe that somebody else is oppressing you and that they have it better than you for you to embrace socialism. It is, it is, it is, it is the ultimate sin manifested into a, political ideology, not the ultimate sin, but it's one of them. And that's, I'm always looking for the deeper reason as to why something is happening. And it is natural for, for people to want to believe that something outside their own power is affecting their lives. Because if it's you, if it's your fault, if it's you who has to step up, that's harder. It's much easier to believe that there's something else. It also is an assault on your ego.

when you look at yourself and you say, well, I guess I'm the one that messed this up. Yeah, it is. And that's a devastating psychological consequence when your ego is hurt that way. It is. Yeah. I wrote a book about that called Extreme Ownership.

It's a good book. Again, it's one of those things where, you know, you wrote this book as, you know, as you're saying, like a cultural philosophy. You know, Leif and I wrote Extreme Ownership as leadership principles. But I mean it didn't take but two seconds for everyone to say oh yeah what you're talking about is you know Easily transforms into a into a cultural philosophy of taking ownership and responsibility for what's going on in your world Absolutely. There's no doubt about it and you find yourself in a lot in light and look do people get cancer? Yes

People get cancer do do do horrible things happen to people to families? Yes, absolutely How do you respond to those things is the question how do you take ownership of what you do next and and and that's the that's the big difference and if what you do next is is you know say it's out of my control and I can't do anything and you're get the mentality that you're a victim of what's happening around you that means you're not going to make any changes to transform your life and move in a more positive direction it's just the way it is and you know I think I think one of these things that happens with you know these ideas behind socialism in America and again it's it's like crazy that we would be sitting here talking about

this. Anybody that reads anything about history knows that this is just not good. But, you know, it comes across always as, hey, well, what we want to do is help everyone out. That's what we want to do. We want to help everyone out. And okay, if that's like the core belief, and this is where I think sometimes we could do better or, you know, someone like myself could do a better job explaining to people. Look, if you care about us. human beings so much if you want to help as many people as possible in this country the best possible thing you could do is allow the market to flourish allow people to build businesses that's what you that's what changes people's lives that

that's what helps not get giving them a handout and making them reliable or reliant on the state right that doesn't help anybody it helps them for a week you know it helps them for that pay period but it doesn't help them transform their lives into something more positive One way I explain that exact sentiment is to ask someone to imagine how they would raise their kid if they love their kid. Would you give them whatever they want? Would you tell your kid that whatever they do wrong, it's not their fault. Somebody else made them do it wrong.

Would you tell them that there's no consequences for their actions? Would you tell them that if they do an hour of chores and their sibling does three hours of chores, is that they deserve the same reward. Would you teach them any of these things? There is no liberal who would teach other kids these things. They don't because they love their kids and they want their kids to be successful. But that's effectively what we're saying

that we should teach our citizens. And so I ask people, why don't we treat our citizens the way we treat our kids as if we loved them? Because that's true compassion. It doesn't mean we don't have a social safety net, right? And that's always the counter argument. It's a disingenuous counter argument.

Well, the counter argument to that is, look, with your kids, and this is an example that I use, especially when I'm talking to businesses. So I say, listen, like, we'll be with a startup, right? That's grown from, you know, they were 10 people, then there are 100 people. And now they're getting to that threshold. And I say, listen, at some point, you're going to have to put some discipline on what's going on inside of your company. You're going to have people come to work at aligned times. You're going to have them eat lunch at certain times, not just when it. You're going to have to have to have meetings that are scheduled.

And look, when you've got a company of 12 people, you can get away with all that stuff. And it's great. There's money coming in and everything's. But as soon as you start to grow, well, you have to start to have discipline inside your organization. Right. And so the example I give people is I say, listen, have you ever met a kid that when he's, when he's born, look, when a child is born, you give them whatever they want. You got to keep them alive, right? There's your social safety.

Like you have to give them food, water, milk. You have to get, you have to feed them. You have to take care of them. If you continue to do that when they're three, four, five, well, by the time they're 10, you actually now have Satan for a child. Yeah. Because this kid is totally out of control. Demanding doesn't, not only is totally demanding, but doesn't know how to do anything

for themselves. Can't make themselves a sandwich. Can't tie their own shoes. They can't do anything. So what you have to do is you have to let people fend for themselves. You have to let kids brush up against the guardrails of failure. You have to do that. And yes, you have to do that with society as well, in my opinion.

And that's what that's what the thing, the argument that I don't hear back at people that are saying, hey, we should give everything away for free is listen, that we don't have enough to give away everything for free. Right. The best way that you can take care of the most amount of people is to allow freedom, allow individual freedom, allow people to allow people to. allow people to pursue goals, allow people to pursue business, allow people to grow things and hire people. That's how you, that's how we all win. It's so, it's crazy to me that we still have these discussions. And it's also, yeah, it's crazy to me that we're having these discussions right now in this country.

There's like this, there's like this belief that they subscribe to, which is if only politicians weren't so mean and corrupt, you know, there's all these things hidden that, we could just give you, but they don't want to. And I'm just like, does that really sound right? Like to say, does that really sound like that's, that's correct? That was just all just extra money, just hidden in the, in the, in the, in the treasury that we could just give out, but we don't want to, that everybody, that we have all these luxury apartments that we could just give out, you know, because housing's a right or whatever, or that, or that there's just

enough doctors in hospitals to take care of everyone. And they're just kind of waiting around. Like not, you know, I mean, like, come on. You know, it's not, if it sounds too good to be true, it most certainly is. And again, it doesn't mean that we don't want to keep striving for a, you know, broader access to health care. It doesn't mean that we don't want to keep striving for a more efficient social safety net. Not saying that. But the, but the lurch to the progressive left in socialism is, it's based upon this idea that we're keeping something from you. And it's just not true.

It's based on this idea, too, that, that, where do I want to go with this? It's kind of like a constant escalation of crisis. And it's not surprising that we got there. Okay. And this is what I mean by that. If you're a progressive, you're generally wanting more, well, progress, right? Change for the sake of change itself is often the case. And you have to promise more things than you did last time, right?

Because fundamentally, it's based in this sense of compassion, giving people things from the government. They don't think very much, they don't think much more about what that does to the foundation of the creation that you talked about. It's just giving people more things. And it's almost like they relied on conservatives for the last hundred years

to at least be an obstacle to their worst instincts, right? Because conservatives are the ones who say, okay, hold on. Think of the second and third order consequences of that. Think of what that does to our foundations. When I say foundations, I mean foundations of a free market system that creates all this wealth in the first place. Like you can't just, you can't remove the legs of the stool. If you want to improve the stool, I get it.

Let's work on that. But don't remove the legs of the stool. It'll just fall. Same with our political foundations. Same with our cultural foundations. There's three groups that are very important. I could go on for hours about this. but I'll try and stay on top on this line of thought here.

And so you promise more things and you promise more things. And eventually you're like running out of things to promise and you've got to be bolder and bolder and bolder. This is how you get socialism. Well-intentioned liberalism always leads to socialism. It takes years, but it happens. We're at that point now. Okay, like the well-intentioned liberals,

maybe the smarter Democrats that Republicans have often worked with who I think always overpromise but know full well that the Republican colleagues will sort of measure the policy and I don't think they believe it themselves frankly but they've created a generation that does believe it this is where we're at right now the AOCs of the world are true believers and they've got a lot of followers this is what happens when this lie of compassion

Passion gets told too many times. A generation starts to actually believe it. And this is the situation we're in now. This is why 70% of the millennials surveyed will say they would vote for a socialist. Now, there's good news and bad news associated with a number like that. They don't always define socialism correctly, which is good. Yeah, true. And also, I was having a conversation with someone about this the day.

I mean, in 1968, how many 20-year-olds would have said they would have voted for socialism? It'd probably be 70% as well. Yeah. There was a socialist candidate, and I can't remember the name right now, but I just saw this quote, and it was so interesting because that socialist communist candidate back then in the 60s basically said what I just said. You know, you've got a, I can't remember the exact quote, but it was something along the lines of the elements of liberal policy are there to eventually create the fabric of socialism for us.

It's like, then that is exactly what happens. It happens a little bit at a time. And here's another way of thinking about it. that I help people understand. Okay, so you want to raise the minimum wage. Okay, and you want to raise it to $15 an hour or $20 an hour. And that's fine. There's guaranteed that you will lose jobs when you do that.

That's guaranteed, okay? And so you lose jobs. And depending on how much you raise it and the cost of living in that area, you'll lose a certain number of jobs. Okay, well, the well, the well-intentioned liberal in government who wants to control the economy says, well, we don't want to lose the jobs. Okay, well, just make people hire more. Just make, make the employers hire more people. Okay, fine. So you make them hire more people, but they still have to pay that minimum wage. Well, their costs haven't changed and their overall budget hasn't changed. So now what? Well, then they have to raise prices, right? Raise prices

jastically. Well, now there's hyperinflation and that's not good. And also the poor people can't afford the things that they want to buy. So that's not good. Okay, well, just make them lower the prices. Okay, we're going out of business. Okay, just take over the business. So now you own the means of production. And I'm not saying it happens that quickly, but that's how it happens. Like there's, there's a, there's a logical line there, where that well intention first step of intervening in the markets has consequences. And eventually if you want to control it, well, you have to really control it. And then you're in a really bad place because then you're then you're, then you're actually controlling production.

And when you do that, well, then you're in a place called Venezuela. Yeah. And that isn't turning out so well. All right. Little tangent right there. Well, it's actually, I go into this huge discussion about the minimum wage in the book. Not because it actually relates to mental toughness because the way I relate it in the book is part of having fortitude, part of being mentally tough is having the ability to think through some questions before you react emotionally. Very simple. I'm pretty sure. I think that example is used in the chapter called be still. And I mean that quite literally.

just be still when you hear something that is emotionally triggering or you disagree with. Think about this notion that there might be another side to the story. Like just maybe if you just ask some questions. And at first, again, the minimum wage, it seems like the right thing to do. Like, people should just get paid more. I want them to get paid more. They should. So I just give the arguments in there.

Like there's economic arguments and there's geographical arguments. By that, I mean, you know, why would you have? have a federal minimum wage. It's the same for the entire country. When in San Francisco, the rent is $3,500 a month, and in Lubbock, Texas, it's $700 a month. That really quickly makes the case against a federal minimum wage, not saying that each city can't do their own thing. And I go into the economic arguments of who's actually working at minimum wage jobs. The point isn't to make the argument against the minimum wage. The point is to get you to understand that This issue, like many, many other issues and questions, has many, many layers to it.

And if you stop and you think, first assume those layers exist, right? Then the next step is look into the layers and there might be more to it. And when you do that, you are exhibiting mental strength. You're exhibiting the ability to not react, but to just ask questions. And like, I have a feeling, just a feeling that the people really angrily waving those $15 minimum wage signs have not looked into the arguments. Yeah. But they're passionate. Yeah, it's really, you know, at our factory up in Maine, you know, this is a classic thing.

Like, sometimes you need more people to load boxes. And who do you get to load boxes? This is an unskilled job. Like, hey, we just need you to move. It's not even loading by it. It's moving boxes from here in the warehouse to where they're going to get loaded on trucks to get shipped out. You know who wants that job? A kid that's 16 years old that needs gas money and he's going to work that job two hours a night, whatever, and make a little bit of cash on the side.

That's cool. We can afford to do that at our business. The minute you say, hey, instead of paying that guy $10 an hour, you've got to give him $16 an hour. Well, now it's guess what? We're going to take, we're going to just take some of our other labor and have them fill in, you know, half an hour or half an hour there. And all of a sudden, you've eliminated three jobs. The overall budget of the business does not change just because you change the minimum wage. But there's this like belief.

And again, you know, it's, I'm always amazed by how little thought gets put into some of these, you know, feel good policy, policy proposals. Like, as if there's no second, third order consequences to these things. And like, you just, you have to think through that. We just have to. That would be nice. All right. Let's get back to the book. I'm going to take you back to the book.

You just debriefed the entire book. We can just end now. All right, so here we go. Awake now in Longstool. I could not move. I was beaten and for the moment physically broken. I was riddled with shards and debris under the skin and deep within. I was swollen badly suffering from a thousand small cuts, everything burned and itched.

Though oddly enough, I don't recall any. pain in my eyes. I said before that I woke up unable to see, but this was not entirely true. I could see, I could not see my surroundings true, but I was certainly seeing. I was surrounded by constant hallucinations, the result of my optic nerve still communicating erratically with my brain. The hallucinations were lucid and all followed a pattern. I was in Afghanistan.

I was with the guys. I was in an Afghan village. mud walls and compounds. There was an Afghan man sitting next to me. There were piles of weapons in the corner. I lived my previous experiences over and over again. I knew it wasn't real. I was hallucinating but not delusional.

If I was awake, I was seeing these images. If I was lucky enough to fall asleep and dream, never more than 30 minutes, then I would wake up and still, wake up still inside the visual reality of the dream. That sounds insane. That was, that was, that was insane. Now, with some of that, was some of that drugs that you, were you on?

Were you on any drugs that were giving you hallucinations? No. Or this was just all your optic nerves communicating. And there's, there's some, I researched this, you know, later in life. And there's some history of this happening to people who go suddenly blind, that that optic nerve will continue to do that. It couldn't have been drugs. I mean, the only drugs I was on were painkillers and that wouldn't, wouldn't,

have that effect. It was just some weird things. It was so weird and kind of terrifying. And it just, it amplified the whole experience because I knew it wasn't real. I knew it wasn't real. There was, but I would, I would always see them there and I would talk about them.

And so, you know, the stranger stories are from my friends. There's a couple seals who came to me to Landstool, which was such an enormous blessing. You know, you can't even describe how important it is for somebody in that state to just have somebody they know, or at least somebody they kind of trust. It doesn't even have to be a team guy you know. It could just be somebody who understands you, just there.

And I remember this old Afghan man sitting next to me. And it was always like a weird blue light. Like it really was like a dream out of the movies, you know, where like a, and his face would be kind of melting. I just remember that very specifically. I don't remember all the hallucinations, and I always remember piles of weapons. It was really like we were, it was remembering the moments,

which were so many, because we would always do two to three day ops on that particular deployment. And so we'd hold up in some compound, and it was, you know, it's like, all the guys are just in this tiny little room together, shooting the shit, and our weapons are kind of strewn throughout,

and that's what I would see. I would just seeing that experience all the time, and the mud walls, and one particularly weird dream, and I think I do describe this in the book, it's, uh, I was, I was like,

I was in a third world country and like in a department store, you know, like going through a very crowded department store, not with people, but with clothes. Like they're, like they're, you know,

because in like in a lot of these countries, they just, it's not like Walmart, you know, where you can comfortably walk through things. Like they pack too much stuff in, because they don't have that much space, but they got a lot of stuff,

and they pack it in there. And I'm just like trying to move through these clothes, and it's like musty, and the lights are fluorescent. Like, again, like, this is a very third-world country kind of scene. You know, I couldn't say where it was, but I've been to a lot of third-world countries. So my mind is used to this sort of visualization.

And then I woke up, and I know I'm awake, but I'm still there. That's what really sucked, to not be able to leave the nightmare. Like I was literally, living in a nightmare. And we always use the word literally wrong in our modern day society. I am not using it wrong. I was literally living in the nightmare.

And it was inescapable. And that's what sucked. Because like you just couldn't shake it. And that's, that's a, it was just a horrible place to be. It finally went away when a nurse, an astute nurse,

an observant nurse just realized what was going on. And she started asking us about it. And my wife has just, just like kind of exasperated at this point. She wasn't my wife then, but she was, you know, a fiance then. And she was just, you know, exhausted and, like, just trying to deal with this. And I think it was like, I think it was like right after my first surgery or maybe right

before. I don't remember. But she was just like, how long has this been going on? And we're like, the whole time, like, ever since I woke up, you know, so days, maybe a week. I'm not really sure. And she's like, that's not good. You should, I mean, her response was like, you will have irreparable PTSD if this continues, you know, because like you just, living in a nightmare is not a great place to be like it's just.

And so she shot me up with a bunch of Ativan, which was like it's a hard anti-anxiety drug. And then it got really weird. Then the hallucinations changed. They didn't go away right away. They changed to Christmas. So I was like in a, I was like in like a Rudolph the red nose reindeer Christmas world. This is what you're seeing. Yeah.

Even though you can't see anything, this is what you're saying. Yeah. It's very vivid. It's very vivid. It's not like when you close your eyes and imagine things. It's like it was vivid. The Christmas world was cool. That's cool.

Yeah. It was more relaxing. It was like it was happier. And then it went black. And then black, black was the best. That was good. It was like you would never think that you'd be happy to be blind. But like that was that was a good.

It was necessary. I could finally take a nap. Going back to the book here, Tara, this was your fiancé at the time. Tara was there when I finally arrived in Bethesda and never left my side from that moment on. Most of my family came up to see me, as did many friends. They were far more worried than I was and their spirits were low. This was most likely due to the fact that they were many. coherent enough to sense the pessimistic expectations of my surgeons the doctors did not

think I would see again they said so many times and I simply didn't believe them my optimism my self-deception and my belief that the coming surgery on my left eye would work and that I would see was nothing less than a delusional gift that allowed me to keep my sanity though I am not one for overt expressions of faith I will say this I genuinely believe God's strength was working through me then. He was allowing me to believe something impossible. I prayed and my family prayed and we believed. We believed that the military surgeons would pick through a pierced and shrapnel ridden eye,

remove the most minuscule shards and debris and then restore my sight. We did not have good reason to believe it, but we did. it's interesting that you call this self-deception and delusional that it sounds like everyone else was just like hey man you know this ain't gonna work yeah you should really stop say I it's like um that's exactly right it was uh it was a necessary self delusion and again I was like I don't know why that was and that's why I say I don't could have been had to have been God God saying you know I can't I'm not gonna save your eye for you, bud. We'll rely on surgeons to do that, but I'll at least allow you to believe that it's possible because otherwise you're going to go nuts. And again, it's, I think my, you know,

whatever you want to call it, post-traumatic growth afterwards is a function of being able to to live through the experience a certain way. Because it's terrifying to think that you might not see again. That's terrifying. And I, you know what I, and I'm again, because that chapter is called perspective from darkness. There are other veterans who do. immediately lost both eyes. They had no chance of seeing again. That's hardship. I didn't have to deal with that. You know, if somebody else has had it worse than you, always remember that, even when you get blown up in the face. But yeah, the doctors, and that continued, it wasn't just being able to see anything again. It was being able to see well again. I was demanding,

I was demanding the first surgery. So the first surgery for my left eye, because my right eye's gone. My right eye was gone in Kandahar. They happened to be an ophthalmologist there that enucleated the eye right away. They do that early on so that your body will focus on the eye that's, you know, possibly saveable. But the right eye was so screwed up. And I wish that had pictures of it. And that's kind of gruesome.

But, you know, and people don't want to take pictures of you in that because they're like, oh, that's not good to take pictures of you. But, you know, keep in mind that the person. might want those pictures later on. Some people don't realize. We had Kirstie Ennis on and she got, you know, she got in a helo crash in Afghanistan. And, you know, she's a beautiful girl. And she had pictures of her face where 50 cow, like the way the helo went down.

I mean, it did some massive damage to her face. And she has pictures of it. And you look at the pictures and you can't believe that, you know, she was able to recover the way she did. It's amazing. But, you know, she's a Marine, and I will say that she's much aligned with your feelings on this. I think she's pretty stoked that she has those pictures of herself all jacked off. I wonder who took those pictures, though. Was it the kind of like, oh, after they got into like the medical kind of place?

You know what? Actually, I think it was. I think it was, if you remember her story, there was some really good plastic surgeon, like a plastic surgeon, female plastic surgeon, that I think was probably like, oh, I'm going to document this. Yeah, see, so there's a difference between that and then like someone being like, hey, wait, guys, and bust out their phone and start taking bitches. Which is what you would think a team guy would do. Well, and team guy would obviously go, oh, cool, check out Dan's other eye. I'm going to get some snaps of this. And we got some, you know, so I've only got one picture, but it's a good week out. I mean, it's not, at least a few days. Like, it's, there's some healing

that has taken place, but I look, I look bad. Like, it looks like a shock. It looks like I got hit in the face with a shotgun. That's what my face looks like. I could show it to you right now if you really want to see it, just so you can react to it on the... Yeah, bust it out, man. Let's see what up. I've never posted it because it's a little too gruesome for posting.

You got to blur it out. Give the option. Yeah, the... Well, now I kind of lost my train of thought. Where were we at? So you get the surgery in the book, you talk about they removed the broken lens. Yeah. Some copper wire that was in there, a bunch of other debris.

The hallucination stop. And then you're six weeks. They got to put you in a position for six weeks to recover. Right. So there's a couple things that happened here. That's the picture. Oh, damn. That's about a week after.

So there's some healing there, but it's not looking great. Yeah, that's rough. So. Damn. Yeah. Right eyes gone. Left eye. has a cataract meaning the lens which is in the middle of your eye is destroyed cataracts

are a pretty normal thing for older folks to get you know just basically means the lens has kind of I wouldn't know what the right term is but it kind of clouds over you need to replace it in my case it was trauma induced so just a bunch of fragments burst through the eye and destroyed the lens you can kind of look at a lens like a window all right and this is an important way of thinking about it because if it clouds over. If that window's just, you can't see through it anymore, we'll just replace the window pane. But if the blast destroys the window, then you're trying to sew a new window pane onto basically the curtains, which are like the scleral of your eye. And that was sort of

the situation I was dealing with. So the first miracle was they removed the lens entirely. So, okay, so that thing's out. Because I remember this, I think, I think it was in Landstool. I sort of remember them shining a really bright light, my eye just to see if I could see light. And I could see some light. And when they did that, what I saw, was like darkness, but there was like a light, almost like we're in this room right now and there's this bright light above our heads.

It's kind of like that, but everything else was like a cloud. Like being on an air, like imagine you're like going through a cumulus cloud as you're taking off. Like that's what it looked like. Very odd and strange. And again,

so the first miracle, this, and about maybe a week later when I finally got back to the Bethesden, we did the surgery. They removed the big copper wire that had really been destroying me. my eye. So that's good. And so we kind of start to see some blurriness after that,

you know, which is kind of what I see now. As I look at you now, I'm wearing a contact. And without, if I took this contact out, I wouldn't recognize you. I don't know, I wouldn't run into things necessarily, but I can't see anything. You know, it's, it's, it's, it's, I mean, I, it's like, you know, 21,000 vision. It's, I can't really see anything. It's just, It's just blurry. Can't see close, can't see far. Can't find my glasses if I lose them. The glasses I do have are like that thick.

That's what I wear at night or on airplanes or, you know, if I don't feel like wearing a contact. So that never goes away. But at the time, I wanted it to go away. Like I wanted to be like, no, just make the eye better, doctors. Why can't you just do that? Because I got places to be, okay? And they're like, yeah, do you?

You know? I was like, yeah. I mean, I was like, okay, so you just did this surgery. Remove the cataract. Now, I want a new lens so that I don't have to wear like contacts and glasses because I don't look cool in these glasses, right? I'm not a fan. And, you know, I don't really have the contact situation yet.

And I actually wouldn't for two and a half years it would take to get a really good contact. That's actually comfortable. And so I was like, just do the surgery. And they're like, well, and they're like, we really shouldn't. And I was like, okay, what's the, how much do we have to wait to do the surgery? you know, what's the minimum time? Because I need to have it as soon as possible because, you know, I got to get back to the platoon.

I've got to go back. And they're like, well, I mean, I guess technically six weeks. I'm like, six weeks it is. And like, I couldn't see them at the time, but they're looking at each other like, what the hell are you talking about? Like, this isn't, you don't understand what your situation is. Like, they were just, I mean,

and my wife tells me all this now because I couldn't see them. And I couldn't, I wasn't self-aware enough. to gauge people's reactions. I was in a totally different state of mind. I was on a lot of painkillers and drugs. And so, you know, and just like full on seal mode. Like, get the job done.

Must get back to platoon, kill bad guys. And it's just like wasn't making sense to people. Like they were just like, I don't know what's wrong with this guy. And so they just kind of humored me, I think. Like they were just like, yeah, sure. And we'll definitely do that. But they had no intention of doing it for good reason. And then what you're talking about with the six weeks blindness, that occurred later.

So these miracles happened and like we saved my eye and that was really exciting. But then they, you know, but they're looking at it every day and they do this one test and they see this hole in my retina. So that's not a big deal because it's just a hole. You know, it means there's some blind spots. And as I look at you, I can kind of see the blind spot. It's like right in my, it's annoying. But I deal with it. knowing when I read, frankly.

The problem with that is your retina, the anatomy of your retina causes that hole to expand. There's a film, there's like a membrane on the back of your retina that creates tension. And so anytime there's a hole in your retina, that means the hole will just expand slowly. So it's macular degeneration. Again, this happens with older folks quite a bit. The way to fix that is remove the membrane. We're not really sure why the membrane's on there in the first place. and so you just remove the membrane and then you're good, all right?

But, and that's fine. That's actually a pretty normal surgery. But for me, it was a really high risk surgery because, you know, my eye is so fragile. And so they were worried about the retina detaching. Luckily, it did not, you know, because, well, who knows why. Again, God's intervention. And, but you do have to be faced down for six weeks to recover from that. So that was just.

That just sucked. You had to lay face down the entire time for six. You have to lay it face down because what they do is they inject this gas into your eye. And that creates a bubble, which creates tension. And if the bubble is meant to be pressed up against your retina to keep it in place. Got it. And the only way for it to press up against your retina is for you to be looking down. And so you just look down.

I mean, it just sucks. You just have to be face down. Doesn't matter how you're doing it. Just lay down or walk face down or whatever it is. but just make sure you're facing down for six weeks. And you're blind the whole time. Most of the time they'll do this like one eye at a time so somebody can see still. But, you know, I'm not a one eye at a time kind of guy anymore.

Damn. You get past that. You say when the six weeks were over, I sat up and I was not blind. Moreover, with the help of a truly remarkable contact lens from Boston site, to which the Navy referred me years later, I was eventually returned to 2020 correctable vision in my left eye. That's the story of being blown up. I can't say I recommend the experience.

Yet even as it was happening, even in the moment after the blast, I had to admit it could have been worse. I still had my legs. I had my arms. I had 10 fingers and 10 toes. My brain worked, even after a severe concussion.

I was still alive. It is impossible not to constantly think of the many veterans who have sacrificed so much more. Impossible not to think of SEAL petty officer second class Mike Monsor who threw himself on a grenade while on a rooftop in Ramadi in Iraq 2006, saving his teammates. Impossible not to think of Air Force Master Sergeant John Chapman who fought all night against the Taliban, coming in and out of consciousness from his wounds, eventually succumbing to them on that. Afghan Ridgeline, but only after earning the Medal of Honor for saving 23 service members. Impossible not to think of my platoon members and dear friends, Dave Worson and Pat Feeks, who were killed just two months after I was evacuated from Helmand. Impossible not to think of their loved ones who'd been expecting them home a month later.

Impossible not to think of the eight men whose initials are tattooed on my chest in remembrance. Charles Keating the 4th Patrick Feeks Dave Worson Brad Kavanaer Brett Marrihew Kevin Ebert Brendan Looney

and Tom Falk this is the simple reality Others have had it harder than me many many others From that darkness comes realism From that realism comes gratitude. From gratitude comes perspective.

A healthy sense of perspective is an antidote to outrage. It is an antidote to self-pity, despair, and weakness. It's not a cure-all for your mental state when faced with adversity, but it is sure to dull the edges of your worst tendencies toward mental breakdown. Yeah. That's the perspective that you and I already talked about today. that perspective that it would be seem like it would be very helpful for people to think about. It is.

And, you know, I'm using extreme examples, right? Not everybody can relate to that, but they don't have to. And I don't want you to go be in a terrible situation just to earn some perspective, right? But just the simple reminder to yourself that it exists. Like somebody else has had it harder. There's a comfort in that, I think. And it is an antidote to self-pity. Self-pity is a gateway to the outrage culture that I think we see all around us.

And self-pity is a gateway to the socialistic tendencies. I think that we've been seeing as of late. And you can avoid these things with some perspective and gratitude. And, you know, it's, again, it's hard for anybody in the teams to ever feel sorry for themselves when you know, because you know of these guys. And you know some of those guys I listed, of course. And, you know, if there's ever a reason you need to get up in the morning, not at 4.30, but like later. You know, like in a normal human time, then the boys who wish they could get up, you know, that's a good reason, because they would like to be able to get up and they can't.

And their widows are really wishing they would get up to and they can't. You know, and the man, I swear, I mentioned unsung heroes, but the widows are the heroes of the SEAL teams. I have yet to meet the wife of one of those. those guys who fell into self-pity and despair. I have only met, I only know ones who have overcome with the greatest grace. It's just amazing. I've watched these, uh, watch these women just serve as the most ultimate example. Mothers, um, as well, you know, that, that I know you know, um, like Debbie Lee,

Lee, for instance. Absolutely. Um, it's just, it's just incredible to, to watch that fortitude. We just couldn't do it without them. Yeah, so always one of the things about Mark's mom and Leif and I talk about this a lot is, you know, when we called her from Iraq to talk to her and to console her, she was consoling us. You know, she was wanted to make sure we were okay. She wanted to make sure we were handling things. She wanted to know if we needed anything.

That was her attitude out of the gate. Yeah. And that shows you, you know, the kind of people that you're talking about. You know, someone that's taking their own personal worst nightmare that any, you know, any parent could ever have of losing their kid and immediately saying, well, what can I do for you guys? Yeah. It is unbelievable. He's You know

It was recent friend Good friend I lost Was Chuck Keating the fourth And You know His wife Started a foundation In his name

His dad as well And his family's just been incredible But that's not That's not the exception Like that's been the rule From what I've seen And It's so much harder

To be the family left behind Than it is to to be us, I think. You know, we go and we choose to do this thing overseas, and we're doing it with our brothers in arms, and we love it. And we know what's coming the next day. We're in control to an extent, to the greatest extent we can be. But our family is not.

Their life doesn't change, except that we're just not there, and they don't know what's happening. And then they get a call. And I don't actually go into detail in my wife's experience on the perspectives from darkness. But, you know, she gets a call. And so her only consolation is that it's a call and not a guy at the door.

But, you know, it's a call that she's getting before 6 a.m., before her alarm goes off to go to work. And then there's, you know, the very typical kind of lack of exact information given to her. She's not sure what my face looks like because they're, because they don't know what my face looks like. they're not sure if it's still there, if my head is still there. Like there's all this misinformation getting to her.

Enough information to just plant seeds of absolute horror. It's horrible. But you know who went there first was the Looney family. Oh, right on. You know, it's like it's, it was, it's Amy Looney there, you know, who just lost her husband two years earlier. And she's the one there consoling Tara. and it's just that that's the type of community that the SEAL teams is blessed with and you know

it's it is it is a true blessing and it's unique I wish it were broader I wish we could say you know I talk to other friends and other and other communities that doesn't seem it's not as good and I wish it was I wish we should all strive to just to take care of each other in way. So rolling into your next chapter and I haven't made my caveat that I always make, I'm not reading this whole book right now. And so when it skips around, it's because I'm not reading the whole book. You have to buy the book so that you can hear the whole thing. And we're just, you know, you and I are going off on a bunch of tangents, which is awesome. But, you know, the book that has so many great details in it and the stories are so clear. And they're real

personal too. So you got to buy the book to get that got to buy the book you got to buy the book. So the next chapter which you mentioned earlier is called Who's your hero and I'm going to jump to this part right here where you talk about the seal teams. It says the seal teams like any like many military units are relentless in the pursuit of establishing hero archetypes. Doing so is extremely important when the goal is to create a monoculture that operates as a mission oriented team. This is a community with a very deep sense of who we want to be. We talk about it all the time and we beat it into our trainees. Jocko specifically puts it into our trainees.

I did some of them. Here's some of the things that will be beaten into you. You will be someone who is never late. You will be someone who takes care of his men, gets to know them, and puts their needs before yours. You will be someone who does not quit in the face of it. of adversity. You will be someone who takes charge and leans when no one else will. You will be detail-oriented, always vigilant. You will be aggressive in your actions but never lose your cool. You will have a sense of humor because sometimes that is all that can get you through the darkest

hours. You will work hard and perform even when no one is washing. You will be creative and think outside the box even if it gets you in trouble. You are a rebel but not a mutineer. You are a jack of all trades and master of none. And then you go into the official ethos, which you mentioned earlier. I was debating if I should read this and I think I'm actually just going to read it. It's a good ethos.

So here we go. In times of war or uncertainty, there is a special breed of warrior ready to answer our nation's call, a common man with uncommon desire to succeed. Forged by adversity, He stands alongside America's finest special operations forces to serve his country, the American people, and protect their way of life. I am that man.

My trident is a symbol of honor and heritage, bestowed upon me by the heroes that have gone before. It embodies the trust of those I have sworn to protect. By wearing the trident, I accept the responsibility of my chosen profession and way of life. It is a privilege that I must earn every day. My loyalty to country and team is beyond reproach. I humbly serve as a guardian to my fellow Americans, always ready to defend those who are unable to defend themselves. I do not advertise the nature of my work, nor seek recognition for my actions.

I voluntarily accept the inherent hazards of my profession, place. the welfare and security of others before my own. I serve with honor on and off the battlefield. The ability to control my emotions and my actions, regardless of circumstance, sets me apart from other men. Uncompromising integrity is my standard. My character and honor are steadfast. My word is my bond.

We expect to be, we expect to lead and be led. in the absence of orders I will take charge lead my teammates and accomplish the mission I lead by example in all situations I will never quit I persevere and thrive on adversity my nation expects me to be physically harder and mentally stronger than my enemies if knocked down I will get back up every time I will draw on every remaining ounce of strength to protect my teammates and to accomplish our mission. I am never out of the fight. We demand discipline.

We expect innovation. The lives of my teammates and the success of our mission depend on me, my technical skill, tactical proficiency, and attention to detail. My training is never complete. We train for war and fight to win. I stand ready to bring the full spectrum of combat power to bear in order to achieve my mission and the goals established by my country.

The execution of my duties will be swift and violent when required, yet guided by the very principles that I serve to defend. Brave men have fought and died building the proud tradition and feared reputation that I am bound to uphold. In the worst of conditions, the legacy of my teammates steadies my resolve and silently guides my every deed. I will not fail. So that's the seal ethos. And interestingly, I don't know if you, do you know where that came from? No, I was actually, I just thought about that in the last three seconds. I was like, I would love to be a fly on the wall as this was getting drafted. So it was written in 2005. A bunch of us went to San Clemente Island, I would say there was maybe 10 or 15, yeah, probably 10 or 15 team guys that went

out to San Clement Island and made this and made the other like shorter one, the little, the little short seal ethos. And it was actually part of what was driving it was in response to before, I think it was before, what year did you get to the teams? I started buds in 2006. Yeah. Okay, so in like 2003, 2004, there was a platoon that just, there was a platoon commander that died his hair. He was overseas on deployment, died his hair, blonde, had a pierced earring and was selling drugs to his platoon.

I mean, just a total disaster. And then there was a bunch of other, you know, look, as you know, as we know, like, we're in the news a lot. And there's spikes. We're in their news for some negative things. And so there was a couple other really negative things. That was kind of the peak was this guy dealing drugs inside of his own platoon and the platoon being a total disaster and getting disbanded and sent home from deployment. By the way, this is like during a time of war. So, you know, the admiral who, you know, was a great guy said, look, we need to do something about this.

And that's what, so we went out and the, and this is what came out of it. I'm looking at. I still remember some little things like, there were some things where I was, you know, a little bit more. I wanted, I wanted them to be a little bit more aggressive on some things. Like, I remember, I remember I got shut down one of the lines that I was like, no, it should be. Destroy your enemy. Like that's what we do. And it didn't make the cut.

I think it was in I think it was this part right here where it says I stand I stand to I stand to bring the full spectrum of combat power to bear in order to achieve my mission and the goals established by my country. My version it was to achieve my mission and destroy my enemy or destroy the enemies of our country or something like that. And I got I got the reins pulled in on me. There was there was quite a few. But you know, I did all right. I mean, we got some discipline in there, right? We did pretty good.

I would love to see what the Jocko version would be. Yeah. You wanted to go more aggressive? No way. Like, that's impossible to believe. You know, and it's interesting. And one of the reasons that, like, a lot of the discussion around it, and there were some great, and there was a bunch of great guys out there.

I mean, it was like the Admiral Pick guys to go out there. It was pretty awesome. A great crew of people. And at the time, you know, it was 2005, like, we didn't really have as much combat experiences we have, you know, now, which is just awesome. But my attitude was like, listen, we're not writing this for 05s, right? We're not writing this for seal team commanders or Commodores. Like, this thing should be leveled at the point of aim, point of impact, should be an E5 team guy. Look, I know that this guy that was a, was an officer that had this

bad platoon, but like, that's, that's who, not who we're naming. We should not have those problems. and like that's, yes, we got to handle that. But this should be a point of aim, point of impact should be an E5 team guy. That's, that needs to understand the ethos and go, hey, I need to do the right thing. Because, by the way, if you're in a platoon and you've got squared away E5s, they'll destroy that. They'll crush that officer that's doing dumb things. Yeah. They'll kill him.

Or not kill him, literally Vietnam frag style, but they will get him removed, you know. And, you know, that's what will happen. So, yeah. And I think it hits that pretty well. Yeah, yeah, it does pretty good. It does pretty good. Yeah, it's a great ethos. And it was awesome to be out there when this thing was getting written and then see it.

You know, it's always interesting to be a part of things like that that you don't really know. Like, I mean, you don't really understand what you're doing at the time. You know, you're just trying to get the job done. You're trying to do a good job. But you don't always know what the impact's going to be later when you do something. something like that. But yeah, it was an honor to be out there and make that happen or help make that happen again. There's a bunch of people out there. I was, uh, I, I may very well of, but no, I wouldn't, I wouldn't say it was the junior guy, but there, because there was, you know, there was

a bunch of master chiefs out there, a bunch of badass master chiefs too. So, um, yeah, it's cool. And it's just, it's so important. And, uh, I'm going to stop jumping ahead on the book now that I understand what we're doing because I've already, I already hit this part. Should I pre-brief to you, I guess. Yeah. But the, uh, it's so important. for an organization to understand who they want to be. And that was the whole reason I put the seal ethos in there because there's a deep cultural mindset that is beaten into us, you know, quite literally. There's the more high-minded philosophical approach,

which is the seal ethos. But it does a good job of relating to the lowest level guy, too. But it goes way beyond the steel ethos. I mean, there's so many other lessons that get repeated like mantras, throughout training, throughout buds, about who you are. And like what it means to be a guy who wears the trident, like what that really means. And it's a simple stuff, you know, and I listed some of it earlier, right? Like just don't quit.

Just be on time. Like work when no one's watching. You know, it's like just really simple stuff, but it's like it's who you better be. And you better be funny. Like, you know, that's actually part of our culture. Part of being a good team guy. You better have a really sick sense of humor. And like, you better go after each other.

But it better be funny. You know, like, it's got to actually. And, like, we rely on that dark humor in a really fundamental way that I think is maybe a side of us that isn't as prevalent in all the books and all the movies. But, like, I like to think we're pretty damn funny. I mean, I've been on Saturday Night Live, so obviously I'm funny. Yeah, yeah. You know?

Yeah, no, a thick skin. and the ability to verbally spar with people 24 hours a day from the moment you report into work, the moment you show up until, and any mistake that you make, you better, you know, you throw a shot on a, you know,

while you're shooting, you throw a shot and hit something that you shouldn't hit or whatever. It's just sign up for ridicule because that's what's about to happen. It's the greatest thing. It really is. You got a bunch of stuff in here that's, you start talking about traits.

And, you know, again, it's what's what you're talking about. Some of the traits of you must be someone that can take a joke. This is very simple. You want to be productive. You want to be someone that makes progress every single day. You want to be someone who identifies a goal and sticks with it. Again, you know what I like about these is just going back to the other conversation. If you think about how you would want your kid to act, these are good things.

This is how you want your kid to act. You want to be seen as reliable. You want people to ask things of you because you have a reputation for getting it done. Reliability is an element of fortitude. You want to be, you want to have the ability to delay gratification. A mentally tough person can avoid the next cupcake and save it for later after earning some exercise. You want to be even tempered.

You don't ever want to lose it. Emotions don't drive your actions. You want to be humble. You have confidence but not overbearing. You want to be someone that internalizes someone else's point of view before speaking at them. Like these are the kind of things you're talking about. And, and you, you put, you. say this, the question is, how do we become the heroes we want to be? My answer, sanctioned intellectual

property theft. That's how. No one has a patent on good habits. You can steal them. Identify your heroes and emulate the character traits that make that person more successful than you currently are. And this gets into, this, I love this. This is one of my favorite chapters to write because I love psychology. You know, Jordan Peterson is one of my favorite thinkers out there. There's a lot of psychological references in this chapter and um and another one too but especially this one and hero archetypes and we already already hit what i meant by hero archetypes and i just think that's so important you have to have a visualization of what you're looking up to you have to look at yourself in 10 years and think okay that's that's how how would how would that person react to this situation

i should react that way now like you know and it's hard and this isn't that's supposed to be easy. And when I say sanctioned intellectual property theft, it's like, look at the attributes of people you respect. You know, like, what are they doing? Like, if you want to get to where they're at, just copy them. This isn't, this isn't rocket science. You know, this is, and any of your listeners are like, well, yeah, that's why I listen to Jock. Yeah. Yeah. And what's cool is, and you and I were talking about this earlier, uh, this idea of sanctioned intellectual property theft, you know, uh, extreme ownership. is this is personal response did did I make up personal responsibility in the form of extreme

ownership no I didn't I didn't make up the you know discipline equals freedom did I am I the first person that ever said you know what if you have discipline in your life you'll have more freedom I mean it's in the Bible like these these aren't things that I old ideas are the best Exactly. And, you know, maybe I worded them a way that was easier for people to understand or came at it from a different angle or whatever. But the fact of the matter is this stuff's out there. And these are these traits that you're talking about are just as you were saying earlier, it's like, oh, we want your kid to not lose their temper. That's what you, you want your kid to be reliable. These are really basic things. And yet, if you don't identify them, which is your point. If you don't identify them, which is your point. If you don't identify, identify them. And you know, that's what in the warrior kid book, so I written these kids books. Well, one of the things in the warrior kid books is first his uncle who's a seal teaches him all the different codes. All the different warrior codes from ancient times till today to the Ranger code to the seal code. They're there in the book and then he says you need to write your own code and that's what he does in the book. It writes his own code of what it means to be a warrior kid and that's what he lives up to. So same thing you're saying here. Yeah. It's and And then again, to the discussion about hierarchies and why that's kind of an important way of looking at this. Because, and also why I say you don't pick a person to be your hero.

You pick many. Real or imagined characters who excel in a certain hierarchy. And that's an important thing to define. There's different types of hierarchies. Like some people excel in a jiu jitsu hierarchy. If you want to be good at jiu jitsu, copy this person. Okay, but you don't listen to everything they say because they might be all screwed up in some other way. This is a, this is a fact.

But, but like, you know, follow this leader. Like there's something about that leader that I like and that there's something that makes me want to follow them. What is it? I should identify it. I can start to emulate those behaviors. One note I made in, in your book here is when you said, when you said to do that, I have plus bad examples. And in my latest book, Leadership Strategy and Tactics,

I had this beautiful situation unfold where I had a horrible officer that we had a mutiny and got him fired. And then the guy that took over was the best guy ever and super humble, gave us ownership. I mean, it was just awesome. But I learned probably as much

from the egotistical guy and seeing how we all reacted to him and seeing how we didn't want to listen to him. We didn't want to follow him. As I learned from the guy, that was just fantastic leader. So I look at, you know, hey, here's a, here's, I was always pulling the good things from people, but then also looking at people with negative examples and saying, okay, I know not

to act like that. The villains. Yeah. And if got heroes, you've got to have villains. And it's, and I guess the point of that chapter is, is, yeah, to remind people of what some of the good attributes are and to, and to, and to think consciously about identifying those attributes, identifying yourself. as the hero you want to be and then living up to that.

So that's part of it. But the broader cultural conversation is the fact that outrage culture is largely this product of the fact that we have started to look at the wrong hero archetypes. We have started to elevate attributes that are not heroic at all into a heroic reality. And it's not good. And that's sort of, that's the second part of the chapter, the wrong heroes. And it's what we talked about, this aggrieved victim status. the loudest person on the internet, the snarkiest person on the internet, the one owning the libs or the cons.

You know, it's like that one gets the most likes. Like, it's passion over sophistication. And these are not good things. I understand that it's entertaining, right? I understand the temptation, especially on social media, but it's really detrimental to our larger conversation. You know, why should the fist-banging activist, you know, speaking truth to power, whatever the hell that means? why should that be the person we listen to just because they're mad? Like why why does anger beget some kind of credibility?

It doesn't make any sense, but that's how we're acting as a culture. It doesn't make any sense, though. And like, I just want us to think through that. Like, that's the whole point of the chapter. And we'd be better off if we started to kind of rediscover the heroes that have gotten us through thousands of years of civilization. And again, the oldest ideas are the best ones. If people have been talking about certain heroic attributes for thousands of years,

there's really good chance those are good ideas because they've lasted. And they've gone through trial and error. But like every generation, you know, you've got to when you have to teach those ideals. And then as a young person, you have to stop and think, maybe there's a reason it's like this. Maybe I'm not the first one to think in revolutionary terms. You know, like just maybe. Like there's a reason your granddad is telling you it's this way. And it's not because he's just stupid and out of touch.

Like just stop. And like, let's think about that as a possibility. Yeah, it's weird with this. I would love to try and trace back the roots of this because one thing, like one time we were on this podcast, we were talking about something and somebody asked a question on a Q&A. And I basically what I said was, and I think you turned it into a clip, Echo Charles, is I was saying like, hey, you got to stifle those emotions. But don't let those emotions out.

What are you kidding me? Like, you can't let that show. And the reaction from some people was, you know, that's horrible. You should never stifle your emotions. They'll, that'll, it turns into these, whatever, the mental problems and all this stuff. And I'm like, people took what I said to the extreme, which clearly, I don't really believe in anything extreme. That's why I wrote the book called The Dicotomy of Leisure. Right. Except extreme ownership. Yeah. Yeah. Well, well, interestingly, you know, extreme

ownership can be taken too far and you can have people in leadership positions that go to an extent where they want to own everything and they don't decentralize anything and it becomes a problem. So that's why we wrote the dichotomy of leadership because you have to find balance in everything. So with this idea of stifle your emotions, look, oh, if you lose a loved one, I'm not saying you need to, you know, act tough the whole time. No. And also as a leader, In any position, if you're walking around completely stoic with no emotions, you won't attack. You won't connect with anybody. And so you don't have any personal connections with anybody? That's not a seal platoon.

If you're in a seal platoon and you have no personal connection with your guys and your platoon, you're not a leader. They don't respect you. They won't follow you. And I've seen that kind of leader. Absolutely. And it doesn't work. It doesn't work. So when I say stifle your emotions, I'm talking about your little petty emotions that you're getting spun up about something.

Yeah. That's what I'm talking about. And, you know, and especially in my business, like, politics, it's like you realize quickly, you've got to define what you mean in very clear terms because everybody's first reaction is to totally take it out of context or, or just assume the worst of what you meant. Assume the worst of intentions. I go into a great amount of detail about this in the book, too, because that's a big marker of outrage culture. Is this need, this, like, desire to be like,

Just assume the worst of what you meant. Oh, stifle my emotions. Oh, okay, just walk around like robots. Of course that's not what you meant. You know, like, let's be gracious with how we understand each other. Just like, just a tad. It'd be a lot better off. Next chapter.

It's called No Plan B, which has, you know, got a little counterintuitive sound to it because as a seal and as a human being, you're always like, oh, you know, you got to have a plan B in case something goes wrong. Here's your premise behind this. You don't entertain. a plan B option because when you do, you're entertaining failure. And in entertaining failure, you will embrace it. Ultimately, the no plan B mentality isn't about keeping you from doing something.

Rather, it's about embracing a positive goal as your only choice. It's about enabling you to do something. It's about clearing the paths to your goals to your achievements, to your tasks and your responsibilities. So, explain your idea behind no, no, no plan. point B. So this started out as I was thinking about how not to quit at Buds. And anytime I'd ever been asked that question, I would simply say, well, because I never had a choice. Because I just didn't think about Buds as a choice. I didn't think about it as an achievement that I would,

you know, hopefully make. It was just like, okay, I just have to do this because that's just, I just have to. You know, and I think most of us who made it through Buds just had that mentality, like, okay, I just have to do another boat race. And then, man, this really is. sucks. Like, I really hate this, but I just, I just, I don't have a choice. You know, like, it's, there's no other option. There's something liberating about that mentality. It's the only mentality you can have and it is truly a no plan B mentality. So, and I'm very, and I explain that in the book. I'm like, I don't mean no contingencies. Obviously, you have to plan ahead. Um, but no plan B is fundamentally about not quitting. And not quitting needs to be defined rather carefully, you know,

And I point out, like, changing directions in life could seem like quitting. It's not necessarily. Like, you're not a good artist. Just stop. Like, you're just not good. It's time to change directions, man. You know? And that's okay.

Like, that's okay. That doesn't, like, you know, it's, and I go into a much deeper conversation about living with purpose. Ultimately, what I mean by living your plan A and not living your plan B, it is about living with purpose. And purpose is something only you can tell, really, if you're living up to it or not. It's hard to tell from the outside. But you know, you know if you quit.

Like, you know if you just didn't do the right thing to live up to your end goal and execute the millions of smaller tasks that you need to execute to live up to your end goal. And I think this is also the chapter where I really go into some, deeper discussions about one of my favorite quotes from St. John Paul or Pope John Paul II, which is in America, freedom is, it's not the right to do what you want, but to, but the freedom to do what you ought. I'm screwing up that quote a little bit, but the point is this, you live with ordered liberty. Ordered liberty means we live with a purpose. Like we have freedom, and with that freedom, we have a responsibility to live as we ought to live.

And then we have to define, okay, what is living how we ought to live? Like, that's a whole other discussion. This is why religion is so important. This is why religion is such an important foundation. Our Judeo-Christian history is a very important foundation of our culture. Even if you don't believe in God, you have to admit that we get our morality from this place, from the Ten Commandments. And that matters. Like, it matters in a really deep way.

and our moral, you know, kind of that sense of absolute morality and where our laws come from and where this notion comes from of what it is to do the right thing. Like, how do you define the right thing? Again, we've already talked about this. If it's based in thousands of years of wisdom and trial and error, there's a good chance that it's right. Okay?

Not a guaranteed chance, but there's a really good chance. Even if it doesn't feel good or it doesn't feel nice and compassionate, And it's real and it creates a sustainable society. And ultimately, sustainable societies should be our end goal. Outrage culture is counter to a sustainable society. It is chaos manifested in our words and our actions. Yeah, you say here, pure freedom is chaos, anarchy, and moral decay. Freedom to do what you like without any moral compass can quickly result in the temptation to indulge in habits that may feel good momentary.

but are wholly detrimental to yourself and others. Pure freedom detached from a higher sense of purpose results in at best in overindulgence, lack of discipline, unfaithful relationships, and some drug use. At worst, it can result in the total deterioration of a society. And, you know, this is, I think it was actually Jason Gardner, before he was out of the teams, but he was listening to the podcast, and he was hearing me talk about, I think he was hearing me talk about the gulags, or just something.

And he goes, hey, discipline equals freedom. That applies to societies too, doesn't it? And I'm like, yes, it does. If you have total freedom, everyone do it, whichever you want, well, then you're destroyed. And you end up a slave to, well, you end up a slave to any number of things. Whereas if you have discipline inside of society, which is called law and order, and you follow those rules, well, then you actually end up with more freedom, which is what we try to do here. Yeah. I mean, discipline equals freedom is the simplest way of putting that, because it's, it's, it's, it's,

It's very true. And it's been true for a very long time. Indeed. Indeed. Next chapter. Again, I'm jumping forward here. Next chapter.

This is the chapter. People got to read the book. They want more. Absolutely. There's a lot more in there. There's a ton. And you know, you give a lot of almost academic level backup.

So you give some like common sense stuff. You give some academic. And you talk about the psychological. psychological viewpoint of things some historical references you do a great job of balancing out what you're saying and showing multiple examples from different aspects so that's why there's that's why the book you have to read the book to get all that information um the next one is called be still I got to read this little section in the SEAL teams our first exercise in training the mind to be still is drownproofing

And yes, it is as ridiculous as it sounds, as legend has it, and it may indeed just be legend. Drownproofing originates from the story of an American POW in Vietnam as the Viet Cong transported him along the May Kong River. They decided they'd have enough, had enough of him and threw him overboard. But this was not some magnanimous gesture of human civility. He was not being released for good behavior. They expected him to drown. It was a reasonable expectation. His hands were tied behind his business.

and his feet were tied together. Visualize that for a for a second. This creates quite the predicament, especially when you are trying not to drown. He had to figure out how to swim to shore. And as the story goes, he did just that. Ever since then, a key element of seal training involves drownproofing us,

making sure that we too can jump from a boat with our hands and feet tied. And then you go over the multiple ways to do this. And you say here to do this, it requires that you do not panic. While instructors are yelling, don't panic. And that's, you know, you talked about that as being sort of one of your first lessons in learning how to be calm and not freak out about stuff. It's such a necessary part of military training.

And drownproofing is an excellent way to do it. Not because we actually think that might happen. Like, how unlucky would that be? That'd be unlucky. Or lucky. And it's like, wow. You're like, this is just like training. You know, they put a weight on you, though.

You're screwed or, you know, there's a lot of ways to tie you up. Anyway, not the point. The point is not that you're preparing for this specific eventuality. The point is, is that you have a set of skills and you better implement those skills while the fear of drowning is all around you. And, of course, it gets worse than the drownproofing. It gets into dive comp or pool comp, which is probably my least favorite thing in Buds. when I got to Bud's

I had no idea what it was they had a Texas chainsaw massacre movie poster up but it had it was crossed out and it said Bud's pool comp massacre and they had like drawn a regulator on a person getting murdered by leather face yes yeah so I was like well I wonder what that is

but yeah sure enough sounds great yeah sign me up you know I failed pool comp yeah I failed pool comp my first my first go at pool comp I failed and I was recycle to the next class? No, I mean, I got to retest again on Monday.

So we took pool comp on Friday. And then we got retested on Monday if we failed. I failed. Okay. Well, yeah, I mean, I failed first couple times too. Very rarely. Very rarely people. Through the first time.

Yeah. I was not happy. What's pool comp? Pool comp is they put an old school dive rig on you. So like the old school scuba tanks and this thing called a, what's it called a dual hose regulator? That's what I call it. There's a hose that comes in that brings the air in and there's one that you blow out.

And they put you down on the bottom of the pool and they just start to just mess with you. They rip your regulator. They rip your mask off. And then they start tying knots in your regulator that you have to then untie underwater. And then you have to follow all these proper procedures to get everything back on. Meanwhile, they're slapping you in the head. They're grinding your face into the thing into the pool deck. And it sucks.

And eventually they tie something called a whammy knife. knot, which is a knot that you can't get out. And so they tie this whammy knot, and then you have to go to proper ditching procedures, which means you take your rig completely off. You try. You have to attempt to get it to work. If you can't get it to work, you take off your weight belt, you lay it over your rig, and then you look at your instructor, you give them the thumbs up, and then you do a proper free swimmer assent.

And if you mess up any of these, and there's procedures for everything. If you mess them up, then you fail. So, but it's, dude, it's, it's, it's no joke. Like, they come down and freaking hammer you. Yeah. Oh, man. And they always get you as you have exhaled. Oh, yeah, for sure.

They're watching the bubbles. And then the wave. And then the wave, they call it a surf hit. Like, so they're simulating this wave. This amazingly complex wave that somehow ties your hoses and knots. It's like, isn't true. That's not real. Okay.

Like, there's no wave like that. But it's not the point. You know, it's same with drownproofing. The point is not to prepare you for this eventualality. There is no way in hell that your hoses will ever be tied in knots Mostly because you'll never use a rig like this that actually can be tied in knots because this rig is not It's it's just for training So that's not the point into the point is the procedures the point is

You're drowning will you still calm yourself and work through procedures that's the entire point of the exercise If you panic you are going to fail and there's physiological reasons for that because you're using more optics for freaking out and And there's psychological reasons and they're just the instructor. These instructors are seals. They don't want a guy in the teams that's going to be on a dive with them. That's going to freak out if something goes wrong because stuff goes wrong when you're diving. So that that to, you know, from your perspective was a was a, the initial recognition of like, hey, I better be calm. Right.

Be still, as you say. And, yeah, the reason I say be still, because I was thinking of the patrolling acronym that we use. Sills. Yep. You know, stop, look, listen, smell. And that's exactly what it sounds like. You stop because you've done something to the environment. Maybe you landed with a helicopter.

And that's actually, you know, I don't want to give too much away in the book. But there's a really great intro to this chapter, everybody. You've got to buy it to know what it is. And so you stop and you've created a disturbance. So stop and look around. Just chill and look around and then keep moving. That's Sills. Sills.

That's what we say, and it's a patrolling tactic. It also kind of sounds like still, and it's kind of the same meaning. Same idea, for sure. That's why I named the chapter B still. And then you apply that to your life, because I understand that not everybody is going to be thrown overboard with their hands and feet tied. But if you are, I go in a great detail about how to overcome that particular predicament. It is possible. Yeah, there's a lot of methodology.

there. It's much easier than you think as long as you don't panic. So, and this is another chapter called do something hard. So, hey, you know what? Your do something hard could be drownproofing. And everybody can do this. Do it with a buddy though. Do it with a buddy. Do not. Do not do it alone. Do it with a buddy. For sure. That's the worst thing. One up, one down. Luckily, it's hard to tie your own hands behind your back without a buddy. So the point is this, it's, again, old lessons. Count to 10 before you react. That's fundamentally what this chapter's about. And we have had a habit lately, given the, given the extreme nature of our kind of immediate gratification that occurs with social media to react very quickly and wildly about things. Our media reacts unbelievably quickly and wildly

about things. And it is a disservice to our country. It is, I mean, that's an extreme statement, but it is true. It has gotten out of hand. And it's, it's so. bad that I felt the need to write this book. Our media does it. But again, their media is feeding off of us. We have to do better as individuals. We have to say like,

that's not going to work on me. You know, that quick over-the-top reaction is not going to work on me. I'm not going to do it. I'm not going to feed into it. I'm not going to reward it. That's our duty.

You have to not click on click bait headlines. Yeah. Well, I mean, I can't help myself. I'm going to click on the, click, but I'm not going to react to it, right? So that's the, you know, and even for good practice, go ahead and click on it. See if it makes you mad.

And if it does, do it again. It's incredible when you click on a clickbait article. And I'm talking mainstream news media. And you go, oh my gosh, I can't believe that happened. And you click on it. And you're like, wait a second. That's not what happened. I just got click baited.

Don't let it happen. And the problem is, actually, see, the problem is is that people don't click. The problem is... Oh, they just read the headline. And I go into a lot of detail on that, actually. I give some example. I could give examples every single day. I just kind of chose some random ones for the book.

But an example might be... The examples I use in the book are regarding something like environmental regulations, because this is a very emotional topic for people. When you hear the Trump administration repealed 12 Obama-era environmental regulations, here's what you're thinking. And be honest, this is what you're thinking. You're thinking black or green sludge oozing into a river. You're thinking black smoke like emanating from a factory all of a sudden while, you know,

these corporate fat cats count their money and birds are falling out of the sky. Like this is what you're thinking. If you're being like this is the visualization that occurs. But is it true? Nobody asked the second question. Is it true? Yeah. What does this actually mean?

Or what does it mean? Or like why would they deregulate that? You know, why was it put in place just a few years ago? You know, I mean, like, what kind of regulation was it? You know, is there a good reason for it? And then I go into basically a case study on something called new source regulation, and we don't have to talk about it now. But I basically write a case study on this because it's important.

Like there's good examples and there's, and there's, and then the headline about that particular regulation basically said, you know, Trump is removing air pollution regulations. So again, your mind goes to those places I just talked about. The article itself kind of gives both sides, like actually not a bad article. And this is usually the case in my experience, because I do this every day. In my experience, the writer, the journalist is not always, but a lot of times, like actually kind of gives a balanced article. But the editorialized headline is terrible, totally misleading. You know, their own article debunks the headline.

And you're like, what the hell is going on here? Okay. Now, a lot of that's oftentimes because the journalist is not the one writing the headline. Okay, so that's a whole different story. And then you look into it, right? And it's like, okay, well, it turns out, yeah, they want to, they want to make it easier for factories to update their systems or power generation plans to update their systems. They don't want to have them go through this new source review regulation, which is extremely costly and unpredictable. And environmentalists say, well, that's just, that's, you're just giving, giving away to corpora. You're deregulating them, but it's like, well, no, as it turns out, if you want to put a carbon capture addition to your power plant, which means capturing more pollutants or carbon dioxide, then you can't. You can't have to go through this extremely costly new source review. Well, maybe we should stop that. And that's the background. I can go to a lot more detail on that.

But just one example. I can think of an example almost every single day. Like the headline just isn't what you think, you know? Let's bring it back to coronavirus. So the headline is, you know, the Trump administration screwed up the coronavirus tests. Like South Korea is testing 20,000 people a day. And we've only done like, you know, 10,000 tests or something. And by the time you're listening to this podcast, that reality has changed drastically.

But in our current moment, that's what happened in the last couple of months. And there's some truth to that. Like America was behind on tests. but who's actually at fault? Ask the question, right? And then look into the answer from some different sources. Because the truth is, FDA never approved any South Korean test. For all we know, those tests aren't very high quality.

There's different kinds of tests. You know, they might give false positives or false negatives. That stuff matters when you're trying to control an epidemic. You know, it would be easy to just buy the South Korean test. We don't do that. Not because Trump said we don't want to do it, not because Trump isn't taking it seriously. Hell, it's not even Obama, okay? It's actually none of their fault.

It's just our system. Okay? Our system is in there for a reason. Like we have a very strict system from the FDA on what kind of tests can be used for stuff like this. Now, that exists for a decent reason. For instance, if people remember the, I think it's called Theranos? The lady who has a fake cancer test. That's absolutely called Theranos.

Yeah. Absolutely. You're very sure of this. No, I tracked on that big time because there's a, it's a very interesting case study. Oh, yeah. You're in the corporate. Yeah, for about a million different reasons. It's a really interesting case story.

And just that, that. They fake the cancer treatment or cancer test. It wasn't just cancer. It was like, hey, you can identify literally hundreds and hundreds of problems that you could have medically from a single pinprick of blood. Right. Which was just, just completely. Not true. Not true.

Just not true. Now, going into more detail, that particular lab was federally regular. and qualified under a certain type of regulation through CMS, but they, but not through the FDA's regulations. Okay. So eventually they were caught, right? And that's what it's for. Like, that's what the regulation is for.

So it's still annoying, right? We should have more tests for the coronavirus available, but our system was not designed to make that happen quickly. It should have been. I'm not saying there's not room for some lessons learned here and some change, and we will make those changes actually. The administration, frankly, already has. So, but the only way to do it is to get the private sector involved and to give them the flexibility to do the test and then to streamline the FDA's testing of that test so that we know it's actually a decent test. You know, there was this,

the point is, right, like, stop and think and wonder, be curious. Like, is, is it true that a test is just a test? Like, of course not. Like, there's all different types. Some are swath. You know, I mean, it's some are lab, some test kits. Like, some are more accurate than others. Like, is it possible that it's more complicated than the headline is telling you? Is it possible?

Is it just a little bit possible? You know, and again, when I say the media does it such a disservice, it's because it's so, you know, you should have somewhat of a combative media against government. Their point is a check and balance against government. But you would hope that. their purpose would be to educate. And I believe that has changed radically. I believe they don't longer view it as their duty to educate the public. They only see confrontation as their duty. And I don't find that to be a good service to the American people. I would say that as an accurate statement. The news does that or has been doing that a lot, though, even like regular local news,

They do that where they'll, but it's not, you don't click on it, but it's the same concept when they say, um, you're, is your cell phone killing you? Yeah. More at 11, you know? So it's like, that's the click bait right there. So you've been doing that for a long time. Is it? Yeah.

And then yeah, then you, then you listen to it because you're like, dang, might be killing me. Yeah. You listen to it. And then it's like, oh yeah, you know, someone dropped their cell phone and it like made them, you know, do something that killed them. It turns out to be like totally innocuous. Yeah, yeah.

debunks the headline. Speaking of headlines. Next chapter. Sweat the small stuff. This chapter, this is the chapter where I gave you permission to complain. Permission to moan and groan about the nitty gritty, small but annoying, ankle-biting inconveniences we face in our everyday lives. Permission to gripe about even your smallest troubles,

grumble about long lines at the drive-thru and whine about the imperfect weather. I'm actually going to encourage it. You're welcome. Okay, don't thank me yet. There are certain ground rules. One, sweating the small stuff is okay, but exercise your complaints lightheartedly. Seek out humor and your whining, be humble, be self-aware. Two, if you allow yourself to sweat the small stuff, and I think you should, then you must also force yourself to be detail-oriented.

Three, if you allow yourself to sweat the small stuff, then you must try your hardest not to sweat the big stuff. What are you talking about here? What actually kind of goes back to, what you got to, I just restrain myself from moving to this chapter when you said it before, when you got a bunch of criticism, right, for saying don't be emotional about stuff. And people are like, well, you can't tell me that. And that makes them emotional, ironically. But in your reaction was, okay, I'm not saying be a robot. You know, I'm just saying, like, don't let it get the best of you. And so I really wanted to be like, oh my God, it's like my chapter about sweating the small stuff.

Because every time you're told, you know, oh, don't sweat the small stuff. And I'm like, well, I don't know about that. I think there's some venting that has to occur. And I think we take it a little too far in the SEAL teams. Oh, yeah. I mean, we complain about the smallest of things. But there's like, and I examined that. Like this chapter is about examining that truth.

Why do we do that? Are we a bunch of divas? Yes, yes. But that is true. Two things can be true. That is affirmative. That two things can be true at once. We can be divas, but there's also a deeper reason and value to it.

As long as you do it right. And I try to examine, I try to really examine that carefully in this chapter about what the right way is to complain. And like I try to set some ground rules, like be funny. Being funny is a decent way to do things. It can't be too serious. Like there's a difference between complaining about how crappy the coffee is at the command and complaining about the actual command atmosphere to your guys. There's a big difference.

From a leadership perspective, there's a difference there. Like one can be kind of funny and just like, oh, yeah, stupid, whatever. Coffee's crap and the building's stupid or whatever. Like the same things, people, the gym isn't hard enough. There's not enough weights because I'm stronger than. Whatever. You know, typical dumb team guy complaints. There's a difference as a leader.

Those are legitimate complaints though. Yeah. Especially. Yeah. No, I complain all the time. Like, oh,

I guess we're out of 45 pound plates. You know, my deadlift. But it's like, but the, as a leader especially, a big difference between that and being like, our CEO is messed up.

Like that's, that's, this is one of the things I talk about leadership strategy and tactics is like, if you, are just whitewashing everything, this coffee is fantastic. And it sucks. Your guys are starting to look at you going, okay, wait a second. You're not real. You're not real and you think that you're, you're not questioning. You're not pushing back against anything. However, like you said, if you come down and you say, are commanding officers an idiot, that's going to be problematic. So you got to,

you got to be careful about what you're complaining about. To your point, complaining forms some level of bond, right? That's one of the things that we do in the teams. Like we're going to complain about the freaking birthing that we have and the this, that and the other thing. And it's like, okay, cool, because we're all in the same team. We're all complaining about it. But if somebody starts complaining about things that matter at a more strategic level,

now we've got a problem. The other part of the don't sweat the small stuff mentality is the detail-oriented part. This is really important because being detail-oriented is an element of fortitude, I would argue. I think rather effectively. And I wrapped it into this chapter, though. And you could probably wrap the detail-oriented mindset into many of the lessons in this chapter. But I put it into this one,

because if you're sweating the small stuff, then by definition, you are concerned about small things. And it's not self-evident to me that being so chill-acts about all the stuff is a virtue. And we sometimes see that as a virtue, like the big, and I note, like the dude from the big Lebowski.

That guy doesn't care about anything. But is that good? Well, other than bowling and white Russians. He was pretty passionate about those things. That is true. Another Caucasian area. But, but, you know, it's like, you know, that cool kid in high school who just like lets everything roll off their back, you know?

It's like the cool surfer dude. I got it. I'm not saying there's no value in that, but it's not self-evident to me that that's what we should aspire to because it's not obvious to me that they're highly productive people. Maybe they are. I'm not saying they can't be. But if you're not concerned with small things, there's a pretty decent chance you're not concerned about bigger questions in life, about bigger elements of personal responsibility. And you might not be that motivated to move up the hierarchy that we talked about. And so being concerned with the small stuff is a habit. It's an Aristotelian, in the Aristotelian sense, we build good habits that are meant for a higher person. purpose. That's what makes them a good habit. We do it because it is good. And so that's the deeper thing here. Yeah, complain a little bit. Like, like, especially, you know, on the way here,

we're going down, is that Midway Drive? And San Diego has often had this problem. And I've complained about it for a very long time, which is that the lights are not synchronized. They're not synchronized for traffic flow, the way like New York City is in Manhattan. Those are well-synchronized lights. One of my biggest pet peeves is the lights are not synchronized because it's a solvable problem. Might and too, by the way. To synchronize the lights, you know, as a city manager or a mayor or however the system is. And I was like, as I was going from red light to red light trying to get to Jocko's podcast

because I cannot be late because I just wrote in my book that I gave him, don't be late. That was funny. I was like, these damp red lights. You know, and so my wife is like, I am so sick of hearing you complain about the way. She's like, she hates this chapter because she's so used to the SEAL team culture. She's like, why'd you even write this? Like, don't encourage this.

I'm like, I am trying to encourage it to the right extent, you know, because I am walking a fine line for sure. And we're trying to, we're trying to reverse some commonly held beliefs. And it was a fun chapter of the right. It was one of my favorite ones. Yeah, and obviously you just met me the dichotomy of this is if you get so focused on little things, then you are wasting your time. You know, you're wasting your time. The mats on my personal home gym might are dirty and people say, you're, that's, you need to clean your mats.

What kind of discipline is that? I'm like, look, I would have to spend an hour a day clean those mats to make them look clean, maybe even more than that. I don't. I don't care. It's my garage gym. There's chalk on the floor and sweat. wet. That's the way it is. I'm not worried about it. Yeah. And that's a really good point too. And it's, well, it makes, especially makes sense in the, in the context of the dichotomy, right? Right.

And like, and I'm, and I, and I hope that what I write there helps people understand that there is a balance. You know, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's operating in that gray area so that you can focus on the big stuff because, you know, seals like to complain about wet socks. Like a lot. Like it's a, and I go into great detail about this. And we avoid wet socks that, you know, to an extreme extent. But when it, when things get really hard, you know, we, the complaining seems to stop. When things are really serious, we understand and have some perspective about that.

And we, when we act accordingly. And, and I think that's perfectly relatable to regular life. You know, it's why we go, it's why we go and do happy hours after work. You know, you're just, you're blowing off some steam in a healthy way. It's why people go see a therapist. Like, you're really just, you're really just complaining to the therapist for an hour. Vinting. And that's, that's necessary.

Venting. Echo says. Yeah. It's like, it's like you're just kind of letting that steam out so that you're, you're, your holding tank of emotions doesn't explode in somebody's face. And that's because that's how you lose an eye. Uh, next chapter. The right sense of shame.

In America today, we too often look at personal failings as things to overcome, move past, or forget. Sometimes we should do one or all of those things, but we should also do something else. Learn our lesson. The list of public figures who run headlong into self-inflicted failure, personal, political, or otherwise, and then reemerge shameless without having appeared to learn a thing is long. Don't get me wrong. I'm no opponent of redemption. Far from it.

I certainly believe there should be space for reemergence from public scorn. I believe redemption is a trademark of an enlightened society. One of the more detestable social trends now is the mocking of redemption and the dismissing of the idea that it is possible or even desirable. In place of a system of repentance, justice, and murder. We have a culture of mindless fury and outrage culture. So you talk about this sense of shame, which is like a really important thing. And I looked at this from a team guy perspective.

The amount of shame, like for instance, if you forget a piece of gear, you, when a guy in one of my platoons or my task unit made a mistake, I almost never had to do anything other than simply very, very, you. quietly acknowledged that that I saw. Let him know you know. And they would be crushed. The shame would just drive them to never make that mistake again. That's what you're talking about here. That we've kind of lost that in a sense.

Like in a huge sense. And then the other side of that is like, hey, just because you forgot something doesn't mean I go, I don't want you in this platoon. You're a piece of shit. You can get, no, no, no. It's like, it's okay. Hey, you made a mistake. You own it.

You admit it. You tell me what you're going to do to fix it. And then we're back on the level. And we're ready to move forward, which we don't have. And then, of course, you go into this whole episode that took place with a comedian whose name is Pete Davidson. Is his name? Yep. So this guy is on Saturday Night Live one night.

And he says, they put a picture up of you. And they put a bunch of a bunch of politicians up there. And then they put a picture of you up in and this guy Pete Davidson says, this guy's kind of cool. Davidson cracked. Dan Crenshaw. You might be surprised to hear he's a congressional candidate from Texas and not a hitman in a porno. The audience howled or as the audience howled Davidson jumped in with a quick aside.

I'm sorry. I know he lost his eye in war. or whatever. So that happened. Yeah, that happened. I want to, and most people know that story by now in pretty detail.

I do give some behind the scenes never before heard elements to that story. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's good detail. Which is why you got to read the book. Yeah. But why is that in the shame chapter

is the question, I think. I also, I want to hear your perspective on that whole thing too at first because you told me, minute ago. Yeah, you know, from my perspective, it looked like this. Like, just be clear, like during the election, when it all happened, because I was on your show last time, well before this ever happened. No one knew who Dan Crenshaw was back then. Yeah. When you first came on. Except all of Jocco's listeners. Well, then they did. But I'm saying like, when you first came on,

no one really, you know, you, you'd just started your campaign. That was early. And yeah, so it was early. And, uh, but now all of a sudden, man, overnight, everybody knew who you were because of this and what happened was from my perspective was people people started hitting me up on social media like are you gonna uh you know denounce saturday live and uh you know what did you think of this and then they put the little thing in there and you know of course my kind of gut was like kind of funny you know i was like my response was like kind of funny i don't know that that made me laugh but here's the thing luckily for me I'm always behind on Twitter

like I'm not quite caught up and as I finally started where I was like okay I'm gonna respond to this right around then and I was like man what do I'm like thinking to myself I don't think Dan is like crying over this I don't think he's at home going I can't believe that some comedian

made fun of me like I'm thinking about but people are acting as if you were outraged they were outraged for you and you know God bless them. It wasn't like they're bad people. They were just offended by it. It's like what we do now. Yeah. They were offended by it. And like you and I both know, I'm like, hey, man, that's something that probably has been said to him a hundred times in a platoon space somewhere. You know, like,

they're going to make fun of you for everything. So anyways, uh, when I finally responded, it was like, I think Dan can handle himself or something. And I quoted you saying, hey, uh, whatever your thing was, was like, hey, I'm not outraged. It's fine. He's literally a comedian. And once again, I'll use the term literally. Yeah. And the guy is literally a comedian.

He's supposed to make fun of things and make people laugh. He's not doing political commentary. And it's not a personal attack on you for just to just to attack you as a human being. He's trying to make people laugh. So that was kind of my perspective. It's funny how like when you're in a position like you are and I am in, you know, people like, they hit you up on social media. It's almost like this challenging, like, you better do this or I'll never, never like you again.

Or if you don't do what they want, I liked you. But now, now I can't trust you anymore. It's just funny how that works. So that's one element of it. But the, yeah, the hitman and a porno thing was pretty funny. Like that was, that isn't what you. I don't think that even pissed off anybody, to be honest. It was the, it was the next comment.

It was the next comment, which was, yeah, I mean, it was very dismissive. It was actually the whatever. Yeah, yeah, exactly. It was actually the whatever. Yeah, yeah. If he hadn't said that, he wouldn't have received any backlash. If he would have said, I'm sorry, I know he lost his eye in war. It would have been like, you know what?

Okay, cool. Yeah. And then he said, or whatever. Right, right. And it was in a very dismissive tone. And now, okay, so, but why is that in that chapter? And it's because of this. So the point is that the Saturday Night Live story was a story.

was a story fundamentally about showing the right sense of shame and reaction to that. So, because it could have gone a lot different, right? I could have asked Jocko to be like, denounce them for me and they're like, okay,

fine, Dan, geez, being kind of a bitch, but, you know, and I could have actually stoked to the outrage and just like played the aggrieved victim.

And by the way, if you read left-wing media these days, they'll say that's all the things I did. It's actually absurd. how they rewrite history. Oh, 100%. It's insane. Like the lies that occur from left wing media are, don't get me started.

I've already started. But, okay, so that's not what happened, right? I was like, my line was something along the lines of like a, you know, in this life, like try hard not to offend people, but also try really hard not to be offended. So, you know, it's kind of sucks what he said, but now I'm not going to ask for him to be denounced or I don't want, I'm not demanding an apology. Be careful not to demand an apology. I don't care if they apologize.

It's like my life goes on either way. That's sort of how I stated that. And no, he shouldn't be fired. People ask me, like, should be fired. Like, no. Like, why? You know? And I'm remembering now you also said something along the lines of, look, I'm not really

offended, but you may have offended other people. Like you kind of took a stance for other vets that have been wounded, especially guys that had been more grievously wounded than you. That was the important line I had to walk on that entire reaction. because that's legitimate. Totally legitimate. You can't kind of, you can't forgive the guy right off the bat.

You have to acknowledge that he was screwed up. And, but on the other hand, you can also acknowledge that, that he may have made a mistake, like he may have misspoke. Like, it may have been sort of ad-libbed,

you know, because that is a very highly scripted show. But after working with Pete Davidson, like he kind of goes off the rail sometimes. And, you mean on the show? or in life? Both.

Okay. Obviously. But, you know, so it's like, you know, oh, is that, it's kind of going back to be still. Like, is there a chance that there's more to this story? Is there a chance I don't have to act like an aggrieved victim? I don't feel like an aggrieved victim. So maybe don't act like it. And so that gave, that gave SNL the space to invite me on the show.

If I had really stoked the outrage mob, why would they invite me on their show? because now I've put them in a corner. And so you can see this going that way. And this is how it usually goes, right? This kind of extreme sense of shame must be showed. And the extreme sense of or the extreme outrage results in an extreme sense of shame. And so we've miscalibrated how we feel shame in this country. And that's a problem for our culture.

And the reason Americans liked the whole SNL moment with me and Pete was because it was the right balance. So the right sense of shame is about finding the right balance of shame. Because it seems like we have these like two options. And I open up that chapter talking about all these politicians who run headlong into failure and then like reemerge untouched or unrepent at all. There's a lot of examples like that. And I try to have bipartisan examples, by the way, because I did want this to be readable to people other than my conservative fan base. and the point is that yeah those politicians are bad people for basically feeling no shame

at the same time our culture has given them no incentive to feel any shame because the outrage mob is so severe and so unrelenting and so unforgiving that there's no incentive to actually react the way you should react and so you end up just not either not apologizing or apologizing profusely and like I actually in the book I actually actually analyzed this with some bell curves and graphs that I drew

just to like illustrate this visually for people so you just have to buy the book to see what I'm talking about but the point is we need to get back to the middle ground where it's like I'm kind of sorry but I'm not really sorry you know and there's some good examples of that like I used Ellen DeGeneres as a great example because she took all this heat for like you know

hanging out with George W. Bush at the Dallas Cowboys game she didn't apologize she wasn't like you know, I didn't, she could have done like the extreme apology. I didn't realize how much pain I would cause the LGBTQ community. She could have said that, right? And you've seen other celebrities do similar thing, like similar apologies. It's like you've got nothing to apologize for, nothing. And she didn't apologize.

She just kind of explained it. She kind of just put people in their place. Like, hey, like it's cool to hang out and be friends with people who you disagree. agree with. And that was it. Novel idea. It was, and it was, it was, it was a, she diffused the situation rather elegantly. And, um, I use a couple other examples of some good ones too, but that's what we have to be aspiring to. And, um, and we're not there right now. And then it gets into the, the chapter gets into the individual sense of shame because this is, that, that's the cultural

problem we have. That's the cultural outrage mob problem that I've just described. But there's a more individualistic sense of shame too about how you care yourself through your daily life and how you have to feel bad about something if you're going to live your plan A. Like you have to know what it is and you have to understand right and wrong. You can only understand right and wrong if you understand what you should feel shame about. And then I get again into kind of a religious discussion here about like our morality and like how we actually know right from wrong. Like this is a deep thing to understand and how you should feel bad.

about certain things if you're going to live the right way. And again, we do this meticulously in the SEAL teams. I think I have a story in there about just a debrief from a typical seal chief and how that went. You know, we thought we did good. No, you didn't. And you're going to feel bad about it. And you have to make yourself feel bad about it. And that's that's the psychological reason that the psychological underpinnings of of this chapter is,

is you a sealed chief or jaco can make you know he can let you let them know that they screwed up right but the question is do you feel bad about it most team guys do most team guys like it's just it's hard to feel like you screwed up but in the other in the outside world that's not always the case a lot of people are thinking whatever i shouldn't even be in trouble I was going to say since I was in a position where a lot of times I was debriefing people and telling them that they screwed something up. And the reactions were from a good, this is the difference. You said most team guys, good team guys go, ah, man, I screwed that up. I got to fix it.

Bad team guys go, that didn't really matter. That wouldn't have, that would never happen real world. I would, you know, like they've got a million excuses. They don't take ownership better than they, and it just falls apart. They feel no shame. They feel no shame. Exactly. They feel like it's not my fault.

It's not on me. And there's a rationalization that occurs. And you have to, the only thing you can control is your conscious mind. Okay. So you can control the conversation going on in your head about how you rationalize that. And the more you rationalize it, the less likely it is that you actually feel the shame in your gut. Because at first you feel it, like you know it was your fault. And you feel it, but then you rationalize it away.

And eventually, that rationalization kind of takes over and you no longer even. feel the shame in your gut. And you're going on a very bad path at that point. And again, this, this, I try to relate this to very basic stuff in life. Like, like, don't you feel bad when you're that guy who kind of leaves the shopping cart in a parking spot? Because you should. Yeah.

You're a bad person. You're a bad person. You are. Kind of, you are. Somebody's going to hit that. Or it can't park. Yeah. Or it's just a, it's not the right thing to do.

You're just a bad person. You know you did it. Yeah. You know who you are. You're out there. Yeah, you say in here, we should feel a sense of shame for not training hard enough

for sleeping in too late for eating that extra scoop of ice cream. We should feel regret after walking by a piece of trash next to a storm drain knowing full well will go straight in the ocean. We should feel bad for not tipping

that hard working waiter. We should be embarrassed when we owe a friend money and they have to constantly remind us to pay them back. Hope all the team guys are listening to that one. We should feel lazy for leaving

our food tray on the table in a fast food restaurant, even though their trash cans are right there. You go on and you say, we should be, in short, be accountable for everything you do. It was why Commander Jocka Willink, echo Charles. One of my mentors in the teams wrote an entire book on the subject called Extreme Ownership. The premise of the book is quite simple. Everything is your fault. Be accountable. Take ownership.

Take responsibility. From this responsibility, you will find freedom. it is liberating really is it's liberating the worst thing the worst thing is trying to look and find who you're going to blame because then you don't have control over it when you say you know what this is my fault

then you are free to go and make changes in your life free to fix things it's it's the deeper discussion about why personal responsibility is a bedrock of our cultural of our culture and our cultural foundations and as a conservative we always say it like I'm always like ah personal

responsibility. And in speeches, I try to delve into that a lot deeper. Like, this is actually why, this is the argument for why it matters. And it's actually quite simple. Personal responsibility is empowering and lack of personal responsibility is disempowering. The other issue is it's completely unsustainable for a, for a society to engage in a lack of personal responsibility. It's unsustainable because by definition, if you're not personally responsible, someone else must be responsible for, you. And that's fine if like you're an infant or you're in the, you know, it's a small segment of society, right? You can, you know, again, our government tries to take that into account. But if you actually encourage the undermining of the foundation itself, the

undermining of personal responsibility as a virtue in and of itself, which is what's happening on the left, if you try to undermine that cultural foundation, you're creating an unbelievably unsustainable trajectory where it is, where we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we you have more and more people who are convinced that somebody else should be responsible for them and therefore take their own power. It's unbelievably disempowering. And it's just, you wouldn't wish that state of mind on anybody except your worst enemies. Yeah.

You know, again, it's not how you treat people you love. And it's one of those things that's tempting, right? It's short term gratification. It seems like the easier way to go because in the short term, hey, I just got this. And I didn't have to work for it. Yeah. That's the short term. And unfortunately, we know where it ends up.

It's like a pyramid scheme. Think about it. See what I'm saying? I'm thinking about it. I'm getting paid or whatever because someone got to do the work at the end of the day. But a pyramid scheme, it's like everyone's waiting for their turn to like get. Yeah, yeah. And then at the end of the day, everybody crashes because, oh, who's doing the work?

Oh, no, no, him. No, not me, him. Remember, we're not doing anything. That's right. I had to think about that for a second. Yeah, that's right. My initial thought was trying to put it together, but yeah, you're right, because you're building it on everyone's going to get money. Yeah.

Yeah. At some point, somewhere's that making it coming from. It's basically the diffusion of responsibility is what you're talking about and sort of the tragedy of the comments as well. It's kind of a mix of all those things. And it's not good. It's unsustainable. Next chapter. Duty.

A sense of duty. My parents imbued in me a sense of duty to do. that which has inherent value. You go on to say duty is ingrained in the human condition. Our great religions are essentially based on a sense of duty to love God and live well. We have a duty not only to survive in this world, but to pursue a higher purpose. We are here for a reason. And living for that purpose is our choice to make.

It is the path to happiness. So again, we're starting to talk about, you know, the idea. that you're going to find happiness in some short-term gratification is not true. Right. And this is, this chapter comes right after the sense of shame chapter because you have to understand what is wrong so that you can understand what is right. And that is, that is the, the darkness and the light. And you have to live in both.

And sense of duty is, it's living your plan A. You know, and I say, don't live your plan B. no plan B. Again, what I explained before, that was about purpose. That's about living with purpose. And so we get into a lot more detail about what that is in this chapter. We talk about the great religions. We talk about why that's important. And then it's a duty to live in the books about mental toughness. And so we bring it back into, it's a duty to live with that fortitude. And again, to feel bad, this is deeply intertwined with a sense of shame, to feel bad when you don't, to understand what that duty is and how to live within it. And I can't remember if I list the Ten

commandments in this chapter or the, I think it's a different chapter. Yeah, but it's the same kind of discussion. Oh no, it is this chapter. It is this chapter. Okay. So the, and then I, and so that's when I get into a really long discussion about where our laws come from. So this, kind of goes into political philosophy as well. And the fact is, is that the Ten Commandments are the origins of our law. And I talk about how Moses, the portrait of Moses is in the House of Representatives, staring down at the Speaker of the House. And, well, along with 23 other lawgivers, but Moses is in the middle.

Moses is the only one who's not in side profile. That's important because he was the original receiver of law, not man-made law, but like absolute law. These things are true. It can't be argued with. They are just true. All right. Like commandments one through four basically say, these are true. You can't argue with them.

Like believe in God. And the rest of them are like, this is what you should do. You know, don't steal, don't kill, all that. And an atheist could say, well, I know that. I don't need the Bible to tell me that I shouldn't do these things. I know they're true. My counter to that is, how do you know? How do you know?

Who told you? who taught them? Where did they get them from? How do you know they're true? And they can't answer that. They're true because they do come from a higher power. They're true because they come from thousands of years of wisdom. And whether you believe in that higher power or not, you're still following it.

And you can't escape that reality. If you try to and if you start to believe that human morality is changeable and that we can just choose that to change some of those commandments, well then you get the Holocaust. Like it's a short path, man. Like it's a short path to the horrors of the 20th century. The secularism of the 20th century killed millions, tens and tens of millions.

And because we untethered ourselves from absolute morality. It's a really dangerous path. Yeah, when you talk about that and you end up saying at a very basic level, this is back to the book, at a very basic level, this is a shirking of fundamental human duty and responsibility, irresponsibility to what exactly? Politeness, open-mindedness, and grace for starters. These are our duties to our fellow Americans. Just the basics.

If we lose those fundamental virtues, we lose our sense of unity. Without a sense of unity under an umbrella of common values, this whole great American experiment unravels. And as you just said, we've seen this before. common values exactly and and they come from somewhere. A large part of this book is about showing gratitude for your history, gratitude for what works. I like to say that, again, just being a conservative. Conservatism is based fundamentally on things that work, not things that feel good, but things that work. And that's important, you know.

It doesn't mean we're always right, but most of the time, I think. At least the foundations are. And you can't just undermine the foundation. of a society and I see that happening more and more unfortunately you rattle off some of these duties you have a duty to accomplish something every day you have a duty to live up to your best self the person you want to be the hero archetype you admire you have a duty to embrace shame and learn from it you have a duty to be polite thoughtful patient you have a duty to overcome your hardships and not wallow and self-pity you have a duty to contribute even if your contribution is small you have a duty to be on time you have a duty to do your job even if your job sucks you have a duty to stay healthy both for yourself and so that you do not become a burden on others you have a duty to be part of the solution not the problem in other words don't join the twitter mob you have a duty

to try hard not to offend others and try harder not to be offended and this is where you start broaching into what I was saying earlier there is a selfish reason to live a life of purpose and responsibility it will make you tougher and more successful we aren't perfect and we won't always adhere to these basic duties, but I hope we can start to agree on what they are, feel some shame when we fall short, and begin living our lives with purpose. This is the time-tested formula for a stronger people and more than that, a stronger America. This is what people miss sometimes. And I talk about this a lot from a leadership perspective. From a leadership perspective, if I'm a leader that tries to climb on people's back, tries to make myself look good, tries to always

shine the line light of myself, and find the best deal for myself. If I'm that type of leader, I might get ahead for a second here or there, but ultimately, I will not be in charge of anything. If you're the type of leader that takes care of your troops, looks out for the good of the mission, you look out for everyone above yourself. If you're that type of leader, look, you might take hits now and again because you're propping up everyone else above yourself. But in the long run, this is the amazing thing. In the long run, you will absolutely be a more successful leader than me who's over here. looking out for myself and and that's a similar thing to what you're saying here which is like if you do these things which seem like sometimes they be a pain

right getting up every day and being on time taking care of your health like all these things that maybe you don't feel being polite to people right sometimes you just want to do what I want to do that ultimately taking care of yourself and putting yourself as the supreme cause of your life ultimately you will be less successful than if you take care of other people if you treat other They're people with respect. If you do your job, if you do those things that, again, on the surface, they seem like they might not help you.

In the long run, you will absolutely win, absolutely. And when you win, your team wins, your community wins, your country wins. That's what happens. Right. And your individual actions and habits and tasks that are inherently good, we have to, again, we have to kind of redefine what good is because we've forgotten. But that makes up the fabric of the larger culture. And if we want a successful culture that is not at each other's throats and not losing our minds because of microaggressions and offenses, then you've got to live within that.

And, yeah, treating other people with respect and doing things for others, again, very basic biblical teachings that are unfortunately being swept away, especially in favor of kind of this sense of grand. standing and sense of morality where it's it's more moral to demand that others do something for others you know like that's I've again going back to the problems with socialism it seems to me because some socialists will sometimes say well Jesus was a socialist no Jesus encouraged you to be charitable with your time and your money right that's what Jesus said he didn't say stand on top of the hill screaming that other people give away their money that's not sorry like that's That's just you're deliberately misinterpreting the teachings of the Bible in favor of socialism. There's a few other biblical reasons.

I think socialism is not correct. But for our purposes on this chapter, that's a big one. Sense of duty to give your time and your money and contribute that way. And it will make you more successful in the long run because building good relationships is a huge part of success. We forget about that sometimes. Jordan Peterson goes into a lot of detail in that particular element, which is kind of fascinating to, again, he's a big fan.

And has he been on your show? Three times. Three times. Yep. Wow. He was on before he was on before he was kind of popular. Yeah. Before 12 Rules for Life came out.

And then he was on two times after that. And yeah, they're some of the most popular episodes of the podcast. Until this one, of course. Yeah, sure. Yeah. I'm sure. 100%. That's interesting because a lot of people, they make that mistake, how you're like,

you have to have to do it. Because people make that mistake with extreme ownership too. Yeah, yeah. They're like, hey, if my boss would just get on board with this concept, you know, like, the problems would be solved. If my team would just take ownership. Yeah. Yeah.

We're not talking about your team. And same thing with relationships. I've been using the percentage lately of 99.9% of the things that I got in the military and did in the military were based on relationships and not based on chain of command So every time one of my guys, you know, had a mission I didn't this is how are you going to do it? No, it's like, hey, how do you want to get this done? Every time my boss came to me, they weren't like, hey, Chuck, this is what you need to do. And they're like, hey, here's what we got.

What do you think? Everything was about relationships. Every, every, the extreme example was in the Battle of Ramadi when we needed fire support from tanks who needed to risk their lives to go and get my guys prevent them from being overrun in the field. Those tanks didn't work for me. They weren't a totally separate chain of command. And yet they would do it. Why?

Because we had awesome relationships up and down the chain of command. And so, yeah, absolutely. Relationship building is, um, it's, it's critical to every aspect of life. And the little tagline that I often tell people is relationships are stronger than the chain of command. 100%. Yeah. 100%.

Uh, next chapter. Do something hard. In Buds, it's all about the next 10 minutes. Sometimes it's about the next 30 seconds. If you're thinking about buds in its entirety, six brutal months, then the thought is simply too much. The men who quit are the men who look up at the day before them and see all the days to come. They are thinking they're the men who are miserable and wet and cold and thinking about the hot coffee and a girlfriend they miss. And suddenly, because they imagine the months long suffering they will inevitably face, they break.

they are already using every ounce of endurance and fortitude to survive what's happening right now expanding their horizons to an infinite number of miserable right nows does them in so you focus on the next 10 minutes and remind yourself that the instructors can't kill you even if they're claiming otherwise thousands have made it before you you can too what's on the other side of those months and months of 10 minute blocks are over liberation transformation and meaning. So that's one way to get through buds. Buds isn't six months long.

It's about four minutes long right now. I'm going to get through it. Lots of four minutes. Lots and lots of them. Or longer for some of us if we extend our time by breaking a leg or some just not not great, but also normal. Yeah, normal. A lot of people get injured.

They get rolled back. They got to go back. over and over again. So how does this apply then to, you know, this is broad advice to human beings? Yeah. So, because not everybody's going through Buds and nor should they. And obviously I'm using my own experiences here.

Like this was my transformation. Bud's, Buds is a transformation for a lot of seals. It's what gives us confidence and it, you push your limits so that you, what, way past what you thought were there so that you're confident enough to break past more limits when they come because they will come. And they came from me getting blown up. That was a limit that I didn't quite experience even in Hellweek. And it got worse because things can get worse.

But Hell Week and Buds in general and the mentality that we developed accordingly at least allowed me to deal with it later. And so doing something hard, it has a number of benefits. One is kind of a simple sense of preparedness. And the Stoics, I referenced Stoics, Stoicism a lot throughout the book. And the Stoics are referenced in this one because they believed in hardship as preparedness. So that's a very, that's a very practical reason to just do hard stuff. you know, if you're worried about being homeless one day, try sleeping on the floor sometimes.

Like, try going a few days without the comforts of your home so that if it did happen, you'd actually be prepared for it. That's a very simplistic way of looking at it, but like that's what they meant by that. Simple preparedness. You know, if you want to be better at running up a mountain, run up a mountain. Like, it's, you know, so the act of preparedness. But there's a deeper reason why I think doing something hard matters. it's the it's the psychology of suffering and so this is a chapter that has a lot of psych references in it um i did a lot of research on this one specifically with a guy named dr alison

from uh university of richmond and the benefits of suffering are well documented um psychologically and physiologically speaking interesting research that i won't go into now but because again got i want people to read it i don't want people to come away from this podcast be like check got it you know not buying that book now thanks jocco so uh there's there's a lot more to it but um the suffering has inherent value and we've we've created this society where we try to avoid suffering and risk at all costs and there's it's not self-evident that that's a good thing in fact it's pretty evident that it's a bad thing we've become more fragile as a result and again there's good research that shows that we've become kind of this fragile culture.

We need to be anti-fragile. Hardship should make us stronger, not just that we're resilient to it, but that it actually makes us stronger. This is fundamentally true. Again, I think the Bible talks about this. Our psychological research talks about this. There's evidence that, again, physiological pain, you know, working out, it changes your brain.

It makes you better at men. memory. And if you're better at like, if your brain works better, I would argue that you're mentally tougher. So like there's again, so like start lifting weights, you know. And if you can't lift weights, like find something else that is hard. So again, it's not buds. And I'm not saying live through trauma either. Okay. Like swimming with sharks is hard. Like don't go swim with sharks. That's bad. But so I guess what I'm saying is don't put yourself in a dangerous situation where you'll have to live through a hardship and then overcome it. Okay, that's not what I'm saying. I am saying it has to be self-imposed and it has to be habitual and there's value in that. And it could be simple,

right? It could be taking a cold shower on weekends. Like, I'm just going to, on weekends, I'm going to take cold showers. It could be waking up at 4.30 a.m. Sounds like a good plan. Yeah. I hate that plan. But that's, but that's like, there's a reason you do it, you know, and a sense of discipline. You're on the path. Like, this is, this is what you do. And it's different for everybody, but just find it. And maybe make it harder the next time, you know?

But eventually, in your case, you would just be never, I guess, what would that look like, wake up earlier? No sleep. Now you're just in the middle of the night. It's like, it's like. Yeah, you know, it's weird. I'm thinking about there'd be sometimes with team guys

on operations where it goes, it goes past the normal everyday level of suck. Like it starts to suck bad, whatever it is, whether it's a long, long insert, you know, patrol in,

whether it's the heat, whether it's the cold, whatever that thing is, like you will be, I would say, one out of every eight, just standard kind of operations that you're going, one out of every eight,

you're going to have to go into that zone where you look around at the other guys and you're like, yeah. You're like, yep, this everyone right here, everybody in this boat, in this zodiac that is absolutely freezing right now, this sucks for everybody. And you know what? It's just like, yep, we're going to keep going. And it's like glorious. And then you look back on it later and you're like, that was amazing. And it makes you better. And it, it, it, it, there's a spiritual awakening that occurs with suffering, self-imposed suffering. No doubt.

And also not self-imposed suffering. I'm just saying don't go seek out the, you know, what would be better to refer to as tragedy. Right. I'm not saying seek out the tragedy. But also, now I'm kind of, I'd be jumping into the next chapter because sort of leads into it. But then you're telling yourself a story about the tragedy. And there's still value in that.

And again, this is backed up by research. Like I did my homework on this. There is, whether you call it post-traumatic growth or, or kind of positive, I forget the other terms, but there's a bunch of terms, psychological terms that, that prove and demonstrate that people not only become more resilient, but even stronger after really hard occurrences.

So don't run from it as a society. We need to embrace it. Yeah, no doubt in my mind. And let's jump to the next chapter, but first, let me close this one out, because it's, here's what you say, in the raw humanistic sense, without suffering, there can be no internal resilience to adversity, no proper preparedness for the future.

Suffering, controlled by you and for the right cause, can be a building block for both spiritual health and mental toughness. In a liberty-based nation like the United States, we are free to fail and to suffer. That fortitude is a welcome and necessary attribute. rather than trying to erase suffering at every opportunity, we would all be wise to value it and seek it out. So go do something hard. And so this next chapter, which you were just alluding to, is called the stories we tell ourselves. You say, you could tell the story of my life as a succession of hard times and heavy burdens. You could tell it as an array of kicks to the head interspersed with failures.

My mom died. My leg broke. My eye got blown out. My active commission got taken away. My fellowship application got denied. All these things are factually accurate. They happened. I endured them.

That is where a lot of people would leave it. These are things that happened to them from forces beyond their control. Leaving it here, leaving it there, communicate. a handful of ideas about someone he's unfortunate he's unlucky he's beaten he's a victim that is not where people should leave it stories about burdens born on their own omit the most important parts the responsibility of the individual the reaction of the individual the growth and maturing of the individual the world does something to you because it will always do something to you. But once it's done, that share of the story is over. That is where your share of the story

begins. That's the point where the story stops being something done to you and starts being about you. And you go into, you know, we talked about your mom dying, but you mentioned your leg, but you're getting blown. There's a lot of things that you, a lot of, what do you call them, hard times, heavy burdens and failures that you talk about in the book that we haven't even touched. And again, that's why people get the book so they can learn those lessons and see what you went through there. But also see this, you know, this is now we're getting towards the end of the book where you're starting to tie this stuff together and say, hey, listen, you were in hard, you were in bad situations. How, what are you going to do in the face of those bad

situations more poignantly? What is the story that you tell yourself? Yeah. And Stern throughout this book is a particular thread about victimhood ideology and how that pertains to outrage culture. I would argue that victimhood ideology is a tenant of outrage culture. It's not surprising that you feel really mad and offended and angry and outraged if you also feel like you're oppressed, if you also feel like you're a victim, and you embrace that victimhood. This isn't all that surprising either. It's expected because, going back to the hero archetypes, we've elevated victims.

Why would Jesse Smollett pretend and make up the story that he got attacked by two MAGA hat wearing guys in Chicago at 2 a.m.? Why would he make that up? Because we've elevated victims to heroes. Like, that's, that's, why does Elizabeth Warren claim the lies that she's claimed about being Native American or that she was fired for being pregnant? These are lies. They're well-documented lies. You know what's interesting is I'm just thinking of the, is it Jussie?

Jesse. I'm thinking about that guy's story. If you were to go back 20 years and someone was going to make up a story, the story that they would make up would be, I got attacked by two guys and I kicked their ass. Yes. That's really important point to me. It's crazy.

And that's exactly what I'm talking about. It's like that's our, our hero archetypes have shifted so wildly that the that the more likable story is getting your ass kicked and then complaining about it as opposed to like no I just whip their ass like that's exactly that's a that's a perfect point to make and like and that's why I start the book with who is your hero because it's such an important concept and in this case it's like okay now that you know who your hero is well then you should you should identify how you react to hardship. I'm not saying hardship doesn't exist. When I bash victimhood ideology, I'm not saying

there are no victims. It is possible that you truly are a victim. Absolutely. But, you know, but one that should be defined. The word injustice needs to be defined better so that we can overcome outrage culture. And injustice doesn't mean things that aren't fair or things that you don't like. Unfortunately, that's how the word is used all too often. Injustice means someone else is truly infringing on your rights. Rights defined as life, liberty, and property. Injustice can be defined as your due process being taken away, some true unfairness or discrimination being implemented against you. That can be defined as injustice, okay? An outcome based on something other than your merit can be defined as an injustice. But victimhood ideology really strains these definitions.

And I think people know this intuitively. Just watch the news and watch how people are reacting on social media. This is a really big problem. It prevents us from telling the right stories about injustice and then solving it and overcoming it. We've been encouraged to live in the story of victimhood when something bad happens. And that may feel good. Again, it goes back to what you're saying before, this sort of short, the short term thinking. It feels good in the short term, right?

It feels like it's somebody else's fault. And there's a comfort in that. There's like a warm blanket of self-pity that occurs. And like that's comforting. But it's also, you could almost say quite literally killing you. Because it leads you down this path of despair that ends in not a good place. If you always feel things are out of your control and you're disempowered and it literally cannot get better. You cannot get better.

One of the questions that I get asked a lot with. working with companies, they'll say, you know, what's the biggest obstacle for having a culture of extreme ownership? And it's really easy answer. The answer is ego, because when something goes wrong and you have to say, hey, this is my fault, well, that hurts your ego.

And that's the biggest thing that people have to overcome. Now, the other thing that's interesting is, and you address this here, so the other question I'll get asked a lot when it comes to extreme ownership, I've kind of already mentioned it, you know, is, hey, if my kid gets sick, how do I take ownership of that? If I get cancer, how do I take ownership of that? If the market falls apart and we lose all over money, I have to let people go, how do I take ownership of the market? How do I take ownership of a natural disaster that occurred, right?

So there's, I get asked that question. And the response is you take ownership of how you, how you respond. to that occurring, right? When something bad happens and you, you, you, you go through the same thing here. You say, even if I was not totally responsible for what happened, I was still responsible for what would happen. And this is after you got, after you got removed from the Navy. I mean, they didn't kick you out of it when they forced you to retire, right? Yeah.

They forced you retire. Look, you, that, that's, that's, you, that's, you, that's, you, that's, you, they, they, they're, they, they, That's just happening to you. Like the big blue navy is going, you're done. And you can't control it. And so how do you take ownership of that? You take ownership by how you respond to that. And what you say is you try and find your next mission.

Right. You can control the next step. There's another important point here that I lay out, which is the way you describe your history. This is important as putting yourself in the wrong. right psychological framework. And we call those get to statements. Like, I have to wear an eyepatch or I get to wear an eye patch, you know, because

it looks cool. So that's nice. Or I get to wear the gold tridenti, because it looks cool. But you can go much deeper than that. Like I, you know, and some of the, to an extent, this is self-deception, right? And you know that consciously going, going into it. Like, and because I use another example, like, well, I have to pay my bills or I get to pay my bills because it shows that I'm an adult and I'm living responsibly. I have to pay taxes or I get to pay taxes.

That one's harder. That one stings. That one stings harder. Especially if you live in California. Yeah. Guys, all you do is pay taxes. Yes, we do. But who doesn't pay taxes?

And they're not even synchronizing the lights. Because if you get to pay taxes, that means that you've made enough money. to pay taxes. That's what I'm saying. There you go. So that's like one way to do it. Or live in a different country, by the way. Yeah.

I mean, and it's, you know, fundamentally what you're doing there is finding the silver lining. Because finding the silver lining in a bad situation is fundamentally about telling yourself a different story about that situation. And so it's not whistling past the graveyard.

You know, it's not ignoring the actual hardship. It's just forcing yourself to have the fortitude to tell yourself the right story about it. That's what the chapter is fundamentally about. Yeah. It's one of those things.

You read through it and you go, yeah, this is the attitude that you would want a kid to have. You close it out here. 20 years ago, I received a letter in the mail from Rice University. The letter might as well have been addressed, Dear Failure, because it was indeed a letter informing me that my services were not required at the prestigious school. I failed to get in.

20 years later, I became the U.S. congressman who represents Rice University. The path from that failure to my present day success was not an easy one. Many more obstacles and failures would present themselves. Every day, each against a small obstacle, against each small obstacle, I had to tell the right story in order to stay on the path to self-fulfillment. Failure like suffering has intrinsic value and worth should we choose. choose to confront it properly. Otherwise, the ultimate story of success, whatever that may be for you, will never get told. The other element here, I don't go into that much detail, but it's an answer I give when,

especially kids, ask how to deal with hardship. And I like to point out that every obstacle is an opportunity. And that sounds kind of cliche, but it's really not. It's true. I wouldn't be a congressman if I hadn't gotten my eye blown out. This is true. I would have stayed in the teams. I never would have left.

I had no reason to leave. I fought very hard not to leave. Best job ever. Why would you leave? Yeah. And if I hadn't have been so many things. I talked about, you know, got denied this cool White House fellowship. If I had gotten that, I wouldn't be a congressman.

You know, so technically that's a failure. But, you know, you also. Also, it's not. When did you go for that fellowship? Right after Harvard. Right after Harvard. Harvard was right after the Navy for one year, applied for that, didn't get it. You applied for the White House Fellowship?

Right. And you didn't get it. Didn't get it. And then you're like, okay, cool. Can't beat them, join them? Well, no. So ran for Congress because now I control the funding for the White House Fellowship. Yeah.

That's right. Naval Academy didn't love me either. Well, I guess it was actually can't join them, beat them. I guess is what you're actually. Yeah, yeah, I definitely didn't join them. Different branch of government. You didn't get into Naval Academy either. No, didn't get into the Naval Academy, rejected.

I'm not going to defund the Naval Academy. But. But. But, no, I didn't get in. And what if I had? I don't know. Maybe I wouldn't have even made it to Buds. You know, you could argue, you know, it's a different selection process.

Like, there's all these. You want to hear a little story that I tell myself? Whenever I get some kind of, like, little injury. even if it's like a more significant injury, maybe it's something that's going to take me out of off my training schedule for a month, right? Hurt my knee, hurt my shoulder or something. I always tell myself that that was the greater powers way of getting me to not train because the next day I was really going to get hurt.

Yeah. The next day I was really good. I say that kind of stuff all the time. So I'm just like, okay, cool. That's God's way of telling me I'm not supposed to train right now because otherwise I was going to break my neck or something. So we're just going to that's right. That's the story I tell myself sometimes. I think it's a I mean it's not a joke. I think it's a real I believe in that kind of stuff honestly. I do believe that some things happen for a reason. It's up to you to actually react to it appropriately.

But I don't know. I actually do believe in that and I think that comes out in this in this chapter to an extent. All right. Next chapter you went from the personal story now we're talking about the story of America. This is chapter 10. The individual stories we tell ourselves, not just about our hardships, but about who we are combined to create our American story. Every one of us adds a small thread to the larger fabric of our culture. And as we change and evolve, so do our cultural norms. The American story itself evolves. This isn't a bad thing either. It is natural and constant throughout history. But something is changing for the worse. The American story itself is being threatened.

Our cultural fabric has often changed and evolved, but it has never been irreparably torn. The closest we ever came was a civil war. I suggest to you that the latest threat to our American story is outrage culture, identity politics, and victimhood ideology that it elevates. The threat is born of small beginnings, as big threats so often are,

it starts with toxic personal narratives wrapped in cheap cloth of victimhood, always looking to an external culprit to blame for real or perceived injustices. So this is the direction you fear that we are heading right now. I think we're there. So pessimistic.

Well, it's just, well, I'll tell you one thing. It depends on who you talk to, right? Well, I was going to say, I was just, like when I was with Ben, Shapiro, and I just went up and talked to, Candice Owens and you know they live at ground zero for interacting with crazy people. I mean and you're I'm there you're not quite as there. It becomes all you see and then you get a little bit more

pessimistic. Exactly. And and you know I'm really lucky because you know I work with a bunch of different companies all over the country and work with every different type of company and work with all levels inside of a company. So I'm not just out there only talking to the CEOs and the C-suite. I'm also out They're talking to frontline troops, communicating with them, talking about what problems they have. So we really get to see, and everyone at Eshlan Front, we really get to see the pulse of not only of America over a large span, but at a bunch of different socioeconomic levels and in a bunch of different industries. Whereas, I mean, Candace and Ben, like, they go to speak at colleges. That's kind of what they do. And, well, you're not going to run into the same type of people that I'm going to run into that's working on a construction site or a manufacturing plant in Iowa.

No, you're sure not. And I do the same thing. I've been pleasantly surprised, to be perfectly honest with you, even when I go to colleges and especially high schools. I think the questions are good. If there's disagreement, it's been good. Yeah, actually, now that you mentioned, I go and talk at colleges sometimes. too. And you mentioned, you know, you were talking about the kind of crowd that comes in to see, I mean, the kind of crowd that comes in to see Candace Owens or Ben Shapiro. Sure, there's people that want to

see them that have like a conservative viewpoint, but they probably attract at least as many, if not more, lunatics. They do. And it's, I have seen it happen less over time, also because, you know, Ben and Candace and Charlie Kirk, they, that is kind of what they're looking. looking for because they want the debate to happen on camera. I personally, I enjoy it too. Like, I want, I want people on the left to come and debate me. And I'm going to, you know, that's what I want. That's one of the reasons I'm doing it. If it's just a bunch of people there agreeing with me, then I'm not, I'm not making a lot of progress. It's really just a rally at that point. And there's value in that too, but we are going there for the confrontation. I just want it to be respectful

and fact-based. And it's not always that way. I've had some interesting experiences where it just devolves into emotional ramblings. But I've also had some really interesting public debates. And like that's kind of unusual for a politician to do. See, that's the Candace Owens and Ben Shapiro model. It's unusual for a politician to do

because we can get in so much more trouble doing it because it's dangerous. You don't know how that's going to go. People setting up ambushes on you for a got-you moment. Right, right. And so just be prepared for it. and you'll be fine. Know what you're talking about.

You know, that's like this. And so I do it. And it's, but I enjoy it quite a bit. So that, you know, but okay, but back to the original question, which is, are we, are we there as a culture? And the answer is kind of like, it's worse than it used to be. How about that? You know, whether, like, we're in a disaster area right now with respect to victim of ideology and identity politics. It's, that could be debated forever.

And it kind of depends on what your standard is. You know, like, well, what does it look like to be? over the edge on that. Like, I'm not sure. I just know it's worse. I just know it's gotten a lot worse. And other, I referenced Jonathan Haidt quite a bit in this book, one of my favorite authors. And his book, The Coddling of the American Mind is a great read. If you're really looking to examine how this evolved on college campuses, and they can really

examine it down to the year, you know, about 2013, which, and then they examine all the reasons for this, you know, this sort of outrage culture. And even then, though, they point out it's mostly at the coastal elite institutions. It happens a lot less on other college campuses where, listen, the reality is most college kids just want to get drunk and, like, get through their next class. And, you know, they're not super hyped up about politics. Social media, the fact, and those of us who live within the world of social media, also makes us believe that, like, that it's a lot worse than it really is. and you have to remove yourself from that. And so you won't see me using examples in this book of people on social media.

You'll see me using examples from leaders in our country and like big, you know, big media companies like the New York Times, you know, really pushing these narratives. So I'm not getting my evidence for this problem from random commentators, even if I could count thousands of them because it's like what are thousands. a tiny tiny little itty-bitty fraction of the United States. What matters is the leaders and how that's changed over time. So that's why I come at this and I say, you know, there is a real problem here and we're there because our leaders are talking like this.

Like this is a bigger movement than just some idiots on Twitter. It's bigger than that. And so that's why I think it's such a... Because if I couldn't find those examples, then I would argue that, yeah, maybe I'm overblowing it. But victimhood ideology is, it's here. And I could, you know, from what you just read, the argument I'm making there, unless you were going to go on to something else. Go ahead.

See, the arguments I'm making there is that there's a series of steps that have led to this moment where we're telling a different story about of America. And I give an analysis of how it's victimhood ideology that's created this. There's a lot of elements, but victimhood ideology is a big one. It's because at first start small, as I note there, it's of small beginnings where you're blaming somebody else. Like maybe it's your platoon commander who just didn't see the value in you the way they should have. Which, by the way, if you talk to modern military commanders, there's a problem with, you know, a younger generation. Like they're seeing these differences in how it is to manage troops. It's just, it's different.

It's hard. It's not the same. Like I came into the SEAL teams thinking, okay, like I have to, I feel like I have to earn. my way here newer newer maybe team guys maybe not team guys but definitely in the military newer troops are thinking like they're owed more than or they're the organization itself has a duty to them but not the other way around like a duty to give them more responsibility and and leadership or whatever and but they haven't quite earned it yet like more status but without earning it yet so something

we've this is something when I talk to leaders I'm curious what you're perception is on this because you talk to so many corporate leaders and how it is to to manage the different generations. I mean, what that's like. Not only corporations, but also still talking to military troops. And there's always people, well, this is a question that I get asked all the time. And it's, you know, what's wrong with my team? And you can probably guess how I answer that this is a leadership problem and one of the things I fall back to all the time so I don't know that I can think of a more difficult workforce to deal with than being then dealing with draftees in Vietnam in the Vietnam War people that did not believe

in the cause did not want to do the job and in doing the job their life and limb was at risk You cannot think of a more difficult workforce to try and deal with. So I've read many, many, many, many, many books about Vietnam. I've interviewed many Vietnam veterans, leaders and troops. And here's the deal. Good leaders. Good leaders. And my first example is Colonel David Hackworth, who's like my personal mentor,

Even though I never met him, but I read his book many times and all of his books many times. But when he talks about the draftees and he was in Korea and he was in Vietnam, he was a battalion commander in Vietnam, he was one of the most decorated guys ever. And when he would talk and he was a complete lifer, this guy worshipped the army. He was in the military since he was 15 years old. It was all he ever knew. And when he would talk about his drafties and when he talks about him in his book about face, he loved that. his draftees and he loved his draftees because guess what they would call it they would call bullshit when they didn't think he was making a good call they would give him pressure against what

he was saying to do if it didn't make sense they would test him they would push back and as a leader he thought that's exactly what I want that's exactly what I want is I don't want people I don't want a bunch of robots I had one of his company commanders on the podcast who retired as a general Um, Mook Mukiama, General Mukiyama, fantastic guy. And I asked him, and he was a company commander in Vietnam. And I said, what, because I, this is this question I hear all the time. I said, you know, sir, what did you think of your, of your draftees in Vietnam? And he, he said, I, I really couldn't tell who was a draftee and who wasn't.

And so then do read other books. And what it boils down to is, and most of the books, the other books that I read are like, interviews with people and if you have leaders that are not good leaders guess what they do they complain about the draftees about how they they push back they didn't follow orders people like william callie in charge of the mili masker what did he think he hated draftees because he's a shitty leader and so when you talk to me about a millennial the the characteristics of a millennial uh hey they they they think they deserve stuff they want to to know why they're doing what they're doing they want to have ownership of stuff they think

they deserve to be in charge of stuff and I'm like bring me that new guy I'll take that new guy any day of the week and I'll take that new guy and be like okay you want you want to you want to run stuff you want to know you want to know why you're doing what you're doing absolutely you deserve that that's decentralized command you need to know why you're doing what you're doing perfect you want to take ownership of stuff absolutely you you think you should be in a higher elevated position good let's get you there so we we can always complain about the junior generation, the freaking kids and the teams right now are way better than I was. When I checked in as a new guy, are you kidding me?

They're way better. They're tough bastards too. It's not like they're just more tech. You know, some people will say, well, you know, the new generation's more tech savvy. It's like, yeah, they are. And they're tough as hell. So when we start talking about what the problems is with our troops, what a good leader does, it says, okay, there's these I need to treat this guy with I need to make some maneuvers here to get this person on board with the program because it's not like some young army guys like I don't want to do a good job it's not like some person at a tech company some person that just graduated from college and went to a tech company is like you know what I don't want to do well here like no they want to do well now they might have some high visions of themselves cool whose job is it to put those visions into check whose job is to explain to them listen man

I'm glad you want to step up and run everything. That's awesome. Let me ask you this Do you even understand how this you know how the economy of our business is working right now? Explain this here look at this look at this spreadsheet and explain what this means I have no idea. Okay cool. Let's get you educated on this let's get you to learn this because you know what? I do want you to elevate I want you to take over this company. That's fine But you got to learn this stuff at the so as a leader. We got to we got to look at people and this again. This happens all the time and it happens within one potential You know, I guarantee you had guys in your platoon that thought they knew everything and you had some guys that were like happy to be here and they're just humble You get you get all these guys. You get all these guys and is there some little difference in the generations?

Sure, there's always difference in generations. No freaking generation was as hard as mine, right? We always hear that You know the guys when I got to the teams. It was like the guys from the 70s were like oh the guys from the 80s were like oh the guys from the 80s are weak and then the guys from the 90s were weak like let's just keep going and How do we reflect things as a leader? Make adjustments when if my team is not performing well, I'm 100% responsible for it. If my team has a bad attitude, I'm 100% response before it and I'm going to get it fixed. That's what I'm going to do. I'm responsible to do that. Yeah, and that's a very nuanced look at this.

I'm always asking this question because I am a millennial, you know? And it's hard to generalize a generation. You just can't. But you have to. There stereotypes exist for a reason. So it's good for analysis to try and figure that out. And I don't know. I don't know where I fall on it because I see the, I see, I do see some bad aspects.

It's in, you know, wanting more responsibility was maybe the wrong thing to, to hit on as a negative attribute. That's obviously a good thing. But it also, but sometimes it's accompanied by a, uh, a, uh, a, uh, a non. not so humble belief that somebody is victimizing them and preventing them from moving up because of some kind of oppression. And that's happened a lot. Who's responsible for fixing that attitude? I can promise you right now.

We'll play the question game all day long. And I do this. I do this with every level of leadership. I have people coming, you know, my team's all jacked up. Okay, cool. Who's in charge of your team? Well, yeah, that's right. You are.

Or someone will say, my frontline troops aren't doing what I'm going to do. Oh, who's in charge of your team? front line troops it's bill okay who's in charge of Bill Mike who's in charge of Mike me that's right you're responsible for what's going on down there and if there's attitudes that you don't like man you're responsible for it yeah you are absolutely responsible for it and if you're a good leader you can get those attitudes to to shift in the right direction and generally by doing exactly what we're talking about when and you and I were having a conversation earlier it's like

if they understand why these decisions are being made or why they they actually need to learn some of these frontline jobs before they can move up the chain and command, if they understand that they have a path for mobility to increase their pay and increase their responsibility inside of an organization, they'll go, okay, cool, thank you for telling me that. And now I'm going to go get after it. As opposed to, millennials suck. And I can't, I can't deal with millennials.

It's like, okay, cool. Yeah. I mean, I guess it's, I guess that's why I wrote the book, right? Because I do see these things as problems, and I don't see them in my team. My team's great, and they're millennials or younger. So obviously something is working there. Maybe that's because I hired the right people with the right temperament. I don't know.

And who's in charge of doing that? Well, me. Exactly. Exactly. So when you meet someone that says, oh, I got these horrible people on my team, have you tried to fix them? Yeah, but I can't fix them. Well, A, whose fault is that? and be who actually hired these people in the first place.

If you, if you can sit down with someone and you interview them, or you hire them and then they're horrible and they have a horrible attitude and they don't want to be a part of the team, great, you're not going to be a part of my team. Yeah. You're not going to be a part of my team

if that's, if that's what you bring to the table. And so, and so this book, I think, is like, what I'm trying to do is look at it a broader cultural problem because it is. It is. And then try to give lessons to fix it,

you know, because for all the reasons you just stated, It's like we had to take ownership of our culture as well. It's not just ownership of our team that we can, you know, you should, of course, and that you can control a lot when you're leading a team. But we've got to come together as a culture and be better. Because as I, as the part you read, as an individual, you're an individual thread in the larger fabric of society.

And our culture is being transformed and not in a good way. And I hope the problem isn't as bad as I kind of. make it out to be. But, you know, worst case scenario, I'm wrong. And things are going in a great direction. Well, even I wouldn't say worst case scenario, you're wrong. I mean, clearly there are indicators of what you're talking about. And as you said, you're not talking about people on Twitter. You're talking about mainstream media organizations that that proceed in this direction. And the analysis, because I went off on a tangent talking about millennials and the management issues with them.

So the analysis I go into is it goes something like this. You believe in a victimhood ideology. You believe that somebody else is to blame. Maybe it's your team. Maybe it's your boss. Maybe it's your parent. Maybe it's your teacher. Whatever it is, somebody else's fault.

You're living that story about yourself individually. That is expanded. It's expanded to groups. It's expanded to this sort of group-on-group identity politics. That my fate is tied to an immutable characteristic that is tied to a group. Maybe it's race, maybe it's gender, maybe it's socioeconomic in nature. And by consequence, there is another group oppressing my group. Okay, so it's group on group politics.

This is identity politics to the core. It's the promise of more power from one group to another. You're telling somebody they're a victim and you're telling them that you're the champion of them against the oppressors. So that's the next thing. Then it evolves even more than that. It involves into these kind of institutional conflicts. And so it's not just a group that's oppressing you.

That group is tied to a broader institution. Maybe that institution is the church. Maybe that institution is some kind of cultural institution. Maybe it's a merit. Maybe it's a meritocracy. To me, that's an institution. This notion that we compete based off of merit and that your reward is tied to how well you perform or your talent, right?

The meritocracy is an important institutional construct in our culture. culture. Okay. There's other institutions too, like the Supreme Court. Okay, when you're talking about packing the Supreme Court, you're talking about tearing down an institution. So there's government institutions, there's cultural institutions, there's social institutions. You know, the word institution is malleable in that sense. And it should describe a kind of a cultural framework that we operate in, I think. Those come under attack, you know, because it's the institution's fault. I talk about Thomas Sol, he's an economist, Hoover Institute, Stanford, amazing thinker and author. He talks about how the French Revolution was led by Rousseau.

It was based on this idea that the natural state of things involves no suffering, but that it is institutions that cause suffering. Well, that's a really interesting concept. It's like this belief that that life is actually, it is not, it is not natural in life to be oppressed or to go through suffering. It is not natural. What is natural, what it is, it is the unnatural institutions, manmade institutions that created your suffering. Therefore, we must revolutionize those institutions, tear them down and build our utopia.

This was how the French Revolution happened. This is how 17,000 people were dead in the next few years from the, from the, from the terror that ensued. It is the thinking that led to Marxism and the horrors of the 20th century. All right. This isn't all that controversial of a statement to make. It's just kind of how it happened. And that is how the progressive left thinks as well. It comes from somewhere. Like progressivism has a history, just like conservatism has a history. And it is a history based on this kind of your feelings are correct. If you feel something, it must be right. And, and you should, and the injustices against you are always manmade, and they're always come from an oppressor.

They're never a natural part of life. Therefore, government is there to fix those institutions. And that's why you must proceed with the revolution. This is the thinking that occurs. Okay. So that ends up, once you've torn down the institutions, there's another old ultimate oppressor and it's the American founding itself. That's the story of America that keeps getting told and that worries me a great deal. We didn't used to fight about that. The left and the right did not fight about the story of America the way we're fighting about it now. And it's become this question of whether America was even founded on anything good at all. That's the story being spun. And it stems from this individual victimhood identity politics. And again, I'm not making this up.

I'm not because I'm looking at major leaders that say these kind of things. You know, I quote Beto. I quote Ilhan Omar. America was founded on genocide. Not that America committed genocide. That would be an accurate statement, you know. But America was founded on it. That implies a very different meaning.

Saying that white supremacy is a problem is a true statement. Saying we were founded on it, that's a different implication. You're indicting the American founding itself. So what does that lead to? Well, it leads to popularity with burning the American flag. It leads to popularity with kneeling for the national anthem. It leads to popularity with attacking the Pledge of Allegiance as an institution in and of itself. It leads to the New York Times, you know, the New York Times prioritizing a message that America is just okay on the 4th of July.

Like it leads, you know, I open up. in this chapter talking about the New York Times going after the Apollo 1150th anniversary, basically praising the USSR instead of America on this day. It's like, why is that, why is that the reaction? Because there's this need to tear down the institutions of America at its core. Why is that? Well, because you need to tear something down at its core if you want to implement the revolutionary utopia that you envision. So this is the most political chapter by far, right? This is where I really delve into the differences, like the real deep differences between

conservatism and progressivism because I nail conservatives a little bit on this too as far as the victimhood ideology goes. Like it's a different form of ideology. It's a different form of victimhood, but it occurs. And it occurs up to the limits of tearing down institutions. Conservatives have a very inherent distrust of government institutions, like sometimes to a to a conspiratorial degree. But we stopped way short of actually bashing the founding of America.

And then the solutions to this problem, which is what I really end the chapter with, I make a very strong argument against progressivism as a solution to these problems. Mostly because progressivism at its heart is a promise to end your suffering. And that is an inherently dishonest promise to make, for the reasons I just say again, that's the basis of the French Revolution. We can end your suffering because it's man-made.

It's not natural. The natural state of things is for you to live in a wonderful utopia, prancing around in the trees or whatever the heck they're imagining. It doesn't make any sense because it's not real. And so to tell somebody that you will end their suffering, to tell them that you can replace God with government. Because what is religion fundamentally? It's like that Jesus took on the crucifixion

and the passion of the Christ is about him taking on the suffering. There's a spiritual element to this. And that can't be replaced by a government ideology. Fundamentally, at its basic level, that's what progressivism attempts to promise people. And I also tried to define what I mean by the progressive movement very carefully in the book because I don't want, there's a lot of people who identify as progressive because, you know, they just got back from a gay wedding or they like smoke some pot or they like tattoos or whatever or they do yoga you know like that's I I've defined that very carefully as social progressivism like in the modern sense and like that's just not what we're talking about here I'm talking about the deeper underlying politics and history of the progressive movement and what it's fundamentally promising people talking about the role of government in your life and you know because again I want this to be readable to a lot of different people but this is the most

political chapter by far you know one thing that speaking of the tattooed yoga whatever person I was a really rebellious kid right and I think at some point there's gonna have to be like a like a Republican with a Mohawk and face tattoos that's gonna come out and say like hey I have face tattoos, I like whatever genre of underground subculture music. I don't want to conform to anything. And the best way to live that life is to actually support conservative values because conservative values support individual freedom.

And that's what I believe in. Yeah. And I think that's what's going to get some of these. Because let's face it, an 18 year old kid, wants to be rebellious. Why? Because they're trying to get out of the house. They're trying to show their dad that they don't need them anymore. Trying to show their mom that they don't need them anymore.

So I'm going to get a Mohawk. I'm going to tattoo on my neck. And I'm going to move forward into the world. And other kids look around and go, okay, that's how we're rebelling. But at some point, you go, actually, it just blows my mind that people say, you know, you go up to anyone and say, you know, do you want the government to be in charge of anything? You go up to someone with a Mohawk or whatever. And they're like, no way, man.

No way, man. And then you go, cool. Why would you vote for the government to be in charge of more of our lives? I just don't think that connection gets made often enough. No, it doesn't. And I deal with this often. And since I talk to most, not mostly, but I'm a politician who does a lot more youth engagement than most politicians do.

And so I address this directly. Like, how do you, as a conservative young person, how do you, make the case for conservatism to your fellow young people who kind of live by this kind of libertarian. I mean, what you described is sort of a libertarian, an extra rebellious libertarian, these people who kind of live by this notion of, you know, social progressivism and freedom, but fundamentally they believe in a kind of Republican form of government that is out of your life and, you know, fiscally responsible. You know, they live by this mantra, well, I'm socially liberal but fiscally conservative right that's what people say and then they vote democrat 100%

like almost 100% at the time so it's it's a mantra that makes them feel good but it doesn't mean anything to them and um i mean delving into this is like my my life's work at this point yeah i feel so i'm so glad i don't have to talk about this stuff all the time i'll do it once a year with you other than that it's a super interesting thing and you're like like why why is your entire vote your entire vote on a political party based on the abortion issue. I mean, it doesn't make sense. It's not a rational decision. I'm sorry, it's just not.

Especially because that issue will not affect you. You know, because people will say this and they've got like three kids and they're like, well, and they would never get an abortion themselves. It's like, this doesn't affect you at all. You know, you can make a pretty good argument that should be decided at the state level and yet you are voting 100% because of this issue at the federal level. This is not a rational decision. or gay marriage.

It's like that's definitely not a rational decision considering it's not even argued about anymore. Like that's the Supreme Court's done with that one. So it doesn't, you know, it's really surprising to see how people think about these things. And so I guess bring it back to the book. My point is I'm trying to distinguish there. I'm trying to distinguish this into a role of like what, into a conversation about what government is actually for and how that manifests into victimhood ideology, how that manifests into the story about America

because, again, it's a very short path from victimhood ideology and America as an oppressor to hatred of America itself. And I only quote the big ones. I only quote, you know, Taylor Swift because she's a cultural icon. You know, and she's out there saying

if you're not a cisgender white male, your rights are being stripped away. That's a Taylor Swift quote. That's an amazing thing to say from one of the most successful, prosperous people in the world. Why would she believe that? What is happening that she believes this thing? That is so fundamentally not true. That is so easy to debunk.

Why would she believe this? Why did AOC believe that she's the next one, I quote, which is like, what did she say? My generation has never known American prosperity. How does that make any sense? I mean, it only makes sense in this context where it's good to be a victim. Yeah. It only makes sense when you understand that the goal is to elevate victimhood. And then they use that and then they use that to tear down the story of America itself.

And it's such a dangerous path that we're on that we want to revolutionize the foundations of our prosperity to such an extent. And again, the only way to justify, the only way to make people believe that their eyes are lying to them, that all the good things around them are just lies, the only way to make them believe that is to constantly hammer them with this crisis narrative, with this false narrative that people are trying to oppress them or there's other people being oppressed. And you've never met them. But guess what? It's happening. And if you don't raise your fist against the injustice, then you're part of the problem, you and your white privilege. it's this is happening in such an extreme level um you know and it's and again the good news is is like people listening like well i haven't seen it good that's good but it is happening

yeah no i mean we gotta be aware like you said there's evidence uh big evidence from from real players out there that that preach this and and live this sort of life um it's kind of interesting man because we on this podcast very seldom talk about politics at all all and yet people kind of know where I stand and they kind of you know just it's all good well like you said it is a real thing that is going on it is a problem and that's so one thing that I would say is very nice about your book is that it is a first of all it explains it and it gives some pretty good answers on how to move forward and one of the things you do is you close out with with an American ethos yeah set you set forth an American ethos in the book or what I

think you called a draft or a you say perhaps it goes something like this and you and you spell it out pretty straightforward nothing that really anybody would sensibly argue with right you know nothing that you could really sensibly argue with and I'll let people get the book and and and read it but you know the last line of It is, you know, I will live with fortitude. You know, name of the book is fortitude. That's sort of the last line of the American ethos that you put forth. And that's a simple statement, right?

It's a simple statement, but it's something that you can actually carry with you in every part of your life. And the way you tie fortitude into all these other aspects of how to deal with other people, how to react to things. That is what the book is about. And it really sets forth a great path for people to go down. to get themselves, their family, their country into a more stable and productive and better place. So I've read a tiny fraction of the book today. Whoever, what you should do is order this book right now.

Now here's something that you haven't ran into yet, Dan. Your publisher, your publisher is, first of all, they're underestimating you. They're underestimating the people that want to hear this message. So they're only going to print X amount of books. They're looking at pre-sales. They're like, okay, we're only going to print X amount of books because it's an investment. It's a risk for them.

And then what happens is the book comes out. People start to read it. It catches on fire. And then all of a sudden, they're four weeks out from printing more books. So what people need to do right now is pre-order the book, which makes the publisher then print more. Also, I should note, all pre-orders are getting assigned bookplate. All of them. Ouch.

Yeah, my hand hurts. Yeah, that's not fun. So, order the book right now. We'll have it on our website so you guys can click through and order it. Well, I need to clarify that. You have to go to Dancrenshaw book.com slash pre-order to upload your receipt so that we know you pre-ordered it and can actually get you the bookplate. You know what? If you do that, you get the bookplay.

And I've been putting out that website pretty constantly. Yeah, cool. I'm going to take this as a personal challenge to see if I can break you. Get so many freaking pre-orders that you have to sign book plates for like a month. This, I mean, do something hard, you know? Sign one million book plates. Do something hard. That is nasty.

You actually have a podcast now, your own podcast, which is called Hold These Truths. Tell us about that podcast a little bit. So I'm always looking. for ways to communicate. It's my job. I've got to communicate the truth and the policies that I believe are right and the things we're voting on in Washington. So I do that a ton on social media, as everybody knows that. And there's, you know, there's a different method of communicating for every platform. And one thing that you can't do on Instagram and Facebook and Twitter is have really lengthy conversations and deep dives into policy issues. So I do that on the podcast. And

And, you know, it started because I'm like, you know, I get these five-minute conversations during hearings when I have a really interesting witness come and talk about something. And maybe I'll meet with that person later too. And it's a really interesting conversation. And I ask some, you know, questions that I need answered. Why don't we record that? Why don't we dive into these things? And so what you'll find from that podcast is a whole variety of issues.

You know, one day it'll be it about Iran or China. Another day, it'll be it about student loans. I've interviewed the previous head of the ACLU. We'll talk about free speech. We'll talk about, you know, does discrimination law make sense in these conditions? Like there's some really fascinating deep dyes. We'll talk about 5G. We'll talk about Bitcoin.

I mean, a whole variety of things. Medicare for all, the environment, the Green New Deal, like all of this stuff. And talking to actual experts on the subjects. I was going to say that your job gives you access to people that actually know what they're talking about. Yeah. Yeah, they'll come and talk to me. And are you bringing on people that you don't agree with? Well, I've gotten into debates with some, for sure, especially head of the ACLU.

We probably could do more of that. It just started. So I'm trying to build up a library right now of just deep dives into certain policies. Or I'm kind of just asking the questions. Because, you know, the way we went at this podcast, too, is like, I don't have time to prepare for it. I'm too busy to take the time to really prepare a podcast the way you are preparing your podcast each time. It's not feasible for me. What's more feasible is that I'm just a genuinely curious person talking to another person who knows a lot of things. That I can take an hour out

and do. And I think it ends up being pretty good. And so, you know, yeah, we haven't, we haven't, We haven't had a full-on, like, debate on a podcast yet, and I haven't figured out how I would even structure that if we were to. Because I debate in my public life so often. It's like, you know, I don't always, I don't need to put it on the podcast either, but I bet a lot of people would like to watch it, though. Yeah, I mean, I think it would be nice

because you could be in a situation where they're not constrained by time if you got somebody else that was sane. Yeah. That had a different viewpoint on this, that or the other thing, where you could actually discuss and maybe make some mutual, forward progress between coming to better ideas or more mutually agreed upon ideas

that might be nice. You are on Instagram at Dan Crenshaw TX which is for Texas Echo in case you didn't know that. Facebook, Dan Crenshaw at Dan Crenshaw and you also have your website

which is Crenshaw for Congress. Is that where the book is as well? Or no. No. Where is the book? The book is Dan Crenshaw book.com. Got it. I like your branding.

It's just like mine. My name. Exactly. Now, did I miss anything as far as like all this, all this stuff as far as getting in touch with you and all that? No, I mean, it's easy to find me on social media. You have to keep in mind. Here's some annoyances about how my social media works. On Instagram, I have one account.

Okay. It's my personal account. It's not really official. It's not really campaign. But the way the rules work, you have to generally differentiate between official and campaign, which is why there's two Facebook accounts, which is why there's two Twitter accounts. And you have to follow all of them to get all the information. Instagram, if you're an Instagram user, it's a little easier for you.

I just, because I control that's my personal account. And that's why you just have to search for me a couple times and then follow both. That's the only thing I would add. Got it. Now, Dan, I know you're doing a lot for America, which is definitely appreciated. But I want you know that we're doing our part over here as well in the private sector. We're working hard to make people better. Yes. To make the economy better and rebuild the foundation of America or at least one foundation of America and that is self-reliance and our ability to create and build the best products in the world 100% American made.

Did I say 100% American made? Yes. Yeah, 100% American made. In three years, I think it's three years. We've gone from. employees to 80 we are just getting warmed up little company up in Maine is my home state my home region I should say I'm a New Englander yeah because I got time in Connecticut and Maine but I can I claim it a little bit my home a record is Maine yes you can claim so up there we got a little factory we got a little something called origin Maine tell us about it echo Charles okay oh by the way we are getting softer by the way as a generally speaking as a group we are all getting softer that's why generation after generation they say oh my generation was harder than this new

generation that's why they always say it you're saying it factually it's factually and this is why generally speaking I think as individuals there's variations in individuals for sure and even little micro groups for sure variation but this is why technology the whole reason for technology is to solve our problems is to make things easier make everything easier exactly right And I'd say I like to look, not like to, but I look at it as to solve our problems, which is making things easier for sure. So even like the caveman, right, when they invented the wheel,

oh, these softies, they got the wheel now. You know what I'm saying? Because before that generation, like our generation, we had to carry stuff. I mean, they're objectively harder. I think objectively speaking, you know. And it's not a bad thing that we've made things easier, but. Right. But you have to art.

It was just kind of the whole point of the chapter, do something hard. You have to make up for that by artificially hardening your own life. Oh, yeah. And that's why this is like your book is good. That's why what you say is good is because, bro, we can't, this is a wave. A wave of just easiness coming on us. And there's no stopping it. But individually we can kind of like fight against not necessarily the wave, but the results of the wave.

Yeah. You can do something hard. Yeah. So what you get though, what you will get inevitably is everyone with all their problem solved. And we're always looking for these little issues. Yeah. Because that's how, right? That's nature.

Human nature. So now it's like, hey, that's some injustice right there. Yeah, yeah. It's a lot, it's a lot harder to complain about the injustice of your Wi-Fi and your neighborhood not being as strong as if you don't got food on your plate. Exactly. Right. Exactly. Right.

Yeah. And, you know, and think about like your kids now, right? Where it's like, oh, yeah, they got to wear helmets now. So I'm saying. Hey, you guys got to wear seat belts now. Try it until like a 1965 something. Yeah. Bray,

you're going to die in that thing. It seems like, you know what I'm saying? But that was just how back then. Now get in your 2020, whatever, Tesla. And bro, you can fall asleep behind the wheel.

Literally. Yeah. They got you. No problem. Exactly right. All your problem solved. So that's how, you know, it's like all these groups of people.

Like very small groups of people, but they're super loud because they can be now. That's just how. Like back in the day, Because they're not out hunting down elk with a bow and arrow. Yeah. And not to mention the technology allows all this, you know. So, yeah, and they're loud or whatever.

But you make a good point where it's like, yeah, if you go out and look for all these issues, it's like it's hard to find them. But you're how you say like Ben Shapiro and Dan, they're in ground zero. Oh, man. Karen is better at ground zero. Yeah. So it's going to seem pretty bad. Nonetheless, yes. So yes.

keep up the good fight against the wave. I will. Doing hard things. What hard things you got for us? Echo Charles, what can we do? Jiu-Jitsu, hard. Daily hardships all day. Daily hardships.

You know, working out fitness, jujitsu, and I was going to say fashion, but that's more your issue. That's hard for you. You see what? Okay. Anyway, so when we do Jiu-Too, what are we doing,

we're doing ghee, we're doing no-gi. No-gi. If you get a ghee, get an origin key for all the reasons you mentioned yeah yeah we'll get you up to the factory up in main dan yeah you gotta go check it out it's um it's awesome it's awesome it's awesome we literally brought the last bought the last loom in louisden main from a 500,000 square foot abandoned factory that hadn't been used in 20 years and all the other hundreds and hundreds of looms from that factory sent overseas we're bringing it back we had one loom now I think we got four looms

We're bringing it back. That's awesome. And, you know, the folks up there, these are folks that their industry was taken away from them. Their industry was sold overseas. And now they're back. Craftsmen, crafts women. Sewing, making boots, making jeans. All in America from, and every single part of those jeans is American.

Yeah. This is such an important, I'm going to bring into a little bit of politics and how I view this. and the need to embrace some sense of American economic nationalism, which we've lost over time. And the rise of Trump, when people ask about how the Republican Party has changed under Trump, it's usually a disingenuous question. What they want you to say is that Republicans are racist, right? That's really what they're insinuating when they ask that question,

or that they're more racist now. That's not true. But there is some change, And this drive towards a to a conversation about economic nationalism is actually part of that change. And it's been interesting to watch. And I think it's a necessary change. Because what Trump got was a lot of Democrat voters who had maybe voted Democrat their whole life. But they were part of a union.

Culturally speaking, they identify a hell of a lot more with me than they do AOC. Okay. So they started voting based on that. But also Trump finally talked about some things they were concerned about, which was like, China, okay, China taking advantage of us, NAFTA taking advantage of us. And the reality is that's a, that's a nuanced conversation. It's not, it's not, it's different for every factory, to be honest. Sometimes it's the business itself that sucked. Sometimes it is Chinese dumping that occurred, all right? Sometimes it's just, it's a mix of things. But Republicans for too long adhere to a,

to a highly stringent free market economy dogmatic approach, which said, if another country can make it cheaper, they should make it. All right, that's just, that's economics 101. We're done. No more thinking about it. Well, it's not that simple.

Like, there's winners and losers here. Just because, like, tomatoes are now five cents cheaper for everybody, doesn't mean that we're all better off. You know, we have thousands of farmers that no longer make tomatoes. Also, we don't make tomatoes. And now, by the way, again, let's bring it back to some coronavirus, we've got a real conversation to this country to have about medical device manufacturing and supply lines of our medical industry and computer industry and everything

else. Like there is benefit, even if it costs us more, there is benefit to having that here in America. It's a real benefit, not just the job, the manufacturing jobs are certainly some of those benefits, but there's a national security reason as well. And it's about time. We have a more honest conversation about that as a republic. Democrats will just be against Trump no matter what. So like, because they don't, they're not really principled in this. They're mostly about seeking power for the sake of the revolution. And I could go way back into that again.

But and, and so, you know, I, we just, I think that's an interesting point is, is where I want to end that. And so I love what you guys are doing, I guess is what I'm really trying to say. Yeah, well, it's, and, you know, we got this right now, again, you're talking coronavirus. We got 100% American supply chain. So zero impact is zero impact. It's it's just it's it's It's awesome and yeah, you're talking about the the Chinese are making a bunch of the what 95% of the pharmaceuticals or something crazy There's crazy number like that. Yeah, that's not okay. That's not okay and yeah if you save five cents on something That's not okay when when something happens even if it was even if it was just a natural disaster that that caused problems over there. You know no no political anything That's a real problem

And to have single source for life, life-saving capabilities, that's a bad plan. And hopefully we look back at this coronavirus and we say, hey, I'm glad we got a heads-up. I'm glad we got a free lesson, relatively cheap lessons learned about this. So anyways, up in Maine, we're doing it. We're doing it right now. We've been doing it. And we're going to continue to grow. We're going to continue to get out the best products.

We're making supplements too. supplementation, as Echo Charles likes to call it. Sure, from time to time. So for supplementation, what? Joint supplements, very important, by the way. Yeah. Joints.

I should probably take some of this. Yeah, bro, what are you going to do? Like, if your joints don't work. Yeah, not much. It's just getting new ones. Yeah, well, yeah, yeah, there is that technology, by the way. Yeah. Also, Moke.

Moke, technically is supplementation, technically. What is that? Mulk. It's more of a dessert. It's a dessert that has. that happens to have a bunch of protein in it and probiotics and it has no sugar and it's super healthy and it tastes delicious. Technology, man. I'm skeptical of the delicious part.

That's what's crazy. That's what's crazy. That's what's crazy. That's what has got so many people officially on the Mulk Train. I eat so much dessert. I will send you. What flavor of these flavors? Chocolate, vanilla, mint chocolate chocolate chip, which is my personal favorite.

Reese's peanut butter cup And I know I can't call it that But that's what it tastes like Peanut butter chocolate I'm a big fan of the peanut butter chocolate And then here's the one that's Kind of the creeper or the What's it called?

The creeper? No, the sleeper. The sleeper is strawberry. So did you ever have strawberry quick When you were a kid? Yeah. Did you like it? Yes.

Okay, I'm not kidding. I'm not kidding. Strawberry milk tastes better than strawberry quick. No. I'm telling you, bro. It's like a competitor.

Is it a liquid? Wait, can we back? Because my, my preference for flavor does depend on the substance that we're discussing. Yeah. It's like a milkshake. Milkshake.

It's like a milkshake or a chocolate milk or a or a, or a Nestle's quick. Okay. Although you can make pancakes. What? You can make pancakes. You can put milk in pretty much anything. Okay. So based on the fact that it's more like a milkshake, then I would, yeah, then I would say not the peanut butter.

I do like peanut butter milkshake, but that's more of an ice cream that I'm, I'm favorite. So can we have milk ice cream? Is that a thing? We have things in process for the milk ice cream. And did you have some at camp? Yes, sir. Okay.

So, yeah, we have milk ice cream. We need to move forward on our logistics. That's a heavy logistics. You know, you're talking about shipping, frozen foods, et cetera. So we're moving in that direction. We're not there yet. We're working on it. Gotcha.

It's a, we have milk bars coming, which, once again, totally ridiculous. Yeah. Totally ridiculous. I would change your stuff so strawberry then yeah no we'll get you the whole line yeah the whole deal the whole line so you'll just be you'll be sometimes you're gonna be the mood for men sometimes you know strawberry I've got a sweet tooth oh yeah those milk bars you're gonna it's funny because you know how kids are the kind of the litmus test you know like if if you give the kid like let's say back in the day right you got your diet shake and then it's like kids

spitting it out and you say you should give it to the kid the kids like bro don't like this like you know I dig it or whatever they don't just don't like And I have a video of this where my son, three, by the way, which is a solid little test group. Good, good experiment. Yeah, yeah. Because he doesn't have morals or nothing like that. So he's just like. And he'll tell you the truth.

Yeah, that's what I mean. Like he doesn't care about your feelings or whatever. So yeah, I have a video of him chomping a milk bar. And I'm like, I didn't give him a milk bar. And he's like, oh, yeah, he just called the chocolate bar, whatever. And I was like, what are eating? And he's like, yeah, frozen chocolate bar. And here's the thing.

I put those in the freezer to hide them. And he went in there. Like it. Now with motivation, obviously, you see what I'm saying? Taste Buds is the number one motivating factor in this case. Check. Anyway, so that was the test. That's Monk bar though.

I don't want to get too ahead of myself. Yeah, yeah. We'll stick with the monk for now. Slide that sure. All right. So, yes, and by the way, all those things, the supplementation, the drinks, everything is available at orjumane. com. Also at vitamin shop nationwide.

There you go. Also, we will be listing Dan's book for easy availability, fortitude, on our website, jocopodcast.com. Go ahead, click on the book section, on the top menu, we have a book section there. That's by episode. So this episode, boom, you'll see Dan's book there. Anyway, you can get it there. Also, we have a store. It's called jaco store.

So you go jocco store.com, similar to Dan's book, or what was it called, fortitudebook.com, Dancrenshaw book.com. Dancrenshaw book.com. Yeah, yeah. So the simplicity, same. Jocko store. It's a store from Jocko. Jock store, right?

Dot com. Anyway, this is where you can get, uh, what, shirts, hats, hoodies, many garments representative of the path. The path. That's true.

Subscribe to the podcast if you haven't already, which if you haven't already, you might want to just do a full-on sort of systems check of your whole life. Otherwise, just, just subscribe. Check out Dan's podcast, which is called Hold These Truth, or you can just search for Dan Crunch on it, pops up.

Don't forget about the grounded podcast, where we talk about the most important things in life, all kind of related to another thing in life called Jiu-Jitsu. Warrior Kid podcast, we're going to have one with Dan Crunch on it, by the way, so your kids can figure out how they want to be directed down the path. And don't forget about that Warrior Kid soap, from Irish Oaks Ranch.com. Black soap,

which is magically turns to cleanliness on your body. Yeah, counterintuitive for sure. It's called, yes, Dan. Question. I have black toothpaste. Okay, well, activated charcoal. Activated charcoal.

And it helps some sort of thing, right? I don't know what it does. Yeah, but we know it kind of looks cool, right? It stains my towels. We know that it looks cool. So, but it feels cleaner. Yeah. I like it.

So we got, we got soap that helps to kill germs, bacteria. Does not stay your towel. All that. All that. Yeah. And that soap is called killer soap. And what that will do, it will help you and your family stay clean. You know, sure it does.

Got a YouTube channel. Yes. Video version of this podcast. You want to see what Dan Crenshaw looks like. Good, good looking guy. Really good looking. You know, cool eye patch, new eye patch, by the way. It's new.

Yeah. Just unveiled this. one boom you don't see what that looks like we have a YouTube channel on YouTube YouTube dot com etc you understand also some excerpts on there by the way you don't want to watch the whole if you don't afford to your friend and go hey check out what echo Charles said about this and then they send him a four hour what is it yeah four hour video video yeah that doesn't work that doesn't help anybody no man so you're part of the problem at that point in life

we got psychological warfare on mp3 platforms if you need a little Psychological hitter you can get it. We got flipside canvas Dakota Meyer my brother making cool Things to hang on your wall. We got a bunch of books. We got fortitude by Dan Crenshaw We got leadership strategy and tactics field manual We got the way the warrior kids series. We got Mikey in the dragon we got discipline equals freedom field manual We got extreme ownership in the dichotomy leadership get every single one of those books Yeah, get them. Yeah, yeah sure. Yeah Eschelonfront Leadership Consultancy. What we do is solve problems through leadership

Go to echelonfront.com if you need help at your business team corporation. We got you covered. EF Online is online training for leadership, interactive. Check that out. Muster 2020. Orlando, May 7th and 8th. Not so sure about that one.

We may be getting some, what do you think, Dan? What do you think the chances are? 900 people. I mean, experts think, you know, this is a change in America life that will last a month or two. And then we'll be on the downtrend. We can look at the numbers coming out of China and South Korea. as perhaps a guide as to how the decrease in cases happens. Hopefully we don't even reach the peaks that they did yet to be seen.

Plus, you got social distancing slowing down the curve. Echo basically, if you've been hanging around, Echo, Echo thinks that he's sort of a national hero right now because he's not shaking people's hands. He's sort of taking on, you know, you were talking about the archetypical hero. I think we had Echo Charles over there. He's sacrificing his own. Hugs. His own hugs and whatnot.

He's keeping it real. Look, if Orlando doesn't go down, we'll keep you posted, but then it's going to be Phoenix, Arizona, September 16th, and 17th, Dallas, Texas, December 3rd and 4th. And, of course, we have EF Overwatch and EF Legion. If you need personnel inside your business that understand the principles that we talk about all the time that we wrote about, go to EFoverwatch.com for executive leadership from the military. Go to EFlegin. for frontline troops and leaders. That's what we do. And if you still want to interact with us some more,

which is just getting kind of crazy. I mean, it's been a long time. There's a lot of hours. But if you need more, then we are on the interwebs. Dan, like I said, Dan is on Twitter and on Instagram at Dan Crenshaw, TX

for Texas Facebook, Dan Crenshaw. Website Dan Crenshaw for Congress. Echo and I are also there on Twitter, on Instagram and on the good old Facebook. Echo's at Echo Charles and I am at Jock Wollock. Echo, any closing thoughts? No, good to see Dan Crenshaw again. This time, this time as an esteemed member of Congress.

Esteemed, big time esteemed, yeah. It's a lovely word. I really appreciate it. It's been fun. Yeah, a little longer than we thought. We got a lot to say. Man, some tangential things, but all good. And thanks for coming back on. You know, thanks for sharing your life story and your lessons are not just here, but in the book. And I know people are going to thank you for the book.

And I am going to thank you. And everyone thanks you for your service and your sacrifice. Not only on the battlefield, but now, you know, you're fighting a different kind of battle. And, you know, you and I talk offline. And I've told you twice once on the phone and once when you showed up here, I'm really glad that you have your job and I have mine. Your job is not one that I would want and not fun, but you're doing it for the right reasons. And I think everyone appreciates the fact that you're fighting a battle for the future of America. So that America remains now and forever the land of free and the home of the brave.

And the same goes to the rest of our servicemen and women out there. Freedom is not free. And someone has to hold the line. And it is all of you soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines out there who keep evil and darkness at bay. And we thank you for that. And the same thing goes to our police and law enforcement and firefighters and paramedics and EMTs and dispatchers and correctional officers and border patrol and secret service. Same thing. Freedom isn't free.

It takes sacrifice. And thanks to all of you for what you do every day to take care of us and keep our country free and to everyone else out there. Life is a struggle. It's a challenge. It's suffering. And you're not always going to win. But even when you don't win, as Dan says, don't quit, don't give up, don't be a victim, don't take the easy path. Don't squander this life.

Instead, live with fortitude by getting up every day and getting after it. And until next time, this is Dan Crenshaw and Echo and Jocko. Out.